Their lives hung on it. They knew that, to a man.
Kennedy, the photographer and mapper, buried himself in the photolab, rolling the film strips, checking the camera synchronizations, checking again and again the special film-sensitivities, preparing the tiny photo-scooter with its four giant multi-lensed 3-V cameras for the initial runs on the planet. Dorffman, the radioman, worked with him in the craft, setting up the delicate beaming mechanisms that Kennedy would depend upon for contact with the ship, then retiring to his own shop to prepare the sampler-units that would be sent down for the first remote contact with the surface of Wolf IV. In the maze of catwalks and bridges in the engine rooms Mangano and Leeds labored to set the auxiliary engines, the auxiliary power supplies, the portable powerpacks and generators into condition for use in all emergency circumstances. Paul Morehouse spent hours with Salter and Peter Brigham, working out landing procedures, setting up special problems to be solved, checking timing and coordination and accuracy, until he was satisfied that either of them could handle the ship with skill in any emergency that might arise.
The ship was emergency tuned. She was tense and poised with the dampered eagerness of a greyhound at the bar. Her crew had one goal to reach, one charge to fulfill to the limit of human ability: be ready for anything.
They had to be, and they knew it. As the weeks passed and the ship sped on, there was no way to escape the knowledge.
No one dug in harder than Peter Brigham. Where he had turned his cleverness to troublemaking before, now he was the pacifier, and if there was an edge to his peacemaking nobody noticed it in particular. In fact, to Lars the change was remarkable. Peter maintained his sarcastic tongue and his arrogant manner to the rest of the crew, but to Lars he was different. They talked now where they had bickered. There was no further reference to Lars’ slowness; one rest period Peter listened with something approaching admiration as Lars told him the problems that were faced and overcome daily by a Greenland wheat farmer if he wanted to stay alive.
And Lars in turn was amazed at the store of information in his new friends head. To Lars curiosity had always been a luxury; he had been too busy mastering his own narrow field to wander far astray. But Peter’s curiosity was all-consuming. He had read far more than Lars had imagined, and more remarkable yet, he had, occasionally, thought about what he had read.
“Now you take the teleps, for instance,” Peter said one sleep period as they lay in the bunkroom. “The youngsters they have on 3-V, tossing the teledice around like they were alive, and reading card-packs like magicians. A lot of people think they’re freaks, some sort of weird misfits that just don’t behave like normal people.”
“Well, aren’t they? You don’t see me going around trying to read minds, do you?” Lars yawned.
“No, and yet everybody knows that mothers and their babies read each other’s minds like books. Well, all right, not very well, maybe, but there’s something in contact there. I sometimes wonder if everybody isn’t a little bit telep.”
Lars chuckled. “If you could read my mind right now, you’d get pretty sore.”
“Well, they used to think that. Back in the Great War Age, men like Rhine were even trying to prove it scientifically. Of course, they got laughed out of existence, but you can’t help wondering.”
“You go ahead and wonder. I’m going to sleep.” Lars turned to the wall, still chuckling.
“I used to know what my father was thinking,” Peter said doggedly. “I swear I did.”
And once again Lars was jerked back to the story Peter had told him of the expedition to Arcturus IV. Peter had worshiped his farther; it was no wonder that he had built up a burning hatred for the man he believed was responsible for his death. And yet now he worked his full share on Walter
Fox’s ship and never mentioned Fox. “Go to sleep,” Lars said gently. “There’s work to be done tomorrow.”
He was indeed a prophet, if without honor. Four hours later the Koenig drive lapsed and threw the Ganymede into control of the atomic-thrust engines.
The ship had entered the system of the star called Wolf.
They hit a stable orbit 500 miles out from the planet and started Schedule I rolling like a well-oiled precision robot. Ever present in the black space-void, the huge orange sun that was the star Wolf glared balefully at them, like an angry giant, half-slumbering, half-aware that intruders were near. Below them was the fourth planet, a dim gray sphere that lay featureless and silent in its cradle of blackness, reflecting the light of its sun in orange-grayness sometimes, blotting out the stars in blackness at other times. When the planet eclipsed the sun the lead-gray color became pit-black. Only occasionally was there a break in its gray blanket, allowing a glimpse of surface beneath.
