“‘Well,’ I responded, ’I cannot tell.  I know very little as yet.  I feel wonderfully active and vitalized.  My senses are acute.  I see further, hear further, smell further than I ever did on earth, and it even seems to me I can anticipate things.  The nerve currents are so rapid, the mind seems so persuasive, that coming events are registered by a prophetic feeling I can scarcely describe.  For that reason, Chapman, I grow happier every minute, for now I see approaching that great joy, my reunion with Martha, the one great divine event I hunger and hope for.

“‘Well,’ said Chapman, as a cloud covered the scudding moons, ’I do hope you may see her, and somehow I think, too, you will.  But, Dodd,’ the moons emerged, and the lower one was in transit across the face of the upper, ’I must call your attention to this strange peculiarity of our bodies, that we undergo extremes of temperature with almost no noticeable sense of the great heat or cold.  This region we are traversing is about the latitude of Christ Church, as I told you, and it is the period of harvests, and the heat is moderate, but in the height of summer the heat seems scarcely more felt than now, and in the clothing I am now wearing, I have sailed through the ice packs of the North, and slept thinly covered in its snows, but without undue discomfort.  I tell you, matter in us, and flesh and blood in us are all differently conditioned.’

“’Why not ask these questions of the wise men of the Patenta, the doctors and chemists?’ I replied.  ’I can think of an analogy that might make this Martian constitution intelligible.  A close, dense body conducts heat or cold; a loose, open texture or cellular mass does not.  In our curious embodiment from spirit the substance of our bodies is an etherealized matter, loosely, I might say, flocculently, disposed, and while it conveys sensations of a certain tone or key of vibratory intensity, it will not respond to any violent or coarse shocks.  They simply cannot be carried.  They escape us.  Are the people all alike amongst the Martians?’

“‘Oh, no,’ returned Chapman, who pointed to the widening spaces in the beams between the slow Deimos and the fleeter flying Phobos, ’there are great differences.  I have seen that.  In materialization some seem badly put together, and these resemble our former terrestrial bodies.  They grow old, they succumb to disease, they feel changes of weather and they have less vitality.  Yes,’ and he drew nearer, ’it is these unhappy misbirths in this spirit land who retain the sin of earth and cannot survive and get the Kinkotantitomi or irreverently, as the earthling would say, the grand bounce.  They are fired off the planet.’

“He paused and laughed.  How strange this almost human laugh sounded, and yet how pleasant!  I looked at him with a deep affection.  He noticed the impression, and quickly drawing me to him, said half timidly: