Part 11

He thrust their arms aside, forced them to release him by smiting them cheek and thigh. He did it unconsciously, thinking only of Janice and what the scream might mean. But they seemed to take the blows as compliments and murmured: "What a lover! What a man!"

He saw her then--saw her above the straining white arms and tumultuously heaving breasts of women who seemed suddenly Medusa-like, the shadowy Gorgons of some monstrous dream.

She was struggling in the arms of a man who seemed in all respects the exact opposite of a brute. He had the body of an Athenian athlete in the days of Grecian splendor and his head was aureoled in gold. He was young and lithe-limbed and the band of gold which encircled his light blond hair, worn long, above the classic manliness of his features, glittered in the sunlight, giving him an almost Apollo-like aspect as he stood by the stream. Apollo, the Sun god.

Damn him to hell, Loring thought.

He knew nothing about how a woman would feel but from his knowledge of women he could hardly doubt or question the man's undisputed right to consider himself literally brimming over with male sex appeal. He was the kind of man it was hard to imagine any woman resisting for long and yet Janice was struggling violently in his arms!

Loring had freed himself completely now and he lost no time in reaching the man's side. Greek athlete or not, the man had no chance at all and he seemed to realize it the instant he looked into Loring's eyes.

He released Janice and started to move backwards, away from Loring. But Loring did not let him retreat far. He dropped the repulsed Apollo to the ground with a savage right to the jaw.

ELEVEN

Tragor sat facing the Chief Coordinator for the second time in four days, and if he had been shaken the first time he was infinitely more alarmed now. His shoulders were trembling so that he was sure the Coordinator would remark about it, and all of the color had drained from his face.

"Tragor," Kraii said, his eyes piercingly accusing, "your plan for Earth conquest has been a disastrous failure from first to last. Subject a man to struggle and hardship, you said--place his life in danger, and he will find an android woman impossible to resist! Well, did that fool of an artist find thirty android women irresistible? Did he? Answer me, Tragor."

It did not seem as though Tragor's face could have gone any paler. But suddenly it did. It seemed paler than pale, as if the receding blood had turned it into a thin tissue so hueless that the term "color" could not even be applied to it.

"His surrender would have been complete if the Earthwoman had not screamed," he said. "All of his resistance was gone."

"Tragor, have you lost your mind? Two-thirds of the men in high places on Earth have women they love just as compulsively. And if we put your miserable plan into operation a good many women would scream. Just the sight of us would start them screaming. You have proved conclusively that the Plan cannot work."

Tragor started to rise, appalled by the sudden fury which blazed in the Coordinator's eyes. He recoiled backwards and as he did so a hand-gun clattered on the chart stand before him. Kraii had whipped the hand-gun from beneath the stand so quickly that it seemed almost like a conjuring trick. But to deceive the eye of a Martian frozen with terror was no great feat and Kraii knew it.

He seemed to enjoy the sudden look of stricken disbelief in Tragor's stare. He seemed actually to relish inflicting such an irrevocable choice of evils on a Martian completely at his mercy.

"Do it now, Tragor," he said. "If you put it off even for a moment you'll waver and lack the courage to kill yourself. Then we shall have to execute you publicly. Think of the shame and disgrace of a public execution, Tragor. I am offering you the easiest choice first. Do it immediately. Right here and now. When it is over, I'll aerate the compartment thoroughly, so you need not worry on that score."

"No, I can't! You're asking too much of me!"

Tragor recoiled another step, looking at the Chief Coordinator with an almost childlike simplicity of appeal that would have moved a Martian with a heart of stone. But if Kraii had a heart, it was certainly not of stone. Stone can be splintered and shattered and even dissolved. Quite obviously the fierce, dangerous and obdurate metal of the Chief Coordinator's heart was not in the least like stone.

"Oh, I know, I know," Kraii said. "It's customarily done after a decent interval, in the privacy of the condemned's own compartment. Watching you kill yourself will be very painful to me. But I am prepared to endure it for your sake. It will be easier for you this way.

"Think, Tragor. I'll be right here, close to you, and if you imagine for a moment that I am not still your friend you do me a grievous injustice. My nearness right up to the end should be comforting to you. A fellow Martian, sharing every one of your life drives, every compulsive emotion you've ever experienced from the cradle to the grave. I did not blunder as you did, but that is the only real difference between us. Do you imagine for a moment that I do not sympathize with you?"

"No, no. Give me a little time. Only a few minutes," Tragor pleaded. "That's all I ask. Then if you can't--"

Tragor's voice broke on a strangled sob.

"Tragor, listen to me. You have a choice of two alternatives. You can either kill yourself--and that is the honorable way--or you'll be shamefully executed. Which will it be?"

Tragor took a slow step forward. It was a short step and it hardly seemed to bring him much nearer to the hand-gun. But to the Chief Coordinator it seemed a step in the right direction and his features relaxed a little.