Kennedy’s cameras ground continously, the little man’s face buried for hours at a time in the view box of the telescopic scanner as Commander Fox took a place beside him, trying to penetrate, to find any detail, any suggestion of the nature of the planet
“Clouds,” Kennedy growled again and again. “Nothing. Even haze filters won’t break them.”
“Something coming now,” Fox said. “Watch it.”
“Yeah. Polar cap. And now there’s a break down below— brother! Ice halfway down to the equator. She’s a cold baby, that planet. Got the heat suits in shape?”
Fox grinned humorlessly. “Dorffman? Any signs of life?”
The radioman shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Don’t drop it. How about the radar?”
“No signal of anything. Not even meteors to shake us up some.”
“Keep in touch with that screen. If anything shoots up, I want to know it yesterday.”
“Right. Want me to bounce a couple down there?”
Fox scratched his jaw. “A thought, at that. I don’t think so. The more we know before we re spotted the better.”
“Might tell us what we want to know.”
“Might blow us out of the sky, too. Patience, lad.” He flipped a switch. “Lambert?”
“Nothing for you, Commander.”
Kennedy pushed back from the viewer. “Gotta get closer.”
“Nothing at all on the films?”
“Afraid not.”
“All right. Paul, drop us in closer.”
They broke orbit, and the lead-gray sphere began to swell, to flatten as they moved. Still there was no sign. No aircraft rose from the surface; no signals went up. The planet might have been dead, but the cloud blankets were thicker than ever, hiding, obscuring.
They took a new orbit at 150 miles. “All right,” said Fox. “Get the scouts out and let’s get busy.”
They got busy.
Lambert brought in a prelim on the other planets while Lars still checked and rechecked details. “This may help some. No. I planet is in close and hot, comparable to our Mercury. II and III are twins and carry no atmosphere to speak of. V and VI are far out and cold, ammonia-methane atmosphere. Looks like IV is the only planet of Wolf with anything like a plausible atmosphere, at least as far as humans are concerned.”
“No possibility that Millar took his ship down on one of the others?”
“Not a shade.”
“Then let’s poke a finger down there. Got your scout ready?”
The snub-nosed servo broke free of the ship and slid down in a descending orbit, moving in slow downward spirals and vanishing into the cloud blanket. Dorffman sat alert at the radio controls and hissed through his teeth. “Something wrong, I think.”
“What is it?”
“Magnetic storm. It’s fierce! I’m losing it. No, there it is. But it’s not stable. Either these instruments are way off or that atmosphere is wild.”
The men crowded around him as he moved the controls. Far below the servo scooped up surface air and surface dirt, measured temperature, pressure, gravitation, wind velocity. Dorffman started it up again, and swore. They spotted it instants later, a bright metal chip zooming upward in a wildly erratic course, finally stabil
izing and homing on the receiver slot in the Ganymede. Robot fingers opened it, transferred air and soil samples to flasks and culture plates. Then Lars and Lambert got busy.
Kennedy groaned as cloud banks whirled by below him.
“Only a little peek once in a while. I’d better take the scooter down.”
“All right. Go to it. But fifty miles is the limit, and get back here fast if there’s a peep of trouble. Keep whispering in Dorffman’s ear.”
They watched him slide down in the camera-scooter, heard his signals to Dorffman dissolve into a rattle of indistinguishable static as he hit the atmosphere. They sweated him out six hours until he homed in, weary and disgusted.
“No good?” asked Fox.
He shook his head. “Nothing of value. We were right about the ice cap. Squares with the temp readings, too, mean equatorial temperature is about 4° Centigrade. There are oceans at the equator, and a long continental land mass. Maybe the next run will give me more.”
The next run didn’t and neither did the next or the next. But Kennedy kept trying.
Lars reported the atmosphere analysis. “Oxygen 16.8, carbon dioxide 0.8, nitrogen 81.3. Inert gases make up the rest. No trace of sulphur or chlorine or organic gases. It’s a breathable atmosphere even if it’s a little short of O².”
“Radioactivity?”
“Some latent activity, but it’s negligible. No concentration we can spot.”
