Fallen Star (24 page)
“Are you in trouble, old scout? There’s been a lot of loose talk. The Artz books are by the board—you know that. Not even
Ellen could rescue them now. We know; we tried.”
“You shouldn’t have,” I said, my nose filling. “The whole Second Western Polar Basin Expedition was a preposterous fiasco,
and I couldn’t possibly write any book about it anyhow. I just have nothing to say that anybody would believe—let alone anything
of any scientific merit to report.”
“As bad as that?” Ellen said.
“Just that bad.”
“I’d
believe you,” Ham said gently. “Julian, if you can’t trust me, who can you trust? I am your friend. If you tell me not to
say a word to anyone else, I’ll obey completely. But I would like to know what it was all about.”
I thought about it, turning the Pilsner glass in my hands. I had thought about it before, and nothing new occurred to me now.
“Ham,” I said, “I’ll tell you before I tell anyone else. And that’s as far as I can go. I’m not concealing any crime, except
perhaps in the historical sense—and don’t ask me to explain my qualification. I’m not in trouble with myself. I’m not holding
out anything that the IGY ought to know—or at least I think I’m not. I’ll promise this, too : if another satellite disappears,
then I’ll open up right away. But I can’t now. I am the only man left in the world who can choose to speak or to keep silent
about this, because I’m the only man left who saw—what I saw. And I choose to keep silent, for what I think are good reasons.
I can’t say anything else.”
Ham lit a cigarette, and watched the smoke rise judiciously.
“You are also the only man in the world,” he said suddenly, “who could satisfy me with that answer. Ellen, what do you think?”
She only smiled at him. I will never forget that smile.
“I owe you something,” Ham added, as though there were
some connection. “Do you want a job? I’m thinking of chucking the university—it’s up to its ears in weapons development anyhow—and
going into the instrument business. I could use a writer—somebody who could write specifications and manuals on the one side,
and sales fliers and advertising on the other. I couldn’t afford two men, but one man who could do both jobs would take a
big load off my back. And you could advise me on trends; I’m too specialized to watch them, most of the time.”
Ham had invented his instrument business right there on the spot. If I hadn’t already known him well enough to suspect it
on my own, one look at Ellen’s expression would have convinced me.
“Thanks. No,” I said huskily. “I don’t want to be in the instrument business, at least not on the producing end. I’ve got
too many other things to think about.”
“But, Julian,” Ellen said. “You must be rather short of money.”
“I’m a little short. It doesn’t worry me; I’m running too large a plant, that’s all. I’ve known it for years, but this is
the first time I’ve gotten up the courage to do something about it. Ham, you could help me there, I think.”
He inclined his head attentively. I took a deep breath.
‘I’m going into astrophysics,” I said. “I’ll have to go back to school. I can keep myself and the Pelham crew alive—we’ll
sell the house for a starter—but I can’t cover the tuition. Could you help me get a scholarship?”
“Julian, you crazy Apostate bastard!” Ham said, his eyes glittering. “Of course I can. How is your calculus? Never mind, I’ll
teach you that myself; it’s easy. Do you know what you’re getting into? You couldn’t make it into a graduate school, Julian.
You’ll have to start way back—maybe even as a freshman. Some of it may have to be done nights. I can bung you into Tech like
a shot, but after that it’ll take years of work on your part—maybe ten years. Are you
sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said steadily. “I’m all through with the second-hand stuff, Ham. I want the real thing. I’m starting all over
again. That’s how it’s going to be.”
Ellen got up. “Excuse me,” she said, with great dignity. “I am going to cry.” She vanished into her office.
Ham’s eyes were like furnaces. “Have you told Midge?” he said.
“No, not yet. First I wanted to hear what you would say. You could have said that I hadn’t the talent.”
“Every man,” Dr. Hamilton C. Bloch said to me, “is born with a talent for the truth. It’s not his fault if the people around
him teach him to hate and fear it. But it
is
his fault if he likes it that way, and teaches it to his children. If Midge doesn’t see it that way, you send her to me,
and by God I’ll tell her it’s so.”