"I'm glad you've decided on the honorable way, Tragor. It would be humiliating to be publicly executed in full view of a wretch like Sull. You are right in distrusting him. He hates you and will try to step into your shoes. I may even be compelled to permit it as a necessary expediency."

"No," Tragor said, slowly. "No one is going to step into my shoes--or over them when I am lying dead. Not even you."

Tragor had the hand-gun before Kraii could grasp the implications of a statement so unbelievable.

Tragor held the weapon firmly. He drew himself up and just as resolutely stepped quickly back from the desk again. But he did not raise the hand-gun to his own brow. Instead he narrowed his eyes and pointed the weapon directly at Kraii. He fired three times, straight across the chart table, aiming at the Chief Coordinator's heart.

The bullets struck Kraii just above the heart and went right through him.

Blood spattered on the chart table. It spattered also on the Chief Coordinator's resplendent uniform, his outflung arms, his vacantly staring face. He fell straight forward across the chart table, and as he collapsed upon it Tragor fired for the fourth and last time.

He stood for a moment with the still smoking weapon in his hand, a cold, triumphant smirk on his face. The terrible hatred that had been generated within him by the Chief Coordinator's final taunts had dispelled every vestige of his fear and he was no longer trembling. In working off his fury on the lump of cold clay before him he had forgotten the meaning of fright. It was that way with most Martians. They could be demoralized by terror until an outlet for vindictiveness presented itself with overwhelming force. Then they became exacters of vengeance, cold, deadly, precise.

The fact that the Chief Coordinator had died without speaking marred just a little the completeness of Tragor's triumph. But not seriously, and he immediately set about taking the precautions that would turn that triumph into permanent victory for himself.

He stepped to the chart table, raised the slain Martian's taloned right hand, and coiled the limp talons firmly around the hand-gun, having taken care to wipe all talon prints from the weapon first. He left just a little slack, to make sure that when rigor set in the resulting contraction would not appear excessive, or cause anyone to question the naturalness of the "suicide's" grip.

Then he stepped back and surveyed his handiwork. He was well pleased with himself. By a near miracle psychology had played directly into his hands, the very psychology Kraii had accused him of neglecting in his appraisal of Earthmen.

It was taken for granted that no one--_no one_--would dare oppose the judgment of a Chief Coordinator. It was taken for granted that a hand-gun sent clattering before a condemned Martian could be used in only one way. That it should be turned on the Chief Coordinator himself was against all reason. It went contrary to the most powerful of ingrained psychological compulsions: a Martian's need to feel himself completely a Martian until the moment of his death.

But for one incredible moment Tragor had not thought of himself as a Martian. He had thought of himself as an instrument of destiny, set apart from all other members of his race by a plan for conquest he had spent half a lifetime in perfecting. It was intolerable that the Great Plan should perish with him. It was intolerable that he should die in any case.

His love of life was greater even than the Martian hunger for inflicting death. In that respect he was unusual. Among Martians, he was, perhaps, unique.

Tragor looked briefly and for the last time at the slain Coordinator's hated features, reflecting with satisfaction that no one--not even a Chief Coordinator--could maintain his dignity in death.

Then he turned and walked resolutely from the compartment.

He was half way down the passageway outside when he saw the woman he had taken captive and would have died to possess. She was advancing slowly to meet him and saw with amazement that she was clasping a hand-gun similar to the one he had just used with such deadly accuracy of aim. How, he wondered with a swift intake of his breath, had she managed to secure it? Had she stolen it from one of the warrior-caste brutes? There could be no other way of explaining it, but--

He had no time to puzzle it out, because she raised the weapon suddenly and blew off his head, splintering and shattering the skull and filling the passageway with a drifting spiral of smoke.

"You beast!" she whispered. "You monstrous beast!"

TWELVE

A change in command on any level, on any world, must have instant repercussions. Morale will sag or soar. New faces will appear and grow authoritative and forbidding and old faces will dim and vanish. When the change is limited in scope, only small thrones totter. When it is planet-wide a new world of power comes into existence.

On Mars, the death of the Chief Coordinator produced a social, political, economic and military earthquake; or what, on Mars, was the equivalent of an earthquake. The Martian social structure was shaken to its foundations. Political power became a plum ripe for the plucking. A dozen taloned hands reached for it, but the hands of Sull were the most adroit and experienced.

Sull grasped the plum and began steadily to squeeze it, until it began to remold itself to his satisfaction. But it was not a remolding which could take place overnight, and while power was changing hands, demoralization gained a momentary ascendancy.

On Mars there was famine, pestilence and widespread vandalism. There was a wavering, an uncertainty, in Martian military planning. Orders were delayed or garbled, and the commanders of the Martian ships did not quite know what course of action to follow or how much leeway between the golden heights of a soaring prestige and the deadly shoals of treason.

