Fallen Star by James Blish Page B

him. I had successfully resisted the antihistamine craze in the old days when they
     were being boomed as cures for colds, and I meant to go right on resisting them now that they were being called ataraxics.
     I don’t exactly enjoy my anxieties, but they are my personal property and I mean to keep them.
    “I’m not tense, just tired. And I want to keep alert so l can report accurately. That’s why I’m here.”
    “Very good.” He tossed one of the orange pills into his mouth without seeming to notice that he had done it, and stowed the
     box away. Ahead, Hanchett’s machine crossed the boundaries of the airfield and began to wind north among the heaped drifts.
     Farnsworth followed him closely.
    “It’s a great adventure, Julian,” he said. “We’re coming closer every minute to one of the greatest riddles in creation. I
     know we are. If we could actually solve it….”
    “I admire your faith. You’ve even almost convinced me—and I’m a hard man to convince.”
    “Want more facts? Julian, I have them by the thousands. You shushed me when I told the newspapers that we might find evidences
     of life in any protoplanet fragments we brought up. Did you know then that somebody already has?”
    “I didn’t know it,” I said, “and as a matter of fact I don’t believe it.”
    “But it’s true. Bacteria were cultured from the interiors of meteorites, more than twenty years ago.”
    “Oh, that. I remember those experiments. They were pretty well discredited. The sterile techniques the experimenters used
     weren’t foolproof by any means, as I remember it. And the germs themselves turned out to be pretty commonplace—
Bacillus subtilis
, and some other almost universal Earth types.”
    “But what do you want a meteoric bacterium to do—sing ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’, or show hotel stickers from Jupiter on its
     luggage?” Farnsworth demanded. “I’d like to meet the taxonomist today who’d offer me money that those microbes were one hundred
     per cent identical with
subtilis.
DoctorWollheim once told me that she wouldn’t certify the ancestry of any bacterial cell without a phage typing, and even then she
     still wouldn’t be sure of its orthoclone, whatever that is. What did they know about bacterial genetics in those days?”
    “So the experiment was inconclusive; sure. That’s all I’m saying. Ergo, it has no standing as evidence.”
    Farnsworth sighed. “You’re indeed a hard man to convince, Julian. Maybe I’d best leave you alone and let you convince yourself.
     When I try to convince you, you feel obliged to fight back.”
    It was, I realized, a disturbingly accurate capsule analysis of how I think. Obviously Farnsworth was not yet done with surprising
     me.
    I never knew when we passed over the shoreline of Ellesmere and went out over the ocean itself. The pressure ridges in the
     ice along the shoreline extended more than a mile inland, and nearly that far north, too, so that our progress through them
     was long. It was not, however, monotonous, for these ridges are comparatively long-lasting, and so are sculptured by the wind
     into sharp, interconnected statues and curious shapes full of oval holes, every one opalescent with captured sunlight. It
     was like moving through an ocean made, not of water, but of transparent driftwood.
    By the time we were facing the serrated ice-field that rolled without visible break over the horizon to the Pole, there was
     no land under us at all—nor had there been any for several hours.
    Here we were able to pick up speed. Hanchett’s snowmobile accelerated cautiously until he was doing about twenty miles an
     hour, with occasional delays as he spotted some ridge or dip that might mean trouble. Alone, he might have been able to go
     even faster; but in any train of vehicles there is a whip-crack effect as the last car in line tries to keep up; since the
     driver of the last car never decides where it is that he’s going, he loses two or three