"I don't quite know any more." Her voice betrayed her uncertainty. "They liked Dad and me at first, and when we came back from Earth the second time many of them even came out into the sunlight to meet us. But then the Exploiters came. It was only because they blasted the _Trailblazer_ and opened fire on Dad and me too that the Martians didn't kill us right then." "Then they weren't hostile at first? Weren't they plotting a war on Earth?" "Of course not." Her tone was scathing. "They were just friendly and sick and dispirited and dying. They couldn't even live on Earth." "Then why did your father organize the Mec?" Susan halted in mid-stride and her stinging two-handed slaps left angry marks across his face. "Say anything like that again and I'll scratch your eyes out!" she spat. "But your father--" "He did not!" she snapped. "What he told Gerald Harmon was--" "Harmon?" One of the Martians clucked impatiently and motioned them to move along. Nick recognized the name. Gerald Harmon was the ruler of Earth's greatest industrial combine, Harmon Enterprises. From his factories had come the War's most deadly weapons, and Gravinol had been developed in his laboratories. A finger in every pie and a profit for every finger had always been the Harmon method. "Harmon told Dad he'd send out colonists as soon as things could be arranged in an orderly manner and another ship built, and he persuaded Dad to keep it secret that we had reached Mars on our first flight. Harmon had backed Dad's work, so Dad trusted him in spite of everything people said. And people were right. When his first ship came ... that cold-blooded murderer--" She sobbed, unable to continue. * * * * * Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place in Nick's brain. During the last months of the War when governments were merely hunted groups of men blasted out of one underground shelter after another, when armies went on killing because there was no one to tell them to stop, when work and comfort and productive effort and all the normalities of life had vanished in the dust of ruined cities, the great masses of people who wished only to live out their lives in peace had at last learned their lesson. At last it had been thoroughly beaten into their skulls that wars were the inevitable price of over-organization, of allowing a few individuals--whether politicians or industrialists or the priests of hatred-creeds made little difference--to assume unlimited power over the fates of others. The people had learned, and they were bitterly determined it should not happen again. It was because of this lesson that the unthinkingly obedient survivors of the Special Corps had been so cordially hated and feared. The age of the overlords, of the few exploiters and many exploited, was to be finished. On Earth.