Fallen Star (7 page)

It was feasible, of course. Robert Willey was an old acquaintance of mine, though I couldn’t properly describe him as a close
friend. He is widely known to the public as an expert on a strange assortment of subjects, chiefly rocketry, natural history
and structural engineering, about all of which he has written some notably informative and charming books. He is, in addition,
the author of innumerable popular magazine articles, and is a lecturer with more bids than he can possibly fill.

Though he is no longer a practising scientist, the public thinks of him as one—an impression aided by his record as
a pioneer in the first German rocket society, his expulsion by the Nazis, and the many times he is cited as an authority by
other science writers. He would be an undeniable asset to the Commodore, even if only as a name on a letter head.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I can’t deliver Willey to you on a platter; you’ll have to approach him yourself. He’s a busy
man, and he’ll make up his own mind whether or not he’s interested in our Arctic cruise. You’ll find his phone number in the
Queens book. If you catch him in town, explain the expedition to him and ask him if he’s interested. You can use my name,
which he’ll probably remember without any trouble, and you can also tell him that this is an IGY-sponsored project. But bear
in mind that if he is interested, Farnsworth will have to pay for him. Willey makes money every time he opens his mouth, and
the arrangement satisfies him perfectly.”

“I’ll remember,” Harriet said. “Thank you, Julian.” She sounded very humble; only then did I begin to realize what a shock
she had had.

“Don’t be jittery, Harriet. He’s really a very gracious, generous guy, though his accent makes him sound gruff. It’s just
that he makes his living from his name, so he’s not going to give it away. You’ll have to ask Farnsworth whether or not he
wants Willey enough to pay him; then you go ahead and phone Willey. Okay?”

“I see. Another version of the old Army game. I’ve played that often enough with clients. Thanks, Julian; I’ll let you know
what happens.”

“You can do better than that,” I said. “Call the Commodore right now and tell him he has no aeroplane.”

I explained swiftly what I had found at Teterboro. Somewhere in the background I could hear the baby borne off to bed, crying,
“Daddy, ball, daddy, ball” in doleful protest. I wish I’d been listening more closely. Instead, I added:

“I must confess that I’ve got no stomach for the job, which is why I’m asking you to do it. But the faster it’s done, the
better. He’ll need the news right away, so he can start hotting up the wires to Washington. Maybe you know him well enough
to make him realize you’re doing him a favour—and you can mix the Robert Willey angle in with it.”

“Sure I can. From my point of view it’s a break. Julian,
you’re an angel—a frigid angel. Good-bye, I’ve got to warm up my broomstick.”

“Go to it, carrot-top.”

I hung up. Behind me, Midge said, evenly:
“Carrot-top
, Julian?”

And off we went again.

T
HE
Commodore worked prodigies with Washington; evidently he was highly regarded there, at least in some quarters —and of course
the expedition had had a quasi-official status. There was, however, nothing that the Air Force could do about the Flying Tail.
Through some kind of intradepartmental bollix, that had been sold fair-and-square to the Venezuelans, and it couldn’t very
well be unsold. But there was an existing commitment to the Commodore which the AF was quite willing to recognize.

We wound up with the use of two B-29s in the condition —though only one was pressurized. Perforce, the dogs would ride in
that one, it being impossible to put oxygen masks on dogs. Nor would Dr. Elvers, whom I had finally met, wear well under that
kind of treatment: he was a small, dried prune of a man, with snow-white hair and pink-rimmed eyes. To my surprise, Farnsworth
promptly appointed Jayne the captain of the unpressurized craft, which would also carry Sidney Goldstein, our cryologist;
Ben Taurasi, our engineer-mechanic; Harry Chain, our radioman; Fred Klein, our geologist; and Marshall Benz, our oceanographer—exactly
half of our total personnel.

As a sort of bonus (which is Washington past-tense Latin for “boner”), the Air Force also made us several concessions. Chiefest
of these was their designating us an official AF mission. Aside from giving us unquestioned access to AF installations in
the North, what this meant in practice was that after we had gassed and oiled up the big planes at our own expense, we could
bill the government for the taxes. This didn’t put any money back into Farnsworth’s pocket before
the
expedition started—and I had already seen enough of his operation to realize that lack of ready cash was chronic with
him except when it was acute—but it made his credit good at Teterboro, which was almost as satisfactory.

