Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

Dane lay back easily on his bunk. “You get used to it. Especially when nobody’s going anyplace anyhow. Thanks to you, I’ve had plenty to keep me busy.”

Yudin twitched his black-rimmed glasses at the sheaf of notes and the stacks of photographic prints that cluttered the pipe-legged bunk. “I tried again today to get him to release you and put you in charge of the deciphering operation, but it’s no go. He says no go until he hears what Colonel Cragg has to say.”

Dane wanted to be left alone with the new prints. “How’s he doing today?” he asked, knowing the fellow wanted to talk. He did owe him Noel’s permission to have access to the materials.

“Captain King won’t say anything. Except that he’s doing as well as could be expected and he has a chance. You never get anything out of a medic. Not them. They never give themselves a chance to be wrong. A couple of hundred years ago they stalled you with an ‘In-God’s-hands’ and alibied with an ‘it-was-God’s-will.’ The modern ones just keep their mouth shut and pretend it’s all too complicated for the ignorant layman to understand. If the patient dies, they expected it all along, and there was nothing that could have been done to save him. If he lives, they cured him. It’s a good racket. They can’t lose.”

Yudin got out his big curved pipe and began to stuff it, settling down for a chat. “I don’t like this whole thing. Not one bit do I like it. Item one, not enough power to get off the ground, and they’re no closer to finding out what’s the matter. Item two, those lichens growing so fast you can see them. You actually can see the things grow. Right across the open sand. Straight for this big can we’re sitting in. Why? Item three, these signals. Are they phony or not? If they’re not, where the devil are they coming from? They’ve got to be straight-line transmissions. Like any radar beam. They’re coming straight from the direction of those lichens that are growing out toward us, but there’s no antenna tower that we’ve been able to spot or anything else. Noel’s had two scouting parties out. One party went fifteen miles into the lichens, and damn the risk, and never spotted a sign of anything but lichens. So maybe it’s not line-of-sight beaming after all. Maybe they’re just plain phony. Like Major Noel says, maybe we’ve got a screwball. Huh-uh. Not for me. I don’t think so. What kind of a tap they going to put on my equipment and me not find it? But then what I say is, if there are Martians here, why don’t they show themselves?”

“Maybe they’re afraid of us,” Dane said. “Maybe they’re observing us by some method we haven’t any idea about at all. Maybe they’re some small insect life hiding in the lichens like small villages in a big forest. Maybe anything. How can we tell?”

Yudin laughed a little. “You got ideas, man. But even if they could be that little, they’d have to have equipment. To send the messages.”

“There again, how do we know what they have to have? It doesn’t take a bigger particle of matter than an atom to emit energy. Supposing their entire transmitter was the size of a pinhead. You think a scouting party would find it?”

Yudin shook his head tolerantly. “The power would burn it up.”

“What kind of power? Electrical power as we know it? Or maybe power as they know it? What about a microscopic civilization using subatomic power? If it takes 250 million hydrogen atoms lined up in a row to measure one inch and then a hundred thousand electrons side by side to reach across the diameter of one hydrogen atom, it isn’t too hard for me to conceive of an intelligent being so small that we would have to have a lens to see it and yet with a brain as complex as ours.”

Yudin sprang up from his stool. “I’ve got to report this to Major Noel. They might be invisible and all over the space-craft! We’d be at their mercy!”

He was an odd duck. Somehow his parts didn’t just quite jell. A tangential type, rather than direct and purposefully controlled. No wonder he hadn’t impressed the military.

“It’s just a speculation,” Dane assured him. “I suppose we could think up a dozen more, all with some plausibility.”

“I’ve got to report it to him anyway. The commander has to be informed about all possibilities.” Yudin fell back on his starched sententiousness.

“Just one second more. While you’re telling him about possibilities, you might try to get across another item to add to the three you’re worrying about. That’s this. I know I didn’t knife Colonel Cragg. I know that for sure. I am also as sure as a man can be about another man that Dr. Pembroke didn’t do it. Under any circumstances. That adds up to an item for us all to worry about. There’s a murderer loose on this craft, and he’s no Martian either. Somebody on the Far Venture is a murderer, and my guess is he’ll try again. For my money I’d want a guard over Colonel Cragg all the time.”

The absurd mustache danced above Yudin’s pursed lips. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell him that too.” He locked the door carefully behind him.

Dane picked up the morning’s take in the box of prints Yudin had brought him. This batch was obviously different. There were 174 four-by-five photographic prints cropped and enlarged from each frame taken by the 35-millimeter recording camera over the radar photo plane table. As usual, each had been dated and numbered serially by the darkroom man in the order of exposure. All were filed neatly and in consecutive order in stand-up fashion in a light carton. What struck Dane immediately on his first riffle was that most of the prints in the batch bore what resembled a word in which the former single symbols stood for letters. After the first few prints the single symbols were paired in various combinations. At the end of the two-symbol sequence he came upon a sequence with three symbols to each exposure and finally one of longer combinations with as many as six, eight, and nine symbols. Also, for the first time no new symbols had appeared.

He began sorting the 174 prints into “alphabetical” stacks in which the same symbol appeared either singly or as the first of a pair or group. This gave him eighteen stacks. Most of the prints were in the seven stacks for the seven symbols he had previously decided were numerals. All the singles and pairs were made up of these: the small circle he took for the numeral 1; the two points of light connected vertically by a bar, like a dumbbell balanced on end, apparently the numeral 2; the tiny triangle of three light points and connecting lines that must stand for 3; the square, pentagon, and hexagon for 4, 5, and 6; and a tracing of a little seven-branched tree-like object, probably a seven-tipped lichen plant but almost certainly the numeral 7.

Most of the other symbols had been identified, if some only tentatively. All were made by the threadlike line that connected the dots of light in the manner that constellations are often depicted. A “fishhook,” in which the line proceeded from one point of light and curved back toward its origin to meet another light point, had always appeared standing on its shank between two numerals. Dane assumed it meant “equals.” Two bars joining ends at right angle he called does not equal.” The fishhook with a bar dropped from its point to the middle of its shank fitted in as “equals what?” The dumbbell laid horizontally was “plus,” and shorn of its right-hand point of light it became “minus.” A circle cut through its area with an irregular curve but with two plain polar arcs could be “Mars” or “Martians.” A circle perched upon a truncated cone was obviously the spacecraft. There was a little stick figure, either “man” or “you.” For three symbols he had no meanings: two dots of light placed vertically and joined by a zigzag line; a small logarithmic spiral unwinding from a central dot to a terminal one; a rimless wheel of spokes, each tipped with a point of light.