Now he looked at the Martian against the sky.

“The stars!” he said.

“The stars!” said the Martian, looking, in turn, at Tomas.

The stars were white and sharp beyond the flesh of the Martian, and they were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphorescent membrane of a gelatinous sea fish. You could see stars flickering like violet eyes in the Martian’s stomach and chest, and through his wrists, like jewelry.

“I can see through you!” said Tomas.

“And I through you!” said the Martian, stepping back.

Tomas felt of his own body and, feeling the warmth, was reassured. I am real, he thought

The Martian touched his own nose and lips. “I have flesh,” he said, half aloud. “I am alive.”

Tomas stared at the stranger. “And if I am real, then you must be dead.”

“No, you!”

“A ghost!”

“A phantom!”

They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds.

I’m drunk, thought Tomas. I won’t tell anyone of this tomorrow, no, no.

They stood there on the ancient highway, neither of them moving.

“Where are you from?” asked the Martian at last.

“Earth.”

“What is that?”

“There.” Tomas nodded to the sky.

“When?”

“We landed over a year ago, remember?”

“No.”

“And all of you were dead, all but a few. You’re rare, don’t you know that?”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, dead. I saw the bodies. Black, in the rooms, in the houses, dead. Thousands of them.”

“That’s ridiculous. We’re alive!”

“Mister, you’re invaded, only you don’t know it. You must have escaped.”

“I haven’t escaped; there was nothing to escape. What do you mean? I’m on my way to a festival now at the canal, near the Eniall Mountains. I was there last night. Don’t you see the city there?” The Martian pointed.

Tomas looked and saw the ruins. “Why, that city’s been dead thousands of years.”

The Martian laughed. “Dead. I slept there yesterday!”

“And I was in it a week ago and the week before that, and I just drove through it now, and it’s a heap. See the broken pillars?”

“Broken? Why, I see them perfectly. The moonlight helps. And the pillars are upright.”

“There’s dust in the streets,” said Tomas.

“The streets are clean!”

“The canals are empty right there.”

“The canals are full of lavender wine!”

“It’s dead.”

“It’s alive!” protested the Martian, laughing more now. “Oh, you’re quite wrong. See all the carnival lights? There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets there. That’s where I’m going now, to the festival; we’ll float on the waters all night long; we’ll sing, we’ll drink, we’ll make love, Can’t you see it?”

“Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. Ask any of our party. Me, I’m on my way to Green City tonight; that’s the new colony we just raised over near Illinois Highway. You’re mixed up. We brought in a million board feet of Oregon lumber and a couple dozen tons of good steel nails and hammered together two of the nicest little villages you ever saw. Tonight we’re warming one of them. A couple rockets are coming in from Earth, bringing our wives and girl friends. There’ll be barn dances and whisky — ”

The Martian was now disquieted. “You say it is over that way?”

“There are the rockets.” Tomas walked him to the edge of the hill and pointed down. “See?”

“No.”

“Damn it, there they are! Those long silver things.”

“No.”

Now Tomas laughed. “You’re blind!”

“I see very well. You are the one who does not see.”

“But you see the new town, don’t you?”

“I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low tide.”

“Mister, that water’s been evaporated for forty centuries.”

“Ah, now, now, that is enough.”

“It’s true, I tell you.”

The Martian grew very serious. “Tell me again. You do not see the city the way I describe it? The pillars very white, the boats very slender, the festival lights — oh, I see them clearly! And listen! I can hear them singing. It’s no space away at all.”

Tomas listened and shook his head. “No.”

“And I, on the other hand,” said the Martian, “cannot see what you describe. Well.”

Again.they were cold. An ice was in their flesh.

“Can it be… ?”

“What?”

“You say «from the sky»?”

“Earth.”

“Earth, a name, nothing,” said the Martian. “But… as I came up the pass an hour ago…” He touched the back of his neck. “I felt…”

“Cold?”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“Cold again. Oddly. There was a thing to the light, to the hills, the road,” said the Martian. “I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if I were the last man alive on this world…”

“So did I!” said Tomas, and it was like talking to an old and dear friend, confiding, growing warm with the topic.

The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. “This can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are a figment of the Past!”

“No, you are from the Past,” said the Earth Man, having had time to think of it now.

“You are so certain. How can you prove who is from the Past, who from the Future? What year is it?”

“Two thousand and one!”

“What does that mean to me?”

Tomas considered and shrugged. “Nothing.”

“It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S.E.C. It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show us how the stars stand?”

“But the ruins prove it! They prove that I am the Future, I am alive, you are dead!”

“Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it. Two strangers passing. Ruins, you say?”

“Yes. You’re afraid?”

“Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think — the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?” The Martian was silent, but then he looked on ahead. “But there they are. I see them. Isn’t that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.”

And for Tomas the rockets, far away, waiting for him, and the town and the women from Earth. “We can never agree,” he said.

“Let us agree to disagree,” said the Martian. “What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don’t ask. But the night is very short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds.”

Tomas put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in imitation.

Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other.

“Will we meet again?”

“Who knows? Perhaps some other night.”

“I’d like to go with you to that festival.”

“And I wish I might come to your new town, to see this ship you speak of, to see these men, to hear all that has happened.”

“Good-by,” said Tomas.

“Good night.”

The Martian rode his green metal vehicle quietly away into the hills, The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently in the opposite direction.