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the restaurants and cafés and hotels and looked at the sky. They lifted their dark hands over their upturned white eyes. Their mouths hung wide. In the hot noon for thousands of miles there were little towns where the dark people stood with their shadows under them, looking up.
    In her kitchen Hattie Johnson covered the boiling soup, wiped her thin fingers on a cloth, and walked carefully to the back porch.
    “Come on, Ma! Hey, Ma, come on—you’ll miss it!”
    “Hey, Mom!”
    Three little Negro boys danced around in the dusty yard, yelling. Now and then they looked at the house frantically.
    “I’m coming,” said Hattie, and opened the screen door. “Where you hear this rumor?”
    “Up at Jones’s, Ma. They say a rocket’s coming, first one in twenty years, with a white man in it!”
    “What’s a white man? I never seen one.
    “You’ll find out,” said Hattie. “Yes indeed, you’ll find out.”
    “Tell us about one, Ma. Tell like you did.”
    Hattie frowned. “Well, it’s been a long time. I was a little girl, you see. That was back in 1965.”
    “Tell us about a white man, Mom!”
    She came and stood in the yard, looking up at the blue clear Martian sky with the thin white Martian clouds, and in the distance the Martian hills broiling in the heat. She said at last, “Well, first of all, they got white hands.”
    “White hands!” The boys joked, slapping each other.
    “And they got white arms.
    “White arms!” hooted the boys.
    “And white faces.”
    “White faces! Really?”
    “White like  this,  Mom?” The smallest threw dust on his face, sneezing. “This way?”
    “Whiter than that” she said gravely, and turned to the sky again. There was a troubled thing in her eyes, as if she was looking for a thundershower up high, and not seeing it made her worry. “Maybe you better go inside.”
    “Oh, Mom!” They stared at her in disbelief. “We got to watch, we just got to. Nothing’s going to happen, is it?”
    “I don’t know. I got a feeling, is all.”
    “We just want to see the ship and maybe run down to the port and see that white man. What’s he like, huh, Mom?”
    “I don’t know. I just don’t know,” she mused, shaking her head.
    “Tell us some more!”
    “Well, the white people live on Earth, which is where we all come from, twenty years ago. We just up and walked away and came to Mars and set down and built towns and here we are. Now we’re Martians instead of Earth people. And no white men’ve come up here in all that time. That’s the story.”
    “Why didn’t they come up, Mom?”
    “Well, ’cause. Right after we got up here, Earth got in an atom war. They blew each other up terribly. They forgot us. When they finished fighting, after years, they didn’t have any rockets. Took them until recently to build more. So here they come now, twenty years later, to visit.” She gazed at her children numbly and then began to walk. “You wait here. I’m going down the line to Elizabeth Brown’s house. You promise to stay?”
    “We don’t want to but we will.”
    “All right, then.” And she ran off down the road.
    At the Browns’ she arrived in time to see everybody packed into the family car. “Hey there, Hattie! Come on along!”
    “Where you going?” she said, breathlessly running up.
    “To see the white man!”
    “That’s right,” said Mr. Brown seriously. He waved at his load. “These children never saw one, and  I  almost forgot.”
    “What you going to do with that white man?” asked Hattie.
    “Do?” said everyone. “Why—just  look  at him, is all.”
    “You sure?”
    “What else can we do?”
    “I don’t know,” said Hattie. “I just thought there might be trouble.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    “You  know,”  said Hattie vaguely, embarrassed. “You ain’t going to lynch him?”
    “Lynch him?” Everyone laughed. Mr. Brown slapped his knee. “Why, bless you, child, no! We’re going to shake his hand. Ain’t we,