“How much money you got?”

  I grinned without humor. “Back pay, fifty thousand U. N. dollars. Inflation allowance, one million.”

  “That allowance was decided on four months ago. Now it’ll just about buy three meals and two nights’ lodging. The city has to pay its workers in food, clothes, and what little medical care we can offer.” He tugged nervously at his ear lobe, avoiding my eyes. “I wish I could put you up for the night, Commander, but there are seven of us in one room as it is, and—”

  “I know. Thanks, but I’ll find something.”

  “Try the Benedictine Hostel. Little group of monks got together, built a shack, and put up anyone who’ll help with the work. If there’s any room left at all, they’ll give you a doss and let you help with the chores.”

  “Suits me. I’ll even contribute something—say half a million dollars.”

  “They’d appreciate it. They have a lot of cripples to look after, who can’t work.” He gave me directions; it was about three miles off. “But be careful,” he warned. “Plenty of gangsters around. They’d as soon kill you as look at you. The last few months made people pretty desperate.”

  I slapped my holstered Magnum repeater. As an officer, I’d been allowed to keep my sidearm. And my spaceman’s gray ought to get me some respect too—unless somebody decided to kill me for the suit.

  It wasn’t entirely dark yet, but the dusk was thick as I walked from the airport. I wasn’t sorry; it blurred the gaunt buildings on either side of the street, empty windows and gaping doorways, now and then a burnt wreck. There weren’t many others abroad, and they shuffled unspeakingly past, without aim, without hope. The silence was complete—utter blank quiet, dense and heavy, making the noise of my boots and the whimper of raw wind unnaturally loud. I walked faster, hoping to find light and kindliness.

  The hand on my arm sent me leaping away, whirling around and yanking the pistol out with a snarl. When I saw that it was a woman, I knew how tensed I had been. My heartbeat was a fury in my ears.

  “Hello, spaceman,” she said.

  I lowered the gun and took a step toward her. “What do you want?” Trying to hold my voice steady, I made it a harsh snap.

  “I—well—” She looked away from me, cringing back into the doorway where she had stood. Approaching closer, I saw her draw a shuddering breath and square her thin shoulders and turn back to face me.

  “Want shelter tonight?” she asked.

  I looked at her for a long while, not saying anything.

  “You’re just in from space, aren’t you?” Her voice was very low, and it wavered. But it wasn’t a slum voice; she had been well educated.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, do you want to stay with me tonight?” She had to gulp before she could get it out. “I have a place.”

  I went up and stood before her, peering into the gloom to make her out. She was medium tall, and her figure must have been good once, but the legs under the tattered dress were pathetically thin. Young, too—early twenties. Her face was pale, the cheekbones stark under enormous eyes, but her nose had a pert tilt to it and her mouth was soft and gentle. She was trembling and breathing hard, not able to meet my gaze.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  Her voice lifted raggedly, “Look, don’t be this way. If you—want me, then say so. Otherwise, get on—please!”

  I had been almost ten years in space, rarely seeing Earth or a human colony, so I knew a prostitute when I met one. “This is your first try, isn’t it, sis?” I asked.

  She nodded mutely.

  “The city offers jobs,” I said. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “All the jobs left open are too heavy for me.” Her tone was a mumble now. “I can’t haul bricks—I tried it and collapsed. I can’t get out into the country. No room left there, even if the farmers would take in another stray. And I’ve got a little girl to look after.”

  I shook my head, smiling with an effort. “Sorry, sis. I can’t take advantage of you that way.”

  “If it isn’t you, it’ll be someone else,” she said hopelessly. “I’d rather it was you. My husband was a spaceman.”

  I came to a decision. “How much do you—charge?”

  “I—” A dry whisper. “Half a million. Is that too much?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m looking for shelter, and you seem to have a place. I’ll pay half a million for bed and breakfast—and nothing else.”

