“Keep in touch with that screen. If anything shoots up, I want to know it yesterday.”
“Right. Want me to bounce a couple down there?”
Fox scratched his jaw. “A thought, at that. I don’t think so. The more we know before we re spotted the better.”
“Might tell us what we want to know.”
“Might blow us out of the sky, too. Patience, lad.” He flipped a switch. “Lambert?”
“Nothing for you, Commander.”
Kennedy pushed back from the viewer. “Gotta get closer.”
“Nothing at all on the films?”
“Afraid not.”
“All right. Paul, drop us in closer.”
They broke orbit, and the lead-gray sphere began to swell, to flatten as they moved. Still there was no sign. No aircraft rose from the surface; no signals went up. The planet might have been dead, but the cloud blankets were thicker than ever, hiding, obscuring.
They took a new orbit at 150 miles. “All right,” said Fox. “Get the scouts out and let’s get busy.”
They got busy.
Lambert brought in a prelim on the other planets while Lars still checked and rechecked details. “This may help some. No. I planet is in close and hot, comparable to our Mercury. II and III are twins and carry no atmosphere to speak of. V and VI are far out and cold, ammonia-methane atmosphere. Looks like IV is the only planet of Wolf with anything like a plausible atmosphere, at least as far as humans are concerned.”
“No possibility that Millar took his ship down on one of the others?”
“Not a shade.”
“Then let’s poke a finger down there. Got your scout ready?”
The snub-nosed servo broke free of the ship and slid down in a descending orbit, moving in slow downward spirals and vanishing into the cloud blanket. Dorffman sat alert at the radio controls and hissed through his teeth. “Something wrong, I think.”
“What is it?”
“Magnetic storm. It’s fierce! I’m losing it. No, there it is. But it’s not stable. Either these instruments are way off or that atmosphere is wild.”
The men crowded around him as he moved the controls. Far below the servo scooped up surface air and surface dirt, measured temperature, pressure, gravitation, wind velocity. Dorffman started it up again, and swore. They spotted it instants later, a bright metal chip zooming upward in a wildly erratic course, finally stabilizing and homing on the receiver slot in the Ganymede. Robot fingers opened it, transferred air and soil samples to flasks and culture plates. Then Lars and Lambert got busy.
Kennedy groaned as cloud banks whirled by below him.
“Only a little peek once in a while. I’d better take the scooter down.”
“All right. Go to it. But fifty miles is the limit, and get back here fast if there’s a peep of trouble. Keep whispering in Dorffman’s ear.”
They watched him slide down in the camera-scooter, heard his signals to Dorffman dissolve into a rattle of indistinguishable static as he hit the atmosphere. They sweated him out six hours until he homed in, weary and disgusted.
“No good?” asked Fox.
He shook his head. “Nothing of value. We were right about the ice cap. Squares with the temp readings, too, mean equatorial temperature is about 4° Centigrade. There are oceans at the equator, and a long continental land mass. Maybe the next run will give me more.”
The next run didn’t and neither did the next or the next. But Kennedy kept trying.
Lars reported the atmosphere analysis. “Oxygen 16.8, carbon dioxide 0.8, nitrogen 81.3. Inert gases make up the rest. No trace of sulphur or chlorine or organic gases. It’s a breathable atmosphere even if it’s a little short of O².”
“Radioactivity?”
“Some latent activity, but it’s negligible. No concentration we can spot.”
“How about micro-organisms?”
“They’re there, but they grow cold; 5° is their optimum. They won’t live in our mice, and Lambert doubts that there’s any possibility of contamination, but we’re making vaccines just the same. No sense in being heroes.”
Fox gave him a tired smile and went back to the close films from Kennedy’s last run. He had slept little if any in the week they had been orbited, and he felt weariness in every muscle. Frame after frame flickered before his eyes, sterile, empty of information.
“All right,” he said finally. “Get the boys together. From here on in we’re up to our necks.” He gave Kennedy a hopeless look. “No sign of the Planetfall in any of the films?”
“Not a sign.” There was no hesitation in Kennedy’s voice.
“That’s what I like about you,” Fox said. “You’re so honest.”
Council of War.
Every man was present, and every man was tense. In the welter of detail work it had been easy to forget the broader picture, to thrust out of their minds where they were, why they were there, what they had to do there. But that was over now.
“We’ve gotten everything we can get up here, and we have nothing. Some physical data, incomplete; some looks at the surface, so sketchy they’re useless. We have no data that helps us.”
“No positive data,” Kennedy corrected him. “We’ve got plenty of negative data.”
“You mean the fact that nothing has tried to shoot us out of the sky?” Fox shrugged. “That’s not much comfort, I’m afraid.”
“More than that. No evidence at all that Wolf IV is any kind of going concern. Not a peep, not a picture. And also, we know the Planetfall couldn’t have landed anywhere else. Not in this system.”
Fox looked around at the men. “Still not much to go on. Schedule I is a blank for all practical purposes. So we move into Schedule II. We’ve got to put the ship down there.”
There was a stir about the room.
Lambert took his pipe out of his mouth. “Bio division can’t find any reason not to set down. We know there’s microscopic flora, safe, and surface vegetation. Also insect life, pretty low order. I can’t militate against a landing. Still—”
“Well?” Fox looked at him sharply.
“We still don’t know what we’re going to do when we get down there. We know we land on the equator, period. We might as well walk in blindfolded.”
“Granted,” said Fox.
“If there are aliens down there, they may be set to mop us up in twenty minutes flat. They may just be waiting.”
“Well, what do you suggest?”
Suddenly Peter Brigham spoke up. “Seems to me we’re ignoring one very important fact.”
“What’s that?”
“That nothing happened to the Planetfall until she was on the ground with the crew dispersed. She went through her routine Schedule I just the way we have, and apparently didn’t see anything to scare her off. Looks to me as though we could orbit out here for fifty years and get no farther than we are now.”
There were nods of agreement, reluctant nods. Lambert lit his pipe again. Jeff Salter scraped his jaw with his hand and looked unhappy.
“There’s one thing we can still do,” Kennedy said at last. “We need a close look down there, a good look. Let me take the scooter down close, three or four thusand feet, and see if I can’t get some decent films. Then at least we could land on solid ground.”
Fox nodded. “You want to try it?”
“You bet I do.”
“Then get moving. The rest of you hit the sack for a while. I want some of you half-awake when Kennedy gets back. We may not get any sleep for a while after we’ve landed.”
No one disputed the wisdom of Fox’s words, but no one slept. They watched the little photographer slide the scooter out of her slot and zoom down toward the gray planet to vanish into the cloud bank. Dorffman stayed rooted to the beam receiver, struggling to keep contact, but the signals got weaker and more garbled by the second and finally disintegrated into occasional bursts of nonsense-squawking. Dorffman shook his head, and tried to sleep in his headset.