He sat down and wiped slowly at his puffy but somehow powerful face.
The slim and calm Schauffer turned, got a bottle out of the liquor cabinet, poured four drinks. "We've worked long and hard," he said. "A toast to a well earned victory, gentlemen."
They drank.
Michelson was thinking, not of a well earned victory, but of retirement and rest. Forty years he had worked. For victory over the Eurasians. After that, for victory over the Martians. He wanted to sleep late, fish and rest in the sun.
"Three tons of G-Agent," Engstrand said softly.
The rocket would hit Mars. Countless other rockets would fly out of it, each directed, each exploding and casting out its deadly sprays and gases of the G-agent.
"Within an hour," Morgenson said, "after the rocket hits, there won't be a bug, a germ, a piece of lichen left alive. Unless somebody sends it there, there won't be anything alive on Mars again for a long time."
"I'd still like to know what kind of life it is," Schauffer said.
Michelson looked at the floor. "Now we'll never know."
"But we'll stay alive to speculate about it, and some day maybe they'll figure how to get a man across space. And then we'll know what died up there."