Horowitz: Don’t for God’s sake let him take off that helmet!
Kearsarge: Don’t worry. He can’t.
Flannel slumps and lies still. Kearsarge goes to him and opens valve a little. He beckons Horowitz and together they drag him back to the cabin and with some difficulty get him on the couch and strapped down.
Horowitz: What happened? I had my hands full of reagents in there.
Kearsarge: Space nutty. They get like that sometimes after blackout. He wanted out. Tried to take the boat.
Horowitz: He say anything?
Kearsarge: Buncha junk. Said, 14:30, 14:30. Said it was too late, had to get out.
Horowitz: That snivvy under the console popped at 14:30. He knew about it.
Kearsarge: Did he now. What was it?
Horowitz: Cyanide gas. If we hadn’t been holed and forced to put the helmets on, we’d’ve had it.
Kearsarge: Except him. He figured to be up an’ around lookin’ at his watch, and when she popped, he’d be in the boat headed home and we’d keep blasting till the pile run dry, som’res out t’ords Algol.
Horowitz: Can you fix those releases so he can’t reach them?
Kearsarge: Oh, sure.
Fade. Light picks up Burcke at the side.
Burcke (as narrator): They got an explanation out of Flannel, and it satisfied none of them. He said he knew nothing of any cyanide. He said that Heri, knowing he was a bad spaceman, had told him that if it got so bad he couldn’t stand it, he could always come back in the lifeboat. But if he did that, he’d have to do it before 14:30 after blastoff or there wouldn’t be fuel enough to decelerate, start back, and maneuver a landing. He insisted that that was all there was to it. He would not say what he was doing aboard, except to state that Heri Gonza wanted him to look out for Heri’s interests.
No amount of discussion made anything clearer. Heri certainly could not have wanted the expedition to fail, nor his ship hurled away from the solar system. They reluctantly concluded that some enemy of Heri Gonza’s must have sabotaged them—someone they simply didn’t know.
The weeks went by—not easy ones, by any means, in those close quarters, without any event except Iris Barran’s puzzling discovery that the ship required no astrogator after alclass="underline" what the veteran Kearsarge couldn’t handle in his head was easily treated in the computer. Why, then, had Heri Gonza insisted on her cramming on astrogation?
Zoom in to Saturn until it fills a quadrant. String out the moons.
Heri Gonza watched the bridge sequence, as Saturn swept close and the moons rolled by like broken beads, and little Iapetus swam close. Iapetus is not a moon like most, round or oblate, but a rock, a drifting mountain some 500 miles in diameter. And before them was the solution to the mystery of the changing moonlight. Some unknown cataclysm has cloven Iapetus, so that it has one sheer face, nearly four hundred square miles of flat plain (or cliff, depending on how you look at it) made of pale gray basaltic material. Since Iapetus always maintains one face to Saturn, it always appears brighter as it rounds the eastern limb, and dimmer as it goes west, the albedo of the flat face being much higher than the craggy ruin of the rest of its surface.
“Burckee, Burckee, Burckee ol’ turkey,” murmured the comedian in accents of wonder, “who the hell writes your stuff? Who writes your lousy, lousy stuff?”
Stock shot, Fafnir putting down tail-first on rocky plain, horizon washed out and black space brought down close. Rocks sharp-cornered, uneroded. Long shot, stabilizing jacks extending widest. Ladder out. Two suited figures ride it down, the other two climb down.
Closeup, all four at tail-base.
Horowitz: (filter mike) Check your radios. Read me?
All : Check. Read you fine.
Horowitz: Each take a fin. Walk straight out with the fin as a guide, and when you’ve passed our scorch area, get a rock scraping every five feet or so until you’re far enough away that the horizon’s a third of the way up the hull. Got that? No farther. (Beat) And I can almost tell you now, we aren’t going to find one blessed thing. No virus, no spore, no nothing. My God, it’s no more than twelve, thirteen degrees K in the shadows here. Anyway ... let’s go.
Burcke: (off) Scratch and hop, scratch and hop. In this gravity, you don’t move fast or push hard, or you’ll soar away and take minutes to come down again. Shuffle and scratch, scratch and sweep, scratch and hop. It took them hours.
Closeup, Kearsarge, looking down.
Kearsarge: Here’s something.
Closeups, each of the other three, looking up, turning head at the sound of Kearsarge’s voice.
Horowitz: What is it?
Kearsarge: Scorch. A regular mess of it. Hell, you know what? Swope toppled his ship. I can see where he came down, then where he took off, scraping along to the big edge there.
Flannel: Wonder he didn’t wreck her.
Kearsarge: He did. He couldn’t hurt the hull any in this gravity, but he sure as hell wiped off his antennae, because there they are: landing, range, transmission—every one, by God. No wonder he came barreling in the way he did. You can’t land a Fafnir on manual, but you can try, and he tried. Poor ol’ Swopie.
Horowitz: Everybody over there by Kearsarge. Maybe Swope picked up something where he scraped.
Long shot of the four working around long scorch and scrape marks.
Burcke: (off, narrating) They filled their specimen sacks and brought them aboard, and then for seventy-two hours they went through their dust and stones with every test Horowitz could devise. ... He had been quite right in his first guess. The moonlet Iapetus is as devoid of life as the inside of an autoclave.
Cut to foredeck set, but up-ended, the controls at highest point, the floor what was the after bulkhead. Iris moving around with slow shuffle; setting out magnetized plates on steel table, each one hitting loudly. In background, Flannel fusses with small electron mike, watching screen and moving objective screws. Lifeboat blister open, Kearsarge inside, working.
Airlock cycles, opens, and Horowitz comes in, suited, with sack. He is weary. Iris helps with helmet.
Horowitz: I’ve had it. Let’s get home. We can get just so duty-bound.
Iris: What’s this ‘home’? I don’t remember.
Horowitz: You for home, Kearsarge?
Kearsarge: Any time you’re through hoein’ this rock.
Horowitz: What are you doing in there?
Kearsarge: Just routine. Figured you might want to buzz around the other side with the boat.
Horowitz: No, sir. I came close enough on foot. I say we’re done here. A man could sit home with a pencil and paper and figure out the density of sub-microscopic growth this place would have to have to bring any back on the hull. We’d be hip deep in it. The iapetitis virus didn’t come from Iapetus, and that, friends, is for sure and official.