It was a big square house with a deep front porch, and some trees around it. I sat down in a wicker chair, and Miss Graham brought her mother out. Her mother talked a little about Jim, how they missed him, and how she declared he'd been just like a son.
When her mother went back in, Miss Graham showed me a little bunch of blue envelopes, 'These were the letters I got from Jim. There weren't very many of them, and they weren't very long.'
'We were only allowed to send one thirty-word message every two weeks,' I told her. 'There were a couple of thou- sand of us out there, and they couldn't let us jam up the message transmitter all the time.'
'It was wonderful how much Jim could put into just a few words,' she said, and handed me some of them. I read a couple. One said, 'I have to pinch myself to realize that I'm one of the first Earthmen to stand on an alien world. At night, in the cold, I look up at the green star that's Earth and can't quite realize I've helped an age-old dream come true.'
Another one said, 'This world's grim and lonely, and mys- terious. We don't know much about it yet. So far, nobody's seen anything living but the lichens that Expedition One reported, but there might be anything here.'
Miss Graham asked me, 'Was that all there was, just lichens?'
'That, and two or three kinds of queer cactus things,' I said. 'And rock and sand. That's all.'
As I read more of those little blue letters, I found that now that Jim was gone I knew him better than I ever had. There was something about him I'd never suspected. He was romantic inside. We hadn't suspected it, he was always so quiet and slow, but now I saw that all the time he was more romantic about the thing we were doing than any of us.
He hadn't let on. We'd have kidded him, if he had. Our name for Mars, after we got sick of it, was the Hole. We always talked about it as the Hole. I could see now that Jim had been too shy of our kidding to ever let us know that he glamorized the thing in his mind.
'This was the last one I got from him before his sickness,' Miss Graham said.
That one said, 'I'm starting north tomorrow with one of the mapping expeditions. We'll travel over country no hu- man has ever seen before.'
I nodded. 'I was on that party myself. Jim and I were on the same half-track,'
'He was thrilled by it, wasn't he, Sergeant?' I wondered. I remembered that trip, and it was hell. Our job was simply to run a preliminary topographical survey, checking with Geigers for possible uranium deposits. It wouldn't have been so bad, if the sand hadn't started to blow.
It wasn't sand like Earth sand. It was ground to dust by billions of years of blowing around that dry world. It got inside your breathing mask, and your goggles, and the en- gines of the half-tracks, in your food and water and clothes. There was nothing for three days but cold, and wind, and sand.
Thrilled? I'd have laughed at that before. But now I didn't know. Maybe Jim had been, at that. He had lots of pa- tience, a lot more than I ever had. Maybe he glamorized that hellish trip into wonderful adventure on a foreign world.
'Sure, he was thrilled,' I said. 'We all were. Anybody would be.'
Miss Graham took the letters back, and then said, 'You had Martian sickness too, didn't you?'
I said, yes, I had, just a touch, and that was why I'd had to spend a stretch in reconditioning hospital when I got back.
She waited for me to go on, and I knew I had to. 'They don't know yet if it's some sort of virus or just the effect of Martian conditions on Earthmen's bodies. It hit forty per cent of us. It wasn't really so badfever and dopiness, mostly.'
'When Jim got it, was he well cared for?' she asked. Her lips were quivering a little.
'Sure, he was well cared for. He got the best care there was,' I lied.
The best care there was? That was a laugh. The Brst cases got decent care, maybe. But they'd never figured on so many coming down. There wasn't any room in our little hospitalthey just had to stay in their bunks in the alumi- num Quonsets when it hit them. All our doctors but one were down, and two of them died.
We'd been on Mars six months when it hit us, and the loneliness had already got us down. All but four of our rockets had gone back to Earth, and we were alone on a dead world, our little town of Quonsets huddled together under that hateful, brassy sky, and beyond it the sand and rocks that went on forever.
You go up to the North Pole and camp there, and find out how lonely that is. It was worse out there, a lot worse. The first excitement was gone long ago, and we were tired, and homesick in a way nobody was ever homesick beforewe wanted to see green grass, and real sunshine, and women's faces, and hear running water; and we wouldn't until Ex- pedition Three came to relieve us. No wonder guys blew their tops out there. And then came Martian sickness, on top of it.
'We did everything for him that we could,' I said. Sure we had. I could still remember Walter and me tramp- ing through the cold night to the hospital to try to get a medic, while Breck stayed with him, and how we couldn't get one.
I remember how Walter had looked up at the blazing sky as we tramped back, and shaken his fist at the big green star of Earth.
'People up there are going to dances tonight, watching shows, sitting around in warm rooms laughing! Why should good men have to die out here to get them uranium for cheap power?'
'Can it,' I told him tiredly. 'Jim's not going to die. A lot of guys got over it.'
The best care there was? That was real funny. All we could do was wash his face, and give him the pills the medic left, and watch him get weaker every day till he died.
'Nobody could have done more for him than was done,' I told Miss Graham.
'I'm glad,' she said. 'I guessit's just one of those things.' When I got up to go she asked me if I didn't want to see Jim's room. They'd kept it for him just the same, she said. I didn't want to, but how are you going to say so? I went up with her and looked and said it was nice. She opened a big cupboard. It was full of neat rows of old magazines.
'They're all the old science fiction magazines he read when he was a boy,' she said. 'He always saved them.' I took one out. It had a bright cover, with a space ship on it, not like our rockets but a streamlined thing, and the rings of Saturn in the background.
When I laid it down, Miss Graham took it up and put it back carefully into its place in the row, as though somebody was coming back who wouldn't like to find things out of order.
She insisted on driving me back to Omaha, and out to the airport. She seemed sorry to let me go, and I suppose it was because I was the last real tie to Jim, and when I was gone it was all over then for good.
I wondered if she'd get over it in time, and I guessed she would. People do get over things. I supposed she'd marry some other nice guy, and I wondered what they'd do with Jim's things-with all those old magazines nobody was ever coming back to read.
I would never have stopped at Chicago at all if I could have got out of it, for the last person I wanted to talk to anybody about was Walter Millis. It would be too easy for me to make a slip and let out stuff nobody was supposed to know.
But Walters father had called me at the hospital, a couple of times. The last time he called, he said he was having Brock's parents come down from Wisconsin so they could see me, too, so what could I do then but say, yes, I'd stop. But I didn't like it at all, and I knew I'd have to be careful. Mr. Millis was waiting at the airport and shook hands with me and said what a big favor I was doing them all, and how he appreciated my stopping when I must be anxious to get back to my own home and parents.
'That's all right,' I said. 'My dad and mother came out to the hospital to see me when I first got back.' He was a big, fine-looking important sort of man, with a little bit of the stuffed shirt about him, I thought. He seemed friendly enough, but I got the feeling he was looking at me and wondering why I'd come back and his son Walter hadn't. Well, I couldn't blame him for that.
His car was waiting, a big car with a driver, and we started north through the city. Mr, Millis pointed out a few things to me to make conversation, especially a big atomic- power station we passed.
'It's only one of thousands, strung all over the world,' he said. 'They're going to transform our whole economy. This Martian uranium will be a big thing, Sergeant.' I said, yes, I guessed it would.
I was sweating blood, waiting for him to start asking about Walter, and I didn't know yet just what I could tell him. I could get myself in Dutch plenty if I opened my big mouth too wide, for that one thing that had happened to Expedition Two was supposed to be strictly secret, and we'd all been briefed on why we had to keep our mouths
