Not in Solitude [Revised Edition]

by Kenneth F. Gantz

  An alert burst into the earphones. All personnel return to spacecraft immediately. Three times it pre-empted the diaphragms. Then Dane heard the out-parties state their positions and acknowledge compliance, the specimen collectors, the teams scouting the lichen boundary. Something was urgent.

  22

  THUS IT began.

  “Standing order,” Noel told him. “No civilians outside during signal reception.”

  “But this order called in all personnel,” Dane persisted.

  “Special order of the commander. As soon as the signal was reported to him, he extended the order to all personnel.”

  The signal had projected a recognizable map on the photo plane table, a sort of outline aerial view of the terrain immediately around the spacecraft. With the Far Venture almost in the center, it depicted the surroundings over a radius of about eight or nine miles, judging by the position of the boundary of the lichen forest, which run halfway between the greatly out-of-scale image of the spacecraft and the edge of the map. It was still coming in.

  “Look here.” Noel pointed at it. “How many of these white dots do you count?”

  Dane leaned over the image. “Six.”

  Noel took a charting protractor and a rule. Measuring off the positions of the six dots, he jotted down figures on a pad. “If we estimate distances according to the straight-line distance to the lichen boundary, we can approximate their coordinates.” He jabbed at the intercom.

  “Major Noel to Lieutenant McDonald.” The acknowledgment squawked. “Give me the positions last reported by all out-parties.”

  When he had McDonald’s co-ordinates down, he threw his pad on the table. “See for yourself.”

  The correspondence of the two sets of co-ordinate was close.

  Dane nodded meaningfully in the direction of the guard on duty.

  “Step down to 3-high and wait until I call you,” Noel ordered.

  Dane said, “You think the colonel’s right now? You think we’ve got spies now? Or do you think we’ve got Martians?”

  Noel’s dark brows contracted. “The Old Man tell you too?” He nodded. “It might figure.”

  “Look,” Dane said, “any Tong Asia agents here, we brought them. Supposing they could figure out a way to send the signals without being zeroed in. Even if we assume that very big if, they couldn’t have sent this signal.”

  Noel nodded again. “If they were sending from outside, they couldn’t know the positions of all the parties. That what you mean?”

  “Right. And if they were sending from inside someway, even if that were possible, could they know? How could they? Not all the positions are fixed in advance before the parties set out, are they?”

  Noel shook his head. “Only to a general area. I don’t know myself until they report.”

  “We’ve got Martians, Noel,” Dane told him. “Highly intelligent ones. They’ve got us spotted. Someway. Every move.”

  “Where are they?” Noel demanded. “Why don’t they show? What’s the idea of this hide-and-go-seek business?” He went over to the observation ports. “What’s out there but empty sand and low-class vegetation? Where are the minds? They can’t be far away. But whereinhell are they?” He came back and took up some photo copies. “A symbol message came first. You make anything out of it?”

  Dane reached for the prints. The symbols he had seen many times. But some of the pairs and triads were reversed. “Well, you read it or can’t you?”

  “Part of it maybe,” Dane told him. “It says, if it makes any sense at all, its says, Men are other-many. Martians are one. Wait a minute,” he said. “Maybe the reverse order means interrogation. If we put a question mark after that first one, it could ask a question: Men are other-many? Maybe it means, How many men are here? Then the next one wants to tell us there is only one kind of Martian. The rest of it could be a warning to stay in the spacecraft. Literally it says something like, No men out spacecraft.”

  “Maybe our parties are getting close onto them,” Noel said. “They don’t want us exploring around. We might stumble onto something.”

  “Maybe they just don’t like us here period,” Dane said.

  “This thing is not good. I’ve really got to go along with you now. Martians. It’s almost inevitable they are hostile.”

  Dane shook his head. “Invasion from space is a pretty frightening business in any man’s world. They’ve also got to find out about our capabilities and our intent. Whether we intend to harm them or not. It would be a great tragedy if we can’t convince them we are beings that understand good will.”

