“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.