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the Prussian or Scandinavian, on a thick neck, reminding me instantly of the familiar bust of Spengler;
     his hair was fire-red except for the grey at the temples, and in the middle stages of regrowth from a crew cut, rather like
     a shaving-brush which had been set afire. He was a most peculiar physical type, suggesting instantly that his glands must
     have been—and might still be—considerably out of whack: the bullet head, generally a product of sexual precocity, at war with
     the long extremities of delayed adolescence, the huge hands and feet and the prominent bony ridges over the eyes obvious stigmas
     of early acromegaly—a real endocrinologist’s nightmare. Without foreknowledge, I would have said he was forty.
    But I bring this up only by hindsight. At the time, I believe, I noticed only that he was big, and that he was wearing the
     button of the Explorers’ Club in the lapel of a white linen dinner-jacket.
    “Glad to meet you, Julian,” he said warmly. “Quite a party we’re going to have. Forty days at the Pole—the busiest forty days
     in exploration history, I’m going to see to that. Jayne, these people have no drinks ! What’s yours, sir?”
    “Scotch if it’s available,” I said gratefully. I had no objection to being waited upon by the Commodore, and I wanted the
     drink.
    “Of course it is, of course. Harriet, a bit of Gin and It, eh?”
    “Fine, Geoffrey.” She was smiling, I noticed.
    “I suppose Jayne’s been filling you in,” he said from the sideboard. “Sorry to have missed it. Arguing with suppliers—sometimes
     seems to take up the whole damned day. Arguing about credit, if you can imagine that—with
our
blue-chip backers? I say shame, then I say
Schade
, then I say
vergogna
, and then I just yell at ’em. I’m a good yeller.” He grinned and handed me my drink. “Usually it works.”
    I grinned back. The fact is that I liked him at once. He had a tremendous magnetism, and I was happy to find he had a sense
     of humour to go with it, and could deprecate himself in front of strangers. There was no doubt that he was deliberately flamboyant;
     it stuck out all over him. But then, Byrd had had more than a touch of the grandstander in him, too—which ha simply been the icing over an essentially brave and serious-minded man. Who’s perfect?
    “Forty days doesn’t seem very long to me,” I said, after a long, grateful pull of exceptionally good, smoky Scotch. “Between
     your commercial commitments and all the observations the IGY needs—”
    “Julian, let me tell you that the IGY is at the very bottom of my priority list,” he said, sitting down in a heavy armchair
     and hitching it closer to me with one hand. “I didn’t want this expedition to be an IGY project from the beginning; it was
     forced on me. I made that very clear to everybody, from Kaplan right on down, last year. They think that they’re forward-looking
     and adventurous and God knows what else because they’re going to send up some satellites during the Year—after the American
     Rocket Society kicked them repeatedly into doing what should have been done ten years ago. D’you know the kind of interplanetary
     data
I’ll
be looking for? No, of course you don’t. I’ll tell you. It has nothing to do with whether the Earth is thirty feet bigger
     around the middle than we thought it was. What good is the Earth? What I want is a piece of Planet Number Four-and-a-half.”
    He had me there. The fourth planet, of course, is Mars; Earth is the third, counting outward from the Sun. The fifth is Jupiter.
     But four-and-a-half? It didn’t exist. The space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is an endless elliptical river of cosmic
     junk, made up of rocks of all shapes and sizes. There are thousands of them; the biggest is some five hundred miles in diameter,
     the smallest may be no bigger than pebbles; the average size is about that of a free-floating mountain. These little nuisance-worlds
     are