Not in Solitude [Revised Edition]

by Kenneth F. Gantz

  Dane said, “The facts had to be made known. What we were getting at——”

  Cragg sneered. “What you were getting at was a sensation. To peddle your newspapers. At the critical moment Colonel Cragg made a wrong move and then lucked into a win because he had misjudged the enemy’s timing and the arc of his main thrust. Pretty easy for you to figure it out. A military genius like you. Six months later with all the intelligence spread out in front of you for as long as you wanted it and a dozen second-guessing, so-called experts prompting you, you write it up like a student’s staff exercise. Okay, smart man Doctor Wiseman! Now we’ve got the makings of another ball on hand. And you don’t even see all the figures in the problem! What’s Tong Asia got to do with it, he wants to know!”

  Dane thought of the long midnight at Sahara Air Force Base, with the rocket forces deployed over a thousand miles of sand, alert for the take-off. Speaking of luck, Amalgamated Press had had some good fortune itself to have a man there at the hour of decision, when the word was transmitted that Tong Asia was about to strike. A few hours earlier he had dined with Colonel Anson Cragg, commander of the 3rd Rocket Wing, a good beginning for an assignment to write up the new electro-radiant weather telemeasures installed on the Sahara plateau and in the Atlas Range. It had been apparent that Cragg was amiably willing to assist the mighty Amalgamated. But before bedtime Dane was sweating to put together a story of the alert from the broken sentences that were flung to him outside the operations rooms and the blacked windows of the blazing staff offices. Then it was dawn and Colonel Cragg was back from Lower Space, Hemisphere South, with the news of a great victory.

  “But,” Senator Hodge had persisted at the investigation, “you were returning to your bases when you picked up the Asian attack, which we now know came out of altitude orbit and was earth-tracking a thousand miles above the Indian Ocean ready to go into orbital attack against the United States squarely athwart your alert zone. Don’t you agree that certain newspapers are right when they say it was only the flukiest of good luck that you came near them at all, after miscalculating their maneuver? At speeds on the order of three to five miles a second, Colonel, one doesn’t expect or often get a second chance after the attack goes into glide phase, I am informed by competent testimony. Nor do we expect our commanders to make mistakes, however brilliantly redeemed, at the possible cost of Houston or Chicago or St. Louis, quite possibly all three and maybe more.”

  So the opposition wire and its five thousand editors chose to make him a martyr and a hero. A persecuted victor. It was good copy, and a good play against Amalgamated. But Cragg did not get his star. After three years he had not yet got it.

  “So we’re five years ahead of Tong Asia with the drive,” Cragg went on. “They can’t get anything of any size off Earth. You think maybe they’re not going to do their damnedest to infiltrate this expedition? Two or three five-million-dollar bribes? Chicken feed to know what’s up here. You’re so good at figuring things out. Give that one a thought. No matter how we screen them, we’ve got to consider the possibility they’ve got a man on board. Maybe planted for this years ago.”

  Dane said, “Colonel, you should try writing a killer-thriller.” In spite of himself he ran them through his mind. Spivak, the Central European? Vining, fanatic of mechanism? Too obviously obvious? Yudin—weak? Wertz—selfish? It would not have to be the least likely. It didn’t have to be someone beyond suspicion, like Heileman.

  “For example,” Cragg said, “why was Pembroke so anxious to get out on the surface? Why did he sneak out again against orders when he was supposed to be confined to bed?” “Now wait a minute!” Dane jumped up.

  “You’ve been friendly with him for years, haven’t you?”

  Dane said, “If there is any crime against a man that’s vicious and contemptibly cowardly, it’s slandering his loyalty on a damn supposition!”

  “I recall that you had some very pressing business yourself out on the surface after Pembroke didn’t come back.”

  Dane gave him a succinct four-letter word.

  Cragg fell back on his pillow with a sigh. “Dane, you are an able man. In your way. But if you’re on the level, you’ve got a lot to learn. I don’t really much suspect you, but I do suspect Pembroke very much. If I’m right, he had a partner. Obviously, since he is dead. Maybe you, but I don’t much think so. For one thing, I don’t think you’ve got the guts.”

