Rocket to Limbo

by Alan Edward Nourse

  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 on 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.

  Tom Lorry pounded on the table for order, and counted the men present. There were twenty-two, including Lars and Peter, a full complement for a first class explorer in the Colonial Service. Lorry nodded to Fox, and took a seat near the projector, handing a spool of tape to Morehouse. “Everyone’s here, Commander.”

  “Fine, then we can begin.” Fox looked slowly around the room, his eyes stopping for a fraction of a second as they met Lars’ eyes, and again when they rested on Peter. “There’s been a lot of talk going around the ship that there’s something funny about this trip, that we’ve blasted under phoney orders, that we’re not hitting Vega at all but someplace else, that we’re heading for a plague spot someplace where we’ll be quarantined for six months, and so on, and so on. So I think we’d better clear the air before we get into our normal in-transit routines.” He glanced at Lambert. “Anybody have any trouble with reaction this time, by the way?”

  “Not to speak of,” said Lambert.

  “Fine.” Fox leaned against the table. “These rumors are like any other rumors, they’re false and they’re true. It’s perfectly true that the Ganymede has blasted under restricted orders, and that we are not bound for Vega.” He paused to let that penetrate as a buzz of voices rose and the men shifted their feet uneasily. “Colonial Security regarded the secrecy as necessary, and I think you’ll be able to see why in a minute if you’ll let me go on. As for the rest of the wild stories I’ve been hearing bits of here and there, they’re about as far off the mark as they can get. You men aren’t very imaginative guessers. Let’s have the tape, Paul.”

  Across the room Lars could see a malicious glint in Peter Brigham’s eve as he leaned over to whisper in Jeff Salter’s ear. Then the lights dimmed and a wall screen sprang to life. The buzz of voices quieted.

  The screen showed an image of a Colonial Service Star Ship, lying in its launching rack in Catskill Rocketport. At first Lars thought it was the Ganymede, but little structural details were different. Two gantries were busily loading the ship as Commander Fox’s voice rose above the click of the projector.

  “The ship you see here is the Star Ship Planetfall. She was a first class Colonial Service explorer, commissioned on November 17, 2347—that’s just three and a half years ago. Anybody remember her?”

  There was silence. Then someone said, “The Planetfall— yes! She was under Millar, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Took her shakedown out to Sirus I and blew two generators?”

  “That was before she was commissioned,” Fox said. “It gave her a reputation as a jinx ship, but she was a good sound planet-breaker just the same. She carried the new modification Koenig engines that we have and a full exploratory crew of twenty-two men. With Millar aboard her, she was equipped to approach any planet of any star system that could be reached in the lifetime of a man, and to bring back all the data Colonial Service would ever need to open colony. You see her loading for a trip here. Good ship, the Planetfall.”

  They watched the flickering pictures in silence as the camera moved in close. Gantries rose and fell; all about the ship was an eager bustle of activity. The camera settled on crates of dry-stores being hoisted into the hold, ship’s name and destination stenciled on the sides.

  “Wait a minute—” one of the men said suddenly. “That ship was headed out into the Marakov Sector, wasn’t it? A new star or something?”

  “There’s a man with a good memory,” Commander Fox said. “Her first commission was for a big jump, out to the planetary system of a star known as Wolf. It’s a long way out there. The near stars with familiar colonies are just around the corner in comparison. Wolf had been identified on photo plates, and that was as close as men had gotten to this star. We’d never had a ship anywhere near there before. But plate analysis said that it was a Sol-type star and that it had planets. Planetfall’s job was to chart those planets and bring back all the information she could about colony prospects there. I don’t need to tell you why. You know why Colonial exists. You know how desperately Earth needs new colonies for its people.”

  “I can remember the big hullaballoo when they blasted,” a little man next to Lars said. “Full 3-V coverage and everything. They made a big production of it. That was just about three years ago, not even that long. But there was something I can’t quite nail about it. When did she get back?”

  “She didn’t,” said Commander Walter Fox.

  There was silence in the room for the space of a long breath. Then a babble of voices arose.

  “But I heard—”

  “There was some kind of a report—”

  “Yes, yes! The Colonial Service said—”

  “The Colonial Service damped it out cold,” Fox cut in with a loud voice. “They made a brief report in certain of the official journals that the Planetfall had had a disaster in space—something wrong with her drive—and had been blown to atoms. They buried the story in the” public press for all they were worth, and only a very few speculations ever met the public eye. They had to do it that way. They couldn’t afford a scare breaking loose at home and wrecking the colonization program. But those reports had nothing even remotely to do with what really happened to the Planetfall.”

