Now the Far Venture entered hurricane seas. She pitched and rolled until only men strapped in their places could pretend to function. Cradling his head and face inside his arm, Dane abandoned himself to the forces that were wrenching the big spacecraft asunder. How the smoothly firing drive, no matter in what fashion disturbed, could produce such gyrations, he could not imagine.
Vaguely later, he caught a glimpse of a multitude of winking red buttons. “Bombs exploded!” he yelled.
Some placated sea god laid hand over the angry waters. Listing far over, the Far Venture hung quietly in whatever space embraced her.
Dane got to the photo plane monitor and switched it into the message circuit on observation deck antenna. A scramble of meaningless lines danced randomly, like a madman’s game of jackstraws.
The Martian was jammed! At least for the moment it was incoherent.
“Colonel Cragg!” he cried. “Are you all right?”
“Get me out from under!” Cragg sang out, loud in the quiet. They lifted McDonald’s body off him.
Cragg stared at the blood on his hands. “I don’t think it’s me.” He felt inside his torn robe. “I don’t think so.”
“Give it full speed and let’s get away fast!” Dane urged. “The Martians’ transmission is all fouled up. Maybe we have stunned it. Now’s our chance.”
They helped Cragg to his feet and supported him while he watched the spasmodically flashing lines in the oscilloscope. He nodded to Dane. “Looks like you hit it right on the head.”
He threw a glance at the angle-of-flight indicator before he raised the phone he had never let go. “Beloit. Give me maximum acceleration as fast as possible. To hell with the damage,” he retorted. “Just give me as much speed as you can as quickly as you can. I want to get out in space. Away out in space. We’ll worry about course later.”
With acceleration the floor became the floor again. Shapes assumed their normal form. The Far Venture was again the familiar world where men stood upright.
31
FOR AN hour the spacecraft shot up from the planet Cragg let the acceleration grow until the ride felt like an elevator going through the roof.
Once he grinned. “She’s responding perfectly to control. Now we make space, and it’s good-by to your Martian.” Then he sat with his eyes fixed on the command banks while the minutes worked around the clock. The fell radiation had vanished, but the radiomen could not raise Earth.
Finally he spoke to Major Beloit The automatic acceleration control took over, and they stood free of their boots and weights at apparent gravity Earth. Then he said to Dane, “Give me a push. Let’s take a look.”
They went down the lift to 2-low and opened a port. The variegated disk of Mars bulged its green and red shapes of false continents and seas out from the tail cone against the star-spangled blackness.
Cragg pushed out his silver case brusquely at Dane and lighted one of the black stogies for him. Dane marveled at the man’s vitality. If the rough-and-tumble take-off had any physical effect on him, it had been tonic. Cragg put the lighter to his own stogie and breathed out the first cloud of the pungent smoke, his eyes looking over the flame at Dane. “I think we’ve carried it off. Unless your Martian mind has got a long reach when it snaps out of its razzle-dazzle.”
Dane said, “It disturbs me. I can’t feel good about it. I hate to think that we found intelligence on Mars and then maybe destroyed it. Or left it impaired. Maybe insane. It’s a pity we couldn’t make it understand us!”
“Maybe it did.” Cragg said. “Though for its own purposes. Maybe it understood us well enough to know it didn’t want anything we had to bring. Maybe it just didn’t like the idea of change.”
Dane said, “We’ve had quite a history of that on Earth. Either you agree with me or I’ll smash you for your wickedness, which you have already proved by your disagreement with me.”
Cragg looked his stogie over carefully, rotating it in his fingers, inspecting the entire wrapper leaf. “When I was a young man I used to worry a lot about the poor prospects of heresy. The thing that bothered me was that the very idea of change came inevitably from reflective thought, but then the man who reflected couldn’t help choosing some of his reflections as the best ones to believe. The next thing he inevitably did was to believe the others were wrong to believe. From there he had only one more step to take to intolerance and a new orthodoxy.”
