Rocket to Limbo

by Alan Edward Nourse

  There was tense silence. Then Fox said, “But the city—”

  “I was coming to that. I had to scout for another hour to find a pass over the ridge, but I found one, and got through under die weather to a high plateau-like valley on the other side. I was just going to take a quick run, and then come back here when I saw it down there, and I thought my eyes were going bad on me. I thought I saw buildings through a break in the clouds. I had the cameras going full tilt, and made another pass, and then half a dozen more, and every time I saw something, all right, but it never looked the same twice. It seemed to be shifting all over the place, and then I couldn’t find it at all.”

  Commander Fox scowled. “Now look, a city doesn’t go bouncing all over the countryside.”

  “Maybe not, but that’s exactly what this thing was doing.”

  “Let’s look at the films.”

  The first ones were dry enough for viewing. Lars helped Paul Morehouse set up the projector, and soon they were watching the jerking landscape flowing by on the 3-V screen as Kennedy stood by to identify the locations.

  It chilled every man to watch those films. Lars caught himself shivering and wishing they were watching the old flatties that never put the viewer quite so much in the picture. It looked cold out there, cold with a savage bitterness that the bleakest winters on Earth could not match. The land was gray and cruel-looking, with jagged mountain crests and long rugged stretches of wind-bitten gray-green vegetation spread out like a jungle, clinging fungus-like to the rocky land. They saw the river, yellow-gray, torrential as it raced down the mountainsides, spreading out onto a broad delta where it met the gray sea. There seemed to be trails through the jungle, but there were only momentary glimpses of these. Certainly there was nothing resembling a road.

  Then the camera’s eye turned up into the mountains, and they caught a silvery flash in the distance. Kennedy ran through long strips of film eagerly. “Here, now,” he said. “I got it better a little farther along—there!”

  Lars stopped the projector, and they gazed at the fuzzy picture. It stood out clearly from its surroundings, the wrecked hull of a Star Ship, its nose buried deep in snow and rubble on the righ, rocky ridge, the great yawning holes of its jets rising up like another crag to meet the wind. Snow drifted into the gaping airlock. There was no sign of life anywhere about it.

  “The Planetfall,” Jeff Slater said heavily. “Commander, what more do you want to know? This is what we came here to find. We’ve found her. They were wrecked in landing. Nobody could have survived. Any fool can see that this planet is hopeless as a colony site. Why risk waiting any longer?”

  “What do you propose?” Fox asked.

  “Let’s get back home,” said Salter.

  A murmur went around the room. Fox shook his head and turned to Kennedy. “Let’s see that city.”

  Once again the camera’s eye carried them along, higher and higher into the rugged mountains. Presently a pass appeared, and the ship skimmed through, barely clearing the crags as it slid down into the valley below. Bob Kennedy sat forward eagerly. “You’ll see it now—it was right down—”

  His voice faded as they stared at the films. A ragged valley floor, passing swiftly beneath them, a break in the clouds, a view of more mountains in the distance.

  There was no sign of any city.

  They watched to the end of the film. “Is there any more?” Kennedy asked sharply, “Any film that didn’t come out?”

  “Not a bit,” said Fox. “This is it, all of it.”

  “Let me see it again.”

  Once again they watched. Commander Fox took a deep breath. “I don’t see anything here that looks like a city.”

  “Neither do I,” Kennedy said bleakly. He was silent for a long moment, staring at the screen. “Commander, it was there. I know it was there.”

  “Buildings?”

  “Towers, spires, streets—I saw them.” The photographer twisted uncomfortably. “I couldn’t be wrong, either. It was like no city I’ve ever seen before. I’d swear it was nothing that was ever built by human hands.”

  Commander Fox’s eyes were very bright. He walked to the observation screen and stared down at the gray expanse of planet that lay below as the men watched him and waited. Finally he turned, rubbing his palms together. “Mr. Morehouse, take the ship down.”

  “On the delta?”

  “If that’s the safest place to drop it.”

  “It’s the only place,” said Kennedy.

  “Fine,” said the Commander. “Put it down there, then. We’re going to have a look at that ship on the ridge. We’re going to have a look at that city, too—or whatever else it may be.”

  Three hours later Morehouse had demonstrated his qualifications as a Star Ship navigator by making a near-impossible landing without so much as a jar on touching down. The job had been done virtually blind, for as the Ganymede settled toward the planet’s surface the clouds also had descended, and the ship touched down in a violent torrent of freezing wind and rain. Crewmen at the observation ports gave up their watch in short order; there was nothing to see but the black muddy ground around the ship, and the blanket of gray that swallowed it up on all sides.

  They waited, breathlessly, for something to happen. Nothing did. The wind howled and died, the fog closed in closer, but that was all. Soon the grayness turned to blackness, and they knew that night had come.

  Meanwhile, the crew were at work preparing gear and supplies for the landing parties. “I want six men on the ship at all times,” Commander Fox told them. “Dorffman, you’ll be at the radio to keep in contact with both parties, and to warn the others if there is any irregularity. Our first job will be a preliminary look around, primarily to determine the best route up to that wrecked ship. You can keep Mangano and Morehouse with you, and three others.”

