Not in Solitude [Revised Edition]

by Kenneth F. Gantz

  Beloit acknowledged and stood back to the port. The suit was at a hundred yards, walking very slowly. His mind flashed back to Earth and thirty years ago. It was New Year’s Day, 1991. He stood on a fishing pier on Dauphin Island and watched the tide roll out of Mobile Bay into the Gulf. There was a blond girl with a long surf rod, casting her line gracefully and far out into the water. A year or two older than he was, he guessed, nineteen or twenty maybe, and her figure was full and good against a yellow sweater. He wanted her pretty bad, but she had only looked at him once, quickly unseeing after perception of his squat, stocky figure and coarse face. Acutely aware, he reeled in his line and went back to the cottage, where he was master of a slide rule and the sophomore engineering problems in his texts. She would be fat and fifty now, wherever she was, smug over a couple of grown offspring. He himself had no particular trouble in getting plenty of girls younger than her own children. Funny if he had run on to a daughter of hers sometime around Mobile and never known it. Not any odder than standing in a spacecraft on the planet Mars and looking out on the sight of a grotesque, humanish object come up over a bizarre red plain to the mouths of their guns.

  The intercom rasped. “Suit at fifty yards. Open entry,” Noel ordered.

  Beloit went down to the observation port that looked into the entry lock. The outside hatch hung open and the ladder was out. Automatic weapons in hand, two pressure-suited guards stood over the opening, motionless.

  The seconds ticked off, until there was a shifting of posture by both guards. Beloit knew that the suit was below. They could see it. He wouldn’t want to be Pembroke, stepping into sight under that entry. A jumpy finger on the trigger and the shock of seeing the thing all of a sudden, and reflexes might go off, in spite of disciplined control.

  They were backing away from the open hatch. Slowly a monstrous head rose above the opening in the curving side. An extraordinary hand reached through and grasped the highest rung. Then the suit was inside and the hatch was closing.

  Beloit blinked, straining to see through the hazy transparency of the small port. He took out his handkerchief and wiped at the dust that covered the pane. The suit was turning ponderously from one guard to the other. Finally it raised its corrugated arms and worked at its helmet, passing misshapen paws ineffectually at the collar wing nuts.

  It ought to take off the gauntlets, Beloit thought. If it was one of us, it would twist the lock joint of its gauntlets. Pembroke would know to take off the gauntlets first.

  Beloit snatched at his microphone. “Can’t you make him out?” he demanded. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Dr. Pembroke, sir,” the answer came. The man sounded surprised.

  Beloit wondered about it before he recalled that the men would have no reason to expect anything else. They had been told only to be careful. He was now surprised at his own suspense. What else could have been in the suit except Pembroke?

  It took a little time, but the suit finally managed to get its neck locks loosened. When it lifted off the heavy helmet, the massed white hair of Dr. Pembroke and the wizened face, small for the large head and hair shock, were plainly revealed. Beloit phoned Noel. As far as he could judge, Pembroke’s actions were normal. Perhaps he had forgotten about the gauntlets until he had managed to get his helmet off and the guards had told him. He pulled off the rest of the suit briskly enough, leaving it in a heap on the floor. One of the guards had his helmet visor open and was motioning to Pembroke to get into the lift. As soon as the panel slid shut on him, Beloit heard the faint grind of the mechanism. The lift was ascending.

  That was that. Beloit felt the fatigue hit him and thought of his bunk. Damn, it was a quarter to five. He needed more than the couple of hours’ sleep he was going to get. Maybe Noel would hurry it up with the all-clear so he could go to bed. Officious little squirt—really. But a competent technician. Still not the man for commander. When the phone rang, he picked it up quickly, blowing his breath out against his thrust-up lower lip.

  It was Noel all right, but now he wanted Beloit to come up to the command post. Bed? What did Noel care about Beloit’s rest?

  Beloit picked a path through the litter of the control panel. It was going to be a hulluva job to put all the stuff together again and check it, not to speak of tracing through the remainder of the generators. The better part of a week. Anyway you looked at it. Hell, he was just tired. Nothing could look good at five o’clock in the morning. After the whiskey faded out, the blonde’s face looked dirty.

