"Why, Doc?" he said to Lorring, as they played cards in the rec-hall. "The answer is in all of us, here. Or we would never have come to Mars. Where was there ever such a place of history, enigma, weird beauty, fascination to men? You can't be neutral. Hating Mars, you'd never stay. Half loving it, like most of us, you would--for a while. Loving it, you'd want a much closer look than is possible at Port Laribee, from which we sally forth like rubbernecks. Too bad that Mars is too rough for men, in the long run. Too bad that the Martians are extinct. Once there were even machines to maintain a better climate." Other specialists were within hearing. They laughed, but they knew what Dayton meant. They'd seen the dun deserts, the great graven monoliths, dust scoured, the heaps of rust. Being here had the charm of a quest for ancient treasure, marked by the mood of death. Parsons, the metallurgist, said: "Funny, but I remember Kort's posture--bent, just like the figures in the bas-reliefs. Though Martian skeletal structure was far different. That sounds as if part of Mars sneaked into Kort's body, doesn't it? Hell, there's no pseudo-science here! Plodding through dust, and at low gravity, you just naturally develop that posture as a habit. Now call me nuts." "You're nuts, Parsons," Kettrich, the biologist, obliged. Not many days later, Frank Terry and his son came to Port Laribee. Bringing a seven-year-old boy--a bright little guy named Will--to unlivable Mars, marked the elder Terry at once as a screwball. Was the mother dead or divorced? Was Terry a remittance man, exiled by his family? He seemed to have enjoyed the good things.... Such curiosity was bad taste. Forget it. "We like the sound of the place," Frank Terry explained. "We thought we'd take some photographs, really get friendly with the place...." His listeners foresaw the withering of Terry's familiar enthusiasm, and his departure within a week. Except maybe Dayton guessed differently. The intellectual Terry was not much like Dave Kort. Yet perhaps a kinship showed in a certain expression, as if their natures had the same basis. During the next Martian year, Dayton and the observatory crew saw the sporting-goods-store sheen vanish utterly from these two. They carried less and less equipment with each succeeding sally into the wilderness. Dried lichen, stuffed inside their air-tight garments, soon served them as additional insulation against cold. From their lengthening jaunts they brought back the usual relics--golden ornaments, carvings, bits of apparatus that had not weathered away. And the usual photographs of blue-green thickets, war-melted cities, domes celled like honeycombs, suggesting a larval stage in the life-cycle of the ancients, and of country littered with shattered crystal--much Martian land had once been roofed with clear quartz, against the harshening climate.