“Rather long,” he said. “Must have taken Arnfeld several days to finish this, at least.”

  “They had several days in the cabin, didn’t they, lord?” asked the sub-officer.

  “Yes, I suppose so.” The bleak eyes studied the first sentences: This is being written by David Mark Arnfeld, a citizen of the United States of America, planet Earth, on 21 August 2043. I am of sound mind and body, and investigation of my service psychiatric record will show that I can hardly have gone insane as has been claimed. I wish only to tell the whole truth in a matter that concerns all of my race and all of Mars.

  “Hm.” Intelligence Prime looked thoughtfully up. “We’ll have to see about altering his record, just in case somebody does think to check it.” He grinned. “I have Mr. Arnfeld to thank for reminding me of that!”

  “It seems to be an account of—”

  “I can see that for myself. Bring me the woman, I want to question her about this.”

  “Yes, lord. At once.” The sub-officer glided from the room.

  Intelligence Prime continued his perusal. In order to overlook no detail which will give verisimilitude and which can be checked to confirm my story, I will tell everything that has happened, down to minute details of conversation and subjective impressions as nearly as I can remember or reconstruct them. If this lends my work the appearance of fiction, I regret it, but implore anyone who reads this to take it secretly—I cannot overemphasize the need for secrecy—to Rafael Torreos, formerly colonel of the U. N. Inspection Service, in São Paulo, Brazil, and give it directly into his hands.

  And I must be allowed a little latitude anyway. I once wanted to be a writer, and have whiled away many hours by scribbling. Since this is probably the last writing I shall ever do, you must let me tell the story in my own way.

  “Torreos,” mused Intelligence Prime. “The woman did not mention his name…Oh, yes. He’s been working with the Martians…Hm, yes, we’d better take care of him pretty soon, just in case.”

  The chime sounded again. The door opened, silently, and two guards accompanied the sub-officer into the room. Between them was a woman. She could have been a good-looking creature in happier circumstances, thought Intelligence Prime; even now, her hair was a tangled web of gold that caught the light in a thousand shimmers. But her face was thin and white, her eyes were reddened, and she trembled unceasingly.

  “Christine Hawthorne,” he asked without preliminary, “have you seen this book before?” His voice was quiet, toneless, and he shaped his vocal cords to speak unaccented English.

  “Where is my child?” she answered harshly. “What have you done with her?”

  “The child is being well cared for,” he said. “It will be restored to you in due course, if you cooperate with me.”

  “Haven’t I done enough?” she asked dully. “Wasn’t it enough that I sold out Dave and Reggy and my whole race?”

  “What you cannot seem to understand,” said Intelligence Prime with a chill in his words, “is the finality of our victory. David Arnfeld and Regelin dzu Coruthan are dead. The bodies are in our possession, what is left of them. Why—you killed them yourself!”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Their story, such little of it as ever came out, has been totally refuted, buried, forgotten. You, the last survivor, are our prisoner—officially dead yourself, and we will never let you go. It behooves you to act accordingly. Now, have you seen this book before?”

  She came closer and looked down at it. “Yes,” she said at last. “It was lying in the cabin when we got there. Dave wrote in it, day after day, and finally he hid it, just before the end. He didn’t tell me or Reggy where he was going to hide it, so we couldn’t tell you if we should be captured alive.”

  “He might have known we would make a thorough search. Still, he had nothing to lose.” Intelligence Prime jerked his thumb. “Take her away.” As the group reached the door, he added with an impulse of kindliness: “You might as well give her the child, too.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  The door closed behind them. Intelligence Prime sighed and leaned back, the tiredness flowing into him again. It had been a long hunt.

  Well—he’d better read this thing himself. The full account of the episode, told from the enemy’s side, might contain some useful hints.