  No use climbing ladders. He went over and punched at the call button of the lift. The indicator showed the car at 1-high, but no responsive whir came from the mechanism. Somebody had propped the car door open, a favored malpractice. Let the other fellow climb the ladders, I’ve got a can of beans to deliver. Half the crew under military discipline and the other half civilians. What else could you expect? One thing you could say for Colonel Cragg. He had been tough, but he handed it out to them all, and all alike. Military or civilian, he was in command. Whether they liked it or not, you had to have a strong commander on a junket like this. Noel would never cut it. Doctor this and doctor that would drop in their big words here and there until the poor bastard didn’t know which way was which. Not that he would have picked John Dane for a murderer, but it just showed what could happen when things got out of hand in an emergency. Confinement neurosis, the psycho men called it. Everybody on edge and every man for himself or what he thought was the right thing to do.

  When he climbed out on to 1-high deck, Noel was waiting for him.

  “Come on,” he ordered, “I want to show you something.” He led off around the curving passageway.

  Crumpled in the corner of the lift car was the body of Dr. Pembroke. Half the side of his head was blown away. A service pistol lay in the blood on the floor. Captain Spear was standing by.

  “What I want to know,” Noel demanded, “is why you would let this man who was obviously out of his mind retain possession of firearms?”

  Beloit focused on the image of Pembroke entering the lift. The old man must have had it in his pocket. Maybe a shoulder holster under his garments. “Suicide?” he asked.

  “Look to you like he was run over by a truck?” Noel snarled. “Why was he allowed to retain a weapon? Or didn’t you think of it?”

  “He didn’t have any visible.” Beloit said. “Your orders were not to come near him.”

  “I said you were not to go near him. I said no one was to touch that suit. You had men down there. You should have had them search him after he got out of the suit.”

  Beloit swore at himself. What was the use?

  “I’ll have to enter that in the record against you,” Noel said with an air of dismissal.

  These unpredictable things happened. When they happened, they happened swiftly and out of control of anything but good fortune. This one would dog him the rest of his career. Maybe not neglect of duty, exactly. Under the circumstances no board of officers would pin that on him, even if Noel chose to put a charge against him, but certainly an entry for ineffectiveness in a critical situation, and boom! There went the silver leaves he should have won out of this damned expedition.

  “Not that you didn’t make an understandable mistake, especially after the way you’ve been loaded with work,” Noel echoed his thoughts, “but I don’t expect a field-grade officer to make mistakes, particularly when it comes to security. I’m not going to prefer charges, but I am going to give you a reprimand. That’s all,” he added abruptly. “Spear, have the body removed and record what you found when you opened the lift.”

  14

  DR. JOSÉ RUIZ CRUZATE smacked the heel of his palm against his forehead. “Non! C’est impossible! It cannot be!” He snatched up a sprig of the lichen stuff and ran around his lab bench to thrust it under Wertz’s nose. “It is living. Even now this piece, it has the life! Do not talk to me of your chemicals. With the life there are the ways of life. It is not required that we understand, for them to be.”


  Cruzate was a little squirrel of a man. Wertz was pleased with the pertinence of the metaphor. Cruzate had the bright darting eyes and the quick pose of a squirrel, as if he were ever ready to scurry out across the lawn for a nut and back up a tree into his hole. Except that a squirrel does not suggest the pedant, and a pedant Cruzate undoubtedly was. An excitable, Frenchified, poetizing pedant, but pedantic as the multiplication tables when it came to his beloved “subject” of botany, as he always referred to it. Not the “discipline” or the “science” of botany or simply “botany,” but always the old-fashioned term, the “subject” of botany.

  “The ‘subject’ of botany,” Cruzate loved to say, pronouncing the word sujet, as in French, when he was excited, “the sujet de botany is like the drama of Racine. La botanique she is classique. She has the order. But also she has the poetry. What surprise! What variation of form and theme!”

