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 looked again through its heavy, slotted quartz windows and now he could see them coming. He could make out the toy-like silhouette of their jeep, emerging in reckless, bounding leaps from the edge of the cultivated forest. Now they were racing at full tilt across the hard-packed yellow sand of the desert in a bee-line for the ship that had landed them here a scant three weeks ago.
Captain Nicholas Joel watched them, their excitement a visible thing as they pounded up clouds of saffron behind them, and knew without activating 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 the time it would take the jeep to reach the flaring stern of the White Whale, figured how many minutes it would take the pneumatic lift to whisk them three hundred and twelve feet up to the fore-waist, and snatched open the door of his liquor cabinet.