  That’s when she started to cry. I held her close till it was over, stroking the long gold hair that was still beautiful. Her dress, I noticed, had been fairly good once, and it was almost painfully clean; how she’d managed that, without soap, I didn’t know. Sand and water, maybe.

  We walked hand in hand toward her dwelling. She guided me deftly through heaps of rubble, smashed stone, broken girders, sharded glass, now and then a human bone. It was altogether dark, and I often stumbled.

  A big hotel had collapsed freakishly, leaving a cave in its mountain of ruin. She had camouflaged the entrance with a couple of splintered doors and one of the bushes which had begun growing here and there in the city.

  We crawled through a narrow tunnel to a hole roughly seven feet square and four feet high. It was as clean as her dress, and almost as drab: a few salvaged utensils, a mattress, a dim oil lamp, and some books. There was a girl playing on the floor, a pretty little three-year-old with her mother’s shining hair and huge green eyes. She ran to the woman, who took her up and murmured to her.

  “You weren’t lonely, Alice, were you?”

  “Oh, no, mom-muh, I finked up Hoppy an’ Hoppy came sat down on a lamp an’ he got big eyes an’ wings an’ you brought’a daddy home wif you an’ Hoppy says—”

  I sat down in the corner. “You’d have let your daughter watch?” I sneered. There was an emptiness in my breast.

  She turned on me with a flare of rage. “If you don’t like it,” she yelled, “get out! You’ve been taken care of, you had food and work and order around you, if you died it would’ve been quick and decent. You didn’t have any gangs to hide from, anyone else to keep alive—go on, get out of here!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I wasn’t trying to be holier than thou. A man who helped bombard Zuneth can’t look down on anyone.”

  “You were there?” Her anger ebbed from her, and she smiled. “That was our greatest victory. We must have killed a million Marshies then.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Hit ’em from space, just as they hit Earth later on. A million living, feeling creatures blown to bloody shreds. I’m not proud of it.”

  “I’d like to kill every one of them,” she murmured. “Every last damned one.”

  “Forget it,” I said. I thumbed through the books, which, from their markings, she had dug out of the library. Shakespeare, the Greek tragedies, Goethe’s Faust in German, Whitman, Benet, and—sentimentally—Brooke. Yes, she was of good family. I thought of her huddled in here, reading The Trojan Women, and shook my head.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Christine Hawthorne,” she said. “My friends called me Kit.” I saw a flush go up her cheeks after that impulse; she thought she’d inadvertently given me a come-on after all.

  “No fears, Kit,” I said, “I’m what they call normal, and haven’t seen a woman in a long time, but—No fears. I’m Dave Arnfeld.”

  We talked for a long time. She had, like me, grown up in war, but until last year the strife had been far from Earth and she’d enjoyed a fairly decent existence. Her people had been well-to-do, cultured and cosmopolitan, she’d traveled and gone to college and known something of our heritage. Four years ago she’d met Lieutenant James Hawthorne—she showed me the faded picture of his boyish, pleasant face—and married him; but he was dead in the Battle of Juno when she bore his child. A linguist in Comcenter, she’d been at home when New York was destroyed, only a miraculous improbability had saved her and the girl, Alice. After that it had been the usual tigerish struggle to keep alive, until her will finally broke. It was coming back now, though, I could see resolution rising in her.

  Only what good was that when there was nothing she could do to live?

  “Where are you going?” she asked me.

  “Upstate,” I said. “I own a place near Albany, inherited it from my parents, and no one else is alive but me. It’ll have gone pretty much to pot, but I can start it up again, I hope. Turn farmer—there isn’t much else for a man to do, these days.”

  I knew what she was thinking, but pride made her try to change the subject. “I didn’t think there were many Germans up that way.”

  “Swedish, if you please,” I laughed. “Though most of the stock is Dutch and English from colonial days.”

  We fought the nation’s battles since the French and Indian War. Now we’ve gone down to defeat with her.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ll need a housekeeper and general assistant. You seem to be tough. Why not come along?”

  She held the child close. “It’s a dangerous trek,” she said.