  “What if they don’t understand it themselves?”

  “We’ve got to try,” Dane told him. “If we fail then the flight of the Far Venture is a colossal failure. Man, we’re face to face with the first intelligent beings Earth men have ever encountered. The conquest of space, if you want to call it that, oughtn’t to be allowed to start out with war and death and destruction. We have higher ideals than that. We just have to make them understood. Someway.”

  Noel said, “I hear you talking. Maybe I’m no idealist by your standards, but first of all I want to see them. I want to know what we have to deal with. That’s what I’ve got to know before anything else.”

  Slowly, with invisible movement, the six dots crept across the signal map, converging on the spacecraft. Dane stood by with Noel while one by one the out-parties came up and entered, and the dots that tracked them vanished one by one until all personnel were inside and the Martian map stood clear.

  Dane said, “Now I’m going to answer their question. If it was a question. We’ve got to make them understand we’re friendly.”

  He began to send the message he had converted to the Martian number code, making and breaking the radar-beam circuit as he had done dozens of times without response since the earliest contact. The long inarticulate generations, he thought, striving to express the forming subtleties of their spirit and finding only broad, dull words on their tongue. Awkwardly he spelled out, We are many men. From not-Mars. Add men to Martians equals good. What are Martians?

  Hopefully he looked at the photo plane table but the map-like reception remained undisturbed. He went back to the switch and began his message again. We are many men. Add men to Martians equals good.

  The map signal began to clear from the opaque glass. While they watched, pictogram symbols came on.

  “They’re answering!” Dane exclaimed. “At last they’re going to answer us!”

  He spelled it out, translating the symbols at sight. “Martians are one. One is good. Not-one is bad. Many men equals bad.”

  “Sounds like a dictator,” Noel commented.

  A flash of light briefly dominated the observation deck. A simultaneous crackling blast like diminutive thunder smote them. They stared at each other.

  “Thunder and lightning?” Noel exclaimed. “Impossible!”

  The flashes and the diminished thunderclaps increased in tempo, flaring at the ports like a barrage of old-time artillery in a historical motion picture.

  “The spark fires!” Dane shouted above the cracking crescendo. “They’re attacking us with the spark fires!”

  Through the ports they saw arcing bolts dart heavily from the distant lichen beds upon the spacecraft.

  “First daytime storm yet,” Noel yelled. “We’re right in the middle of it.”

  “It’s an attack,” Dane shouted again. “They’re trying to burn us up with their electrical discharges.”

  Noel’s face twisted up. He shook his head. “Electrical storm of some kind. Our metal is drawing it.” He jabbed a finger at the intercom. “That thing’s useless in all this. But our metal meteor shield will ground it okay. Nothing to worry about.”

  He could be right, Dane thought for a moment. But it was too pat. The message. An avowal of enmity itself. Then immediately the concentration of discharges on them. No, it was more than probable that the Martians had decided to destroy them. Fearful things from another world. Not to be
trusted. But after the extended and laborious effort to establish a crude exchange of communication, what could have led them to a sudden decision? If it was the message he had sent, they knew everything in it already. Unless it was the one about adding men to Martians. Maybe that meant something different to them than he had meant by it.

  The eye-splitting fires now leaped so rapidly upon them that the sand plain danced crazily under the staccato flashes. From horizon to horizon, up and down the long swing of the lichen beds, the bolts converged against the metallic toadstool hunched up antenna-like on the sands to receive them. It was impossible not to listen for the sounds of dissolution, for creak and groan of straining plates and beams.

  Major Noel shouted below for a messenger, and the buzzers called the Air Force crew to emergency stations. Dane visualized the men hurrying to their posts in the channels and working recesses of the intricate, enormous mechanism. Then Noel was motioning him to go below. He shook his head.

