Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1
Ray Douglas Bradbury
One hundred classic stories from the celebrated author of Fahrenheit 451.In this, the first volume of Ray Bradbury's short stories, some of the author's finest works are published together, among them ‘Homecoming’, ‘Veldt’, ‘A Sound of Thunder’ and ‘The Long Rain’.Join an ill-fated crew of astronauts pushed to the brink of insanity by the incessant and highly corrosive rain on Venus, a high-tech virtual reality playroom that comes to life with terrible consequences, and a safari company offering tours for the wealthy back in time to the prehistoric era to stalk and kill dinosaurs, resulting in the present they return to being irrevocably altered.This collection is a rare treasure trove of wonder; as apprehensive about technology and the fate of humanity as it is elegiaic of its irrepressible progress. Each story presents an enlightening and poetic facet of Bradbury’s writing, every one as relevant now as when it was first written.
Ray Bradbury StoriesVolume 1
Copyright (#ulink_cd399bb1-2ce6-5a98-a85d-0a2ad9d3e55a)
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © 1980 Ray Bradbury Enterprises / A California Corporation
Copyright 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Ray Bradbury.
Copyright renewed 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Ray Bradbury.
Originally published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
‘The Coffin’ was originally published in Dime Mystery. Copyright 1947 by Popular Publications. ‘The Man Upstairs’ was originally published in Harper’s magazine. Copyright 1947 by Harper & Brothers. ‘Punishment Without Crime’ was originally published in Other Worlds. Copyright 1950 by Other Worlds. ‘The Long Rain’, ‘Frost and Fire’, and ‘The Blue Bottle’ were originally published in Planet Stories. Copyright 1946, 1950 by Love Romances Publishing Company, Inc. ‘The City’ was originally published in Startling Stories, Copyright 1950 by Better Publications, Inc. “Kaleidoscope” was originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories. Copyright 1949 by Standard Magazines.
Most of the stories in this book were previously published in the UK in the following: The Illustrated Man, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1952, and then by Grafton 1977, Flamingo Modern Classics 1995, Voyager Classics 2002, The Martian Chronicles, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1951 under the title Silver Locusts, Corgi 1956, Grafton 1977 publication also entitled Silver Locusts, published by Flamingo 1995; R is for Rocket, first published in Great Britain by Rupert-Hart Davis Ltd 1968; Machineries of Joy, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1966, and by Grafton 1977; S is for Space, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1968; Twice 22 (comprised of stories from Golden Apples of the Sun and A Medicine for Melancholy) first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1953; Fahrenheit 451, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1954 and by Grafton 1976, by Flamingo 1993, and by Voyager Classics 2001; I Sing the Body Electric! first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1970, Corgi 1971, and Grafton 1991; Dandelion Wine, published by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1957, Corgi 1965 and Grafton 1977; Long After Midnight first published in Great Britain by Hart-Davis MacGibbon 1977; October Country (containing some stories published in Dark Carnival) first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1953, New English Library 1963. Some stories also published in the United States in the following: American Mercury; Arkham Sampler; Charm; Collier’s; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; Eros; Esquire; Famous Fantastic Mysteries; alaxy; Harper’s; MacLean’s; Mademoiselle; Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; Marvel Science Fiction; McCall’s; Penthouse; Planet Stories; Playboy; Sai nt Detective; Saturday Evening Post; Seventeen; Shenandoah; Star Science Fiction Stories #3; Startling Stories; Super Science Fiction Stories; Thrilling Wonder Stories; Today; and Weird Tales.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007280476
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN 9780007497683
Version: 2017-09-25
Contents
Cover (#ua604795e-2be7-5469-a252-b82cae199b01)
Title Page (#u44686cf5-659d-5a0a-8a5d-b3217a43b439)
Copyright (#uf2a03fea-b9df-55a4-9559-589631745103)
Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle: An Introduction by Ray Bradbury (#u6afad4d4-8955-53dd-948c-921e0914b765)
The Night (#u6f2e45a4-7998-5bec-9882-c79fded82493)
Homecoming (#u788e1765-a5e6-5365-a2a6-5f68f429c7c8)
Uncle Einar (#u08af4d3c-5a13-5788-8b3e-e8acd0f037a9)
The Traveler (#ub6ccde31-d529-5943-a715-6176938892f6)
The Lake (#uec898d10-b96e-5baf-9780-35aafdf1da95)
The Coffin (#u2fa69ccb-8d5a-5f55-a1af-86c05410d329)
The Crowd (#u1fe51c0d-f97a-56bc-9d98-694c79b8516a)
The Scythe (#u24c10ca8-1226-5f93-aab6-b3f3e7f8149d)
There Was an Old Woman (#u526e1f5e-e24f-5d2f-9e6e-a2a1927f59c2)
There Will Come Soft Rains (#u7b8493ca-c764-5f95-8fb4-900682ca2f25)
Mars Is Heaven (#u8fc0990c-b2ee-5405-ad22-b638cee3623c)
The Silent Towns (#u42719fe9-a9c0-5e92-8e11-b7e90c3e4062)
The Earth Men (#u2efc9176-993c-52ac-b932-a5615ce4b151)
The Off Season (#uf5f55032-686a-58ac-b2ef-33736302ee33)
The Million-Year Picnic (#ucf20577c-511e-599b-9867-63c8d88fe545)
The Fox and the Forest (#u424aa70e-d6cf-5f7f-9eb1-02e274527fcc)
Kaleidoscope (#u998ad8ee-b401-5080-aed2-c4d21eacc3a0)
The Rocket Man (#ua43141c4-e8b7-59ac-b98a-4ed469bfacab)
Marionettes, Inc. (#u817a0986-da9f-56da-a9bd-258acb0e5943)
No Particular Night or Morning (#udb391857-360b-5780-81a3-a3957e4a43bf)
The City (#u90183fa7-45d5-5878-ac5c-d156af17dc06)
The Fire Balloons (#u7199869d-6846-5eb9-a09e-54e673dba339)
The Last Night of the World (#u3b62f1c5-d11f-5b05-bb80-adca74e02661)
The Veldt (#litres_trial_promo)
The Long Rain (#litres_trial_promo)
The Great Fire (#litres_trial_promo)
The Wilderness (#litres_trial_promo)
A Sound of Thunder (#litres_trial_promo)
The Murderer (#litres_trial_promo)
The April Witch (#litres_trial_promo)
Invisible Boy (#litres_trial_promo)
The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fog Horn (#litres_trial_promo)
The Big Black and White Game (#litres_trial_promo)
Embroidery (#litres_trial_promo)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (#litres_trial_promo)
Powerhouse (#litres_trial_promo)
Hail and Farewell (#litres_trial_promo)
The Great Wide World over There (#litres_trial_promo)
The Playground (#litres_trial_promo)
Skeleton (#litres_trial_promo)
The Man Upstairs (#litres_trial_promo)
Touched with Fire (#litres_trial_promo)
The Emissary (#litres_trial_promo)
The Jar (#litres_trial_promo)
The Small Assassin (#litres_trial_promo)
The Next in Line (#litres_trial_promo)
Jack-in-the-Box (#litres_trial_promo)
The Leave-Taking (#litres_trial_promo)
Exorcism (#litres_trial_promo)
The Happiness Machine (#litres_trial_promo)
Calling Mexico (#litres_trial_promo)
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (#litres_trial_promo)
Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed (#litres_trial_promo)
The Strawberry Window (#litres_trial_promo)
A Scent of Sarsaparilla (#litres_trial_promo)
The Picasso Summer (#litres_trial_promo)
The Day It Rained Forever (#litres_trial_promo)
A Medicine for Melancholy (#litres_trial_promo)
The Shoreline at Sunset (#litres_trial_promo)
Fever Dream (#litres_trial_promo)
The Town Where No One Got Off (#litres_trial_promo)
All Summer in a Day (#litres_trial_promo)
Frost and Fire (#litres_trial_promo)
The Anthem Sprinters (#litres_trial_promo)
And So Died Riabouchinska (#litres_trial_promo)
Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar! (#litres_trial_promo)
The Vacation (#litres_trial_promo)
The Illustrated Woman (#litres_trial_promo)
Some Live Like Lazarus (#litres_trial_promo)
The Best of All Possible Worlds (#litres_trial_promo)
The One Who Waits (#litres_trial_promo)
Tyrannosaurus Rex (#litres_trial_promo)
The Screaming Woman (#litres_trial_promo)
The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place (#litres_trial_promo)
Night Call, Collect (#litres_trial_promo)
The Tombling Day (#litres_trial_promo)
The Haunting of the New (#litres_trial_promo)
Tomorrow’s Child (#litres_trial_promo)
I Sing the Body Electric! (#litres_trial_promo)
The Women (#litres_trial_promo)
The Inspired Chicken Motel (#litres_trial_promo)
Yes, We’ll Gather at the River (#litres_trial_promo)
Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You! (#litres_trial_promo)
A Story of Love (#litres_trial_promo)
The Parrot Who Met Papa (#litres_trial_promo)
The October Game (#litres_trial_promo)
Punishment Without Crime (#litres_trial_promo)
A Piece of Wood (#litres_trial_promo)
The Blue Bottle (#litres_trial_promo)
Long After Midnight (#litres_trial_promo)
The Utterly Perfect Murder (#litres_trial_promo)
The Better Part of Wisdom (#litres_trial_promo)
Interval in Sunlight (#litres_trial_promo)
The Black Ferris (#litres_trial_promo)
Farewell Summer (#litres_trial_promo)
McGillahee’s Brat (#litres_trial_promo)
The Aqueduct (#litres_trial_promo)
Gotcha! (#litres_trial_promo)
The End of the Beginning (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also By Ray Bradbury (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicyclean introduction by Ray Bradbury (#ulink_b068578f-bdaf-5184-9213-69cafa0aba1a)
In 1953 I wrote an article for The Nation defending my work as a sciencefiction writer, even though that label only applied to perhaps one third of my output each year.
A few weeks later, in late May, a letter arrived from Italy. On the back of the envelope, in a spidery hand, I read these words:
B. BERENSONI TATTI, SETTIGNANOFIRENZE, ITALIAFIRENZE, ITALIA
I turned to my wife and said. ‘My God, this can’t be from the Berenson, can it, the great art historian?!’
‘Open it,’ said my wife.
I did, and read:
Dear Mr Bradbury:
In 89 years of life, this is the first fan letter I have written. It is to tell you that I have just read your article in The Nation – ‘Day After Tomorrow.’ It is the first time I have encountered the statement by an artist in any field, that to work creatively he must put flesh into it and enjoy it as a lark, or as a fascinating adventure.
How different from the workers in the heavy industry that professional writing has become!
If you ever touch Florence, come to see me.
Sincerely yours. B. BERENSON.
Thus, at the age of thirty-three, I had my way of seeing, writing and living approved of by a man who became a second father to me.
I needed that approval. We all need someone higher, wiser, older to tell us we’re not crazy after all, that what we’re doing is all right. All right, hell, fine!
But it is easy to doubt yourself, because you look around at a community of notions held by other writers, other intellectuals, and they make you blush with guilt. Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.
But, you see, my stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go, and runs off.
That is the kind of life I’ve had. Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle, as an Irish police report once put it. Drunk with life, that is, and not knowing where off to next. But you’re on your way before dawn. And the trip? Exactly one half terror, exactly one half exhilaration.
When I was three my mother snuck me in and out of movies two or three times a week. My first film was Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I suffered permanent curvature of the spine and of my imagination that day a long time ago in 1923. From that hour on, I knew a kindred and wonderfully grotesque compatriot of the dark when I saw one. I ran off to see all the Chaney films again and again to be deliciously frightened. The Phantom of the Opera stood astride my life with his scarlet cape. And when it wasn’t the Phantom it was the terrible hand that gestured from behind the bookcase in The Cat and the Canary, bidding me to come find more darkness hid in books.
I was in love, then, with monsters and skeletons and circuses and carnivals and dinosaurs and, at last, the red planet, Mars.
From these primitive bricks I have built a life and a career. By my staying in love with all of these amazing things, all of the good things in my existence have come about.
In other words, I was not embarrassed at circuses. Some people are. Circuses are loud, vulgar, and smell in the sun. By the time many people are fourteen or fifteen, they have been divested of their loves, their ancient and intuitive tastes, one by one, until when they reach maturity there is no fun left, no zest, no gusto, no flavor. Others have criticized, and they have criticized themselves, into embarrassment. When the circus pulls in at five of a dark cold summer morn, and the calliope sounds, they do not rise and run, they turn in their sleep, and life passes by.
I did rise and run. I learned that I was right and everyone else wrong when I was nine. Buck Rogers arrived on scene that year, and it was instant love. I collected the daily strips, and was madness maddened by them. Friends criticized. Friends made fun. I tore up the Buck Rogers strips. For a month I walked through my fourth-grade classes, stunned and empty. One day I burst into tears, wondering what devastation had happened to me. The answer was: Buck Rogers. He was gone, and life simply wasn’t worth living. The next thought was: Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; those are my enemies.
I went back to collecting Buck Rogers. My life has been happy ever since. For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction. Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space-travel, sideshows or gorillas. When such occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
For, you see, it is all mulch. If I hadn’t stuffed my eyes and stuffed my head with all of the above for a lifetime, when it came round to word associating myself into story ideas, I would have brought up a ton of ciphers and a half-ton of zeros.
‘The Veldt,’ collected herein, is a prime example of what goes on in a headful of images, myths, toys. Back some thirty years ago I sat down to my typewriter one day and wrote these words: ‘The Playroom.’ Playroom where? The Past? No. The Present? Hardly. The Future? Yes! Well, then, what would a Playroom in some future year be like? I began typing, word associating around the Room. Such a Playroom must have wall-to-wall television in each wall, and in the ceiling. Walking into such an environment, a child could shout: River Nile! Sphinx! Pyramids! and they would appear, surrounding him, in full color, full sound, and, why not? glorious warm scents and smells and odors, pick one, for the nose!
All this came to me in a few seconds of fast typing. I knew the Room, now I must put characters in the Room. I typed out a character named George, brought him into a future-time kitchen, where his wife turned and said:
‘George, I wish you’d look at the Playroom. I think it’s broken—’
George and his wife go down the hall. I follow them, typing madly, not knowing what will happen next. They open the door of the Playroom and step in.
Africa. Hot sun. Vultures. Dead meats. Lions.
Two hours later the lions leaped out of the walls of the Playroom and devoured George and his wife, while their TV-dominated children sat by and sipped tea.
End of word-association. End of story. The whole thing complete and almost ready to send out, an explosion of idea, in something like 120 minutes.
The lions in that room, where did they come from?
From the lions I found in the books in the town library when I was ten. From the lions I saw in the real circuses when I was five. From the lion that prowled in Lon Chaney’s film He Who Gets Slapped in 1924!
1924! you say, with immense doubt. Yes, 1924. I didn’t see the Chaney film again until a year ago. As soon as it flashed on the screen I knew that that was where my lions in ‘The Veldt’ came from. They had been hiding out, waiting, given shelter by my intuitive self, all these years.
For I am that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all. I remember the day and the hour I was born. I remember being circumcised on the second day after my birth. I remember suckling at my mother’s breast. Years later I asked my mother about the circumcision. I had information that couldn’t have been told me, there would be no reason to tell a child, especially in those still-Victorian times. Was I circumcised somewhere away from the lying-in hospital? I was. My father took me to the doctor’s office. I remember the doctor. I remember the scalpel.
I wrote the story ‘The Small Assassin’ twenty-six years later. It tells of a baby born with all its senses operative, filled with terror at being thrust out into a cold world, and taking revenge on its parents by crawling secretly about at night and at last destroying them.
When did it all really begin? The writing, that is. Everything came together in the summer and fall and early winter of 1932. By that time I was stuffed full of Buck Rogers, the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the night-time radio serial Chandu the Magician. Chandu said magic and the psychic summons and the Far East and strange places which made me sit down every night and from memory write out the scripts of each show.
But the whole conglomeration of magic and myths and falling downstairs with brontosaurs only to arise with La of Opar, was shaken into a pattern by one man, Mr Electrico.
He arrived with a seedy two-bit carnival. The Dill Brothers Combined Shows, during Labor Day weekend of 1932, when I was twelve. Every night for three nights, Mr Electrico sat in his electric chair, being fired with ten billion volts of pure blue sizzling power. Reaching out into the audience, his eyes flaming, his white hair standing on end, sparks leaping between his smiling teeth, he brushed an Excalibur sword over the heads of the children, knighting them with fire. When he came to me, he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose. The lightning jumped into me, Mr Electrico cried: ‘Live forever!’
I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I went to see Mr Electrico the next day, with the excuse that a nickel magic trick I had purchased from him wasn’t in working order. He fixed it, and toured me around the tents, shouting at each, ‘Clean up your language,’ before we entered to meet the dwarfs, acrobats, fat women, and Illustrated Men waiting there.
We walked down to sit by Lake Michigan where Mr Electrico spoke his small philosophies and I talked my big ones. Why he put up with me, I’ll never know. But he listened, or it seemed he listened, maybe because he was far from home, maybe because he had a son somewhere in the world, or had no son at all and wanted one. Anyway he was a defrocked Presbyterian minister, he said, and lived down in Cairo, Illinois, and I could write him there, any time I wished.
Finally he gave me some special news.
‘We’ve met before,’ he said. ‘You were my best friend in France in 1918, and you died in my arms in the battle of the Ardennes forest that year. And here you are, born again, in a new body, with a new name. Welcome back!’
I staggered away from that encounter with Mr Electrico wonderfully uplifted by two gifts: the gift of having lived once before (and of being told about it) … and the gift of trying somehow to live forever.
A few weeks later I started writing my first short stories about the planet Mars. From that time to this, I have never stopped. God bless Mr Electrico, the catalyst, wherever he is.
If I consider every aspect of all the above, my beginnings almost inevitably had to be in the attic. From the time I was twelve until I was twenty-two or three, I wrote stories long after midnight – unconventional stories of ghosts and haunts and things in jars that I had seen in sour armpit carnivals, of friends lost to the tides in lakes, and of consorts of three in the morning, those souls who had to fly in the dark in order not to be shot in the sun.
It took me many years to write myself down out of the attic, where I had to make do with my own eventual mortality (a teenager’s preoccupation), make it to the living room, then out to the lawn and sunlight where the dandelions had come up, ready for wine.
Getting out on the front lawn with my Fourth of July relatives gave me not only my Green Town, Illinois, stories, it also shoved me off toward Mars, following Edgar Rice Burroughs’ and John Carter’s advice, taking my childhood luggage, my uncles, aunts, my mom, dad, and brother with me. When I arrived on Mars I found them, in fact, waiting for me, or Martians who looked like them, pretending me into a grave. The Green Town stories that found their way into an accidental novel titled Dandelion Wine and the Red Planet stories that blundered into another accidental novel called The Martian Chronicles were written, alternately, during the same years that I ran to the rainbarrel outside my grandparents’ house to dip out all the memories, the myths, the word-associations of other years.
Along the way, I also re-created my relatives as vampires who inhabited a town similar to the one in Dandelion Wine, dark first cousin to the town on Mars where the Third Expedition expired. So, I had my life three ways, as town explorer, space-traveler, and wanderer with Count Dracula’s American cousins.
I realize I haven’t talked half enough, as yet, about one variety of creature you will find stalking this collection, rising here in nightmares to founder there in loneliness and despair: dinosaurs. From the time I was seventeen until I was thirty-two. I wrote some half-dozen dinosaur stories.
One night when my wife and I were walking along the beach in Venice. California, where we lived in a thirty-dollar-a-month newlyweds’ apartment, we came upon the bones of the Venice Pier and the struts, tracks, and ties of the ancient roller-coaster collapsed on the sand and being eaten by the sea.
‘What’s that dinosaur doing lying here on the beach?’ I said.
My wife, very wisely, had no answer.
The answer came the next night when, summoned from sleep by a voice calling, I rose up, listened, and heard the lonely voice of the Santa Monica bay fog horn blowing over and over and over again.
Of course! I thought. The dinosaur heard that lighthouse fog horn blowing, thought it was another dinosaur arisen from the deep past, came swimming in for a loving confrontation, discovered it was only a fog horn, and died of a broken heart there on the shore.
I leaped from bed, wrote the story, and sent it to the Saturday Evening Post that week, where it appeared soon after under the title ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.’ That story, titled ‘The Fog Horn’ in this collection, became a film two years later.
The story was read by John Huston in 1953, who promptly called to ask if I would like to write the screenplay for his film Moby Dick. I accepted, and moved from one beast to the next.
Because of Moby Dick, I reexamined the life of Melville and Jules Verne, compared their mad captains in an essay written to reintroduce a new translation of 20,000 Leagues Benath the Sea, which, read by the 1964 New York World’s Fair people, put me in charge of conceptualizing the entire upper floor of the United States Pavilion.
Because of the Pavilion, the Disney organization hired me to help plan the dreams that went into Spaceship Earth, part of Epcot, a permanent world’s fair, now building to open in 1982. In that one building, I have crammed a history of mankind, coming and going back and forth in time, then plunging into our wild future in space.
Including dinosaurs.
All of my activities, all of my growing, all of my new jobs and new loves, caused and created by that original primitive love of the beasts I saw when I was five and dearly cherished when I was twenty and twentynine and thirty.
Look around among these stories and you will probably find only one or two that actually happened to me. I have resisted, most of my life, being given assignments to go somewhere and ‘sponge up’ the local color, the natives, the look and feel of the land. I learned long ago that I am not seeing directly, that my subconscious is doing most of the ‘sponging’ and it will be years before any usable impressions surface.
As a young man I lived in a tenement in the Chicano section of Los Angeles. Most of my Latino stories were written years after I had moved from the tenement, with one terrifying, on-the-spot, exception. In late 1945, with World War II freshly over, a friend of mine asked me to accompany him to Mexico City in an old beat-up Ford V-8. I reminded him of the vow of poverty that circumstances had forced on me. He rebutted by calling me a coward, wondering why I didn’t rev up my courage and send out three or four stories which I had hidden away. Reason for the hiding: the stories had been rejected once or twice by various magazines. Pummeled by my friend, I dusted the stories off and mailed them out, under the pseudonym William Elliott. Why the pseudonym? Because I feared that some Manhattan editors might have seen the name Bradbury on the covers of Weird Tales and would be prejudiced against this ‘pulp’ writer.
I mailed off three short stories to three different magazines, in the second week of August 1945. On August 20, I sold one story to Charm, on August 21, I sold a story to Mademoiselle, and on August 22, my twenty-fifth birthday, I sold a story to Collier’s. The total monies amounted to $1,000, which would be like having $10,000 arrive in the mail today.
I was rich. Or so close to it I was dumbfounded. It was a turning point in my life, of course, and I hastened to write to the editors of those three magazines confessing my true name.
All three stories were listed in The Best American Short Stories of 1946 by Martha Foley, and one of them was published in Herschel Brickell’s O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories the following year.
That money took me to Mexico, to Guanajuato, and the mummies in the catacombs. The experience so wounded and terrified me, I could hardly wait to flee Mexico. I had nightmares about dying and having to remain in the halls of the dead with those propped and wired bodies. In order to purge my terror, instantly, I wrote ‘The Next in Line.’ One of the few times that an experience yielded results almost on the spot.
Enough of Mexico. What about Ireland?
There is every kind of Irish story here because after living in Dublin for six months I saw that most of the Irish I met had a variety of ways of making do with that dreadful beast Reality. You can run into it head-on, which is a dire business, or you can skirt around it, give it a poke, dance for it, make up a song, write you a tale, prolong the gab, fill up the flask. Each partakes of Irish cliché, but each, in the foul weather and the foundered politics, is true.
I got to know every beggar in the streets of Dublin, the ones near O’Connell’s Bridge with maniac pianolas grinding more coffee than tunes and the ones who loaned out a single baby among a whole tribe of rain soaked mendicants, so you saw the babe one hour at the top of Grafton Street and the next by the Royal Hibernian Hotel, and at midnight down by the river, but I never thought I would write of them. Then the need to howl and give an angry weep made me rear up one night and write ‘McGillahee’s Brat’ out of terrible suspicions and the begging of a rainwalking ghost that had to be laid. I visited some of the old burnt-out estates of the great Irish landowners, and heard tales of one ‘burning’ that had not quite come off, and so wrote ‘The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place.’
‘The Anthem Sprinters,’ another Irish encounter, wrote itself down years later when, one rainy night, I recalled the countless times my wife and I had sprinted out of Dublin cinemas, dashing for the exit, knocking children and old folks to left and right, in order to make it to the exit before the National Anthem was played.
But how did I begin? Starting in Mr Electrico’s year, I wrote a thousand words a day. For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.
The day came in 1942 when I wrote ‘The Lake.’ Ten years of doing everything wrong suddenly became the right idea, the right scene, the right characters, the right day, the right creative time. I wrote the story sitting outside, with my typewriter, on the lawn. At the end of an hour the story was finished, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up, and I was in tears. I knew I had written the first really good story of my life.
All during my early twenties I had the following schedule. On Monday morning I wrote the first draft of a new story. On Tuesday I did a second draft. On Wednesday a third. On Thursday a fourth. On Friday a fifth. And on Saturday at noon I mailed out the sixth and final draft to New York. Sunday? I thought about all the wild ideas scrambling for my attention, waiting under the attic lid, confident at last that, because of ‘The Lake,’ I would soon let them out.
If this all sounds mechanical, it wasn’t. My ideas drove me to it, you see. The more I did, the more I wanted to do. You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can’t sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
There was another reason to write so much: I was being paid twenty to forty dollars a story, by the pulp magazines. High on the hog was hardly my way of life. I had to sell at least one story, or better two, each month in order to survive my hot-dog, hamburger, trolley-car-fare life.
In 1944 I sold some forty stories, but my total income for the year was only $800.
It suddenly strikes me that there is much in this collection I haven’t commented on yet. ‘The Black Ferris’ is of interest here because early one autumn twenty-three years ago it changed itself from a short short story into a screenplay and then into a novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes.
‘The Day It Rained Forever’ was another word-association I handed myself one afternoon, thinking about hot suns, deserts, and harps that could change the weather.
‘The Leave-Taking’ is the true story of my great-grandmother who nailed shingles on rooftops well into her seventies, then took herself up to bed when I was three and said farewell to everyone and went to sleep.
‘Calling Mexico’ sprang into being because I visited a friend of mine one afternoon in the summer of 1946 and, as I entered the room, he handed me the telephone and said, ‘Listen.’ I listened and heard the sounds of Mexico City coming from two thousand miles away. I went home and wrote about my telephone experience to a friend in Paris. Halfway through my letter, the letter turned into the story, which went off in the mail that day.
‘Skeleton’ happened because I went to my doctor when I was twentytwo, complaining that my neck, my throat, felt strange. I touched all around the tendons and muscles of my neck. The doctor did likewise and said, ‘You know what you’re suffering from?’
‘What?’
‘A bad case,’ he said, ‘of discovery of the larynx. We all discover, at one time or another, various tendons, various bones, in our bodies we never noticed before. That’s you. Take an aspirin and go home.’
I went home, feeling my elbows, my ankles, my ribs, my throat, and my medulla oblongata.
‘Skeleton,’ a contest between a man and his hidden bones, wrote itself that night.
‘The Picasso Summer’ was the result of my walking on the shoreline with friends and my wife one late afternoon. I picked up a Popsicle stick, drew pictures in the sand and said: ‘Wouldn’t it be awful, if you’d wanted to own a Picasso all your life, and suddenly bumped into him here, drawing mythological beasts in the sand … your very own Picasso “etching” right in front of you …’
I finished the story, about Picasso on the beach, at two in the morning.
Hemingway. ‘The Parrot Who Met Papa.’ One night in 1952 I drove across Los Angeles with friends to invade the printing plant where Life was publishing their issue with Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea in it. We grabbed copies, hot off the press, sat in the nearest bar, and talked about Papa, Finca Vigía, Cuba, and, somehow, a parrot who had lived in that bar and talked to Hemingway every night. I went home, made a notation about the parrot, and put it away for sixteen years. Prowling my file folders in 1968 I came upon just the note for a title: ‘The Parrot Who Met Papa.’
My God, I thought, Papa’s been dead eight years. If that parrot is still around, remembers Hemingway, can speak with his voice, he’s worth millions. And what if someone kidnapped the parrot, held it for ransom?
‘The Haunting of the New’ happened because John Godley, Lord Kilbracken, wrote me from Ireland describing his visit to a house that had burned and been replaced, stone by stone, brick by brick, in imitation of the original. Within half a day of reading Kilbracken’s postcard, I had firstdrafted the tale.
Enough now. There you have it. Here are one hundred stories from almost forty years of my life, containing half the damning truths I suspected at midnight, and half of the saving truths I re-found next noon. If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere – and went. I have not so much thought my way through life as done things and found what it was and who I was after the doing. Each tale was a way of finding selves. Each self found each day slightly different from the one found twenty-four hours earlier.
It all started that autumn day in 1932 when Mr Electrico gave me the two gifts. I don’t know if I believe in previous lives, I’m not sure I can live forever. But that young boy believed in both and I have let him have his head. He has written my stories and books for me. He runs the Ouija Board and says Aye or Nay to submerged truths or half-truths. He is the skin through which, by osmosis, all the stuffs pass and put themselves on paper. I have trusted his passions, his fears, and his joys. He has, as a result, rarely failed me. When it is a long damp November in my soul, and I think too much and perceive too little, I know it is high time to get back to that boy with the tennis shoes, the high fevers, the multitudinous joys, and the terrible nightmares. I’m not sure where he leaves off and I start. But I’m proud of the tandem team. What else can I do but wish him well, and at the same time acknowledge and wish two other people well? In the same month that I married my wife Marguerite, I became affiliated with my literary representative and closest friend, Don Congdon. Maggie typed and criticized my stories. Don criticized and sold the results. With the two of them as teammates these past thirty-three years, how could I have failed? We are the Connemara Lightfoots, the Queen’s Own Evaders. And we’re still sprinting for that exit.
Here are the stories. Turn the page.
The Night (#ulink_b068578f-bdaf-5184-9213-69cafa0aba1a)
You are a child in a small town. You are, to be exact, eight years old, and it is growing late at night. Late for you, accustomed to bedding in at nine or nine-thirty: once in a while perhaps begging Mom or Dad to let you stay up later to hear Sam and Henry on that strange radio that is popular in this year of 1927. But most of the time you are in bed and snug at this time of night.
It is a warm summer evening. You live in a small house on a small street in the outer part of town where there are few street lights. There is only one store open, about a block away: Mrs Singer’s. In the hot evening Mother has been ironing the Monday wash and you have been intermittently begging for ice cream and staring into the dark.
You and your mother are all alone at home in the warm darkness of summer. Finally, just before it is time for Mrs Singer to close her store, Mother relents and tells you:
‘Run get a pint of ice cream and be sure she packs it tight.’
You ask if you can get a scoop of chocolate ice cream on top, because you don’t like vanilla, and Mother agrees. You clutch the money and run barefooted over the warm evening cement sidewalk, under the apple trees and oak trees, toward the store. The town is so quiet and far off, you can only hear the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the stars.
Your bare feet slap the pavement, you cross the street and find Mrs Singer moving ponderously about her store, singing Yiddish melodies.
‘Pint ice cream?’ she says. ‘Chocolate on top? Yes!’
You watch her fumble the metal top off the ice-cream freezer and manipulate the scoop, packing the cardboard pint chock full with ‘chocolate on top, yes!’ You give the money, receive the chill, icy pack, and rubbing it across your brow and cheek, laughing, you thump barefootedly homeward. Behind you, the lights of the lonely little store blink out and there is only a street light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city seems to be going to sleep …
Opening the screen door you find Mom still ironing. She looks hot and irritated, but she smiles just the same.
‘When will Dad be home from lodge-meeting?’ you ask.
‘About eleven-thirty or twelve,’ Mother replies. She takes the ice cream to the kitchen, divides it. Giving you your special portion of chocolate, she dishes out some for herself and the rest is put away. ‘For Skipper and your father when they come.’
Skipper is your brother. He is your older brother. He’s twelve and healthy, red-faced, hawk-nosed, tawny-haired, broad-shouldered for his years, and always running. He is allowed to stay up later than you. Not much later, but enough to make him feel it is worthwhile having been born first. He is over on the other side of town this evening to a game of kick-the-can and will be home soon. He and the kids have been yelling, kicking, running for hours, having fun. Soon he will come clomping in, smelling of sweat and green grass on his knees where he fell, and smelling very much in all ways like Skipper; which is natural.
You sit enjoying the ice cream. You are at the core of the deep quiet summer night. Your mother and yourself and the night all around this small house on this small street. You lick each spoon of ice cream thoroughly before digging for another, and Mom puts her ironing board away and the hot iron in its case, and she sits in the armchair by the phonograph, eating her dessert and saying, ‘My lands, it was a hot day today. It’s still hot. Earth soaks up all the heat and lets it out at night. It’ll be soggy sleeping.’
