The attack was no great surprise. When people take up a new way of life, when they pull up stakes and go striding into the sunrise, strife paces after like a ravenous hound, red tongue lolling. When the first colonists from Earth swarmed into the crumbling Martian cities a good third of them ended up in stony desolation with their hearts drilled through.
They danced to riotous tunes, calling for louder music and stronger wine, and they fought savagely to set up little kingdoms of tyranny eighty feet square.
Everywhere anarchy reigned, and haggard-eyed, desperate men crouched behind smoke-blackened ruins and held off other men as greedy as themselves. They fought and died by dozens, by hundreds, their minds inflamed by the quickly-made discovery that the Martian cities were vast treasure troves.
You had to go prospecting, you had to search, and when you found your own shining treasure you didn’t want to share it with any man alive.
Steve had his gun trained on the wall ahead when he ducked down at my side.
“Yes, sir,” I whispered, half to myself. “This is going to be rough!”
“They asked for it!” Steve said.
His gun roared twice.
From the wall ahead came a burst of gunfire in reply.
“If they think they’re going to get this mirror away from me—”
I looked at his grim, sweat-beaded face. “I’ll help you fight for it,” I said.
“So nice of you,” he grunted.
“Then maybe you’ll have sense enough to bury it face down in the sand.”
Guns went off thirty feet directly in front of us. Red sand geysered up, granite cracked and splintered. You could feel the awful heat of the blazing exchange of bullets.
I could see faces between the chinks. Malignant faces moving from peephole to peephole like scavenger birds hopping about in the desert.
I was aiming at one of the peepholes when Steve groaned and sagged against me. His gun arm sagged, and I could see that a bullet had pierced his shoulder high up.
“I’m sorry, Tom,” he whispered, hoarsely. “I was careless, damn it!”
“Never mind, Steve,” I said.
“Now they’ll close in and get you. Better take my gun. You can use two guns.”
“I won’t need two guns, Steve,” I said. “I’m walking into the open with my hands raised.”
“You’re crazy!” he breathed, his eyes on my face. “We’re outnumbered five to one. They’ll drop you the instant you step out from behind this wall.”
My gun was hot and smoking. I smiled and tossed it to the sand.
“I’ll be back in a minute and fix up that shoulder,” I said.
“You’ll be walking to your death,” he said. “They’ve been trailing us for days, hoping we’d stumble on something. They must have seen me pick up that mirror.”
“They trailed us because they thought we looked experienced, rugged,” I said. “They thought we were following a map. They just haven’t got what it takes to go prospecting for themselves. They’re hyenas of the desert, Steve.”
“All right—hyenas. That means they won’t respect a white flag. If you walk out with your hands raised they’ll burn you down before you’ve taken five steps.”
I steadied my helmet and unloosed my collar so that I wouldn’t feel cramped.
“Don’t worry, Steve,” I said.
I knew they saw me the instant I stepped out from behind the wall.
The silence was ominous, and I could feel their eyes upon me, hot and deadly.
I didn’t raise my hands. It didn’t seem quite right to let them think I was seeking a truce. A man may be a fool to play fair with killers, but something made me change my mind about raising my hands.
I’d give them their chance—ten seconds. I wouldn’t try to bargain for those ten seconds by walking toward them under false colors. I’d just trust to luck and—
Steve had never seen the weapon I held in my palm. It was a tiny electrostatic accelerator tube, capable of flexible, high precision control of ions with energies up to twelve million electron-volts.
It was a simple thing—and unbelievably destructive. It made no sound at all. But ten seconds after I clicked it on, the desert directly in my path was glowing white hot.
Just a glow, white, dazzling for an instant. Then a dull rumbling shook the ground and the wall opposite blackened and crumbled. The heat was like a blast of incandescent helium gas from a man-made sun.
I turned and walked back to where Steve was lying.
“I didn’t want to do it that way,” I said. “But I had no choice. It was them—or us.”
Steve seemed not to realize we were no longer in danger. There was fear in his eyes, and he was staring at me as if I’d just returned from the dead.
In a way I had. A man may die fifty deaths while counting off ten seconds in his mind.
“I’ll give you something to help you sleep, Steve,” I said.
It didn’t take me long to dress and bind up his wound. He winced once or twice, but he never took his eyes from the mirror.
“You promised to bury it face down in the sand,” I said.
He looked at me. “You know better than that,” he said. “I promised nothing of the sort.”
“It’s like falling in love with a ghost, only worse,” I said.
“That’s where you’re wrong. There’s nothing ghostly about her.”
I mixed him a sleeping draught, using the little water we had left.
In five minutes he was snoring. I pried the mirror from his fingers and propped it up against a rock, so that he could see her face when he woke up.
Then I stretched myself out in the sand, kicked off my shoes and stared up at the sky. The sun was just sinking to rest, and there was a thin sprinkling of stars in the middle of the sky.
The stars seemed cold and immeasurably remote.
Would it work out?
Could it possibly work out? Was I sticking out my neck in a gamble so big it was like attempting to pierce the sun, and hammer out a new humanity on a great blazing anvil heated to