  The talking died as the Commander went on. “We know she blasted for Wolf two years and eight months ago. We know nothing happened to her drive because she was in drive-transmitted communication with the Colonial Service dispatcher on Earth from the moment she blasted on. She went into normal Koenig drive at the appointed time, and she reached the Wolf system. We know that. She reported six planets in orbit around a yellow-white sun, and she chose Wolf IV as the most promising of the six for a preliminary landing and pilot study. We know that, too, but that’s all we know for sure. The Planetfall landed, and vanished. We had some signals from her during the landing processes, then no signals.” Fox snapped off the projector and raised the lights, then looked around at his crew. “Our commission is brief and to the point, gentlemen. We’re going to Wolf IV, and we’re going to find that ship if there’s enough of her still in one piece to find. If there isn’t, our job is to find out what happened to the pieces.”

  He leaned back against the table again. No one had anything to say. The men stared at him, and at each other, shaking their heads. “Well, that’s about
it,” the Commander said. “Naturally, there will be some changes in the preparatory routines. From the standpoint of equipment and preparation, we’re on a frank exploratory cruise to an unknown system. That means full study program when we arrive, not just the spot check you anticipated for Vega III. You’ll have plenty of time to get ready, we’ll be three and a half months en route. Now if there are no questions, we’ll break this up.”

  The hungry-looking man called Jeff Salter had been whispering loudly with Peter Brigham across the room; now he bounded to his feet, a crease of anger across his forehead. “Wait a minute, Commander. We’ve got a question or two over here, I think.”

  Commander Fox frowned and faced the man. “All right, let’s have them.”

  “Well, now, I mean this is pretty sudden, what with the men expecting a quick run to Vega and back.” Jeff Salter rubbed his chin, frowning. “And I don’t quite understand the story on this Planetfall. Did she make a landing on Wolf IV or not?”

  “She landed, all right.”

  “There were messages that got through?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I see. But did she crash?”

  Quite suddenly all attention was focussed on the tall, thin man asking the question. Beside him Peter Brigham was sitting, carefully staring at nothing. “I mean, if she crashed in landing, and the signal cut off, there wouldn’t be much sense in sending a ship out to find her, would there?”

  Commander Fox’s frown deepened. “She didn’t crash; at least the messages from her seemed to indicate a safe landing. There were some legible messages from her after she landed, but the atmospheric conditions apparently were terrible, and we didn’t get very much. What we did get was all garbled and difficult to understand.”

  “But she didn’t crash.” Salter seemed to think about this for a moment, then, “What did happen to her?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re commissioned to find out,” Fox snapped. “It seems to me that you’re just trying to make this hard to understand, Salter. You can read the orders as they came from the dispatcher if you want to.”

  “Oh, I’m not much worried about what the orders say,” Salter said. “Thing that worries me is just what happened to the Planetfall after she landed on this place, and just what the Colonial Service is getting us into on this trip.” He glanced quickly at Peter, then back at the Commander. “I don’t understand all this secrecy, for one thing. Exploratory ships have cracked up before and there wasn’t any fuss made about it—it was the breaks, that was all. So now why should Colonial Service be so almighty scared to tell the truth about the Planetfall? Why should they worry about how the colonists might react unless that crew found something on Wolf IV to be almighty afraid of.”

  “Let’s keep our feet on the ground, shall we?” Fox’s voice was suddenly angry. “What could they have found there?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you, Commander.”

  “We don’t know what they found. I’ve told you that. We don’t know what happened to them.”

  Next to Lars, Lambert was shaking his head. “Salter’s just guessing,” he whispered sharply. “Maybe their radio was wrecked, and surface conditions wiped them out before they could get it fixed. A thousand things could have happened. He’s dreaming up spooks.”

  “He’s not dreaming up anything by himself,” Lars retorted. “Don’t you see who he’s been talking to?”

  But Salter was on his feet again. “Commander, if this is just a simple reconnaissance run to try to locate a lost ship, and if all you know is what you’re telling us here, the whole set-up looks mighty strange. Maybe there are some things you don’t know for sure that you’re very suspicious of and that we rightly ought to know about. Seems to me you’ve got a pretty good idea of what happened to the Planetfall when it landed on Wolf IV, and of what they found there. I think maybe you know why the Colonial Service was so scared of public reaction that they didn’t dare publish the truth, too. Otherwise, why would we be carrying fusion bombs in the hold of this ship?”

  Lars heard Lambert’s breath hiss through his teeth. There was an electric silence as the men stared at Fox. The Commander’s eyes turned for an instant to Tom Lorry, a glance of alarm, unmistakably clear. “Who told you that, Mr. Salter?”

  Peter Brigham’s voice broke out sharply. “I did. I saw them loading the things.”

  Fox rubbed his chin. He gave Jeff Salter a blistering glare, then turned to Peter. “Yes. I see. Maybe you’re the one who should have been asking all the questions, Brigham. You seem to be doing my thinking for me. What does it all spell out to you?”

