While Sammy was still with us the phone rang. Pat took it. She seemed determined that everyone should know she was with me — though what good that would do her I couldn’t see. Quite the reverse. But people who set a lot of store on being honest and outspoken are often honest and outspoken when it does no good and a lot of harm.
The call was for Pat. She listened, slammed down the phone, and turned to us angrily. “Well, what do you know about that!”
“Nothing,” said Sammy patiently, “until you tell us.”
“That was my aunt. Somebody got into my room last night and destroyed everything — clothes, books, furniture, letters. The whole shooting match. Imagine anyone doing a thing like that!”
Sammy took the practical view. “Their usefulness has only been shortened by a day or two, anyway,” he remarked. “Why should you care?”
“But — ”
“It’s just spite,” I said. “Why be surprised, Pat? You’re cynical about so many things — it should be no shock that when people hate you they take any small revenge they can.”
Pat grinned involuntarily. “No, it isn’t really,” she admitted. “And as Sammy says, it hardly matters now. But it’s pretty petty, isn’t it?”
“What an odd juxtaposition,” Sammy murmured. “Pretty petty. Pretty petty. Pretty petty.”
Pat said she was going over to have a look around. I offered to take her, but surprisingly Sammy stood up and said he’d go with her. He put it neatly, using precisely the words that made any other arrangement impossible. In fact he cut me out. He must have been feeling a whole lot better than when he came in and talked despondency.
There was a knock on the door so soon after they had gone that I thought they had come back. I threw the door open casually, so sure it was Pat and Sammy that anyone else would have surprised me.
But I certainly didn’t expect the melodrama of three masked men who brushed past me and shut the door.
I wasn’t perturbed. Nothing could happen to me. I wouldn’t have been so sure of one stranger, for individuals can be mad enough to kill the only man who can save them. But three — they couldn’t be as mad as that, in the same way, all at once.
“Now what?” I asked. “More particularly, why?”
They all carried guns. The leader drew his and gestured with it, like a schoolboy.
“We mean to go to Mars, Easson,” he said, his voice deliberately muffled. “If you get that clear for a start, we’ll understand each other better.”
“Then you’d better get out before I recognize any of you,” I told them. “Otherwise it’s very sure none of you will.”
“One of us is going to stick beside you until takeoff. We figure that’ll make a difference. We — ”
His talking like a cowboy irritated me. For all I knew they might be kids playing a game.
“Get to hell out of here,” I told them, “before I tear your masks off. What kind of a fool do you think I am?”
Nobody moved. So I explained the obvious. “If I die, nobody from Simsville goes to Mars,” I said, a little more patiently. “They won’t send another lieutenant now. So that won’t help you. If you stick beside me as you say, it can only last until we get to Detroit, and then we’ll be split. You won’t be able to do anything about that. Then I can have you thrown into a cell somewhere and that’s that. If you get me to promise anything — which would be very easy, for I’ll say anything you like — it will last only till I know I’m safe. Then the program’s as before. Is that clear?”
I looked from one to another of them. “Okay,” I said. “You know where the door is. You just came in.”
They went. As easily as that. I gave them credit for having realized before they came that that was probably what would happen. I couldn’t really blame them for trying. I might have been weak enough and stupid enough to fall in with their plans. But it was a poor effort.
I’d had enough of my room. I went out to go to Henessy’s. I saw the Stowes out with Jim and waved to them. They waved back tentatively. They belonged to the small group who still cared a great deal about what people would think. They didn’t want anyone to say they were fawning on me, begging for what everyone wanted.
I saw Betty Glessor and Morgan Smith, who haven’t been mentioned so far because I never thought of them. I had exchanged about ten words with them. But they were next on the list to the Powells.
That’s what it came to in the end. The more I learned about people, the more likely they were to come off my list. Perhaps Smith was a drinker and a doper and a sadist and a killer — I hadn’t time to find out. I didn’t know he was any of these things, so I could take him to Mars.
Tentatively I scratched out the Powells and marked in Smith and Glessor.
Still looking after them, I almost ran into Leslie. She had no job, now that school was closed. She grinned. I stopped, having nothing to say, but no reason to walk past her when she seemed to want to talk.
“What are you doing?” she asked — a silly question if ever I heard one.
“Just killing time,” I said.
“Like me to help you?”
“If you have any bright ideas.”
She knew a little place down the valley I hadn’t had a chance to see. She said it was a good place to think of when remembering Earth.
It was curious, I’d never thought of that. Perhaps because I’d lived in three country districts and four cities before I was ten, I had never felt any duty to any one place. I hadn’t thought much about leaving Earth forever. I had realized vaguely that Harry Phillips would do so with a pang; but if everybody left on Earth was going to die, I was going to leave it without any regrets. What was Earth, anyway? Just a place. Define planets generically, and you had Mars and no loss on the deal that technology couldn’t make up in a hundred years or so.
