Rocket to Limbo

Lars felt his heart pounding as he stepped across to the rolling strip bearing the green and white cross of the Ganymede. His ship I The assignment he had dreamed of since his first day in the Academy—to ship aboard the Ganymede with Walter Fox, the man who had opened more planets colonization than any man since the first Koenig-drive ship had left Earth; the man whose seal of approval on a planet was a virtual guarantee of a successful and healthy colony. This trip on the Ganymede would be no exploratory voyage, to be sure—a full week now before blastoff to bunk down the new members of the crew and get the Officers-in-Training settled in their duties; then a milk-run to Vega III to run a final check on a colony about to be opened to free colonization— but it would be a good trip to give an Officer-in-Training his space legs. There would be exploratories later, to unvisited stars, to unknown dangers. Time enough for that, Lars thought. Now it was enough just to be assigned aboard the Ganymede.

He glanced at the chrono on his wrist and stepped off the strip at a refresher booth. The assignment orders in his pocket instructed him to join his ship at 1400 hours; it was now only 1135. He had time to catch a shower and get himself into presentable uniform before going aboard. He wanted his first impression to be a good one. He could see himself in his mind’s eye, stepping off the gantry into the entrance lock of the Ganymede, saluting the flag first, then the officer of the deck. Walter Fox himself, perhaps? No, that would be too much to hope for. But perhaps Mr. Lorry then, the second officer, returning his salute with casual briskness and saying, “Name, Officer?”

“Heldrigsson, sir. Officer-in-Training. Planetary ecology.”

“Oh yes, one of the biology boys. You’ll be working with Dr. Lambert, then.”

“Yes, sir. That’s what I’d hoped. Where will I find him, sir?”

“Up in the lab, I suppose. Glad to have you aboard, Officer.” And another salute.

In the refresher booth skillful robot fingers helped Lars ease off his travel-stained uniform, picked through his pack for disposables and discarded them all with a whoosh down the disposal chute. As new clothing popped out of the slot Lars stepped into the shower stall, still glowing from his daydream. He relaxed as sheets of warm water and detergent sponges enveloped him. Even five years of intensive study and preparation at the Academy could never truly prepare a man for space—this was understood from the start—and neither could they explain in advance the feeling of tension and excitement, the indescribable fever of wonder and adventure that took possession of you the hour before you stepped aboard a Star Ship for your first Officer-in-Training assignment.

He had tried to explain it to Dad during the two-week graduation furlough from which he was just returning. It had been good to be home again for a few days, good to feel the warm winds coming up from the south, good to feel the bite of a pick once again in the rocky north-central Greenland soil. The farm was the same as he had remembered it, the heavy house built of glacial rock, the huge granite fireplace, the outbuildings, the fields of wheat spreading forth for miles in every direction. Dad had seemed unchanged, too, his face burned red and seamed by the wind, his hands rough and brown. Mom looked older and more tired, her eyes bright with worry as she greeted her son, but she had smiled through the worry, refusing to say a word to dampen his enthusiasm for his new assignment.

He had spent the first days with old Black, the huge Labrador who guarded the farm against all assailants, hiking the hills and valleys he remembered so well from his childhood. But he knew the question” would come, and presently it did as he sat with Dad before the fire one night after dinner.

“Why do you want to go?” his father had asked him. “What are you looking for, Lars? What do you think you’re going to find out there on a Star Ship that you won’t find right here at home?”

Lars had grinned, a little embarrassed. Just like Dad, he thought, to dispense with preliminaries and speak his mind bluntly. “I don’t know, for sure. I just know I’ve got to do it. I want to go where nobody ever went before. I want to do things that nobody else has ever done, or ever could do.” He patted Black’s massive head, felt the dog muzzle his hand affectionately. “Black knows why I want to go. Ask him why he always wants to see what the other side of a hill looks like.”

“And you have to go on a Star Ship for this?” Dad lit his pipe and watched his son’s face carefully. “You think all the frontiers are out there? You’re wrong, son. Look at our farm, our Greenland. Why, in your Grandfather Heldrigsson’s day our whole Greenland was an icecap!”

Lars shrugged. “The weather technicians—” he said.