  He skimmed briefly over the autobiographical paragraph. Those details he knew. David Arnfeld had been born in 2017 in upstate New York, of an old and wealthy family. He had been only five years old when the war broke out; at twelve he had been selected for Lunar Academy, at sixteen he had graduated directly into spatial service, and since then most of his time had been spent as officer on various spaceships and interplanetary bases. At twenty-five he had been exec of Pallas Base, and then the war had ended and he had come home.

  Intelligence Prime squinted, cursing the close handwriting, and began to read with more interest.

  -1-

  We got the news from a courier boat, several weeks after the event, because the radio had been out for quite a while. We’d been expecting to hear of Earth’s defeat, the end had been in sight when the Martians took Luna, but nevertheless the word left a hollowness in us. Many men wept. I couldn’t cry, somehow, but I went through my duties in a mechanical fashion, and my inward self seemed to have withdrawn. It was worst during sleep-period, lying there in the dark and loneliness, and staring at nothing.

  There was plenty to do, and I was glad of that, it kept me from thinking. I was virtual commander of the asteroid, the Old Man had gone into an unspeaking numbness and we hardly ever saw him. I had to wind up the paperwork, of course, and there was a lot; I had to oversee the engineers and make sure they didn’t sabotage the installations. Once I caught a man at that, he was deliberately wrecking the safety controls on our main power pile so it would blow out sooner or later. When I put him on the carpet, he was truculent. “Are we going to turn this over to the Marshies?” he demanded. “Are we just going to give it to them, and kiss their skinny bums into the bargain?”

  “The proper form of address for a superior officer is ‘sir,’ ” I answered wearily. “We have orders from HQ, which is acting under the armistice agreement, to yield this base in good condition, and I’m going to see that those orders are carried out.” Loosening up a bit, I added: “Mars has us by the throat. If we don’t do as they say, it’ll go hard with Earth. You have a family there, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “And maybe they were killed in the bombardment.”

  “We gave them a good fight,” I said. “Twenty years of it. Maybe we can get our revenge later, but that won’t be for a long time yet. Meanwhile, yes, we will kiss the Martians if it’s necessary to keep our people alive.”

  I let him off with ten days in hack, but posted a warning that the next offense meant a summary court-martial. By and large, the men knew I was right. Something had gone out of them, they were beaten, and it was not a pleasant thing to see. I invented jobs for them, games, exercises, anything to jerk them back toward life, but it went slowly.

  We had a four months’ wait without a sign from HQ. I began to worry, we’d been on short rations for a long while and now our supplies were terribly low. I wondered if I shouldn’t violate orders myself, commandeer a rocket, and go after help. Hilton’s Planetoid wasn’t far away now, as astronomical distances go, and they had hydroponics and yeast vats there.

  The asteroid spun swiftly through a great cold dark, between a million frosty stars and the glittering belt of the Milky Way. The sun was remote, a tiny heatless disc whose light was pale on the cruel jagged rocks. Outside the base proper, it was always silent, your breathing felt thick inside the helmet.

  The relief came at last, without warning: four great troopships orbiting up with a vivid splash of rocket flame, and the lean black form of a Martian cruiser for convoy. We lined up as smartly as we could and received the officers with all due ceremony. For we were Pallas Base and the fighting men of Earth’s United Nations, we had beaten off three murderous attacks in a year and we had lasted out the long grinding wait between them. I think the Martian commander was pleased at our appearance. He didn’t offer to shake hands, which was tactful of him, but he bowed his seven-foot body stiffly from the waist in the best manner of their military aristocracy.

  “Are you in charge, Commander?” he asked. He, spoke in Portuguese, and did it better than I. The Brazilian dialect may be the dominant tongue of Earth, but we were mostly Britons and Norteamericanos here and had used English.

  “At the moment, Sevni,” I answered as formally. “Captain Roberts is—indisposed.” As a matter of fact, I knew the Old Man was in bed with a bottle, probably crying as he often did these days, but there was no reason to admit it.

