Rocket to Limbo

by Alan E Nourse

  He only vaguely sensed that these two qualities alone had finally brought him through the Academy in the face of stiff competition from much quicker minds. In the Colonial Service there was a place for stubbornness and thoroughness that all the cleverness in the world could never fill.

  Lars grinned suddenly. “Tell you what, you flit around with your star maps, and I’ll plod, okay? But when we get to Vega III, I’ll know everything there is to know about the place. I’ll know what kinds of bacteria and viruses can wipe out this ship, and what ones we can use for defense. I’ll know what we can use for food, and what we’d better keep away from. And I’ll know whether there’ll ever be a healthy colony of Earthmen on Vega III or not.”

  Peter looked up at him. “Is that what all those reader-tapes are about?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I like to see you keeping busy,” said Peter, “but it seems a little silly to me, considering the Ganymede isn’t going to Vega III.”

  For a moment Lars thought he had heard wrong. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me. We’re not going to Vega III. We’re not going anywhere remotely near it.”

  “But the dispatch bulletin — ”

  Peter snorted. “I know what the bulletin said. Routine run to Vega III for a final check on the new colony site. That’s what’s going out on all the news tapes, too, but it doesn’t happen to be true. I’ve been keeping my eyes open, and if this ship goes to Vega III I’ll eat those reader-tapes right off the spool.”

  “Where do you think we’re going, then?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else on board does, either, except the skipper and the navigator, and they’re not telling. The navigator gave me a three-hour lecture on Koenig drive navigation this afternoon while he was setting up the coordinates, but he didn’t set them up for Vega or any place near Vega. He must have thought I didn’t know anything about interstellar navigation.”

  “Maybe you don’t,” Lars said bluntly.

  This hit a raw spot. “Look, he didn’t even put the ship in the right Sector! I could assemble and disassemble this ship’s navigation controls in my sleep, and I know those coordinates are fishy. But that’s not all, by a long way. Why all the secrecy? Colonial Security has had this ship under constant surveillance for a week. They’ve got agents all over the place. Special ID checks on all the crewmen. They’ve practically locked us in here since we came aboard. Why all the precautions if this is just a routine run to Vega III?”

  Lars shook his head. “Maybe they’ve uncovered a sabotage attempt or something.”

  “I doubt it. Nobody sabotages Colonial Service ships any more. And that wouldn’t explain the other things. Like all those questions Commander Fox was asking.”

  “Questions?”

  “About how we feel about the possibility of meeting up with intelligent aliens on some star system somewhere.”

  Lars felt a chill go through him. He had heard that this was Walter Fox’s pet theme, that somewhere in the Universe intelligent aliens must exist, and that sometime, somewhere, men would encounter them. It was not a pleasant thought. There was enough danger and death to face in exploring unknown star systems without meeting hostile members of an alien race. It had taken the Colonial Service many years to quiet such fears, to convince colonists from Earth that there were no such aliens. And yet —

  Peter grinned at him. “Shake you up a little?”

  “It’s nonsense,” Lars snapped. “You’re making a big case out of nothing at all.”

  “Oh, there’s nothing glaring about it, just little things. And one thing I forgot to mention that isn’t so little. The cargo we have aboard. It seems to be something very special, triple Security guard all the time it was being loaded. Some of the crates were very small and very heavy — weighed tons. And one of them broke open on the gantry coming up. The Security boys covered it in a hurry, but I happened to get a quick look.” The half smile formed on Peter’s lips. “Whatever was inside was wrapped in a lead blanket six inches thick. Now, what do you suppose a Star Ship could be carrying that would require shielding like that?”

  The wall-speaker interrupted them with a series of squawks and squeals. Then Mr. Lorry’s voice flooded the compartment:

  “All hands listen with care. The SS Ganymede will blast off in fifteen minutes. All hands strap down and wait for the broken signal. That will indicate the one-minute countdown. We will accelerate for one hundred and ten seconds on chemical thrust, then for seven minutes and twenty seconds on atomic thrust before the Koenig drive is activated. You will be uncomfortable, but this discomfort will pass. In each locker is a supply of amphetamine alkaloid to reduce the sensations of discomfort. You are advised to take two capsules now and a final capsule when the signal begins.”

