‘I – I—’ He groped after words, but there was only a hollowness in him. ‘I do n-n-not know wh-what to s-s-s-s-s – say. This is a surprise to me too, and, well, a surprise.’

  ‘The question,’ said Feinberg sharply, ‘is what we are going to do about it.’

  ‘They are Siberians?’ asked Gammony. His voice was low and heavy. ‘They really are?’

  ‘Da,’ said Ivanovitch. ‘Marks in Rosshian on deir equipment.’

  ‘And one of the dead men is of Asian race,’ added Feinberg. ‘Yeah, our friends are Siberians all right. And what does that mean?’ When there was no reply, he answered himself: ‘An expedition of their own. It may have taken off a little earlier or a little later than ours, depending on what orbit and accelerations they used, but at any rate it got here later, probably not many days ago.’

  ‘How d’you figure that?’ asked O’Neill.

  ‘Because they knew just where we were. That means they spotted us from space, while making their preliminary studies. And if they’re so eager to dispose of us, they wouldn’t have lost any time in making the attempt. Nor can their ship – or ships – be too far from ours, since their men could get here on foot.’

  ‘Maybe they got some kind of cars,’ ventured Collie.

  ‘Not when every pound of mass counts,’ declared Feinberg. ‘No, I don’t see that. They had power-beam receivers similar to our own, as well as batteries to carry them a ways beyond beam range. The implication is that their spies – or intelligence agents, if you want the polite word – have lifted the knowledge of power-beaming from our country. Quite probably they got a good many tips on spaceship building from our project too, if not the complete plans. They must have known we were coming here.’

  ‘Well,’ said Wayne, ‘It wasn’t a secret.’

  ‘No,’ said Feinberg, ‘but when they start out at practically the same time as we, it’s more than coincidence. Goddammit, they came here with the main idea of liquidating us!’

  ‘Why?’ There was a strange helplessness on Wayne’s face. ‘Why should they do that?’

  ‘Their government don’t like ours,’ said Arakelian, ‘and also, if they knock us over, they’ll have all our equipment and installations. We’ll have done a lot of their hauling and work for them, if they plan to set up a Mars colony of their own.’

  ‘There’s room for everyone,’ said Lois. ‘Great God, do we have to carry our stupid quarrels out here too?’

  ‘For some reason,’ shrugged Arakelian, ‘Siberia must want a monopoly on Mars. Just why doesn’t matter right now. What counts is doing something about it.’

  ‘And that something,’ said O’Neill, ‘is to get the hell out of here. If they came prepared to fight us, they’ll have all the advantages. We’d best go home and be reporting the matter while we can.’

  Ivanovitch shook his head, and there was anger in the blue eyes. ‘No,’ he growled. ‘Give dem deir own medicine back. We can do it. We ain’t cowards.’

  O’Neill flushed. ‘Take that back!’ he snapped. ‘I was just after saying what the sensible thing would be.’

  ‘That’s enough, boys,’ said Arakelian. ‘Nobody’s calling you yellow, Tom. Me, I kind of think you’re right. The information is more important than any heroics.’

  ‘And once they’re in possession here, and have had time to build up defenses, just how do we get our port back?’ challenged Feinberg. ‘Lug tanks and battleships clear from Earth, I suppose?’

  ‘Wait – wait!’ Alaric Wayne held up one thin hand. It seemed to strew silence.

  ‘Economics—’ He paused and drew a long breath. ‘It seems best to me to stay here for a while, at least. We are warned now, and can make our own defenses. I could build a colloid resonator like I once did – nobody ever was told how it works. Yes, I think we could stand them off, since they can hardly have aircraft along and a spaceship is not made for bombing.’

  O’Neill grinned harshly. ‘That puts a different light on it,’ he said. ‘Faith, we can mop ‘em up ourselves!’

  ‘Not so easily,’ said Wayne. He spoke low and tonelessly, looking at the floor. ‘We are eight, and they must be many more. The resonator is a weapon of limited value. I would have to think!’ He glanced back up at them with a curious pleading. ‘I am not a magician. I cannot pull invincibility out of a hat. This situation will have to be evaluated, and for that we need information.’

  ‘Scouts,’ nodded Gammony. ‘Yeah, sho’ thing. Count me in.’

