Fallen Star (16 page)

“Don’t ask me,” Farnsworth said. “Maybe he just caught
the glare off the side or the wings. He’s the very man to do it. I’m just as pleased that it worked out this way, anyhow.
We tried, we missed, and that’s that. Now we can get down to business.”

“Geoffrey, you’re out of your mind. Why won’t you give him a chance? Who’s going to believe in your sedimentary meteorite,
if you allow Joe to be discredited? Don’t you
want
to be believed?”

“I don’t think it will make a particle of difference one way or the other,” Farnsworth said disgustedly. “The meteorite is
inarguably just what it is. I’ve had Fred working on it, and he confirms my views.” I looked at the geologist, who nodded
—a little reluctantly, I thought, but perhaps I only imagined it. “What difference can it make whether or not Joe got squiffed
and missed their damned tin can? They expected to lose half of them, anyhow, didn’t they?”

“Joe wasn’t drunk. He doesn’t have anything with him
to
drink. I saw him burn it all, myself. As for the satellite, the IGY wants its course plotted because any deviation it shows
from prediction will help provide evidence for the true shape of the Earth. In other words, they’re charting the Earth’s gravitational
field—which governed the course your meteorite followed as it fell. That in turn will be a clue to where it came from.” I
didn’t at all know whether or not this was true; I was counting on Geoffrey’s not knowing, either. “Anyhow, that’s all beside
the point. You’re not even giving Joe a chance—that’s what counts. You’re the guy who dragged him up here, and took advantage
of his being down on his luck—and now that it looks like he’s in more trouble, you’re all set to ditch him without even listening
to him. Is that what you call being a human being?”

“In a minute I’m going to lose my temper,” Farnsworth said edgily. “This is no country for being free with dangerous accusations,
Julian.”

“Agreed,” I retorted. “And you’re being mighty free about accusing Joe of fluffing. Why won’t you give him a chance?”

“Oh, all right. I’ll talk to him. It can’t do any harm.”

“Good. Come on then. You can help me haul some fuel back.”

“In
this
weather?” the Commodore said. “I’ll talk to him, Julian, but stop pushing. He’ll keep, after all.”

Jayne stood up. “I’ll go, Geoffrey,” she said. “Think it over
while I’m gone. Maybe it won’t pay to be bull-headed this time. It didn’t pay before.”

He scowled at her, but offered no objections.

“Thanks,” I told her. “Geoffrey, do me the favour of remembering that you admitted I was right the last time. Believe me,
this thing is the very last blow as far as the expedition’s prestige is concerned—unless Joe really saw that satellite and
can prove it, pix and all.”

“Julian,” Farnsworth growled,
“stop pushing.
Don’t you ever recognize when you’ve won an argument?”

Alarmed, I shut up and got to work.

Jayne helped me drag the fuel-cans willingly enough, but it seemed to take hours. Out in the open there was a complete “whiteout”—an
even glare of daylight on flying snow and ice-crystals which obliterated not only the horizon but the very distinction between
the ground and the sky, so that our vision was as useless as if we had been crawling with pillowcases over our heads. By the
time we got back to the tent we were nearly snowblind despite our goggles, and stumbled and bumped into each other and against
anonymous objects, and spilled kerosene on the ground trying to load the stove and the lantern until I was almost afraid to
strike a match to make them go. At last, however, the stove thumped softly and began to compete with the all-pervasive cold;
and a moment later, another pop, a droning hiss and a glare of yellow light announced that Jayne had gotten the lantern into
operation.

At first, even after my eyes got used to the new change in illumination, I failed almost completely to understand what I saw.
The inside of the tent was a shambles, but not at all the kind of shambles that might have been explained in terms of the
storm. My first wild assumption was that a polar bear had broken into the place, though we had yet to see one.

The whole floor of the tent was littered with scraps and wads of paper, and with large, rectangular pieces of grey glass,
on one of which somebody had stepped—probably Jayne, since I didn’t remember having crunched down on anything while we were
groping. There were also wads of aluminium foil, and a good many scattered heaps of clothing, all the latter apparently from
Wentz’s pack, which had been torn open.

Then I saw Wentz. He was lying on his sleeping bag—not in it—with his eyes open, staring cloudily at the pinnacle
of the tent. His mouth was open, his breathing loud and bubbling.

