They had won. He and Hugh had sent the message. Earth would be warned and Mars would lose its hope of conquering a new and younger world. Whatever dreams of conquest this old red planet may have nurtured would never come to be. He put his hands up and ripped the helmet from his head, flinging it on the ground. The metallic machines were ringed around him, motionless, almost as if they were looking at him. Almost as if they were waiting for his next move. Wildly he whooped at them. "Start something, damn you! Just start something!" But the line in front of him parted and he saw the blackened thing that lay upon the sand. The twisted, blasted, crumpled thing that huddled there. Scott dropped his sledge and a sob rose in his throat. His hands clenched at his side and he tottered slowly forward. He stood above the body of his brother, flung there on the sand by the searing backlash of the rocket blast. "Hugh!" he cried, "Hugh!" But the blackened bundle didn't stir. Hugh Nixon was dead. Eyes bleared, Scott stared around at the machines. They were breaking up, scattering, moving away. "Damn you," he screamed, "don't you even care?" * * * * * But even as he spoke, he knew they didn't care. The plant civilization of Mars was an unemotional society. It knew no love, no triumph, no defeat, no revenge. It was mechanistic, cold, logical. It did only those things which aimed at a definite end. So long as there was a chance of protecting the rocket, so long as there was hope of halting its flight after it had been tampered with, that civilization would act. But now that it was in space, now that it could not be recalled, the incident was over. There would be no further action. Scott looked down at the man at his feet. Harry Decker and Jimmy Baldwin and now Hugh Nixon. Three men had died here on Mars. He was the only one left. And he probably would die, too, for no man could for long breathe that Martian air and live. What was it Hugh had said that first day? "_It plays hell with the tissues of your lungs._" He stared around him, saw the interminable red deserts and the scarlet patches of Martian lilies, nodding in the breeze. Saw the humming bugs flashing in the pale sunlight. Saw the shimmer of the mighty building that had no doors or windows. His lungs were aching now and his throat was raw. It was harder and harder to breathe. He knelt in the sand and lifted the blackened body. Cradling it in his arms, he staggered along. "I have to make another cross," he said. Far overhead, in the depths of space, twinkled the blue planet whose life would never know the slavery of the emotionless race of a dying world. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Message From Mars, by Clifford D. Simak