Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

“You’re a pal,” Dane assured him. “How about helping me with this gear?”

He stepped down into the red sand. Mars, he thought. This is the planet Mars. He became freshly aware of the huge night Laden with what the old storytellers called menace. Maybe even now the Martians were fulfilling their promise to come to the spacecraft. From somewhere out in the dark From beyond the rim of the lighted landing site, where the brilliantly illumined circle tapered off into the solid dark that was periodically dealt a shallow wound by the beacon.

Once a minute the broad blade of the light swept around. A man should be visible in the observation-deck telescope at a thousand yards. The radar should pick him up at ten thousand. Only they were not looking for men.

Major Noel’s voice spoke into the ear set. “Come over here, Dane. Get behind me. Number two. The lichens are coming up fast. They’re at five hundred yards now.”

The men with the flame throwers had stretched their skirmish line to fifty-yard intervals all around the Far Venture Behind them waited the squat flame tanks. Suddenly Noel barked a command. One of the tanks wheeled abruptly and churned the dust to station beyond the southern arc of the perimeter. The other remained in place, facing the east.

“You want some pictures,” Noel’s voice rasped, “get ready. We’re going to burn hell out of them!”

A timbre of elation sang in the cry. Dane pressed the shutter-release button on his belt, snap-shooting the wide-legged stance Noel had taken against the east, the luminescent numeral 2 large on his back tank. He got one or two good ones of the waiting picket-line of outlandishly garbed men before a jumble of excitement rattled against his eardrums. Everyone was shouting into microphones at once.

Dane stared at the lichen clump that popped up a couple of hundred yards out in the light. A supplementary searchlight came on from the spacecraft and sought it out. More lights came on and shifted about, showing up one… two four… then more and more clumps standing along a broad front where only one had sprung into view an instant before.

Noel crackled orders on the command frequency. Dane saw the flame-bearers shift to meet the approach, like an elongated football scrimmage line.

The stuff pulsed forward in livid spurts, giving the appearance of impinging like bushy darts laterally across the sand. It was suddenly very close. So close that Dane saw the new plants erupt from the sand in front of the stands of plants that had themselves burst into existence in the van a second or two before.

He remembered once writing that a man caught in choking suspense can think or talk only in trite patterns and phrases. No epic speeches, like the epic heroes spout. Generally he says something like “God damn it,” and afterward he can’t remember that he thought anything except that things were not different as they should have been. To face great peril and have your surroundings look just about the same as always denies the rightness of things. It is inappropriate, Dane had written, for a man to endure the slow crisis of approaching death, then to escape in the nick of time and describe his feelings later with so puny a simile as “It was like a bad dream.” Now he had just caught himself thinking, It’s like a nightmare. One of those where you want to run pell-mell away and are rooted where you stand, while the menace stalks you, aware of you, closing in to take you.

He heard Noel say, “Light your pieces.”

Down the line and around the flanks spurts of bluish, chemical flame stabbed out shortly from the nozzles.

“What’s he waiting for!” Dane cried out.

Noel still stood broad-legged… immovable… bestriding his few inches of sand. Like the Colossus sadly dwindled in size, Dane thought.

“Let ‘em have it!” he ordered at last.

The lichens were barely fifty feet from the perimeter line when the heavy spurt of flame arched from the tank out across the sand and hosed back and forth. Four smaller flame thrusts stabbed at the flanks.

A miasma of oily smoke boiled thickly from the scorched plants, clinging to the ground and billowing under the dripping flame. It drifted slowly, coming in on the men holding the nozzles to hang a dense curtain over the fire tips and their targets. Then it piled in so close that it swallowed the fire lances in its creeping front.

“Cut your fires back,” Noel commanded.

The flame thrusts sucked back to their nozzles. The sortie stood intent while the searchlights played across the face of the smoke fog. Dane felt an impatience to brush off the confining helmet to see better.

Noel’s voice came on again. Quietly now. “I’m going into the smoke for a look. Seckinger, you advance your tank with me ten feet at my left. Hold your fire down unless I give the word.”

Seckinger, Airman First Class, said, “Yes, sir.” Dane visualized his square face set behind the port of the sealed tank. He was a quiet, chunky young man. His square shoulders suggested the blue, double-breasted sea coats his ancestors must have worn on the voyages he had told about. He was a good choice for a wing man.

Seckinger moved the tank up close, and Noel started forward. Before they got to the wall ahead, a cry came from the right flank. “They’re coming through the smoke over here. They’re coming through the smoke!” the man repeated.

Dane saw Noel turn ponderously. The tank halted at his upraised arm. Then his command came sharply. The other tank darted left in the dream scene, and the blue fire spurted ahead of its nose. A searchlight twisted from the towering bulk of the Far Venture and picked up the new attack.

Remembering his business to get pictures, Dane moved down the line. A great flash of light dazzled him. A roar of noise tore at him. He froze, stunned under another flash that seared his eyes, followed quickly by a third. “Spark-fire bolts!” he shouted into his microphone. “It’s a spark-fire storm!”

The tank belched its stream of fire in an undeviating line. One of its supporting flame bearers lay on the sand, his own fire jet spurting into the dust at right angles to his body. The bolts were aimed at them! Dane turned quickly, stumbling off balance in the clumsy gear.

“Noel!” he shouted. “The bolts! They struck one of the men!”

No time for answer. Lightning streaked out of the east and slammed the tank by Noel. Little balls of orange fire bounced briefly on its metal. Noel lay on the ground.

Something moved against his legs. Dane stood still, breathing hard. His helmet air tasted light and dry, like the stale atmosphere of a long-closed building. He looked down, knowing what he would see.

The lichens had sprung up all around him. Knee-deep.

The airmen shot out their small streams of fire, burning swaths back to the Far Venture, now aground in a sea of lichens. As the heavy smoke drifted from some of the burned areas, Dane saw with quick apprehension the lichens pop up again from the scorched sand, swallowing the remnants of the burned-out plants. They devoured sand and charred plants alike, burying the scours left by the flames in their leaden green.

Both tanks stood motionless. Their tongues licked ahead, but they made no movement in traverse nor gave any other indication that the operators inside were still alive.

A bright bolt spat over the east and lashed down another flame thrower.

Dane drew a deep lungful of his stuffy air. For a quick moment he imagined he could smell an acridity. Lichen acids eating against his suit? Frantically he trampled the plants down around him, playing his electric torch on his armored legs. His breath sighed out relief. Suddenly he shouted into the microphone. “Turn off your flames and get inside. You’re not doing any good. They’re coming up again where they’ve been burned off.”