by James Blish
Oh, I was a willing victim, I can’t pretend that I wasn’t. The notion of being entrapped by the number two editor of Pierpont-Millennium-Artz didn’t repel me a bit.
“Julian,” Ellen said seriously while I opened the second quart of ale, “tell me what you know about the International Geophysical Year.”
“That’s a sizeable task,” I said. “It started July first of last year, and runs to the end of this year, and scientists all over the world are taking part in it; its over-all purpose is to enlarge our knowledge of the Earth; the projects involved range all the way from Antarctic expeditions to the launching of satellite missiles. I wrote a piece for the Times about it that pretty well sums up my knowledge of it, except for a few pieces of specialized knowledge that weren’t suitable for a lay audience, or were of too limited interest for a general discussion.”
“I saw the article. That’s what made me ask Ham whether or not you were available. Frankly, the IGY needs competent science writers very badly.”
“Well, I’m certainly interested,” I said guardedly. “Geophysics isn’t exactly my best subject, though.”
“That doesn’t matter. Just about every science imaginable is involved in the project, and no one writer could cover it all in anything short of a decade. What we need most are historians to cover specific areas of the Year. And we need a man to write two books about the IGY for the layman.”
“Two books?”
“Yes,” she said. “One isn’t really about the IGY per se; I’ll get to that one in a moment. The other is to be published after the Year is over, explaining what we originally hoped to accomplish, and how well we succeeded.”
“An official historian, in other words?” Ham asked interestedly.
“No. At least not in the technical sense. The official history will run to a good many volumes, and it won’t be for laymen. Probably we’ll ask Laura Fermi to do that for us. She has the qualifications, and she seems to be doing a stunning job on the Fifty-five Atomic Energy Conference at Geneva. What we want is an interpreter.”
I worked on the ale while I thought about it. It took a good deal of thinking. If Ellen meant to offer the post to me, I couldn’t accept it out of hand. It would mean my committing myself to this one project for some years to come, to the practical exclusion of income from one-shot sources—the sources from which, ordinarily, I drew the money to keep a wife, four girls and a draughty fourteen-room house in operating condition.
Finally I decided to say just that, and did. I suspected that Ellen might be a little repelled by the sheer crassness of such an approach to science, but I was wrong.
“I can’t offer the whole thing to you anyhow,” Ellen said with a faint smile. “Ham reminded me of you——”
I looked a dagger or two at Ham. He blinked benignly at the fire.
“—too late for me to give you still a third book, one explaining what the IGY is for. But I think you may be just right on the second one, the layman’s book on what we do accomplish. In the meantime, since the IGY can’t pay you a retainer, I’ve made a tentative arrangement with Artz that will keep you paid until the Year is over.”
“Very good. How does it work?”
“Hold on to your bridgework,” Ham said sleepily.
“We want you to go with the Second Western Polar Basin Expedition,” Ellen said. “You’ll act as historian for it, on behalf of the IGY; and after it’s over, you’ll also write a book about it for Artz. The expedition itself will probably pay you a small salary—we aren’t sure about that yet—and Artz will give you an advance on the book. Since you’ll be at the North Pole a while, you won’t have much need for spending money.
“Now, if you do a good job on the Polar Basin book, I think we’ll have no trouble selling the IGY publications committee on hiring you to do the post-Year layman’s book. Artz will publish that too; and Pouch Editions will reprint both books. The total sum involved comes to fifteen hundred dollars in advance from Artz, plus four thousand from Pouch, plus whatever Commodore Bramwell-Farnsworth is willing to pay you as a salary. That won’t be much, I’m afraid, but it’ll at least be noticeable; the Commodore likes to do his exploring in style. Call it sixty-five hundred to seven thousand all told. Could you do it for that?”
“Cripes!” I said feelingly. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t blame you for being cautious,” Ellen added. “Considering that the total is conditional. If Artz doesn’t like the Polar Basin book, you’d be left with nothing but the one advance and the expedition salary.”
“Oh, that doesn’t worry me,” I said truthfully. “I can handle the job—science writing is my business, and I know I can do it, just like a riveter knows he can rivet. But—the North Pole! I hate winter, Ellen. Let me think a minute. How long would I be away?”
“About four months,” Ellen said, smiling, “Bramwell-Farnsworth thinks he’ll be ready to leave in late April, and with luck you ought to be back early in September. That isn’t so bad—you’ll miss the summer, but it isn’t like being stuck in Antarctica for two years. But it depends partly on the earth-satellite programme. If a satellite isn’t launched successfully by September, you may have to wait for the first successful shot. One of the expedition’s purposes is to monitor that shot over the Pole.”
“I see. What else will they be doing?”
“Quite a bit. There’s a lot we need to know. There’ll be fourteen in the party counting yourself, mostly oceanographers; also astronomers, a radiologist, a cryologist, and, of course, a meteorologist.”
