Past that was a wonderful green, orange, yellow, and purple banner, showing a lion holding a sword. It was the flag of Ceylon.
And past that was a red ball on a white field, the flag of Japan.
The banners signified the countries that the various Martian units would attack and paralyze when the war between Mars and Earth began.
Unk saw no banners until his antenna let his shoulders sag, let his joints loosen — let him fall out. He gawked at the long perspective of barracks and flagpoles. The barrack before which he stood had a large number painted over the door. The number was 576.
Some part of Unk found the number fascinating, made Unk study it. Then he remembered the execution — remembered that the red-headed man he had killed had told him something about a blue stone and barrack twelve.
Inside barrack 576, Unk cleaned his rifle, found it an extremely pleasant thing to do. He found, moreover, that he still knew how to take the weapon apart. That much of his memory, at any rate, had not been wiped out at the hospital. It made him furtively happy to suspect that there were probably other parts of his memory that had been missed as well. Why this suspicion should make him furtively happy he didn’t know.
He swabbed away at his rifle’s bore. His weapon was an 11-millimeter German Mauser, single shot, a type of rifle that made its reputation when used by the Spaniards in the Earthling Spanish-American War. All of the Martian Army’s rifles were of about the same vintage. Martian agents, working quietly on Earth, had been able to buy up huge quantities of Mausers and British Enfields and American Springfields for next to nothing.
Unk’s squadmates were swabbing their bores, too. The oil smelled good, and the oily patches, twisting through the rifling, resisted the thrust of the cleaning rod just enough to be interesting. There was hardly any talk.
No one seemed to have taken particular notice of the execution. If there had been a lesson in the execution for Unk’s squadmates, they were finding the lesson as digestible as Pablum.
There had been only one comment on Unk’s participation in the execution, and that had come from Sergeant Brackman. “You done all right, Unk,” said Brackrnan.
“Thanks,” said Unk.
“This man done all right, didn’t he?” Brackman asked Unk’s squadmates.
There had been some nods, but Unk had the impression that his squadmates would ‘have nodded in response to any positive question, would have, shaken their heads in response to any negative one.
Unk withdrew the rod and patch, slipped his thumb under the open breech, caught the sunlight on his oily thumbnail. The thumbnail sent the sunlight up the bore. Unk put his eye to the muzzle and was thrilled by perfect beauty. He could have stared happily at the immaculate spiral of the rifling for hours, dreaming of the happy land whose round gate he saw at the other end of the bore. The pink under his oily thumbnail at the far end of the barrel made that far end seem a rosy paradise indeed. Some day he was going to crawl down the barrel to that paradise.
It would be warm there — and there would be only one moon, Unk thought, and the moon would be fat, stately, and slow. Something else about the pink paradise at the end of the barrel came to Unk, and Unk was puzzled by the clarity of the vision. There were three beautiful women in that paradise, and Unk knew exactly what they looked like! One was white, one was gold, and one was brown. The golden girl was smoking a cigarette in Unk’s vision. Unk was further surprised to find that he even knew what kind of cigarette the golden girl was smoking.
It was a MoonMist Cigarette.
“Sell MoonMist,” Unk said out loud. It felt good to say that — felt authoritative, shrewd.
“Huh?” said a young colored soldier, cleaning his rifle next to Unk. “What’s that you say, Unk?” he said. He was twenty-three years old. His name was stitched in yellow on a black patch over his left breast pocket.