  The speaker went dead with a click. Lars and Peter stared at each other for a moment. They knew what to do. Throughout Academy there had been blastoff drills, landing drills, and drills to cover almost any kind of in-space emergency. But now for an instant they stood rooted to the floor.

  Then Lars was scrambling into the upper acceleration cot. Thickly padded straps closed around his arms, shoulders, hips and legs as he gulped the green capsules and waited, listening to the steady thrum-thrum-thrum of the idling motors far below.

  It seemed like hours before the wall-speaker began a broken signal in a slow monotonous rhythm. Beep — beep — beep — The lights flickered and went out, and still they waited.

  Suddenly Lars realized that he was frightened. Sweat stood out on his forehead; every muscle in his body was tense. This was no jaunt to the Moon, no quick run to Mars or Titan. This was a Star-jump, the moment he had waited for since he was a little boy watching the flare of rockets rising from the southern sky. His mind was whirling with wonder and excitement. To the stars, he thought, and the thought echoed back in the darkness with a sharp chill of apprehension: To what star?

  Vega?

  Or somewhere else?

  Suddenly the thrum-thrum-thrum rose in pitch, growing rapidly faster, louder. At first Lars thought he was suddenly sleepy as he sank back into the soft bunk padding. His body was heavy, his eyelids sagged, his face — But it wasn’t sleep. A huge, unbearable feathery weight was pressing him down, crushing him, smothering him. He could hardly draw air into his lungs.

  There was a shift, a jolt, as the pressure eased momentarily, then slammed him harder yet. We’re aloft, he thought wildly. On atomics now. Too late to go back. He felt the powerful thrust of the engines driving through him until his whole body was vibrating with the ship.

  Minutes passed. The pressure grew. He tried to move his head, but it was pressed with the terrible weight of acceleration against the headrest. I can’t breathe, he thought. How long — ?

  Then, suddenly, the pressure was gone and a new sensation replaced it. He felt himself growing big, huge, mammoth as the room and bunk around him seemed to shrink away. He had a Sensation of falling steeply, giddily away, away from himself, away from everything. A rhythmic vibrato had begun, deep within his body and mind, growing faster, shaking him, frightening and deadly in its intensity. He tried to scream, but no sound came from his throat, only the silent vibration growing stronger every instant.

  And then he knew what it was: the Koenig drive, thrusting the ship out into space with incredible speed, peeling light years away, shearing out beyond the bounds of light-speed and dimension, ramming the ship through a distortion of space itself.

  To the stars —

  They were aloft. Outside was nothingness. For two months their ship would be enclosed in a protective cocoon of energy, shielding them from forces beyond it that could wrench them into shapeless atoms. They were in space, en route at last.

  As Lars sank back into the darkness of first-stage reaction to the drive, the thought drifted hazily through his mind. To where? If not Vega, what star? For what purpose? With what strange cargo in the hold, wrapped snugly in six inch blankets of lead? What
conceivable cargo —

  Vaguely the thought drifted from his grasp as he tried to find an answer, then slammed back sharply into focus. His eyes flew open and he stared into the darkness.

  He knew the answer. There was only one thing the cargo could be. The ship was carrying bombs. Thermonuclear bombs, outlawed on Earth for centuries.

  But why?

  As he sank helplessly into sleep, no answer came to that question.

  3

  ROCKET TO LIMBO

  HE WAS neither asleep nor awake. For eons it seemed that he lay still, enveloped in softness, yearning for sleep that did not quite come. The thunder and thrum of engines had taken on a musical quality, a militant beat repeated over and over and over like an ancient disc record caught in a groove.

  Around him was blackness, impenetrable space blackness, but there were no stars, no planets. Muffled sounds came to him that he could not identify, and he felt waves of nausea passing through him. Then, with incredible suddenness the blackness was shattered by a piercing light as a first-magnitude star burst into violent flame, sending out streamers of color.

