“I’m sorry,” Joyce Barron said softly.
“Why?”
“Because you’ve lost your home. I—I’m not sure our pilots knew what they were destroying.”
“But why should you be sorry?” Ben said. “You should be proud. This must have been their first objective, and your ships did a fine job on it. It looks to me like they made a clean sweep, blotted out everything they could see.”
“It just doesn’t seem right,” Joyce said.
“Why not? This is your war. Why be sorry when you win the first battle hands down?”
“But your people forced the war,” the girl said.
“How?” Ben Trefon said bitterly. “How did we force it? We tried and tried to make peace with you, but you wouldn’t listen. Can you blame us for trying to stay alive? Did you ever see us killing and maiming and pounding cities to rubble on any of our raids? We could have, easily enough, but we never did.”
“You hadn’t done that yet,” Tom Barron broke in. “But we knew it was coming sooner or later. That was obvious to everybody. We knew it was just a matter of time, until you had your war machines finished and your army of monsters trained and ready to invade us. What else could we do but fight back, when we knew that was coming?”
“What are you talking about?” Ben said.
“The Spacer invasion, of course. You didn’t really think that we would stand by and wait for you to unleash your monster hordes against us, to slaughter us or turn us into slaves? Do you really blame us for turning and fighting?”
Ben Trefon stared at the sandy-haired youth. There was no mistaking the utter sincerity in his voice, but the words made no sense. “Monster hordes? Invasion? What are you saying?” Tom Barron shook his head angrily. “Look, can’t we stop pretending now? We know what you people have been doing all these years. We know what you’ve been planning, we’ve known it for decades. So why try to pretend it isn’t true now? We’re your prisoners, we can’t do anything, but at least we can be honest.”
“But I’m not pretending,” Ben exploded. “I don’t even understand what you’re saying.”
“Are you going to pretend that you haven’t been raiding us for centuries?”
“Well, of course we’ve been raiding you.”
“And stealing our women?”
“That’s true, too,” Ben said.
“You bet it’s true. Spacers have kidnapped women on every raid they’ve ever made. Thousands and thousands of girls, and not one of them ever came back.”
Ben Trefon scratched his jaw. “What’s that got to do with monsters?” Tom snorted in disgust. “We may not know much about space navigation, but we aren’t stupid. We’ve had enough radiation accidents and nuclear wars to know about the mutants that result, and we know about the radiation in space. You’ve got to be using Earth women for something, and we can put two and two together.”
Ben stared at him, wondering if he had heard right. His first impulse was to laugh, but the desperate sincerity in Tom’s voice stopped him. He isn’t making this up as he goes along, Ben thought. He actually believes what he’s saying. Suddenly a dozen puzzling little things began to make sense: Tom Barren’s desperate move to try to prevent his sister’s kidnapping, his obvious suspicion of Ben, his questions about laboratories on Mars and his assumption that Ben would kill him when he was first captured—suddenly it began to make a horrible kind of sense.
“Wait a minute,” Ben Trefon said. “Wait a minute now. Tell me again so I’m sure I’ve got this straight.
What do you think we are?”
“You mean you yourself?”
Ben shook his head. “I mean Spacers in general.”
“We know what you are,” Tom Barron said.
“Do you think we’re human?”
Tom hesitated. “Human, yes. But changed. Without any atmosphere to protect you, you get hard doses of cosmic radiation, and that makes changes. Some of the Earthmen who went into space and came home again were changed, and had monsters for children.”
“What kind of monsters?” Ben broke in.
“Creatures with two heads, creatures that could hypnotize just by looking at you, creatures that could read minds, I don’t know what else. The government never did publish details.”
“And you thought I was a monster in disguise,” Ben said. “That was why you wanted to feel my hands and face.”
“I thought it was possible,” Tom said stiffly. “Hypnosis can blind people and make them see things that aren’t really there.”
Ben nodded grimly. It fit, every bit of it. A simple truth, but completely misinterpreted, twisted and distorted by the telling and retelling until it was turned into utter falsehood. “And these laboratories,” Ben went on. “Tell me about them. Where are they supposed to be, and what’s supposed to be happening in them?”
Tom Barron shook his head. “Nobody on Earth has ever found out where they are, but we know what they are. You’d have to have breeding places for your monsters, places to experiment until you could breed the kind of invasion army you wanted.” The Earthman’s voice was bitter. “I don’t know why I’m wasting my time talking. You already know all this. But at least you seem to be halfway human—can’t you see how we feel?” He looked up at Ben. “Think about it for a minute. Think how you’d feel, living down there, if you knew that any minute, any hour, any day or year, raiders might be coming down to carry off your own sister to breed monsters with. Think how you’d feel!” There was a long pause as Ben looked from Tom Barron to his sister and back again. He could see the truth now, so simple that it was ridiculous, yet twisted into a horrible nightmare in his prisoners’
minds. He shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“I can’t imagine how I’d feel, no matter how hard I try. You see, I’ve never had a sister, and neither has any other man born in space. Not one of us. Never.”
Outside the ship the wind was howling now, and they could hear the rattle of sand beating against the metal hull. There was a scraping sound as some desert creature scurried under the ship for shelter against the wind. Tom Barron’s face darkened angrily. “I’m not joking,” he said. “I’m dead serious. If you’re going to sit and laugh we can stop talking right now.”
“If you think I’m laughing, you’re wrong,” Ben said. “All I’m saying is the truth—the only truth there is in this whole fantastic monster story of yours.”
“Then what do you mean that you have no sisters?” Tom said.
“I mean just exactly that.”
“But why not?”
“Because all the children born to Spacers are male,” Ben Trefon said. “In all our history, no Spacer has ever fathered a female child. Boys, yes. Girls, never.”
The Barrons stared at each other. “But that doesn’t make sense!” Joyce protested. “No people could ever survive without—” She broke off in mid-sentence, her eyes widening.
“You’re so right,” Ben said. “Without women, we would grow old, and die, and that would be the end of us. And that is the reason why we kidnap women on every raid. There’s no other way for us to survive in space.”
There was a long silence. Then Joyce shook her head in confusion. “I just don’t understand,” she said.