by James Blish
“I swear I will. Believe me, Harriet; I give you my oath.” He looked at her with great earnestness for a moment, and then turned back to his driving. Harriet glanced at me. I tried to convey that I thought Farnsworth meant it, though I was still reserving judgment despite my growing admiration for the man; but there are limits to what one can convey with a shrug and a half-nod and a one-quarter smile which tilts in the wrong direction. Harriet resumed looking through the windshield, the hard violet glare throwing shadows into her eye-sockets and under her cheekbones. The effect was rather like what happens to women’s faces under fluorescent lighting, but without the tinge of sallowness; by God, it did make her look beautiful.
“Number One to Number Two. Geoffrey, we’re pulling up. There’s a long fissure dead ahead. It’s very heavily faulted. I think we’d better have a sounding; is Sidney available?”
“Right here,” the cryologist called toward Farnsworth’s mike. “Available Goldstein, at your service.”
Farnsworth backed the snowmobile down into low-low gear and then braked it gingerly. Hanchett’s snowbuggy was immobile about fifty yards ahead of us, its radar dish going round and round with idiot conscientiousness. I peered through the periscope and saw Jayne’s machine panting into view behind us.
“Do you want to set off a charge here, Sid?” Farnsworth said. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t start taking soundings now, as far as I can see.”
“I want to look at that fault, first. I don’t want to risk making it worse; this is a tidal zone. If I think it can stand it, why not? That’s what we brought the dynamite for.” He left to get into his parka.
Some ten minutes later, we saw him trudging away across the ice with his kit, absurdly foreshortened, towards Hanchett’s vehicle, where he stopped and just stood for a while. Then he disappeared into the lead buggy.
We waited, listening to the snoring of our idling engine, while the high thin stillness of the top of the world piled in invisible drifts around us.
“Number One to Number Two. Sidney votes against firing any charge here. We’ll go ahead about half a mile and stop there for a test boring. Better sit tight until you pick up the concussion, or we report that there isn’t going to be one.”
“Right. Does it look serious?”‘
“Sidney says no. Maybe I’m being overcautious. But I think we ought to test, before we cross on to what may be thinner ice.”
“Right.” Farnsworth touched a button, and there was a small muffled explosion underneath us: a shotgun charge, driving a piton into the ice. The piton would act as a sonar probe to pick up the sound of Sidney’s explosion; the echo should offer a good index of the thickness of the ice at the point of detonation.
“Jayne, are you set for Sid’s echo?”
“All set.”
Hanchett’s snowmobile began to crawl forward, almost imperceptibly. Its nose went up and then down, and then one rear wheel lifted high on its independent suspension, as though the squat square animal had mistaken one of the ice-sculptures for a fireplug. Then the vehicle was climbing up again, out of the fissure. On the other side, Hanchett halted for a moment, and then resumed creeping.
“All clear,” Hanchett’s calm voice reported.
I was having difficulty in keeping the perspectives straight at this distance. Hanchett’s buggy seemed to be much harder to see than it should be, at the snail’s pace at which it was moving. Furthemore, it seemed to be dwindling in reverse perspective, the whiteness rising around its bottom, as though the horizon were intervening behind him and us. I looked at Farnsworth; he was frowning, obviously as baffled as I was.
The snowmobile stopped again. Nevertheless, it continued to become more difficult to see. The sky was as clear as ever.
“What the hell?” Farnsworth said plaintively. “Doc, are you moving?”
“No,” the radio said. “We’ve developed a slight list. Hold on; we’re checking.”
The white horizon between us and the buggy rose again, with a marked jerk. Now I could see the list. Hanchett’s snowmobile was tilted slightly to the right, and it was slewed that way a little, too. So was the impossible intervening horizon.
The fault was sliding. I tried to shout and found my throat filled with glue. Farnsworth had seen it, however. He hit the transfer-case on our buggy into middle-low gear and we lurched forward, our wheels spinning and slipping despite their four-point drive.
“Grapnels!” he bawled. “Lines! Everybody into suits! Jayne, get under way!”
