Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

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.

“Very good,” Cragg barked. “McDonald has found them. I won’t say I’m not surprised. It looked pretty hopeless. Their being alive, I mean. Fill me in,” he added. “If they don’t talk or move, what makes them think they’re alive? They can’t get inside the suits to check.”

Noel told him about the breathing. “McDonald said they found Dr. Pembroke sitting up like a Buddha all by himself out in the weeds. They couldn’t rouse any of them at all. Dane thinks they’re in a state of shock.”

“Captain King had better watch out for that man. Next thing he’ll be in the flight surgeon business.” Cragg sprawled down in his chair and put his feet up on the workbench. “Sounds like an overdose of that static electricity to me. They’ve been in the middle of the spark fire for two days.”

There was one for you. Even if the guy didn’t have any scientific training.

Cragg shook his head and scowled at the log sheet. “This estimated time of arrival you’ve got here of 1230 hours. They’ve got to carry three men.”

“They think they’ll make it. McDonald thinks so.” He told him about the carrying sling made out of specimen bags. “They’ve got a pretty fair chance of making it.”

Cragg got up and went to the chart desk to make his own measurement. “Carrying sixty to seventy pounds of man a piece, they’ll really have to crowd it.”

“They can haul them in their specimen cart when they get out of the lichens.” Anyway, you could damn well bet that the colonel would never take off with them in sight, coming in over the red plain. And they would be in sight in the glass as soon as they left the lichen beds. No matter what time it was, he’d never take off with them alive and kicking and right under his nose. No commander could do that.

Cragg found his easy chair again. “Stand by for 1300 take-off as planned. If they’re late, we’ve got to give them a break, but I want to be ready to go the minute they’re inside. Unless the penetrations build up. If it does, then they’ve had it anyway. Now you’d better get a little sleep,” he added, the finality of his tone choking off Noel’s remark about the lack of data on the lethality of the radiation. “You’re going to have a busy afternoon.” He began the business of lighting one of his cigars.

Noel opened the door of the radio room to tell the watch to call him at 1000. He went back to the chart table and picked up his pencils. At the exit he stopped.

“Well?”

Noel hesitated. The colonel was obviously disinclined to talk any more. “There was one other thing.”

Cragg waited him out.

“On the report McDonald made just before you came in—some of the things they said didn’t make sense, or I didn’t understand them. But when I queried them, they only laughed.”

Cragg spit out a puff of smoke. “Major, please come to the point!”

Noel said, “It was just that it was peculiar—under the circumstances.”

“You losing sleep to talk nonsense?”

Noel regretted that he had introduced the thing. Now there was no help for it. “McDonald reported that they were making good time, considering the difficulty of wading through the lichens. Then Dane cut in and said, ‘Once I was very happy. There was soft black soil at the edge of the orchard and we made a garden.’ That’s all he said. I couldn’t get another word from him.”

Cragg snorted. “That settles it. The radiation is getting them too. He’s jetting off wing. Not that he had far to turn.”

Noel thought a moment. “I’m sure I remember it exactly word for word. Then McDonald laughed and signed out.” He hesitated a second. “Maybe we ought to mount a party to go meet them.”

The colonel poked the cigar at him. “Not another man leaves this spacecraft. Not one man. Not even to go outside for one minute. We’ve very likely lost seven men already.” He puffed rapidly at his restored smoke. “Put an operator on them. I want to know as soon as he can contact them. I want to talk to McDonald myself. I want to give him a good laugh.”

Noel went back into the radio room and gave the order to the watch. Then he went to his bunk. In two minutes he was asleep.

In no better than two more minutes he was fighting the buzz of the intercom. It was already 1000. He fumbled for the right key and called Captain Spear at the command post. “What’s the news from the McDonald party?”

Spear came on. “None, sir. We’ve been unable to contact them since your last contact at 0654.”

Noel calculated rapidly. They should have reached the edge of the lichen beds by now. Or be very near to it.

He pulled on his heavy boots and climbed the ladders to the sunlit lookout chamber in the peak of the spacecraft. He stood for a moment, ringed with glassite ports and 110 feet aboveground, and looked out at the red emptiness before he waved the observer aside. He swung the three-inch refractor at the near horizon of the lichen forest and put his face against the eyepiece. He followed the low line of the vegetation slowly to far left and then to far right. Then he began to scour the red plain in front of it. The dust flat was as bare as the perimeter of the lichen land had been uninterrupted by alien form or movement.

It was not good. He kept at the search until the hands of his watch crawled around to 1020 hours. Finally he relinquished the telescope to the observer. He had the six decks below to inspect before take-off time. He had to go over the entire 80-foot sphere perched 24 feet high on its truncated drive cone. Opening on the circular corridors of the five decks above the drive deck were nearly two hundred rooms and quarters. Not all, fortunately, housed equipment essential to the maneuvering of the spacecraft, but all merited at least a professional glance.

He climbed down through the hatch to 3-high deck immediately below. Its storerooms and compartments delayed him only a few minutes. All but two displayed either their initial seals or those affixed in last night’s inspection.

Two-high deck bore laboratories equipped for the scientists and the hospital. Not much to be held in readiness here either, although he did want to stop in the radiation laboratory to get a reading from the cloud-chamber monitor.

A round little thick-lipped man by the name of Spivak handed him the graphs. Noel let out a low whistle.

Spivak nodded. “One-point-three above yesterday this time.” He seemed cheerful about it. He fished out a pencil and pointed at the red line that rose at a steep angle over yesterday’s blue line. “They’re diverging sharply.”

Noel handed him back the clipboard. “Calculate the rate of divergence based on the last hour and give me predictions for 1200, 1300, and 1400 hours. I want it right away.”

Spivak picked up a greenish pad. “I’ve already got it. Rate of divergence, point-one-four-five. That’s from 0900 to 1015, but from 1000 to 1015 she went up to point-one-five-eight. Take the last rate off, and here’s your curve.”

Noel didn’t like the way the man said it. He snatched the graph pad from him and scanned it hurriedly. Fear confirmed, he examined it more carefully. Twelve o’clock: 11.2 per cent intensity; penetrations .0083 per second. Thirteen hundred hours: 13.7 per cent intensity; penetrations .0136. Fourteen hundred hours: 16.6 and .0291. He looked up at Spivak. “What do you think?”