Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

“Okay! Okay! I’ll open the damned door and go in after my stuff! Then burn all you want to!”

“Let us try the heat for a few days,” Cruzate intervened. “I can assure you that these things are the lichen-type plants. They do not survive the temperature 150 degrees. Then the work of Wertz, it is not lost. I think even after a few hours it is quite safe to go in. They are of my profession, these lichens, you know,” he added gently.

Noel turned to his airman. “Bring me an electric drill. I want a one-inch hole through that door. Okay,” he added to Cruzate, “we’ll proceed on your advice.”

Wertz wondered why he had made such a point about it. Who could know what Pandora’s box of tricks he had unlocked? Cruzate lived in another time. A much older time of the twentieth century. He was almost early twentieth century. Systematic. Categorical. Everything subject to classification. Definable classes, admitting no penumbra. A fairish jolt of his mental kaleidoscope and it wouldn’t surprise him if Cruzate began to find teleological patterns in his ordered arrays.

The airman was a long time coming back. Apparently one-inch drills were not found in every tool chest. After he had rigged it up, Noel directed him to pierce the door panel.

The man flexed broad shoulder muscles. His husky fore-arms and hands fondled the heavy tool gracefully, with an odd suggestion of its buoyancy. He tried the security of the chuck before he pressed the trigger switch. Then he addressed the case-hardened point to the timageel surface of the door. The whirring deepened as the tool took hold and he put some weight behind it.

Suddenly he bent forward. Wertz thought the drill had won through, even as he saw a large area of the solid door crumple into pieces, like breaking a pane of painted glass. The airman lurched into the green rose that blossomed full-blown through the hole. He cried out hoarsely and staggered back, rubbing at his face.

Wertz shouted, “Lie down!” He grabbed his belt and pulled back and down. “Get down on the floor!” He snatched up a bucket of sodium carbonate. “Cover your eyes!” he yelled at the cursing, rolling figure.

He poured the bucketful over the head and hands. Then he took up the soaking sponge out of the other bucket and swabbed at eyes, ears, and neck, leaving the livid acid marks. The man was severely burned. The acid tips had turned viciously caustic since he and Cruzate had plunged out through them.

He heard Major Noel snap out an order for flame throwers. When he looked up, the evil rose had doubled. It grew visibly before his eyes, expanding its circumference and thrusting forward its protrusion, its surface shaking and stirring chaotically in a slow, Brownian dance. He grabbed the blowtorch, which mercifully still stood on the floor nearby, and fumbled with its pump. Any second the things might explode throughout the whole corridor.

“Let me have that!” Major Noel demanded. In the same breath he ordered Cruzate to get away from the danger. “We can’t risk you two. Get going!”

“The hell with you, sir!” Wertz shot back. “Commanders are not expendable either. Besides, this is my baby!”

At last the torch roared. Its nozzle hissed out a blue-white dagger.

Noel said, “Whipple, take this man. I want that torch.”

Before he could get out of his crouch, Wertz felt a choking arm shock around his neck, and a weight from behind dragged him irresistibly back, sprawling and locked in some kind of judo hold.

He saw Noel take up the torch and thrust it at the lichens. “Cover your eyes! Your eyes!” he gasped against the choking arm.

Under the moving blast of the torch the lichens blackened. A stultifying smoke arose, gray, heavy, and stinking with chemical vapors. Wertz thought of the possibility of cynogen compounds. Hydrogen cyanide… formed when carbon is strongly heated in temperatures of the order of 2000 degrees in a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen. There had been no opportunity for exhaustive study of the complex organic acids in the tips. The charred stems were certainly carbon… but the open flame… that was combustion. Anyway, one whiff of cyanide and they would all have been dead by now.

Noel went all around the circumference. Then he passed the flame over the center in slow, smooth brush strokes. Wertz decided that he was holding his own. And the sinister trembling of the plants was no longer visible. “Okay, fellow, you’ve done your job,” he said. “You can let me up now.” The smoke was getting chokingly thick. “Better lay off that, Major. You’ve breathed enough of this stuff. You’d better get some masks before you burn out the laboratory.”

“I have attended to that,” Noel said.

Neither of them wanted to say much about the condition of the walls and surfaces inside. The door was of thinner metal than the decks and even the bulkheads, but then, maybe the acids were concentrated against other areas inside. Even now lichens could be erupting. The entire laboratory could be a sieve, leaking acid lichens into all the adjoining rooms and spaces.

The corridor filled rapidly with crewmen and equipment. Captain Spear came up. “This has got to be fast,” Noel told him. I want two men in asbestos suits and one for myself. You will take the rest of the men out, including these civilians, and seal off the corridor. First I want all the doors opening on this corridor sealed. This is going to make a big chemical stink. Then we’re going to pour Wertz’s laboratory full of fire. That will be all for the lichens.”

Captain Spear said, “I’ll take the M-6 in.”

“Don’t waste time, Captain,” Noel answered levelly. “You can instruct me in my duties some other time. Carry out your orders and clear out of here. On the double! I imagine that, armed with a flame thrower that can burn out a pillbox, I am the match for a small roomful of plants.”

Spear smiled wryly and began barking his orders.

Wertz grudgingly gave the devil his due. He didn’t like the guy, but Noel had the stuff in him. Wertz realized that all the others, officers and crewmen alike, had known without a word being spoken who was going in with the flame thrower. The guy was not only their commander, but he was a leader to be followed. Somehow he did look different from the others now. Just a guy, dead pan, pulling on asbestos overalls, but he emanated an easy confidence and a competence that gave the operation the assured outcome of a planned drill.

There was something about the professional military it took a long time to become aware of. They cherished their little dignities and made ostensible show of their obligations, but when the issue confronted them, they drew up together in a tight-knit band for the attack, all the way through from buck airmen to commander, relying on their commingled merits. There was a clue to it in the way Noel had ordered the “civilians” out. It was not just solicitude for the well-being of civilians; it was that civilians didn’t belong where the military stood in danger. A kind of unworthiness to meet the foe. Wertz felt a touch of disgrace.

A phone jangled sharply at the end of the corridor. One of the men ran to it. “It’s for you,” he reported to Major Noel. Wertz noted that he came back properly close before he spoke. “Emergency from the command post.”

Noel shook off the man who was adjusting the flamethrower harness to his shoulders. “I’ll take it,” he directed Captain Spear. “Check these men in their suits. I’m about ready to go in.”

LIEUTENANT YUDIN hitched up a leg over a knee. “I shouldn’t say it, I guess, but I don’t think Major Noel ought to keep you chained up like this.” He looked quickly down and away from the links around Dane’s ankle. “It’s already been three days. Most everybody thinks Dr. Pembroke did it anyway.”