The General’s eyebrows rose a little. He pondered Troon for a moment, and then smiled slightly.
‘I see. I have been a little puzzled. Your officers are still under that impression?’
Troon leaned forward to tap his cigarette ash into a tray.
‘Perhaps I don’t quite understand you, General.’
‘Don’t you, Commander? I am speaking of your value as a fighting unit.’
Their eyes met steadily for some seconds. Troon shrugged.
‘How high would you place our value as a fighting unit, General?’
General Budorieff shook his head gently.
‘Not very high, I am afraid, Commander,’ he said, and then, with a touch of apology in his manner, continued: ‘Before the last attack on our station you had dispatched nine medium missiles. I do not know whether you have fired any more since then, therefore the total striking power at your disposal may be either three medium missiles - or none at all.’
Troon turned, and looked out of the window towards the camouflaged missile-pits. His voice shook a little as he asked: ‘May I inquire how long you have known this General?’ Gently the General said:
‘About six months.’
Troon put his hand over his eyes. For a minute or two no one spoke. At length the General said:
‘Will you permit me to extend my sincere congratulations, Commander Troon? You must have played it magnificently.’
Troon, looking up, saw that he was genuine.
‘I shall have to tell them now,’ he said. ‘It’s going to hurt their pride. They thought of everything but that.’
‘It would, I think, be better to tell them now,’ agreed Budorieff, ‘but it is not necessary for them to know that
we
knew.’
‘Thank you, General. That will at least do something to diminish the farcical element for them.’
‘Do not take it too hard, Commander. Bluff and counterbluff are, after all, an important part of strategy - and to have maintained such a bluff as that for almost twenty years is, if I may say so, masterly. I have been told that our people simply refused to believe our agents’ first reports on it.
‘Besides, what was our chief purpose here - yours, mine, and the Americans? Not to
make
war. We were a threat which, it was hoped, would help to
prevent
war - and one fancies that all of us here did do something to postpone it. Once fighting was allowed to start, it could make really very little difference whether our missiles were added to the general destruction or not. We have all known in our hearts that this war, if it should come, would not be a kind that anyone could win.
‘For my part, I was greatly relieved when I received this report on your armament. The thought that I might one day be required to destroy your quite defenceless station was not pleasant. And consider how it turns out. It is simply because your weapons were a bluff that your station still exists: and because it exists, that we still have a foothold on the moon. That is important.’
Troon looked up.
‘You think so, too, General? Not very many people do.’ ‘There are not, at any time, many people who have - what do you call it in English? - Divine discontent? Vision? Most men like to be settled among their familiar things, with a notice on the door: “Do Not Disturb.” They would still have that notice hanging outside their caves if it were not for the few discontented men. Therefore it is
important
that we are still here,
important
that we do not lose our gains. You understand?’
Troon nodded. He smiled faintly.
‘I understand, General. I understand very well. Why did I fight for a Moon Station? Why did I come here, and stay here? To hold on to it so that one day I could say to a younger man: “Here it is. We’ve got you this far. Now go ahead. The stars are before you ...” Yes, I understand. But what I have had to wonder lately is whether the time will ever come for me to say it....’
General Budorieff nodded. He looked out, long and speculatively, at the pearl-blue Earth.
‘Will there be any rocket-ships left? Will there be anyone left to bring them?’ he murmured.
Troon looked in the same direction. With the pale earth- light shining in his face he felt a sudden conviction.
‘They’ll come,’ he said. ‘Some of them will hear the thin gnat-voices crying. ... They’ll have to come. ... And, one day, they’ll go on...’
The calendar-clock tells me that, at home, it is breakfast-time on the 24th of June. There’s no reason, as far as I can see, why that should not be so: if it is, I must have been on Mars for exactly ten weeks. Quite a time; and I wonder how many more weeks to follow...?
One day, other people will come here and find, at least, the ship. I ought to have tried to keep a regular log, but it did not seem worth while - and, anyway, it wouldn’t have been regular for long. I have been - well, I have not been quite myself. .,. But now that I have faced facts I am calmer, almost resigned; and I find myself feeling that it would be more creditable not to leave simply a mystery. Someone is sure to come one day; better not to leave him to unravel it by inference alone, and perhaps wrongly. There are some things I want to say, and some I ought to say - besides, it will give me something to occupy my mind. That is rather important to me; I don’t want to lose my hold on my mind again if I can help it. Funny, it is the early things that stick: there used, I remember, to be an old drawing-room song to impress the ladies: ‘Let me like a soldier fall! ‘
... Hammy, of course, and yet...
But no need to hurry. There is, I think, still some time to go. ... I have come out on the other side of something, and now I find in the thought of death a calmness; it is so much less frightening that the thought of life in this place.
... My regrets have turned outwards - the chief of them is for the distress my Isabella must now be feeling, and for the anxieties I must leave her to face alone as George and Anna grow up....
I do not know who is going to read what I am writing. One supposes that it will be some member of an expedition that knows all about us, up to the time of our landing. We gave the bearings of our landing-place on the radio, so there should be no great difficulty in finding the ship where she now lies. But one cannot be sure. Possibly the message was not received: there may be reasons why a long time will pass before she is found. It could even be that she will be discovered accidentally by someone who never heard of us.... So, after all, an account may serve better than a log. ...
I introduce myself: Trunho. Capitão Geoffrey Montgomery Trunho, of the Space Division of the Skyforce of Brazil, lately of Avenida Oito de Maio 138, Pretario, Minas Gerais, Brazil, America do Sul. Citizen of the Estados Unidos do Brasil, aged twenty-eight years. Navigator, and sole- surviving crew-member, of the E.U.B. Spacevessel,
Figurão
.
I am Brasileiro by birth. My grandfather, and my father, were formerly British subjects, and became Brazilian by naturalization in the year 2056, at which time they changed the name from Troon to Trunho, for phonetic convenience.
Our family has a space tradition. My great-great-grand- father was the famous Ticker Troon - the one who rode the rocket, at the building of the first space-station. My great-grandfather was Commander of the British Moon Station at the time of the Great Northern War, and it is likely that my grandfather would have followed him there later, but for the war. It so happened, however, that the war broke out during my grandfather’s term of groundwork at the British Space-House - or, to be more accurate, at one of the Space-House’s secret and deep-dug operational centres; and it happened, further, that the actual outbreak of hostilities occurred when he was off-base. He was, in fact, on leave in Jamaica, where he had taken his wife (my grandmother) and my father, then aged six, on a visit to his mother’s recently bought house.
Many books have been written since the event, showing that that war was inevitable, and that the high councils knew it to be inevitable; but my grandfather always denied that. He maintained that on the highest levels, no less than in the public mind, it had come to be thought of as the-war-that-would-never-happen.
Our leaders may have been foolish; they may, in a long state of deadlock, have been too easily lulled: but they were not criminal lunatics, and they knew what a war must mean. There were, of course, incidents that caused periodical waves of panic, but however troublesome they may have been to trade and to the stock-markets, they were not taken very seriously on the higher political levels, and from a Service point of view were even felt not to be a bad thing. Had the never-happen attitude been quite unperturbed there would, without doubt, have been cuts in Service allocations, technical progress would have suffered in consequence, and too much of a falling-behind could conceivably mean that the Other Fellows would have gained enough ascendancy and superiority in armament to make them think a quick war worth risking.
In the opinion of his own Department, my grandfather asserted, an actual outbreak seemed no more likely than it had seemed two years, or five years, or ten years before. Their work was going on as usual, organizing, reorganizing, and superseding in the light of new discoveries; playing a kind of chess in which one’s pieces were lost, not to the opponent, but to obsolescence. There never has been, according to him, any conclusive proof that the war was not touched off by some megalomaniac, or even by accident. It had long been axiomatic on both sides that, should missiles arrive, the form was to get one’s own missiles into the air as soon as possible, and hit the enemy’s potential as fast and as hard as one could - and, in 2044, there was little that could not be considered a part of his potential, from his factories to the morale of his people and the health of his crops.
