Alan E. Nourse - Rocket to Limbo

VIP免费

2024-12-24 0 0 226.46KB 76 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

ROCKET TO LIMBO

by ALAN E. NOURSE

WOLF IV-THE PLANET FROM WHICH NO SHIP EVER RETURNED!

Lars Heldrigsson was fresh out of the Colonial Service Academy and his first

assignment was a milk-run to Vega aboard the Ganymede. Not a very exciting trip, except

that the ship's commander, Walter Fox, had explored and opened up more new

colony-worlds than any other man alive!

But the Ganymede had hardly blasted off before Lars dicovered that not all the crew

shared his admiration of their chief. Rumors circulated to the effect that Fox still believed

there were other intelligent beings in the galaxy; that they weren't going to Vega at all, but to

Wolf IV, the one planet from which no man had ever returned alive . . .

Then the ship made landfall and Lars' first look out the viewport told him the rumors had

been rightl But it was the commander's announcement that clinched it. "We've landed on

Wolf IV," Fox said grimly, "and we're going to hunt aliens! You men work with me - or you'll

never see Earth againl"

Turn this book over for second complete novel

Quotes from the reviews:

"This is no ordinary star-jump: author Nourse had conceived a ^really'Credible plot with

three dimensional characters motivated by plausible reasoning. Furthermore, he has an

almost uncanny ability to visualize the strange sensations and settings of the world of the

future."

- Virginia Kirkus

"There is something haunting about rocket to limbo . .. The author suggests that if man

has faith, he can literally rearrange his environment to suit himself."

- English Journal

"The pace is good, suspense well sustained, and the conclusion satisfyingly surprising."

- Best Setters

"Better than most."

- San Francisco Chronicle

ROCKET TO LIMBO

by ALAN E. NOURSE

ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

ROCKET TO LIMBO

An Ace Book, by arrangement with David McKay Co., Inc. All Rights- Reserved

To J. McP. H. who will write his own some day

PROLOGUE

ad astba, the words on the bronze plaque read.

The heavy metal sheet was bright and new, gleaming red-brown in the afternoon

sunlight. Great bolts of brass buckled it to the base of the launching rack, a slab of gray

granite cut in a single piece from the living rock of the mountains high above the rocket port.

Reaching up from the rack, the Star Ship stood like a silvery needle, poised, graceful, eager

to break away from the bonds of Earth-pointing upward toward the stars it sought.

To the stars.

The ship was named Argonaut in memory of that legendary ship and its crew that had

plunged into unknown waters so many centuries before. She had been built with tireless

care and devotion; years had been spent outfitting her for the brave journey she was now

daring to make. The finest engineers on Earth had designed her to carry the growth tanks

and fuel blocks, the oxygen and reprocessing equipment, the libraries and information

banks that her crew would require during the long voyage. Her massive engines had •been

tested and retested to tolerances never before achieved on Earth.

They had to be, for these engines must not fail.

The ship's name was carved on the bronze plaque, and the names of the men and

women of her crew. Below this the dates were written:

Launched: March 3, 2008 Returned:

There was no way of knowing when she would return, if she ever did return. There had

never been a ship like the

6 ROCKET TO LIMBO

Argonaut before. This was no clumsy orbit-craft to carry colonists and miners to the

outpost stations on Mars and Venus. The Argonaut was a Star Ship, designed for one

purpose-to carry her crew across the black gulf of space between the stars. Her destination

was Alpha Centauri; her voyage might take centuries to complete.

None of the crew who launched her would live to make landfall at her destination-they

knew that. But their children, or perhaps their children's children might survive to send the

ship blasting homeward again.

The Argonaut was bound on the Long Passage.

