Fallen Star (3 page)

“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.

C
OMMODORE
G
EOFFREY
B
RAMWELL
-F
ARNSWORTH
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.

Harriet, I found, had come down in the world a little. She had been moved into a much smaller office since I had seen
her last, and although she was still as pretty as ever—she was a small, succulent redhead with very white skin, breasts like
inverted teacups and a most unbusinesslike rump—she looked rather harried. I knew the signs as of old: Pfistner was thinking
of dumping MACB(eth), and MACB(eth) was all set to dump Harriet the moment it happened. I made no comment, however; at these
wakes, advance mourning is in bad taste. I told her that I wasn’t part of the Press any longer, but that I would be writing
a book, and gave details.

“My God,” she said, crossing her legs and swinging her foot nervously. “You must be out of your mind, Julian.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, maybe I’m prejudiced. But from Pfistner’s point of view we’ve had nothing but trouble with that outfit. It hasn’t been
anything like worth the work and the money we’ve put into it—in terms of publicity, I mean.”

“Naturally you mean. Tell some more.”

“Well,” she said judiciously, “I suppose you know that they were supposed to go
last year.
Pfistner gave them five thousand bucks, enough tabascomycin to treat a regiment, two thousand Butamine tablets for airsickness——”

“Why so many for only a dozen people?”

Harriet looked at me with fond pity, as one might look at an idiot son.

“The dogs,” she said.

“Oh. Go on.”

“Well, they never left the ground, that’s all. They got their snowmobiles up to Alert all right, but the take-off was held
up for a week by bad weather, and then all of a sudden they were all out of money. The whole thing made them look like fools.
And of course it made us look like fools, too; what publicity Pfistner got out of it was three quarters bad.”

“Is that all?”

“No, it isn’t all, though it would have been enough. They were a terrible nuisance to Pfistner, too—always calling the plant
to ask for more money, more drugs, more technical cooperation, making big promises. Bramwell-Farnsworth is a madman, in my
opinion, and that bitch of a wife of his is no better. And nothing we could do could persuade him to deal with me instead
of the client. He’d agree very sweetly, pat me on the behind——”

“Which you
loathed——”

“—and ten minutes later he’d be raising Cain with Will Clafflin on the phone, trying to be put through to old Jonathan Pfistner
Junior himself. It was a real mess, and I doubt that it’ll be any better this year.”

“Are you telling this same story to the press?” I said.

“Oh, no, not in those terms—though we are letting it be known that Bramwell-Farnsworth may not get off the ground this year
either. He’s not going to pull the rug out from under us twice. But since you’re planning to go with him, it won’t hurt you
to go with your eyes open.”

It didn’t, after all, sound too bad to me. If Bramwell-Farnsworth had been a nuisance to Pfistner, as he pretty obviously
had been, it might mean no more than that he was over-zealous in providing for his expedition—hardly a drawback from my point
of view. The fact that he was making a second attempt on the Pole was clear enough indication that he hadn’t alienated all
his sponsors with his first try; after all, he still had Pfistner. I put that one up to Harriet in the form of a short curve
over the left-hand corner of the plate.

“Why didn’t MACB(eth) recommend against the project this year?”

“We did,” Harriet said gloomily. “But ‘Once burned, twice shy’ doesn’t seem to work up in the Bronx on this deal. As a matter
of fact, Bramwell-Farnsworth’s into them this year for twice as much as last. What could we do? They’re the client.”

That settled that. Obviously this was all Harriet’s headache, and none of mine. I said briskly:

“I guess I’ll take my chances. What are we supposed to do for Pfistner, besides accept their money and use their drugs?”

“Collect soil samples.”

“You’re out of luck, carrot-top. There’s no soil within five hundred miles of the Pole.”