“Gentlemen,” he said, “you give me courage. Unless one of you has some objection to offer, I hereby decree that, if possible, three units be dispatched singly on this mission. They will progress as far as possible through the empires of space and the outer worlds and will return with whatever succor or tidings each has been able to obtain. This mission would be worthwhile even if you return with no more than a few hundred pounds of Element One Hundred and Seventy-Six. There must be some way, gentlemen, there must be some way.”
Lars the Ranger stood up. “I shall order the preparation of three destroyer units and do what I can to provide them with fuel and food. If it is your will, I shall command one of them and place two at the disposition of Smit and Greto.”
He about-faced and approached the door, where he turned. “I can hardly believe, gentlemen, that we have at last decided upon a course of vigorous action. Who knows but what we shall succeed?” The door of the Grand Council Chamber shut behind him.
Rumors spread far and wide across the planet and hope attended by many doubts turned people’s eyes to the night skies where the stars blinked strong and young. A few broadcasting systems expended hoarded ergs of power to announce the departures of the expedition. Several old-time glass-paper editions of the newspapers in Greater Europa were given over exclusively to accounts of the various explorers. Smit was cited as the commander most likely to succeed, and his boasts at the spaceport before he took off were quoted as the purest truth.
A week after Smit’s departure much space and talk was devoted to the fabulous Greto whose reputation as a financier had been founded fifteen hundred years ago with the Capella exploitation. They neglected the fact that it had been his further speculations which had impoverished him. They placed their hopes in his ability to “flimflam the money moguls of the greater empires.”
When it came the time of Lars the Ranger to depart most of the news value of the expeditions was gone. Lars the Ranger had very little to say at the port. No one questioned the mechanics or remarked the fact that he had prudently taken weeks to groom his ship and to choose his crew. But old officers came and offered this one a map, that one a chart, and another a handful of bullets. And men who had ranged far and knew were on hand to bid him Godspeed and good luck amongst the spinning suns, the comets and dying stars. They toasted him in farewell and Lars the Ranger was gone.
Earth, only half remembering, waited and starved. Winter came. Frugal of their power, the expedition ships transmitted no messages. And Mankin, day after day moving thin-worn chessmen idly about on his board, bided his time.
The plains and mountains lay red, the thin air moaned bitterly cold about the towers of the government building. Sand drifted across the char-marks on the rocket field. Then spring came, and summer came, and were gone again, and another winter lay coldly dusty upon Earth’s breast.
And one bitter morning a battered and rusty Mercy, which had borne Greto, came to rest on the government field. The instant it was sighted each man thought of his rank and vied at the doors of the Council chambers to give welcome to Greto. But it was no smooth and wily treasurer who came up to the big black doors. Greto hobbled, tired and bent, his space clothing ragged and out of repair. He was worn by hunger and all the bitter hardship of space. He did not need to push through the crowd, his appearance alone was enough to compel it back.
The doors opened before him and he entered. Mankin was about to mount the dais in formality when he saw Greto.
He stopped. Tears of sympathy leaped into his eyes. He came forward, arms outstretched. “Oh, my friend, my old friend,” and he quickly seated him in a chair and brought him wine.
“Where are your officers and crew?” said Mankin. Greto did not need to answer. His eyes remained steadily on the floor. He turned over one hand and let it drop.
“From hunger when we had no food, and from sickness for which we had no medicine. I am ashamed, Mankin. I am ashamed to be here.”
Mankin sat on a small stool and folded his hands in his lap. “I am sure you did what you could, Greto. Nothing can tell you how sorry I am. Perhaps things do not go so well with them.”
Greto shook with sudden anger. He lifted his worn, starved face. His eyes glared up through the ceiling and at the unseen stars.
“Things go well enough up there. They are fat, they are wealthy.” He grasped Mankin’s hand. “They hate us. They hate us for the rules and mandates we put upon them. They hate us for the taxes that once we levied. They hate us for the wars we fought to stop. They hate us for the centuries we depreciated their currency to uphold the value of our own. Pluteron in the Alpha Draco Empire laughed at me when I came. He laughed with hysteria and was still laughing when I left. There was no mirth in that laughter. There was only satisfaction. They hate us, Mankin. We shall get nothing from them, nothing!
“Cythara of Betelgeuse took a collection amongst the officers of his court to put a wreath in orbit about our sun after we were gone. I have been driven by laughter, by scorn.”
He sat for a little while, chin on his breast. “Help me to my house, Mankin. I am afraid I have not long to live.”
But it was Smit’s return which spread the blackness of gloom across the world. For Smit was neither starved nor weary. Hate stood like a black aura around him through which cracked the lightning of his voice. Feet planted wide apart, he stood in the spaceport. He met all who came to him with such a tirade concerning the ungratefulness of the children in space that the world was shocked into hopeless rage.
He had gone the length of space, stopping everywhere he deemed it expedient. Everywhere he went he had met violence and suspicion. He had crossed the trail of Greto several times. He spoke of the Greto Plan to stabilize the currency of all space, with Earth as the central banking house, and the brutality with which the scheme, quite feasible, had been everywhere rejected. He told how Greto had sought to borrow a sufficient amount to rehabilitate Earth, and the outrageous interest that had been promised and how the governments which Greto had approached had fought Smit with the plan on his arrival.