Up on the scaffolding surrounding the ship, lights were shining, men were moving

quickly up and down as last-minute preparations were completed. The gantry crane crept up

and down, up and down, loading aboard the final crates of supplies. For weeks the giant

nuclear engines had been warming, preparing for the sudden demand of power to thrust the

ship away from Earth's gravity. A chronometer clicked off the dwindling minutes. Gradually

the scaffolding cleared of men; the crane at last came down and stayed, its lights blinking

out. High up on the hull a pressure door swung slowly shut, sealing the silvery skin of the

great ship.

Around it, well beyond the range of blast gases, crowds of people stood waiting silently,

thinking in their hearts what they could not put into words. Across the land eyes were turned

upward, hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the ship as she streaked up through the quiet

sky. Others saw it on silvery screens, or listened to the excited voice of the 3-V announcer.

One thing was certain-the eyes of Earth were on the Argonaut, a crowded, war-weary,

overpopulated, hungry Earth. The people knew the hope that lay behind the voyage: that the

Argonaut would find a place where Earthmen could settle, could build homes and colonies,

and so relieve the terrific press of people on their own crowded planet.

ROCKET TO LIMBO 7

But there was another reason too for the voyage. The stars were a challenge that Man

had to answer sometime. The time had come at last.

A young woman of twenty stood in the crowd, watching the ship with sad eyes. Her

husband placed his arm around her shoulder and drew her closer to him.

"How are you doing?" he asked.

She shivered. "I'm scared."

"So am I. Everyone's scared, in a way. It means so much, and it's so frightening and yet

so wonderful, too-you know?"

She nodded and clung closer. Her father was the first officer of the Argonaut. She knew

she would never see him again, and she knew that he would never set foot on land again.

The trip would take too long. His life was the ship now, and the ship was his life and

responsibility, the ship and the children who would be born aboard it.

"John, I wish we could go along."

• He patted her shoulder. "I know. I do too. But our work Is here."

"A hundred years, maybe two hundred! How can they hope to make it?"

He watched the last of the ground-crew scurrying down the ramps, heard the expectant

hush falling over the crowd. "I don't know, but they'll make it," he said firmly. "They wiH."

There was a restless stirring as the seconds passed. Then, like thunder gathering in the

distance, rising louder and-founder, the roar began. White flame blossomed from the jet of

the ship, billowed out in a searing mushroom against the fallout dampers, as the roar

echoed and re-echoed down the valley. Slowly, as if lifted gently on the magic fire the ship

rose; slowly, then faster, higher and higher. The mushroom became a tongue of fire as the

roar rose to a scream and the ship drove heavenward. The eyes of Earth followed the

8 ROCKET TO LIMBO

great finger of light into the sky, not daring to breathe, waiting, waiting-

And then the ship was gone. A sigh rippled through the crowds of people, and they

turned their faces away from the sky. Slowly the crowd began to melt away, leaving the

granite pedestal with the bronze plaque sitting in the gathering dusk, waiting to receive the

ship when she returned. When? No one knew. No one there would live to see it.

The Long Passage had begun.

The young woman clenched her husband's hand, and without a word they turned away.

She felt her child move within her, and she smiled.

He will be proud of his grandfather, she thought, if he's a he.

She did not know that the great-grandson of this unborn son of hers would be the man

who would give mankind a Short Passage to the stars.

Silently, John and Mary Koenig turned and left the field as darkness gathered.

Chapter One

STAR SHIP GANYMEDE

ad astha, the words on the bronze plaque read.

The block of granite that held the plaque was darkened with age; the bronze itself was

green, the words obscure and hard to'make out. Lars Heldrigsson shifted his Spacer's pack

down from his broad shoulder and bent over, squinting, to make out the letters.

Launched: March 3, 2008 Returned:

ROCKET TO LIMBO 9

There was no date on the second line. Slowly the young man ran his eyes down the

names of the crewmen and felt the old familiar prickle of wonder and excitement starting at

the base of his spine. They must have been brave ones, those people, he thought. Trying to

make a Star-jump with ordinary unassisted thrust engines! It seemed incredible, and yet

they had done it. Where were they now? Dead long since, of course, but what about their

grandchildren and great-grandchildren? Lars tried to imagine being born and raised in a

Star Ship, depending upon tapes and films for knowledge of Earth and Earthmen left

behind, never knowing the crunch of gravel under the feet, or the warm flush of a summer

breeze on the cheek. Had they finally reached a landfall, ever, anywhere?

