The voice of the little man came again into the room.
"Adventure," he said. "Adventure for all of us, and hope, and happiness." His voice trembled a little with the immensity of his own vision. "A new heaven and a new Earth, and a new dream for all mankind—everlasting, eternal, enduring for all time!"
His voice was drowned by a crowd roar that filled the room, then died away.
The jets under the ship came to life with an ear-splitting whoo-o-om! and the ship leveled off and hurtled west.
Electrical impulses touched the desert outside and rebounded to register on a dial the information that his distance from the ground was two thousand feet. He consulted another dial and found that the rocket was traveling a little more than eighteen hundred feet a second. Too fast. He cut it down to a thousand feet. Instruments were checked.
The energy waves he had received in space had come from the most desolate part of Mars. Lawrence was unable to understand why anyone chose this part of the planet to live on.
It was barren of the Martian planets collected by the settlers for their medicinal and museum value on earth, and it was far from the closely-clustered settler's towns. Which was strange. The settlers, he thought with a smile, made a lot of their being pioneers and all that sort of thing, but they loved their mechanical comforts and the warm, close companionship of their fellows.
He reached over and flicked the switch of the visor set in the nose of the ship for observation purposes. The scene revealed was as disappointingly prosaic to him now, as it had been when he had first seen it. It looked just as the mid-western deserts used to look before the Consul had turned them into fertile agricultural grounds, with one exception: the ground was as red as blood, even in the feeble light of the Martian moons.
There was a wind blowing, carrying the sand and the half-vegetable, half-animal "tumblies" along with it. But the wind always blew on Mars at this time of year, despite the thin air, when one was this near to the pole.