“No, Ham,” I said. “I’ll tell her. I’d better go and do it right now. I’m sorry I upset Ellen——”
“You’re a crazy man,” Ham said gruffly, standing up. “Ellen was way ahead of me. She’ll never forgive you, and neither will
I. You say you’re starting all over again. How many growing thirty-six-year-old boys do you know that that’s happened to?
Great God, man,
don’t you know that we envy you?”
No, I hadn’t known; and I was not sure why they should. Even from the top of the mountain, it looked like a long road still
ahead. But I put my first foot down on it across Ham’s and Ellen’s doorsill, on the way back to Pelham, and somehow I was
in no doubt whatsoever that tomorrow—though that be only the next day after today, or the end of the world—I would be walking
among the stars.
I
WAITED
a long time to break silence, even to Ham, and I thought I had good reason, just as I’d told him at the beginning. The reason
had nothing to do with the fact that I could hardly have gotten anybody to listen to me during the first years. In the fullness
of time, Jayne had after all found a third man to love, a man who had been silently in love with her for God knows how many
years—young Faber himself; it was the last headline she ever made. I could easily have broken what I had to say through the
Faber chain, had I felt urgent enough about it to risk bringing her back into a limelight she no longer either wanted or needed.
Or, I might have risked Ham’s reputation; his endorsement, not necessarily of what I had to say, but of my credibility, would
have made news all by itself, and insured me an audience among the science writers at the very minimum.
But I kept silent, because throughout those years I was unable to convince myself completely that Elvers had indeed been only
a crazy man who ran about on the Arctic ice-cap in shorts, and thought he was better with dogs than he turned out to be in
the pinch. Each time I would settle uneasily back on to that comfortable conclusion, a sharp point came out of it and nipped
me.
Most of the stings were small, but their effects were cumulative. Out of Elvers’ “legend” about the destruction of Nferetet
and Infteret, for instance, I remembered that Elvers said the Martian atmosphere had been thinned, until the high ice-clouds
were as close as sixty miles from the ground. Sixty miles is a figure that, as a chiropodist whose madness had taken a form
suggested by Geoffrey, he would have had to have plucked out of nowhere at random. Yet it happens to be the precise depth
of the Martian atmosphere today, as ultra-violet photography shows it. He got the figure from Geoffrey? No, because Geoffrey
rounded figures, Elvers never did. Geoffrey placed the diameter of Ceres at about five hundred miles; Elvers said that the
moon of Nferetet was 480 miles in diameter, which happens to be—if “happens to be” really summarizes the situation—the
precise
diameter of Ceres.
In Elvers’ “legend”, there were two asteroidal protoplanets involved, not counting Ceres. From the point of view of celestial
mechanics, two is the minimum number. Geoffrey, the protoplanet bluff, hadn’t known this; how could a chiropodist have hit
upon it? For that matter, I have checked the dynamics of such a system, and I’ve asked another man to check
me;
in particular, I asked my expert at what date two such planets would naturally collide. He placed the date at “about a million
years from now, give or take ten thousand.” The agreement with Elvers’ date is good; Elvers’ is just slightly outside my expert’s
margin of error.
(And don’t take my figures for it. My expert is the only expert there is on this subject; if you know the subject, you’ll
know just where to find his name in the preceding pages. If you don’t, I have no intention of attaching that very eminent
name to so irresponsible a series of speculations as I am engaged in here. I am speaking alone, to myself and for myself.)
Elvers was an adult albino. Human albinoes are doomed
creatures who must stay out of the sun as much as possible. When they must venture outside, they have to wear clothing which
covers as much of their bodies as possible, and their hands and faces must be coated with a carefully calculated equivalent
of sun-tan oil, which screens out every scrap of ultra-violet light from the sunlight that reaches their skin. If they don’t
observe these precautions scrupulously, they die in childhood, of cancer of the skin.
