I glanced back. Two of the five Martians were on the ground. It wasn't luck, it wasn't good shooting, it was a goddamn miracle. Gail broke up the party. The three surviving Martians had had enough and, as Gail emptied that enormous .45 without hitting anything, they broke and ran in all directions, waving their trunklike arms in sheer terror. My earphones gave the cricket-burp. Martian cuss words, no doubt. Still holding my rifle in my left hand and my pistol in my right, I clasped Gail in my arms, yelling things like "sweetheart, darling, angel." "Sweetheart--darling--angel!" screamed the Martians. I tried to kiss Gail through my helmet and hers, too. And we laughed and cried as we ran back to the Mars-car. Tears were streaming down her cheeks as I helped her into the locks. As we entered the car again, we stopped laughing. A half mile away fifteen hundred Martians were leaving the highway and advancing toward us with joined arms. My earphones screeched with Mars talk: "Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Sweetheart!" They'd interpreted our cries of relief as battle cries. Without removing my helmet, I put the car into high speed, away from the advancing Martians, and headed northward. The desert lay ahead of us, rolling and vacant, its wide expanse broken only by outcroppings of smooth rocks. I advanced the throttle till the car was traveling as fast as it would go. But as I worked up to that speed, the Martians had gained a little. Now they galloped in pursuit like race horses, except that they were faster than any Derby winner I ever saw. The gravity had something to do with that. But it wasn't fast enough to catch us, although I knew now that the Martians Spartan had shot hadn't been really pursuing me. They'd been loping along, believing I was frightened and harmless, and they'd assumed they had nothing to fear from me. Possibly, if Spartan had not fired, Mars men and earthmen might have co-existed, in spite of their basic differences and the fact that they were deadly poison to one another. Then the radio crackled with Axel's voice. "What's your trouble, Bill?" Our helmet radios, being short wave, don't carry very far on a spherical planet, the signals tending to shoot over the horizon into space. However, Mars must have some kind of a heavy side that caused freak reception just as the same thing happens on the earth. Axel had heard the gist of our cries and laughter in the Battle of Pnyx. I switched on our transmitter to reply, since the Mars-car radio was powerful enough to carry quite a distance and, besides, its wave length was longer. "We just won the first battle of an interplanetary war, Axel," I said, "but a million Martians are chasing me. They've just begun to fight." "You must have found a bar at Pnyx. Talk sense, will you?" "Fifteen hundred Martians, anyway, Axel, and I'm not kidding. They're running, really running, and they've shown no signs of tiring after more than twenty miles of it, even though they're not catching me."