Not in Solitude [Revised Edition]

by Kenneth F. Gantz

  “That’s just it. They can’t find anything the matter. They’re tearing them all the way down now.”

  “Migod!” Dane exclaimed. “What I know about mechanics is how to open a can of sardines, but I do know a man couldn’t do something in a few minutes to those engines that couldn’t be found and fixed in a hurry. He wouldn’t be able to make any noise. He couldn’t use any heavy tools.”

  “That’s not what the engineers say. If he is the top rocket man in the United States.”

  Dane snorted. “It doesn’t make sense. I want to see this guy Cragg. Now!” Burning up, he reached for the ladder.

  Noel said, “Maybe you’d better wait a minute. He’s looking for you, too. He’ll wait. But here’s something you want to think about before you shoot off your mouth. As soon as we spotted you out on the plain this afternoon, the colonel released Vining and put him to work on the engines. That puts your Mr. Vining on somewhat of a spot. You right along with him. If he gets them working, the colonel will probably prosecute the two of you for sabotage or wilfully risking the spacecraft. If we get back to Earth, it’s a trial and maybe prison. Of course if Vining can’t start them, it doesn’t matter much one way or the other.”

  His foot on the first rung, Dane turned half around. “What about you? What do you think?”

  Noel laughed without mirth. “I know what I want to think. I hope to hell the colonel is right. I want to leave here. And quick. But I’m scared. I don’t figure you’re smart enough for it. I don’t mean you’re dumb. I mean just not sharp smart. I don’t think you’re hard enough to think of giving yourself or Pembroke an ace in the hole with those engines until you could get back here. Vining maybe. But I don’t figure you for it.”

  “Thanks for not too much.”

  Dane went on up the ladder. He mounted rapidly to Colonel Cragg’s quarters.

  Lieutenant McDonald and Wertz were already in the little chamber.

  Cragg’s lips thinned. His face, rough and stubborn as fired stone, twitched at the long scar that ran across his cheekbone to the tip of his ear. When he was angered, officially or privately, as he frequently was, the scar flared red. At the sight of Dane it began to burn. He threw down his pencil. “That’s all, gentlemen, I want to speak to Dr. Dane.” Dourly he watched them get out.

  “Dane,” he lanced out, “I’ve got only one thing to say to you. I intend to prosecute you to the limit of the law for delaying the take-off and exposing this vehicle and its crew to grave danger in wilful contradiction of the orders of its commander.”

  “Possibly I ought to remind you,” Dane restrained himself, “that I am not in the military service. I may be technically under your command for the duration of this voyage, but at its end I shall be as free to sue you as you are to charge me. If I were you, I wouldn’t make any wild charges I couldn’t prove.”

  “Through no fault of yours,” Cragg ignored him, “we are all still healthy. Yesterday the penetrations came within point five of critical. For some reason, or good luck, they leveled off just in time. Today they are a little lower. Now that you and the precious Pembroke are safe inside, I suppose Vining will be able to repair the drive.”

  Dane decided to try to be reasonable. “Colonel, have you given any thought to the possibility of intelligence on this planet? Hostile intelligence? Spark fires concentrating around our personnel. Men mysteriously unconscious. Radios mysteriously dead when you need them most. Lieutenant Houck mysteriously dead. Fire patterns pointed at the spacecraft. Engines mysteriously inoperative. It just might add up to God knows what.”

  Cragg surveyed him coldly. “This conference is over.”

  Dane said, “That’s okay with me. Our plain ordinary physical troubles are bad enough for me. Now maybe even the lichen vegetation is reacting to us. If the lichens really are attracted by the spacecraft metal, you had better give a lot of thought to stopping them before they get in contact with us.”

  Cragg spoke contemptuously in four letters.

  10

  FROM THE ports of the high observation deck Dane watched the Martian night unroll itself from the east, as visible as a blue-black storm moving in wide brush strokes to paint over the sunset. Occasionally a metallic clamor intruded, but otherwise the spacecraft, huge and solid, seemed to doze, unfolding its people for sleep and untroubled security. The hour of evening slowed, nodded—deceived. Dane knew that in a dozen tactic positions men were alert.

