chapter six

A DESERTER IN TIME OF WAR

    "I am at a loss to understand why German batball is not an event, possibly a key event, in the Olympic Games."

— WINSTON NILES RUMFOORD

It was a six-mile march from the army camp to the plain where the invasion fleet lay. And the route of the march cut across the northwest corner of Phoebe, the only city on Mars.

    The population of Phoebe at its height, according to Winston Niles Rumfoord's Pocket History of Mars, was eighty-seven thousand. Every soul and every structure in Phoebe was directly related to the war effort. The mass of Phoebe's workers were controlled just as the soldiers were controlled, by antennas under their skulls.

    Unk's company was now marching through the northwest corner of Phoebe, on its way in the midst of its regiment to the fleet. It was thought unnecessary now to keep the soldiers moving and in ranks by means of twinges from their antennas. War fever had them now.

    They chanted as they marched, and set their iron. heeled boots down hard on the iron street. Their chant was bloody:

Terror, grief, and desolation —

Hut, tup, thrup, fo! —

Come to every Earthling nation!

Hut, tup, thrup, fo! —

Earth eat fire! Earth wear chains!

Hut, tup, thrup, fo!

Break Earth's spirit, spill Earth's brains!

Hut, tup, thrup, fo!

Scream! Tup, thrup, fo!

Bleed! Tup, thrup, fo!

Die! Tup, thrup, fo!

Doooooooooommmmmmmmmm.

The factories of Phoebe were still going full blast. No one was idling in the streets to watch the chanting heroes pass. Windows winked as dazzling torches inside went off and on. A doorway vomited spattering, smoking yellow light as metal was poured. The screams of grinding wheels cut through the soldiers' chant.

    Three flying saucers, blue scout ships, skimmed low over the city, making sweet cooing sounds like singing tops. "Toodleoo," they seemed to sing, and they skimmed away in a flat course while the surface of Mars curved away beneath them. In two shakes of a lamb's tail, they were twinkling in space eternal.

    "Terror, grief and desolation — " chanted the troops.

    But one soldier was moving his lips without making a sound. The soldier was Unk.

    Unk was in the first file of the next to the last rank of his company.

    Boaz was right behind him, his eyes making the back of Unk's neck itch. Boaz and Unk, moreover, were made Siamese twins by the long tube of a six-inch siege mortar which they were carrying between them.

    "Bleed! Tup, thrup, fo!" chanted the troops. "Die! Tup, thrup, fo! Doooooooooommmmmmmmmm."

    "Unk, old buddy — " said Boaz.

    "Yes, old buddy?" said Unk absently. He was holding, amid the confusion of his soldier's harness, a live hand grenade. The pin had been pulled. To make it go off in three seconds, Unk had only to let go of it.

    "I done fixed us up with a good assignment, old buddy," said Boaz. "Old Boaz — he takes care of his buddy, don't he, buddy?"

    "That's right, buddy," said Unk.

    Boaz had arranged things so that he and Unk would be on board the company mother ship for the invasion. The company mother ship, though it would, through a logistical fluke, be carrying the tube of the siege mortar, was essentially a noncombat ship. It was meant to carry only two men, the rest of the space being taken up by candy, sporting goods, recorded music, canned hamburgers, board games, goofballs, soft drinks, Bibles, note paper, barber kits, ironing boards, and other morale-builders.

    "That's a lucky start, ain't it, old buddy — getting on the mother ship?"

    "Lucky us, old buddy," said Unk. He had just chucked the grenade into a sewer as he passed.

    There was a spout and roar from the throat of the sewer.

    The soldiers hurled themselves to the street.

    Boaz, as the real commander of the company, was the first to raise his head. He saw the smoke coming from the sewer, supposed that it was sewer gas that had exploded.

    Boaz slipped his hand into his pocket, pressed a button, fed to his company the signal that would make them stand up again.

    As they stood, Boaz stood, too. "God damn, buddy," he said, "I guess we done had a baptism of fire."

    He picked up his end of the siege mortar's tube.

    There was nobody to pick up the other end.

    Unk had gone in search of his wife and son and his best friend.

    Unk had gone over the hill on flat, flat, flat, flat Mars.

    The son that Unk was looking for was named Chrono.

    Chrono was, by Earthling reckoning, eight years old. He was named after the month in which he had been born. The Martian year was divided into twenty-one months, twelve with thirty days, and nine with thirty-one. These months were named January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, Winston, Niles, Rumfoord, Kazak, Newport, Chrono, Synclastic, Infundibulum, and Salo.

    Mnemonically:

Thirty days have Salo, Niles, June, and September,

Winston, Chrono, Kazak, and November,

April, Rumfoord, Newport, and Infundibulum.

All the rest, baby mine, have thirty-one.

