Part 4

Some minutes later a young spaceman with sandy, disordered hair that even space regulations could do nothing with, came into the compartment. Jim Hawley was Rob’s best friend and had flighted a number of expeditions with him. There was a sober look on Jim’s customarily jovial face.

“The men are complaining like babies, Rob,” Jim said. “Do you think they’ll be any good to us?”

“They’ll have to be, Jim,” Rob answered grimly. “They’re all we have.”

Jim looked at his stalwart young friend in admiration. “You and Grant are all right, Rob. Not many men would risk their careers on an old man’s whims. Aren’t you scared—just a little bit?”

“I’m plenty scared,” Rob told him, with a nervous smile. “I’m only a subofficer of five months, and here I am in charge of an expedition. Don’t think that isn’t frightening. In a sense, the lives of all men aboard the ship will be in my hands after we land.”

“If you need me,” Jim assured him, “here’s one buddy you can count on.”

Two days later the Centaurus had intercepted the orbit of Titania and was beginning to barrel surfaceward. Rob, looking outside from the officer’s platform up forward, saw a huge rocky world filling the port, its mantle of ice shimmering in the reflected light of the unseen primary body.

The _Centaurus_ dropped lower over a plateau that Rob had pointed out to Mr. Brigger as the spot where Dr. Franz had visited. The underjets threw out pencils of braking power to check the plunge of the space ship.

Finally the _Centaurus_ touched down on its tail fins and then Spacemaster Brigger said to Rob, “It’s all yours now, Allison.”

Looking out over the hoary wilderness, completely airless because of the little world’s inability to retain an atmosphere, Rob felt suddenly incompetent. Only now did he realize fully his youthful inexperience. It was one thing to be an idle witness on a journey; it was another to be in charge of a crew of men.

Rob heard footsteps on the platform and turned to see Jim Hawley walking up. Jim grinned in his engaging fashion, and it was like a tonic to Rob’s spirits.

“What do you say we get started, Rob?” he said. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

Rob had the skipper round up the crew in the orientation compartment as soon as he had made his own plans. Then he laid before them the order of procedure. On a flannel board he tacked an enlarged map he had copied from one owned by Dr. Franz.

“Here’s a sketch of this area,” Rob explained. “Dr. Franz neglected to mark where he had seen the fishlike animal swimming beneath the ice. He did report that he was only able to find one after days of searching. They must be very scarce.”

“So scarce there probably aren’t any at all,” retorted one of the subofficers in a low voice.

Rob ignored the remark and went on with his explanation. “We’ll scatter out over the area and begin searching. It won’t be an easy job because the ice isn’t completely clear but is streaked through with ammonia and other opaque solubles.”

“Just how long will we have to keep up this search?” another crewman demanded. “I don’t want to spend Christmas in this forsaken place.”

Spacemaster Brigger spoke up then. “We can spend seven days on searching and still have enough supplies and fuel to get us home again. If we don’t find anything in that time, we start back just the same. Is that clear, Mr. Allison?”

“Yes, sir,” Rob said. Seven days sounded like ample time, but the area they had to cover was several square miles. From Dr. Franz’s description of the place, the liquid medium beneath the ice was wide and deep, a veritable ocean. Beneath this solution the ice began again and extended into the core of the small planet.

Explanations over, the majority of the crew, about twenty spacemen, climbed into their space gear, Rob and Jim with them. Mr. Brigger and a few key personnel would remain aboard to attend the operational facilities of the ship. The suits were triple-reinforced against the exceeding cold and were electrically heated. The helmets, with inside radio sets, were frost-free types, and the shoes were doubly weighted and spike-soled for navigating over the icy, low-gravity surface.

The men descended to the ground on an escalator dropped from the side of the _Centaurus_. Rob had the men spread out, two by two, as safety buddies. He concentrated on the farther corners of the ice field to begin with, intending to bring the searchers closer and closer to the ship each day.

As the men began hiking over the glacier, Rob and Jim talked together through their helmet radio sets.

“I don’t understand how the water under the ice flows without freezing in this superlow temperature,” Jim remarked.

“It can’t be water,” Rob answered. “It’s something else, probably a liquefied gas with an extremely low freezing point. Wherever it is, it must contain all the elements needed to support its strange life forms.”

