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The captain shut his eyes "I want to see Marilyn very much"

The roo

"Good night, Ed"

A pause "Good night, John"

He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float For the first tiically now, It had all been e, the familiar faces But now

How? he wondered Hoas all this oodness of sohtful of his children? How and why and what for?

He considered the various theories advanced in the first heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig He let all kinds of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his ht Mom Dad Edward Mars Earth Mars Martians

Who had lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been the way it was today?

Martians He repeated the word idly, inwardly

He laughed out loud alave hi to consider, of course Highly iet it Ridiculous

But, he thought, just supposeJust suppose, now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship co and saw us inside our ship and hated us, Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that ould be taken off guard Well, ould the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earth Men with atomic weapons?

The ansas interesting Telepathy, hypnosis, ination

Suppose all of these houses aren't real at all, this bed not real, but only figiven substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians, thought Captain John Black Suppose these houses are really so on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lullhis own mother and father as bait?

And this town, so old, fro before any of my men were born From a year when I was six years old and there were records of Harry Lauder, and Maxfield Parrish paintings still hanging, and bead curtains, and "Beautiful Ohio," and turn-of-the-century architecture What if the Martians took the memories of a town exclusively from my mind? They say childhood memories are the clearest And after they built the town from my mind, they populated it with the most-loved people from all the minds of the people on the rocket!

And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and father at all, But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with the ability to keephypnosis all of the time