“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.
chapter seven
VICTORY
“There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized, along the lines of the Mafia.”
— WINSTON NILES RUMFOORD
It has been said that Earthling civilization, so far, has created ten thousand wars, but only three intelligent commentaries on war — the commentaries of Thucydides, of Julius Caesar and of Winston Niles Rumfoord.
Winston Niles Rumfoord chose 75,000 words so well, for his Pocket History of Mars that nothing remains to be said, or to be said better, about the war between Earth and Mars. Anyone who finds himself obliged, in the course of a history, to describe the war between Earth and Mars is humbled by the realization that the tale has already been told to glorious perfection by Rumfoord.
The usual course for such a discomfited historian is to describe the war in the barest, flattest, most telegraphic terms, and to recommend that the reader go at once to Rumfoord’s masterpiece.
Such a course is followed here.
The war between Mars and Earth lasted 67 Earthling days.
Every nation on Earth was attacked.
Earth’s casualties were 461 killed, 223 wounded, none captured, and 216 missing.
Mars’ casualties were 149,315 killed, 446 wounded, 11 captured, and 46,634 missing.
At the end of the war, every Martian had been killed, wounded, captured, or been found missing.
Not a soul was left on Mars. Not a building was left standing on Mars.
The last waves of Martians to attack Earth were, to the horror of the Earthlings who pot-shotted them, old men, women, and a few little children.
The Martians arrived in the most brilliantly-conceived space vehicles ever known in the Solar System. And, as long as the Martian troops had their real commanders to radio-control them, they fought with a steadfastness, selflessness, and a will to close with the enemy that won the grudging admiration of everyone who fought them.
It was frequently the case, however, that the troops lost their real commanders, either in the air or on the ground. When that happened, the troops became sluggish at once.
Their biggest trouble, however, was that they were scarcely better armed than a big-city police department. They fought with firearms, grenades, knives, mortars, and small rocket-launchers. They had no nuclear weapons, no tanks, no medium or heavy artillery, no air cover, and no transport once they hit the ground.
The Martian troops, moreover, had no control over where their ships were to land. Their ships were controlled by fully automatic pilot-navigators, and these electronic devices were set by technicians on Mars so as to make the ships land at particular points on Earth, regardless of how awful the military situation might be down there.
The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin — one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.
The war between Earth and Mars began when 500 Martian Imperial Commandos took possession of the Earthling moon on April 23. They were unopposed. The only Earthlings on the moon at the time were 18 Americans in the Jefferson Observatory, 53 Russians in the Lenin Observatory, and four Danish geologists at large in the Mare Imbrium.
The Martians announced their presence by radio to Earth, demanded Earth’s surrender. And they gave Earth what they described as “a taste of hell.”