  Not only the engineers pursued their mystery. An officer stood watch at the command post, very probably Colonel Cragg himself. Power spun out of the dynamos for the lights and the living equipment, the radar that probed their environment, and the diverse complexes in the laboratories that stood by to record and interpret it.

  Not only the crew and its officers, but physicists, biologists, chemists, astronomers, botanists, zoologists, mathematicians and statisticians, mineralogists strove in their tiny workshops with their instruments and their learning to bend a new world to the discipline of ordered inquiry. Doubtlessly the medic still lingered at his task of restoring Dr. Pembroke, Beemis, and Jackson. The cook and his helper must be busy with the evening rations.

  And even as Dane contemplated the quiet and his aloneness, Airman First Class Humphries climbed into the chamber and busied himself with the searchlight, bringing on the piercing white beam and making trial sweeps over the near terrain. Afterward he switched it on automatic, so that the bright light ground tirelessly through 360 degrees of the darkness that shut them in.

  The kitten-friendly Humphries was himself unusually reticent. In fact he had not spoken a word, greeting or otherwise. “You mad about something?” Dane asked him.

  With patent care Humphries continued to monitor the sweep of the light. “I’m on duty,” he muttered.

  “That mean you can’t even say hello? You’ve been on duty up here before and spoken your piece.”

  “Colonel Cragg ordered a special watch.”

  “What does he think is out there to watch against?” Dane tried.

  “He didn’t say.” The remark was rudely short.

  “Look, fellow,” Dane spoke out sharply, “I may as well begin with you. There seems to be an idea running around that somebody fouled up the engines. If that’s what you’re sore about. Just for the record, I didn’t. And I’m convinced that Mr. Vining didn’t either.”

  The man stopped his fiddling. “Then why wouldn’t they run?” he said. Surly disbelief canceled the question.

  Dane decided that he might as well get to work. He toggled the power switches of the radar photo plane table. “I don’t know. We can only hope they find the trouble soon.”

  “The grease is we’ll take off in the morning. Now that you got back with Dr. Pembroke.”

  “I don’t seem to have many choices,” Dane observed. “If Vining and the engineers can fix the engines, he and I are guilty of sabotage. If they don’t, we rot here.” He worked the keys that inflated the balloon and released the antenna reel. In the attenuated atmosphere, even with the peanut scanner and the tiny photo-electric pickup button, the balloon could carry the finest and lightest of lead wires scarcely a thousand feet aloft.

  Through the ports he had seen visually that the spark fires were exceptionally profuse, but when he tuned the plane table and threw both the radar and the photo-electric pickups on it, he let out a low whistle. Masses of the spark nets glowed twice as bright as he had yet observed them, and the great overriding bolts flung themselves from the nets to the horizon line every few seconds. Without any plotting Dane perceived the insistent and superior intensity of a pattern that converged toward the spacecraft. When he measured the peninsula of lichens that had thrust out into the plain, it was over two thousands yards long. In one day it had grown two thousand yards!

  While he watched, an odd blip of light formed at the tip of the peninsula’s image on the glass. To his amazement he saw it wink once, then twice, then three times, then repeat the cycle. After a pause the light winked again. Stea
dily the phenomenon repeated itself.

  Why had Colonel Cragg sent a party out after dark to explore the lichen peninsula and why were they signaling with lights? He didn’t recognize the signal. One dot, two dots, three dots spelled out E-R-S in radio code. It meant nothing to him.

  Then he noticed that the phenomenon could not be a light signal. It was not being picked up by the photo-electric scanner. It was being picked up by the radar antenna. It had to be a radar signal, and the impulse that bore it was not originating with the spacecraft!

  He fumbled at the keys of the intercom and called the command post. “Captain Spear?” he called, recognizing the answering voice. “Dane. Has Colonel Cragg got a patrol out? Near the lichen beds?”

  “No.” The reply was coldly official.

  “Could any of the scientists have gone out?”

  “That would really take the colonel off! Didn’t you get a copy of the order he passed out?”

  “Get this!” Dane said. “This is important. Check everybody and see if anyone is missing. It’s possible someone might have slipped out without your knowing it.”