You both sit there listening to the summer silence. The dark is pressed down by every window and door, there is no sound because the radio needs a new battery, and you have played all the Knickerbocker Quartet records and Al Jolson and Two Black Crows records to exhaustion: so you just sit on the hardwood floor by the door and look out into the dark dark dark, pressing your nose against the screen until the flesh of its tip is molded into small dark squares.
‘I wonder where your brother is?’ Mother says after a while. Her spoon scrapes on the dish. ‘He should be home by now. It’s almost nine-thirty.’
‘He’ll be here,’ you say, knowing very well that he will be.
You follow Mom out to wash the dishes. Each sound, each rattle of spoon or dish is amplified in the baked evening. Silently, you go to the living room, remove the couch cushions and, together, yank it open and extend it down into the double bed that it secretly is. Mother makes the bed, punching pillows neatly to flump them up for your head. Then, as you are unbuttoning your shirt, she says:
‘Wait awhile, Doug.’
‘Why?’
‘Because. I say so.’
‘You look funny, Mom.’
Mom sits down a moment, then stands up, goes to the door, and calls. You listen to her calling and calling Skipper. Skipper, Skiiiiiiiiiperrrrrrrr over and over. Her calling goes out into the summer warm dark and never comes back. The echoes pay no attention.
Skipper, Skipper, Skipper.
Skipper!
And as you sit on the floor a coldness that is not ice cream and not winter, and not part of summer’s heat, goes through you. You notice Mom’s eyes sliding, blinking; the way she stands undecided and is nervous. All of these things.
She opens the screen door. Stepping out into the night she walks down the steps and down the front sidewalk under the lilac bush. You listen to her moving feet.
She calls again. Silence.
She calls twice more. You sit in the room. Any moment now Skipper will reply, from down the long long narrow street:
‘All right, Mom! All right, Mother! Hey!’
But he doesn’t answer. And for two minutes you sit looking at the made-up bed, the silent radio, the silent phonograph, at the chandelier with its crystal bobbins gleaming quietly, at the rug with the scarlet and purple curlicues on it. You stub your toe on the bed purposely to see if it hurts. It does.
Whining, the screen door opens, and Mother says:
‘Come on, Shorts. We’ll take a walk.’
‘Where to?’
‘Just down the block. Come on. Better put your shoes on, though. You’ll catch cold.’
‘No, I won’t. I’ll be all right.’
You take her hand. Together you walk down St James Street. You smell roses in blossom, fallen apples lying crushed and odorous in the deep grass. Underfoot, the concrete is still warm, and the crickets are sounding louder against the darkening dark. You reach a corner, turn, and walk toward the ravine.
Off somewhere, a car goes by, flashing its lights in the distance. There is such a complete lack of life, light, and activity. Here and there, back off from where you are walking toward the ravine, you see faint squares of light where people are still up. But most of the houses, darkened, are sleeping already, and there are a few lightless places where the occupants of a dwelling sit talking low dark talk on their front porches. You hear a porch swing squeaking as you walk near.
‘I wish your father was home,’ says Mother. Her large hand tightens around your small one. ‘Just wait’ll I get that boy. I’ll spank him within an inch of his life.’
A razor strop hangs in the kitchen for this. You think of it, remember when Dad has doubled and flourished it with muscled control over your frantic limbs. You doubt Mother will carry out her promise.
Now you have walked another block and are standing by the holy black silhouette of the German Baptist Church at the corner of Chapel Street and Glen Rock. In back of the church a hundred yards away, the ravine begins. You can smell it. It has a dark sewer, rotten foliage, thick green odor. It is a wide ravine that cuts and twists across the town, a jungle by day, a place to let alone at night, Mother has often declared.
You should feel encouraged by the nearness of the German Baptist Church, but you are not – because the building is not illumined, is cold and useless as a pile of ruins on the ravine edge.
You are only eight years old, you know little of death, fear, or dread. Death is the waxen effigy in the coffin when you were six and Grandfather passed away – looking like a great fallen vulture in his casket, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell you how to be a good boy, no more to comment succinctly on politics. Death is your little sister one morning when you awaken at the age of seven, look into her crib and see her staring up at you with a blind blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men come with a small wicker basket to take her away. Death is when you stand by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realize she’ll never be in it again, laughing and crying, and make you jealous of her because she was born. That is death.
But this is more than death. This summer night wading deep in time and stars and warm eternity. It is an essence of all the things you will ever feel or see or hear in your life again, being brought steadily home to you all at once.
Leaving the sidewalk, you walk along a trodden, pebbled, weed-fringed path to the ravine’s edge. Crickets, in loud full drumming chorus now, are shouting to quiver the dead. You follow obediently behind brave, fine, tall Mother who is defender of all the universe. You feel braveness because she goes before, and you hang back a trifle for a moment, and then hurry on, too. Together, then, you approach, reach, and pause at the very edge of civilization.
The ravine.
Here and now, down there in that pit of jungled blackness is suddenly all the evil you will ever know. Evil you will never understand. All of the nameless things are there. Later, when you have grown you’ll be given names to label them with. Meaningless syllables to describe the waiting nothingness. Down there in the huddled shadow, among thick trees and trailed vines, lives the odor of decay. Here, at this spot, civilization ceases, reason ends, and a universal evil takes over.
You realize you are alone. You and your mother. Her hand trembles.
Her hand trembles.
Your belief in your private world is shattered. You feel Mother tremble. Why? Is she, too, doubtful? But she is bigger, stronger, more intelligent than yourself, isn’t she? Does she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Is there, then, no strength in growing up? no solace in being an adult? no sanctuary in life? no flesh citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flush you. Ice cream lives again in your throat, stomach, spine and limbs; you are instantly cold as a wind out of December-gone.
You realize that all men are like this. That each person is to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If you should scream now, if you should holler for help, would it matter?
You are so close to the ravine now that in the instant of your scream, in the interval between someone hearing it and running to find you, much could happen.
Blackness could come swiftly, swallowing; and in one titanically freezing moment all would be concluded. Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might probe the disturbed pathway, long before men with trembling brains could rustle down the pebbles to your help. Even if they were within five hundred yards of you now, and help certainly is, in three seconds a dark tide could rise to take all eight years of life away from you and—
The essential impact of life’s loneliness crushes your beginning-to-tremble body. Mother is alone, too. She cannot look to the sanctity of marriage, the protection of her family’s love, she cannot look to the United States Constitution or the City Police, she cannot look anywhere, in this very instant, save into her heart, and there she’ll find nothing but uncontrollable repugnance and a will to fear. In this instant it is an individual problem seeking an individual solution. You must accept being alone and work on from there.
You swallow hard, cling to her. Oh Lord, don’t let her die, please, you think. Don’t do anything to us. Father will be coming home from lodge-meeting in an hour and if the house is empty … ?
Mother advances down the path into the primeval jungle. Your voice trembles. ‘Mom. Skip’s all right. Skip’s all right. He’s all right. Skip’s all right.’
Mother’s voice is strained, high. ‘He always comes through here. I tell him not to, but those darned kids, they come through here anyway. Some night he’ll come through and never come out again—’
Never come out again. That could mean anything. Tramps. Criminals. Darkness. Accident. Most of all – death.
Alone in the universe.
There are a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins is the small towns’ music, with no lights but many shadows. Oh the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life is a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, are threatened by an ogre called Death.
Mother raises her voice into the dark.
‘Skip! Skipper!’ she calls. ‘Skip! Skipper!’
Suddenly, both of you realize there is something wrong. Something very wrong. You listen intently and realize what it is.
The crickets have stopped chirping.
Silence is complete.
Never in your life a silence like this one. One so utterly complete. Why should the crickets cease? Why? What reason? They have never stopped ever before. Not ever.
Unless, Unless—
Something is going to happen.
It is as if the whole ravine is tensing, bunching together its black fibers, drawing in power from all about sleeping countrysides, for miles and miles. From dew-sodden forests and dells and rolling hills where dogs tilt heads to moons, from all around the great silence is sucked into one center, and you at the core of it. In ten seconds now, something will happen, something will happen. The crickets keep their truce, the stars are so low you can almost brush the tinsel. There are swarms of them, hot and sharp.
Growing, growing, the silence. Growing, growing, the tenseness. Oh it’s so dark, so far away from everything. Oh God!
And then, way way off across the ravine:
‘Okay, Mom! Coming, Mother!’
And again:
‘Hi, Mom! Coming, Mom!’
And then the quick scuttering of tennis shoes padding down through the pit of the ravine as three kids come dashing, giggling. Your brother Skipper, Chuck Redman, and Augie Bartz. Running, giggling.
The stars suck up like the stung antennae of ten million snails.
The crickets sing!
The darkness pulls back, startled, shocked, angry. Pulls back, losing its appetite at being so rudely interrupted as it prepared to feed. As the dark retreats like a wave on a shore, three kids pile out of it, laughing.
‘Hi, Mom! Hi, Shorts! Hey!’
It smells like Skipper all right. Sweat and grass and his oiled leather baseball glove.
‘Young man, you’re going to get a licking,’ declares Mother. She puts away her fear instantly. You know she will never tell anybody of it, ever. It will be in her heart though, for all time, as it is in your heart, for all time.
You walk home to bed in the late summer night. You are glad Skipper is alive. Very glad. For a moment there you thought—
Far off in the dim moonlit country, over a viaduct and down a valley, a train goes rushing along and it whistles like a lost metal thing, nameless and running. You go to bed, shivering, beside your brother, listening to that train whistle, and thinking of a cousin who lived way out in the country where that train is now; a cousin who died of pneumonia late at night years and years ago … You smell the sweat of Skip beside you. It is magic. You stop trembling. You hear footsteps outside the house on the sidewalk, as Mother is turning out the lights. A man clears his throat in a way you recognize.
Mom says, ‘That’s your father.’
It is.
Homecoming (#ulink_191bd623-b39f-5dda-b831-703205de1b22)
‘Here they come,’ said Cecy, lying there flat in her bed.
‘Where are they?’ cried Timothy from the doorway.
‘Some of them are over Europe, some over Asia, some of them over the Islands, some over South America!’ said Cecy, her eyes closed, the lashes long, brown, and quivering.
Timothy came forward upon the bare plankings of the upstairs room. ‘Who are they?’
‘Uncle Einar and Uncle Fry, and there’s Cousin William, and I see Frulda and Helgar and Aunt Morgiana and Cousin Vivian, and I see Uncle Johann! They’re all coming fast!’
‘Are they up in the sky?’ cried Timothy, his little gray eyes flashing. Standing by the bed, he looked no more than his fourteen years. The wind blew outside, the house was dark and lit only by starlight.
‘They’re coming through the air and traveling along the ground, in many forms,’ said Cecy, in her sleeping. She did not move on the bed: she thought inward on herself and told what she saw. ‘I see a wolflike thing coming over a dark river – at the shallows – just above a waterfall, the starlight shining up his pelt. I see a brown oak leaf blowing far up in the sky. I see a small bat flying. I see many other things, running through the forest trees and slipping through the highest branches: and they’re all coming this way!’
‘Will they be here by tomorrow night?’ Timothy clutched the bedclothes. The spider on his lapel swung like a black pendulum, excitedly dancing. He leaned over his sister. ‘Will they all be here in time for the Homecoming?’
‘Yes, yes, Timothy, yes,’ sighed Cecy. She stiffened. ‘Ask no more of me. Go away now. Let me travel in the places I like best.’
‘Thanks, Cecy,’ he said. Out in the hall, he ran to his room. He hurriedly made his bed. He had just awakened a few minutes ago, at sunset, and as the first stars had risen, he had gone to let his excitement about the party run with Cecy. Now she slept so quietly there was not a sound. The spider hung on a silvery lasso about Timothy’s slender neck as he washed his face. ‘Just think. Spid, tomorrow night is Allhallows Eve!’
He lifted his face and looked into the mirror. His was the only mirror allowed in the house. It was his mother’s concession to his illness. Oh, if only he were not so afflicted! He opened his mouth, surveyed the poor, inadequate teeth nature had given him. No more than so many corn kernels – round, soft and pale in his jaws. Some of the high spirit died in him.
It was now totally dark and he lit a candle to see by. He felt exhausted. This past week the whole family had lived in the fashion of the old country. Sleeping by day, rousing at sunset to move about. There were blue hollows under his eyes. ‘Spid. I’m no good,’ he said, quietly, to the little creature. ‘I can’t even get used to sleeping days like the others.’
He took up the candleholder. Oh, to have strong teeth, with incisors like steel spikes. Or strong hands, even, or a strong mind. Even to have the power to send one’s mind out, free, as Cecy did. But, no, he was the imperfect one, the sick one. He was even – he shivered and drew the candle flame closer – afraid of the dark. His brothers snorted at him. Bion and Leonard and Sam. They laughed at him because he slept in a bed. With Cecy it was different; her bed was part of her comfort for the composure necessary to send her mind abroad to hunt. But Timothy, did he sleep in the wonderful polished boxes like the others? He did not! Mother let him have his own bed, his own room, his own mirror. No wonder the family skirted him like a holy man’s crucifix. If only the wings would sprout from his shoulder blades. He bared his back, stared at it. And sighed again. No chance. Never.
Downstairs were exciting and mysterious sounds, the slithering black crape going up in all the halls and on the ceilings and doors. The sputter of burning black tapers in the banistered stairwell. Mother’s voice, high and firm. Father’s voice, echoing from the damp cellar. Bion walking from outside the old country house lugging vast two-gallon jugs.
‘I’ve just got to go to the party, Spid,’ said Timothy. The spider whirled at the end of its silk, and Timothy felt alone. He would polish cases, fetch toadstools and spiders, hang crape, but when the party started he’d be ignored. The less seen or said of the imperfect son the better.
All through the house below, Laura ran.
‘The Homecoming!’ she shouted gaily. ‘The Homecoming!’ Her footsteps everywhere at once.
Timothy passed Cecy’s room again, and she was sleeping quietly. Once a month she went belowstairs. Always she stayed in bed. Lovely Cecy. He felt like asking her, ‘Where are you now, Cecy? And in who? And what’s happening? Are you beyond the hills? And what goes on there?’ But he went on to Ellen’s room instead.
Ellen sat at her desk, sorting out many kinds of blonde, red and black hair and little scimitars of fingernails gathered from her manicurist job at the Mellin Village beauty parlor fifteen miles over. A sturdy mahogany case lay in one corner with her name on it.
‘Go away,’ she said, not even looking at him. ‘I can’t work with you gawking.’
‘Allhallows Eve, Ellen: just think!’ he said, trying to be friendly.
‘Hunh!’ She put some fingernail clippings in a small white sack, labeled them. ‘What can it mean to you? What do you know of it? It’ll scare hell out of you. Go back to bed.’
His cheeks burned. ‘I’m needed to polish and work and help serve.’
‘If you don’t go, you’ll find a dozen raw oysters in your bed tomorrow,’ said Ellen, matter-of-factly. ‘Good-by, Timothy.’
In his anger, rushing downstairs, he bumped into Laura.
‘Watch where you’re going!’ she shrieked from clenched teeth.
She swept away. He ran to the open cellar door, smelled the channel of moist earthy air rising from below. ‘Father?’
‘It’s about time,’ Father shouted up the steps. ‘Hurry down, or they’ll he here before we’re ready!’
Timothy hesitated only long enough to hear the million other sounds in the house. Brothers came and went like trains in a station, talking and arguing. If you stood in one spot long enough the entire household passed with their pale hands full of things. Leonard with his little black medical case. Samuel with his large, dusty ebon-bound book under his arm, bearing more black crape, and Bion excursioning to the car outside and bringing in many more gallons of liquid.
Father stopped polishing to give Timothy a rag and a scowl. He thumped the huge mahogany box. ‘Come on, shine this up, so we can start on another. Sleep your life away.’
While waxing the surface, Timothy looked inside.
‘Uncle Einar’s a big man, isn’t he, Papa?’
‘Unh.’
‘How big is he?’
‘The size of the box’ll tell you.’
‘I was only asking. Seven feet tall?’
‘You talk a lot?’
About nine o’clock Timothy went out into the October weather. For two hours in the now-warm, now-cold wind he walked the meadows collecting toadstools and spiders. His heart began to beat with anticipation again. How many relatives had Mother said would come? Seventy? One hundred? He passed a farmhouse. If only you knew what was happening at our house, he said to the glowing windows. He climbed a hill and looked at the town, miles away, settling into sleep, the town-hall clock, high and round, white in the distance. The town did not know, either. He brought home many jars of toadstools and spiders.
In the little chapel belowstairs a brief ceremony was celebrated. It was like all the other rituals over the years, with Father chanting the dark lines, Mother’s beautiful white ivory hands moving in the reverse blessings, and all the children gathered except Cecy, who lay upstairs in bed. But Cecy was present. You saw her peering, now from Bion’s eyes, now Samuel’s, now Mother’s, and you felt a movement and now she was in you, fleetingly, and gone.
Timothy prayed to the Dark One with a tightened stomach. ‘Please, please, help me grow up, help me be like my sisters and brothers. Don’t let me be different. If only I could put the hair in the plastic images as Ellen does, or make people fall in love with me as Laura does with people, or read strange books as Sam does, or work in a respected job like Leonard and Bion do. Or even raise a family one day, as Mother and Father have done …’
At midnight a storm hammered the house. Lightning struck outside in amazing, snow-white bolts. There was a sound of an approaching, probing, sucking tornado, funneling and nuzzling the moist night earth. Then the front door, blasted half off its hinges, hung stiff and discarded, and in trooped Grandmama and Grandpapa, all the way from the old country!
From then on people arrived each hour. There was a flutter at the side window, a rap on the front porch, a knock at the back. There were fey noises from the cellar; autumn wind piped down the chimney throat, chanting. Mother filled the large crystal punch bowl with a scarlet fluid poured from the jugs Bion had carried home. Father swept from room to room lighting more tapers. Laura and Ellen hammered up more wolfs-bane. And Timothy stood amidst this wild excitement, no expression to his face, his hands trembling at his sides, gazing now here, now there. Banging of doors, laughter, the sound of liquid pouring, darkness, sound of wind, the webbed thunder of wings, the padding of feet, the welcoming bursts of talk at the entrances, the transparent rattlings of casements, the shadows passing, coming, going, wavering.
‘Well, well, and this must be Timothy!’
‘What?’
A chilly hand took his hand. A long hairy face leaned down over him. ‘A good lad, a fine lad,’ said the stranger.
‘Timothy,’ said his mother. ‘This is Uncle Jason.’
‘Hello, Uncle Jason.’
‘And over here—’ Mother drifted Uncle Jason away. Uncle Jason peered back at Timothy over his caped shoulder, and winked.
Timothy stood alone.
From off a thousand miles in the candled darkness, he heard a high fluting voice; that was Ellen. ‘And my brothers, they are clever. Can you guess their occupations, Aunt Morgiana?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘They operate the undertaking establishment in town.’
‘What!’ A gasp.
‘Yes!’ Shrill laughter. ‘Isn’t that priceless!’
Timothy stood very still.
A pause in the laughter. ‘They bring home sustenance for Mama, Papa and all of us,’ said Laura. ‘Except, of course, Timothy …’
An uneasy silence. Uncle Jason’s voice demanded. ‘Well? Come now. What about Timothy?’
‘Oh, Laura, your tongue,’ said Mother.
Laura went on with it, Timothy shut his eyes. ‘Timothy doesn’t – well – doesn’t like blood. He’s delicate.’
‘He’ll learn,’ said Mother. ‘He’ll learn,’ she said very firmly. ‘He’s my son, and he’ll learn. He’s only fourteen.’
‘But I was raised on the stuff,’ said Uncle Jason, his voice passing from one room on into another. The wind played the trees outside like harps. A little rain spatted on the windows – ‘raised on the stuff,’ passing away into faintness.
Timothy bit his lips and opened his eyes.
‘Well, it was all my fault.’ Mother was showing them into the kitchen now. ‘I tried forcing him. You can’t force children, you only make them sick, and then they never get a taste for things. Look at Bion, now, he was thirteen before he …’
‘I understand,’ murmured Uncle Jason. ‘Timothy will come around.’
‘I’m sure he will,’ said Mother, defiantly.
Candle flames quivered as shadows crossed and recrossed the dozen musty rooms. Timothy was cold. He smelled the hot tallow in his nostrils and instinctively he grabbed at a candle and walked with it around and about the house, pretending to straighten the crape.
‘Timothy,’ someone whispered behind a patterned wall, hissing and sizzling and sighing the words, ‘Timothy is afraid of the dark.’
Leonard’s voice. Hateful Leonard!
‘I like the candle, that’s all,’ said Timothy in a reproachful whisper.
More lightning, more thunder. Cascades of roaring laughter. Bangings and clickings and shouts and rustles of clothing. Clammy fog swept through the front door. Out of the fog, settling his wings, stalked a tall man.
‘Uncle Einar!’
Timothy propelled himself on his thin legs, straight through the fog, under the green webbing shadows. He threw himself across Einar’s arms. Einar lifted him.
‘You’ve wings, Timothy!’ He tossed the boy light as thistles. ‘Wings, Timothy: fly!’ Faces wheeled under. Darkness rotated. The house blew away. Timothy felt breezelike. He flapped his arms. Einar’s fingers caught and threw him once more to the ceiling. The ceiling rushed down like a charred wall. ‘Fly, Timothy!’ shouted Einar, loud and deep. ‘Fly with wings! Wings!’
He felt an exquisite ecstasy in his shoulder blades, as if roots grew, burst to explode and blossom into new, moist membrane. He babbled wild stuff; again Einar hurled him high.
The autumn wind broke in a tide on the house, rain crashed down, shaking the beams, causing chandeliers to tilt their enraged candle lights. And the one hundred relatives peered out from every black, enchanted room, circling inward, all shapes and sizes, to where Einar balanced the child like a baton in the roaring spaces.
‘Enough!’ shouted Einar, at last.
Timothy, deposited on the floor timbers, exaltedly, exhaustedly fell against Uncle Einar, sobbing happily. ‘Uncle, uncle, uncle!’
‘Was it good, flying? Eh, Timothy?’ said Uncle Einar, bending down, patting Timothy’s head. ‘Good, good.’
It was coming toward dawn. Most had arrived and were ready to bed down for the daylight, sleep motionlessly with no sound until the following sunset, when they would shout out of their mahogany boxes for the revelry.
Uncle Einar, followed by dozens of others, moved toward the cellar. Mother directed them downward to the crowded row on row of highly polished boxes. Einar, his wings like sea-green tarpaulins tented behind him, moved with a curious whistling down the passageway: where his wings touched they made a sound of drumheads gently beaten.
Upstairs, Timothy lay wearily thinking, trying to like the darkness. There was so much you could do in darkness that people couldn’t criticize you for, because they never saw you. He did like the night, but it was a qualified liking: sometimes there was so much night he cried out in rebellion.
In the cellar, mahogany doors sealed downward, drawn in by pale hands. In corners, certain relatives circled three times to lie, heads on paws, eyelids shut. The sun rose. There was a sleeping.
Sunset. The revel exploded like a bat nest struck full, shrieking out, fluttering, spreading. Box doors banged wide. Steps rushed up from cellar damp. More late guests, kicking on front and back portals, were admitted.
It rained, and sodden visitors laid their capes, their water-pelleted hats, their sprinkled veils upon Timothy who bore them to a closet. The rooms were crowd-packed. The laughter of one cousin, shot from one room, angled off the wall of another, ricocheted, banked, and returned to Timothy’s ears from a fourth room, accurate and cynical.
A mouse ran across the floor.
‘I know you, Niece Leibersrouter!’ exclaimed Father, around him but not to him. The dozens of towering people pressed in against him, elbowed him, ignored him.
Finally, he turned and slipped away up the stairs.
He called softly. ‘Cecy. Where are you now, Cecy?’
She waited a long while before answering. ‘In the Imperial Valley,’ she murmured faintly. ‘Beside the Salton Sea, near the mud pots and the steam and the quiet. I’m inside a farmer’s wife. I’m sitting on a front porch. I can make her move if I want, or do anything or think anything. The sun’s going down.’
‘What’s it like, Cecy?’
‘You can hear the mud pots hissing,’ she said, slowly, as if speaking in a church. ‘Little gray heads of steam push up the mud like bald men rising in the thick syrup, head first, out in the boiling channels. The gray heads rip like rubber fabric, collapse with noises like wet lips moving. And feathery plumes of steam escape from the ripped tissue. And there is a smell of deep sulphurous burning and old times. The dinosaur has been abroiling here ten million years.’
‘Is he done yet, Cecy?’
The mouse spiraled three women’s feet and vanished into a corner. Moments later a beautiful woman rose up out of nothing and stood in the corner, smiling her white smile at them all.
Something huddled against the flooded pane of the kitchen window. It sighed and wept and tapped continually, pressed against the glass, but Timothy could make nothing of it, he saw nothing. In imagination he was outside staring in. The rain was on him, the wind at him, and the taperdotted darkness inside was inviting. Waltzes were being danced: tall thin figures pirouetted to outlandish music. Stars of light flickered off lifted bottles; small clods of earth crumbled from casques, and a spider fell and went silently legging over the floor.
Timothy shivered. He was inside the house again. Mother was calling him to run here, run there, help, serve, out to the kitchen now, fetch this, fetch that, bring the plates, heap the food – on and on – the party happened.
‘Yes, he’s done. Quite done,’ Cecy’s calm sleeper’s lips turned up. The languid words fell slowly from her shaping mouth. ‘Inside this woman’s skull I am, looking out, watching the sea that does not move, and is so quiet it makes you afraid. I sit on the porch and wait for my husband to come home. Occasionally, a fish leaps, falls back, starlight edging it. The valley, the sea, the few cars, the wooden porch, my rocking chair, myself, the silence.’
‘What now, Cecy?’
‘I’m getting up from my rocking chair,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m walking off the porch, toward the mud pots. Planes fly over, like primordial birds. Then it is quiet, so quiet.’
‘How long will you stay inside her, Cecy?’
‘Until I’ve listened and looked and felt enough: until I’ve changed her life some way. I’m walking off the porch and along the wooden boards. My feet knock on the planks, tiredly, slowly.’
‘And now?’
‘Now the sulphur fumes are all around me. I stare at the bubbles as they break and smooth. A bird darts by my temple, shrieking. Suddenly I am in the bird and fly away! And as I fly, inside my new small glass-bead eyes I see a woman below me, on a boardwalk, take one two three steps forward into the mud pots. I hear a sound as of a boulder plunged into molten depths. I keep flying, circle back. I see a white hand, like a spider, wriggle and disappear into the gray lava pool. The lava seals over. Now I’m flying home, swift, swift, swift!’
Something clapped hard against the window. Timothy started.
Cecy flicked her eyes wide, bright, full, happy, exhilarated.
‘Now I’m home!’ she said.
After a pause, Timothy ventured. ‘The Homecoming’s on. And everybody’s here.’
‘Then why are you upstairs?’ She took his hand. ‘Well, ask me.’ She smiled slyly. ‘Ask me what you came to ask.’
‘I didn’t come to ask anything,’ he said. ‘Well, almost nothing. Well – oh, Cecy!’ It came from him in one long rapid flow. ‘I want to do something at the party to make them look at me, something to make me good as them, something to make me belong, but there’s nothing I can do and I feel funny and, well. I thought you might …’
‘I might,’ she said, closing her eyes, smiling inwardly. ‘Stand up straight. Stand very still.’ He obeyed. ‘Now, shut your eyes and blank out your thought.’
He stood very straight and thought of nothing, or at least thought of thinking nothing.
She sighed. ‘Shall we go downstairs now, Timothy?’ Like a hand into a glove, Cecy was within him.
‘Look everybody!’ Timothy held the glass of warm red liquid. He held up the glass so that the whole house turned to watch him. Aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters!
He drank it straight down.
He jerked a hand at his sister Laura. He held her gaze, whispering to her in a subtle voice that kept her silent, frozen. He felt tall as the trees as he walked to her. The party now slowed. It waited on all sides of him, watching. From all the room doors the faces peered. They were not laughing. Mother’s face was astonished. Dad looked bewildered, but pleased and getting prouder every instant.
He nipped Laura, gently, over the neck vein. The candle flames swayed drunkenly. The wind climbed around on the roof outside. The relatives stared from all the doors. He popped toadstools into his mouth, swallowed, then beat his arms against his flanks and circled. ‘Look, Uncle Einar! I can fly, at last!’ Beat went his hands. Up and down pumped his feet. The faces flashed past him.
At the top of the stairs, flapping, he heard his mother cry, ‘Stop, Timothy!’ far below. ‘Hey!’ shouted Timothy, and leaped off the top of the well, thrashing.
Halfway down, the wings he thought he owned dissolved. He screamed. Uncle Einar caught him.
Timothy flailed whitely in the receiving arms. A voice burst out of his lips, unbidden. ‘This is Cecy! This is Cecy! Come see me, all of you, upstairs, first room on the left!’ Followed by a long trill of high laughter. Timothy tried to cut it off with his tongue.
Everybody was laughing. Einar set him down. Running through the crowding blackness as the relatives flowed upstairs toward Cecy’s room to congratulate her, Timothy banged the front door open.
‘Cecy. I hate you. I hate you!’
By the sycamore tree, in deep shadow, Timothy spewed out his dinner, sobbed bitterly and thrashed in a pile of autumn leaves. Then he lay still. From his blouse pocket, from the protection of the matchbox he used for his retreat, the spider crawled forth. Spid walked along Timothy’s arm. Spid explored up his neck to his ear and climbed in the ear to tickle it. Timothy shook his head. ‘Don’t, Spid. Don’t.’
The feathery touch of a tentative feeler probing his eardrum set Timothy shivering. ‘Don’t, Spid!’ He sobbed somewhat less.
The spider traveled down his cheek, took a station under the boy’s nose, looked up into the nostrils as if to seek the brain, and then clambered softly up over the rim of the nose to sit, to squat there peering at Timothy with green-gem eyes until Timothy filled with ridiculous laughter. ‘Go away, Spid!’
Timothy sat up, rustling the leaves. The land was very bright with the moon. In the house he could hear the faint ribaldry as Mirror, Mirror was played. Celebrants shouted, dimly muffled, as they tried to identify those of themselves whose reflections did not, had not ever, appeared in a glass.
‘Timothy.’ Uncle Einar’s wings spread and twitched and came in with a sound like kettledrums. Timothy felt himself plucked up like a thimble and set upon Einar’s shoulder. ‘Don’t feel badly, Nephew Timothy. Each to his own, each in his own way. How much better things are for you. How rich. The world’s dead for us. We’ve seen so much of it, believe me. Life’s best to those who live the least of it. It’s worth more per ounce, Timothy, remember that.’
The rest of the black morning, from midnight on, Uncle Einar led him about the house, from room to room, weaving and singing. A horde of late arrivals set the entire hilarity off afresh. Great-great-great-great and a thousand more great-greats Grandmother was there, wrapped in Egyptian cerements. She said not a word, but lay straight as a burnt ironing board against the wall, her eye hollows cupping a distant, wise, silent glimmering. At the breakfast, at four in the morning, one-thousand-odd-greats Grandmama was stiffly seated at the head of the longest table.
The numerous young cousins caroused at the crystal punch bowl. Their shiny olive-pit eyes, their conical, devilish faces and curly bronze hair hovered over the drinking table, their hard-soft, half-girl half-boy bodies wrestling against each other as they got unpleasantly, sullenly drunk. The wind got higher, the stars burned with fiery intensity, the noises redoubled, the dances quickened, the drinking became more positive. To Timothy there were thousands of things to hear and watch. The many darknesses roiled, bubbled, the many faces passed and repassed …
‘Listen!’
The party held its breath. Far away the town clock struck its chimes, saying six o’clock. The party was ending. In time to the rhythm of the striking clock, their one hundred voices began to sing songs that were four hundred years old, songs Timothy could not know. Arms twined, circling slowly, they sang, and somewhere in the cold distance of morning the town clock finished out its chimes and quieted.
Timothy sang. He knew no words, no tune, yet the words and tune came round and high and good. And he gazed at the closed door at the top of the stairs.
‘Thanks, Cecy,’ he whispered. ‘You’re forgiven. Thanks.’
Then he just relaxed and let the words move, with Cecy’s voice, free from his lips.
Good-bys were said, there was a great rustling. Mother and Father stood at the door to shake hands and kiss each departing relative in turn. The sky beyond the open door colored in the east. A cold wind entered. And Timothy felt himself seized and settled in one body after another, felt Cecy press him into Uncle Fry’s head so he stared from the wrinkled leather face, then leaped in a flurry of leaves up over the house and awakening hills …
Then, loping down a dirt path, he felt his red eyes burning, his fur pelt rimed with morning, as inside Cousin William he panted through a hollow and dissolved away …
Like a pebble in Uncle Einar’s mouth, Timothy flew in a webbed thunder, filling the sky. And then he was back, for all time, in his own body.