“Let’s start looking too, Jim,” Rob suggested.

The first “day” passed without success. Then the second. Night was only a relative term, for Uranus, Titania’s main source of light, was never out of the sky. On the third day, some of the men complained about having to spend ten hours at a time in biting cold weather searching for something they were sure did not even exist. Despite the men’s heavily insulated suits, the ultralow temperature that frosted the suits like mold could not be entirely kept out. Rob sympathized with the men, but there was no other way to do the job.

It was on the fifth day that one of the searchers spotted a small thick-bodied shape several feet beneath the ice. The cordon of searchers had closed in more than halfway to the ship by now.

“Jim, will you supervise operation of the ice saw?” Rob asked, when they had joined the men who had made the discovery.

Jim nodded and left.

“Has it moved yet?” Rob asked one of the crewmen, trying to curb the almost overpowering excitement he felt.

“No,” one of them replied. “It seems to be dead and embedded in the ice.”

Presently the ice saw came trundling up on its ski runners, being pushed along by Jim and two others. It was a boxlike machine, heavily insulated against the cold. Jim dropped the blade and turned on the machine, guiding it along an invisible outline around the imprisoned thing. He went over the cuts several times, lowering the blade each time until a depth of several feet was reached. Then he gave the saw a side-to-side motion, and there was a sharp crack as the block of ice was snapped off beneath the surface.

By now all the searchers had come over. Jim worked the lifters on the machine and the block of ice, containing its inanimate prisoner, was raised and set down. The men crowded close and looked. Then Rob looked, and Jim. Rob felt a sickening disappointment as he realized their failure. There was no creature inside the ice at all. It was nothing but a slab of rock.

One of the men snorted contemptuously. Another laughed openly in scorn.

Rob bit his lips and regretfully ordered the ice saw back to the ship. Then he sent the men back to their positions of search.

The young officer felt little hope. The ring was closing in toward the _Centaurus_. There wasn’t much more area that hadn’t already been examined. Rob, realizing the attitude of the men, knew they hadn’t probed as diligently as they were supposed to have. Very likely large areas had been only carelessly examined. But that couldn’t be helped.

Rob went through the last day with the slow resignation of defeat settling within him. In only a few hours the searchers would have covered the entire area, and their own moment of victory would be at hand.

When the search was finally over and still no one had found anything moving beneath the ice, Rob knew how it felt to taste defeat.

Jim clapped Rob sympathetically on the shoulder. “I’m sorry, Rob,” he said. “Perhaps later on there will be another expedition.”

“There won’t be any more to this place, you can be sure of that!” Rob blurted. “After this failure, the Space Command certainly won’t send any more good money after bad!”

Later, as all on board the _Centaurus_ slept, Rob tossed restlessly on his cot. He heard the quiet breathing of the crewmen in the adjoining compartments. They were happy; their reluctant job was done and they were going home. The blast-off was scheduled for 0600 the next morning.

Rob could not stand his plaguing thoughts. He got out of bed and pulled on his clothes. He looked across the room at Jim Hawley, breathing deeply in sound slumber. Rob walked down the corridor to the garb room and began tugging on space gear. He realized only then how bone-weary he was, how his head ached from the tension of the past weeks, how heavily his heart throbbed in his breast. He couldn’t relax any place now, he knew, but it would be easier outside, continuing the search to the very end.

Rob tucked an electron gun in the holster of his suit, then left the _Centaurus_. He struck out over the glacier pack, his head lowered. It came to him then how difficult it would have been for the men to detect any moving object in the murky maze below.

Hours passed and Rob found himself far from the ship. He was shivering from the stubborn cold. He turned the heat in his suit to full strength and pushed his aching legs faster to speed up the circulation. His eyes never left the ground, searching, searching....

If he were the only one involved in the failure, it wouldn’t matter so much, but it was his brother’s problem too. Grant hadn’t made many mistakes on research expeditions—that was why he held the highest office in the organization. After this, though, it would go hard with him. Then there was the misunderstood Dr. Franz, who deserved a better fate than being labeled an old man who in his final days seemed to have lost his clear, scientific outlook.

