The thunder brawled around him. Once he saw Wayne smile across the narrow space and indicate a set of ragged pips on the radar. His lips formed words: ‘Siberian party.’ Yes, it would be Byelinsky’s men, trundling their ridiculous gun across desolation. They would be gaping upward in total bewilderment, and then, no doubt, they would wheel around and begin the heartbreaking struggle back to their camp. But when they got there, the issue would already be decided – one way or another.

  Collie tried to push fear out of himself, and looked at the sky. It was a deep midnight blue overhead, a serene and lovely color. Mars wasn’t such a bad world, taking it all in all. If he had Lois with him, he could well imagine returning here and settling down and growing up with the colony. The happy man was he who had given his life to something big.

  Once the ship tilted horribly. Collie’s head spun and he grabbed the chair arms with a stark knowledge that now he was going to die. But she fought herself back, roaring and stuttering, she moved clumsily through heaven again.

  And now, now, now they were descending, splashing fire as they came down, now was the moment of decision.

  Collie saw the tall forms of the Siberian vessels lift into view, he saw the remembered hills and the pathetic little lost cluster of machines and crates. They must have burst so suddenly into sight, with such devastating unexpectedness, that there had been no time for the enemy to blast off. It took so long to warm up a motor that he was locked here and could only wait – unless he had some unknown weapon in reserve.

  The rockets cut out, the ship shuddered once and then was wholly quiet. Gammony and Arakelian slumped in their chairs, sweat-soaked and shaking. They had landed.

  No movement around the camp, no sign of life, just the two ships standing bright in the sunlight. Wayne unbuckled himself and took one step over to the radio. It was already tuned to the international call-band. He picked up the microphone and said in a flat voice: ‘This is Captain Wayne calling Colonel Byelinsky. This is Captain Wayne, N.A.U., calling the Siberian expedition. Come in, come in, Siberia.’

  The set hummed and crackled. Collie shook his head to clear it, he was still half deafened by the rocket noise, and freed himself. When he stood up, he was trembling uncontrollably. Strange, the calm which had fallen on Wayne.

  ‘Byelinsky.’ Collie jumped as the voice crackled out of the loudspeaker. Almost, he could see the man, square-built, erect, squinting across at the newcomer. He didn’t think the Siberian would show dismay. The same cool smile, the same tone of aloof humor, yes, that would be his way of dying.

  ‘You have three of our personnel imprisoned,’ said Wayne. ‘Release them at once, and we can negotiate.’

  ‘We have only two, I fear,’ replied Byelinsky. ‘Ivanovitch was killed aiding Collingwood’s escape.’

  Misha dead, Misha of the boisterous mirth and the unspoken comradeship, he was down with dust in his mouth and would never laugh again: Collie felt a stinging in his eyes.

  ‘Well,’ said Wayne coldly. ‘Let the others go.’

  ‘I have no mind to do so,’ answered Byelinsky, without rancor. They are useful hostages.’

  ‘If you don’t,’ said Wayne, ‘we will destroy you.’

  ‘With what?’ asked the colonel. ‘I know you haven’t any artillery. We need only sit here and wait for our own assault party to return. If you are wise, it is you who will ask for terms.’

  Wayne’s face and voice were like a speaking mask. Byelinsky might have been some piece of mechanism that wasn’t functioning properly. ‘I do not intend to bandy words,’ he said. ‘You will get no chance to lift off the ground. You know who I am. You have exactly one minute to surrender.

  There was no response. Wayne sighed and took the resonator in his hands. ‘Collie,’ he asked, ‘where is their brig?’

  ‘Right there,’ pointed the hillman. ‘In the waist o’ that ship, unless they’ve been moved.’

  ‘That’s a chance we’ll have to take,’ said Wayne. He flipped a switch, and the resonator hummed as it began to warm up.

  The thought of Lois wiped out by that beam was too much for a mind to hold. Collie rejected it with a convulsive movement of his hands.

  An airlock door opened and three suited figures stood waiting for the ladder to reach ground. One held a superbazooka.