  The spark fire mounted steadily into a vast, flickering concourse, surging wildly over the full sunshine of the Martian noon. They awaited the unknown climax. There was nothing else to do. The circular, domed chamber in the nose of the Far Venture, like the interior of a metallic igloo, inspired no confidence of sustaining the spectacular assault mounted against it, for all its welded and rivet-headed seams. Its multiwired electronic probing devices menacingly threatened the entry of the currents drenching the exterior sheathing and coursing down through it into the ground.

  For forty-two minutes the attack endured. Then suddenly it ceased. As abruptly as if a switch had been pulled. Sun-born light came back to Mars, and a pervasive quiet drowned the heavy staccato of giant firecrackers. All over the Far Venture movement was suspended while the assembly fore-bore to draw breath. Outside, the sands of Mars were as empty as through all the hours since the landing. There were no legions of monstrous beings.

  They had come through. For the moment at least their defenses had held.

  “Look!” Noel exclaimed.

  A few pictogram symbols stood forth on the plane table. Dane read them aloud. “Men move?”

  Noel said, “They’re not too bright if they expect us to answer that. We sit tight and let them come to find out if we’re still alive. We’ll have a few surprises for them.” He went to the phone. “I want all firing stations continuously manned. Double watch on all lookout points. And send two more men up here.” He hung up sharply. “If they want to play rough when they show, we’ll put some real heat on them. Then we’ll discuss things with them some more. Maybe they’ll talk another kind of turkey.”

  “No,” Dane objected. “We don’t want to hurt any of them, except as a last resort.”

  Noel lifted the hatch. “It’s up to Colonel Cragg for the final decision. But they’ve showed their hand.”

  23

  DANE STOOD for a while over the photo plane table, but the incoming signal showed no change. From time to time he went to gaze briefly out over the red terrain. Between the line of the lichen beds with the finger thrust forward at the Far Venture and the line of flat sand hills that completed the surrounding horizon lay nothing but the gentle drifts of the desert.

  At 1217 hours the signal went off. Dane watched closely, but the opaque glass bore only the scanning of the near environs. At 1245 he commented to the command post on the state of his appetite. At 1300 Lieutenant Yudin’s round face rose out of the hatch.

  He said, “I’ve got word for you from Colonel Cragg. Orders, that is.”

  Dane spoke shortly. “Did Colonel Cragg enjoy his lunch?”

  Yudin contemplated him with surprise. “I don’t know. How come you give a damn?”

  “I don’t,” Dane told him. “I’m willing to assume he did. I haven’t had mine yet. You’re an hour late. Supposing I enjoy mine first. Then Cragg can order me all he wants.”

  Yudin was pained. “Dane, you’re a smart fellow. Why don’t you act smart? So you don’t like the man. So he’s a hard man for anyone to like. Right now he couldn’t care less about you and your newspapers. That guy’s got the decisions to make. Right down to the final yes or no that can make him or break him, and maybe save us or lose all our lives. Sure he’s a cinch for a star if he keeps saying the right word. If we ever get back to where they hand out stars. Right now he’s got the sweat. I can’t say I like him too well either, but then I don’t know him—really. No one ever really knows the commander. You always got to remember he sits in a damn hot and lonely seat.”

  Dane viewed the lieutenant with new interest. Misfitting uniform, comic-opera face, voice that suggested anything but leadership, not before had he revealed the consciousness of worth that characterized his fellows. Now he was actually insulted that anyone could suggest his commander’s word was less than law. Dane thought a little wistfully of the absence of this hedgehog loyalty from his own life patterns, like the Amalgamated Press.

  “Okay, Yudin,” he said. “You talked me into it. Even if I starve, let’s have it.”

  “It’s only an order,” Yudin said. “If you’d listened, you’d already be in the mess hall.” He fished out a folded sheet.

  Dane read, “Dr. John Dane. Under no circumstances will you send any messages to the Martians without my prior approval. Colonel Anson Cragg, USAF, Commanding Far Venture.”

  “The deal is this,” Yudin volunteered. “We expect to have the drive ready for a trial take-off tomorrow. We play possum until we’re fully operative. Then we resume contact with the Martians.”

