"Suicide?" Mrs. Swaime asked, soft as a prayer.
"Must have been," Don Raffe snapped. He twisted his magazine into a club, underlining his words with thumps against his open palm. "Some weakling not worthy to stand with us in war, he was. A conscientious objector, probably." Don Raffe said "conscientious objector" exactly as he'd have said the name of a sexual perversion. "We're all going to the Capital on the Leader's business. Some of us have been called to the Leader's actual presence." He glowed pride, giving his secret away. "There is no place in the Leader's new society for weaklings. They are better where this one is, underground, dead."
"Many of us are pained by the thought of war," the Martian said. "Not in the pain of weakness, but that of pity for men lost in battle who might have grown strong in peace."
"A peace-monger!" Don Raffe's was the tone of a Puritan finding a red zuchetto under his pastor's hat. "Surely you don't expect our Leader to bear forever the insults of the Yellow Confederacy? Of course," Don Raffe's eyes widened in anticipation of delicious violence, "you men from Mars are yellow, too." The foreigner, whose skin was in fact the color of lemon-peel, smiled and made no comment.
"I wish you men wouldn't talk so much about war," Mrs. Swaime broke in. "Talking about ugly things just helps them to happen. Rafiel, my boy, is in the Continental Guard. He says we'll have no war. He says that the Confederacy is too afraid of our airpower to risk a war. Rafiel is a flier."
"Of course," Don Raffe smiled, his smile not reaching up to his eyes. "The Yellow Confederacy is so afraid of our flying defenders that we're forced to travel like moles, so as not to confuse our own radar guns. Our skies are closed to us. Everything that flies across two continents, from Tierra del Fuego to Medicine Hat, is shot from the air as an enemy. We must take to these caves for a ten-hour trip. Ten hours for a capsule to be blown from Bogota to the coast, a trip a rocket could clip off in minutes! That's why our leader will take us to war, to get back the freedom of our own blue skies." Don Raffe finished, a little breathless.
"I wonder who the poor man was," Mrs. Swaime said, ignoring him.
Miss Barrie shook her head, wondering the same thing. Without saying anything, she went back to the galley to call a surface station on the capsule's radio-telephone. While she was back there, Miss Barrie took a lamp and peered through the glass window in the rear hatch. She saw what becomes of a man caught between a pistoning capsule and its tube. After being sick, she came to tell us that the surface station had determined that we were just east of the village of Rabanan. My mental map of the route the Tube followed showed Rabanan as a dot fifteen kilometers from the nearest exit hatch. Miss Barrie smiled on courage. "A rescue party will be here before long," she assured the others. "Would anyone care for sandwiches or coffee while we wait?" Her stomach must have cringed at the thought.
"Tea would be nice," Mr. Rhinklav'n volunteered. Then he realized his blunder: tea came from Confederacy countries. "I mean coffee, of course!" he said.
"I'll help you get it ready," Mrs. Grimm said to Miss Barrie.