Chapter 11

Right at this point there has to be a shift in the way I’ve been recording events as they happened, because what happened next took place elsewhere, while I was flat on my back in the hospital. By “what happened next” I mean ... to me and Joan personally and to Commander Littlefield and the Martian Colonization Board and everything I’d come to Mars to take cognizance of, and do my best to change for the better.

I know, I know. Ten million separate events are taking place all the time on Earth and on Mars and by no stretch of the imagination could they be thought of as an immediate part of this record. But when the threads all start to draw together and tighten about you in a destiny-altering way you have to keep the time-sequence in order and record developments as they take place. Otherwise when they become of immediate concern later on the entire picture will seem out of focus. The frame will start lengthening out and the people in the picture will be out-of-kelter also, and scattered all over the landscape. The only way you can keep them sharply in focus is to record what happens to them when it happens.

It shouldn’t be too difficult, because there’s a seeing eye that hovers over the Mars’ Colony day and night. The big Time-Space eye that records everything that takes place in the universe, so that nothing is ever really lost beyond re-capture. The past, the present and the future keep flickering, in a backward-forward way, across that immense retina, and some day a technique may be developed for running history off in reverse and you’ll see events that took place thousands of years ago as if they were happening today on a lighted screen.

So ... let’s look through that Big Eye straight down at the Mars Colony, you and I together. And remember. In this particular instance we won’t need a history-reversing gimmick at all, because what we’ll see and hear is NOW. It starts as a two-person conversation:

“John, I’m frightened. What if the insulation isn’t absolutely foolproof? What if one of those Endicott Fuel containers isn’t shielded in just the right way? Suppose the radio-active stuff inside builds up to what the nuclear physicists call critical mass and there’s an atomic explosion? Blowups have happened ... even in the Endicott Laboratories under the strictest kind of supervision.”

“Now look. There’s not the slightest danger. Do you think for one moment Endicott would take that big a risk--even though Wendel has the entire combine backed into a corner?”

“They’d take any kind of risk now, because they have no choice. John, if you were going to give me another baby you’d have given me fair warning. I could have steeled myself to endure the harshness and unfairness of it. But when you bring death home with you--”

The woman had been very pretty once. You could see that just by glancing at her. But now her face had a drawn, haggard look and her pallor was more than pronounced. It verged on grayness. Her hair was thinning and turning white and only her eyes remained lustrous, truly alive, as if all that remained of the woman she had once been had been drawn to a focus in the gaze she was training on her husband in desperate appeal.

“Why did you do it, John? You’re not just endangering your life and mine. If we didn’t have four children ... maybe I wouldn’t be talking this way.”

“I told you I was forced into it, didn’t I? Wendel is calling Endicott’s bluff. We can no longer go on buying Endicott fuel cylinders openly on margin, hundreds of them and letting all of them stay in Wendel’s custody, because we don’t really own them at all. The price goes up or the price goes down and we sell out and buy again--and we’re supposed to own four-fifths of the Endicott Combine. But there’s not a single Colonist who owns the equivalent of four or five cylinders outright. I don’t own these six cylinders. But I had to bring them home with me.”

“I just don’t understand why. It’s too complicated for me. A nuclear explosion would be much easier for me to understand.”

“All right ... I’ll go over it again. But try to listen more carefully this time. Before this big, cut-throat war started only one man suspected that one of the two competing combines might try to sell its fluid property to the Colonists on margin. They were supposed to cooperate, not compete, because it was thought that Wendel couldn’t possibly keep its nuclear generators operating without fuel. It can’t, of course, but only one man suspected that Endicott might refuse to be dwarfed by Wendel in a sharp-practice duel and fight to stay big and powerful by letting the Colonists buy and sell fuel on speculation. That would put the Colonists right in the middle, don’t you see?”

“Yes ... I do,” the woman who had once been almost beautiful said. “Thank you for giving me credit for having that much intelligence. You seem to forget that I have a fairly good memory too. We’ve gone over this a hundred times.”

“Sure we have. But it doesn’t seem to have made too deep an impression on you. You can sum it all up by saying that on paper, from day to day, it’s the Colonists who now own the Endicott Combine, or most of it. So it’s the Colonists who are carrying the battle directly to Wendel, fighting for the right to go on wildcatting, to get rich overnight or end up pauperized. It’s wildcatting in a sense, just as it was when oil instead of atomic fuel was the big prize to be fought over Earthside. When a Colonist buys Endicott fuel cylinders on margin, it’s practically the same as if he were digging an oil well in his own backyard.”