“Maybe, though, the public was right,” Rob thought. “Maybe it was a hoax Dr. Franz pulled in order to gain public recognition he had never quite made.” But even now, in the blackest moment, Rob couldn’t really believe this of the dear friend who had launched his brother’s career.

Rob’s legs were beginning to feel like stumps as the time dragged on. He stumbled often on burls of ice that cluttered the wasteland. Finally he tripped and fell heavily, and it seemed that he did not even have the strength to rise again. His helmet was flat on the ice and his eyes, misted over with sleeplessness, were still looking downward.

_Then he caught a sign of movement in the depths._ He blinked his eyes to clear the glaze out of them.

“There it is again!” he said aloud. “It’s no hallucination either!” It was a long dark shape threading its way sluggishly down below. Now the thing was rising to the surface. Cold, bulging eyes peered into his own.

With numb fingers Rob uncached his electron gun and pressed the barrel against the ice. A moment later the creature was hanging buoyant and lifeless under the submerged edge of the ice layer. Rob struggled to his feet, astounded at the renewed energy he now had. He memorized the spot as best his dazed faculties would allow. Then he laid the pistol on the ice for an additional marker. He began running toward the ship.

From that moment on, Rob’s mind seemed to be in a dream world. He vaguely remembered the long way back to the space ship and then nearly collapsing before reaching it. He dimly remembered Jim, who had missed him, coming outside and assisting him into the warmth of the vessel. And he barely recalled pouring out the story of his find.

Now, much later, he was fully awake and the nightmare was over. He found himself on his cot, fully dressed. Jim Hawley was looking down on him. Rob was aware that the ship was moving. He knew the _Centaurus_ had already blasted off for home.

“Did you find—!” he exclaimed.

Jim soothed him with a smile. “Yeah, we dug out your monster and we’ve got him aboard. If you’re through being a sleepyhead, I’ll take you to see him.”

“How long have I been under?”

“Twelve hours.”

“Wow!”

“Feel rested?”

“Good as new,” Rob answered.

They went down the corridor to one of the cold-storage compartments. Several of the crew were inside, as well as the skipper. But Rob wasn’t noticing the men. He was looking at a dark alien form lying on the floor. Rob went over closer and knelt down. The creature was fishlike, and the strangest thing about it was the glistening dark skin, similar to metal. Rob touched it and it was like stroking cold steel.

“No wonder it can live in such frigid temperatures,” Rob murmured, “with a metallic covering like that! Won’t the scientists back home have a picnic dissecting him?”

He stood up and found his gaze level with Mr. Brigger’s.

“I never believed in your fantastic theory,” the chief officer said, “and I still doubt it after I’ve seen it. But I admired your spirit from the first, Allison. I believe you would have been as good a loser as a winner and I’m proud to have flighted with you.”

He smiled and offered his hand to Rob, who shook it. Then the others came forward, and they too offered congratulations. But Rob’s thoughts weren’t for his own success this day. They were reaching ahead to when Grant Allison would be even more of a fabulous figure in the field of space science, and Dr. Franz would at last have claimed his well-deserved victory.

EXPEDITION PLUTO

“The lieutenant doesn’t think you’ve got your mind on navigation, Rob,” Duff Ford was saying, as he and Rob Allison stood before a port of the rocket ship _Rigel_ looking out over the sea of space.

“Does it show that much?” the lean young spaceman answered.

“We’ll find him, Rob,” the redhead answered. “Stop eating your heart out.”

“You never knew Jim Hawley, did you, Duff?” Rob asked.

“No, but from what I’ve heard of him, he’s quite a guy. Always smiling and bursting with friendliness.”

“That’s Jim,” Rob said, a tightness in his throat. “I sure would like to know what happened to him and the others on Pluto.”

“How come you didn’t get to go along on the first Pluto expedition?” Duff asked. “I thought you and Jim Hawley always went together.”

“I’ve been working with my brother in the States,” Rob replied. “As the new president of Interplanet Exploration, he’s been awfully busy.”

“There’s a real guy,” Duff said with admiration, “your brother Grant. I guess he’s the greatest spaceman who’s been born. And judging by your own record around the solar system, Rob, you’re not far behind him.”

“Thanks for the flattery,” Rob said, grinning.