  What the guy really meant, Wertz supposed, was that plant life—it’s a wonder he didn’t call it the vegetable kingdom, or whatever the French for that would be—what he meant was that plant life is capable of reduction to reasonably systematic classification but displays a wide spectrum of deviation from the systematic norms. The man was provincial. Consider the carbon compounds and their isomers, endless, almost mathematically infinite in their number and their diversity of properties. Cruzate knew too much botany and not enough anything else. Even so, you couldn’t help liking the little guy a lot.

  “Why does a Spaniard like you talk French when you get mad?” he asked him.

  “I have tell you, I have tell every man on this madman’s venture I am so blindly vain to adopt, I have tell you all from the dawn to the dark, Spanish I am not. My name, it is Spanish. My father’s father, he was Spanish, but my father and my mother and I, even one named José Ruiz Cruzate after my father’s father, became born in the glorious city of Paris, where I am even now, if not for my insufferable pride in my poor attainments and the blandishments of you Americans. Paris! Not canned up like the herring in an impossible place with the fear of the machinery trouble and the listening to the talk of the nonsense. And why do I speak French? I know no Spanish for my native tongue. You Americans, perhaps with your atomic drives and your United States Air Force and your Expedition Mars you have better reason for a man to be speaking French than it is his own native tongue?”

  “Okay, Ruiz,” Wertz told him, “I only wanted to hear you explode. Now what don’t you like about the idea, except that it’s a chemical concept instead of biological?”

  “Non!” Cruzate shouted. “It is you who do not understand. Not I. It is impossible. You do not comprehend either the lichen or the life.”

  “You want to tell me why they grow over more than a mile of bare dust in a day?”

  Cruzate threw the lichen branch back on the bench. “You want to tell me why the spring corn breaks through the soil crust, to come out for the sun?” He shrugged dramatically. “Non, my friend, we see these things, we describe them, we give them the names, but let us not ask ourselves why they come to be. That is the way of things. Why does a man become old? Why does the stone fall? Perhaps it should likewise fly up? You find the answer in your test tubes? Non. You tell me only that the stone falls. You tell me only that it falls in such a way.”

  Wertz creaked the chair back. “You and I are going to have to have a talk about operational analysis one of these days. You’re talking words. Your distinctions are verbal. The distinctions I would like to make are distinctions in the understanding of activity of one kind or another. In any situation upon which we direct our inquiry, a complete analysis of the activity involved would satisfy our inquiry. Maybe there are other things to analyze than activity, but they have not proved necessary for our purposes. Take the question of meanings. If I want to know the meaning of a term I wish to use, I think I must know the conditions under which I will use it. If I want to know the meaning of a term you use, I have to know the conditions that caused you to use it. So I say meanings are operational. They grow out of activities. Don’t talk to me about ‘life’ as if it could exist isolated and pure, like a substance. Talk to me about the activities you want to associate and characterize by the term ‘living,’ which is therefore itself a term naming an activity.”

  Cruzate exploded a bah! “You give me the headache. You should be in the Sorbonne.”

  “Okay,” Wertz said, “I’ll split hairs with you. You tell me why you’re so sure these things have Earth-like life; then, I’ll tell you how they act. Once we see what activity the term ‘growth’ describes here on Mars in the case of the Mars lichens, perhaps we can also discuss the terms ‘living’ and ‘generation’ more calmly.”

  Cruzate exclaimed, “So now we play the game! I tell you what you already know. I describe the lichen plant. Then you tell me I am wrong, because these lichens are different. That I already know.” His voice was climbing toward the Frenchman’s octave. ‘I know also they are of the lichen family. Any botanist recognize these thing at once as a variety of lichen, Ascomycetous fungus living symbiotically with protococcalous algae. Fruticose thallus body, erect and freely branching, like Cladonia, the reindeer moss, except very much more large and more coarse. A first-year student recognize it immediately. Thus are the principles of plant life exhibited here in another world, even as your elements and compounds are to be found the same.”

