I couldn't get it out of my mind for a long while. I used to lie in bed and think of it somewhat like this:
There was this man, with his feet planted in the purple sands, and he looked up into the night sky when the moon called Deimos was in perigee, and he studied it. And he said to himself, "Well, I shall write a book and I shall say in this book that the moon of Mars is thus and so. And I will be accurately describing it, for in truth the moon is thus and so."
And on the other side of the planet there was another man. And he, too, looked up into the night sky. And he began to study the moon called Phobos. And he, too, decided to write a book. And he knew he could accurately describe the moon of Mars, for his own eyes had told him it looked like thus and so. And his own eyes did not lie.
I thought of it in a manner somewhat like that. I could tell the woman that Harry Smythe, her first husband, was the man who had killed Tahily, the Martian she loved. I could tell her Smythe had killed him in a fair fight because the Martian had tried to jump a claim. And her heart would be set to rest, for she would know that the whole thing was erased and done with, at last.
Or, on the other hand, I could do what I eventually did do. I could tell her absolutely nothing, in the knowledge that that way she would at least have the strength of hate with which to sustain herself through the years of her life. The strength of her hate against this man, whoever he might be, plus the chill joy of anticipating the day—maybe not tomorrow, but some day—when, like the dream of finding gold on Mars, she'd finally track him down and kill him.
I couldn't leave her without a reason for living. Her man was dead and her son would never whistle again. She had to have something to live for, didn't she?