There were no more men in space. The dark ships strode the ways between the worlds, lightless, silent, needing no human mind to guide them. The R-ships, carrying the freight and the passengers, keeping order, keeping the law, taking the Pax Terrae to the limits of the Solar System and guarding there the boundary which was not now ever to be crossed.
No more men in space. No strong hands bridling the rockets, no eyes looking outward to the stars. But still upon the wide-flung worlds of Sol were old men who remembered, and young men who could dream.
The shadow of the sandstone pillar lay black upon the ground. Kirby slipped into it and stood still, looking back the way he had just come. Wilson stopped too, in the shadow, asking nervously, "Nobody's following us, are they?"
Kirby shook his head. "I just wanted another look at the place. I don't know why, I've seen it often enough."
He had not been running. Neither he nor Wilson had been doing anything outwardly unusual, and yet Kirby was soaked with sweat and his heart was pounding. He could hear Wilson's heavy breathing, and he knew it was the same with him.
"I'm scared," said Wilson. "Why should I be scared now?" He was a young man, long and narrow, with very strong, very sensitive hands.
"The last time," Kirby said. "We only need a few more hours now, after all these years."
He let his voice trail off, as though he had been going to say more and decided not to, and Wilson muttered, "You're worried about March."
"He's been taking too much interest in my department lately. I wish I knew—"
"Yeah, Kirby, let's go."
"Take it easy. A minute more isn't going to matter."
The sandstone pillar, linked by chains to a line of other pillars, marked the westward limit of the section reserved for the fliers of spaceport personnel. Behind Kirby, three miles away, the great crystal dome of Kahora rose up from the desert, glowing splendidly with light. Under its protective shell the pastel city bloomed like a hothouse garden, bathed in warmed and sweetened air. Kahora was the Trade City for Mars, where the business of a planet was done in luxury and comfort.
Out here where Kirby stood the everlasting wind blew thin and dry across the wastes of half a world, edged with bitter dust, and the only light there was at hand came from the swift low moons. But the spaceport that served Kahora blazed with a white glare, and the control towers were tipped with crimson stars.
Kirby stood in the shadow and looked at this place where he had spent the years of his living burial since they barred the rockets from space. And now that he was through with it, now that he was never going to see it again, the hatred that he had for it could be let free. It was a long hate, and old hate. It had lived in him like a corrosive acid, poisoning everything he did or thought, poisoning the daytime and the nighttimes and even the times he spent with Shari, which were the only good ones. He wanted to be rid of it.
Wilson muttered again about going, but Kirby didn't hear him. He was looking at the shops and sheds and multifarious buildings of the port, and in particular at the one called Parts and Supplies, which had been his personal prison. He was looking at the looming forest of towers that controlled the dark ships, that guided them back and forth between the worlds.
He was looking at the ships.
They lay in their massive cradles, ranged in rows according to type and size. The R-40 heavy freighters, the R-10 mixed carriers, the R-3 planetary patrol ships with the stings in their tails. Men worked over them. Cargo cranes rolled and rumbled, and the lights blazed. The ships lay, cold, lofty, soulless, enduring the probing of experts into their sensitive electronic brains because they must, but obedient to nothing and answering no master but the invisible impulses of beam and power.
Above all else, Kirby hated the ships.
He was older than Wilson. He could remember Kahora Post as it had been when the rockets roared and thundered across it. He could remember the barrooms that were around it, crowded with men from every world, speaking a thousand tongues. He could remember the spacemen's talk, and how some of them were already chafing at the barrier of Pluto's orbit, finding the System too small for them and looking hungrily at the stars beyond.
He could remember. He was a rocket man. He had seen every port in the System, or most of them, before he was twenty, and at twenty-six he had his master's ticket and was waiting for a ship. He had hated the dark robots then, because some day they were going to be a threat to trade. After their initial cost, a manned rocket could not compete with them. But that threat seemed a long way off.