In the growing dawn, the last few were embracing and crying and thinking how the world was becoming less a place for them. There had been a time when they had met every year, but now decades passed with no reconciliation. ‘Don’t forget,’ someone cried, ‘we meet in Salem in 1970!’
Salem. Timothy’s numbed mind turned the words over. Salem, 1970. And there would be Uncle Fry and a thousand-times-great Grandmother in her withered cerements, and Mother and Father and Ellen and Laura and Cecy and all the rest. But would he be there? Could he be certain of staying alive until then?
With one last withering blast, away they all went, so many scarves, so many fluttery mammals, so many sere leaves, so many whining and clustering noises, so many midnights and insanities and dreams.
Mother shut the door. Laura picked up a broom. ‘No,’ said Mother. ‘We’ll clean tonight. Now we need sleep.’ And the family vanished down cellar and upstairs. And Timothy moved in the crape-littered hall, his head down. Passing a party mirror, he saw the pale mortality of his face all cold and trembling.
‘Timothy,’ said Mother.
She came to touch her hand on his face. ‘Son,’ she said, ‘we love you. Remember that. We all love you. No matter how different you are, no matter if you leave us one day.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘And if and when you die, your bones will lie undisturbed, we’ll see to that. You’ll lie at ease forever, and I’ll come visit every Allhallows Eve and tuck you in the more secure.’
The house was silent. Far away the wind went over a hill with its last cargo of dark bats, echoing, chittering.
Timothy walked up the steps, one by one, crying to himself all the way.
Uncle Einar (#ulink_5127a4fa-b7d6-5f37-951b-7ca7ef52343b)
‘It will take only a minute,’ said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
‘I refuse,’ he said. ‘And that takes but a second.’
‘I’ve worked all morning,’ she said, holding to her slender back, ‘and you won’t help? It’s drumming for a rain.’
‘Let it rain,’ he cried, morosely. ‘I’ll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes.’
‘But you’re so quick at it.’
‘Again, I refuse.’ His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.
She gave him a slender rope on which were tied four dozen fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with distaste. ‘So it’s come to this,’ he muttered, bitterly. ‘To this, to this, to this.’ He almost wept angry and acid tears.
‘Don’t cry; you’ll wet them down again,’ she said. ‘Jump up, now, run them about.’
‘Run them about.’ His voice was hollow, deep, and terribly wounded. ‘I say: let it thunder, let it pour!’
‘If it was a nice, sunny day I wouldn’t ask,’ she said, reasonably. ‘All my washing gone for nothing if you don’t. They’ll hang about the house—’
That did it. Above all, he hated clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under on the way across a room. He jumped up. His vast green wings boomed. ‘Only so far as the pasture fence!’
Whirl: up he jumped, his wings chewed and loved the cool air. Before you’d say Uncle Einar Has Green Wings he sailed low across his farmland, trailing the clothes in a vast fluttering loop through the pounding concussion and backwash of his wings!
‘Catch!’
Back from the trip, he sailed the clothes, dry as popcorn, down on a series of clean blankets she’d spread for their landing.
‘Thank you!’ she cried.
‘Gahh!’ he shouted, and flew off under the apple tree to brood.
Uncle Einar’s beautiful silklike wings hung like sea-green sails behind him, and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned swiftly. He was one of the few in the Family whose talent was visible. All his dark cousins and nephews and brothers hid in small towns across the world, did unseen mental things or things with witch-fingers and white teeth, or blew down the sky like fire-leaves, or loped in forests like moon-silvered wolves. They lived comparatively safe from normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings.
Not that he hated his wings. Far from it! In his youth he’d always flown nights, because nights were rare times for winged men! Daylight held dangers, always had, always would; but nights, ah, nights, he had sailed over islands of cloud and seas of summer sky. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich, full soaring, an exhilaration.
But now he could not fly at night.
On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe after a Homecoming among Family members in Mellin Town, Illinois (some years ago) he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he had told himself, vaguely, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills beyond Mellin Town. And then – crack out of the sky—
A high-tension tower.
Like a netted duck! A great sizzle! His face blown black by a blue sparkler of wire, he fended off the electricity with a terrific back-jumping percussion of his wings, and fell.
His hitting the moonlit meadow under the tower made a noise like a large telephone book dropped from the sky.
Early the next morning, his dew-sodden wings shaking violently, he stood up. It was still dark. There was a faint bandage of dawn stretched across the east. Soon the bandage would stain and all flight would be restricted. There was nothing to do but take refuge in the forest and wait out the day in the deepest thicket until another night gave his wings a hidden motion in the sky.
In this fashion he met his wife.
During the day, which was warm for November first in Illinois country, pretty young Brunilla Wexley was out to udder a lost cow, for she carried a silver pail in one hand as she sidled through thickets and pleaded cleverly to the unseen cow to please return home or burst her gut with unplucked milk. The fact that the cow would have most certainly come home when her teats needed pulling did not concern Brunilla Wexley. It was a sweet excuse for forest-journeying, thistle-blowing, and flower-chewing; all of which Brunilla was doing as she stumbled upon
Asleep near a bush, he seemed a man under a green shelter.
‘Oh,’ said Brunilla, with a fever. ‘A man. In a camp-tent.’
Uncle Einar awoke. The camp-tent spread like a large green fan behind him.
‘Oh,’ said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. ‘A man with wings.’
That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him. She began to talk. In an hour they were old friends, and in two hours she’d quite forgotten his wings were there. And he somehow confessed how he happened to be in this wood.
‘Yes, I noticed you looked banged around,’ she said. ‘That right wing looks very bad. You’d best let me take you home and fix it. You won’t be able to fly all the way to Europe on it, anyway. And who wants to live in Europe these days?’
He thanked her, but he didn’t quite see how he could accept.
‘But I live alone,’ she said. ‘For, as you see, I’m quite ugly.’
He insisted she was not.
‘How kind of you,’ she said. ‘But I am, there’s no fooling myself. My folks are dead, I’ve a farm, a big one, all to myself, quite far from Mellin Town, and I’m in need of talking company.’
But wasn’t she afraid of him? he asked.
‘Proud and jealous would be more near it,’ she said. ‘May I?’ And she stroked his large green membraned veils with careful envy. He shuddered at the touch and put his tongue between his teeth.
So there was nothing for it but that he come to her house for medicaments and ointments, and my! what a burn across his face, beneath his eyes! ‘Lucky you weren’t blinded,’ she said. ‘How’d it happen?’
‘Well …’ he said, and they were at her farm, hardly noticing they’d walked a mile, looking at each other.
A day passed, and another, and he thanked her at her door and said he must be going, he much appreciated the ointment, the care, the lodging. It was twilight and between now, six o’clock, and five the next morning, he must cross an ocean and a continent. ‘Thank you; good-by,’ he said, and started to fly off in the dusk and crashed right into a maple tree.
‘Oh!’ she screamed, and ran to his unconscious body.
When he waked the next hour he knew he’d fly no more in the dark again ever; his delicate night-perception was gone. The winged telepathy that had warned him where towers, trees, houses and hills stood across his path, the fine clear vision and sensibility that had guided him through mazes of forest, cliff, and cloud, all were burnt forever by that strike across his face, that blue electric fry and sizzle.
‘How?’ he moaned softly. ‘How can I go to Europe? If I flew by day, I’d be seen and – miserable joke – maybe shot down! Or kept for a zoo perhaps, what a life that’d be! Brunilla, tell me, what shall I do?’
‘Oh,’ she whispered, looking at her hands. ‘We’ll think of something …’
They were married.
The Family came for the wedding. In a great autumnal avalanche of maple, sycamore, oak, elm leaf, they hissed and rustled, fell in a shower of horse-chestnut, thumped like winter apples on the earth, with an overall scent of farewell-summer on the wind they made in their rushing. The ceremony? The ceremony was brief as a black candle lit, blown out, and smoke left still on the air. Its briefness, darkness, upside-down and backward quality escaped Brunilla, who only listened to the great tide of Uncle Einar’s wings faintly murmuring above them as they finished out the rite. And as for Uncle Einar, the wound across his nose was almost healed and, holding Brunilla’s arm, he felt Europe grow faint and melt away in the distance.
He didn’t have to see very well to fly straight up, or come straight down. It was only natural that on this night of their wedding he take Brunilla in his arms and fly right up into the sky.
A farmer, five miles over, glanced at a low cloud at midnight, saw faint glows and crackles.
‘Heat lightning,’ he observed, and went to bed.
They didn’t come down till morning, with the dew.
The marriage took. She had only to look at him, and it lifted her to think she was the only woman in the world married to a winged man. ‘Who else could say it?’ she asked her mirror. And the answer was: ‘No one!’
He, on the other hand, found great beauty behind her face, great kindness and understanding. He made some changes in his diet to fit her thinking, and was careful with his wings about the house; knocked porcelains and broken lamps were nerve-scrapers, he stayed away from them. He changed his sleeping habits, since he couldn’t fly nights now anyhow. And she in turn fixed chairs so they were comfortable for his wings, put extra padding here or took it out there, and the things she said were the things he loved her for. ‘We’re in our cocoons, all of us. See how ugly I am?’ she said. ‘But one day I’ll break out, spread wings as fine and handsome as you.’
‘You broke out long ago,’ he said.
She thought it over. ‘Yes,’ she had to admit. ‘I know just which day it was, too. In the woods when I looked for a cow and found a tent!’ They laughed, and with him holding her she felt so beautiful she knew their marriage had slipped her from her ugliness, like a bright sword from its case.
They had children. At first there was fear, all on his part, that they’d be winged.
‘Nonsense, I’d love it!’ she said. ‘Keep them out from under foot.’
‘Then,’ he exclaimed, ‘they’d be in your hair!’
‘Ow!’ she cried.
Four children were born, three boys and a girl, who, for their energy, seemed to have wings. They popped up like toadstools in a few years, and on hot summer days asked their father to sit under the apple tree and fan them with his cooling wings and tell them wild starlit tales of island clouds and ocean skies and textures of mist and wind and how a star tastes melting in your mouth, and how to drink cold mountain air, and how it feels to be a pebble dropped from Mt. Everest, turning to a green bloom, flowering your wings just before you strike bottom!
This was his marriage.
And today, six years later, here sat Uncle Einar, here he was, festering under the apple tree, grown impatient and unkind; not because this was his desire, but because after the long wait, he was still unable to fly the wild night sky: his extra sense had never returned. Here he sat despondently, nothing more than a summer sun-parasol, green and discarded, abandoned for the season by the reckless vacationers who once sought the refuge of its translucent shadow. Was he to sit here forever, afraid to fly by day because someone might see him? Was his only flight to be as a drier of clothes for his wife, or a fanner of children on hot August noons? His one occupation had always been flying Family errands, quicker than storms. A boomerang, he’d whickled over hills and valleys and like a thistle, landed. He had always had money; the Family had good use for their winged man! But now? Bitterness! His wings jittered and whisked the air and made a captive thunder.
‘Papa,’ said little Meg.
The children stood looking at his thought-dark face.
‘Papa,’ said Ronald. ‘Make more thunder!’
‘It’s a cold March day, there’ll soon be rain and plenty of thunder,’ said Uncle Einar.
‘Will you come watch us?’ asked Michael.
‘Run on, run on! Let Papa brood!’
He was shut of love, the children of love, and the love of children. He thought only of heavens, skies, horizons, infinities, by night or day, lit by star, moon, or sun, cloudy or clear, but always it was skies and heavens and horizons that ran ahead of you forever when you soared. Yet here he was, sculling the pasture, kept low for fear of being seen.
Misery in a deep well!
‘Papa, come watch us; it’s March!’ cried Meg. ‘And we’re going to the Hill with all the kids from town!’
Uncle Einar grunted. ‘What hill is that?’
‘The Kite Hill, of course!’ they all sang together.
Now he looked at them.
Each held a large paper kite, their faces sweating with anticipation and an animal glowing. In their small fingers were balls of white twine. From the kites, colored red and blue and yellow and green, hung caudal appendages of cotton and silk strips.
‘We’ll fly our kites!’ said Ronald. ‘Won’t you come?’
‘No,’ he said, sadly. ‘I mustn’t be seen by anyone or there’d be trouble.’
‘You could hide and watch from the woods,’ said Meg. ‘We made the kites ourselves. Just because we know how.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You’re our father!’ was the instant cry. ‘That’s why!’
He looked at his children for a long while. He sighed. ‘A kite festival, is it?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘I’m going to win,’ said Meg.
‘No, I’m!’ Michael contradicted.
‘Me, me!’ piped Stephen.
‘God up the chimney!’ roared Uncle Einar, leaping high with a deafening kettledrum of wings. ‘Children! Children. I love you dearly!’
‘Father, what’s wrong?’ said Michael, backing off.
‘Nothing, nothing, nothing!’ chanted Einar. He flexed his wings to their greatest propulsion and plundering. Whoom! they slammed like cymbals. The children fell flat in the backwash! ‘I have it, I have it! I’m free again! Fire in the flue! Feather on the wind! Brunilla!’ Einar called to the house. His wife appeared. ‘I’m free!’ he called, flushed and tall, on his toes. ‘Listen, Brunilla, I don’t need the night any more! I can fly by day! I don’t need the night! I’ll fly every day and any day of the year from now on! – but, God, I waste time, talking. Look!’
And as the worried members of his family watched, he seized the cotton tail from one of the little kites, tied it to his belt behind, grabbed the twine ball, held one end in his teeth, gave the other end to his children, and up, up into the air he flew, away into the Match wind!
And across the meadows and over the farms his children ran, letting out string to the daylit sky, bubbling and stumbling, and Brunilla stood back in the farmyard and waved and laughed to see what was happening; and her children marched to the far Kite Hill and stood, the four of them, holding the twine in their eager, proud fingers, each tugging and directing and pulling. And the children from Mellin Town came running with their small kites to let up on the wind, and they saw the great green kite leap and hover in the sky and exclaimed:
‘Oh, oh, what a kite! What a kite! Oh, I wish I’d a kite like that! Where, where did you get it!’
‘Our father made it!’ cried Meg and Michael and Stephen and Ronald, and gave an exultant pull on the twine and the humming, thundering kite in the sky dipped and soared and made a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!
The Traveler (#ulink_4683505c-d903-5f29-a4ca-2e29f32e7642)
Father looked into Cecy’s room just before dawn. She lay upon her bed. He shook his head uncomprehendingly and waved at her.
‘Now, if you can tell me what good she does, lying there,’ he said. ‘I’ll eat the crape on my mahogany box. Sleeping all night, eating breakfast, and then lying on top her bed all day.’
‘Oh, but she’s so helpful,’ explained Mother, leading him down the hall away from Cecy’s slumbering pale figure. ‘Why, she’s one of the most adjustable members of the Family. What good are your brothers? Most of them sleep all day and do nothing. At least Cecy is active.’
They went downstairs through the scent of black candles; the black crape on the banister, left over from the Homecoming some months ago and untouched, whispering as they passed. Father unloosened his tie, exhaustedly. ‘Well, we work nights,’ he said. ‘Can we help it if we’re – as you put it – old-fashioned?’
‘Of course not. Everyone in the Family can’t be modern.’ She opened the cellar door; they moved down into darkness arm in arm. She looked over at his round white face, smiling. ‘It’s really very lucky I don’t have to sleep at all. If you were married to a night-sleeper, think what a marriage it would be! Each of us to our own. None of us the same. All wild. That’s how the Family goes. Sometimes we get one like Cecy, all mind: and then there are those like Uncle Einar, all wing; and then again we have one like Timothy, all even and calm and normal. Then there’s you, sleeping days. And me, awake all and all of my life. So Cecy shouldn’t be too much for you to understand. She helps me a million ways each day. She sends her mind down to the green-grocer’s for me, to see what he sells. She puts her mind inside the butcher. That saves me a long trip if he’s fresh out of good cuts. She warns me when gossips are coming to visit and talk away the afternoon. And, well, there are six hundred other things—!’
They paused in the cellar near a large empty mahogany box. He settled himself into it, still not convinced. ‘But if she’d only contribute more,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask her to find some sort of work.’
‘Sleep on it,’ she said to him. ‘Think it over. You may change your mind by sunset.’
She was closing the lid down on him. ‘Well,’ he said, thoughtfully. The lid closed.
‘Good morning, dear,’ she said.
‘Good morning,’ he said, muffled, enclosed, within the box.
The sun rose. She hurried upstairs to make breakfast.
Cecy Elliott was the one who Traveled. She seemed an ordinary eighteen-year-old. But then none of the Family looked like what they were. There was naught of the fang, the foul, the worm or wind-witch to them. They lived in small towns and on farms across the world, simply, closely re-aligning and adapting their talents to the demands and laws of a changing world.
Cecy Elliott awoke. She glided down through the house, humming. ‘Good morning, Mother!’ She walked down to the cellar to recheck each of the large mahogany boxes, to dust them, to be certain each was tightly sealed. ‘Father,’ she said, polishing one box. ‘Cousin Esther,’ she said, examining another, ‘here on a visit. And—’ she rapped at a third, ‘Grandfather Elliott.’ There was a rustle inside like a piece of papyrus. ‘It’s a strange, cross-bred family,’ she mused, climbing to the kitchen again. ‘Night-siphoners and flume-fearers, some awake, like Mother, twenty-five hours out of twenty-four; some asleep, like me, fifty-nine minutes out of sixty. Different species of sleep.’
She ate breakfast. In the middle of her apricot dish she saw her mother’s stare. She laid the spoon down. Cecy said, ‘Father’ll change his mind. I’ll show him how fine I can be to have around. I’m family insurance; he doesn’t understand. You wait.’
Mother said, ‘You were inside me a while ago when I argued with Father?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought I felt you looking out my eyes,’ the mother nodded.
Cecy finished and went up to bed. She folded down the blankets and clean cool sheets, then laid herself out atop the covers, shut her eyes, rested her thin white fingers on her small bosom, nodded her slight, exquisitely sculptured head back against her thick gathering of chestnut hair.
She started to Travel.
Her mind slipped from the room, over the flowered yard, the fields, the green hills, over the ancient drowsy streets of Mellin Town, into the wind and past the moist depression of the ravine. All day she would fly and meander. Her mind would pop into dogs, sit there, and she would feel the bristly feels of dogs, taste ripe bones, sniff tangy-urined trees. She’d hear as a dog heard. She forgot human construction completely. She’d have a dog frame. It was more than telepathy, up one flue and down another. This was complete separation from one body environment into another. It was entrance into tree-nozzling dogs, men, old maids, birds, children at hopscotch, lovers on their morning beds, into workers asweat with shoveling, into unborn babies’ pink, dream-small brains.
Where would she go today? She made her decision, and went!
When her mother tiptoed a moment later to peek into the room, she saw Cecy’s body on the bed, the chest not moving, the face quiet. Cecy was gone already. Mother nodded and smiled.
The morning passed. Leonard, Bion and Sam went off to their work, as did Laura and the manicuring sister: and Timothy was dispatched to school. The house quieted. At noontime the only sound was made by Cecy Elliott’s three young girl-cousins playing Tisket Tasket Coffin Casket in the back yard. There were always extra cousins or uncles or grand-nephews and night-nieces about the place; they came and went; water out a faucet, down a drain.
The cousins stopped their play when the tall loud man banged on the front door and marched straight in when Mother answered.
‘That was Uncle Jonn!’ said the littlest girl, breathless.
‘The one we hate?’ asked the second.
‘What’s he want?’ cried the third. ‘He looked mad!’
‘We’re mad at him, that’s what,’ explained the second, proudly. ‘For what he did to the Family sixty years ago, and seventy years ago and twenty years ago.’
‘Listen!’ They listened. ‘He’s run upstairs!’
‘Sounds like he’s cryin’.’
‘Do grown-ups cry?’
‘Sure, silly!’
‘He’s in Cecy’s room! Shoutin’. Laughin’. Prayin’. Gryin’. He sounds mad, and sad, and fraidy-cat, all together!’
The littlest one made tears, herself. She ran to the cellar door. ‘Wake up! Oh, down there, wake up! You in the boxes! Uncle Jonn’s here and he might have a cedar stake with him! I don’t want a cedar stake in my chest! Wake up!’
‘Shh,’ hissed the biggest girl. ‘He hasn’t a stake! You can’t wake the Boxed People, anyhow, Listen!’
Their heads tilted, their eyes glistened upward, waiting.
‘Get off the bed!’ commanded Mother, in the doorway.
Uncle Jonn bent over Cecy’s slumbering body. His lips were misshaped. There was a wild, fey and maddened focus to his green eyes.
‘Am I too late?’ he demanded, hoarsely, sobbing. ‘Is she gone?’
‘Hours ago!’ snapped Mother. ‘Are you blind? She might not be back for days. Sometimes she lies there a week. I don’t have to feed the body, she finds sustenance from whatever or whoever she’s in. Get away from her!’
Uncle Jonn stiffened, one knee pressed on the springs.
‘Why couldn’t she wait?’ he wanted to know, frantically, looking at her, his hands feeling her silent pulse again and again.
‘You heard me!’ Mother moved forward curtly. ‘She’s not to be touched. She’s got to be left as she is. So if she comes home she can get back in her body exactly right.’
Uncle Jonn turned his head. His long hard red face was pocked and senseless, deep black grooves crowded the tired eyes.
‘Where’d she go? I’ve got to find her.’
Mother talked like a slap in the face. ‘I don’t know. She has favorite places. You might find her in a child running along a trail in the ravine. Or swinging on a grape vine. Or you might find her in a crayfish under a rock in the creek, looking up at you. Or she might be playing chess inside an old man in the court-house square. You know as well as I she can be anywhere.’ A wry look came to Mother’s mouth. ‘She might be vertical inside me now, looking out at you, laughing, and not telling you. This might be her talking and having fun. And you wouldn’t know it.’
‘Why—’ He swung heavily around, like a huge pivoted boulder. His big hands came up, wanting to grab something. ‘If I thought—’
Mother talked on, casual quiet. ‘Of course she’s not in me, here. And if she was there’d be no way to tell.’ Her eyes gleamed with a delicate malice. She stood tall and graceful, looking upon him with no fear. ‘Now, suppose you explain what you want with her?’
He seemed to be listening to a distant bell, tolling. He shook his head, angrily, to clear it. Then he growled. ‘Something … inside me …’ He broke off. He leaned over the cold, sleeping body. ‘Cecy! Come back, you hear! You can come back if you want!’
The wind blew softly through the high willows outside the sundrifted windows. The bed creaked under his shifted weight. The distant bell tolled again and he was listening to it, but Mother could not hear it. Only he heard the drowsy summer-day sounds of it, far far away. His mouth opened obscurely:
‘I’ve a thing for her to do to me. For the past month I’ve been kind of going – insane. I get funny thoughts. I was going to take a train to the big city and talk to a psychiatrist but he wouldn’t help. I know that Cecy can enter my head and exorcise those fears I have. She can suck them out like a vacuum cleaner, if she wants to help me. She’s the only one can scrape away the filth and cobwebs and make me new again. That’s why I need her, you understand?’ he said, in a tight, expectant voice. He licked his lips. ‘She’s got to help me!’
‘After all you’ve done to the Family?’ said Mother.
‘I did nothing to the Family!’
‘The story goes,’ said Mother, ‘that in bad times, when you needed money, you were paid a hundred dollars for each of the Family you pointed out to the law to be staked through the heart.’
‘That’s unfair!’ he said, wavering like a man hit in the stomach. ‘You can’t prove that. You lie!’
‘Nevertheless, I don’t think Cecy’d want to help you. The Family wouldn’t want it.’
‘Family, Family!’ He stomped the floor like a huge, brutal child. ‘Damn the Family! I won’t go insane on their account! I need help. God damn it, and I’ll get it!’
Mother faced him, her face reserved, her hands crossed over her bosom.
He lowered his voice, looking at her with a kind of evil shyness, not meeting her eyes. ‘Listen to me, Mrs Elliott,’ he said. ‘And you, too, Cecy,’ he said to the sleeper. ‘If you’re there,’ he added. ‘Listen to this.’ He looked at the wall clock ticking on the far, sun-drenched wall. ‘If Cecy isn’t back here by six o’clock tonight, ready to help clean out my mind and make me sane, I’ll – I’ll go to the police.’ He drew himself up. ‘I’ve got a list of Elliotts who live on farms all around and inside Mellin Town. The police can cut enough new cedar stakes in an hour to drive through a dozen Elliott hearts.’ He stopped, wiped the sweat off his face. He stood, listening.
The distant bell began to toll again.
He had heard it for weeks. There was no bell, but he could hear it ringing. It rang now, near, far, close, away. Nobody else could hear it save himself.
He shook his head. He shouted to cover the sound of those bells, shouted at Mrs Elliott. ‘You heard me?’
He hitched up his trousers, tightened the buckle clasp with a jerk, walked past Mother to the door.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I heard. But even I can’t call Cecy back if she doesn’t want to come. She’ll arrive eventually. Be patient. Don’t go running off to the police—’
He cut her. ‘I can’t wait. This thing of mine, this noise in my head’s gone on eight weeks now! I can’t stand it much longer!’ He scowled at the clock. ‘I’m going. I’ll try to find Cecy in town. If I don’t get her by six – well, you know what a cedar stake’s like …’
His heavy shoes pounded away down the hall, fading down the stairs, out of the house. When the noises were all gone, the mother turned and looked, earnestly, painfully, down upon the sleeper.
‘Cecy,’ she called, softly, insistently. ‘Cecy, come home!’
There was no word from the body. Cecy lay there, not moving, for as long as her mother waited.
Uncle Jonn walked through the fresh open country and into the streets of Mellin Town, looking for Cecy in every child that licked an ice-pop and in every little white dog that padded by on its way to some eagerly anticipated nowhere.
The town spread out like a fancy graveyard. Nothing more than a few monuments, really – edifices to lost arts and pastimes. It was a great meadow of elms and deodars and hackmatack trees, laid out with wooden walks you could haul into your barn at night if the hollow sound of walking people irked you. There were tall old maiden houses, lean and narrow and wisely wan, in which were spectacles of colored glass, upon which the thinned golden hair of age-old bird nests sprouted. There was a drug shop full of quaint wire-rung soda-fountain stools with plywood bottoms, and the memorious clear sharp odor that used to be in drug stores but never is any more. And there was a barber emporium with a red-ribboned pillar twisting around inside a chrysalis of glass in front of it. And there was a grocery that was all fruity shadow and dusty boxes and the smell of an old Armenian woman, which was like the odor of a rusty penny. The town lay under the deodar and mellow-leaf trees, in no hurry, and somewhere in the town was Cecy, the one who Traveled.
Uncle John stopped, bought himself a bottle of Orange Crush, drank it, wiped his face with his handkerchief, his eyes jumping up and down, like little kids skipping rope. I’m afraid, he thought. I’m afraid.
He saw a code of birds strung dot-dash on the high telephone wires. Was Cecy up there laughing at him out of sharp bird eyes, shuffling her feathers, singing at him? He suspicioned the cigar-store Indian. But there was no animation in that cold, carved, tobacco-brown image.
Distantly, like on a sleepy Sunday morning, he heard the bells ringing in a valley of his head. He was stone blind. He stood in blackness. White, tortured faces drifted through his inturned vision.
‘Cecy!’ he cried, to everything, everywhere. ‘I know you can help me! Shake me like a tree! Cecy!’
The blindness passed. He was bathed in a cold sweating that didn’t stop, but ran like a syrup.
‘I know you can help,’ he said. ‘I saw you help Cousin Marianne years ago. Ten years ago, wasn’t it?’ He stood, concentrating.
Marianne had been a girl shy as a mole, her hair twisted like roots on her round ball of head. Marianne had hung in her skirt like a clapper in a bell, never ringing when she walked; just swithering along, one heel after another. She gazed at weeds and the sidewalk under her toes, she looked at your chin if she saw you at all – and never got as far as your eyes. Her mother despaired of Marianne’s ever marrying or succeeding.
It was up to Cecy, then. Cecy went into Marianne like fist into glove.
Marianne jumped, ran, yelled, glinted her yellow eyes. Marianne flickered her skirts, unbraided her hair and let it hang in a shimmery veil on her half-nude shoulders. Marianne giggled and rang like a gay clapper in the tolling bell of her dress. Marianne squeezed her face into many attitudes of coyness, merriment, intelligence, maternal bliss, and love.
The boys raced after Marianne. Marianne got married.
Cecy withdrew.
Marianne had hysterics; her spine was gone!
She lay like a limp corset all one day. But the habit was in her now. Some of Cecy had stayed on like a fossil imprint on soft shale rock: and Marianne began tracing the habits and thinking them over and remembering what it was like to have Cecy inside her, and pretty soon she was running and shouting and giggling all by herself; a corset animated, as it were, by a memory!
Marianne had lived joyously thereafter.
Standing with the cigar-store Indian for conversation, Uncle Jonn now shook his head violently. Dozens of bright bubbles floated in his eyeballs, each with tiny, slanted, microscopic eyes staring in, in at his brain.
What if he never found Cecy? What if the plain winds had borne her all the way to Elgin? Wasn’t that where she dearly loved to bide her time, in the asylum for the insane, touching their minds, holding and turning their confetti thoughts?
Far-flung in the afternoon distance a great metal whistle sighed and echoed, steam shuffled as a train cut across valley trestles, over cool rivers through ripe cornfields, into tunnels like finger into thimble, under arches of shimmering walnut trees. Jonn stood, afraid. What if Cecy was in the cabin of the engineer’s head, now? She loved riding the monster engines across country far as she could stretch the contact. Yank the whistle rope until it screamed across sleeping night land or drowsy day country.
He walked along a shady street. Out of the corners of his eyes he thought he saw an old woman, wrinkled as a dried fig, naked as a thistle-seed, floating among the branches of a hawthorn tree, a cedar stake driven into her breast.
Somebody screamed!
Something thumped his head. A blackbird, soaring skyward, took a lock of his hair with it!
He shook his fist at the bird, heaved a rock. ‘Scare me, will you!’ he yelled. Breathing rawly, he saw the bird circle behind him to sit on a limb waiting another chance to dive for hair.
He turned slyly from the bird.
He heard the whirring sound.
He jumped about, grabbed up. ‘Cecy!’
He had the bird! It fluttered, squalled in his hands.
‘Cecy!’ he called, looking into his caged fingers at the wild black creature. The bird drew blood with its bill.
‘Cecy, I’ll crush you if you don’t help me!’
The bird shrieked and cut him.
He closed his fingers tight, tight, tight.
He walked away from where he finally dropped the dead bird and did not look back at it, even once.
He walked down into the ravine that ran through the very center of Mellin Town. What’s happening now? he wondered. Has Cecy’s mother phoned people? Are the Elliotts afraid? He swayed drunkenly, great lakes of sweat bursting out under his armpits. Well, let them be afraid awhile. He was tired of being afraid. He’d look just a little longer for Cecy and then go to the police!
On the creek bank, he laughed to think of the Elliotts scurrying madly, trying to find some way around him. There was no way. They’d have to make Cecy help him. They couldn’t afford to let good old Uncle Jonn die insane, no, sir.
B-B-shot eyes lay deep in the water, staring roundly up at him.
On blazing hot summer noons, Cecy had often entered into the soft-shelled grayness of the mandibled heads of crayfish. She had often peeked out from the black egg eyes upon their sensitive filamentary stalks and felt the creek sluice by her, steadily, and in fluid veils of coolness and captured light. Breathing out and in the particles of stuff that floated in water, holding her horny, lichened claws before her like some elegant salad utensils, swollen and scissor-sharp. She watched the giant strides of boy feet progressing toward her through the creek bottom, heard the faint, water-thickened shout of boys searching for crayfish, jabbing their pale fingers down, tumbling rocks aside, clutching and tossing frantic flippery animals into open metal cans where scores of other crayfish scuttled like a basket of waste-paper come to life.
She watched pale stalks of boy legs poise over her rock, saw the nude loin-shadows of boy thrown on the sandy muck of the creek floor, saw the suspenseful hand hovered, heard the suggestive whisper of a boy who’s spied a prize beneath a stone. Then, as the hand plunged, the stone rolled. Cecy flirted the borrowed fan of her inhabited body, kicked back in a little sand explosion and vanished downstream.