I turned to beat it down below, but he caught me by the wrist. “Not you,” he said. “I need you.” The buggy lurched into high-low.
By the time we reached the edge of the fissure, it had tipped entirely free of the pack. Hanchett’s machine rested with absurd solemnity on the tilting floe for long seconds, like a fly on a wall.
“Hanchett! Back up, in God’s name!”
Hanchett’s rear wheels began to turn backwards, slowly. His machine slid downhill, turning in a slow circle. The ice-ridge on our left screamed, broke free and reared skyward. Hanchett coolly turned his front wheels in the direction of the skid, but he had no traction now. The buggy went down the flat slope like a hunaway roller-skate.
It struck the black water on the other side at right angles and fell over. The radio rang like a gong. The ice-cake, freed of the car’s weight, caught it by the wheels on the other side and turned it over on its back, mangling it like a chunk of taffy. Someone cried out—I shall never know who, for the sound came out of our radio in a great blare of unfocused despair, impossible to identify.
Then the snowbuggy dropped straight down into the Arctic Ocean and was gone. There was a great blurt of an air-bubble as it vanished, flinging up spray that went floating away as ice-crystals on the wind. The ice-floe heeled back toward us, heeled again, rocked back, groaned, and was peremptorily frozen into place in the white world again, slightly out of true.
There was nothing left but ice, and a peculiar mechanical sound which I identified first, quite crazily, with the peeping of Hanchett’s guide-beam as he sank. After I identified the sound properly, I felt crazier than ever, for it was not mechanical at all. It was a human voice, coming from the cab in the buggy behind us.
Hip-ip-ip-ip! Hip-ip-ip! Hip-ip! Hip-ip-ip-ip-ip! Hip-ip-ip!
Farnsworth took his microphone by the throat, his face savage, but words had failed him at last. To the north another, smaller plume of spray went up: above the spot where Hanchett was still plunging toward the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, there was now a blow-hole in the ice-cap.
And Elvers was giggling. I will remember that sound as long as I live.
Eight
WE had to stop there. Hanchett had been our only sober astronomer, and our only navigator. We had also lost Dr. Wollheim, and Dr. Benz, our senior oceanographer, and Ben Taurasi, our engineer-mechanic. We had been crazy to put Hanchett and Taurasi in the lead buggy, but it was too late to know better now. They were gone. So were Sidney Goldstein and Benz, on both of whom we had been planning to depend for survival on this frozen ocean.
And Wollheim was gone too. She wanted to live no less, however we had valued her. In this white desert any life was precious, as it is precious anywhere, even in the deserts of cities. I had never known that before, but I knew it now, and it scared the hell out of me. It still does. I keep thinking that people I despise have as much right to life as I do, and it’s not a thought that I like. But when I see now in my unforgiving memory the buck bubble that was the end of Dr. Wollheim, I remember that I was pleased to see her go—after all, she was unpleasant to look at, and no good to me—and I am terrified still at my own cruelty and indifference. Forgive me, poor bag of bones I need your forgiveness; you no longer need anything.
That is what I ask for now, but it was not my first reaction. When I was small, I lived in my grandparents’ house with my mother, who was divorced and was doing very badly at supporting us by teaching singing. I had very little consciousness of the strugg
le, or of the bitterness that underlay it in the household on both sides, until the day that I broke my glasses in some scramble or other—I forget just what.
It was a quiet summer afternoon when I came back to the house; I found my mother sitting in her second-floor room at her vanity-table, one of the few pieces of furniture that she had not sold after the divorce. I told her what had happened, and tendered the pieces—one lens and the frame still intact, and every scrap of the broken lens, for I knew even then that opticians could get measurements from the pieces to make a new lens. I felt rather proud of myself for having salvaged it all.
To my astonishment and fright, she burst into tears; and what she said was, “How am I ever going to pay for it now?”
