“The next day as I awoke I found my friend and Chapman waiting for me.  I felt wonderfully refreshed, and the exultant mood of the Martians possessed me.  I sang with an interior tumult of excitement.  I drew before my mind the beauty of your mother reincorporated in this gay, lovely world of Mars, so full of power and light and youthful impulse.  Again I sang, and it was the very air your mother so often played to me, ‘Der Grüne Lauterband,’ of Schubert.  A few passers by, below my window, caught the refrain, my voice rose higher and higher, and their disappearing figures seemed to carry the merry, hopping notes far away.  How fair and glorious it all was!

“And I was to visit Scandor, to visit the beautiful Martian country, the mines, the huge fossil ivory deposits, to sail on those canals, whose resplendent lines we had detected from the earth.

“My door was shaken, and almost as if yet living on the earth, I cried out ‘Come in.’  Chapman and my friend entered with laughter and congratulation.  Chapman spoke first:  ’Dodd, you are summoned to the Council of the Patenta.  All are anxious to see you.  At present it is hoped you will not push further the matter of the telegraphy with the Earth.  The disturbances in Pike increase daily—­flashing stars seem to emerge from nothing, meteoric showers, like a rain of sparks rush across the fields of the telescopes, gaseous disengagements from what seem like shining nuclei, shoot upward for thousands of miles from their surfaces; all is chaos, and these disturbances have been noticed in other regions of the heavens.  Again spirits have ceased arriving at the Hill of the Phosphori, the Chorus Halls are almost empty, and the singers have no employment.  Such a dearth of spirits has not been known before for months.  It is not uncommon for long intervals to occur when only a few spirits arrive, but now there are none.

“’The Registeries report that many lately reincarnated spirits speak the languages of Venus and Mercury, and tell of the terrific physical convulsions in both planets, that wars are raging in Mercury, and a singular plague devastating Venus.  The country people have sent in word by the canals that rockets in clusters covering hundreds of square miles are arising from Scandor.  The cause is unknown, cannot even be surmised, and last night Herschell and Gauss, at the big telescopes, detected a comet charging towards us with an incredible velocity.  The Council believe I should at once start for Scandor to bring the month’s report, and these new excitements, to the paper Dia, while they urge that you should recount to the governors at Scandor your story, and the marvellous fact of the answer sent back from the Earth to you by your son.  We will go, after an audience with the Council, together, and because of some need of more stone from the quarries, we will stop on our way out and leave orders at Mit and Sinsi, where the quarries are.  The trip is full of beauty and wonder, and Scandor, I am told, is Heaven itself.’