completely repaired, and ready for your return to Earth whenever you desire."

"So, it's—You said Harrison and Janis would be here in nine days! That means I've been out for nearly two weeks! For a nap that's a long time, but nobody could get that bucket back in one piece in eleven days! Not after what I did to it—"

"Your ship is completely repaired, Earthman."

Johnny knew somehow that the voice wasn't lying. So maybe when you got off of Earth miracles did happen. He just didn't know enough.

"We wish to give you data to take back to your Earth which will banish disease for you—all disease. Data which will give you spacecraft that match our own in technical perfection. Data that will make you the undisputed masters of your environment. We offer you the stars, Earthman."

He shut a thousand racing thoughts out of his head. "Maybe I'll believe this fairy tale of yours on one condition," Johnny said, "because I can't intelligently do otherwise."

"And that—condition?"

"Tell me why."

There was a pause, and it was as though something forever unknowable to men hung in the silence.

"Picture, if you can, Earthman," the answer came at last, "several small islands in the center of a great sea; all without life, save two. The men on one have learned to build boats which can successfully sail the sea within certain limits—they can visit the other islands, but are too frail and too limited in power to venture past the horizon. It is infinitely frustrating to them. The only places to which they may go are dead places. Save for one—only one, and it becomes magnified in importance—it becomes an entire raison d'etre in itself. For without it, the men with the boats sail uselessly....

"We are old, Earthman. We have watched you—waited for you for a long time. And now you have grown up. You have burst your tiny bubble of human experience. You have set out upon the sea yourselves...."

"You guys should give graduation talks. I didn't ask for a scaled-down philosophy. You tell me that you want to give us every trick in your hat—for free, no questions asked. So I asked why. And the question isn't changing any."

"The answer should be self-evident, Earthman. We are old. And we are lonely."

There was a logic at work somewhere in his brain even during the dream. It told him that he was exhausted from the day's tour with the child-like men of Mars, and that the dream was only the vagaries of a reeling, tired mind of a badly jarred subconscious. It told him that the things he had seen had been too alien for his relatively inflexible adult Earth mind to accept without painful reaction, and this was the reaction.

This, the dream. That was all it was; his logic said so.

Faith spread out before the undisciplined eye of his dreaming brain, and the near-conscious instant of logic faded. The fertile plains that once had been yellow desert-land mounted golden fruits to a temperate sun, and beyond the distant green of gently-rolling hills spread the resplendent city, and there were other cities as gracefully civilized beyond the untroubled horizon.

And in the dream, these were all things men had done, as though sanity had invaded their minds overnight. It was the Earth that men had intended, rather than that which they had built.

The sun dimmed. The air chilled, and the grains and fruits wilted, and the rolling hills were a darker hue than green as the shadow lengthened, spread to the gleaming cities beyond and then as it touched them and ran soundlessly the length and breadth of their wide malls, there were other changes....

Skeletons, reaching upward to a puffy, leaden sky.

The horizon split into jagged, broken moats of dark flame, and Earth was no longer what men had built, but what they eternally feared they must one day create....

Then Johnny Love was suddenly awake bolt upright in his cot and his eyes were open wide. His muscles were taut and cramped. And he