That uncertainty generated a need for solidarity in action, and the Martian commanders, though wary and suspicious of one another, were drawn more closely together in their hatred of the common enemy. They became defiantly reckless, and for the first time Martian ships took to traveling openly in mass formation, in a display of armored strength which they foolishly imagined might bring Earth to its knees.

While Loring and Janice stood alone on Mars, in a small room with one window, under constant guard and completely at Sull's mercy, five Martian ships moved westward across the Eastern United States, and began deliberately to court--Armageddon.

Colonel Richard Clegman of the United States Air Force awoke from a dream of coffee cups set in a row, each cup steaming and unstirred, and blinked sleep from his eyelids. In his dream it hadn't been just the coffee cups which had upset him with their tantalizing aroma, which seemed to hover just beyond the less appetizing aromas of drifting smoke, vaporized rocket fuels and burning rubber. He had been annoyed by the barking of a dog just outside the high wire fence where four Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles stood on their launching platforms with their nose-cones pointing skyward, their silvery tail-fins resplendent against the dawn sky.

Dogs at a guided missile and bombing plane base were an anomaly he strongly resented, but could do nothing about. Air Force personnel in general were not in the least allergic to mascots and dogs and cats were mascots, of a sort. But so were pin-up blondes, and as Clegman did not have the kind of mind which might have permitted him, under certain circumstances, to confuse the two, they remained forever distinct and poles apart in his thoughts.

A blonde pin-up met with his full approval, and he even carried one himself, in a small gold locket beneath his meticulously laundered officer's shirt. Only--he would not have cared to admit to anyone that the girl in the photograph was his wife. To do so would have been a betrayal, because it was important that the members of his command should think of him as a devil of a fellow who could trade Rabelaisian jests with the salty freedom which can come only from a wide range of experience in all fields of human warfare, not excluding the amorous.

That sort of thing made for tough-fibered camaraderie in action, as every experienced soldier knew. In fact, Clegman was quite sure that even John Paul Jones and Lord Nelson had played down the fact that they'd been one-woman men to keep shipboard morale on a gusty, universally shared "I've a big-eyed doll in Tokyo" level.

He had only to think about it for a moment for Korean War memories to come roaring back, with the deck of the Flat Top awash in the dawn and the big bombing planes warming up. Not as big as the jets of today but big enough.

"If I live through this one, Commander, I won't just phone Maizie. It's six dolls for me, if I have to burn up the wires and run into debt getting them on long distance and paying their fares on a Borling Special. How about you, Commander? I'll bet you've got a dozen cuties from Miami to Tahiti you're keeping mum about. I don't blame you--with brunettes at a premium and blondes and redheads so scarce you've got to dazzle them with at least seven wound stripes. How about it Commander? I'm sort of curious."

"That's my business."

"Oh, sure, sure. You could get sore and pull rank on me. But you won't. You're too human a guy. Why don't we form a pool and trade a few phone numbers? We could make it a party to end all parties. A real bang-up night. This time tomorrow we may be pushing up daisies--or sea anemones. How do the jokers put it? The daisies hammer you home. And when you're in a pine box, Commander, you'll sure as hell wish you hadn't let a single day go by."

"You're right about that, Lieutenant," Clegman could hear himself replying, even though it wasn't strictly true in his case. "I can't complain exactly. But there was a girl in Paris--well, if I'd dated her properly I might have been less worried than I am right now about being blown apart."

"Real curves, eh, Commander?"

"Real curves. And not just curves alone. There was a sultry-eyed something about her--"

"Commander, how many dames do you figure there are in the world? Ever stop to count them? I've been too busy myself to add up the sum total of the really special ones I've just missed meeting."

"I know what you're trying to say. There'll be plenty of choices ahead for both of us if we're lucky enough to be alive this time tomorrow. You don't have to draw me a diagram. I've been thinking along the same lines."

It hadn't been true, of course. There was such a thing as loyalty, and when you've met the one and only girl and married her at an early age it kept your far-roaming Casanova impulses from making you even want to talk like that. But you had no right to think only of yourself. A sternly straight-laced Commander could weaken the fighting strength of even a big Flat Top, with twenty planes serving for the moment as a kind of woman-substitute.

Clegman wasn't Puritanic, of course. In fact, he was the exact opposite of a blue-nosed kill-joy.... But you didn't need a hundred blondes if there was just one you thought of night and day. People could laugh if they wished, but he considered himself a very lucky guy.

He had then, and he still did, because he'd been married for fourteen years to the same blonde, and every time he met her she seemed like a new woman to him, because she was always making adorable little changes in herself.

Only, for the sake of keeping up morale, it was something he couldn't let the members of his command suspect. The full truth would have made them feel like outcasts, standing before the locked gates of paradise. So he kept the locket well concealed, and only took it out to whisper, "My darling," thirty or forty times a day.

