Chapter VIII: Part 8

Then I saw that she was staring past me and without turning I knew that she was appealing to Wendel with the same look of pleading desperation in her eyes. "If he gives the signal his command will be obeyed. And he'll do it unless you stop him! When you've lived with a man in the intimacy of marriage--yes, that's important and I have to say it--you know him better than anyone else. You know what he's capable of. He'll give the signal unless you do as he says, because the insignia he's wearing gives him no choice. If you don't stop him now ... _you'll die with him_!"

I turned then and stared straight at Wendel. I'd never seen a man sag before in quite the way he did. All of the life seemed to go out of his eyes. His defiance gave way to a look of utter hopelessness, of abject surrender, and he sank so low in his chair that he seemed on the verge of slumping to the floor, despite Lynton's grip on his shoulders.

His voice, when he spoke, scarcely rose above a whisper. "All right, Graham," he said. "You win."

As I turned back to the screen and saw the look of overwhelming relief and gratefulness in Joan's eyes I couldn't help wondering how close she had been to being right. Had the insignia really given me any choice? If Wendel had stayed defiant and refused to crack--would I have gone through with it? How much does any man know about _himself_?

I'd probably never know the answer.

In the days that followed every one of the Wendel agents were rounded up and returned to Earth to stand trial. I never did find out the identity of the agent who had shot the dart at me from high up on the spiral or the one who had sent a little mechanical killer in my direction by the shores of Lake Michigan in New Chicago.

It didn't worry me at all, because I was sure that both of those delightful characters were among the agents who had been rounded up in the mopping up operations.

Oh, yes--they rescued her with her hair in disarray and no longer standing high up on her head. Three days later, drifting through empty space about three hundred thousand miles from Mars. She's in prison now and will have to answer charges. But I intend to go all out in the plea I'll make in her defense when she comes up for trial.

Some judges are enlightened and merciful and others are harsh tyrants, but with the backing of the Board I'm not too worried about the outcome. If it goes against us, I'll take it to the highest court in the land, and the backing of the Board carries plenty of weight there too.

Eventually I forgave Commander Littlefield.

"I'm a hard man, Ralph," he said, standing in the starlight outside the Port Administration Section with a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand, right after he'd received assurances from Earth he'd be placed in command of a new sky ship. "I did what I did because I am what I am. I knew that her life hung in the balance, that every word we exchanged increased the danger. But when I weighed that against the future of the Colony--I felt I had no choice. I knew what a full confession would mean to us."

I never saw Nurse Cherubin again. She married her doctor and they were honeymoon passengers on the next scheduled Earth trip, which took place while I was busy making sure that the whole Wendel Combine would come apart at the seams. It was a little like watching a volcanic explosion and keeping the lava flow channeled with the full weight of the Board's authority.

Joan and I have become Martian Colony residents for the duration. I mean by that there will always be new battles to be fought in a war that will never end ... as long as Man stays a part of the universe. There's something embattled about him that you don't find in any other species. Maybe it's good and maybe it's bad, but it helps to explain why he keeps building for the future, He never knows--and just not knowing makes him want to build as sturdily as he can.

You never prize anything so much as when you feel you're about to lose it. So you fight to preserve it, and when you've done that you've built up enough excess energy to want to make a stab at something better. And when that's threatened you'll fight again and so on until the final curtain.

It's just the way things are.

THE END

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Planet In Danger!

There was trouble brewing on Mars--_bad_ trouble. Two giant industrial empires fought for control there, and their struggle imperiled the whole Mars colony. Civil war--atomic civil war--could break out any second, leaving Earth's only foothold in Space a mass of radio-active rubble.

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End of Project Gutenberg's Mars is my Destination, by Frank Belknap Long