Rocket to Limbo

Lars had no opportunity to worry about his bunkmate when he stepped into the entrance lock of the Ganymede. Lambert spoke to the officer of the deck, a stout, ruddy-faced man whose up-turned eyebrows gave him an expression of continuous surprise. “Mr. Lorry, this is Heldrigsson, the other OIT.”

“Your new whipping boy, huh?” Lorry nodded curtly to Lars. “All right, get him bunked in and see that he knows how to strap himself down. Skipper can’t see him now anyway, so we’ll have to wait until after blastoff.”

They made their way below toward the bunkrooms. As they went they passed through the laboratories, narrow compartments lined with cabinets and technical equipment. Lars recognized the ultracentrifuge blocked in against the bulkhead, saw the tiers of incubators, the agitators and water-baths, the cartons of pipettes and reagents still unopened, but secured tightly for blastoff.

“There’s a big difference between routines you’ve learned in Earthside labs and the ones we use in the field,” Lambert was saying. “Here we have to be compact, but we also have to be fast, accurate and absolutely thorough while maintaining strict isolation technique. Let a foreign bug get loose on board a ship, and that ship may be dead. But we’ll have time for the details later. Your bunkroom is aft of here. Better get settled now.”

From far below in the ship engines were throbbing, sending a low, rhythmic vibration through every brace and floor-plate. Lars stepped into the compact little bunkroom. It was hardly more than a cubbyhole, with two acceleration cots one above the other, two narrow wall lockers, and a two-foot walk space alongside.

Fortunately, Lars thought, not much time would be spent in quarters. A good part of his instruction had dealt with the organization of Star Ships and the pattern of life aboard them. He knew that this bunkroom, like all compartments on the ship, was sealed air-tight and pressure-tight when its oval hatch was dogged, setting in action the emergency oxygen supply. Beneath the lower cot pressure suits were stored, as well as a small sealed chest containing emergency food and water supplies. Disasters occurred on Star Ships despite all precautions; when they did, each separate region of the ship became a temporarily self-sustaining emergency unit for the men trapped there.

But under normal conditions the bunkrooms were used almost solely for sleeping, blastoff and landing. The Koenig drive did peculiar things to a man’s insides, Lars had heard. According to the stories, you didn’t care too much if the space was a little cramped. All you really wanted was a steady bunk to strap into, and nobody to bother you for a while.

A wall-speaker crackled and a metallic voice exploded in the tiny room:

“ALL HANDS CHECK BLASTOFF QUARTERS. BLASTOFF WILL BE ON SCHEDULE AT 2100 HOURS. REPEAT. ALL HANDS CHECK STATIONS.”

Lars’ heart began racing. In any Star Ship voyage the blastoff was a critical time. The Koenig drive could never be used safely until a ship had cleared a planet’s gravitational pull. That meant that chemical and atomic engines had to lift the vast weight of the ship from the ground and thrust it outward with gathering speed until escape velocity was reached. Giant gyroscopes helped carry the burden of stabilizing and guiding the great ship’s course through the first hazardous five thousand miles, but the spectre of disaster was ever present until the ship finally rode free of gravitational demands.

There had been ships whose gyros jammed and sent tons of metal and dozens of men plunging dizzily through the outer atmosphere into the sea. No one would forget the Mercury, which had struck New Chicago, jets still roaring, and rammed itself through four hundred feet of concrete and granite before the reaction chamber exploded.

But once in free fall the paramagnetic fields of the Koenig drive could be activated, hurling the ship forward through a distortion-pattern in normal space, carving the time of interstellar transport down to a fraction of that required with the Long Passage. The voyage to Vega III was scheduled for two months; it might take a day more, or two days less, but essentially only two months for a journey that would have consumed at least a hundred and fifty years on a Long Passage.

It was the Koenig drive that had given men the stars.

Lars began undoing his pack, storing his personal items in one of the wall lockers. That his bunkmate had already been here was abundantly clear. A used uniform had been thrown carelessly across the lower bunk; three shoes were scattered at random about the room, and both wall lockers had been appropriated. Lars sighed and began emptying the contents of one locker onto the bunk.

There was no question, he thought gloomily, that his bunkmate was Peter Brigham.

He had nearly finished when a voice behind him said, “Well! If it isn’t the farmer boy.”