scientists at the four-hundred-inch bowl on Aconcagua something to think about."

All the while, Commander Pickens sat inside the Phoebus with a grim look on his face and a faraway light in his blue eyes. They made ready to take off, and Healey said:

"Sir, aren't you going to put foot on the Moon?"

Pickens turned to him with a look almost of fanaticism. "The Moon is small stuff. I don't step out of this ship on another planet until we get to Mars."

They took off. It was a little rough getting into the air. The Phoebus' stern dragged a little on the upthrust and opened a few seams against the ridge where the flag was planted but the flag wasn't disturbed, and they welded up the cracks on the way back, behind closed bulkheads.

Eight hours after take-off they were settling down again over the Wyoming desert. Again they landed safely, and this time the whole world was there to meet them—the whole world, that is, except the International Air Marines. If there was an officer of the Marines present he must have been masquerading as a sagebrush, but there were three hundred thousand insane civilians out on the desert, and almost that many reporters—and to reporters who hadn't had a real news story since the atomic bomb back in 1945, this was a video scanner's dream....

Well, they had gone to the Moon and they had come back. They were summoned by the President. They got medals. Congress voted them the pay of their "inactive" statuses and raised everybody's rank. They got everything—except what they most wanted. Apparently the big brass in the Air Marines didn't watch the video reports.

Lieutenant Healey and the rest of the two hundred were disappointed and discouraged—all but Commander—now Captain—Pickens.

"No," he said. "I didn't think a little trip to the Moon would change anything. But wait till we come back from Mars!"

Healey looked thoughtfully at the captain. For the first time, he realized that Pickens, too, had his heart set on reinstatement. But Pickens was more practical than the rest of them. He had been a captain in the Air Marines. He knew how tough they were to crack.

They went back to work. Captain Pickens paid no attention to anything but the Phoebus. The gleam would come in his blue eyes and his jaws would clench and he would say, "We're going to Mars!" And everybody knew they were.

 Prev. P 7/51 next