"I don't see your reasoning on that. Where does this tie in with the magazine stories?"
"Morale. A big thing. The Earthmen know they can't fail. It is in them like blood beating in their veins. They cannot fail. They will repel each invasion, no matter how well organized. Their youth of reading just such fiction as this has given them a faith we cannot equal. We Martians? We are uncertain; we know that we might fail. Our morale is low, in spite of the banged drums and tooted horns."
"I won't listen to this treason," cried the assignor. "This fiction will be burned, as you will be, within the next ten minutes. You have a choice, Ettil Vrye. Join the Legion of War, or burn."
"It is a choice of deaths. I choose to burn."
"Men!"
He was hustled out into the courtyard. There he saw his carefully hoarded reading matter set to the torch. A special pit was prepared, with oil five feet deep in it. This, with a great thunder, was set afire. Into this, in a minute, he would be pushed.
On the far side of the courtyard, in shadow, he noticed the solemn figure of his son standing alone, his great yellow eyes luminous with sorrow and fear. He did not put out his hand or speak, but only looked at his father like some dying animal, a wordless animal seeking rescue.
Ettil looked at the flaming pit. He felt the rough hands seize him, strip him, push him forward to the hot perimeter of death. Only then did Ettil swallow and cry out, "Wait!"
The assignor's face, bright with the orange fire, pushed forward in the trembling air. "What is it?"
"I will join the Legion of War," replied Ettil.
"Good! Release him!"
The hands fell away.
As he turned he saw his son standing far across the court, waiting. His son was not smiling, only waiting. In the sky a bronze rocket leaped across the stars, ablaze. . . .
"And now we bid good-by to these stalwart warriors," said the assignor. The band thumped and the wind blew a fine sweet rain of tears gently upon the sweating army. The children cavorted. In the chaos Ettil saw his wife weeping with pride, his son solemn and silent at her side.
They marched into the ship, everybody laughing and brave. They buckled themselves into their spiderwebs. All through the tense ship the spiderwebs were filled with lounging, lazy men. They chewed on bits of food and waited. A great lid slammed shut. A valve hissed.
"Off to Earth and destruction," whispered Ettil.
"What?" asked someone.
"Off to glorious victory," said Ettil, grimacing.
The rocket jumped.
Space, thought Ettil. Here we are banging across black inks and pink lights of space in a brass kettle. Here we are, a celebratory rocket heaved out to fill the Earthmen's eyes with fear flames as they look up to the sky. What is it like, being far, far away from your home, your wife, your child, here and now?
He tried to analyze his trembling. It was like tying your most secret inward working organs to Mars and then jumping out a million miles. Your heart was still on Mars, pumping, glowing. Your brain was still on Mars, thinking, crenulated, like an abandoned torch. Your stomach was still on Mars, somnolent, trying to digest the final dinner. Your lungs were still in the cool blue wine air of Mars, a soft folded bellows screaming for release, one part of you longing for the rest.
For here you were, a meshless, cogless automaton, a body upon which officials had performed clinical autopsy and left all of you that counted back upon the empty seas and strewn over the darkened hills. Here you were, bottle-empty, fireless, chill, with only your hands to give death to Earthmen. A pair of hands is all you are now, he thought in cold remoteness.
Here you lie in the tremendous web. Others are about you, but they are whole--whole hearts and bodies. But all of you that lives is back there walking the desolate seas in evening winds. This thing here, this cold clay thing, is already dead.
"Attack stations, attack stations, attack!"
"Ready, ready, ready!"
"Up!"
"Out of the webs, quick!"
Ettil moved. Somewhere before him his two cold hands moved.
How swift it has all been, he thought. A year ago one Earth rocket reached Mars. Our scientists, with their incredible telepathic ability, copied it; our workers, with their incredible plants, reproduced it a hundredfold. No other Earth ship has reached Mars since then, and yet we know their language perfectly, all of us. We know their culture, their logic. And we shall pay the price of our brilliance.
"Guns on the ready!"
"Right!"
"Sights!"
"Reading by miles?"
"Ten thousand!"
"Attack!"
