"We are old, Earthman. We have watched you—waited for you for a long time. And now you have grown up. You have burst your tiny bubble of human experience. You have set out upon the sea yourselves...."
"You guys should give graduation talks. I didn't ask for a scaled-down philosophy. You tell me that you want to give us every trick in your hat—for free, no questions asked. So I asked why. And the question isn't changing any."
"The answer should be self-evident, Earthman. We are old. And we are lonely."
There was a logic at work somewhere in his brain even during the dream. It told him that he was exhausted from the day's tour with the child-like men of Mars, and that the dream was only the vagaries of a reeling, tired mind of a badly jarred subconscious. It told him that the things he had seen had been too alien for his relatively inflexible adult Earth mind to accept without painful reaction, and this was the reaction.
This, the dream. That was all it was; his logic said so.
Faith spread out before the undisciplined eye of his dreaming brain, and the near-conscious instant of logic faded. The fertile plains that once had been yellow desert-land mounted golden fruits to a temperate sun, and beyond the distant green of gently-rolling hills spread the resplendent city, and there were other cities as gracefully civilized beyond the untroubled horizon.
And in the dream, these were all things men had done, as though sanity had invaded their minds overnight. It was the Earth that men had intended, rather than that which they had built.
The sun dimmed. The air chilled, and the grains and fruits wilted, and the rolling hills were a darker hue than green as the shadow lengthened, spread to the gleaming cities beyond and then as it touched them and ran soundlessly the length and breadth of their wide malls, there were other changes....
Skeletons, reaching upward to a puffy, leaden sky.