He kissed her. A moment later he was out in the golden afternoon. He avoided the kids playing football out there in the street just as he used to play. He would have liked to talk to them. But--not now. He climbed into his car. There he sat quietly for a moment, thinking. The autumn shadows, cast by the houses and trees, were long and blue. They reminded him of the shadows on Mars; and he felt a slight, not unpleasant, chill of loneliness and mystery plucking at his nerves. The sound of the wind wasn't so very different here either! Only out there it was shriller and much fainter and more sad, in the thin air, and through the muffling fabric of his oxygen suit. Not so long ago Sam had seen those Martian winds shredding plumes of rusty red dust from the desert. He'd seen them blow balled masses of dried, prickly vegetation, like tumbleweeds, across the undulating red plain, and into the deep machine-dug gorges, all but waterless now, that on Earth were called the "canals." He'd seen those dried bundles of weeds collected in rows against the granite masonry of walls that were cold and crumbled in their ancientness but which looked fused along their low crests, like old lava, telling a story of violent and enigmatic calamity. Thus Sam Conway's reveries became unpleasant once more. He wanted to hurry again. He started the car, and drove swiftly out of the village. The tires crunched in dead leaves as he swung into the driveway that led down by the lake. Premonition must have been working in him, accentuating his caution and his haste. There was a fair-sized brick building there, an old garage. He unlocked the heavy door and went inside. The large main room of the structure was to be his laboratory; the office, his living quarters. He surveyed the dingy interior critically. Everything, so far as he could see, was exactly as he had left it except for a small smear of ash on the floor in the office room. Driveway ash. Part of a man's footprint. His own? With the panic of a disturbed miser, Sam Conway thought back carefully. It could be his own footprint; but he couldn't remember--couldn't be sure! His heart began to throb in mounting anxiety at the thought that the lair of his secret might have been entered during his absence. He pulled the shades carefully. Then he clawed his way through the clutter of paraphernalia in the little room--mostly boxes of new laboratory equipment, as yet unpacked. And a few glass jars containing plant samples, and specimens of odd Martian fauna--souvenirs he hadn't been required to turn over to the scientists.