Not in Solitude [Revised Edition]

by Kenneth F. Gantz

  “Reasonable questions,” Cragg dug at him. “Now are we to understand that you’re going to tell us?”

  “I may be,” Dane said. “We have discovered only one form of life. As far as we have been able to investigate, we have entered an antiseptic world. Nothing lives in it except lichens. Why?”

  “An equally obvious question would be why don’t you come to the point?”

  “For the sake of making your recording complete, let’s add one more preliminary. The reason is that one form of life is so completely dominant that it has been able to exterminate any other life.”

  “If you mean the lichens,” Cragg said, “what about your Martians? How come they were able to live?”

  “Now I come to my point,” Dane answered. “My first point. The answer is, the lichens are the Martians.”

  For a minute they were still; then Colonel Cragg grunted. He looked with mock patience at Lieutenant McDonald. “Complete with equipment to broadcast television messages, I suppose. Lichens!” he burst out.

  “Excuse me, sir,” McDonald interrupted. He pushed his headset up from his other ear. “Captain Finerty reports that the burning party is ready to go out.”

  “Hold it!” Dane exclaimed. “If you please,” he added, not wanting to add to the man’s temper. “The lichens will kill them. Like last night. At least let me say what I’ve got to say.”

  McDonald looked at the colonel. Cragg chewed at his lip but he nodded.

  This man is not stupid at all, Dane thought suddenly. He’s not missing any bet. “Supposing,” he said, “the lichens might not only be individual plants but could also be, each one of them, members of a colony of plants made up of a lot of lichens that function as a whole, as one big plant. As an entity, I mean. We have colony plants like that on Earth among the lowest forms. In a college botany course I took in algae and fungi we made drawings of them under the microscope. I’ve always remembered one in particular called Volvox. The name reminded me of the vox humana stop, and I’ve never liked pipe-organ music.”

  Cragg hitched around to another position in his confining chair. “You’re doing one helluva lot of talking, as usual. Without showing me anything. How about let’s skip the biographical details? They’re not very fascinating. Then you can get down to the point. I suppose you’re going toward one. How come I’m always telling you to get to the point? You ought to talk less and say more. That goes for your writing too,” he added. “In plain English, how in hell could lichens be Martians and send messages over the radar? That’s what you said. That’s what we’re waiting to hear about.”

  It wasn’t any time to get sore. Even to point out that that monologue itself was quite a speech for a man who admired brevity. “Volvox,” Dane said, “is a hollow microscopic globe made up of thousands of independent one-celled plants connected by strands of cytoplasm, so that the colony functions like a multicellular individual instead of a mere physical aggregate. It reproduces as an individual to form new colonies. Forms eggs inside the colony, so to speak. What if the lichen plants here on Mars are formed into colonies something on the same order, individual plants linking themselves together to form a superindividual? Then what if the colonies have evolved intelligence, so that each colony is like a brain, one brain? Then each individual lichen plant in the colony might be the equivalent of one brain cell, or a cluster of brain cells. Just like the neurons and clusters in our own brains.”

  “The spark fires!” Cragg exclaimed.

  “Right,” Dane said. “The spark fires could very well be the discharges of mental action, just like the electrical currents in our own brains, only on a very large and powerful scale. Assume that the lichen colonies cover a large area and are all brain, then the network patches of spark fire are mighty suggestive to me of neural patterns, with the big bolts to connect them in larger associations, just as in human conscious thought.”

  “Now I’m damned!” McDonald gulped. “If you’ll excuse me, sir.”

  “You and I both, Lieutenant,” Cragg told him.

