Fallen Star Read Free Page B

peculiar expression which I could not then read—a combination, perhaps, of impatience and enforced suspension of judgment—flickered
     over Ellen’s face and was gone.
    “They tried to start last year on their own hook,” she said. “All kinds of things went wrong; I think they were under-financed.
     But with IGY support they should be able to get better sponsors this year.”
    “Why didn’t they have IGY support last year?” Ham asked_
    “They didn’t want it, Ham. We offered it, and they turned it down. They said they’d turn their results over to us after the
     expedition got back, but they didn’t want to follow the programme we’d laid out for them. They had other researches that they
     wanted to prosecute instead, and above all they wanted to go in 1957, not this year. Now, since they didn’t make it last year
     anyhow, they’re willing to go along with us.”
    “We’ll make a Machiavelli of you yet,” Ham said. I don’t think Ellen understood him; if she did, she gave no sign.
    “Julian, what do you think?” she said. “Would you like to try it?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Midge and the kids won’t like it, I suppose. But it sounds to me like it’s worth a try.”
    “Hooray !” Ham said, hoisting his Pilsner glass at me. “Send me back a polar-bear rug, boy. I’ve got a new young lady who’ll
     settle for nothing else.”
    Surprisingly, Ellen Fremd blushed slightly and got up abruptly from her desk. I followed her back into the living room, turning
     over in my mind a few surmises that were both unworthy and none of my damned business—always the most interesting kind. The
     rest of the evening was pleasant but uneventful, devoted, as I recall, largely to swapping diverting anecdotes about the fabulous
     Dr. Ralph Alpher.
    But when the evening was over and I was ready to venture out into the blizzard again, I astonished myself by blurting out
     on Ellen’s doorstep:
    “Ellen, I don’t mean to uncover old wounds—I hope you’ll forgive me if I do. I only want to say that—that whatever your differences,
     and they’re your own affair—I always enormously admired Dean.”
    She closed her eyes for a moment, and in the light spilling out the dim hall she looked for just an instant as millennially
     in repose as that heart-stopping head of Queen Nefertete. Now I had done it; I could have bitten my tongue off. I didn’t even
     know why I had opened my big bazoo.
    Then she looked back at me and smiled with the greatest gentleness.
    “I admired him too,” she said quietly. “Thank you for saying so.”
    I made my good-byes as best I could, considering the enormity of the gaffe, and the door closed. On the way downthe stairs, Ham took my elbow between a thumb and a finger as powerful as wire-cutters.
    “You bastard,” he said. “What a way to return a favour.”
    “I know,” I said. “Right now I’d rather be at the North Pole than anywhere.”
    “I’d almost rather have you there. You just put me right back where I started from, two years ago.”
    Then I realized that the favour he was talking about was the favour he had done me, not any of Ellen’s.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to. It just happened.”
    “I know. Maybe it was the right thing to do, for that matter. You couldn’t have any conception of how damnably shy she is,
     especially after the bust-up with Dean; she blames herself.”
    We paused in the vestibule and looked out at the swirling storm.
    “Couldn’t you have warned me?” I said. “Hell, Ham, you’ve been the harem type for as long as I’ve known you. If you’d said—”
    “It’s true, I’m my own worst enemy,” Ham said, lightly, but with an undertone of bitterness I had never heard from him before.
     “Well, life isn’t all anti-chronons and skittles. Some things have to come the hard way. Let’s go have a Tom and Jerry.”
    He took my arm again, gently, and we plunged blindly out into the still-swirling snowstorm. Ham is