A humming silence. A silence of insects throbbing in the walls of the rocket. The insect singing of tiny bobbins and levers and whirls of wheels. Silence of waiting men. Silence of glands emitting the slow steady pulse of sweat under arm, on brow, under staring pale eyes!
"Wait! Ready!"
Ettil hung onto his sanity with his fingernails, hung hard and long.
Silence, silence, silence. Waiting.
Teeee-e-ee!
"What's that?"
"Earth radio!"
"Cut them in!"
"They're trying to reach us, call us. Cut them in!"
Eee-e-e!
"Here they are! Listen!"
"Calling Martian invasion fleet!"
The listening silence, the insect hum pulling back to let the sharp Earth voice crack in upon the rooms of waiting men.
"This is Earth calling. This is William Sommers, president of the Association of United American Producers!"
Ettil held tight to his station, bent forward, eyes shut.
"Welcome to Earth."
"What?" the men in the rocket roared. "What did he say?"
"Yes, welcome to Earth."
"It's a trick!"
Ettil shivered, opened his eyes to stare in bewilderment at the unseen voice from the ceiling source.
"Welcome! Welcome to green, industrial Earth!" declared the friendly voice. "With open arms we welcome you, to turn a bloody invasion into a time of friendships that will last through all of Time."
"A trick!"
"Hush, listen!"
"Many years ago we of Earth renounced war, destroyed our atom bombs. Now, unprepared as we are, there is nothing for us but to welcome you. The planet is yours. We ask only mercy from you good and merciful invaders."
"It can't be true!" a voice whispered.
"It must be a trick!"
"Land and be welcomed, all of you," said Mr. William Sommers of Earth. "Land anywhere. Earth is yours; we are all brothers!"
Ettil began to laugh. Everyone in the room turned to see him. The other Martians blinked. "He's gone mad!"
He did not stop laughing until they hit him.
The tiny fat man in the center of the hot rocket tarmac at Green Town, California, jerked out a clean white handkerchief and touched it to his wet brow. He squinted blindly from the fresh plank platform at the fifty thousand people restrained behind a fence of policemen, arm to arm. Everybody looked at the sky.
"There they are!"
A gasp.
"No, just sea gulls!"
A disappointed grumble.
"I'm beginning to think it would have been better to have declared war on them," whispered the mayor. "Then we could all go home."
"Sh-h!"said his wife.
"There!" The crowd roared.
Out of the sun came the Martian rockets.
"Everybody ready?" The mayor glanced nervously about.
"Yes, sir," said Miss California 1965.
"Yes," said Miss America 1940, who had come rushing up at the last minute as a substitute for Miss America 1966, who was ill at home.
"Yes siree," said Mr. Biggest Grapefruit in San Fernando Valley 1956, eagerly.
"Ready, band?"
The band poised its brass like so many guns.
"Ready!"
The rockets landed. "Go!"
The band played "California, Her
e I Come" ten times. From noon until one o'clock the mayor made a speech, shaking his hands in the direction of the silent, apprehensive rockets.
At one-fifteen the seals of the rockets opened
The band played "Oh, You Golden State" three times.
Ettil and fifty other Martians leaped out, guns at the ready.
The mayor ran forward with the key to Earth in his hands.
The band played "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and a full chorus of singers imported from Long Beach sang different words to it, something about "Martians Are Coming to Town."
Seeing no weapons about, the Martians relaxed, but kept their guns out.
From one-thirty until two-fifteen the mayor made the same speech over for the benefit of the Martians.
At two-thirty Miss America of 1940 volunteered to kiss all the Martians if they lined up.
At two-thirty and ten seconds the band played "How Do You Do, Everybody," to cover up the confusion caused by Miss America's suggestion.
At two thirty-five Mr. Biggest Grapefruit presented the Martians with a two-ton truck full of grapefruit.
At two thirty-seven the mayor gave them all free passes to the Elite and Majestic theaters, combining this gesture with another speech which lasted until after three.
The band played, and the fifty thousand people sang, "For They Are Jolly Good Fellows."
It was over at four o'clock.
