Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

He slept most of the afternoon, and woke feeling better than he had at any time since the accident. He was coming to terms with the loss of Patty. It was painful, and he promised himself if he got home he’d never leave again. But his situation was not desperate. The environment did not seem especially dangerous, and the Momsen could keep him alive indefinitely. He had a transmitter, so he would be able to say hello when help showed up. Survival depended only on his ability to adjust to being alone.

The Institute had nothing between here and home. It was seventy-some parsecs to Earth. Alexia’s distress signal, riding its subspace carrier, would cross that vast ocean in 26 months and some odd days, which meant that he could expect a rescue party in about five years.

Fortunately, food was no problem. Storage lockers on board the SARC, the Sakata-Avery Rescue Chamber, held enough hamburgers and flashlight batteries to maintain eight people for years. He had weapons, though this world so far had revealed nothing dangerous. And he had a pleasant beach home. Rent free, with his pay piling up.

That evening, he dragged a chair outside, called up a novel, and sat watching the sun dip into the mountains. It was whiter than Sol, slightly larger, in reality as well as in appearance. When the leading edge touched the horizon, Martin set his watch at six o’clock. A day here was longer than at home, maybe by two hours. So his watch was useless for its designed purpose. But he would check it tomorrow when the sun touched the horizon again, and it would tell him the precise length of the day. Not that it mattered.

The SARC had come down in the northern hemisphere, and he’d steered for a temperate zone. The planet, which they had named Amity, was entering that portion of its orbit in which his hemisphere would be tilting away from the sun. Autumn was coming.

He would want a calendar. Again, not that he had any real use for one. But it would be something to occupy him. He knew Amity circled its G2 main sequence primary in just over seventeen terrestrial months.

Declination was eleven degrees. That should mean a mild winter.

He thought about supplies. Had he overlooked anything? He had an abundance of solar energy, with backup systems. The shoreline gave no indication of unusual tides, sudden inundations, anything of that nature.

The SARC possessed an extensive film library. Complete runs of the most popular HV shows of the last century. There were quiz and discussion shows, and other programs of an educational nature; and a complete run, ten years worth, of Brandenburg and Scott , a “sociodrama” in which two wisecracking government agents helped people adjust to assorted problems arising from economic dislocation, overpopulation, divergence of religious views, and so on.

He had fifty years of the World Series, and a lot of horse races. And the better part of the Library of Congress.

He also had a radio. There was, of course, nothing to listen to other than the hourly distress call put out by the datapak. The datapak was an orbiting cluster of antennas, receivers, and transmitters, aimed at Earth by an on-board computer, beeping across hyphenated space. Its receivers were designed to pick up stray whispers of signal, electronic sighs to be filtered and dissected, the results channeled for analysis, enhancement, and ultimate restoration. It would, one day, lead his rescuers to him.

Martin’s front yard was humanity’s most remote outpost. It was half again as far as Calamity, on the other side of Sol.

A tree-squatter sat on its hind legs, watching him. It resembled an oversized and overweight squirrel. He tossed it a nut. It advanced with caution, took the nut, glanced briefly at him, and vanished back into the scrub.

The tree-squatter, with its quick black eyes, was around all the time, looking for food. But it would not trust him, and always cleared out if he tried to approach.

There were lots of squirrels and tree-squatters and floaters, but no one had yet found any philosophers or electricians. Consequently, Earth was reassuming its classic Ptolemaic position as center of the universe. The Theological Implications, as people were fond of saying, were obvious. The primordial soup, stirred centuries ago by evolutionists to evict the Creator, had acquired an extra ingredient. The view that people were a direct result of divine intervention was once again respectable. The numerous empty garden worlds, like this one, might almost have been prepared specifically for human use. But if places like this suggested a friendly cosmos to people back home, to Martin the skies were too silent, the forests too empty. The Institute was dying. The human race had more real estate than they could use for the foreseeable future. Expeditions were expensive, ships were wearing out, and the government could see no return for its money. Unless something happened that could rekindle the taxpayers’ imaginations, the Great Adventure was drawing to a close. Moreover, it was unlikely that the political power structure wanted any unsettling discoveries. There would probably be a general sigh of relief when the last vessel returned emptyhanded from its last flight.

No new unit had been added to the fleet in thirty years. Equipment was run down, and parts were scarce. In fact, he thought wearily, if the truth were known, the loss of Alexia would probably turn out to be attributable to a broken hose.

He missed Patty.

The place was too quiet. The wind blew and the tides came and went and seabirds flapped past. He was becoming increasingly oppressed by a sense of unease. Somewhere, in the hills, or maybe at sea, he’d have liked to see a light.

He kept the HV on constantly. The voices were reassuring. He listened to them argue politics, philosophy, medicine, religion, and sex. He watched various kinds of dramas, watched comedians, listened to musicals and even started to develop a taste for opera.

He took to bolting the door. It was the beginning of the Greenway Syndrome.

Everett Radcliffe, stranded on the back side of the Moon for six months after a series of improbable accidents had carried off his two colleagues, had heard footsteps behind him the rest of his days. Will Evans had taken his life after four months in a prototype of Martin’s shelter. Myra Greenway, for whom the disorder was named, was adrift for a year in a SARC, never close to a planetary surface. She swore that something had lived outside, trying continually to get at her. Brad Kauffman had spent eight months alone in a crippled cruiser after his partner had died, and had refused, on his return to Earth, to come out of his house at night.

There were other cases.

Something deep in the soul does not like unbroken, intense solitude. Cut whatever it is that ties a man to the rest of his species, plunge him into the outer dark, and you will not get him back whole.

Martin tried not to think about it.

Standard procedure was to embrace whatever entertainment was available, cultivate hobbies, keep occupied. He glanced at the hologram. An aging beauty was swapping mindless chitchat with a comedian.

He could collect rocks.

Martin was not a man easily frightened. He’d intervened in a gang assault, did not fear speaking to large groups of people, and had ridden the great starships into the unknown. Nevertheless, he continued to keep his door locked.

STATUS REPORT 037 ALEXIA 090857 GMT: PATRICIA MASON DEAD OF INJURIES SEPTEMBER 3.

He thought of Patty’s family, two years from now, receiving this news, and added: PEACEFULLY. He poked in his name, and hit the transmit.

The morning was gray with rain. He played bridge with the computer, got bored, tried a novel. After lunch, he sat down at the terminal and pointed the datapak’s antennas at Sirius. The speakers crackled with static.