Ellen Varney was perhaps sure she did know. She smiled faintly, like the Mona Lisa smiling at the naïveté of men, and their little-boy vanities. But there was a shadow of worry in her eyes, too.
"You won't stay here for supper, then, with the folks and me, Sam," she said wistfully. "Like old times...."
Sam couldn't think of anything nicer. But the pull of something else was much more strong.
"No, Honey," he said. "I—"
"Don't stumble, Sam," the girl returned. "Tomorrow night, then?"
"Maybe. I hope...."
He kissed her. A moment later he was out in the golden afternoon. He avoided the kids playing football out there in the street just as he used to play. He would have liked to talk to them. But—not now.
He climbed into his car. There he sat quietly for a moment, thinking. The autumn shadows, cast by the houses and trees, were long and blue. They reminded him of the shadows on Mars; and he felt a slight, not unpleasant, chill of loneliness and mystery plucking at his nerves. The sound of the wind wasn't so very different here either! Only out there it was shriller and much fainter and more sad, in the thin air, and through the muffling fabric of his oxygen suit.
Not so long ago Sam had seen those Martian winds shredding plumes of rusty red dust from the desert. He'd seen them blow balled masses of dried, prickly vegetation, like tumbleweeds, across the undulating red plain, and into the deep machine-dug gorges, all but waterless now, that on Earth were called the "canals."
He'd seen those dried bundles of weeds collected in rows against the granite masonry of walls that were cold and crumbled in their ancientness but which looked fused along their low crests, like old lava, telling a story of violent and enigmatic calamity.