"His parents were killed in a car crash years ago," Miss Graham said. "He lived with an uncle on a farm outside Grandview, but they didn't get along, and Jim came into town and got a job at the power station."
She added, as we turned a comer, "My mother rented him a room. That's how we got to know each other. That's how wehow we got engaged."
"Yeah, sure," I said.
It was a big square house with a deep front porch, and some trees around it. I sat down in a wicker chair, and Miss Graham brought her mother out. Her mother talked a little about Jim, how they missed him, and how she declared he'd been just like a son.
When her mother went back in, Miss Graham showed me a little bunch of blue envelopes, "These were the letters I got from Jim. There weren't very many of them, and they weren't very long."
"We were only allowed to send one thirty-word message every two weeks," I told her. "There were a couple of thou- sand of us out there, and they couldn't let us jam up the message transmitter all the time."
"It was wonderful how much Jim could put into just a few words," she said, and handed me some of them. I read a couple. One said, "I have to pinch myself to realize that I'm one of the first Earthmen to stand on an alien world. At night, in the cold, I look up at the green star that's Earth and can't quite realize I've helped an age-old dream come true."
Another one said, "This world's grim and lonely, and mys- terious. We don't know much about it yet. So far, nobody's seen anything living but the lichens that Expedition One reported, but there might be anything here."
Miss Graham asked me, "Was that all there was, just lichens?"
"That, and two or three kinds of queer cactus things," I said. "And rock and sand. That's all."