Rocket to Limbo

“How could you? You’ve only looked at one side of the nickel. The news broadcasts don’t tell you the other side: that Fox is so obsessed with this idea of first contact with aliens that he runs his crews into the ground in order to satisfy it. He’s lost more crewmen than any other major explorer, and do you know why? Because he isn’t satisfied with finding good colony sites and then bringing his ship home again to let the ground-breakers take over. He’s got to scour every planet for evidence of intelligent life. If he kills half his crew doing it, that’s just too bad.”

Lars stared, horrified at the virulence in Peter’s voice. “You really hate him, don’t you?”

Peter’s mouth twisted. “I hate everything he stands for.”

“But it’s more than that,” said Lars. “It’s wrong, it doesn’t fit you, somehow. I can remember you back in school, always putting on this show of sarcasm, acting as if you hated everybody and everything, and yet you nearly flunked your finals last year because you spent all cram-week coaching little Barnes, who was on probation and flunking out.”

Peter shrugged impatiently. “He’d have flunked for sure if he hadn’t had help.”

“Yes, but you gave him help. All that sarcasm and bitterness was just a phoney act when the chips were down with Barnes, weren’t they, Peter?”

“All right, so I’m an angel in disguise.”

“Not by a long way, but now you’re putting this whole crew in jeopardy just to cut Walter Fox’s throat for him. It doesn’t add up, Peter. I’m slow, but I’m not blind. And all these stories about Fox and his crews on exploratories.”

Peter was on his feet, his eyes blazing. “They’re true!” he cried. “They’re true. You just don’t know. You think he’s great, but he’s cruel and stupid and bad.** Suddenly his voice was different; the sarcasm and arrogance were gone, and he was sincere, almost pleading. “Look. Just listen to me for a minute. There was a landing on Arcturus IV ten years ago, maybe eleven, do you remember? That was the first time a ship had landed there, the prelims had warned against it, but Fox went down. He could have flown the surface in an observation craft, but he was afraid they might miss something on the surface. He thought he had found evidence of an alien on that planet, so he led his crew through a hundred miles of dust storms and desert without proper protection from the sun, without adequate food or water.

“Fox didn’t find his alien, but when the crew got back to the ship all of them had radiation burns, and three of them were dead. No, you didn’t read the whole story of that trip, because they never published it. They were afraid they’d scare away colonists. They got their colony going, too, but the three men who died didn’t come back to life. They put up a monument to them on Arcturus IV, and then forgot them and the trip just as fast as they could.”

“Wait a minute,” Lars said. “I read the log of that trip. There was something about dust-devils—”

“You mean Fox’s obsession. Maybe you remember the names of the men that died.”

“One was Markovsky, he was the engineer. And there was Lindell and—”

Lars’ jaw dropped, and he stared at Peter.

“Go on,” said Peter.

“I—didn’t know—”

“Three names on a gravestone,” said Peter. “Markovsky and Lindell and Brigham. Thomas Brigham, navigator on the Star Ship Mimas under Walter Fox. My father.”

Somewhere in the corridor beyond a time-bell chimed. Far below them the engines of the ship shifted subtly, driving the vibrating thrum-thrum-thrum a fraction faster. Occasionally they heard a voice above them, the clang of a boot on metal plates, familiar sounds of a ship en route, for a Star Ship is never silent. But in the tiny bunkroom it seemed for a moment that a separate world existed.

“I didn’t know,” said Lars.

“Of course you didn’t.” Peter’s voice was surprisingly gentle, a gentleness Lars had never heard from him. It struck him even harder than the words Peter had blurted out a moment before. He had known Peter only by the shell, the anger and bitterness and arrogance. But now, suddenly, he knew that all this had only been a shell, and slowly Lars began to understand things. Things that he had wondered about many times before, things he had never understood about the slender, dark-haired youth he had disliked so much.

Before, he had only seen the hatred that Peter had shown to the world; now, with sudden understanding, he saw the misery and loneliness that lay behind the hatred. He-had a mental picture of a boy, maybe ten years old, receiving the news that his father was dead somewhere, on some far planet. The news created a void that nothing ever again could fill. Then he saw the boy, older, questioning, wondering, having to know why his father had died, impatient in his loss and misery with the published reports, seeking out other crewmen, questioning—