“They aren’t going to hurt me, kill me, Elma.
Get up, honey, get up.”
“What — what?”
Elma blinked around and slowly, as the ship was sent into the wind again, she helped herself, as in a dream, back up to a seat and slumped there like a sack of stones, saying no more.
The sand slid under the ship.
In half an hour they were back at the crossroads, the ships planted, all of them out of the ships.
The Leader stood before Sam and Elma, his mask beaten of polished bronze, the eyes only empty slits of endless blue-black, the mouth a slot out of which words drifted into the wind.
“Ready your stand,” said the voice.
A diamond-gloved hand waved.
“Prepare the viands, prepare the foods, prepare the strange wines, for tonight is indeed a great night!”
“You mean,” said Sam, “you’ll let me stay on here?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not mad at me?”
The mask was rigid and carved and cold and sightless.
“Prepare your place of food,” said the voice softly.
“And take this.”
“What is it?”
Sam blinked at the silver-foil scroll that was handed him, upon which, in hieroglyph, snake figures danced.
“It is the land grant to all of the territory from the silver mountains to the blue hills, from the dead salt sea there to the distant valleys of moonstone and emerald,” said the Leader.
“M-mine?” said Sam, incredulous.
“Yours.”
“One hundred thousand miles of territory?”
“Yours.”
“Did you hear that, Elma?”
Elma was sitting on the ground, leaning against the aluminum hot-dog stand, eyes shut.
“But why, why — why are you giving me all this?” asked Sam, trying to look into the metal slots of the eyes.
“That is not all.
Here.”
Six other scrolls were produced.
The names were declared, the territories announced.
“Why, that’s half of Mars!
I own half of Mars!”
Sam rattled the scrolls in his fists. He shook them at Elma, insane with laughing.
“Elma, did you hear?”
“I heard,” said Elma, looking at the sky.
She seemed to be watching for something.
She was becoming a little more alert now.
“Thank you, oh, thank you,” said Sam to the bronze mask.
“Tonight is the night,” said the mask.
“You must be ready.”
“I will be.
What it is — a surprise?
Are the rockets coming through earlier than we thought, a month earlier from Earth?
All ten thousand rockets, bringing the settlers, the miners, the workers and their wives, all hundred thousand of them?
Won’t that be swell, Elma?
You see, I told you. I told you, that town there won’t always have just one thousand people in it.
There’ll be fifty thousand more coming, and the month after that a hundred thousand more, and by the end of the year five million Earth Men.
And me with the only hot-dog stand staked out on the busiest highway to the mines!”
The mask floated on the wind.
“We leave you.