screen wildly, then plummeted downward ablaze.
"Hit!" I reported. "Down!"
I was warming with the heat and the excitement of the battle. Warming, too, with the fierce pride of a Marine who thrills at the combat teamwork of his guns and his buddies. Shane was still magnificently unperturbed. This was his crew. These were the men he himself was responsible for. Their success with this gun was his success.
Another, and larger, Martian craft blotted into vision on my vizascreen.
"Target!" I called.
"Screen!" Shane barked.
"Screen four," I called.
"Point three," Shane called. "Fire!"
Our atomic cannon blasted once more. The Martian fighter craft never knew what hit it. The orange explosion that caught it amidships completely demolished its side gun bubbles. It dropped immediately in flame, split asunder.
"Hit," I yelled. "Down."
THERE were more then, eight more within the next ten minutes. We got three of those. Then we downed a giant of a space fighter for our seventh.
And then there was a lull, no more ships popping into vision on my vizascreen. The crew waited tensely, impatiently. Shane, of course, was coolly blasé. The roar of battle around us was growing fainter and fainter.
Two more minutes, and the gunfire was only scattered, sporadic. Then, at length, it was silenced completely. I wiped the sweat from my brow and looked at Shane.
"Got seven," he said casually. "Not bad. But you birds'll have to put in extra hours on accounta those five misses."
I shook my head in silent amazement. The big blundering blockhead. The show was over, and he thought everything was going to be just the same now as it always was. Didn't he realize what he'd done? Didn't he have any idea this treacherous attack was his own dammed stupid fault? Didn't he know he was through, washed up—that even this magnificent gun record he'd just established wouldn't mean a thing in another two hours?
The "All Clear" sounded then. I've never heard a wail that sounded as much like music. . . .
"The Martian fighter space craft that slipped through the atomic mine fields," our Admiral, Old Ironpants, said three hours later, "were merely part of a space armada of close to a thousand of such ships. It was only to be expected that some of them would blunder through by luck. However, only fifteen of these did so."
We were standing in the stateroom of Old Ironpants, Shane and I. The Admiral, his hatchet face wreathed with smug pride, sat with the stern old duck from the Federation Secret Service. Even the stern old duck seemed complacently relaxed for an instant.
"It seems," the Admiral went on, "that your remarkable gun crew accounted for seven, or almost half, of the enemy ships that did slip through. I consider this excellent for your record, Sergeant Shane. The proper commendation for you and your crew will be made publicly within the next week. Now that the Federation is formally at war with Mars, crews of your type can't go unrewarded."
STILL dizzy from the mad reversal of fortune, I heard Shane, bursting with ego, say, "Thank you, Sir."
The stern old duck from the Federation Secret Service broke in, then, to heap fuel on Shane's already blazing conceit.
