All drank, Thacher and the three of them, heavy-set Erickson, Mara, her eyes nervous and alert, Jan, who had just come. Again a look pa.s.sed between Mara and Erickson, a look so swift that he would not have caught it had he not been looking directly at her.
"What line do you represent, Mr. Erickson?" Thacher asked.
Erickson glanced at him, then down at the sample case on the floor. He grunted. "Well, as you can see, I"m a salesman."
Thacher smiled. "I knew it! You get so you can always spot a salesman right off by his sample case. A salesman always has to carry something to show. What are you in, sir?"
Erickson paused. He licked his thick lips, his eyes blank and lidded, like a toad"s. At last he rubbed his mouth with his hand and reached down, lifting up the sample case. He set it on the table in front of him.
"Well?" he said. "Perhaps we might even show Mr. Thacher."
They all stared down at the sample case. It seemed to be an ordinary leather case, with a metal handle and a snap lock. "I"m getting curious," Thacher said. "What"s in there? You"re all so tense. Diamonds?
Stolen jewels?"
Jan laughed harshly, mirthlessly. "Erick, put it down. We"re not far enough away, yet."
"Nonsense," Erick rumbled. "We"re away, Jan."
"Please," Mara whispered. "Wait, Erick."
"Wait? Why? What for? You"re so accustomed to--"
"Erick," Mara said. She nodded toward Thacher. "We don"t know him, Erick. Please!"
"He"s a Terran, isn"t he?" Erickson said. "All Terrans are together in these times." He fumbled suddenly at the catch lock on the case. "Yes, Mr. Thacher. I"m a salesman. We"re all salesmen, the three of us."
"Then you do know each other."
"Yes." Erickson nodded. His two companions sat rigidly, staring down.
"Yes, we do. Here, I"ll show you our line."
He opened the case. From it he took a letter-knife, a pencil sharpener, a gla.s.s globe paperweight, a box of thumb tacks, a stapler, some clips, a plastic ashtray, and some things Thacher could not identify. He placed the objects in a row in front of him on the table top. Then he closed the sample case.
"I gather you"re in office supplies," Thacher said. He touched the letter-knife with his finger. "Nice quality steel. Looks like Swedish steel, to me."
Erickson nodded, looking into Thacher"s face. "Not really an impressive business, is it? Office supplies. Ashtrays, paper clips." He smiled.
"Oh--" Thacher shrugged. "Why not? They"re a necessity in modern business. The only thing I wonder--"
"What"s that?"
"Well, I wonder how you"d ever find enough customers on Mars to make it worth your while." He paused, examining the gla.s.s paperweight. He lifted it up, holding it to the light, staring at the scene within until Erickson took it out of his hand and put it back in the sample case.
"And another thing. If you three know each other, why did you sit apart when you got on?"
They looked at him quickly.
"And why didn"t you speak to each other until we left Deimos?" He leaned toward Erickson, smiling at him. "Two men and a woman. Three of you.
Sitting apart in the ship. Not speaking, not until the check-station was past. I find myself thinking over what the Martian said. Three saboteurs. A woman and two men."
Erickson put the things back in the sample case. He was smiling, but his face had gone chalk white. Mara stared down, playing with a drop of water on the edge of her gla.s.s. Jan clenched his hands together nervously, blinking rapidly.
"You three are the ones the Leiter was after," Thacher said softly. "You are the destroyers, the saboteurs. But their lie detector-- Why didn"t it trap you? How did you get by that? And now you"re safe, outside the check-station." He grinned, staring around at them. "I"ll be d.a.m.ned! And I really thought you were a salesman, Erickson. You really fooled me."
Erickson relaxed a little. "Well, Mr. Thacher, it"s in a good cause. I"m sure you have no love for Mars, either. No Terran does. And I see you"re leaving with the rest of us."
"True," Thacher said. "You must certainly have an interesting account to give, the three of you." He looked around the table.
"We still have an hour or so of travel. Sometimes it gets dull, this Mars-Terra run. Nothing to see, nothing to do but sit and drink in the lounge." He raised his eyes slowly. "Any chance you"d like to spin a story to keep us awake?"
Jan and Mara looked at Erickson. "Go on," Jan said. "He knows who we are. Tell him the rest of the story."
"You might as well," Mara said.
Jan let out a sigh suddenly, a sigh of relief. "Let"s put the cards on the table, get this weight off us. I"m tired of sneaking around, slipping--"
"Sure," Erickson said expansively. "Why not?" He settled back in his chair, unb.u.t.toning his vest. "Certainly, Mr. Thacher. I"ll be glad to spin you a story. And I"m sure it will be interesting enough to keep you awake."
They ran through the groves of dead trees, leaping across the sun-baked Martian soil, running silently together. They went up a little rise, across a narrow ridge. Suddenly Erick stopped, throwing himself down flat on the ground. The others did the same, pressing themselves against the soil, gasping for breath.
"Be silent," Erick muttered. He raised himself a little. "No noise.
There"ll be Leiters nearby, from now on. We don"t dare take any chances."
Between the three people lying in the grove of dead trees and the City was a barren, level waste of desert, over a mile of blasted sand. No trees or bushes marred the smooth, parched surface. Only an occasional wind, a dry wind eddying and twisting, blew the sand up into little rills. A faint odor came to them, a bitter smell of heat and sand, carried by the wind.
Erick pointed. "Look. The City-- There it is."
They stared, still breathing deeply from their race through the trees.
The City was close, closer than they had ever seen it before. Never had they gotten so close to it in times past. Terrans were never allowed near the great Martian cities, the centers of Martian life. Even in ordinary times, when there was no threat of approaching war, the Martians shrewdly kept all Terrans away from their citadels, partly from fear, partly from a deep, innate sense of hostility toward the white-skinned visitors whose commercial ventures had earned them the respect, and the dislike, of the whole system.
"How does it look to you?" Erick said.
The City was huge, much larger than they had imagined from the drawings and models they had studied so carefully back in New York, in the War Ministry Office. Huge it was, huge and stark, black towers rising up against the sky, incredibly thin columns of ancient metal, columns that had stood wind and sun for centuries. Around the City was a wall of stone, red stone, immense bricks that had been lugged there and fitted into place by slaves of the early Martian dynasties, under the whiplash of the first great Kings of Mars.
An ancient, sun-baked City, a City set in the middle of a wasted plain, beyond groves of dead trees, a City seldom seen by Terrans--but a City studied on maps and charts in every War Office on Terra. A City that contained, for all its ancient stone and archaic towers, the ruling group of all Mars, the Council of Senior Leiters, black-clad men who governed and ruled with an iron hand.
The Senior Leiters, twelve fanatic and devoted men, black priests, but priests with flashing rods of fire, lie detectors, rocket ships, intra-s.p.a.ce cannon, many more things the Terran Senate could only conjecture about. The Senior Leiters and their subordinate Province Leiters-- Erick and the two behind him suppressed a shudder.
"We"ve got to be careful," Erick said again. "We"ll be pa.s.sing among them, soon. If they guess who we are, or what we"re here for--"
He snapped open the case he carried, glancing inside for a second. Then he closed it again, grasping the handle firmly. "Let"s go," he said. He stood up slowly. "You two come up beside me. I want to make sure you look the way you should."
Mara and Jan stepped quickly ahead. Erick studied them critically as the three of them walked slowly down the slope, onto the plain, toward the towering black spires of the City.
"Jan," Erick said. "Take hold of her hand! Remember, you"re going to marry her; she"s your bride. And Martian peasants think a lot of their brides."