I ran to my own room and shut the door. I puzzled painfully about it all the rest of the day, and finally emerged with the only solution I could see: a cache of a dollar and seventy-two cents I had been putting together all summer long out of my allowance. My mother had stopped crying by that time, but she took the money without comment, leaving me feeling as though nothing whatever had been settled. It would never have occurred to me then that she had not been crying about the money at all, but about the disability—for it had never seemed like much of a disability to me. Indeed, I didn’t make the connection until years later, when I remembered that she had also cried the day I had the glasses put on me for the first time.
This is something that the Greeks never knew about tragedy, for it is an exclusive discovery of the twentieth century: that first reactions to tragedy are almost invariably wildly trivial and inappropriate, because the deep emotions that they call forth drag with them associations from the still-living past which seem more real, because they have been lived with longer, than the immediate event itself seems. It would never have occurred to even so mighty an artist as Sophocles, for instance, to have put into my mind, at the moment I saw the snowbuggy disappear, this first desperate cry: But it isn’t MY fault at all!
But then, nobody has ever accused Sophocles of having been near-sighted.
Farnsworth, too, was shaken; God alone knew what his first reactions could have been. He said very little, but he promptly gave up any vestige of his desire to take the snow-buggies to the Pole that might have remained after the disaster. Jayne recovered first, at least enough to remind him tentatively of the commercial stake we had in using the snow-buggies. He snarled her down in four short, raw, ugly words, seemingly printable enough in themselves, but delivered to Jayne in a voice I would not use to a garbage-robbing tramp. It-stunned everyone; there was a long silence. It was as though he had relieved himself at the foot of a monument.
“Shut up,” was what he said. “Make camp.”
Those were the four words: no more than that. And that is what they sounded like.
We made camp with a minimum of talk, tying down the remaining buggies, setting up our fifty-foot radio mast and our wind generator, and taking intensive inventory of what we had lost in the way of equipment in the lead buggy. It was hard work getting the mast up, even with the winch, and I for one raised a good sweat inside my outdoor clothes. Nevertheless, I was astonished to see Elvers industriously cutting fifty-pound blocks of ice, wearing nothing but cleated shoes, wool socks, shorts and a jacket. I pointed him out to Farnsworth while we rested from hauling on a guywire.
“What does he think he’s doing? He must be out of his mind.”
“He’s odd,” Farnsworth said grimly. “But he’s working. He’s going to build an igloo for the dogs. They’re supposed to live outdoors whenever possible.”
“No, I mean running around half naked like that.”
“I notice you’re sweating, Julian. There’s almost no wind, so he isn’t likely to get frostbitten. He knows the North. Right now he’s in more danger from sunburn than he is from the cold. See if you can snub that loop around the peg on the next heave.”
We met that “evening”, after a dinner which nobody ate much of, in the galley in Farnsworth’s buggy. We were a markedly gloomy and depleted group, especially since neither Elvers nor Harry Chain was there; Elvers was still working, and Harry was testing the radio. None of those present seemed to want to look any of the others in the face for longer than a few seconds at a time, and I noticed that Wentz, who had been shocked sober and had remained that way all the rest of the day, working with the rest of us, for once did not look any more haggard than anybody else.
“It comes down to this,” Farnsworth said at last, in oddly muffled tones. “We’re going to leave the buggies here as a home base, and make the Pole our advance base. We’ll go on by sled, taking only what we need. At the Pole we’ll set up the tents, but we’ll also build igloos for the research projects to operate in. You’ve all been watching Elvers and you can see that there’s no trick to it, beyond having sufficient structural vizualization to trim the blocks right. If you get into trouble, Elvers will be available to help you. He’ll drive the lead team, with Jayne; I’ll bring up the rear with Fred Klein, and Wentz will be in the middle with Julian. Harriet, you and Harry Chain will stay here; in an emergency, you’ll have Harry to drive the buggy.”
He looked from one to another of us, sombrely. “This isn’t how we planned it, but it’s how it’s going to have to be,” he said. “Harriet, I know you’re determined to stick to me until you get your cheque. But this time you’re going to have to give in. You’re totally ignorant of any skill we can use at the advance base. Here at the home base you just might save all the rest of our lives. Understand?”
“No, not entirely,” Harriet said. I noticed, however, that her voice was quiet and steady. “What good am I here, for that matter?”