The month of Salo was named after a creature Winston Niles Rumfoord knew on Titan. Titan, of course, is an extremely pleasant moon of Saturn.

    Salo, Rumfoord's crony on Titan, was a messenger from another galaxy who was forced down on Titan by the failure of a part in his space ship's power plant. He was waiting for a replacement part.

    He had been waiting patiently for two hundred thousand years.

    His ship was powered, and the Martian war effort was powered, by a phenomenon known as UWTB, or the Universal Will to Become. UWTB is what makes universes out of nothingness — that makes nothingness insist on becoming somethingness.

    Many Earthlings are glad. that Earth does not have UWTB.

    As the popular doggerel has it:

Willy found some Universal Will to Become,

Mixed it with his bubble gum.

Cosmic piddling seldom pays:

Poor Willy's six new Milky Ways.

Unk's son Chrono was, at eight years old, a wonderful player of a game called German batball. German batball was all that he cared about. German batball was the major sport on Mars — in the grammar school, in the Army, and in the factory workers' recreation areas.

    Since there were only fifty-two children on Mars, Mars got along with just one grammar school, right in the middle of Phoebe. None of the fifty-two children there had been conceived on Mars. All had been conceived either on Earth or, as in Chrono's case, on a space ship bringing new recruits to Mars.

    The children in the school studied very little, since the society of Mars had no particular use for them. They spent most of their time playing German batball.

    The game of German batball is played with a flabby ball the size of a big honeydew melon. The ball is no more lively than a ten-gallon hat filled with rain water. The game is something like baseball, with a batter striking the ball into a field of opposing players and running around bases; and with the fielders attempting to catch the ball and frustrate the runner. There are, however, only three bases in German batball — first, second, and home. And the batter is not pitched to. He places the ball on one fist and strikes the ball with his other fist. And if a fielder succeeds instriking the runner with the ball when the runner is between bases, the runner is deemed out, and must leave the playing field at once.

    The person responsible for the heavy emphasis on German batball on Mars was, of course, Winston Niles Rumfoord, who was responsible for everything on Mars.

    Howard W. Sams proves in his Winston Niles Rumfoord, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci that German batball was the only team sport with which Rumfoord was at all familiar as a child. Sams shows that Rumfoord was taught the game, when a child, by his governess, a Miss Joyce MacKenzie.

    Back in Rumfoord's childhood in Newport, a team composed of Rumfoord, Miss MacKenzie, and Earl Moncrief the butler, used to play German batball regularly against a team composed of Watanabe Wataru the Japanese gardener, Beverly June Wataru the gardener's daughter, and Edward Seward Darlington the half-wit stable boy. Rumfoord's team invariably won.

    Unk, the only deserter in the history of the Army of Mars, now crouched panting behind a turquoise boulder and watched the school children playing German batball on the iron playground. Behind the boulder with Unk was a bicyde he had stolen from a gas-mask factory's bicycle rack. Unk did not know which child was his son, which child was Chrono.

    Unk's plans were nebulous. His dream was to gather together his wife, his son, and his best friend, to steal a space ship, and to fly away to some place where they could all live happily ever after.

    "Hey, Chrono!" cried a child on the playground. "You're up to bat!"

    Unk peered around the boulder at home plate. The child who came up to bat there would be Chrono, would be his son.

    Chrono, Unk's son, came up to bat.

    He was small for his age, but surprisingly manly through the shoulders. The child's hair was jet black, bristly — and the black bristles grew in a violently counter-clockwise swirl.

    The child was left-handed. The ball rested on his right fist, and he prepared to hit it with his left.

    His eyes were deep-set, like his father's eyes. And his eyes were luminous under their black-thatched eaves. They glowed with an unshared rage.

    Those rage-filled eyes flicked this way, then that. Their movements rattled the fielders, drawing them away from their positions, convincing them that the slow, stupid ball was going to come at them with terrible speed, was going to tear them to pieces if they dared to get in the way.

    The alarm inspired by the boy at bat was felt by the teacher, too. She was in the traditional position for an umpire in German batball, between first and second base, and she was terrified. She was a frail old lady name Isabel Fenstermaker. She was seventy-three, and had been a Jehovah's Witness before having her memory cleaned out. She had been shanghaied while trying to sell a copy of The Watchtower to a Martian agent in Duluth.

    "Now, Chrono — " she said simperingly, "it's only a game, you know."

    The sky was suddenly blackened by a formation of a hundred flying saucers, the blood-red ships of the Martian Parachute Ski Marines. The combined cooing of the ships was a melodious thunder that rattled the schoolhouse windowpanes.

    But, as a measure of the importance young Chrono gave to German batball when he came to bat, not a single child looked up at the sky.

    Young Chrono, having brought the fielders and Miss Fenstermaker to the brink of nervous collapse, now put the ball down by his feet, took from his pocket a short strip of metal that was his good-luck piece. He kissed the strip for luck, returned the strip to his pocket.

    Then he suddenly picked up the ball again, hit it a mighty bloop, and went scrambling around the bases.

    The fielders and Miss Fenstermaker dodged the ball as though it were a red-hot cannonball. When the ball came to a stop of its own accord, the fielders went after it with a sort of ritual clumsiness. Clearly, the point of their efforts was not to hit Chrono with the ball, was not to put him out. The fielders were all conspiring to increase the glory of Chrono by making a show of helpless opposition.

    Clearly, Chrono was the most glorious thing that the children had ever seen on Mars, and any glory they themselves had came from their association with him.. They would do anything to make his glory grow.

    Young Chrono slid into home in a cloud of rust.

    A fielder hurled the ball at him — too late, too late, much too late. The fielder ritually cursed his luck.

    Young Chrono stood, dusted himself off, and again kissed his good-luck piece, thanked it for another home run. He believed firmly that all his powers came from the good-luck piece, and so did his schoolmates, and so, secretly, did Miss Fenstermaker.

    The history of the good-luck piece was this:

    One day the school children were taken by Miss Fenstermaker on an educational tour of a flamethrower factory. The factory manager explained to the children all the steps in the manufacture of flamethrowers, and hoped that some of the children, when they grew up, would want to come to work for him. At the end of the tour, in the packaging department, the manager's ankle became snarled in a spiral of steel strapping, a type of strapping that was used for binding shut the packaged flame-throwers.

    The spiral was a piece of jagged-ended scrap that had been cast into the factory aisle by a careless workman. The manager scratched his ankle and tore his pants before he got free of the spiral. He thereupon put on the first really comprehensible demonstration that the children had seen that day. Comprehensibly, he blew up at the spiral.

    He stamped on it.

    Then, when it nipped him again, he snatched it up and chopped it into four-inch lengths with great shears.

    The children were edified, thrilled, and satisfied. And, as they were leaving the packaging department, young Chrono picked up one of the four-inch pieces and slipped it into his pocket. The piece he picked up differed from all the rest in having two holes drilled in it.

    This was Chrono's good-luck piece. It became as much a part of him as his right hand. His nervous system, so to speak, extended itself into the metal strap. Touch it and you touched Chrono.

    Unk, the deserter, stood up behind his turquoise boulder, walked vigorously and officiously into the school yard. He had stripped his uniform of all insignia. This gave him a rather official, warlike look, with- out binding him to any particular enterprise. Of all the equipment he had been carrying before he deserted, he retained only a jungle knife, his single-shot Mauser, and one grenade. These three weapons he left cached behind the boulder, along with the stolen bicycle.

    Unk marched up to Miss Fenstermaker. He told her that he wished to interview young Chrono on official business at once — privately. He did not tell her that he was the boy's father. Being the boy's father entitled him to nothing. Being an official investigator entitled him to anything he might care to ask for.

    Poor Miss Fenstermaker was easily fooled. She agreed to let Unk interview the boy in her own office.

    Her office was crammed with ungraded school papers, some of them dating back five years. She was far behind in her work — so far behind that she had declared a moratorium on school work until she could catch up on her grading. Some of the stacks of papers had tumbled, forming glaciers that sent fingers under her desk, into the hallway, and into her private lavatory.

    There was an open, two-drawer filing cabinet filled with her rock collection.

    Nobody ever checked up on Miss Fenstermaker. Nobody cared. She had a teaching certificate from the State of Minnesota, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milky Way. and that was all that mattered.

    For his interview with his son, Unk sat behind her desk while his son Chrono stood before him. It was Chrono's wish to remain standing.

    Unk, in planning the things he would say, idly opened Miss Fenstermaker's desk drawers, found that they were filled with rocks, too.

    Young Chrono was shrewd and hostile, and he thought of something to say before Unk did. "Baloney," he said.

    "What?" said Unk.

    "Whatever you say — it's baloney," said the eight-year-old.

    "What makes you think so?" said Unk.

    "Everything anybody says is baloney," said Chrono. "What you care what I think anyway? When I'm fourteen, you put a thing in my head and I do whatever you want anyway."

    He was referring to the fact that antennas were not installed in the skulls of children until their fourteenth year. This was a matter of skull size. When a child reached his fourteenth birthday, he was sent to the hospital for the operation. His hair was shaved off, and the doctors and nurses joshed him about having entered adulthood. Before the child was wheeled into the operating room he was asked to name his favorite kind of ice cream. When the child awoke after the operation, a big dish of that kind of ice cream was waiting for him — maple walnut, buttercrunch, chocolate chip, anything.

    "Is your mother full of baloney?" said Unk.

    "She is since she came back from the hospital this last time," said Chrono.

    "What about your father?" said Unk.

    "I don't know anything about him," said Chrono. "I don't care. He's full of baloney like everybody else."

    "Who isn't full of baloney?" said Unk.

    "I'm not full of baloney," said Chrono. "I'm the only one."

    "Come closer," said Unk.

    "Why should I?" said Chrono.

    "Because I'm going to whisper something very important."

    "I doubt it," said Chrono.

    Unk got up from the desk, went around to Chrono, and whispered in his ear, "I'm your father, boy!" When Unk said those words, his heart went off like a burglar alarm.

    Chrono was unmoved. "So what?" he said stonily. He had never received any instructions, had never seen an example in life, that would make him think a father was of any importance. On Mars, the word was emotionally meaningless.

    "I've come to get you," said Unk. "Somehow we're going to get away from here." He shook the boy gently, trying to make him bubble a little.

    Chrono peeled his father's hand from his arm as though the hand were a leech. "And do what?" he said.

    "Live!" said Unk.

    The boy looked over his father dispassionately, seeking one good reason why he should throw in his lot with this stranger. Chrono took his good-luck piece from his pocket, and rubbed it between his palms.

    The imagined strength he got from the good-luck piece made him strong enough to trust nobody, to go on as he had for so long, angry and alone. "I'm living," he said. "I'm all right," he said. "Go to hell."

    Unk took a step backward. The corners of his mouth pulled down. "Go to hell?" he whispered.

    "I tell everybody to go to hell," said the boy. He was trying to be kind, but he wearied of the effort at once. "Can I go out and play batball now?"

    "You'd tell your own father to go to hell?" murmured Unk. The question echoed back through Unk's emptied memory to an untouched corner where bits of his own strange childhood still lived. His own strange childhood had been spent in daydreams of at last seeing and loving a father who did not want to see him, who did not want to be loved by him.

    "I — I deserted from the army to come here — to find you," said Unk.

    Interest flickered in the boy's eyes, then died. "They'll get you," he said. "They get everybody."

    "I'll steal a space ship," said Unk. "And you and your mother and I will get on it, and we'll fly away!"

    "To where?" said the boy.

    "Some place good!" said Unk.

    "Tell me about some place good," said Chrono.

    "I don't know. We'll have to look!" said Unk.

    Chrono shook his head pityingly. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't think you know what you're talking about. You'd just get a lot of people killed."

    "You want to stay here?" said Unk.

    "I'm all right here," said Chrono. "Can I go out and play batball now?"

    Unk wept.

    His weeping appalled the boy. He had never seen a man weep before. He never wept himself. "I'm going out to play!" he cried wildly, and he ran out of the office.

    Unk went to the window of the office. He looked out at the iron playground. Young Chrono's team was in the field now. Young Chrono joined his teammates, faced a batter whose back was to Unk.

    Chrono kissed his good-luck piece, put it in his pocket. "Easy out, you guys," he yelled hoarsely. "Come on, you guys — let's kill him!"

    Unk's mate, the mother of young Chrono, was an instructress in the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Schliemann breathing, of course, is a technique that enables human beings to survive in a vacuum or in an inhospitable atmosphere without the use of helmets or other cumbersome respiratory gear.

    It consists, essentially, of taking a pill rich in oxygen. The bloodstream takes on this oxygen through the wall of the small intestine rather than through the lungs. On Mars, the pills were known officially as Combat Respiratory Rations, in popular parlance as goofballs.

    Schliemann Breathing is at its simplest in a benign but useless atmosphere like that of Mars. The breather goes on breathing and talking in a normal manner, though there is no oxygen for his lungs to take in from the atmosphere. All he has to remember is to take his goofballs regularly.

    The school in which Unk's mate was an instructress taught recruits the more difficult techniques necessary in a vacuum or in a harmful atmosphere. This involves not only pill-taking, but plugging one's ears and nostrils, and keeping one's mouth shut as well. Any effort to speak or to breathe would result in hemorrhages and probably death.

    Unk's mate was one of six instructresses at the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Her classroom was a bare, windowless, whitewashed room, thirty feet square. Ranged around the walls were benches.

    On a table in the middle was a bowl of goofballs, a bowl of nose and ear plugs, a roll of adhesive plaster, scissors, and a small tape recorder. Purpose of the tape recorder was to play music during the long periods in which there was nothing to do but sit and wait patiently for nature to take its course.

    Such a period had been reached now. The class had just been dosed with goofballs. Now the students had to sit quietly on the benches and listen to music and wait for the goofballs to reach their small intestines.

