Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

“If there is a danger here, it must be recorded,” McDonald said mildly. “We are not the last men to come to Mars.”

Dane said, “Let’s take a good look around here. We can start while he’s calling in.” He was ashamed of the undisciplined tenseness that had led him into a petty quarrel. He should have kept his mouth shut. Like McDonald.

Major Noel stood by for McDonald’s briefing. Then his voice crackled sharply. “I ought to order you back now. I’m sure Colonel Cragg would do it.”

“Look,” Dane broke in, “Dr. Wertz and I happen to be civilians. I suppose Colonel Cragg can take off without us, but Dr. Pembroke is in charge of the scientific party. Colonel Cragg has no military command over its investigations.”

“He has over you,” Noel said. “You’re a correspondent attached to the crew, aren’t you, even if you also do happen to be holding down a slot in the Pembroke group. Or did you forget?”

McDonald said, “Sir, I’ll accompany Dr. Dane and Dr. Wertz. If I may.”

“I only said I ought to order you to return,” Noel came back. “You will go with them, and you will see that they get back. On time. Report promptly on all findings. Your power is good.”

THEY TOOK up the 39-degree course, heading directly for Dane’s co-ordinates. It was 0135, an hour and thirty-five minutes after midnight. They had less than twelve hours.

According to the last fix, they were a thousand yards into the lichens. Little more than half a mile. It was at least three miles more to the estimated location of the missing party. A mile an hour was now as much as they could expect to make through the lichen forest. Just to walk to the plotted location and return far enough to get out of the lichens would approach seven hours, with no delays. If the terrain got no worse. Sunrise being due at 0614, that made them emerge at least two hours after daylight. That was the best, any way Dane figured it.

They came into open ground, in areas forty to fifty yards across with the familiar red soil showing up in their lights After a time a sensible downhill grade developed, but the lichens were again thicker and their speed did not improve. The haze now obscured the few stars of early night, and the beacon of the spacecraft had dipped below the crest of the descent.

Wertz said, “One thing about your theory doesn’t jibe. I went along with you on your plot of the spark-fire concentrations. It made as good sense as anything that they had something to do with Pembroke’s party. But if you’re right about that, how come no concentrations where we found Houck’s body?”

“It doesn’t fit,” Dane admitted. “But if the concentrations signified anything at all about Dr. Pembroke’s locations, then they proved that he moved three thousand yards farther into the lichens from one night to the next. That’s what we’re counting on.”

McDonald said, “It would have helped if we could plot them in the daytime.”

“A lot of things would help,” Wertz said. “If we only knew about them.”

Between 0130 and 0230 they made less than a mile. To maintain familiar hour relations with sun-time, their Earth watches had been synchronized at every midnight, moved back 37 minutes to accommodate the 24-hour-and-37-minute rotation of Mars. At 0255 hours by their improvised Mars time Dane estimated that they were near the place of concentration recorded for Dr. Pembroke’s first night in the lichens.

He called McDonald. “How about getting us a fix?”

They were practically on it. Sixty yards short. Some to the right. They were steadily veering to the right hand.

After they had swept the location for twenty minutes, they resumed course.

Another forty minutes, at 0425 hours, and they came on a bare depression running ribbon-like and fifty yards wide diagonally across their path. It looked like an old Earth gully rounded and filled in with wind-blown red soil. It extended to left and to right as far as their lights would shine.

“Rope me,” McDonald said. “I’m going into it.”

He edged down the sloping bank and kicked at the loose dust. It was ten or twelve inches deep at the bottom, but he thought the footing underneath was the same clay-like stuff that had been found under the red plain.

They made their 0430 call and reported the find. The fix showed 5370 yards in and slightly left of course. They had overcorrected.

Dane said, “Anybody coming through three miles of nothing but lichen beds would be sure to explore this. It’s the first different thing they would have seen.”

“So we follow it,” Wertz said. “It’s slanting ahead pretty close to our way.”

The going was slower. It was like walking in drifted snow, only the dust did not help them by packing. The minutes perversely increased their tempo.

McDonald thrust out an arm. “Something’s on the ground.”

It could have been spread out for a sign. The shoulder strap was unbuckled. One end of the strap stretched straight forward, pointing along the channel. The other lay at right angles, indicating the bank toward the spacecraft.

“It’s a specimen bag,” Wertz said unnecessarily.

Dane said, “Now we know we’re on the trail.”

Wertz said, “Maybe Houck was coming back for help and put it down for a marker.”

“We ought to see some tracks,” McDonald objected. He pointed to their own passage.

“Not necessarily,” Dane told him. “We had a five-mile wind early this afternoon. That’s plenty to drift light dust.”

They waded on. After another half hour the dust channel bent to the left in a sharp curve.

“It’s taking us back toward the 39-degree course line now,” McDonald said.

The steady shuffle took them along more red channel and between more lichen-covered banks. It could be no dried-up watercourse, not on Mars, but they could not imagine a cause for it or advance any reason for the failure of the lichens to spread over it. With only minor alteration in course it was more like a wide, dusty sunken road than anything else. But who would have made a road?

“Maybe ages ago. Hundreds of thousands of years,” McDonald said.

“It’s pretty well agreed now that Mars is a young planet, as far as life is concerned,” Dane told him. “The lichens are probably at the beginning of life here. Not the end. Between the two planets, Earth life is the old life. Besides, the lichens would have covered over a road long ago.”

“It’s probably a surface fault of some kind,” Wertz said. “A fault could have exposed some mineral substance the lichens don’t like. I’ll take some samples on the way back.”

“It’s time for the 0530 report,” McDonald said. “Maybe we ought to hold it up a few minutes. We’re almost to your location.”

“Better get a fix,” Dane said.

“We’re going to have to make speed out of here,” Wertz said. “It’s 0530. We left the spacecraft at 2120. That means we’ve been eight hours and ten minutes getting here. Eight hours and ten minutes from now is 1340 hours, and Colonel Cragg said he takes off at 1300 regardless.”

“We can get back a lot faster,” Dane said. “We ought to come on to them in another thirty minutes, if they’re where we think they are. That’s 0600. That leaves us seven hours. In a straight line it’s only about eight miles and a half back to the spacecraft. With no time out for searching around on the way back and in the daylight, we ought to make it to the edge of the lichen forest in three hours and a half without any trouble and make it over the dust plain in two and a half hours more. That’s six hours. Well still have an hour for cushion.”

“What do we do if we have to carry them out?”

“We take off their gravity weights, and pack them out. One each. We’ll make it. We’ve got to.”