“Joe! Joe!”

“It’s no use, Julian,” Jayne said, with a sort of amused regret. “I’ve seen it all before. The first time we took Joe Wentz
on safari with us, he had only one piece of luggage with him—containing one change of clothing, a bottle of Scotch, a bottle
of rye, a bottle of gin, a bottle of dry vermouth, a bottle of sour mash bourbon, a bottle of brandy, a bottle of perfume,
a bottle of ink and a bottle of ketchup. Geoffrey was right; he never changes.”

“It can’t be. He must be sick.” I dropped to my knees beside him and bent to listen to his chest.

We were, as it turned out, both right. He was drunk, without doubt; this close to him I could smell the stuff. After a moment
of rummaging, I even found the bottle: a half-litre of straight ethyl alcohol, either from our medical stores or from Farnsworth’s
or Fred’s stock of reagents. It still contained an oozing lump of cloudy crystals about as big as my fist. I was obscurely
glad to discover that it wasn’t whisky—or perfume, for that matter—though the fact made Wentz not one whit less drunk.

But he was sick, too. It didn’t take much guessing to figure out what was the matter with him—not
in
this country, and with Wentz’s history

Like most long-confirmed alcoholics, he was a pushover for pneumonia.

I handed Jayne the empty flask without comment. “He’s got so much congestion in his chest now that he’s damn near drowning,”
I said huskily. “Now’s our chance to see if all that tabascomycin Pfistner gave us is as good as they said it was. Drunk or
sober, we’ve got to bail him out of this—to save his life,
and
to hear what his story is on this satellite foul-up.”

She nodded and looked around; I pointed out our first-aid bundle.

“Are you in any doubt about the story?” she said, gently.

“I sure as hell am. So, all right, he’s drunk now, that’s plain to see. But I
know
he wasn’t drunk during the satellite transit. If he’s back on the stuff now, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”

“Really, Julian?” she said. “Oh hell, this is one of
Pfistner’s Mechaniject syringes—I keep forgetting how you open them…. Ah, there it is. I can’t quite see you pouring raw alcohol
down him against his will.”

“That isn’t what I mean.” I wasn’t entirely sure what I did mean, for that matter; all I had was a gnawing suspicion, and
I was fighting that as hard as I could. I felt for Wentz’s pulse; it was way up, and his forehead was burning.

Jayne loaded the syringe with a cartridge like a professional and knelt beside us. “Rump or arm?” I asked her.

“Just roll up his sleeve. He’s chilled enough already without taking his pants down.” She sank the needle into his triceps
muscle with the neat precision of a marksman placing a dart, and the plunger went home. I swabbed the puncture with the drippings
from the alcohol bottle and rolled Wentz’s sleeve back down.

“Are you a nurse too, Jayne?”

“Hell no,” she said abstractedly, lifting the sick astronomer’s eyelids and looking under them. Deprived of its forced animation,
her face, I could see now, was so rounded in contour as to be downright motherly; her professional photographs had given her
bone-highlights that she just didn’t have when her face was relaxed. “But in the jungle everybody has to know how to give
shots, if you want to keep your bearers…. He’s damn sick, all right…. Even the healthiest boys can turn up with tropical ulcers
between one day’s trek and another. We used to burn penicillin like gin, some weeks.”

She settled him into his bedding, and sat down on mine to watch him. There was, of course, nothing else that could be done
for a while but watch.

I couldn’t stay still, all the same, and instead I began to pick compulsively about in the litter. The scraps and wads of
paper turned out to be reprints from an issue of
Astronomica Acta,
dated ten years ago. They were all headed :

AN N-CLASS HIGH-LUMINOSITY STAR SHOWING HIGH PROPER MOTION

A Preliminary Report

J. Wentz

(Ph.D., Utrecht)

Evidently he had had a cache of the pamphlets in his pack along with the filched alcohol—and had been spending his time since
I had seen him last drinking and brooding over
his paper. The year-date was right for the year his honorary doctorate from Lisbon had been both awarded and revoked; God
only knew what that meant. But it was clear that before he had passed out, he had begun to destroy the copies one after another,
but had not been able to bring himself to do a complete job of it. In the end, the lantern must have gone out while he was
still at it; the four undamaged pamphlets I found fanned out at the foot of the bedding must have evaded his groping hands
in the frigid darkness.

Thereafter, he had had no choice but to sit alone in the invisible wreckage, thinking about Wentz’s Runaway Giant, and sucking
the sludge from the ice crystals through the neck of the bottle. After a while, he had groped about for something else to
destroy, and had found it : the pieces of glass on the floor.

They were photographic plates, deprived of their covers, which were also amid the litter. The aluminium foil belonged to the
cosmic-ray emulsions; the red-and-black paper sheets to the optical plates; he had missed neither. I suppose that, even in
his fury of self-loathing, he had not begun to strip the plates until after the lantern sputtered out and left him in the
cold darkness, but it did us no good to speculate about that now; for even had the plates been safe as long as the tent had
been dark, they had been exposed the moment that Jayne had lit the lantern.

Possibly the cosmic-ray emulsions were still salvageable; with them it wasn’t the surface exposure that counted, but the deep
penetrating of particles millions of times more massive than light-photons. Had Hanchett been with us still, he would have
known what to do for them, if anything could indeed still be done.

But the optical plates were kaput. We were never going to know whether Joe had photographed the IGY’s satellite, or just a
high-flying SAS airliner. His say-so was all we had left. The evidence lay wiped out around our feet.

Under the twin drives of the stove and the lamp, the tent began to warm up. The winds that were creating the whiteout were
turbulent, but they were no match for those that we had had during the storm proper; the tent was reasonably heat-tight again,
and the foilcloth reflected the warmth back at us in increasing waves. It felt good for a while, and then
it began to feel a little like too much of a good thing; but we didn’t stop it down. Wentz needed it. Sick, drunk and bedraggled
as he was, he couldn’t be allowed to sweat out his fever inside his work-clothes—Jayne had already stripped him of those—and
his occasional violent starts invariably burst him halfway out of his bedding. We had to make sure that he wasn’t exposed
to the raw winter each time he thrashed himself uncovered.

But it got more and more uncomfortable for us. I gave up first, peeling myself out of my parka. This left me walking about
in the same outfit—twill shorts and flight jacket—that I had ridiculed when I had first seen Elvers wearing it out in the
open on the ice-cap; I didn’t think it so funny now. Jayne held out a little longer, and when she emerged from her snowsuit
I could understand why : she was wearing a tight-fitting, astonishingly shaggy red wool union-suit. Under any other circumstances,
I would either have goggled or dissolved into helpless laughter; she was a caricature of every calendar cheesecake picture
ever painted, and for that matter I looked pretty bizarre myself. But we neither of us laughed. I remember thinking only that
the whiteout was for once in our favour, since as long as it lasted neither Farnsworth nor anybody else would be likely to
blunder in and see us in these Beaux-Arts rigs.

“Do you think we can take turns sleeping?” I asked her.

“I don’t think so, Julian. Listen to that cough—if it gets any worse he’ll strangle in his own sputum unless one of us is
around to catch him when the crisis comes. If he wakes up, we’ll have to give him water, and some broth if possible. And in
any event he’ll have to have another shot every four hours around the clock. We’ll each of us have to help keep the other
one awake—and in this heat it isn’t going to be easy.”

“Then we’d better eat, ourselves.”

I broke out rations, and Jayne made a thick, anonymous soup of them atop the stove. It was pleasant to have a hot meal, even
though the fumes from the stove and the lantern masked out most of its taste; it was authoritatively salty, and that was all,
but at least it was also hot. Then we squatted down, side by side, to watch Joe.

I was beginning to nod when Jayne said suddenly : “Fred’s the last we have, isn’t he, Julian?”

“Um? The last what?”

“The last real scientist. We’re about cashiered, as far as scientific standing is concerned—even if we pull Joe through.”

“Just what I’ve been saying,” I said, resting my chin on my knees. Jayne stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned
back.

“All right. We’re going to be mud with our sponsors when we get back, I can see that. But Julian, I can’t make Geoffrey see
it. Oh, he believes it off the top of his head, but he isn’t really sold on it. He thinks that if he can just get back home
with his pieces of protoplanet, people are going to forgive him everything and fall on his neck with glad cries.”