Dane couldn’t deny him that. Some primary pieces were missing, he thought as he swarmed through the hatch into the observation chamber.
He looked out at the sterile plains of Mars and the elongated shadow of the spacecraft pacing off toward the east over the red desert like a problem in geometry. Would they ever see Earth again? If they did, would men ever come again to Mars?
In a few minutes possibly the last night on Mars would begin. No communication with the Martians had yet been achieved later than an hour or two after sunset. None before ten in the morning. Opportunity was fleeting fast. Dane went to the switch key. He began to send in the number code.
Men not know Martians, he managed in the rough-hewn symbol language. Martians exist? Men know not. Men know two plus two equals four. Men know Martians not equal zero. What Martians equal?
He repeated that much twice and then sent, Martians come spacecraft. Know is good. Martians come spacecraft. Martians equal what? Martians come spacecraft. Men know. Good. Good.
He saw the photo plane table flicker with the beginning of a reply. Exulting, he watched it finally settle into the familiar symbols. He read: Martians are one. One is good. Men and Martians are many. Many is bad. Men die. Men are not. Martians are one. One is good. Martians come spacecraft. Men die. Spacecraft die. Men and spacecraft not exist. Equals good. Martians are one. One is good.
It was like a chant at the jungle’s edge. From the flicker of cold light against the opal glass hate burned unmistakably through the halting tirade. Dane leaped for the switch key. Bigod, they had to understand. They had to come in peace and be received in peace.
Simultaneously with his clutch over the knob a clamor of metal burst around him. He fought it stupidly, before he realized the alarm gong overhead was clanging in his ear noise stopped abruptly, and he heard Major Noel’s impersonal authority on the speaker. “Battle stations. All crew to battle stations.”
Dane ran to the ports. “You see anything?”
Humphries shook his head. “Huh-uh.”
If anything moved under the fading light it was too small or too distant to be visible.
Through the open hatch rose a hubbub of excited voices, hurrying footsteps, and whine of motors—the jolting staccato of the guns clearing. “They sure as hell spotted something,” Humphries sang out. “Take a look on the table. I gotta stay here at my post.”
Of course. The plane table.
The opal glass was dead! A thought stung. It’s been knocked out. The Martians have blinded us. He jerked at the switch key. It was off.
Lieutenant Yudin thrust his head through the hatch “What’s up? I was asleep,” he added.
“I don’t know,” Dane answered him. “Unless...”
The intercom squawked again. Then it said, “Stand by at all stations. Lichens are advancing rapidly. Point of closest approach is 112 degrees. Repeat, 112 degrees. Range 2600 yards. Repeat, 2600 yards.”
Dane whistled. “That’s fourteen hundred yards closer.” But he couldn’t have killed the plane tables more than ten minutes by the messages, he thought guiltily.
On the Plane table the line of the lichen peninsula ran straight across the sand plain toward the spacecraft, a finger of light that crawled purposively across the grid lines
Dane put the dividers on it. “It’s making a hundred yards a minute. A good hundred yards! You ought to be able to see it through the port by now,” he called to Humphries
Humphries turned to Lieutenant Yudin. “No, sir. It’s too dark now.”
The last slice of the small sun floated over the low hills in the west wrapping itself in smallish yellow blaze. They strained to see through the thick glassite ports, but the light was almost gone. To the east the land had disappeared under starless night. The rotating guard beacon strained weakly at the twilight.
In five minutes the lichens had marched another measured six hundred yards. The range had closed to two thousand yards.
“They’re going out!” Humphries exclaimed. “They’re taking out the flamethrowers.”
Dane counted eleven pressure-suited figures on the sand below, looking down at them past the bulge of the spherical hull. They seemed to stand almost under the shelter of the curving sides. All but one had the cylinders of the self-oxydizing flame ejectors strapped behind their shoulders. Two one-man flame-throwing tanks darted from under the spacecraft, their armor red with the dust they kicked up in motionless clouds. Then the little party spread apart and deployed in a bowed line facing the oncoming lichens.
