Chapter 4

There was only one small window in Trilling’s office. But I could see that the sky outside was still bright with stars, and the glimmer of the ceiling lamp made the metal surface above us seem to fall away and dissolve into a much wider expanse of star-studded space.

The ceiling-mirrored image of the lamp itself looked like the Sun, blazing in noonday brightness directly overhead and out beyond were galaxies and super-galaxies strung like beads on a wire across the great curve of the universe.

It was just an illusion, of course. You could see the same thing in the light-mirroring depths of a glass of wine, if you stared hard enough. But for an instant it seemed to bring bigness, vastness right into the room with us.

I was conscious of the silence again, lengthening, hanging heavy between us, as if we’d each said too much, or possibly ... not quite enough.

Then Trilling bent and removed something else from his desk. I couldn’t see what it was until he set it down directly in front of me, because it was much smaller than the midget tape recorder and his hand covered it.

A flat metal box, wafer-thin, doesn’t provide much scope for speculation, and I was pretty sure that the object inside was a tiny metal precision instrument or a watch or a medal even before he said: “This should make Joan change her mind, Ralph!” and snapped the box open.

The insignia caught and held the light, a two-inch silver hawk with its wings outspread. The white lining of the box made it stand out, as if it were flying through fleecy clouds high in the sky, and symboling in its flight far more than just the elevation of one man to the highest command post the Martian Colonization Board had the authority to bestow.

The significance of that finely-wrought, seldom-worn silver bird was not lost on me. In the maze of a hundred legends, a hundred witness-confirmed stories of triumph and disappointment, of heroic progress and tragic back-tracking, it had remained an important link between Earthside expectations and what was actually taking place on Mars.

Only one man could wear it at any one time, and only four men had worn it since the establishment of the colony. All four were dead now, their gravestones a white gleaming on the red desert sand a few miles north of the colony.

“Well, Ralph?” Trilling said.

I tried hard to maintain my composure, to say just the right thing, because I’d lived long enough to know there are depths beyond depths to some emotions that can’t be put into words. Attempt to talk the way you feel, and you’re sure to sound a little ridiculous. I was only certain of one thing. No man could wear that insignia and not feel, resting upon his shoulders, a responsibility so tremendous that whatever pride he might take in it would have to be tempered by humility--if he wanted to go on wearing it for long.

Trilling seemed aware of what was passing through my mind, for he made it easy for me. He simply smiled, snapped the box shut with a briskness that was almost casual, and handed it to me.

“You’ve got real massive military prestige now, Ralph,” he said. “Right at the moment the Board would be gravely concerned if you wore that insignia in public. But there’s nothing to prevent you from wearing it in the privacy of your own home. Later on the Board may decide you can accomplish more by coming right out and letting the colonists know there’s a lion in the streets who intends to do more than just roar. A safe, protective kind of lion--dangerous only to over-ambitious men with destructive ideas.”

I started to reply but he waved me to silence. “Hold on, Ralph--let me finish. You won’t be wearing that insignia in public straight off. But I hope you’ll have enough good sense to make the best possible use of it to overcome the first really big obstacle in your path.”

He nodded. “It will be a kind of blackmail, in a way--morally reprehensible. You’ll be taking advantage of something it isn’t in a woman’s nature to resist. But you have no choice. You’ve got to go to Mars and if you went alone you’d be about as useful to us as a celibate kangaroo, all packaged and ready to be sent on a journey to the taxidermist.”

He seemed to realize it wouldn’t have to be quite that drastic, for he grimaced wryly. “All right, all right. You could go out and find another woman and I probably could talk the Board into being the opposite of stuffy about it. But I happen to know what kind of man you are, and how you feel about Joan. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure she’s the only woman in the world for you.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I had the insignia in my inner breast pocket, and I knew that there were few obstacles it couldn’t blast away on Earth or on Mars, if I kept remembering what it symbolized with Joan at my side.

I went out into the cool night again, past that long tremendous building with just one of its floors ablaze, past the big sky ships looming like sentinel ghosts on their launching pads, past winking lights and speeding cars and pedestrians walking slowly and something inside of me made me feel I’d undergone a kind of sea change, and could face whatever the future might hold without grabbing for a life-line that didn’t exist.

It was a good way to feel. A man had to sink or swim without having a life-line thrown to him--if he hoped to live long enough to change things around in an important way on Mars. He had to keep his head and breast the raging currents with the sturdiest kind of overhand strokes, or be drawn down into the undertow and battered senseless against the rocks that lined the shoreline.

The change must have shown a little on the surface, in the set of my jaw or just the way I was walking, because no less than three pedestrians turned to stare at me as I went striding past them on my way to the New Chicago Underground.

I was almost at the northern entrance of the big, tree-lined square directly opposite the Administration Building when it hit me--the memory-recall, the swift emergence from its cubby-hole deep in my mind of the narrow brush I’d had with Death and hadn’t even discussed with Trilling.

It had been a mistake not to discuss it, because it concerned the Board as much as it did me. Someone who knew about the insignia--or had made a shrewd guess as to just how big a job was awaiting me on Mars--had wanted me dead. The attempt on my life took on a much larger, more crucial dimension when viewed in that light.

There were three hundred million people in the United States, and if I’d been just a private citizen, with no more than my own safety at stake, I could have lost myself in that immense ocean of humanity for a week or a month and gained a brief respite. There are plenty of ways you can protect yourself against a surprise attempt on your life, if you have the time to take safety precautions. When there’s a would-be assassin at large who is dead set on measuring you for a coffin you have to work the problem out carefully, with a minimum of risk.

It takes skill and psychological insight, but it can be done. You’ve just got to remember that an assassin is never quite normal. Even when a socio-political motivation is the governing passion of his life you’re one jump ahead of him the instant you’ve figured out exactly how his mind works.

In fact, one of those safety precautions could have been protecting me as I crossed the square, if I hadn’t let my stubborn pride stand in the way. Why hadn’t I asked Trilling to provide me with armed protection?

Two alert bodyguards, trailing me on the street and down into the Underground and standing watch outside my apartment all night long--and staying fifty paces behind me until the Mars’ rocket zero-count ended and the big sky ship took off with a roar ... would have given the Board the kind of reassurance they had a right to expect.