Dean Evans

“ Tony Radek's upper lip lifted a little, showing small angry teeth.
At once the Emote Neutral lights in the office flickered wildly. Tony pulled his eyes from the screen and glared up at the lights. That's progress for you. Let a man go on one little momentary emotional binge, like this, and right away spies in the joint start screaming. In a moment now, the one on his right—the Master Screen—would blink into life and old hell-hips himself would start poking around asking questions. ”

“ Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual. And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.
There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just disappeared. ”

“ Gannett sat in his jeep with the motor running and the purple flames coming out of the tailpipe. His hands were tight around the wheel, but the Jeep wasn't moving. Gannett was staring off into space and his eyes looked as though somebody had peeled them back.
He said it to himself mentally, for the first few times. Then, as if he couldn't contain them any longer, the words tumbled out of his mouth into the night air:
"Everybody's dead, by God!"
He drove through deserted streets until he found an all-night drugstore. It didn't seem funny to him just yet that the streets were deserted ”

“ He turned his head to the right, stared at the Master Screen and waited.
The screen blazed into life. A narrow-faced man with washed-away eyes that looked as though they'd seen sin and hadn't liked it peered angrily over toward Tony behind the desk.
"Mr. Radek!" he had a thin, thin voice that sounded like a sheet of paper slitting down the middle. "What's going on down there? Can't you control your own office? Or maybe you'd like to be back in Training?" ”

“ His eyes came deliberately up to mine and stopped there. He said nothing. He waited. Outside, the drums throbbed, slowly at first, then moderated in tempo. It was like the throbbing—or sobbing, if you prefer—of the old, old pumps whose shafts go so tirelessly down into the planet for such pitifully thin streams of water.
"I'm looking for an Earthwoman," I said. "This particular Earthwoman took a Martian for a husband." ”

“ Gannett planted his big feet wide apart and frowned sourly around and sniffed the air like a dog at a gopher hole. "The damn world smells sick," he grunted.
Which was also true. The world did smell sick. The world smelled something like that peculiar odor that comes from an old graveyard carefully tended by an old man with dank moss sticking to the soles of his old shoes. ”

“ I put the knife down. Sweat was coming on my forehead now, I could feel it. I was remembering. I was remembering the knife and what was scaring me even more was I was remembering the very day I had lost it. In the attic.
I said very carefully, "All right. You've made your point. You can take it from there."
"Quite so, Mr. Anders. You now admit I exist, that I have extraordinary powers. I am your own creation, Mr. Anders. As I said before you have exceptional senses, including imagination. And yes, imagination is the greatest of all the senses. ”

“ Or, on the other hand, I could do what I eventually did do. I could tell her absolutely nothing, in the knowledge that that way she would at least have the strength of hate with which to sustain herself through the years of her life. The strength of her hate against this man, whoever he might be, plus the chill joy of anticipating the day—maybe not tomorrow, but some day—when, like the dream of finding gold on Mars, she'd finally track him down and kill him. ”

“ This old Brown Bess hasn't been thought of acquisitively for some years. It's been in the museum—abandoned. Therefore subject to the discarded junk pile as you yourself so cleverly put it before. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Anders?"
Perfectly—oh, perfectly, Mr. Bioplast. The rum was going around my eyes now. Going up and around and headed like an arrow for the hunk of my brain that can't seem to hide fast enough. ”

“ Everybody was dead, even the redhead in the Golden Bubble who couldn't lose.
"What the hell am I doin' alive, then?" he asked himself.
There was no answer to that. He thought of his mine, The Lousy Disappointment, and wondered if, living most of the time below the surface as he did, he had been protected from some sort of purple gas or something that seemed to have killed off everybody else. It could be. Some very light gas, maybe, that wouldn't seep below the surface. ”

“ When we were children, we always called them the furious roses because they were a furious red. We always used to say that if an innocent man was executed, the furious red rose would right away turn white, Tony. ”

“ I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything more than a ghoul, you don't.
Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though, was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. ”

“ Tony Radek was getting old. He was a "safe" now. That meant he needn't worry about the war any longer. He was a nice, mild, peaceable gentleman who stayed at home and thought beautiful thoughts about the younger men out in space. A man his age didn't feel anger and hate and retribution and lust and treachery any more. He was just a little old fat guy. He was the Federal Executioner.
He frowned again and leaned forward and touched a nacre button on the desk top. That lit up the screen on his left. Not the Master Screen, which was the one on his right. ”

“ And on the other side of the planet there was another man. And he, too, looked up into the night sky. And he began to study the moon called Phobos. And he, too, decided to write a book. And he knew he could accurately describe the moon of Mars, for his own eyes had told him it looked like thus and so. And his own eyes did not lie.
I thought of it in a manner somewhat like that. I could tell the woman that Harry Smythe, her first husband, was the man who had killed Tahily, the Martian she loved. ”