Not in Solitude [Revised Edition]

by Kenneth F. Gantz

  Noel’s eyes slid into his and locked. “An hour ago I was told you had a record for imagination, but don’t try to make a fool out of me with a bunch of wild ideas. I want to know two things. First, what you really know, if anything. Second, why have you been feeding Lieutenant Yudin a lot of stuff and nonsense?”

  “What’s the matter, Major? Your nerves acting up?” Dane said bluntly.

  Noel laid down the straightedge carefully, feeling for the desk top, his hard eyes unswerving, staring at him as if a steel circle held the two of them immovably together.

  Then a change, almost of friendliness, came over him. The official mask relaxed. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t want to be peremptory with you, Dr. Dane. And I don’t expect any man to take it lying down if I am. I lost two men this afternoon and two friends. I can’t forget that I am at least temporarily responsible for an important mission of the United States Air Force that includes the safe return of this spacecraft and all aboard. Both that mission and our return are mysteriously endangered. I’ve got to know anything you might have learned or what you might really suspect about these messages we have been receiving. First of all, I’ve got to know why you’re so sure they aren’t just faked someway.”

  Dane thought a minute. “Well, in the first place, we would have to assume somebody aboard has capabilities we don’t know about ourselves. Before they could fake the pictogram symbols, for example, and tap them to a radar screen. That’s a pretty big assumption right there. And all because somebody’s crazy? That’s not enough for me either. Why go to all that assumption, just because it’s hard to believe there are intelligent Martians on what we call a desert planet?”

  Noel listened without interruption, with the skill of a man accustomed to detailed, factual briefings. Dane began at the beginning. He sketched in the background of the number table he had put together and explained the means it gave for reply to the Martians. He wrote down the symbols for the sentences he had solved, ending with the one that queried, “What are men?”

  “With your permission,” he went on, “I want to state again that I have had nothing to do either with the stoppage of the drive or with the attack on Colonel Cragg. I want my release from arrest. I want to answer these signals, and I want unrestricted opportunity to build up a vocabulary of symbols for the possibility of detailed communication. We are on the verge of one of the great events of human history. We have made first contact with minds from another world. The significance of that contact dwarfs everything else connected with this voyage. And everything else in our century. Even the fact of this interplanetary flight itself.”

  Noel said, “If you are right, there are two things that we’ve got to do—not just one. If there really are Martians, we’ve got to find out who and what they are. We’ve to find out how advanced a civilization they have, and especially if they are any threat to Earth on future flights here. But second, and this is the one that counts, we’ve got to get the information back to Earth. To do that, we’ve got to get off this planet.”

  He smiled frostily. “I’m going to release you from arrest. You will give your full attention to developing friendly communication with the Martians, if any. I won’t say I’m ready to agree with you that there are. But I’m going to follow through with you. For a working assumption, at least. I’ve got to. You will exercise your activity through Lieutenant Yudin. He’ll be instructed to give you all the help we can.”

  Dane stood up, exultant despite a thought about how imprisonment scars a man’s independence. Suddenly angry with his joy, he had to say it. “Am I to take it you’ve decided I’m clear? Or is it just that you need my help?”

  “It looks like you’re doing better with the messages than the rest of the staff. But there’s one thing you can take for sure,” Noel snapped. “You’re not my candidate for the man who stuck that knife in the colonel. If you were, you’d rot before I’d turn you lose.”

  The lips tightened again. The mask was back. “One thing more I want you to understand. You civilians are on board as technical experts and advisers. You are not to interfere in any way with the operation of this spacecraft or the duties of its crew.”

  Dane said, “Have it anyway you like. I’m not looking for a medal.”

  “Good.”

  “Since you’ve been so thoughtful as to clear me of suspicion of attempted murder, you have somebody else in mind?”

  “I didn’t say you were clear of suspicion. I said I didn’t think you did it. You ought to know who I’ve got in mind. I understand you’ve already put in your yell about it.”

  Dane grunted his disgust. “You’d better wash your face on that one. It’s really out on a limb! Dr. Pembroke couldn’t do such a thing, no matter what condition he was in. Mentally or otherwise.” He struggled to hold his voice level. “I’ll tell you what I told your stooge Yudin. There’s a murderer on this ship. And if he tried for Colonel Cragg once, he’ll probably try again.”

  “You ought to be glad I take Pembroke for my man. How-ever”—Noel shrugged—“Colonel Cragg is not so sure about Pembroke.”

  “Cragg!” Dane exclaimed. “I thought he was still out.”

  Noel shook his head. “Negative. He revived enough to say a few words last night and he’s better this morning.”

  “Well,” Dane shot at him impatiently, “that ought to settle it. Who did he say it was?”

  Noel shrugged. “It was dark in the passage and the knifeman got him from behind.”

  “You mean he doesn’t know who stabbed him?”

  “No, he’s not certain. He’s not sure at all. But he doesn’t much think it was Pembroke. He seems to remember a last-minute impression that it was a big man. Too big for Pembroke. Say more your size.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dane demanded. “What are you trying to say?”

  Noel shrugged again. “I’m not trying to say anything. Except that the colonel doesn’t really know who did knife him. But he does think it could have been you.”