  Wayne shook his head. ‘It is not a matter for volunteers,’ he replied. ‘We must make up the optimum party.’

  Collie stole a look at Lois. She was giving the captain a withdrawn and bitter stare, and he knew what she was thinking. Cogs in a machine.

  ‘It’ll be a dangerous job,’ said Arakelian. ‘They’ll be expecting us to try it.’

  ‘But this is a large territory, and it gets rugged toward the west, where they fled,’ answered Wayne. ‘Mr. Collingwood, your special inheritance, plus your hunter’s background, seem to single you out for leader.’

  Collie nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He was scared sure, he hated the thought of going out where there were guns, but—

  ‘Then Mr. Ivanovitch, whose strength will prove valuable on an arduous march,’ continued Wayne, ‘and Mr. O’Neill, who can spy out details from a distance without requiring binoculars whose reflections could betray him, and Miss Grenfell, who could detect possible ambushes or the like. The rest of us will prepare defenses.’

  ‘Hey, now, wait!’ O’Neill stepped forward, pushing by the others. ‘You can’t send Lois to—’

  ‘It’s all right, Tom,’ she said, almost in a whisper. ‘I’d like to go.’

  ‘But – but—’

  ‘You heard her, Mr. O’Neill,’ said Wayne coldly. ‘Now, Mr. Collingwood, obviously I can’t give you any specific instructions. Just do what you can. Value your lives above everything else – each of you is one-eighth of our fighting strength – and do nothing reckless. I would suggest that you scouts get some sleep now, while the rest of us make up your equipment for you.’

  Just like that, thought Collie. Just like that.

  Dawn was swift on Mars, pale cold light climbing rapidly into the sky and then suddenly, the bitter day. When Collie emerged, the changeless desert was already etched hard to the near horizon. He had a brief wistful remembrance of dawns on Earth, for a moment it was as if he stood again in grass that was wet with dew and listened to the chatter of birds in high trees, then he jerked his mind back and nodded to the others. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  Four human forms, clumsy in their airsuits, walked out across the desert, and the rest stood watching till they were gone from sight. Collie turned the situation over in his head. The power-beam wouldn’t help them much past the horizon, but they had extra batteries and sun-power accumulators which would recharge those to some degree. They were all heavily burdened with food and water. Ivanovitch’s pack was almost as big as himself, and had weapons. Allowing a reasonable safety margin, they could keep going for six days, three out and three back. The Siberians could be no farther away: the chances were it was only about two days’ march to their ship.

  Their trail was clear enough to his hunter’s eyes. In this quiet air, even dust-tracks were slow to disappear. He noted landmarks and the positions of the sun and visible stars, without conscious effort. To the untrained vision, Mars looked all the same – rusty dunes, color-streaked outcroppings of rock, gnarled thickets, steep ravines, the distant swelling of low hills. But he should be able to find his way back.

  O’Neill spoke after a while. Voices had a curiously tinny sound as they came through the speakers, the air, and the earphones. ‘Won’t they be knowing we’ll follow?’

  ‘Mebbe,’ shrugged Collie. ‘Not much they can do ‘bout it, though ‘cept try to bushwhack us, an’ that wouldn’t be easy in this open country.’

  ‘I mean, how about their evading us? Crossing bare rock, for instance, where they won’t leave a trail?’

  ‘They went back along the way they come – see the two sets o’ prints? We can always follow the first trail. An’ since it ain’t too easy to locate y’rself here, they prob’ly just took a compass bearin’ an’ headed in a straight line for our camp. So far both trails point due north-northwest. No, we’ll locate ‘em all right.’

  Lois bit her lip. ‘I still can’t understand it,’ she murmured. ‘This world is enough of an enemy for the whole human race. Why do we have to fight each other as well?’

  ‘Dey started it,’ said Ivanovitch.

  ‘No, I mean, well, it’s as if there were something wrong with all humankind. As if we could never learn.’

  ‘Some people,’ said Collie, ‘don’t. Not without a club to teach ‘em.’

  ‘It isn’t that simple,’ said O’Neill. ‘We have to strike back, in self-defense, so that’s how this particular battle gets started. But why did they attack us in the first place? It isn’t that they’re monsters. They have some other purpose, a high purpose for which they’ll fight anything – Mars or their fellow men or the whole universe. And I’m thinking that a race which wouldn’t fight for what it considered worthwhile, wouldn’t last long.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ asked Lois desolately. ‘Do we just keep on tearing each other’s throats out, till the end of time?’