  “Except that there are countless millions of possible chemical compounds and combinations, few of which we know naturally on Earth—or here. Sure, we’ve found a fungus-like body drawing its sustenance from the chemical soil in a lichen-like manner, breaking down the compound of the soil with lichen-like acids exuded through the mycelium-like sheath of the thallus, as you call it. Sure, there are chlorophyll-bearing, plant-like cells captive within the plant to supply the photosynthesis. The whole thing looks like a lichen. Superficially it acts like a lichen in many ways, but make no mistake, it’s not what you call a lichen at all in its most significant activity. I mean its growth and reproduction. Or have you found the customary spores and sex organs?”

  “It may be they are characteristic of another season. By analogy the plant should have them.”

  “Look, Ruiz, how many planets in the solar system? How do we know? We don’t. We count those we observe. We don’t establish an ideal number in our minds, like the ancients, and say there are five, or some other number that fits a harmony of the spheres. We count them. Likewise there are no sex organs or no spores until we observe them. You can’t establish a phenomenon by analogy with a preconceived pattern. You have to establish it experimentally.”

  “It may be that you have established your explosive generation experimentally? Is it not more likely these plants have what we call the fast life and convert the soil food into the lichen cells with a great quickness? It is common to observe the mycelium of a fungus to grow across the entire field of the microscope while we watch it. In forty-eight hours a speck of fast-growing fungus can advance at a rate of 1/8000 inch a minute, a rapidity incredible. Every advancing cell, it can put out a new side branch every thirty to forty minutes, and each branch, it can advance at the same rate and put out new branches. In twenty-four hours the fungus colony has produce one half mile of mycelium strands. In forty-eight hours it has produce the hundreds of miles of cells. By the analogy why can we not expect these big lichens to grow in large size, as the microscopic Earth fungi can grow in the miniature?”

  Wertz said, “Look, Ruiz, just as I told you, you’re talking in words. You can’t predict events by analogy.” He got up on his feet, the old soreness bearing out against the base of his spine. He was going to get a regular program of exercise going when he got back to Earth and put himself back in some semblance of shape. There was always the threat of diabetes to the thickset man who let himself get fat. Martha would have to quit making so many biscuits and good fried meat gravy. A man couldn’t help stuffing. But a man ought to do something for himself besides live in a laboratory. Had been almost ten years
since he had even so much as played a game of golf. “Ruiz,” he said, “come down to my lab. I want to show you something.”

  Wertz noticed the disorder of his place after Cruzate’s neat workroom. Both benches were cluttered, and most of the jars and impervious flasks on the self-stowing shelves would need careful attention before the take-off. Still, he had his luck. Without his old good luck he might have drudged along for weeks without turning up the Mars isomer. That’s it. I’ll call it the Mars Isomer, he decided. Get a supply of the lichen things back home in good condition and throw a new idea to the annual A.A.A.S. meeting for a change. Dr. Rudolf Wertz of the National Institute will now present a paper on “The Mars Isomer, a Chemical Life Principle.”

  He took up the test tube that held his centimeter or two of the isomer, the product of a truly original attack, if he did say so. “I isolated this stuff from the lichen tips. Now watch. He put a small pinch of a yellowish-brown powder on a filter paper. “Hydrous ferric oxide. I brought along a quantity in the natural earthy state on the possibility that the Vaucouleurian theory might be correct, that it is the constituent of the soil of Mars that gives the planet its red color. I wanted to compare the natural Earth substance with the Mars soil, but they don’t quite match. The Mars mineral is more like the amorphous substance we call ferrite, metallic derivatives of the ferric hydroxide Fe2O2(OH)2. Now the lichen type of plant, as you have just said, consists of two dissimilar organisms, a fungus living married with several algae.”

  Cruzate said, “Symbiosis.”

  “You have the term,” Wertz admitted. “Now, as I understand it, the fungus offers protection from the cold and provides inorganic substances by exuding acids that can decompose what the plant is growing on. The protoplasm of the algae cells at the growing tips manufactures enzymes and organic acids that diffuse through the cell wall into the host material. If the fungus is growing on wood, these digestive chemicals diffuse out into the wood host and break it down into simple sugars. These in turn diffuse into the fungus mycelium and are converted into more fungus. In the lichen the digestive acids, so to speak, can even break down rock as a host to secure what we might call their food. That is correct?”