  “Well, at least he admits we’ve got Martians. That’s something.”

  At 1330 Dane left the messroom, pleased with his bellyful of German-grilled knackwurst, baked beans, and home-fried potatoes. Now he had the story of the electrical attack to write up for his thickening sheaf of untransmitted dispatches. He decided to go back up to the observation-deck typewriter.

  On 3-high the fire-control center stood full alert. Dane looked in through the glassite panel at the eight men manning its electronic finders and gunsights. They swung in their seats, each half encircled by banks of dials and switches, the flowing scopes and lighted red alert buttons casting up their faces in the darkened cubicles. In the middle of the shadows the fire-control officer sat at his big radar plane table, waiting for the commander to whisper release into his phone for ordnance ranging from caliber .50 machine guns to fire rockets and nuclear missiles powerful enough to blast across a metropolis.

  At 1450 Lieutenant Yudin interrupted his clacking concentration. “Come here and take a look at this, will you?”

  Airman Humphries had his finger pressed against the opaque surface of the radar photo plane table. Dane followed it to the image of the lichen peninsula.

  “It looks longer to me,” Humphries said.

  Dane got out last night’s scope pictures. He put a pair of dividers on a print taken at 0400 and measured off the peninsula. When he laid the dividers against the scale, he whistled. ‘It’s grown about 500 yards closer today.”

  Humphries’ jaw lengthened seriously. “It’s done it since noon. I’d of noticed it when I came on duty.”

  Dane said, “That would be mighty fast growing.” He thought of the explosive generation of the lichens inside the spacecraft. “It doesn’t make too much of a projection on the table face. Maybe you just didn’t notice it.”

  “I always notice that strip,” Humphries insisted. “I always look at it. When I came on duty, it wasn’t past that.” He poked a pencil at one of the engraved grid lines. “That’s for sure.”

  “You’d better report it,” Dane told Yudin. He sharpened a grease pencil to a fine point and drew it across the opaque glass athwart the tip of the peninsula.

  Major Noel came up at once. He studied the image on the oscilloscope. Then he took up the dividers and repeated Dane’s measurement of the 0400 photograph. He called the cartographer for a chart of the region drawn up from the aerial photographs taken of the landing site before the Far Venture had settled down on the s
and. When he was satisfied with his data, he carefully plotted the new extension of the growth.

  Dane watched him sketch in the line connecting the plotted positions. It was no mere, prosaic pencil line that grew on the paper to show official concern. The precise marking on the chart brought it close, like the sweep of an invading army overlaid on an operations map.

  “Keep a man on it,” Noel told Yudin. “It hasn’t extended any in the last fifteen minutes, but it may take another spurt. I want to know immediately about any detectable growth.”

  Yudin nodded at Humphries. After Noel had got through the hatch, he said, “Here. Like this.” He took the dividers and set them to span from the tip of the peninsula to the first grid line behind it. “Now you can check it exactly.”

  No observable extension occurred until 1547. Dane was staring through glasses at the dirty line of the main lichen beds against the reddish flat. Humphries’ startled shout was like a blow. One he had been waiting for. He turned slowly and went over to the table, breathing deeply and thinking that wearing the gravity boots was like limping, a tired man’s limp.

  “It’s moving,” Humphries gasped. “It’s moving so fast you can see it move.”

  Minutely but perceptibly the luminous line crept forward from the point of the dividers he held to mark its tip.

  Yudin went to the phone and spoke into the mouthpiece. He broke the connection and dialed another number. “Yudin calling Major Noel,” he repeated. After a moment he said, “Sir, Yudin. It’s creeping closer. Yes, sir. About one hundred yards.” He listened a minute and put up the instrument.

  “He already knew it,” he said. “They’ve been watching the monitors at fire control or command. It was enough to show up there.” He seemed disappointed. Even affronted. As if his big table had been slighted.

  Rapidly now, the fingery apparition on the face of the oscilloscope lengthened toward the Far Venture, obviously pointing out to it even though it was yet three and a half miles away.