Rocket to Limbo

“Salter wouldn’t have said a word if you hadn’t fed him the questions, and you know it.”

“All right, so what? Who’s going to listen to an OIT on a Star Ship? And it was time somebody had wit enough to ask some questions. Or maybe you’d prefer to stand by and let Walter Fox butcher the lot of us, eh?”

“Why blame Commander Fox? He’s acting under orders just the way we are.”

“Sure. So was Millar of the Planetfall Only the Planetfall didn’t have quite the right orders to cover the situation.” Peter started for the hatchway. “After all, the Colonial Service isn’t a military organization. Every one of us signed contracts for this voyage, and the contract I signed didn’t say anything about Wolf IV in it, orders or no orders.”

Lars chuckled. “What do you think you’re going to do? Ask the Commander to please turn the ship around and go home again?”

Peter wasn’t smiling any more. “You just keep your eyes open,” he said slowly. “Old Foxy isn’t quite through answering questions yet.”

Then he was gone, leaving Lars staring at the clanging hatch. He stared for a moment. Then he roused himself and started for the lab.

There was work to be done.

Until his first hour in the bio lab with John Lambert, Lars had had no conception of the amount and variety of preparation required by an exploratory run to a new star. And after his first hour he had no time to worry about Peter or the crew or the ships destination or anything else. As Lambert pointed out first off, there was more work to be done than any two mortal humans could hope to accomplish in the time they had.

So they set about to do it.

Much of it was chore and drudge work, but it had to be done. Culture media had to be prepared fresh, sterilized, poured into plates and stored. Glassware and instruments had to be minutely calibrated. Fresh reagent solutions had to be prepared with painstaking care, for success or failure of a mission could depend upon a fraction of a pH point, a quarter of a cc miscalculated. Lars spent hours at the microbalances, weighing, measuring, dissolving, distilling, checking volumetric variations and molarity constants.

But there was other work, which Lambert alone could teach Lars. There were tapes to be studied, but in the field, when all the chips are down, only a man experienced in the fielcjwork can teach. And Lambert was an excellent teacher. Where he might have been impatient, he was tolerant; where he might have skimped, he refused to. “You can’t know too much in advance,” he would say over and over. “On a new planet the crew depends on you for their lives. You have to know what to look for, what to guard against.”

“But if it’s a new planet, how can you know that?” Lars protested wearily. “I should think you’d have to wait and see.”

“If you counted on that approach, your first trip would very likely be your last one,” Lambert chuckled. “Naturally, we can’t predict specific problems and dangers until we get there, but we can be prepared to meet broad classes of trouble. What about bacteria and viruses? We can be prepared to nail them quickly, find out which ones are dangerous, and prepare vaccines. What about the atmosphere? We can be ready to test it in ten minutes and know whether it can support us or not. What about plant proteins, animal proteins, the growing quality of the soil?” He slipped off his glasses and ran a hand through his sandy hair. “All were trying to do is reduce the odds against us. You’ll get on to it, but it means digging and digging”

And digging was what they did. As days passed Lars seldom left the lab except for meals and sleep periods. Doggedly he worked to learn the testing techniques, the analyses, the evaluation procedures. He studied the standard flow-sheet of procedure to be followed, and worked out with Lambert places where their situation differed from standard, special trouble spots, special problems. Lambert set up test problems, based entirely on speculation, then patiently went over them with Lars, pointing out a critical omission here, sure death to the crew there, and slowly Lars learned.

Yet he never could throw off the sense of dread, of growing danger as the ship moved implacably toward its destination. At the end was Wolf IV, and then —

What? What then?

At the beginning of the fourth day-period after the meeting in the lounge, Lambert was gone when Lars reached the lab. A few moments later he came in, puffing on his dead pipe, a worried frown wrinkling his forehead. He went about the lab grumbling under his breath until Lars said, “What’s the trouble?”

“I don’t know.” Lambert shook his head disgustedly and sank down in a bucket chair. “There’s something going on around this ship, and I don’t like it a bit.”

Lars put down the slide he had been examining and looked up sharply. “Going on? What?”