    The tune being played had been pirated recently from an Earthling broadcast. It was a big hit on Earth — a trio composed for a boy, a girl, and cathedral bells. It was called "God Is Our Interior Decorator." The boy and girl sang alternate lines of the verses, and joined in close harmony on the choruses.

    The cathedral bells whanged and clanged whenever anything of a religious nature was mentioned.

    There were seventeen recruits. They were all in their newly issued lichen-green undershorts. The purpose of having them strip was to permit the instructress to see at a glance their external bodily reactions to Schliemann breathing.

    The recruits were fresh from amnesia treatments and antenna installations at the Reception Center Hospital. Their hair had been shaved off, and each recruit had a strip of adhesive plaster running from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.

    The adhesive plaster showed where the antenna had been put in.

    The recruits' eyes were as empty as the windows of abandoned textile mills.

    So were the eyes of the instructress, since she, too, had recently had her memory cleaned out.

    When they released her from the hospital, they told her what her name was, and where she lived, and how to teach Schliemann breathing — and that was about all the factual information they gave her. There was one other item: they told her she had an eight-year-old son named Chrono, and that she could visit him at his school on Tuesday evenings, if she liked.

    The name of the instructress, of Chrono's mother, of Unk's mate, was Bee. She wore a lichen-green sweatsuit, white gym shoes, and, around her neck, a whistle on a chain and a stethoscope.

    There was a rebus of her name on her sweatshirt.

    She looked at the clock on the wall. Enough time had passed for the slowest digestive system to carry a goofball to the small intestine. She stood, turned off the tape recorder, and blew her whistle.

    "Fall in!" she said.

    The recruits had not yet had basic military training, so they were incapable of falling in with precision. Painted on the floor were squares within which the recruits were to stand in order to form ranks and files pleasing to the eye. A game resembling musical chairs was now played, with several empty-eyed recruits scuffling for the same square. In time, each found a square of his own.

    "All right," said Bee, "take your plugs and plug up your noses and ears, please."

    The recruits had been carrying the plugs in their clammy fists. They plugged their noses and ears.

    Bee now went from recruit to recruit, making certain that all ears and nostrils were sealed.

    "All right," she said, when her inspection was done. "Very good," she said. She took from the table the roll of adhesive plaster. "Now I am going to prove to you that you don't need to use your lungs at all, as long as you have Combat Respiratory Rations — or, as you'll soon be calling them in the Army, goofballs." She moved through the ranks, snipping off lengths of adhesive, sealing mouths with them. No one objected. When she got through, no one had a suitable aperture through which to issue an objection.

    She noted the time, and again turned on the music. For the next twenty minutes there would be nothing to do but watch the bare bodies for color changes, for the dying spasms in the sealed and useless lungs. Ideally, the bodies would turn blue, then red, then natural again within the twenty minutes — and the rib cages would quake violently, give up, be still.

    When the twenty-minute ordeal was over, every recruit would know how unnecessary lung-breathing was. Ideally, every recruit would be so confident in himself and goofballs, when his course of instruction was over, that he would be ready to spring out of a space ship on the Earthling moon or on the bottom of an Earthling ocean or anywhere, without wondering for a split second what he might be springing into.

    Bee sat on a bench.

    There were dark circles around her fine eyes. The circles had come after she left the hospital, and they had grown more somber with each passing day. At the hospital, they had promised her that she would become more serene and efficient with each passing day. And they had told her that, if through some fluke she should not find this to be the case, she was to report back to the hospital for more help.

    "We all need help from time to time," Dr. Morris N. Castle had said. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. Some day I may need your help, Bee, and I won't hesitate to ask for it."

    She had been sent to the hospital after showing her supervisor this sonnet, which she had written about Schliemann breathing:

Break every link with air and mist,

Seal every open vent;

Make throat as tight as miser's fist,

Keep life within you pent.

Breathe out, breathe in, no more, no more,

For breathing's for the meek;

And when in deathly space we soar,

Be careful not to speak.

If you with grief or joy are rapt,

Just signal with a tear;

To soul and heart within you trapped

Add speech and atmosphere.

Every man's an island as in

    lifeless space we roam.

Yes, every man's an island:

    island fortress, island home.

Bee, who had been sent to the hospital for writing this poem, had a strong face — high cheek-boned and haughty. She looked strikingly like an Indian brave. But whoever said so was under an obligation to add quickly that she was, all the same, quite beautiful.

    Now there was a sharp knock on Bee's door. Bee went to the door and opened it. "Yes?" she said.

    In the deserted corridor stood a red and sweating man in uniform. The uniform had no insignia. Slung on the man's back was a rifle. His eyes were deep-set and furtive. "Messenger," he said gruffly. "Message for Bee."

    "I'm Bee," said Bee uneasily.

    The messenger looked her up and down, made her feel naked. His body threw off heat, and the heat enveloped her suffocatingly.

    "Do you recognize me?" he whispered.

    "No," she said. His question relieved her a little. Apparently she had done business with him before. He and his visit, then, were routine — and, in the hospital, she had simply forgotten the man and his routine.

    "I don't remember you, either," he whispered.

    "I've been in the hospital," she said. "I had to have my memory cleaned."

    "Whisper!" he said sharply.

    "What?" said Bee.

    "Whisper!" he said.

    "Sorry," she whispered. Apparently whispering was part of the routine for dealing with this particular functionary. "I've forgotten so much."

    "We all have!" he whispered angrily. He again looked up and down the corridor. "You are the mother of Chrono, aren't you?" be whispered.

    "Yes," she whispered.

    Now the strange messenger concentrated his gaze on her face. He breathed deeply, sighed, frowned — blinked frequently.

    "What — what's the message?" whispered Bee, "The message is this," whispered the messenger. "I am the father of Chrono. I have just deserted from the Army. My name is Unk. I am going to find some way for you, me, the boy, and my best friend to escape from here. I don't know how yet, but you've got to be ready to go at a moment's notice!" He gave her a hand grenade. "Hide this somewhere," he whispered. "When the time comes, you may need it."

    Excited shouts came from the reception room at the far end of the corridor.

    "He said he was a confidential messenger!" shouted a man.

    "In a pig's eye he's a messenger!" shouted another. "He's a deserter in time of war! Who'd he come to see?"

    "He didn't say. He said it was top secret!"

    A whistle shrilled.

    "Six of you come with me!" shouted a man. "We'll search this place room by room. The rest of you surround the outside!"

    Unk shoved Bee and her hand grenade into the room, shut the door. He unslung his rifle, leveled it at the plugged and taped recruits. "One peep, one funny move out of any of you guys," he said, "and you'll all be dead."

    The recruits, standing rigidly on their assigned squares on the floor, did not respond in any way.

    They were pale blue.

    Their rib cages were quaking.

    The whole awareness of each man was concentrated in the region of a small, white, life-giving pill dissolving in the duodenum.

    "Where can I hide?" said Unk. "How can I get out?" It was unnecessary for Bee to reply. There was no place to hide. There was no way out save through the door to the corridor.

    There was only one thing to do, and Unk did it. He stripped to his lichen-green undershorts, hid his rifle under a bench, put plugs in his ears and nostrils, taped his mouth, and stood among the recruits.

    His head was shaved, just like the heads of the recruits. And, like the recruits, Unk had a strip of adhesive plaster running from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck. He had been such a terrible soldier that the doctors had opened his head up at the hospital to see if he might not be suffering from malfunctioning antenna.

    Bee surveyed the room with enchanted calm. She held the grenade that Unk had given her as though it were a vase with one perfect rose in it. Then she went to the place where Unk had hidden his rifle, and she put the grenade beside it — put it there neatly, with a decent respect for another's property.

    Then she went back to her post at the table.

    She neither stared at Unk nor avoided looking at him. As they told her at the hospital: she had been very, very sick, and she would be very, very sick again if she didn't keep her mind strictly on her work and let other people do the thinking and the worrying. At all costs, she was to keep calm.

    The blustering false alarms of the men making the room-to-room search were approaching slowly.

    Bee refused to worry about anything. Unk, by taking his place among the recruits, had reduced himself to a cipher. Considering him professionally, Bee saw that Unk's body was turning blue-green rather than pure blue. This might mean that he had not taken a goofball for several hours — in which case he would soon keel over

    To have him keel over would certainly be the most peaceful solution to the problem he presented, and Bee wanted peace above all else.

    She didn't doubt that Unk was the father of her child. Life was like that. She didn't remember him, and she didn't bother now to study him in order to recognize him the next time — if there was going to be a next time. She had no use for him.

    She noted that Unk's body was now predominantly green. Her diagnosis had been correct, then. He would keel over at any minute.

    Bee daydreamed. She daydreamed of a little girl in a starched white dress and white gloves and white shoes, and with a white pony all her own. Bee envied that little girl who had kept so clean.

    Bee wondered who the little girl was.

    Unk fell noiselessly, as limp as a bag of eels.

    Unk awoke, found himself on his back in a bunk in a space ship. The cabin lights were dazzling. Unk started to yell, but a sick headache shushed him.

    He struggled to his feet, clung drunkenly to the pipe supports of the bunk. He was all alone. Someone had put his uniform back on him.

    He thought at first that he had been launched into space eternal.

    But then he saw that the airlock was open to the outside, and that outside was solid ground.

    Unk lurched out through the airlock and threw up. He raised his watering eyes, and saw that he was seemingly still on Mars, or on something a lot like Mars.

    It was night time.

