Chapter V

"Get up," Alan said, jerking the atomic pistol from his belt.

"But Haddix said--"

"Your guards welcomed me, Keifer. You couldn't afford to tell anyone else I was dead. Laura, are you all right?"

"Yes, Alan. I thought you ... he said...."

"We're getting out of here. Keifer, call your guards. Tell them to bring General Olmstead here. If you try any tricks, I'll kill you." Alan's head was whirling. He'd lost too much blood, he thought vaguely. There were two Laura's and two Keifer's swimming before his eyes.

"You can't desert your own people," Keifer told him. "You don't like my policies, but--"

"Shut up. You told Haddix to kill me. One of Haddix's men killed Eugene Talbrick, at your orders."

"I--"

Alan jammed the atomic pistol against Keifer's chest. "One question," he said. "I want the truth. Who cut off the space-warp?"

"Earth--"

"I'm going to Earth to find out. I just want to know where I stand, that's all."

Keifer shrugged. "We did it, Alan. The Federation."

"You mean _you_ did it. But why?"

Keifer remained stonily silent.

Abruptly, Alan found himself down on one knee. It took an incredible effort of will to stand up again. He needed a blood transfusion and could sleep around the clock and still wake up exhausted. Laura ran to him and said, "You're badly hurt, Alan. You ought to have that treated."

He smiled bleakly. "Tell me how?" he said, and handed her the pistol. "If Keifer does anything except send for your father, use this." He staggered to the couch and sat there, letting his head slump forward and down almost to his knees to renew the flow of blood to his brain. Dimly, he was aware of Keifer crossing the room to a video screen and asking someone at the other end to bring General Olmstead--Keifer said _Mr._ Olmstead--to his quarters.

Then there was a roaring in Alan's ears, the distant, far off pounding of surf on a water world like Venus, not arid Mars. It came closer, it swept down upon Alan in a surging, foaming tide and engulfed him....

* * * * *

"Alan! Alan! Dad is here."

"Laura." He blinked his eyes. Groggy, he stood up. Laura was on one side of him, General Olmstead on the other, pointing the atomic pistol squarely at Bennett Keifer.

"Just how do you expect to get out of here?" Keifer demanded.

"That's easy," Alan said. "You are coming with us."

"To Earth? You'll never make me."

"Get this straight," Alan said. "I could walk clear across Red Sands without anyone trying to stop me. I'm Alan Tremaine, remember? But we're going to do it the hard way because I want to turn you over to the authorities on Earth. Let's go."

Outside in the corridor, a few guards were loitering. They came to attention and saluted smartly as Keifer and Alan Tremaine came into view with General Olmstead and his daughter. They never suspected that General Olmstead held a pistol, hidden by the folds of his tunic, at Keifer's back.

General Olmstead told Alan as they followed the narrow corridor to a larger one, "My place is with the defenders of Red Sands. I wouldn't feel right going to Earth with you."

"We're taking the warp-ship," Alan said. "It's not really built for interplanetary travel, but it will have to do. We could drop you at Syrtis. But sir, I'd rather take Laura with me. Let's get her safely out of this war."

"Wait a minute!" Laura cried. "If you think--"

"I do," her father said, "and so does Alan. You'll go to Earth with him. He needs someone along to help watch Keifer, anyhow."

"But Dad!"

"But nothing."

"Alan, I want to go with you, but--"

"You heard your father. But nothing."

Fifteen minutes later, they were putting on insulined surface garments at the quartermaster supply depot near the great stone portal which separated Red Sands from the Martian desert.

The clerk said, "Going up to the warp-station?"

"No," Bennett Keifer told him.

"Yes," Alan said.

The clerk scratched his head, but saluted as they marched toward the stone portal. "Open it," Alan told him.

The portal slid away. The fierce Martian wind blasted them with swirling, choking sand. The intense cold cleared Alan's head. Five hundred yards across the ochre sand, they could see the black bulk of the warp-ship. The portal groaned and scraped shut behind them. You could see nothing but a bare escarpment of Martian granite.

"Haddix is tied up in the ship," Alan shouted over the shrieking wind. "We'll put him outside, then blast off."

Now the warp-ship loomed over them, balanced black and ugly on its tail. Alan worked the airlock mechanism with numb fingers. The lock swung in.

Haddix was there, all right. Haddix stood in the airlock with another uniformed figure on either side of him.

Haddix was pointing an atomic pistol out at them.

* * * * *

"He left me here," Haddix told Keifer. "I got loose and called for help. I figured he was planning to use the ship again or he would have taken me out with him. So we waited right here. Smart, huh?"

"That was ingenious, _Major_ Haddix," Keifer agreed.

Haddix climbed out of the airlock and stood with them on the ochre sand. His two men emerged behind him with coils of rope. "Sit down," Haddix said. "A trick I learned on Venus. We'll tie them back to back."

Nodding, Keifer asked General Olmstead for his weapon.

Alan crouched, facing Haddix. Once they were tied, they were as good as dead. Rallying the Outworld people behind Alan's name, Keifer would certainly dominate the Federation planets and might even go further. Haddix stood there warily, feet planted wide apart, ready for anything. It hardly seemed a calculated risk, Alan thought. It seemed like suicide.