Certainly they had never returned to Earth. After three hundred and fifty years the granite

launching rack still stood empty. The rocket port had grown up around it, engulfing it .as the

years passed, until it stood in the great central lobby of the busy Terminal, a silent monument

to the desperation and bravery of the ship that was launched there. " Nor had the Argonaut

ever reached the planets of Alpha Centauri, its intended destination, for modern

Koenig-drive ships had searched those planets long and diligently and found no trace, no

sign that Man had ever come there. All tile near stars had been reached and explored by

now-Altair and Vega, Alpha Centauri and Sirius and Arcturus and the rtst-and nowhere had

a sign been found. The Argonaut had become a legend, a brave gesture of the past, but die

thought of that hopeless voyage never failed to stir Lars Heldrigsson, to make him eager to

be off, impatient with the years of study that had been necessary to qualify him for the

Colonial Service Patrol. It was a legend of greatness, and there was still a challenge in the

stars that time and a changing world 4sould never destroy.

Pf this Lars Heldrigsson was very sure.

10 ROCKET TO LIMBO

He shouldered his pack again, a tiny fifty-pound bundle, the weight limit allowed

crewmen on Colonial Service ships, and walked quickly up the long ramp into the main

Terminal Concourse. He was large for his eighteen years, standing a full six feet two, broad

shouldered, powerful. His height and weight had been something of an issue when he had

entered the Colonial Service Academy five years before; since then he had gained another

two inches, and barely passed the physical examination before graduation, not because of

any sign of ill health but because of sheer size. His shock of yellow-white hair, his blue eyes

and the flat, heavy features of his face revealed clearly his Nordic ancestry. He seemed to

move slowly and ponderously. Throughout his Me he had had to contend with smaller, faster

ones who made the unfortunate mistake of assuming that Lars Heldrigsson couldn't move

fast when he wanted to-to their enduring regret.

Now he stepped briskly out into the Concourse, felt himself picked up and carried by the

streams of travelers, crewmen, colonists and Security men riding the rolling strips to and

from the launching racks and loading platforms. Everywhere there was feverish activity and

bustle. Across the way he saw lines of colonists waiting for their final physicals and baggage

checks before boarding the Star Ships that would carry them out to new homes, rugged-

homes, perhaps, a far cry from the crowded mechanization of the cities of Earth, but homes

where they could have land and food and a place to raise their children, homes linked to

Earth by the strong bonds of Colonial Service ships that traveled to the stars and back in

months.

And down the Concourse were the flashing lights of the shuttles leading out to the ships

themselves.

Star Ship Tethys, now loading colonists and supplies for the fourth planet of Sirius, an

old Colony, well established, rich in land, rich in Earth-mutated wheat, a sub-tropical

paradise with room for many thousands of families to settle and

ROCKET TO LIMBO 11

grow, almost self-supporting now and soon to apply for in-' dependent elections and

representation in the Colonial Council.

Star Ship Danton, taking men and machinery to the newly opened colony on Aldebaran

III, a bitter place until Earth weather technicians and Earth civil engineers had carved a

foothold for hungry Earthmen to find homes. A weatherbeaten fisherman made his way onto

the shuttle, with a gold ring in his ear and a tiny Arcturian monkey-bear on his shoulder,

tossing three sparkling tele-dice in the air before him to amuse his pet and laughing as the

creature batted at them with a tawny paw. There were great seas and many fish on

Aldebaran III.

