"A laugh? At a fortune? Why—oh, yes. Of course; turned out they made a pretty stupid mistake about that cargo, eh?"
"Well, it seemed a funny mistake. Their whole cargo of rare, fissionable elements was nothing but perfectly ordinary sand and rock. Now, this crew was rough, but prospecting was their business. They knew their business. It just wasn't possible that they could have made such a mistake. At first the officials were inclined to drop the whole thing as a pointless hoax. But it was so pointless. Somebody was sharp enough to push for an investigation on that account. They rounded up the prospectors, who were all hustling around trying to promote supplies to get them back to Nirva. They got a psychiatric team to run them all through a complete check. The clues to the truth of the matter turned up then; but they were not, at least not generally understood."
"What—?"
"The psychiatric team found that each of the eleven told a similar story, and actually had a similar mental picture of Nirva. But, examined closely, the detail, the artifacts, the—uh—types and—ah—um—habits of the women were startlingly, if not sensationally, different. So different that, in fact, the planet seemed to be perfect. Perfect according to each crewman's idea of the perfect planet. Some of them had pretty crude ideals of perfection, of course. The psychiatric team pushed through an order grounding all members of the crew. All of them ended badly, by the way—seven suicides, two murders, two violent mental cases. The team submitted a completely inconclusive report. Then they proposed that they all be sent to examine Nirva."
"Well? Get to the point, Garten!"
"The expedition went out. It never came back. No word ever came back. The administration jumped to a conclusion that the planet, Nirva, had become hostile and the expeditionary force captured. A battle cruiser, advised to expect resistance and with orders to use all force necessary to pacify the planet and rescue prisoners, was sent out. The cruiser went. It met resistance near Nirva and won a brilliant victory. The Nirva forces surrendered. The ship landed and officers and crew were feted by the defeated population. Prisoners were rescued. Finally, and with some little reluctance the captain, a devoted family man, gave orders and the cruiser headed back. But—at the first jump away, the prisoners and something like two-thirds of the cruiser's crew vanished. Naturally there was a good deal of excitement.
"Arrant nonsense."
"Yes, sir. Of course. But—two further rescue expeditions ran into much the same thing. It seemed that only individuals with the most vital and binding ties or absorbing interests back home ever came back from Nirva. Others, especially anyone with the least trace of instability, stayed there."
"A lunatic planet for the feeble-minded!"