  Lars opened his eyes, and the immensity of space collapsed around him, shrinking into the tiny bunk compartment, and the star became the wall light. John Lambert was standing by his bunk, swabbing his arm with alcohol.

  “What — ?”

  “Just lie still and try to relax,” Lambert said gently. “You’ll be out of it.”

  Lars tried to sit up, but the straps held him down. “Out of it? Out of what?”

  “Reaction, of course.” Lambert swabbed his arm again and set the syringe aside. “Koenig drive sets up some very odd sensations, particularly if you’ve never been through it before. Feeling better now?”

  Lars nodded dizzily and unstrapped himself. After a moment he slipped down to the deck.

  Peter Brigham’s bunk was empty.

  “They needed him in the navigation shack, so I broke him loose first,” Lambert said.

  “How long — ?”

  “Seven hours or so. I checked half an hour ago and you were still out like a punch-drunk fighter.”

  Lars rubbed his forehead gingerly. “I feel like one, too. Does it always hit you like this?”

  “More or less. You learn to modify it after a while. It’s as much a psychological reaction as anything else. You’re no longer legitimately a part of space-time as we normally know it. Just a kind of bubble slicing through it crosswise, you might say. Though the math boys would squirm if you put it that way. They’ve got a lot of fancy terms for the Koenig distortion field.”

  “I bet.” Lars sank down on the bunk, still trying to orient himself. He felt as if he’d been sleeping for weeks. “Then we’re on our way!”

  “Yes, we very decidedly are on our way and then some. I would hate to have to bicycle home from here.”

  “But we’re not on our way to Vega.” It wasn’t a question the way Lars said it. It was a statement.

  Lambert stopped rewrapping the syringe and looked up, startled. Then he laughed. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “Somebody in your family a telep? Or are you just looking in your crystal ball?”

  “I haven’t been able to work tele-dice since I was six,” Lars said doggedly. “You don’t need to be a telepath to know that something is very strange about this little jaunt.”

  “Like what?”

  Lars told him what Peter had said about the coordinates, about his own suspicions. He started to tell him what he had surmised about the cargo in the hold, but stopped. Something deep inside him seemed to be crying out, warning him. Don’t play all your cards at once.

  Lambert listened to him, and shook his head. “Sounds like you’ve done some fancy putting-together-of-two-and-two,” he said finally. “And you’re at least partly right, of course. The Ganymede isn’t going to Vega III. But I don’t know where she is going. All I know is that she blasted under secret orders, and that every high mucky-muck in the Colonial Service is nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof about her mission, whatever it is. This seems to be a very special-type trip.”

  “But they can’t just shoot two dozen men out to nowhere without telling them where they’re going!” Lars protested. “It’s — it’s against the law.”

  “You’ll find that the Colonial Service does pretty much whatever it pleases, my boy, law or no law,” Lambert said dryly. “What are you going to do about it? Protest? Whom are you going to protest to? You’re in deep space.”

  “But Commander Fox — ”

  Lambert smiled. “I wouldn’t go howling to Walter Fox too quickly, if I were you. For one thing, he’s called a meeting of the crew for an hour from now and may have some news for everybody then. Meanwhile, how would you like a glimpse at what deep space looks like?”

  The starboard observation pit was in darkness when they entered. “We keep the opacifiers in operation in case anyone comes in unprepared,” Lambert said. “Watch now!”

  He pulled a switch and the pit was flooded with brilliant light. At first Lars thought it came from within the ship; then he saw that it was coming in through the huge observation dome as the opacifiers slid out of contact. Lars stared, his jaw dropping at the brilliant display that lay before him.

  He had expected vast blackness, inky blackness studded with myraid brilliant pinpoints of light. He had taken training runs from Earth to the Moon on several occasions, runs made under chemical- and atomic-thrust engines alone, and at those times that was what deep space had looked like — huge, and empty, and lonely. That had been an awesome sight to see, the view of deep space that the earliest pioneers trying for the stars must have seen from year’s end to year’s end on the Long Passage.

