Rocket to Limbo

Kennedy, the photographer and mapper, buried himself in the photolab, rolling the film strips, checking the camera synchronizations, checking again and again the special film-sensitivities, preparing the tiny photo-scooter with its four giant multi-lensed 3-V cameras for the initial runs on the planet. Dorffman, the radioman, worked with him in the craft, setting up the delicate beaming mechanisms that Kennedy would depend upon for contact with the ship, then retiring to his own shop to prepare the sampler-units that would be sent down for the first remote contact with the surface of Wolf IV. In the maze of catwalks and bridges in the engine rooms Mangano and Leeds labored to set the auxiliary engines, the auxiliary power supplies, the portable powerpacks and generators into condition for use in all emergency circumstances. Paul Morehouse spent hours with Salter and Peter Brigham, working out landing procedures, setting up special problems to be solved, checking timing and coordination and accuracy, until he was satisfied that either of them could handle the ship with skill in any emergency that might arise.

The ship was emergency tuned. She was tense and poised with the dampered eagerness of a greyhound at the bar. Her crew had one goal to reach, one charge to fulfill to the limit of human ability: be ready for anything.

They had to be, and they knew it. As the weeks passed and the ship sped on, there was no way to escape the knowledge.

No one dug in harder than Peter Brigham. Where he had turned his cleverness to troublemaking before, now he was the pacifier, and if there was an edge to his peacemaking nobody noticed it in particular. In fact, to Lars the change was remarkable. Peter maintained his sarcastic tongue and his arrogant manner to the rest of the crew, but to Lars he was different. They talked now where they had bickered. There was no further reference to Lars’ slowness; one rest period Peter listened with something approaching admiration as Lars told him the problems that were faced and overcome daily by a Greenland wheat farmer if he wanted to stay alive.

And Lars in turn was amazed at the store of information in his new friends head. To Lars curiosity had always been a luxury; he had been too busy mastering his own narrow field to wander far astray. But Peter’s curiosity was all-consuming. He had read far more than Lars had imagined, and more remarkable yet, he had, occasionally, thought about what he had read.

“Now you take the teleps, for instance,” Peter said one sleep period as they lay in the bunkroom. “The youngsters they have on 3-V, tossing the teledice around like they were alive, and reading card-packs like magicians. A lot of people think they’re freaks, some sort of weird misfits that just don’t behave like normal people.”

“Well, aren’t they? You don’t see me going around trying to read minds, do you?” Lars yawned.

“No, and yet everybody knows that mothers and their babies read each other’s minds like books. Well, all right, not very well, maybe, but there’s something in contact there. I sometimes wonder if everybody isn’t a little bit telep.”

Lars chuckled. “If you could read my mind right now, you’d get pretty sore.”

“Well, they used to think that. Back in the Great War Age, men like Rhine were even trying to prove it scientifically. Of course, they got laughed out of existence, but you can’t help wondering.”

“You go ahead and wonder. I’m going to sleep.” Lars turned to the wall, still chuckling.

“I used to know what my father was thinking,” Peter said doggedly. “I swear I did.”

And once again Lars was jerked back to the story Peter had told him of the expedition to Arcturus IV. Peter had worshiped his farther; it was no wonder that he had built up a burning hatred for the man he believed was responsible for his death. And yet now he worked his full share on Walter

Fox’s ship and never mentioned Fox. “Go to sleep,” Lars said gently. “There’s work to be done tomorrow.”

He was indeed a prophet, if without honor. Four hours later the Koenig drive lapsed and threw the Ganymede into control of the atomic-thrust engines.

The ship had entered the system of the star called Wolf.

They hit a stable orbit 500 miles out from the planet and started Schedule I rolling like a well-oiled precision robot. Ever present in the black space-void, the huge orange sun that was the star Wolf glared balefully at them, like an angry giant, half-slumbering, half-aware that intruders were near. Below them was the fourth planet, a dim gray sphere that lay featureless and silent in its cradle of blackness, reflecting the light of its sun in orange-grayness sometimes, blotting out the stars in blackness at other times. When the planet eclipsed the sun the lead-gray color became pit-black. Only occasionally was there a break in its gray blanket, allowing a glimpse of surface beneath.