This time, he was slow to open his eyes. He was afraid he would see the riveted hull of the ship above his head. It was the white ceiling of the hospital, though, and he let the captive air out of his lungs. When he turned his head he saw Colonel Stregham sitting by the bed.
"Did we make it?" Tony asked. It was more of statement than a question.
"You made it, Tony. Both of you made it. Hal is awake here in the other bed.”
There was something different about the colonel's voice and it took Tony an instant to recognize it. It was the first time he had ever heard the colonel talk with any emotion other than anger.
"The first trip to Mars. You can imagine what the papers are saying about it. More important, Tech says the specimen and meter reading you brought back are invaluable. When did you find out it wasn't an exercise?"
"The twenty-fourth day. We found some kind of Martian animal. I suppose we were pretty stupid not to have tumbled, before that."
Tony's voice had an edge of bitterness.
"Not really. Every part of your training was designed keep you from finding out. We were never certain if we would have to send the men without their knowledge, there was always that possibility. Psych was sure the orientation and separation from Earth would cause a breakdown. I could never agree with them."
"They were right," Tony said, trying to keep the memory of fear out of his voice.
"We know now that they were right, though I fought them at the time. Psych won the fight and we programmed the whole trip over on their say-so. I doubt if you appreciate it, but we went to a tremendous amount of work to convince you two that you were still in the training program."
"Sorry to put you to all that trouble," Hal said. The colonel flushed a little, not at the words but at the loosely-reined bitterness that rode behind them. He went on as if he hadn't heard.
"Those two conversations you had over the emergency phone were, of course, taped and the playback concealed in the ship. Psych scripted them on the basis of fitting any need. Apparently they worked. The second one was supposed to be the final touch of realism, in case you should start being doubtful. Then we used a variation of deep freeze that suspends about ninety-nine percent of the body processes, — it hasn't been revealed or published yet. This along with anticoagulants in the razor cut on Tony's chin covered the fact that so much time had passed.
"What about the ship?" Hal asked. "We saw it — it was only half-completed."
"Dummy," the colonel said. "Put there for the public's benefit and all foreign intelligence services. Real one had been finished and tested weeks earlier. Getting the crew was the difficult part. What I said about no team finishing a practice exercise was true. You two men had the best records and were our best bets.
"We'll never have to do it this way again, though. Psych says that the next crews won't have that trouble; they'll be reinforced by the psychological fact that someone else was there before them. They won't be facing the complete unknown."
The colonel sat chewing his lip for a moment, then forced out the words he had been trying to say since Tony and Hal had regained consciousness.
"I want you to understand. . both of you. . that I would rather have gone myself than pull that kind of thing on you. I know how you must feel. Like we pulled some kind of a…"
"Interplanetary practical joke," Tony said. He didn't smile when he said it.
"Yes, something like that," the colonel rushed on. "I guess it was a lousy trick — but don't you see, we had to? You two were the only ones left, every other man had washed out. It had to be you two, and we had to do it the safest way.
"And only myself and three other men know what was done, what really happened on the trip. No one else will ever know about it, I can guarantee you that."
Hal's voice was quiet, but cut through the room like a sharp knife.
"You can be sure Colonel, that we won't be telling anybody about it."
When Colonel Stregham left, he kept his head down because he couldn't bring himself to see the look in the eyes of the first two explorers of Mars.
"But this war was finished years before I was born! How can one robot torpedo — fired that long ago — still be of any interest?"
Dall the Younger was overly persistent — it was extremely lucky for him that Ship-Commander Lian Stane, both by temperament and experience, had a tremendous reserve of patience.
"It has been fifty years since the Greater Slavocracy was defeated— but that doesn't mean eliminated," Commander Stane said. He looked through the viewport of the ship, seeing ghostlike against the stars the pattern of the empire they had fought so long to destroy. "The Slavocracy expanded unchecked for over a thousand years. Its military defeat didn't finish it, just made the separate worlds accessible to us. We are still in the middle of that reconstruction, guiding them away from a slave economy."
