When Madeleine opened her eyes, it was night. On many a starry night she had lain inside walls not so different from these, and felt much the same, she thought, surrounded by a desert of her own. Away off there in the blackness, Earth shone palely—and she might as well never have left it at all.
And then again she saw the old hermit's eyes out there in the dark, his burning eyes where there should be only sterile emptiness in the night. And his voice calling where there would otherwise have been only the dusty echoes of an arid past.
Outside now the tourists were gathering in the double moonlight. The weird extrapolation of Earth music that was supposed to be the strains of Martian rhythms drifted to her, and lights flickered from burning tapers where dancers undulated and writhed fitfully. A libidinous expectancy was as heavy as a thick scent in the night.
Then, only for a moment, she despised herself for not being with the others, for never having been able to participate in the futile make-believe. She felt like a child who had never grown beyond the stage of the most old-fashioned fairy tales. Someone who had gone beyond the looking-glass and had never been able to get back, but who had never quite been able to forget the world from which she had come.
She could hear her parents and Don talking in the next room.
"It's a shame for her to miss the ritual of the double moons," Don said.
"She's always been that way," Mr. Ericson said. "Staying by herself."
"We've tried everything," said Mrs. Ericson.
"She's spent half her life on an analyst's couch," said Mr. Ericson.
"She wouldn't even," Mrs. Ericson said, "fall in love with her analyst!"