  ‘We change the purposes,’ said O’Neill. ‘We give the entire human race the same goals.’

  Hard to do,’ grunted Collie. ‘Won’t even be a single race any more.’

  ‘It’s got to be done,’ said O’Neill. For a moment, he looked beyond them, and there was a dream on his face.

  Collie shrugged again and fell silent. They marched on. The ship had vanished over the horizon, and they were alone among rocks and dunes and quietness.

  The ordinary processes of living became fantastically complicated here. You ate a cold meal by attaching a box, with gasketed holes for your hands, to the helmet, and opening a special port between helmet and box – feed bag, thought Collie sardonically. You drank a careful ration of water through a nippled hose that plugged to a water tank. You answered the calls of nature by going behind a dune with a special apparatus to protect you from loss of air and heat.

  You could do nothing about sweat and a growing beard, so you were always aware of itching and had no way to scratch. Your very breathing depended on tanks and valves and pumps, here your body was only the dependent part of a machine. It had not been so bad around camp, with the ship always at hand, but out in the desert, with nothing to do but walk, madness began to gnaw; you knew your unreasoning irritation for its first toothmarks and there was little you could do to control it.

  ‘It’s too big for us,’ said Collie. ‘We’ll never lick Mars. We can’t take on a whole planet.’

  ‘We’ve got to,’ said O’Neill.

  ‘Oh, sure, we can talk about ways and means. But we can’t bring enough people, enough machinery, enough anything. It’d be a lot easier to colonize the South Pole.’

  ‘That it would,’ said O’Neill, ‘except that the Antarctic happens to be radioactive. We’ve no choice. We must have Mars.’

  ‘Have it – how? By diggin’ pits in the ground?’

  ‘For a starter, yes. And after that building colonies around and over the pits. Then modifying terrestrial and Martian life-forms, and improving our biochemistry and algae farming, so the colonies are self-supporting. Then getting some more oxygen into the atmosphere – there’s a lot of it locked up in these rocks – and water, and carbon dioxide; and meanwhile, perhaps, working toward a race of colonists who don’t need so much air and heat as true Earthlings. Then bit by bit, decade by decade for the next five hundred or a thousand years, reclaiming these deserts. It can be done. The fundamental knowledge is already ours. What we need is engineering practice, and money, and work. Always work.’

  ‘Money,’ said Collie. ‘Hell, ain’t no country on Earth, ain’t all Earth herself, can pay for that.’

  ‘They’ll have to,’ said O’Neill. ‘Money is just a symbol for human effort. If the whole race of man has to give up everything for a century, live on a bare survival level, to start a successful Mars colony, then it’ll just have to, that’s the whole of it. Because it’s a matter of all life surviving. We’ve got to have research stations free of contamination, and unmutated Martian life to experiment with, before we can learn enough genetics to unscramble our heredity. And if that fails, if the job can’t be done, then Earth’s ecology will go to hell, only the most primitive animals will live. Then Mars is still the only hope: the Mars colonists will keep going, and eventually they’ll come back to reseed Earth with life.’ He shook his dark head. ‘Survival is not a money matter, Collie.’

  The hillman glanced at him. Funny, he thought, I never figured Tom for a fighter. And yet he’s more so than me, in his own way.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said aloud. ‘Yeah, I reckon you’re right. But when we get home, if we ever do, I’m not liftin’ my a – um – myself off Earth till they’re carryin’ my coffin.

  ‘I’ll stay here, said O’Neill quietly. ‘Earth may be more comfortable just now, but Mars is where there is hope.’

  Lois gave him a long stare, her eyes traveled over to Collie and then back to him again. ‘First,’ she said practically, ‘there’s the little matter of these Siberians.’

  They pitched camp in a hollow between two dunes. A shovel made a shallow pit in which they erected the heavy fabric, half tent and half sleeping bag, that was their only shelter. It was hoped that the body heat of four people huddled together would be enough so that only a small drain on the batteries was needed.