Ettil sat down in the shadow of the rocket, two of his fellows with him. "So this is Earth!"
"I say kill the filthy rats," said one Martian. "I don't trust them. They're sneaky. What's their motive for treating us this way?" He held up a box of something that rustled. "What's this stuff they gave me? A sample, they said." He read the label. BLIX,the new sudsy soap.
The crowd had drifted about, was mingling with the Martians like a carnival throng. Everywhere was the buzzing murmur of people fingering the rockets, asking questions.
Ettil was cold. He was beginning to tremble even more now. "Don't you feel it?" he whispered. "The tenseness, the evilness of all this. Something's going to happen to us. They have some plan. Something subtle and horrible. They're going to do something to us--I know."
"I say kill every one of them!"
"How can you kill people who call you 'pal' and 'buddy'?" asked another Martian.
Ettil shook his head. "They're sincere. And yet I feel as if we were in a big acid vat melting away, away. I'm frightened." He put his mind out to touch among the crowd. "Yes, they're really friendly, hail-fellows-well-met (one of their terms). One huge mass of common men, loving dogs and cats and Martians equally. And yet--and yet----"
The band played "Roll Out the Barrel." Free beer was being distributed through the courtesy of Hagenback Beer, Fresno, California.
The sickness came.
The men poured out fountains of slush from their mouths. The sound of sickness filled the land.
Gagging, Ettil sat beneath a sycamore tree. "A plot, a plot--a horrible plot," he groaned, holding his stomach.
"What did you eat?" The assignor stood over him.
"Something that they called popcorn," groaned Ettil.
"And?"
"And some sort of long meat on a bun, and some yellow liquid in an iced vat, and some sort of fish and something called pastrami," sighed Ettil, eyelids flickering.
The moans of the Martian invaders sounded all about.
"Kill the plotting snakes!" somebody cried weakly.
"Hold on," said the assignor. "It's merely hospitality. They overdid it. Up on your feet now, men. Into the town. We've got to place small garrisons of men about to make sure all is well. Other ships are landing in other cities. We've our job to do here."
The men gained their feet and stood blinking stupidly about.
"Forward, march!"
One, two, three,four! One, two, three,four! . . .
The white stores of the little town lay dreaming in shimmering heat. Heat emanated from everything--poles, concrete, metal, awnings, roofs, tar paper--everything.
The sound of Martian feet sounded on the asphalt.
"Careful, men!" whispered the assignor. They walked past a beauty shop.
From inside, a furtive giggle. "Look!"
A coppery head bobbed and vanished like a doll in the window. A blue eye glinted and winked at a keyhole.
"It's a plot," whispered Ettil. "A plot, I tell you!"
The odors of perfume were fanned out on the summer air by the whirling vents of the grottoes where the women hid like undersea creatures, under electric cones, their hair curled into wild whorls and peaks, their eyes shrewd and glassy, animal and sly, their mouths painted a neon red. Fans were whirring, the perfumed wind issuing upon the stillness, moving among green trees, creeping among the amazed Martians.
"For God's sake!" screamed Ettil, his nerves suddenly breaking loose. "Let's get in our rockets--go home! They'll get us! Those horrid things in there. See them? Those evil undersea things, those women in their cool little caverns of artificial rock!"
"Shut up!"
Look at them in there, he thought, drifting their dresses like cool green gills over their pillar legs. He shouted.
"Someone shut his mouth!"
"They'll rush out on us, hurling chocolate boxes and copies ofKleig Love andHolly Pick-ture, shrieking with their red greasy mouths! Inundate us with banality, destroy our sensibilities! Look at them, being electrocuted by devices, their voices like hums and chants and murmurs! Do you dare go in there?"
"Why not?" asked the other Martians.
"They'll fry you, bleach you, change you! Crack you, flake you away until you're nothing but a husband, a working man, the one with the money who pays so they can come sit in there devouring their evil chocolates! Do you think you could control them?"
"Yes, by the gods!"
From a distance a voice drifted, a high and shrill voice, a woman's voice saying, "Ain't that middle one there cute?"
"Martians ain't so bad after all. Gee, they're just men," said another, fading.