On to another rock she went to sit fanning the sand, holding her claws before her, proud of them, her tiny glass-bulb eyes glowing black as creek-water filled her bubbling mouth, cool, cool, cool …
The realization that Cecy might be this close at hand, in any live thing, drove Uncle Jonn to a mad fury. In any squirrel or chipmunk, in a disease germ, even, on his aching body. Cecy might be existing. She could even enter amoebas …
On some sweltering summer noons, Cecy would live in an amoeba, darting, vacillating, deep in the old tired philosophical dark waters of a kitchen well. On days when the world high over her, above the unstirred water, was a dreaming nightmare of heat printed on each object of the land, she’d lie somnolent, quivering and cool and distant, settling in the well-throat. Up above, trees were like images burned in green fire. Birds were like bronze stamps you inked and punched on your brain. Houses steamed like manure sheds. When a door slammed it was like a rifle shot. The only good sound on a simmering day was the asthmatic suction of well water drawn up into a porcelain cup, there to be inhaled through an old skelatinous woman’s porcelain teeth. Overhead, Cecy could hear the brittle clap of the old woman’s shoes, the sighing voice of the old woman baked in the August sun. And, lying lowermost and cool, sighting up up through the dim echoing tunnel of well, Cecy heard the iron suction of the pump handle pressed energetically by the sweating old lady; and water, amoeba, Cecy and all rose up the throat of the well in sudden cool disgorgement out into the cup, over which waited sun-withered lips. Then, and only then, did Cecy withdraw, just as the lips came down to sip, the cup tilted, and porcelain met porcelain …
Jonn stumbled, fell flat into the creek water!
He didn’t rise, but sat dripping stupidly.
Then he began crashing rocks over, shouting, seizing upon and losing crayfish, cursing. The bells rang louder in his ears. And now, one by one, a procession of bodies that couldn’t exist, but seemed to be real, floated by on the water. Worm-white bodies, turned on their backs, drifting like loose marionettes. As they passed, the tide bobbed their heads so their faces rolled over, revealing the features of the typical Elliott family member.
He began to weep, sitting there in the water. He had wanted Cecy’s help, but now how could he expect to deserve it, acting a fool, cursing her, hating her, threatening her and the Family?
He stood up, shaking himself. He walked out of the creek and up the hill. There was only one thing to do now. Plead with individual members of the Family. Ask them to intercede for him. Have them ask Cecy to come home, quickly.
In the undertaking parlor on Court Street, the door opened. The undertaker, a short, well-tonsured man with a mustache and sensitively thin hands, looked up. His face fell.
‘Oh, it’s you, Uncle Jonn,’ he said.
‘Nephew Bion,’ said Jonn, still wet from the creek, ‘I need your help. Have you seen Cecy?’
‘Seen her?’ said Bion Elliott. He leaned against the marble table where he was working on a body. He laughed. ‘God, don’t ask me that!’ he snorted. ‘Look at me, close. Do you know me?’
Jonn bristled. ‘You’re Bion Elliott. Cecy’s brother, of course!’
‘Wrong.’ The undertaker shook his head. ‘I’m Cousin Ralph, the butcher! Yes, the butcher.’ He tapped his head. ‘Here, inside, where it counts, I’m Ralph. I was working in my refrigerator a moment ago over at the butcher shop when suddenly Cecy was inside me. She borrowed my mind, like a cup of sugar. And brought me over here just now and sifted me down into Bion’s body. Poor Bion! What a joke!’
‘You’re – you’re not Bion!’
‘No, ah, no, dear Uncle Jonn. Cecy probably put Bion in my body! You see the joke? A meat-cutter exchanged for a meat-cutter! A dealer in cold-cuts traded for another of the same!’ He quaked with laughter. ‘Ah, that Cecy, what a child!’ He wiped happy tears from his face. ‘I’ve stood here for five minutes wondering what to do. You know something? Undertaking isn’t hard. Not much harder than fixing pot roasts. Oh, Bion’ll be mad. His professional integrity. Cecy’ll probably trade us back, later. Bion never was one to take a joke on himself!’
Jonn looked confused. ‘Even you can’t control Cecy?’
‘God, no. She does what she does. We’re helpless.’
Jonn wandered toward the door. ‘Got to find her somehow,’ he mumbled. ‘If she can do this to you, think how she’d help me if she wanted …’ The bells rang louder in his ears. From the side of his eyes he saw a movement. He whirled and gasped.
The body on the table had a cedar stake driven through it.
‘So long,’ said the undertaker to the slammed door. He listened to the sound of Jonn’s running feet, fading.
The man who staggered into the police station at five that afternoon was barely able to stand up. His voice was a whisper and he retched as if he’d taken poison. He didn’t look like Uncle Jonn any more. The bells rang all the time, all the time, and he saw people walking behind him with staked chests, who vanished whenever he turned to look.
The sheriff looked up from reading a magazine, wiped his brown mustache with the back of one clawlike hand, took his feet down off a battered desk and waited for Uncle Jonn to speak.
‘I want to report a family that lives here,’ whispered Uncle Jonn, his eyes half-shut. ‘A wicked family, living under false pretenses.’
The sheriff cleared his throat. ‘What’s the family’s name?’
Uncle Jonn stopped. ‘What?’
The sheriff repeated it. ‘What’s the family’s name?’
‘Your voice,’ said Jonn.
‘What about my voice?’ said the sheriff.
‘Sounds familiar,’ said Jonn. ‘Like—’
‘Who?’ asked the sheriff.
‘Like Cecy’s mother! That’s who you sound like!’
‘Do I?’ asked the sheriff.
‘That’s who you are inside! Cecy changed you, too, like she changed Ralph and Bion! I can’t report the Family to you, now, then! It wouldn’t do any good!’
‘Guess it wouldn’t,’ remarked the sheriff, implacably.
‘The Family’s gotten around me!’ wailed Uncle Jonn.
‘Seems that way,’ said the sheriff, wetting a pencil on his tongue, starting on a fresh crossword puzzle. ‘Well, good day to you, Jonn Elliott.’
‘Unh?’
‘I said “Good day.”’
‘Good day.’ Jonn stood by the desk, listening. ‘Do you – do you hear anything?’
The sheriff listened. ‘Crickets?’
‘No.’
‘Frogs?’
‘No,’ said Uncle Jonn. ‘Bells. Just bells. Holy church bells. The kind of bells a man like me can’t stand to hear. Holy church bells.’
The sheriff listened. ‘No. Can’t say as I hear ’em. Say, be careful of that door there; it slams.’
The door to Cecy’s room was knocked open. A moment later. Uncle Jonn was inside, moving across the floor. The silent body of Cecy lay on the bed, not moving. Behind him, as Jonn seized Cecy’s hand, her mother appeared.
She ran to him, struck him on head and shoulders till he fell back from Cecy. The world swelled with bell sounds. His vision blacked out. He groped at the mother, biting his lips, releasing them in gasps, eyes streaming.
‘Please, please tell her to come back,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt anyone any more.’
The mother shouted through the clamor of bells. ‘Go downstairs and wait for her there!’
‘I can’t hear you,’ he cried, louder. ‘My head.’ He held his hands to his ears. ‘So loud. So loud I can’t stand it.’ He rocked on his heels. ‘If only I knew where Cecy was—’
Quite simply, he drew out a folded pocket knife, unfolded it. ‘I can’t go on—’ he said. And before the mother moved he fell to the floor, the knife in his heart, blood running from his lips, his shoes looking senseless one atop the other, one eye shut, the other wide and white.
The mother bent down to him. ‘Dead,’ she whispered, finally. ‘So,’ she murmured, unbelievingly, rising up, stepping away from the blood. ‘Sohe’s dead at last.’ She glanced around, fearfully, cried aloud.
‘Cecy, Cecy, come home, child, I need you!’
A silence, while sunlight faded from the room.
‘Cecy, come home, child!’
The dead man’s lips moved. A high clear voice sprang from them.
‘Here!I’ve been here for days! I’m the fear he had in him: and he never guessed. Tell Father what I’ve done. Maybe he’ll think me worthy now …’
The dead man’s lips stopped. A moment later, Cecy’s body on the bed stiffened like a stocking with a leg thrust suddenly into it, inhabited again.
‘Supper, Mother,’ said Cecy, rising from bed.
The Lake (#ulink_0a955b6f-79ee-5ff5-8084-a69f6460b0c3)
They cut the sky down to my size and threw it over the Michigan lake, put some kids yelling on yellow sand with bouncing balls, a gull or two, a criticizing parent, and me breaking out of a wet wave, finding this world very bleary and moist.
I ran up on the beach.
Mama swabbed me with a furry towel. ‘Stand there and dry,’ she said.
I stood there, watching the sun take away the water beads on my arms. I replaced them with goose-pimples.
‘My, there’s a wind,’ said Mama. ‘Put on your sweater.’
‘Wait’ll I watch my goose-bumps,’ I said.
‘Harold,’ said Mama.
I put the sweater on and watched the waves come up and fall down on the beach. But not clumsily. On purpose, with a green sort of elegance. Even a drunken man could not collapse with such elegance as those waves.
It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason. The beach was so long and lonely with only about six people on it. The kids quit bouncing the ball because somehow the wind made them sad, too, whistling the way it did, and the kids sat down and felt autumn come along the endless shore.
All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins. One by one the places slammed their covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand, blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August. It got so that now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and Donald and Delaus Schabold’s feet, down by the water curve.
Sand blew up in curtains on the sidewalks, and the merry-go-round was hidden with canvas, all of the horses frozen in mid-air on their brass poles, showing teeth, galloping on. With only the wind for music, slipping through canvas.
I stood there. Everyone else was in school. I was not. Tomorrow I would be on my way west across the United States on a train. Mom and I had come to the beach for one last brief moment.
There was something about the loneliness that made me want to get away by myself. ‘Mama. I want to run up the beach a ways,’ I said.
‘All right, but hurry back, and don’t go near the water.’
I ran. Sand spun under me and the wind lifted me. You know how it is, running, arms out so you feel veils from your fingers, caused by wind. Like wings.
Mama withdrew into the distance, sitting. Soon she was only a brown speck and I was all alone.
Being alone is a newness to a twelve-year-old child. He is so used to people about. The only way he can be alone is in his mind. There are so many real people around, telling children what and how to do, that a boy has to run off down a beach, even if it’s only in his head, to get by himself in his own world, with his own miniature values.
So now I was really alone.
I went down to the water and let it cool up to my stomach. Always before, with the crowd, I hadn’t dared to look, to come to this spot and search around in the water and call a certain name. But now—
Water is like a magician. Sawing you in half. It feels as if you were cut half in two, part of you, the lower part, sugar, melting, dissolving away. Cool water, and once in a while a very elegantly stumbling wave that falls with a flourish of lace.
I called her name. A dozen times I called it.
‘Tally! Tally! Oh, Tally!’
Funny, but you really expect answers to your calling when you are young. You feel that whatever you may think can be real. And sometimes maybe that is not so wrong.
I thought of Tally, swimming out into the water last May, with her pigtails trailing, blonde. She went laughing, and the sun was on her small twelve-year-old shoulders. I thought of the water settling quiet, of the lifeguard leaping into it, of Tally’s mother screaming, and of how Tally never came out …
The life-guard tried to persuade her to come out, but she did not. He came back with only bits of water-weed in his big-knuckled fingers, and Tally was gone. She would not sit across from me at school any longer, or chase indoor balls on the brick streets on summer nights. She had gone too far out, and the lake would not let her return.
And now in the lonely autumn when the sky was huge and the water was huge and the beach was so very long. I had come down for the last time, alone.
I called her name over and over. Tally, oh, Tally!
The wind blew so very softly over my ears, the way wind blows over the mouths of sea-shells to set them whispering. The water rose, embraced my chest, then my knees, up and down, one way and another, sucking under my heels.
‘Tally! Come back, Tally!’
I was only twelve. But I know how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that is no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long autumn days of the years past when I had carried her books home from school.
Tally!
I called her name for the last time. I shivered. I felt water on my face and did not know how it got there. The waves had not splashed that high.
Turning, I retreated to the sand and stood there for half an hour, hoping for one glimpse, one sign, one little bit of Tally to remember. Then, I knelt and built a sand-castle, shaping it fine, building it as Tally and I had often built so many of them. But this time, I only built half of it. Then I got up.
‘Tally, if you hear me, come in and build the rest.’
I walked off toward that faraway speck that was Mama. The water came in, blended the sand-castle circle by circle, mashing it down little by little into the original smoothness.
Silently, I walked along the shore.
Far away, a merry-go-round jangled faintly, but it was only the wind.
The next day, I went away on the train.
A train has a poor memory: it soon puts all behind it. It forgets the cornlands of Illinois, the rivers of childhood, the bridges, the lakes, the valleys, the cottages, the hurts and the joys. It spreads them out behind and they drop back of a horizon.
I lengthened my bones, put flesh on them, changed my young mind for an older one, threw away clothes as they no longer fitted, shifted from grammar to high school, to college books, to law books. And then there was a young woman in Sacramento. I knew her for a time, and we were married.
I continued my law study. By the time I was twenty-two, I had almost forgotten what the East was like.
Margaret suggested that our delayed honeymoon be taken back in that direction.
Like a memory, a train works both ways. A train can bring rushing back all those things you left behind so many years before.
Lake Bluff, population ten thousand, came up over the sky. Margaret looked so handsome in her fine new clothes. She watched me as I felt my old world gather me back into its living. She held my arm as the train slid into Bluff Station and our baggage was escorted out.
So many years, and the things they do to people’s faces and bodies. When we walked through the town together I saw no one I recognized. There were faces with echoes in them. Echoes of hikes on ravine trails. Faces with small laughter in them from closed grammar schools and swinging on metal-linked swings and going up and down on teeter-totters. But I didn’t speak. I walked and looked and filled up inside with all those memories, like leaves stacked for autumn burning.
We stayed on two weeks in all, revisiting all the places together. The days were happy. I thought I loved Margaret well. At least I thought I did.
It was on one of the last days that we walked down by the shore. It was not quite as late in the year as that day so many years before, but the first evidences of desertion were coming upon the beach. People were thinning out, several of the hot dog stands had been shuttered and nailed, and the wind, as always, waited there to sing for us.
I almost saw Mama sitting on the sand as she used to sit. I had that feeling again of wanting to be alone. But I could not force myself to speak of this to Margaret. I only held on to her and waited.
It got late in the day. Most of the children had gone home and only a few men and women remained basking in the windy sun.
The life-guard boat pulled up on the shore. The life-guard stepped out of it, slowly, with something in his arms.
I froze there. I held my breath and I felt small, only twelve years old, very little, very infinitesimal and afraid. The wind howled. I could not see Margaret. I could see only the beach, the life-guard slowly emerging from the boat with a gray sack in his hands, not very heavy, and his face almost as gray and lined.
‘Stay here, Margaret,’ I said. I don’t know why I said it.
‘But, why?’
‘Just stay here, that’s all—’
I walked slowly down the sand to where the life-guard stood. He looked at me.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
The life-guard kept looking at me for a long time and he couldn’t speak. He put the gray sack down on the sand, and water whispered wet up around it and went back.
‘What is it?’ I insisted.
‘She’s dead,’ said the life-guard quietly.
I waited.
‘Funny,’ he said, softly. ‘Funniest thing I ever saw. She’s been dead. A long time.’
I repeated his words.
He nodded. ‘Ten years, I’d say. There haven’t been any children drowned here this year. There were twelve children drowned here since 1933, but we recovered all of them before a few hours had passed. All except one, I remember. This body here, why it must be ten years in the water. It’s not – pleasant.’
I stared at the gray sack in his arms. ‘Open it.’ I said. I don’t know why I said it. The wind was louder.
He fumbled with the sack. ‘The way I know it’s a little girl, is because she’s still wearing a locket. There’s nothing much else to tell by—’
‘Hurry, man, open it!’ I cried.
‘I better not do that,’ he said. Then perhaps he saw the way my face must have looked. ‘She was such a little girl—’
He opened it only part way. That was enough.
The beach was deserted. There was only the sky and the wind and the water and the autumn coming on lonely. I looked down at her there.
I said something over and over. A name. The life-guard looked at me. ‘Where did you find her?’ I asked.
‘Down the beach, that way, in the shallow water. It’s a long long time for her, ain’t it?’
I shook my head.
‘Yes, it is. Oh God, yes it is.’
I thought: People grow. I have grown. But she has not changed. She is still small. She is still young. Death does not permit growth or change. She still has golden hair. She will be forever young and I will love her forever, oh God, I will love her forever.
The life-guard tied up the sack again.
Down the beach, a few moments later, I walked by myself. I stopped, and looked down at something. This is where the life-guard found her, I said to myself.
There, at the water’s edge, lay a sand-castle, only half-built. Just like Tally and I used to build them. She half and I half.
I looked at it. I knelt beside the sand-castle and saw the little prints of feet coming in from the lake and going back out to the lake again and not ever returning.
Then – I knew.
‘I’ll help you to finish it,’ I said.
I did. I built the rest of it up very slowly, then I arose and turned away and walked off, so as not to watch in crumble in the waves, as all things crumble.
I walked back up the beach to where a strange woman named Margaret was waiting for me, smiling …
The Coffin (#ulink_e8448e38-5340-5eff-b374-0b379cf33abd)
There was any amount of banging and hammering for a number of days: deliveries of metal parts and oddments which Mr Charles Braling took into his little workshop with a feverish anxiety. He was a dying man, a badly dying man, and he seemed to be in a great hurry, between racking coughs and spittlings, to piece together one last invention.
‘What are you doing?’ inquired his younger brother, Richard Braling. He had listened with increasing difficulty and much curiosity for a number of days to that banging and rattling about, and now he stuck his head through the work-room door.
‘Go far far away and let me alone,’ said Charles Braling, who was seventy, trembly and wet-lipped most of the time. He trembled nails into place and trembled a hammer down with a weak blow upon a large timber and then struck a small metal ribbon down into an intricate machine, and, all in all, was having a carnival of labor.
Richard looked on, bitter-eyed, for a long moment. There was a hatred between them. It had gone on for some years and now was neither any better nor any worse for the fact that Charlie was dying. Richard was delighted to know of the impending death, if he thought of it at all. But all this busy fervor of his old brothers stimulated him.
‘Pray tell,’ he said, not moving from the door.
‘If you must know,’ snarled old Charles, fitting in an odd thingumabob on the box before him, ‘I’ll be dead in another week and I’m – I’m building my own coffin!’
‘A coffin, my dear Charlie. That doesn’t look like a coffin. A coffin isn’t that complex. Come on now, what are you up to?’
‘I tell you it’s a coffin! An odd coffin, yes, but nevertheless,’ the old man shivered his fingers around in the large box, ‘—nevertheless a coffin!’
‘But it would be easier to buy one.’
‘Not one like this! You couldn’t buy one like this anyplace, ever. Oh, it’ll be a real fine coffin, all right.’
‘You’re obviously lying.’ Richard moved forward. ‘Why, that coffin is a good twelve feet long. Six feet longer than normal size!’
‘Oh, yes?’ The old man laughed quietly.
‘And that transparent top: who ever heard of a coffin lid you can see through? What good is a transparent lid to a corpse?’
‘Oh, just never you mind at all,’ sang the old man heartily. ‘La!’ And he went humming and hammering about the shop.
‘This coffin is terribly thick,’ shouted the young brother over the din. ‘Why, it must be five feet thick: how utterly unnecessary!’
‘I only wish I might live to patent this amazing coffin,’ said old Charlie. ‘It would be a god-send to all the poor peoples of the world. Think how it would eliminate the expenses of most funerals. Oh, but, of course, you don’t know how it would do that, do you? How silly of me. Well, I shan’t tell you. If this coffin could be mass-produced – expensive at first, naturally – but then when you finally got them made in vast quantities, gah, but the money people would save.’
‘To hell with you!’ And the younger brother stormed out of the shop.
It had been an unpleasant life. Young Richard had always been such a bounder he never had two coins to clink together at one time: all of his money had come from old brother Charlie, who had the indecency to remind him of it at all times. Richard spent many hours with his hobbies: he dearly loved piling up bottles with French wine labels, in the garden. ‘I like the way they glint,’ he often said, sitting and sipping, sipping and sitting. He was the only man in the county who could hold the longest gray ash on a fifty-cent cigar for the longest recorded time. And he knew how to hold his hands so his diamonds jangled in the light. But he had not bought the wine, the diamonds, the cigars – no! They were all gifts. He was never allowed to buy anything himself. It was always brought to him and given to him. He had to ask for everything, even writing paper. He considered himself quite a martyr to have put up with taking things from that rickety old brother for so long a time. Everything Charlie ever laid his hand to turned to money; everything Richard had ever tried in the way of a leisurely career had failed.
And now, here was this old mole of a Charlie whacking out a new invention which would probably bring Charlie additional specie long after his bones were slotted in the earth!
Well, two weeks passed.
One morning, the old brother toddled upstairs and stole the insides out of the electric phonograph. Another morning he raided the gardener’s greenhouse. Still another time he received a delivery from a medical company. It was all young Richard could do to sit and hold his long gray cigar ash steady while these murmuring excursions took place.
‘I’m finished!’ cried old Charlie on the fourteenth morning, and dropped dead.
Richard finished out his cigar, and, without showing his inner excitement, he laid down his cigar with its fine long whitish ash, two inches long, a real record, and arose.
He walked to the window and watched the sunlight playfully glittering among the fat beetlelike champagne bottles in the garden.
He looked toward the top of the stairs where old dear brother Charlie lay peacefully sprawled against the banister. Then he walked to the phone and perfunctorily dialed a number.
‘Hello, Green Lawn Mortuary? This is the Braling residence. Will you send around a wicker, please? Yes. For brother Charlie. Yes. Thank you. Thank you.’
As the mortuary people were taking brother Charles out in their wicker they received instructions. ‘Ordinary casket,’ said young Richard. ‘No funeral service. Put him in a pine coffin. He would have preferred it that way – simple. Good-by.’
‘Now!’ said Richard, rubbing his hands together. ‘We shall see about this coffin’ built by dear Charlie. I do not suppose he will realize he is not being buried in his “special” box. Ah.’
He entered the downstairs shop.
The coffin sat before some wide-flung French windows, the lid shut, complete and neat, all put together like the fine innards of a Swiss watch. It was vast, and it rested upon a long long table with rollers beneath for easy maneuvering.
The coffin interior, as he peered through the glass lid, was six feet long. There must be a good three feet of false body at both head and foot of the coffin, then. Three feet at each end which, covered by secret panels that he must find some way of opening, might very well reveal – exactly what?
Money, of course. It would be just like Charlie to suck his riches into his grave with himself, leaving Richard with not a cent to buy a bottle with. The old bastard!
He raised the glass lid and felt about, but found no hidden buttons. There was a small sign studiously inked on white paper, thumbtacked to the side of the satin-lined box. It said:
THE BRALING ECONOMY CASKET. Copyright, April, 1946. Simple to operate. Can be used again and again by morticians and families with an eye to the future.
Richard snorted thinly. Who did Charlie think he was fooling? There was more writing:
DIRECTIONS: SIMPLY PLACE BODY IN COFFIN—
What a fool thing to say. Put body in coffin! Naturally! How else would one go about it? He peered intently and finished out the directions:
SIMPLY PLACE BODY IN COFFIN – AND MUSIC WILL START.
‘It can’t be—’ Richard gaped at the sign. ‘Don’t tell me all this work has been for a—’ He went to the open door of the shop, walked out upon the tiled terrace and called to the gardener in his greenhouse. ‘Rogers!’ The gardener stuck his head out. ‘What time is it?’ asked Richard. ‘Twelve o’clock, sir,’ replied Rogers. ‘Well, at twelve-fifteen, you come up here and check to see if everything is all right. Rogers,’ said Richard. ‘Yes, sir,’ said the gardener. Richard turned and went back into the shop. ‘We’ll find out—’ he said, quietly.
There would be no harm in lying in the box, testing it. He noticed small ventilating holes in the sides. Even if the lid were closed down there’d be air. And Rogers would be up in a moment or two. SIMPLY PLACE BODY IN COFFIN – AND MUSIC WILL START. Really, how naive of old Charlie! Richard hoisted himself up.
He was like a man getting into a bathtub. He felt naked and watched over. He put one shiny shoe into the coffin and crooked his knee and eased himself up and made some little remark to nobody in particular, then he put in his other knee and foot and crouched there, as if undecided about the temperature of the bath-water. Edging himself about, chuckling softly, he lay down, pretending to himself (for it was fun pretending) that he was dead, that people were dropping tears on him, that candles were fuming and illuminating and that the world was stopped in mid-stride because of his passing. He put on a long pale expression, shut his eyes, holding back the laughter in himself behind pressed, quivering lips. He folded his hands and decided they felt waxen and cold.
Whirr. Spung! Something whispered inside the box-wall. Spung!
The lid slammed down on him!
From outside, if one had just come into the room, one would have imagined a wild man was kicking, pounding, blathering, and shrieking inside a closet! There was a sound of a body dancing and cavorting. There was a thudding of flesh and fists. There was a squeaking and a kind of wind from a frightened man’s lungs. There was a rustling like paper and a shrilling as of many pipes simultaneously played. Then there was a real fine scream. Then – silence.
Richard Braling lay in the coffin and relaxed. He let loose all his muscles. He began to chuckle. The smell of the box was not unpleasant. Through the little perforations he drew more than enough air to live on, comfortably. He need only push gently up with his hands, with none of this kicking and screaming, and the lid would open. One must be calm. He flexed his arms.
The lid was locked.
Well, still there was no danger. Rogers would be up in a minute or two. There was nothing to fear.
The music began to play.
It seemed to come from somewhere inside the head of the coffin. It was green music. Organ music, very slow and melancholy, typical of Gothic arches and long black tapers. It smelled of earth and whispers. It echoed high between stone walls. It was so sad that one almost cried listening to it. It was music of potted plants and crimson and blue stained-glass windows. It was late sun at twilight and a cold wind blowing. It was a dawn with only fog and a faraway fog horn moaning.
‘Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, you old fool you! So this is your odd coffin!’ Tears of laughter welled into Richard’s eyes. ‘Nothing more than a coffin which plays its own dirge. Oh, my sainted grandma!’
He lay and listened critically, for it was beautiful music and there was nothing he could do until Rogers came up and let him out. His eyes roved aimlessly, his fingers tapped soft little rhythms on the satin cushions. He crossed his legs idly. Through the glass lid he saw sunlight shooting through the French windows, dust particles dancing on it. It was a lovely blue day.
The sermon began.
The organ music quieted and a gentle voice said:
‘We are gathered together, those who loved and those who knew the deceased, to give him our homage and our due—’
‘Charlie, bless you, that’s your voice!’ Richard was delighted. ‘A mechanical funeral, by God. Organ music and lecture. And Charlie giving his own oration for himself!’
The soft voice said. ‘We who knew and loved him are grieved at the passing of—’
‘What was that?’ Richard raised himself, startled. He didn’t quite believe what he had heard. He repeated it to himself just the way he had heard it:
‘We who knew and loved him are grieved at the passing of Richard Braling.’
That’s what the voice had said.
‘Richard Braling,’ said the man in the coffin. ‘Why. I’m Richard Braling.’
A slip of the tongue, naturally. Merely a slip. Charlie had meant to say ‘Charles’ Braling. Certainly. Yes. Of course. Yes. Certainly. Yes. Naturally. Yes.
‘Richard was a fine man,’ said the voice, talking on. ‘We shall see no finer in our time.’
‘My name again!’
Richard began to move about uneasily in the coffin.
Why didn’t Rogers come?
It was hardly a mistake, using that name twice. Richard Braling. Richard Braling. We are gathered here. We shall miss – We are grieved. No finer man. No finer in our time. We are gathered here. The deceased. Richard Braling. Richard Braling.
Whirrrr. Spung!
Flowers! Six dozen bright blue, red, yellow, sun-brilliant flowers leaped up from behind the coffin on concealed springs!
The sweet odor of fresh-cut flowers filled the coffin. The flowers swayed gently before his amazed vision, tapping silently on the glass lid. Others sprang up until the coffin was banked with petals and color and sweet odors. Gardenias and dahlias and daffodils, trembling and shining.
‘Rogers!’
The sermon continued.
‘—Richard Braling, in his life, was a connoisseur of great and good things—’
The music sighed, rose and fell, distantly.
‘Richard Braling savored of life, as one savors of a rare wine, holding it upon the lips—’
A small panel in the side of the box flipped open. A swift bright metal arm snatched out. A needle stabbed Richard in the thorax, not very deeply. He screamed. The needle shot him full of a colored liquor before he could seize it. Then it popped back into a receptacle and the panel snapped shut.
‘Rogers!’
A growing numbness, Suddenly he could not move his fingers or his arms or turn his head. His legs were cold and limp.
‘Richard Braling loved beautiful things. Music. Flowers,’ said the voice.
‘Rogers!’
This time he did not scream it. He could only think it. His tongue was motionless in his anaesthetized mouth.
Another panel opened. Metal forceps issued forth on steel arms. His left wrist was pierced by a huge sucking needle.
His blood was being drained from his body.
He heard a little pump working somewhere.
‘—Richard Braling will be missed among us—’
The organ sobbed and murmured.
The flowers looked down upon him, nodding their bright-petalled heads.
Six candles, black and slender, rose up out of hidden receptacles, and stood behind the flowers, flickering and glowing.
Another pump started to work. While his blood drained out one side of his body, his right wrist was punctured, held, a needle shoved into it, and the second pump began to force formaldehyde into him.
Pump, pause, pump, pause, pump, pause, pump, pause.
The coffin moved.
A small motor popped and chugged. The room drifted by on either side of him. Little wheels revolved. No pallbearers were necessary. The flowers swayed as the casket moved gently out upon the terrace under a blue clear sky.
Pump, pause, Pump, pause.
‘Richard Braling will be missed—’
Sweet soft music.
Pump, pause.
‘Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last—’ Singing.
‘Braling, the gourmet—’
‘Ah, at last I have the secret of it all—’
Staring, staring, his eyes egg-blind, at the little card out of the corners of his eyes:
THE BRALING ECONOMY CASKET …
DIRECTIONS SIMPLY PLACE BODY IN COFFIN – AND MUSIC WILL START.
A tree swung by overhead. The coffin rolled gently through the garden, behind some bushes, carrying the voice and the music with it.
‘Now it is the time when we must consign this part of this man to the earth—’
Little shining spades leaped out of the sides of the casket.
They began to dig.
He saw the spades toss up dirt. The coffin settled. Bumped, settled, dug, bumped and settled, dug, bumped and settled again.
Pulse, pause, pulse, pause. Pump, pause, pulse, pump, pause.
‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—’
The flowers shook and jolted. The box was deep. The music played.
The last thing Richard Braling saw was the spading arms of the Braling Economy Casket reaching up and pulling the hole in after it.
‘Richard Braling, Richard Braling, Richard Braling, Richard Braling, Richard Braling …’
The record was stuck.
Nobody minded. Nobody was listening.
The Crowd (#ulink_a4e8ed4e-8d59-505b-b61d-f1f85b7bb8e7)
Mr Spallner put his hands over his face.
There was the feeling of movement in space, the beautifully tortured scream, the impact and tumbling of the car with wall, through wall, over and down like a toy, and him hurled out of it. Then – silence.
The crowd came running. Faintly, where he lay, he heard them running. He could tell their ages and their sizes by the sound of their numerous feet over the summer grass and on the lined pavement, and over the asphalt street; and picking through the cluttered bricks to where his car hung half into the night sky, still spinning its wheels with a senseless centrifuge.
Where the crowd came from he didn’t know. He struggled to remain aware and then the crowd faces hemmed in upon him, hung over like the large glowing leaves of down-bent trees. They were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into a moon-dial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out upon his cheek to tell the time of breathing or not breathing any more ever.
How swiftly a crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere.
A siren. A police voice. Movement. Blood trickled from his lips and he was being moved into an ambulance. Someone said, ‘Is he dead?’ And someone else said, ‘No, he’s not dead.’ And a third person said, ‘He won’t die, he’s not going to die.’ And he saw the faces of the crowd beyond him in the night, and he knew by their expressions that he wouldn’t die. And that was strange. He saw a man’s face, thin, bright, pale: the man swallowed and bit his lips, very sick. There was a small woman, too, with red hair and too much red on her cheeks and lips. And a little boy with a freckled face. Others’ faces. An old man with a wrinkled upper lip, an old woman, with a mole upon her chin. They had all come from – where? Houses, cars, alleys, from the immediate and the accident-shocked world. Out of alleys and out of hotels and out of streetcars and seemingly out of nothing they came.
The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn’t put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.
The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man’s agony by their frank curiosity.
The ambulance drove off. He sank back and their faces still stared into his face, even with his eyes shut.
The car wheels spun in his mind for days. One wheel, four wheels, spinning, spinning, and whirring, around and around.
He knew it was wrong. Something wrong with the wheels and the whole accident and the running of feet and the curiosity. The crowd faces mixed and spun into the wild rotation of the wheels.
He awoke.
Sunlight, a hospital room, a hand taking his pulse.
‘How do you feel?’ asked the doctor.
The wheels faded away. Mr Spallner looked around.
‘Fine – I guess.’
He tried to find words. About the accident. ‘Doctor?’
‘Yes?’
‘That crowd – was it last night?’
‘Two days ago. You’ve been here since Thursday. You’re all right, though. You’re doing fine. Don’t try and get up.’
‘That crowd. Something about wheels, too. Do accidents make people, well, a – little off?’
‘Temporarily, sometimes.’
He lay staring up at the doctor. ‘Does it hurt your time sense?’
