Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

These were the things that strangers could measure and put a value upon. A half hour.

He fought out against the rubbery barrier, lifting his knees against it like a man wading into deeper water. When the half hour had gone, he would stay. Not thinking too hard against the futility of it, he thought he would stay another hour… yes, not before then would he leave off and go back, ending the search… thinking it was a hell of a gift to the yesterday. If you didn’t think about it as only an hour more than the half hour that strangers gave, if you thought about it as very close to life itself, maybe it was enough. I’m tired drunk, he decided. Daylight coming is a little dying all in itself.

The light was flooding all around now, so soon, with the odd brightness, as if a storm came with it, that they knew as the Mars full dawn of day. He turned to look for the Earth helmets, far apart and questing through the improbable brush like treasure divers out of their element. A little luck would do it. A little luck, he thought, just as he angled off and came upon the tiny clearing of cut and strewn lichens with the helmeted figure sitting in the middle.

He went deliberately up and peered in at the white-mustached, Irish-pink face before he said, “Dr. Pembroke! Here he is. Over here. Here he is. We’ve found him.”

He exulted over the same flutter of deep inhalation beneath the wide-eyed stare.

MAJOR NOEL switched off the command speaker. That did it. They were going to make it. McDonald would bring them in.

Colonel Cragg wasn’t going to look too good on this one. Not the way the newspaper guy would write it up, he wouldn’t. All Dane had to do was stick to the facts. Not that he could be expected to miss playing up his own part. If he didn’t do it, Amalgamated Press would do it for him. They would want to make a hero out of their own guy.

The colonel had been wrong to let him go out at all, even if the guy practically forced it on him by his newspaper connections. It was a mistake to let any civilians go at all. The business of the sortie was search and rescue, not any last-minute observation or specimen gathering. For that matter Major Noel had a pretty fair scientific reputation himself, and who had a better right to lead the sortie? But he “couldn’t be spared.”

It was a cinch. Exactly where the guy Dane had said they’d be. A guy named Noel would have found them, with or without Dane, given the co-ordinates, but it sure looked like he wouldn’t get much out of the trip except his name on the crew list.

He explored the back of his scalp, pressing gingerly at the area of the old wound. The ache was worse, pulsing dully every few seconds. Maybe the low gravity pull had something to do with it. It had started up right after they had been on Mars a little while. It had certainly been aching the second night. He remembered it hurting that night, all night. Hell, that was only night before last. Monday night and this was Wednesday morning. It seemed plenty longer than that. Still it couldn’t be anything serious. They had told him he oughtn’t to have any trouble, and he hadn’t in all the three years. No aches or pains, except from the sight of a hospital. No more of that ever. That was wish number one. When you thought about that and all the things that could happen to a guy and every day you see the guys all around you that have already had it, that made you hate the sight of a hospital.

It was uncomfortable and unnatural enough to have to live in a ward with five other men for three months, without being sick and weak while you were doing it. A man who well and in good health was deemed to require the space and privacy of his own three rooms to sustain him for effective duty. What formless asininity of military medicine decreed that it was good for him to share his bedroom and latrine with five strangers when he was sick and flat on his back on his bed the whole long day and longer night—that even the docs themselves didn’t pretend to know. Except that it wasn’t good for patients to be too much alone. When else does a man want to be more free than ever from the slashed, the smashed, and the diseased! And their stupid, interminable yammering. You shut it out with a book, but still it flows on, around and over you until the indignity of your public exposure, even to their visitors, combines with the unnecessary wakings in the mornings and the enforced early dousing of the lights so the five fools could sleep until no wonder a guy even hates to go near a hospital for his annual physical. Seeing the captain with his eyes smashed out fumble with three-weeks-blind fingers at Braille solitaire cards or grope for the latrine door and to know he didn’t have the guts and imagination to destroy himself wasn’t as bad as listening to the colonel with the mysterious sore back bray about his communications difficulties in Africa, interspersed with the careful detail of his daily treatments.

Father had been shocked by what he considered the trap-pings of poverty when he had torn himself away from Westchester and his broker’s desk in the Street and found his son deep in the outlands of Georgia in bed in a room with five men and an unclosed archway yawning at the public hall. He had been too dispirited to explain to him that the normal and easy paternalism of the Air Force and the somewhat shabby beneficence of its Air Medical Corps did not proceed from exactly compatible points of view. You were either a man or a patient. One apparently couldn’t be both, except for purpose of assignment to wards. He knew the Old Man was thinking of the nine years of Stanford technical education, as far across the country as you could get from Westchester, and the nine more years in the Air Force, not undistinguished years and characterized by rapid promotion, then to be treated for an honorable wound in the style of a charity patient. That was one thing he and Father had found to agree upon. It was a species of indecency.

And even that agreement had led inevitably to the old thing, and the Old Man had left angry again, angry as he could be under the circumstances, over a son demonstrably bright enough by his own record to realize the stupidity of wasting his life in uniform, as he had from the very beginning of the idea plainly told him he would be doing nine years before, when the choice was made in a quick afternoon of a California June. “Free life, hell,” he snorted, snatching his hat up off the floor. “You’re just playing a silly and dangerous child’s game, and in costume at that. You see what it’s got you, don’t you? Even a fool can see that,” he shouted for the edification of the blind captain and the communications colonel and the three empty beds whose tenants were obediently sunning themselves on the terrace. He turned his red-flushed, white-haired face away and stomped his still-squared six feet out of the presence of his dark, twisted-featured changeling.

Most of all there was the uniform. You knew the first time you put it on that you were made for it and for a pride in wearing it. It would be unthinkable to think of a time when you wouldn’t wear it. How do you wear a hat after you’ve worn a cap? You going to settle down in a place like Westchester with a neighborhood of supersalesmen, and super bank clerks, and junior executives, and half-assed word and figure merchants and entertain their hungry wives at their parties and contribute to the Episcopalian Church? After Paris one day and Buenos Aires the next? You’d rather ride up the left bank of the Hudson every night right on schedule or drop in at the officers’ mess bar after duty and lose yourself in the never-ending goings and comings of a thousand friends? The good old game of look-who-came-in-on-us-today-I-guess-they-must-not-have-any-guards-on-the-gate-to-day. You want to leave spit-and-polish cleanliness and military orderliness for paper-littered civilian streets and soiled, unsanitary civilian buildings, and ill-groomed, half-washed civilian mobs? There were lots worse things than being a perpetual executive officer or navigation officer or some other kind of an officer and somebody else always getting the command jobs. Back to research and development, Noel. That’s your dish. You can’t be spared. Not enough men with your background in uniform. Maybe not, except when they were handing out the promotions. There were always a lot of qualified ones then. With some kind of qualifications. At least they got the promotions.