Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

He hitched impatiently at the cover on his knees. “As I say, you saved Major Noel, if he pulls through, and they say there’s nothing wrong with him besides shock. Maybe he’ll be up and around tomorrow. I haven’t got much liking for you, but I’ve got to say there’s nothing wrong with your courage. I couldn’t have censored you if you had left Noel on the ground and got yourself the hell out when the tank name started around at you. You didn’t. It took guts to do what you did. I acknowledge that and commend your action and respect your courage. I regret that I cannot respect you. When it comes to your damned newspapers, you are as tricky and as reckless as ever!”

“Just a minute!” Dane interrupted. “I am not a member of your crew, even if I am temporarily under your command. My principle business on this flight is to represent the press. What I write is my own business. Past as well as present.”

“Your business is not to meddle!” Cragg roared. “Are you aware that it is the opinion of some of the scientific party that the lichen growth might be controlled by intelligent beings who are using them to destroy us? Of course you are!”

Dane decided he had had enough, even if he would like to know what the man was driving at. “What I know or don’t know makes very little difference,” he snapped. “It happens to make a great deal of difference to me if somebody chooses to shout at me. Supposing I just say good night and go about my business.” He spun around the mouth-open Sergeant Peeney.

“Sergeant!” Cragg barked. “Switch over to fire control and step outside. Close the door and stand by.” He jerked back to Dane “I’ve got some more to say. Quite a bit more. You will be kind enough to stay and listen.”

“It doesn’t look as if I have much choice,” Dane said grimly.

“You are well aware that there is hostile intelligence on this planet. Pretty damned hostile, I’d say!”

Dane said, “I’ve been exchanging messages with Martians. We all know that.”

“That’s it exactly.” He jerked the wheel chair around to square off at Dane. “That’s it exactly. Yesterday you send a message, and all at once we are attacked by lightning bolts.”

“You think I ought to anticipate that?”

Cragg pulled the corners of his mouth down. “I expect you to obey my orders, and my orders were not to send any more messages after that. Do you obey orders? No. You take it on yourself to send messages again tonight. And what happens! In less than an hour we have five men dead from more lightning bolts.”

“What I sent—” Dane began.

“I know what you sent,” Cragg snarled. “What’s the difference what you did send? The fact is you sent it and then all hell breaks loose. So we got we don’t know what kind of Martians on our neck, and you stir them up while we’re still stuck here on the sand without power for take-off and evasion. All to make some news for your damn papers.” His lips went white. “All these men dead because a news punk’s got to try to make news for his damn papers. You think I’m going to be easy on you? What do you think I’m going to do to you for getting five of my men killed!” He raised his head and roared. “Peeney! Think that over!” he added.

“I doubt if I’ll have time,” Dane told him hotly. “I’m going to be damn busy thinking you’re completely nuts.”

Cragg clamped his jaw down on that one. “Suit yourself. One thing you’re going to do for sure. You’re now going into confinement. Then you can do any kind of thinking you want to.” He barked at Sergeant Peeney standing in the half-opened door. “Take this man to his quarters and post a guard over him.” He swung the wheel chair around hard and slammed the papers from his lap at the command desk.

Peeney said, “You heard the colonel.”

“If I didn’t, I’d get a hearing aid.” Dane laughed briefly at the shock on Peeney’s face.

With the sergeant in tow he climbed up to 3-high. He slid his door panel shut and locked it, somewhat irrationally, against the guard he knew Peeney would post.

The bunk felt good. He was so tired he was sore. The muscles in his flanks were on the edge of quivering, and the pain came sharp in his back when he breathed in deeply in preparation for a long exhalation. Sighing a little less rashly, he plucked at the heavy belt and the binding coveralls and raised up enough to peel them off. Then he lay in the dark but sleep would not come. Once or twice he swore out loud, but he kept coming back to the spark fires and the pattern of the long bolts and the network areas that were obviously some kind of energy centers where the long bolts were generated. The idea that formed was preposterous, but what else would accommodate all the known facts?

He thrashed at it until he was as weary of it as he was tired himself, but he couldn’t make it go away. Finally he switched on the lights and went to his notebook. Write it all out. Set down the observed evidence and the happenings. Relate them to each other and total up all their bearings on the idea. The best way to clarify your thinking, Professor Acher had been fond of repeating. Even if he was too tired to figure it out, he could set it down. Maybe then he could go to sleep.

He wrote for two hours, regretting the portable lost in the wreckage of his former quarters. When he was finished he square-stacked his sheets under the cone of the desk light to ready them for the ring binder. But instead of snapping them in the notebook, he shoved it away and fished an envelope out of his portfolio and sealed what he had written inside. Before he signed his name on the envelope, he took a soft blue pencil and struck out the TO AMALGAMATED PRESS, HOUSTON, TEXAS. Just below the strike-out he printed TO COLONEL CRAGG (IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH).

Things written down take on an existence and a new validity of their own, he thought. We write too many things down. He sat, thinking some more with the dimmed clarity of extreme fatigue about the night the first signals came from the Martians. Why had Dr. Pembroke gone out on the sands, mysteriously alone, to return to his own death? Again Dane tried to put down the nagging thought that the going out had been the deed of a crazed mind. What other reason than madness could have lifted a man from a hospital bed to wander out alone on a strange planet and return empty-handed? If mad enough for one such deed, then maybe why not mad enough for another? Such as putting a knife in Cragg on his way out for his mysterious sortie.

Dane came up short. Wide awake. Not Pembroke. Conclusively not him. The proof of that and of his own innocence as well had rested in his own hands all the while. Unrecognized, it had been his all the while.

He began to write again. Furiously. When he had it all down, he broke open his envelope and resealed its content and his case for Dr. Pembroke inside a new cover. He pondered a minute and then addressed it to Major Noel, also in the event of the death of John Dane.

He was documented. In any event he was documented. He crawled on his bunk, thinking. If certainly not Pembroke, then who? Which was what he had said all the time. Only without any proof to make them listen. Finally he went to sleep.

THE BUZZER wasp-buzzed. Dane climbed up on one elbow and looked at the 0747 hours on his watch.

“No breakfast,” he yelled, remembering very well the confinement practice of waking you up to feed you whether you wanted to eat or not. “I don’t want any breakfast”.

He let himself go backward on the pillow. At least he could sleep all he wanted to.

The buzzer came on again and stayed on. Muttering about fools who insisted on ordering life to their own time, he got out of bed and slid the door panel back from its latch.