She didn't answer. Barstac closed his eyes again. He had remembered happiness, felt it, re-experienced it. And now he didn't want to die.
The Martian's thoughts were dimmer now, and Barstac drifted, and little fingers of crepuscular light fingered out toward him, alluring, disarming, and he drifted back, down the slide-board of time where pain and ugliness were no longer.
Far away, the Martian's voice, talking to Marian perhaps, Barstac didn't know.
Humans are sick. The sickest ones eventually come here. More and more will come. Someday perhaps we can help all of you find your way backward or forward to happiness, and out of the old seas of pain. Sleep, both of you. Sleep. There is only the happiness that was, or that might have been. There is no more pain.
And then Barstac was with his Father again, running down the steep slope under the bright promising light of a million stars frosty and marvelously clear. His Father was laughing. His own wild abandoned joy as he ran beneath the cloud rifts where the sunlight showed, brightening the ragged tops of the asteroid's great metal mountains.
He heard his mother calling to him, and he ran faster.