He leaned back against the table again. No one had anything to say. The men stared at him, and at each other, shaking their heads. “Well, that’s about it,” the Commander said. “Naturally, there will be some changes in the preparatory routines. From the standpoint of equipment and preparation, we’re on a frank exploratory cruise to an unknown system. That means full study program when we arrive, not just the spot check you anticipated for Vega III. You’ll have plenty of time to get ready, we’ll be three and a half months en route. Now if there are no questions, we’ll break this up.”
The hungry-looking man called Jeff Salter had been whispering loudly with Peter Brigham across the room; now he bounded to his feet, a crease of anger across his forehead. “Wait a minute, Commander. We’ve got a question or two over here, I think.”
Commander Fox frowned and faced the man. “All right, let’s have them.”
“Well, now, I mean this is pretty sudden, what with the men expecting a quick run to Vega and back.” Jeff Salter rubbed his chin, frowning. “And I don’t quite understand the story on this Planetfall. Did she make a landing on Wolf IV or not?”
“She landed, all right.”
“There were messages that got through?”
“That’s right.”
“I see. But did she crash?”
Quite suddenly all attention was focussed on the tall, thin man asking the question. Beside him Peter Brigham was sitting, carefully staring at nothing. “I mean, if she crashed in landing, and the signal cut off, there wouldn’t be much sense in sending a ship out to find her, would there?”
Commander Fox’s frown deepened. “She didn’t crash; at least the messages from her seemed to indicate a safe landing. There were some legible messages from her after she landed, but the atmospheric conditions apparently were terrible, and we didn’t get very much. What we did get was all garbled and difficult to understand.”
“But she didn’t crash.” Salter seemed to think about this for a moment, then, “What did happen to her?”
“That’s exactly what we’re commissioned to find out,” Fox snapped. “It seems to me that you’re just trying to make this hard to understand, Salter. You can read the orders as they came from the dispatcher if you want to.”
“Oh, I’m not much worried about what the orders say,” Salter said. “Thing that worries me is just what happened to the Planetfall after she landed on this place, and just what the Colonial Service is getting us into on this trip.” He glanced quickly at Peter, then back at the Commander. “I don’t understand all this secrecy, for one thing. Exploratory ships have cracked up before and there wasn’t any fuss made about it—it was the breaks, that was all. So now why should Colonial Service be so almighty scared to tell the truth about the Planetfall? Why should they worry about how the colonists might react unless that crew found something on Wolf IV to be almighty afraid of.”
“Let’s keep our feet on the ground, shall we?” Fox’s voice was suddenly angry. “What could they have found there?”
“That’s what I’m asking you, Commander.”
“We don’t know what they found. I’ve told you that. We don’t know what happened to them.”
Next to Lars, Lambert was shaking his head. “Salter’s just guessing,” he whispered sharply. “Maybe their radio was wrecked, and surface conditions wiped them out before they could get it fixed. A thousand things could have happened. He’s dreaming up spooks.”
“He’s not dreaming up anything by himself,” Lars retorted. “Don’t you see who he’s been talking to?”
But Salter was on his feet again. “Commander, if this is just a simple reconnaissance run to try to locate a lost ship, and if all you know is what you’re telling us here, the whole set-up looks mighty strange. Maybe there are some things you don’t know for sure that you’re very suspicious of and that we rightly ought to know about. Seems to me you’ve got a pretty good idea of what happened to the Planetfall when it landed on Wolf IV, and of what they found there. I think maybe you know why the Colonial Service was so scared of public reaction that they didn’t dare publish the truth, too. Otherwise, why would we be carrying fusion bombs in the hold of this ship?”
Lars heard Lambert’s breath hiss through his teeth. There was an electric silence as the men stared at Fox. The Commander’s eyes turned for an instant to Tom Lorry, a glance of alarm, unmistakably clear. “Who told you that, Mr. Salter?”
Peter Brigham’s voice broke out sharply. “I did. I saw them loading the things.”
Fox rubbed his chin. He gave Jeff Salter a blistering glare, then turned to Peter. “Yes. I see. Maybe you’re the one who should have been asking all the questions, Brigham. You seem to be doing my thinking for me. What does it all spell out to you?”
The answer was short and sharp in the quiet room. “Aliens,” said Peter.
It struck Lars like a blow, and he felt something cold knot in his stomach. He stared first at Peter, standing defiantly across the room, then at the Commander. Suddenly all the strange things that had happened since he had stepped on the rolling strip to board the Ganymede twenty-four hours before fell into place, and he knew it was the only possible answer.
It was a fearful answer.
Commander Fox slammed his fist down on the desk and rose to his feet, his shoulders trembling. For a moment he glared at Peter; then he took a deep breath, his face gray. “All right, if you insist on the worst answers that might be possible, I’ll give you the worst,” he said harshly. “The ship is in grave danger. We have no way of actually knowing, for certain, any more than I’ve already told you: that the Planetfall landed, and lost radio contact, and never re-established contact. We couldn’t get a clear picture of exactly what did happen from the messages. We could only guess, and suspect, and draw conclusions that might be wrong from what we did know. They ran into trouble—what kind of trouble, from what source, we do not know. But whatever they ran into, it stopped that ship cold in its tracks and it has never since been contacted.”
Commander Fox walked back to the table. “That is why the Colonial Service has maintained such rigid secrecy; not because of what they knew, but because of what they didn’t know. Those last messages have been studied and analyzed in every possible way, and only one conclusion seems to make any sense: that the crew of the Planetfall encountered a race of intelligent aliens on Wolf IV.”
Not a word came from the crewmen now. They sat like stones as Commander Fox continued. “We’re going to Wolf IV to search for that ship, gentlemen. We don’t know what we’re going to find there, perhaps nothing at all. Or we may be destroyed utterly the instant we land. We may face a hostile power with which we have no way to cope, or we may face a new era for Mankind in contact with a friendly alien race who can enrich us just as we can enrich them. But we don’t know which, and from what we know of the Planetfall, we are forced to assume the worst. Were on an alien-hunt, gentlemen, a rocket to Limbo. And I am forced, against everything I believe, to carry the most devastating weapons Earth has at its command, and to use them, if necessary.”