"Hey, there.Yoo-hoo! Martians! Hey!"
Yelling, Ettil ran. . . .
He sat in a park and trembled steadily. He remembered what he had seen. Looking up at the dark night sky, he felt so far from home, so deserted. Even now, as he sat among the still trees, in the distance he could see Martian warriors walking the streets with the Earth women, vanishing into the phantom darknesses of the little emotion palaces to hear the ghastly sounds of white things moving on gray screens, with little frizz-haired women beside them, wads of gelatinous gum working in their jaws, other wads under the seats, hardening with the fossil imprints of the women's tiny cat teeth forever imbedded therein. The cave of winds--the cinema.
"Hello."
He jerked his head in terror.
A woman sat on the bench beside him, chewing gum lazily. "Don't run off; I don't bite," she said.
"Oh," he said.
"Like to go to the pictures?" she said.
"No."
"Aw, come on," she said. "Everybody else is."
"No," he said. "Is that all you do in this world?"
"All? Ain't that enough?" Her blue eyes widened suspiciously. "What you want me to do--sit home, read a book? Ha, ha! That's rich."
Ettil stared at her a moment before asking a question.
"Do you do anything else?" he asked.
"Ride in cars. You got a car? You oughta get you a big new convertible Podler Six. Gee, they're fancy! Any man with a Podler Six can go out with any gal, you bet!" she said, blinking at him. "I bet you got all kinds of money--you come from Mars and all. I bet if you really wanted you could get a Podler Six and travel everywhere."
"To the show maybe?"
"What's wrong with 'at?"
"Nothing--nothing."
"You know what you talk like, mister?" she said. "A Communist! Yes, sir, that's the kinda talk nobody stands for, by gosh. Nothing wrong with our little old system. We was good enough to let you Martians invade,
and we never raised even our bitty finger, did we?"
"That's what I've been trying to understand," said Ettil. "Why did you let us?"
"'Cause we're bighearted, mister; that's why! Just remember that, bighearted." She walked off to look for someone else.
Gathering courage to himself, Ettil began to write a letter to his wife, moving the pen carefully over the paper on his knee.
"Dear Tylla----"
But again he was interrupted. A small-little-girl-of-an-old-woman, with a pale round wrinkled little face, shook her tambourine in front of his nose, forcing him to glance up.
"Brother," she cried, eyes blazing. "Have you been saved?"
"Am I in danger?" Ettil dropped his pen, jumping.
"Terrible danger!" she wailed, clanking her tambourine, gazing at the sky. "You need to be saved, brother, in the worst way!"
"I'm inclined to agree," he said, trembling.
"We saved lots already today. I saved three myself, of you Mars people. Ain't that nice?" She grinned at him.
"I guess so."
She was acutely suspicious. She leaned forward with her secret whisper. "Brother," she wanted to know, "you been baptized?"
"I don't know," he whispered back.
"You don't know?" she cried, flinging up hand and tambourine.
"Is it like being shot?" he asked.
"Brother," she said, "you are in a bad and sinful condition. I blame it on your ignorant bringing up. I bet those schools on Mars are terrible--don't teach you no truth at all. Just a pack of made-up lies. Brother, you got to be baptized if you want to be happy."
"Will it make me happy even in this world here?" he said. "Don't ask for everything on your platter," she said. "Be satisfied with a wrinkled pea, for there's another world we're all going to that's better than this one."
"I know that world," he said.
"It's peaceful," she said.
"Yes."
"There's quiet," she said.
"Yes."
"There's milk and honey flowing."
"Why, yes," he said.
"And everybody's laughing."
"I can see it now," he said.
"A better world," she said.
"Far better," he said. "Yes, Mars is a great planet."
"Mister," she said, tightening up and almost flinging the tambourine in his face, "you been joking with me?"
"Why, no." He was embarrassed and bewildered. "I thought you were talking about----"
"Not about mean old nasty Mars, I tell you, mister! It's your type that is going to boil for years, and suffer and break out in black pimples and be tortured----"
"I must admit Earth isn't very nice. You've described it beautifully."