But there was no ship in the view screen. Instead, he saw a great ruddy disc growing larger by the minute, its polar caps glistening. Ben glanced at the chronometer; he had slept almost twelve hours, and now the alarm was signaling that deceleration was finished and the ship was ready to move into braking orbits around Mars.
Ben sighed with relief and snapped off the alarm. Between planets the ship required little attention, correcting its position automatically against the designated orbit and decelerating at precisely the rate necessary to bring ship’s orbit and planet’s orbit together to permit landing. But landing maneuvers required human skill and judgment. Only in the most extreme emergency would a pilot attempt to plot a landing for his ship without his own hands on the controls, for a few feet of miscalculation could make the difference between a safe landing and a heap of burning rubble on the desert sand.
Now the Barrons were up, crowding behind Ben as he set the controls for his first braking orbit. He felt the drag of the outer reaches of the planet’s atmosphere against the ship, and peered at the disk in the view screen, searching for the landmarks he knew so well.
Suddenly, Ben Trefon felt a chill settle in his chest. In some indefinable way, the surface of the planet looked odd, changed somehow since the last time he saw it. He searched for the shiny dome of the Botanical Experiment Station as he braked in closer to the surface. It was the first landmark he always spotted on a Mars landing, but now he could not find it. As the ship moved across the dark side of the planet, it seemed that there were a dozen glowing red patches visible in the blackness, an eerie succession of ghostly lights he had never seen before.
As he approached the twilight zone, he dipped the ship down sharply. Now details began to appear, and Ben forgot his passengers as he gripped the controls, almost crying out at the ruin he saw spread out before his eyes across the planet surface.
There was a great gaping scar, still smoking, where the experiment station had once stood. Ahead he saw another scar, and another. He searched for the Great Rift and found it, but the straight, clean line he had always seen now looked ragged and broken. He was still searching for the plateau that lay above it when the ship crossed again to the dark side and moved down into its final landing arc.
Stunned, Ben Trefon watched for the bright side again. Once more he found the Rift, saw the blackened crater where another Spacer house had stood. Then he saw the familiar landmarks, the low plateau rising between the Rift and the mountains, and his eyes confirmed what he had seen fleetingly on the last sweep.
He snapped on the null-gravity units, tapped the forward jets, and eased the ship down on a hillock overlooking the plateau. Dust rose around the ship as it settled, but Ben did not see it. He was climbing into a pressure suit before the generators stopped whining, and moments later he stepped down from the exit lock and felt the sand crunch beneath his feet as he walked to the brow of the hill.
Below him, the House of Trefon was a smoking ruin. Fragments of plastic dome stood shattered like broken glass in the sunlight. One of the great stone arches still stood among the fragments of the others.
The hangar area was a glowing crater; in the back of the house the Council chamber was split open in a heap of rubble. The cold wind sweeping down from the north flapped a colored curtain back and forth against a ruined window frame. Except for this there was no movement, no breath of life, nothing but silence and desolation.
Numbly, Ben turned back to the ship. The radiation counter was clicking in his ear: that meant there was still activity in the craters, but the level was low. All the same, he would need a shielded suit before approaching closer.
Inside the ship he pulled off the helmet, and then stopped dead. Tom and Joyce Barron were staring at the view screen. They looked up at him, and their eyes reflected horror and disbelief. “Where are we?” Tom said. “Why are we stopping here? What is that out there?” The numbness seemed to reach to Ben’s fingertips. “That’s our destination,” he said through the tightness in his throat. “Still hot. Still smoking. Take a good look.”
“But you said we were going to your home—” Joyce’s voice trailed off.
Rage exploded in Ben Trefon’s mind. With a sweep of his arm he tore open a locker, hauled out heavy shielded suits, dumped them at the feet of his prisoners. “Go ahead, put them on,” he said. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to get your feet dirty. And you won’t get too close to the hot places, I’ll see to that.
Well, what are you waiting for? You wouldn’t want to miss this. Put on the suits. I’ll take you on a private tour of the greatest house on Mars.”
It was a grim party that made its way down the slope to the edge of the ruins. Ben took the lead, his rage subsiding to a cold white flame. The Barrons followed close behind him. He skirted the obviously hot craters in the hangar area and moved on into the rubble-strewn entry hall. Fragments of the wall were still standing. Great chunks of the tile floor had been thrown up at angles, but Ben picked a careful path through the ruin. Some parts of the house were still recognizable, but his family’s living quarters had taken a shell directly. Not even a fragment remained.
Ben stopped. There was no point to going on. There was not even a stir of life, no sign of human activity. Nothing could have survived such an onslaught. The house had literally been pounded into the ground. Ben knew without looking that he would find no survivors.
In his earphones he heard a choked sob, and the girl said, “I’m going back to the ship.” Something in her voice brought a wave of shame to Ben’s mind. Irrationally he had been blaming the Barrons personally for his loss, rubbing their noses in it. “Yes, go back,” he said. “There’s nothing here for you to see.” He took her arm, guided her across the rubble and out of the danger area. “Go on up and wait in the ship,” he told her gently. “We won’t be long.”
Tom started to follow her, but Ben caught his arm. “I’m going to need some help. You’d better stay.” The Earthman’s eyes were bright with suspicion. “What do you think you’re going to do here?”
“My father was in this house,” Ben said. “We have to be sure there are no survivors. And there’s something I have to look for.”
Reluctantly Tom followed him. For almost an hour they searched the rubble in vain. Maybe some of the people in the house had been evacuated, somehow, but Ben found the ruined shell of his father’s cruiser lying at the edge of the hangar crater. He looked no further. He knew that his father would never have left the house, no matter what the emergency, as long as anyone else remained to be evacuated.
Later he knew that he would try to piece together the details of his father’s death, try to imagine what had happened here from the first moment of warning until the last blow was struck. But for the time being Ben simply accepted it, numbly, as he accepted the ruin of the house. Just one thing burned in his mind now, one thing that had to be done.
He began searching for the stairs that led down to the vault. His father’s words were fresh in his mind; there was something there, something that was now his responsibility.
With Tom’s help he found a way down the sandstone passage that led to the armored vault. It took half an hour of work to clear the passage of rubble, but they managed it. One side of the vault had been caved in under the force of a direct hit, and part of the lead shielding in the ceiling sagged, but the main archives were intact, the repository of Spacer records, deeds, documents and other official papers. If only they had come down here, Ben thought, some of them might have survived. But he knew that no Spacers under attack would ever think of hiding in the ground. For them space would seem the only safe place.