It was the last time he called to her. After that, the silence conveyed an intensity of purpose far stronger than verbal entreaties.
She swerved the sandsled dangerously among the erosions, and felt the grinding strain at the base of her skull as the sled bounded from one spire and careened toward another, which she barely avoided smashing into head-on.
She recognized the area. She leaped out of the car and ran, hearing the pursuing sandsled stop somewhere below her as she climbed.
For an instant dizziness threatened, and the surroundings and the motions of Don and herself and the love moons in the sky seemed wildly, almost dangerously abstracted, as if viewed through drug-glazed eyes. A panicky wash of blood came to her face and she struggled for breath, wanting to cry out. It passed. Her mind groped for reason and the terror receded.
She went on up to the ridge and found the old man waiting. From that high ridge where the night wind cut coldly toward the Martian south, the lights of the rituals in the amphitheatre of Martian Haven flickered in a misty halo far away, like phosphorescent globes of spooky glowing, and frenetic dancings and shiftings of crazed flames.
The old man had a vague, insubstantial look, only his eyes seemed real, almost too real, in their intensity as he looked at her. He was propped against a block of eroded rock and the wind rustled the fringes of his ragged robe.
She sat beside him, their shoulders touched. And then, as though slowly dissolving through some chemical reaction, the old man began to fade. Vaguely Don was there, too, in a nebulous transparency like the old man. And Madeleine lay there, her face pressed into the sand. On Mars one should expect, without shock, a different kind of reality.
Their voices weren't really voices. Just thoughts, thoughts in the head, feelings, but nothing solid. The thoughts of Don and the old man seemed to be in some kind of time-worn conflict.
"You encouraged her," Don was thinking.
"Those who can see a little should be urged to try to see more. Maybe, sometime, we'll find one who is different enough to come through to us."