  “I am sorry for the delay in relieving you,” said the Martian. “But there has been much work to do, as you will understand. The ships here will discharge our men, and then take yours back to Earth. We will set you all down at Quito, and provide you with tickets to whatever major cities are nearest your homes.”

  “You are very kind,” I said.

  “Thank you.” The Martian waved one lean hand. I was struck anew by the odd fact that it isn’t the six fingers or their extra joint or the smooth, leathery-brown skin which makes a Martian hand look unhuman to me, it’s the peculiarly squared nails. “There has been too much strife. It is time for friendship between our peoples.”

  Friendship? I thought. After what you did to Earth?

  We were embarked and settled down for the long run homeward. Most of the time, of course, we orbited, and I forced the men to exercise regularly. After the long time of low asteroid gravity, and now the many weeks in free fall, we wouldn’t be used to Earth-weight. I think I got all of us into pretty good shape—underfed, naturally, but hard and supple, darkened by the harsh spatial sunlight.

  The officers and crew aboard were Martian, but they kept to themselves, we hardly ever saw them, and the trip went without incident. Toward the end of it, I noticed the apathy breaking in our men and in myself. Defeated or not, we were going home! The old worn photographs came out again, the torn and smudged letter flimsies, voices were heard in argument and reminiscence and even song. There were plans made for an annual reunion, and out of my bitterness I began to see that there had been some good times, now and then, in all these lost years.

  We took orbits around Earth, and I spent a long while at the viewport, staring at her as she turned, blue and beautiful, against the stars. There was no sign of the war on her serene face—man and Martian were small things, after all and space and time were very big.

  Ferries took us down to Quito in relays. It had been heavily blitzed, it was still one vast ruin, full of broken rocks and dead men’s bones, but the radioactivity was gone by now and the mountains were as lovely as I remembered them. A new spacefield had been built, with a huddle of shacks around it that might eventually become a reborn city. I didn’t kneel to kiss Earth, as many did, but I stretched my muscles against the glorious massive feel of her pull and I drew the clean sharp air deeply into my lungs, and my eyes blurred for a while.

  Terrestrial liaison officers met me and I spent a couple of days in the routine of disbanding my unit. The men got their tickets and back pay, with a bit extra to make up for the inflation that was putting the knife into our dying economy; they got ration books appropriate to the areas where they lived, and a printed pamphlet describing the new laws and enjoining obedience to the occupation authorities. They got their discharge papers too, but what with the clothing shortage we were allowed to wear our uniforms sans insignia. I looked at the Winged Star for a long time after it was off my tunic, before wrapping it up and slipping it into my pocket.

  The human district commander, Gonzales, saw me off. “Won’t you stay for a while?” he invited. “I would not advise going to New York. It was badly hit. Conditions are hard.”

  “Things are bad everywhere, señor,” I answered.

  “Aye, so. We are thrown back to a primitive economy which cannot support our population.” He grimaced. “You are fortunate to have arrived almost a year late. Last winter and spring—ugh!”

  “Famine?”

  “And plague. The Martians could do little to help us, though I must admit they tried. But millions are dead already, and still it goes on.” He looked grayly across the field. Our Globe and Olive Branch still flew, but Mars’ Double Crescent banner was on a higher staff. “It is the end of human independence,” he said. “From now on, we are cattle.”

  “We’ll come back,” I said. “Give us twenty years to recover, and we’ll rearm and—”

  He winced. “I think I would almost rather have Martian rule than the kind of fascism that would entail, Commander,” he said. “However, they do not intend to let us try. We are to be de-industrialized and made a province. They will keep us that way forever—you know the Martian nature. They are not vindictive, but they are careful, farseeing, and very patient.”

  I thought it was a Draconian measure. Our population would likely have to be halved before we could return to an agricultural economy—and then there would be unending centuries of humans turned into peasants, handicraftsmen, fishers and loggers and miners; at best we could only become lesser bureaucrats in the Martian imperium. We would stay here, shackled by ignorance, while science and industry and the soaring starward adventure went to Mars.