  “Me!” Dane shouted. “That’s impossible. He couldn’t see anything that didn’t happen!”

  “That,” Noel added, “is only his suspicion. Not a certain fact.”

  “Thanks!” Dane told him.

  18

  THEY HAD made him fairly snug in an emptied supply room on 3-high deck. A standard service cot had been bolted to the floor and made up with fresh white linens. Two blue Air Force blankets were tautly tucked in and turned down. A clothes closet with shelves and hooks and a wide shelf to serve him for a table had been contrived out of packing-case plywood and angle irons. He even had an extra stool for company and a folding canvas chair for reading.

  A clothes closet was not much good without clothes, he decided. He went to the quartermaster’s office and signed a chit for Air Force shirts, pants, socks, boots, underwear, sweaters, a kind of work jacket he liked, fatigue coveralls, toilet articles, a billed work cap, writing materials, and a stack of towels.

  While he shoved the stuff into a duffel bag, he saw that he had omitted to ask for shoes. Once the spacecraft was underway and the thrust was converting inertia into the effect of gravity, crew and passengers would dispense with the weighted boots and return to conventional footgear. Maybe he had subconsciously lost all confidence. If they couldn’t take off, he would certainly not be wearing ordinary shoes again.

  Later he went up the ladders to the observation deck. It was already dark outside, but the eastern front flamed with the spark fires. The display was the most intense yet. The snapping long bolts leaped almost steadily from the ground in flashing arcs over the horizon.

  He glanced at Airman First Class Humphries, stolidly on guard with the revolving beam of the sweep-light. He knew that the man was covertly inspecting him as much as the periodically illumined environs of the spacecraft.

  What genuine meeting of Martian and man minds could ever be, with no mutual values for a beginning? What understanding beyond the simplicity of a plus b equals c? It would take generations of mutual
tolerance and effort rare on Earth among men themselves. And tolerance and effort to understand, they themselves were Earth values.

  Dane was dismayed and depressed. His grand scheme of communication with the Martians collapsed to guessing at nonsense riddles.

  A tremendous arcing bolt leaped skyward and over the far curve of the world. For an hour the fires flashed wildly, the single discharges melding into an incoherent pyrotechnic that ringed the eastern sky like cannon fire in a great night battle.

  Airman Humphries broke his silence. He had never seen the fires “so bad.”

  “What do you really think it really is, sir? I mean what’s causing it? Lightning wouldn’t come up out of the ground would it?”

  It might, Dane told him. “If something on the ground could generate a large positive charge in one area and a large negative charge in another. In that case something like lightning might discharge between them. The charges would have to be tremendous, though.”

  Humphries followed his gaze to the radar photo plane table. Its opaque glossy surface boiled with light. “You don’t think it’s lightning, do you?”

  “No, I don’t suppose we ought to say it’s lightning, in the sense of Earth lightning,” he said. “Although it’s obvious it’s a form of static electricity.” He chose the words carefully. “It is very probable that the lichen plants generate charges during the heat of the day that build up by early night, before the cold numbs them. You can see local arcing in the form of the big networks in local patches. Then the local build-up must rise high enough to discharge to some other local network several miles away. Our pressure suits must either repel the charges or ground them some way.” He bought of Tesla effects. “We have certainly felt no electrical effect out among the plants.”

  He swung around on the silence.

  Humphries stared at the face of the plane table. “Come here,” he whispered. “Quick!”

  With two strides Dane was beside him. Messages again. He recognized some of the signs, but from the number of large and new ones something new was being attempted. “The camera!” he said sharply. “You forgot the camera.” He seized its overhead suspension and swung it down to bear on the receiving glass.

  “It sent a picture!” Humphries’ voice was shaky. “It sent a picture of that guy Houck that got killed out in the lichens.”

  “Nonsense,” Dane said brusquely. He locked the camera in the rack and started its motor. “These signs are simple line-and-dot symbols. How would you send a man’s picture into a radarscope?”

  “I saw it. Plain as life!” Humphries insisted. With his hands he measured off two thirds the area of the screen. “It was his face. Plain as day and dead-looking.”

  Dane said, “I won’t say you didn’t see it.” He waited for the boy to control himself. “Visual phenomena are still not too well understood. It’s been proved possible that we actually see a great many things we just think we see.” That one really floundered. “I mean our eyes and our nerves can fool us.”

  “I know what I saw.” Humphries rebelled, face-strained. “When I saw the foot and the legs and the lichens around the body I thought I was just seeing things that looked like them. But the face was plain. Jesus, it was looking right at me! Right there! You’d of seen it too if you’d been looking. You couldn’t miss it. It took up pretty near the whole screen.”

  “Okay,” Dane told him. “So you saw it. Relax and tell me about it.”

  “I just did tell you about it.”

  “I mean how long did the pictures stay on the screen? What did they look like? Were there any other signs or symbols with them? What did you see first?”

  Humphries looked at him blankly.

  “Calm down, fellow. Take it easy. Let’s take it one at a time. What did you see first?” Dane repeated.

