Mars is My Destination

by Frank Belknap Long

This time I didn't look, wonder or black out at intervals. I kept a tight grip on my nerves and refused to even let myself think what an impasse I'd be facing if my talk with Arms Custodian Sherwood didn't bring the kind of results I was counting on.

It's hard to maintain just one rigid mental stance when you're keeping a great many hard-to-control emotions bottled up in your mind with a clamped-down safety valve. But I didn't have to maintain the stance for long, because twenty minutes after we left the skyport the tractor rumbled to a halt before a massive, fortress-like building which stood a considerable distance from the buildings on both sides of it and was protected in its isolation by steel walls, pacing guards and a well-guarded stockpile of thermonuclear weapons.

No Wendel agent would have risked blasting away at me within three miles of that stronghold—unless he was tired of living and didn't want to see another Martian sunrise. It made me feel secure enough to stand up and descend from the tractor without making a production out of it, as if I was two-thirds convinced I'd be blown apart before I could advance twenty feet.

I neither hurried nor wasted time, just stood calmly by the tractor until I was satisfied no one who had seen us drive up—I was quite sure we were under long-range binocular scrutiny—would come striding out of the forest to question us at gunpoint. Then I nodded to Lynton, and walked straight toward the big gray building. I'd told him not to move from his seat until I came out, so there was no need to caution him further.

I can't remember at exactly what point in my approach to the high-walled gate the silver bird became a thunder-bird, or exactly how each of the three guards looked when they first caught sight of it.

I was too startled just by the way the oldest of the three, who must have been a tow-headed twelve-year-old when the first wearer of the insignia walked the streets of the Colony, stared at me, snapped to attention and grounded the heavy weapon he'd been holding slantwise across his chest with a thud. The other two guards quickly followed suit. Quite possibly they had merely taken their cue from him and didn't want to risk an official reprimand. But they certainly put on a convincing performance, as if what they feared most was a full-dress court martial. If I'd dropped down out of the sky in a golden chariot and was Apollo, maybe, or the Aztec Sun God, I couldn't have been accorded more deference.

A moment later the high steel gate opened and shut with a clang and I was on the inside, with more guards on both sides of me. I'd paused a moment, of course, to explain to the elderly guard who had first saluted me, just why I was there and whom I wanted to see.

I had an escort of six guards as I walked to the end of the first-floor corridor, and ascended a short flight of stairs and they continued to escort all the way to the door of Sherwood's office.

Some men can be jolted almost speechless by an unexpected visit and recover their composure so rapidly they seem to have retained it from the beginning. It was that way with Sherwood. He was a big man in his early forties, with close-cropped reddish hair and handsome features.

He was sparing of words, but everything he told me was in direct answer to my questions and a man who can confine himself to just giving you the information you need without wasting words is likely to be the kind of man you can depend on in an emergency.