Free Fallen Star by James Blish

everything, including legs.
    “You’ll get your money,” Farnsworth said. His voice had turned harsh. Evidently he had seen the bulb go off, and he was none
     too sure whether or not a picture of the kick existed. After all, his back had been turned. “But not if you make a scene,
     Harriet. Other people trust me. So can you. You’ll have to.”
    “In a pig’s eye,” she said. Though her voice was now almost as quiet as his, it would have been evident to anyone who knew
     Harriet as well as I did that she was already on the borderline of hysterics. “You’ll pay me, all right. I’m going to stick
     to you like a burdock. You won’t see the last of me until you’ve coughed up every nickel.”
    “You won’t like the Pole much,” Farnsworth said edgily.
    “I’m going there, all the same. I’m going to be on your back for the rest of your life—or until I get my salary.”
    “There isn’t room for you.”
    “Yes there is. I’ll sleep with the dogs if I have to. You don’t want me to go? All right, pay me. Or lump me. What’ll it be?”
    Farnsworth shrugged. “I can’t pay you now,” he said. “Come along if you like.”
    Harriet burst into tears of triumph. To my utter astonishment Jayne took it upon herself to comfort her and calm her down.
     The Commodore removed himself to look at the weather.
    And the newspapermen broke for the telephones like stampeding cattle.
    Luckily, we got off well before the early-bird editions of the papers could reach Teterboro: just at dawn the next morning.
     I emerged from phoning my family to find Farnsworth in an almost childishly sunny mood; he had just been told that the temperature
     had dropped enough to permit his planes to get airborne. He was so pleased that he stopped to pat Chinook, Dr. Elvers’ lead
     Malemute; Chinook promptly bit him, high up on one ham, but he responded with nothing more than a desultory kick. (He didn’t
     miss, though. Chinook was still ki-yi-yi-ing over his injured dignity back in the cargo hold when our plane warmed up and
     drowned him out.)
    Only one reporter—a
Times man—was
on hand to watch us tumbling aboard. I found myself seated next
to
Dr. Eleanor Wollheim, the expedition’s bacteriologist and theonly other woman involved. She was a strictly utilitarian type, about as glamorous as a potato-masher, and clearly disapproved
     of men who kicked dogs, or men who were amused by men who kicked dogs. I strapped myself in, secured my oxygen mask in its
     rack on the back of the seat before me, and looked out the window.
    The engines got louder; the plane was trembling markedly as Farnsworth tested each pod in turn. But I wasn’t, for once, totally
     preoccupied with my clammy palms and last-minute urgency to be on the way. Instead I was watching someone running: a wildly
     gesticulating man, pounding across the field toward us from the direction of the administration building, flourishing what
     looked to be a roll of blue paper.
    Never in my life have I seen anyone so easily identifiable as a process-server. I knew it in the first three seconds after
     I saw him. Harriet settled down belatedly in the seat immediately in front of me and began to buckle her safety belt. I leaned
     forward and bellowed in her ear:
    “Harriet! Did Farnsworth ever pay Robert Willey, either?”
    She looked startledly over her shoulder at me, and then frowned for a moment over my question.
    “No,” she said.
    At the same instant, the plane’s engines hit max RPMs, the dogs howled balefully amid the baggage, and Farnsworth let go of
     the brakes. I was slugged back into my seat, and the gesticulating man vanished instantly. The plane roared down the runway
     into the lightening mist, noisy, confident, and tail-heavy. As the end of the runway came at us, Farnsworth screwed the flaps
     down and we went clumsily into the air in one immense bound.
    The Second Western Polar Basin Expedition was on its way.

Six
    T IMID though I am, I have always loved