Star Ship Mercedes, exploratory to the far system of Morua, a double star with endless

summer on its seventh planet, a good prospect for a new colony in ten more years, after the

exploratory crews and the survey crews and the engineering jerews and the pilot colonies

had done their work in opening it; a new escape valve for Earthmen who no longer had room

enough at home.

Star Ship Ganymede-

'<: Lars felt his heart pounding as he stepped across to the rolling strip bearing the

green and white cross of the Gany-mede. His ship! 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 fc virtual guarantee of a

successful and healthy colony. This *fip on the Ganymede would be no exploratory voyage,

to be Jure- a full week now before blastoff to bunk down the new members of the crew and

get the OfBcers-in-Training settled |a their duties; then a milk-run to Vega III to run a final

ftheck on a colony about to be opened to free colonization- felt it would be a good trip to

give an Officer-in-Training his

12 ROCKET TO LIMBO

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, Officerr

"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, sirr

"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 ROCKET TO LIMBO 13

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, bis 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 ;ft 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 |fim why he always wants to see what the

other side of a hill looks like."

14 ROCKET TO LIMBO

'"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.

"But isn't that a challenge? They took an icy wasteland here and made it the richest

wheatland in the world. Look at the valley of the Amazon. It was a jungle once. Now its crops

feed millions of people. Siberia, Antarctica-rich lands, son. There's work for you here on

Earth."

The clatter of dishes in the kitchen had stopped, and Lars knew his mother was

listening. He shook his head. "I've thought about it, and it's no good. This is your frontier, not

mine. There's no more room on Earth, hasn't been for years. We need colonies, and the

Star Ships have to find them. And I couldn't have a better ship than the Ganymede. You

know that Commander Fox is the best planet-breaker in the business."

"It's a dangerous business."

Lars grinned. "Is that supposed to scare me off?"

"But you don't know how dangerous it may be," his mother said from the doorway.

"Suppose you found aliens on some planet you went to, some race of horrible monsters."

Lars laughed and gave her a bear hug. "Now you're just digging up things to worry

about. There aren't any monsters. Hundreds of ships have gone to hundreds of stars and

never a monster. At least not an intelligent monster. They haven't found a single sign of alien

intelligence anywhere. There aren't any aliens."

"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."

ROCKET TO LIMBO 15

"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, therel"

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."

16 ROCKET TO LIMBO

"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, well 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

retino-scope 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.

ROCKET TO LIMBO 17

"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.

18 ROCKET TO LIMBO

When his appointment had come through he had hardly been able to contain 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 wKere 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. "Ill 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

ROCKET TO LIMBO 19

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 could 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 thoughtfulIy. "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.

Chapter Two

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 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-

ROCKET TO LIMBO 21

jjjlate. 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 yvas 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 haz-

22 ROCKET TO LIMBO

ardous 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 bunk-mate 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 turned 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 okf times, eh?" Peter Brigham lounged in the oval doorway, his quick gray

eyes flickering over to Lars' belongings on the bunk. He looked older than Lars, though

ROCKET TO LIMBO 23

Sfiiieir ages were the same. He was of medium height, with jet iblack hair and a full

lower lip that gave his face a petulant Sfsast. But now he was smiling, a little half-smile that

Lars ^iad come to recognize the year they had bunked together at the Academy. "And here I

thought you'd be up North trap-;ping 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, 111 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

24 ROCKET TO LIMBO

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 crystallizing, 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

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ROCKETTOLIMBObyALANE.NOURSEWOLFIV-THEPLANETFROMWHICHNOSHIPEVERRETURNED!LarsHeldrigssonwasfreshoutoftheColonialServiceAcademyandhisfirstassignmentwasamilk-runtoVegaaboardtheGanymede.Notaveryexcitingtrip,exceptthattheship'scommander,WalterFox,hadexploredandopenedupmorenewcolony-worldsthananyothermanal...

展开>> 收起<<

Alan E. Nourse - Rocket to Limbo.pdf

共76页,预览16页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Alan E. Nourse - Rocket to Limbo

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: