“We’re checking all vehicles. Orders.” He leaned in the window, his revolver level at my temples. “Let’s see both your hands on that wheel, mister.”

  “Look here—”

  He did, and I saw the tautening of his face. “Come out of there,” he said slowly. “With hands up.”

  “I haven’t—”

  “We’ll have to hold you for investigation. Come on, now, out!”

  Something slumped within me. “Officer,” I asked dully, “are you collaborating with the Martians too?”

  “So it is you—”

  I’d given them their chance. Now I moved fast. My left hand chopped down on the barrel of his gun, sweeping it aside and grabbing the wrist, while my right pulled up my own weapon. I fired, and his head exploded before me.

  Regelin was up in the same movement with me, throwing himself across my lap and pumping shots at the man in the police car. The tommy gun stammered once, and then he collapsed in the seat and fell slowly to the floor. Magnum bullets do not leave a pretty corpse.

  We got out. The fields were empty around us, two neat white houses peeked through a screen of trees, the sunlight was bright and warm on the road and the blood and brains. Somewhere a thrush was singing.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to the dead men. “I’m sorry, boys.”

  Kit was weeping, not hysterical but quietly, hopelessly, shielding her daughter from the sight. Regelin and I put the bodies in the car and drove it off on the shoulder. He mopped the spattered mess off me, as well as he could, and we took the car’s armament and drove on.

  After a while Kit looked up and touched my mouth. Her fingertips were cold. “You were hurt, Dave,” she said. “You’re bleeding.”

  “I bit my lip too hard, I guess,” I said tonelessly.

  “It wasn’t murder, David,” said Regelin. The first time he had ever called me by my name. “This is war.”

  “I wonder what the difference is,” I said.

  We turned off the highway and followed dusty country roads into the lowering sun. We didn’t talk much between ourselves, but Kit prattled all the time to Alice, trying to keep her happy. After dark we stopped to eat, and then pushed on.

  Lake Ontario lay quiet under the moon, its darkness broken by a ripple of cold light. You could hear waves lapping on the shore, and the stars were majesty overhead. “I know, this region pretty well,” I told them. “Lots of little resort towns hereabouts. Should be one with a yacht club not far away.”

  We chugged into it—a pretty little place, plastic cottages under trees, on lawns that were dew-glimmering in the moonlight. Few windows glowed, Earth had no time or money for resorts these days, but there were permanent residents. We pulled up on the dock and stretched ourselves gratefully after the long, cramped ride. My belly muscles were still drawn tense. Walking over hollow-sounding planks, I selected our boat, a sweet craft whose owner took obvious pride in it. I felt sorry for him.

  While Kit and Regelin made it ready, I drove the truck back out of town, to a spot where the weed-grown lawn of an empty house sloped into the lake. I set the controls on automatic, pointed the truck at the water, and got out. If my garageman had done a competent job of repair on its water shielding, it should get quite deep before it stopped.

  By the time anyone thought to hunt for our tracks—a boat thief wouldn’t likely be identified with the mad killers—they should be gone. I walked back to the yacht club and jumped into the boat. We cast off and tacked against the landward breeze, out onto the lake.

  “And where will this take us, did you say?” asked Regelin.

  “Clear to Duluth,” I said, “if the bombardment didn’t wreck the St. Lawrence waterway. And there’ll be little if any traffic on the lakes, and we needn’t worry about fuel.”

  I took the first watch. Kit and Alice had the boat’s one bunk, Regelin rolled in a blanket beside them and was asleep at once. Earth gravity must have worn him down more than he admitted. I sat alone by the tiller for an hour or so. Then the door of the little cabin opened and Kit came softly out to sit down beside me.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Will you talk to me, Dave? I feel so horribly alone.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She looked up toward the sky, where the Great Bear wheeled and Andromeda’s nebula was a tiny whorl of silver impossibly far away and the Galactic belt’s clustered suns ran like a pale river between the constellations. “I wonder,” she said. “I wonder which of those stars they came from.”

  “No telling,” I said. “It’s a big universe.”

  “Big and cold.” She shivered. I laid an arm about her waist, drawing her close to me.

  “I’m not afraid for myself,” she said in a thin voice, a child’s voice full of pain that is not understood. “I’ve seen too much in the last year to be afraid of what can happen to me. But Alice—she’s all there is left to me.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m no hero either. We’ve been forced into this. We’re not trying to save Earth, but our own necks. Reggy is the only true altruist, I’m afraid.”

  “He’s—good,” she said. “I never knew Martians could be so gentle.” Fiercely: “And they turned us against each other! They made us kill each other.”

  “Maybe they’re doing it for the wife and kids too.” I said. “War is always an ugly business.”

  She looked at me a long time. “Can’t you hate at all?” she asked finally, wonderingly.

  I shrugged. “Sure. But I’d rather not. A man is thrown into himself, out in space. You do a lot of thinking, and things no longer look as simple as you might wish them to be.”

  “Dave—if by some miracle we should win out—if these aliens can somehow be exposed and overthrown—what then?”

  “I don’t know. I assume Mars will ease up the conditions of peace for us. She probably won’t abandon control of us at once, but we’ll be allowed to rebuild. In a few years, maybe, they’ll get together on an interplanetary union, like the U. N. One is at least allowed to hope.”

  “And you—what will you do then?”

  “Can’t say. Go into business, maybe; there’s a wide field for research and development in rocketry. Or settle down and really try to write. I’d like to hand on some of the thinking I did out there, and tell the whole story of space.”

  “Don’t you ever want a family?”

  “Sure.” I forced a laugh. “Want to apply for the job?”

  “I think—” She fell silent. Then, slowly and very softly: “I think perhaps I might.”

  The boom nearly crowned me when I let go of the tiller.

  I needn’t go into detail on that voyage. It was a strange and utterly happy interlude. Sun and rain and wind, glitter on the lakes, forests green on the shores, loneliness around us like a wall— We were on short rations, we huddled wet and cold against the rains, we cursed contrary winds, we felt a hand close on our hearts when one of the infrequent aircraft flashed overhead, we were cramped and comfortless, but we wished the trip might last forever.

  Regelin was tactfully blind and deaf, he spent most of his time playing with Alice. Sometimes all three of us would talk together, otherwise it was Kit and me, all the years before us bright and insubstantial as sunlit, wind-driven clouds. Our little time was like a life, bounded on either end by darkness, but it was today, held in our hands, and today was forever.

  We made landfall some two weeks after our departure, grounding the boat on a pebbled beach north of Duluth and splashing ashore to the forest. That night we slept on pine boughs with the wind talking in the trees overhead. Our interlude was ended, and we started out next day for the new capital of North America.

  -7-

  Duluth had been a busy port, but with Chicago in ruins the upper midwest cities could be left without bombardment to die on the vine. We circled it and began hiking across country, traveling by night along empty roads, under heartlessly brilliant stars. By day we hid ourselves in copses, haystacks, grainfields. The farmers here had not suffered as much from city mobs as in the east, and I had little trouble begging enough food for my party—our own supplies had been consumed in the boat.

  Minneapolis-St. Paul had been fairly important for a while after World War III, as a terminal for the rapidly expanding air-freight lines; but technology made such pivots unnecessary within a decade, and the double city had been left to dignified obsolescence, a minor airport and manufacturing center, rather quaint and old-fashioned. Its undamaged buildings and central location made it a natural choice for Martian continental headquarters. Neither Kit nor I had ever been here, but Regelin knew the place well; there was a sad humor in our being guided by him.

  A week’s hiking from Lake Superior brought us to the outskirts. We stopped in a wooded tract to clean up, washing ourselves and our nylon clothes in the river until Kit and I looked like any civilian couple. Regelin’s uniform came out of his bundle, to be scrubbed and dried; its plastic-fabric snapped to a crisp military neatness and the silver glistened on its black.

