Rocket to Limbo Read online

  “Your Commander Fox thinks there are,” his father said soberly.

  “He’s never found any. I don’t think he ever will, either. It’s just a pet idea of his.”

  “We still hate to see you go.”

  “You’d think I was going on a Long Passage or something,” Lars said. “It isn’t like that. With Koenig drive in our ship we’ll be out to Vega III and back in two months. I won’t be gone for so long.”

  And yet now, as he slipped into the factory-fresh uniform and checked his pack again, he felt a pang of regret at leaving the place where he was born and raised, where his family had lived since his great-grandfather had come north from Iceland to break the newly opened wheatland. It was a good home, and he would always love it, but he knew that his frontier, somehow, was on the other side of the hill.

  • • •

  Showered, and immaculate in the new uniform, Lars stopped at an Eating Bar for coffee and a burger-steak, offering his Colonial Service card to the robot cashier. Then he stepped onto the rolling strip again. His Service Card and order sheets were in his pocket, readily at hand. As he reached the loading gates, he noticed that no shuttle car was waiting at the end of the strip, which seemed strange. Usually a car waited at each gate to carry passengers out to the ships. He flashed his card briskly to the guard at the gate and started to push through the turnstile to the shuttle platform.

  “Hold it, there!”

  He stopped. The guard was staring at him suspiciously. “What’s wrong?” Lars asked.

  “You,” said the guard. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To the Ganymede.”

  “The Ganymede is off limits to all personnel. That’s straight from Security.”

  “But I’m on the crew of the Ganymede,” Lars protested. “I can show you my orders.”

  Out of nowhere a gray-cloaked officer of the Security Police had appeared at Lars’ side. “Trouble here?”

  The guard nodded vigorously. “Caught this man trying to board the Ganymede. You know our special orders.”

  “Of course.” The Security man turned his eyes to Lars. “You have papers?”

  “Look, I belong on the Ganymede,” Lars said hotly. “What’s all the trouble?”

  “If what you say is so, you have papers to prove it. Let me see them.”

  Lars fumbled open his order sheets and handed them over. The officer scanned them. “Sorry. This won’t quite do. You’d better come along with me.”

  “But it says right there — ”

  “I can see what it says. I see a robotyped order sheet carrying a robotyped authorization to go aboard. But I don’t see any countersignature.”

  Lars’ jaw sagged and he felt his face flushing. “I — I forgot to get it. I was just starting my leave when the orders came, and it slipped my mind in the rush of things — ”

  The Officer gave him a peculiar look. “That so? You’d better come along with me.”

  Lars followed the Security man down a side corridor and into an elevator. Moments later they emerged into a long room one side of which was lined with cubicles. The officer stopped at a desk, flipped the switch on a viewscreen. “Hardy here,” he said. “Get Jackson down here, and contact the Ganymede for me right away. We have a man here trying to crash the gate. May be carrying forged orders, we’ll soon know. Yes, yes, of course it’s urgent!”

  He broke contact and turned to Lars. “Now, then. Let’s see about those orders. In here.”

  He led Lars into a cubicle and strapped him into the seat of an Identi-robot. Lars pressed his palms against the charged metal plates, winced as the bright purple flash of the retinoscope clicked in his eyes. His card and orders were placed in a photochamber.

  “I don’t see why you’re making all this fuss,” he said. “Suppose I weren’t authorized to go aboard the Ganymede? So what? Would it be such a crime?”

  The officer just grunted and pulled the report sheet from the robot. “Okay,” he said finally. “You just wait here a while.” He went out, closing the cubicle door behind him.

  Lars stared about the room, his puzzlement giving way to apprehension. What had gone wrong? Had there been a slip-up somewhere in the issuing of his orders? Certainly he had forgotten the countersignature from the port dispatching officer, but why should that bring Colonial Security Police down on him so swiftly? Surely there was nothing about the forthcoming voyage of the Ganymede that could interest Security so much —

  Or was there?

