Fallen Star (10 page)

But the bottle continued to hang there from his hand, its bottom nearly touching the splintery floorboards. He went on watching
his shoes, as thought he were afraid they might get him up and take him somewhere. When, cautiously, I peered more closely
at him, I saw that he was out with his eyes open.

And I was alone. An impenetrable barrier of alcohol and
frustration between me and the nearest human being; an expedition full of madmen between me and sanity; hundreds of miles
of ice and wilderness between me and the rest of the world; hundreds of hours of desolation between me and the future … and
north of me a rock slumbered—I could almost believe it now—millions of miles from the planet that gave it birth, with the
very bones of Creation frozen at its core….

A plane passed low overhead, but I hardly heard it. For the first time, now that I was all by myself, I was listening to the
wind.

T
HE
incoming plane had been Jayne. She and her party had almost frozen solid, despite their furs and masks, during the last half
of their flight in their unpressurized craft; the biting winds on the airfield must have seemed almost mild to them. Luckily
there were no frostbites. They came trooping into the thawing shack, where they made a great to-do flapping their arms about,
stamping and blowing on their fingers. None of this noise disturbed Dr. Wentz in the least; he sat slumped where he was, seventy
per cent unfrocked astronomer and thirty per cent bourbon (“This whisky guaranteed to be at least three months old—Coloured
and flavoured with wood chips”).

“That’s enough,” Jayne said at last. “Let’s get this show on the road. Coming, Julian?”

She did not seem in the least tired, though the flight must have been gruelling. I shrugged and got up. I didn’t relish the
notion of going out into that cold again, but at least the trip would be short—and I was glad to have conscious company once
more, even if it had to be Jayne. Some of the other members of her group were not so willing:

“Hey, have a heart, Miss Wynn.”

“Can’t we wait another five or ten minutes, at least? I’m still blue right down to my boots.”

“It’s warm in the operations hut,” Jayne said. “I’ve got to get a release on the air in time for the bulldog editions, and
there’s no radio in this damn hole. Let’s move.”

They grumbled, but they climbed back into their togs. “What about him?” Fred Klein said.

Jayne barely bothered to glance at Wentz. “He’s as useful here as he’d be over there,” she said scornfully. “Let him alone.”

“Well, but let’s at least pass the bottle,” Sidney Goldstein suggested. Nobody waited for Jayne to okay this idea; the bottle
was plucked at once from Wentz’s dangling hand. By the time it got to me it was empty, but I’d already had my share. Then
we ploughed out into that blinding cold again.

The operations hut was already crowded when we got there, and after that it was close to impassable. I counted noses with
difficulty and found that everyone was there but Elvers (and, of course, Wentz). Evidently Farnsworth had conned help from
the enlisted men of the base complement for the job of finishing servicing the snowmobiles. Maybe Elvers was supervising.
The base commandant, Col. McKinley, was also there, with two aides; all three of them watched us mill around with expressions
that varied between amusement and alarm. I could understand how they felt; there was something about the gathering that resembled
children just arrived at a party which was on the verge of being too large to control.

Jayne unpacked her typewriter and got right to work on top of a foot-locker. She had a preposterous release about our landing
and our further preparations all written in about ten minutes. She showed it proudly to both Harriet and me.

“You can’t send that,” I protested. “For one thing, it’s a phony.”

“Julian, your tune never changes,” she said. I think she was genuinely hurt. “It isn’t a phony. It’s
essentially
true. Of course we haven’t done all of these things yet, but we’re going to. And how often am I going to find time to radio
home, once we’re really working?”

“Twice a day?” Harriet suggested. Her smile was scared, but she was trying.

“The deskmen back home will smell it out,” I insisted. “If they don’t, the technically informed people will—including the
IGY Committee.”

She sniffed. I had a good idea what I could do with my IGY Committee. Nor could I sway her an inch; Harriet, wisely, didn’t
even try. In the end the release went out just
as she had written it. I could only hope that the papers would have sense enough to tone it down—except for the Faber chain,
which of course would print it verbatim. But if the
Times
, for instance, printed it with some of those cosy bracketed interpolations of theirs, the wire services would get the interpolations
moving as short “adds” to the main story, and even the Faber chain might print those. After all, Jayne was their girl, and
any news about the expedition, even if it corrected her copy, would in a sense be news about her….