  The resonator glowed, somewhere in its tube.

  ‘Those birds can hole us if they get a chance,’ said Collie.

  ‘I know,’ said Wayne. He turned back to the radio. ‘Byelinsky?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your time is up, I think. Do you wish to surrender?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Goodbye, Byelinsky,’ said Wayne, gently and with a note of regret.

  He went back to the viewport and sighted along the resonator. ‘I’ve only used this once before,’ he said. ‘It was an ugly sight. I had nightmares for years. Well—’

  He turned a dial, focusing. Then he tripped a switch.

  One of the men on the ladder went up in a huge crack of fire and smoke. Another tumbled to the ground, his helmet shattered by the explosion of his brain. The third tried to retreat. It was horribly like a singed moth crawling from a flame. Wayne stamped him into scattering smoke.

  Flame began to jet from that ship. It must have been warming up. Wayne refocused and played his invisible beam over it. The ship lay there, still fuming, till there was a haze of dust and ice in the air. There was no one alive to turn off the motors.

  Byelinsky’s voice stammered from the receiver: ‘You criminal – favorable mutants – I have your people hostage, I tell you! They will die if—’

  ‘You are the one who will die,’ said Wayne. ‘We haven’t enough men to board your vessel. Will you come out and surrender?’

  Proudly. ‘No.’

  Wayne scythed the other ship, passing over the midsection. Then there was silence. The Martian wind scattered the smoke which had been men.

  XVIII

  The cutting torch hissed into extinction. For a moment the steel door was too hot to touch. Then Collie had wrapped his hand in a cloth and flung it open. ‘Lois,’ he whispered. He had thought to plunge in and grasp her to him, but now when she stood there in O’Neill’s arms, looking at him with a dazed kind of wonder, his hands fell to his sides. ‘I’m glad you’re alive,’ he said.

  The Irishman was choking in the greasy reek that swirled through the ship. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ he mumbled. ‘I think I’m going to be sick. What devil’s gadget were you after using?’

  ‘Ah don’ know, said Gammony, picking up his torch. ‘An’ Ah don’ think Ah want to know, neither.’

  They clambered into airsuits and made their way outside. Lois laid a hand on Collie’s arm. ‘So you got through,’ she said. ‘That was a wonderful thing you did.’

  ‘Uh, well, that’s all past.’ He shifted on his feet, uncertainly. The hard sunlight struck through the girl’s helmet and he couldn’t take his eyes off her face. ‘You’re alive an’ well, that’s the main thing.’

  ‘So it’s captured the ships you have, eh?’ O’Neill looked around the camp. ‘Quite a stroke. With their fuel and supplies and equipment, our own Mars project is a long ways ahead at one jump. We can install a lot of their stuff right in our own camp, and the rest can wait here for the next expedition to take.’ He frowned. ‘But what about that war party that went out?’

  ‘They’ll be back,’ said Collie, ‘but they ain’t got a chance. We’ll ambush ‘em a few miles out in the hills. I think they’ll surrender. I hope so – wouldn’t be fun blowin’ ‘em up.’ There had only been two survivors of Byelinsky’s group, men who happened to be near the cell. They were locked up now themselves, and one was weeping.

  ‘I figger any pris’ners we take, we can seal inside a disabled ship,’ went on Collie. ‘They’ll have food an’ air, but no tools. Won’t hurt ‘em to wait here till the next American boat comes.’

  O’Neill’s gaunt melancholy face broke into a grin. ‘With this information, the Union is bound to get going on the Mars project,’ he said. ‘And as the late colonel remarked, one colony can hold the entire planet if need be. Though I think the Khan will be a lot less obstreperous when he learns what’s happened. Faith, this one time things do end right!’

  ‘No,’ said Lois. ‘They haven’t ended. They’ve just begun.’

  ‘Her gloved hand stole into O’Neill’s, and she smiled up at him. ‘Just begun,’ she repeated.

  The Irishman looked foolish and happy. He turned to Collie.

  ‘How about being my best man when we get back to Earth?’ he asked.