  It grew cold in the night, grimly and unrelentingly cold. The moisture of their breathing made a thick, spongy coating of ice inside the fabric, ice they would scrape off at dawn before it volatilized and drink again. Collie kept waking up, his muscles stiff with chill, and tellng himself harshly that he would not turn up the heating coils. He was too miserable even to be very much aware of Lois lying there beside him.

  XII

  Collie lay on his belly, looking between two high, gnawed crags, down a long rubbly slope to the enemy camp. The waning sun was at his back, he’d circled around so it wouldn’t glare off their metal, and shadows spilled hugely along the hillside and rose like liquid about the ships.

  There were two of them, each a little bigger than his own, squatting on their tails amidst the iron barrenness of the little valley. A couple of airsuited figures patrolled around them, and he could make out the shapes of machine-guns mounted in stone-walled dugouts. Some machinery had been assembled outdoors, presumably to give more room within the vessels, but there was little trace of construction work.

  ‘Yes,’ muttered O’Neill at his side. ‘They came here to take over our camp, all right.’

  ‘Well, now they know they didn’t,’ said Collie. ‘So what’ll they try next?’

  ‘Couldn’t say. Ordinarily, I’d guess a frontal attack, but all the world has a healthy respect for Alaric Wayne. And there can’t be more than twenty or so of them.’ O’Neill’s mutant eyes ranged down the hillside, studying minutiae of territory that were invisible to Collie.

  ‘You’re the boss,’ O’Neill said after a while. What do you advise? I can’t see much more than we’ve already spied, and it’s too far away for Lois to hear anything – even if she understood Russian.’

  ‘The safe thing,’ said Collie, ‘would be hightail it for home right away. But that just gives ‘em more time to prepare. What I’d like to do is sneak down there with that rocketslinger we took off their man an’ hole their ships like they meant to hole ours. Then we wouldn’t have to worry any more about ‘em, an’ we’d get their supplies and stuff to boot.’

  ‘They aren’t stupid,’ warned O’Neill. ‘They’ll have alarms rigged. I think I can just make out a couple of spots which look like they might have black-light cells buried there. A fence of UV, and if we break it to get in at them we’ll be calling out the marines.’

  ‘Hmmm – yeh. Though wait— Look, Tom, those beams’ll be close to the ground. They’ll expect us to come crawlin’ up at them.’

  ‘So we jump over instead, eh? And land right on top of something else.’

  ‘It won’t take long to blow holes in both ships. Then their air goes whooshin’ out. I can tote the rocketslinger close enough in a matter o’ seconds. They won’t know how fast I can run.’

  O’Neill gave him an odd look. ‘You really are hell-bent to wipe them out, aren’t you?’ he murmured.

  ‘Shucks, I just want to get home,’ grinned Collie. ‘Where I come from, we’re not too finicky about our enemies’ lives.’

  Behind him, Lois laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘No, Collie,’ she said. ‘They’ll have sentries outside too, if they aren’t utter fools. Men at the machine-guns.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he agreed. ‘Here’s how we do it. We’ve all got arms, an’ in this thin air we don’t have to move too quietly. Tom an’ Misha sneak up on either side with their tommy-guns an’ cut down these guards. I’ll have snuck up to the black-light barrier by then. I can get that close without bein’ spotted. The minute you two boys start firin’, I jump the barrier, dash in close, an’ put three or four rocket shells through their hulls.’

  ‘And me?’ she asked.

  ‘You stay here.’

  ‘Now look, just because I’m a woman—’

  ‘ ’Tain’t that, honey. If we don’t make it, somebody’s got to carry word back.’

  She looked at him for a long moment, and then sighed and turned away. Collie gestured O’Neill to crawl back out of sight from the camp with him.

  They spent the next hour planning the operation in some detail, using O’Neill’s minute knowledge of the terrain. At sundown they bolted a hasty meal, though Collie’s throat felt too stiff to swallow. Let’s face it, he thought, I’m scared. I’m scared sweatless.

  Night came like a thunderclap. O’Neill returned from the vantage point to report that there were only two sentries, as had been guessed: one on either side of the ships, close to the machine-guns. They were fairly well-placed, each could sweep a good half circle, but the hills rose so steeply and ruggedly on every hand that an attacker could slip from shadow to shadow until he was within yards of his man. And the dulled sounds of gunfire would not penetrate a heavily insulated spaceship wall. There was no light from the ports, everyone else must be asleep.