He stopped to puff at his failing light. “So we weren’t so far from home on Mars after all. Your Martian’s self-worship of its oneness is not so different from what we call doctrine. We were the heretics on Mars by the very fact of our existence. Why are we surprised? I’m pretty far away from my line, making a speech like that,” he broke off with a deprecatory grin.
Dane shook his head. “Colonel, you’ve been the source of a lot of surprises to me on the Far Venture. Never any more than now.”
“You once labeled me a man of action. I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean it to be any compliment. That what you mean?”
“I underestimated you.”
Cragg shook his head. “I underestimated you more than plenty. A week ago I’d have bet a million you didn’t have the foggiest idea why sometimes you’ve got to make a decision and act on it just like it was one hundred per cent right. Even if you’re not sure of anything else except that it’s high time to do something, one way or the other. Now I’ve seen you act when you couldn’t add up the score. Like the night you brought Noel in. And today. When you took him out again. You turned out to be quite a man of action yourself.
“What I was trying to say about that heresy business,” he went on, “was that I found in the Air Force the simple and satisfying belief in translating objectives into action. If you think about it that way, maybe even the way a guy like you would look at it, a man can have a rational and deliberate belief in the necessity of action. You can believe along with us that action is a right end in itself and that in its larger aspects, in what we call strategy and tactics, it stems from reflection. But what put the icing on my cake for me, what I’m trying to get across, is that I found out, after some time, I admit, that the only fixed Air Force doctrine was the insistence on constant change. The high rating on surprise and divergence from anything that could be predicted. Under the uniform of discipline I found a society of heretics. I don’t say it very well, but that’s what I mean.”
Dane said, “Well, maybe so. But while we’re on the subject of action and decision, I want to tell you it’ll take quite a bit of something to match the way you jerked the Far Venture off the ground of Mars by singlehanded main strength and pure cussedness.”
Cragg wheeled over to a phone. “We’re going on course for Earth,” he said to Dane. “You want to watch?”
Dane was pleasantly warmed by Cragg’s embarrassment. He was going to end up liking the guy if he didn’t watch out.
“You know,” he said, “you’ve maybe put the pieces of this trip back together for me. We’ve all got to hump like hell to avoid a society that organizes us into something like the Martian mind. It’s a lot harder than avoiding the twentieth-century-style totalitarian state. Maybe the real danger is not so much in majorities squelching the heretics but in the simple gravitation of ideals to mass averages of conduct and attainment. After all, the worst threat of the twentieth century wasn’t the nuclear revolution but the population explosion and the taboos that encouraged it. We don’t want any Martian society of the common man stifling the uncommon man. That’s the story I want to take back, but it will gag every wire of Amalgamated.”
“You’d better sugar-coat it a little,” Cragg said dryly.
Hour after hour the Far Venture sped among the star-bright constellations along its straight-line collision course with Earth. Noel’s Automatic Interspatial Navigation Control delicately noted the Doppler shifts in the spectra of its three-star fix under the onrushing speed of the spacecraft and threaded them through its computer, balancing against them the shifting angle of
Earth, checking the perturbations of course by sun and planets, firming the constancy of acceleration, juggling and firing the gimbaling steering jets, even seeking the mystic point in space toward which home rolled in its orbit at eighteen miles a second, its own speed slimmed to a trifle by the massive velocities accumulating to the Far Venture.
Mars rapidly fell away, shrinking until it disappeared behind the Far Venture’s flaring tail. When they neared the 600,000-miles-out mark, they passed into radio communication with Earth. Colonel Cragg sent out the momentous message of success. Thousands of words of reports began feeding into the coding and transmitting machines, and Dane plunged into the writing of bulletins and dispatches for official release on Earth by the Air Force. Not too heavily slashed, he hoped, by security review.
A few minutes after first radio contact Colonel Cragg posted a message of commendation from the White House, personal from the President of the United States. Dane could imagine the milling pressrooms at Amalgamated. Ames would have taken over personally. No doubt about that. Already television and radio bulletins and the banners of extras had spread the opening lines of the greatest news story of all time. Dane idly penciled the head on his copy paper. The inevitable head. LIFE ON MARS! You could bet on that one. With it the unique Earth, stubbornly held by millions as the only possible abode of life, was gone forever.