  “And now,” he said, “we break up the group temporarily. If either division fails to make the rendezvous, the other must go ahead as best it can.” His words rang with decision, and his six-fingered handclasp was firm. I had to admire him; for myself, I felt only a dull hopeless dread, a slogging sort of courage, which went on because there was nothing else to do.

  Kit and I crouched in the long grass and watched him stride confidently out on the highway. It wasn’t long before a Martian truck came from the north; he flagged it down and stepped coolly inside. He needn’t even bother explaining himself unless there was another officer around. “Lucky devil,” I muttered.

  “Till someone recognizes him,” said Kit.

  We began trudging at sunset, a man and woman and child. By midnight we were well into the neat northern residential section, walking down the dark length of Lyndale Avenue. There was a stirring of life at the corner of Broadway: a few bars open, a thin flow of traffic. My heart sprang when I saw a Martian standing on the corner with a notebook. Kit drew me back into the gloom and her hand was cold in mine. “Let’s go around the block,” she whispered.

  “No,” I said, forcing it out between my teeth. “We can’t afford to act furtive. He’s observing everything, but it must only be routine. Traffic analysis, maybe. Come on.” We went right past him. His incurious yellow eyes brushed us and wandered away again. To the untrained Martian, humans of a particular race look very much alike. We were leaning heavily on that fact.

  Later on, we met others: a patrol walking down the streets, a party of drunken enlisted men singing one of their weird ballads, a young-looking soldier drifting past with loneliness on his face. Their cars and trucks purred by us, big steel beasts wearing guns like horns. Now and then an aircraft whooshed overhead, murmuring in for a landing. I saw Martians coming out of homes in which they had been quartered, more of them every minute as we got closer to the loop. It was a strange sight, those tall gaunt forms and unhuman helmeted heads against the shabby-genteel homeliness of a minor human city. It made the occupation wholly real to me.

  We turned off on Seventh Street and went through a neat district of impersonal multi-family units—that meant there’d once been a slum here, I thought—toward the glow of the downtown section. The loop was concentrated within a small area, some ten blocks square, bounded sharply by warehouses, factories, and cheap hotels. The rendezvous was one of the latter, the Rocket Haven, only three blocks off the main drag. We entered the dingy lobby and went up to the deck. “Room for two,” I said.

  “Sorry, mister.” The clerk’s sleepy eyes hardly noticed me. “Place is full up. Martians, you know.”

  “Now there,” whispered Kit with a wry grin, “is an unforeseen complication.”

  “Look,” I said, “we just got in from Des Moines and we’re ready to keel over. We’ve tried several other places in town, and none of them’ll give us a thing. I got a wife and kid here—have a heart!”

  “I said we’re flat out,” answered the clerk. “Can’t even spare a bathtub.”

  I looked at the register where it lay open before me. A name, picked almost at random—Fred Gellert of Duluth—“Why, say you’ve got an old friend of mine here!” My voice came out dull with weariness, but I tried to smile. “Mr. Gellert, see? I meant to meet him anyway, knew he’d be in this place. He won’t mind sharing.”

  “That’s his business,” shrugged the clerk. Indifference was like a mantle over him, he was one of Earth’s broken men. “His key ain’t here, so he’s most likely up there now.”

  “We’ll go see. And look—” I slipped one of our few remaining thousand-dollar bills onto the desk. “My name’s Robinson. James Robinson. I’ll just call you up from the room when we get it straightened out, and I’d like you to write my name in by Mr. Gellert’s. I’m expecting a visitor, you see.”

  We climbed three flights of stairs, not daring to say anything when the halls were full of Martians. Enlisted men, I noticed; the top officers would naturally have the big hotels, the lesser ones be billeted in private homes. These were a quiet, almost stolid lot, the peasantry and hunters of the dry sea bottoms and the stony hills. We heard the wailing of their songs like sorrow in the air.

  When I knocked on Fred Gellert’s door, we were briefly alone. Kit hissed in my ear: “Are you crazy, Dave? He won’t take us in. This is just drawing attention—”

  “We’ve got to meet Reggy here,” I said, with a bite in my tone. “There’s no other way to do it. If he can scout around through town, right out in the open, we can—”

  “Yeh, what is it?” A grumpy, half-awake sound, the door opening a crack. “Who the hell you think y’ are?”