“How about micro-organisms?”
“They’re there, but they grow cold; 5° is their optimum. They won’t live in our mice, and Lambert doubts that there’s any possibility of contamination, but we’re making vaccines just the same. No sense in being heroes.”
Fox gave him a tired smile and went back to the close films from Kennedy’s last run. He had slept little if any in the week they had been orbited, and he felt weariness in every muscle. Frame after frame flickered before his eyes, sterile, empty of information.
“All right,” he said finally. “Get the boys together. From here on in we’re up to our necks.” He gave Kennedy a hopeless look. “No sign of the Planetfall in any of the films?”
“Not a sign.” There was no hesitation in Kennedy’s voice.
“That’s what I like about you,” Fox said. “You’re so honest.”
Council of War.
Every man was present, and every man was tense. In the welter of detail work it had been easy to forget the broader picture, to thrust out of their minds where they were, why they were there, what they had to do there. But that was over now.
“We’ve gotten everything we can get up here, and we have nothing. Some physical data, incomplete; some looks at the surface, so sketchy they’re useless. We have no data that helps us.”
“No positive data,” Kennedy corrected him. “We’ve got plenty of negative data.”
“You mean the fact that nothing has tried to shoot us out of the sky?” Fox shrugged. “That’s not much comfort, I’m afraid.”
“More than that. No evidence at all that Wolf IV is any kind of going concern. Not a peep, not a picture. And also, we know the Planetfall couldn’t have landed anywhere else. Not in this system.”
Fox looked around at the men. “Still not much to go on. Schedule I is a blank for all practical purposes. So we move into Schedule II. We’ve got to put the ship down there.”
There was a stir about the room.
Lambert took his pipe out of his mouth. “Bio division can’t find any reason not to set down. We know there’s microscopic flora, safe, and surface vegetation. Also insect life, pretty low order. I can’t militate against a landing. Still—”
“Well?” Fox looked at him sharply.
“We still don’t know what we’re going to do when we get down there. We know we land on the equator, period. We might as well walk in blindfolded.”
“Granted,” said Fox.
“If there are aliens down there, they may be set to mop us up in twenty minutes flat. They may just be waiting.”
“Well, what do you suggest?”
Suddenly Peter Brigham spoke up. “Seems to me we’re ignoring one very important fact.”
“What’s that?”
“That nothing happened to the Planetfall until she was on the ground with the crew dispersed. She went through her routine Schedule I just the way we have, and apparently didn’t see anything to scare her off. Looks to me as though we could orbit out here for fifty years and get no farther than we are now.”
There were nods of agreement, reluctant nods. Lambert lit his pipe again. Jeff Salter scraped his jaw with his hand and looked unhappy.
“There’s one thing we can still do,” Kennedy said at last. “We need a close look down there, a good look. Let me take the scooter down close, three or four thusand feet, and see if I can’t get some decent films. Then at least we could land on solid ground.”
Fox nodded. “You want to try it?”
“You bet I do.”
“Then get moving. The rest of you hit the sack for a while. I want some of you half-awake when Kennedy gets back. We may not get any sleep for a while after we’ve landed.”
No one disputed the wisdom of Fox’s words, but no one slept. They watched the little photographer slide the scooter out of her slot and zoom down toward the gray planet to vanish into the cloud bank. Dorffman stayed rooted to the beam receiver, struggling to keep contact, but the signals got weaker and more garbled by the second and finally disintegrated into occasional bursts of nonsense-squawking. Dorffman shook his head, and tried to sleep in his headset.
They waited. A card game started up, but didn’t get very far. Lars puttered in the lab, trying to pretend interest, and finally went back to the observation booth to join the others. An hour passed, and another.
“How long was he supposed to take?” Mangano asked peevishly.
“Fox said a four-hour limit. If he isn’t back by then, we go down after him.”
“Silly fool asked for it,” Salter grumbled.
“It had to be done,” Lars snapped.
“Yeah, sure.”
Three hours passed; three and a half, with no sign of the camera-scooter. Dorffman was getting no signals at all now. He swore and cut in on a different band, sweat standing in beads on his forehead.
