“Right.”

“Should we send along twenty or thirty more Rod McBans and get the attackers really loused up?”

“No.”

“Why not, Sir and Owner?”

“Because it would look clever. We rely on never looking clever. I have the next best answer.”

“What’s that?”

“Suggest to all the really rum worlds we know that a good impersonator could put his hands on the McBan money. Make the suggestion so that they would not know that we had originated it. The starlanes will be full of Rod McBans, complete with phony Norstrilian accents, for the next couple of hundred years. And no one will suspect that we set them up to it. Stupid’s the word, mate, stupid. If they ever think we’re clever, we’re for it!” The speaker sighed: “How do the bloody fools suppose our forefathers got off Paradise VII if they weren’t clever? How can they think we’d hold this sharp little monopoly for thousands of years? They’re stupid not to think about it, but let’s not make them think. Right?”

“Right.”

Rod woke with a strange feeling of well-being. In a corner of his mind there were memories of pandemonium — knives, blood, medicine, a monkey working as surgeon. Rum dreams! He glanced around and immediately tried to jump out of bed.

The whole world was on fire!

Bright blazing intolerable fire, like a blowtorch.

But the bed held him. He realized that a loose comfortable jacket ended in tapes and that the tapes were anchored in some way to the bed.

“Eleanor!” he shouted, “Come here.”

He remembered the mad bird attacking him, Lavinia transporting him to the cabin of the sharp Earthman, Lord Redlady. He remembered medicines and fuss. But this — what was this?

When the door opened, more of the intolerable light poured in. It was as though every cloud had been stripped from the sky of Old North Australia, leaving only the blazing heavens and the fiery sun. There were people who had seen that happen, when the weather machines occasionally broke down and let a hurricane cut a hole in the clouds, but it had certainly not happened in his time, or in his grandfather’s time.

The man who entered was pleasant, but he was no Norstrilian. His shoulders were slight, he did not look as though he could hit a cow, and his face had been washed so long and so steadily that it looked like a baby’s face. He had an odd medical-looking suit on, all white, and his face combined the smile and the ready professional sympathy of a good physician.

“We’re feeling better, I see,” said he.

“Where on Earth am I?” asked Rod. “In a satellite? It feels odd.”

“You’re not on Earth, man.”

“I know I’m not. I’ve never been there. Where’s this place?”

“Mars. The Old Star Station. I’m Jean-Jacques Vomact.” Rod mumbled the name so badly the other man had to spell it out for him. When that was straightened out, Rod came back to the subject.

“Where’s Mars? Can you untie me? When’s that light going to go off?”

“I’ll untie you right now,” said Doctor Vomact, “but stay in bed and take it easy until we’ve given you some food and taken some tests. The light — that’s sunshine. I’d say it’s about seven hours, local time, before it goes off. This is late morning. Don’t you know what Mars is? It’s a planet.”

“New Mars, you mean,” said Rod proudly, “the one with the enormous shops and the zoological gardens.”

“The only shops we have here are the cafeteria and the PX. New Mars? I’ve heard of that place somewhere. It does have big shops and some kind of an animal show. Elephants you can hold in your hand. They’ve got those too. This isn’t that place at all. Wait a sec, I’ll roll your bed to the window.”

Rod looked eagerly out of the window. It was frightening. A naked, dark sky did not have a cloud in sight. A few holes showed in it here and there. They almost looked like the “stars” which people saw when they were in spaceship transit from one cloudy planet to another. Dominating everything was a single explosive horrible light, which hung high and steady in the sky without ever going off. He found himself cringing for the explosion, but he could tell, from the posture of the doctor next to him, that the doctor was not in the least afraid of that chronic hydrogen bomb, whatever it might turn out to be. Keeping his voice level and trying not to sound like a boy he said,

“What’s that?”

“The Sun.”

“Don’t cook my book, mate. Give me the straight truth. Everybody calls his star a sun. What’s this one?”

“The Sun. The original Sun. The Sun of Old Earth itself. Just as this is plain Mars. Not even Old Mars. Certainly not New Mars. This Earth’s neighbor.”

“That thing never goes off, goes up — boom! — or goes down?”

“The Sun, you mean,” said Doctor Vomact. “No, I should think not. I suppose it looked that way to your ancestors and mine half a million years ago, when we were all running around naked on Earth.” The doctor busied himself as he talked. He chopped the air with a strange-looking little key, and the tapes fell loose. The mittens dropped off Rod’s hands. Rod looked at his own hands in the intense light and saw that they seemed strange. They looked smooth and naked and clean, like the doctor’s own hands. Weird memories began to come back to him, but his handicap about spieking and hiering telepathically had made him cautious and sensitive, so he did not give himself away.

“If this is old, old Mars, what are you doing, talking the Old North Australian language to me? I thought my people were the only ones in the universe who still spoke Ancient Inglish.” He shifted proudly but clumsily over to the Old Common Tongue: “You see, the Appointed Ones of my family taught me this language as well. I’ve never been offworld before.”

“I speak your language,” said the doctor, “because I learned it. I learned it because you paid me, very generously, to learn it. In the months that we have been reassembling you, it’s come in handy. We just let down the portal of memory and identity today, but I’ve talked to you for hundreds of hours already.”

Rod tried to speak.

He could not utter a word. His throat was dry and he was afraid that he might throw up his food — if he had eaten any.

The doctor put a friendly hand on his arm. “Easy, Mister and Owner McBan, easy now. We all do that when we come out.”

Rod croaked, “I’ve been dead? Dead? Me?”

“Not exactly dead,” said the doctor, “but close to it.”

“The box — that little box!” cried Rod.

“What little box?”

“Please, doctor — the one I came in?”

“That box wasn’t so little,” said Doctor Vomact. He squared his hands in the air and made a shape about the size of the little ladies’ bonnet-box which Rod had seen in the Lord Redlady’s private operating room. “It was this big. Your head was full natural size. That’s why it’s been so easy and so successful to bring you back to normality in such a hurry.”

“And Eleanor?”

“Your companion? She made it, too. Nobody intercepted the ship.”

“You mean the rest is true, too. I’m still the richest man in the universe? And I’m gone, gone from home?” Rod would have liked to beat the bedspread, but did not.

“I am glad,” said Doctor Vomact, “to see you express so much feeling about your situation. You showed a great deal when you were under the sedatives and hypnotics, but I was beginning to wonder how we could help you realize your true position when you came back, as you have, to normal life. Forgive me for talking this way. I sound like a medical journal. It’s hard to be friends with a patient, even when one really likes him…”

Vomact was a small man, a full head shorter than Rod himself, but so gracefully proportioned that he did not look stunted or little. His face was thin, with a mop of ungovernable black hair which fell in all directions. Among Norstrilians, this fashion would have been deemed eccentric; to judge by the fact that other Earthmen let their hair grow wild and long, it must have been an Earth fashion. Rod found it foolish but not repulsive.