“You’re a lifeline,” Farnsworth said. “Harry’s a healthy young man, but he still has the appendix God gave him when he was born. If he were here all alone, and it should act up___”
“I see. Harry will teach me to run his radio, just in case. All right, Geoffrey. I’m scared, but I’ll do as you say.”
I was proud of her, and, I think, so was Farnsworth, in some way I couldn’t understand.
Wentz put up his hand.
“Yes, Joe, what is it?”
“Geoffrey,” the astronomer said, “have you given any thought to turning back? Fun is fun, but I’m beginning to wonder if I see the joke any longer. With a third of our personnel and equipment gone, we’re in trouble right where we sit—and we could make it back to Alert in maybe six hours, if we don’t hit any more trouble.”
“That needed to be said, and I’m glad you said it,” Farnsworth agreed. “I’ll say this: Jayne and I are not going back. I’d be sorry to lose you, Joe, but you can go back if you like. Anybody who wants to leave can get in the other snowmobile; we’ll make do with one.”
“No, no. You’re making a melodrama out of it,” Wentz said. “I’m not proposing a mutiny or a mass desertion, and it isn’t fair to turn it into an appeal for loyalty. All I wanted to know was whether you’d thought about turning back. It’s a serious question. There’s no room in it for challenges or heroics.”
Farnsworth said nothing: he simply spread his hands.
I said slowly, “I can’t assess the risks because I don’t know the North. But there is still work to be done, and I’d like to see us try it. Maybe after today we’ll be less foolhardy.”
“Bravo,” Jayne said. “Fred, how do you feel?”
“I knew it was dangerous when I signed on,” the geologist said. “I agree with Mr. Cole—especially on the foolhardiness.”
“I’m not voting for going back,” Wentz said. “I’m raising the question, that’s all. You all have answered it to my satisfaction.”
There was a brief silence. I was just beginning to wonder what was going on in Harriet’s mind on this subject when the galley door slid back and Harry Chain came in. He was carrying a piece of paper torn off a pad.
“Hi,” he said. “The mast works fine and we’re in business. I reported back to Alert about the accident——”
&nbs
p; “Harry!” Jayne said. “You shouldn’t have done that. I was going to file a story on it. Everything you said is in the public domain now—my bosses will have a hæmorrhage.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Jayne, but they asked how we were doing and I had to say something, so I told them. Also I’ve got a message here for Mr. Cole.” He handed the paper to me.
I read it twice. It meant the same thing the second time through as it had the first. Everyone was watching me curiously.
“It’s from the IGY Committee,” I said. “Not from Ellen Fremd this time, but the Committee itself. That wild dispatch you sent from Alert was too much for them to swallow, Jayne. They’ve disowned us—just as Ellen warned us they would.”
“Why, God damn their desiccated heads,” Jayne said furiously. “They can’t do that.”
“They sure as hell can, and they’ve done it. Now we’re in the soup for sure. There’s only once chance left for us, and that’s to do the work they assigned us to do, and do it right.”
Farnsworth snorted. “They can take that and shove it, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Which is just what they expect you to say. When they hear about our losses, on top of everything else, they’ll sympathize for about five minutes—but that’ll convince them all over again that we’re only a bunch of publicity-happy stumblebums, and probably got just what was coming to us.” I knew I was on dangerous ground, but I had had one more shock than I could take; the words kept right on pouring out, regardless. “Nothing will save us now, nothing, but going on to the Pole and doing an honest job of work. Otherwise we’ll be torn to shreds. Geoffrey, the newspapers will have a field day with this tomorrow; half of them will ridicule us, and the other half will indict us for incompetence running to the edge of manslaughter. After they’re through with you, your sponsors won’t recognize you when you come back even if you meet them under a klieg light. We’ve got to do more now than just make it to the Pole and back. We’ll have to complete our IGY programme and the rest of our research, and, do a bang-up job of it—whether we’ve got the proper instruments and people for it or not. Otherwise those of us who are still alive will all be destroyed and Wollheim and Benz and Sid and Hanchett will have died for less than nothing.”
