Not in Solitude [Revised Edition]

by Kenneth F. Gantz

  “That’s about ten feet,” Wertz announced after they had taken a few steps. “Ready or not, here I come.”

  It glared at them steadily. A few seconds ago they had the only light on a pitch-dark planet. Now it was there. Steady and menacing. A tiny point of light. Low down, if not actually at the bed of the gully, and about the length of a football field ahead, it had suddenly appeared at the side of the shape they stalked.

  Dane realized they had halted. “You see what I see?” He forced his voice level. He sounded flat to himself rather than calm.

  To escape the rising dust, they eased forward with elaborate care. A full minute after the question McDonald said, “Yeh. I see it all right. The next thing is, what is it?”

  Wertz said, “A very good idea would be to wait right here for daylight. Another twenty minutes and we’ll have broad daylight.”

  “We wait here for twenty minutes, that means we’re sitting ducks for anything that’s interested in us,” McDonald said.

  Dane snapped off his handlight. “Cut your lights a second.”

  “That’s a bright boy,” Wertz snarled. “You think darkness is going to hide you, you’d better hope your ghosts have got eyes like ours. What makes you think they see with light?”

  “I don’t know,” Dane said. “Just cut all the lights for five seconds. While I count to five. I want to try something.”

  Afterwards he wondered why he couldn’t have explained instead of arguing. With the first instant they stood unseen to each other in the crowding dark, relief flooded through him. “You see it now?” he urged them triumphantly. “You see it any more? Now let’s have the lights back on,” he said.

  There it was again. The speck of light, but no longer so frightening.

  Wertz swore. “A reflection! A damn reflection!”

  McDonald said, “I don’t mind saying it scared me stiff.”

  “What’s doing the reflecting?” Wertz demanded. “You got any brilliant ideas on what’s shiny enough around here to reflect light?”

  “So we go see,” Dane said. “We just walk up ahead and find out.” A helmet. It had to be a helmet.

  A few more steps and McDonald halted again. He pulled at his belt cloth and wiped the glassite of his vizor, playing his light on the dark shape of the thing ahead, now plainly roundish, with broad bulk near the ground. “It’s not a man,” he announced, moving on. “Whatever it is, it’s not a man Looks like a big pile of something or other.”

  They didn’t have that much with them, Dane thought. Dr. Pembroke and his men couldn’t have had enough with them to make any kind of a pile.

  “Lichens!” McDonald burst out, not halting this time. He wiped his vizor. “Lichens. A big pile of lichens. Right in the middle of the ditch.”

  Dane kept his own light on the brightness that dulled as they approached. Something to the left of the pile. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a helmet.

  Twenty feet away he recognized it. “A specimen can! A plain ordinary everyday specimen can.”

  “It gave me a bang-out I’ll remember for a while,” McDonald said. “I really thought it was an eye or something watching us and shining up in our lights. You suppose they left it here on purpose?”

  Wertz gestured at the waist-high mound of lichens. “Why cut all this stuff and pile it up here? If they intended to take a load of it back, why cut it here and not at the edge, closer to the spacecraft?”

  “Yeh, how were they going to carry it out?” McDonald seconded him.

  Dane said, “It must be another marker of some kind.” He kicked at the base of the pile. All at once he was digging at the mass, scattering the plants right and left. “There’s something buried under it!”

  It was Beemis and Jackson. They lay on their backs, side by side in the dust.

  “Dead?” Wertz threw his light around them, passing it hurriedly over the rows of lichens that rimmed them in above.

  Dane went gingerly over Jackson’s suit. It was intact. Apparently it was still functioning. Certainly there was none of the corroding moss effect visible that had eaten away the suit of Lieutenant Houck.

  He brought his light full upon the face behind the vizor. He took his belt cloth and rubbed the glassite as clean as he could polish it. The eyes were open. Staring. If the man was alive, he thought the light would maybe contract the pupils.

  Suddenly he saw it. “He’s alive! This one’s alive!” he exulted.

  McDonald crawled over from the other body.

  “Look at the nostrils!” Dane urged him. “You have to look close, but they’re moving. He’s breathing slow and hard.”

  They bent closer to Beemis, hoping to detect the tiny movement that meant life. The wide eyes stared up as though reproaching them for disturbing his rest.

  “Yeh!” McDonald exclaimed. “Did you catch it? He’s breathing too.”

  It came again beneath the bluish vizor, and again, the nearly imperceptible narrowing of the nostrils that had marked the widely spaced inhalations.

  McDonald said, “What I’d like to know, was Dr. Pembroke hiding them or did he think he was burying them?”

  Wertz said, “If he thought he was hiding them, this is about as good a way as in a young widow’s bed. A pile of cut lichens in the wide open, in a place where there isn’t any such thing as piles of cut lichens——”

  “He probably did it so he could find them again,” Dane said. “Maybe he was thinking the dust might drift over them.” They were wasting time. “Let’s get going. We’ve still got to find Dr. Pembroke.”

  From McDonald’s stance Dane knew that he was talking with the spacecraft on the liaison frequency. He felt for his own selector switch. No, he didn’t want to say anything. He knew why they couldn’t seem to get moving. They didn’t want to admit that they didn’t know which way to go. After the certainty of a place they had to reach and to return from, there was now a vast uncertainty of where to look and how to look. How long? He thought angrily. That’s what you mean. How long can we look? How much time remains for looking? “None,” he said.

  “What?” Wertz demanded.

  Dane said, “Nothing.” He began to climb out of the gully.

  Wertz said, “We’ve got to start back right away. We don’t have time for any more looking. We’ve barely got time enough to get these two back.”

  Dane kept on climbing. Wertz talked too much. Dammit, the man ought to learn to keep his mouth shut.

  McDonald cut in on intercom. “Major Noel says to take a quick look around and then start back. If Dr. Pembroke went any distance at all, he’s hopelessly lost. We wouldn’t have a chance in a million of stumbling onto him.”

  Damn Major Noel. Damn him, too.

  “Even if he started back for help, he didn’t make it. Once he’s off his feet, there’s a lot of square miles of lichens between here and the spacecraft to hide him.”

  Dane decided to begin with an arc of two hundred yards on the west side of the gully. Might as well begin on the side nearest the spacecraft. Thirty or forty-five minutes there. A like time on the other side of the gully. If the focal point of the spark fires had guided them to Beemis and Jackson, maybe there would have been another focus in the area, if Dr. Pembroke had gone very far.

  He said, “You and Wertz start back with them. I’m going to hunt at least another hour. I can catch up with you before you get back.”

  “Not if you find him and have to carry him, you can’t,” McDonald said. “And if you don’t find him, what’s the use of it?”

  “I stay and look thirty more minutes,” Wertz surprised him. “Then I start back. Not one minute more. We’ve got to get out of these lichens. Anyway, it doesn’t make sense to risk five men for the problematical chance of finding one who’s likely enough dead already.”

  McDonald said, “I’m afraid he’s right. We’ve got a duty to Beemis and Jackson. We know they’re alive. We’ve got to give them their chance.”

  Daylight was brightening fast. As if it were being turned o
n weird stage scenery through a giant rheostat. It was an ugly, comfortless light, sketching in horizonless stretches of vegetation with broad, characterless strokes. Dane stared at the tangled masses of spike-like plants that crowded him in, up to his waist. The full hopelessness of it was as plain as the dirty green of their pigmentation. Dr. Pembroke could lie within twenty feet of him and be unseen.

  It seemed like a yesterday of six months ago. Dr. Pembroke lolling on the cushions of the little cabin cruiser, pulling at a big glass of foaming beer and talking humorous argument with Old Grandfather Dane about everything the two restless minds chanced upon, while the boy fished for the lake perch and the boat swung lazily at anchor under the summer sun. And other long afternoons the boy and the man in the piny woods behind Old Grandfather’s summer place, Dr. Pembroke vigorous in khaki trousers and sneakers, explaining Pleurococcus on the bark like a story of a hidden world, naming the polished pebbles showing treasure color in the creek gravel. And the day Old Grandfather died, Dr. Pembroke coming from Europe to put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and look one more time upon the face of his old friend. “He was always living one more bright day. He didn’t count any of them. He died young at ninety-four.” Dane remembered as if it were a yesterday of six months ago how he had patted him gently on the shoulder and said, “Youth is the search. Time has nothing to do with it.” Then he had tinned away and walked out of the house.

  These were the things that strangers could measure and put a value upon. A half hour.

  He fought out against the rubbery barrier, lifting his knees against it like a man wading into deeper water. When the half hour had gone, he would stay. Not thinking too hard against the futility of it, he thought he would stay another hour...yes, not before then would he leave off and go back, ending the search...thinking it was a hell of a gift to the yesterday. If you didn’t think about it as only an hour more than the half hour that strangers gave, if you thought about it as very close to life itself, maybe it was enough. I’m tired drunk, he decided. Daylight coming is a little dying all in itself.

  The light was flooding all around now, so soon, with the odd brightness, as if a storm came with it, that they knew as the Mars full dawn of day. He turned to look for the Earth helmets, far apart and questing through the improbable brush like treasure divers out of their element. A little luck would do it. A little luck, he thought, just as he angled off and came upon the tiny clearing of cut and strewn lichens with the helmeted figure sitting in the middle.

  He went deliberately up and peered in at the white-mustached, Irish-pink face before he said, “Dr. Pembroke! Here he is. Over here. Here he is. We’ve found him.”

  He exulted over the same flutter of deep inhalation beneath the wide-eyed stare.

  6

  MAJOR NOEL switched off the command speaker. That did it. They were going to make it. McDonald would bring them in.

  Colonel Cragg wasn’t going to look too good on this one. Not the way the newspaper guy would write it up, he wouldn’t. All Dane had to do was stick to the facts. Not that he could be expected to miss playing up his own part. If he didn’t do it, Amalgamated Press would do it for him. They would want to make a hero out of their own guy.

  The colonel had been wrong to let him go out at all, even if the guy practically forced it on him by his newspaper connections. It was a mistake to let any civilians go at all. The business of the sortie was search and rescue, not any last-minute observation or specimen gathering. For that matter Major Noel had a pretty fair scientific reputation himself, and who had a better right to lead the sortie? But he “couldn’t be spared.”

  It was a cinch. Exactly where the guy Dane had said they’d be. A guy named Noel would have found them, with or without Dane, given the co-ordinates, but it sure looked like he wouldn’t get much out of the trip except his name on the crew list.

  He explored the back of his scalp, pressing gingerly at the area of the old wound. The ache was worse, pulsing dully every few seconds. Maybe the low gravity pull had something to do with it. It had started up right after they had been on Mars a little while. It had certainly been aching the second night. He remembered it hurting that night, all night. Hell, that was only night before last. Monday night and this was Wednesday morning. It seemed plenty longer than that. Still it couldn’t be anything serious. They had told him he oughtn’t to have any trouble, and he hadn’t in all the three years. No aches or pains, except from the sight of a hospital. No more of that ever. That was wish number one. When you thought about that and all the things that could happen to a guy and every day you see the guys all around you that have already had it, that made you hate the sight of a hospital.

  It was uncomfortable and unnatural enough to have to live in a ward with five other men for three months, without being sick and weak while you were doing it. A man who well and in good health was deemed to require the space and privacy of his own three rooms to sustain him for effective duty. What formless asininity of military medicine decreed that it was good for him to share his bedroom and latrine with five strangers when he was sick and flat on his back on his bed the whole long day and longer night—that even the docs themselves didn’t pretend to know. Except that it wasn’t good for patients to be too much alone. When else does a man want to be more free than ever from the slashed, the smashed, and the diseased! And their stupid, interminable yammering. You shut it out with a book, but still it flows on, around and over you until the indignity of your public exposure, even to their visitors, combines with the unnecessary wakings in the mornings and the enforced early dousing of the lights so the five fools could sleep until no wonder a guy even hates to go near a hospital for his annual physical. Seeing the captain with his eyes smashed out fumble with three-weeks-blind fingers at Braille solitaire cards or grope for the latrine door and to know he didn’t have the guts and imagination to destroy himself wasn’t as bad as listening to the colonel with the mysterious sore back bray about his communications difficulties in Africa, interspersed with the careful detail of his daily treatments.