  ‘Best man!’ He couldn’t realize it. The lightning hit too swiftly.

  ‘Uh-huh. When we were locked up in there, with nothing much to hope for – well, she said yes.’

  ‘The seventy-seventh proposal, it was,’ she laughed. Her eyes were warm on O’Neill.

  ‘Um, uh, well,’ said Collie. He had to clear his throat a couple of times. ‘Sure, thanks, I’d like to be best man. We’ll throw you a real weddin’. An’, an’, congratulations.’

  He muttered some excuse and turned around and walked off. There was work to do around camp, but he had to get away by himself and think.

  He found a rock high over the valley and sat down and looked across the desert. It was quiet and lonely up here. There was something big about this landscape.

  They will change their minds, women, he thought. It happens. Or mebbe she was only usin’ me to make him jealous.

  There’ll be others, he told himself. It was just that she was the only woman on the planet.

  He guessed that it would take a year or so before he got himself to really believing that.

  Well, what the devil. A year wasn’t so long, when you had a whole future to shape. There was Earth, wide and fair and green, and there was Mars where a man could grow up along with a whole new race of humankind. Yes, he thought, in more than one sense he was lucky.

  So— Collie shrugged. So there was work to do. Right now, for instance. He got up and went down the slope toward the ships. The children of fortune were already busy there.

  As he descended, the sky seemed to grow darker, so that he could more clearly discern the few bright stars. But the sun was still high, and it filled the valley with light.

  EPILOGUE

  ORNA OF NILDO was a courteous host who wished his guest to see all the sights. Ganymede didn’t have many, but the midnight sky was worth a good deal else. He helped Danivar into flexarmor; he himself needed only put on a coat and facial mask. They floated up the gravity shaft together, out the retention field of the turret doorway, and stood on the surface.

  Danivar had of course seen pictures and descriptions of the view. But reality snatched the breath from him. Jupiter at full phase was a vast amber shield, banded with violet, pale red, and a hundred subtler hues. Low above the horizon, it turned crags and scarps into gold, the frozen lake beneath into a chalice that brimmed with radiance. No stars were visible near the giant planet, and few enough on the opposite side of the sky; but such as there were flashed like strewn diamonds. Somehow the quietness was not total: as if with sharper ears one could hear the thin cold singing of the stars.

  After a very long while, Danivar glanced at the thermometer on his wrist. The light was more than enough to read by, though the metal sparkled frostily. ‘A hundred below.’ He knew his remark was inane, but he chose it to offset that which surrounded him, as a jewel shines best on a black background. ‘I expected worse.’

  ‘Our new fusion plants down under the crust are warming the environment up faster than most people realize,’ said Orna. ‘Of course, we’ll need at least another century before Ganymede is at all comfortable, and I’ll be quite an old man, I expect, before we can call our task finished. You don’t convert a moon as big as a small planet overnight. Nonetheless, I can remember when I was a boy, we hadn’t even produced a hydrosphere, let alone air.’

  As if the hugeness around had touched his pride, he added apologetically, ‘I don’t suppose this impresses you much, you being from the richest planet in the System.’ He raised an arm. The tawny chill light seemed to drip from his glove. ‘Look, there’s your home, over near Leo. That green star.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Danivar, ‘we Martians are the ones who can most respect a project like yours. How do you think our own world was built?’

  ‘But that was so long ago.’

  We’ve never forgotten.’

  They fell silent again. Not that their conversation had been in so many words. A gesture, a syllable, the total context of the night and themselves, were enough for such brains. Physically they were dissimilar, for the race still tended to make somatic adaptations to local conditions. But size and shape and metabolic requirements were the least important things about them.

  The cold seemed to deepen. Danivar’s body was protected by the flexarmor; his self was not. Orna saw him huddle the least bit and nodded: ‘Would you like to go back inside?’

  ‘No, thank you. Not yet.’ Danivar turned to face the king planet. Its light flooded his eyes, so that for a moment he was sinking into Jupiter, becoming a part thereof, and thus a part of the entire cosmos. And this, far more than any philosophic creativity meeting, was the reason he had traveled here.

