splendid stars, but he missed the Moon. Phobos and Deimos weren’t worth writing home about.
He sighed and took out a cigarette and winced as he lit it. Synthetic tobacco, synthetic alcohol, synthetic steaks… God! Maybe he ought to throw in his hand and go back to Earth.
Only he liked it here. There was room in the deserts and the equatorial moors. A man was still a man, not a number. You worked with your hands and brain, for yourself, and making a time-gnawed sandstone waste blossom green was more satisfying than punching a clock in an Earthside factory. He wanted to get married and fill his ranch house with kids and raise them up proud of being Martians and Magaracs.
He turned a corner and emerged on Matsuoko Plaza. The thin air carried sound so poorly that he was almost on the rally before he realized.
It was the man himself, ranting from the balcony of Barsoom House. Magarac had to admit the demagogue had personality—a thick-set, dynamic type, with a fierce head that he was always tossing dramatically back, a voice which was organ and trumpet and bass drum. What the planter did not like was the words, or the crowd, or the green-shirted goons stationed around the square.
“—And I say to you, it was hard work, hard work and obedience which made the glorious vision of our grandfathers into the reality you see about you, which transformed a planetwide desolation into a world of men! It was thrift and sobriety. Yes, let me say it was intolerance—intolerance of vice, of drink, of laziness and rebelliousness against constituted authority, which made us what we now are.
“Then let us
Magarac shrank into a dark corner. The mob numbered almost a hundred men, shoving and yelling in an ugly mood, and Magarac was no friend of Blalock’s Freeman Party. As an assemblyman of Syrtis District, he had often spoken publicly against him.
Freeman! Haw! And all the horses laughed. And all the horses’ donkeys laughed. It was the old story, the would-be dictator, appealing to that queer deep streak of masochistic puritanism in the Martian culture. The first colonists had needed such traits, to nerve them for their heartbreaking job.
But now—good Lord! Wasn’t it about time Mars became civilized?
How it happened, Magarac was never sure. One minute, Blalock was talking himself berserk and the crowd was crying amen; the next minute, they were across the plaza, tearing Cassidy’s Bar & Grill apart.
Cassidy was the most inoffensive little man in the Solar System, who often apologized for the rotgut he had to sell and the prices he had to charge. Martian beer was just barely preferable to none at all, though it cost as much as champagne would on Earth, and Cassidy operated a friendly neighborhood pub where men could shed the grinding sameness of desert reclamation in a few hours of conviviality. Magarac not only liked the place and its owner, but figured they were important to keeping the town sane.
When he saw glass splinter as two six-foot bruisers tossed Cassidy through his own window, and when he saw the whole investment smashed and running out in the street, Laslos Magarac decided that if Blalock had intimidated the police, the skunk ought to be shown there was still one man left in Syrtis.
A man, by God!
He ran across the square and started swinging.
Latourelle opened the door and stood uncertainly. “But what happened to you, my friend?
You look like one of the old Martian ruins.”
“Just a ruined Martian.” Magarac lurched into the house and headed for the bathroom.
“Use the whole week’s water ration if you desire,” said Latourelle anxiously. “Me, I am not drinking water any more.”
He hovered about trying to be helpful while Magarac got washed and patched. Apart from a missing tooth, the damage was only skin deep and a glass of analgesite took away the pain. It was with a sigh almost of contentment that Magarac finally stretched out in a battered easy chair.
Latourelle’s house consisted of three rooms: bath, living-dining-sleeping, and a laboratory.
The lab took up most of the space. But with his genius for being comfortable, the Frenchman had made his home a place of cheer.
“When the assembly meets next week, they’re going to get an earful,” said Magarac. “Not that it’ll do any good. Blalock’s bullies have everybody else cowed. But you shoulda seen the other guy.” He smiled dreamily, with bruised and swelling lips. “Four of ’em was one too many for me, but they won’t forget me in a hurry.”
“I take it, then, you had the run-in with the Freemen?”
“They were busting up Cassidy’s tavern. I dragged him away and called a doctor. He’ll be all right.”
“Barbarians! Have they no consideration for others?”
“Not the Freemen. They want to march around in fancy uniforms and so they figure everybody else ought to want the same.” Magarac scowled and lighted a cigarette. His fingers shook a little.'Ollie, Mars is really sick.”
“It must be, if this sort of thing is proceeding unhindered.”
“We’re out of touch with history. What can we do but stagnate, when you have to work a lifetime to save up enough money for one vacation on Earth? Blalock would be laughed out of town back there. But here he’s a big frog because the whole planet is such a small puddle. And life is so grim at best that the shoddy excitement he can offer appeals to the young men.”
Magarac spoke fast, with the feverish loquacity of weariness. “We have to live ascetically because of economics. So, sooner or later, we’re going to rationalize that fact and turn ascetism from an unpleasant necessity to a shining virtue.” He puffed hard, seeking comfort from the vile fake tobacco. “When that happens, Mars will no longer be fit to live on.”
“It is not now, I fear,” said Latourelle.
“Sure, it still is, because we have hope. We can work and hope to improve the place. But if Blalock gets into power, there won’t even be that hope.”
“These things, they come and go,” said Latourelle fatalistically. “The beast will have his day and then be forgotten.”
“Not when the bottom is going to be knocked out of our economy—which will happen pretty soon. Then everybody will be desperate enough to try the old panacea, the Almighty State.”
Magarac’s face twisted. “And we could do so much, Ollie, if we had the chance! We have minerals, we have space for agriculture… and Earth is getting so overcrowded, someday it’ll be desperate for food. But the damned cost of shipping! The time it takes! If we had a fast, cheap method of space travel, we could shuck this lopsided drybean economy, build up diversified industries, turn Mars into an Eden.”
“One cannot very well argue with a gravitational potential difference,” shrugged Latourelle.
“No, but a rocket is such a slow and wasteful way to overcome it.” Magarac looked wistful.
“And if we had something better, we’d be in close touch with Earth. We’d have a living culture to nourish us —books, music, art, everything Man needs to be more than just a two-legged belly.”
“Well, be of good heart, my friend. In another fifty or a hundred years such a method will be available.”
“Hm?” Magarac looked up through two black eyes. “What d’you mean?”
“Did you not know?
Magarac jumped to his feet. “You don’t mean it!”
“But I do.” Latourelle beamed. “There, is not that consolation to you?”
“No,” said Magarac bleakly. “Fifty years will be too late. Mars will have been ruined in a decade.” He leaned over and gripped Latourelle’s shoulders. “D’you think you can build such a ship
“What do you think I am? A sorcerer?”
“I know you’re a Nobel Prize winner, a genuine genius and—”
“And an old tired man who will in a few years return to his beloved valley of the Dordogne and sit on a vine-