  “All right,” I snapped, out of weariness and hunger. “Stay here then.”

  We quarreled for a while, made up, and went to sleep. She agreed, of course. And I saved half a million dollars.

  Breakfast was a quarter can of corned beef, with water lugged from the river. After that we took the kitchenware and started out. Most of the time I carried Alice, who was a gentle, quiet kid. She didn’t seem too scarred by what she had been through, though Kit said she often screamed at night.

  “When she gets older,” I said, “you’d better get a psychiatrist to work on that trauma.” Then I remembered that there probably wouldn’t be any psychiatrists for Earth. Half-trained doctors would be the best we could hope for, because skilled men might do something with bacteria against the Martians.

  It took us most of that day to get out of the city, and hunger was sharp within us. My uniform got me permission to buy food and a night’s rest in a hayloft from one farmer, but he warned me that he was an exception.

  “I thought we were all Earthmen together,” I said.

  “So did I, once,” he answered. “Then the mobs and gangs came out o’ town. I was lucky, so I ain’t bitter about it, but men who seen their houses burned and their kids killed and their women attacked and their grain and livestock stole—they ain’t gonna be so friendly. It’s all the city can do to make ’em sell anything.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Your being a spacer might be dangerous, too,” he said.

  “A lot o’ people are mad about the whole war. There’s stories that Earth started it—mebbe the Marshies planted that rumor, I dunno, but it’s a fact you spacers bungled it so they could grab the moon and blitz us.”

  “I wasn’t in charge,” I said. “But then, I imagine people in your situation can’t be expected to be very logical.”

  Thereafter I turned bandit. Military training and good physical condition helped. I stole a horse and wagon so we could ride, a cow to give us milk, chickens and vegetables for food—just marched in and took them at gun point, with a promise to return them with rent money as soon as possible.

  The law was slack, we had no trouble with the over-burdened police; but a couple of times we were shot at. Kit bore it bravely, death was a little thing to her who had seen so much of it. She was already beginning to fill out and get some color, she’d soon be striking.

  We rolled and bumped through the green countryside, and memories came like drawn knives. This village, that monument, the river shining between long hills, I knew them all, I remembered. I was often silent, and Kit would smile and touch my hand.

  The day came, nearly two weeks later, when we turned off the main highway and went along a rutted gravel road. My heart was loud in my breast, and I rose in the wagon and swept my arm around the horizon. “Ours,” I said.

  Kit’s green eyes widened. “All of it?”

  “Four hundred acres,” I told her, and there was a high pride in my voice. I hadn’t known till now just what a rootless shadow life mine had been, flitting between the worlds like a hunted ghost.

  The fields were well cared for, full of young grain. I assumed the neighbors had worked them. Well, good, I’d settle for shares and have something to start on next spring. If they didn’t want to share—my hand dropped to my gun. But no, that wouldn’t arise, the Smiths and Rackhams and Challengers were old friends. I was home again.

  The grove of trees: about the gate was still there, and I saw the long double line of beeches flanking the drive up to the big white Colonial house. That was all I saw before an oath ripped from me and my gun clanked free. Kit shrieked and snatched her daughter to her.

  The Martian at the gate slanted his rifle up to cover me. “Halt!”

  -3-

  There was no help for it. The enemy had decided to quarter an officer here, and I was cruelly impotent to change the fact.

  We were conducted up the drive under guard, and the officer himself came out on the wide, colonnaded porch. Sunlight streamed through the trees of Earth to dapple his alien face. I stood for a silent moment, studying that countenance.

  There are those who call the Martians ugly, but that isn’t true, not even by human standards. Consider the long straight legs, the lean waist and arms, the tremendous breadth of chest and shoulder—it isn’t a caricature of man, in some ways it is a refinement. The head, with its hairless brown skin, high cheekbones, domed forehead, narrow chin, and long pointed ears, might have been sculptured by Brancusi; the small flat nose does not break that symmetry, the mobile mouth could be human, and the big, slant, golden eyes, under the graceful little antennae, are certainly things of luminous beauty.