Abruptly Dane left the port and yanked at the exit hatch. “See you later,” he said.
25
THE AIRLOCK guard observed him indifferently. Dane came the rest of the way down the ladder with his pressure suit and helmet. When the man saw him start hooking in the radio equipment, his mouth line straightened.
“Not allowed to go outside,” he Georgia-drawled. “Nobody supposed to.”
“I am,” Dane told him. “I represent the almighty press. Amalgamated, that is.”
“Nobody allowed outside,” the guard reiterated. He shifted easily on his feet and peered out the port. “Fire party out there right now, besides.”
Dane pushed a leg into the heavy, articulated casing. I am on my master’s business. The public must be told. See all, hear all, tell all, know nothing. That’s us. Molders of public opinion. Have to be Johnny-on-the-spot, and all that.
“Mebbe so,” the man grunted. “You have to do your looking from here, though.” He brightened a little. “Unless you got a pass. You gotta pass?”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” Dane said. “Why don’t you call the command post and tell them John Dane wants to go out with the fire party on press duty?”
The guard allowed he didn’t care, one way or the other, but he picked up the phone and spoke briefly. “Yeah,” he said “It’s Dr. Dane.” Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “They’re checkin’ with Major Noel. He’s outside” After a minute he said, “Yeah. I’ll tell him.”
He hung up. “Sergeant Peeney says the major says okay, but you gotta stay behind the fire party. That’s so you don’t get hurt,’” he threw in “Case they light up the flame throwers”
“You’re a pal,” Dane assured him. “How about helping me with this gear?”
He stepped down into the red sand. Mars, he thought. This is the planet Mars. He became freshly aware of the huge night Laden with what the old storytellers called menace. Maybe even now the Martians were fulfilling their promise to come to the spacecraft. From somewhere out in the dark From beyond the rim of the lighted landing site, where the brilliantly illumined circle tapered off into the solid dark that was periodically dealt a shallow wound by the beacon.
Once a minute the broad blade of the light swept around. A man should be visible in the observation-deck telescope at a thousand yards. The radar should pick him up at ten thousand. Only they were not looking for men.
Major Noel’s voice spoke into the ear set. “Come over here, Dane. Get behind me. Number two. The lichens are coming up fast. They’re at five hundred yards now.”
The men with the flame throwers had stretched their skirmish line to fifty-yard intervals all around the Far Venture Behind them waited the squat flame tanks. Suddenly Noel barked a command. One of the tanks wheeled abruptly and churned the dust to station beyond the southern arc of the perimeter. The other remained in place, facing the east.
“You want some pictures,” Noel’s voice rasped, “get ready. We’re going to burn hell out of them!”
A timbre of elation sang in the cry. Dane pressed the shutter-release button on his belt, snap-shooting the wide-legged stance Noel had taken against the east, the luminescent numeral 2 large on his back tank. He got one or two good ones of the waiting picket-line of outlandishly garbed men before a jumble of excitement rattled against his eardrums. Everyone was shouting into microphones at once.
Dane stared at the lichen clump that popped up a couple of hundred yards out in th
e light. A supplementary searchlight came on from the spacecraft and sought it out. More lights came on and shifted about, showing up one...two four...then more and more clumps standing along a broad front where only one had sprung into view an instant before.
Noel crackled orders on the command frequency. Dane saw the flame-bearers shift to meet the approach, like an elongated football scrimmage line.
The stuff pulsed forward in livid spurts, giving the appearance of impinging like bushy darts laterally across the sand. It was suddenly very close. So close that Dane saw the new plants erupt from the sand in front of the stands of plants that had themselves burst into existence in the van a second or two before.