  Dane said, “Think what you like about me. I can take care of myself if you get rough. But Dr. Pembroke is a famous American and he’s dead now. You’re not going to yipe at his heels and slander his name.”

  “Power of the press, and all that? You get this straight. I’m going to do exactly what I think is best. I was suspicious of Pembroke from the first. Evidently he tumbled to it, when I had his stuff gone through while he was out on the surface. So he puts a knife in me.”

  Cragg! An intelligent man! In a position of high authority! “This is one that won’t get far,” Dane threw at him.

  “Maybe we can agree on this much,” Cragg said. “I think it’s pretty likely the source of the messages is human. You think they come from Martians. We both can agree that it’s imperative for us to discover their true source before we take off. If you want to prove your point, you’ve got to make visible contact. Get your Martians out in sight. If they exist, we want pictures. We’ve got to reconnaissance their civilization. Especially their capability for hostilities. I want to see these Martians. In the meantime here’s something you can do about your friend Pembroke’s mysterious actions.”

  He waited a moment. “This is confidential. Okay?”

  Dane hesitated. “Just until we get back to Earth. I reserve nothing that bears on Dr. Pembroke, if any charges are made there against him.”

  Cragg nodded. “No one knows this but Major Beloit and Major Noel and myself. Dr. Pembroke didn’t have a pistol on him when he got in the elevator. Somebody stopped the car and shot him and left the pistol to make it look like suicide.”

  Cragg spread a downturned palm over the quiet. “So, either he had some confederate who maybe decided his usefulness was over, especially if he would be caught for knifing me, or he had an enemy. He had enough of an enemy to kill. That wouldn’t be too likely, if he wasn’t anything but what he was supposed to be.”

  “Tong Asia again, I suppose you mean.” Dane said bitterly.

  “It adds up. At least it adds up to a good enough working suspicion for me. You got any better ideas?”

  “Why do you tell me this?” Dane demanded. “Why tell me? A civilian and a newspaper civilian, and to add to the unusualness of telling me, one of your prime suspects?”

  “I’ll tell you why you told me this,” Dane rode on at him. “You’ve got Tong Asia on the brain. In another week you’ll have Tong Asia agents under every bunk. You’ve really decided I’m it. In fact you hope I am. So tell me you only suspect me as a matter of principle and you think if you tell me this you’ll drive me out in the open.”

  “Congratulations, mastermind,” Cragg sneered. “Now put your razor-strap intellect to work on this.” His face flushed. “According to your lights, I am a blunderer. You did your best to ruin my career, and you damn near did it.”

  “I’m afraid you weren’t that important to Amalgamated. Not as an individual,” Dane said. “It was the national safety we had in mind. Preventing any more blunders. At least by you.”

  “Have it your way. I don’t expect much from reporters. I do expect more from myself. Even if I made fifty mistakes, I’ve yet to dishonor the uniform by lying. When Pembroke came in off the surface just before he was killed, he was told to leave his pressure suit and all his gear in the airlock. He did, and it stayed there until the next day. And there his own pistol was found. The pistol that shot him was a spare from the stores. Now the man was stripped down to his shorts when he got into a suit of coveralls he didn’t own. He couldn’t have had the pistol on him when he got on that elevator.”

  The old
rasp of authority came clear. “Now I want to give you an order. You will obey it. Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. If the messages are Tong Asia, our man will be especially anxious to sell you. He’ll want you to make a big headline play out of hostile Martians after we get back. Everything unroutine, you report to me. If you hold anything back, I’ll fry your hide so brown when we get back that it’ll take two Amalgamateds to butter you up again. That’s not all. There’s a technical charge against you in the official log. You want to clear yourself, the best way is to make like a detective. A good one. If you’re on the level, you ought to want to prove it. And that’s all.”

  “No,” Dane said, “that’s not quite all! Someone is out to get you.” He pulled open the door. “I wonder why?”