Nevertheless, Farnsworth was far from satisfied. The delays and setbacks he had suffered over the past two years had slowly
begun to convince him that Somebody was out to get the expedition. He had no hypotheses about the identity of this Somebody,
which at least made him an unusual sample of this kind of crackpottery —almost anybody else would have been blaming the Reds,
the Pentagon, or some other whipping-boy—or about what Somebody might hope to gain by lousing us up. All the same it did no
good to ask pointed questions. On this subject, it was better to ignore Farnsworth as completely as possible.

We had an early spring in ’58, as I’m sure you’ll remember. The increasingly warm days were forcible reminders of how short
the time was growing before take off. As the interval shortened, press interest in us heightened, and Harriet took every possible
advantage of that interest. She arranged interviews right and left; the Commodore was given the chance to radiate animal magnetism
over three high-rated network TV shows, a whole battery of newsreel shorts, and radio interviews galore—to say nothing of
the magazine pieces that were written about him. All this was in addition to the stuff the papers were carrying.

It was a much better p.r. showing than Jayne could have brought off. It’s one thing to be an experienced newspaperman or woman,
but it’s quite another to be an experienced publicist, and Harriet was proving it to the hilt. I am unable to say that Jayne
was much warmed by the demonstration.

But it pleased the expedition’s sponsors; when the headlines began to refer to us as “2WPBE” instead of “POLAR TRY”, they
almost wriggled with delight. And it pleased the Commodore to the very verge of disaster. On a higher and more cerebral plane,
Robert Willey did a marvellous job of explaining to the public what we were going to the Pole for, giving us a good coating
of scientific prestige. The Commodore had agreed immediately to paying Willey’s asking price, a piece of farsightedness on
his part that I hadn’t really expected.

As for my salary, that had also turned out to be generous. That is, the Commodore paid me exactly what Ellen Fremd had forecast,
which, now that I knew him better, I had to
regard as generous. The cheques were not, however, always forthcoming on paydays. Farnsworth finally settled down to being
steadily one week behind on my cheque.

The public relations agencies of our sponsors were now in high gear, and much of their copy got printed—each piece stressing
some one item in our equipment or supplies, to the exclusion of everything else. We posed for innumerable photographs, wearing
our Snowfire togs, packing tabascomycin in with our medical supplies, checking our Dixon navigation instruments. Farnsworth
and Jayne posed together —he looking strong and silent, she slumbrously sultry—for Polar Passion No. 2, the perfume Jayne
was to wear at the Pole; the picture didn’t tell much about the perfume, but then I suppose it’s difficult to photograph a
smell. Most of these pix, of course, were unacceptable as editorial matter, but as artwork for ads they found their way into
everything from the
New Yorker
to
Iron Age.
Jayne got a nice write-up in one of the exposé magazines, too—and I rather doubt that it exaggerated much; the writer, an
anonymous hack who unsigned himself “Harcourt Melish”, evidently had been following her career since he was eleven, his tongue
hanging out a foot all the way.

In the glare of all this public attention, the Commodore blossomed like a giant hollyhock. The things he said about the expedition
became more and more disconnected from the facts. He told the TV audience on the Garroway show about his dream of finding
a hunk of Planet Four-and-a-half, and was delighted to find, next day, that his remarks on that subject had been picked up
by the wire services. After that, there was hardly any holding him. Pretty soon he was hinting that he might find virtually
the whole protoplanet—or anyhow, half of it—on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, and that the recovered lump might well show
“evidences of life”. This, too, was picked up, and front-paged by many of the tabloids, so it wasn’t long before the Commodore
was speculating in public as to whether or not the protoplanet had been destroyed in an interplanetary war with Mars, and
whether or not survivors of the war might have colonized the Earth

At this point Harriet sat on him so firmly that you could almost hear the air going out of him. He wouldn’t have allowed it
if he hadn’t enjoyed the process, but obviously he did. But in the nature of things it was impossible to sit on
Jayne, ‘Though Harriet stopped Farnsworth’s flow of tosh to the press through normal channels, she couldn’t prevent Jayne’s
purveying it in even more highly supercharged form to the Faber chain—after which, of course, it became common coin anyhow.

