Rocket to Limbo

“I know. When I took my first step off a ship onto a new planet, I thought I was dead for sure.” Lambert grinned. “You feel as if you’re leaving your last hope of protection behind you.”

“But this place—”

“You’ll get over it. You’ll be calling this ‘home’ in no time.”

Lars grunted and bent against the stiff gale coming down the valley. The clouds were breaking to the sun-side now, flooding the frozen tundra with an unspeakably gloomy orange-gray light. “That I’ve got to see,” he said. “Right now, the sooner we’re back snug in the Ganymede the better I’ll like it.”

They were making their way across a hard, frozen stubble. Occasionally they broke through the icy crust, sinking ankle-deep into clinging brown mud. Ahead they could see the line of scrub trees clinging to the river’s edge, and beyond the green-black line of the jungle’s edge.

“I wonder why there’s no vegetation here?” Lars puzzled.

“This probably floods every spring,” Lambert said. “This is a poor excuse for summertime, but that’s what it is. This will probably melt during the day and turn into a real quagmire. And there can’t be much topsoil up there in those mountains to catch the runoff of snow, so it will fill the river during relatively warm summer days and cover these flats with mud.” He blinked as a flight of small black birds went by them at rocket-like speed. “Looked like ducks, for a minute.”

“They were,” Lars said. “About the size of robins, though. And I bet they’d be tough to eat.”

As they approached the river they found a surprising variety of animal life scuttling away at their approach. Most of the creatures were gray or black, with nature’s universal color protection, blending perfectly into the tarn. The sun rose higher, until the men cast shadows, but presently the sunlight flickered as deeper shadows crossed it.

Fox signaled a halt, and all eight men blinked up at the sky. Two mammoth hawk-like creatures were gliding across the cloud-studded sky, circling, returning. Hardly a feather fluttered in their wings, which seemed to form a black cape about their bodies. Suddenly the wings collapsed, and the creatures hurtled downward in perfect timing. A startled animal scream burst out near the landing party, and they heard the birds’ wings crash open with a sound like muffled thunder as they rose again into the air. One of them gripped in its talons a tiny furry creature like a short-eared rabbit and tried to make off with its prey, but the others moved in to battle. In an instant the sky was full of feathers of the great hawks and they screamed and raked each other, the rabbit falling to the ground forgotten.

They moved on toward the river, loading their sample bags with bits of the scrub vegetation and samples of soil and rock. Tiny insects scurried out of their way. “How can they live in this climate?” Commander Fox asked, dropping back to confer with Lambert.

“Probably genetic adaptability,” Lambert replied. “We saw the same thing in the microscopic flora. We can assume that this planet was not always so cold and that the change came gradually. Possibly it is having an ice age, just as we know happened on Earth. I want to see those trees, though. Ill bet they’re tough little plants!”

“Shouldn’t be long now. The river’s right ahead.”

They didn’t hurry. They paused for hourly checks with Lorry’s crew, matching their progress toward the other side of the delta. As they moved, the mountains ahead loomed bigger and more formidable. But nowhere was there any sign of life other than the simple forms they saw around them.

At last they reached the river, a wild, gray turbulent stream three hundred yards wide, throwing up a roar of sound that all but drowned out their voices. They moved up the banks, looking for a more favorable crossing place, and Fox signaled to stop for some lunch. It was as Lars sank down to munch his share of the self-heating ration that he made the first discovery.

Later they debated loudly what it was doing there, how it had gotten there, what its presence signified, but at the moment it was the source of unreasonable excitement, for beyond doubt it was a link, an artifact of home, of Earth, of Earthmen.

Lars thought it was a stone, at first, when he sat opposite it and blinked at it vacantly while he ate. His thoughts were far afield, and he must have stared at if for full five minutes before his mind gripped what his eyes were seeing: a gray speckled stone with the dim letters SS Planetfall spread across it.

He let out a cry, dropping his rations into the mud. He stared harder, and saw it was a bag, a standard gray canvas food bag, lying half-buried in the mud near the river’s edge. The rest of the men gathered around, and they pulled it open, revealing half a dozen unopened ration cans, three cans opened and empty, a tiny medical pack, a formless paper folder that could have been nothing but cigarets at some time in the past.