Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

“I’ll tell you why you told me this,” Dane rode on at him. “You’ve got Tong Asia on the brain. In another week you’ll have Tong Asia agents under every bunk. You’ve really decided I’m it. In fact you hope I am. So tell me you only suspect me as a matter of principle and you think if you tell me this you’ll drive me out in the open.”

“Congratulations, mastermind,” Cragg sneered. “Now put your razor-strap intellect to work on this.” His face flushed. “According to your lights, I am a blunderer. You did your best to ruin my career, and you damn near did it.”

“I’m afraid you weren’t that important to Amalgamated. Not as an individual,” Dane said. “It was the national safety we had in mind. Preventing any more blunders. At least by you.”

“Have it your way. I don’t expect much from reporters. I do expect more from myself. Even if I made fifty mistakes, I’ve yet to dishonor the uniform by lying. When Pembroke came in off the surface just before he was killed, he was told to leave his pressure suit and all his gear in the airlock. He did, and it stayed there until the next day. And there his own pistol was found. The pistol that shot him was a spare from the stores. Now the man was stripped down to his shorts when he got into a suit of coveralls he didn’t own. He couldn’t have had the pistol on him when he got on that elevator.”

The old rasp of authority came clear. “Now I want to give you an order. You will obey it. Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. If the messages are Tong Asia, our man will be especially anxious to sell you. He’ll want you to make a big headline play out of hostile Martians after we get back. Everything unroutine, you report to me. If you hold anything back, I’ll fry your hide so brown when we get back that it’ll take two Amalgamateds to butter you up again. That’s not all. There’s a technical charge against you in the official log. You want to clear yourself, the best way is to make like a detective. A good one. If you’re on the level, you ought to want to prove it. And that’s all.”

“No,” Dane said, “that’s not quite all! Someone is out to get you.” He pulled open the door. “I wonder why?”

IT WAS the brightest morning they had had on the planet. In spite of his gear Dane stepped out away from the ladder with a springtime feeling of buoyancy. Even in a pressure suit it was good to be outside the metallic chrysalis of the spacecraft. He admitted that the ponderous, armored Heileman lowering his gangling self down the hatch ladder didn’t look much like an emerging butterfly.

Dane was content to stand a moment and look out over the landscape undulating to the horizon like a sand-blown prairie. The coloring was not unlike the weathered red of the welt of sore soil across the southern United States, softer under the muted sunshine that fell to Mars. Pushed and respread by the gentle winds of the planet, the coarser dust and the sand of the surface had been sorted into a host of small crescent dimes, and the floor of the desert that bore them was intricately figured with arabesque leavings of powdery spindrift. The uninvited diversity of the three-phase power line was alien and inimical to the reticent curves and simple features of the scene it tore apart. The black wires snaking over the sand out to the raw heap of spoil at Dr. Judah’s excavation and, even more alien and inimical, the immense geometry of the spacecraft itself, these were’ the frightening things here, Dane thought, not the limitless aloneness he otherwise beheld.

“You like to buy a few choice acres?” Heileman broke in. “Tax-free. No pets, no children, no nosy neighbors, no lawns to mow, no traffic, no nothing. Wonderful place to retire and write that book. Don’t even have to raise chickens or sweat out a garden.”

Dane turned down the volume in his earphones. “To him who communes with nature even the braying of a distant jackass is melodious, but not when amplified into his eardrums. I suppose it is useless for me to point out to you that there is a certain beauty about this place.”

“Well, hardly useless,” Heileman said. “The remark gives a flavor to your character that we might term generally as odd. More specifically we would call it nuts.”

It was something like three hundred yards to Dr. Judah’s “mine.” A pair of pressure-suited figures sat alone on chunks of stone halfway down the sloping lip of the trench-like scar gouged out of the red soil by tetryl explosive. The scoop shovel was upended near the drag-line motor and cable winch, which was shut down.

“Looks like a strike has been called,” Heileman said. “Us stockholders want to know what’s going on here.”

Dane saw one of the seated men turn his head. Then they both stood and looked up out of the pit. “We’ve quit digging here,” Dr. Judah’s voice came into the phones. “Nothing but igneous rock for twenty feet. Not very promising.”

Heileman picked up a fragment of the stone. “Primordial lava, he observed. “This whole region is probably the impact plain of a big Imbrium-type planetesimal. The dark lava indicates that. High ferrous oxide and sulfide content.”

“However you explain its origin,” Dr. Judah said, “there is obviously little use to excavate it further. It’s undoubtedly several miles thick.”

“On the order of fifteen to twenty kilometers at least,” Heileman agreed. “If you want to go by the estimates on the lunar explosion pits, like Mare Imbrium.”

One doesn’t accustom oneself to conversing normally with another man fifty yards away and in plain sight, Dane decided. He started down the drag incline of the pit, picking a way carefully over the rubble. He wanted to stand on the bottom and look at the Mars stuff all around, undisturbed for at least four billion years, the kind of a date that was expressed offhand as 4 times 109 years ago.

It was, after all, little different from a hole in the ground dug out in Texas, except, as Judah quickly pointed out, for the absence of alluvial gravel. There was the thick layer of sand, maybe five to ten feet, then heavy, hard clay-like stuff, as thick again, then a layer of heavy stone, the bedrock, all deeply tinged with the browns and dark red of the iron color.

Dane glanced into the mask of the second figure. It was Silverman, the civil engineer. The man responded with a grunt in the interphone and turned away.

At the bottom of the pit Dane found a right-sized chunk of the living rock and stowed it into his pouch. Luck granting, it would someday rest polished on his desk, yielded out of the vast original processes of planet formation to be sought in its eternal bed and placed, by the ingenuity of man, heavy on papers concerned with the ephemeral news flow of trivia.

“Migod, a souvenir hunter. Even in this Godforsaken place, he wants something to remember it by,” Silverman said, acid in the rasping phones.

“It’s a shame we won’t be able to move to other locations,” Dr. Judah said. “I had counted on a great many locations.” His helmet bobbed. He was the sort one found far back in the recesses of university departments, with thick spectacles and a green eyeshade, nodding his head over a fresh specimen for the museum. Yet in some fashion fame had come to him, so that now, one of the chosen, he stood on the surface of Mars, still eager for specimens.

Silverman came up close, thrusting his stare through Dane’s mask. “I’ve got something I want you to get through your fancy head, fellow,” he said abruptly. “I served with the colonel in the Third during the war, and he asked me himself to come along on this goddamn flight. For my money he’s a damn fine man and a damn fine commander. I don’t like what your goddamn papers tried to do to him, and I don’t like you. I kept my mouth shut because the colonel wanted it that way when we found out you weaseled your way on board.”