‘Panic sometimes does.’
‘Makes a minute seem like an hour, or maybe an hour seem like a minute?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let me tell you then.’ He felt the bed under him, the sunlight on his face. ‘You’ll think I’m crazy. I was driving too fast, I know. I’m sorry now. I jumped the curb and hit that wall. I was hurt and numb, I know, but I still remember things. Mostly – the crowd.’ He waited a moment and then decided to go on, for he suddenly knew what it was that bothered him. ‘The crowd got there too quickly. Thirty seconds after the smash they were all standing over me and staring at me … it’s not right they should run that fast, so late at night …’
‘You only think it was thirty seconds,’ said the doctor. ‘It was probably three or four minutes. Your senses—’
‘Yeah, I know – my senses, the accident. But I was conscious! I remember one thing that puts it all together and makes it funny, God, so damned funny. The wheels of my car, upside down. The wheels were still spinning when the crowd got there!’
The doctor smiled.
The man in bed went on. ‘I’m positive! The wheels were spinning and spinning fast – the front wheels! Wheels don’t spin very long, friction cuts them down. And these were really spinning!’
‘You’re confused,’ said the doctor.
‘I’m not confused. That street was empty. Not a soul in sight. And then the accident and the wheels still spinning and all those faces over me, quick, in no time. And the way they looked down at me, I knew I wouldn’t die …’
‘Simple shock,’ said the doctor, walking away into the sunlight.
They released him from the hospital two weeks later. He rode home in a taxi. People had come to visit him during his two weeks on his back, and to all of them he had told his story, the accident, the spinning wheels, the crowd. They had all laughed with him concerning it, and passed it off.
He leaned forward and tapped on the taxi window.
‘What’s wrong?’
The cabbie looked back. ‘Sorry, boss. This is one helluva town to drive in. Got an accident up ahead. Want me to detour?’
‘Yes. No. No! Wait. Go ahead. Let’s – let’s take a look.’
The cab moved forward, honking.
‘Funny damn thing,’ said the cabbie. ‘Hey, you! Get that fleatrap out the way!’ Quieter. ‘Funny thing – more damn people. Nosy people.’
Mr Spallner looked down and watched his fingers tremble on his knee. ‘You noticed that, too?’
‘Sure,’ said the cabbie. ‘All the time. There’s always a crowd. You’d think it was their own mother got killed.’
‘They come running awfully fast,’ said the man in the back of the cab.
‘Same way with a fire or an explosion. Nobody around. Boom. Lotsa people around. I dunno.’
‘Ever seen an accident – at night?’
The cabbie nodded. ‘Sure. Don’t make no difference. There’s always a crowd.’
The wreck came in view. A body lay on the pavement. You knew there was a body even if you couldn’t see it. Because of the crowd. The crowd with its back toward him as he sat in the rear of the cab. With its back toward him. He opened the window and almost started to yell. But he didn’t have the nerve. If he yelled they might turn around.
And he was afraid to see their faces.
‘I seem to have a penchant for accidents,’ he said, in his office. It was late afternoon. His friend sat across the desk from him, listening. ‘I got out of the hospital this morning and first thing on the way home, we detoured around a wreck.’
‘Things run in cycles,’ said Morgan.
‘Let me tell you about my accident.’
‘I’ve heard it. Heard it all.’
‘But it was funny, you must admit.’
‘I must admit. Now how about a drink?’
They talked on for half an hour or more. All the while they talked, at the back of Spallner’s brain a small watch ticked, a watch that never needed winding. It was the memory of a few little things. Wheels and faces.
At about five-thirty there was a hard metal noise in the street. Morgan nodded and looked out and down. ‘What’d I tell you? Cycles. A truck and a cream-colored Cadillac. Yes, yes.’
Spallner walked to the window. He was very cold and as he stood there, he looked at his watch, at the small minute hand. One two three four five seconds – people running – eight nine ten eleven twelve – from all over, people came running – fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen seconds – more people, more cars, more horns blowing. Curiously distant, Spallner looked upon the scene as an explosion in reverse, the fragments of the detonation sucked back to the point of impulsion. Nineteen, twenty, twentyone seconds and the crowd was there. Spallner made a gesture down at them, wordless.
The crowd had gathered so fast.
He saw a woman’s body a moment before the crowd swallowed it up.
Morgan said, ‘You look lousy. Here. Finish your drink.’
‘I’m all right, I’m all right. Let me alone. I’m all right. Can you see those people? Can you see any of them? I wish we could see them closer.’
Morgan cried out. ‘Where in hell are you going?’
Spallner was out the door, Morgan after him, and down the stairs, as rapidly as possible. ‘Come along, and hurry.’
‘Take it easy, you’re not a well man!’
They walked out on to the street. Spallner pushed his way forward. He thought he saw a red-haired woman with too much red color on her cheeks and lips.
‘There!’ He turned wildly to Morgan. ‘Did you see her?’
‘See who?’
‘Damn it; she’s gone. The crowd closed in!’
The crowd was all around, breathing and looking and shuffling and mixing and mumbling and getting in the way when he tried to shove through. Evidently the red-haired woman had seen him coming and run off.
He saw another familiar face! A little freckled boy. But there are many freckled boys in the world. And, anyway, it was no use; before Spallner reached him, this little boy ran away and vanished among the people.
‘Is she dead?’ a voice asked. ‘Is she dead?’
‘She’s dying,’ someone else replied. ‘She’ll be dead before the ambulance arrives. They shouldn’t have moved her. They shouldn’t have moved her.’
All the crowd faces – familiar, yet unfamiliar, bending over, looking down, looking down.
‘Hey, mister, stop pushing.’
‘Who you shovin’, buddy?’
Spallner came back out, and Morgan caught hold of him before he fell. ‘You damned fool. You’re still sick. Why in hell’d you have to come down here?’ Morgan demanded.
‘I don’t know, I really don’t. They moved her, Morgan, someone moved her. You should never move a traffic victim. It kills them. It kills them.’
‘Yeah. That’s the way with people. The idiots.’
Spallner arranged the newspaper clippings carefully.
Morgan looked at them. ‘What’s the idea? Ever since your accident you think every traffic scramble is part of you. What are these?’
‘Clippings of motor-car crackups, and photos. Look at them. Not at the cars,’ said Spallner, ‘but at the crowds around the cars.’ He pointed. ‘Here. Compare this photo of a wreck in the Wilshire District with one in Westwood. No resemblance. But now take this Westwood picture and align it with one taken in the Westwood District ten years ago.’ Again he motioned. ‘This woman is in both pictures.’
‘Coincidence. The woman happened to be there once in 1936, again in 1946.’
‘A coincidence once, maybe. But twelve times over a period of ten years, when the accidents occurred as much as three miles from one another, no. Here.’ He dealt out a dozen photographs. ‘She’s in all of these!’
‘Maybe she’s perverted.’
‘She’s more than that. How does she happen to be there so quickly after each accident? And why does she wear the same clothes in pictures taken over a period of a decade?’
‘I’ll be damned, so she does.’
‘And, last of all, why was she standing over me the night of my accident, two weeks ago?’
They had a drink. Morgan went over the files. ‘What’d you do, hire a clipping service while you were in the hospital to go back through the newspapers for you?’ Spallner nodded. Morgan sipped his drink. It was getting late. The street lights were coming on in the streets below the office. ‘What does all this add up to?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Spallner, ‘except that there’s a universal law about accidents. Crowds gather. They always gather. And like you and me, people have wondered year after year, why they gathered so quickly, and how? I know the answer. Here it is!’
He flung the clippings down. ‘It frightens me.’
‘These people – mightn’t they be thrill-hunters, perverted sensationalists with a carnal lust for blood and morbidity?’
Spallner shrugged. ‘Does that explain their being at all the accidents? Notice, they stick to certain territories. A Brentwood accident will bring out one group. A Huntington Park another. But there’s a norm for faces, a certain percentage appear at each wreck.’
Morgan said. ‘They’re not all the same faces, are they?’
‘Naturally not. Accidents draw normal people, too, in the course of time. But these, I find, are always the first ones there.’
‘Who are they? What do they want? You keep hinting and never telling. Good Lord, you must have some idea. You’ve scared yourself and now you’ve got me jumping.’
‘I’ve tried getting to them, but someone always trips me up. I’m always too late. They slip into the crowd and vanish. The crowd seems to offer protection to some of its members. They see me coming.’
‘Sounds like some sort of clique.’
‘They have one thing in common, they always show up together. At a fire or an explosion or on the sidelines of a war, at any public demonstration of this thing called death. Vultures, hyenas, or saints, I don’t know which they are, I just don’t know. But I’m going to the police with it, this evening. It’s gone on long enough. One of them shifted that woman’s body today. They shouldn’t have touched her. It killed her.’
He placed the clippings in a briefcase. Morgan got up and slipped into his coat. Spallner clicked the briefcase shut. ‘Or, I just happened to think …’
‘What?’
‘Maybe they wanted her dead.’
‘Why?’
‘Who knows. Come along?’
‘Sorry. It’s late. See you tomorrow. Luck.’ They went out together. ‘Give my regards to the cops. Think they’ll believe you?
‘Oh, they’ll believe me all right. Good night.’
Spallner took it slow driving downtown.
‘I want to get there,’ he told himself, ‘alive.’
He was rather shocked, but not surprised, somehow, when the truck came rolling out of an alley straight at him. He was just congratulating himself on his keen sense of observation and talking out what he would say to the police in his mind, when the truck smashed into his car. It wasn’t really his car, that was the disheartening thing about it. In a preoccupied mood he was tossed first this way and then that way, while he thought, What a shame, Morgan has gone and lent me his extra car for a few days until my other car is fixed, and now here I go again. The windshield hammered back into his face. He was forced back and forth in several lightning jerks. Then all motion stopped and all noise stopped and only pain filled him up.
He heard their feet running and running and running. He fumbled with the car door. It clicked. He fell out upon the pavement drunkenly and lay, ear to the asphalt, listening to them coming. It was like a great rainstorm, with many drops, heavy and light and medium, touching the earth. He waited a few seconds and listened to their coming and their arrival. Then, weakly, expectantly, he rolled his head up and looked.
The crowd was there.
He could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by. They crowded and jostled and sucked and sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum. His head was bleeding very badly. He tried to move and he realized something was wrong with his spine. He hadn’t felt much at the impact, but his spine was hurt. He didn’t dare move.
He couldn’t speak. Opening his mouth, nothing came out but a gagging.
Someone said. ‘Give me a hand. We’ll roll him over and lift him into a more comfortable position.’
Spallner’s brain burst apart.
No! Don’t move me!
‘We’ll move him,’ said the voice, casually.
You idiots, you’ll kill me, don’t!
But he could not say any of this out loud. He could only think it.
Hands took hold of him. They started to lift him. He cried out and nausea choked him up. They straightened him out into a ramrod of agony. Two men did it. One of them was thin, bright, pale, alert, a young man. The other man was very old and had a wrinkled upper lip.
He had seen their faces before.
A familiar voice said, ‘Is – is he dead?’
Another voice, a memorable voice, responded, ‘No. Not yet. But he will be dead before the ambulance arrives.’
It was all a very silly, mad plot. Like every accident. He squealed hysterically at the solid wall of faces. They were all around him, these judges and jurors with the faces he had seen before. Through his pain he counted their faces.
The freckled boy. The old man with the wrinkled upper lip.
The red-haired, red-cheeked woman. An old woman with a mole on her chin.
I know what you’re here for, he thought. You’re here just as you’re at all accidents. To make certain the right ones live and the right ones die. That’s why you lifted me. You knew it would kill. You knew I’d live if you left me alone.
And that’s the way it’s been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn’t know it was dangerous to move a hurt man. You didn’t mean to hurt him.
He looked at them, above him, and he was curious as a man under deep water looking up at people on a bridge. Who are you? Where do you come from and how do you get here so soon? You’re the crowd that’s always in the way, using up good air that a dying man’s lungs are in need of, using up space he should be using to lie in, alone. Tramping on people to make sure they die, that’s you. I know all of you.
It was like a polite monologue. They said nothing. Faces. The old man. The red-haired woman.
Someone picked up his briefcase. ‘Whose is this?’
It’s mine! It’s evidence against all of you!
Eyes, inverted over him. Shiny eyes under tousled hair or under hats.
Faces.
Somewhere – a siren. The ambulance was coming.
But, looking at the faces, the construction, the cast, the form of the faces, Spallner saw it was too late. He read it in their faces. They knew.
He tried to speak. A little bit got out:
‘It – looks like I’ll – be joining up with you. I – guess I’ll be a member of your – group – now.’
He closed his eyes then, and waited for the coroner.
The Scythe (#ulink_dc1b9e97-0938-52b6-adb7-b3b42dbb8b10)
Quite suddenly there was no more road. It ran down the valley like any other road, between slopes of barren, stony ground and live oak trees, and then past a broad field of wheat standing alone in the wilderness. It came up beside the small white house that belonged to the wheat field and then just faded out, as though there was no more use for it.
It didn’t matter much, because just there the last of the gas was gone. Drew Erickson braked the ancient car to a stop and sat there, not speaking, staring at his big, rough farmer’s hands.
Molly spoke, without moving where she lay in the corner beside him. ‘We must of took the wrong fork back yonder.’
Drew nodded.
Molly’s lips were almost as white as her face. Only they were dry, where her skin was damp with sweat. Her voice was flat with no expression in it.
‘Drew,’ she said. ‘Drew, what are we a-goin to do now?’
Drew stared at his hands. A farmer’s hands, with the farm blown out from under them by the dry, hungry wind that never got enough good loam to eat.
The kids in the back seat woke up and pried themselves out of the dusty litter of bundles and bedding. They poked their heads over the back of the seat and said:
‘What are we stoppin’ for, Pa? Are we gonna eat now. Pa? Pa, we’re awful hungry. Can we eat now, Pa?’
Drew closed his eyes. He hated the sight of his hands.
Molly’s fingers touched his wrist. Very light, very soft. ‘Drew, maybe in the house there they’d spare us somethin’ to eat?’
A white line showed around his mouth. ‘Beggin’,’ he said harshly. ‘Ain’t none of us ever begged before. Ain’t none of us ever goin’ to.’
Molly’s hand tightened on his wrist. He turned and saw her eyes. He saw the eyes of Susie and little Drew, looking at him. Slowly all the stiffness went out of his neck and his back. His face got loose and blank, shapeless like a thing that has been beaten too hard and too long. He got out of the car and went up the path to the house. He walked uncertainly, like a man who is sick, or nearly blind.
The door of the house was open. Drew knocked three times. There was nothing inside but silence, and a white window curtain moving in the slow, hot air.
He knew it before he went in. He knew there was death in the house. It was that kind of silence.
He went through a small, clean living room and down a little hall. He wasn’t thinking anything. He was past thinking. He was going toward the kitchen, unquestioning, like an animal.
Then he looked through an open door and saw the dead man.
He was an old man, lying out on a clean white bed. He hadn’t been dead long; not long enough to lose the last quiet look of peace. He must have known he was going to die, because he wore his grave clothes – an old black suit, brushed and neat, and a clean white shirt and a black tie.
A scythe leaned against the wall beside the bed. Between the old man’s hands there was a blade of wheat, still fresh. A ripe blade, golden and heavy in the tassel.
Drew went into the bedroom, walking soft. There was a coldness on him. He took off his broken, dusty hat and stood by the bed, looking down.
The paper lay open on the pillow beside the old man’s head. It was meant to be read. Maybe a request for burial, or to call a relative. Drew scowled over the words, moving his pale, dry lips.
To him who stands beside me at my death bed:
Being of sound mind, and alone in the world as it has been decreed, I, John Buhr, do give and bequeath this farm, with all pertaining to it, to the man who is to come. Whatever his name or origin shall be, it will not matter. The farm is his, and the wheat; the scythe, and the task ordained thereto. Let him take them freely, and without question – and remember that I, John Buhr, am only the giver, not the ordainer. To which I set my hand and seal this third day of April, 1938.
[Signed] John Buhr, Kyrie eleison!
Drew walked back through the house and opened the screen door. He said. ‘Molly, you come in. Kids, you stay in the car.’
Molly came inside. He took her to the bedroom. She looked at the will, the scythe, the wheat field moving in a hot wind outside the window. Her white face tightened up and she bit her lips and held on to him. ‘It’s too good to be true. There must be some trick to it.’
Drew said, ‘Our luck’s changin’, that’s all. We’ll have work to do, stuff to eat, somethin’ over our heads to keep rain off.’ He touched the scythe. It gleamed like a half-moon. Words were scratched on its blade: WHO WIELDS ME – WIELDS THE WORLD! It didn’t mean much to him, right at that moment.
‘Drew,’ Molly asked, staring at the old man’s clasped hands, ‘why – why’s he holdin’ that wheat-stalk so hard in his fingers?’
Just then the heavy silence was broken by the sound of the kids scrambling up the front porch. Molly gasped.
They lived in the house. They buried the old man on a hill and said some words over him, and came back down and swept the house and unloaded the car and had something to eat, because there was food, lots of it, in the kitchen; and they did nothing for three days but fix the house and look at the land and lie in the good beds, and then look at one another in surprise that all this was happening this way, and their stomachs were full and there was even a cigar for him to smoke in the evenings.
There was a small barn behind the house and in the barn a bull and three cows; and there was a well-house, a spring-house, under some big trees that kept it cool. And inside the well-house were big sides of beef and bacon and pork and mutton, enough to feed a family five times their size for a year, two years, maybe three. There was a churn and a box of cheese there, and big metal cans for the milk.
On the fourth morning Drew Erickson lay in bed looking at the scythe, and he knew it was time for him to work because there was ripe grain in the long field: he had seen it with his eyes, and he did not want to get soft. Three days’ sitting were enough for any man. He roused himself in the first fresh smell of dawn and took the scythe and held it before him as he walked out into the field. He held it up in his hands and swung it down.
It was a big field of grain. Too big for one man to tend, and yet one man had tended it.
At the end of the first day of work, he walked in with the scythe riding his shoulder quietly, and there was a look on his face of a puzzled man. It was a wheat field the like of which he had never seen. It ripened only in separate clusters, each set off from the others. Wheat shouldn’t do that. He didn’t tell Molly. Nor did he tell her the other things about the field. About how, for instance, the wheat rotted within a few hours after he cut it down. Wheat shouldn’t do that, either. He was not greatly worried. After all, there was food at hand.
The next morning the wheat he had left rotting, cut down, had taken hold and come up again in little green sprouts, with tiny roots, all born again.
Drew Erickson rubbed his chin, wondered what and why and how it acted that way, and what good it would be to him – he couldn’t sell it. A couple of times during the day he walked far up in the hills to where the old man’s grave was, just to be sure the old man was there, maybe with some notion he might get an idea there about the field. He looked down and saw how much land he owned. The wheat stretched three miles in one direction toward the mountains, and was about two acres wide, patches of it in seedlings, patches of it golden, patches of it green, patches of it fresh-cut by his hand. But the old man said nothing concerning this; there were a lot of stones and dirt in his face now. The grave was in the sun and the wind and silence. So Drew Erickson walked back down to use the scythe, curious, enjoying it because it seemed important. He didn’t know just why, but it was. Very, very important.
He couldn’t just let the wheat stand. There were always new patches of it ripened, and in his figuring out loud to no one in particular he said, ‘If I cut the wheat for the next ten years, just as it ripens up, I don’t think I’ll pass the same spot twice. Such a damn big field.’ He shook his head. ‘That wheat ripens just so. Never too much of it so I can’t cut all the ripe stuff each day. That leaves nothin’ but green grain. And the next mornin’, sure enough, another patch of ripe stuff …’
It was damned foolish to cut the grain when it rotted as quick as it fell. At the end of the week he decided to let it go a few days.
He lay in bed late, just listening to the silence in the house that wasn’t anything like death silence, but a silence of things living well and happily.
He got up, dressed, and ate his breakfast slowly. He wasn’t going to work. He went out to milk the cows, stood on the porch smoking a cigarette, walked about the back yard a little and then came back in and asked Molly what he had gone out to do.
‘Milk the cows,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and went out again. He found the cows waiting and full, and milked them and put the milk cans in the spring-house, but thought of other things. The wheat. The scythe.
All through the morning he sat on the back porch rolling cigarettes. He made a toy boat for little Drew and one for Susie, and then he churned some of the milk into butter and drew off the buttermilk, but the sun was in his head, aching. It burned there. He wasn’t hungry for lunch. He kept looking at the wheat and the wind bending and tipping and ruffling it. His arms flexed, his fingers, resting on his knee as he sat again on the porch, made a kind of grip in the empty air, itching. The pads of his palms itched and burned. He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants and sat down and tried to roll another cigarette and got mad at the mixings and threw it all away with a muttering. He had a feeling as if a third arm had been cut off of him, or he had lost something of himself. It had to do with his hands and his arms.
He heard the wind whisper in the field.
By one o’clock he was going in and out of the house, getting underfoot, thinking about digging an irrigation ditch, but all the time really thinking about the wheat and how ripe and beautiful it was, aching to be cut.
‘Damn it to hell!’
He strode into the bedroom, took the scythe down off its wall-pegs. He stood holding it. He felt cool. His hands stopped itching. His head didn’t ache. The third arm was returned to him. He was intact again.
It was instinct. Illogical as lightning striking and not hurting. Each day the grain must be cut. It had to be cut. Why? Well, it just did, that was all. He laughed at the scythe in his big hands. Then, whistling, he took it out to the ripe and waiting field and did the work. He thought himself a little mad. Hell, it was an ordinary-enough wheat field, really, wasn’t it? Almost.
The days loped away like gentle horses.
Drew Erickson began to understand his work as a sort of dry ache and hunger and need. Things built in his head.
One noon. Susie and little Drew giggled and played with the scythe while their father lunched in the kitchen. He heard them. He came out and took it away from them. He didn’t yell at them. He just looked very concerned and locked the scythe up after that, when it wasn’t being used.
He never missed a day, scything.
Up. Down. Up, down, and across. Back and up and down and across. Cutting. Up. Down.
Up.
Think about the old man and the wheat in his hands when he died.
Down.
Think about this dead land, with wheat living on it.
Up.
Think about the crazy patterns of ripe and green wheat, the way it grows!
Down.
Think about …
The wheat whirled in a full yellow tide at his ankles. The sky blackened. Drew Erickson dropped the scythe and bent over to hold his stomach, his eyes running blindly. The world reeled.
‘I’ve killed somebody!’ he gasped, choking, holding to his chest, falling to his knees beside the blade. ‘I’ve killed a lot—’
The sky revolved like a blue merry-go-round at the county fair in Kansas. But no music. Only a ringing in his ears.
Molly was sitting at the blue kitchen table peeling potatoes when he blundered into the kitchen, dragging the scythe behind him.
‘Molly!’
She swam around in the wet of his eyes.
She sat there, her hands fallen open, waiting for him to finally get it out.
‘Get the things packed!’ he said, looking at the floor.
‘Why?’
‘We’re leavin’,’ he said, dully.
‘We’re leavin’?’ she said.
‘That old man. You know what he did here? It’s the wheat, Molly, and this scythe, Every time you use the scythe on the wheat a thousand people die. You cut across them and—’
Molly got up and put the knife down and the potatoes to one side and said, understandingly, ‘We traveled a lot and haven’t eaten good until the last month here, and you been workin’ every day and you’re tired—’
‘I hear voices, sad voices, out there. In the wheat,’ he said. ‘Tellin’ me to stop. Tellin’ me not to kill them!’
‘Drew!’
He didn’t hear her. ‘The field grows crooked, wild, like a crazy thing. I didn’t tell you. But it’s wrong.’
She stared at him. His eyes were blue glass, nothing else.
‘You think I’m crazy,’ he said, ‘but wait ’til I tell you. Oh, God, Molly, help me; I just killed my mother!’
‘Stop it!’ she said firmly.
‘I cut down one stalk of wheat and I killed her. I felt her dyin’, that’s how I found out just now—’
‘Drew!’ Her voice was like a crack across the face, angry and afraid now. ‘Shut up!’
He mumbled. ‘Oh – Molly—’
The scythe dropped from his hands, clamored on the floor. She picked it up with a snap of anger and set it in one corner. ‘Ten years I been with you,’ she said. ‘Sometimes we had nothin’ but dust and prayers in our mouths. Now, all this good luck sudden, and you can’t bear up under it!’
She brought the Bible from the living room.
She rustled its pages over. They sounded like the wheat rustling in a small, slow wind. ‘You sit down and listen,’ she said.
A sound came in from the sunshine. The kids, laughing in the shade of the large live oak beside the house.
She read from the Bible, looking up now and again to see what was happening to Drew’s face.
She read from the Bible each day after that. The following Wednesday, a week later, when Drew walked down to the distant town to see if there was any General Delivery mail, there was a letter.
He came home looking two hundred years old.
He held the letter out to Molly and told her what it said in a cold, uneven voice.
‘Mother passed away – one o’clock Tuesday afternoon – her heart—’
All that Drew Erickson had to say was. ‘Get the kids in the car, load it up with food. We’re goin’ on to California.’
‘Drew—’ said his wife, holding the letter.
‘You know yourself,’ he said, ‘this is poor grain land. Yet look how ripe it grows. I ain’t told you all the things. It ripens in patches, a little each day. It ain’t right. And when I cut it, it rots! And next mornin’ it comes up without any help, growin’ again! Last Tuesday, a week ago, when I cut the grain it was like rippin’ my own flesh. I heard somebody scream. It sounded just like – And now, today, this letter.’
She said, ‘We’re stayin’ here.’
‘Molly.’
‘We’re stayin’ here, where we’re sure of eatin’ and sleepin’ and livin’ decent and livin’ long. I’m not starvin’ my children down again, ever!’
The sky was blue through the windows. The sun slanted in, touching half of Molly’s calm face, shining one eye bright blue. Four or five water drops hung and fell from the kitchen faucet slowly, shining, before Drew sighed. The sigh was husky and resigned and tired. He nodded, looking away. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll stay.’
He picked up the scythe weakly. The words on the metal leaped up with a sharp glitter.
WHO WIELDS ME – WIELDS THE WORLD!
‘We’ll stay …’
Next morning he walked to the old man’s grave. There was a single fresh sprout of wheat growing in the center of it. The same sprout, reborn, that the old man had held in his hands weeks before.
He talked to the old man, getting no answers.
‘You worked the field all your life because you had to, and one day you came across your own life growin’ there. You knew it was yours. You cut it. And you went home, put on your grave clothes, and your heart gave out and you died. That’s how it was, wasn’t it? And you passed the land on to me, and when I die, I’m supposed to hand it over to someone else.’
Drew’s voice had awe in it. ‘How long a time has this been goin’ on? With nobody knowin’ about this field and its use except the man with the scythe … ?’
Quite suddenly he felt very old. The valley seemed ancient, mummified, secretive, dried and bent and powerful. When the Indians danced on the prairie it had been here, this field. The same sky, the same wind, the same wheat. And, before the Indians? Some Cro-Magnon, gnarled and shag-haired, wielding a crude wooden scythe, perhaps, prowling down through the living wheat …
Drew returned to work. Up, down. Up, down. Obsessed with the idea of being the wielder of the scythe. He, himself! It burst upon him in a mad, wild surge of strength and horror.
Up! WHO WIELDS ME! Down! WIELDS THE WORLD!
He had to accept the job with some sort of philosophy. It was simply his way of getting food and housing for his family. They deserved eating and living decent, he thought, after all these years.
Up and down. Each grain a life he neatly cut into two pieces. If he planned it carefully – he looked at the wheat – why, he and Molly and the kids could live forever!
Once he found the place where the grain grew that was Molly and Susie and little Drew he would never cut it.
And then, like a signal, it came, quietly.
Right there, before him.
Another sweep of the scythe and he’d cut them away.
Molly, Drew, Susie. It was certain. Trembling, he knelt and looked at the few grains of wheat. They glowed at his touch.
He groaned with relief. What if he had cut them down, never guessing? He blew out his breath and got up and took the scythe and stood back away from the wheat and stood for a long while looking down.
Molly thought it awfully strange when he came home early and kissed her on the cheek, for no reason at all.
At dinner, Molly said, ‘You quit early today? Does – does the wheat still spoil when it falls?’
He nodded and took more meat.
She said, ‘You ought to write to the Agriculture people and have them come look at it.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘I was just suggestin’,’ she said.
His eyes dilated. ‘I got to stay here all my life. Can’t nobody else mess with that wheat; they wouldn’t know where to cut and not to cut. They might cut the wrong parts.’
‘What wrong parts?’
‘Nothin’,’ he said, chewing slowly. ‘Nothin’ at all.’
He slapped his fork down, hard. ‘Who knows what they might want to do! Those gover’ment men! They might even – might even want to plow the whole field under!’
Molly nodded. ‘That’s just what it needs,’ she said. ‘And start all over again, with new seed.’
He didn’t finish eating. ‘I’m not writin’ any gover’ment, and I’m not handin’ this field over to no stranger to cut, and that’s that!’ he said, and the screen door banged behind him.
He detoured around that place where the lives of his children and his wife grew up in the sun, and used his scythe on the far end of the field where he knew he would make no mistakes.
But he no longer liked the work. At the end of an hour he knew he had brought death to three of his old, loved friends in Missouri. He read their names on the cut grain and couldn’t go on.
He locked the scythe in the cellar and put the key away. He was done with the reaping, done for good and all.
He smoked his pipe in the evening on the front porch, and told the kids stories to hear them laugh. But they didn’t laugh much. They seemed withdrawn, tired and funny, like they weren’t his children any more.
Molly complained of a headache, dragged around the house a little, went to bed early, and fell into a deep sleep. That was funny, too. Molly always stayed up late and was full of vinegar.
The wheat field rippled with moonlight on it, making it into a sea.
It wanted cutting. Certain parts needed cutting now. Drew Erickson sat, swallowing quietly, trying not to look at it.
What’d happen to the world if he never went in the field again? What’d happen to people ripe for death, who waited the coming of the scythe?
He’d wait and see.
Molly was breathing softly when he blew out the oil lamp and got to bed. He couldn’t sleep. He heard the wind in the wheat, felt the hunger to do the work in his arms and fingers.
In the middle of the night he found himself walking in the field, the scythe in his hands. Walking like a crazy man, walking and afraid, half-awake. He didn’t remember unlocking the cellar door, getting the scythe, but here he was in the moonlight, walking in the grain.
Among these grains there were many who were old, weary, wanting so very much to sleep. The long, quiet, moonless sleep.
The scythe held him, grew into his palms, forced him to walk.
Somehow, struggling, he got free of it. He threw it down, ran off into the wheat, where he stopped and went down on his knees.
‘I don’t want to kill any more,’ he said. ‘If I work with the scythe I’ll have to kill Molly and the kids. Don’t ask me to do that!’
The stars only sat in the sky, shining.
Behind him, he heard a dull, thumping sound.
Something shot up over the hill into the sky. It was like a living thing, with arms of red color, licking at the stars. Sparks fell into his face. The thick, hot odor of fire came with it.
The house!
Crying out, he got sluggishly, hopelessly, to his feet, looking at the big fire.
The little white house with the live oaks was roaring up in one savage bloom of fire. Heat rolled over the hill and he swam in it and went down in it, stumbling, drowning over his head.
By the time he got down the hill there was not a shingle, bolt or threshold of it that wasn’t alive with flame. It made blistering, crackling, fumbling noises.
No one screamed inside. No one ran around or shouted.
He yelled in the yard. ‘Molly! Susie! Drew!’
He got no answer. He ran close in until his eyebrows withered and his skin crawled hot like paper burning, crisping, curling up in tight little curls.
‘Molly! Susie!’
The fire settled contentedly down to feed. Drew ran around the house a dozen times, all alone, trying to find a way in. Then he sat where the fire roasted his body and waited until all the walls had sunken down with fluttering crashes, until the last ceiling bent, blanketing the floors with molten plaster and scorched lathing. Until the flames died and smoke coughed up, and the new day came slowly; and there was nothing but embering ashes and an acid smoldering.
Disregarding the heat fanning from the leveled frames, Drew walked into the ruin. It was still too dark to see much. Red light glowed on his sweating throat. He stood like a stranger in a new and different land. Here – the kitchen. Charred tables, chairs, the iron stove, the cupboards. Here – the hall. Here the parlor and then over there was the bedroom where—
Where Molly was still alive.
She slept among fallen timbers and angry-colored pieces of wire spring and metal.
She slept as if nothing had happened. Her small white hands lay at her sides, flaked with sparks. Her calm face slept with a flaming lath across one cheek.
Drew stopped and didn’t believe it. In the ruin of her smoking bedroom she lay on a glittering bed of sparks, her skin intact, her breast rising, falling, taking air.
‘Molly!’
Alive and sleeping after the fire, after the walls had roared down, after ceilings had collapsed upon her and flame had lived all about her.
