"Yes, sir."

Commander Pickens leaned forward. Now his eyes were intense. "Then you understand this from the start. Cadet Healey: we're going to Mars!"

Healey opened his eyes and looked straight at Pickens for the first time. "You almost make me feel that we are going to Mars," he said slowly.

"There are two hundred of us out here who have that one idea."

Healey was awed a little at the intensity of the commander. Things weren't turning out as Healey had expected when the gyro pickup had met him in Wamsutter and flown him across the desert, northwest of Rawlins. He had thought vaguely that the Rocket base would be a bunch of zombies, but now as he looked at Commander Pickens he was impressed with the feeling that they were very much alive, and more than that, that perhaps he himself was alive once more. Pickens had been telling him there wasn't a chance to break through the two-hundred-year-old regulations of the Air Marines, but now, in spite of that, Healey began to wonder how the Marines could ignore the men who should make the first flight to Mars.

"We make our own ranks out here," Pickens said. "They're unofficial, of course, but since you were in the top ten of the class of twenty-one-seventeen, I am promoting you to junior lieutenant."

"Thank you, sir."

"Now, then—" Pickens picked up a heavy file folder. "You are a Healey. For five straight generations the Healeys have furnished admirals in the International Air Marines, and you expected to be the sixth." He did not wait for an answer. "But you picked an unfortunate subject for your thesis, and so you were graduated as a cadet only."

"Yes, sir."

Pickens looked at him keenly. "I suppose your father couldn't even attend the exercises. Regulations would prohibit an admiral shaking hands with a graduated cadet."

"That is right, sir."

Pickens looked at him steadily, then his voice was soft:

"We are going to Mars, Lieutenant, and we'll see if the Air Marines can ignore that. The brass hats think they've buried us out here. Twenty-two ships have left this base in the hundred and fifty years since it was established in nineteen-sixty. None has ever come back and landed safely. They've crashed, blown up, or disappeared in the void. 

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