If someone had asked him he would have lied without hesitation and insisted that it was a picture of Jayne Mansfield.

He was awake now, fully awake and not even the cups of black coffee he'd dreamt about could make more supportable the harsh realities of his command, or keep them at arm's length any longer. Besides, he had merely sniffed the coffee without tasting it and all of the cups had been whisked away out of sight by a dozen agile-fingered memories. Agile-fingered at first and then iron-fisted, and dominated by a pair of silver eagles.

The eagles were on the shoulders of his uniform, which was draped across a chair on the opposite side of the room. He found himself wishing that the eagles were maple leaves or, better still, the silver bars of a lieutenant. Hell--why stop there? A private's uniform would have suited him fine.

He luxuriated in the thought for a moment, thinking of how nice it would be to hop in a jeep and go calling on his wife, not caring if he was docked a month's pay and given eight days in the guardhouse. If only he could forget for an hour that the I B M's were Top Secret and had to be zealously guarded by high-ranking officers every hour of the day and night.

Well, he couldn't and that was that. He had eagles to remind him that his duty was an awesome one and that he ought to feel proud. Probably he did, but when you started thinking in terms of tomorrow you felt humble and unimportant. Target Moon, Target Mars, Interplanetary Guided Missiles. Not yet, but soon. And if one of them exploded on takeoff it would tear out your guts, because you'd know exactly what the big babies cost.

You couldn't build them overnight.

In addition to the I B M's, there were eight land-based bombers groomed for instant takeoff just south of the missile launching area and the entire base was under the command of a two-star general who did his best to be everywhere at once, but couldn't quite manage it.

Clegman often found himself wondering if the general wouldn't have preferred the less complicated duties of a master sergeant if it wouldn't have meant giving up such a massive kind of prestige. A colonel could demote himself in his mind without undergoing quite such an emotional wrench, but it was probably too much to expect of a general. He'd have to suffer in silence and delegate as much authority as he safely could to Clegman, who had earned his eagles the hard way, on a twice almost bombed-out Flat Top.

Clegman had to admit that almost everyone in the Air Force had earned his insignia the hard way, whether West Pointers or not. He supposed that went for the other branches of the Service as well but the Air Force was an island universe in itself, and he was well content not to look beyond it.

He wouldn't have too much minded being a two-star general but the private idea appealed to him more. Privates had no major headaches at all until they stepped out of line, which they were certain to do sooner or later.

But the penalties for minor infractions were seldom severe and privates had more freedom of movement on a guided missile base than any officer from a captain on up. His, Clegman's, own day was restricted from dawn to dusk, for in ways that were mysterious the I B M's had taken over command. They were like big-eyed owls awake all night in a whispering forest, and still awake in the daytime.

If you were not careful, an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile could lean on you. I B M's seemed to know exactly how to lean and seemed always to be whispering: "We're powerful preventives, chum. You created us and now we have a life of our own. If you don't treat us with respect--awe, even--we may decide to blow up the world!"

Basically it was absurd, perhaps, to think of the I B M's as alive. But were not all the weapons of men a little like fertile ghosts that could walk the world at will, and give birth continuously to offspring more deadly and specialized than themselves?

Had not the rude stone flints of Dawn Man given birth to bows and arrows and arrows to steel-edged weapons? And did not a good many African tribesmen today still think of weapons as the opposite of inanimate?

All forms of animism were primitive perhaps, but just how primitive was the nuclear fission bomb giving birth to the hydrogen bomb? All right--it was only the belief itself which was primitive and the modern world took a dim view of Dawn Age Man's animism. But dim or not, the view could still be frightening.

Clegman was startled out of his somber revery by a shout from outside the Administration Barracks. When a missile is traveling at the speed of sound its sides pick up all kinds of echoes, subsonic, sonic and supersonic. The shout sounded like that, the human voice distorted, shrill with excitement and then dwindling to just below the threshold of ear-perceptible sound and yet remaining somehow chillingly audible.

The same instant there was a buzzing at Clegman's elbow. He leapt up and clicked on the intercom. A voice said inflexibly: "I've just sent out an emergency alert, sir! Didn't dare wait to contact you. You might not have believed it and a delay of even half a minute--"

"Fraser! What the hell are you talking about? Are you drunk, Captain?" Clegman almost shouted the words, an angry flush creeping up over his cheekbones.

"I was never more sober," the voice said, with unruffled firmness. "Go to the window and look out. The south end of the missile area. You can see them from the barracks now, I think. A moment ago I might have had to talk you into going outside and we'd have wasted precious seconds. I'll take all responsibility for the alert, Colonel."

"You certainly will!" Clegman shouted, his shoulders shaking a little as he clicked off the intercom. "Remember that at the court martial!"

He crossed to the window in four long strides and looked out.

"Oh, Lord!" he breathed.