  I opened the door and stepped inside, my pistol leveled on Fred Gellert’s stomach. Kit closed the door behind us and sat down on the bed, watching us with large eyes. “Don’t say anything,” I told him. “I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot you, though I’d rather not.”

  His eyes narrowed after the first amazement. An undistinguished-looking man, pudgy, his sandy hair tousled with sleep, his pajamas gaping over a pink expanse of belly—but he reacted fast, there was a quick hard brain in him. “You,” he said. “Arnfeld.”

  “Uh-huh,” I nodded. “We need this room tonight. Maybe well need it tomorrow too. You won’t be harmed if you cooperate. If you have any needs of nature, attend to ’em now, because you’re going to be tied and gagged for quite a while.”

  I did an efficient job of it, ripping up a sheet and lashing him fast; he hadn’t a chance of working free. I laid him in a corner and turned to Kit. She had phoned the clerk and had then undressed Alice. The two of them were already in bed, asleep.

  I couldn’t bring darkness to my own eyes, not all at once. So I sat down and told Gellert the whole story, not expecting him to believe it, just hoping forlornly that if we spread the tale widely enough it might live on after we were dead. I wondered why he was in town—maybe he’d taken one of the fat jobs the Martians offered to humans—but felt too tired to question him or search his effects. Presently I dozed off.

  A knock brought me awake, sleep draining out like spilled water. The gun was in my hand as I slipped the door open. Regelin stood there, tall and black against the dim hall light. I let him in and woke Kit, brushing my lips across her cheek. Reggy folded his long frame into the chair, sighing with weariness. He looked a query at Gellert’s bound form, and I explained.

  “Good work,” he said with a brief crooked grin. “Now as for my adventures, things went quite well. There are so many of my people here that I needed only mingle with the crowds; I went right to the Foshay Tower itself, the heart of NAHQ, and studied the directory. Then I had a friendly conversation with a little human switchboard operator, who was very flattered at attention from a Martian officer. We went out and had coffee together, and I got quite a bit of information about administrative personnel.”

  Kit frowned. “That surprises me,” she said.

  “Oh, not all your race hates us,” said Regelin. “Those who haven’t suffered too much from the war and its aftermath, and have received good treatment at our hands, and have decided they might as well learn how to get along with us—What is useful, of course, is that none of them is likely to tell one Martian from another.”

  He leaned forward, clasping his hands together. “What we have to find is a Martian officer who is actually an alien, and whom we can capture and expose. I believe I have located our victim. Yoakh Alandzu ay Cromtha is an aide to Commandant Ruanyi, and has charge of all reports and data filed by the inspection teams as well as the regular occupation officers; in short, he gets all the information about this continent, and helps correlate it with that from the rest of the planet. It is a natural spot for an alien. When I learned further that Alandzu is a taciturn, unfriendly sort, who never unbends unless perhaps with his own staff, and whose antecedents are uncertain—well, that seemed to clinch it. My girl looked up his quarters for me: Suite 1847 in the New Dyckman Hotel. He’ll have a bodyguard, who will doubtless be an alien too, but surely they won’t be expecting us to assault them.”

  “So we grab them quietly and call up your friend Yueth and have him come look at the evidence,” I said slowly. “All well and good. Only how will we make Alandzu oblige us by changing his shape?”

  “Well—” A ghostly smile hovered on Regelin’s lips. “You might try breaking a lamp over his head.”

  I stood up, feeling the eerie tingle of readiness in me. There was no longer time to be afraid. Holding Kit against me, I kissed her for a long while. Then Regelin and I went out and into the street. I let him walk well in front of me.

  It was about 3 a.m. then, darkness and silence like a muted ocean over the city. A few lamps glowed one-eyed along Hennepin Avenue, a car purred down its empty length, a pair of Martian patrollers moved at the remote end of vision. I had a sense of enormousness around me, the city was like one vast organism sleeping, crouched to wake with a scream.