Kenneth Gantz: Not in Solitude

Yes and quite so. Neatly deduced and experimentally sound. But a man had to ride the decks of the Far Venture up the long slant to the splendid globe and see its particolors fade into a sky-filling dun and drab vastness, characterless and unwelcoming to man. Not till then was the lingering hope at last gone that perhaps here might be a home of warm blooded life and zest for living. Before the swooping exploratory encirclements had all been run and the spacecraft had settled on the nude red plain of Isidis Regio five miles west of the vast Syrtis Major lichen beds, Dane had known that one man, at least, doubted the adventure.

But how could you tell a man like his managing editor, the great Ames of Amalgamated Press, how it really was? The nothingness of it. How do you write endless sand and scrub into bulletins?

On the flight out you radioed him copy about the red star and how it swelled into a blemished red moon, and then the spacecraft reversed ends and the red moon vanished behind the decelerating rockets, until nearness bloated it into view again, out beyond the rim of the wide base cone. You could have written that sitting at your typewriter in Houston. Ames could have had all that from the rewrites.

When the radio went out, you couldn’t even tell him that there wasn’t any story. Any Amalgamated beat of a story.

How would you make him realize it, face to face with him again in the Houston office, with the radio typesetters and the babel wires held open all over the globe? What could you tell him about the way it actually was? He hadn’t been there. The three billion people waiting suspensefully for Amalgamated press dispatches hadn’t been there. How could they ever know how undramatically different it was from their Earth-bound imaginings?

As on the last night in Houston. Luxury food. Drink spot for the nation’s big-money men. “The story of the ages, you dog, you! Don’t ever get to be managing editor and have to stay home and nurse the clients.” The odd thing was that Ames really meant it. Like his brag that his mind differed only in skill from the millions of minds that read his clients’ newspapers.

What was the great story? The vastness of rusty desert? The primitive vegetation? No canals? Nothing but a flat world athirst? All those things were known with practical certainty before they left Earth. The static discharges over the lichen beds and a few confirmations and contradictions of minor scientific speculations weren’t enough to show for a hundred million miles. That four men were missing and to be left behind for dead would be small change to Ames.

Maybe the real story was why they had come at all. But try to sell that one to Ames! Ames dealt in who, where, when, what, and how. You don’t feed an international news service on why-stuff.

“Give me the challenge and the mystery!”

“Shock ‘em and weep ‘em and inspire ‘em! In that order.”

“A good bulletin is like a good poem. They don’t read it. They feel it!”

“No journalism, please. Give me word pictures of human doings and human feelings. Readers want to see ‘em doing and feel ‘em feeling.”

Those were the Ames commandments. Placarded singly and in bilious combinations in Amalgamated Press rooms all over the world.

Well, a likely space voyageur the great Amalgamated’s John Dane had turned out to be. Four days on Mars, only four days of the tremendous adventure, and ready to go home. Except for Dr. Pembroke.

He felt his waist. Take off five or ten pounds after they got back. Ought to have done it before. Save up a little money and be shed of the Ames human-interest factory forever.

After a while he went back to his plottings.

The blue-bright net patches were again the last of the spark fires to die down. After the giant bolts ceased to arc out of them and over the far-eastern horizon, the photo plane table still reported the net flashes in radiant, shattered glass patterns for two hours past the Martian sunset. By the time their flickering crosshatches dimmed to reddish flare-ups here and there, Dane had made and developed two hundred photographic exposures of the display on the dark glass table top.

He began to press his calculations into the accumulated mass of discharge plottings, entering the results one by one on his master chart overlay and drafting lines to connect the like-intensity readings. Under his penciling the pattern of last night’s discharges was repeating itself. Methodically he compared his partly completed plot a time or two with yesterday’s chart before he noted an emerging variation. The indication was a certain dislocation of one of the major focal points of the fires.

Now he hastened the calculations, working rapidly and getting excited but restraining his conclusions until he had done all the plotting. Then he drew a line along his straightedge, connecting the location of the spacecraft and the point of Dr. Pembroke’s entry into the lichens and extending deeper into the beds. He grunted in triumph. The line ran squarely through the dislocated focus.

It could be coincidence. But why the shift of this particular focus? He pored over the chart, seeking for phenomena comparable to the shift. If any were there, they eluded him. Maybe the discharge centers of the spark fires were meaningless, like the small whirlpools that form and disappear in rapidly flowing water, vagaries of the streamlines and the urgent fluids. But again, why the shift in this particular center? Odd chance or attraction? It had to be one of the two. Unless maybe design? That, Mr. Ames, would really be it! For an instant he let himself go into wild surmise. His skin crawled before he could shake the spook away, sneering at himself. By what? Design what-in-hell by? Chance? Quite possibly chance. But assume attraction, like a steel mast drawing lightning, and you couldn’t miss it. It was there to be seen. Plain on the chart, also assuming that Dr. Pembroke had chosen to follow a straight-line course. Make only those two assumptions and you couldn’t miss it.

Suddenly he pushed down the commander’s key on the intercom. “Dane to Colonel Cragg.”

The speaker rasped. “Cragg here.”

“I’m coming down. Are you clear?”

“Not now. Let it rest.”

“It can’t. We have to send a search party out. Immediately.”

“No. The answer is still ‘no.’” The speaker clicked dead. Dane stabbed the key. “Colonel Cragg! I’m calling a meeting at once. Of our own people. We’ll make up a party ourselves. With or without your approval.”

“That’s what you think, Doctor Dane.” The colonel’s harsh baritone scorned the title. “Maybe you’d better come down at that.”

Dane twisted away from the table and strapped on the heavy gravity footgear. He pondered the litter of photographic prints a moment, then pushed them aside and took only his master plot. For Colonel Cragg it had to be fast. With his usual feeling for the oddness of the action, he got through the hatch and climbed down the durometal ladders to the commander’s quarters on 1-high deck.

The entry panel was shut. He jabbed twice at the buzzer push and bore against the latch handle until the lock hummed and he could shove through.

UNSMILING BEHIND his desk, Cragg swept over Dane as if inspecting for violations of military neatness. He poked a digit at one of the plastic chairs and clipped off a phrase. “Five minutes.”

Dane ignored the chair. “I have new evidence and good evidence that Dr. Pembroke is still alive. At least someone of his party is alive. I think I know where he is. I want to make up a party and go after him immediately.”

Cragg pushed a thick fist impatiently at his cropped gray hair. “There’s still no time. You’d never make it back by morning.”