Then he had pushed a button and sent the rocket on its way again, back to Earth. He didn't mind writing the reports. Most of them were rubbish anyway, but they seemed to keep the people back at the Institute happy. He did mind the artifacts. It seemed wrong to remove them, though he sent only the less valuable ones back. But perhaps it couldn't be helped. One time, the supply rocket had failed to return when he pushed its red button—the thing was still sitting out there in the desert, slowly rusting. Martin Devere had happily unloaded the artifacts and put them back where they belonged. It wasn't his fault.
The puff of dust on the horizon was beginning to settle. This second rocket had descended with a shrill scream through the thin air, its voice more highly pitched than it would have been in denser atmosphere. Martin Devere had looked up from his work in time to see its braking jets vanish behind the low Martian hills a few kilometers distant.
It was much too large to be an automatic supply rocket, even if there had been reason to expect another one. Martin Devere knew it could mean only one thing—someone was paying him an unannounced visit.
He waited, watching through the igloo wall to see who had come to poke around and bother him after all these years.
At first he was annoyed that the people at the Institute hadn't let him know visitors were coming. Then he reminded himself that it had been years since he'd taken the trouble to listen to his radio receiver, or to read the messages they sent him along with supplies.
After a long time, he made out a smaller dust-puff, and then a little sandcat advancing slowly across the desert. Riding on top of it were two men in space suits.
Everyone on Earth who reads popular magazines or watches TV knows the story of Martin Devere, "The Hermit of Mars." Over the years, now that he is dead, he has become a sort of culture hero, as Dr. Livingston or Albert Schweitzer once were. Though Martin Devere could not be called a humanitarian in any sense of the word. After his divorce from his first and only wife, at the age of 45, he never gave much thought again either to women or any other kind of people—except for his long-dead Martians.
But everyone should know by now how Martin Devere first came to Mars at the age of 50. Even then he was the oldest man on the planet, and Mars sustained quite a large research colony at the time. Only Martin Devere's unchallenged scientific reputation, together with his apparent good health, enabled him to leave Earth as head of a five-man archeological team. This turned up the first fossil ruins far beneath the desert sand.
Then there came a day when the Space Institute of the United Governments decided to abandon Project Mars. It was getting too expensive to maintain. Everything of value to space research had already been learned about the planet, and the archeological site, though yet barely scratched, did not properly come under space research. Closing Project Mars would mean more funds for solar research, on Mercury, for the Lunar colony and for work on the interstellar drive.