  “Jesus,” Spear exclaimed. “If they did, the Old Man will fry them when they get back. Your little trip was enough for him.” His voice changed. “Say, your crowd up to something ‘scientific’ again?”

  “Check, will you?” Dane insisted. “I’m picking up a signal from about three miles out. On the radar frequency.”

  Spear swore again. “Will the Old Man ever fry ‘em! I’ll run down who it is.”

  “And let me know, will you?”

  “Okay, okay.” Spear signed off.

  Immediately he broke in again. “Dane? Spear to Dane. Say,” he said, “what kind of a signal did you say?”

  Dane repeated. “A signal on the radar. A blip. A blip winking on and off like code.”

  “That’s what I thought you said. Radar. You’re seeing things. We don’t have any communications equipment that would make a signal like that.”

  “That I know. At least I was pretty sure of it,” Dane told him, his excitement mounting, “but I’m not mistaken about the signal. I’m looking at it right now. It might be interference from some piece of equipment someone has taken out there and is operating. Check, man,” he shouted at the intercom. “We’ve got to know! Airman Humphries is here with me,” he added, somewhat out of sequence.

  Dane was appalled at his neglect of witnesses and the record. “Humphries, come here,” he called. “Look at this.” Quickly he brought the movie camera to bear on the luminosity of the plane table and started its motor.

  He needn’t have worried. The phenomenon persisted steadily, as unvarying as if it emanated from a timing device.

  “What have you got?” the airman asked him.

  Dane had to talk to someone. “It could be a query. One, two, three. One, two, three. The simplest form of a statement and a query. One, two, three. Over and over again. Something out there could be counting up to three for us. For us to notice that it is counting. For us to recognize that if it can count, therefore it exists. It’s not saying one, two, three. It’s saying, ‘I am! I am! Do you recognize me?’”

  Humphries looked startled. “There ain’t nobody out there. You heard what the captain just said. You feel all right?”

  Dane thought for a minute. “I don’t know how I feel.”

  The intercom rasped. “All present and accounted for,” Captain Spear sang out, like a group commander at retreat. “Nobody outside. You’d better get your equipment checked.”

  It was a let-down. He hadn’t thought of a malfunction in his own device. He pushed the camera out of the way and studied the winking point. He decided to call the radio engineer.

  Lieutenant Yudin had fat, moist-looking hands and a pallid round face that he appointed for an air of effectiveness with a small dark mustache and glasses in circular frames of black plastic. He liked to talk brusquely and firmly. “Must be in the antenna, he pronounced, like a suburban medic rounding out a diagnosis for the soldier commuters. “Better reel it in. Couldn’t be outside interference. Nothing out there to cause it.” He began to manipulate switches.

  “Hold it,” Dane ordered. “I want to try something first. Can you rig up a make-and-break switch so we can interrupt our transmitter beam and send out some signals on it? Like dots and dashes?”

  Yudin’s smallish eyebrows went up. “What for?”

  “I want to try something,” Dane repeated. “Can you do it?”

  Yudin looked as if he had just remembered what he had been told by his wife not to forget. “Sure I can, but what are you up to now? Some of your friends out there again?” He peered out a port at the flashing horizon.

  “No, but it looks as if we’re getting a signal.” Dane pointed at the scope.

  “What do you mean, ‘No, but it looks like we’re getting a signal’? If nobody’s out there, how could we?”

  “That blip.” Dane pointed again. “One, two, three. One, two, three. It’s too regular for a malfunction. It’s exactly the way an ordered, reflective intelligence might approach a supposedly intelligent intruder. It could be a way of saying, ‘I’m here. Do you recognize me?’”

  Yudin’s jaw slacked. Then he laughed raucously. “I’d better call the colonel and tell him you’ve really gone off your nut.”

  “Okay. Okay,” Dane checked him. “First hook up the switch. Then do your calling. There’s a chance something might be out there we didn’t bring with us. Someone, if you want to call it that. I’ve got an idea.”

  “Migod, he really means it!” Doubt slanted toward bewilderment. “You really mean it?”

  “The switch!” Dane insisted.

