---

"Marte!"

His voice echoed hollowly, dying away to an eerie whisper, fainter and fainter.

"Marte!"

It was very silent here on the last level below the giant atomic motors.

The feeble light showered down from a single overhead bulb; it was their special bulb. Marte always lit it when she came below.

"Marte!" His voice was almost pleading.

"Here I am, Johnny. Over here."

"Little imp," he said, not unkindly. "What do you mean, hiding?"

"Hiding, Johnny? I wasn't hiding.... And besides, you looked so funny and lost, standing there, calling me."

He saw her, now, sitting half in shadow, leaning against the far bulkhead.

His feet ping-pinged on the uncarpeted deck plates as he crossed to her.

"Hello," she said brightly. She threw back her head, and her eyes caught the dim light and sparkled it. "I hoped you'd come today." Smiling, she held out her hand.

He took it. "I really shouldn't have," he said.

"Oh?" She puckered her lips in mock anger and drew him down beside her. "Didn't you want to come?"

"You know I did."

"Then why?"

"They might need me in Control," he said, half seriously.

Marte's eyes opened an involuntary fraction. "Nothing's wrong, is there?" Her lips had lost their sudden, native smile, and the smile in her eyes half fled.

"No. Everything's fine.... I just meant in case...."

"Oh, Johnny, don't say it; please." Her eyes spoke with her voice, emotions bubbled in them. Her face had something of a woman's seriousness in it, the product more of native understanding than experience, and much of a girl's naivete. "Don't even think about anything like that." She looked up at him, studied his face intently, and then said, "Tell me that: Say nothing's going to go wrong."

"I was just talking, Marte. Nothing can go wrong; not now."

"Say it again!"

"Nothing is going to go wrong," he said slowly, giving each word its full meaning.

"Do you really—really and truly—believe that?" she asked.

"Of course I do, Marte."

The girl smiled. "I do too—only—" The smile faded. Her eyes focused on some distant place, beyond the last level, beyond the Ship itself. "Only sometimes I'm afraid it's too good to happen.... That I'm dreaming, and that all at once I'll wake up, and—" She shook her head. "But that's silly, isn't it, Johnny?"

"Yes," he said. He settled back and rested against the bulkhead.

---

There was silence for a while, two young people, hand in hand, sitting in silence.

Finally, Marte spoke.

"Here," she said, "feel." She pressed his hand against the bulkhead. "See how cool it is?"

"Of course. It's the outside plate."

"Yes," she said, "I know. There's nothing but space out there." She squeezed his hand. "But just a little while ago, before you came, I was sitting here thinking. And I thought that wind must feel like that. I mean, not how it feels, exactly, but how it makes you feel. Wild and free. Without any bulkheads to keep you from walking and walking."

He shook his head. "Little dreamer," he whispered.

She frowned prettily. "Don't you feel it, too?"

Johnny Nine pressed his hand to the bulkhead again. "Yes, I guess maybe I do. In a way."

"Of course you do! You've just got to. You can't help it! Put your cheek close against the bulkhead and you can almost feel the wind blowing on your face. I can. And if I try hard enough, I can almost smell the fields of flowers all in bloom and hear birds singing, like they were singing from far away.... And I can—"

"You've been reading again," he interrupted with a smile.

"Uh-huh," she said dreamily. "I have.... And when I finished, I came down here, and I thought about it, and I hoped you'd come so we could talk. It was poetry; it was—beautiful....

"You know, Johnny, I'd like to write poetry. If I had the sky and the birds and the rivers and the mountains all to write about."

After a moment, Johnny Nine said, "Go ahead, tell me what the poems were about."

---

---

"Well...." She drew out the word slowly. "It's not what they were about, exactly. It's what they said, not out loud, but down deep. It's like getting a present that means an awful lot to you; it's not the present, but the way it makes your nose tickle and your stomach feel." She smiled wistfully.

"They were all written a long time ago, even before the First Generation, by men back on Earth, but they seemed to be written just for us.... One was about a bird, and how it made the poet feel to watch it fly and hear it sing; it made him feel all warm inside.... And one was about a young girl who worked in the fields, reaping grain...." That image seemed to reverberate in her mind, for she was quiet a moment, as if to listen for the fading echoes.

"I think that would be the most wonderful thing. To help things grow, with your own two hands, and to harvest them when they're ripe and waiting, not 'ponics, like Sam, but really growing out of the Earth."

"Someday," he said softly, "you're going to write the kind of poetry they wrote."

Marte looked down at her hands.

"I want to do so many things.... Maybe help things grow, most of all.... I think there must be a sort of poetry in that, too.

"Johnny?"

"Yes?"

"Do you think we could get a farm? It wouldn't have to be a very big one; just a little farm, where we could raise things?"

"If you want it, Marte."

"Oh, I do. I do!" Her voice carried the lilt of youth in it.

---

The silences that frequently spiced their conversation had no embarrassed elements in them; they said as much as words, and they came mutually.

"Some of it was sad. The poetry. I mean, the deep kind of sadness, the real sadness, the kind that has—hopelessness, and lostness, and aloneness in it.

She caught her breath, sharply. "That kind of sadness. The kind that says something about us. How we've dreamed and planned of going Home—"

She let her voice drift.

"I sometimes think Earth is such a beautiful place that you have to be dead to go there."

Johnny Nine said nothing.

"Think of the wide sky, Johnny. Where we can see the sunrise. I've always dreamed about seeing a sunrise.

"A sun. That's a funny word to say; it just sounds warm. Sun. A sun that is like those little points of light, way beyond the bulkheads. When we see them from Observation, they look all cold. Imagine how it would be to be so close to one of them that it's big and warm....

"Johnny, do you think anything could be as pretty as those pictures, in Compartment Seven, of a blue and gold sunrise?"

"Even prettier."

"Say it again!"

"Even prettier."

"I'll stay up, then, all the first night. I know I will. Just to see the sun come up."

She drew in her legs and clasped her arms around them.

"Tell me again what They said."

Johnny Nine did not answer immediately. He sat motionless, trying to make out the bulkhead that marked the other side of the Ship. But their feeble light could not penetrate so much darkness. It almost seemed as if there were no other bulkhead and no Ship, only darkness, there, that spread out to the ends of the Universe.

Finally he spoke. "It was awful hard to hear them; we're too far away. As near as we could understand, they're having a celebration for us. Hundreds and hundreds of people will be there. All to see us."