"Among the first to come from Earth were the World Government commissions. C.E.A.—exploration and assessment. C.E.D.—economic development. C.I.I.—industrial integration. C.H.W. came later—health and welfare. And so did C.I.E.—information and education.
"It all worked very smoothly. Mars, you remember, was the goal of space-flight for half a century, ever since the pioneer hop to the icy rock of the moon; and the planning commission had it all set up, in advance, from Martian Relations right down to War Planning (top secret in the "if necessary" category).
"But Earth muffed it, and good. The Rockheads of Mars who met the spaceship, and whose delegations worked with the Earth emissaries, were intelligent people, true—but they were the fascists of Mars. What World Government didn't know, and couldn't have known, was that there had been a military revolution on the red planet a short ten years before the first spaceship landed, and that in that revolution the democratic government of the planet was overthrown and its leaders killed or banished!"
Scott Warren took an imaginary sip of water and paced up and down his imaginary lecture platform. He pointed a finger at his imaginary classroom.
The big shots of W.G. had found out about it, of course. It didn't take them too long. Only about two years went by before they were convinced of what had happened, and they had had suspicion of it long before. But it took W.G. twenty years to do anything about it. Twenty years, mind you, when the average lifespan of a Martian is forty.
Of course there were reasons. Good, sound, diplomatic reasons. In the first place, it would have been embarrassing to act sooner. There had been such hoopla and ballyhoo during the first negotiations with the Rockheads, so many grandiose statements and telepix of interplanetary amity, that to have confessed then would have been diplomatic suicide—or so they thought. So the fiction had been maintained. Not only maintained, but magnified and distorted.
So bad did the distortion become that the people back home had almost no inkling of the difficulties in negotiation, of the many concessions Earth had to make to Mars' totalitarian rulers. They didn't know how many insults the Earth envoys had to swallow, or of the innumerable conferences that ended in deadlock because of the Rockheads' impossible demands—demands made to impress their own subject people with their might—or of the W.G. investigators who were imprisoned because they had stumbled across some particularly noisome secret of the corrupt Martian government.
Scott was getting quite wound up. He was pointing a finger again when the door opened. His finger paralyzed in midair.
The thing that entered was taller than he. The entire upper half of it was a face. An idiotically-grinning, white-toothed face. Its eyes were outlined in black and its lips were an oversized red. A caricature of a woman's face, with a great mass of blonde hair coiled fantastically above.