  Nevertheless, as he stood there in his flawless black uniform, with silvered collar and the Double Crescent on his breast, I hated him.

  He waited impassively for us to speak, meanwhile considering my dusty grays. The transparent third lids were drawn across his eyes against the glare of the westering sun; it gave him a blind, remote look.

  I gathered all my military dignity and said flatly: “I am David Mark Arnfeld, former commander in the United Nations Interplanetary Forces, and owner of this property. May I ask the meaning of your presence, Sevni?”

  He looked at me for a while longer. My medium height, stocky build, and blunt, lined face hardly fitted in with his notion of an aristocrat. But finally he bowed. “I am honored, sir,” he said. “There is a likeness of you in the living room, and I have wondered if you would be returning.” His English was fluent, though too crisp to be native. Vannzaru is a harsh language, half of it up in the supersonic range where humans can’t talk or hear. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Sevni Regelin dzu Coruthan, representing the Archate of Mars in this district.” His face remained wooden, but his eyes flickered an inquiry toward Kit, where she stood looking defiantly at him.

  “This young lady is a guest of mine,” I said coldly. I wanted to add: “And you are not,” but he understood my implication well enough.

  “Please come in,” he said. With the curiously tender Martian smile: “Or perhaps I should wait for you to invite me.” Then he dismissed the guards with a curt order.

  We entered the cool dimness of the house. It was as I had known it, polished hardwood floors, golden oak wainscoting, burnished glass and silver, the old books and pictures and furniture, all here. I wanted to cry. But I turned to Regelin instead and asked for an explanation; I made it so chill as to be insolent.

  He explained courteously. Most of the occupation forces on Earth were in garrisons, but individual officers were spotted over the planet as observers and local administrators. He was in charge of the whole New England area. It had been decided to quarter him and his guards and assistants—ten in all—in this unoccupied house, since that would be inconveniencing nobody. “I am afraid it is too late to change now,” he said. “But we will try to keep out of your way, and of course you will be paid a fair rent.”

  “Very nice of you, isn’t it?” exploded Kit. Her hair swirled about her shoulders as she turned on him, where he stood looming a foot and a half above her. “After you’ve burned our homes and killed our people and ruined our planet, it’s easy to be polite, isn’t it? I suppose you think you’re being generous!”

  “Kit,” I said. “Kit, please.”

  “I fear the lady is overwrought,” said Regelin. He faced around to me. “I have to warn you, Mr. Arnfeld, that while it is not the Archon’s intention to interfere unduly with the private lives of Terrestrials, any attempt at sabotage or obstruction of his purposes will be severely punished.”

  “All right,” I said. “You’ve got us by the damper rods.”

  Wistfulness flitted across the dark face. “I would like to be friends,” he said. “We are both spacemen. I was at Juno and the Second Orbit, among other battles, and lost comrades, even as you did. Can we not forget old grudges now that the war is over?”

  “No,” I said.

  “As you wish, Mr. Arnfeld.” He bowed and left me, his tall form erect.

  The Martians were considerate guests. They moved out of the quarters they had held and took over the north wing of the house, where there were several rooms they converted into offices and a dormitory; they left the rest of the house strictly alone, except at mealtimes. A sentry was always at the gate and one at the north door, pacing slowly back and forth. You saw the staff whiz in and out on their scooterbugs, reporting to Regelin where he worked, but they weren’t noisy. They often sat in the garden or strolled through the woods, but if you chanced to meet one he would jump up and bow. We never returned the greeting.

  In many ways, they were actually an asset. They had made arrangements with the neighbors about my land, so that was taken care of. They had installed their own power plant, so we had all the electricity we wanted. They had found domestic help, an elderly couple named Hoose who lived in the servant cottage behind the mansion. Their rent payment was generous, and helped my finances a lot. All in all, I had nothing against them except that they were Martians. The conquerors.