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usually called “asteroids”, but they are not stars and have nothing in common with stars; “planetoids” is a better term.
    “Four-and-a-half?” I said incredulously. “You expect to find an asteroid at the North Pole?”
    “I expect nothing, Julian. An explorer learns to have hopes, but no expectations. I think that the asteroids all belonged
     to a single planet once; and that it exploded not so long ago. I hope to find evidence of that at the Pole—evidence that will
     nail, the hypothesis right down into known fact.”
    “Why at the Pole particularly?”
    He leaned forward and gazed earnestly into my face. Evidently Jayne’s similar and overwhelming approach hadbeen copied from him, with the slight modifications necessary to take fullest advantage of deep decolletage. The notion that
he
had copied it from
her
was out of the question; compared to him, she was a palimpsest subject to anyone’s erasure and inscription.
    “Look at it this way,” he said. “We
know
that some sort of a break up occurred out there. There used to be a larger body between Mars and Jupiter. Now it’s gone,
     and there’s nothing left there but thousands and thousands of rocks. Some of those rocks enter our atmosphere as meteors;
     usually they burn up before we can study them, but some that we have analysed show that they were recently part of a much
     larger body. Are you with me so far?”
    I was, more or less. I dimly remembered some papers in
Nature
which had suggested something of the sort. But it was based on highly disputable evidence, as I recalled; Whipple and other
     experts still stuck to the hypothesis that almost all meteors are the debris of comets. I said so.
    “Whipple’s got to be cautious, he’s an astronomer with a reputation to protect,” the Commodore said. “I’m only an explorer.
     If you want a scientist who supports my position, I’ll give you Urey. But let’s not pair off experts. Why, man, the bottom
     of every ocean in the world is littered with minute round grains of iron, and
everybody
agrees that those came here from space, and that they had to be the result of the break up of the asteroidal planet. They’re
     even called ‘cosmic granules’ in the literature. Isn’t that so?”
    “I think it is.”
    “Very good. Now the granules are too small to tell us anything much, and the meteors get such rough treatment when they pass
     through our atmosphere that it’s hard to agree on what analysis of them shows. But the granules and the meteors are still
     falling. They’re late products of the explosion. What happened right here on Earth immediately after the explosion—only a
     few million years ago? What a dusting we must have gotten then! What a bombardment! How” else do you account for Meteor Crater,
     Chubb Crater, the Carolina potholes? And then came the last glaciation—and of all the seas, only the North Polar Sea has been
     capped with ice ever since! Doesn’t that suggest anything to you, man?”
    “Not very much, I’m afraid.”
    “I’m disappointed in you,” he said solemnly. “Suppose areally big fragment of that protoplanet—big enough to get through our atmosphere with only its skin burned off—wound up at
     the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Then the ocean froze over. There can’t be any recent dust or fragments on the floor of that
     ocean. And what fell a few million years ago has been resting there under constant refrigeration, so chemical changes in it
     would be at a minimum; and physical wear-and-tear from thermal currents, exfoliation and so on has had no chance to destroy
     the evidence it contains. Why, man,
anything
could be down there in that deep-freeze. And that’s what / want to look for; I’m not interested in the IGY’s piddling little
     satellites. It’s a whole planet I’m looking for!”
    It was an impressive notion, all right. But it still didn’t convince me, except as a notion—something for a science-fiction
     writer to play with.