  Humphries tried to think. “The feet. The feet were first. Feet and legs. In a suit. But before that there were some of the other signs like we’ve been receiving.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “They came awful fast. Just on and off. Then something else. I think the shoulders in the lichens came on twice, though. Then the face. Plain as day.”

  “This face?” Dane asked him. “Think back. Was it in outline? Like you draw a face with a pencil? Or solid, more like a photograph?”

  Humphries shook his head. “I didn’t have no time to think about that sort of thing. It just plain scared me half out of my pants, seeing this dead guy’s face looking up at me.

  “Think again,” Dane pushed him. “You saw it. Plain as day, you said.” He grabbed up a pencil and sketched a rough outline of a human face. “Was it just lines like this? Or was it filled in like a photograph?”

  Humphries nodded.

  “Which? Which one, man? You mean it looked like a photograph instead of like a line drawing?”

  Humphries nodded again. “It looked like a real picture coming over the television, only not so plain. Plain enough to tell who it was all right, though.”

  “Couldn’t have been your own reflection, by any chance?”

  Humphries’ mouth straightened. “Look, fellow, I’m reporting what I saw to Lieutenant Yudin. I know a reflection when I see one. Take it or leave it, whatever you want. I make my report to my officers. Not to you.”

  19

  THE MESSAGES from “outside” had become the big and serious confrontation, dwarfing even the trouble with the drive.

  Airman Humphries had been right enough about the pictures. At 1447 hours the next afternoon the Martian, as Dane sometimes thought of the sender of the signals because of its continual references to itself as the “One,” began suddenly to transmit a varied stream of the photograph-like pictures that Humphries had described. Interspersed among the established number symbols were pictures of Houck, of men in pressure suits, of lichens growing in various patterns, including the plant peninsula running out to a very passable portrayal of the spacecraft. And then came the disturbing fragments of scenes from within the spacecraft.

  “How do they know what the inside of the Far Venture looks like?” Noel fretted. “How could they get inside to spy on us. Maybe you were right about them being microscopic.”

  “They are not inevitably hostile,” Dane told him.

  That, Noel came back, was yet to be determined. In the meantime it was evident they were very close. It would be folly to regard them otherwise than as potentially hostile and dangerous.

  The pictures resembled what the photographic men called reticulated negatives, illumined from below. They lacked all fine detail, but the identity of the images was nevertheless unmistakable, the outlines realistically sure and the shadows and highlights contrasty but showing some tonal value. Most of the “shots” from within the Far Venture offered no apparent relevancy to their association with each other. There was one of a ladder, another of a man climbing a ladder. There was one of a man lying on a cot, another of the empty cot. Some showed men climbing into, or out of, the airlock.

  Among the yet uncoded picture sequences that Dane thought were ideogrammatic, two at least, if his inference was correct, were not assuring.

  The oft-repeated sequence of the death picture of Houck among the lichens and one of a pressure suit standing up could very well say, Living men will die, or more directly, Death to the invader. More disturbing inference might easily be drawn from the juxtaposition of generative components of the drive with clumps of lichens. Considering the corrosive quality of the lichen plant, maybe in some way even an instrument of power or productive of a weapon for the Martians—acid war—this sequence might be intended to say, We have destroyed your means of escape.

  Noel was right, of course. The Martians would be dangerous at the least hostile move of the other-world invaders. What they might regard as a hostile act was unimaginable. To a worm the tenderest songbird would be a horrendous, devouring monster, cruel and implacable.

  “They are probably very much afraid of us,” Dane said to him. “To them our physical appearance mus
t be revolting, if not terrifying. Our size may be enormous. Inadvertently we may have harmed or even killed some of them. We’ve got to convince them of our good will, but how to do it when we don’t even have any good guesses about what kind of life they are?”

  For three days the Martians continued to transmit—and ignore all replies. The one-way communications were spasmodic, coming in at various hours of the afternoon or early night but never for longer than a few minutes at a time. The careful teaching procedure of earlier transmissions remained, but there the Martians stopped. Apparently they were indifferent to any sign of understanding from their pupils.

  “It’s a peculiar business,” he told Major Noel at supper. “They teach us a way to talk to them, but they pay no attention to anything we send out. It begins to look as though all the curiosity is ours. Why aren’t they as curious about us as we are about them? An encyclopedia of questions waiting to be answered. Earth comes to Mars. What are we like? Where are we from? Yet they try to teach us how to talk to them and then ignore us.”

  The sharp-twisted features lit up. “Maybe the bastards are exclusive. Maybe they’re just getting ready to give us our orders. All we will have to do is say, ‘Understand and will comply.’” He pushed the bottle of calvados closer to Dane’s elbow. “We’ll have to get it over to them that we don’t want to play rough but that we can if we have to. And plenty.”

  Dane said, “It would be a great pity. A confession of the inadequacy of intelligence.”

  Noel measured himself out a nightcap. “It’s too bad. But what else can we expect? I suppose a guy like you would know about the big flying-saucer scares two or three generations ago. Everybody in those days just naturally took it for granted that if there were really beings coming to Earth from another world, they would be dangerous and hostile.” He tossed off his brandy and stood up. “I’m for the bunk. It’s a long day in this big can.”