But this was not the seat of bitterness with Smit. He told them of space fleets equipped with weapons more deadly than those that Earth had ever known. One governor had given him a slingshot and had ordered him to fight a soldier equipped with a magnetic snare. And Smit had spent two weeks in a foul prison for driving in the governor’s teeth.
He had been refused food, fuel, water, and medical attention for his men. He had been scorned and spat upon and mobbed from Centauri to Unuk. He had been insulted, rejected, scorned and given messages of such insulting import for Earth that here, delivering them, he seemed about to burst apart with rage.
The story of his return journey was one of violence. He had brought back his men but in the progress of returning need of fuel had forced him to loot the government arsenal at Kalrak. He had left the city burning behind him. Smit preached war, he preached it to old men, to rusted and broken machines, to tumbled and moss-grown walls.
Mankin opened the government radio for him and for four days Smit vainly attempted to recruit technicians and scientists to reconstruct the weapons that would be necessary to fight. Immediately after a broadcast in which he had attempted to stir up interest in an ancient and long-unused idea of germ warfare, an old officer of the republic’s fleet barred his way as he attempted to leave the broadcasting building.
Smit, still affecting the dress he had worn on his return, filthy and ragged and seared as it might be, was offended at the clean, well-mended gray uniform.
“If you would help me, what are you doing here?” said Smit. “I have ordered all men to repair to the military arsenal if they wish to forward this campaign.”
The old officer smiled, undaunted by the blunt rage of Smit. “General,” he said, “I have no ideas and I doubt that you would listen to any from me, but I was at the arsenal this morning and I do not think that we could do anything
without fuel, weapons or the materials with which to make them. But I do not come here to advise you to abandon your idea. It will fail of its own accord. I came to ask you news of Lars the Ranger. Certainly if you found Greto’s track, you must have news of Lars.”
Mankin and several others were coming up the steps and Smit grasped at them as an audience.
“Yes, I have news of Lars. He had been in three places before I had arrived; he had said nothing, he had done nothing.”
The old officer looked incredulous. “General, I am not of your branch of service and I would not argue with you, but I believe you play carelessly with the reputation of one who, if he commanded it could have audience wherever he went.”
Smit was stunned. “Yes, certainly, audiences he did have. But he was given nothing. This I know.”
Mankin was interested. “Did you learn nothing of him?” he asked Smit.
“All I know is that when I received audience after him I was heard coldly. My requests were refused, my demands were laughed at, and I was personally insulted. I know but little of this, but I can tell you this certainly, that you can expect nothing of Lars the Ranger.”
The old officer turned away and, as he went down the steps, was seen to be laughing to himself.
For more than two months the campaign of Smit’s raged feebly across the worn, arid surface of Earth. Where he had recruited, no army stood; where he had built, only junk could be seen. The waning efforts of technicians and bacteriologists finally stopped. Earth fell once more into an apathy, and at night men no longer looked hopefully at the stars.
In the first days of spring a mutter of reports came from the spaceport, and people wandered toward it in surprise to find a destroyer there, polished hull carefully repaired and a crew “at quarters” while the commander disembarked. An officer rushed from the crowd and grasped the hand of the voyager.
“Lars,” he cried. And at the shout, several men in the crowd ran across the field to form a group around the newcomer. But the greatest number turned away. Two expeditions had arrived and the dream was spent, the hope was gone.
“What news?” said the old officer. Lars shrugged tiredly, he had aged on his voyage. “Little enough, my friend. They are vastly busy with their own concerns out there, but here I have brought at least some packets of food.” And the quartermaster behind him signaled that the presents be brought down. When they were distributed, Lars walked toward the city.
Mankin heard of his arrival but did not go forth to meet him, for two disappointments were all that he could possibly bear. He had been sitting in the chill of the Council room when he received the tidings from his clerk. He just nodded hopelessly.
Lars entered the chamber and stood for a little while, feeling the coldness of it, looking at the withered Mankin in his chair. Lars came forward and put his helmet down upon the table.
Mankin spoke, “You have been gone for a long while, Lars.”
“What of Greto and Smit?”
“They have both returned. Greto, I am afraid, is dying. He is sick rather with insults than with disease. Smit for some time was a man deprived of reason and he wanders now about the countryside speaking to no one, eating only what is thrust into his hand. He is a beaten man, Lars. This expedition was ill-starred. It would have been better that we had died at least with our dignity rather than to beg for crusts and make fools laugh. As the iron has eaten our air, so has this expedition drained the last sparks of vitality from the two who went before you. It was ill-starred, Lars.”
Lars was about to speak, but Mankin again held up his hand.
“No, do not tell me. You have brought back your men, you have brought back your ship. Perhaps you have begged a little fuel, perhaps you have a little food. But you have nothing with which to save Earth. This I know.”
