“I tell you, it’s top secret!” cried Hale.

  “I shall report directly to the continental commandant,” said Regelin. “Meanwhile, no others shall see you.”

  The prisoners were led upstairs, locked into their room with the four guards told off to watch them. Regelin gave Dzuga some ointment for his burns, but had me carry the trunk downstairs. We went through it item by item.

  “Quite possibly Hale is right and we shall all be shot for this,” said Regelin evenly. “However—” He turned to Kit and me, formally. “I apologize for the earlier misunderstanding. You were right and I was wrong.”

  Impulsively, Kit took his hand. He sighed, wheeled about and went into the Martian wing.

  We moved Alice in with the Hooses, just in case. Neither of us could sleep. We went back to the house, threw together some kind of meal, and afterward sat in the living room. We didn’t say much.

  Regelin came back about midnight. He sat down across from us, and his eyes were dull. “I finally got through on a closed circuit to the Commandant,” he reported. “Ruanyi dzu Varek himself. He ordered me to absolute secrecy and said he was sending a squad at once.”

  “Didn’t he say anything about whether this is a Martian project or not?” I asked.

  “No. Nothing. It is very strange.”

  Kit looked at him. “If he were roused out of bed and given such a story,” she said, “he might not be able to think fast enough. He might slip out of character, just a little bit.”

  Regelin closed his fists. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You know it as well as I do.” Her voice was ferocious. “If these aliens can make themselves look like anybody, and if they have infiltrated, they’ll be in the highest governmental posts.”

  “This inspection team wasn’t too high-ranking,” he said.

  “They’d want to check up for themselves,” said Kit. “See just how their war has succeeded.”

  “Their war—”

  “It fits, doesn’t it?” I asked. “The unnecessary war. Two peaceable worlds, lashed to battle by one provoked incident after another. The bungling on both sides that made the thing such a long and bloody mess, that nearly wrecked both planets. Yes, I think they’ve controlled both our governments for decades.”

  “But if they can simply come in, disguised as us—if they can take over all our riches—why should they destroy us—make us destroy ourselves?”

  “I don’t know. Softening us up for invasion, perhaps. Maybe the armada from Alpha Centauri is already on its way.”

  “No! That doesn’t make sense! The logistics of it are simply ridiculous.” Regelin got up and began pacing, back and forth, back and forth. “And a race capable of mounting an interstellar invasion would be so far advanced technologically that it wouldn’t need to conquer anybody.”

  I leaned back in my chair, suddenly exhausted. “Be that as it may,” I told him, “I predict this: The squad will come with orders for you to release those two things. By then, Dzuga will again be Dzuga. You and we and your four guards will be hustled off and never heard from again.”

  The iron in him broke. “I can’t mutiny,” he groaned.

  “No,” said Kit viciously. “You can only die.”

  “Give us a chance, at least,” I begged. “Let us take a car and get out of here.”

  “I have to think,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know what to do.”

  He paced up and down for a long time. His boots fell dully on the carpet.

  I leaned over to whisper to Kit—I’d attack Regelin, we could overpower him and get away—I had forgotten how well Martians hear. He looked at me with a haggard smile and said: “Don’t.”

  Then, after another moment, he threw back his shoulders, suddenly calm, his decision made. “I am with you in this.”

  Kit leaped up and kissed him. I could only clasp his hand.

  “Don’t make assumptions,” he said quickly. “I am a Martian before all. If Hale was telling the truth, I shall be shot for mutiny; and doubtless lives will be lost before that happens. But I cannot take the chance—those few lives are nothing against the possibility that Mars is being conquered from within.”

  We laid swift plans, but they got us no further than escape; beyond that we couldn’t think. Kit went back outside to get Alice while I packed a few necessities and as much food as I could. Regelin ordered his private car made ready, and gave me a huge roll of greenbacks to take. We went upstairs together, then, and down the hall to the guestroom door.

  Regelin dismissed the guards. It was, perhaps, cruel to abandon them, but they couldn’t be trusted not to turn on us. Then he opened the door and we went into the room. I switched on the lights.