  He shook his head in confusion and settled down on the bench by the wall to wait.

  • • •

  He did not know how long he waited in the tiny, featureless room. His wrist chrono and pack had been removed before the Security man had closed the door. Lars rose and paced the room. He watched the current news-tape flickering on a screen in the corner for a moment or two, then snapped it off in disgust. Too many unanswered questions were crowding his mind for attention.

  He knew that his position on the Ganymede had been obtained in the proper fashion, the same way all Officers-in-Training received their assignments. It was customary for each Star Ship to carry two fledgling officers, to prepare them by actual field experience for the duties they would soon assume in full on ships exploring, and opening new planets. The vast matching-plan system placed qualified men on the ships of their choice whenever there was an opening, unless the ship’s commander objected. To most men leaving the Academy, the choice of ship was not important, but with Lars it had been different. He had set his heart on the Ganymede. When his appointment had come through he had hardly been able to maintain his joy.

  But now something had gone wrong.

  After what seemed like hours, footsteps stopped outside the door. He heard the Security officer’s voice:

  “You’re quite certain of this now, Doctor?”

  “Yes, yes, there’s no question.” It was a voice Lars had never heard, a deep and pleasant voice. “He belongs on the ship, all right.”

  “Well — if you’re sure. I’m sorry we caused all the trouble.”

  “Nonsense. You couldn’t afford to take a chance.”

  “No, we couldn’t, considering the peculiar nature of — well, you understand.”

  “Perfectly. Now where are you keeping him?”

  The door opened and the Security man came in, followed by a. tall man of about thirty with sandy hair and hornrimmed glasses. “Looks like you’re in luck,” the Security man said to Lars. “I’ll get your things.”

  When he had gone the sandy-haired man regarded Lars with a grin. “Boy, you picked the wrong time to go slipping up on little details like countersignatures! They’d liked to have had you breaking rocks on Titan for the next ten years. I imagine you’ll be wanting these.” He handed Lars his orders. They were now officially countersigned. “I’m Lambert, by the way. I think we’ll be working together for a while.”

  “You’re the ecologist on the Ganymede?”

  “If you want to call it that. General biologist and jack-of-all-biological trades. You’ll find that ‘ecology’ covers a multitude of sins on an exploratory ship. But we’ll have time to break you in when you get settled a bit. We’re leaving Earth tonight, you know.”

  “The shipping orders say next week!”

  “Well! They do, now, don’t they!” Dr. Lambert chuckled. “It’s going to be a pretty short week.”

  “Look, I don’t get this,” Lars exploded. “First they nail me like a — a spy or something when I try to board my own ship, and now you tell me we’re blasting a week ahead of schedule. What’s going on? Why is Security so worried about the Ganymede, anyway?”

  Lambert shot him a warning glance as the Security man returned with his pack and chrono. “I think we’d better get aboard before these boys change their minds. Let’s go.”

  Moments later they were riding the gantry crane up the smooth side of the Ganymede. Lars clutched his countersigned orders tightly in an inner breast pocket. He c
ould see the yellow light of the entrance lock above him, and felt again the surge of excitement in his chest. His ship! For the moment he forgot that his questions were still unanswered.

  “You’ll want to get bunked down first,” Dr. Lambert was saying. “The other Officer-in-Training is already aboard, of course. You’ll be bunkmates.”

  Lars nodded. “Who is he? Another bio man?”

  “Navigator. I thought you knew.” Lambert regarded Lars thoughtfully. “He’s a classmate of yours, says you two are old pals. Though I must admit I didn’t much like the way he said it.”

  “What did you say his name was?”

  “Brigham,” Lambert said. “Peter Brigham. Know him?”

  Lars nodded slowly as the crane came to rest at the entrance lock.

  Any ideas that he might have had that the voyage to Vega III would be a milk-run vanished from his mind with a groan.

  He knew Peter Brigham, all right.

  2

  THE STRANGE CARGO

  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 waterbaths, the cartons of pipettes and reagents still un-opened, 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 fields,” 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 floorplate. 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.”

