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Grandpa and Grand like wax, shis shimmer on a hot day
The coffins were lowered Someone murmured about "the unexpected and sudden deaths of sixteen fine ht--"
Earth pounded down on the coffin lids
The brass band, playing "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," marched and slammed back into town, and everyone took the day off
June 2001: --AND THE MOON BE STILL AS BRIGHT
It was so cold when they first caather the dry Martian wood and build a s about a celebration; he athered the wood, set fire to it, and watched it burn
In the flare that lighted the thin air of this dried-up sea of Mars he looked over his shoulder and saw the rocket that had brought them all, Captain Wilder and Cheroke and Hathaway and Sam Parkhill and himself, across a silent black space of stars to land upon a dead, drea world
Jeff Spender waited for the noise He watched the other men and waited for them to jump around and shout It would happen as soon as the nu the "first" , but , perhaps, that the other expeditions had failed and that this, the Fourth, would be the one Theyit, nevertheless, thinking of the honor and fas became accustomed to the thinness of the atmosphere, which almost made you drunk if you moved too quickly
Gibbs walked over to the freshly ignited fire and said, "Why don't we use the ship chemical fire instead of that wood?"
"Neverup
It wouldn't be right, the first night on Mars, tolike a stove It would be a kind of imported blasphemy There'd be time for that later; time to throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the New York Tiray Martian sea bottoms; time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicate ruins of the old Martian valley towns Plenty of tiht
He fed the fire by hand, and it was like an offering to a dead giant, They had landed on an immense tomb Here a civilization had died It was only siht be spent quietly
"This isn't my idea of a celebration" Gibbs turned to Captain Wilder "Sir, I thought we in and meat and whoop it up a bit"
Captain Wilder looked off toward a dead city a mile away "We're all tired," he said remotely, as if his whole attention was on the city and his ht we should be glad we got across all that space without getting aone man of us die"
Theto each other's shoulders or adjusting their belts Spender watched them They were not satisfied They had risked their lives to do a big thing Now they wanted to be shouting drunk, firing off guns to shoonderful they were to have kicked a hole in space and ridden a rocket all the way to Mars