  Father had been shocked by what he considered the trap-pings of poverty when he had torn himself away from Westchester and his broker’s desk in the Street and found his son deep in the outlands of Georgia in bed in a room with five men and an unclosed archway yawning at the public hall. He had been too dispirited to explain to him that the normal and easy paternalism of the Air Force and the somewhat shabby beneficence of its Air Medical Corps did not proceed from exactly compatible points of view. You were either a man or a patient. One apparently couldn’t be both, except for purpose of assignment to wards. He knew the Old Man was thinking of the nine years of Stanford technical education, as far across the country as you could get from Westchester, and the nine more years in the Air Force, not undistinguished years and characterized by rapid promotion, then to be treated for an honorable wound in the style of a charity patient. That was one thing he and Father had found to agree upon. It was a species of indecency.

  And even that agreement had led inevitably to the old thing, and the Old Man had left angry again, angry as he could be under the circumstances, over a son demonstrably bright enough by his own record to realize the stupidity of wasting his life in uniform, as he had from the very beginning of the idea plainly told him he would be doing nine years before, when the choice was made in a quick afternoon of a California June. “Free life, hell,” he snorted, snatching his hat up off the floor. “You’re just playing a silly and dangerous child’s game, and in costume at that. You see what it’s got you, don’t you? Even a fool can see that,” he shouted for the edification of the blind captain and the communications colonel and the three empty beds whose tenants were obediently sunning themselves on the terrace. He turned his red-flushed, white-haired face away and stomped his still-squared six feet out of the presence of his dark, twisted-featured changeling.

  Most of all there was the uniform. You knew the first time you put it on that you were made for it and for a pride in
wearing it. It would be unthinkable to think of a time when you wouldn’t wear it. How do you wear a hat after you’ve worn a cap? You going to settle down in a place like Westchester with a neighborhood of supersalesmen, and super bank clerks, and junior executives, and half-assed word and figure merchants and entertain their hungry wives at their parties and contribute to the Episcopalian Church? After Paris one day and Buenos Aires the next? You’d rather ride up the left bank of the Hudson every night right on schedule or drop in at the officers’ mess bar after duty and lose yourself in the never-ending goings and comings of a thousand friends? The good old game of look-who-came-in-on-us-today-I-guess-they-must-not-have-any-guards-on-the-gate-to-day. You want to leave spit-and-polish cleanliness and military orderliness for paper-littered civilian streets and soiled, unsanitary civilian buildings, and ill-groomed, half-washed civilian mobs? There were lots worse things than being a perpetual executive officer or navigation officer or some other kind of an officer and somebody else always getting the command jobs. Back to research and development, Noel. That’s your dish. You can’t be spared. Not enough men with your background in uniform. Maybe not, except when they were handing out the promotions. There were always a lot of qualified ones then. With some kind of qualifications. At least they got the promotions.

  The clock said twenty more minutes. Then he could get some sleep. A good nap and maybe he would feel a lot better.

  At straight up 0700 Colonel Cragg stepped smartly into the command post. He sped the customary glance over the long workbench before he checked the instrumentation banked above it. The frown, Noel supposed—hell, he knew—was for the chart spread untidily askew before the commander’s chair. Noel got up and laid it out smoothly on the chart desk; answering the good morning and watching the colonel pick up the log sheet.

  The guy wouldn’t ask what had happened. Not him. He would get the officially recorded information first. Through channels, even with the two of them in the room together.