"Do you think we could get a farm? It wouldn't have to be a very big one; just a little farm, where we could raise things?" "If you want it, Marte." "Oh, I do. I _do_!" Her voice carried the lilt of youth in it. * * * * * The silences that frequently spiced their conversation had no embarrassed elements in them; they said as much as words, and they came mutually. "Some of it was sad. The poetry. I mean, the deep kind of sadness, the real sadness, the kind that has--hopelessness, and lostness, and aloneness in it. "_Here he lies where he longed to be._ _Home is the sailor, home from the sea,_ _And the hunter home from the hill._" She caught her breath, sharply. "That kind of sadness. The kind that says something about us. How we've dreamed and planned of going Home--" She let her voice drift. "I sometimes think Earth is such a beautiful place that you have to be dead to go there." Johnny Nine said nothing. "Think of the wide sky, Johnny. Where we can see the sunrise. I've always dreamed about seeing a sunrise. "A sun. That's a funny word to say; it just _sounds_ warm. Sun. A sun that is like those little points of light, way beyond the bulkheads. When we see them from Observation, they look all cold. Imagine how it would be to be so close to one of them that it's big and warm.... "Johnny, do you think anything could be as pretty as those pictures, in Compartment Seven, of a blue and gold sunrise?" "Even prettier." "Say it again!" "Even prettier." "I'll stay up, then, all the first night. I know I will. Just to see the sun come up." She drew in her legs and clasped her arms around them. "Tell me again what They said." Johnny Nine did not answer immediately. He sat motionless, trying to make out the bulkhead that marked the other side of the Ship. But their feeble light could not penetrate so much darkness. It almost seemed as if there were no other bulkhead and no Ship, only darkness, there, that spread out to the ends of the Universe. Finally he spoke. "It was awful hard to hear them; we're too far away. As near as we could understand, they're having a celebration for us. Hundreds and hundreds of people will be there. All to see us." "Hundreds ... and ... hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds!" She turned her face to his. "It seems hard to believe, doesn't it? All those people!" "Maybe even more than that, Marte." "Johnny?" She ducked her head and pulled her legs in tighter. "Johnny?" "Yes?" "We can have babies, can't we?" She asked it in a rush. "... Yes. We can have babies. As many as we want." She wrinkled her nose. "... It seems funny, to be able to have all the babies you want. Not one every time somebody dies: but all you want!" She smiled at some secret communication with herself. "I think we'll have a dozen....