Rocket to Limbo

“Yes. The rest of us will split into groups of eight, and move out separately. Lorry> you’ll be in charge of one; I’ll lead the other, and we’ll move in opposite directions from the ship, heading for the mountain range. You take Kennedy with you; I’ll take Lambert. Well want to move by daylight, if nothing turns up during the night to change our minds, so you’d better get things set up. We’ll only be out over one night for the first recon, so we shouldn’t need the half-tracks. We may find them useful the second time out if we decide to make an overland try for the wrecked ship.”

Peter Brigham had been busy in the navigation shack ever since Kennedy had returned with his films and his odd story of the “city” in the valley. When he finally got back to the bunkroom he found Lars poring over a checklist of supplies. “Well! What did you think of Kennedy’s story?” he asked Lars as he flopped down on the bunk.

Lars shrugged. “Not very much to think.”

“But he didn’t make sense!” Peter exclaimed. “He says he saw a city, sort of. Only it wasn’t on the film. Not a sign of it.”

Lars nodded. As he had watched the films he had had the same queer sensation of dread and wonder that he had felt the day Commander Fox had revealed the true mission of the Ganymede. “Obviously he either saw something that the camera didn’t pick up, or else he only thought he saw something.”

Peter grinned excitedly. “But what about the Planetfall? You saw the films. Did that look like the kind of a crackup that anyone could have lived through?”

Lars hesitated. “No—”

“You bet it didn’t. And yet there were messages broadcast from here after the Planetfall landed, remember? So the messages that were received must either have been sent before the ship landed, or else they weren’t sent by the crew of the Planetfall at all.”

Lars put his list down and stared at Peter. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Well, think about it for a minute.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Just that there’s something very strange going on. I don’t know what, exactly, but something. You start thinking about it, and nothing quite fits. Know what I mean? You look at it briefly and everything seems perfectly obvious. The Planetfall landed on Wolf IV, the crew radioed its landing home, started to explore their landing, and were overwhelmed by some sort of alien force or other. Now, if you assume that there are aliens here, it seems to tie up into a nice, neat bundle, until you start to examine it closely. And then, all of a sudden, it falls apart, because the parts just don’t add up right.”

Lars shook his head. “I still don’t see what you’re driving at.”

“It’s hard to explain. Look, do you remember those abstract-recognition tests they used to give us back at the Academy? They flashed colored pictures on the screen for a tenth of a second and then asked us what we saw that was wrong? Most of the errors were simple—a man with a woman’s hat on, or something like that—but then there was that series that almost everybody missed, remember?”

“You mean the ones where they’d omitted the processing for one of the colors?”

“That’s rightl Take a color picture of a mountain landscape, for instance, and just fail to process it for red. It looks awfully peculiar, but you’re really up against it to say exactly why.” Peter jumped up excitedly. “That’s what this whole business looks like to me—a color picture with one of the colors missing. Some big factor, influencing everything that’s happened, that we just can’t even see. Something we’re missing entirely.”

“Of course, it could be the nature of the aliens themselves,” Lars suggested.

“Maybe. But I’m not so sure it has anything to do with aliens. That’s another thing. If there are aliens here, where are they? They certainly haven’t come rushing out to greet us. But I think the thing we’re missing is something different, and I don’t think we’re going to nail it down until we get close enough to the wreck of the Planetfall to see just exactly what did happen to her.”

“Which crew are you going with?” Lars asked.

“I don’t know. Have they been assigned?”

“I’m assigned to go with Fox and Lambert,” said Lars. “You’d better check. We ought to try to be together.”

“We will,” said Peter. “If I have to beat old Foxy over the head with his own log book.”

Preparations were nearly completed when John Lambert conferred with Fox in the control room an hour or so before dawn.

“Supplies should be adequate for forty-eight hours, but thirty-six would be safer to plan on,” he told the Commander, a worried frown on his face.

“The heater-packs are charged on the suits?”

“Oh, yes. We’ll be warm enough. On a longer trek we’d have to carry generators for recharges, but this will do for a preliminary reconnaissance. The other things, too, auxiliary oxygen, though we shouldn’t need it. Medical supplies for emergencies—”

Fox frowned. “Then what’s worrying you, John?”