  When he drew his attention back, he felt that sadness which is the price of transcendence. He said, as if to himself, ‘There was so much life there once.’

  ‘What?’ Orna stirred, restless. The sound of his feet on naked rock rang more loudly through the thin air than one might have expected.

  ‘Earth.’ Danivar’s gaze sought the sky again, but he couldn’t find the planet he named. ‘I was there for a while several years ago, as esthetician of an archeological party.’

  ‘Oh? I thought that was an exhausted field. How many millennia have you Martians been digging on Earth?’

  ‘Much fewer than the old Humans lived there. A million years hence, we may turn up flint arrowheads or ceramic vessels. The site I helped excavate wasn’t that ancient, however. In fact, quite late, probably founded a bare century prior to the Final War. Artifacts indicated it was inhabited afterward too, and that the last dwellers took part in the emigration to Mars.’

  ‘You mean when the terrestrial biosphere collapsed?’

  ‘Yes. That dates the site rather close. We know from surviving records how narrow the escape was. If it had taken Alaric Wayne ten years longer to establish a self-sufficient terrestroid ecology on Mars, you and I would not be here now.’

  ‘I’ve been taught that much. Also how the project in turn depended on settling the tribal quarrels of the time peacefully, so that all Earth’s resources could be devoted to the task. In the end, to save themselves, the Old Humans redeemed themselves.’

  Danivar’s smile was not gentle. ‘I suspect a good deal of force and intrigue was involved in their reformation. There aren’t any turned points in history, except those we arbitrarily choose long afterward. We look at the hopeful aspect, the relative few who were biologically fit and could be evacuated to Mars, and forget the long-drawn tragedy of the deformed who must be left behind to die. Nor was that first Martian settlement the genesis of modern hominid life. The effort to achieve genetic stability required millennia.’ His eyes crossed the sawtoothed mountains and went on beyond his home world. ‘So I do not blandly consider that all worked out for the best. Had it not been for that damned war and its aftermath, we might stand here amidst flowering gardens and know that our people had already reached the stars.’

  ‘We would not exist,’ said Orna prosaically.

  Danivar laughed. ‘True. The trend of events must ever seem toward the best, since it is toward the one observing the trend. And after all, I went to Earth to help excavate that site before it was buried under an impounded river, as part of the ecological restoration program. Earth too shall bloom.’

  His tone dropped low. ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘I cannot forget what we found in those ruins. Imagine. There I stood, in a desert more grim than any on Mercury, because Mercury is still decently barren whereas there a few primitive plants tried in their distorted fashion to live. And the wind blew around those old, old snags of walls, , and the sunlight of Earth spilled over us with a horrible brilliant indifference.

  ‘I held a box in my hand. A small box of some resistant alloy, not too badly corroded. When I opened it, I found a clutter of objects, coins, ornaments, keys, valuables of one sort of another, chiefly masculine. They included an oblong of stiff paper. One side had been a garish colored photograph, of which little remained, but the writing on the other side was decipherable yet. A mail communication, which the receiver had preserved.’

  The shadow of a moon began to cross Jupiter’s face. The night seemed to make an inaudible sound, as if the stones underfoot • groaned with the gathering cold. Orna waited.

  ‘I’d spent a few hours learning the ancient languages, of course,’ said Danivar at last. ‘Now I almost wish I hadn’t. For I stood with the wind gibing at me, there on the old broken planet, and read what had been written. Not that it was anything so special,’ he added hastily. ‘But I’ve wondered about lingering auras. A hundred generations hence, when the sense of perception is fully developed, we may know.

  ‘Anyhow! The message was to someone named Hugh Drummond, a masculine name. The point of origin was named St. Louis, Missouri, and the date was just prior to that recorded for the outbreak of the Final War. What it said was merely, Darling, All’s well. Do finish your business soon. I don’t want to hustle you or anything, and of course your work is important, but the kids and I miss you so much. I can’t help wishing you hadn’t postponed that holiday we were going to take together, just by ourselves. Well, next year! All my love, Barbara.’