"Hang on!" I said.
I picked him up. He groaned as I lifted him and carried him up the ramp and into the ship. Inside, Gail and I stripped the suit away from the wound. The bullet had struck a rib in the suit, glanced to a rib bone and then lodged in the muscles of his shoulders. It was a nasty wound, made by a flattened bullet, but it was not the kind of an injury that would prove to be fatal. We applied antiseptics and removed the bullet.
While Axel rested, I took the digging machinery which we had used to construct the moat and covered Spartan's and Joel's remains and the bodies of dead Martians. I found many large rubies and sapphires—unusual stones, but not six billion dollars' worth. Whatever profit came from the trip would be in scientific knowledge.
Gail and I erected a small cairn over the spot where Spartan lay. It was not to Spartan alone, but to four men, including Willy Zinder, who had died in order that our trip to Mars might succeed. I objected to Spartan's being listed as a hero, but Gail said, "It's not really him, Bill Drake. It's what he stood for."
"Murder, egotism, selfishness?"
"He was a human being," she replied. "The monument is to humanity. There are good human beings, bad ones and the strong."
"It's hard to swallow," I said. "But including him doesn't detract from the others."
People, I decided, shouldn't be judged by specific, isolated acts, but by the sum of their contributions. Besides, not many folks will go to Mars to see the cairn—at least, not for a long, long time—even if the Martians leave it standing.
We didn't stay long on Mars because we didn't know for sure if we'd put a big enough scare into the Martians to keep them away permanently. Besides, as I told Axel, "They might bring the bomb next time."
We never learned if Mars still had the bomb. They'd had it once, but they were now decadent, far below what they had been in ages probably long before the first ape man came down from a tree to walk on his hind legs. Those cities were evidence of past glories. But except for the barges on Chalus, we saw no means of locomotion. They must have had tools, but we never saw them. And the only art we saw was a statue in a ruined city. Had man come to Mars a million years ago, who knows what might have been here to greet him?