Elvers never took any such precautions. As Geoffrey had pointed out to me, even a normally pigmented man would have risked
severe sunburn in the togs which Elvers wore at the Pole. What does this mean, except to prove further that the man was insane?
I don’t know; but every time I thought of Elvers walking bare-legged and bare-armed under the Polar sun, I remembered that
on Mars the sun gives far less heat than it does here on Earth, yet is far fiercer on the UV end of the spectrum because of
the thinner air. No albino could have survived there who carried the skin-cancer gene, as all Earthly albinoes do—and as Elvers,
going by his behaviour alone, just as plainly did not.
Elvers knew what the copper dawn was, and had a most appropriate name for it. To this day I have yet to encounter any reference
to it elsewhere, even in the most likely places. How could Saint-Exupéry have missed it, for instance? But evidently he did.
There is a fair arsenal of additional small-shot I could bring into play here, but this is not a text. I could, I think, make
just as good a case for the other side—that Elvers was not and could not have been a Martian. The oxygen tension on Mars appears
to be too low to support any animal life above the level of a worm, let alone as complicated an organism as Elvers’ was. Similarly,
Elvers was water-based, as we all are; how did he survive dehydration in an atmosphere as poor in water as Mars’ is? It is
easier to see how he might have survived freezing—he knew how the Eskimos take shelter and husband heat—but no animal with
normal lungs can breathe air which contains no trace of water vapour without being killed by it. And if Elvers was evolved
to breathe the atmosphere of Mars, how could he stand our water-heavy air even at the Pole, let alone in muggy New York or
Washington? And if he was so different from humankind that he did not breathe at all—after all, we have no
autopsy, nor have I been able to run down any record of any physical examination he ever had in his life—then where did he
get his energy? He could hardly have been a plant; there are all kinds of fundamental, ineluctable arguments against an autotrophic
man.
But I never found any record of his birth, or of his past, until he turned up in the Bureau of Standards in 1950. The government’s
habit of secrecy has protected his application papers and back-file from me; but where was he before he worked for the government?
An adult albino ought to be a medical prodigy, fully documented in the literature—especially since the way to protect them
against cancer sufficiently to allow them to grow into adulthood wasn’t discovered until two years.
after
Elvers went to work to Washington.
And, of course, there was the Lump.
I have no final answer, though I have been muttering in my beard about it for years. Last month, however, President Kennedy
announced that the First Fleet will leave SV-2, the second manned satellite, for Mars sometime within the next six months.
The science writers fumed; they hadn’t been told that any such fleet was a-building. I wish I had known about it earlier myself,
but I’ve worked as fast as I could to get this all down: the story of the Second Western Polar Basin Expedition, as it happened,
by the man whose duty it was to record it.
If Elvers was not, after all, insane, then the First Fleet may have a nasty shock awaiting it when it sets down on the Sinus
Roris.
But, on the whole, I think it won’t. Whether Elvers was mad or sane is almost beside the point. I do not think it will be
Martians who will bring us to the end of our tether; if we all die, next year or in a million years (give or take ten thousand),
it will be by our own hands. Elvers was mad, but that did not make him imported; his madness was familiar.
If you suppose that he was just what he claimed to be, the answer is still the same. I think we will die by our own hands;
I am certain that Elvers’ Martians are impotent to kill us. They can have no real idea of what they’re up against; men are
not what Elvers—or Julian Cole—thought they were. They might, in fact, even let Elvers’ people live.
And you could call that revenge, if you like.
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A Case Of Conscience
A Torrent Of Faces (with Norman L. Knight)
And All The Stars A Stage
Black Easter
Doctor Mirabilis
Cities in Flight
, comprising:
∼
They Shall Have Stars
∼
A Life For The Stars
∼
Earthman, Come Home
∼
A Clash Of Cymbals (The Triumph Of Time)
Fallen Star (The Frozen Year)
Jack Of Eagles
Midsummer Century