Fallen Star
James Blish
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain's oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language's finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
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Misborne on a highway as a raft on dust
The lady travels faster than she can
And absent in a cliff or cave or jungle
Minded, to degree, wonders that she ran.
She lifts her wrist to see, unknowing
She will murmur, “How fast are we going?”
—Virginia Kidd
Anachronisms: Watch and Woman
I
WILL
maintain to my dying day that I never deserved to be handed Jayne Wynn. Of course, I am perhaps the only man in the world
she ever met who didn’t want her, not even on the rocks, neat. So by the peculiar way my life seems to fall out, I
should
have been the guy to wind up with her. But if I did, it was only for lack of trying.
I never wanted to hold the Earth in the palm of my hand, either; so I got the chance. Naturally; how else could it have happened?
Maybe this doesn’t make much sense to you, but it makes perfect sense to me. After a good many years I have become a passionate
adherent of the “personal devil” theory of history—modern history, anyhow. I have been through the nineteenth-century evolutionary
historians; through Spengler, Toynbee and the other cyclical theorists; through the single-bee-in-bonnet boys like Henry George
and Silas McKinley, and just about every other philosophy of history that you can name. That kind of reading helps me to make
my living.
And I’ve come to the reasoned conclusion that only one theory makes sense: the one which assumes that every historical event
is aimed personally at my very own head.
It may, be paranoid of me, but it works. If there are boats to be missed, I will miss them. If there are picnics to be rained
out, I will be there, without my raincoat. If there’s a cold going around, I catch it. If I want to go to college in Germany,
the country goes Nazi while I’m still in junior high. If I am having a book published on December 11th, war breaks out on
December 10th.
These events are not accidental. They are intended to louse me up. They arrive labelled,
Special delivery to Julian Cole.
This explanation passes every test known to science: it is simple, yet comprehensive, and predictions can be made from it.
Like this:
As a man whose home base is Pelham, and who regards the territory west of Akron as buffalo country, I should have known that
the Committee for the international Geophysical Year would decide to send me to the North Pole. I didn’t exactly predict this,
but it didn’t surprise me, either.
Or: Since I was a science writer in good standing, full-fledged member of the NASW, making my living selling articles to such
journals as
The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s
and
Scientific American
, it was logical that if the IGY turned up one single epochal
but utterly unprintable
discovery, I would be the guy who had to sit on it. If it involved the whole future of humanity, so much the better; give
it to Cole, and don’t let him open his mouth.
Now you try it. Given a man thoroughly devoted to his wife, four daughters and defective furnace (there is, they say, something
wrong with the pump). Given also Miss Jayne Wynn, spectacularly blonde writer of historical novels as bosomy as herself, reporter
for the Middle West’s eight-newspaper Fabian chain, admired and desired from Korea to Ikurtsk, and the wife of Commodore Geoffrey
Bramwell-Farnsworth, R.C.N. Throw in two other women and ten other men, for all the difference that will make. Stir, and put
on ice for four months.
That’s right. You got it the first time. Of course, personal devil or no personal devil, I balked at it—I balked in spades,
and for a while it seemed to be working. As a reward for my stubbornness, I got the unprintable story—and the fate of the
Earth, thrust into my flaccid hands like a toy. Since nothing that can possibly happen to me now could be anything but an
anticlimax—including being hauled off to Bellevue and being stuffed to the eyebrows with chlorpromazine—I’m going to print
the story anyhow. This is it.
And you may call it revenge, if you like.
I
N
January of 1958, Midge and I asked Ham Bloch—Dr. Hamilton C., the same man who put the luminiferous ether back on the mathematical
throne Einstein had knocked it off of—to our Pelham house for dinner. Ham is a very old friend of mine, and easily the best
friend I have, but my motives for that evening weren’t entirely social. Ham had recently decided that a fundamental atomic
particle called the anti-chronon ought to exist (at least, he said deprecatingly, in Hilbert space), and I was hoping to get
him to explain it to me so that I, in my turn, could explain it to laymen for pelf. It’s a nice way to make a living: you
work sitting down, you set your own hours, and sometimes it seems worth doing—which is more than you can say for most jobs.
Ham is a very engaging man, with none of the god-like austerity people associate with physicists. He looks more like a stevedore,
who just possibly may play tenor sax on the side; and as a matter of fact he is a composer, though only for fun. Sometimes
you can’t tell him from an extraordinary ordinary citizen.
