Out on the road, the foot soldiers and the tank crew slogged eastward, retreating from the siege which had failed so ingloriously.
In their thicket, Mary and Peter sat and watched the Building.
«You said they came from the stars,» said Mary. «But why did they come here? Why did they bother with us? Why did they come at all?»
«To save us,» Peter offered slowly. «To save us from ourselves. Or to exploit and enslave us. Or to use our planet as a military base. For any one of a hundred reasons. Maybe for a reason we couldn’t understand even if they told us.»
«You don’t believe those other reasons, the ones about enslaving us or using Earth as a military base. If you believed that, we wouldn’t be going to the building.»
«No, I don’t believe them. I don’t because I had cancer and I haven’t any longer. I don’t because the polio began clearing up on the same day that they arrived. They’re doing good for us, exactly the same as the missionaries did good among the primitive, disease-ridden people to whom they were assigned. I hope—»
He sat and stared across the field, at the trapped and deserted tank, at the shining ladder of the roads.
«I hope,» he said, «they don’t do what some of the missionaries did. I hope they don’t destroy our self-respect with alien Mother Hubbards. I hope they don’t save us from ringworm and condemn us to a feeling of racial inferiority. I hope they don’t chop down the coconuts and hand us—»
But they know about us, he told himself. They know all there is to know.
They’ve studied us for—how long? Squatting in a drugstore corner, masquerading as a cigarette machine. Watching us from the counter in the guise of a stamp machine.
And they wrote letters—letters to every head of state in all the world.
Letters that might, when finally deciphered, explain what they were about.
Or that might make certain demands. Or that might, just possibly, be no more than applications for permits to build a mission or a church or a hospital or a school.
They know us, he thought. They know, for example, that we’re suckers for anything that’s free, so they handed out free gifts—just like the quiz shows and contests run by radio and television and Chambers of Commerce, except that there was no competition and everybody won.
Throughout the afternoon, Peter and Mary watched the road and during that time small groups of soldiers had come limping down it. But now, for an hour or more, there had been no one on the road.
They started out just before dark, walking across the field, passing through the wall-that-wasn’t-there to reach the road. And they headed west along the road, going toward the purple cloud of the building that reared against the redness of the sunset.
They travelled through the night and they did not have to dodge and hide, as they had that first night, for there was no one on the road except the one lone soldier they met.
By the time they saw him, they had come far enough so that the great shaft of the building loomed halfway up the sky, a smudge of misty brightness in the bright starlight.
The soldier was sitting in the middle of the road and he’d taken off his shoes and set them neatly beside him.
«My feet are killing me,» he said by way of greeting.
So they sat down with him to keep him company and Peter took out the water bottle and the loaf of bread and the cheese and bologna and spread them on the pavement with wrapping paper as a picnic cloth.
They ate in silence for a while and finally the soldier said, «Well, this is the end of it.»
They did not ask the question, but waited patiently, eating bread and cheese.
«This is the end of soldiering,» the soldier told them. «This is the end of war.»
He gestured out toward the pens fashioned by the roads and in one nearby pen were three self-propelled artillery pieces and in another was an ammunition dump and another pen held military vehicles.
«How are you going to fight a war,» the soldier asked, «if the things back there can chop up your armies into checkerboards? A tank ain’t worth a damn guarding ten acres, not when it isn’t able to get out of those ten acres. A big gun ain’t any good to you if you can’t fire but half a mile.»
«You think they would?» asked Mary. «Anywhere, I mean?»
«They done it here. Why not somewhere else? Why not any place that they wanted to? They stopped us. They stopped us cold and they never shed a single drop of blood. Not a casualty among us.»
He swallowed the bit of bread and cheese that was in his mouth and reached for the water bottle. He drank, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
«I’m coming back,» he said. «I’m going out and get my girl and we both are coming back. The things in that building maybe need some help and I’m going to help them if there’s a way of doing it. And if they don’t need no help, why, then I’m going to figure out some way to let them know I’m thankful that they came.»
«Things? You saw some things?»
The soldier stared at Peter. «No, I never saw anything at all.»
«But this business of going out to get your girl and both of you coming back? How did you get that idea? Why not go back right now with us?»
«It wouldn’t be right,» the soldier protested. «Or it doesn’t seem just right. I got to see her first and tell her how I feel. Besides, I got a present for her.»
«She’ll be glad to see you,» Mary told him softly. «She’ll like the present.»
«She sure will.» The soldier grinned proudly. «It was something that she wanted.»
He reached in his pocket and took out a leather box. Fumbling with the catch, he snapped it open. The starlight blazed softly on the necklace that lay inside the box.
Mary reached out her hand. «May I?» she asked.
«Sure,» the soldier said. «I want you to take a look at it. You’d know if a girl would like it.»
Mary lifted it from the box and held it in her hand, a stream of starlit fire.
«Diamonds?» asked Peter.
«I don’t know,» the soldier said. «Might be. It looks real expensive. There’s a pendant, sort of, at the bottom of it, of green stone that doesn’t sparkle much, but—»
«Peter,» Mary interrupted, «have you got a match?»
The soldier dipped his hand into a pocket. «I got a lighter, Miss. That thing gave me a lighter. A beaut!»
He snapped it open and the flame blazed out. Mary held the pendant close.
«It’s the symbol,» she said. «Just like on my bottle of perfume.»
«That carving?» asked the soldier, pointing. «It’s on the lighter, too.»
«Something gave you this?» Peter urgently wanted to know.
«A box. Except that it really was more than a box. I reached down to put my hand on it and it coughed up a lighter and when it did, I thought of Louise and the lighter she had given me. I’d lost it and I felt bad about it, and here was one just like it except for the carving on the side. And when I thought of Louise, the box made a funny noise and out popped the box with the necklace in it.»
The soldier leaned forward, his young face solemn in the glow from the lighter’s flame.
«You know what I think?» he said. «I think that box was one of them. There are stories, but you can’t believe everything you hear …»
He looked from one to the other of them. «You don’t laugh at me,» he remarked wonderingly.
Peter shook his head. «That’s about the last thing we’d do, Soldier.»
Mary handed back the necklace and the lighter. The soldier put them in his pocket and began putting on his shoes.
«I got to get on,» he said. «Thanks for the chow.»