    The iron plain was studded with ranks and files of space ships.

    As Unk watched, a file of ships five miles long arose from the formation, sailed melodiously off into space.

    A dog barked, barked with a voice like a great bronze gong.

    And out of the night loped the dog — as big and terrible as a tiger.

    "Kazak!" cried a man in the dark.

    The dog stopped at the command, but he held link at bay, kept Unk flattened against the space ship with the threat of his long, wet fangs.

    The dog's master appeared, the beam of a flashlight dancing before him. When he got within a few yards of Unk, he placed the flashlight under his chin. The contrasting beam and shadows made his face look like the face of a demon.

    "Hello, Unk," he said. He turned the flashlight off, stepped to one side so that he was illuminated by the light spilling from the space ship. He was big, vaguely soft, marvelously self-assured. He wore the bloodred uniform and square-toed boots of a Parachute Ski Marine. He was unarmed save for a black and gold swaggerstick one foot long.

    "Long time no see," he said. He gave a very small, v-shaped smile. His voice was a glottal tenor, a yodel.

    Unk had no recollection of the man, but the man obviously knew Unk well — knew him warmly.

    "Who am I, Unk?" said the man gayly.

    Unk gasped. This had to be Stony Stevenson, had to be Unk's fearless best friend. "Stony?" he whispered.

    "Stony?" said the man. He laughed. "Oh, God — " he said, "many's the time I've wished I was Stony, and many's the time I'll wish it again."

    The ground shook. There was a whirlwind rush in the air. Neighboring space ships on all sides had leaped into the air, were gone.

    Unk's ship now had its sector of the iron plain all to itself. The nearest ships on the ground were perhaps half a mile away.

    "There goes your regiment, Unk," said the man, "and you not with them. Aren't you ashamed?"

    "Who are you?" said Unk.

    "What do names matter in wartime?" said the man. He put his big hand on Unk's shoulder. "Oh, Unk, Unk, Unk," he said, "what a time you've had."

    "Who brought me here?" said Unk.

    "The military police, bless them," said the man.

    Unk shook his head. Tears ran down his cheeks. He was defeated. There was no reason for secrecy any more, even in the presence of someone who might have the power of life and death over him. As to life and death, poor Unk was indifferent. "I — I tried to bring my family together," he said. "That's all."

    "Mars is a very bad place for love, a very bad place for a family man, Unk," said the man.

    The man was, of course, Winston Niles Rumfoord. He was commander-in-chief of everything Martian. He was not actually a practicing Parachute Ski Marine. But he was free to wear any uniform that caught his fancy, regardless of how much hell anybody else had to go through for the privilege.

    "Unk," said Rumfoord, "the very saddest love story I ever hope to hear took place on Mars. Would you like to hear it?"

    "Once upon a time," said Rumfoord, "there was a man being carried from Earth to Mars in a flying saucer. He had volunteered for the Army of Mars, and already wore the dashing uniform of a lieutenant-colonel in the Assault Infantry of that service. He felt elegant, indeed, having been rather underprivileged spiritually on Earth, and assumed, as spiritually underprivileged persons will, that the uniform said lovely things about him.

    "His memory hadn't been cleaned out yet, and his antenna had yet to be installed — but he was so patently a loyal Martian that he was given the. run of the space ship. The recruiters have a saying about a male recruit like that — that he has named his balls Deimos and Phobus," said Rumfoord, "Deimos and Phobus being the two moons of Mars.

    "This lieutenant-colonel, with no military training whatsoever, was having the experience known on Earth as finding himself. Ignorant as he was of the enterprise in which he was ensnarled, he was issuing orders to the other recruits, and having them obeyed."

    Rumfoord held up a finger, and Unk was startled to see that it was quite translucent. "There was one locked stateroom that the man was not permitted to enter," said Rumfoord. "The crew carefully explained to him that the stateroom contained the most beautiful woman ever taken to Mars, and that any man who saw her was certain to fall in love with her. Love, they said, would destroy the value of any but the most professional soldier.

    "The new lieutenant-colonel was offended by the suggestion that he was not a professional soldier, and he regaled the crew with stories of his amatory exploits with gorgeous women — all of which had left his heart absolutely untouched. The crew remained skeptical, pretending to the opinion that the lieutenant-colonel had never, for all his lascivious questing, exposed himself to an intelligent, haughty beauty such as the one in the locked stateroom.

    "The crew's seeming respect for the lieutenant-colonel was now subtly withdrawn. The other recruits sensed this withdrawal, and withdrew their own. The lieutenant-colonel in his gaudy uniform was made to feel like what he really was, after all — a strutting clown. The manner in which he could win back his dignity was never stated, but was obvious to one and all. He could win it back by making a conquest of the beauty locked in the stateroom. He was fully prepared to do this — was desperately prepared —

    "But the crew," said Rumfoord, "continued to protect him from supposed amatory failure and a broken heart. His ego fizzed, it sizzled, it snapped, it crackled, it popped.