He had his master's ticket, and presently he would have a ship, and by the time the robots got themselves established the way would be open to the stars and a whole new era would begin.
Kirby, hating in the shadow of the sandstone pillar, thought, "But it didn't happen that way. The new era never had a chance, because the old eras caught up to us first. The wars, the booms, the busts. One war, one bust too many."
And almost before anyone realized it, there were no more men in space.
Wilson shuffled his feet in the blowing dust. The stolen things were weighing heavy in his pockets, and he had still to face his wife. He said, "Let's go."
Kirby looked at the dark ships. "It was the planners that did it. The legislate-and-regulate, safety-and-security boys. From the cradle to the grave without one moment of personal risk. Well, they had what the people wanted right then, and maybe you can't blame them. They'd had a hard time of it. But—"
But damn them all eternally, even so. Because of them all the Stabilization Acts had passed. Trade Stabilization. Population Stabilization. Crop Stabilization. The busy minds of the experts working. Take the manned ships out of space and there can't be any trade wars or any other kinds of wars. The worlds can't get at each other to fight. Stop expansion outward to the stars and eliminate the risks, the economic upsets that attend every major change, the unpredictable rise and shift of power. Stabilize. Regulate. Control. We may lose a few unimportant liberties but think what well gain. Security for all, and for all time to come! And the dark ships of the Government will keep you safe.
"Inventories," said Kirby bitterly. "Do you know how many millions of inventories I've made out in that stinking Part's department?" Suddenly he laughed. "I wonder if they'll ever know how much I managed to hook out of those inventories?"
"Look," said Wilson. "Please. Let's get out of here."
Kirby shrugged and followed him. The fliers were not far away, small competent descendants of the helicopter, designed for family use like the old-fashioned automobile, and just as planet-bound. Wilson opened the door, but he didn't get in. A sudden reluctance seemed to have overtaken him.
"I thought you were in a hurry," Kirby said.
"Yeah. Damn it, Kirby, what am I going to tell her?"
"The truth."
"Oh, lord. She'll—I don't know what she'll do."
"All over Mars men are having the same trouble. Bull it through."
Wilson said sourly, "It's easy for you to talk."
"I've got my own troubles."
"I suppose so. But you have kids, Kirby. That's the thing. That's what she'll really blow her top about. And Kirby, you know, she's got a lot on her side."
"Listen, Wils. You knew you were going to have to do this from the beginning. It's tough on everybody, but it's too late to back out now. You believe in what you're doing, don't you?"
"Sure. Yes. But—"
"Then go ahead. Some day your wife will come around to seeing that what you did was best."
Wilson said, "I hope I live that long." He climbed into his flier and slammed the door. Kirby stepped back. The rotors started to whir and then the small craft lifted straight up and skidded away toward the suburbs of Kahora. Kirby smiled crookedly and shook his head. He got into his own flier and took off. It ran smoothly by itself on autopilot, and he occupied his time by removing carefully from his pockets several dozen transistors he had just stolen from the government and placing them in a hidden compartment of his own designing.
By the time he was finished, the blazing dome of Kahora stood like a crystal wall on his left, showing through it a distorted vision of pastel buildings and gardens of many colors. Kirby glanced at it once, disinterested. It had always seemed to him a smothering place, where everything was soft and artificial, including the people. Like most of the resettled population, he lived outside the dome.
The suburbs were as pleasant as planning and effort could make them. Built long and low of the native clay, the houses suited the landscape and the cruel climate. Native desert growths filled out the dry gardens. They were not lovely, but they had an exotic charm of their own, much like the Earthly cactus and the Joshua tree. Kirby had not minded the place itself, only the law that required him to live there and forbade him to leave for any length of time this particular area of Mars.
The populations of the Solar System had been carefully figured to the last decimal point and portioned out among the planets according to food- and employment-potential, so that nowhere was there a scarcity or an overplus, and nobody's individual whim was allowed to upset the balance. If you wanted to change your residence from one sector or one world to another, the red tape involved was so enormous that men had been known to die of old age while waiting for a permit.
