“There are your ripple marks,” he said at last, almost in a whisper. “But you can discount them now___”
“Discount them!” Farnsworth shouted, springing to his feet. “Great Jehosephat, Fred, we’re going to rub every nose in the
world in those ripple-marks! I
knew we
had to split that goddam Lump!”
“Listen to me, Geoffrey,” Fred said, his voice even lower and more intense than before. “There’s something here that’s far
more important than ripple-marks. Look here.” He pointed. “Look closely. Do you know what those are?”
Farnsworth dropped down again and leaned over the rock. I still could not see what it was that they were looking at, but the
expression of dawning, fanatical triumph on the Commodore’s face was more than frightening enough. He said nothing for a long
time; then, huskily :
“Fossils, Fred?”
“Yes,” the geologist said. “Fossil crinoids. Two of them. And possibly two or three tentacles from a third.”
I overcame my paralysis of alarm almost instantly. I don’t even remember running over there; suddenly, I had my nose as close
to that opened face of the Lump as either of them.
I am no geologist, but I’ve seen fossil crinoids before, they’re hard to mistake. They look like miniature dust-mops with
flexible handles. These were small, and one was imperfect. The intact one, too, was atypical, but the differences were not
as great as I would have expected, considering where the Lump had come from. When you thought about that gap of millions upon
millions of miles of dark vacuum, what was surprising was how much the fossil
resembled
Palaeozoic types evolved on the Earth.
Farnsworth had made it. The asteroidal protoplanet was a fact—complete with “evidences of life”.
T
HE
first one to break the silence was Elvers, who said:
“That reminds me, Julian. I promised to tell you the legend about the copper dawn.”
“Not now, for heaven’s sake. This is no time for that. Geoffrey, if——“
“It’s one of the oldest legends we have,” Elvers said. “People say that in the time before the war there was much more air
to breathe than there is now, and it was warmer most of the year, even at night. But as a result of the weapon we used against
Nferetet, we lost a lot of that air. That brought the ice-crystal cloud layer down to within sixty miles of the ground. Since
then we see the copper dawn almost every day, except during sandstorms, of course.”
Farnsworth stood up and looked toward the radio igloo, shading his eyes with his hand. “He’s out of his mind,” he said with
abstracted irritation. “Jayne’s coming this way. That’s timing it neatly, I must say.”
I was watching Elvers closely now. He didn’t sound much crazier than he had before, which had been quite crazy enough to suit
me; but he was plainly in a terrible state of the trembles. Something seemed to have frightened him profoundly—and what could
it have been but the Lump? Why that should be I could only dimly guess, but he was the only one of the four of us who had
yet to move a step closer to it, let alone touch it. Even his face was turned away; he was looking at the horizon, though
there was no copper dawn visible now.
“Is that all there is to it, Elvers?” I said.
“That’s all there needs to be,” Elvers said in a sing-song voice. “It’s the brand on our brows. It reminds us of all the blood
we shed. No, that isn’t all. It reminds us that we will yet have to wade in more blood, to keep the secret.”
Under those conditions I would have thought it impossible to feel a chill, but I did. “I see,” I said cautiously. “Is that
what the voices say?”
He turned and looked at me blankly. “What voices?” he said. “It’s only a legend. And a warning. That’s all.”
That was far from enough, but I had no chance to draw him out further, for Jayne was topping the nearest hummock and sliding
down toward us.
“You’re just in time,” Geoffrey said. “We’ve got it, Jayne. We’re made. Come take a look.”
“In a minute. Listen, I’ve got news, and I couldn’t get it all written out fast enough, there was so much of it. I’ve got
to tell you right now before I garble it.” She turned to me with a beaming smile. “Julian, Joe Wentz has been vindicated by
your IGY friends—or forgiven, anyhow. It seems that he wasn’t the first man to lose the satellite. He was probably the last
man to see it, instead. They backtracked his figures, and it seems that his object came into sight at just the proper place
and at the proper velocity, and that it changed course while he was watching it. None of the other observing teams have picked
up a trace of it anywhere, and I gather that they’ve really combed the skies for it. I couldn’t get all the details, but the
essence of it is that it’s vanished, just as though somebody’s stolen it right out of the sky.”