    "There was a drinking party in the officers' mess," said Rumfoord, "and the lieutenant-colonel became quite drunk and loud. He bragged again of his heartless lewdnesses on Earth. And then he saw that someone had placed in the bottom of his glass a stateroom key.

    "The lieutenant-colonel sneaked away to the locked stateroom forthwith, let himself in, and closed the door behind him," said Rumfoord. "The stateroom was dark, but the inside of the lieutenant-colonel's head was illuminated by liquor and by the triumphant words of the announcement he would make at breakfast the next morning.

    "He took the woman in the dark easily, for she was weak with terror and sedatives," said Rumfoord. "It was a joyless union, satisfactory to no one but Mother Nature at her most callous.

    "The lieutenant-colonel did not feel marvelous. He felt wretched. Foolishly, he turned on the light, hoping to find in the woman's appearance some cause for pride in his brutishness," said Rumfoord sadly. "Huddled on the bunk was a rather plain woman past thirty. Her eyes were red and her face was puffy with weeping, despair.

    "The lieutenant-colonel, moreover, knew her. She was a woman that a fortune teller had promised him would one day bear his child," said Rumfoord. "She bad been so high and proud the last time he saw her, and was now so crushed, that even the heartless lieutenant-colonel was moved.

    "The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves — that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, hilt one of outrageous fortune's cruelest agents as well. The woman had regarded him as a pig when they met before. He had now proved beyond question that he was a pig.

    "As the crew had predicted," said Rumfoord, "the lieutenant-colonel was spoiled forever as a soldier. He became hopelessly engrossed in the intricate tactics of causing less rather than more pain. Proof of his success would be his winning of the woman's forgiveness and understanding.

    "When the space ship reached Mars, he learned from loose talk in the Reception Center Hospital that he was about to have his memory taken away. He thereupon wrote himself the first of a series of letters that listed the things he did not want to forget. The first letter was all about the woman he had wronged.

    "He looked for her after his amnesia treatment, and found that she had no recollection of him. Not only that, she was pregnant, carrying his child. His problem, thereupon, became to win her love, and through her, to win the love of her child.

    "This he attempted to do, Unk," said Rumfoord, "not once, but many times. He was consistently defeated. But it remained the central problem of his life — probably because he himself had come from a shattered family.

    "What defeated him, Unk," said Rumfoord, "was a congenital coldness on the part of the woman, and a system of psychiatry that took the ideals of Martian society as noble common sense. Each time the man wobbled his mate, utterly humorless psychiatry straightened her out — made her an efficient citizen again.

    "Both the man and his mate were frequent visitors. to the psychiatric wards of their respective hospitals. And it is perhaps food for thought," said Rumford, "that this supremely frustrated man was the only Martian to write a philosophy, and that this supremely self-frustrating woman was the only Martian to write a poem."

    Boaz arrived at the company mother ship from the town of Phoebe, where he had gone to look for Unk. "God damn — " he said to Rumfoord, "everybody go and leave without us?" He was on a bicycle.

    He saw Unk. "God damn, buddy," he said to Unk, "boy — you ever put your buddy through hell. I mean! How you get here?"

    "Military police," said Unk.

    "The way everybody gets everywhere," said Rumford lightly.

    "We got to catch up, buddy," said Boaz. "Them boys ain't going to attack, if they don't have a mother ship along. What they going to fight for?"

    "For the privilege of being the first army that ever died in a good cause," said Rumford.

    "How's that?" said. Boaz.

    "Never mind," said Rumford. "You boys just get on board, close the airlock, push the on button. You'll catch up before you know it. Everything's all fully automatic."

    Unk and Boaz got on board.

    Rumfoord held open the outer door of the airlock. "Boaz — " he said, "that red button on the center shaft there — that's the on button."

    "I know," said Boaz.

    "Unk — " said Rumfoord.

    "Yes?" said Unk emptily.

    "That story I told you — the love story? I left out one thing."

    "That so?" said Unk.

    "The woman in the love story — the woman who had that man's baby?" said Rumfoord. "The woman who was the only poet on Mars?"

    "What about her?" said Unk. He didn't care much about her. He hadn't caught on that the woman in Rumfoord's story was Bee, was his own mate.

    "She'd been married for several years before she got to Mars," said Rumford. "But when the hot-shot lieutenant-colonel got to her there in the space ship bound for Mars, she was still a virgin."

    Winston Niles Rumfoord winked at Unk before shutting the outside door of the airlock. "Pretty good joke on her husband, eh, Unk?" he said.