Fallen Star by James Blish Read Free Book Online

After all, if there had never been any protoplanet between Mars and Jupiter—and as I recalled, if there
     had been, the bottom number of such planets had to be three, and the probability was that there had been scores —then any
     granules and meteorites the Commodore found under the Arctic ice-cap would be just like those everybody else already had under
     study.
    As a research project, competing with all the others for a chunk of our forty days at the Pole, it wasn’t
a
fortieth as important as the IGY satellite programme. We
knew
what we were likely to get out of that.
    “I see it doesn’t inspire you,” the Commodore said, taking my glass away for a refill. “But it will, it will. You need imagination
     in this exploring trade, Julian.”
    “Like
mokele-mbembe?”
I ventured.
    “Exactly, exactly!” He seemed genuinely pleased. “You must look for the possible. Never mind that it’s also the unlikely,
     as far as the rules of evidence are concerned. Suppose you never find it? You cover a lot of territory while you’re looking;
     isn’t that so?”
    “It certainly is,” I said. “I still don’t much credit the idea, but I endorse the principle. And at least you’ll dredge up
     Pfistner’s soil samples in the process.”
    “Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s a part of the programme that intrigues me too. It isn’t even certain that there’s any life down
     there at all. If there is, I doubt that Pfistner will ever get an antibiotic out of it; competition between microorganisms
     can’t be very keen at those temperatures. But inthe antibiotics business, where there’s life there’s hope, I should think.”
    Harriet was watching me with an expression of virulent disapproval, but there was nothing I could do about that. What the
     hell; I
liked
the guy. And I think he could sense it. Underneath his flamboyance, he seemed to be in search of approval—not at all an uncommon
     thing in adventurers of all kinds. And obviously he warmed to even the slightest show of it, as though he was genuinely ignorant
     of how hypnotic his vitality alone could be to a new acquaintance.
    “Geoffrey,” Jayne said, putting her hands behind her and leaning back on the hassock to look up at him. The pose was as deliberately
     provocative as any press agent could have asked, but Farnsworth frankly didn’t notice. “Show Julian our aeroplane.”
    “Oh, the plane!” he said enthusiastically. “Now there’s a whale of a piece of apparatus. It’s been out of service for years—nobody
     wanted it—but it’s still airworthy and it’s perfect for Polar operation. Let me see, where are those pictures? Rupert Hawkes
     built it as a prototype for the Air Force, but they had bad luck with it, and it was their own fault. The first thing they
     did—Jayne, what did I do with those pictures?—was to build another one twice as big, and of course it was unstable; turned
     turtle on its first flight, killed a damned good test pilot who didn’t want to have anything to do with it in the first place.
     But the prototpe—ah! here they are—is a perfectly stable medium transport, and the Air Force has given us the use of it. Here
     it is, sir. The Hawkes Flying Tail—a bizarre aircraft to be sure, but incredibly capacious, and with enormously high lift—just
     the thing for low-temperature flying. I’m going to pilot it myself, and I am
not
a reckless pilot.”
    I looked at the pictures, at first with flat incredulity, and then, gradually, with dawning recognition. It had been years
     since the Hawkes Flying Tail had dropped out of the publicity limelight, and since nothing like it had ever been flown since,
     let alone adopted into mass production, I had almost forgotten that such a thing had ever existed. It looked like nothing
     so much as a powered box kite, or—as the newspapers’ name suggested—the tail of an ordinary aircraft detached, enlarged, slightly
     redesigned, and put into the air on its own.
    None of the