He remembered once writing that a man caught in choking suspense can think or talk only in trite patterns and phrases. No epic speeches, like the epic heroes spout. Generally he says something like “God damn it,” and afterward he can’t remember that he thought anything except that things were not different as they should have been. To face great peril and have your surroundings look just about the same as always denies the rightness of things. It is inappropriate, Dane had written, for a man to endure the slow crisis of approaching death, then to escape in the nick of time and describe his feelings later with so puny a simile as “It was like a bad dream.” Now he had just caught himself thinking, It’s like a nightmare. One of those where you want to run pell-mell away and are rooted where you stand, while the menace stalks you, aware of you, closing in to take you.
He heard Noel say, “Light your pieces.”
Down the line and around the flanks spurts of bluish, chemical flame stabbed out shortly from the nozzles.
“What’s he waiting for!” Dane cried out.
Noel still stood broad-legged...immovable...bestriding his few inches of sand. Like the Colossus sadly dwindled in size, Dane thought.
“Let ‘em have it!” he ordered at last.
The lichens were barely fifty feet from the perimeter line when the heavy spurt of flame arched from the tank out across the sand and hosed back and forth. Four smaller flame thrusts stabbed at the flanks.
A miasma of oily smoke boiled thickly from the scorched plants, clinging to the ground and billowing under the dripping flame. It drifted slowly, coming in on the men holding the nozzles to hang a dense curtain over the fire tips and their targets. Then it piled in so close that it swallowed the fire lances in its creeping front.
“Cut your fires back,” Noel commanded.
The flame thrusts sucked back to their nozzles. The sortie stood intent while the searchlights played across the face of the smoke fog. Dane felt an impatience to brush off the confining helmet to see better.
Noel’s voice came on again. Quietly now. “I’m going into the smoke for a look. Seckinger, you advance your tank with me ten feet at my left. Hold your fire down unless I give the word.”
Seckinger, Airman First Class, said, “Yes, sir.” Dane visualized his square face set behind the port of the sealed tank. He was a quiet, chunky young man. His square shoulders suggested the blue, double-breasted sea coats his ancestors must have worn on the voyages he had told about. He was a good choice for a wing man.
Seckinger moved the tank up close, and Noel started forward. Before they got to the wall ahead, a cry came from the right flank. “They’re coming through the smoke over here. They’re coming through the smoke!” the man repeated.
Dane saw Noel turn ponderously. The tank halted at his upraised arm. Then his command came sharply. The other tank darted left in the dream scene, and the blue fire spurted ahead of its nose. A searchlight twisted from the towering bulk of the Far Venture and picked up the new attack.
Remembering his business to get pictures, Dane moved down the line. A great flash of light dazzled him. A roar of noise tore at him. He froze, stunned under another flash that seared his eyes, followed quickly by a third. “Spark-fire bolts!” he shouted into his microphone. “It’s a spark-fire storm!”
The tank belched its stream of fire in an undeviating line. One of its supporting flame bearers lay on the sand, his own fire jet spurting into the dust at right angles to his body. The bolts were aimed at them! Dane turned quickly, stumbling off balance in the clumsy gear.
“Noel!” he shouted. “The bolts! They struck one of the men!”
No time for answer. Lightning streaked out of the east and slammed the tank by Noel. Little balls of orange fire bounced briefly on its metal. Noel lay on the ground.
Something moved against his legs. Dane stood still, breathing hard. His helmet air tasted light and dry, like the stale atmosphere of a long-closed building. He looked down, knowing what he would see.
The lichens had sprung up all around him. Knee-deep.
The airmen shot out their small streams of fire, burning swaths back to the Far Venture, now aground in a sea of lichens. As the heavy smoke drifted from some of the burned areas, Dane saw with quick apprehension the lichens pop up again from the scorched sand, swallowing the remnants of the burned-out plants. They devoured sand and charred plants alike, burying the scours left by the flames in their leaden green.
Both tanks stood motionless. Their tongues licked ahead, but they made no movement in traverse nor gave any other indication that the operators inside were still alive.
A bright bolt spat over the east and lashed down another flame thrower.