But as Leslie spoke I understood that no other planet would ever be made the same as Earth.
We stopped about two miles from Simsville, and there was no sign anywhere of mankind. Two hills folded in on us, hills thickly wooded. A stream meandered one way, then the other, in its search for lower ground. The clouds were very white and still against an almost tropical blue sky.
I found for the first time that though I had no eye for beauty I could let it sink in and something in me appreciated it.
Leslie was wearing a watered-silk blue dress, and I could appreciate that too. It darkened her fair hair. I had always liked blue and gold.
“I wish …” said Leslie.
We had sat down in the shade, and she was leaning forward, her legs drawn up in front of her, pulling at her ankles.
“What do you wish?” I asked obligingly.
She seemed to have forgotten. “Why was it done like this?” she demanded.
I was disappointed. I had hoped I was getting away from Simsville and my job and its responsibility.
“How can one person get to know over three thousand people in fourteen days?” she went on. “You know you can’t. You haven’t tried. Oh, I don’t say you aren’t conscientious. I think you are. If you could have arranged the method of selection, all over the world, how would you have done it?”
I shrugged. “Phone book, I guess.”
“How do you mean?”
“Every three hundred and twenty-fifth name.”
Leslie caught her breath as if I’d suggested setting fire to a cathedral. “You couldn’t!” she exclaimed. “That would be horribly callous.”
“Why? It would be fair.”
“But this way … at least there’s a chance. The good, the wise, the clever, the beautiful may come through …”
“For God’s sake!” I ejaculated, shocked by her lack of understanding. “Do you think that’s what we’re supposed to do? Take all the crowned heads in our thousands of little arks and ignore the rabble? Intellectual or artistic snobbery is no better than social snobbery. If I had Beethoven and Michelangelo and Napoleon and Madame Curie and Shakespeare and Helen of Troy and St. Peter here in Simsville, do you think I’d pick them?”
“Wouldn’t you?” She had lost her horror, and in its place was a vast surprise.
“Suppose I did, what would happen to John Doe? Sure, if Simsville had a genius, I’d consider him. There aren’t too many geniuses. But when it’s one out of three hundred, we’re not going to blot out the average man and woman by taking only the people who would come out at the head of a competitive examination in something or other. I …”
I didn’t have the eloquence I needed. I knew I was right. I wanted her to see it. But how could I tell her that outstanding people, after all, were only clever dogs that had learned new tricks, and that John Smith was worth quite as much to himself as Shakespeare?
“Let’s talk of something else,” I said helplessly. “Or better still, not talk at all.”
She nodded, hesitated, and then with sudden resolution put her hand to her throat.
Perhaps I was to blame as much as she was. I watched stupidly as she did things to her dress, and then became angry when there was no reason to be. After all, what was wrong in wanting to live? Why shouldn’t people try anything and everything?
I knew too much about her, and not enough. If it had been Pat … well, if it had been Pat it would have been quite different. All I knew was that Leslie wasn’t the kind to give herself casually to a near stranger. And that, instead of improving things, made them worse.
“You brought me here for this?” I asked furiously.
“Suppose I did?” she said defiantly.
I was wildly, unreasonably angry. I was also, quite irrationally, disappointed. “You think you could buy any lieutenant that way?” I demanded. “We could all of us have screen stars and princesses and models every night, no obligation, without having to bother about small-town teachers. What I should do is take you, and strike you off the list.”
She became very still. It was all melodramatic, cheap, and stupid. She had been very clumsy in her effort to seduce me, not knowing how it was done. If she had known how to pretend to be in love with me, or at least attracted by me, the cheapness would have gone. But only someone who was ashamed of herself could make the horrible mess Leslie made of it.
“Hadn’t you even the sense to see,” I said bitterly, “that any of us could have any woman we wanted? Don’t you think I’ve had enough silly offers and proposals? People who promise to do everything I say on Mars, who offer me the equivalent of ten years’ salary in whatever currency we use out there, if they have to sweat for twenty years to pay it … men who contract to do my killing for me in the colony, help me to set up a state of my own. Damn it, Leslie, isn’t it obvious that I must have decided long ago on the only possible thing to do about such proposals — and that’s to leave the people who make them behind?”
“You said … something that implied you’d picked me to go.”
“Yes, I had.”
Her head came up sharply and she laughed in my face. “I heard the same thing often when I was a child,” she retorted.
“ ‘I was going to give you something, but now I won’t.’ We all said it. It …”
I lunged away from her, back to Simsville. The blue silk dress still lay about her as if she were sitting in a sparkling pool.