"The canals are empty right there."
"The canals are full of lavender wine!"
"It's dead."
"It's alive!" protested the Martian, laughing more now. "Oh, you're quite wrong. See all the carnival lights? There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets there. That's where I'm going now, to the festival; we'll float on the waters all night long; we'll sing, we'll drink, we'll make love, Can't you see it?"
"Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. Ask any of our party. Me, I'm on my way to Green City tonight; that's the new colony we just raised over near Illinois Highway. You're mixed up. We brought in a million board feet of Oregon lumber and a couple dozen tons of good steel nails and hammered together two of the nicest little villages you ever saw. Tonight we're warming one of them. A couple rockets are coming in from Earth, bringing our wives and girl friends. There'll be barn dances and whisky--"
The Martian was now disquieted. "You say it is over that way?"
"There are the rockets." Tomas walked him to the edge of the hill and pointed down. "See?"
"No."
"Damn it, there they are! Those long silver things."
"No."
Now Tomas laughed. "You're blind!"
"I see very well. You are the one who does not see."
"But you see the new town, don't you?"
"I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low tide."
"Mister, that water's been evaporated for forty centuries."
"Ah, now, now, that is enough."
"It's true, I tell you."
The Martian grew very serious. "Tell me again. You do not see the city the way I describe it? The pillars very white, the boats very slender, the festival lights--oh, I see them clearly! And listen! I can hear them singing. It's no space away at all."
Tomas listened and shook his head. "No."
"And I, on the other hand," said the Martian, "cannot see what you describe. Well."
Again they were cold. An ice was in their flesh.
"Can it be ... ?"
"What?"
"You say 'from the sky'?"
"Earth."
"Earth, a name, nothing," said the Martian. "But ... as I came up the pass an hour ago ... " He touched the back of his neck. "I felt ... "
"Cold?"
"Yes."
"And now?"
"Cold again. Oddly. There was a thing to the light, to the hills, the road," said the Martian. "I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if I were the last man alive on this world ..."