Not in Solitude [Revised Edition]

by Kenneth F. Gantz

  This edition is published by Muriwai Books – www.pp-publishing.com

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  Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.

  © Muriwai Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

  Publisher’s Note

  Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

  We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

  NOT IN SOLITUDE

  BY

  KENNETH F. GANTZ

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Contents

  TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

  1 4

  2 10

  3 15

  4 21

  5 26

  6 31

  7 37

  8 42

  9 46

  10 50

  11 59

  12 64

  13 69

  14 72

  15 83

  16 87

  17 95

  18 99

  19 102

  20 106

  21 114

  22 118

  23 122

  24 126

  25 134

  26 142

  27 146

  28 153

  29 157

  30 163

  31 169

  REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 175

  1

  THE RADAR alert buzzer snarled softly in the confined observation deck. Its periodic alto grunting was tuned low, but after a night and a day of waiting, it had the shocking effect of steam on a raw burn.

  Neglecting his discarded heavy footgear, Dane got up from the chart table and went light-bodied to the observation ports. The night already crowded black against the guard-lighted sand a hundred feet below. Except in the east where the spark fires danced.

  A dazzling finger of light stabbed suddenly from the space craft into the northeast. It probed delicately in azimuth at long range, paling the sweeping patrol beam that swung periodically around a lower horizon in obedience to the one-minute rotation of its mounting. Dane stared through the wide glassite port.

  Binoculars, he thought, and turned away to reach for his case. He looked at Airman First Class Humphries, intent upon the auxiliary radar screen. “What do you read?” he demanded, excitement bubbling in his voice.

  Humphries shook his head. “Blank here.”

  Before Dane had his glasses in focus, the outlancing strike of light was cut off, knife sharp. The buzzer sounded again briefly, and was still.

  “More dust puffs, I reckon,” Humphries said.

  The disappointment tasted sour. The revolving patrol beacon swept by again; but light or dark, there was nothing outside to see except the crazy static discharges over the lichen beds. Nothing anywhere but the lichens and the damned red dust of Mars that the big spacecraft sat upon, a huge ball of a sphere atop rigid metallic skirts belling out like a sawed-off cone against the supporting dust below.

  Dane glanced at the clock, twisting his chin against his shoulder to look up. Maybe a civilian just didn’t understand. But only the United States Air Force would mount a clock face down at the peak of an overhead dome. Every uniformed manjack in the spacecraft wore a watch at his wrist as meticulously time-ticked as a chronometer—and nearly as costly in its manufacture. Yet the Air Force thought it important that you could get the time at an upcocked eye from any post on the igloo-shaped observation deck of the Far Venture. A better name in itself than they foresaw, Dane thought grimly. A man could find a grave easily enough in his own native dust of Earth. He turned impatiently. From whatever angle you looked at that stupid clock, Dr. Pembroke had now been outside without a word for 24 hours.

  Dane would have been ready enough to go home. He could agree on that with the entire crew and all the scientific party cooped up in the spacecraft against the planetary radiation. On that one thing at least, he would agree with Colonel Cragg—except for Dr. Pembroke. Even without the radiation.

  “You going to take some more pictures up here before we take off?” Humphries asked.

  Humphries was a small-talker. “The equipment is making them now,” Dane answered shortly. “Two a minute.” He went to the photo plane table and pretended to check the smoothly clicking recording camera.

  Humphries said, “I don’t mean them. You going to take any more pictures up here, I wish you’d get me in on one and maybe get it printed in the papers when we get back.”

  “I’m also supposed to be the assistant physicist,” Dane said. “Two jobs don’t give you much time for extras, especially when on one of them you’re working for Amalgamated Press and on the other for Dr. Pembroke.”

  “I got a girl in Richmond I can use a little help with.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Dane said, “maybe tomorrow I’ll get a chance to shoot you.”

  “I got competition.” The roly-poly face frowned thought-fully over the slender love link. “Plenty of competition.”

  Dane let him ramble. He was as fidgety as a shut-up cat himself. After a bit he found himself gazing distastefully at the big ash tray littered with his half-smoked butts. His hand shot out to seize it, and before he could check the motion, he slammed it hard against the up-curving shell of the chamber.

  “Hell!” he said. “Damn-it-to-hell!”

  Humphries swiveled around on his stool. “What’s the matter, Doc?” He studied the mess on the deck plates.

  “Who’s in command here?” Dane demanded.

  “Huh?” Humphries’ jaw loosened.

  “If Colonel Cragg is in command, what can I do? Or anyone else after he makes up his mind. Like a little tin god in a big tin can!”

  Humphries looked over his shoulder at the intercom. He said, “Doc, you ought to get some rest. You can’t keep going on two, three hours sleep.”

  “You want a picture to impress your girlfriend. Colonel Cragg wants a bigger picture. The Far Venture lands on Earth. All hail the great captain. So Dr. Pembroke and three men are left behind, the show goes on and all that.”

