not really happening, so we'll have to accept it as truth. It's the real thing any way you look at it." Danton saw the grin fade slowly across the mask of Keith's face. "Are we really here, Captain?"

Danton peered into the scope again. "Yes," he whispered.

"Mars, the god of war," Keith said, "awaits his favorite sons."

A big dull reddish ball, like an eyeball, a blood-shot eye. The cone of its giant shadow streaming out, a quadrant of the heavens. And then all at once, as if the eye were closing, it darkened except where the sun splattered down on its far half, a pool of sickly light radiating outward into dissipating orange and brown.

Danton thought of the Oligarchs down there, or what remained of them. The Oligarchs and the slaves they would have brought with them in their ships. In a hundred years they could have multipled considerably. And the Oligarchs themselves, the last of the old world type of faithless human madness—essentially amoral, no empathy, tremendous egotism—filled with the old ideas of class superiority. They destroyed with utter casualness. What advanced stage had their paranoid culture reached in a century? It wasn't something one wanted to think about.

The planet was reaching up like a clenched red fist. He felt the impulse to duck. Sweat ran down his face, itched along his ribs. A hundred years was a long time to be someone else, and now Danton was wondering if he dared trust himself anymore as a soldier. His hands moved again over the controls.

The wrecked Oligarch ship had been found off the Mindanao Deeps by a sub-sea exploring party, brought up, reconditioned, studied. There were records and documents in it, and from these Seers made his decision. He brought back Danton. In secret, of course; send them to out of living graves. They were trained, made into astrogators, cosmologists. Everything in absolute secrecy, of course. And after the ship blasted off for Mars, only the three of them and Seers retained any knowledge that there had been a ship at all. The reconditioners had fixed that up. Those who had found it, the scientists who had studied it, no one remembered a thing.

"Find out what you can, then come back," Seers had said. "Don't fight. If you fight, you might never come back. We would never know then what to do. We can prepare ships like this one, Danton. In secret, of course, send them to Mars. But we don't want to take a chance like that unless we have to. If activity like that ever leaked out to the people, 

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