Rocket to Limbo

Kennedy’s cameras ground continously, the little man’s face buried for hours at a time in the view box of the telescopic scanner as Commander Fox took a place beside him, trying to penetrate, to find any detail, any suggestion of the nature of the planet

“Clouds,” Kennedy growled again and again. “Nothing. Even haze filters won’t break them.”

“Something coming now,” Fox said. “Watch it.”

“Yeah. Polar cap. And now there’s a break down below— brother! Ice halfway down to the equator. She’s a cold baby, that planet. Got the heat suits in shape?”

Fox grinned humorlessly. “Dorffman? Any signs of life?”

The radioman shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Don’t drop it. How about the radar?”

“No signal of anything. Not even meteors to shake us up some.”

“Keep in touch with that screen. If anything shoots up, I want to know it yesterday.”

“Right. Want me to bounce a couple down there?”

Fox scratched his jaw. “A thought, at that. I don’t think so. The more we know before we re spotted the better.”

“Might tell us what we want to know.”

“Might blow us out of the sky, too. Patience, lad.” He flipped a switch. “Lambert?”

“Nothing for you, Commander.”

Kennedy pushed back from the viewer. “Gotta get closer.”

“Nothing at all on the films?”

“Afraid not.”

“All right. Paul, drop us in closer.”

They broke orbit, and the lead-gray sphere began to swell, to flatten as they moved. Still there was no sign. No aircraft rose from the surface; no signals went up. The planet might have been dead, but the cloud blankets were thicker than ever, hiding, obscuring.

They took a new orbit at 150 miles. “All right,” said Fox. “Get the scouts out and let’s get busy.”

They got busy.

Lambert brought in a prelim on the other planets while Lars still checked and rechecked details. “This may help some. No. I planet is in close and hot, comparable to our Mercury. II and III are twins and carry no atmosphere to speak of. V and VI are far out and cold, ammonia-methane atmosphere. Looks like IV is the only planet of Wolf with anything like a plausible atmosphere, at least as far as humans are concerned.”

“No possibility that Millar took his ship down on one of the others?”

“Not a shade.”

“Then let’s poke a finger down there. Got your scout ready?”

The snub-nosed servo broke free of the ship and slid down in a descending orbit, moving in slow downward spirals and vanishing into the cloud blanket. Dorffman sat alert at the radio controls and hissed through his teeth. “Something wrong, I think.”

“What is it?”

“Magnetic storm. It’s fierce! I’m losing it. No, there it is. But it’s not stable. Either these instruments are way off or that atmosphere is wild.”

The men crowded around him as he moved the controls. Far below the servo scooped up surface air and surface dirt, measured temperature, pressure, gravitation, wind velocity. Dorffman started it up again, and swore. They spotted it instants later, a bright metal chip zooming upward in a wildly erratic course, finally stabilizing and homing on the receiver slot in the Ganymede. Robot fingers opened it, transferred air and soil samples to flasks and culture plates. Then Lars and Lambert got busy.

Kennedy groaned as cloud banks whirled by below him.

“Only a little peek once in a while. I’d better take the scooter down.”

“All right. Go to it. But fifty miles is the limit, and get back here fast if there’s a peep of trouble. Keep whispering in Dorffman’s ear.”

They watched him slide down in the camera-scooter, heard his signals to Dorffman dissolve into a rattle of indistinguishable static as he hit the atmosphere. They sweated him out six hours until he homed in, weary and disgusted.

“No good?” asked Fox.

He shook his head. “Nothing of value. We were right about the ice cap. Squares with the temp readings, too, mean equatorial temperature is about 4° Centigrade. There are oceans at the equator, and a long continental land mass. Maybe the next run will give me more.”

The next run didn’t and neither did the next or the next. But Kennedy kept trying.

Lars reported the atmosphere analysis. “Oxygen 16.8, carbon dioxide 0.8, nitrogen 81.3. Inert gases make up the rest. No trace of sulphur or chlorine or organic gases. It’s a breathable atmosphere even if it’s a little short of O².”

“Radioactivity?”

“Some latent activity, but it’s negligible. No concentration we can spot.”

“How about micro-organisms?”

“They’re there, but they grow cold; 5° is their optimum. They won’t live in our mice, and Lambert doubts that there’s any possibility of contamination, but we’re making vaccines just the same. No sense in being heroes.”

Fox gave him a tired smile and went back to the close films from Kennedy’s last run. He had slept little if any in the week they had been orbited, and he felt weariness in every muscle. Frame after frame flickered before his eyes, sterile, empty of information.

“All right,” he said finally. “Get the boys together. From here on in we’re up to our necks.” He gave Kennedy a hopeless look. “No sign of the Planetfall in any of the films?”