Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

Yet you have to do something. At least you have to know for sure. You have to confirm the fearful certainty. As a man who suspects himself in a fatal disease compels himself to seek the certainty of the doctor’s verdict, dreading to go only a little less than dreading to stay away and risk the loss of a possible cure.

He saw McDonald stir. Then Wertz. Then he realized that he was shouting into his microphone for them to wake up.

“My God!” he heard Wertz’s voice rumble. “It’s night!” The man got stiffly to his feet, an ungainly mechanical figure in the beam of light.

McDonald was already calling to spacecraft.

“It’s no use,” Dane told him. “I tried it. Either Colonel Cragg has taken off and left us, or maybe they’re not listening in for us.”

They knew that was unlikely. They did not like to say impossible. The operator might be snoozing at his post. But not on Colonel Cragg’s crew. Maybe something might have gone wrong with the equipment. Radio long range had been out with Earth ever since they had come close to the planet. Maybe there had been some kind of a blankout on the liaison wave length.

Dane said, “I’m not going to believe he left us until I see it for myself. We’ll go see if they’ve gone.”

Wertz said, “We were fools to come out here. He warned us.”

“No,” Dane said harshly. “Somebody had to come.”

Lieutenant McDonald said, “I guess we lost the toss. But it’s a hard way to get it.”

Dane picked up his rope’s end and put it over his shoulder. “I say let’s go see. We’ll call every ten minutes. It doesn’t matter much about the power now.”

The others bent slowly to take up the load. Wertz said, “I don’t think it was natural sleep. I had some awfully silly ideas running around in my head while we were walking. You want to know what I think, this radiation effect is working on us. Before long we’re out like them.” He jerked an armored hand at the three unconscious men.

“We’re going to get out of these lichens,” Dane told him. “By a straight line. As fast as we can go.”

“I remember I thought I was going down the beach at Clearwater, Florida,” McDonald said. “I was looking for a place there called the Seahorse Tavern. You men were off your orders too. How do we know what direction we’ve been going?”

“All we have to do,” Dane told him, “is go straight west. That will bring us out on the dust. By then we’ll see the beacon light. Maybe before. If it’s still there, we’ll see it.”

“We ought to see it now,” Wertz objected. “Unless we’ve been backtracking.”

“There’s a lot of dust haze, maybe.” Dane threw his light ahead. “The lights don’t penetrate very far.”

The others tried it, shining their lights in sweeping arcs.

“Maybe you’re right,” McDonald said. “At least it’s a hope.”

They made one more call. Then they started into the west, the only direction that could be conceived as friendly. The loaded sling swung clumsy and slow against their urgency. Talk was over. They needed their breath. There was nothing to say except the things that a man has to keep within himself.

After an hour the lights were thrusting ahead against a thicker dusty ground haze, quelling at least the fear that because they could not yet see the beacon light, there was none to see.

At 0057 they came out of the lichens and stood all at once with unreasonable surprise on the broad dust plain, flat before them, denuded and barren as the bed of an old salt sea.

“Which way now?” Wertz wanted to know.

Dane had been thinking about that for an hour. “Unless we’re hopelessly off, we should be northeast of the landing place. If we follow the edge to the south, we ought to find our specimen cart. Then we’ll know our course exactly.”

They went south for a half mile, then another half mile, and then at least another. The straight edge of the plant land still ran empty before them as far as the lights would shine. Rest stops were coming closer together. As the distance fell behind, nobody said anything about how far they had come into the south.

At 0245 Lieutenant McDonald finally called a halt. “I hate to think it, but we must have turned the wrong way. We’ve come more than two miles. If we’d been walking in the right direction, we’d have come to the cart by now.”

They eased the sling to the ground.

Dane said, “I don’t think so. I mean I don’t think we had any reason to turn north. Unless we walked a long way straight south this morning, we’ve got to be right. If we were wandering around off bearing, we could just as likely have gone northerly.”

“Look,” Wertz said, “we know the spacecraft is gone, but even if it isn’t, it’s five miles out from the lichens. It’s five miles out there in the dust someplace. North or south from here, we don’t know which. I say we strike straight out. After we get out in the dust about five miles, we wait for daylight. We couldn’t be too far off. We’ll see it all right, if they waited for us. What’s more important, maybe they can see us. This way we can walk ourselves completely out of their sight. Even if the dust settles.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. Except for the cart. The cart would relieve them of their load and double their speed. “Maybe it’s only another hundred yards in front of us,” Dane told them. “If we turn out now, we know for certain we’ve got to carry this sling all night.”

“Maybe I ought to scout ahead,” McDonald said. “I can go twice as fast if I don’t have to lug anything. You two wait here and I’ll come back with the cart if I can find it in the next mile.”

“No!” Dane said sharply. “We stick together. You saw what happened to Houck.”

“What are you trying to do?” Wertz exploded. “You starting that up again!”

“I don’t know what I think. Except that it’s obvious Houck was coming back for help. Maybe he was even coming to warn the rest of us. Something happened to him. Or maybe again, something got him.”

McDonald whistled. “Jesus! You mean maybe something didn’t want him to get back to the spacecraft?”

“He’s nuts!” Wertz growled. “Nothing living could exist here. Except the damned lichens.”

“I hope you’re right,” Dane said. “I hope to hell you’re right. But what you really mean is that something like us couldn’t exist here. Something that our experience can describe. That’s all you can mean. It’s extremely probable that a lot of things exist in the universe that our experience is too limited to describe. Why not here?”

“Nuts again,” Wertz said.

“Just the same,” Dane persisted, “there’s a kind of pattern to the things that have been happening here on Mars. Maybe it’s a conscious pattern trying to impose itself upon us. Maybe we were deliberately kept from returning. Maybe Dr. Pembroke and the others were kept from getting back to the spacecraft.”

“But why?” McDonald demanded.

Dane picked up his rope. “Who knows? Maybe if some kind of conscious beings do exist here, they’re curious. Curiosity is the mark of consciousness. That’s why we came to Mars ourselves, isn’t it? Curiosity.”

“Curiosity killed a cat,” Wertz said grimly.

It’s an obsession, Dane told himself. It’s a kind of pathetic fallacy. I’m forcing my own thoughtways upon events to make them conform to my own experience. But he could not help finishing out his idea. “If there is curiosity here, it could be observing us. Like specimens, so to speak. That’s what we would do in its place.”

“Cut it out,” Wertz snapped. “You’ll have me believing you. Not that it matters a hell of a lot. Cragg is long gone.”

“We don’t say that until we know it for sure,” Dane said. “Let’s go.”