  Still—in their place, I’d have done the same! We had so many natural advantages, we’d come so close to annihilating them—oh, if there’d been some brains on the General Staff, we could have taken Mars in five years! Instead, we made one ghastly blunder after another, and only the fact that the Martians made almost as many had kept us going. Of course, this was the first space war in history, one couldn’t expect to foresee everything, but it was weird how both sides had fumbled it and turned what might have been a sharp, clean blow into twenty ruinous years of attrition.

  Well—too late now. Too late forever.

  “Farewell, Commander,” said Gonzales. “And good luck to you.”

  “And to you,” I said, shaking his hand. “To all of us.”

  “We’ll all need it, Commander,” he said.

  The rocket flight to New York was uneventful. My fellow passengers, all human, all shabbily clad and grim about the mouth, plied me with questions about the space war, and I was as eager to learn about what had happened at home. I hadn’t been on Earth for five years. Well, the last several months had been rugged—atomic bombardment from space, capitulation, famine and plague. Our transportation and manufacturing centers had been so thoroughly wrecked that it hadn’t been possible to feed the huge urban majority, or take care of them in any way. Crime and anarchy had risen out of the ruins and still snarled around the world, though the Martian occupation forces were now cooperating with U. N. and local police to smash that violence.

  “And it’ll get worse,” said an American gloomily. “There’s years of hunger in front of us, before the population is down far enough. We can’t do anything to recover. The Marshies are systematically dismantling whatever important industry we have left. There won’t be any in five or six years. We’ll be traveling by sailboat and horseback. This rocket line here is scheduled to be confiscated in another few months, when its most urgent freight-hauling duties are over.”

  “We gotta fight,” said another man. “There ain’t many of them. Mebbe five million Marshie troops, spread thin in, uh, garrisons all over this planet. They got the gravity against ’em, too. We got to get together and throw ’em out.”

  “With what?” I asked wearily. “Hunting rifles and kitchen knives? Against artillery, machine-guns, flame throwers, armor, aircraft? And don’t forget their bases on the moon, either. Any time we act up, they can shoot some more rockets at us.”

  “You’ve surrendered, spaceman?” A young, prematurely hard-looking woman gave me a contemptuous glance.

  “I guess so,” I said. “If you want to call it that.”

  -2-

  We landed near evening, and I went up in the control tower of the clumsily rebuilt airport and spent a very long and quiet while looking over the city. They’d told me New York had had it bad, but I’d never realized it would be like this.

  The haughty skyline of Manhattan was a jumble of steel skeletons, stripped, snapped off, and stark against the sky. Some of the buildings had caught a freakish heat-gust and melted where they stood, so that they were brittle crags of lumpy, twisted, fire-blackened steel.

  Outside the great bowl of the main crater, it was all rubble, a dead wilderness of heaped rock, and I saw dust and ash scudding over it in the wind. Brooklyn was another tumbled ruin, though a few empty shells still tottered erect. Haze and gathering dusk hid the remainder of the city from me, but I saw no lights anywhere, no lights at all.

  The human airport chief, who had let me climb up to see, nodded wearily at me when I came down. “I warned you against going, Commander Arnfeld,” he said. His voice was flat, gray as his face. The eyes were sunken and feverish. “It’s—ugly.”

  “How many live here now?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Who knows? A million, perhaps. Those who could, fled out into the country when the famine and diseases got under way; there were plenty of battles between farmers and the mobs. Now we truck in some food, and we can offer jobs at rubble clearing and so on, so conditions are a little better. Not much, but a little.”

  “How’ll I get upstate?” I asked. “My home is there.”

  “Shank’s mare, Commander, unless you can hitch a ride on one of the farm wagons. But they don’t like city people since last winter.”

  “Well—” I looked out the window. Airport lights were feeble against the darkness that flowed in from the sea. “I’d better stay here overnight, then. Can you recommend a place?”