Their usual technique was to dress like civil engineers and offer not-quite-bright men and women nine dollars an hour, tax free, plus food and shelter and transportation, to work on a secret Government project in a remote part of the world for three years. It was a joke between Helmholtz and Miss Wiley that they had never specified what government was organizing the project, and that no recruit had ever thought to ask.
Ninety-nine per cent of the recruits were given amnesia upon arriving on Mars. Their memories were cleaned out by mental-health experts, and Martian. surgeons installed radio antennas in their skulls in order that the recruits might be radio-controlled.
And then the recruits were given new names in the most haphazard fashion, and were assigned to the factories, the construction gangs, the administrative staff, or to the Army of Mars.
The few recruits who were not treated in this way were those who demonstrated ardently that they would serve Mars heroically without being doctored at all. Those lucky few were welcomed into the secret circle of those in command.
Secret agents Helmholtz and Wiley belonged to this circle. They were in full possession of their memories, and they were not radio-controlled. They adored their work, just as they were.
“What’s that there Slivovitz like?” Helmholtz asked the bartender, squinting at a dusty bottle on the bottom row. He had just finished a sloe gin rickey.
“I didn’t even know we had it,” said the bartender. He put the bottle on the bar, tilting it away from himself so he could read the label. “Prune brandy,” he said.
“Believe I’ll try that next,” said Helmholtz.
Ever since the death of Noel Constant, Room 223 in the Wilburhampton had been left empty — as a memorial.
Malachi Constant now let himself into Room 223. He had not been in the room since the death of his father. He closed the door behind him, and found the letter under the pillow.
Nothing in the room had been changed but the linen. The picture of Malachi as a little boy on the beach was still the only picture on the wall.
The letter said:
Dear Son: Something big and bad has happened to you or you wouldn’t be reading this letter. I am writing this letter to tell you to calm down about the bad things and kind of look around and see if something good or something important anyway happened on account of we got so rich and then lost the boodle again. What I want you to try and find out is, is there anything special going on or is it all just as crazy as it looked to me?
If I wasn’t a very good father or a very good anything that was because I was as good as dead ‘for a long time before I died. Nobody loved me and I wasn’t very good at anything and I couldn’t find any hobbies I liked and I was sick and tired of selling pots and pans and watching television so I was as good as dead and I was too far gone to ever come back.
That is when I started the business with the Bible and you know what happened after that. It looked as though somebody or something wanted me to own the whole planet even though I was as good as dead. I kept my eyes open for some kind of signal that would tell me what it was all about but there wasn’t any signal. I just went on getting richer and richer.
And then your mother sent me that picture of you on the beach and the way you looked at me out of that picture made me think maybe you were what all the big money buildup was for. I decided I would die without ever seeing any sense to it and maybe you would be the one who would all of a sudden see everything clear as a bell. I tell you even a half-dead man hates to be alive and not be able to see any sense to it.
The reason I told Ransom K. Fern to give you this letter only if your luck turned bad is that nobody thinks or notices anything as long as his luck is good. Why should he?