  21

  IT WAS the brightest morning they had had on the planet. In spite of his gear Dane stepped out away from the ladder with a springtime feeling of buoyancy. Even in a pressure suit it was good to be outside the metallic chrysalis of the spacecraft. He admitted that the ponderous, armored Heileman lowering his gangling self down the hatch ladder didn’t look much like an emerging butterfly.

  Dane was content to stand a moment and look out over the landscape undulating to the horizon like a sand-blown prairie. The coloring was not unlike the weathered red of the welt of sore soil across the southern United States, softer under the muted sunshine that fell to Mars. Pushed and respread by the gentle winds of the planet, the coarser dust and the sand of the surface had been sorted into a host of small crescent dimes, and the floor of the desert that bore them was intricately figured with arabesque leavings of powdery spindrift. The uninvited diversity of the three-phase power line was alien and inimical to the reticent curves and simple features of the scene it tore apart. The black wires snaking over the sand out to the raw heap of spoil at Dr. Judah’s excavation and, even more alien and inimical, the immense geometry of the spacecraft itself, these were’ the frightening things here, Dane thought, not the limitless aloneness he otherwise beheld.

  “You like to buy a few choice acres?” Heileman broke in. “Tax-free. No pets, no children, no nosy neighbors, no lawns to mow, no traffic, no nothing. Wonderful place to retire and write that book. Don’t even have to raise chickens or sweat out a garden.”

  Dane turned down the volume in his earphones. “To him who communes with nature even the braying of a distant jackass is melodious, but not when amplified into his eardrums. I suppose it is useless for me to point out to you that there is a certain beauty about this place.”

  “Well, hardly useless,” Heileman said. “The remark gives a flavor to your character that we might term generally as odd. More specifically we would call it nuts.”

  It was something like three hundred yards to Dr. Judah’s “mine.” A pair of pressure-suited figures sat alone on chunks of stone halfway down the sloping lip of the trench-like scar gouged out of the red soil by tetryl explosive. The scoop shovel was upended near the drag-line motor and cable winch, which was shut down.

  “Looks like a strike has been called,” Heileman said. “Us stockholders want to know what’s going on here.”

  Dane saw one of the seated men turn his head. Then they both stood and looked up out of the pit. “We’ve quit digging here,” Dr. Judah’s voice came into the phones. “Nothing but igneous rock for twenty feet. Not very promising.”

  Heileman picked up a fragment of the stone. “Primordial lava, he observed. “This whole region is probably the impact plain of a big Imbrium-type planetesimal. The dark lava indicates that. High ferrous oxide and sulfide content.”

  “However you explain its origin,” Dr. Judah said, “there is obviously little use to excavate it further. It’s undoubtedly several miles thick.”

  “On the order of fifteen to twenty kilometers at least,” Heileman agreed. “If you want to go by the estimates on the lunar explosion pits, like Mare Imbrium.”

  One doesn’t accustom oneself to conversing normally with another man fifty yards away and in plain sight, Dane decided. He started down the drag incline of the pit, picking a way carefully over the rubble. He wanted to stand on the bottom and look at the Mars stuff all around, undisturbed for at least four billion years, the kind of a date that was expressed offhand as 4 times 109 years ago.

  It was, after all, little different from a hole in the ground dug out in Texas, except, as Judah quickly pointed out, for the absence of alluvial gravel. There was the thick layer of sand, maybe five to ten feet, then heavy, hard clay-like stuff, as thick again, then a layer of heavy stone, the bedrock, all deeply tinged with the browns and dark red of the iron color.

  Dane glanced into the mask of the second figure. It was Silverman, the civil engineer. The man responded with a grunt in the interphone and turned away.

  At the bottom of the pit Dane found a right-sized chunk of the living rock and stowed it into his pouch. Luck granting, it would someday rest polished on his desk, yielded out of the vast original processes of planet formation to be sought in its eternal bed and placed, by the ingenuity of man, heavy on papers concerned with the ephemeral news flow of trivia.

  “Migod, a souvenir hunter. Even in this Godforsaken place, he wants something to remember it by,” Silverman said, acid in the rasping phones.

