Then the camera’s eye turned up into the mountains, and they caught a silvery flash in the distance. Kennedy ran through long strips of film eagerly. “Here, now,” he said. “I got it better a little farther along—there!”
Lars stopped the projector, and they gazed at the fuzzy picture. It stood out clearly from its surroundings, the wrecked hull of a Star Ship, its nose buried deep in snow and rubble on the righ, rocky ridge, the great yawning holes of its jets rising up like another crag to meet the wind. Snow drifted into the gaping airlock. There was no sign of life anywhere about it.
“The Planetfall,” Jeff Slater said heavily. “Commander, what more do you want to know? This is what we came here to find. We’ve found her. They were wrecked in landing. Nobody could have survived. Any fool can see that this planet is hopeless as a colony site. Why risk waiting any longer?”
“What do you propose?” Fox asked.
“Let’s get back home,” said Salter.
A murmur went around the room. Fox shook his head and turned to Kennedy. “Let’s see that city.”
Once again the camera’s eye carried them along, higher and higher into the rugged mountains. Presently a pass appeared, and the ship skimmed through, barely clearing the crags as it slid down into the valley below. Bob Kennedy sat forward eagerly. “You’ll see it now—it was right down—”
His voice faded as they stared at the films. A ragged valley floor, passing swiftly beneath them, a break in the clouds, a view of more mountains in the distance.
There was no sign of any city.
They watched to the end of the film. “Is there any more?” Kennedy asked sharply, “Any film that didn’t come out?”
“Not a bit,” said Fox. “This is it, all of it.”
“Let me see it again.”
Once again they watched. Commander Fox took a deep breath. “I don’t see anything here that looks like a city.”
“Neither do I,” Kennedy said bleakly. He was silent for a long moment, staring at the screen. “Commander, it was there. I know it was there.”
“Buildings?”
“Towers, spires, streets—I saw them.” The photographer twisted uncomfortably. “I couldn’t be wrong, either. It was like no city I’ve ever seen before. I’d swear it was nothing that was ever built by human hands.”
Commander Fox’s eyes were very bright. He walked to the observation screen and stared down at the gray expanse of planet that lay below as the men watched him and waited. Finally he turned, rubbing his palms together. “Mr. Morehouse, take the ship down.”
“On the delta?”
“If that’s the safest place to drop it.”
“It’s the only place,” said Kennedy.
“Fine,” said the Commander. “Put it down there, then. We’re going to have a look at that ship on the ridge. We’re going to have a look at that city, too—or whatever else it may be.”
Three hours later Morehouse had demonstrated his qualifications as a Star Ship navigator by making a near-impossible landing without so much as a jar on touching down. The job had been done virtually blind, for as the Ganymede settled toward the planet’s surface the clouds also had descended, and the ship touched down in a violent torrent of freezing wind and rain. Crewmen at the observation ports gave up their watch in short order; there was nothing to see but the black muddy ground around the ship, and the blanket of gray that swallowed it up on all sides.
They waited, breathlessly, for something to happen. Nothing did. The wind howled and died, the fog closed in closer, but that was all. Soon the grayness turned to blackness, and they knew that night had come.
Meanwhile, the crew were at work preparing gear and supplies for the landing parties. “I want six men on the ship at all times,” Commander Fox told them. “Dorffman, you’ll be at the radio to keep in contact with both parties, and to warn the others if there is any irregularity. Our first job will be a preliminary look around, primarily to determine the best route up to that wrecked ship. You can keep Mangano and Morehouse with you, and three others.”
“Both parties?” Dorffman asked.
“Yes. The rest of us will split into groups of eight, and move out separately. Lorry> you’ll be in charge of one; I’ll lead the other, and we’ll move in opposite directions from the ship, heading for the mountain range. You take Kennedy with you; I’ll take Lambert. Well want to move by daylight, if nothing turns up during the night to change our minds, so you’d better get things set up. We’ll only be out over one night for the first recon, so we shouldn’t need the half-tracks. We may find them useful the second time out if we decide to make an overland try for the wrecked ship.”
Peter Brigham had been busy in the navigation shack ever since Kennedy had returned with his films and his odd story of the “city” in the valley. When he finally got back to the bunkroom he found Lars poring over a checklist of supplies. “Well! What did you think of Kennedy’s story?” he asked Lars as he flopped down on the bunk.
Lars shrugged. “Not very much to think.”
“But he didn’t make sense!” Peter exclaimed. “He says he saw a city, sort of. Only it wasn’t on the film. Not a sign of it.”
Lars nodded. As he had watched the films he had had the same queer sensation of dread and wonder that he had felt the day Commander Fox had revealed the true mission of the Ganymede. “Obviously he either saw something that the camera didn’t pick up, or else he only thought he saw something.”
Peter grinned excitedly. “But what about the Planetfall? You saw the films. Did that look like the kind of a crackup that anyone could have lived through?”
Lars hesitated. “No—”
“You bet it didn’t. And yet there were messages broadcast from here after the Planetfall landed, remember? So the messages that were received must either have been sent before the ship landed, or else they weren’t sent by the crew of the Planetfall at all.”
Lars put his list down and stared at Peter. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Well, think about it for a minute.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Just that there’s something very strange going on. I don’t know what, exactly, but something. You start thinking about it, and nothing quite fits. Know what I mean? You look at it briefly and everything seems perfectly obvious. The Planetfall landed on Wolf IV, the crew radioed its landing home, started to explore their landing, and were overwhelmed by some sort of alien force or other. Now, if you assume that there are aliens here, it seems to tie up into a nice, neat bundle, until you start to examine it closely. And then, all of a sudden, it falls apart, because the parts just don’t add up right.”
Lars shook his head. “I still don’t see what you’re driving at.”
“It’s hard to explain. Look, do you remember those abstract-recognition tests they used to give us back at the Academy? They flashed colored pictures on the screen for a tenth of a second and then asked us what we saw that was wrong? Most of the errors were simple—a man with a woman’s hat on, or something like that—but then there was that series that almost everybody missed, remember?”
“You mean the ones where they’d omitted the processing for one of the colors?”
“That’s rightl Take a color picture of a mountain landscape, for instance, and just fail to process it for red. It looks awfully peculiar, but you’re really up against it to say exactly why.” Peter jumped up excitedly. “That’s what this whole business looks like to me—a color picture with one of the colors missing. Some big factor, influencing everything that’s happened, that we just can’t even see. Something we’re missing entirely.”