Abruptly, Elvers began to giggle. Jayne swung a furious,. astonished glance on him. Without a moment’s hesitation, he ran,
scuttling over the hillocks toward the kennels.
“I loathe that crazy little bastard,” Jayne said, staring after him. “Anyhow, they’re still searching, and hoping to pin down
the accident or whatever it was. They say it couldn’t have changed course by itself and that the reasons why it did are probably
very important. They say they want us to help, and they’ll reinstate us in return for the favour. In short, complete capitulation!
The question is, where do we take it from here?”
That wasn’t the question in my mind. Mine was:
Who
had taken it from there? Staring down at that meteoric fossil, I was already beginning to wonder crazily whether or not I
already knew the answer—and if I did, to whom in all the world I could possibly tell it.
I looked over at Farnsworth. His expression made it perfectly clear that he had been following much the same line of
thought. It was a mixture of stunned triumph and genuine alarm.
“I his would be funny, if it weren’t so likely to be deadly,” he said. “Jayne, you’d better come and take a look at the Lump
here, so you’ll know just what we’re up against.”
She walked around the grappling rig and looked down curiously while Farnsworth and Fred took turns explaining, and I stamped
my feet. The rest of me was warm, thanks to the high reflectivity of the ice, but my boots knew I was at the North Pole. So
did the end of my nose, despite the rabbit-skin patch on it.
“I think this is great,” Jayne said. “But I don’t see the connection.”
“You tell her, Julian. Maybe she’ll believe it, coming from you.”
That startled me. I couldn’t help wondering exactly what, other than self-knowledge, lay behind his putting it that way, but
I could read nothing into his tone but the same grudging humility that the words seemed to be conveying. It seemed unlikely
to me that Jayne would have told him what Joe’s death had surprised us at. While it is true that hell hath no fury, etc.,
she hadn’t exactly been scorned, either. I put my initial split-second inference down to pure jumpiness.
“We’re in trouble with that wild-eyed guess Geoffrey was broadcasting back in the States, until Harriet made him stop it,”
I told Jayne. “The War Between Mars and the Asteroids. The science writers themselves never fell for it, but feature desks
and columnists love anything that smacks of the fantastic. Just think back to the play they gave to the flying saucer stuff
and you’ll see what I mean.”
“I still don’t get it,” Jayne confessed.
“All right, just add up the facts as they stand now. The satellite has vanished, nobody knows why. We have evidence here that
shows there
was
once a large planet, with life on it, between Mars and Jupiter. What happens if we report that evidence now? The silly-season
beat will consider the source, dig into the morgue, and the War Between Mars and the Asteroids will be revived instanter.
Half the columnists in the country will call us fools and charlatans and publicity-grabbers—and the other half will be hinting
darkly that the satellite was stolen by Martians.”
Across the ice, I could see Elvers creeping back, and I
wondered who we’d get this time—the trembling paranoid or the humdrum little albino chiropodist. This time he wasn’t running,
but as a datum that wasn’t very illuminating.
“It’s an irresistible hypothesis to the kind of brain that goes in for
Flabbergasting Stories—or
for Frank Scully and Gray Barker and Jessup and Adamski,” I added. “It’s got our boy Elvers, right now.”
“Is
that
what all that rambling was about?” the Commodore said, startled. “I wasn’t paying very close attention.”
“I wasn’t either, at first. But the point is this : we’ve got to decide whether or not we want to take the risk of letting
that idea get into general circulation. The responsibility’s entirely ours, and whichever decision we make may be the wrong
one.”
“Why do we need to bring the matter up at all?” Fred said.
“Fred, it isn’t a question of our bringing it up. Geoffrey brought it up
in posse
months ago. They’ll think he’s trying to bring it up again, as soon as they get our report on the Lump, and then the business
about the satellite having been stolen will follow naturally. There’s where the danger lies.”
“Why?” Fred said, more puzzled than ever.
“Well, first, because it might very well trigger a mass psychosis. The world’s ripe for one. But, more important, because
there may be a small possibility that it’s true.”