But there was nothing else he could do.

He scooped up a handful of sand and flung it in Haddix's face, leaping for the Security Officer with the same motion. Then several things happened at once. Laura screamed. Keifer was grappling with General Olmstead, fighting a grim tug of war with him for the pistol. Haddix's weapon blasted air just above Alan's face, the searing flash of energy momentarily blinding him. Alan hit Haddix low with his shoulder, striking the man's knees, he thought. Haddix tumbled over on top of him, flattening Alan against the sand.

Alan got two handfuls of sand, then drove his fists at Haddix's face and opened them, rubbing the sand into his eyes. Haddix screamed like an animal in sudden, unexpected pain. There was a sudden wet warmth on Alan's left arm as the wound opened and began bleeding again, but Haddix had fallen away from him and Alan's energy-blinded eyes were beginning to make out shapes again.

He found Haddix's weapon in his hand as the two soldiers charged down upon him. He fired once and blasted a hole in the first one's chest. Haddix was scrambling over the sand toward him, groping blindly, cursing. The second soldier swung his coil of rope like a flail, whipping it down across Alan's face. He felt blood flowing in a quick torrent from his nose. He held the atomic pistol in both hands as the soldier lifted the rope overhead again. The second blast of energy from Alan's weapon decapitated the soldier. The head tumbled away. The body took two steps toward Alan as if it could not believe this had happened, then pitched forward on the sand, staining the ochre with a deeper red.

Alan gagged but did not have time to be sick. He stood up and saw Haddix fleeing toward the escarpment which hid Red Sands. He fired once, but the range was too great, the wind too strong. Keifer and Laura were fighting for the second atomic pistol, Laura kicking him, raking his face with her fingernails and keeping him away from General Olmstead, who lay motionless on the sand. Keifer struck her brutally across the jaw with his fist, then turned, fired once in Alan's direction without aiming, and sprinted toward the escarpment.

Laura was unconscious. General Olmstead was unconscious or dead. Alan's limbs were like water. He knew Keifer would bring help. He had perhaps three minutes.

Somehow, he managed to drag Laura and her father inside the warp-ship. He slammed the outer airlock door, closed the inner door, staggered to the controls. Figures, tiny black dots against the barren ochre wilderness, were running toward the ship when Alan took it up into space under five G's acceleration.

Everything was going to be all right, he thought, and fainted.

* * * * *

Something cool was stroking his forehead, bathing the caked blood from his face. He was aware that his tunic and blouse had been removed, aware of a clean white bandage on his arm. Laura's face swam in and out of focus before him.

"Where are we?" he asked.

Laura did not answer.

He looked at the controls. Seventy five thousand miles out from Mars, heading toward Earth. Present speed, thirty eight miles per second, still increasing. He could feel the gentle acceleration pressure, probably one and a half G's, tugging at him.

"Are we being followed?" he asked Laura.

"No. I don't know. Please. Please!"

"What's the matter?"

"Dad. He's--dead. Alan, Keifer killed him." Laura was crying silently, her shoulder shaking with sobs, her eyelids closed tightly, the tears streaming from them down her cheeks. "He's--dead...."

Alan stood up and walked to where he had dragged General Olmstead's inert form. A hole in the General's tunic revealed the wound. There was no pulse beat in his wrist.

First my father, Alan thought. First Richard Tremaine. Now General Olmstead. They were on opposite sides, the one championing freedom for the Outworlds, the other opposing it. But there had been nothing violent about their disagreement. It had been a political battle, waged in the arena of politics. And when Richard Tremaine had been granted Equal Union for his people, General Olmstead had bowed graciously to Earth's decision. Under other circumstances, they could have been friends, Alan's dead father and Laura's.

Now they were dead.

Both struck down by Bennett Keifer.

Alan wondered if it were always that way. The bad people rising to the top, like scum on water, employing treachery and violence to achieve their ends.

"It will be more than a vendetta," he said out loud.

"What did you say?"

"I'm going to get Keifer. My whole life will stand still until I can get him. Not because he killed them, not entirely for that. Because of who he is and what he stands for and how he'll use treachery and violence like this for his own ends. Because Equal Union and parliamentary routine never satisfied a man like him and never will. Because he can stop the flow of water to Mars and watch his own people crying for water if it serves his purposes to incite them against Earth. I'll get him, Laura. I promise you that."

He wrapped General Olmstead's body in an old Federation flag which he found in a rear cabin of the warp-ship. "It isn't the globe and stars of Earth," he said softly, "but it's the Federation my father stood for, the real Federation."

Laura nodded. "Dad would have wanted it that way."

Alan carried his flag-draped burden to the airlock, placed it in the chamber, then stepped back and bolted the inner door. Laura stood silently for a moment with her head bowed while Alan recited what he could remember of the 23rd Psalm. Somehow, it cleaned some of the hatred from his system and left cold clear purpose in its place. The prayer was for his father too and all the free people who had ever died and would ever die fighting tyranny.

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for Thou are with me. Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me...."

Alan pulled the lever which controlled the outer door of the airlock. General Olmstead found his final resting place in the deep void of space where he had spent most of his life in the service of his fellow men.