Fallen Star (23 page)

“Jayne, are you——“

“I’m all right, Julian,” she said. “Never mind. I heard what you said to the kids. That’s enough.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said doggedly. “There’s

She put a cold hand over my mouth. “Shh,” she said. “It’s quite enough. Thank you, and God bless you. Between Geoffrey and
you, I won’t need another man ever, I think. Let’s let it rest at that.”

I got helplessly to my feet. Behind me, Col. McKinley
cleared his throat, and I turned reluctantly. The aide was back, and McKinley was holding out to me a sheet of legal-length
mimeo paper with grey writing on it. I looked at it without really knowing what I was seeing.

“The release,” McKinley said, with peculiar gentleness.

“Oh,” I thought about it. At last I said, “I think I’ll waive that, Colonel. Thanks for offering it to me. But I’m not mad
at Lieutenant Church any more. I think maybe we’d just better all be allowed to go home.”

McKinley lowered the release slowly to the tabletop.

“As you wish,” he said, spacing the words evenly, without emphasis. “If I can help you, Mr. Cole, I hope you will say so.
I think we owe it to you.”

“You can help Mrs. Farnsworth, and the kids,” I said. I was suddenly very tired. “Not me. I did kill Commodore Farnsworth,
Colonel; also, I killed Dr. Wentz. Not with bullets or blows, no. What I did wasn’t actionable. But I’m the man, and your
stenotypists should so enter it.”

“Julian!” Jayne cried out.

“I think not,” Col. McKinley said. “As a matter of fact, our typists here are only students, here for practice. I will review
their transcripts very closely; they probably contain many errors.”

He stood up—very stiff, very military. “This board
is
adjourned. Captain, instruct Lieutenant Church to prepare an appropriate release for my inspection. Then schedule a flight
out for tomorrow. Assign pilots for the expedition’s planes, and ship all the expedition’s salvageable equipment aboard them,.
on consignment to Mrs. Farnsworth; we will send the snowmobiles out by the next Navy freighter. Route the survivors to the
Air Force base closest to their preferred destination.”

“Yessir,” the aide said, scribbling furiously.

“Dismissed.”

I turned, stumbling.
But ‘twas a famous victory.
I looked back as the orderlies took my arms, and saw Harry and Harriet still sitting side by side, clinging to each other’s
hands. The wind was rising again around the hospital. Any moment now, it seemed, it would carry them away.

We were met at Stewart Field—for after all, despite Col. McKinley’s good intentions about our “preferred destinations”,
we none of us had any place left to go but New York —by a huge Unwelcoming Committee of reporters, photographers, radiomen,
newsreel and television cameramen, and sightseers. Nobody from the public relations departments of our sponsors put in an
appearance, of course. Midge wasn’t there either, but I had anticipated that—in fact, I was responsible for it : the first
thing I had done after Col. McKinley had dismissed us was to get his permission to send a radiogram, warning her that my arrival
time was uncertain and that I would see her at home the instant I could make it. The last thing in the world that I wanted
was to greet her in the middle of a wolf-pack. I would have recognized her—my eyesight was now almost as good as new, I had
to give the Air Force surgeons that—but I was none too sure that she would recognize me.

We had all anticipated it, and while we were still in flight, Harriet had suggested that we get off the plane scrambled—me
first, as a figure of some public interest; then Harry, who would be skipped impatiently by the Unwelcoming Committee; then
Jayne, who would be photographed in batteries no matter where in the order she fell; and as an anticlimax, Harriet, who would
stay behind to parry the questions. It was ingenious, but I was stubbornly opposed to it. I wanted us to disembark as human
beings, not as pieces of a newspaper story, and in particular in such a way that Harry and Harriet weren’t separated. I suggested
instead that Jayne go first, as the surviving officer of the expedition, followed by Harry and Harriet, the last working members.
I didn’t care where I fell, as long as it was on the ground; last was as good as any place.

But as it turned out, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference in what order we got off the plane. It was Jayne they wanted,
and it was Jayne they got, despite the half-hearted efforts of the field’s military police—who after all had no reason to
suspect the pushing civilians of any hostile intent. My attempts to spoil their shots only resulted in their getting several
pictures of Jayne and me together, which of course was one of the things they most wanted.