However, within the assigned sector you could move where you wanted to, and so almost the whole population of the suburban settlement worked and schemed and sweated and toiled to get inside the dome. It was a status symbol, a matter of prestige, even more than it was a matter of the undeniably greater comfort. With some it became an obsession. Kirby remembered that when his wife had succumbed to a mutant virus that swept the colony, his first feeling had been relief that he would no longer have to hear about Kahora.
If she had lived, he thought, this would have been easy. I wouldn't even have said good-bye. But now there is Shari, and that makes it not easy.
He remembered what he had said to Wilson. Be brave and bull it through, make her come whether she wants to or not. Good, stern, sensible advice. Only he himself was not going to take it, and Wilson had known he was not going to take it. He felt cowardly and ashamed, thinking of the men all over Mars who were going through the same ordeal as Wilson, trying to explain their patent lunacy to shocked and irate wives. And he was not going to say a word to Shari. Not even, out loud, good-bye.
The flier passed over the streets of the suburb where he had lived once, long ago, but he did not see them. There was a low ridge beyond the suburb, and on the other side was the Martian town, the very ancient town that had been the original Kahora, and as great a city in its day as the new one was now. From the air one could see how shrunken it was, with wide abandoned fringes that crumbled slowly away into nothingness. The ruins of the King City, the old battlemented stronghold of the rulers, stood up dark and lonely against the racing moons, and at its battered feet there curved the deep-gouged bed of a navigable river, dry and choked with dust.
Kirby set his flier down beside a flat-roofed house on a winding street. He went inside. And she was waiting for him.
He had never come home in all these years that she had not been waiting for him, no matter what the hour, and almost always she was smiling. Tonight she was not smiling. Tonight she was not as she had ever been before, and her eyes, the color of smoky topaz set a little obliquely in a high-boned face, held a look that he had never seen, a look that did not come into the eyes of the Earth women, a fey look, wild and somber. It made Kirby shiver. He started to speak, to ask her the reason for her strangeness, but she came to him swiftly and said, in the old High Martian,
"Beloved, there is danger, close behind you."
Kirby's heart began to pound again. He reached out and caught her, almost roughly, her strong slim shoulder under his hand. "Danger, Shari? What do you mean danger?" She was not even dressed in her customary way. She wore a coverall and boots, as though she might be planning a long trip into the desert. "What's all this? What are you—?"
"I'm going with you," she said.
Kirby had told her nothing. No single word had ever been said between them. "Going with me?" he said, and stared at her, not believing. "You're talking nonsense. What's the matter with you?"
"You weren't even going to say good-bye." Now she smiled, and shook her head.
Kirby was alarmed. "Who's been talking to you, Shari?"
"I am Martian, Kirby. I have no need for talk."
He thought he understood what she meant, and her eyes frightened him with the wisdom that was in them. He turned away and said desperately, "You don't know where I'm going. You don't know what the chances are, you don't realize—"
"You are going a great distance, Kirby. Farther than men have ever gone before. I know. And if you were going farther still, I would go with you."
She had a bundle packed. He saw it, neatly rolled and tied with cords, and it was a small thing, not much to carry away into the dark beyond. He looked around suddenly at the room he knew so well, the beautiful ancient things, the priceless carpet worn thin as silk but nothing of its brightness lost, the wide couch and the low tables carved from woods that had not grown on Mars for millennia, the little familiar things. He said, "How long have you lived in this house, you and your family before you?"
She smiled. "What is time on Mars? Besides, I'm the last. What matter if I lose this now or in a little while?" She put something into his hand. "Here is a gun, Kirby. You will have to use it."
He stared at the unfamiliar thing, unfamiliar because it was so many years since he had seen one, and then he looked at her sharply. "You were talking about danger."
She nodded to the window place, where the shutters were open to the moonlight. "Listen, and you will hear it coming."