  “It’s a shame we won’t be able to move to other locations,” Dr. Judah said. “I had counted on a great many locations.” His helmet bobbed. He was the sort one found far back in the recesses of university departments, with thick spectacles and a green eyeshade, nodding his head over a fresh specimen for the museum. Yet in some fashion fame had come to him, so that now, one of the chosen, he stood on the surface of Mars, still eager for specimens.

  Silverman came up close, thrusting his stare through Dane’s mask. “I’ve got something I want you to get through your fancy head, fellow,” he said abruptly. “I served with the colonel in the Third during the war, and he asked me himself to come along on this goddamn flight. For my money he’s a damn fine man and a damn fine commander. I don’t like what your goddamn papers tried to do to him, and I don’t like you. I kept my mouth shut because the colonel wanted it that way when we found out you weaseled your way on board.”

  Dane said, “Hold it! What’s eating you?” The man had been taciturn, given to keeping to himself, aloof in the confines of the Far Venture, but this sudden animosity was unpredictable from anything that had gone before.

  Silverman said, “I’ll hold you, all right.” He lifted up a geologist’s short pick. “I got no reason not to crack your helmet this minute and your damn head along with it. We’re not going anyplace anymore.”

  “Hey!” Heileman shouted. “You nuts?”

  The pick twitched higher. He was going to strike. Dane threw himself against him, inside the arc of the weapon, seizing the arm and bending it up and out. The man went mad, twisting and dragging Dane down on the rubble with him.

  Dane desperately threw his weight on the thickset body, feeling it fight to break his hold with powerful upheavings, managing to pin both arms down with holds on the wide wrists in spite of the awkward gauntlets and the encasings of Silverman’s heavy forearms.

  One flailing blow on the helmet and he was gone. A quick hiss of escaping pressure and he would be exploded for keeps.

  Suddenly the upthrusting body went limp. Dane lay on it a moment warily, until he realized that Silverman’s suit must have ruptured. He got on his knees, appalled at the bewildering uselessness of the man’s death, but when he looked into the face mask he saw the eyes staring back malevolently. He stood clear with a great relief.

  “Whatinhell’s come over you two?” he heard Heileman saying. It had happened so quickly that neither he nor Judah had moved.

  Silverman’s voice cut in. He said it conversationally. Almost reflectively. “Maybe you stuck that knife in the colonel and maybe you didn’t. Personally I think you did. But if anything happens to him again, you’ll be the one that gets it. I’ll kill you before the day is over. I promise
you faithfully. You’ll be the one that pays for it.” He got up, cast around for his pick, and set off for the Far Venture.

  “He’s mad,” Dr. Judah said. “God help us all!”

  Dane burned with a quick heat. It would be a good thing to run the man down and have it out. His fists longed to strike and his fingers to choke. When he noticed the others regarding him silently, he cursed them and the Far Venture and everyone in it for fools and lunatics. “Including me,” he added grimly. He began the climb up the rubble-strewn ramp.

  After a few minutes of plodding Heileman began to talk. “A good many billions of years ago——”

  They were doing what is known as handling him with care, regarding him, too, as a “case.” The thought angered him; then it concerned him that it had angered him. It should have been funny.

  There was the disease. If the Martians wished it, they had only to wait and the invaders would destroy themselves. It was the confinement sickness. The isolation neurosis. Claustrophobic dementia, with a whole planet underfoot. They were getting stir-crazy.

  The day was very clear. Although the sun was a dwarf half his familiar size, he beamed a friendly orange in the deep blue, bonding the white ball and sawed-off cone of the spacecraft with a tint of the fire glow he poured down upon the red oxide sands shimmering under heat waves. The brighter stars also hung in the chill sky, unidentified without their weaker cohorts, disturbingly unwanted. One they had all learned to recognize, the Mars Pole Star. But not Polaris, playing child’s game with the comforting Big Dipper. A star called Deneb, a name that fitted no American tongue. Deneb, formerly of the constellation Cygnus, now chosen by the axis of this red, white, and blue world to be its constant. To mark its pole for these eyes that had come to see.