Colonel Sanderson himself was talking. He looked the way Stanley must have looked when he found Livingstone, gaunt and bearded and jumpy; and his crew, lined up behind him before the ship's pickup camera, were in no better shape. The lot of them stared hungrily out at us as if they had just found a peephole into Heaven and couldn't wait to see if there was a gate farther along the fence.
"... established conceptions of Martian areography are completely erroneous," the colonel was saying. "There are no drifting deserts of sand or howling typhoons of ferrous dust. We can show you actual conditions better by camera, I think, than they could be detailed in words."
The view jumped to another camera aimed from an outside port, and we saw Mars. Colonel Sanderson's voice kept up a running commentary behind the scene, but we only half heard him.
The ship rested in about two feet of water. Around it the whole world curved up to the horizon in a shallow concave sweep like the inside of a great rusty bowl, lined with knee-high reeds that grew as far as the eye could see out of a knee-deep marsh. A fist-sized sun hung low in the sky, its glare dulled to a muddy crimson by a shimmering cloud of gnats that whirled and danced to infinity. There was a sort of vast, featureless roaring in the background that sounded like Niagara at two hundred yards, not deafening but loud enough to force Colonel Sanderson to raise his voice.
"The frog noise is worst," he was saying. "It drives us to the point of insanity at times.... One member of our party has succumbed to it already, a machinist named Willkins who disappeared two weeks ago. Apparently the poor fellow drowned himself in the marsh, since no trace of him has been found since."
That was when I realized why the little man on the stool beside me looked so familiar—because I had seen his pictures in the papers, along with the rest of Sanderson's crew, a thousand times during the past year. The mixed expression on his face made sense now, too; he wasn't only disgusted and defensive, he was guilty.
"So that's how you knew what it was like," I said. "You couldn't stick it out with the others, so you jumped ship. You deserted!"
He gave me a hangdog look. "It's not deserting unless the country is at war," he said. "It's just going over the hill, A.W.O.L."
The television roar got louder, and when I looked up the ship's cameraman was doing a close-up for our benefit. He panned the shot downward until we seemed to be standing ten feet above the marsh, and at that distance I could see plainly what it was that caused the uproar.