His shoes smoked as he pushed through piles of fuming litter. It could have seared his feet off at the ankles, he wouldn’t have known.
‘Molly …’
He bent over her. She didn’t move or hear him, and she didn’t speak. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t alive. She just lay there with the fire surrounding her and not touching her, not harming her in any way. Her cotton nightgown was streaked with ashes, but not burnt. Her brown hair was pillowed on a tumble of red-hot coals.
He touched her cheek, and it was cold, cold in the middle of hell. Tiny breaths trembled her half-smiling lips.
The children were there, too. Behind a veil of smoke he made out two smaller figures huddled in the ashes sleeping.
He carried all three of them out to the edge of the wheat field.
‘Molly. Molly, wake up! Kids! Kids, wake up!’
They breathed and didn’t move and went on sleeping.
‘Kids, wake up! Your mother is—’
Dead? No, not dead. But—
He shook the kids as if they were to blame. They paid no attention; they were busy with their dreams. He put them back down and stood over them, his face cut with lines.
He knew why they’d slept through the fire and continued to sleep now. He knew why Molly just lay there, never wanting to laugh again.
The power of the wheat and the scythe.
Their lives, supposed to end yesterday, May 30, 1938, had been prolonged simply because he refused to cut the grain. They should have died in the fire. That’s the way it was meant to be. But since he had not used the scythe, nothing could hurt them. A house had flamed and fallen and still they lived, caught halfway, not dead, not alive. Simply – waiting. And all over the world thousands more just like them, victims of accidents, fires, disease, suicide, waited, slept just like Molly and her children slept. Not able to die, not able to live. All because a man was afraid of harvesting the ripe grain. All because one man thought he could stop working with a scythe and never work with that scythe again.
He looked down upon the children. The job had to be done every day and every day with never a stopping but going on, with never a pause, but always the harvesting, forever and forever and forever.
All right, he thought. All right. I’ll use the scythe.
He didn’t say good-by to his family. He turned with a slow-feeding anger and found the scythe and walked rapidly, then he began to trot, then he ran with long jolting strides into the field, raving, feeling the hunger in his arms, as the wheat whipped and flailed his legs. He pounded through it, shouting. He stopped.
‘Molly!’ he cried, and raised the blade and swung it down.
‘Susie!’ he cried. ‘Drew!’ And swung the blade down again.
Somebody screamed. He didn’t turn to look at the fire-ruined house.
And then, sobbing wildly, he rose above the grain again and again and hewed to left and right and to left and to right and to left and to right. Over and over and over! Slicing out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat, with no selection and no care, cursing, over and over, swearing, laughing, the blade swinging up in the sun and falling in the sun with a singing whistle! Down!
Bombs shattered London, Moscow, Tokyo.
The blade swung insanely.
And the kilns of Belsen and Buchenwald took fire.
The blade sang, crimson wet.
And mushrooms vomited out blind suns at White Sands, Hiroshima, Bikini, and up, through, and in continental Siberian skies.
The grain wept in a green rain, falling.
Korea, Indo-China, Egypt, India trembled: Asia stirred, Africa woke in the night …
And the blade went on rising, crashing, severing, with the fury and the rage of a man who has lost and lost so much that he no longer cares what he does to the world.
Just a few short miles off the main highway, down a rough dirt road that leads to nowhere, just a few short miles from a highway jammed with traffic bound for California.
Once in a while during the long years a jalopy gets off the main highway, pulls up steaming in front of the charred ruin of a little white house at the end of the dirt road, to ask instructions from the farmer they see just beyond, the one who works insanely, wildly, without ever stopping, night and day, in the endless fields of wheat.
But they get no help and no answer. The farmer in the field is too busy, even after all these years; too busy slashing and chopping the green wheat instead of the ripe.
And Drew Erickson moves on with his scythe, with the light of blind suns and a look of white fire in his never-sleeping eyes, on and on and on …
There Was an Old Woman (#ulink_ec89a82c-0ce0-5d7b-92e7-e90c7cf16952)
‘No, there’s no lief arguin’. I got my mind fixed. Run along with your silly wicker basket. Land, where you ever get notions like that? You just skit out of here; don’t bother me, I got my tattin’ and knittin’ to do, and no never minds about tall, dark gentlemen with fangled ideas.’
The tall, dark young man stood quietly, not moving. Aunt Tildy hurried on with her talk.
‘You heard what I said! If you got a mind to talk to me, well, you can talk, but meantime I hope you don’t mind if I pour myself coffee. There. If you’d been more polite. I’d offer you some, but you jump in here high and mighty and you never rapped on the door or nothin’. You think you own the place.’
Aunt Tildy fussed with her lap. ‘Now, you made me lose count! I’m makin’ myself a comforter. These winters get on mighty chill, and it ain’t fittin’ for a lady with bones like rice-paper to be settin’ in a drafty old house without warmin’ herself.’
The tall, dark man sat down.
‘That’s an antique chair, so be gentle,’ warned Aunt Tildy. ‘Start again, tell me things you got to tell, I’ll listen respectful. But keep your voice in your shoes and stop starin’ at me with funny lights in your eyes. Land, it gives me the collywobbles.’
The bone-porcelain, flowered clock on the mantel finished chiming three. Out in the hall, grouped around the wicker basket, four men waited, quietly, as if they were frozen.
‘Now, about that wicker basket,’ said Aunt Tildy. ‘It’s past six feet long, and by the look, it ain’t laundry. And those four men you walked in with, you don’t need them to carry that basket – why, it’s light as thistles, Eh?’
The dark young man was leaning forward on the antique chair. Something in his face suggested the basket wouldn’t be so light after a while.
‘Pshaw,’ Aunt Tildy mused. ‘Where’ve I seen a wicker like that before? Seems it was only a couple years ago. Seems to me – oh! Now I remember. It was when Mrs Dwyer passed away next door.’
Aunt Tildy set her coffee cup down, sternly. ‘So that’s what you’re up to? I thought you were workin’ to sell me somethin’. You just set there until my little Emily trounces home from college this afternoon! I wrote her a note last week. Not admittin’, of course, that I wasn’t feelin’ quite ripe and pert, but sort of hintin’ I want to see her again, it’s been a good many weeks. Her livin’ in New York and all. Almost like my own daughter. Emily is.
‘Now, she’ll take care of you, young man. She’ll shoo you out’n this parlor so quick it’ll—’
The dark young man looked at Aunt Tildy as if she were tired.
‘No, I’m not!’ she snapped.
He weaved back and forth on the chair, half shutting his eyes, resting himself. O, wouldn’t she like to rest, too? he seemed to murmur. Rest, rest, nice rest …
‘Great sons of Goshen on the Gilberry Dike! I got a hundred comforters, two hundred sweaters and six hundred potholders in these fingers, no matter they’re skinny! You run off, come back when I’m done, maybe I’ll talk to you.’ Aunt Tildy shifted subjects. ‘Let me tell you about Emily, my sweet, fair child.’
Aunt Tildy nodded thoughtfully. Emily, with hair like yellow corn tassels, just as soft and fine.
‘I well remember the day her mother died, twenty years ago, leavin’ Emily to my house. That’s why I’m mad at you and your wickers and such goin’s-on. Who ever heard of people dyin’ for any good cause? Young man, I don’t like it. Why, I remember—’
Aunt Tildy paused; a brief pain of memory touched her heart. Twenty-five years back, her father’s voice trembled in the late afternoon:
‘Tildy,’ he whispered, ‘what you goin’ to do in life? The way you act, men don’t walk much with you. You kiss and skedaddle. Why don’t you settle down, marry, raise children?’
‘Papa,’ Tildy shouted back at him. ‘I like laughin’ and playin’ and singin’. I’m not the marryin’ kind. I can’t find a man with my philosophy, Papa.’
‘What “philosophy’s” that?’
‘That death is ridiculous! It run off with Mama when we needed her most. You call that intelligent?’
Papa’s eyes got wet and gray and bleak. ‘You’re always right, Tildy. But what can we do? Death comes to everybody.’
‘Fight!’ she cried. ‘Strike it below the belt! Don’t believe in it!’
‘Can’t be done,’ said Papa sadly. ‘We all stand alone in the world.’
‘There’s got to be a change sometime. Papa. I’m startin’ my own philosophy here and now! Why, it’s silly people live a couple years and are shoved like wet seeds in a hole; but nothin’ sprouts. What good do they do? Lay there a million years, helpin’ no one. Most of them fine, nice, neat people, or at least tryin’.’
But Papa wasn’t listening. He bleached out, faded away, like a photo left lying in the sun. She tried to talk him out of it, but he passed on, anyway. She spun about and ran. She couldn’t stay on once he was cold, for his coldness denied her philosophy. She didn’t attend his burial. She didn’t do anything but set up this antique shop on the front of an old house and live alone for years, that is, until Emily came. Tildy didn’t want to take the girl in. Why? Because Emily believed in dying. But her mother was an old friend and Tildy had promised help.
‘Emily,’ continued Aunt Tildy, to the man in black, ‘was the first to live in this house with me in all the years. I never got married. I feared the idea of livin’ with a man twenty-thirty years and then have him up and die on me. It’d shake my convictions like a house of cards. I shied off from the world. I screamed at people if they so much as mentioned death.’
The young man listened patiently, politely. Then he lifted his hand. He seemed to know everything, with the dark, cold shining of his eyes, before she opened her mouth. He knew about her and World War II, when she shut off her radio forever and stopped the newspapers and beat a man’s head with an umbrella, driving him from her shop when he insisted on describing the invasion beaches and the long, slow tides of the dead drifting under the silent urgings of the moon.
Yes, the dark young man smiled from the antique rocker, he knew how Aunt Tildy had stuck to her nice old phonograph records. Harry Lauder singing ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’,’ Madame Schumann-Heink and lullabies. With no interruptions, no foreign calamities, murders, poisonings, auto accidents, suicides. Music stayed the same each day, every day. So the years ran, while Aunt Tildy tried to teach Emily her philosophy. But Emily’s mind was fixed on mortality. She respected Aunt Tildy’s way of thinking, however, and never mentioned – eternity.
All this the young man knew.
Aunt Tildy sniffed. ‘How do you know all those things? Well, if you think you can talk me into that silly wicker basket, you’re way off the trestle. You lay hands on me, I’ll spit right in your face!’
The young man smiled. Aunt Tildy sniffed again.
‘Don’t simper like a sick dog. I’m too old to be made love at. That’s all twisted dry, like an old tube of paint, and left behind in the years.’
There was a noise. The mantel clock chimed three. Aunt Tildy flashed her eyes to it. Strange. Hadn’t it chimed three o’clock just five minutes ago? She liked the bone-white clock with gold angels dangling naked about its numeraled face and its tone like cathedral bells, soft and far away.
‘Are you just goin’ to sit there, young man?’
He was.
‘Then, you won’t mind if I take a little cat nap. Now, don’t you stir off that chair. Don’t come creepin’ around me. Just goin’ to close my eyes for a spell. That’s right. That’s right …’
Nice and quiet and restful time of day. Silence. Just the clock ticking away, busy as termites in wood. Just the old room smelling of polished mahogany and oiled leather in the Morris chair, and books sitting stiff on the shelves. So nice. Nice …
‘You aren’t gettin’ up from the chair, are you, mister? Better not. I got one eye open for you. Yes, indeed I have. Yes, I have. Oh. Ah, hmmmm.’
So feathery. So drowsy. So deep. Under water, almost. Oh, so nice.
Who’s that movin’ around in the dark with my eyes closed?
Who’s that kissin’ my cheek? You, Emily? No. No. Guess it was my thoughts. Only – dreamin’. Land, yes, that’s it. Driftin’ off, off, off …
Ah? What say? Oh!
‘Wait while I put on my glasses. There!’
The clock chimed three again. Shame, old clock, now, shame. Have to have you fixed.
The young man in the dark suit stood near the door. Aunt Tildy nodded.
‘You leavin’ so soon, young man? Had to give up, didn’t you? Couldn’t convince me; no, I’m mule-stubborn. Never get me free of this house, so don’t bother comin’ back to try!’
The young man bowed with slow dignity.
He had no intention of coming again, ever.
‘Fine,’ declared Aunt Tildy. ‘I always told Papa I’d win! Why, I’ll knit in this window the next thousand years. They’ll have to chew the boards down around me to get me out.’
The dark young man twinkled his eyes.
‘Quit lookin’ like the cat that ate the bird,’ cried Aunt Tildy. ‘Get that old fool wicker away!’
The four men trod heavily out the front door. Tildy studied the way they handled an empty basket, yet staggered with its weight.
‘Here, now!’ She rose in tremulous indignation. ‘Did you steal my antiques? My books? The clocks? What you got in that wicker?’
The dark young man whistled jauntily, turning his back to her, walking along behind the four staggering men. At the door he pointed to the wicker, offered its lid to Aunt Tildy. In pantomime he wondered if she would like to open it and gaze inside.
‘Curious? Me? Pshaw, no. Get out!’ cried Aunt Tildy.
The dark young man tapped a hat onto his head, saluted her crisply.
‘Good-by!’ Aunt Tildy slammed the door.
There, there. That was better. Gone. Darned fool men with their maggoty ideas. No never minds about the wicker. If they stole something, she didn’t care, long as they let her alone.
‘Look.’ Aunt Tildy smiled. ‘Here comes Emily, home from college. About time. Lovely girl. See how she walks. But, land, she looks pale and funny today, walkin’ so slow. I wonder why. Looks worried, she does. Poor girl. I’ll just fix some coffee and a tray of cakes.’
Emily tapped up the front steps. Aunt Tildy, rustling around, could hear the slow, deliberate steps. What ailed the girl? Didn’t sound like she had no more spunk than a flue-lizard. The front door swung wide. Emily stood in the hall, holding to the brass doorknob.
‘Emily?’ called Aunt Tildy.
Emily shuffled into the parlor, head down.
‘Emily! I been waitin’ for you! There was the darndest fool men here with a wicker. Tryin’ to sell me somethin’ I didn’t want. Glad you’re home. Makes it right cozy—’
Aunt Tildy realized that for a full minute Emily had been staring.
‘Emily, what’s wrong? Stop starin’. Here, I’ll bring you a cup of coffee. There!
‘Emily, why you backin’ away from me?
‘Emily, stop screamin’, child. Don’t scream. Emily! Don’t! You keep screamin’ that way, you go crazy. Emily, get up off the floor, get away from that wall! Emily! Stop cringin’, child. I won’t hurt you!
‘Land, if it ain’t one thing it’s another.
‘Emily, what’s wrong, child … ?’
Emily groaned through her hands over her face.
‘Child, child,’ whispered Aunt Tildy. ‘Here, sip this water. Sip it, Emily, that’s it.’
Emily widened her eyes, saw something, then shut them, quivering, pulling into herself. ‘Aunt Tildy, Aunt Tildy, Aunt—’
‘Stop that!’ Tildy slapped her. ‘What ails you?’
Emily forced herself to look up again.
She thrust her fingers out. They vanished inside Aunt Tildy.
‘What fool notion!’ cried Tildy. ‘Take your hand away! Take it, I say!’
Emily dropped aside, jerked her head, the golden hair shaking into shiny temblors. ‘You’re not here, Aunt Tildy. I’m dreaming. You’re dead!’
‘Hush, baby.’
‘You can’t be here.’
‘Land of Goshen, Emily—’
She took Emily’s hand. It passed clean through her. Instantly. Aunt Tildy raised straight up, stomping her foot.
‘Why, why!’ she cried angrily. ‘That – fibber! That sneak-thief!’ Her thin hands knotted to wiry, hard, pale fists. ‘That dark, dark fiend; he stole it! He toted it away, he did, oh he did, he did! Why, I—’ Wrath steamed in her. Her pale blue eyes were fire. She sputtered into an indignant silence. Then she turned to Emily. ‘Child, get up! I need you!’
Emily lay, quivering.
‘Part of me’s here!’ declared Aunt Tildy. ‘By the Lord Harry, what’s left will have to do, for a bit. Fetch my bonnet!’
Emily confessed. ‘I’m scared.’
‘Certainly, oh, certainly not of me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why, I’m no spook! You known me most of your life! Now’s no time to snivel-sop. Fetch up on your heels or I’ll slap you crack across your nose!’
Emily rose, in sobs, stood like something cornered, trying to decide which direction to bolt in.
‘Where’s your car, Emily?’
‘Down at the garage – ma’am.’
‘Good!’ Aunt Tildy hustled her through the front door. ‘Now—’ Her sharp eyes poked up and down the streets. ‘Which way’s the mortuary?’
Emily held to the step rail, fumbling down. ‘What’re you going to do, Aunt Tildy?’
‘Do?’ cried Aunt Tildy, tottering after her, jowls shaking in a thin, pale fury. ‘Why, get my body back, of course! Get my body back! Go on!’
The car roared. Emily clenched to the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at the curved, rain-wet streets. Aunt Tildy shook her parasol.
‘Hurry, child, hurry, before they squirt juices in my body and dice and cube it the way them persnickety morticians have a habit of doin’. They cut and sew it so it ain’t no good to no one!’
‘Oh, Auntie, Auntie, let me go, don’t make me drive! It won’t do any good, no good at all,’ sighed the girl.
‘Here we are.’ Emily pulled to the curb, and collapsed over the wheel, but Aunt Tildy had already popped from the car and trotted with mincing skirt up the mortuary drive, around behind to where the shiny black hearse was unloading a wicker basket.
‘You!’ She directed her attack at one of the four men with the wicker. ‘Put that down!’
The four men looked up.
One said, ‘Step aside, lady. We’re doing our job.’
‘That’s my body tucked in there!’ She brandished the parasol.
‘That I wouldn’t know anything about,’ said a second man. ‘Please don’t block traffic, madam. This thing is heavy.’
‘Sir!’ she cried, wounded. ‘I’ll have you know I weigh only one hundred and ten pounds.’
He looked at her casually. ‘I’m not interested in your heft, lady. I’m due home for supper. My wife’ll kill me if I’m late.’
The four of them moved on, Aunt Tildy in pursuit, down a hall, into a preparations room.
A white-smocked man awaited the wicker’s arrival with a rather pleased smile on his long, eager-looking face. Aunt Tildy didn’t care for the avidity of that face, or the entire personality of the man. The basket was deposited, the four men wandered off.
The man in the white smock glanced at Auntie and said:
‘Madam, this is no fit place for a gentlewoman.’
‘Well,’ she said, gratified, ‘glad you feel that way. It’s exactly what I tried to tell that dark-clothed young man!’
The mortician puzzled. ‘What dark-clothed young man is that?’
‘The one that came puddlin’ around my house, that’s who.’
‘No one of that description works for us.’
‘No matter. As you just so intelligently stated, this is no place for a lady. I don’t want me here. I want me home cookin’ ham for Sunday visitors, it’s near Easter. I got Emily to feed, sweaters to knit, clocks to wind—’
‘You are quite philosophical, and philanthropical, no doubt of it, madam, but I have work. A body has arrived.’ This last, he said with apparent relish, and a winnowing of his knives, tubes, jars, and instruments.
Tildy bristled. ‘You put so much as a fingerprint on that body, and I’ll—’
He laid her aside like a little old moth. ‘George,’ he called with a suave gentleness, ‘escort this lady out, please.’
Aunt Tildy glared at the approaching George.
‘Show me your backside, goin’ the other way!’
George took her wrists. ‘This way, please.’
Tildy extricated herself. Easily. Her flesh sort of – slipped. It even amazed Tildy. Such an unexpected talent to develop at this late day.
‘See?’ she said, pleased with her ability. ‘You can’t budge me. I want my body back!’
The mortician opened the wicker lid casually. Then, in a recurrent series of scrutinies he realized the body inside was … it seemed … could it be? … maybe … yes … no … no … it just couldn’t be, but …‘Ah,’ he exhaled, abruptly. He turned. His eyes were wide, then they narrowed.
‘Madam,’ he said, cautiously. ‘This lady here is – a – relative – of yours?’
‘A very dear relation. Be careful of her.’
‘A sister, perhaps?’ He grasped at a straw of dwindling logic, hopefully.
‘No, you fool. Me, do you hear? Me!’
The mortician considered the idea. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Things like this don’t happen.’ He fumbled with his tools. ‘George, get help from the others. I can’t work with a crank present.’
The four men returned. Aunt Tildy crossed her arms in defiance. ‘Won’t budge!’ she cried, as she was moved like a pawn on a chessboard, from preparations room to slumber room, to hall, to waiting chamber, to funeral parlor, where she threw herself down on a chair in the very center of the vestibule. There were pews going back into gray silence, and a smell of flowers.
‘Please, ma’am,’ said one of the men. ‘That’s where the body rests for the service tomorrow.’
‘I’m sittin’ right plumb here until I get what I want.’
She sat, pale fingers fussing with the lace at her throat, jaw set, one high-buttoned shoe tapping with irritation. If a man got in whopping distance, she gave him a parasol whop. And when they touched her, now, she remembered to – slip away.
Mr Carrington, Mortuary President, heard the disturbance in his office and came toddling down the aisle to investigate. ‘Hear Hear,’ he whispered to everyone, finger to mouth. ‘More respect, more respect. What is this? Oh, madam, may I help you?’
She looked him up and down. ‘You may.’
‘How may I be of service, please?’
‘Go in that room back there,’ directed Aunt Tildy.
‘Yee-ess.’
‘And tell that eager young investigator to quit fiddlin’ with my body. I’m a maiden lady. My moles, birthmarks, scars, and other bric-a-brac, includin’ the turn of my ankle, are my own secret. I don’t want him pryin’ and probin’, cuttin’, or hurtin’ it any way.’
This was vague to Mr Carrington, who hadn’t correlated bodies yet. He looked at her in blank helplessness.
‘He’s got me in there on his table, like a pigeon ready to be drawn and stuffed!’ she told him.
Mr Carrington hustled off to check. After fifteen minutes of waiting silence and horrified arguing, comparing notes with the mortician behind closed doors. Carrington returned, three shades whiter.
Carrington dropped his glasses, picked them up. ‘You’re making it difficult for us.’
‘I am?’ raged Aunt Tildy. ‘Saint Vitus in the mornin’! Looky here. Mister Blood and Bones or whatever, you tell that—’
‘We’re already draining the blood from the—’
‘What!’
‘Yes, yes. I assure you, yes. So, you just go away, now; there’s nothing to be done.’ He laughed nervously. ‘Our mortician is also performing a brief autopsy to determine cause of death.’
Auntie jumped to her feet, burning.
‘He can’t do that! Only coroners are allowed to do that!’
‘Well, we sometimes allow a little—’
‘March straight in and tell that Cut-’em-up to pump all that fine New England blue blood right back into that fine-skinned body, and if he’s taken anything out, for him to attach it back in so it’ll function proper, and then turn that body, fresh as paint, into my keepin’. You hear!’
‘There’s nothing I can do. Nothing.’
‘Tell you what. I’m settin’ here for the next two hundred years. You listenin’? And every time any of your customers come by, I’ll spit ectoplasm right squirt up their nostrils!’
Carrington groped that thought around his weakening mind and emitted a groan. ‘You’d ruin our business. You wouldn’t do that.’
Auntie smiled. ‘Wouldn’t I?’
Carrington ran up the dark aisle. In the distance you could hear him dialing a phone over and over again. Half an hour later cars roared up in front of the mortuary. Three vice-presidents of the mortuary came down the aisle with their hysterical president.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’
Auntie told them with a few well-chosen infernalities.
They held a conference, meanwhile notifying the mortician to discontinue his homework, at least until such time as an agreement was reached … The mortician walked from his chamber and stood smiling amiably, smoking a big black cigar.
Auntie stared at the cigar.
‘Where’d you put the ashes?’ she cried, in horror.
The mortician only grinned imperturbably and puffed.
The conference broke up.
‘Madam, in all fairness, you wouldn’t force us out on the street to continue our services, would you?’
Auntie scanned the vultures. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind at all.’
Carrington wiped sweat from his jowls. ‘You can have your body back.’
‘Ha!’ shouted Auntie. Then, with caution: ‘Intact?’
‘Intact.’
‘No formaldehyde?’
‘No formaldehyde.’
‘Blood in it?’
‘Blood, my God, yes, blood, if only you’ll take it and go!’
A prim nod. ‘Fair enough. Fix ’er up. It’s a deal.’
Carrington snapped his fingers at the mortician. ‘Don’t stand there, you mental incompetent. Fix it up!’
‘And be careful with that cigar!’ said the old woman.
‘Easy, easy,’ said Aunt Tildy. ‘Put the wicker on the floor where I can step in it.’
She didn’t look at the body much. Her only comment was. ‘Natural-lookin’.’ She let herself fall back into the wicker.
A biting sensation of arctic coldness gripped her, followed by an unlikely nausea and a giddy whorling. She was two drops of matter fusing, water trying to seep into concrete. Slow to do. Hard. Like a butterfly trying to squirm back into a discarded husk of flinty chrysalis!
The vice-presidents watched Aunt Tildy with apprehension. Mr Carrington wrung his fingers and tried to assist with boosting and pushing moves of his hands and arms. The mortician, frankly skeptical, watched with idle, amused eyes.
Seeping into cold, long granite. Seeping into a frozen and ancient statue. Squeezing all the way.
‘Come alive, damn ye!’ shouted Aunt Tildy to herself. ‘Raise up a bit.’
The body half-rose, rustling in the dry wicker.
‘Fold your legs, woman!’
The body grabbled up, blindly groping.
‘See!’ shouted Aunt Tildy.
Light entered the webbed blind eyes.
‘Feel!’ urged Aunt Tildy.
The body felt the warmth of the room, the sudden reality of the preparations table on which to lean, panting.
‘Move!’
The body took a creaking, slow step.
‘Hear!’ she snapped.
The noises of the place came into the dull ears. The harsh, expectant breath of the mortician, shaken; the whimpering Mr Carrington; her own crackling voice.
‘Walk!’ she said.
The body walked.
‘Think!’ she said.
The old brain thought.
‘Speak!’ she said.
The body spoke, bowing to the morticians:
‘Much obliged. Thank you.’
‘Now,’ she said, finally, ‘cry!’
And she began to cry tears of utter happiness.
And now, any afternoon about four, if you want to visit Aunt Tildy, you just walk around to her antique shop and rap. There’s a big, black funeral wreath on the door. Don’t mind that! Aunt Tildy left it there: that’s how her humor runs. You rap on the door. It’s double-barred and triple-locked, and when you rap her voice shrills out at you.
‘Is that the man in black?’
And you laugh and say. No, no, it’s only me, Aunt Tildy.
And she laughs and says. ‘Come on in, quick!’ and she whips the door open and slams it shut behind, so no man in black can ever slip in with you. Then she sets you down and pours your coffee and shows you her latest knitted sweater. She’s not as fast as she used to be, and can’t see as good, but she gets on.
‘And if you’re ’specially good,’ Aunt Tildy declares, setting her coffee cup to one side, ‘I’ll give you a little treat.’
‘What’s that?’ visitors will ask.
‘This,’ says Auntie, pleased with her little uniqueness, her little joke.
Then with modest moves of her fingers she will unfasten the white lace at her neck and chest and for a brief moment show what lies beneath.
The long blue scar where the autopsy was neatly sewn together.
‘Not bad sewin’ for a man,’ she allows. ‘Oh, some more coffee? There!’
There Will Come Soft Rains (#ulink_4118a1a2-92ff-5836-b087-9229ec3ac17e)
In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!
In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny-side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.
‘Today is August 4, 2026,’ said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, ‘in the city of Allendale, California.’ It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. ‘Today is Mr Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.’
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.
Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: ‘Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today …’ And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.
Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.
At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.
Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.
Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.
Ten o’clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.
Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.
The five spots of paint – the man, the woman, the children, the ball – remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.
The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.
Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, ‘Who goes there? What’s the password?’ and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.
It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!
The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.
Twelve noon.
A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.
For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.
The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here.
It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.
The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.
Two o’clock, sang a voice.
Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.
Two-fifteen.
The dog was gone.
In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.
Two thirty-five.
Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.
But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.
At four o’clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls.
Four-thirty.
The nursery walls glowed.
Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden films clocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aromas of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes.
It was the children’s hour.
Five o’clock. The bath filled with clear hot water.
Six, seven, eight o’clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.
Nine o’clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.
Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:
‘Mrs McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?’
The house was silent.
The voice said at last, ‘Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random.’ Quiet music rose to back the voice. ‘Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite …
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war,not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,If mankind perished utterly:
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawnWould scarcely know that we were gone.
The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.
At ten o’clock the house began to die.
The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!
‘Fire!’ screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: ‘Fire, fire, fire!’
The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.
The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.
But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.
The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.
Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!
And then, reinforcements.
From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green chemical.
The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.
But the fire was clever. It had sent flame outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.
The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.
The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the first brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed, Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.
In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river …
Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in, the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.
Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.
Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:
‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is …’
Mars Is Heaven (#ulink_3c20f5aa-f081-5f29-9d67-5f7d482a11ec)
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship: it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain. The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket had bloomed out great flowers of heat and color and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!
Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient Moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.
‘Mars!’ cried Navigator Lustig.
‘Good old Mars!’ said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
‘Well,’ said Captain John Black.
The rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon this lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up on the green stood a tall brown Victorian house, quiet in the sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze. At the summit of the house was a cupola with diamond leaded-glass windows and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see a piece of music titled ‘Beautiful Ohio’ sitting on the music rest.
Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.
The rocket men looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held to each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale.
‘I’ll be damned,’ whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers. ‘I’ll be damned.’
‘It just can’t be,’ said Samuel Hinkston.
‘Lord,’ said Captain John Black.
There was a call from the chemist. ‘Sir, the atmosphere is thin for breathing. But there’s enough oxygen. It’s safe.’
‘Then we’ll go out,’ said Lustig.
‘Hold on,’ said Captain John Black. ‘How do we know what this is?’
‘It’s a small town with thin but breathable air in it, sir.’
‘And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,’ said Hinkston, the archaeologist. ‘Incredible. It can’t be, but it is.’
Captain John Black looked at him idly. ‘Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.’
Captain Black stood by the port. ‘Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded-glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like a piano and probably is a piano; and five, if you look closely through this telescopic lens here, is it logical that a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, ‘Beautiful Ohio? All of which means that we have an Ohio River on Mars!’
‘Captain Williams, of course!’ cried Hinkston.
‘What?’
‘Captain Williams and his crew of three men! Or Nathaniel York and his partner. That would explain it!’
‘That would explain absolutely nothing. As far as we’ve been able to figure, the York expedition exploded the day it reached Mars, killing York and his partner. As for Williams and his three men, their ship exploded the second day after their arrival. At least the pulsations from their radios ceased at that time, so we figure that if the men were alive after that they’d have contacted us. And anyway, the York expedition was only a year ago, while Captain Williams and his men landed here some time during last August. Theorizing that they are still alive, could they, even with the help of a brilliant Martian race, have built such a town as this and aged it in so short a time? Look at that town out there; why, it’s been standing here for the last seventy years. Look at the wood on the porch newel; look at the trees, a century old, all of them! No, this isn’t York’s work or Williams’. It’s something else. I don’t like it. And I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is.’
‘For that matter,’ said Lustig, nodding, ‘Williams and his men, as well as York, landed on the opposite side of Mars. We were very careful to land on this side.’
‘An excellent point. Just in case a hostile local tribe of Martians killed off York and Williams, we have instructions to land in a further region, to forestall a recurrence of such a disaster. So here we are, as far as we know, in a land that Williams and York never saw.’
‘Damn it,’ said Hinkston, ‘I want to get out into this town, sir, with your permission. It may be there are similar thought patterns, civilization graphs on every planet in our sun system. We may be on the threshold of the greatest psychological and metaphysical discovery of our age!’
‘I’m willing to wait a moment,’ said Captain John Black.
‘It may be, sir, that we’re looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of God, sir.’
‘There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr Hinkston.’
‘I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a town like this could not occur without divine intervention. The detail. It fills me with such feelings that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.’
‘Do neither, then, until we know what we’re up against.’
‘Up against?’ Lustig broke in. ‘Against nothing, Captain. It’s a good, quiet green town, a lot like the old-fashioned one I was born in. I like the looks of it.’
‘When were you born, Lustig?’
‘Nineteen fifty, sir.’
‘And you, Hinkston?’
‘Nineteen fifty-five, sir. Grinnell, Iowa. And this looks like home to me.’
‘Hinkston, Lustig, I could be either of your fathers. I’m just eighty years old. Born in 1920 in Illinois, and through the grace of God and a science that, in the last fifty years, knows how to make some old men young again, here I am on Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but infinitely more suspicious. This town out here looks very peaceful and cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens me. It’s too much like Green Bluff.’ He turned to the radioman. ‘Radio Earth. Tell them we’ve landed. That’s all. Tell them we’ll radio a full report tomorrow.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Captain Black looked out the rocket port with his face that should have been the face of a man eighty but seemed like the face of a man in his fortieth year. ‘Tell you what we’ll do, Lustig; you and I and Hinkston’ll look the town over. The other men’ll stay aboard. If anything happens they can get the hell out. A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens, our crew can warn the next rocket. That’s Captain Wilder’s rocket, I think, due to be ready to take off next Christmas. If there’s something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next rocket to be well armed.’
