Fallen Star Read online

  FALLEN STAR

  James Blish

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  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:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today's leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Website

  Also by James Blish

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  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.

  One

  IN 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, w
ell-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.

  “What does she want?”

  “I think she’d better tell you that herself,” Ham said. “I don’t mean to be mysterious, I just don’t want to suggest more than she may want to offer. But if you’re interested in a big, long-term job, she has one for you—that much I can tell you.”

  “You pushed her a little, I’ll bet,” Midge said.

  “Oh, just a little. I think she had Leonard Engel in mind at first, to be frank. But if you’re interested——”

  “I’m interested,” I said promptly. “When do we start?”

  Ham grinned at me and polished off his salad before replying. “Why don’t you and Midge and I go to see her, say Friday night?” he said at last.

  “Not me,” Midge said. “That’s too soon for me to get a sitter.” This was a black lie, since we don’t need a sitter; Bethany, our eldest, sits for the other three, and without demur, since she’s paid for it. But Ham knew Midge well enough to be aware of how dull she thought all talk about the sciences; he had included her in the invitation pro forma.

  “Well, it’d be just as well not to make a major engagement out of it, anyhow,” he said. “It will have to be pretty tentative. If she gets called to Washington earlier than she expects, all bets are off. But unless you hear from me in the meantime, let’s make it for eight-thirty Friday evening.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, Ellen has an apartment in town; I thought you knew that.” He leered at Midge, took out his notebook, and wrote down the address in his spidery mathematician’s handwriting, ostentatiously shielding it with his free hand. He tore out the page, folded it once, and passed it to me under the tablecloth.

  “Pelham, New York,” Midge said darkly. “Dr. Hamilton C. Bloch, noted atom-smasher and home wrecker, was found here today, partially dismembered. The police, noting the large number of enemies Dr. Bloch had made, reported themselves baffled but not surprised.”

  “Many screen and television stars, advertising agency receptionists, and other professional beauties are reported to be in mourning,” Ham agreed complacently. “A wreath bearing the legend ‘To Our Secret Prince’, rumoured to be from the entire cast of the Rockettes up to number twenty-four from the left, is already hanging over Dr. Bloch’s favourite pencil, which has been placed under glass by the National Society for the Preservation of——”

  “I’m going to turn you into an artifact myself in about ten seconds,” I said. “Mercy, Ham. My curiosity-bump is killing me. Is this project of Ellen’s solely a publishing matter, for Artz? Or does it have something to do with the IGY?”

  “Peace,” Ham said solemnly. He lit a cigar and pulled on it gently between swallows of coffee. “Let us now discuss the anti-chronon—in hushed voices.”

  Midge got up. “Excuse me,” she said. “I have to put the brood to bed.”

  I think that Midge did want to go, more or less mildly, to the meeting, if only to get a look at Ellen Fremd; but she didn’t broach the subject to me, and by Friday morning it would obviously have been impossible anyhow. A record snowstorm had begun to fall during the night, and was already well on its way toward tying up the entire East Coast; we had eighteen inches in Pelham, and the New York Central train I caught at ten a.m. was the last one to get out of the town until late Sunday afternoon.

  As for me, I loathe snow, so probably I should have seen what was coming—something with lots of snow in it. Oh yes, I believe in the pathetic fallacy too; that’s the personal devil’s favourite trope.

  Ellen Fremd’s Manhattan roost turned out to be a small, entirely charming apartment in the east twenties, with a high-ceilinged living-room, a miniature kitchen, and a real, functional fireplace toward which I gravitated instantly, dripping as I went. Ham had already arrived, and evidently had tipped Ellen off to my passion for ale. As soon as I was settled by the fire, she b
rought me a quart of it, with a chilled mug, a bowl of potato chips and another bowl of some spread which tasted like whipped Philadelphia cheese with minced clams and nutmeats in it. (I found out later that it consisted of dehydrated onion soup mixed with sour cream; had she told me that beforehand, nothing could have persuaded me to try it. As it was, I bolted it down most happily.)

  We chatted desultorily while I ate and got my bones warm, saying nothing in particular, but re-establishing our lines of communication. As I’d told Ham, I’ve always thought Ellen a wonderful girl, and she did not seem to me to have changed much. She was noticeably slightly older, perhaps, but otherwise just as always: tall, willowy to the point of thinness but not a gram beyond that point, and with a muted wit that vanishes entirely amongst strangers. She is also quite shy, which mystifies me. Why should a woman with enough brains to be a historian of science, an editor, a Sarton Medal winner and a frequent contributor to Isis, and enough looks and grace to pass anywhere for a high-fashion model, be shy with strangers and even with acquaintances?

  From where I sat by the fire, I could see that there was a small office just off the living-room. My post gave me a direct view of a magnificent photograph, about four by six, which was hanging over Ellen’s desk. It looked like a star caught in the act of blowing up—as, in miniature, it was: the photo was an enlargement from a cosmic-ray emulsion-trace, showing a heavy primary nucleus hitting a carbon atom in the emulsion and knocking it to bits, producing a star of fragment-traces and a shower of more than two hundred mesons.

  Nobody with any sense of the drama implicit in a photograph like that—a record of the undoing of one of the basic building blocks of the universe, by a bullet that had travelled unknowable millions of years and miles to effect the catastrophe—could have resisted asking for a closer look. Only afterwards did I begin to appreciate how devious Ellen’s shyness had made her. She followed me promptly into the office with a fresh quart of ale, toured me around the room to look at the other pictures—all of them of historic events in recent physics, captured in the traces left by the atomic actors themselves—and had me securely seated at her desk, ready for business, before I had more than half eaten my way through the hors d’œuvres. I suspected that Ham had been through this long before, for he watched me walking innocently into the web with a very small smirk, and took possession of the potato chips and the spread the moment I got up.