I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this. A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you like the appearance of squeezed blood. There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs, and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I looked once again at the woman. "What about him?" she whispered. Her eyes were still startled. I smiled reassuringly. "Nothing, lady, nothing. I'm sorry I upset you. I was just being nosy is all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told me it was the 'Calm' from William Tell. He also told me his mother had taught him." Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks. She said one word only: "Well?" "Nothing," I answered. "Except that Martians are supposed to be tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and when he told me his _mother_ had taught him--" I shrugged and laughed a little. "Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy." She nodded. "We agree on that last part." Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily. "I would like to speak to the Martian lady," I said. "There isn't any Martian lady." "There _has_ to be, doesn't there?" I said it with little sharp prickers on the words. But she did, too: "_Does there?_" I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard and at the same time curiously defiant--as though she would dare me to go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts. For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to whistle. And then--after what seemed to me a very long while--I slowly tumbled to what she meant. Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother.