Not in Solitude [Revised Edition]

by Kenneth F. Gantz

  “Very good,” Cragg barked. “McDonald has found them. I won’t say I’m not surprised. It looked pretty hopeless. Their being alive, I mean. Fill me in,” he added. “If they don’t talk or move, what makes them think they’re alive? They can’t get inside the suits to check.”

  Noel told him about the breathing. “McDonald said they found Dr. Pembroke sitting up like a Buddha all by himself out in the weeds. They couldn’t rouse any of them at all. Dane thinks they’re in a state of shock.”

  “Captain King had better watch out for that man. Next thing he’ll be in the flight surgeon business.” Cragg sprawled down in his chair and put his feet up on the workbench. “Sounds like an overdose of that static electricity to me. They’ve been in the middle of the spark fire for two days.”

  There was one for you. Even if the guy didn’t have any scientific training.

  Cragg shook his head and scowled at the log sheet. “This estimated time of arrival you’ve got here of 1230 hours. They’ve got to carry three men.”

  “They think they’ll make it. McDonald thinks so.” He told him about the carrying sling made out of specimen bags. “They’ve got a pretty fair chance of making it.”

  Cragg got up and went to the chart desk to make his own measurement. “Carrying sixty to seventy pounds of man a piece, they’ll really have to crowd it.”

  “They can haul them in their specimen cart when they get out of the lichens.” Anyway, you could damn well bet that the colonel would never take off with them in sight, coming in over the red plain. And they would be in sight in the glass as soon as they left the lichen beds. No matter what time it was, he’d never take off with them alive and kicking and right under his nose. No commander could do that.

  Cragg found his easy chair again. “Stand by for 1300 take-off as planned. If they’re late, we’ve got to give them a break, but I want to be ready to go the minute they’re inside. Unless the penetrations build up. If it does, then they’ve had it anyway. Now you’d better get a little sleep,” he added, the finality of his tone choking off Noel’s remark about the lack of data on the lethality of the radiation. “You’re going to have a busy afternoon.” He began the business of lighting one of his cigars.

  Noel opened the door of the radio room to tell the watch to call him at 1000. He went back to the chart table and picked up his pencils. At the exit he stopped.

  “Well?”

  Noel hesitated. The colonel was obviously disinclined to talk any more. “There was one other thing.”

  Cragg waited him out.

  “On the report McDonald made just before you came in—some of the things they said didn’t make sense, or I didn’t understand them. But when I queried them, they only laughed.”

  Cragg spit out a puff of smoke. “Major, please come to the point!”

  Noel said, “It was just that it was peculiar—under the circumstances.”

  “You losing sleep to talk nonsense?”

  Noel regretted that he had introduced the thing. Now there was no help for it. “McDonald reported that they were making good time, considering the difficulty of wading through the lichens. Then Dane cut in and said, ‘Once I was very happy. There was soft black soil at the edge of the orchard and we made a garden.’ That’s all he said. I couldn’t get another word from him.”

  Cragg snorted. “That settles it. The radiation is getting them too. He’s jetting off wing. Not that he had far to turn.”

  Noel thought a moment. “I’m sure I remember it exactly word for word. Then McDonald laughed and signed out.” He hesitated a second. “Maybe we ought to mount a party to go meet them.”

  The colonel poked the cigar at him. “Not another man leaves this spacecraft. Not one man. Not even to go outside for one minute. We’ve very likely lost seven men already.” He puffed rapidly at his restored smoke. “Put an operator on them. I want to know as soon as he can contact them. I want to talk to McDonald myself. I want to give him a good laugh.”

  Noel went back into the radio room and gave the order to the watch. Then he went to his bunk. In two minutes he was asleep.

  In no better than two more minutes he was fighting the buzz of the intercom. It was already 1000. He fumbled for the right key and called Captain Spear at the command post. “What’s the news from the McDonald party?”

  Spear came on. “None, sir. We’ve been unable to contact them since your last contact at 0654.”

  Noel calculated rapidly. They should have reached the edge of the lichen beds by now. Or be very near to it.

  He pulled on his heavy boots and climbed the ladders to the sunlit lookout chamber in the peak of the spacecraft. He stood for a moment, ringed with glassite ports and 110 feet aboveground, and looked out at the red emptiness before he waved the observer aside. He swung the three-inch refractor at the near horizon of the lichen forest and put his face against the eyepiece. He followed the low line of the vegetation slowly to far left and then to far right. Then he began to scour the red plain in front of it. The dust flat was as bare as the perimeter of the lichen land had been uninterrupted by alien form or movement.

  It was not good. He kept at the search until the hands of his watch crawled around to 1020 hours. Finally he relinquished the telescope to the observer. He had the six decks below to inspect before take-off time. He had to go over the entire 80-foot sphere perched 24 feet high on its truncated drive cone. Opening on the circular corridors of the five decks above the drive deck were nearly two hundred rooms and quarters. Not all, fortunately, housed equipment essential to the maneuvering of the spacecraft, but all merited at least a professional glance.

  He climbed down through the hatch to 3-high deck immediately below. Its storerooms and compartments delayed him only a few minutes. All but two displayed either their initial seals or those affixed in last night’s inspection.

  Two-high deck bore laboratories equipped for the scientists and the hospital. Not much to be held in readiness here either, although he did want to stop in the radiation laboratory to get a reading from the cloud-chamber monitor.

  A round little thick-lipped man by the name of Spivak handed him the graphs. Noel let out a low whistle.

  Spivak nodded. “One-point-three above yesterday this time.” He seemed cheerful about it. He fished out a pencil and pointed at the red line that rose at a steep angle over yesterday’s blue line. “They’re diverging sharply.”

  Noel handed him back the clipboard. “Calculate the rate of divergence based on the last hour and give me predictions for 1200, 1300, and 1400 hours. I want it right away.”

  Spivak picked up a greenish pad. “I’ve already got it. Rate of divergence, point-one-four-five. That’s from 0900 to 1015, but from 1000 to 1015 she went up to point-one-five-eight. Take the last rate off, and here’s your curve.”

  Noel didn’t like the way the man said it. He snatched the graph pad from him and scanned it hurriedly. Fear confirmed, he examined it more carefully. Twelve o’clock: 11.2 per cent intensity; penetrations .0083 per second. Thirteen hundred hours: 13.7 per cent intensity; penetrations .0136. Fourteen hundred hours: 16.6 and .0291. He looked up at Spivak. “What do you think?”

  The man shrugged. “You really want to know what I think? I think we’d better get the hell off this Godforsaken ball of nothing fast. We can’t take it. She’ll pour through our insulation like a sieve.”

  Noel thought of Dane and young McDonald. Wertz with his heavy humorless stories. Not a chance. Not even the diamond-hard timageel that sheathed the spacecraft and the magnetic zoning could arrest the invisible bombardment.

  “I’ll tell Colonel Cragg. There’s no word from McDonald since 0700. He’ll more than likely move up the take-off.”

  Spivak said, “I know. He just left. He’s checking your take-off settings right now.”

  “You know a hell of a lot,” Noel snapped. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Did you ask me?” The man grinned. “Look”—his face darkened savagely—“I want to go. We all
want to go. We’ve made the trip and proved it, and this stuff is hot. The hull won’t turn it. We got no time for lifesaving. Except our own, and damn little for that. The colonel’s got good sense.”

  Noel strode to the call box and flipped the all-stations key. “Noel to Colonel Cragg.”

  “Noel.” The reply was crisp-toned and meaningful. “I was about to call you. The big computer is out. Edwards can’t get it to function, but I want an immediate take-off. I assume you’re ready. We’ll have to use the settings for 1300. Man all stations and charge the drive.”

  “They’re not good for two hours yet!” Noel remonstrated. “The settings are computed to a tolerance of no more than 120 seconds.”

  The speaker blasted. “I am well acquainted with take-off settings. They’ll have to do. We’re going off in less than thirty minutes. That is, if this spacecraft is ready, as ordered. It is, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Noel answered grimly.

  “Then we use the 1300 settings and correct when we can after take-off. It would take the rest of the day to work out new settings by hand with a slide rule. Do you read me?”

  Noel looked at Spivak’s broad civilian grin. “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s 1043. We go off at 1100. I’ll stand by for your clear. Take over.”

  7

  DANE WADED through the lichens. During the first few minutes of it, he had thought that it was going to wear them down quickly. The weight itself wasn’t too bad. The inert forms of Dr. Pembroke, Jackson, and Beemis swung in the triangular hammock devised from specimen bags joined together and suspended from ropes knotted in baldric fashion around the waists and shoulders of the three bearers. By leaning outward against the weight of the three points of the triangle they could support the hammock off the ground fairly easily.

  But the going had been awkward, until they caught the cadence of it. The sling fought its suspension among them, sagging and bumping the ground with every unevening of the pace. After a time they mastered the technique of keeping the suspending cords taut by an approximation of military step and with response to any slackening of one of the cords by leaning harder against the other two. The lichens now slid smoothly underneath, and even with frequent pauses they were making almost as good speed under the thin daylight, coming out burdened, as they had made on the way in under darkness.

  Dane noticed that his thermometer had already climbed to -15° Centigrade for the ambient atmosphere. The pressure-suit air conditioner would soon be loading to hold down his body heat. He sniffed for the faintly chemical odor it imparted to his air when the temperature began to climb. His mouth was unusually dry, it occurred to him. He thought briefly of a malfunction. But his inside temperature was normal, so the thing had to be all right, even if he couldn’t smell it.

  Sniffing like that reminded him of spring air and the fresh scent of newly turned earth. He was glad it was time to rest again and let the tiresome thing slip to the ground. He was thirsty. Mars and spring gardening. You think of funny things sometimes.

  Now they were marching again. He must have been thinking of something when they had started. No one had said anything for a long time, so that the starts and stops and the marching were all about the same, except for the work of the carrying. It was a lot like wading in waist-deep water. The lichens offered a retarding inertia, rather than a clinging obstacle that had to be pushed forcibly aside. The sparsely entangled meshes of the rubbery plants parted for their advance with small resistance, bearing a shapeless shadow of the strangers effortlessly ahead of them and closing as effortlessly behind them into renewed entangled meshes. It was simply the matter of taking steps, one and then another and another. Uncomfortable and tiring but certainly possible. After a while he noticed that his mouth was open again and turned his head to the water tube.

  But now it was something that Jane said about the sailboat. He couldn’t remember. He was surprised at his watch. How did it get to almost nine o’clock? If McDonald and Wertz would stop talking, he would be able to remember what Jane had said.

  Ahead over the green stuff he saw one of the bare places. They could rest there awhile, and he would remember about the sailboat and tell them about it. The smallish sun was up pretty high in a blue-white sky. Hazy. Looked like snow. But they certainly had time to talk awhile before they went in to lunch.

  “Take a break,” he muttered, coming out of the weeds into the open red dirt. He let his burden sag to the ground and sat down, deciding that Washington was a poor place for a man to live when he could be on the mesas and plains of Texas. Fatigue rolled over him. It was good to rest. Why had he thought about Jane Slocum? He hadn’t seen her for seven years. Since the weekend of the prom and he had gone back to Texas. It could be very dark in Texas, camping in the big deer lots. In the loneliness of late night it was dark in the camp, where the thick brush shut off the stars. It was dark, but the sleeping bag was snug-warm and the air was clean and easy to breathe.

  Dane sat up, realizing at once where he was. It was midnight dark. With a quick pang he stabbed his light around, spotting the recumbent forms of Wertz and Lieutenant McDonald and the ones in the carrying sling. According to his watch, the hour was 2041. Maturing despair knotted around his bowels and jerked him wide awake with a clear realism. The spacecraft had been gone eight hours! He looked up for Earth, but the high haze was thick and the heavens were blindly unrelieved.

