It was a cruel world, this Mars, a world of cold and ruin and soaring scornful emptiness, a world that broke men's hearts and drained their lives from them-rainless, oceanless, heatless, kindless, where the great wheel of the stars swng through a desert of millennia, where the days cried with wind and the nights rang and groaned with frost. It was a world of waste and mystery, an niggard world where a man ate starvation and drank thirst and finally went down in darkness.

1962.