The roster made sense. The northern ice cap does not lie over a continent, as the Antarctic ice cap does; instead, it’s only a sheet floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, with no land under it at all. A fully equipped expedition there would need to take daily depth soundings, to record the fluctuations of the ice cap above the ocean bottom—a procedure that would not only yield valuable information for studies of gravity, but might also be a life-or-death matter for the expedition itself, providing new knowledge about the currents in the cold depths, and new knowledge of where crevasses in the cap could be expected to become numerous at various times of the year. The astronomer, of course, would track the earth satellite. The radiologist, working with him, would make cosmic ray observations and study the aurora borealis. The meteorologist would in part be there for the survival of the party itself, but he would also bring back data on the polar weather of immediate practical value to outfits like Scandinavian Air Lines, which run transport routes, and to the U.S. Air Force to boot. The cryologist, I supposed, would be interested both in charting ice movement and in studying the chemistry of everything in sight under conditions of permanent cold.
“It sounds interesting,” I said cautiously. “Also somewhat familiar, Ellen. Wasn’t there some talk in the papers about this expedition last year? A name like Bramwell-Farnsworth’s sounds familiar at any time, of course, but——”
A peculiar expression which I could not then read—a combination, perhaps, of impatience and enforced suspension of judgment—flickered over Ellen’s face and was gone.
“They tried to start last year on their own hook,” she said. “All kinds of things went wrong; I think they were under-financed. But with IGY support they should be able to get better sponsors this year.”
“Why didn’t they have IGY support last year?” Ham asked_
“They didn’t want it, Ham. We offered it, and they turned it down. They said they’d turn their results over to us after the expedition got back, but they didn’t want to follow the programme we’d laid out for them. They had other researches that they wanted to prosecute instead, and above all they wanted to go in 1957, not this year. Now, since they didn’t make it last year anyhow, they’re willing to go along with us.”
“We’ll make a Machiavelli of you yet,” Ham said. I don’t think Ellen understood him; if she did, she gave no sign.
“Julian, what do you think?” she said. “Would you like to try it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Midge and the kids won’t like it, I suppose. But it sounds to me like it’s worth a try.”
“Hooray !” Ham said, hoisting his Pilsner glass at me. “Send me back a polar-bear rug, boy. I’ve got a new young lady who’ll settle for nothing else.”
Surprisingly, Ellen Fremd blushed slightly and got up abruptly from her desk. I followed her back into the living room, turning over in my mind a few surmises that were both unworthy and none of my damned business—always the most interesting kind. The rest of the evening was pleasant but uneventful, devoted, as I recall, largely to swapping diverting anecdotes about the fabulous Dr. Ralph Alpher.
But when the evening was over and I was ready to venture out into the blizzard again, I astonished myself by blurting out on Ellen’s doorstep:
“Ellen, I don’t mean to uncover old wounds—I hope you’ll forgive me if I do. I only want to say that—that whatever your differences, and they’re your own affair—I always enormously admired Dean.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, and in the light spilling out the dim hall she looked for just an instant as millennially in repose as that heart-stopping head of Queen Nefertete. Now I had done it; I could have bitten my tongue off. I didn’t even know why I had opened my big bazoo.
Then she looked back at me and smiled with the greatest gentleness.
“I admired him too,” she said quietly. “Thank you for saying so.”
I made my good-byes as best I could, considering the enormity of the gaffe, and the door closed. On the way down the stairs, Ham took my elbow between a thumb and a finger as powerful as wire-cutters.
“You bastard,” he said. “What a way to return a favour.”
“I know,” I said. “Right now I’d rather be at the North Pole than anywhere.”
“I’d almost rather have you there. You just put me right back where I started from, two years ago.”
Then I realized that the favour he was talking about was the favour he had done me, not any of Ellen’s.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to. It just happened.”
“I know. Maybe it was the right thing to do, for that matter. You couldn’t have any conception of how damnably shy she is, especially after the bust-up with Dean; she blames herself.”
We paused in the vestibule and looked out at the swirling storm.
“Couldn’t you have warned me?” I said. “Hell, Ham, you’ve been the harem type for as long as I’ve known you. If you’d said—”
“It’s true, I’m my own worst enemy,” Ham said, lightly, but with an undertone of bitterness I had never heard from him before. “Well, life isn’t all anti-chronons and skittles. Some things have to come the hard way. Let’s go have a Tom and Jerry.”
He took my arm again, gently, and we plunged blindly out into the still-swirling snowstorm. Ham is the only authentic genius I can count among my friends, but he is more than that: he is a great gentleman. I pay him this tribute here because his role in this story from here on out is both minor and very odd, and I want no doubt left in anybody’s mind of what I think of this man. Here he exists, in love, which is as good a going-out as anyone has devised yet.
Midge and the kids didn’t like it. Duffy, the four-year-old, was delighted—she spent two nights writing a thank-you letter to Santa Claus for me to carry—until she realized that I wouldn’t be coming home from the North Pole every night for supper. Then she wailed like a homeless kitten. I was flattered, but it didn’t make things any easier. Bethany, fourteen, took it even harder, to my great surprise; I had thought her too deeply immersed in her universe of cacophony, crushes and crises to notice whether I was home or not. She didn’t say much, but suddenly she seemed at least three years younger; she even brought me her math problems, which she had scorned to do as early as ten. Ruth, who is eight, was wide-eyed, and bragged a good deal outside the house, but inside she was preternaturally muted, and abruptly resumed wetting her bed.
This whole complex scared the wits out of me. As for Jeanie, not yet two, there was no possibility of explaining to her what was to come, and that frightened me most of all. A free-lance writer is home and available to his children through most of their waking hours; they are never given the chance to become used to his being normally invisible, as the father who holds an office job usually is. Jeanie saw me almost as often as she saw Midge. What would happen inside her small nascent soul when I vanished into the Arctic for a whole summer would never be riddled. Only this much was certain: when I got back, the baby wouldn’t know me any longer.
Had I been weighing these arguments all by myself, I undoubtedly would have chucked the whole job out of hand. But Midge pressed them, forcing me to think up answers. Answers you invent yourself come to have the force of law.
“I still don’t think it’s safe,” Midge insisted at the end of a long, after-lights-out argument. “Flying over the Pole in an airliner is one thing. But travelling right on the ice, with dog-sleds—that’s something else again.”
“This isn’t Nineteen-nine any longer, Midge,” I said. “There’ll be nothing primitive or desperate about this expedition. We aren’t going there just to be the first men to reach the Pole. That’s been done. We’re going because there’s work to be done up there, work that’ll be no good to anybody unless it’s brought back, and us with it. There’ll be expensive apparatus to protect, as well as lives. Besides, as Ellen says, Bramwell-Farnsworth likes to travel in style. There’ll be no real danger.”
She sighed faintly and curled up against my back. “All right,” she said. “But I still don’t like it. At least you won’t be leaving for a while.”
“No indeed, I don’t even know a tenth of the details yet,” I said, turning over. “Tomorrow I start to find out.”
“All right,” she said quietly. “But be sure to come back.”
After that, no more was said about it that night.
Two
COMMODORE GEOFFREY BRAMWELL-FARNSWORTH liked to travel in style.
He was, I discovered at the public library, a World War I Canadian destroyer officer, fifty-six years old, who was now an American citizen; and the Second Western Polar Basin Expedition would be his ninth junket into rough country. The last such expedition, a year-long African safari, had bagged a record-making 2, 413-pound rhino, and had explored a great deal of the world’s most dismal rain-forest in search of mokele-mbembe—the legendary beast which Bramwell-Farnsworth (together with Ivan Sanderson and, more tentatively, Robert Willey) firmly believed to be a dinosaur of the Diplodocus genus.
Well, why not? They never so much as saw mokele-mbembe, of course, but had they come back from the Belgian Congo with a live dinosaur, I think few naturalists would have been more than mildly surprised. Since the catching of live coelacanth fishes off the Madagascar coast, almost anything from Africa in the line of “living fossils” seems believable, or at least conceivable; coelacanths are considerably older than dinosaurs, supposedly having been extinct for seventy million years.
For the most part, the safari had been conducted in three ten-ton trailers—one of them carrying supplies and a Diesel-electric generating system, the other two carrying the exploring party in air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted comfort. The living trailers had full-length bathtubs, too, not just shower stalls; and one of them also contained a well stocked bar.
Nor did Bramwell-Farnsworth have any intention of giving up these rough comforts for the Polar venture. The trailers, somewhat lightened and otherwise converted, had been shipped last year to Alert, 550 miles south of the Pole on the northernmost tip of Ellesmere Island, and presumably were still waiting there for the second try. The newspapers called them his “snow yachts”.
Exploring like this is not cheap. The African safari, for instance, had run to $250,000—Bramwell-Farnsworth had apparently mentioned the figure every time he was interviewed—and it was obvious that the Polar Basin expedition would be almost as expensive. This kind of money can no longer be raised
as Byrd once raised it, by soliciting pennies from school children—nowadays no school kid would give you a penny toward any destination short of the Moon—nor did the IGY have that much to allocate to what was, from the IGY’s point of view, a minor collateral venture. Bramwell-Farnsworth needed other sources of funds, and he had found them.
He was commercially sponsored, like the Mickey Mouse Club, by some eighteen U.S. corporations.
One of them was an outfit I already knew well: Jno. Pfistner & Sons, Inc., a Bronx firm which was the world’s largest producer of biological drugs. Though Pfistner was over a century old, they had come into the brand-name pharmaceuticals market only recently, having discovered an antibiotic called tabascomycin which promised to cure everything (to hear them talk) but cancer, the common cold and the divorce rate. Before this discovery, they had sold their products only in bulk, to other prescription-drug houses, for relabelling. As a result, they were agressively publicity-hungry; I could well understand how they had been sucked into this affair.
What I didn’t understand was how they were going to justify the money to their stockholders, or explain the tie-in to the press logically enough to make their sponsorship of the venture worth more than a mention (“One of the sponsors of the ‘business safari’, Jno. Pfistner & Sons, Inc., also contributed medical supplies.”) To find out, I went to see Harriet Peters, the Pfistner account exec. at Medical and Agricultural Communications Bureau (ethical division)—which, despite the imposing name, is a public relations agency pure and simple.