On the second day, early, they passed the quarter-way point and had attained a speed of over 575 miles per second. Earth was bright, dominant among the stars off the right nose. The spectacular sun sealed out on the left rear shot its prominences visibly higher on the observoscope, crimson tongues licking at its black panoply. In the afternoon Dane had word that Major Noel wanted to talk to him.
The room was stripped down to the built-in bed. The nurse brought Dane a light plastic stool. The insignia missing from the blue coveralls hadn’t changed Noel’s appearance. To Dane his mixed-up dark face looked the same as ever. His voice was normal, like his manner, when he said hello.
“How are you feeling?” Dane couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Noel darted his eyes about for a moment, then got up and closed the door the nurse had left ajar. At once it reopened, and the nurse stuck his head in.
“Shut the door, man,” Noel snapped in his familiar manner of command.
The nurse looked at Dane. Dane nodded, and the door drew quietly shut.
“I want to talk to you,” Noel announced.
“You know I’m a newspaper type,” Dane said.
“That’s why I picked you. There’ll be a lot of crap printed over this and I want to make one thing plain to you. If I can do it. I’m no goddamn traitor.”
Dane said nothing.
“I want you to believe me. “You’ve been along with us. You know why I want you to believe that. I don’t want that on my name.” He picked at the blue coveralls. “Or on this. I don’t want it even mentioned on this.”
Dane decided there was nothing to say to that either.
“I’ve committed a sin,” Noel said. “It’s an obsolete word, but the act is not obsolete.”
It was going to be an uncomfortable session. “I don’t get you,” Dane said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I’ve committed a crime too. Murder. But I’m no goddamn traitor. Murder I can pay for. The sin I can’t ever pay for. Call this a confession if you like. In the old meaning of the word.”
“Look,” Dane said, “like I told you, I’m a newspaper guy. Don’t tell me anything. You’re going to need a lawyer before you do any talking.”
For a minute he thought he had lost the man. The tight little face squeezed into its wrinkles. The eyes suddenly reminded him of acorns. Why that? he wondered. You couldn’t write a thing like that. Every damn reader would think howinhell can eyes look like acrons? But they did.
Noel grabbed up a stogie that looked exactly like the ones Cragg preferred.
“God damn him, he sends me these. So God damn him, I’ll smoke them. At least I’ll break even for once with the bastard. I put a knife in him and he sends me a box of cigars. For good services rendered—up to now. I know how the guy thinks. What do I get if I hit the jackpot! He whips me even with his back turned. I couldn’t even kill the sonofabitch with a wide-open invitation. That old woman King thinks I’m a nut; so Colonel Cragg thinks I’m a nut and puts me in the hospital and sends me cigars. I want you to put that straight too. I’m a nut all right, but not the way King thinks. If he thinks. I’ve got to add up my own score. No hospital, no prison, no damn box of cigars is going to help a damn bit.”
Noel hitched closer on the edge of his bed. “That’s why I called you in. You’re right in my book. I also owe you a big one, even if I do wish to hell you’d left me out there. But you had to drag me in. So now you owe me too. I’m your baby, boy.”
Here it comes. Dane thought. “What do you expect?” he said.
“It’s a sin. The worst one of all. My goddamn vanity. Vanitas vanitatem, crieth the preacher. For once he was right. The unseemly vanity of vanity. It’s the sin of command. First you think it’s you. Then you think it ought to be you. Then you think it’s got to be you. I wanted the power, okay. Then I coveted the name. Not okay. So I tried to kill him for his name. Commander of the Far Venture. First flight to Mars. My spectrum beacon or he wouldn’t even have been here. I would have brought the spacecraft home just as well as Colonel Cragg. Christ, what a cockeyed idea. The guy’s got it. He’s got it. He was born with it. That’s why I put the knife in him. He’s got it and I don’t have it. And he and I both know it.”
“Pembroke?” Dane interrupted him. He was embarrassed. Men like Noel shouldn’t break down.