  “It has to be right,” Dane said. “By two or three hours after sunset the lichens are cold frozen. The spark fires die down and disappear. In the morning the plants warm up, and metabolism gets under way, and we get messages, starting about ten o’clock. By then they’re warm enough to think. You remember how the patterns of the fires built up around Dr. Pembroke’s scout and how they focused on the spacecraft. How they are aware of us I don’t know. Maybe by projecting electromagnetic radiation and receiving reflections that are cast back. As we do with radar. Maybe that’s the way they communicate with us. One thing for sure, they can concentrate their mental electricity, assuming I’m right, and project it beyond themselves. The way they did at us last night. It all adds up,” he urged. “The messages say the Martians are coming. Then the lichens grow out and surround us. We haven’t found any other life here. Maybe long ago they did away with all other life. Now they can’t endure the thought of any life but their own. Maybe the very idea of another life horrifies them and shocks them. Maybe it frightens them. As we would be frightened by, say, the ants mutating into an intelligence like our own, but with mores descended from the folkways of ants. It adds up. They have covered Mars themselves, in a moral solitude of identical life. Now we come. A different life. Therefore evil. So they will destroy us. If they can.”

  Cragg shook his head. “It sounds impossible, Dane. If you’re right, then they grew themselves out to reach us. Possibly to corrode the hull. But that doesn’t account for the failure of the drive to activate as it should.”

  “But it does account for it!” Dane said. “Remember the radiation we experienced the first days we were here? What if they are able to emanate that? You remember the radiation built up in the daytime and reached its peak late in the afternoon. Then fell away to almost nothing at night. That points to the lichens again. When they noctivate, nothing much happens. When they are awake, we get messages, radiation, and spark fires. What if that radiation was meant to kill us off? Maybe along with it the lichens can also exert an electromagnetic field, such as Vining thinks has got us caught. Maybe they are purposively exerting a field that throws out the balances of the drive so we can’t get away.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes,” Cragg said.

  “How can you fight a vegetation that grows all over the planet?” Lieutenant McDonald burst out. “There must be billions of plants. They grow faster than you can watch them.”

  “Maybe we might,” Dane told him. “There is one more thing. It puzzled me, so I thought I was all wrong. This morning we got messages at 0700 hours. How could the lichens send them? With the sun up only thirty or forty minutes they would still be frozen. I was sure I had everything all thought out last night. I even wrote it down. Then when the messages came in so early, they upset the whole idea. Until I thought of something else. That was the one that scared me, but maybe it also gives us a chance to get away.”

  He went over to the globe of Mars in the corner and set it spinning on its axis. “There are vast lichen forests all around the globe. The sun is always shining on them. Somewhere it will be daytime and they will be awake and fully alive. The early messages simply came from lichens where it was already later than ten o’clock in the morning.”

  “The colonies linked together,” McDonald said.

  Dane said, “Maybe. It’s the only answer that explains the early messages.”

  McDonald said, “Jesus! I say again how do we fight something like that! If we could destroy the plants around here, the rest would simply grow more. There wouldn’t be any way to kill them all off!”

  “Unless we find a way to break their hold on the drive, we haven’t got a chance,” Dane said.

  Colonel Cragg was studying the wall charts of the planet. “There are several million square miles of them. Impossible to blast them all.”

  Dane said, “I wasn’t thinking that, but of course it’s a possibility. What I was thinking was that if we could only apply enough forc
e to the Martian colonies to shock them severely, their attention might be relaxed or diverted enough to cause them to lose control of our drive. Then we could take off before they recovered.”

  “You got that one figured out too?” Cragg wanted to know.

  “Maybe this might work,” Dane went on. “We know they’re sensitive to our radar transmissions, because they can get the messages we send. What if we transmitted a series of high-energy waves? We might be able to upset their mental processes temporarily. Maybe an overpowering transmission from us might have the same effect on the lichen brains through their receiving organs, whatever they are, as tremendously loud noises do on man. Maybe we can shell-shock them. Or maybe it might jam their mental currents and weaken their field of force against our drive. Assuming Vining is right.”

  “You told anybody about this?” Cragg demanded.

  Dane said, “Not yet.”

  “We’ll try it out,” Cragg said abruptly. “Get Major Beloit and Lieutenant Yudin in on this,” he ordered McDonald. “I want all the power we can put into the big peripheral antenna. I want all radar equipment—all the spare stuff—assembled and power line laid in and everything ready to blast out the granddaddy of all jamming in an hour. Whatever you do, I don’t want any testing to get into the antenna. When you’re ready, let me know.”

  He nodded at Dane. “If your Mr. Martians can be jammed, maybe like you think, we’ll give them one hell of a shock.”

  He grabbed at the hand wheel of his chair and rolled around at McDonald again. “Tell Major Beloit that the drive is to be ready to try another take-off in the next hour. I don’t want any disassembly or adjustments that make it inoperative. Not unless I personally approve them.”

  McDonald said, “Yessir.”

  “Sergeant Peeney,” Cragg plowed on, “I want our primary scientists in the mess hall right away. I want an opinion out of our head think gents before we start something.”

  “What’s the matter, you think they might retaliate?” Dane asked him. He hadn’t thought of that. But how could they? If it worked.

  Cragg looked surprised. “I always expect retaliation when I attack. If I’m attacked I try to devise a successful counterattack. Why should I expect less of my enemy? Even if he is a Martian and I don’t know one damn thing about him.”

  29

  CRAGG PUT down his headset. He nodded at Dane. “All set.”

  The minute hand stood at seven minutes before 1100 hours. Dane looked at Major Noel. He was watching Cragg with the intensity Dane had seen on the faces of the roulette players at Golden Beach. The memory of the Gulf Coast smote him, lazing under the cumulous puffs, bright white and high over the sand splashed with girl colors. A new life, he resolved. If we make it okay. A new girl and the rest of the long Gulf summer to look for pleasure. Maybe an hour or two a day to write up the journal and cull out his photographs. Maybe most days to forget Mars as anything but a stained speck in the south-east evening sky. It was impossible to think that the beach would never come for him again.

  Cragg was giving Lieutenant McDonald his orders. Pour out the shock waves for ten minutes. Then they would try the take-off.

  He turned to Noel. “You will go to fire control and remain there for emergency, all guns and weapons ready. Report when you’re ready at your station.” He snapped his chair around smartly. “Sergeant Peeney, sound the alert. Take-off will be at 1110 hours. All personnel will now remain secure at their stations.”

  All at once Dane felt that now or never was the time to say his piece.

  “Can you wait just one minute?” he said quickly. “There’s one more thing I ought to tell you and Noel both, while we’re all here together. I’ve got positive proof that Dr. Pembroke couldn’t have knifed Colonel Cragg. Absolute airtight proof.”

  Noel swung back. “Yeah. That I’d like to hear. It’d have to be good and airtight.”

  Cragg said, “We’ll get on with our present business, gentle-men, if you don’t mind. Time enough later for that.”

  “We don’t know what’s going to happen here in the next few minutes,” Dane said. “I’ve got it all written down and sealed in that envelope I told you about. It’s among my papers addressed to Major Noel, to be delivered to him if anything happens to me. It ought to be told first, before we take any more chances. So more than one will know about it.”

  “Noel?” Cragg said. “Why Noel?”

  Dane said, “Because if I’m right, you’re certainly still on somebody’s list. And I know without any doubt I’m right.”

  “You’ve got a lot of envelopes around, haven’t you, son?”

  “It’s pretty simple, after it occurred to me,” Dane said. “I should have thought of it a long time ago.”

  Cragg moved impatiently. “Skip the preliminaries. Let’s get right down to it.”

  “It’s just this,” Dane said. “The assumption has been made all along that Dr. Pembroke left the infirmary when the nurse went to mess from 1730 to 1800.”

  “That’s the only time the door was unguarded,” Noel said.

  “There had to be at least one other time, and a later one at that, Dane told them. “Because Dr. Pembroke was still in his bed at about 1830. Here’s how I know. We started receiving the first Martian signals that night about 1815. Almost immediately I called Captain Spear and asked him to check to see if anyone was outside the Far Venture. A few minutes later Captain Spear reported everybody present and accounted for. If Dr. Pembroke hadn’t been in bed where he was supposed to be, Spear would have found it out.”

  Cragg said, “Sergeant, check the log.”

  Peeney flipped the pages, selected one, and ran his finger down the margin. “Yes, sir,” he reported. “It’s here. Just before the entry about the first signals coming in.”

  “Read it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Peeney frowned at the page and cleared his throat. “‘Checked all personnel for presence inside the spacecraft,’” he read. “‘Requested by Dr. Dane. Dr. Dane reported reason to believe one or more personnel outside contrary to order of the commander. Head count completed at 1831. All present.’”

  “There you have it,” Dane said. “The colonel was attacked immediately after 1800 when Captain Spear relieved him at the command post. Dr. Pembroke was not guilty. He couldn’t possibly have been. He was still in his bed at 1830 or very shortly before.”

  Noel said, “Unless he slipped out and did his knife act and went back to bed and then slipped out again after the head count.”

  Dane said, “After 1800 the nurse was on duty. He couldn’t have got back in. Once maybe, watching for his chance, he might have slipped out when the nurse was in the john or something. But not in and out like it was payday at the bank. Not on that tight schedule. That nurse’s station is right at the entrance and he sits there all the time. You also want to remember that Dr. Pembroke was still unconscious at 1600, when Captain King made his afternoon examination. Huh-uh,” Dane told them. “You’ve lost your candidate.”

  Noel said, “Where’s that put you, Dane?”

  Dane said, “Right back on the observation deck. At 1800 I was climbing the ladders to get there.”

  Cragg said, “That’s enough for now. We get away from here, we’ll have a full-dress investigation. I know one thing. I didn’t put that knife in my own back.”

  “One other thing,” Noel said. “Spear’s roll call wasn’t a hundred per cent perfect. If he made it around 1830, he ought to have discovered that the colonel didn’t answer and sent somebody to see why.”

  “He wouldn’t check on me,” Cragg said in a tone of affront. “Besides, he had just relieved me at the command post at 1800. He knew I was in the spacecraft. Whatinhell do you think I’d be doing outside!”

  Noel said, “It was just a thought.”

  “Let’s get on with this jamming idea,” Cragg ruled impatiently. “Sergeant, change the alert. Take-off will now be at 1115.”

  Peeney flipped the switches and addressed a low, slow voice to
the microphone. Neither Cragg nor McDonald moved when a jumpy buzzer gouged at the hushed command post.

  Peeney flipped another switch and listened.

  “Major Noel at station, sir. All weapons are ready.”

  The tardy minutes counted down. Cragg sat his wheel chair with irreproachable calm. Dane thought of Grant on his log in the evening of Shiloh’s first day. Sergeant Peeney stood at the signal board like an acrobat on edge for his routine. Lieutenant McDonald perched a hip on the chart table, swung a leg to and fro.

  At last Cragg moved his eyes, sweeping over them, each one, and said, “Here we go. Have Lieutenant Yudin apply full power to the antennas.”

  Peeney pulled a key and spoke into his microphone. After a moment he said, “Full power on now, sir.”

  It was anti-climax. Something visible or at least audible should happen. Dane needed events. He knew the unseeable, silent power was surging outward from their human island, but there was no difference now between four men waiting in a sealed, assault-proof chamber and what there had been before Cragg had given the word for action.

  While the seconds ticked off, they held their tight tableau. The commander being silent, the others were constrained to silence. Dane felt the oppressive weight of it, heavy on the man who sat comtemplative and outwardly indifferent among them.

  Then there was no more suspense. Cragg leaned forward and said, “Start the take-off.”

  Peeney chucked a key on the communications panel. McDonald stood briskly up from the chart table and spoke into a microphone, “Commence take-off.”

  Cragg said, “Ten per cent power.”

  McDonald repeated it in his microphone.

  One of the banked speakers came alive, sporting its red pilot light. “Ten per cent power recorded.”

  Cragg said, “Work it up to twenty-five.”

  McDonald repeated the order into the microphone.