TASK MISSION
BY FOX B. HOLDEN
Captain Jorl thought Arcturus IV was the
answer to all he had ever wanted. And it was.
But there was also a twist.... How can there
be an ideal where everything is perfection?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, April 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Captain Nicholas Joel stood waiting in his fore-waist bridge; he lookedagain through its heavy, slotted quartz windows and now he could seethem coming. He could make out the toy-like silhouette of their jeep,emerging in reckless, bounding leaps from the edge of the cultivatedforest. Now they were racing at full tilt across the hard-packed yellowsand of the desert in a bee-line for the ship that had landed them herea scant three weeks ago.
Captain Nicholas Joel watched them, their excitement a visible thingas they pounded up clouds of saffron behind them, and knew withoutactivating his personal communicator what they'd have to tell him.
"We've hit it again!" they'd tell him.
He turned his big body from the curving windows, quickly calculated thetime it would take the jeep to reach the flaring stern of the WhiteWhale, figured how many minutes it would take the pneumatic lift towhisk them three hundred and twelve feet up to the fore-waist, andsnatched open the door of his liquor cabinet.
Sam Carruthers would be the first one to say it.
Thin, quiet Sam, who'd been in space as ship's surgeon and psychiatristfor as long as Joel himself. It had been twenty-two years since they'dleft the Academy together. Sam had taken his specialty training inspace medicine, while he, Joel, had let himself get sucked intoqualifying as pilot.
Twelve years of the Academy. And twenty-two more being ordered aroundthe freezing hell of God's black universe like a toy on a string.
And for all of it, Sam still had that look in his dark, broodingeyes—the look that had been glazed with shock, but which had still notsurrendered, the day they told Sam he wasn't going to make pilot.
The look would still be there four minutes and thirty seconds from nowwhen he led the others into the fore-waist bridge to holler "We've hitit again!" It would always be.
Joel tilted the liquor bottle and one big, clumsy-looking hand pouredsteadily into the thick glassite flagon he held in the other. He downedit in a gulp.
Hit it again hell!
And behind Sam there would be the first officer, Dobermann. Little,wiry German who knew more about languages and semantics than the guywho'd invented them, and the best astro-navigator you could find inthis or any other galaxy. Sure, they always gave Nicholas Joel nothingbut the best. That was part of it. Part and parcel of the whole damnconspiracy.
Dobermann wouldn't say anything when he came in. But there'd be athorough-going, successful, mission-accomplished look on his handsomeface. Dobermann never missed.
And Southard.... Still a kid, still wet behind the ears, but a hell ofa promising astrophysicist, backed up with plenty of biochemistry andgeophysics. It was still a big, romantic adventure to Southard, and hewore the single red, gleaming stripe of ship's second officer on hisbroad young shoulders as though it was the thick gold circle of a fullcaptaincy.
Joel filled the flagon and emptied it a second time. He went back tothe windows, the liquor bottle and flagon still in his hands.
To most me