It felt good to smile again. He hadn’t smiled since he’d learned about the break in communication from the Pluto expedition ship _Capella_. The breakoff had come suddenly after landing, and the source of the trouble was unknown. As soon as Rob had heard that the _Rigel_ was going in search of the missing explorers, he had signed up for the trip as assistant to the navigator. He’d been grateful for the companionship of young Duff Ford, a likeable fellow he’d met in space school. Duff was a regular crewman, an air purifier, on the _Rigel_.

Duff was speaking again. “Think we’ll get by the big boy there with the halo?”

Rob looked at the giant, glowing pearl of Saturn, which had been growing before their eyes for the past couple of days. Though placid and beautiful against the velvet sky, the ringed planet was a real menace to the _Rigel_.

“Lieutenant Stone said it’s going to be a tight squeeze,” Rob answered. “We hope we’ve got enough rocket power to fight off the terrific gravity pull of Saturn and his moons.”

“I can’t understand why we couldn’t go on a beeline to Pluto without even coming close to the other planets,” Duff said. “Pluto is a long ways off the plane of the outer planets, isn’t it?”

“We could,” Rob answered, “if it weren’t for floating clouds of explosive hydrogen which have been found to exist outside of the plane of the ecliptic. That’s why we have to stay in close until we’re past Neptune.”

“Won’t Uranus and Neptune give us trouble?” Duff asked. “They’re pretty big too.”

“Uranus is far around on his orbit, and Neptune is heading away from us. However, we’ll see Neptune at a distance.”

Hours later Rob was in the navigation compartment with Lieutenant Stone, his immediate superior. They were leaning over a level ground-glass screen upon which were a projected television image and a panel of dials. In the middle of the scene was poised the oblate sphere of Saturn and its spinning necklace of millions of meteoric particles. Scattered about were globes of varying sizes, which were Saturn’s moons. The screen surface was roughened to take pencil marks. A tiny dot represented the _Rigel_, and arcs were drawn to show the motions of all the objects.

“Our closest approach to the planet will be here at point ‘X’,” spoke the navigator. Glancing at his watch, he added, “We’ve got about five minutes to go.”

As they waited, Rob went over to the side port where he could watch the luminous planet directly. He thought he had never seen a sight so beautiful. Saturn was banded with color layers something in the manner of Jupiter, only in softer tints. Riotous masses seethed and tossed in the cauldron of fury beneath the apparently paper-thin girdle of shaded bands.

“It’s gorgeous—but deadly too,” Lieutenant Stone commented.

“Yes, sir,” Rob murmured, “and I’m in no mood for a bath of methane and ammonia. We’ve got to get to Pluto; that’s the only thing that’s important!”

At zero hour, all rockets were blowing at full capacity. Rob could feel the _Rigel_ bending to the implacable will of the big world. As the ship’s nose was pulled inward, the young spaceman could see the anxiety on his superior’s face.

“I hope we’ve calculated this thing correctly, Rob,” the lieutenant said tightly. “The ship should begin to turn tail on Saturn in a little while.”

But the _Rigel_ still had not turned after twenty, nor even forty, minutes.

“We’re losing ground!” Lieutenant Stone said, checking a dial on the screen. “Something’s wrong! But that can’t be!”

Rob went over to the screen, where the spectroscope dial showed that the globe was growing closer, although it was not visibly so. If the _Rigel_ were not checked within a short time, the space ship would plunge into Saturn’s poisonous atmosphere! Rob picked up a clipboard of papers and began studying it.

“I’d give anything if we were on the _Procyon_ which took you and your brother to Jupiter!” Lieutenant Stone complained. “The _Rigel_’s built primarily for distance and hasn’t a fraction of the _Procyon_’s rocket thrust!”

“There seems to be something wrong in the figures for Titan!” Rob suddenly spoke.

Lieutenant Stone looked over his shoulder. Silently the two went through the figures, inspecting every equation where the numbers appeared relating to Saturn’s largest satellite.

“The figures are wrong in two places!” the officer exclaimed. “No wonder we miscalculated the total gravity pull! Whoever prepared these notes back at the base will surely catch it! I guess we can’t blame him too much, though. These figures were worked up on extra short notice for us.”

“What’re we going to do, lieutenant?” Rob asked. “The ship’s on top power drive now!”