Lars shook his head slowly. “You are right, Mankin. I have brought nothing. I did not expect to receive anything, since I did not beg. I did not threaten. In some places I heard of Greto’s schemes. They hated him because they hated the financial control which Earth in her power exercised over the outer empires. In all the immensity of space there is not a man who would give a plugged mean coin to save a single child on Earth, if it meant the restoring of the financial tyranny which once we exercised.”
“I know this,” said Mankin sadly. “We hoped for too much.”
Lars again shook his head. “No, Mankin, we were greedy for too much. Perhaps I have failed, perhaps I have not failed. I do not know.”
“What did you tell them?” asked Mankin, not wanting hope to rise in his heart. “What did you tell them that you dare believe they might help us?”
“I did not tell them very much. And I thought first of how I might gain their goodwill. I found immediately that it could not be purchased or begged. I am afraid, Mankin, that I have amused myself at your expense.”
This shocked the ancient president. He leaped to his feet. “You had better explain that, Lars!”
“I dined with them,” said Lars. “I looked at their fleets, I admired their dancing girls, I saw their crops, and had the old battle places pointed out to me. And I told them stories. And this, reminding them, stimulated many tales. I asked for nothing, Mankin. I did not expect anything. I hope for nothing now. I am sorry that this is the report I must render.”
“You had better go,” said Mankin quietly.
For a month Lars, nearly ostracized, lived at the Navy yard in the improved destroyer, receiving old shipmates, giving presents from his frugal stock but going unaddressed in the streets. He heard nothing but condemnation for “the man who did not even try.”
And then, one morning the town was shaken by a terrible roar and with certainty that vengeance had been their return for the expedition, the populace tumbled from their beds to find six great gleaming spheres on the spaceport landing. They were larger than any other space vehicle these people on Earth had ever seen. From them came tumbling young men, well fed and laughing. Then they began to unload equipment.
No one dared to address the newcomers. With a hysterical certainty that they were about to be enslaved, the people of the capital, taking what little food they had, began to stream out of the far gate. A radio message from Asia was broadcast to the effect that fourteen huge vessels, unidentified, were landing troops. Greater Europa reported being besieged but said that no overt act had been made and all was being done to evacuate the population before bombardment.
Mankin received the reports in terror on his dais. He called together his cabinet. Noteworthily omitting Lars, he spent some fruitless six hours in feeble and frightened debate on measures of defense. No one came to him from the enemy forces and he felt, at last, that he must surrender before lives were lost.
When he and his staff went forward from the palace, they found that nineteen new vessels lay in the plain beyond the city. And that an encampment was being hastily constructed.
He was met by four boisterous young officers, each one from a different empire, all in working dress. The first of them, caught by the dignity of the cabinet and the president, and recognizing them as people of authority, quickly turned to his friends and sent one of them racing back toward a nearby sphere.
Mankin took a grip on his courage, he had never looked for the day when he would have to surrender Earth to an attacking force. But now that he saw that it could not be helped, he could only try to carry it forth with dignity.
He was somewhat amazed at the courteous mien of the young officers, who did not speak to him but respectfully waited for a sign from the large spaceship.
In a moment or two, hastily pulling on a uniform coat and adjusting his epaulettes, a large middle-aged man strode toward the group. He stopped at a distance of five paces from Mankin, identified the chest ribbon and the ancient robe of office and then spoke.
“You are President Mankin?” he said politely.
Mankin stiff
ened himself and answered. “Yes. Whom have I the pleasure of addressing?”
“I am General Collingsby,” he said. With a crisp military bow, he extended his hand. “It is an honor to meet you, sir,” said Collingsby, “I am sorry I occasioned you the difficulty of having to come to the port. I am ashamed at my own discourtesy in not having called on you immediately. However, command has its responsibilities and, as these are supply forces, there has been considerable trouble in establishing consignments and in distributing our various fleets over the surface of the earth.”
He coughed. “Excuse me, sir, but by Jupiter, your air is certainly thin here! My blood pressure must be up off the meter. But here, permit me to invite you into my cabin where it is more comfortable, and we can talk at leisure.”
Mankin straightened his shoulders. “Sir, I thank you for your courtesy. I can only say that I hope that you will observe the various usages of war and that you will treat your prisoners without inhumanity and that you will occasion as little suffering as possible.”
General Collingsby looked startled and then embarrassed. It was easily read upon his face that he had no clue to the meaning of Mankin’s statements.
“My dear sir,” he stammered, “I do not understand you. Has not my own governor, Voxperius, contacted you concerning our arrival?”
“General,” said Mankin, “the ionized beams of communication between Earth and her former colonies have been severed for more than seventy years. I am afraid we have not had sufficient power or even need to continue them in operation.”
Collingsby looked at his staff in round-eyed wonder and then at Mankin. He looked beyond the group before him and his face lighted. “Perhaps this gentleman can clarify matters.”
Mankin turned to see Lars the Ranger, with a small group of officers, approaching.
Collingsby eagerly grabbed Lars by the arm. “My dear fellow, would you please acquaint your president with the true complexion of affairs. By Jupiter, I had not thought of it before but it certainly does look like an invasion. Oh, I am ashamed of this, Lars! I am ashamed of it! What a panic we must have caused. But I was certain that my government and the other governments had contacted Earth. Didn’t you know, Lars?”