So, one night, my grandfather went to sleep in a world where peace was no more restive than it had been for years; and in the morning he awoke in one that had been at war for four hours, with casualties already high in the millions.
All over North America, all over Europe, all over the Russian Empire there were flashes that paled the sun, heatwaves that seared and set on fire whole countrysides. Monstrous plumes were writhing up into the sky, shedding ashes, dust, and death.
My grandfather was immediately obsessed by his duty - his obligation to get back somehow to his post, which was that section of the British Service located in northern Canada. For two days he spent nearly all his time in Kingston, badgering the authorities and anyone else he could find.
There were plenty of aircraft there, plenty of all kinds, large airlines, crowded freighters, small owner-flown machines, but they were all coming from the north; most of them pausing only to refuel, and then fleeing on, like migrating birds, to the south. Nothing took off for the north.
Communications were chaotic. No one could tell what fields were still available, still less how long they would remain so. Pilots resolutely refused to take the risk, even for large sums, and the airport authorities backed them up by refusing to sanction any northward flights with an impregnability against which my grandfather, and numbers of anxious United States citizens, battered in vain.
On the evening of the second day, however, he succeeded in buying someone out of a seat on a south-bound aircraft, and set off with the intention of making a circuit via Port Natal, in Brazil, Dakar, and Lisbon, and so to England where he hoped to be able to find a Service machine to get him to Canada. In point of fact, he arrived at Freetown, Sierra Leone, about eight days later, and got no further. News there was still scarce and contradictory, but there was enough of it to convince not merely pilots, but everyone else, that even if an aircraft should safely get through, a landing almost anywhere in Europe would mean delayed, if not immediate, suicide.
It took him two months to get home again to Jamaica, by which time, of course, the Northern War was almost history.
It was, however, such recent history that the non-combatants were still numbed by the shock. The near-paralysis of fright which had held everyone outside the war-zone for a month was relaxed, but people had still not fully got over their astonishment at finding themselves and their homes surviving undamaged. Still persisting, too, was that heightened awareness which made each new, untroubled day seem a gracious gift, rather than a right. There was a dazed pause, a sense of coming-to again before the worries of life swept back.
And all too soon the worries were plentiful - not only over radiation, active dusts, contaminated water, diseases threatening both flora and fauna, and such immediate matters; but also over the whole problem of re-orientation in a world where most of a hemisphere had become a malignant, unapproachable desert...
Jamaica, it was clear, was not going to have much to offer except exports for which there was virtually no market. It could sustain itself; one might be able to go on living there, with much diminished standards, but it was certainly no place to build a new life.
My grandmother was in favour of a move to South Africa where her father was chairman of the board of a small aircraft company. She argued that my grandfather’s knowledge and experience would make him a useful addition to the board, and that with most of the great aircraft factories of the world now destroyed, a tremendous growth of the company was inevitable.
My grandfather was unenthusiastic, but he did go as far as to pay a visit there to talk the matter over with his father-in-law. He returned unconverted, however. He was not, he said, at all taken with the place; there was something about it that made him uneasy. My grandmother, though disappointed, refrained from pressing the matter - which turned out to be fortunate, for a little over a year later her father, and all her relatives there, were among the millions who died in the great African Rising.
But before that-took place my grandfather had made his own decision.
‘China,’ he said, ‘is not out, but she has been very badly mauled and reduced - it will take her a long time to recover. Japan has suffered out of proportion to the material damage there because of the concentration of her population. India is weakened, as usual, by her internal troubles. Africa has been kept backward. Australia is the centre of the surviving British, and may one day become an important nation - but it will take time. South America, however, is intact, and looks to me to be the natural focus of world power in the immediate future; and that means either Brazil or the Argentine. I should be very much surprised indeed if it were to turn out to be Argentina. So we shall go to Brazil.’