Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

Dane said, “Hold it! What’s eating you?” The man had been taciturn, given to keeping to himself, aloof in the confines of the Far Venture, but this sudden animosity was unpredictable from anything that had gone before.

Silverman said, “I’ll hold you, all right.” He lifted up a geologist’s short pick. “I got no reason not to crack your helmet this minute and your damn head along with it. We’re not going anyplace anymore.”

“Hey!” Heileman shouted. “You nuts?”

The pick twitched higher. He was going to strike. Dane threw himself against him, inside the arc of the weapon, seizing the arm and bending it up and out. The man went mad, twisting and dragging Dane down on the rubble with him.

Dane desperately threw his weight on the thickset body, feeling it fight to break his hold with powerful upheavings, managing to pin both arms down with holds on the wide wrists in spite of the awkward gauntlets and the encasings of Silverman’s heavy forearms.

One flailing blow on the helmet and he was gone. A quick hiss of escaping pressure and he would be exploded for keeps.

Suddenly the upthrusting body went limp. Dane lay on it a moment warily, until he realized that Silverman’s suit must have ruptured. He got on his knees, appalled at the bewildering uselessness of the man’s death, but when he looked into the face mask he saw the eyes staring back malevolently. He stood clear with a great relief.

“Whatinhell’s come over you two?” he heard Heileman saying. It had happened so quickly that neither he nor Judah had moved.

Silverman’s voice cut in. He said it conversationally. Almost reflectively. “Maybe you stuck that knife in the colonel and maybe you didn’t. Personally I think you did. But if anything happens to him again, you’ll be the one that gets it. I’ll kill you before the day is over. I promise you faithfully. You’ll be the one that pays for it.” He got up, cast around for his pick, and set off for the Far Venture.

“He’s mad,” Dr. Judah said. “God help us all!”

Dane burned with a quick heat. It would be a good thing to run the man down and have it out. His fists longed to strike and his fingers to choke. When he noticed the others regarding him silently, he cursed them and the Far Venture and everyone in it for fools and lunatics. “Including me,” he added grimly. He began the climb up the rubble-strewn ramp.

After a few minutes of plodding Heileman began to talk. “A good many billions of years ago—”

They were doing what is known as handling him with care, regarding him, too, as a “case.” The thought angered him; then it concerned him that it had angered him. It should have been funny.

There was the disease. If the Martians wished it, they had only to wait and the invaders would destroy themselves. It was the confinement sickness. The isolation neurosis. Claustrophobic dementia, with a whole planet underfoot. They were getting stir-crazy.

The day was very clear. Although the sun was a dwarf half his familiar size, he beamed a friendly orange in the deep blue, bonding the white ball and sawed-off cone of the spacecraft with a tint of the fire glow he poured down upon the red oxide sands shimmering under heat waves. The brighter stars also hung in the chill sky, unidentified without their weaker cohorts, disturbingly unwanted. One they had all learned to recognize, the Mars Pole Star. But not Polaris, playing child’s game with the comforting Big Dipper. A star called Deneb, a name that fitted no American tongue. Deneb, formerly of the constellation Cygnus, now chosen by the axis of this red, white, and blue world to be its constant. To mark its pole for these eyes that had come to see.

An alert burst into the earphones. All personnel return to spacecraft immediately. Three times it pre-empted the diaphragms. Then Dane heard the out-parties state their positions and acknowledge compliance, the specimen collectors, the teams scouting the lichen boundary. Something was urgent.

THUS IT began.

“Standing order,” Noel told him. “No civilians outside during signal reception.”

“But this order called in all personnel,” Dane persisted.

“Special order of the commander. As soon as the signal was reported to him, he extended the order to all personnel.”

The signal had projected a recognizable map on the photo plane table, a sort of outline aerial view of the terrain immediately around the spacecraft. With the Far Venture almost in the center, it depicted the surroundings over a radius of about eight or nine miles, judging by the position of the boundary of the lichen forest, which run halfway between the greatly out-of-scale image of the spacecraft and the edge of the map. It was still coming in.

“Look here.” Noel pointed at it. “How many of these white dots do you count?”

Dane leaned over the image. “Six.”

Noel took a charting protractor and a rule. Measuring off the positions of the six dots, he jotted down figures on a pad. “If we estimate distances according to the straight-line distance to the lichen boundary, we can approximate their coordinates.” He jabbed at the intercom.

“Major Noel to Lieutenant McDonald.” The acknowledgment squawked. “Give me the positions last reported by all out-parties.”

When he had McDonald’s co-ordinates down, he threw his pad on the table. “See for yourself.”

The correspondence of the two sets of co-ordinate was close.

Dane nodded meaningfully in the direction of the guard on duty.

“Step down to 3-high and wait until I call you,” Noel ordered.

Dane said, “You think the colonel’s right now? You think we’ve got spies now? Or do you think we’ve got Martians?”

Noel’s dark brows contracted. “The Old Man tell you too?” He nodded. “It might figure.”

“Look,” Dane said, “any Tong Asia agents here, we brought them. Supposing they could figure out a way to send the signals without being zeroed in. Even if we assume that very big if, they couldn’t have sent this signal.”

Noel nodded again. “If they were sending from outside, they couldn’t know the positions of all the parties. That what you mean?”

“Right. And if they were sending from inside someway, even if that were possible, could they know? How could they? Not all the positions are fixed in advance before the parties set out, are they?”

Noel shook his head. “Only to a general area. I don’t know myself until they report.”

“We’ve got Martians, Noel,” Dane told him. “Highly intelligent ones. They’ve got us spotted. Someway. Every move.”

“Where are they?” Noel demanded. “Why don’t they show? What’s the idea of this hide-and-go-seek business?” He went over to the observation ports. “What’s out there but empty sand and low-class vegetation? Where are the minds? They can’t be far away. But whereinhell are they?” He came back and took up some photo copies. “A symbol message came first. You make anything out of it?”

Dane reached for the prints. The symbols he had seen many times. But some of the pairs and triads were reversed. “Well, you read it or can’t you?”

“Part of it maybe,” Dane told him. “It says, if it makes any sense at all, its says, Men are other-many. Martians are one . Wait a minute,” he said. “Maybe the reverse order means interrogation. If we put a question mark after that first one, it could ask a question: Men are other-many? Maybe it means, How many men are here? Then the next one wants to tell us there is only one kind of Martian. The rest of it could be a warning to stay in the spacecraft. Literally it says something like, No men out spacecraft. ”

“Maybe our parties are getting close onto them,” Noel said. “They don’t want us exploring around. We might stumble onto something.”