Midge loves him, which I understand entirely and foster on the rare days when he rubs her the wrong way. There’s nothing peculiar
about this, at least by my lights. I’ve never felt the least doubt of Midge, and it goes much deeper than the simple and unrevealing
fact that she has borne me four daughters. (After all, Strindberg would have asked, how could I be sure any of them was mine?)
It springs from the fact that Midge never looks the same to me two days running. In photographs, and I suppose to other people,
she is a small, intense brunette, well-shaped and with good legs which often go unnoticed except at the beach because she
goes about most of the time in flat heels and no stockings. She strikes most people, too, as extraordinarily pale and cameo-like—an
impression which, must be in striking contrast with the way she becomes swearing-excited about the most minor of subjects;
she is a great pounder upon flat surfaces, and has sometimes given strangers the notion that she was about to leave me forever
because I hadn’t had my shoes shined in two weeks. When she is really worried about something, she can screw that classical
Italian face into an expression of such intense agony that she seems to be in the thumbscrews—a trick which sometimes makes
me want to slap her, if only to give her something really upsetting to look agonized over. (Once I even did, but I won’t do
it again, believe me.) W hen she is making love, on the other hand, she becomes stiller and stiller, and when she is truly
on the heights her face has the timeless impassivity of a Japanese print.
This mutability, I am convinced, is something, that only a happily married man ever sees. Under any other circumstances, women
don’t differ much from your first impression of them. When I was a little boy just becoming conscious of my sex, I used to
wonder why little girls didn’t stand looking at themselves in the mirror all day long, enjoying how different they were. I
knew why I didn’t: after all, I was no mystery to myself. And I felt that Midge, by being different every day, was properly
celebrating her different-ness as a woman, which properly should include loving Ham Bloch if he had it coming, as he plainly
did. I was equally sure that I was in no danger, for I was sure she knew as well as I did that there was no mystery worth
exploring about men.
As it happens, I was never proven wrong about Midge, to my great fortune. But I was stunningly wrong about myself, and about
Ham Bloch.
We didn’t talk anti-chronons at dinner, all the same, for Midge is bored with technical matters. Her attitude toward all the
sciences is that, after all, she can always call somebody. Instead, Ham asked me almost immediately:
“Do you remember Ellen Fremd?”
“Certainly. Dean Howland’s wife—a fine girl. Why?”
“Well,” Ham said musingly around a mouthful of
risotto
, “she’s not Dean’s wife any longer, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“I don’t think I know her,” Midge said. “Should I be jealous?”
“Twenty-four hours a day,” Ham said. “It’s the only state of mind proper for a woman. I keep all my wives in a perpetual green
funk. Matter of principle.”
“If you ever do get married, your wife will probably run you like a railroad,” Midge retorted. “But who’s Ellen Fremd?”
“She’s the official historian of Latham Observatory,” I explained. “She wrote that book last year on Latham’s six-hundred-foot
radio telescope. I met her when she married Dean; I think you met him once just after we were married.”
“She’s still with Latham,” Ham said. “She’s also number two editor at Pierpont-Millennium-Artz—handles their Artz Physics
series. Right now, she’s also on the publications committee for the International Geophysical Year. And she’s looking for
you.”
“Me?” I said, a little squeakily. “I didn’t know she cared. Ham, did you put her up to this?”
“I swear I didn’t. She just got into town this week, on some business with Artz, and she’s going on to Washington on Saturday,
on IGY business. She called me yesterday and said straight out, ‘Whatever became of Julian Cole?’ I hadn’t even mentioned
your name. She wanted to know if you were still writing science; I told her you never stopped.”
I was flattered, and I won’t pretend I wasn’t. My acquaintanceship with Ellen had been of the slightest, emerging solely out
of deep admiration for her poet-husband—or ex-husband, as it now developed. And Pierpont-Millennium-Artz is
the name in
American scientific publishing; their books get terrific circulation, thanks to an arrangement they have with Pouch Editions,
the major paperback house. But at the time I doubt that I even thought about the Pouch tie-in; for once, I wasn’t scenting
money. I was scenting prestige. Though I had already had several books published, none of them had come from anywhere near
so august a publisher.