His nostrils failed to respond to the faintly acrid odor of wet dead leaves. His eyes failed to discover the rather sharp, ugly cut of the profile of the hills or the ungainly dip of the valleys. He was blind to the muddiness of the brook and his ears could not hear the sucking sound the water made as it pitched over dirty-colored rocks. He did not look, hear, or feel as he might have on that section of Mars, where the dream of twenty years might have disappeared like a speared bubble to become ugly reality. He was capable of none of the deadening response that might have been his, here on Mars, had he been a man who had not lived twenty years to offer, finally, one totally honest, unselfish motion in this universe. He simply stepped to his reward, smiling.