The reaction was inevitable. A week before the scheduled take off date, I got a telegram from Canada. I had been expecting
it. It said:

WHATS GOING ON
2
WPBE STOP NEWSPAPER STORIES HERE HIGHLY INACCURATE SENSATIONAL NONSENSICAL STOP IGY COMMITTEE DISTURBED ASKING CLARIFICATION
STOP WIRE ME CARE CHUBB CRATER STATION E FREMD

I could hardly blame her. I wired back:

COMMODORE DRINKING HEAVY PR WINE AIDED ABETTED SPONSORS PR AGENCIES AND MISS WYNN STOP WILL BE OFF AIR IN WEEK UNTIL THEN
WILL TRY SHOOSHING HIM JULIAN COLE

Her reply was short, sharp and pointed:

SHOOSH FIRMLY STOP IGY SPONSORSHIP VERGING WITHDRAWAL B FREMD

After some long and difficult pondering I took all the telegrams—the copy of mine included—to Farnsworth and shoved them at
him, without saying a word. He began to bluster almost at once, but the last wire stopped him in mid-eruption.

“Does she mean it?” he said, peering at me sharply. “Surely she’s bluffing?”

“Ellen doesn’t know the meaning of the word. She never dealt with anybody in her life on any basis but that of the straight
goods.” I had this from Ham, of course, not from personal experience; but Ham is a reliable observer. “In some respects it’s
made her very unhappy, but that’s how she is. She says exactly what she means.”

“Um.” The Commodore chewed at his lower lip. “That’s a strange way to deal with people, I must say. But…. What do you think
I ought to do?”

“Just lay off a little, Geoffrey. Don’t let the papers trap you into thinking that everything that gets into print is good
for us. If you said tomorrow that you were throwing up the expedition because you’d fallen in love with the Ranee of Krajputni,
you’d be on page one of every paper in town—but that kind of publicity isn’t worth having. If you can just
drop the Space Cadet angle for one more week—and persuade Jayne to drop it, too—we’ll be on our way, and the IGY won’t be
able to yank the rug out from under us. Can’t you do that?”

“Uh, yes, I guess I can,” Farnsworth said, somewhat mollified, but rather gloomy too. “Nobody in this country has any sympathy
with creative imagination any more. It isn’t as if I said anything impossible. You know, Julian, this is another piece of
the pattern. We’ve been harassed and bedevilled from the moment we conceived of this expedition. There’s no longer any question
in my mind about it.
Somebody
doesn’t want us to get to the Pole.”

“Meaning Ellen Fremd?” I said acidly, against my better judgment. “Horsefeathers, Geoffrey.”

“No, not Ellen Fremd directly. But she’s being used. It all adds up. She’s another piece in the jigsaw puzzle.”

“Jigsaw puzzles are pictures that have been cut apart in patterns that have no relationship to the original,” I said frostily.
“As a model for logic they lead straight to the straitjacket. Any man who tried to ‘use’ Ellen Fremd would wind up with blackened
stumps where his hands used to be.”

“You may be right,” he said, in the tone of a man who knew I was wrong.

“Anyhow, Geoffrey, look here, it’s very simple. Just lay off the War Between Mars and the Asteroids from now until take off.
That’s all I ask.”

“All right, Julian.”

But he was still brooding when I left. I wouldn’t have put any money on the staying power of his agreement.

Somehow, all the same, the appointed hour crept closer. That whole week was hotter than Purgatory; I wonder now how any of
us lasted it out. Yet take off time did at last arrive.

Were I writing a novel, I would give you here a touching farewell scene between Midge and the kids and me. Under the actual
circumstances, nothing could be more inappropriate—not because there wasn’t such a scene, but because when take off time arrived,
we didn’t take off. Bad weather shut in early that morning: thick fog, coupled with a muggy heat more intense than we had
had to suffer earlier. There was no chance at all of our getting off the ground, let alone rising above the weather. The planes
were so heavily loaded
that the heat-rarified air wouldn’t have allowed us to reach flying speed before we hit the end of even the longest of Teterboro’s
runways.

We sat on the field, swearing, while it got hotter and hotter and thicker and thicker, listening with our minds’ ears to the
expensive aviation petrol evaporating from the tanks. Farnsworth was in a foul mood, but the dogs were in a fouler; not even
Elvers could get near them without being snapped at savagely. The result was that after my final farewells I had to trail
ingloriously back to Pelham to the unbelieving and disapproving stares of almost the whole brood; only the baby was glad to
see me back, and she only because she was too little to understand that I wasn’t supposed to be home at all.