On the wall the speaker crackled. “Lorry, Morehouse, Lambert, better come aft to the lifeboats. He’s got twenty minutes more. If he’s not back, we’ll take two boats down.”
Below them a vile gray dawn was moving across the planet’s face. The star Wolf glowered an evil orange. The men were silent now, staring through the viewports, hardly breathing.
There was a glint of light below, the whine of a jet engine, and a sudden crackle of static from the receiver, mellowing out into a readable signal. The men let out a cheer as the scooter rose from the clouds and began homing on the Star Ship. Minutes later it clanged into its slot, and Kennedy crawled from the cockpit, weary and pale but very much alive. He threw off his heater-suit with a groan, but his eyes were bright with excitement.
“The films!” Fox exploded. “Did you get films? Could you see anything?”
“Find a poor man a beer, if you can,” groaned Kennedy. “Better yet, coffee. I want to sit down.” He grinned at the men around him, and then said, “I got films, all right. Miles of films. I followed a break in the weather clear around that dirty ball, and I filmed her, by Jupiter. But you’ll want to see my last reel first.”
“You saw something?”
“I saw enough to shut me up for the rest of my life,” said Kennedy. “I saw more than enough. Including the wreck of the Planetfall.” He hesitated, an odd look on his face. “But it was something else I saw that threw me. I just hope my camera saw it too.”
Chapter Seven
Peter Makes A Choice
The whole crew was crowding around Bob Kennedy now as he drank coffee and got himself warm. Here at last was something tangible, something the men could grasp, some clear-cut and indisputable fact in the
midst of a sea of uncertainty. But Kennedy would say nothing more until the film reels were unloaded from the cameras and fed into the processing baths. “Those are my eyes,” he insisted doggedly. “They’ll tell you better than I can exactly what I saw down there.”
“But you saw the Planetfall” the Commander said.
“I saw the wreck of the Planetfall. At least it looked like a wreck from the glimpse or two I got of it. And you’ll never bring the Ganymede down close to her. She’s spread all over the mountainside in what looked like almost inaccessible country. In fact—” the photographer blinked owlishly at the navigator, “—Paul is going to have a time landing this crate anywhere on that planet. There’s only one continental land mass, lying on the equator, and almost every bit of it looks vicious. Mountains and storms. Gorges cutting a mile deep. Only one river, and that looks bigger than our Amazon. It drains the whole mountain range. And the whole country is covered with the meanest looking jungle I ever set eyes on.”
“Jungle? In that climate?” It was Lambert’s turn to look surprised.
“Wait until you see the pictures.”
Lambert lit his pipe thoughtfully. “If there’s a river of that size, there’s a delta.”
“That’s right, and that looked like the only reasonable landing place,” Kennedy affirmed. “But I wouldn’t like to navigate this boat down on it, and it’ll put us a good seventy-five miles from the wreck in the mountains.”
“Did you see anything suggesting survivors?” Fox asked.
Kennedy hesitated. “Let’s look at the films, shall we? The wreck I saw looked cold as a wedge, but there was a valley over a pass from where it lay, and what I saw there—well, I’m not just so sure what I saw.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It looked like a city,” said Kennedy slowly.
Commander Fox stared at him. “A city! Are you certain?”
“No, I’m not. Not by a long sight. Look, let me just run through it briefly.” The photographer refilled his coffee cup and rubbed his forehead wearily. “I broke through the clouds just over this river, and I spent some time following it up into the rough mountain country. Well have to trek up into that place, Commander. I wouldn’t take the risk of setting even my scooter down there. The weather was terrible, but I got some good shots of the terrain, and I think you’ll agree. Anyway, I lost the river when it broke into smaller streams, and was just debating whether I should try to find a pass over the mountains from that level or go up higher when I saw something up on the ridge. I kept in low, and nearly killed myself ramming the ridge because of the fog, but I finally got a close look. There was something that didn’t belong there, and on my final pass I got a clear look at the jets and fins of a Star Ship sticking up out of a snowbank high on the ridge. Then I saw chunks of hull-plate and smashed-up engines spread for five miles in all directions. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the Planetfall. Nobody could have survived a crash like that.”
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