  “It’s tough,” Humphries said. “I already read them for dead ever since they don’t answer no more on the radio.”

  “They’re not dead,” Dane said bitterly. “Except that Colonel Cragg says they’re dead. That makes them officially dead. As good as dead.”

  Humphries shook his head. “You maybe ought to keep shut up. No use getting yourself in a jam with the colonel. Besides, what you going to do about it?”

  “I’m not wearing a uniform myself,” Dane said. “But you’re right about one thing. What am I going to do about it?”

  “Just take it easy,” Humphries said. “Just take it easy and roll with the punches.” He nodded wisely. “What the colonel decides is going to be, anyway.”

  God damn Colonel Cragg! He was like an aging football player. Thick in the neck and thick in the head, with eyes that looked only straight to the front. Bull Cragg they called him in the United States Air Force. You might as well try to get him concerned about an unresolved chord as about a human matter outside his line of duty. He moved in larger orbits.

  The flash bulletin out of
Washington had not been unexpected at Amalgamated. WAR HERO TO COMMAND FIRST FLIGHT TO MARS! Cragg had his admirers in the Pentagon, all right, and his carefully tended contacts with influence even in higher places. To honor a popular figure, the War Chief had passed over not only Air General Cluett, commander of the first moon flight back in 2010, but even younger Air Force brilliants like Major Noel, the inventor of the sensational spectrum-beacon Automatic Interspatial Navigation Control. Before the rest of the make-ready was over, it was apparent that Cragg was personally committed not to a scientific expedition but to a military reconnaissance. So much for Dr. Pembroke, Director of Science for Expedition Mars. Director? Certainly. To the extent that suited Colonel Cragg.

  Dane went back to his port and stared out at Mars, visible in the east by the flaring spark fires.

  The most Earth-like of the solar planets, a distinguished astrophysicist had pronounced it, yet structurally the opposite of Earth. A homogeneous sphere, he said, a nearly uniform mixture of silicate and metallic iron-nickel, with no core of iron like that of Earth. A physically alien world, more like the moon than the lush habitation that man calls home.

  A monotonous sphere of reddish dust, the great astronomical observers had portrayed it, unrelieved except for eroded hills worn down by long-gone floods, flecked at the poles by a thin frost, stained widely by a green discoloration, possible vegetative.

  With an atmosphere as rare as Earth’s at eleven miles high, with no detectable trace of free oxygen, a classic astrobiologist had written of it, one must concede that the vegetation apparently comprising the green areas is on the low order of the lichen or the liverwort, if indeed it should parallel in any way the growing things of Earth. But, he had summed up, life at such a disappointing level is not what men would seek when the time arrived for their first journey to their neighbors in space.

  Yes and quite so. Neatly deduced and experimentally sound. But a man had to ride the decks of the Far Venture up the long slant to the splendid globe and see its particolors fade into a sky-filling dun and drab vastness, characterless and unwelcoming to man. Not till then was the lingering hope at last gone that perhaps here might be a home of warm blooded life and zest for living. Before the swooping exploratory encirclements had all been run and the spacecraft had settled on the nude red plain of Isidis Regio five miles west of the vast Syrtis Major lichen beds, Dane had known that one man, at least, doubted the adventure.

  But how could you tell a man like his managing editor, the great Ames of Amalgamated Press, how it really was? The nothingness of it. How do you write endless sand and scrub into bulletins?

  On the flight out you radioed him copy about the red star and how it swelled into a blemished red moon, and then the spacecraft reversed ends and the red moon vanished behind the decelerating rockets, until nearness bloated it into view again, out beyond the rim of the wide base cone. You could have written that sitting at your typewriter in Houston. Ames could have had all that from the rewrites.

  When the radio went out, you couldn’t even tell him that there wasn’t any story. Any Amalgamated beat of a story.

  How would you make him realize it, face to face with him again in the Houston office, with the radio typesetters and the babel wires held open all over the globe? What could you tell him about the way it actually was? He hadn’t been there. The three billion people waiting suspensefully for Amalgamated press dispatches hadn’t been there. How could they ever know how undramatically different it was from their Earth-bound imaginings?

  As on the last night in Houston. Luxury food. Drink spot for the nation’s big-money men. “The story of the ages, you dog, you! Don’t ever get to be managing editor and have to stay home and nurse the clients.” The odd thing was that Ames really meant it. Like his brag that his mind differed only in skill from the millions of minds that read his clients’ newspapers.

  What was the great story? The vastness of rusty desert? The primitive vegetation? No canals? Nothing but a flat world athirst? All those things were known with practical certainty before they left Earth. The static discharges over the lichen beds and a few confirmations and contradictions of minor scientific speculations weren’t enough to show for a hundred million miles. That four men were missing and to be left behind for dead would be small change to Ames.

  Maybe the real story was why they had come at all. But try to sell that one to Ames! Ames dealt in who, where, when, what, and how. You don’t feed an international news service on why-stuff.