  He threw on his radio and called. Over and over again until he had to admit the certainty. There was no answer. There could be no answer. The Far Venture was long beyond the range of their feeble radio packs. They were alone. Unthinkably abandoned. Never to see Earth again. With three days’ oxygen, he thought bitterly, they would not become old inhabitants of their alien world.

  He bent his light over the lieutenant. The eyes were shut, the features composed and natural behind the visor of the helmet. Looking close, he saw the systole and diastole of the lips expressing a normal breathing. He shined the light on Wertz. They were both asleep. Nothing but asleep.

  Well, he had his pistol. It would be kind to put them permanently to sleep. He fought the numbing impulse to review the delight of being snug aboard the onrushing space-craft—amid the familiar confinement—already thousands of miles along course. The challenge of the endless emptiness to be traversed would be welcome; the nagging thought that the perfect flight of the spacecraft might be imperfect, a minor trouble.

  It was panic thinking—make-believe—absurd. They were here. On Mars. Colonel Cragg was human. Like all men, he was human. If he had to choose between saving himself and his crew and waiting out three overdue wanderers in a forbidding mystery, he would make only one choice.

  Yet you have to do something. At least you have to know for sure. You have to confirm the fearful certainty. As a man who suspects himself in a fatal disease compels himself to seek the certainty of the doctor’s verdict, dreading to go only a little less than dreading to stay away and risk the loss of a possible cure.

  He saw McDonald stir. Then Wertz. Then he realized that he was shouting into his microphone for them to wake up.

  “My God!” he heard Wertz’s voice rumble. “It’s night!” The man got stiffly to his feet, an ungainly mechanical figure in the beam of light.

  McDonald was already calling to spacecraft.

  “It’s no use,” Dane told him. “I tried it. Either Colonel Cragg has taken off and left us, or maybe they’re not listening in for us.”

  They knew that was unlikely. They did not like to say impossible. The operator might be snoozing at his post. But not on Colonel Cragg’s crew. Maybe something might have gone wrong with the equipment. Radio long range had been out with Earth ever since they had come close to the planet. Maybe there had been some kind of a blankout on the liaison wave length.

  Dane said, “I’m not going to believe he left us until I see it for myself. We’ll go see if they’ve gone.”

  Wertz said, “We were fools to come out here. He warned us.”

&nbs
p; “No,” Dane said harshly. “Somebody had to come.”

  Lieutenant McDonald said, “I guess we lost the toss. But it’s a hard way to get it.”

  Dane picked up his rope’s end and put it over his shoulder. “I say let’s go see. We’ll call every ten minutes. It doesn’t matter much about the power now.”

  The others bent slowly to take up the load. Wertz said, “I don’t think it was natural sleep. I had some awfully silly ideas running around in my head while we were walking. You want to know what I think, this radiation effect is working on us. Before long we’re out like them.” He jerked an armored hand at the three unconscious men.

  “We’re going to get out of these lichens,” Dane told him. “By a straight line. As fast as we can go.”

  “I remember I thought I was going down the beach at Clearwater, Florida,” McDonald said. “I was looking for a place there called the Seahorse Tavern. You men were off your orders too. How do we know what direction we’ve been going?”

  “All we have to do,” Dane told him, “is go straight west. That will bring us out on the dust. By then we’ll see the beacon light. Maybe before. If it’s still there, we’ll see it.”

  “We ought to see it now,” Wertz objected. “Unless we’ve been backtracking.”

  “There’s a lot of dust haze, maybe.” Dane threw his light ahead. “The lights don’t penetrate very far.”

  The others tried it, shining their lights in sweeping arcs.

  “Maybe you’re right,” McDonald said. “At least it’s a hope.”

  They made one more call. Then they started into the west, the only direction that could be conceived as friendly. The loaded sling swung clumsy and slow against their urgency. Talk was over. They needed their breath. There was nothing to say except the things that a man has to keep within himself.

  After an hour the lights were thrusting ahead against a thicker dusty ground haze, quelling at least the fear that because they could not yet see the beacon light, there was none to see.