“But the crew,” said Rumfoord, “continued to protect him from supposed amatory failure and a broken heart. His ego fizzed, it sizzled, it snapped, it crackled, it popped.
“There was a drinking party in the officers’ mess,” said Rumfoord, “and the lieutenant-colonel became quite drunk and loud. He bragged again of his heartless lewdnesses on Earth. And then he saw that someone had placed in the bottom of his glass a stateroom key.
“The lieutenant-colonel sneaked away to the locked stateroom forthwith, let himself in, and closed the door behind him,” said Rumfoord. “The stateroom was dark, but the inside of the lieutenant-colonel’s head was illuminated by liquor and by the triumphant words of the announcement he would make at breakfast the next morning.
“He took the woman in the dark easily, for she was weak with terror and sedatives,” said Rumfoord. “It was a joyless union, satisfactory to no one but Mother Nature at her most callous.
“The lieutenant-colonel did not feel marvelous. He felt wretched. Foolishly, he turned on the light, hoping to find in the woman’s appearance some cause for pride in his brutishness,” said Rumfoord sadly. “Huddled on the bunk was a rather plain woman past thirty. Her eyes were red and her face was puffy with weeping, despair.
“The lieutenant-colonel, moreover, knew her. She was a woman that a fortune teller had promised him would one day bear his child,” said Rumfoord. “She bad been so high and proud the last time he saw her, and was now so crushed, that even the heartless lieutenant-colonel was moved.
“The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves – that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, hilt one of outrageous fortune’s cruelest agents as well. The woman had regarded him as a pig when they met before. He had now proved beyond question that he was a pig.
“As the crew had predicted,” said Rumfoord, “the lieutenant-colonel was spoiled forever as a soldier. He became hopelessly engrossed in the intricate tactics of causing less rather than more pain. Proof of his success would be his winning of the woman’s forgiveness and understanding.
“When the space ship reached Mars, he learned from loose talk in the Reception Center Hospital that he was about to have his memory taken away. He thereupon wrote himself the first of a series of letters that listed the things he did not want to forget. The first letter was all about the woman he had wronged.
“He looked for her after his amnesia treatment, and found that she had no recollection of him. Not only that, she was pregnant, carrying his child. His problem, thereupon, became to win her love, and through her, to win the love of her child.
“This he attempted to do, Unk,” said Rumfoord, “not once, but many times. He was consistently defeated. But it remained the central problem of his life – probably because he himself had come from a shattered family.
“What defeated him, Unk,” said Rumfoord, “was a congenital coldness on the part of the woman, and a system of psychiatry that took the ideals of Martian society as noble common sense. Each time the man wobbled his mate, utterly humorless psychiatry straightened her out – made her an efficient citizen again.
“Both the man and his mate were frequent visitors. to the psychiatric wards of their respective hospitals. And it is perhaps food for thought,” said Rumford, “that this supremely frustrated man was the only Martian to write a philosophy, and that this supremely self-frustrating woman was the only Martian to write a poem.”
Boaz arrived at the company mother ship from the town of Phoebe, where he had gone to look for Unk. “God damn – ” he said to Rumfoord, “everybody go and leave without us?” He was on a bicycle.
He saw Unk. “God damn, buddy,” he said to Unk, “boy – you ever put your buddy through hell. I mean! How you get here?”
“Military police,” said Unk.
“The way everybody gets everywhere,” said Rumford lightly.
“We got to catch up, buddy,” said Boaz. “Them boys ain’t going to attack, if they don’t have a mother ship along. What they going to fight for?”
“For the privilege of being the first army that ever died in a good cause,” said Rumford.
“How’s that?” said. Boaz.
“Never mind,” said Rumford. “You boys just get on board, close the airlock, push the on button. You’ll catch up before you know it. Everything’s all fully automatic.”
Unk and Boaz got on board.
Rumfoord held open the outer door of the airlock. “Boaz – ” he said, “that red button on the center shaft there – that’s the on button.”
“I know,” said Boaz.
“Unk – ” said Rumfoord.
“Yes?” said Unk emptily.
“That story I told you – the love story? I left out one thing.”
“That so?” said Unk.
“The woman in the love story – the woman who had that man’s baby?” said Rumfoord. “The woman who was the only poet on Mars?”
“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.