“I can, if it’s written by liars,” Ben retorted angrily. “I’ve heard about the lies they teach you on Earth.
Well, that’s your concern. You can go ahead and believe them if you want, but don’t try to tell them to me.”
He turned away with a strange feeling of weariness and disgust. It was the old, old argument he had heard so many times before, and it was just as false and evil now as it ever was. Lies, officially presented as history and drummed into their heads from childhood on until they accepted them blindly and wouldn’t even consider that they might not be the truth. It must be true, Ben thought, what he had heard about the vicious propaganda that all Earthmen had thrown at them constantly; here were two in his own ship spouting it back at him. It was no wonder that there was no end to the bitterness between Earthmen and Spacers.
But he knew that there was no sense arguing the question now. He didn’t really care if his prisoners thought he was descended from traitors—why should he care what they thought? They were prisoners of war now, and nothing more, and he had other things more important to worry about.
He checked the controls, rechecked the pre-calculated orbit to be sure the ship was following precisely, and then fought down a yawn. “Look,” he said to Tom, “I haven’t slept for two days. The ship is on automatic so it won’t require checking for a while. I’m going to try to rest, and you two would be smart to get some sleep too. We may not have much chance when we get where we’re going.” He threw himself down on an acceleration cot, feeling the vibration of the ship’s engines throbbing through his body as the ship moved out in the great arc that would take him to Mars and home. His body ached, and he desperately wanted to sleep, but rest was not easy. He could let his body sag and relax, but he could not throw off the vast weight of apprehension that lay on his mind, plaguing him as he thought of his father’s last words to him, and of the House of Trefon on the desert plateau above the Great Rift on Mars.
He had to get warning there in time. Anything else was unthinkable. He thought of the long history of the House of Trefon, of the pride and honor of his grandfather and his father in that house and of the unselfish leadership they had provided the Spacer clan. If the House of Trefon were to fall to an invading fleet from Earth, far more would be lost than a few lives and a house on the Martian desert…
He forced the thought out of his mind angrily, and thought instead of the happy days he had spent in his father’s house, the long exploratory trips they used to take down into the Rift, or north to the dessicated ruins of the Martian cities, the silent monuments of the race that had once lived on that planet before its water had gone, so very different from human beings and yet so strangely similar, from the evidence they had left behind them. As a race the Martians had perished, unable to escape a dying planet and unable to survive upon it. And eons later, another race of creatures on the blue-green planet closer to the sun had been threatened by extinction by their own hands and had survived only because a few of them had discovered a larger challenge than their own ambitions.
Ben thought of Joyce Barron’s scornful words, and again anger rose in his mind. He knew the true story of the Spacers’ exile, of course. Every Spacer did. It was recorded in the log books of the earliest space garrisons that existed before the Great War. Parts of it had been pieced together from official documents; much had been handed down from father to son. Ben had heard the story time and again in the songs and ballads of the maukis, and that more than anything had driven it into the very fiber of his mind, for the mournful chants of the maukis were one of the most powerful forces that bound all Spacers together in their loneliness.
So Ben Trefon knew that there had been a time when Earth had been divided against itself in a bitter war. For more than a century the two greatest nations on Earth had pitted themselves against each other, building horrible weapons and mounting massive artillery against the day when nuclear war would come. Outposts in space had become an important part of that race for armament, as the great powers competed to mount manned satellites in orbit around the Earth, armed with weapons powerful enough to smash the planet into fragments. Earth’s moon was explored and turned into a fortress; Mars and Venus were probed and even the asteroids were explored and exploited for the radioactive riches they contained.
A nuclear war, sooner or later, had seemed inevitable. In the council halls and government strongholds on Earth the jousting had become more and more desperate, until the final blow seemed only a matter of time. By then both sides knew that the final blow would come from the space garrisons, and both sides on Earth had built their hopes and their defenses in the powerful forces beyond the planet’s surface.
But in space an incredible thing happened. For those early pioneers in space, violent danger and sudden death were constant companions. Survival alone was a never ending, unremitting battle against fearful odds. To those men food, shelter, oxygen and water were the vital issues, and the ideas that divided the nations on Earth in their remoteness seemed petty and quibbling to these men who fought their hearts out merely to survive. It was not so strange that an esprit de corps grew up among them, a sense of closeness in the face of death, a common loyalty that seemed to override the importance of the nations of their birth and the politics of their governments. Nor was it strange that this common loyalty to themselves as men brought with it a new kind of sanity and opened their eyes to values their governments on Earth had long forgotten.
They realized that they held in their hands weapons that could wipe their home planet barren of life. At first as individuals and then in frank conspiracy they realized that these weapons must never be used. So, when the moment of truth arrived in the councils on Earth, and the Earth forces delivered their blows at each other, expecting the massive backing of their garrisons in space, the men in those garrisons drew together shoulder to shoulder and withheld the devastating attack they were expected to deliver.
There had surely been a conspiracy, Ben Trefon thought, but a conspiracy to draw the teeth of the warring factions on Earth. The Earth councils had raged and threatened and pleaded, and finally had gone on to fight their war as best they could, but its force was blunted as the space garrisons refused to deliver the suicidal blow. After the dust of the war had settled, those brave men in space reaped the reward of their deed as the councils on Earth turned against them in frustration and hatred. It was a bitter reward, and time did not change it. Branded as traitors, they were exiled from the planet of their birth, driven back when they attempted to come home, forced to take up a lonely, wandering life in the great emptiness of space beyond the boundaries of Earth.
This was the history of the Spacers that every Spacer knew: the history of a group of people cast out and reviled, with cruel injustice, by a homeland that became more bitter as the years passed. And now, Ben thought sleepily, injustice was heaped upon injustice, for the outcasts could not even be left alone to live in space! There was no doubt in his mind that this was the true account of Space history… yet a nagging question remained that he could not quite answer. If this was the whole truth, then his prisoners had to be wrong. And yet he had the strange feeling that Tom and Joyce Barron, born and raised on Earth, really believed that he and his father’s house were beneath contempt, the offspring of pirates and traitors who deserved nothing more than total extermination.
And he wondered, as he drifted to sleep, if any of them, Earthmen or Spacers, really knew the whole truth.
He awoke with a start, the alarm bell clanging in his ears. He had had a terrible dream; a huge black space ship had been attacking, firing wave after wave of missiles that were weaving their way inexorably toward him as his own defensive shells jammed in their tubes and refused to fire. Now he leaped from the cot and crossed the cabin in three steps, his hands on the missile controls before his eyes were completely open.