The young men's eyes glittered. They were an odd group. Small—most of them, none over five feet five inches—and pale, unlike the old man who was bulky around the shoulders and had skin virtually leathered by various radiations and temperatures and winds.
Each day this group waited hungrily for the old man to come and talk to them. The stories he told were the breath of life to them. And of all the tales of adventures in the far ends of the universe, the one that was most repeatedly called for was the story of what had happened to Earth.
"Tell us about Earth," said one of them, now, in a low voice.
"About how great we were?" said the old man. "About what love was like? About homes and children and how a man went to work in the morning at tasks of his own choosing? Or...."
"No. About what happened. You know. At the finish."
The old man looked up again. His eyes were dreamy.
"Earth," he said, softly. "Earth. I've been through the galaxies these last forty years and I've seen planets by the thousand. And there never was one like Earth."
"Tell us," they said, each in urgent, differing words, but all with the same tortured look. "Tell us about what went wrong."
"I've told you that a hundred times," he said.
But they wanted it again. Like a man who relives an incident to examine each moment with incredulity, as if in hope that it will fade and not have happened, as if in unconscious attempt to move sideways from that point into another time stream probability where a different course of action will be true.