Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net 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. Sam Carruthers would be the first one to say it. Thin, quiet Sam, who'd been in space as ship's surgeon and psychiatrist for as long as Joel himself. It had been twenty-two years since they'd left the Academy together. Sam had taken his specialty training in space medicine, while he, Joel, had let himself get sucked into qualifying as pilot. Twelve years of the Academy. And twenty-two more being ordered around the 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, brooding eyes--the look that had been glazed with shock, but which had still not surrendered, the day they told Sam he wasn't going to make pilot. The look would still be there four minutes and thirty seconds from now when he led the others into the fore-waist bridge to holler "We've hit it again!" It would always be. Joel tilted the liquor bottle and one big, clumsy-looking hand poured steadily into the thick glassite flagon he held in the other. He downed it in a gulp. Hit it again _hell_!