Fred looked stunned, Jayne angry; Farnsworth only nodded soberly.
“Look at it this way, Fred,” the Commodore said. “That explanation has already been laughed at by the press, and it would
be twice as funny coming from us now, even if we only imply it, by reporting what we’ve found. If it
does
turn out to be true, it will probably also turn out to have been very expensive to have laughed it off. Do
we
want to take that chance—tiny though I admit it is?”
“I think there’s no such chance at all,” Fred said. “But just for the sake of argument—well, if theft
is
the explanation, maybe it would be vital to get it on the air and get it circulating, whether people laugh at it initially
or not.”
“There’s that,” I admitted. “And that’s why I say that no matter which way you look at it, the responsibility’s ours. I can’t
think of any group in the world less competent to handle it, but that’s academic now. It’s in our hands, and there’s nobody
else we can shift it to.”
Elvers giggled behind me. I jumped as though I had been stabbed. Some time during the course of the argument he evidently
had made a wide half-circle on the ice, and had managed to come up behind all of our backs, or at least out of all our fields
of view. We were accustomed to ignoring him, anyhow. I whirled around in a hurry, coming within an ace of falling down.
He had his Parkchester with him, the special magazine-loading model they had given us to shoot polar bears and Russians with.
Somehow I didn’t doubt that he had kept it well oiled, unlike mine, with the special low-temperature silicones. It was pointed
straight at Farnsworth. Elvers’ hands were trembling, but his aim did not vary enough at pointblank range for the trembling
to make any difference.
“I am taking responsibility,” he said, his teeth chattering so hard that it was almost impossible to understand him. I remembered
that he had never seemed to be bothered by the cold.
“Elvers,” Geoffrey said in a voice like the rumble of a tank, “drop that thing where you stand and go back to the kennels.
If I have to take it away from you, I won’t be gentle.”
In that same voice, Geoffrey must at one time or another quelled whole rebellions, even in the middle of jungles and without
any other weapon. You had only to hear it to believe that implicitly.
But it had no visible effect on Elvers. “You, Fred,” he said. “Roll those four rocks back down the hole in the ice.”
Fred’s eyebrows went up for a moment. Then he grinned at Farnsworth’s suddenly anguished expression.
“I don’t want to do that,” the geologist said gently. “Neither do you, Elvers—not after you worked so hard, helping us to
bring them up. You’re pretty sick. Better give me the gun, and we’ll see if some rest will help.”
“No,” Elvers said between trembling jaws. “Roll those rocks into the water.”
Fred shrugged. “Roll ’em yourself,” he said.
The rifle swerved and went off. Almost instantly, it was boring straight at Geoffrey again.
A rifle designed to stop a quarter-ton polar bear is no weapon to use on a man at point-blank or any other range. Fred Klein,
wearing an expression of infinite surprise, jack-knifed
and toppled. Elvers had shot him through the heart with the precision of a master anatomist, but the high-velocity bullet
had crushed his whole chest.
Every muscle in Farnsworth’s big, clumsy body was as tight as a drum-cord, but Elvers never took his eyes off his boss; he
knew who was dangerous and who wasn’t. I was so sick I could hardly stand, let alone act.
“Jayne,” Elvers said. He was chittering like a terrified squirrel. “Those rocks. Down the hole.”
Jayne looked at her husband. The silence could not have been long, but it was the longest I have ever endured. Those pieces
of the Lump were a summary of Geoffrey’s whole life as an explorer, and of the reasons why he had very little life as anything
else. He could, had he wanted to, have given Jayne’s life for them; she would have allowed it, and he knew it; he needed only
to tell her to stand fast. Or he might have given his own, by telling her to obey, and then charging Elvers; he just might
have borne the crazy chiropodist down by sheer momentum even in dying. I am not sure how much good I would have been had he
tried it, but I think I would have tried hard—and he must have known that he could trust Jayne in any free-for-all. And of
course, he could have told her to obey, and done nothing, in the hope of exchanging the Lump for all of our lives, and for
the shadow of another chance to take the responsibility that Elvers had pre-empted.
But in fact he did none of these things. He only stood, his face a huge mask of anguish. He looked utterly paralysed.