its own fierce rockets. Svan’s mist-trained eyes spotted the circling figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship’s own. They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the side of the ship.
Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance. He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?
He became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.
Paralyzed, he heard the girl’s voice. “Svan! They’re coming! They found the guard’s rifle, and they’re looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan, with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came for you. We must flee!”
He stared unseeingly at the light. “Go away!” he croaked unbelievingly. Then his muscles jerked into action. The time was almost up—the bomb in the car—
“Go away!” he shrieked, and turned to run. His fists clenched and swinging at his side, he made a dozen floundering steps before something immense pounded at him from behind. He felt himself lifted from the road, sailing, swooping, dropping with annihilating force onto the hard, charred earth of the clearing. Only then did he hear the sound of the explosion, and as the immense echoes died away he began to feel the pain seeping into him from his hideously racked body. …
The Flight Surgeon rose from beside him. “He’s still alive,” he said callously to Lowry, who had just come up. “It won’t last long, though. What’ve you got there?”
Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a connection had been broken. “He had a bomb,” he said. “A magnetic-type, delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car, and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us.”
“Amazing,” the surgeon said dryly. “Well, they won’t do any bombing now.”
Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered. The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder.
“Better them than us,” he said. “It’s poetic justice if I ever saw it. They had it coming. …” He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of paper between his fingers. “This is the only part I don’t get,” he said.
“What’s that?” Lowry craned his neck. “A piece of paper with a cross on it? What about it?”
The surgeon shrugged. “He had it clenched in his hand,” he said. “Had the devil of a time getting it loose from him.” He turned it over slowly, displayed the other side. “Now what in the world would he be doing carrying a scrap of paper with a cross marked on both sides?”
Let the Ants Try
Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn’t; he was on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag, when the bombs struck.
He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her body was ever found. The children, of course, weren’t as lucky as that. Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.
That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of 1960.
He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down; he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency Administration laughed at him. “Move in, if you’re crazy enough to stay.”
When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind almost stopped functioning. He ate and slept, and when it grew cold he shivered and built fires, and that was all. The War Department wrote him two or three times, and finally a government man came around to ask what had happened to the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington. But he looked queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed unmolested in the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful distance away from Gordy’s hairy face and torn clothes.
He said, “The Secretary sent me here, Mr. Gordy. He takes a personal interest in your discovery.”
Gordy shook his head. “The Secretary is dead,” he said. “They were all killed when Washington went.”
“There’s a new Secretary,” the man explained. He puffed on his cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was scrabbling into a truck garden. “Arnold Cavanagh. He knows a great deal about you, and he told me, ‘If Salva Gordy has a weapon, we must have it. Our strength has been shattered. Tell Gordy we need his help.’ ”
Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.
“I haven’t got a weapon,” he said.
“You have something that can be used as a weapon. You wrote to Washington, before the War came, and said—”
“The War is over,” said Salva Gordy. The government man sighed, and tried again, but in the end he went away. He never came back. The thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly written off as a crackpot idea after the man made his report; it was exactly
