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_A world had collapsed around this man--a world that would never shout his praises again. The burned-out cities were still and dead, the twisted bodies and twisted souls giving him their last salute in death. And now he was alone, alone surrounded by memories, alone and waiting ..._
happy ending
_by MACK REYNOLDS and FREDRIC BROWN_
Sometimes the queerly shaped Venusian trees seemed to talk to him, but their voices were soft. They were loyal people.
There were four men in the lifeboat that came down from thespace-cruiser. Three of them were still in the uniform of the GalacticGuards.
The fourth sat in the prow of the small craft looking down at theirgoal, hunched and silent, bundled up in a greatcoat against the coolnessof space--a greatcoat which he would never need again after thismorning. The brim of his hat was pulled down far over his forehead, andhe studied the nearing shore through dark-lensed glasses. Bandages, asthough for a broken jaw, covered most of the lower part of his face.
He realized suddenly that the dark glasses, now that they had left thecruiser, were unnecessary. He slipped them off. After thecinematographic grays his eyes had seen through these lenses for solong, the brilliance of the color below him was almost like a blow. Heblinked, and looked again.
They were rapidly settling toward a shoreline, a beach. The sand was adazzling, unbelievable white such as had never been on his home planet.Blue the sky and water, and green the edge of the fantastic jungle.There was a flash of red in the green, as they came still closer, and herealized suddenly that it must be a _marigee_, the semi-intelligentVenusian parrot once so popular as pets throughout the solar system.
Throughout the system blood and steel had fallen from the sky andravished the planets, but now it fell no more.
And now this. Here in this forgotten portion of an almost completelydestroyed world it had not fallen at all.
Only in some place like this, alone, was safety for him.Elsewhere--anywhere--imprisonment or, more likely, death. There wasdanger, even here. Three of the crew of the space-cruiser knew. Perhaps,someday, one of them would talk. Then they would come for him, evenhere.
But that was a chance he could not avoid. Nor were the odds bad, forthree people out of a whole solar system knew where he was. And thosethree were loyal fools.
The lifeboat came gently to rest. The hatch swung open and he steppedout and walked a few paces up the beach. He turned and waited while thetwo spacemen who had guided the craft brought his chest out and carriedit across the beach and to the corrugated-tin shack just at the edge ofthe trees. That shack had once been a space-radar relay station. Now theequipment it had held was long gone, the antenna mast taken down. Butthe shack still stood. It would be his home for a while. A long while.The two men returned to the lifeboat preparatory to leaving.
And now the captain stood facing him, and the captain's face was a rigidmask. It seemed with an effort that the captain's right arm remained athis side, but that effort had been ordered. No salute.
The captain's voice, too, was rigid with unemotion. "Number One ..."
"Silence!" And then, less bitterly. "Come further from the boat beforeyou again let your tongue run loose. Here." They had reached the shack.
"You are right, Number ..."
"No. I am no longer Number One. You must continue to think of me as_Mister_ Smith, your cousin, whom you brought here for the reasons youexplained to the under-officers, before you surrender your ship. If you_think_ of me so, you will be less likely to slip in your speech."
"There is nothing further I can do--Mister Smith?"
"Nothing. Go now."
"And I am ordered to surrender the--"
"There are no orders. The war is over, lost. I would suggest thought asto what spaceport you put into. In some you may receive humanetreatment. In others--"
The captain nodded. "In others, there is great hatred. Yes. That isall?"
"That is all. And, Captain, your running of the blockade, your securingof fuel _en route_, have constituted a deed of high valor. All I cangive you in reward is my thanks. But now go. Goodbye."
"Not goodbye," the captain blurted impulsively, "but _hasta la vista_,_auf Wiedersehen_, _until the day_ ... you will permit me, for the lasttime to address you and salute?"
The man in the greatcoat shrugged. "As you will."
Click of heels and a salute that once greeted the Caesars, and later thepseudo-Aryan of the 20th Century, and, but yesterday, he who was nowknown as _the last of the dictators_. "Farewell, Number One!"
"Farewell," he answered emotionlessly.
* * * * *
Mr. Smith, a black dot on the dazzling white sand, watched the lifeboatdisappear up into the blue, finally into the haze of the upperatmosphere of Venus. That eternal haze that would always be there tomock his failure and his bitter solitude.
The slow days snarled by, and the sun shone dimly, and the _marigees_screamed in the early dawn and all day and at sunset, and sometimesthere were the six-legged _baroons_, monkey-like in the trees, thatgibbered at him. And the rains came and went away again.
At nights there were drums in the distance. Not the martial roll ofmarching, nor yet a threatening note of savage hate. Just drums, manymiles away, throbbing rhythm for native dances or exorcising, perhaps,the forest-night demons. He assumed these Venusians had theirsuperstitions, all other races had. There was no threat, for him, inthat throbbing that was like the beating of the jungle's heart.
Mr. Smith knew that, for although his choice of destinations had been ahasty choice, yet there had been time for him to read the availablereports. The natives were harmless and friendly. A Terran missionary hadlived among them some time ago--before the outbreak of the war. Theywere a simple, weak race. They seldom went far from their villages; thespace-radar operator who had once occupied the shack reported that hehad never seen one of them.
So, there would be no difficulty in avoiding the natives, nor danger ifhe did encounter them.
Nothing to worry about, except the bitterness.
Not the bitterness of regret, but of defeat. Defeat at the hands of thedefeated. The damned Martians who came back after he had driven themhalfway across their damned arid planet. The Jupiter SatelliteConfederation landing endlessly on the home planet, sending their vastarmadas of spacecraft daily and nightly to turn his mighty cities intodust. In spite of everything; in spite of his score of ultra-vicioussecret weapons and the last desperate efforts of his weakened armies,most of whose men were under twenty or over forty.
The treachery even in his own army, among his own generals and admirals.The turn of Luna, that had been the end.
His people would rise again. But not, now after Armageddon, in hislifetime. Not under him, nor another like him. The last of thedictators.
Hated by a solar system, and hating it.
It would have been intolerable, save that he was alone. He had foreseenthat--the need for solitude. Alone, he was still Number One. Thepresence of others would have forced recognition of his miserablychanged status. Alone, his pride was undamaged. His ego was intact.
* * * * *
The long days, and the _marigees'_ screams, the slithering swish of thesurf, the ghost-quiet movements of the _baroons_ in the trees and theraucousness of their shrill voices. Drums.
Those sounds, and those alone. But perhaps silence would have beenworse.
For the times of silence were louder. Times he would pace the beach atnight and overhead would be the roar of jets and rockets, the ships thathad roared over New Albuquerque, his capitol, in those last days beforehe had fled. T
he crump of bombs and the screams and the blood, and theflat voices of his folding generals.
Those were the days when the waves of hatred from the conquered peoplesbeat upon his country as the waves of a stormy sea beat upon crumblingcliffs. Leagues back of the battered lines, you could _feel_ that hateand vengeance as a tangible thing, a thing that thickened the air, thatmade breathing difficult and talking futile.
And the spacecraft, the jets, the rockets, the damnable rockets, moreevery day and every night, and ten coming for every one shot down.Rocket ships raining hell from the sky, havoc and chaos and the end ofhope.
And then he knew that he had been hearing another sound, hearing itoften and long at a time. It was a voice that shouted invective andranted hatred and glorified the steel might of his planet and thedestiny of a man and a people.
It was his own voice, and it beat back the waves from the white shore,it stopped their wet encroachment upon this, his domain. It screamedback at the _baroons_ and they were silent. And at
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