In some other respects they did not make out well at all. Jayne was hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, and still without make-up;
a good many newspaper readers were going to find it hard to believe that she was Jayne Wynn, even with
“before” portraits for comparison. Nor would she, nor any of the rest of us, say anything but “No comment”. We said it over
and over again, scores of times at least, and at long last we managed to bore the boys—otherwise we might be there still.

On the train to Pelham I had a chance to see what the first editions did with the story. It was not pretty reading. Furthermore,
there were so many holes in the background material that I suspected—accurately, as I found later—that we had already been
in the papers for a good many consecutive days.

The story that I read did include about half the text of Lieutenant Church’s release, which was a model as retractions and
exonerations go—I could see Col. McKinley’s hand in several of its key phrases—but of course such things never make as good
copy as the original allegations do. The Church handout was hooked to the jump of the story, as a three-em shirt-tail. The
jump, of course, was on
page 36
, back with the horoscope and Little Orphan Annie.

Midge was on the phone in the hallway when I opened the front door. She slammed the handset into its cradle unceremoniously
and ran when she saw me. She ran my way.

In that instant, I knew that I was home.

“Julian, Julian,” she crooned when she got her breath back. “My God, I was terrified. Are you all right? Are you really all
right?”

“I’m fine,” I said shakily. ‘I had all kinds of luck. Where are the kids?”

“Out in the park. I didn’t want them here, not yet. My God, I still can’t believe it.”

I held her tighter, and we didn’t say anything for a while.

Finally I said huskily, “Let’s have a drink to celebrate. I’ve got to sit down or I’ll fall down. It’s hot in here.”

“No it isn’t. It’s just right.”

We sat down on the living room couch. I had already forgotten the drink.

I looked around.

“It’s different.”

“I moved some furniture. It gave me something to think about.”

“Who was on the phone?”

“The L.-C. They want your own true life story, by-line and all. Ten instalments, ten thousand bucks.”

“They’re mighty free with the old man’s money now that he’s dead,” I said. “Speaking of which, who’s president now?”

“We don’t know yet. The hospital isn’t talking.”

“Oh? He’s sick again?”

“That’s what they say.” She looked at me. “Julian——”

“That’s me.”

“No it isn’t,” she said, and burst into tears.

I held her and waited. There is never anything else that you can do.

“It’s me,” I insisted gently, when I thought she could hear me. “Midge, it’s all right. I’m not hurt, and I didn’t shoot anybody,
and everything’s going to be all right, and the L.-C. can go drown in its own filth for all I care.”

“I don’t care about the goddam L.-C.,” she sobbed, clinging to me. “Except for the kids. You should hear what gets said to
them. Oh, Julian, Julian, what happened? Is it true about that bitch? Was it all good for anything?”

“What happened was simple and very ugly,” I said sombrely. “We lost some of our party on the first day out, an unnecessary
accident. Another man, one of the best we had, died of pneumonia. And we had a madman among the survivors; he killed Geoffrey,
and Fred Klein, and would have killed Jayne too if the dogs hadn’t turned on him.”

She was looking at me strangely, her eyes wet.

“And is that all?” she said in a level voice.

“It’s all that I know for sure, Midge. if you mean Jayne, she’s no bitch—and I probably did sleep with her. I’m not sure about
it, but I hope I did. I turned her down once when I shouldn’t have. If I failed her the second time, on the last night, I
was a zombie without a drop of compassion in my whole body. I only hope it isn’t so.”

“Because she’d lost her husband?” Midge said.

“Because she had lost him years ago.”

She crossed her hands on her knees and looked at them for a long time. Then, without looking back at me, she said: “I’ll get
the drinks.”

She went into the kitchen. I found that I couldn’t sit still. I got up and walked around the room, touching things. On the
mantel above the fireplace, my book on tracer medicine was open to the hard chapter,
Operation REScue,
the one about Dr. Snell’s basic research on the reticulo-endothelial system.

