There was only one thing to do, and Unk did it. He stripped to his lichen-green undershorts, hid his rifle under a bench, put plugs in his ears and nostrils, taped his mouth, and stood among the recruits.
His head was shaved, just like the heads of the recruits. And, like the recruits, Unk had a strip of adhesive plaster running from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck. He had been such a terrible soldier that the doctors had opened his head up at the hospital to see if he might not be suffering from malfunctioning antenna.
Bee surveyed the room with enchanted calm. She held the grenade that Unk had given her as though it were a vase with one perfect rose in it. Then she went to the place where Unk had hidden his rifle, and she put the grenade beside it – put it there neatly, with a decent respect for another’s property.
Then she went back to her post at the table.
She neither stared at Unk nor avoided looking at him. As they told her at the hospital: she had been very, very sick, and she would be very, very sick again if she didn’t keep her mind strictly on her work and let other people do the thinking and the worrying. At all costs, she was to keep calm.
The blustering false alarms of the men making the room-to-room search were approaching slowly.
Bee refused to worry about anything. Unk, by taking his place among the recruits, had reduced himself to a cipher. Considering him professionally, Bee saw that Unk’s body was turning blue-green rather than pure blue. This might mean that he had not taken a goofball for several hours – in which case he would soon keel over
To have him keel over would certainly be the most peaceful solution to the problem he presented, and Bee wanted peace above all else.
She didn’t doubt that Unk was the father of her child. Life was like that. She didn’t remember him, and she didn’t bother now to study him in order to recognize him the next time – if there was going to be a next time. She had no use for him.
She noted that Unk’s body was now predominantly green. Her diagnosis had been correct, then. He would keel over at any minute.
Bee daydreamed. She daydreamed of a little girl in a starched white dress and white gloves and white shoes, and with a white pony all her own. Bee envied that little girl who had kept so clean.
Bee wondered who the little girl was.
Unk fell noiselessly, as limp as a bag of eels.
Unk awoke, found himself on his back in a bunk in a space ship. The cabin lights were dazzling. Unk started to yell, but a sick headache shushed him.
He struggled to his feet, clung drunkenly to the pipe supports of the bunk. He was all alone. Someone had put his uniform back on him.
He thought at first that he had been launched into space eternal.
But then he saw that the airlock was open to the outside, and that outside was solid ground.
Unk lurched out through the airlock and threw up. He raised his watering eyes, and saw that he was seemingly still on Mars, or on something a lot like Mars.
It was night time.
The iron plain was studded with ranks and files of space ships.
As Unk watched, a file of ships five miles long arose from the formation, sailed melodiously off into space.
A dog barked, barked with a voice like a great bronze gong.
And out of the night loped the dog – as big and terrible as a tiger.
“Kazak!” cried a man in the dark.
The dog stopped at the command, but he held link at bay, kept Unk flattened against the space ship with the threat of his long, wet fangs.
The dog’s master appeared, the beam of a flashlight dancing before him. When he got within a few yards of Unk, he placed the flashlight under his chin. The contrasting beam and shadows made his face look like the face of a demon.
“Hello, Unk,” he said. He turned the flashlight off, stepped to one side so that he was illuminated by the light spilling from the space ship. He was big, vaguely soft, marvelously self-assured. He wore the bloodred uniform and square-toed boots of a Parachute Ski Marine. He was unarmed save for a black and gold swaggerstick one foot long.
“Long time no see,” he said. He gave a very small, v-shaped smile. His voice was a glottal tenor, a yodel.
Unk had no recollection of the man, but the man obviously knew Unk well – knew him warmly.
“Who am I, Unk?” said the man gayly.
Unk gasped. This had to be Stony Stevenson, had to be Unk’s fearless best friend. “Stony?” he whispered.
“Stony?” said the man. He laughed. “Oh, God – ” he said, “many’s the time I’ve wished I was Stony, and many’s the time I’ll wish it again.”
The ground shook. There was a whirlwind rush in the air. Neighboring space ships on all sides had leaped into the air, were gone.
Unk’s ship now had its sector of the iron plain all to itself. The nearest ships on the ground were perhaps half a mile away.
“There goes your regiment, Unk,” said the man, “and you not with them. Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Who are you?” said Unk.
“What do names matter in wartime?” said the man. He put his big hand on Unk’s shoulder. “Oh, Unk, Unk, Unk,” he said, “what a time you’ve had.”
“Who brought me here?” said Unk.
“The military police, bless them,” said the man.
Unk shook his head. Tears ran down his cheeks. He was defeated. There was no reason for secrecy any more, even in the presence of someone who might have the power of life and death over him. As to life and death, poor Unk was indifferent. “I – I tried to bring my family together,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Mars is a very bad place for love, a very bad place for a family man, Unk,” said the man.
The man was, of course, Winston Niles Rumfoord. He was commander-in-chief of everything Martian. He was not actually a practicing Parachute Ski Marine. But he was free to wear any uniform that caught his fancy, regardless of how much hell anybody else had to go through for the privilege.
“Unk,” said Rumfoord, “the very saddest love story I ever hope to hear took place on Mars. Would you like to hear it?”
“Once upon a time,” said Rumfoord, “there was a man being carried from Earth to Mars in a flying saucer. He had volunteered for the Army of Mars, and already wore the dashing uniform of a lieutenant-colonel in the Assault Infantry of that service. He felt elegant, indeed, having been rather underprivileged spiritually on Earth, and assumed, as spiritually underprivileged persons will, that the uniform said lovely things about him.
“His memory hadn’t been cleaned out yet, and his antenna had yet to be installed – but he was so patently a loyal Martian that he was given the. run of the space ship. The recruiters have a saying about a male recruit like that – that he has named his balls Deimos and Phobus,” said Rumfoord, “Deimos and Phobus being the two moons of Mars.
“This lieutenant-colonel, with no military training whatsoever, was having the experience known on Earth as finding himself. Ignorant as he was of the enterprise in which he was ensnarled, he was issuing orders to the other recruits, and having them obeyed.”
Rumfoord held up a finger, and Unk was startled to see that it was quite translucent. “There was one locked stateroom that the man was not permitted to enter,” said Rumfoord. “The crew carefully explained to him that the stateroom contained the most beautiful woman ever taken to Mars, and that any man who saw her was certain to fall in love with her. Love, they said, would destroy the value of any but the most professional soldier.
“The new lieutenant-colonel was offended by the suggestion that he was not a professional soldier, and he regaled the crew with stories of his amatory exploits with gorgeous women – all of which had left his heart absolutely untouched. The crew remained skeptical, pretending to the opinion that the lieutenant-colonel had never, for all his lascivious questing, exposed himself to an intelligent, haughty beauty such as the one in the locked stateroom.
“The crew’s seeming respect for the lieutenant-colonel was now subtly withdrawn. The other recruits sensed this withdrawal, and withdrew their own. The lieutenant-colonel in his gaudy uniform was made to feel like what he really was, after all – a strutting clown. The manner in which he could win back his dignity was never stated, but was obvious to one and all. He could win it back by making a conquest of the beauty locked in the stateroom. He was fully prepared to do this – was desperately prepared –