Short story where a guy tries to warn about an alien attack but is instead mistakenly believed to be leading it

Question

I read this short story long ago, probably in an anthology. The details are fuzzy but I think the protagonist may have been dismissed from the human army/fleet or otherwise fallen from grace. He somehow realizes there is an alien fleet preparing to attack Earth; he points his spaceship towards Earth to warn humans about the impending attack, in what for some reason is a suicide mission, because he tells himself he will be remembered as humanity's savior.

He crashes on Earth, humanity repels the attack anyway, and in the end, when they find the debris of his spaceship, they think he was actually leading the invasion. The story closes with a character saying the protagonist will always be remembered as the worst traitor to the human race.

Answer 1

FOUND IT!

Exiled from Earth by Sam Merwin, from 1940.

The guy's name is Andar Sammeth.

God, this eluded me for ages, but searching for the traitor phrase in Spanish gave me the answer. It was in the expanded, Spanish language version of an old anthology by Kendell Foster Crossen. This version is credited to Crossen and Charles Nuetzel so I guess it's the fusion of two different anthologies.

The version of the anthology I read is organized in an original way -- stories are grouped by era, so the book is divided in four parts, going from 1945 to 2100 (Atomic Era), from 2100 to 3000 (Galactic Era), from 3000 to 10 000 (Stellar Era) and from 10 000 onwards (Delphic Era). Stories are classified according to the era they appear to be happening in, regardless of the temporal location given by the author; for example, the last section includes a story that takes place around year 2000 or 3000 IIRC.

Merwin's story, “Exiled from Earth”, is included in the Stellar Era section. It goes like this:

Andar Sammeth has been voluntarily exiled from his home planet (Earth, obviously) for more than a century, after having reached a high position in the human government. He took off after a disagreement with the government heads about the danger posed by the Mercurians; they warned him his exile would be permanent, so he would be banned from ever returning.

One day, when he's aboard his own small spaceship, ruminating about returning to Earth one time before dying, he finds a Mercurian ship disguised as a meteorite. He follows it to the dark side of the Moon and finds hundreds of Mercurian ships hidden there, also disguised as meteorites. He realizes they plan to attack Earth while the human fleet is far away. As he makes this realization, the “meteorites” start taking off.

Sammeth tries to get to the planet first so that he can give a warning, but the Mercurian ships are so fast he has no alternative but to inmolate himself by entering the atmosphere at high speed and crash his own ship. As he does this he tells his Venusian companion he will be remembered as the only savior of the human race.

When he's about to crash, he sees that there are some human ships on Earth. The last thing he sees before crashing is these ships starting to repeal the Mercurian attack.

After the attack is repealed, the head of the Earth government and the commander of the Terran fleet stand before the corpses of Andar Sammeth and his Venusian buddy. The commander confirms the dead man's identity. The head of the government says: “I can't believe it. Sammeth was heading the Mercurian attack”. He spits on Sammeth's body and says he “will be remembered as the worst traitor to his own race”.