‘So are we. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.’
‘Tell the men to stand by the guns then. Come on, Lustig, Hinkston.’
The three men walked together down through the levels of the ship.
It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the green branches, and the blossom scent drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town someone was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was ‘Beautiful Dreamer.’ Somewhere else a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’,’ sung by Harry Lauder.
The three men stood outside the ship. They sucked and gasped at the thin, thin air and moved slowly so as not to tire themselves.
Now the phonograph record being played was:
Oh, give me a June night
The moonlight and you …
Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.
The sky was serene and quiet, and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and tree shadings of a ravine. Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by, bumping.
‘Sir,’ said Samuel Hinkston, ‘it must be, it has to be, that rocket travel to Mars began in the years before the First World War!’
‘No.’
‘How else can you explain these houses, the iron deer, the pianos, the music?’ Hinkston took the captain’s elbow persuasively and looked into the captain’s face. ‘Say that there were people in the year 1905 who hated war and got together with some scientists in secret and built a rocket and came out here to Mars—’
‘No, no, Hinkston.’
‘Why not? The world was a different world in 1905: they could have kept it a secret much more easily.’
‘But a complex thing like a rocket, no, you couldn’t keep it secret.’
‘And they came up here to live, and naturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they brought the culture with them.’
‘And they’ve lived here all these years?’ said the captain.
‘In peace and quiet, yes. Maybe they made a few trips, enough to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped for fear of being discovered. That’s why this town seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see a thing, myself, older than the year 1927, do you? Or maybe, sir, rocket travel is older than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world centuries ago and was kept secret by the small number of men who came to Mars with only occasional visits to Earth over the centuries.’
‘You make it sound almost reasonable.’
‘It has to be. We’ve the proof here before us; all we have to do is find some people and verify it.’
Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had been in a small town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.
They set foot upon the porch. Hollow echoes sounded from under the boards as they walked to the screen door. Inside they could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a crystal chandelier and a Maxfield Parrish painting framed on one wall over a comfortable Morris chair. The house smelled old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could hear the tinkle of ice in a lemonade pitcher. In a distant kitchen, because of the heat of the day, someone was preparing a cold lunch. Someone was humming under her breath, high and sweet.
Captain John Black rang the bell.
Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hall, and a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘Beg your pardon,’ said Captain Black uncertainly. ‘But we’re looking for – that is, could you help us—’ He stopped. She looked out at him with dark, wondering eyes.
‘If you’re selling something—’ she began.
‘No, wait!’ he cried. ‘What town is this?’
She looked him up and down. ‘What do you mean, what town is it? How could you be in a town and not know the name?’
The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady apple tree. ‘We’re strangers here. We want to know how this town got here and how you got here.’
‘Are you census takers?’
‘No.’
‘Everyone knows,’ she said, ‘this town was built in 1868. Is this a game?’
‘No, not a game!’ cried the captain. ‘We’re from Earth.’
‘Out of the ground, do you mean?’ she wondered.
‘No, we came from the third planet, Earth, in a ship. And we’ve landed here on the fourth planet, Mars—’
‘This,’ explained the woman, as if she were addressing a child, ‘is Green Bluff, Illinois, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on a place called the world, or, sometimes, the Earth. Go away now. Good-by.’
She trotted down the hall, running her fingers through the beaded curtains.
The three men looked at one another.
‘Let’s knock the screen door in,’ said Lustig.
‘We can’t do that. This is private property. Good God!’
They went to sit down on the porch step.
‘Did it ever strike you, Hinkston, that perhaps we got ourselves somehow, in some way, off track, and by accident came back and landed on Earth?’
‘How could we have done that?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Oh God, let me think.’
Hinkston said, ‘But we checked every mile of the way. Our chronometers said so many miles. We went past the Moon and out into space, and here we are. I’m positive we’re on Mars.’
Lustig said, ‘But suppose, by accident, in space, in time, we got lost in the dimensions and landed on an Earth that is thirty or forty years ago.’
‘Oh, go away, Lustig!’
Lustig went to the door, rang the bell, and called into the cool dim rooms: ‘What year is this?’
‘Nineteen twenty-six, of course,’ said the lady, sitting in a rocking chair, taking a sip of her lemonade.
‘Did you hear that?’ Lustig turned wildly to the others. ‘Nineteen twenty-six! We have gone back in time! This is Earth!’
Lustig sat down, and the three men let the wonder and terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred fitfully on their knees. The captain said, ‘I didn’t ask for a thing like this. It scares the hell out of me. How can a thing like this happen? I wish we’d brought Einstein with us.’
‘Will anyone in this town believe us?’ said Hinkston. ‘Are we playing with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn’t we just take off and go home?’
‘No. Not until we try another house.’
They walked three houses down to a little white cottage under an oak tree. ‘I like to be as logical as I can be,’ said the captain. ‘And I don’t believe we’ve put our finger on it yet. Suppose, Hinkston, as you originally suggested, that rocket travel occurred years ago? And when the Earth people lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged psychosis. Then threatened insanity. What would you do as a psychiatrist if faced with such a problem?’
Hinkston thought. ‘Well, I think I’d rearrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every road, and every lake, and even an ocean, I’d do so. Then by some vast crowd hypnosis I’d convince everyone in a town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all.’
‘Good enough, Hinkston. I think we’re on the right track now. That woman in that house back there just thinks she’s living on Earth. It protects her sanity. She and all the others in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay eyes on in your life.’
‘That’s it, sir!’ cried Lustig.
‘Right!’ said Hinkston.
‘Well.’ The captain sighed. ‘Now we’ve got somewhere. I feel better. It’s all a bit more logical. That talk about time and going back and forth and traveling through time turns my stomach upside down. But this way—’ The captain smiled. ‘Well, well, it looks as if we’ll be fairly popular here.’
‘Or will we?’ said Lustig. ‘After all, like the Pilgrims, these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won’t be too happy to see us. Maybe they’ll try to drive us out or kill us.’
‘We have superior weapons. This next house now. Up we go.’
But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming afternoon street. ‘Sir,’ he said.
‘What is it, Lustig?’
‘Oh, sir, sir, what I see—’ said Lustig, and he began to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and shaking, and his face was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if at any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked down the street and began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling, picking himself up, and running on. ‘Look, look!’
‘Don’t let him get away!’ The captain broke into a run.
Now Lustig was running swiftly, shouting. He turned into a yard halfway down the shady street and leaped up upon the porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof.
He was beating at the door, hollering and crying, when Hinkston and the captain ran up behind him. They were all gasping and wheezing, exhausted from their run in the thin air. ‘Grandma! Grandpa!’ cried Lustig.
Two old people stood in the doorway.
‘David!’ their voices piped, and they rushed out to embrace and pat him on the back and move around him. ‘David, oh, David, it’s been so many years! How you’ve grown, boy; how big you are, boy. Oh, David boy, how are you?’
‘Grandma, Grandpa!’ sobbed David Lustig. ‘You look fine, fine!’ He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them, cried on them, held them out again, blinking at the little old people. The sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass was green, the screen door stood wide.
‘Come in, boy, come in. There’s iced tea for you, fresh, lots of it!’
‘I’ve got friends here.’ Lustig turned and waved at the captain and Hinkston frantically, laughing. ‘Captain, come on up.’
‘Howdy,’ said the old people. ‘Come in. Any friends of David’s are our friends too. Don’t stand there!’
In the living room of the old house it was cool, and a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern, and iced tea in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue.
‘Here’s to our health.’ Grandma tipped her glass to her porcelain teeth.
‘How long you been here, Grandma?’ said Lustig.
‘Ever since we died,’ she said tartly.
‘Ever since you what?’ Captain John Black set down his glass.
‘Oh yes.’ Lustig nodded. ‘They’ve been dead thirty years.’
‘And you sit there calmly!’ shouted the captain.
‘Tush.’ The old woman winked glitteringly. ‘Who are you to question what happens? Here we are. What’s life, anyway? Who does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive again, and no questions asked. A second chance.’ She toddled over and held out her thin wrist. ‘Feel.’ The captain felt. ‘Solid, ain’t it?’ she asked. He nodded. ‘Well, then,’ she said triumphantly, ‘why go around questioning?’
‘Well,’ said the captain, ‘it’s simply that we never thought we’d find a thing like this on Mars.’
‘And now you’ve found it. I dare say there’s lots on every planet that’ll show you God’s infinite ways.’
‘Is this Heaven?’ asked Hinkston.
‘Nonsense, no. It’s a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. That other Earth. I mean. The one you came from. How do we know there wasn’t another before that one?’
‘A good question,’ said the captain.
Lustig kept smiling at his grandparents. ‘Gosh, it’s good to see you. Gosh, it’s good.’
The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in a casual fashion. ‘We’ve got to be going. Thank you for the drinks.’
‘You’ll be back, of course,’ said the old people. ‘For supper tonight?’
‘We’ll try to make it, thanks. There’s so much to be done. My men are waiting for me back at the rocket and—’
He stopped. He looked toward the door, startled.
Far away in the sunlight there was a sound of voices, a shouting and a great hello.
‘What’s that?’ asked Hinkston.
‘We’ll soon find out.’ And Captain John Black was out the front door abruptly, running across the green lawn into the street of the Martian town.
He stood looking at the rocket. The ports were open and his crew was streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of people had gathered, and in and through and among these people the members of the crew were hurrying, talking, laughing, shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The rocket lay empty and abandoned.
A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair jumped up and down. Little boys shouted. ‘Hooray!’ Fat men passed around ten-cent cigars. The town mayor made a speech. Then each member of the crew, with a mother on one arm, a father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street into little cottages or big mansions.
‘Stop!’ cried Captain Black.
The doors slammed shut.
The heat rose in the clear spring sky, and all was silent. The brass band banged off around a corner, leaving the rocket to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight.
‘Abandoned!’ said the captain. ‘They abandoned the ship, they did! I’ll have their skins, by God! They had orders!’
‘Sir,’ said Lustig, ‘don’t be too hard on them. Those were all old relatives and friends.’
‘That’s no excuse!’
‘Think how they felt, Captain, seeing familiar faces outside the ship!’
‘They had their orders, damn it!’
‘But how would you have felt, Captain?’
‘I would have obeyed orders—’ The captain’s mouth remained open.
Striding along the sidewalk under the Martian sun, tall, smiling, eyes amazingly clear and blue, came a young man of some twenty-six years. ‘John!’ the man called out, and broke into a trot.
‘What?’ Captain John Black swayed.
‘John, you old son of a bitch!’
The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him on the back.
‘It’s you,’ said Captain Black.
‘Of course, who’d you think it was?’
‘Edward!’ The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston, holding the stranger’s hand. ‘This is my brother Edward. Ed, meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston! My brother!’
They tugged at each other’s hands and arms and then finally embraced. ‘Ed!’ ‘John, you bum, you!’ ‘You’re looking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what is this? You haven’t changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you were twenty-six and I was nineteen. Good God, so many years ago, and here you are and, Lord, what goes on?’
‘Mom’s waiting,’ said Edward Black, grinning.
‘Mom?’
‘And Dad too.’
‘Dad?’ The captain almost fell as if he had been hit by a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and without co-ordination. ‘Mom and Dad alive? Where?’
‘At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue.’
‘The old house.’ The captain stared in delighted amaze. ‘Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?’
Hinkston was gone. He had seen his own house down the street and was running for it. Lustig was laughing. ‘You see, Captain, what happened to everyone on the rocket? They couldn’t help themselves.’
‘Yes. Yes.’ The captain shut his eyes. ‘When I open my eyes you’ll be gone.’ He blinked. ‘You’re still there. God, Ed, but you look fine!’
‘Come on, lunch’s waiting. I told Mom.’
Lustig said, ‘Sir, I’ll be with my grandfolks if you need me.’
‘What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then.’
Edward seized his arm and marched him. ‘There’s the house. Remember it?’
‘Hell! Bet I can beat you to the front porch!’
They ran. The trees roared over Captain Black’s head; the earth roared under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw the house rush forward, the screen door swing wide. ‘Beat you!’ cried Edward. ‘I’m an old man,’ panted the captain, ‘and you’re still young. But then, you always beat me, I remember!’
In the doorway, Mom, pink, plump, and bright. Behind her, pepper-gray, Dad, his pipe in his hand.
‘Mom, Dad!’
He ran up the steps like a child to meet them.
It was a fine long afternoon. They finished a late lunch and they sat in the parlor and he told them all about his rocket and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just the same and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted it thoughtfully in his old fashion. There was a big turkey dinner at night and time flowing on. When the drumsticks were sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain leaned back and exhaled his deep satisfaction. Night was in all the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of pink light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down the street came sounds of music, pianos playing, doors slamming.
Mom put a record on the Victrola, and she and Captain John Black had a dance. She was wearing the same perfume he remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they danced lightly to the music. ‘It’s not every day,’ she said, ‘you get a second chance to live.’
‘I’ll wake in the morning,’ said the captain. ‘And I’ll be in my rocket, in space, and all this will be gone.’
‘No, don’t think that,’ she cried softly. ‘Don’t question. God’s good to us. Let’s be happy.’
‘Sorry, Mom.’
The record ended in a circular hissing.
‘You’re tired. Son.’ Dad pointed with his pipe. ‘Your old bedroom’s waiting for you, brass bed and all.’
‘But I should report my men in.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Well. I don’t know. No reason, I guess. No, none at all. They’re all eating or in bed. A good night’s sleep won’t hurt them.’
‘Good night. Son.’ Mom kissed his cheek. ‘It’s good to have you home.’
‘It’s good to be home.’
He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking with Edward. Edward pushed a door open, and there was the yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college and a very musty raccoon coat which he stroked with muted affection. ‘It’s too much,’ said the captain. ‘I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.’
Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the pillows. He slid the window up and let the night-blooming jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant dancing and whispering.
‘So this is Mars,’ said the captain, undressing.
‘This is it.’ Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves, drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders and the good muscular neck.
The lights were out; they were in bed, side by side, as in the days how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was nourished by the scent of jasmine pushing the lace curtains in upon the dark air of the room. Among the trees, upon a lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it was playing softly, ‘Always.’
The thought of Marilyn came to his mind.
‘Is Marilyn here?’
His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from the window, waited and then said, ‘Yes. She’s out of town. But she’ll be here in the morning.’
The captain shut his eyes. ‘I want to see Marilyn very much.’
The room was square and quiet except for their breathing.
‘Good night, Ed.’
A pause. ‘Good night, John.’
He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the first time the stress of the day was moved aside: he could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the familiar faces. But now …
How? he wondered. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose? Out of the goodness of some divine intervention? Was God, then, really that thoughtful of his children? How and why and what for?
He considered the various theories advanced in the first heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind, turning, throwing out dull flashes of light. Mom. Dad. Edward. Mars, Earth. Mars. Martians.
Who had lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been the way it was today?
Martians. He repeated the word idly, inwardly.
He laughed out loud almost. He had the most ridiculous theory quite suddenly. It gave him a kind of chill. It was really nothing to consider, of course. Highly improbable. Silly, Forget it. Ridiculous.
But, he thought, just suppose … Just suppose, now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and saw us inside our ship and hated us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earth Men with atomic weapons?
The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory, and imagination.
Suppose all of these houses aren’t real at all, this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians, thought Captain John Black. Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions. What better way to fool a man, using his own mother and father as bait?
And this town, so old, from the year 1926, long before any of my men were born. From a year when I was six years old and there were records of Harry Lauder, and Maxfield Parrish paintings still hanging, and bead curtains, and ‘Beautiful Ohio,’ and turn-of-the-century architecture. What if the Martians took the memories of a town exclusively from my mind? They say childhood memories are the clearest. And after they built the town from my mind, they populated it with the most-loved people from all the minds of the people on the rocket!
And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and father at all. But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time.
And that brass band today? What a startlingly wonderful plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then Hinkston, then gather a crowd; and all the men in the rocket, seeing mothers, aunts, uncles, sweethearts, dead ten, twenty years ago, naturally, disregarding orders, rush out and abandon ship. What more natural? What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A man doesn’t ask too many questions when his mother is suddenly brought back to life; he’s much too happy. And here we all are tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us? Sometime during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed will change form, melt, shift, and become another thing, a terrible thing, a Martian. It would be very simple for him just to turn over in bed and put a knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street, a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth …
His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold. Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid.
He lifted himself in bed and listened. The night was very quiet. The music had stopped. The wind had died. His brother lay sleeping beside him.
Carefully he lifted the covers, rolled them back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother’s voice said, ‘Where are you going?’
‘What?’
His brother’s voice was quite cold. ‘I said, where do you think you’re going?’
‘For a drink of water.’
‘But you’re not thirsty.’
‘Yes, yes, I am.’
‘No, you’re not.’
Captain John Black broke and ran across the room. He screamed. He screamed twice.
He never reached the door.
In the morning the brass band played a mournful dirge. From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes, and along the sun-filled street, weeping, came the grandmas and mothers and sisters and brothers and uncles and fathers, walking to the churchyard, where there were new holes freshly dug and new tombstones installed. Sixteen holes in all, and sixteen tombstones.
The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes looking like the mayor, sometimes looking like something else.
Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward, and they cried, their faces melting now from a familiar face into something else.
Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping, their faces shifting like wax, shimmering as all things shimmer on a hot day.
The coffins were lowered. Someone murmured about ‘the unexpected and sudden deaths of sixteen fine men during the night—’
Earth pounded down on the coffin lids.
The brass band, playing ‘Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,’ marched and slammed back into town, and everyone took the day off.
The Silent Towns (#ulink_a8c60543-9fc4-5ff6-b6d3-13992c736fa1)
There was a little white silent town on the edge of the dead Martian sea. The town was empty. No one moved in it. Lonely lights burned in the stores all day. The shop doors were wide, as if people had run off without using their keys. Magazines, brought from Earth on the silver rocket a month before, fluttered, untouched, burning brown, on wire racks fronting the silent drugstores.
The town was dead. Its beds were empty and cold. The only sound was the power hum of electric lines and dynamos, still alive, all by themselves. Water ran in forgotten bathtubs, poured out into living rooms, onto porches, and down through little garden plots to feed neglected flowers. In the dark theaters, gum under the many seats began to harden with tooth impressions still in it.
Across town was a rocket port. You could still smell the hard, scorched smell where the last rocket blasted off when it went back to Earth. If you dropped a dime in the telescope and pointed it at Earth, perhaps you could see the big war happening there. Perhaps you could see New York explode. Maybe London could be seen, covered with a new kind of fog. Perhaps then it might be understood why this small Martian town is abandoned. How quick was the evacuation? Walk in any store, bang the NO SALE key. Cash drawers jump out, all bright and jingly with coins. That war on Earth must be very bad …
Along the empty avenues of this town, now, whistling softly, kicking a tin can ahead of him in deepest concentration, came a tall, thin man. His eyes glowed with a dark, quiet look of loneliness. He moved his bony hands in his pockets, which were tinkling with new dimes. Occasionally he tossed a dime to the ground. He laughed temperately, doing this, and walked on, sprinkling bright dimes everywhere.
His name was Walter Gripp. He had a placer mine and a remote shack far up in the blue Martian hills and he walked to town once every two weeks to see if he could marry a quiet and intelligent woman. Over the years he had always returned to his shack, alone and disappointed. A week ago, arriving in town, he had found it this way!
That day he had been so surprised that he rushed to a delicatessen, flung wide a case, and ordered a triple-decker beef sandwich.
‘Coming up!’ he cried, a towel on his arm.
He flourished meats and bread baked the day before, dusted a table, invited himself to sit, and ate until he had to go find a soda fountain, where he ordered a bicarbonate. The druggist, being one Walter Gripp, was astoundingly polite and fizzed one right up for him!
He stuffed his jeans with money, all he could find. He loaded a boy’s wagon with ten-dollar bills and ran lickety-split through town. Reaching the suburbs, he suddenly realized how shamefully silly he was. He didn’t need money. He rode the ten-dollar bills back to where he’d found them, counted a dollar from his own wallet to pay for the sandwiches, dropped it in the delicatessen till, and added a quarter tip.
That night he enjoyed a hot Turkish bath, a succulent filet carpeted with delicate mushrooms, imported dry sherry, and strawberries in wine. He fitted himself for a new blue flannel suit, and a rich gray Homburg which balanced oddly atop his gaunt head. He slid money into a juke box which played ‘That Old Gang of Mine.’ He dropped nickels in twenty boxes all over town. The lonely streets and the night were full of the sad music of ‘That Old Gang of Mine’ as he walked, tall and thin and alone, his new shoes clumping softly, his cold hands in his pockets.
But that was a week past. He slept in a good house on Mars Avenue, rose mornings at nine, bathed, and idled to town for ham and eggs. No morning passed that he didn’t freeze a ton of meats, vegetables, and lemon cream pies, enough to last ten years, until the rockets came back from Earth, if they ever came.
Now, tonight, he drifted up and down, seeing the wax women in every colorful shop window, pink and beautiful. For the first time he knew how dead the town was. He drew a glass of beer and sobbed gently.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘I’m all alone.’
He entered the Elite Theater to show himself a film, to distract his mind from his isolation. The theater was hollow, empty, like a tomb with phantoms crawling gray and black on the vast screen. Shivering, he hurried from the haunted place.
Having decided to return home, he was striking down the middle of a side street, almost running, when he heard the phone.
He listened.
‘Phone ringing in someone’s house.’
He proceeded briskly.
‘Someone should answer that phone,’ he mused.
He sat on a curb to pick a rock from his shoe, idly.
‘Someone!’ he screamed, leaping. ‘Me! Good Lord, what’s wrong with me!’ he shrieked. He whirled. Which house? That one!
He raced over the lawn, up the steps, into the house, down a dark hall.
He yanked up the receiver.
‘Hello!’ he cried.
Buzzzzzzzzz.
‘Hello, hello!’
They had hung up.
‘Hello!’ he shouted, and banged the phone. ‘You stupid idiot!’ he cried to himself. ‘Sitting on that curb, you fool! Oh, you damned and awful fool!’ He squeezed the phone. ‘Come on, ring again! Come on!’
He had never thought there might be others left on Mars. In the entire week he had seen no one. He had figured that all other towns were as empty as this one.
Now, staring at this terrible little black phone, he trembled. Interlocking dial systems connected every town on Mars. From which of the thirty cities had the call come?
He didn’t know.
He waited. He wandered to the strange kitchen, thawed some iced huckle-berries, ate them disconsolately.
‘There wasn’t anyone on the other end of that call,’ he murmured. ‘Maybe a pole blew down somewhere and the phone rang by itself.’
But hadn’t he heard a click, which meant someone had hung up far away?
He stood in the hall the rest of the night. ‘Not because of the phone,’ he told himself. ‘I just haven’t anything else to do.’
He listened to his watch tick.
‘She won’t phone back,’ he said. ‘She won’t ever call a number that didn’t answer. She’s probably dialing other houses in town right now! And here I sit – Wait a minute!’ He laughed. ‘Why do I keep saying “she”?’
He blinked. ‘It could as easily be a “he,” couldn’t it?’
His heart slowed. He felt very cold and hollow.
He wanted very much for it to be a ‘she.’
He walked out of the house and stood in the center of the early, dim morning street.
He listened. Not a sound. No birds. No cars. Only his heart beating. Beat and pause and beat again. His face ached with strain. The wind blew gently, oh so gently, flapping his coat.
‘Shh,’ he whispered. ‘Listen.’
He swayed in a slow circle, turning his head from one silent house to another.
She’ll phone more and more numbers, he thought. It must be a woman. Why? Only a woman would call and call. A man wouldn’t. A man’s independent. Did I phone anyone? No! Never thought of it. It must be a woman. It has to be, by God!
Listen.
Far away, under the stars, a phone rang.
He ran. He stopped to listen. The ringing, soft. He ran a few more steps. Louder. He raced down an alley. Louder still! He passed six houses, six more. Much louder! He chose a house and its door was locked.
The phone rang inside.
‘Damn you!’ He jerked the doorknob.
The phone screamed.
He heaved a porch chair through the parlor window, leaped in after it.
Before he even touched the phone, it was silent.
He stalked through the house then and broke mirrors, tore down drapes, and kicked in the kitchen stove.
Finally, exhausted, he picked up the thin directory which listed every phone on Mars. Fifty thousand names.
He started with number one.
Amelia Ames. He dialed her number in New Chicago, one hundred miles over the dead sea.
No answer.
Number two lived in New New York, five thousand miles across the blue mountains.
No answer.
He called three, four, five, six, seven, eight, his fingers jerking, unable to grip the receiver.
A woman’s voice answered, ‘Hello?’
Walter cried back at her, ‘Hello, oh Lord, hello!’
‘This is a recording,’ recited the woman’s voice. ‘Miss Helen Arasumian is not home. Will you leave a message on the wire spool so she may call you when she returns? Hello? This is a recording. Miss Arasumian is not home. Will you leave a message—’
He hung up.
He sat with his mouth twitching.
On second thought he redialed that number.
‘When Miss Helen Arasumian comes home,’ he said, ‘tell her to go to hell.’
He phoned Mars Junction, New Boston, Arcadia, and Roosevelt City exchanges, theorizing that they would be logical places for persons to dial from: after that he contacted local city halls and other public institutions in each town. He phoned the best hotels. Leave it to a woman to put herself up in luxury.
Suddenly he stopped, clapped his hands sharply together, and laughed. Of course! He checked the directory and dialed a long-distance call through to the biggest beauty parlor in New Texas City. If ever there was a place where a woman would putter around, patting mud packs on her face and sitting under a drier, it would be a velvet-soft, diamondgem beauty parlor!
The phone rang. Someone at the other end lifted the receiver.
A woman’s voice said, ‘Hello?’
‘If this is a recording,’ announced Walter Gripp, ‘I’ll come over and blow the place up.’
‘This isn’t a record,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘Hello! Oh, hello, there is someone alive! Where are you?’ She gave a delighted scream.
Walter almost collapsed. ‘You!’ He stood up jerkily, eyes wild. ‘Good Lord, what luck, what’s your name?’
‘Genevieve Selsor!’ She wept into the receiver. ‘Oh, I’m so glad to hear from you, whoever you are!’
‘Walter Gripp!’
‘Walter, hello, Walter!’
‘Hello, Genevieve!’
‘Walter. It’s such a nice name. Walter, Walter!’
‘Thank you.’
‘Walter, where are you?’
Her voice was so kind and sweet and fine. He held the phone tight to his ear so she could whisper sweetly into it. He felt his feet drift off the floor. His cheeks burned.
‘I’m in Marlin Village,’ he said. ‘I—’
Buzz.
‘Hello?’ he said.
Buzz.
He jiggled the hook. Nothing.
Somewhere a wind had blown down a pole. As quickly as she had come. Genevieve Selsor was gone.
He dialed, but the line was dead.
‘I know where she is, anyway.’ He ran out of the house. The sun was rising as he backed a beetle-car from the stranger’s garage, filled its back seat with food from the house, and set out at eighty miles an hour down the highway, heading for New Texas City.
A thousand miles, he thought. Genevieve Selsor, sit tight, you’ll hear from me!
He honked his horn on every turn out of town.
At sunset, after an impossible day of driving, he pulled to the roadside, kicked off his tight shoes, laid himself out in the seat, and slid the gray Homburg over his weary eyes. His breathing became slow and regular. The wind blew and the stars shone gently upon him in the new dusk. The Martian mountains lay all around, millions of years old. Starlight glittered on the spires of a little Martian town, no bigger than a game of chess, in the blue hills.
He lay in the half-place between awakeness and dreams. He whispered, Genevieve. Oh, Genevieve, sweet Genevieve, he sang softly, the years may come, the years may go. But Genevieve, sweet Genevieve … There was a warmth in him. He heard her quiet sweet cool voice sighing. Hello, oh, hello, Walter! This is no record. Where are you. Walter, where are you?
He sighed, putting up a hand to touch her in the moonlight. Long dark hair shaking in the wind; beautiful, it was. And her lips like red peppermints. And her cheeks like fresh-cut wet roses. And her body like a clear vaporous mist, while her soft cool sweet voice crooned to him once more the words to the old sad song, Oh, Genevieve, sweet Genevieve, the years may come, the years may go …
He slept.
He reached New Texas City at midnight.
He halted before the Deluxe Beauty Salon, yelling.
He expected her to rush out, all perfume, all laughter.
Nothing happened.
‘She’s asleep.’ He walked to the door. ‘Here I am!’ he called. ‘Hello, Genevieve!’
The town lay in double moonlit silence. Somewhere a wind flapped a canvas awning.
He swung the glass door wide and stepped in.
‘Hey!’ He laughed uneasily. ‘Don’t hide! I know you’re here!’
He searched every booth.
He found a tiny handkerchief on the floor. It smelled so good he almost lost his balance. ‘Genevieve,’ he said.
He drove the car through the empty streets but saw nothing. ‘If this is a practical joke …’
He slowed the car. ‘Wait a minute. We were cut off. Maybe she drove to Marlin Village while I was driving here! She probably took the old Sea Road. We missed each other during the day. How’d she know I’d come get her? I didn’t say I would. And she was so afraid when the phone died that she rushed to Marlin Village to find me! And here I am, by God, what a fool I am!’
Giving the horn a blow, he shot out of town.
He drove all night. He thought. What if she isn’t in Marlin Village waiting, when I arrive?
He wouldn’t think of that. She must be there. And he would run up and hold her and perhaps even kiss her, once, on the lips.
Genevieve, sweet Genevieve, he whistled, stepping it up to one hundred miles an hour.
Marlin Village was quiet at dawn. Yellow lights were still burning in several stores, and a juke box that had played steadily for one hundred hours finally, with a crackle of electricity, ceased, making the silence complete. The sun warmed the streets and warmed the cold and vacant sky.
Walter turned down Main Street, the car lights still on, honking the horn a double toot, six times at one corner, six times at another. He peered at the store names. His face was white and tired, and his hands slid on the sweaty steering wheel.
‘Genevieve!’ he called in the empty street.
The door to a beauty salon opened.
‘Genevieve!’ He stopped the car.
Genevieve Selsor stood in the open door of the salon as he ran across the street. A box of cream chocolates lay open in her arms. Her fingers, cuddling it, were plump and pallid. Her face, as she stepped into the light, was round and thick, and her eyes were like two immense eggs stuck into a white mess of bread dough. Her legs were as big around as the stumps of trees, and she moved with an ungainly shuffle. Her hair was an indiscriminate shade of brown that had been made and remade, it appeared, as a nest for birds. She had no lips at all and compensated this by stenciling on a large red, greasy mouth that now popped open in delight, now shut in sudden alarm. She had plucked her brows to thin antenna lines.
Walter stopped. His smile dissolved. He stood looking at her.
She dropped her candy box to the sidewalk.
‘Are you – Genevieve Selsor?’ His ears rang.
‘Are you Walter Griff?’ she asked.
‘Gripp.’
‘Gripp,’ she corrected herself.
‘How do you do,’ he said with a restrained voice.
‘How do you do.’ She shook his hand.
Her fingers were sticky with chocolate.
‘Well,’ said Walter Gripp.
‘What?’ asked Genevieve Selsor.
‘I just said, “Well,”’ said Walter.
‘Oh.’
It was nine o’clock at night. They had spent the day picnicking, and for supper he had prepared a filet mignon which she didn’t like because it was too rare, so he broiled it some more and it was too much broiled or fried or something. He laughed and said, ‘We’ll see a movie!’ She said okay and put her chocolaty fingers on his elbow. But all she wanted to see was a fifty-year-old film of Clark Gable. ‘Doesn’t he just kill you?’ She giggled. ‘Doesn’t he kill you, now?’ The film ended. ‘Run it off again,’ she commanded. ‘Again?’ he asked. ‘Again,’ she said. And when he returned she snuggled up and put her paws all over him. ‘You’re not quite what I expected, but you’re nice,’ she admitted. ‘Thanks,’ he said, swallowing. ‘Oh, that Gable,’ she said, and pinched his leg. ‘Ouch,’ he said.
After the film they went shopping down the silent streets. She broke a window and put on the brightest dress she could find. Dumping a perfume bottle on her hair, she resembled a drowned sheep dog. ‘How old are you?’ he inquired. ‘Guess.’ Dripping, she led him down the street. ‘Oh, thirty,’ he said. ‘Well,’ she announced stiffly, ‘I’m only twenty-seven, so there!
‘Here’s another candy store!’ she said. ‘Honest, I’ve led the life of Riley since everything exploded. I never liked my folks, they were fools. They left for Earth two months ago. I was supposed to follow on the last rocket, but I stayed on: you know why?’
‘Why?’