  Hale still wore his human form, and Dzuga had reassumed Martian shape. They got out of bed and stood looking down the muzzle of our guns.

  “You are going to tell us the truth,” said Regelin. “The whole truth.”

  Anger flushed Hale’s face. “I have already done so,” he said.

  “I know something of biological science,” declared Regelin, “and I also know that revolutionary weapons are not developed overnight. I do not believe any Martian laboratory could have created your kind. You are from outer space—aren’t you?”

  Hale shook his head. I gathered myself, ready to beat the truth out of them. Whether I could have brought myself to torture or not, I don’t know. We were already too late.

  Regelin lifted his hand as I moved toward them. “Listen!”

  We heard it soon after, the steady thunderclap of a rocket drilling the sky, and it was coming nearer. The squad from Headquarters!

  No—they couldn’t have gotten here that soon. Ruanyi must have called up a nearby garrison and had them send that vessel. Which meant it was really urgent to him—

  We shot the aliens in the head, feeling no remorse for executing the murderers of our planets. I had half expected them to change shape in death, but they remained the same as they sprawled on the floor. They died like men, I thought with a grisly humor.

  “Hurry!” gasped Kit.

  Regelin tossed a sheet of paper to the floor, on which he had typed an account of our findings. If the squad was of hostile aliens, it would be useless; they’d burn it. But if Hale had told the truth, it was some small justification for our mutiny, and perhaps the authorities would try to take us alive. Perhaps.

  We clattered down the stairs and out to the driveway. The car stood there, idling—a long black ovoid, Diesel-powered. Kit tumbled into the back seat, Regelin and I into the front; he let me drive, and we slid away from the house.

  “Now where?” he asked.

  “Try Albany,” I said. “We can hole up there for the night, maybe.”

  The engine roared behind me. By the vague dashlight glow, I saw our speedometer creeping over the 200 mark. The wind of our passage bellowed, but I could hear Alice crying in the back seat and Kit soothing her.

  Regelin leaned toward me. “The hunt will be on by morning,” he said. “They will have the number of this car.”

  I nodded. “Well ditch it in Albany.”

  It was only minutes to the town at our speed. We slowed and purred down empty streets. The moon was hidden by the buildings, and lamps were turned off to conserve Earth’s thin remaining trickle of power.

  I parked in an alley and we walked out into the night. Our feet sounded loud on the pavement, we were the only ones abroad. This was a run-down district, hangout of what crooks and bums the city had. I knew a disreputable hotel, and halted before its dim blue light. Leaving the others outside, I walked in, my nose in a handkerchief that managed to cover most of my face. A sleepy clerk looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Single for tonight,” I muttered. “Hurry up, please—I gotta bad nosebleed.” I had cut myself to draw blood and stain the handkerchief.

  The clerk demanded a quarter million in advance, and I peeled it off and carried my own trunk—with all our possessions—up a dark stairway to the shabby No. 18 he had given me. I let myself in, locked the door, and climbed down the fire escape. We four went back up it. Kit and Alice were quickly asleep on the bed, while Regelin and I tossed for the chair. I lost, and stretched myself on the dirty floor. Oddly, I wasn’t long about falling asleep either.

  In the early morning, we opened a can of beans for breakfast, and conferred over it. “The alarm will be out by now,” said Regelin. “And what can we do?”

  “Go to someone we can trust,” I said. “We can’t talk to just any local sheriff or Martian officer or whatnot. Even if he believed us, which is unlikely, he’d have to go through channels, which means the enemy would soon be able to stop him.” I scratched a bristly chin. “The man I’d like to see right now is Rafael Torreos. He’s an old friend of mine, I know he’s all right. And he is, or was, a colonel in our Intelligence, and has some connection with Martian higher-ups. He’s be able to do something,” I chuckled drearily. “But unfortunately. Torreos is in Brazil.”

  “Could you send him a letter?” asked Kit.

  “With the postal service shot? No. Unless we can find someone going to Brazil who’ll deliver it.”

  Regelin scowled. “I think I could vouch for Sevni Yueth dzu Talazan, in our own Intelligence,” he said. “And he would have much more influence than your Torreos. However, he will not believe so fantastic a story without proof. I would not believe it myself.”

  “And if Yueth’s in your C.I.A., as you say, he’s way to hellangone in North America GHQ,” I grumbled. “He might almost as well be in Brazil. It’s fifteen hundred miles.”

  “Nevertheless—”

  “I’m s’ill hungry, mom-muh,” said Alice. It reminded me joltingly of how awkward a party we were.

  Proof. The best proof, perhaps the only one, would be an alien. If dead, the corpse would have to be in alien form, unless dissection would reveal its otherness. I wondered how many of them there were. Anyone you meet, the coffee shop proprietor, the aid station attendant, the cop on the corner, the boy on a bicycle, any one of them may be a monster.

  No, probably not. They might assume humble disguises for special purposes, but generally they would be the rulers—officers, nobles, politicians, big businessmen, key bureaucrats. Society is a great machine, and they had to be in the vital positions to control it.

  I didn’t think their numbers were enormous; but the fact that they gave the orders would turn every man’s and Martian’s hand against us.

  So—the aliens would be concentrated in the big headquarters, in important offices. We’d have to go clear to the stronghold of Ruanyi dzu Varek himself, and he was almost certainly of the enemy. Clear to Minneapolis, with all the nation hunting us.

  But at least it would be an unexpected direction. Logically, we ought to head north for the woods. And Regelin’s friend Yueth would be in Minneapolis too.

  I got up off the floor. “Let’s go,” I said.

  -6-

  It was up to me to get transportation; Kit and Regelin were too conspicuous. I left them talking, he soothing her with an account of his family and their home on Mars, and went downstairs. The ordinary slack suit, such as I was wearing, offers no way to mask a face; and the weather outside was damnably bright, which gave me no excuse to wear a hooded raincape. I would just have to rely on the fact that most people are unobservant. I crossed the lobby with my skin prickling.

  I passed the desk. Different clerk now, why did it have to be that alert-looking boy? “Back after breakfast,” I flung at him over my shoulder. So nobody would blunder into the room—

  Having occasionally ridden here for a spree, a few hours to forget I was beaten and broken, I knew the district fairly well. There was a small garage with a used-car business on the side, not far from the hotel. I’d never talked to the owner, but he was a young man with a missing hand, the prosthetic was a service issue—a former spaceman. He was tinkering with a car when I walked into his shop. Nobody else was there, and my breath shuddered out of me.

  He straightened and regarded me with spaceman’s eyes, the long steady squint against actinic glare. “Yes?” It was a voice full of bitterness and protest.

  “I want to buy a small truck,” I said.

  He looked surprised, then, and gratified; his business must be almost zero these days. “I got a couple good ones,” he said. “Come on out and look at ’em.” When the sunlight was full on my face, his eyes hardened. I could almost read his mind, remembering: Five feet eleven, stocky build, brown hair, gray eyes, snub nose, cleft chin…Reward…

  “What was your outfit?” I asked. In the effort to hold itself steady my tone was flat. “I was with the Sixth myself.”

  “Fireballs,” he answered, very slowly.

  “The Ninth—yeah. A good fleet. You were with us at Second Orbit.”

  “That’s where I lost my flipper,” he said. “You were—lucky.”

  “Not so far. In fact, my luck’s been so bad I’ve decided to leave town. There are better places. Something might still be done to help Earth get on her feet again.”

  “Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “I’d like to see that happen, but I got a wife and lads. I know better’n to buck the Marshies.”

  “Some people don’t,” I said. “But a wise man who’d like to see better days might keep his mouth shut instead of getting poor damned fools into trouble. Even for a reward. My name’s Robinson.”

  He grinned then. “Okay, Mr. Robinson. Maybe I could let you have a truck cheap. Only it won’t get you very far, you know. Even charcoal’s hard to come by.”

