Rocket to Limbo

“Find a poor man a beer, if you can,” groaned Kennedy. “Better yet, coffee. I want to sit down.” He grinned at the men around him, and then said, “I got films, all right. Miles of films. I followed a break in the weather clear around that dirty ball, and I filmed her, by Jupiter. But you’ll want to see my last reel first.”

“You saw something?”

“I saw enough to shut me up for the rest of my life,” said Kennedy. “I saw more than enough. Including the wreck of the Planetfall.” He hesitated, an odd look on his face. “But it was something else I saw that threw me. I just hope my camera saw it too.”

Chapter Seven Peter Makes A Choice

The whole crew was crowding around Bob Kennedy now as he drank coffee and got himself warm. Here at last was something tangible, something the men could grasp, some clear-cut and indisputable fact in the midst of a sea of uncertainty. But Kennedy would say nothing more until the film reels were unloaded from the cameras and fed into the processing baths. “Those are my eyes,” he insisted doggedly. “They’ll tell you better than I can exactly what I saw down there.”

“But you saw the Planetfall” the Commander said.

“I saw the wreck of the Planetfall. At least it looked like a wreck from the glimpse or two I got of it. And you’ll never bring the Ganymede down close to her. She’s spread all over the mountainside in what looked like almost inaccessible country. In fact—” the photographer blinked owlishly at the navigator, “—Paul is going to have a time landing this crate anywhere on that planet. There’s only one continental land mass, lying on the equator, and almost every bit of it looks vicious. Mountains and storms. Gorges cutting a mile deep. Only one river, and that looks bigger than our Amazon. It drains the whole mountain range. And the whole country is covered with the meanest looking jungle I ever set eyes on.”

“Jungle? In that climate?” It was Lambert’s turn to look surprised.

“Wait until you see the pictures.”

Lambert lit his pipe thoughtfully. “If there’s a river of that size, there’s a delta.”

“That’s right, and that looked like the only reasonable landing place,” Kennedy affirmed. “But I wouldn’t like to navigate this boat down on it, and it’ll put us a good seventy-five miles from the wreck in the mountains.”

“Did you see anything suggesting survivors?” Fox asked.

Kennedy hesitated. “Let’s look at the films, shall we? The wreck I saw looked cold as a wedge, but there was a valley over a pass from where it lay, and what I saw there—well, I’m not just so sure what I saw.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It looked like a city,” said Kennedy slowly.

Commander Fox stared at him. “A city! Are you certain?”

“No, I’m not. Not by a long sight. Look, let me just run through it briefly.” The photographer refilled his coffee cup and rubbed his forehead wearily. “I broke through the clouds just over this river, and I spent some time following it up into the rough mountain country. Well have to trek up into that place, Commander. I wouldn’t take the risk of setting even my scooter down there. The weather was terrible, but I got some good shots of the terrain, and I think you’ll agree. Anyway, I lost the river when it broke into smaller streams, and was just debating whether I should try to find a pass over the mountains from that level or go up higher when I saw something up on the ridge. I kept in low, and nearly killed myself ramming the ridge because of the fog, but I finally got a close look. There was something that didn’t belong there, and on my final pass I got a clear look at the jets and fins of a Star Ship sticking up out of a snowbank high on the ridge. Then I saw chunks of hull-plate and smashed-up engines spread for five miles in all directions. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the Planetfall. Nobody could have survived a crash like that.”

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.