  Yudin pointed at the control panel. “You can use the main power switch. It won’t burn up on you. There’s not enough juice.”

  Dane tried it. It was awkward, but he could do it. If he went at it slowly.

  He waited until the mysterious blip showed and then interrupted itself. Trying to work the switch in the same cadence, if not the same speed, he sent out answering pulses. One, two, three. One, two, three. Then he stopped.

  The blip came on again. One, two, three. The same as before.

  “Next will be our Brooklyn hour. After a few dozen scenes with our sponsor.” But Yudin was caught up in the experiment, staring nearsightedly at the table scope.

  Again Dane repeated the signal, striving to mock its tempo. A thought occurred to him. “I’ll reverse it.” He sent, three, two, one. Three, two, one.

  They waited a minute. Another long minute. “Looks like you signed him off,” Yudin said, relief in his voice. “Fooling around with that switch probably upset some impedance in the antenna circuit that was causing it.”

  Dane felt the knot of tension loosen. “Maybe you’re right.” Was he disappointed?

  Yudin picked up his tool kit. “You didn’t really think there might be something out there watching us, did you?”

  “Look!” Dane shouted. The blip was on again. Winking furiously. Then, while he stood stiffly, arm half raised to point, it settled into the signal. One, two, three. One, two, three.

  “I’d better pull that antenna in,” Yudin said. Suddenly he whispered, “Migod!” He stared at the scope.

  The thing was winking the reverse signal. Three, two, one. Three, two, one!

  Dane leaped for the switch. Four, two, three, one, he signaled. Four, two, three, one.

  Immediately the answer came. Four, two, three, one. Even the slower tempo of Dane’s sending was imitated!

  “I’ll try a word on it!” Dane seized the switch handle and spelled out c-a-t in code.

  Back came the answer. Dash-dot-dash-dot, dot-dash, dash. C-a-t! Then the identification signal was repeated. One, two, three.

  Beginning to perspire, Dane sent the word that associated itself. Back came the answer, Dash-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dash-dash-dot. D-o-g!

  Yudin stepped away from the radar table. He swore softly and looked at Dane, not framing the ques
tion in his eyes.

  Dane felt a weird stroking against the nerves in his back. “There’s something out there,” he said hoarsely. “Something out there is aware of us.”

  Yudin took off his glasses and examined their cleanliness. “What do you think it is?”

  “I’m going to ask it,” Dane told him. He called Airman Humphries from his task with the searchlight. “I’m going to transmit the question ‘Who are you?’ Watch the radar carefully and remember what you see.” He went back to the switch. “You read the code, don’t you?”

  Humphries looked at Yudin.

  The lieutenant nodded.

  Humphries said, “Some.”

  “Watch it closely, then,” Dane said. He took hold of the switch. “We ought to make a record of this.” He indicated the charting table. “Both of you take pencil and paper and write down exactly what I send and what comes back.”

  He waited until they had picked up the writing materials, watching them with vivid attention as they selected pencils and handled the scratch pads. Then he began to send, W-h-o a-r-e y-o-u? He repeated, W-h-o a-r-e y-o-u?

  He saw Yudin’s face and Humphries’ distorted by the effort of concentration. Then he was no longer aware of anything around him but the opaque glass mask of the plane table, veined with the fitful pattern of the spark fires over the map pickup.

  At last the signal began to wink. Dane followed it breathlessly, feeling his lips spell out the letters like a child in school. W-h-o a-r-e y-o-u? W-h-o a-r-e y-o-u? His own signal had merely been repeated.

  “He wants to know who we are,” Humphries said uncertainly.

  “Tell them,” Yudin said.

  Dane shook his head. “It couldn’t know English. It’s only repeating our signal.”

  “Maybe it’s an echo,” Humphries suggested.

  “Not from this planet,” Yudin said. “Not with radar waves traveling 186,000 miles a second. Too slow. It couldn’t be an echo. Impossible. Look,” he added soberly, “I don’t like this. Supposing there really is some kind of Martian. Underground cities and that stuff they used to write stories about. What are they going to think about us? What do they do next? Maybe they’re getting ready to come after us!”