Forbidden Planet Read Free Page A

stationary in a moving Cosmos. Now—I could feel it!—the ship was moving, heading like an arrow toward one single blazing star that hung in the blackness ahead . . .
    Altair—an impossible, blazing jewel hung on an impossible curtain of the blackest impossible velvet . . .
    V
    Hours later—about 1800 by our time—I was in the Control Area once more. I’d been in the Surgery, fixing for the mandatory pre-arrival check-up, but I’d sneaked back as soon as I could, to find Quinn had gone to the Relay chamber. So I slid into his chair again . . .
    And saw something which made my first view of Altair, which had so impressed me, seem almost insignificant. When I first sat down, the only difference I could see was that the jewel-like star was nearer and therefore larger—but presently, as I watched, other and smaller jewels began to thrust through the black velvet all around the great central stone. And each jewel seemed to my fascinated eyes to be a different color.
    They were stars—and it was like watching them being born. The fact that I knew they were other, farther away members of a constellation which had been existing since the beginning of Time made no difference to the exquisite sensation of watching them, for me, come into being . . .
    I don’t know how long I sat there, fascinated, but at last Quinn came back and they almost dragged me out of the chair—and Adams and I left the Control room and had some sort of a meal, after which I went to bed.
    But not to sleep. Adams had told me that by our morning we’d be in sight of the Altair planets, and I was too excited to do much more than doze sporadically.
    During the last of the dozes, I was brought wide awake by a shrill whistle from the communicator, and then Adams’ voice calling all hands to General Assembly.
    I pulled on clothes and hurried along to the men’s mess, where all Assemblies were held. I took my place in the front row, with Farman and Quinn. Behind us were the Bosun and the two non-coms. Behind them were the rest of the crew. There were twenty of us. John Adams wasn’t there yet, in accordance with the unwritten protocol which seems to provide that Commanders must always keep everybody waiting.
    I looked around, and thought for the thousandth time how young all the faces were. Young, that is, in flesh and coloring, in cellular tissue. But in another way, not young at all but tough and weathered by experience. From this, I got onto my old line of thought about the new breed these children constituted.
    Then Adams arrived. He stood at the end of the mess room and looked us over. He was saturnine and controlled as ever, and it occurred to me that he was even more representative of the new breed than any of the others. Perhaps this was because he seemed somehow, in spite of his very definite good looks, sort of ageless, with more self-recognized force and control than his twenty-seven years or so could conceivably have given him in any other walk of life.
    “You all know why you’re here,” he said at last. “To be told, in accordance with Standing Orders, what this trip’s about. Personally, I think this way of not telling a crew what a mission’s about until they’ve reached the objective—well, I think it’s damn silly. Outdated as rocket propulsion. I think you ought to’ve been told, not only where we are going, but why.” One of his rare smiles came here. “But if any of you space-bugs quotes me, I’ll have him on Charge for maligning an officer.”
    There was a ripple of laughter, and he went on, “We’re headed for the fourth planet of Altair, as you all know. If Lt. Farman’s as good an Astrogator as he says he is—” another laugh—“we ought to be settling down in twenty-four hours.” He paused a moment. “We don’t know anything about this planet. We are on Reconn. Object: to find out what’s happened to Exploratory Mission Eighty-three. This mission left Earth Base twenty years ago, Earth time. The ship was