The first reports of Halkett's treachery that got back to earth were confused and contradictory. Later ones stated that Captain Halkett was under guard in one of the South Jupiter posts. He had been the cause of the hard-fought subjugation campaign in one of the sections failing, and of a large Jovian force escaping. That was all that was known certainly at first.
Then came details. Three forces under Halkett and Burnham and an officer named James had been operating against the Jovians in that section. Halkett commanded a heavy atom-blast battery and Burnham and James had been driving the Jovian forces toward it. For a score of the short Jovian days and nights the men of Burnham and James had pushed the Jovians in the desired direction, toiling against the relentless gravitation's drag, through the endless fern forests they had to cut through and against the weird beasts they dislodged from those forests. They had without question done their part against the Jovians.
But Halkett had not. He had deliberately ordered his men not fire on the Jovians and the flipper-men had escaped past him. Earth. could hardly credit the news. There came from soldiers and civilians alike a swift demand for Halkett's punishment. The Council ordered Crane to send Halkett home for court-martial.
Crane told Halkett that in the guardhouse on South Jupiter, and told him much more for he was half-crazed with the thing.
"Halk, how could you have done it?" he kept saying. "I've got send you back now and God knows what a court-martial will do you with feeling against you so strong on earth."
"Don't worry about it, Crane," said Halkett steadily. "I did as wanted and I'm willing to take my medicine."
"But why did you do it?" Crane demanded for the hundredth time. "Halkett, if you'll only plead that you didn't know the Jovians were coming through — that it was some kind of blunder—"
Hall Burnham seconded him. "A blunder on your part would lose you your commission but you'd escape a sentence," he told Halkett. "Surely it was partly that, at least."
Halkett shook his head. "It wasn't. I can't explain just what it was, why I did it — but if you'd have seen those Jovians coming through the forest there, weary, terrorized, hunted onward for days yet somehow unresentful — I couldn't turn the atom-blasts loose on them!"
Crane made a gesture. "Halkett, I understand what you felt but even so you shouldn't have done it. I'd go back with you to earth for the trial but I can't leave here now."
"It's all right, Jimmy," Halkett told him. "I'm willing to take what comes."
Halkett departed for earth under guard in one of the next detachment of rockets, while Crane and Burnham and the rest went on with the subjugation of South Jupiter. During the voyage the rocket's officers were careful to show Halkett consideration but no man of them spoke a word to him except when necessary. Feeling in the army against its first traitor was intense.
When Halkett reached earth after that strange voyage from Jupiter, the heads of the Council ordered an immediate court-martial. It took place in the great Army building. Halkett's trial occupied four days and during those days the building was surrounded by crowds waiting to hear his fate.
Popular indignation at Halkett ran high, and many cries for his summary execution were being voiced. People contrasted the gallant struggles of Crane and the rest to hold South Jupiter for humanity with this treachery on the part of a trusted officer. Halkett might have been lynched if he had been less well guarded.
Inside the great building Halkett stood up and heard his conduct judged. The officers who heard the case gave him a fair trial. His counsel argued ably concerning Halkett's previous gallant record, the possibility of temporary aberrations and the like. Halkett might have escaped but for his own testimony a little later.
"I was quite in command of all my faculties when I ordered the atom-batteries not to fire," he said quietly.
"Did you realize, Captain Halkett," asked the presiding officer crisply, "that in so doing you were betraying your sworn oath?"
Halkett said that he had realized. "Then what reason can you give for your deliberate breach of trust?"
Halkett hesitated. "I can't give any reason that you'd understand," he said.
Then he burst out with sudden white passion—"Why shouldn't I have done it? After all, Jupiter belonged to the Jovians, didn't it? What were we there but invaders, interlopers? How could I order those hunted flipper-men destroyed when all they were trying to do was to keep their own world?"
His counsel made frantic signals to him but Halkett was beyond restraint. "What right have we Earth races on Mars or Jupiter either? What right had we to wipe out almost all the Martians as we did, and to repeat it now on Jupiter? Because their planet has resources, the Jovians have to be killed!"
That outburst removed any chance of Halkett's acquittal. The presiding officer read gravely the sentence of ten years in military prison.
"It is only consideration of your former record on Mars and South Jupiter and the fact that you were one of Drake's historic party," he stated, "that keeps this court from giving you a life-sentence or even the extreme penalty."
Halkett took the verdict without any show of emotion and was led back to his cell. Burnham, who had come in from Jupiter in time for the trial's end, went to see him before he was taken to the military prison. Halkett shook hands with him in silence — the two had nothing to say.
With Halkett in prison the world's wrath was appeased. His name was stricken off all the records of the Council's Army. Burnham went back to Jupiter. Halkett spent his days in the shops of the military prison, helping manufacture atom-blasts and bombs and other army supplies. He stood imprisonment quietly.
Crane had moved heaven and earth to get Halkett acquitted but had found his influence useless. Burnham came back and told him how Halkett had taken the verdict. For a long time these two sat silent, perhaps thinking of three thrilled youngsters in technical school who had followed Gillen's flight and rushed to join Drake.
Crane went grimly on with the business of subduing South Jupiter. In the excited activity of that campaign the world forgot Halkett quickly. Crane's plan was working with the precision of a machine, section after section of the great planet being subjugated. Over all South Jupiter those Jovians not yet attacked were moving up into the planet's northern half as yet unvisited by the earthmen's forces.
In four earth years South Jupiter was under earth control. It was gripped tightly by Crane's system of forts, most of its forests had been destroyed by atom-blasts, and as towns grew slowly around the forts great grain-planting projects were getting under way. There were some reservations of Jovians, but the greater part of the Jovians not slain during the subjugation were in North Jupiter. There the fern forests still stretched untouched from the equator to the northern pole, the same as when Gillen first had seen them. But now Crane was looking north toward them.
Jimmy Crane was now General James Crane, thirty-one years old and with gray showing at his temples from nine years of strenuous campaigning on Mars and Jupiter. He had been back to earth twice from Jupiter, once with Burnham who was now a colonel, and both times had tried to see Halkett but had been prevented by strict regulations. Halkett had for four years now worked quietly on in the prison shops making atom-blasts, bombs and rocket parts.