  Lars straightened up and turn slowly to the newcomer. “Hello, Peter,” he said evenly. “It looks as though we’re going to be bunkmates again, for a while.”

  “Just like old times, eh?” Peter Brigham lounged in the oval doorway, his gray eyes flickering over to Lars’ belongings on the bunk. He looked older than Lars, though their ages were the same. He was of medium height, with jet black hair and a full lower lip that gave his face a petulant cast. But now he was smiling, a little half-smile that Lars had come to recognize the year they had bunked together at the Academy. “And here I thought you’d be up North trapping polar bears. I guess you made it through exams all right, after all.”

  “I made it. So did you, I see.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “Oh, no. I just haven’t seen you since — you know.”

  “Mmm. The Prom, you mean.” The dark-haired youth looked away. “No grudges, I trust.”

  Lars hesitated a fraction of a second. Then, “No, no grudges.”

  “That’s good. Say, are you still lugging this around?” Peter held up the little pocket photo-file from Lars’ pack, grinning maliciously. “Any new additions?”

  “Yes. A new picture of the farm.”

  “How dull.” Peter tossed it back on the bunk. “How are Greenland’s icy mountains doing these days, anyway?”

  “About the same as the New York jungle. You know, Peter, you ought to get out and plow a field sometime. It’d do you good. You might even get over this idea that the Northland is all cold.”

  “Well, I’ll leave the plowing to you, I think.” The half-smile returned. “I should really be up in the navigator’s shack right now, but I thought here’s poor old Heldrigsson stumbling aboard, and he’ll need somebody to show him around.” Peter’s eyes narrowed. “By the way, I hear you had a little trouble coming aboard this man-trap.”

  Lars’ muscles tightened. “A little bit. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just another one of the funny little things that are happening on this ship, that’s all.”

  Lars went on unpacking without any comment. He had never liked this thin, bitter classmate of his, and he could think of no one he would less rather have as a bunkmate for two months in the cramped quarters of the Star Ship. But he particularly had no desire to confide his own conviction, just now crystalliz
ing, that something was definitely not as it seemed on the Star Ship Ganymede. “It was just a mix-up,” he said casually. “It was straightened out in a hurry.”

  “So I heard. Old Foxy went to bat for you. It’s just as well he did, too. Those Security boys can get rough when there’s something to get rough about.”

  Lars just looked at him and went on unpacking. For a while there was silence. Then as Lars unwrapped a spool of reader-tapes he had brought along, Peter’s eyebrows went up.

  “Books, already!” he exclaimed. “Aren’t you sick of studying by now?”

  “I’ve still got plenty to learn in my field,” said Lars. I suppose you have your navigation down cold, he thought.

  “Ah, yes. Bugs of Other Planets and How They Bite. But really, now, don’t you get tired of all those smelly culture plates?”

  “If it weren’t for the culture plates, there wouldn’t be any colonies,” Lars said shortly. “Nor any live exploratory crews coming back, either.”

  “They’d never even get landed without a navigator.”

  “True enough, but the navigator doesn’t give the go-ahead on a new colony site. Neither does the skipper. The exploratory crew can poke around all they like and decide anything they want to decide about a place, but when the chips are down it’s the ecologist who says okay or no-kay. And he’s got to know what he’s doing.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” said Peter. “It’s a pretty good field, I guess, for a plodder.”

  Lars flushed. He knew that he was slow. There were men like Peter Brigham in the Academy who could pick up their work quickly, with little or no effort. In five whole years Lars had never known Peter to thread a reader-tape until a week before examinations. But for Lars it was different. He had gotten through by slogging every inch of the way. He was a slow learner, a dogged worker who got through by digging and digging. Ideas came slowly to him; he needed time to tear through abstractions and foreign concepts to make them part of his knowledge. But once lodged in his mind, they were lodged for good. He wasn’t fast, but he was stubborn, and he was thorough.