  But this was incredibly different, and incredibly awesome and beautiful. Running about the ship like a brilliant envelope a yard from the hull plates was a shimmering orange flow, flickering like tiny tongues of flame, surrounding the ship with fire. Beyond that there was no blackness, no sign of star-lights. Instead there were staggering flashes of brilliant light: orange, yellow, blue, violet, cutting impossibly complex patterns of color on the pale gray background. It was as though the ship were in the middle of a rapidly turning kaleidoscope, hanging poised in the shifting, whirling geometrical patterns, brilliant in their color, frightening in their intensity, in the very alienness of the impressions they made on the human eye.

  Lars knew there was no alienness there, only a distortion of space and time, wrenched out of normal shape by the energy of the Koenig drive. What he was seeing was only the reflection of twisted, tortured energy-channels altered violently by the Koenig field. Not until the drive was finally shut off would the familiar pattern of black space and brilliant stars return to view. But then it would be a new star system, a new region of the galaxy with unfamiliar patterns of brightness to see.

  He shut his eyes, dizzily. You could only watch for a few moments before the hypnotic luminosity became too dazzling. Lambert snapped the opacifier on again and activated the lights in the chamber. “Surprise you?”

  Lars nodded, grinning sheepishly. “I didn’t expect that.”

  “That’s all right,” Lambert said. “You’re due for a few more surprises before this day-period is over, I think. Let’s get down for that meeting.”

  It was an uneasy meeting.

  Lars knew the moment he stepped into the small, compact lounge that he was by no means the only member of the crew who had sensed that everything was not right. The men were waiting in small groups, talking among themselves in low voices, casting sidelong glances at the forward hatchway leading to the control room section of the ship. Lars could see Peter Brigham across the room, talking rapidly to a thin, hungry-looking man with pale cheeks and prominent eyes, who blinked and nodded from time to time as he listened. Other men, coming past them, stopped to listen, bending nearer to Peter. From all the groups a hum of uneasiness arose, not angry, but not quite peaceful either.

 
Lambert raised his eyebrows, taking the room in at a glance, and Lars could see a shadow of worry cross his face. They took seats near the rear of the room. “Your young friend seems to be doing a lot of talking,” Lambert said.

  “So it seems. Who’s that he’s talking to?”

  “The skinny one? That’s Jeff Salter. Assistant navigator. Morehouse over there is the navigator.”

  Lambert pointed to a cheerful-faced young man perspiring over a tape projector he was busy preparing for use.

  “Films?”

  “Looks like it,” Lambert nodded. Another group of men came in and gradually settled in the bucket seats around the room. The lounge was well appointed for men with occasional lengthy periods of free time and very cramped living quarters. Tables tipped out from slotted storage racks along one wall; several cabinets were filled with playing cards and games. The far wall was packed with reader-tapes and several reading machines. In the corner a 3-V was flickering, poorly transmitted through the Koenig drive, but clearly discernible, a man and two girls building pyramids and spires with gaily colored teleblocks, teetering one unit up on top of another with a great show of difficulty as the structures built up crazily.

  The forward hatchway opened and Tom Lorry, the startled-looking second officer came in, followed by a tall, heavily built man dressed in Colonial gray. Lars’ heart jumped. It was the first time he had seen Commander Walter Fox, although the explorer’s heavy features, severe jaw and shock of gray hair above pale blue eyes were as familiar to Lars as his own face in the mirror. Lars probably knew Walter Fox from tapes and films better than anyone on the ship did, for Lars had read every account of every expedition that Walter Fox had ever headed. Yet it was still a shock to see the man himself walk in, a commanding figure, firm and precise in his movements as he smiled and nodded to the men and sat down to the edge of a table in the front part of the room.

  Not a man to tangle with, Lars thought to himself. Not a man to have angry at you, indeed, but a good man to have leading the ship any place the ship might be going.