Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

Wertz swore. “A reflection! A damn reflection!”

McDonald said, “I don’t mind saying it scared me stiff.”

“What’s doing the reflecting?” Wertz demanded. “You got any brilliant ideas on what’s shiny enough around here to reflect light?”

“So we go see,” Dane said. “We just walk up ahead and find out.” A helmet. It had to be a helmet.

A few more steps and McDonald halted again. He pulled at his belt cloth and wiped the glassite of his vizor, playing his light on the dark shape of the thing ahead, now plainly roundish, with broad bulk near the ground. “It’s not a man,” he announced, moving on. “Whatever it is, it’s not a man Looks like a big pile of something or other.”

They didn’t have that much with them, Dane thought. Dr. Pembroke and his men couldn’t have had enough with them to make any kind of a pile.

“Lichens!” McDonald burst out, not halting this time. He wiped his vizor. “Lichens. A big pile of lichens. Right in the middle of the ditch.”

Dane kept his own light on the brightness that dulled as they approached. Something to the left of the pile. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a helmet.

Twenty feet away he recognized it. “A specimen can! A plain ordinary everyday specimen can.”

“It gave me a bang-out I’ll remember for a while,” McDonald said. “I really thought it was an eye or something watching us and shining up in our lights. You suppose they left it here on purpose?”

Wertz gestured at the waist-high mound of lichens. “Why cut all this stuff and pile it up here? If they intended to take a load of it back, why cut it here and not at the edge, closer to the spacecraft?”

“Yeh, how were they going to carry it out?” McDonald seconded him.

Dane said, “It must be another marker of some kind.” He kicked at the base of the pile. All at once he was digging at the mass, scattering the plants right and left. “There’s something buried under it!”

It was Beemis and Jackson. They lay on their backs, side by side in the dust.

“Dead?” Wertz threw his light around them, passing it hurriedly over the rows of lichens that rimmed them in above.

Dane went gingerly over Jackson’s suit. It was intact. Apparently it was still functioning. Certainly there was none of the corroding moss effect visible that had eaten away the suit of Lieutenant Houck.

He brought his light full upon the face behind the vizor. He took his belt cloth and rubbed the glassite as clean as he could polish it. The eyes were open. Staring. If the man was alive, he thought the light would maybe contract the pupils.

Suddenly he saw it. “He’s alive! This one’s alive!” he exulted.

McDonald crawled over from the other body.

“Look at the nostrils!” Dane urged him. “You have to look close, but they’re moving. He’s breathing slow and hard.”

They bent closer to Beemis, hoping to detect the tiny movement that meant life. The wide eyes stared up as though reproaching them for disturbing his rest.

“Yeh!” McDonald exclaimed. “Did you catch it? He’s breathing too.”

It came again beneath the bluish vizor, and again, the nearly imperceptible narrowing of the nostrils that had marked the widely spaced inhalations.

McDonald said, “What I’d like to know, was Dr. Pembroke hiding them or did he think he was burying them?”

Wertz said, “If he thought he was hiding them, this is about as good a way as in a young widow’s bed. A pile of cut lichens in the wide open, in a place where there isn’t any such thing as piles of cut lichens—”

“He probably did it so he could find them again,” Dane said. “Maybe he was thinking the dust might drift over them.” They were wasting time. “Let’s get going. We’ve still got to find Dr. Pembroke.”

From McDonald’s stance Dane knew that he was talking with the spacecraft on the liaison frequency. He felt for his own selector switch. No, he didn’t want to say anything. He knew why they couldn’t seem to get moving. They didn’t want to admit that they didn’t know which way to go. After the certainty of a place they had to reach and to return from, there was now a vast uncertainty of where to look and how to look. How long ? He thought angrily. That’s what you mean. How long can we look? How much time remains for looking? “None,” he said.

“What?” Wertz demanded.

Dane said, “Nothing.” He began to climb out of the gully.

Wertz said, “We’ve got to start back right away. We don’t have time for any more looking. We’ve barely got time enough to get these two back.”

Dane kept on climbing. Wertz talked too much. Dammit, the man ought to learn to keep his mouth shut.

McDonald cut in on intercom. “Major Noel says to take a quick look around and then start back. If Dr. Pembroke went any distance at all, he’s hopelessly lost. We wouldn’t have a chance in a million of stumbling onto him.”

Damn Major Noel. Damn him, too.

“Even if he started back for help, he didn’t make it. Once he’s off his feet, there’s a lot of square miles of lichens between here and the spacecraft to hide him.”

Dane decided to begin with an arc of two hundred yards on the west side of the gully. Might as well begin on the side nearest the spacecraft. Thirty or forty-five minutes there. A like time on the other side of the gully. If the focal point of the spark fires had guided them to Beemis and Jackson, maybe there would have been another focus in the area, if Dr. Pembroke had gone very far.

He said, “You and Wertz start back with them. I’m going to hunt at least another hour. I can catch up with you before you get back.”

“Not if you find him and have to carry him, you can’t,” McDonald said. “And if you don’t find him, what’s the use of it?”

“I stay and look thirty more minutes,” Wertz surprised him. “Then I start back. Not one minute more. We’ve got to get out of these lichens. Anyway, it doesn’t make sense to risk five men for the problematical chance of finding one who’s likely enough dead already.”

McDonald said, “I’m afraid he’s right. We’ve got a duty to Beemis and Jackson. We know they’re alive. We’ve got to give them their chance.”

Daylight was brightening fast. As if it were being turned on weird stage scenery through a giant rheostat. It was an ugly, comfortless light, sketching in horizonless stretches of vegetation with broad, characterless strokes. Dane stared at the tangled masses of spike-like plants that crowded him in, up to his waist. The full hopelessness of it was as plain as the dirty green of their pigmentation. Dr. Pembroke could lie within twenty feet of him and be unseen.

It seemed like a yesterday of six months ago. Dr. Pembroke lolling on the cushions of the little cabin cruiser, pulling at a big glass of foaming beer and talking humorous argument with Old Grandfather Dane about everything the two restless minds chanced upon, while the boy fished for the lake perch and the boat swung lazily at anchor under the summer sun. And other long afternoons the boy and the man in the piny woods behind Old Grandfather’s summer place, Dr. Pembroke vigorous in khaki trousers and sneakers, explaining Pleurococcus on the bark like a story of a hidden world, naming the polished pebbles showing treasure color in the creek gravel. And the day Old Grandfather died, Dr. Pembroke coming from Europe to put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and look one more time upon the face of his old friend. “He was always living one more bright day. He didn’t count any of them. He died young at ninety-four.” Dane remembered as if it were a yesterday of six months ago how he had patted him gently on the shoulder and said, “Youth is the search. Time has nothing to do with it.” Then he had tinned away and walked out of the house.