Unk’s and Boaz’s automatic pilot-navigator, controlling the cabin lights, among other things, created an artificial cycle of Earthling nights and days, nights and days, nights and days.
The only things to read on board were two comic books left behind by the shipfitters. They were Tweety and Sylvester, which was about a canary that drove a cat crazy, and The Miserable Ones, which was about a man who stole some gold candlesticks from a priest who had been nice to him.
“What he take those candlesticks for, Unk?” said Boaz.
“Damn if I know,” said Unk. “Damn if I care.” The pilot-navigator had just turned out the cabin lights, had just decreed that it be night inside.
“You don’t give a damn for nothing, do you?” said Boaz in the dark.
“That’s right,” said Unk. “I don’t even give a damn for that thing you’ve got in your pocket.”
“What I got in my pocket?” said Boaz.
“A thing to hurt people with,” said Unk. “A thing to make people do whatever you want ’em to do.”
Unk heard Boaz grunt, then groan softly, there in the dark. And he knew that Boaz had just pressed a button on the thing in his pocket, a button that was supposed to knock Unk cold.
Unk didn’t make a sound.
“Unk — ?” said Boaz.
“Yeah?” said Unk.
“You there, buddy?” said Boaz, amazed.
“Where would I go?” said Unk. “You think you vaporized me?”
“You O.K., buddy?” said Boaz.
“Why wouldn’t I be, buddy?” said Unk. “Last night, while you were asleep, old buddy, I took that fool thing out of your pocket, old buddy, and I opened it up, old buddy, and I tore the insides out of it, old buddy, and I stuffed it with toilet paper. And now I’m sitting on my bunk, old buddy, and I’ve got my rifle loaded, old buddy, and it’s aimed in your direction, old buddy, and just what the hell do you think you’re going to do about anything?”
Rumfoord materialized on Earth, in Newport, twice during the war between Mars and Earth — once just after the war started, and again on the day it ended. He and his dog had, at that time, no particular religious significance. They were merely tourist attractions.
The Rumfoord estate had been leased by the mortgage holders to a showman named Marlin T. Lapp. Lapp sold tickets to materializations for a dollar apiece.
Save for the appearance and then the disappearance of Rumfoord and his dog, it wasn’t much of a show. Rumfoord wouldn’t say a word to anyone but Moncrief, the butler, and he whispered to him. He would slouch broodingly in a wing chair in the room under the staircase, in Skip’s Museum. And he would cover his eyes with one hand and twine the fingers of his other hand around Kazak’s choke chain.
Rumfoord and Kazak were billed as ghosts.
There was a scaffolding outside the window of the little room, and the door to the corridor had been removed. Two lines of sightseers could file past for a peek at the chrono-synclastic infundibulated man and dog.
“I guess he don’t feel much like talking today, folks,” Marlin T. Lapp would say. “You got to realize he’s got a lot to think about. He isn’t just here, folks. Him and his dog are spread all the way from the Sun to Betelgeuse.”
Until the last day of the war, all the action and all the noise was provided by Marlin T. Lapp. “I think it’s wonderful of all you people, on this great day in the history of the world, to come and see this great cultural and educational and scientific exhibit,” Lapp said on the last day of the war.
“If this ghost ever speaks,” said Lapp, “he is going to tell us of wonders in the past and the future, and of things in the Universe as yet undreamed of. I just hope some of you are lucky enough to be here when he decides the time is ripe to tell us all he can.”
“The time is ripe,” said Rumfoord hollowly.
“The time is rotten-ripe,” said Winston Niles Rumfoord.
“The war that ends so gloriously today was glorious only for the saints who lost it. Those saints were Earthlings like yourselves. They went to Mars, mounted their hopeless attacks, and died gladly, in order that Earthlings might at last become one people — joyful, fraternal, and proud.