Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

They took up the three-part load of the sling and resumed their grind along the edge of the lichen beds. At 0305 hours they rested for five minutes. At 0310 they headed again into the south, with McDonald on point at the apex of their little triangle.

At 0319 McDonald checked abruptly, hand upraised in the signal to halt. “What’s that up ahead?”

DANE STRAINED to see. There was nothing for him but the vague curtain of the dust haze. Nor for Wertz, behind his thick-lensed spectacles.

“It’s a fence, looks like!” McDonald exclaimed. “Right out there. Straight ahead. Can’t you see it!”

A hand came out of nowhere and gripped. Dane strove to speak. He heard himself say in a tight voice, “Let’s get a little closer.”

They freed themselves from the weight of the sling and huddled.

“We ought to spread out a little,” Dane told them, “and move up on it slow. Keep one light steady ahead. McDonald’s. He’s got the best eyesight. Wertz and I’ll cover us around the sides and behind.”

He snapped his own light on and began to play it to the right and right rear.

Wait a minute,” he added. “Remember our basic briefings. If there is something alive and conscious out there, don’t fire at it until it is definitely hostile and dangerous.”

“Jesus God!” Wertz rasped.

“We don’t know.” Dane forced himself to speak calmly. “They could be friendly. Wouldn’t we try to be friendly on Earth, until the unbelievable monsters from another world at-tacked us? We’ve got to remember that if the things are monsters to us, our appearance is for that very same reason monstrous to them.”

“I don’t want to take any more of this,” McDonald spoke out. “Let’s go on ahead and get it over with.”

They inched forward, deeper into the fantasy. McDonald’s beam gouged the dust that sifted through the night until it was diffused, dissipated, and throttled at the limit of vision. Playing his own light steadily to the side and rear, Dane wrestled with desire to face into the fearful front, if only for the briefest assurance.

It was unbearably long. Then Dane saw it himself. A long low barrier hugged the ground athwart their path.

Suddenly McDonald broke ahead, striding swiftly at the thing.

“Lieutenant!” Dane yelled at him, forgetting the helmet and the microphone.

A raucous reply burst in his ears. “Here’s your fence!” McDonald sounded as if he were choking on the words. “Completely without monsters. It’s only some more damned lichens.”

They went up, clammy with the draining suspense. Blocking further advance to the south, a long line of lichens stretched out as far to the right as they could see.

Wertz played his light about. “Looks like we’re in the pocket of a bay. They must have been falling back gradually to the left.”

Dane checked his compass quickly. “What do you get, McDonald?”

“What do you mean, what do I get?”

“Your compass. What direction does the edge of this bed run?”

McDonald raised his wrist to look. He shook the instrument and looked again. “East and west, according to this.”

“Mine reads the same. How about yours, Wertz?”

“East and west,” Wertz answered. “I don’t get it. The lichen beds run almost due north and south for forty or fifty miles. Something must be wrong with the compasses.”

They checked the instruments against each other. If they were in error, they were no more than a degree apart on the error.

Wertz said, “It’s probably a small promontory we over-looked.”

“Then we’re long miles away from the landing place,” McDonald said. “From the observation deck you can see the edge of the lichen forest runs north and south from horizon to horizon.”

“A small promontory could fool you from a distance,” Wertz argued. “It probably only runs out a hundred yards or so and then bends back to the south.”

Dane detected the taint in his voice. “You thinking what I’m thinking, Wertz?” he went on. “About the carts?”

“Where else could they be?” Wertz burst out angrily. “First we can’t find Dr. Pembroke’s cart. Then we can’t find ours. Now we find lichens where lichens are not supposed to be. Only they couldn’t grow that fast.”

Dane said, “What do we really know about them? Remember how fast the green areas on Mars have been observed to expand in the spring? Only an extremely intense metabolism in the plants could explain it. Maybe to cope with their environment they have a metabolism comparable to our rate of living raised several powers.”

“You saying they grew out around the carts?” McDonald asked.

“I can’t think anything else,” Dane said. “We should have thought of it sooner. There wasn’t any place for Dr. Pembroke’s cart to be except in the lichens, and he wouldn’t have dragged it into them. That goes for ours too.”

McDonald pointed at the plants in front of them. “In there someplace?”

Dane hesitated. Then he made up his mind. “No. Not in there. Somewhere behind us. I think we must have passed the place a long way back. I think these lichens grew out today for another reason. I think we’re directly opposite the landing place at its closest point to the lichens. I think this stuff is growing out towards the spacecraft.”

“The metal?” Wertz fumbled with the idea. “The metal, maybe? Attracted by it, maybe?”

Dane knew he was thinking about Houck’s pressure suit. He was thinking about that corroded, crumbling metal himself. “Or maybe by the power emanations of the spacecraft’s equipment,” he said. “Last night there was a significant spark fire pattern pointing directly at the spacecraft. If we follow this line on out, I’ll bet it will point directly at the landing place.”

Wertz said, “So what?”

A little more and Wertz would give up. “We don’t know that,” Dane told him sharply. “Until we do, we’ve got to keep trying. Maybe Colonel Cragg set a new time to wait us out. It could be daylight. We’ve got to hurry until we know he’s gone for sure.”

They retraced their steps to their burden and angled out to follow the lichens.

After a while Lieutenant McDonald said, “This is no promontory we overlooked. Not this big a one.”

The lichens ran on west for a quarter of a mile before they cut off and bent sharply back in the direction of the main beds. At the apex the peninsula was narrow. Fingerlike.

They slogged on. Out into the open dust plain, glad to leave the cursed lichens behind. Even if only a vast emptiness of rolling sand dust lay before them. It was, Dane noted, 0355.

Apathetically he listened to McDonald make the 0400 call and waited without hope for an answer. Dog-tired, he thought.

They now rested every ten minutes. Still the pace dragged. The load they bore was not backbreaking, but it had clung to them for so long that it was like the old man of the sea—unrelenting—endlessly swinging among them and trying to draw them down into the dust. At best they were making scarcely a mile for every hour of fighting to stay on their feet.

It was 0500. If his hunch about the lichen peninsula was correct, Dane thought, they could not be more than three miles from the landing place. No faintest imagining of beacon light had they seen. Perversely the dust settled more thickly over their own probing light rays.

“We couldn’t see the top light if we were within a thousand feet of it,” the lieutenant essayed. The note of hope was faint.

They rested and went on again. There was no end, Dane thought. They were marching in a non-time. The minutes and hours they measured on watches made no sense. Purpose was reduced to putting a foot forward, then the other, then the first, then the second. Except for the blessed stops.