So they set about to do it.
Much of it was chore and drudge work, but it had to be done. Culture media had to be prepared fresh, sterilized, poured into plates and stored. Glassware and instruments had to be minutely calibrated. Fresh reagent solutions had to be prepared with painstaking care, for success or failure of a mission could depend upon a fraction of a pH point, a quarter of a cc miscalculated. Lars spent hours at the microbalances, weighing, measuring, dissolving, distilling, checking volumetric variations and molarity constants.
But there was other work, which Lambert alone could teach Lars. There were tapes to be studied, but in the field, when all the chips are down, only a man experienced in the fielcjwork can teach. And Lambert was an excellent teacher. Where he might have been impatient, he was tolerant; where he might have skimped, he refused to. “You can’t know too much in advance,” he would say over and over. “On a new planet the crew depends on you for their lives. You have to know what to look for, what to guard against.”
“But if it’s a new planet, how can you know that?” Lars protested wearily. “I should think you’d have to wait and see.”
“If you counted on that approach, your first trip would very likely be your last one,” Lambert chuckled. “Naturally, we can’t predict specific problems and dangers until we get there, but we can be prepared to meet broad classes of trouble. What about bacteria and viruses? We can be prepared to nail them quickly, find out which ones are dangerous, and prepare vaccines. What about the atmosphere? We can be ready to test it in ten minutes and know whether it can support us or not. What about plant proteins, animal proteins, the growing quality of the soil?” He slipped off his glasses and ran a hand through his sandy hair. “All were trying to do is reduce the odds against us. You’ll get on to it, but it means digging and digging”
And digging was what they did. As days passed Lars seldom left the lab except for meals and sleep periods. Doggedly he worked to learn the testing techniques, the analyses, the evaluation procedures. He studied the standard flow-sheet of procedure to be followed, and worked out with Lambert places where their situation differed from standard, special trouble spots, special problems. Lambert set up test problems, based entirely on speculation, then patiently went over them with Lars, pointing out a critical omission here, sure death to the crew there, and slowly Lars learned.
Yet he never could throw off the sense of dread, of growing danger as the ship moved implacably toward its destination. At the end was Wolf IV, and then —
What? What then?
At the beginning of the fourth day-period after the meeting in the lounge, Lambert was gone when Lars reached the lab. A few moments later he came in, puffing on his dead pipe, a worried frown wrinkling his forehead. He went about the lab grumbling under his breath until Lars said, “What’s the trouble?”
“I don’t know.” Lambert shook his head disgustedly and sank down in a bucket chair. “There’s something going on around this ship, and I don’t like it a bit.”
Lars put down the slide he had been examining and looked up sharply. “Going on? What?”
“I don’t know. Nothing I can put my finger on. Maybe it’s nothing at all, but no, by Jupiter, it’s not!” He looked up at Lars angrily. “Talk. Grumbling and griping. Whispers. I know, put twenty-two men together in close quarters for a few weeks and there’ll always be griping, but this is different. It’s got an ugly tone to it.”
Lars chewed his lip for a moment. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”
“Shoot.”
“Did you know all along we were going to Wolf IV?”
Lambert looked startled. “Not by a long way! I knew we were under restricted orders, all right, but I didn’t know why! And I didn’t know we were carrying fusion bombs.”
“And yet you, of all men on the ship, should have known, it seems to me. I still don’t understand the secrecy.”
“They were afraid of leaks.”
“So the news leaked. So what?”
Lambert looked at Lars narrowly. “Do you have any idea of the reaction home on Earth if news got out that a hostile alien had been contacted by an Earth ship?”
“Well—I—I suppose it would scare people a little.”
“Scare them! My boy, you’d have a panic on your hands like Earth hasn’t seen in centuries! Your colonization program would go up in one big puff of pink smoke. The Colonial Service would be legislated out of existence. Earth would start arming for very dear life, and God alone knows what would become of the colonies already established. The whole system would crumble, and we’d be back where we started three hundred years ago. That’s what would happen.”
“But why? If nobody has seen an alien, why be so deathly afraid of it?”
“That’s exactly why.” Lambert sighed and tried to light his pipe again. “Human beings are pretty brave creatures, as long as they know what they’re dealing with. But put them up against something completely unknown, utterly inconceivable to them, and they’ll panic. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s happened over and over. Fear of the unknown. It’s plagued mankind since the year one, and we still aren’t rid of it—”
Lars blinked at him, and shook his head. “Certainly everybody wouldn’t lose his head.”
“Enough would to make it disastrous.”
“But suppose the alien wasn’t hostile at all. Suppose it was friendly.”
Lambert smiled wearily. “Aliens, by definition, are hostile. Walter Fox has been fighting that idea as long as he’s been in space. It’s common sense that somewhere, sometime, in centuries of exploration, men are going to encounter an alien race in the stars. The aliens might be good, or bad. It would be a fearful gamble to find out which, but if they were good, we could be immensely richer for the contact. Fox believes the gamble is worth it. He believes we will meet aliens, sometime, and that they will be good. But Fox is one man against millions. He talks, but nobody listens, but he goes on hoping that he’ll be the one to make contact. Call him a fanatic, if you want to. I happen to think he’s right.”
Lambert stood up slowly. “That’s why I don’t like what I’m hearing around the ship. The men are getting panicky in spite of all the psych conditioning they’ve had, and in spite of all the care that went into selecting the crew for this mission. They’re the best possible men in their jobs, and still they’re panicky. To me, that means only one thing.”
Lars felt the knot in his stomach again. “What?”
“Somebody on board is deliberately setting off the panic. Somebody who’s smart enough to keep under cover himself and put the words into other peoples’ mouths. I think you know who, too.”
Lars was silent for a long time. Then he said, “I guess I do. But Why? Why should he want to do it?”
“You find out that answer in time and you might save this ship a whole lot of trouble,” Lambert said heavily. “Because we’re heading for trouble now faster than we’re heading for Wolf IV.”
The talking was worse than Lars realized. The tension in the ship had grown tremendously since he had dug into the work in the lab. In small groups lurking in the corridors, in hasty words passed across the eating bar in the galley, in looks, nods, and whispers trouble was spelled out in large letters.
There was Jeff Salter, talking to the assistant engineer and the radioman down in the lounge, with a wary eye out for intruders, saying, “We’ve been shanghaied, that’s what happened. You know what that means.” And, “Old Foxy hasn’t any legal right to force us into it. We signed contracts, you know.” And, “Guinea pigs! That’s what he’s making us. You guys eager to be heroes? I’m not.”