I was already getting to be expert at whistling past graveyards.

The door opened, letting in a banshee scream of wind and finely powdered snow, and Elvers’ face peered at us from under his
parka. Everybody yelled at him and be shut himself out at once.

Farnsworth had jostled his way over to the commandant’s desk, where he spread his charts out and bent over them, frowning,
his big forefinger stabbing here and there for Hanchett’s benefit. “It’s not going to be as simple as it looks,” he was saying.
“I’d be happier if there were
a
few small islands north of us to anchor the ice and give us base points. As it is, there’s just no place to drive a bench-mark
once we leave Ellesmere.”

“We can’t cross over the Otterloo Current in any case with the machines,” Hanchett said. “It’d be better to follow a curve
off to the west, even if it does take us farther from the mainland.”

“You’re going to try to go all the way to the Pole in those moving-vans of yours?” Col. McKinley said incredulously.

“That’s why we brought them up here.”

“You can’t do it,” the commandant said. “Those vehicles are totally unsuitable for summer work on the ice. The cap isn’t continuous
in the summer—it’s just pack ice. You can’t put that much weight on it.”

“We’ll manage,” Farnsworth said. “That’s what we’ve got experts with us for.”

“No such thing as an expert up here. The Arctic Ocean is the least explored area in the whole world. That damned ice is untrustworthy
in the summer, and that’s that. You’ll never make it in those machines.”

Farnsworth straightened, his face darkening. I realized that I had never seen him really angry before. “Look here,
Colonel,” he said evenly. “I’m the man who’s running this expedition. I’m being paid to run it, by some of the biggest businesses
in the world; they think I know what I’m doing. So do I.”

“I don’t,” Col. McKinley said, staring back at Farnsworth with an expression as sardonically motionless as an Easter Island
statue. “I’ve been up here two years, and I’m not an expert. You got here today. Draw the moral.”

“I have no time for that kind of exercise, nor any patience with it. If I leave my snowbuggies behind, I lose my trademark,
which is worth many thousands of dollars. I also fail to fulfill my testing commitments to my sponsors. I also lose most of
my ability to be of use to the government, and to the International Geophysical Year. Therefore, the buggies go, and with
your co-operation. This is what I say. That makes it so.”

Col. McKinley stood stock still for a moment; then he spread his hands and shrugged. “Those are the orders I have,” he said
harshly. “Hell, Commodore, I’m not trying to run your expedition. I’m just trying to keep you from committing suicide. Go
ahead, do it your way; it’s no skin off my nose.”

Farnsworth smiled winningly. “Thank you, sir” he said. “I don’t want to be bull-headed either. go along with you this far:
Suppose I take one of our planes over the proposed route, first? If there are serious conditions anywhere along the path,
Hanchett and I can easily plot a new course around them. That ought to keep us out of trouble.”

“It’ll get you shot down, too,” McKinley said, with a certain relish. “I’m sorry, Commodore, but that’s out of the question.
I am empowered to forbid that kind of operation, and I do forbid it.”

“Why, in God’s name?” Farnsworth said, his face changing colour again.

“Because this is a military area—or a theatre of war, if you really want the blunt name for it. For an IGY outfit, you people
seem to be pretty light on facts the IGY knows by heart. Were you at the Stockholm IGY meeting in 1956?”

“No,” Farnsworth said. “What has that to do with it?”

“The Russians proposed then that we and they fly alternate daily observation patrols across the Pole, landing at each other’s
bases at Nome and Murmansk. Our people weren’t
empowered to accept, but later on Washington accepted, with conditions. The Russians accepted the conditions.”

“Well?”

“One of the conditions rules out all unscheduled flights. Only normal commercial traffic and the agreed transpolar patrol
are allowed. The violating party is liable to attack on sight. There are fighters up all the time to enforce the rule—we’ve
even had a few inconclusive dogfights, and one of those could blow up into something major any time now. If you take one of
those crates of yours over the Pole, the Russians will ‘shoot you down, and we’ll just have to sit back and watch, them do
it. If we stepped in, in violation of the agreement, we’d start a war—after all, we made the conditions ourselves, Clear enough?”