Dane drew a deep lungful of his stuffy air. For a quick moment he imagined he could smell an acridity. Lichen acids eating against his suit? Frantically he trampled the plants down around him, playing his electric torch on his armored legs. His breath sighed out relief. Suddenly he shouted into the microphone. “Turn off your flames and get inside. You’re not doing any good. They’re coming up again where they’ve been burned off.”
His shouted words were drowned by the sharper tone of the Far Venture’s command set. “Turn off all fire. Return to the spacecraft.” The familiar voice named itself. “Colonel Cragg to Major Noel. Turn off all fires and return to the spacecraft. Immediately.”
Another spark bolt snapped home. Dane counted the same number of men still standing. He wondered if the few bolts that had fallen so far were prelude to a storm like yesterday’s. Maybe it was too late in the night for the bolts to build up in any profusion. The cold of the darkness must be rapidly deepening, if there was a real connection between the phenomenon of the dwindling spark fires and the oncoming night. Maybe whatever was directing the lightning weapon was short of ammunition.
It occurred to him to move himself. This was no time to linger. Not even for Amalgamated Press pictures.
He took a few steps, breasting the lichen stuff, wading it gingerly before he thought of Noel. If the bolt at the tank had not hit him directly, he could still be alive.
He turned back from the Far Venture, fuzzily amazed at the need to do it, and began plowing through the lichens toward the immobilized tank marked out for him in the smoke by its spouting flame. How much longer would it burn before its fuel was exhausted? He was not sure how the stuff burned anyway, except that some of its ingredients provided oxygen for combustion.
One of the Far Venture’s lights came circling around and picked him up. “Dane,” he heard Colonel Cragg’s voice in the ear set. “You’re going the wrong way, man. Turn around and follow the light. Just follow the light.”
It was an odd thing to say. He turned a moment and waved his arm against the light. When he thought of his radio, he switched to the liaison frequency of the spacecraft. “I’m going after Major Noel.” His heart began to pound at the declaration. Now there was no turning back.
“Come on inside. Right now,” Colonel Cragg said.
Dane took up his wading through the stand of lichens. Toward the tank. The throbbing of his heart resolved itself into a surge of power. The fine thrill of discovery that he too was able to make himself move.
“Noel will be picked up. It’s been provided for,” Colonel Cragg said.
Dane waved his arm again in the bright l
ight and kept on wading. The lichen stuff was relatively widely spaced, sparse compared with the stands of the lichen forest.
The earphones crackled with Colonel Cragg’s voice. “Good luck, fellow!”
Dane approached the tank uneasily. If Seckinger was still alive, maybe dazed, he might move about in his confinement and inadvertently swivel the nozzle and its streaking flame around. In which event John Dane’s suit would quickly fry
As if he had divined his thought, Colonel Cragg came on, “We can’t raise Seckinger. Take a look at him, will you?” He switched off but came right on again. “Watch that flame nozzle. It’s on 360-degree swivel.”
“Roger, and thanks,” Dane answered. Fine. Swiveled for 360-degree coverage. All the way around the circle, and dodge that if you can.
He came cautiously up to the side of the midget armor. He couldn’t see Noel. The lichens were thick enough around the tank. After the metal, maybe. Better get the job done and get out of here fast. What the tank was made out of, he hadn’t the foggiest idea. Maybe the same double-alloyed timageel as the hull of the spacecraft. Certainly not the softer metal of the interior partitions. He spoured his light over the tank’s lower plates, in the lichen shadow. He could see no corrosion even where he pushed aside stems in direct contact with the metal.
He straightened and shot his light into the side port. Its metal shutter was not closed over the glassite.
Seckinger hung forward against his shoulder harness. His eyes were open. At least the one eye Dane could see was open, as if he were staring at his instrument panel. Dane could detect no movement of breathing. He rapped sharply on the rim of the port.
Colonel Cragg came in.
Dane said, “I think he’s dead.”
“You think you can make it in with Major Noel?”
“I can try.” Whatinhell did Cragg think he was here for if he didn’t think he could carry seventy-five pounds?
Not in Solitude [Revised Edition] Page 19