  “Both parties?” Dorffman asked.

  “Yes. The rest of us will split into groups of eight, and move out separately. Lorry> you’ll be in charge of one; I’ll lead the other, and we’ll move in opposite directions from the ship, heading for the mountain range. You take Kennedy with you; I’ll take Lambert. Well want to move by daylight, if nothing turns up during the night to change our minds, so you’d better get things set up. We’ll only be out over one night for the first recon, so we shouldn’t need the half-tracks. We may find them useful the second time out if we decide to make an overland try for the wrecked ship.”

  Peter Brigham had been busy in the navigation shack ever since Kennedy had returned with his films and his odd story of the “city” in the valley. When he finally got back to the bunkroom he found Lars poring over a checklist of supplies. “Well! What did you think of Kennedy’s story?” he asked Lars as he flopped down on the bunk.

  Lars shrugged. “Not very much to think.”

  “But he didn’t make sense!” Peter exclaimed. “He says he saw a city, sort of. Only it wasn’t on the film. Not a sign of it.”

  Lars nodded. As he had watched the films he had had the same queer sensation of dread and wonder that he had felt the day Commander Fox had revealed the true mission of the Ganymede. “Obviously he either saw something that the camera didn’t pick up, or else he only thought he saw something.”

  Peter grinned excitedly. “But what about the Planetfall? You saw the films. Did that look like the kind of a crackup that anyone could have lived through?”

  Lars hesitated. “No—”

  “You bet it didn’t. And yet there were messages broadcast from here after the Planetfall landed, remember? So the messages that were received must either have been sent before the ship landed, or else they weren’t sent by the crew of the Planetfall at all.”

  Lars put his list down and stared at Peter. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Well, think about it for a minute.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Just that there’s something very strange going on. I don’t know what, exactly, but something. You start thinking abo
ut it, and nothing quite fits. Know what I mean? You look at it briefly and everything seems perfectly obvious. The Planetfall landed on Wolf IV, the crew radioed its landing home, started to explore their landing, and were overwhelmed by some sort of alien force or other. Now, if you assume that there are aliens here, it seems to tie up into a nice, neat bundle, until you start to examine it closely. And then, all of a sudden, it falls apart, because the parts just don’t add up right.”

  Lars shook his head. “I still don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  “It’s hard to explain. Look, do you remember those abstract-recognition tests they used to give us back at the Academy? They flashed colored pictures on the screen for a tenth of a second and then asked us what we saw that was wrong? Most of the errors were simple—a man with a woman’s hat on, or something like that—but then there was that series that almost everybody missed, remember?”

  “You mean the ones where they’d omitted the processing for one of the colors?”

  “That’s rightl Take a color picture of a mountain landscape, for instance, and just fail to process it for red. It looks awfully peculiar, but you’re really up against it to say exactly why.” Peter jumped up excitedly. “That’s what this whole business looks like to me—a color picture with one of the colors missing. Some big factor, influencing everything that’s happened, that we just can’t even see. Something we’re missing entirely.”

  “Of course, it could be the nature of the aliens themselves,” Lars suggested.

  “Maybe. But I’m not so sure it has anything to do with aliens. That’s another thing. If there are aliens here, where are they? They certainly haven’t come rushing out to greet us. But I think the thing we’re missing is something different, and I don’t think we’re going to nail it down until we get close enough to the wreck of the Planetfall to see just exactly what did happen to her.”

  “Which crew are you going with?” Lars asked.

  “I don’t know. Have they been assigned?”

  “I’m assigned to go with Fox and Lambert,” said Lars. “You’d better check. We ought to try to be together.”

  “We will,” said Peter. “If I have to beat old Foxy over the head with his own log book.”

  Preparations were nearly completed when John Lambert conferred with Fox in the control room an hour or so before dawn.

  “Supplies should be adequate for forty-eight hours, but thirty-six would be safer to plan on,” he told the Commander, a worried frown on his face.

  “The heater-packs are charged on the suits?”

  “Oh, yes. We’ll be warm enough. On a longer trek we’d have to carry generators for recharges, but this will do for a preliminary reconnaissance. The other things, too, auxiliary oxygen, though we shouldn’t need it. Medical supplies for emergencies—”

  Fox frowned. “Then what’s worrying you, John?”

  Lambert sighed, and took a bucket seat across from the Commander. “I don’t know. Nothing important.”

  “If something’s bothering you, it’s important,” Fox said. “I know that by now. Come on, man. Out with it.”

  Lambert looked at him. “Walter, are you sure this is smart? Taking so many men off the ship at once?”

  “You thinking of an attack?”

  “Well—vaguely.”

  “If they were going to attack us, they’ve had plenty of time. We were in orbit for over a week, and nothing came up to scrap with us. We’ve been down now for twenty-four hours, and not a peep.”

  “I’d still feel better with just one crew out.”

  Fox chewed his lip. “You mean the talking that’s going on.”

  “Partly. It isn’t in the open like it was before, but it’s there. And I don’t think that Peter Brigham has anything to do with it this time. But it’s an ugly undercurrent just the same. I’m worried that something is going to break wide open.”