  “Oh, I’ll make out. I’m just an average guy trying to get along in the world. So damned average that people often fail to recognize me.”

  “Yeah, your face is easy to forget. Okay, now here I got—”

  We finished the deal quickly: a battered old pickup with a canvas-covered box was mine for a price which cut deeply into our funds but was nevertheless a bargain. I shook hands with the dealer as I left, the plastic claw was hard and cool in my palm. “Good luck, Mr. Robinson,” he said.

  I clattered back to the hotel and into the alley behind it. No one in sight, no one watching, but any minute a face might show at a window, someone might walk in on us. I whistled softly, and my companions scrambled down the fire escape and crouched in the box while I went in and got my trunk and checked out of the hotel.

  Coming out of Albany and onto the road to Rochester was like being born again. I looked at green fields and old trees and the homes of men, sunlit under the tall blue sky of Earth, and laughed aloud.

  The wheezy old wreck could hardly make Rochester before dark, but that suited me well enough. It was clearly hopeless to try to get to Minneapolis on the highways. Lack of fuel, mechanical breakdowns, and the occupation police like hounds on our trail—impossible! We had to take another route.

  I stopped after a while and let the others into the cab with me. Regelin wore a hat and one of my shirts, he would seem human enough to a casual glance, and Alice was hidden on her mother’s lap between him and me. We could pass for any local farm family—I hoped.

  “Where we goin’, mom-muh?” asked the girl. A breeze through the cab ruffled her fine light hair, and the big eyes looked out on a world which at that age is all fable.

  “On a long trip, dear,” said Kit gently.

  “Can I bring Hoppy too?”

  “Of course,” said Kit. “We wouldn’t do without Hoppy.”

  Regelin smiled. “Who is this Hoppy?” he asked. “Your doll?”

  “Oh, no,” said Alice. “Hoppy’s a mons’er. He got wings, an’ come sit onna bed inna mornin’ an’ talk to me. I fink up Hoppy when I get lonesome. You know any mons’ers, Mista Marsman?”

  “A few,” said Regelin gravely. “Here and there.”

  Kit shook her head. “It’s like a nightmare,” she murmured. “So slowly, with them chasing us, and we’re going right toward the heart of the danger.”

  “It might be well if we left you and the child to hide with someone,” said Regelin.

  “Won’t work,” I said bitterly. “Who can we trust? If anybody took them in, he might get scared later and betray them for the reward or just to save his own skin. And with the breakdown of travel and communications, everybody is naturally becoming more interested in what his neighbor’s doing. Strangers arriving to stay with someone would stick out like the good old sore thumb.”

  My garageman had, with elaborate casualness, told me the public announcement, which had gone on the air about dawn and been rebroadcast periodically. We three were wanted dead or alive for mutiny, murder, and conspiracy. We were believed to be insane, with systematic delusions to which no one should pay attention. The reward was considerable—a hundred million U. N. dollars, convertible into Mars’ hard currency if desired. Handbills and posters with the same information and our pictures would be issued soon.

  Kit whistled at what I said. “They want us bad!” With a forlorn little smile: “Never thought I’d be worth that much to anybody.”

  “You are to me, Kit.” I reached down and squeezed her hand. She gave me a strange look.

  Regelin’s face was haggard. “When my family hears of this—” He shook his head, letting blankness slide over him.

  It was mid-afternoon when we heard the siren. We had just gone through a village, and I saw the pursuing car streak from it. My heart gave a leap and then settled down into a steady, furious drumming. “Down!” I yelled. “Out of sight!”

  Kit had already pulled Alice to the floor. Regelin dropped over her. I threw a blanket across the two and laid my gun beside me. The siren howled and the blue ovoid edged alongside us, forcing us off the road.

  I stopped and turned to face the man who was climbing out. There was another with him, holding a tommy gun. State troopers—young, both of them, ordinary decent lads from the green dales of Earth. My voice sounded blurred in my ears: “What is it, officer? What’d I do wrong?”