“Perfectly,” Farnsworth said, unruffled. “All right, no planes. We’ll just have to do it the hard way—in the snowmobiles.
Very good. Jayne, come over here and let’s check the crews.”

McKinley was shunted aside, wearing the expression of a man who has won all the battles and lost the war. The manœuvre was
purely dramatic on Farnsworth’s part, for there was not a great deal of planning left to do. The lead snowbuggy would be driven
by Dr. Hanchett, who had the responsibility of seeing to it that we would follow the proposed path into the interior, and
arrive on time at the Pole instead of somewhere on the north coast of Greenland. As the next most valuable members of the
party, Elvers and the dogs would ride in the last buggy, which Jayne would drive, because only a total of four people in the
party knew how to drive them. This meant that Harriet had to ride in the middle buggy with Farnsworth because she would not
be separated from her pay-cheque, so I decided to ride in the middle buggy too, along with Sidney Goldstein, our cheerful
cryologist, who professed to be much smitten with Harriet. Wentz was put in with Jayne and Elvers on the theory that he would
be in no shape to care whom he rode with, though it wasn’t expressed quite that openly. Wollheim was to go with Hanchett in
order to make sure that there was one woman in each buggy, thus dividing the risk to what little of potential American motherhood
we had with us.

And so on. It was all very sane and unexcited, like parcelling out passengers for a three-car picnic. All through the
allocation the wind howled without let or surcease, and somewhere along the line I found Harriet’s hand curled in mine, like
a hedgehog warming its nose in its burrow.

We got up at 5.00 a.m. the next day, but it was nearly noon outside, as it had been for many weeks. I was getting my first
taste of what it is like to live in a country where the days and nights are each six months long, and the sun goes down a
little and then rises again in the sky without ever having set. Above the Arctic Circle, Kepler and God are superseded by
something called Benchley’s Law, which says that the Earth does not really go around the Sun at all, but around Aroostook,
Me., and besides there is really no such place anyhow.

When there is no Time, you make one up; and man-made time is always fast. At least in the beginning, I would have eaten five
or six meals a day, slept twice as often as usual, and wound up the week on only three of four clock-days, had it not been
for clocks and the wise condescension of old Arctic hands among the young draftees on the base. My metabolism was enormously
speeded up, by the cold perhaps, and. I think, by my drive to get through the calendar months and back home. Without clocks,
I would have aged several years in those two months, out of inability to recognize when a given astronomical day actually
was over.

By the time I arrived in the cave where the snowmobiles were stored, it was already deafening with the echoes of two of their
engines. Mechanics were heating the block of the third engine with a huge blowtorch, and before long it too was slamming noise
off the walls. In the darkness after the snow-glare, the buggies looked like crouching animals, their gigantic tyres—almost
as high as they were—tucked under their blunt chins like paws.

Inside, however, they were warm and comfortable, and surprisingly roomy. If you take a vehicle almost as big as a two-story
house, and apportion the space inside it as economically as you would apportion it in a submarine, you can pack in a lot of
living space along with the necessary equipment, and Farnsworth’s designer hadn’t stinted. The impression of being on shipboard
was heightened in the tiny driver’s cab, which was laid out like a miniature ship’s bridge.

Farnsworth was up there when I came in, humming something repetitious and full of flatted fifths which I suppose was
African, and watching the elaborate dashboard while the engine warmed up.

“Hello, Julian,” he said abstractedly. “Find your cabin all right? Enough room? Got your things stowed away?”

I gave him a blanket yes and watched over his shoulder. The doors to the cave were being swung open now, letting in the intense
white glare and lighting up the hunched shoulders of Hanchett’s snowmobile ahead of us. Abruptly the basketwork dish atop
Hanchett’s machine began to revolve on its alt-azimuth mounting. The astronomer was testing his radar, the invisible lifeline
he would use to keep us together across the ice.