  Walter Fox stared out the observation port, his hands clenched behind his back as he watched the slow orange-gray light spreading across the land. The fog had lifted; he could see the river now, and the mountains very close. He turned back to Lambert, shaking his head. “You weren’t with me when we ran up against the dust-devils on Arcturus IV, were you? No, that was before your time. Ten, eleven years ago. We thought they were intelligent aliens, at first. No, they weren’t legends, they existed. And we know now that there was no intelligence, as we know it, in them; just a hungry, malignant, instinctive urge to destruction. They killed by means of the violent waves of fear they could drive through men’s minds, blind, raging fear. They would have wiped out my crew if I’d let them sit there and wait for the creatures to come. But I didn’t do that. I got them on their feet and made them march. I shouted at them, and whipped them, and drove them.”

  Fox rubbed a hand across his eyes, as though the memory even now was cruel. “I made those men hate me with all the bitterness they could muster, because by hating me they could keep alive, and by giving way to fear they would have died. I killed three of them, just as surely as if I’d run knives into their throats, but I brought nineteen back safely and broke a planet that now gives homes to seven million Earthmen.”

  He paused, looking down at Lambert. “You don’t finish paying a price like that for a planet very soon, John. You keep paying it over and over again. But you learn some things. I’ve learned enough to know that my men have to move into the teeth of this thing, whatever it is, that’s waiting for us. It’s here, I’m certain of it. And it’s waiting.”

  Lambert still looked unhappy, and the Commander smiled. “Stop worrying,” he said. “We won’t move fast, or very far, until we see what things are like out there. It’s just a step outside to look around. But we can’t wait for—whatever it is—to move first. We’ve waited as long as we dare.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” Lambert said finally. “I won’t mind getting out and stretching my legs a bit. I understand Lars will be with us, and Salter. Who else?”

  “Leeds, Carstairs and Klein. And there may be another. If you’re going below, tell Peter Brigham I’d like to see him.”

  Peter had not found his name on either landing party roster, and was somewhat startled at the Commanders early morning summons. He found Fox alone in the control room, staring gloomily out at the frozen land around the ship. A dozen protests were in Peters mind as he stepped into the room, but when he was face to face with Fox, they suddenly faded in confusion, and he felt a flush of shame.

  He really didn’t have any grounds to demand very much, he reflected.

  “Mr. Morehouse has given me a good report on your work in his department, Brigham,” Fox began. “An excellent report, in fact. He thinks that with time and experience you could make a top-rate navigator. That’s quite a compliment from Morehouse, I might add, and he’s not given to compliments.”

  “I—I’m glad he’s satisfied,” Peter stammered.

  “Yes,” said Fox. “So am I. But now we’ve got the problem of landing parties to face, and landing parties are a little different from the normal routine on a Star Ship.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Peter tightly.

  “I think maybe it’s time we understood each other. I understand perfectly well the part you were playing early on this trip to turn the men against me. You know that, but you may not know that I also know why.”

  Peter’s face was pale. “Then you know—”

  “I know that you are your father’s son, yes. I’ve known what you have been doing for quite a number of years, you see. I’ve known that one time or another we were going to have to face things out. We can never break free of the past, and we never make decisions that are universally good. I owed you this voyage, and I hoped that out of it you might grow to understand what happened to your father so long ago. I hoped you might even understand why my decision was right, even though it killed Thomas Brigham. But be that as it may, I do know that I can’t in clear conscience order you to join a landing party here. You may go, or stay on the ship, as you
choose.”

  Peter stared at him for a long moment. “Lars is going with you?” he asked finally. “Yes.”

  “Then I want to go.”

  “You understand that we can’t have any fun and games. I’ve got to have a hundred per cent support. If you have any doubts about that, I warn you: stay on the ship.”

  “I want to go.” There was no hesitation in Peter’s voice. Commander Fox nodded, and offered his hand. Peter took it.

  An hour later, the first landing party moved through the lock and stepped down to the surface of Wolf IV.

  Chapter Eight

  The Foulest Blow

  They stood on a cold and gloomy land. An icy wind whipped down the valley that the river cut in the mountain rim and howled like demons in their ears. They were not cold; the bulky heater-suits with their power-packs strapped on their backs kept arms and faces warm enough, filtered and warmed the thin oxygen atmosphere before it struck their nostrils. But the heater-suits could not begin to keep out the desolation and coldness that spread around them and chilled them far deeper than their bones.

  Lars had heard of the feeling. The old-timers called it “land-shock” and it struck Lars like a tidal wave as he felt frozen mud crunch under his boots. Until this moment he had been protected, warm and secure in the bosom of a ship that was, in effect, an extension of home. Hull plates were thin, and the shell of the ship was frail enough, but its strengh lay in what it represented. Now that strength was sheared away, and he felt for the first time the desolation of no protection, the almost physical shock of standing alone, a frail flesh and blood creature, on the open surface of a barren, alien land. There was a sense of loss, of overpowering dread, and Lars found a dozen panicky thoughts flooding his mind as he glanced over his shoulder at the ship behind them: Suppose it’s gone when we come hack. What if we were stranded here, without ship, without food? What if—they— attacked while we were gone? What if—