There was a rising terror in her now. And a slowly dawning horror. The sunlight streamed in, gleaming redly on his hair, his shoulders. He seemed to be the center of a flaming red ball …
He sent for you, Sally. Why doesn’t he get up and speak to you, if only to pour salt on the wounds you’ve borne for eight long years?
Poor Sally! You wanted a strong, protective, old-fashioned husband. What have you got instead?
Sally went up to the desk and looked steadily into eyes so calm and blank that they seemed like the eyes of a child lost in some dreamy wonderland barred forever to adult understanding.
For an instant her terror ebbed and she felt almost reassured. Then she made the mistake of bending more closely above him, brushing his right elbow with her sleeve.
That single light woman’s touch unsettled him. He started to fall, sideways and very fast. Topple a dead weight and it crashes with a swiftness no opposing force can counterbalance.
It did Sally no good to clutch frantically at his arm as he fell, to tug and jerk at the slackening folds of his suit. The heaviness of his descending bulk dragged him down and away from her, the awful inertia of lifeless flesh.
He thudded to the floor and rolled over on his back, seeming to shrink as Sally widened her eyes upon him. He lay in a grotesque sprawl at her feet, his jaw hanging open on the gaping black orifice of his mouth …
Sally might have screamed and gone right on screaming—if she had been a different kind of woman. On seeing her husband lying dead her impulse might have been to throw herself down beside him, give way to her grief in a wild fit of sobbing.
But where there was no grief there could be no sobbing …
One thing only she did before she left. She unloosed the collar of the unmoving form on the floor and looked for the small brown mole she did not really expect to find. The mole she knew to be on her husband’s shoulder, high up on the left side.
She had noticed things that made her doubt her sanity; she needed to see the little black mole to reassure her …
She had noticed the difference in the hairline, the strange slant of the eyebrows, the crinkly texture of the skin where it should have been smooth …
Something was wrong … horribly, weirdly wrong …
Even the hands of the sprawled form seemed larger and hairier than the hands of her husband. Nevertheless it was important to be sure …
The absence of the mole clinched it.
Sally crouched beside the body, carefully readjusting the collar. Then she got up and walked out of the office.
Some homecomings are joyful, others cruel. Sitting in the taxi, clenching and unclenching her hands, Sally had no plan that could be called a plan, no hope that was more than a dim flickering in a vast wasteland, bleak and unexplored.
But it was strange how one light burning brightly in a cottage window could make even a wasteland seem small, could shrink and diminish it until it became no more than a patch of darkness that anyone with courage might cross.
The light was in Tommy’s room and there was a whispering behind the door. Sally could hear the whispering as she tiptoed upstairs, could see the light streaming out into the hall.
She paused for an instant at the head of the stairs, listening. There were two voices in the room, and they were talking back and forth.
Sally tiptoed down the hall, stood with wildly beating heart just outside the door.
“She knows now, Tommy,” the deepest of the two voices said. “We are very close, your mother and I. She knows now that I sent her to the office to find my ‘stand in.’ Oh, it’s an amusing term, Tommy—an Earth term we’d hardly use on Mars. But it’s a term your mother would understand.”
A pause, then the voice went on, “You see, my son, it has taken me eight years to repair the ship. And in eight years a man can wither up and die by inches if he does not have a growing son to go adventuring with him in the end.”
“Adventuring, father?”
“You have read a good many Earth books, my son, written especially for boys. Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. What paltry books they are! But in them there is a little of the fire, a little of the glow of our world.”
“No, father. I started them but I threw them away for I did not like them.”
“As you and I must throw away all Earth things, my son. I tried to be kind to your mother, to be a good husband as husbands go on Earth. But how could I feel proud and strong and reckless by her side? How could I share her paltry joys and sorrows, chirp with delight as a sparrow might chirp hopping about in the grass? Can an eagle pretend to be a sparrow? Can the thunder muffle its voice when two white-crested clouds collide in the shining depths of the night sky?”
“You tried, father. You did your best.”
“Yes, my son, I did try. But if I had attempted to feign emotions I did not feel your mother would have seen through the pretense. She would then have turned from me completely. Without her I could not have had you, my son.”
“And now, father, what will we do?”
“Now the ship has been repaired and is waiting for us. Every day for eight years I went to the hill and worked on the ship. It was badly wrecked, my son, but now my patience has been rewarded, and every damaged astronavigation instrument has been replaced.”
“You never went to the office, father? You never went at all?”
“No, my son. My stand-in worked at the office in my place. I instilled in your mother’s mind an intense dislike and fear of the office to