  “Give me the challenge and the mystery!”

  “Shock ‘em and weep ‘em and inspire ‘em! In that order.”

  “A good bulletin is like a good poem. They don’t read it. They feel it!”

  “No journalism, please. Give me word pictures of human doings and human feelings. Readers want to see ‘em doing and feel ‘em feeling.”

  Those were the Ames commandments. Placarded singly and in bilious combinations in Amalgamated Press rooms all over the world.

  Well, a likely space voyageur the great Amalgamated’s John Dane had turned out to be. Four days on Mars, only four days of the tremendous adventure, and ready to go home. Except for Dr. Pembroke.

  He felt his waist. Take off five or ten pounds after they got back. Ought to have done it before. Save up a little money and be shed of the Ames human-interest factory forever.

  After a while he went back to his plottings.

  The blue-bright net patches were again the last of the spark fires to die down. After the giant bolts ceased to arc out of them and over the far-eastern horizon, the photo plane table still reported the net flashes in radiant, shattered glass patterns for two hours past the Martian sunset. By the time their flickering crosshatches dimmed to reddish flare-ups here and there, Dane had made and developed two hundred photographic exposures of the display on the dark glass table top.

  He began to press his calculations into the accumulated mass of discharge plottings, entering the results one by one on his master chart overlay and drafting lines to connect the like-intensity readings. Under his penciling the pattern of last night’s discharges was repeating itself. Methodically he compared his partly completed plot a time or two with yesterday’s chart before he noted an emerging variation. The indication was a certain dislocation of one of the major focal points of the fires.

  Now he hastened the calculations, working rapidly and getting excited but restraining his conclusions until he had done all the plotting. Then he drew a line along his straightedge, connecting the location of the spacecraft and the point of Dr. Pembroke’s entry into the lichens and extending deeper into the beds. He grunted in triumph. The line ran squarely through the dislocated focus.

  It could be coincidence. But why the shift of this particular focus? He pored over the chart, seeking for phenomena comparable to the shift. If any were there, they eluded him. Maybe the discharge centers of the spark fires were meaningless, like the small whirlpools that form and disappear in rapidly flowing water, vagaries of the streamlines and the urgent fluids. But again, why the shift in this particular center? Odd chance or attraction? It had to be one of the two. Unless maybe design? That, Mr. Ames, would really be it! For an instant he let himself go into wild surmise. His skin crawled before he could shake the spook away, sneering at himself. By what? Design what-in-hell by? Chance? Quite possibly chance. But assume attraction, like a steel mast drawing lightning, and you couldn’t miss it. It was there to be seen. Plain on the chart, also assuming that Dr. Pembroke had chosen to follow a straight-line course. Make only those two assumptions and you couldn’t miss it.

  Suddenly he pushed down the commander’s key on the intercom. “Dane to Colonel Cragg.”

  The speaker rasped. “Cragg here.”

  “I’m coming down. Are you clear?”

  “Not now. Let it rest.”

  “It can’t. We have to send a search party out. Immediately.”

  “No. The answer is still ‘no.’” The speaker clicked dead. Dane stabbed the key. �
�Colonel Cragg! I’m calling a meeting at once. Of our own people. We’ll make up a party ourselves. With or without your approval.”

  “That’s what you think, Doctor Dane.” The colonel’s harsh baritone scorned the title. “Maybe you’d better come down at that.”

  Dane twisted away from the table and strapped on the heavy gravity footgear. He pondered the litter of photographic prints a moment, then pushed them aside and took only his master plot. For Colonel Cragg it had to be fast. With his usual feeling for the oddness of the action, he got through the hatch and climbed down the durometal ladders to the commander’s quarters on 1-high deck.

  The entry panel was shut. He jabbed twice at the buzzer push and bore against the latch handle until the lock hummed and he could shove through.

  2

  UNSMILING BEHIND his desk, Cragg swept over Dane as if inspecting for violations of military neatness. He poked a digit at one of the plastic chairs and clipped off a phrase. “Five minutes.”

  Dane ignored the chair. “I have new evidence and good evidence that Dr. Pembroke is still alive. At least someone of his party is alive. I think I know where he is. I want to make up a party and go after him immediately.”

  Cragg pushed a thick fist impatiently at his cropped gray hair. “There’s still no time. You’d never make it back by morning.”

  “We’ve got to try! We’ve got to stay here and try.” Dane spread out his chart. “Look at this.”

  Cragg shoved it away. “You know I’ve already given the order for take-off. Give it up and face facts, man. He’s dead.”

  Dane put the chart back. He forced himself to speak evenly. “He is alive. He moved yesterday after he signaled he was entering the lichens. Now I can show he has moved again since last night. Something’s gone wrong, but at least I know where he is.”

  “One thing you’ve got right,” Cragg snapped, “is that one about something being wrong. The radiation intensity is up eight per cent over yesterday. At 1400 this afternoon we registered five times the penetrations we did yesterday. Or don’t you know that!”