In the shiny antiseptic ward at Martian Haven, the virus was burned out by a certain number of roentgens of carefully proportioned X-rays, gamma rays and neutron bombardment. She kept thinking of the old man's eyes, of the stray thought that promised joy. She kept seeing the old man lying off the trail among the rocks, how he had raised himself on his elbow, and how he waggled the blood-clot of his head in the glaring sun as they dragged Madeleine away. Occasionally she thought of the whole project--in Mars, Mecca of Earth tourists, Martian Haven, Dream City of the Solar System--that was so colorful and impressive and exotic to others, and she wondered if it was all really as ridiculous as it seemed to her. She lay there in the dark of the room as evening reached over the dead sea bottom toward the edifice that was Martian Haven. Out there in the big amphitheatre, resurrected supposedly from old Martian ruins, Martian Haven, with all of its rich, efficient facilities and staff, was preparing the stage, props and guests for the Love Ritual of the Double Moons. The core and centerpiece of Martian Haven was a great cubistic hotel, with the two Martian canals on two sides, renovated, of course, and a five-mile-long artificial lake on a third side. It was somehow designed, in the middle of all that vast emptiness of dead sea, sand and eroded rock, to have a not-ungraceful look of insubstantiality, as though at any moment it might open great wings of some sort and take off into the Martian nowhere by which it was so overwhelmingly surrounded. The side that faced the lake curved in a half-moon, so that it commanded a wide prospect to the eroded hills that had once been mountains to the west and to the east thousands of unbroken miles of desert, that had once, they said, been an ocean. When Madeleine opened her eyes, it was night. On many a starry night she had lain inside walls not so different from these, and felt much the same, she thought, surrounded by a desert of her own. Away off there in the blackness, Earth shone palely--and she might as well never have left it at all. And then again she saw the old hermit's eyes out there in the dark, his burning eyes where there should be only sterile emptiness in the night. And his voice calling where there would otherwise have been only the dusty echoes of an arid past. Outside now the tourists were gathering in the double moonlight. The weird extrapolation of Earth music that was supposed to be the strains of Martian rhythms drifted to her, and lights flickered from burning tapers where dancers undulated and writhed fitfully. A libidinous expectancy was as heavy as a thick scent in the night.