"I'm not sure the Board is wise in putting out that kind of propaganda. Or any kind of propaganda. After all, we're not trying to sell Mars to anyone. We're doing something that has to be done--you might almost say we're just trying, in a very earnest way, to plug up a gap in the biggest dam that was ever built, to keep the flood waters from carrying us all to destruction." "You're wrong, Ralph," he said. "It isn't just propaganda. A dream always has to go striding on ahead of reality. It may seem strange to you, but the reality does not frighten or discourage me. Mars is a new world and on a new world there has to be--not one, but many beginnings." He paused an instant, then added: "That's why we're sending you to Mars, Ralph. There will have to be another beginning. It won't show too much on the surface. No matter how successful you are, for the colony will remain what it is basically--an experiment in survival. All of a new world's energy will remain, and the turbulence and the hard-to-endure disappointments. But you can help the Colonists go back, and feel the way they did when the first passenger rocket settled down on the red desert sand forty million miles from Earth and the Space Age took on a new dimension." 4 There was only one small window in Trilling's office. But I could see that the sky outside was still bright with stars, and the glimmer of the ceiling lamp made the metal surface above us seem to fall away and dissolve into a much wider expanse of star-studded space. The ceiling-mirrored image of the lamp itself looked like the Sun, blazing in noonday brightness directly overhead and out beyond were galaxies and super-galaxies strung like beads on a wire across the great curve of the universe. It was just an illusion, of course. You could see the same thing in the light-mirroring depths of a glass of wine, if you stared hard enough. But for an instant it seemed to bring bigness, vastness right into the room with us. I was conscious of the silence again, lengthening, hanging heavy between us, as if we'd each said too much, or possibly ... not quite enough. Then Trilling bent and removed something else from his desk. I couldn't see what it was until he set it down directly in front of me, because it was much smaller than the midget tape recorder and his hand covered it. A flat metal box, wafer-thin, doesn't provide much scope for speculation, and I was pretty sure that the object inside was a tiny metal precision instrument or a watch or a medal even before he said: "This should make Joan change her mind, Ralph!" and snapped the box open. The insignia caught and held the light, a two-inch silver hawk with its wings outspread. The white lining of the box made it stand out, as if it were flying through fleecy clouds high in the sky, and symboling in its flight far more than just the elevation of one man to the highest command post the Martian Colonization Board had the authority to bestow.