Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

“You think I trifle on my wife?” King huffed.

Dane said, “Do you? How should I know what you want?”

At thirty-seven hours out the Far Venture sped near the midpoint. The power was cut, and with all personnel strapped in place, the delicate job of firing the steering jets to nudge the Far Venture into a half turn on her transverse axis was undertaken and successfully completed. Now with her nose again addressed to far-off Mars, she plunged tail-first toward the meeting with Earth, fifty-five million miles away. The drive was brought on, and deceleration began. Slowly the speed dropped off, and Earth, the green star that blazed brighter than all others, disappeared in front of the onward rushing tail cone.

On the third day they were so near that a segment view of familiar shapes and continents hung past the edge of the rocket housing. In a few hours they would be landing.

As he watched from the lower ports, Dane saw the cloud-flecked coast line of the Mexican Gulf swing up out of the distortion of the arcing globe, rising out of the rim fog and the vapor masses that circled the visible partisphere and merged into the halo of ambient air, clear-cut against the black of space. In only the inner elements could Dane make out the homely outlines of his childhood maps, but there, clearly, was the coast of Texas and opposite it the long thumb of Florida pointing at a Cuba veiled by the cloud pocks of the Caribbean.

The United States of America! Dull tints after dazzling Mars, a commingling of brownish-yellowish-greenish nondescript hue, but touched with a glory carried unforgotten and brought with them home.

Yes, as Colonel Cragg had pronounced, the reconnaissance had succeeded. Much of what they had gone for had been done. They had answered the riddle of the ages. Now men would go again, and elsewhere, being bred not only to vision but to action. Men would not rest content with bare knowledge that there are other minds than man’s, that mankind does not dwell in solitude amid the insensate matter whence it sprang.

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Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.

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