Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

Noel shrugged. “It was dark in the passage and the knifeman got him from behind.”

“You mean he doesn’t know who stabbed him?”

“No, he’s not certain. He’s not sure at all. But he doesn’t much think it was Pembroke. He seems to remember a last-minute impression that it was a big man. Too big for Pembroke. Say more your size.”

“Wait a minute,” Dane demanded. “What are you trying to say?”

Noel shrugged again. “I’m not trying to say anything. Except that the colonel doesn’t really know who did knife him. But he does think it could have been you.”

“Me!” Dane shouted. “That’s impossible. He couldn’t see anything that didn’t happen!”

“That,” Noel added, “is only his suspicion. Not a certain fact.”

“Thanks!” Dane told him.

THEY HAD made him fairly snug in an emptied supply room on 3-high deck. A standard service cot had been bolted to the floor and made up with fresh white linens. Two blue Air Force blankets were tautly tucked in and turned down. A clothes closet with shelves and hooks and a wide shelf to serve him for a table had been contrived out of packing-case plywood and angle irons. He even had an extra stool for company and a folding canvas chair for reading.

A clothes closet was not much good without clothes, he decided. He went to the quartermaster’s office and signed a chit for Air Force shirts, pants, socks, boots, underwear, sweaters, a kind of work jacket he liked, fatigue coveralls, toilet articles, a billed work cap, writing materials, and a stack of towels.

While he shoved the stuff into a duffel bag, he saw that he had omitted to ask for shoes. Once the spacecraft was underway and the thrust was converting inertia into the effect of gravity, crew and passengers would dispense with the weighted boots and return to conventional footgear. Maybe he had subconsciously lost all confidence. If they couldn’t take off, he would certainly not be wearing ordinary shoes again.

Later he went up the ladders to the observation deck. It was already dark outside, but the eastern front flamed with the spark fires. The display was the most intense yet. The snapping long bolts leaped almost steadily from the ground in flashing arcs over the horizon.

He glanced at Airman First Class Humphries, stolidly on guard with the revolving beam of the sweep-light. He knew that the man was covertly inspecting him as much as the periodically illumined environs of the spacecraft.

What genuine meeting of Martian and man minds could ever be, with no mutual values for a beginning? What understanding beyond the simplicity of a plus b equals c? It would take generations of mutual tolerance and effort rare on Earth among men themselves. And tolerance and effort to understand, they themselves were Earth values.

Dane was dismayed and depressed. His grand scheme of communication with the Martians collapsed to guessing at nonsense riddles.

A tremendous arcing bolt leaped skyward and over the far curve of the world. For an hour the fires flashed wildly, the single discharges melding into an incoherent pyrotechnic that ringed the eastern sky like cannon fire in a great night battle.

Airman Humphries broke his silence. He had never seen the fires “so bad.”

“What do you really think it really is, sir? I mean what’s causing it? Lightning wouldn’t come up out of the ground would it?”

It might, Dane told him. “If something on the ground could generate a large positive charge in one area and a large negative charge in another. In that case something like lightning might discharge between them. The charges would have to be tremendous, though.”

Humphries followed his gaze to the radar photo plane table. Its opaque glossy surface boiled with light. “ You don’t think it’s lightning, do you?”

“No, I don’t suppose we ought to say it’s lightning, in the sense of Earth lightning,” he said. “Although it’s obvious it’s a form of static electricity.” He chose the words carefully. “It is very probable that the lichen plants generate charges during the heat of the day that build up by early night, before the cold numbs them. You can see local arcing in the form of the big networks in local patches. Then the local build-up must rise high enough to discharge to some other local network several miles away. Our pressure suits must either repel the charges or ground them some way.” He bought of Tesla effects. “We have certainly felt no electrical effect out among the plants.”

He swung around on the silence.

Humphries stared at the face of the plane table. “Come here,” he whispered. “Quick!”

With two strides Dane was beside him. Messages again. He recognized some of the signs, but from the number of large and new ones something new was being attempted. “The camera!” he said sharply. “You forgot the camera.” He seized its overhead suspension and swung it down to bear on the receiving glass.

“It sent a picture!” Humphries’ voice was shaky. “It sent a picture of that guy Houck that got killed out in the lichens.”

“Nonsense,” Dane said brusquely. He locked the camera in the rack and started its motor. “These signs are simple line-and-dot symbols. How would you send a man’s picture into a radarscope?”

“I saw it. Plain as life!” Humphries insisted. With his hands he measured off two thirds the area of the screen. “It was his face. Plain as day and dead-looking.”

Dane said, “I won’t say you didn’t see it.” He waited for the boy to control himself. “Visual phenomena are still not too well understood. It’s been proved possible that we actually see a great many things we just think we see.” That one really floundered. “I mean our eyes and our nerves can fool us.”

“I know what I saw.” Humphries rebelled, face-strained. “When I saw the foot and the legs and the lichens around the body I thought I was just seeing things that looked like them. But the face was plain. Jesus, it was looking right at me! Right there! You’d of seen it too if you’d been looking. You couldn’t miss it. It took up pretty near the whole screen.”

“Okay,” Dane told him. “So you saw it. Relax and tell me about it.”

“I just did tell you about it.”

“I mean how long did the pictures stay on the screen? What did they look like? Were there any other signs or symbols with them? What did you see first?”

Humphries looked at him blankly.

“Calm down, fellow. Take it easy. Let’s take it one at a time. What did you see first?” Dane repeated.

Humphries tried to think. “The feet. The feet were first. Feet and legs. In a suit. But before that there were some of the other signs like we’ve been receiving.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“They came awful fast. Just on and off. Then something else. I think the shoulders in the lichens came on twice, though. Then the face. Plain as day.”

“This face?” Dane asked him. “Think back. Was it in outline? Like you draw a face with a pencil? Or solid, more like a photograph?”

Humphries shook his head. “I didn’t have no time to think about that sort of thing. It just plain scared me half out of my pants, seeing this dead guy’s face looking up at me.

“Think again,” Dane pushed him. “You saw it. Plain as day, you said.” He grabbed up a pencil and sketched a rough outline of a human face. “Was it just lines like this? Or was it filled in like a photograph?”

Humphries nodded.

“Which? Which one, man? You mean it looked like a photograph instead of like a line drawing?”

Humphries nodded again. “It looked like a real picture coming over the television, only not so plain. Plain enough to tell who it was all right, though.”