“How do you think he got out of the spacecraft? Sure the lock works automatically. He leaves the outside trap open, the next push on the inside entrance button, it closes before the upper hatch can be opened. I saw him go. I let him go. You think all that goes on and I don’t know? He thinks he’s after Beemis and Jackson. He’s on the goof. So I help him. He’s a good murderer. But he comes back. Somehow he comes back. Pembroke was just a cover-up. I can pay for that. The law provides a payment for that.”
“Beemis and Jackson?” Dane wanted to know.
Noel shook his head. “I don’t know. It was a good idea at the time. Foul it up for Cragg. Work him into it. Make him look bad. Call it whatever you want to call it. I can pay for Beemis and Jackson too. But the sin. How do I pay for that! I might just as well have been a goddamn traitor. I betrayed the uniform, you dope! Not to Tong Asia. Here!” he pounded his heart. “Here I betrayed it! For the damn lousy sake of vanity!”
He got up and opened the door. “That’s it. Think about it yourself a little, before you write about me.”
Captain King was in the flight surgeon’s office. He shook his head. “He’s caught now. It’s a defense mechanism. It won’t play in tune with the facts. Besides, it’s characteristic.”
Dane said, “I don’t know. Maybe yes.”
“Dane, it’s typical. For days he would go along level, and he doesn’t like what he’s thinking. Then blip, he goes haywire for a while. Once he goes too far haywire. Then he’s got a load to carry, and that doesn’t help him any. Probably he’s had a latent paranoia for a long time. Aggravated maybe by the situation. That rap he had on the head once wouldn’t help any. Brain’s a funny thing. Hurt it—who knows how it heals? Confinement in the spacecraft. Worry. Responsibility. Looking back, you can see he was different after he took over. Then Cragg comes back. He’s depressed again. But it’s always been there. Probably from adolescence. He shrugged a quod erat demonstrandum.
Dane said, “No, I don’t go along with that at all. Noel’s probably as sane as you or me or any of us. We all straddle the rail. We covet our neighbor’s ox and his wife too, maybe. One man takes one more drink and there’s hell to pay. One way or another. Maybe he doesn’t get caught. But he has to pay for hell just the same. The rest of us just keep on lusting. Noel’s s
ound as a dollar on that one. It’s not the punishment that’s worrying him. He cracked his own idol. His own idea of himself. It wasn’t the overt act. It’s the idea that led to it that’s eating him.”
“You think I trifle on my wife?” King huffed.
Dane said, “Do you? How should I know what you want?”
At thirty-seven hours out the Far Venture sped near the midpoint. The power was cut, and with all personnel strapped in place, the delicate job of firing the steering jets to nudge the Far Venture into a half turn on her transverse axis was undertaken and successfully completed. Now with her nose again addressed to far-off Mars, she plunged tail-first toward the meeting with Earth, fifty-five million miles away. The drive was brought on, and deceleration began. Slowly the speed dropped off, and Earth, the green star that blazed brighter than all others, disappeared in front of the onward rushing tail cone.
On the third day they were so near that a segment view of familiar shapes and continents hung past the edge of the rocket housing. In a few hours they would be landing.
As he watched from the lower ports, Dane saw the cloud-flecked coast line of the Mexican Gulf swing up out of the distortion of the arcing globe, rising out of the rim fog and the vapor masses that circled the visible partisphere and merged into the halo of ambient air, clear-cut against the black of space. In only the inner elements could Dane make out the homely outlines of his childhood maps, but there, clearly, was the coast of Texas and opposite it the long thumb of Florida pointing at a Cuba veiled by the cloud pocks of the Caribbean.
The United States of America! Dull tints after dazzling Mars, a commingling of brownish-yellowish-greenish nondescript hue, but touched with a glory carried unforgotten and brought with them home.
Yes, as Colonel Cragg had pronounced, the reconnaissance had succeeded. Much of what they had gone for had been done. They had answered the riddle of the ages. Now men would go again, and elsewhere, being bred not only to vision but to action. Men would not rest content with bare knowledge that there are other minds than man’s, that mankind does not dwell in solitude amid the insensate matter whence it sprang.
Not in Solitude [Revised Edition] Page 24
