Rocket to Limbo

It chilled every man to watch those films. Lars caught himself shivering and wishing they were watching the old flatties that never put the viewer quite so much in the picture. It looked cold out there, cold with a savage bitterness that the bleakest winters on Earth could not match. The land was gray and cruel-looking, with jagged mountain crests and long rugged stretches of wind-bitten gray-green vegetation spread out like a jungle, clinging fungus-like to the rocky land. They saw the river, yellow-gray, torrential as it raced down the mountainsides, spreading out onto a broad delta where it met the gray sea. There seemed to be trails through the jungle, but there were only momentary glimpses of these. Certainly there was nothing resembling a road.

Then the camera’s eye turned up into the mountains, and they caught a silvery flash in the distance. Kennedy ran through long strips of film eagerly. “Here, now,” he said. “I got it better a little farther along—there!”

Lars stopped the projector, and they gazed at the fuzzy picture. It stood out clearly from its surroundings, the wrecked hull of a Star Ship, its nose buried deep in snow and rubble on the righ, rocky ridge, the great yawning holes of its jets rising up like another crag to meet the wind. Snow drifted into the gaping airlock. There was no sign of life anywhere about it.

“The Planetfall,” Jeff Slater said heavily. “Commander, what more do you want to know? This is what we came here to find. We’ve found her. They were wrecked in landing. Nobody could have survived. Any fool can see that this planet is hopeless as a colony site. Why risk waiting any longer?”

“What do you propose?” Fox asked.

“Let’s get back home,” said Salter.

A murmur went around the room. Fox shook his head and turned to Kennedy. “Let’s see that city.”

Once again the camera’s eye carried them along, higher and higher into the rugged mountains. Presently a pass appeared, and the ship skimmed through, barely clearing the crags as it slid down into the valley below. Bob Kennedy sat forward eagerly. “You’ll see it now—it was right down—”

His voice faded as they stared at the films. A ragged valley floor, passing swiftly beneath them, a break in the clouds, a view of more mountains in the distance.

There was no sign of any city.

They watched to the end of the film. “Is there any more?” Kennedy asked sharply, “Any film that didn’t come out?”

“Not a bit,” said Fox. “This is it, all of it.”

“Let me see it again.”

Once again they watched. Commander Fox took a deep breath. “I don’t see anything here that looks like a city.”

“Neither do I,” Kennedy said bleakly. He was silent for a long moment, staring at the screen. “Commander, it was there. I know it was there.”

“Buildings?”

“Towers, spires, streets—I saw them.” The photographer twisted uncomfortably. “I couldn’t be wrong, either. It was like no city I’ve ever seen before. I’d swear it was nothing that was ever built by human hands.”

Commander Fox’s eyes were very bright. He walked to the observation screen and stared down at the gray expanse of planet that lay below as the men watched him and waited. Finally he turned, rubbing his palms together. “Mr. Morehouse, take the ship down.”

“On the delta?”

“If that’s the safest place to drop it.”

“It’s the only place,” said Kennedy.

“Fine,” said the Commander. “Put it down there, then. We’re going to have a look at that ship on the ridge. We’re going to have a look at that city, too—or whatever else it may be.”

Three hours later Morehouse had demonstrated his qualifications as a Star Ship navigator by making a near-impossible landing without so much as a jar on touching down. The job had been done virtually blind, for as the Ganymede settled toward the planet’s surface the clouds also had descended, and the ship touched down in a violent torrent of freezing wind and rain. Crewmen at the observation ports gave up their watch in short order; there was nothing to see but the black muddy ground around the ship, and the blanket of gray that swallowed it up on all sides.

They waited, breathlessly, for something to happen. Nothing did. The wind howled and died, the fog closed in closer, but that was all. Soon the grayness turned to blackness, and they knew that night had come.

Meanwhile, the crew were at work preparing gear and supplies for the landing parties. “I want six men on the ship at all times,” Commander Fox told them. “Dorffman, you’ll be at the radio to keep in contact with both parties, and to warn the others if there is any irregularity. Our first job will be a preliminary look around, primarily to determine the best route up to that wrecked ship. You can keep Mangano and Morehouse with you, and three others.”

“Both parties?” Dorffman asked.