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Mars is My Destination

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<h2>20</h2> She looked as she always had, with her hair piled up high on her head and the full lips drowsily sensuous, and her breasts thrusting firmly upward against the tight-clinging fabric that ensheathed them just below the curve of her throat, and the soft whiteness of her upper bosom. Only her eyes had changed. Stark terror looked out of them and suddenly as she stared at us she pressed one hand to her throat and swayed back against the bulkhead on the right side of the doorway. It brought her up short. But I was sure that if it hadn't she'd have gone right on retreating backwards until she either started screaming again or crumpled to the floor in a dead faint. She neither screamed again nor fainted, for Commander Littlefield gave her no time to succumb to utter panic. But if his voice hadn't rung out as sharply as it did—at the precise moment that it did—the outcome might have been quite different. "Why did you return to the ship?" he shouted. "Why did you do such a reckless thing? Was it because we suspected you? Was it because you knew we were about to place you under arrest? Answer me! Your life may depend on it." "Yes ... I went back," she said. "But only to get ... something I didn't want you to find. I was pretty sure I'd hidden it where you'd never think of searching, but when you started suspecting me—" "I see. A damaging piece of evidence? Something of the sort?" She nodded. "Yes ... yes ... a paper. It would have proven my guilt." "You admit your guilt then? We can still save you, but not if you go on lying, clinging to the story you told us. Every part of that is false." "No, no!" She almost screamed the words. "Most of what I told you was true. My brother did work for Wendel and ... I didn't know that he had died. I just found that out a few hours ago. I came to Mars to help him, to save him if I could. I was a Wendel agent, but only because I had no choice. They threatened to kill my brother ... used that as a weapon to make me spy for them and do—uglier things." Her voice rose pleadingly. "Bring the ship back. Don't send me out alone into space. You can't be that cruel—" "We can't bring the ship back. But we can save you. Just tell the truth. Wendel knew that the Board was sending someone to Mars to investigate the combine, a man who couldn't be bribed to shut his eyes to what he was sure to see here. You had instructions to kill that man before he could set foot on Mars. Wendel wanted him killed because they knew the Board was backing him to the hilt and he had been given enough authority to make him the most dangerous kind of adversary. Wendel also knew that you were the most resourceful and intelligent agent in their employ. "You proved that, to my satisfaction, when you did what no one has ever done before—outwitted a Mars' rocket security alert system by concealing yourself in a cybernetic robot. I'm sure it didn't take Wendel long to discover that you are as intelligent as you are beautiful—both valuable assets in a secret agent. Priceless assets. The time is very short. Am I right so far?" "Yes ... it's all true. Please ... help me!" "You tried to kill, without success, the man the Board was sending to Mars to investigate and crack down on both Wendel and Endicott. You tried to kill him three times." "No, only once. I'm telling you the truth. I didn't fire that dart. There were other Wendel agents on board. One tried to blow up the ship. And there were other Wendel agents in New Chicago, with instructions to assassinate him if they could." "I see. But you did try to kill him in New Chicago. Why did you come to Mars, if you didn't intend to try again?" "I told you. I didn't lie when I said I came to save my brother, that I wanted to see Wendel exposed ... forced to face criminal charges. When I tried to stab him in the New Chicago Underground and failed ... I realized what Wendel had done to me, what a vicious person I'd become. I decided I couldn't go on being that kind of person any longer, not even to save my brother. I took the only other way I could think of to keep Wendel from killing my brother. I am a resourceful woman, I am intelligent ... why should I deny it? I might have made the Wendel Combine think twice about killing him. But now my brother's dead and—" Her shoulders sagged and a look of torment came into her eyes. "All right. One thing more. When that Wendel agent surprised you in the chart room and the man you'd tried to kill saved you ... why were you so frightened? Why did the agent go into such a rage? You must have thought he intended to kill you. And if you were both Wendel agents—" "I wasn't supposed to be on the ship. He knew it, and must have been pretty sure I'd turned traitor. He knew all about my brother. There wasn't much he didn't know about me, because he was a very high-placed agent. He knew I had every reason to hate Wendel. And I think he was also the kind of man who turns sadistic when he has a woman completely at his mercy." She saw me then. I could tell by the way her eyes widened and then fastened on me, staring straight past Littlefield as if he was no longer her only accuser. But she was mistaken if she thought I had any desire to accuse her. I was furious with Littlefield, sickened by his relentless attack on her and if I hadn't been stunned for a moment, caught up in a kind of hypnotic spell by the suddenness of that attack and the startling candor she'd displayed in replying to it I'd have interfered sooner. What she'd told him was evidence. It would help me to smash Wendel in a legal way, which is always the best way, when backed up as it would have to be by armed, completely lawful authority. All I'd have to do would be to put what she'd just said into one package and what Wendel agents had done to an Endicott fuel cylinder in a densely populated section of the Colony in another and bring the two packages together and there would take place, on Earth and on Mars, the kind of explosion that would blow the Wendel Combine into the rubbish bin of history. The Wendel-Endicott war would be over, and the Colonists would have a new birth of freedom. A death-bed confession has the strongest kind of legal validity and when a woman thinks she has been sent out into space on an unmanned rocket perhaps to die ... she is not likely to lie about anything. An unforeseeable accident—a blind fluke of circumstance—had dealt Littlefield a winning hand and he had taken full advantage of it. He had done it to help me, God pity him ... for I hated him for it. Every question he'd asked her and every reply she'd taken a minute or two to make explicit had cut down her chances of staying on this side of eternity. She was looking straight at me. "Ralph!" she said. "I don't want to die alone in space! What are they trying to do to me?" It was as much as I could take. I grabbed Littlefield by the shoulders and swung him about and demanded. "You said you could save her. How? Were you lying? If you were ... I'll kill you." "Let go of me, Ralph," he said. "A chance like that would never come again. I had to risk it." "All right—you've risked it. Now ... can you save her? That's all I want to know. Nothing else matters." "Yes ... I think so. If the cylinder doesn't blow up for three or four more minutes. If she puts on a vacuum suit and goes out into space and we're able to pick her up tomorrow or the next day—" "Then for God's sake tell her. You'll have to tell her about the cylinder, or she won't know how great the danger is. She may take her time about it." "All right," he said. "I'll take care of it." He was talking to her in the big screen when Joan and I walked out of the port clearance building. We walked out because, if the explosion had come while he was talking, just watching it would have killed me. No worse death can come to a man than the one that can take place inwardly, for it can shrivel and blacken his soul and leave him a burnt-out shell of a man until he dies physically. And Joan could sense that, and wanted to get me out of there as quickly as possible. The explosion came a full ten minutes later, which meant that even Hillard hadn't known how variable the critical mass buildup could be in at least a few of the Endicott cylinders. We were standing in the open, two hundred feet from the nearest rocket launching pad, when we saw it—Littlefield's exploding star high up in the night sky. The brightness lasted less than ten seconds. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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