Lieutenant Stone explained the new development over the intercom phone to Spacemaster O’Leary. The skipper verified the fact that the _Rigel_ was on full thrust. He said that there was no other alternative but to abandon ship and make for the moon Japetus in the two space boats and hope to be picked up later from there.

“We can’t abandon the ship!” Rob burst out uncontrollably.

“And why not, Allison?” came the skipper’s retort over the intercom.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but I was thinking of the _Capella_ and her crew!” Rob said. “What will happen to them?”

“That can’t be helped I’m afraid,” the skipper replied. “My first duty is to my ship and men. Both of you prepare to abandon ship.”

When Spacemaster O’Leary had cut off, Lieutenant Stone said, “I’m sorry, Rob. I know how much you thought of Spaceman Hawley, but there’s nothing more to be done. Better get together what stuff you want to take along.”

However, as the officer began getting up his things, Rob remained at the screen, poring over it and a little mathematical machine called an electronic computer.

“Ready to go, Rob?” Lieutenant Stone asked sometime later.

“I think I’ve found something, sir!” Rob said, holding a place on the screen with his finger.

“A die-hard, if I ever saw one,” murmured his superior, with an admiring grin. He came over to see.

“Scylla is known to have a slightly unpredictable orbit,” Rob said. “During the past few minutes I’ve traced it cutting inward toward the planet. I’ve checked the moon’s gravity-and-distance ratio on the computer, and I believe if we delay the abandon-ship for several more minutes we can pull free of Saturn and its family!”

“Let me see,” the lieutenant said. They checked the slight movement of Saturn’s tenth satellite, which had been discovered in 1963. Scylla was tiny, a dense ball of rock only three miles in diameter. But its diminishing gravity pull as it moved away could be enough to swing the balance in favor of the _Rigel_.

Lieutenant Stone agreed with Rob’s finding in general, although in the brief time available there was no opportunity to make a positive measurement. He phoned the skipper, who was ready to send out the first space boat. Lieutenant Stone reported to him Rob’s find.

“If you agree it’s worth a chance, lieutenant, I’ll play ball,” the skipper replied.

As Rob stared apprehensively at the big planet from the side port, he tormented himself about whether he had done the right thing in suggesting what he did. Had the _Rigel_ been abandoned, as was planned, all hands would have been saved. As things stood now, however, the entire crew might perish. Still, Rob could not really regret taking the responsibility. Times before, when there had been lives at stake, he had stuck by his convictions and had never failed to accept danger when that seemed the best move for all concerned.

Rob and Lieutenant Stone kept their eyes glued on the TV screen, particularly the speck that was Scylla and the slight motion it was describing. Rob felt shudders rock the space ship as great powers locked in combat.

Some minutes later, Lieutenant Stone checked the dials and said with a deep sigh of relief, “I think we’ve done it! Thanks, Rob!”

They had done it. The balance was swung in favor of the _Rigel_ as Saturn’s tiny companion continued to move away, giving up the fight. From now on the planet would appear to diminish in size, but it would be many hours before its commanding sphere would be lost among the other millions of lights in the heavens.

For days and days, nothing seemed to change in the endless depths of black space as the _Rigel_ sped toward Pluto. There were the same monotonous patterns of stardust and the eternally broad sweep of the Milky Way and other remote galaxies. Only the distant planets grew and shrank in size. As the space ship neared Neptune, the big green world enlarged importantly. Rob and Duff, in an off-duty hour, watched the frigid, lonely planet.

“Neptune reminds me a little of Earth,” Rob said.

Duff’s brows raised questioningly. “I can’t see _any_ similarity. Why, Neptune is four times Earth’s diameter!”

“But Neptune’s mean surface gravity is the same as Earth’s because of its low density,” Rob replied. “Like Saturn, another big puffball, Neptune has a small rocky core surrounded by huge layers of ice and atmosphere. Both Neptune and Earth have a greenish cast, and each has a satellite of about the same size and at about the same distance away.”

“There’s one big difference, though, Rob,” Duff said. “Neptune’s a zillion times colder.”

“It’s still not as cold as we’re going to find Pluto,” Rob reminded him, “near absolute zero!”

The redhead made a wry face. “Why did you have to say that? It’s so warm and comfortable in here!”