  The answer was short and sharp in the quiet room. “Aliens,” said Peter.

  It struck Lars like a blow, and he felt something cold knot in his stomach. He stared first at Peter, standing defiantly across the room, then at the Commander. Suddenly all the strange things that had happened since he had stepped on the rolling strip to board the Ganymede twenty-four hours before fell into place, and he knew it was the only possible answer.

  It was a fearful answer.

  Commander Fox slammed his fist down on the desk and rose to his feet, his shoulders trembling. For a moment he glared at Peter; then he took a deep breath, his face gray. “All right, if you insist on the worst answers that might be possible, I’ll give you the worst,” he said harshly. “The ship is in grave danger. We have no way of actually knowing, for certain, any more than I’ve already told you: that the Planetfall landed, and lost radio contact, and never re-established contact. We couldn’t get a clear picture of exactly what did happen from the messages. We could only guess, and suspect, and draw conclusions that might be wrong from what we did know. They ran into trouble—what kind of trouble, from what source, we do not know. But whatever they ran into, it stopped that ship cold in its tracks and it has never since been contacted.”

  Commander Fox walked back to the table. “That is why the Colonial Service has maintained such rigid secrecy; not because of what they knew, but because of what they didn’t know. Those last messages have been studied and analyzed in every possible way, and only one conclusion seems to make any sense: that the crew of the Planetfall encountered a race of intelligent aliens on Wolf IV.”

  Not a word came from the crewmen now. They sat like stones as Commander Fox continued. “We’re going to Wolf IV to search for that ship, gentlemen. We don’t know what we’re going to find there, perhaps nothing at all. Or we may be destroyed utterly the instant we land. We may face a hostile power with which we have no way to cope, or we may face a new era for Mankind in contact with a friendly alien race who can enrich us just as we can enrich them. But we don’t know which, and from what we know of the Planetfall, we are forced to assume the worst. Were on an alien-hunt, gentlemen, a rocket to Limbo. And I am forced, against everything I believe, to carry the most devastating weapons Earth has at its command, and to use them, if necessary.”

  The Commander nodded to Mr. Lorry and turned to leave.

  “If there are no further questions now, we’ll fall out and get this ship into trim, I think. We’re going to need it.”

  The men sat where they were for several seconds after the hatchway clanged shut behind the Commander. Then, silently, they arose and filed out toward their station assignments.

  The talking didn’t start until later.

  Chapter Four

  “Mutiny Comes Next”

  Although a casual observer would have noticed nothing at all remarkable, it was clear to Lars Heldrigsson that a fundamental change had come over the Star Ship Ganymede and her crew since Commander Fox had revealed the true nature of their voyage.

  The change was certainly subtle. There was nothing definite that Lars could point to, nothing that could be pinned down in a report or dissected under a microscope, but it was there as surely as Lars himself was there. It pervaded the atmosphere of the place, haunting the dim corridors, whispering through the crew’s quarters and lounges, invading even the quiet confines of the bio
lab where Lars spent the greatest part of his time. There was a sense of uneasiness, of something building and growing, something of fear, something of violence, ever present yet never definable in any terms at all.

  An old-timer would have said that the ship carried the mark of the Argonaut, and other old-timers would have known exactly what he meant even if they couldn’t explain it to the youngsters. It was the mark of doom, of inevitable disaster that no human effort could hope to forestall, above all the mark of futility and hopelessness and fear.

  Yet the Ganymede did not alter her course by any fraction. The thrum of the Koenig engines deep in her hold continued without faltering, driving her like a mindless juggernaut on and on. Her course was set and minutely adjusted; she responded to it with the perfection of the skillfully tuned machine that she was.

  Lars’ first reaction to the news of their destination was a baffling composite of excitement and fear. As he made his way from the lounge toward the bunkroom, his mind was flaming with excitement. So it wasn’t to be a milk-run, after all! The prospect of a jaunt to Vega III and back, even considering his fledgling position on the ship, had never stimulated this sort of excitement. True, he was new to interstellar space; he had much to learn, how much he was only now beginning to grasp; even the simplest and most ungallant of voyages would have been endlessly new and stimulating. Even Peter Brigham as a bunkmate could not have detracted too much from that, he thought wryly. But Wolf IV was quite a different matter.

  It was what the Colonial Service called a “new star” — unknown territory, a new sun to be seen, new planets to be explored; perhaps a new home for crowded mankind chiseled from the raw material of untouched ground. There were no preliminary reports to rely upon here, no records of previous exploratories. It was planet-breaking in the fullest sense, in a system never before seen by men.

  But here his burgeoning excitement caught him up short, for he knew that it was not quite true.