Rocket to Limbo

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.

Wolf the star and Wolf the fourth planet of the star Wolf had been seen by men. A ship had gone there before, and vanished. It had landed and disappeared without a murmur. What the Planetfall had met there no one knew for sure, but there was no way to avoid one simple fact: they had met something. And that was the source of the dread, a cold core of fear that Lars could feel deep in his chest and never quite put down.

Aliens.

There was nothing to think of, nothing to refer to, nothing even to fear but the idea itself. In Lars’ mind the concept of alien life was a large gray cloud of nothing, bottomless and featureless. No one had ever contacted aliens before. Small animals and animated plants, yes, even insentient moving things that seemed at first glance to have minds of their own. But a sentient alien being, a thinking, intelligent alien creature, never. The thought was somehow awesome. The knowledge that such a creature might be waiting for them on Wolf IV was both fearful and unbelievable.

He wished, suddenly, that he could pretend that it was not true, and knew in the same instant that it was. It must be, for the Planetfall had vanished without a word.

Peter Brigham was in the bunkroom when Lars arrived. “Well!” he said maliciously. “I thought you’d be high-tailing it to the lab to study up on the biochemistry of unknown aliens. Or aren’t there any tapes on that subject up there?”

“I was just on my way,” said Lars.

Peter leaned back in the lower bunk, smiling. “Kind of puts a different color on the trip, it seems to me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean we’ve been shanghaied, brother.”

Lars groped for the meaning of the ancient word. Peter burst out laughing. “You know what it means. Back when they used sailing vessels on Earth, and took years to make simple two-hour voyages, they couldn’t get crews to go willingly, so they got them drunk and sapped them over the head. When the men came around they were a little too far out to sea to swim home again.”

“It’s not the same thing at all,” Lars protested.

“I’d like to see you get home from here on your own power. There’s no difference, except that there are laws against this sort of thing, and they’re enforced, and old Foxy has broken every one of them.”

Lars regarded the dark-haired youth for a moment. “You seem mighty pleased about it.”

“Me?” Peter grinned unpleasantly. “Not me. Why, I’m just as worked up about it as some of the others. Jeff Salter, for instance.”