It takes a whole history to know what will move a man
deeply at any instant in his life. Until my return to Ellesmere, I had not been able to cry since childhood, when I realized
that I would never be spanked again after the day I failed to howl about it; but I gained nothing by so crippling myself—nowadays
my nose runs instead, which is even more undignified for a grown man. That open book made me snivel as no Polar wind had been
able to do. In it I could see Midge, who was bored by the simplest scientific matters, trying to reach me through the nearest
thing she could find to my voice, no matter how dull, no matter how remote from the world as she saw it.

I picked up the book and went back to the couch with it, where I sat turning the pages in a kind of stupor. What comfort could
she have gotten from all that stuff about the molybdenum fraction of xanthine oxidase, the potentiation of micrococcal toxicity
by mucin, the carbon-14 labelling of metabolic precursors in reticulocyte generation…. What comfort had anybody been able
to get from it, for that matter? It was only magic.

I heard Midge’s toe strike the kick-plate of the swinging door between the dining-room and the kitchen, and then she came
in with a jingling glass in each hand. It had taken her a long time to prepare two simple highballs; her eyes were quite red.
But she was not crying now.

She came into the living room and sat down quietly on the floor, leaning against my legs. I took a glass from her. The Scotch
smelled good, and though I thought of Joe Wentz as I lifted it, it tasted good too.

“I thought about it,” Midge said huskily. “And I was right: it isn’t you any longer. You never used to notice other people
enough to know what they needed, most of the time. That answers the other question I asked.”

“What question?”

”Whether anything good came out of it all. I—I’m glad you slept with Jayne. I’m glad you went. It’s going to be hard to get
used to, living with another man. But I think I’ll like it. A touch of adultery helps make Suburbia go around.”

“It’s not another man,” I said, baffled. “It’s just only me, Midge.”

She turned and leaned her arms across my knees. She was wearing her gamin grin.

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “And I won’t tell anybody else.
As far as I’m concerned, you’re an impostor—but it’s
a
secret between us. Wait till we go to bed tonight. You’re going to have your work cut out for you; my husband hasn’t been
officially reported dead yet.”

And then she burst into tears all over again. I leaned over and kissed the back of her head. I was far from sure that I knew
what she was talking about, but I was content to wait. I could hear the four girls coming up the walk.

The telephone was hardly silent a minute. It was easy enough to shuck off the newspapers; they were still getting nothing
out of Jayne, and Harry and Harriet’s marriage gave them something new to write about which drew their attention further away
from the expedition rather than closer to it, although I’m sure that’s not the way they thought about it. Neither bride or
groom told them anything either; and when Jayne gave them half of her salvage money, they vanished, on a honeymoon to some
place the reporters were unable to trace. (Only, I suppose, because by that time the whole subject was running rather thin,
so the reporters had given up trying really hard.)

The other calls were harder to take. Most of them were from colleagues in the science-writing racket. Their questions were
penetrating and hard to parry;, their commiserations were even worse. Almost uniformly they wanted to know what I was going
to do for a living now—which of course I couldn’t answer except by telling the truth, which was none of their business—and
What the Hell Really Happened, Anyhow, Julian?—which I couldn’t answer either. Hardest of all to take was the universal assumption
that I was passing them on the way
down
that mountain.

I could not argue that; furthermore, I didn’t want to. I had already been to see Ham and Ellen Bloch. From then on, my erstwhile
colleagues were plucking at the wrong bleeding tree.

“What the hell really happened, anyhow, Julian?” Ham said, pouring me a tall Pilsner glass. “I went over your man Wentz’s
figures a dozen times, and I couldn’t find a thing wrong with them. I had a hard time convincing the IGY, even with Ellen
to help, but I wasn’t in any doubt about it myself. Wentz accurately reported an unbelievable event—
that’s what it seems to come down to. But can you go on from there?”

“No,” I said. “I have a theory, Ham, but I’m bound not to tell it. Maybe sometime later—but I can’t promise even that.”

Ham sat down by Ellen and leaned forward earnestly. Over his shoulder, I could see the plate of the meson explosion in his
wife’s office; it made him look as though he were wearing a star-cluster for an epaulet.