‘Because everyone picked on me. So I stayed where I could throw perfume on myself all day and drink ten thousand malts and eat candy without people saying. ‘Oh, that’s full of calories!’ So here I am!’
‘Here you are.’ Walter shut his eyes.
‘It’s getting late,’ she said, looking at him.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m tired,’ she said.
‘Funny. I’m wide awake.’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘I feel like staying up all night,’ he said. ‘Say, there’s a good record at Mike’s. Come on, I’ll play it for you.’
‘I’m tired.’ She glanced up at him with sly, bright eyes.
‘I’m very alert,’ he said. ‘Strange.’
‘Come back to the beauty shop,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something.’
She took him in through the glass door and walked him over to a large white box. ‘When I drove from Texas City,’ she said. ‘I brought this with me.’ She untied the pink ribbon. ‘I thought: Well, here I am, the only lady on Mars, and here is the only man, and, well …’ She lifted the lid and folded back crisp layers of whispery pink tissue paper. She gave it a pat. ‘There.’
Walter Gripp stared.
‘What is it?’ he asked, beginning to tremble.
‘Don’t you know, silly? It’s all lace and all white and all fine and everything.’
‘No, I don’t know what it is.’
‘It’s a wedding dress, silly!’
‘Is it?’ His voice cracked.
He shut his eyes. Her voice was still soft and cool and sweet, as it had been on the phone. But when he opened his eyes and looked at her …
He backed up. ‘How nice,’ he said.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Genevieve.’ He glanced at the door.
‘Yes?’
‘Genevieve, I’ve something to tell you.’
‘Yes?’ She drifted toward him, the perfume smell thick about her round white face.
‘The thing I have to say to you is …’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘Good-by!’
And he was out the door and into his car before she could scream.
She ran and stood on the curb as he swung the car about.
‘Walter Griff, come back here!’ she wailed, flinging up her
arms.
‘Gripp,’ he corrected her.
‘Gripp!’ she shouted.
The car whirled away down the silent street, regardless of her stompings and shriekings. The exhaust from it fluttered the white dress she crumpled in her plump hands, and the stars shone bright, and the car vanished out onto the desert and away into blackness.
He drove all night and all day for three nights and days. Once he thought he saw a car following, and he broke into a shivering sweat and took another highway, cutting off across the lonely Martian world, past little dead cities, and he drove and drove for a week and a day, until he had put ten thousand miles between himself and Marlin Village. Then he pulled into a small town named Holtville Springs, where there were some tiny stores he could light up at night and restaurants to sit in, ordering meals. And he’s lived there ever since, with two deep freezes packed with food to last him one hundred years, and enough cigars to last ten thousand days, and a good bed with a soft mattress.
And when once in a while over the long years the phone rings – he doesn’t answer.
The Earth Men (#ulink_ea82785e-61f6-510d-943e-039d575052d1)
Whoever was knocking at the door didn’t want to stop.
Mrs Ttt threw the door open. ‘Well?’
‘You speak English!’ The man standing there was astounded.
‘I speak what I speak,’ she said.
‘It’s wonderful English!’ The man was in uniform. There were three men with him, in a great hurry, all smiling, all dirty.
‘What do you want?’ demanded Mrs Ttt.
‘You are a Martian!’ The man smiled. ‘The word is not familiar to you, certainly. It’s an Earth expression.’ He nodded at his men. ‘We are from Earth. I’m Captain Williams. We’ve landed on Mars within the hour. Here we are, the Second Expedition! There was a First Expedition, but we don’t know what happened to it. But here we are, anyway. And you are the first Martian we’ve met!’
‘Martian?’ Her eyebrows went up.
‘What I mean to say is, you live on the fourth planet from the sun. Correct?’
‘Elementary,’ she snapped, eying them.
‘And we’ – he pressed his chubby pink hand to his chest – ‘we are from Earth, Right, men?’
‘Right, sir!’ A chorus.
‘This is the planet Tyrr,’ she said, ‘if you want to use the proper name.’
‘Tyrr, Tyrr.’ The captain laughed exhaustedly. ‘What a fine name! But, my good woman, how is it you speak such perfect English?’
‘I’m not speaking, I’m thinking,’ she said. ‘Telepathy! Good day!’ And she slammed the door.
A moment later there was that dreadful man knocking again.
She whipped the door open. ‘What now?’ she wondered.
The man was still there, trying to smile, looking bewildered. He put out his hands. ‘I don’t think you understand—’
‘What?’ she snapped.
The man gazed at her in surprise. ‘We’re from Earth!’
‘I haven’t time,’ she said. ‘I’ve a lot of cooking today and there’s cleaning and sewing and all. You evidently wish to see Mr Ttt; he’s upstairs in his study.’
‘Yes,’ said the Earth Man confusedly, blinking. ‘By all means, let us see Mr Ttt.’
‘He’s busy.’ She slammed the door again.
This time the knock on the door was most impertinently loud.
‘See here!’ cried the man when the door was thrust open again. He jumped in as if to surprise her. ‘This is no way to treat visitors!’
‘All over my clean floor!’ she cried. ‘Mud! Get out! If you come in my house, wash your boots first.’
The man looked in dismay at his muddy boots. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is no time for trivialities. I think,’ he said, ‘we should be celebrating.’ He looked at her for a long time, as if looking might make her understand.
‘If you’ve made my crystal buns fall in the oven,’ she exclaimed, ‘I’ll hit you with a piece of wood!’ She peered into a little hot oven. She came back, red, steamy-faced. Her eyes were sharp yellow, her skin was soft brown, she was thin and quick as an insect. Her voice was metallic and sharp. ‘Wait here. I’ll see if I can let you have a moment with Mr Ttt. What was your business?’
The man swore luridly, as if she’d hit his hand with a hammer. ‘Tell him we’re from Earth and it’s never been done before!’
‘What hasn’t?’ She put her brown hand up. ‘Never mind. I’ll be back.’
The sound of her feet fluttered through the stone house.
Outside, the immense blue Martian sky was hot and still as warm deep sea water. The Martian desert lay broiling like a prehistoric mud pot, waves of heat rising and shimmering. There was a small rocket ship reclining upon a hilltop nearby. Large footprints came from the rocket to the door of this stone house.
Now there was a sound of quarreling voices upstairs. The men within the door stared at one another, shifting on their boots, twiddling their fingers, and holding onto their hip belts. A man’s voice shouted upstairs. The woman’s voice replied. After fifteen minutes the Earth Men began walking in and out the kitchen door, with nothing to do.
‘Cigarette?’ said one of the men.
Somebody got out a pack and they lit up. They puffed slow streams of pale white smoke. They adjusted their uniforms, fixed their collars. The voices upstairs continued to mutter and chant. The leader of the men looked at his watch.
‘Twenty-five minutes,’ he said. ‘I wonder what they’re up to up there.’ He went to a window and looked out.
‘Hot day,’ said one of the men.
‘Yeah,’ said someone else in the slow warm time of early afternoon. The voices had faded to a murmur and were now silent. There was not a sound in the house. All the men could hear was their own breathing.
An hour of silence passed. ‘I hope we didn’t cause any trouble,’ said the captain. He went and peered into the living room.
Mrs Ttt was there, watering some flowers that grew in the center of the room.
‘I knew I had forgotten something,’ she said when she saw the captain. She walked out to the kitchen. ‘I’m sorry.’ She handed him a slip of paper. ‘Mr Ttt is much too busy.’ She turned to her cooking. ‘Anyway, it’s not Mr Ttt you want to see: it’s Mr Aaa. Take that paper over to the next farm, by the blue canal, and Mr Aaa’ll advise you about whatever it is you want to know.’
‘We don’t want to know anything,’ objected the captain, pouting out his thick lips. ‘We already know it.’
‘You have the paper, what more do you want?’ she asked him straight off. And she would say no more.
‘Well,’ said the captain, reluctant to go. He stood as if waiting for something. He looked like a child staring at an empty Christmas tree. ‘Well,’ he said again. ‘Come on, men.’
The four men stepped out into the hot silent day.
Half an hour later, Mr Aaa, seated in his library sipping a bit of electric fire from a metal cup, heard the voices outside in the stone causeway. He leaned over the window sill and gazed at the four uniformed men who squinted up at him.
‘Are you Mr Aaa?’ they called.
‘I am.’
‘Mr Ttt sent us to see you!’ shouted the captain.
‘Why did he do that?’ asked Mr Aaa.
‘He was busy!’
‘Well, that’s a shame,’ said Mr Aaa sarcastically. ‘Does he think I have nothing else to do but entertain people he’s too busy to bother with?’
‘That’s not the important thing, sir,’ shouted the captain.
‘Well, it is to me. I have much reading to do. Mr Ttt is inconsiderate. This is not the first time he has been this thoughtless of me. Stop waving your hands, sir, until I finish. And pay attention. People usually listen to me when I talk. And you’ll listen courteously or I won’t talk at all.’
Uneasily the four men in the court shifted and opened their mouths, and once the captain, the veins on his face bulging, showed a few little tears in his eyes.
‘Now,’ lectured Mr Aaa, ‘do you think it fair of Mr Ttt to be so ill-mannered?’
The four men gazed up through the heat. The captain said, ‘We’re from Earth!’
‘I think it very ungentlemanly of him,’ brooded Mr Aaa.
‘A rocket ship. We came in it. Over there!’
‘Not the first time Ttt’s been unreasonable, you know.’
‘All the way from Earth.’
‘Why, for half a mind, I’d call him up and tell him off.’
‘Just the four of us; myself and these three men, my crew.’
‘I’ll call him up, yes, that’s what I’ll do!’
‘Earth. Rocket. Men. Trip. Space.’
‘Call him and give him a good lashing!’ cried Mr Aaa. He vanished like a puppet from a stage. For a minute there were angry voices back and forth over some weird mechanism or other. Below, the captain and his crew glanced longingly back at their pretty rocket ship lying on the hillside, so sweet and lovely and fine.
Mr Aaa jerked up in the window, wildly triumphant. ‘Challenged him to a duel, by the gods! A duel!’
‘Mr Aaa—’ the captain started all over again, quietly.
‘I’ll shoot him dead, do you hear!’
‘Mr Aaa, I’d like to tell you. We came sixty million miles.’
Mr Aaa regarded the captain for the first time. ‘Where’d you say you were from?’
The captain flashed a white smile. Aside to his men he whispered, ‘Now we’re getting someplace!’ To Mr Aaa he called, ‘We traveled sixty million miles. From Earth!’
Mr Aaa yawned. ‘That’s only fifty million miles this time of year.’ He picked up a frightful-looking weapon. ‘Well, I have to go now. Just take that silly note, though I don’t know what good it’ll do you, and go over that hill into the little town of Iopr and tell Mr Iii all about it. He’s the man you want to see. Not Mr Ttt, he’s an idiot; I’m going to kill him. Not me, because you’re not in my line of work.’
‘Line of work, line of work!’ bleated the captain. ‘Do you have to be in a certain line of work to welcome Earth Men!’
‘Don’t be silly, everyone knows that!’ Mr Aaa rushed downstairs. ‘Goodby!’ And down the causeway he raced, like a pair of wild calipers.
The four travelers stood shocked. Finally the captain said, ‘We’ll find someone yet who’ll listen to us.’
‘Maybe we could go out and come in again,’ said one of the men in a dreary voice. ‘Maybe we should take off and land again. Give them time to organize a party.’
‘That might be a good idea,’ murmured the tired captain.
The little town was full of people drifting in and out of doors, saying hello to one another, wearing golden masks and blue masks and crimson masks for pleasant variety, masks with silver lips and bronze eyebrows, masks that smiled or masks that frowned, according to the owners’ dispositions.
The four men, wet from their long walk, paused and asked a little girl where Mr Iii’s house was.
‘There.’ The child nodded her head.
The captain got eagerly, carefully down on one knee, looking into her sweet young face. ‘Little girl, I want to talk to you.’
He seated her on his knee and folded her small brown hands neatly in his own big ones, as if ready for a bedtime story which he was shaping in his mind slowly and with a great patient happiness in details.
‘Well, here’s how it is, little girl. Six months ago another rocket came to Mars. There was a man named York in it, and his assistant. Whatever happened to them, we don’t know. Maybe they crashed. They came in a rocket. So did we. You should see it! A big rocket! So we’re the Second Expedition, following up the First. And we came all the way from Earth …’
The little girl disengaged one hand without thinking about it, and clapped an expressionless golden mask over her face. Then she pulled forth a golden spider toy and dropped it to the ground while the captain talked on. The toy spider climbed back up to her knee obediently, while she speculated upon it coolly through the slits of her emotionless mask and the captain shook her gently and urged his story upon her.
‘We’re Earth Men,’ he said. ‘Do you believe me?’
‘Yes.’ The little girl peeped at the way she was wiggling her toes in the dust.
‘Fine.’ The captain pinched her arm, a little bit with joviality, a little bit with meanness to get her to look at him. ‘We built our own rocket ship. Do you believe that?’
The little girl dug in her nose with a finger. ‘Yes.’
‘And – take your finger out of your nose, little girl – I am the captain, and—’
‘Never before in history has anybody come across space in a big rocket ship,’ recited the little creature, eyes shut.
‘Wonderful! How did you know?’
‘Oh, telepathy.’ She wiped a casual finger on her knee.
‘Well, aren’t you just ever so excited?’ cried the captain. ‘Aren’t you glad?’
‘You just better go see Mr Iii right away.’ She dropped her toy to the ground. ‘Mr Iii will like talking to you.’ She ran off, with the toy spider scuttling obediently after her.
The captain squatted there looking after her with his hand out. His eyes were watery in his head. He looked at his empty hands. His mouth hung open. The other three men stood with their shadows under them. They spat on the stone street …
Mr Iii answered his door. He was on his way to a lecture, but he had a minute, if they would hurry inside and tell him what they desired …
‘A little attention,’ said the captain, red-eyed and tired. ‘We’re from Earth, we have a rocket, there are four of us, crew and captain, we’re exhausted, we’re hungry, we’d like a place to sleep. We’d like someone to give us the key to the city or something like that, and we’d like somebody to shake our hands and say ‘Hooray’ and say ‘Congratulations, old man!’ That about sums it up.’
Mr Iii was a tall, vaporous, thin man with thick blind blue crystals over his yellowish eyes. He bent over his desk and brooded upon some papers, glancing now and again with extreme penetration at his guests.
‘Well, I haven’t the forms with me here, I don’t think.’ He rummaged through the desk drawers. ‘Now, where did I put the forms?’ He mused. ‘Somewhere. Somewhere. Oh, here we are! Now!’ He handed the papers over crisply. ‘You’ll have to sign these papers, of course.’
‘Do we have to go through all this rigmarole?’
Mr Iii gave him a thick glassy look. ‘You say you’re from Earth, don’t you? Well, then there’s nothing for it but you sign.’
The captain wrote his name. ‘Do you want my crew to sign also?’
Mr Iii looked at the captain, looked at the three others, and burst into a shout of derision. ‘Them sign! Ho! How marvelous! Them, oh, them sign!’ Tears sprang from his eyes. He slapped his knee and bent to let his laughter jerk out of his gaping mouth. He held himself up with the desk. ‘Them sign!’
The four men scowled. ‘What’s funny?’
‘Them sign!’ sighed Mr Iii, weak with hilarity. ‘So very funny. I’ll have to tell Mr Xxx about this!’ He examined the filled-out form, still laughing. ‘Everything seems to be in order.’ He nodded. ‘Even the agreement for euthanasia if final decision on such a step is necessary.’ He chuckled.
‘Agreement for what?’
‘Don’t talk. I have something for you. Here. Take this key.’
The captain flushed. ‘It’s a great honor.’
‘Not the key to the city, you fool!’ snapped Mr Iii. ‘Just a key to the House. Go down that corridor, unlock the big door, and go inside and shut the door tight. You can spend the night there. In the morning I’ll send Mr Xxx to see you.’
Dubiously the captain took the key in hand. He stood looking at the floor. His men did not move. They seemed to be emptied of all their blood and their rocket fever. They were drained dry.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ inquired Mr Iii. ‘What are you waiting for? What do you want?’ He came and peered up into the captain’s face, stooping. ‘Out with it, you!’
‘I don’t suppose you could even—’ suggested the captain. ‘I mean, that is, try to, or think about …’ He hesitated. ‘We’ve worked hard, we’ve come a long way, and maybe you could just shake our hands and say ‘Well done!’ do you – think?’ His voice faded.
Mr Iii stuck out his hand stiffly. ‘Congratulations!’ He smiled a cold smile. ‘Congratulations.’ He turned away. ‘I must go now. Use that key.’
Without noticing them again, as if they had melted down through the floor, Mr Iii moved about the room packing a little manuscript case with papers. He was in the room another five minutes but never again addressed the solemn quartet that stood with heads down, their heavy legs sagging, the light dwindling from their eyes. When Mr Iii went out the door he was busy looking at his fingernails …
They straggled along the corridor in the dull, silent afternoon light. They came to a large burnished silver door, and the silver key opened it. They entered, shut the door, and turned.
They were in a vast sunlit hall. Men and women sat at tables and stood in conversing groups. At the sound of the door they regarded the four uniformed men.
One Martian stepped forward, bowing. ‘I am Mr Uuu,’ he said.
‘And I am Captain Jonathan Williams, of New York City, on Earth,’ said the captain without emphasis.
Immediately the hall exploded!
The rafters trembled with shouts and cries. The people, rushing forward, waved and shrieked happily, knocking down tables, swarming, rollicking, seizing the four Earth Men, lifting them swiftly to their shoulders. They charged about the hall six times, six times making a full and wonderful circuit of the room, jumping, bounding, singing.
The Earth Men were so stunned that they rode the toppling shoulders for a full minute before they began to laugh and shout at each other:
‘Hey! This is more like it!’
‘This is the life! Boy! Yay! Yow! Whoopee!’
They winked tremendously at each other. They flung up their hands to clap the air. ‘Hey!’
‘Hooray!’ said the crowd.
They set the Earth Men on a table. The shouting died.
The captain almost broke into tears. ‘Thank you. It’s good, it’s good.’
‘Tell us about yourselves,’ suggested Mr Uuu.
The captain cleared his throat.
The audience ohed and ahed as the captain talked. He introduced his crew; each made a small speech and was embarrassed by the thunderous applause.
Mr Uuu clapped the captain’s shoulder. ‘It’s good to see another man from Earth. I am from Earth also.’
‘How was that again?’
‘There are many of us here from Earth.’
‘You? From Earth?’ The captain stared. ‘But is that possible? Did you come by rocket? Has space travel been going on for centuries?’ His voice was disappointed. ‘What – what country are you from?’
‘Tuiereol. I came by the spirit of my body, years ago.’
‘Tuiereol.’ The captain mouthed the word. ‘I don’t know that country. What’s this about spirit of body?’
‘And Miss Rrr over here, she’s from Earth, too, aren’t you, Miss Rrr?’
Miss Rrr nodded and laughed strangely.
‘And so is Mr Www and Mr Qqq and Mr Vvv!’
‘I’m from Jupiter,’ declared one man, preening himself.
‘I’m from Saturn,’ said another, eyes glinting slyly.
‘Jupiter, Saturn,’ murmured the captain, blinking.
It was very quiet now; the people stood around and sat at the tables which were strangely empty for banquet tables. Their yellow eyes were glowing, and there were dark shadows under their cheekbones. The captain noticed for the first time that there were no windows; the light seemed to permeate the walls. There was only one door. The captain winced. ‘This is confusing. Where on Earth is this Tuiereol? Is it near America?’
‘What is America?’
‘You never heard of America! You say you’re from Earth and yet you don’t know!’
Mr Uuu drew himself up angrily. ‘Earth is a place of seas and nothing but seas. There is no land. I am from Earth, and know.’
‘Wait a minute.’ The captain sat back. ‘You look like a regular Martian. Yellow eyes. Brown skin.’
‘Earth is a place of all jungle,’ said Miss Rrr proudly. ‘I am from Orri, on Earth, a civilization built of silver!’
Now the captain turned his head from and then to Mr Uuu and then to Mr Www and Mr Zzz and Mr Nnn and Mr Hhh and Mr Bbb. He saw their yellow eyes waxing and waning in the light, focusing and unfocusing. He began to shiver. Finally he turned to his men and regarded them somberly.
‘Do you realize what this is?’
‘What, sir?’
‘This is no celebration,’ replied the captain tiredly. ‘This is no banquet. These aren’t government representatives. This is no surprise party. Look at their eyes. Listen to them!’
Nobody breathed. There was only a soft white move of eyes in the close room.
‘Now I understand’ – the captain’s voice was far away – ‘why everyone gave us notes and passed us on, one from the other, until we met Mr Iii, who sent us down a corridor with a key to open a door and shut a door. And here we are …’
‘Where are we, sir?’
The captain exhaled. ‘In an insane asylum.’
It was night. The large hall lay quiet and dimly illumined by hidden light sources in the transparent walls. The four Earth Men sat around a wooden table, their bleak heads bent over their whispers. On the floors, men and women lay huddled. There were little stirs in the dark corners, solitary men or women gesturing their hands. Every half-hour one of the captain’s men would try the silver door and return to the table. ‘Nothing doing, sir. We’re locked in proper.’
‘They think we’re really insane, sir?’
‘Quite. That’s why there was no hullabaloo to welcome us. They merely tolerated what, to them, must be a constantly recurring psychotic condition.’ He gestured at the dark sleeping shapes all about them. ‘Paranoids, every single one! What a welcome they gave us! For a moment there’ – a little fire rose and died in his eyes – ‘I thought we were getting our true reception. All the yelling and singing and speeches. Pretty nice, wasn’t it – while it lasted?’
‘How long will they keep us here, sir?’
‘Until we prove we’re not psychotics.’
‘That should be easy.’
‘I hope so.’
‘You don’t sound very certain, sir.’
‘I’m not. Look in that corner.’
A man squatted alone in darkness. Out of his mouth issued a blue flame which turned into the round shape of a small naked woman. It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt light, whispering and sighing.
The captain nodded at another corner. A woman stood there, changing. First she was embedded in a crystal pillar, then she melted into a golden statue, finally a staff of polished cedar, and back to a woman.
All through the midnight hall people were juggling thin violet flames, shifting, changing, for nighttime was the time of change and affliction.
‘Magicians, sorcerers,’ whispered one of the Earth Men.
‘No, hallucination. They pass their insanity over into us so that we see their hallucinations too. Telepathy. Autosuggestion and telepathy.’
‘Is that what worries you, sir?’
‘Yes. If hallucinations can appear this “real” to us, to anyone, if hallucinations are catching and almost believable, it’s no wonder they mistook us for psychotics. If that man can produce little blue fire women and that woman there melt into a pillar, how natural if normal Martians think we produce our rocket ship with our minds.’
‘Oh,’ said his men in the shadows.
Around them, in the vast hall, flames leaped blue, flared, evaporated. Little demons of red sand ran between the teeth of sleeping men. Women became oily snakes. There was a smell of reptiles and animals.
In the morning everyone stood around looking fresh, happy, and normal. There were no flames or demons in the room. The captain and his men waited by the silver door, hoping it would open.
Mr Xxx arrived after about four hours. They had a suspicion that he had waited outside the door, peering in at them for at least three hours before he stepped in, beckoned, and led them to his small office.
He was a jovial, smiling man, if one could believe the mask he wore, for upon it was painted not one smile, but three. Behind it, his voice was the voice of a not so smiling psychologist. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’
‘You think we’re insane, and we’re not,’ said the captain.
‘Contrarily, I do not think all of you are insane.’ The psychologist pointed a little wand at the captain. ‘No. Just you, sir. The others are secondary hallucinations.’
The captain slapped his knee. ‘So that’s it! That’s why Mr Iii laughed when I suggested my men sign the papers too!’
‘Yes, Mr Iii told me.’ The psychologist laughed out of the carved, smiling mouth. ‘A good joke. Where was I? Secondary hallucinations, yes. Women come to me with snakes crawling from their ears. When I cure them, the snakes vanish.’
‘We’ll be glad to be cured. Go right ahead.’
Mr Xxx seemed surprised. ‘Unusual. Not many people want to be cured. The cure is drastic, you know.’
‘Cure ahead! I’m confident you’ll find we’re all sane.’
‘Let me check your papers to be sure they’re in order for a “cure.”’ He checked a file. ‘Yes. You know, such cases as yours need special “curing.” The people in that hall are simpler forms. But once you’ve gone this far, I must point out, with primary, secondary, auditory, olfactory, and labial hallucinations, as well as tactile and optical fantasies, it is pretty bad business. We have to resort to euthanasia.’
The captain leaped up with a roar. ‘Look here, we’ve stood quite enough! Test us, tap our knees, check our hearts, exercise us, ask questions!’
‘You are free to speak.’
The captain raved for an hour. The psychologist listened.
‘Incredible,’ he mused. ‘Most detailed dream fantasy I’ve ever heard.’
‘God damn it, we’ll show you the rocket ship!’ screamed the captain.
‘I’d like to see it. Can you manifest it in this room?’
‘Oh, certainly. It’s in that file of yours, under R.’
Mr Xxx peered seriously into his file. He went ‘Tsk’ and shut the file solemnly. ‘Why did you tell me to look? The rocket isn’t there.’
‘Of course not, you idiot! I was joking. Does an insane man joke?’
‘You find some odd senses of humor. Now, take me out to your rocket. I wish to see it.’
It was noon. The day was very hot when they reached the rocket.
‘So.’ The psychologist walked up to the ship and tapped it. It gonged softly. ‘May I go inside?’ he asked slyly.
‘You may.’
Mr Xxx stepped in and was gone for a long time.
‘Of all the silly, exasperating things.’ The captain chewed a cigar as he waited. ‘For two cents I’d go back home and tell people not to bother with Mars. What a suspicious bunch of louts.’
‘I gather that a good number of their population are insane, sir. That seems to be their main reason for doubting.’
‘Nevertheless, this is all so damned irritating.’
The psychologist emerged from the ship after half an hour of prowling, tapping, listening, smelling, tasting.
‘Now do you believe!’ shouted the captain, as if he were deaf.
The psychologist shut his eyes and scratched his nose. ‘This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination and hypnotic suggestion I’ve ever encountered. I went through your “rocket,” as you call it.’ He tapped the hull. ‘I hear it. Auditory fantasy.’ He drew a breath. ‘I smell it. Olfactory hallucination, induced by sensual telepathy.’ He kissed the ship. ‘I taste it. Labial fantasy!’
He shook the captain’s hand. ‘May I congratulate you? You are a psychotic genius! You have done a most complete job! The task of projecting your psychotic image life into the mind of another via telepathy and keeping the hallucinations from becoming sensually weaker is almost impossible. Those people in the House usually concentrate on visuals or, at the most, visuals and auditory fantasies combined. You have balanced the whole conglomeration! Your insanity is beautifully complete!’
‘My insanity.’ The captain was pale.
‘Yes, yes, what a lovely insanity. Metal, rubber, gravitizers, foods, clothing, fuel, weapons, ladders, nuts, bolts, spoons. Ten thousand separate items I checked on your vessel. Never have I seen such a complexity. There were even shadows under the bunks and under everything! Such concentration of will! And everything, no matter how or when tested, had a smell, a solidity, a taste, a sound! Let me embrace you!’
He stood back at last. ‘I’ll write this into my greatest monograph! I’ll speak of it at the Martian Academy next month! Look at you! Why, you’ve even changed your eye color from yellow to blue, your skin to pink from brown. And those clothes, and your hands having five fingers instead of six! Biological metamorphosis through psychological imbalance! And your three friends—’
He took out a little gun. ‘Incurable, of course. You poor, wonderful man. You will be happier dead. Have you any last words?’
‘Stop, for God’s sake! Don’t shoot!’
‘You sad creature. I shall put you out of this misery which has driven you to imagine this rocket and these three men. It will be most engrossing to watch your friends and your rocket vanish once I have killed you. I will write a neat paper on the dissolvement of neurotic images from what I perceive here today.’
‘I’m from Earth! My name is Jonathan Williams, and these—’
‘Yes, I know,’ soothed Mr Xxx, and fired his gun.
The captain fell with a bullet in his heart. The other three men screamed.
Mr Xxx stared at them. ‘You continue to exist? This is superb! Hallucinations with time and spatial persistence!’ He pointed the gun at them. ‘Well. I’ll scare you into dissolving.’
‘No!’ cried the three men.
‘An auditory appeal, even with the patient dead,’ observed Mr Xxx as he shot the three men down.
They lay on the sand, intact, not moving.
He kicked them. Then he rapped on the ship.
‘It persists! They persist!’ He fired his gun again and again at the bodies. Then he stood back. The smiling mask dropped from his face.
Slowly the little psychologist’s face changed. His jaw sagged. The gun dropped from his fingers. His eyes were dull and vacant. He put his hands up and turned in a blind circle. He fumbled at the bodies, saliva filling his mouth.
‘Hallucinations,’ he mumbled frantically. ‘Taste. Sight. Smell. Sound. Feeling.’ He waved his hands. His eyes bulged. His mouth began to give off a faint froth.
‘Go away!’ he shouted at the bodies. ‘Go away!’ he screamed at the ship. He examined his trembling hands. ‘Contaminated,’ he whispered wildly. ‘Carried over into me. Telepathy. Hypnosis. Now I’m insane. Now I’m contaminated. Hallucinations in all their sensual forms.’ He stopped and searched around with his numb hands for the gun. ‘Only one cure. Only one way to make them go away, vanish.’
A shot rang out. Mr Xxx fell.
The four bodies lay in the sun. Mr Xxx lay where he fell.
The rocket reclined on the little sunny hill and didn’t vanish.
When the town people found the rocket at sunset they wondered what it was. Nobody knew, so it was sold to a junkman and hauled off to be broken up for scrap metal.
That night it rained all night. The next day was fair and warm.
The Off Season (#ulink_26c3430e-9749-5ad5-b047-42330c1eb2d5)
Sam Parkhill motioned with the broom, sweeping away the blue Martian sand.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Yes, sir, look at that!’ He pointed. ‘Look at that sign. SAM’S HOT DOGS! Ain’t that beautiful, Elma?’
‘Sure, Sam,’ said his wife.
‘Boy, what a change for me. If the boys from the Fourth Expedition could see me now. Am I glad to be in business myself while all the rest of them guys’re off soldiering around still. We’ll make thousands, Elma, thousands.’
His wife looked at him for a long time, not speaking. ‘Whatever happened to Captain Wilder?’ she asked finally. ‘That captain that killed that guy who thought he was going to kill off every other Earth Man, what was his name?’
‘Spender, that nut. He was too damn particular. Oh, Captain Wilder? He’s off on a rocket to Jupiter, I hear. They kicked him upstairs. I think he was a little batty abouts Mars too. Touchy, you know. He’ll be back down from Jupiter and Pluto in about twenty years if he’s lucky. That’s what he gets for shooting off his mouth. And while he’s freezing to death, look at me, look at this place!’
This was a crossroads where two dead highways came and went in darkness. Here Sam Parkhill had flung up this riveted aluminum structure, garish with white light, trembling with juke-box melody.
He stooped to fix a border of broken glass he had placed on the footpath. He had broken the glass from some old Martian buildings in the hills. ‘Best hot dogs on two worlds! First man on Mars with a hot-dog stand! The best onions and chili and mustard! You can’t say I’m not alert. Here’s the main highways, over there is the dead city and the mineral deposits. Those trucks from Earth Settlement 101 will have to pass here twenty-four hours a day! Do I know my locations, or don’t I?’
His wife looked at her fingernails.
‘You think those ten thousand new-type work rockets will come through to Mars?’ she said at last.
‘In a month,’ he said loudly. ‘Why you look so funny?’
‘I don’t trust those Earth people,’ she said. ‘I’ll believe it when I see them ten thousand rockets arrive with the one hundred thousand Mexicans and Chinese on them.’
‘Customers.’ He lingered on the word. ‘One hundred thousand hungry people.’
‘If,’ said his wife slowly, watching the sky, ‘there’s no atomic war. I don’t trust no atom bombs. There’s so many of them on Earth now, you never can tell.’
‘Ah,’ said Sam, and went on sweeping.
From the corners of his eyes he caught a blue flicker. Something floated in the air gently behind him. He heard his wife say, ‘Sam. A friend of yours to see you.’
Sam whirled to see the mask seemingly floating in the wind.
‘So you’re back again!’ And Sam held his broom like a weapon.
The mask nodded. It was cut from pale blue glass and was fitted above a thin neck, under which were blowing loose robes of thin yellow silk. From the silk two mesh silver hands appeared. The mask mouth was a slot from which musical sounds issued now as the robes, the mask, the hands increased to a height, decreased.
‘Mr Parkhill, I’ve come back to speak to you again,’ the voice said from behind the mask.
‘I thought I told you I don’t want you near here!’ cried Sam. ‘Go on, I’ll give you the Disease!’
‘I’ve already had the Disease,’ said the voice. ‘I was one of the few survivors. I was sick a long time.’
‘Go on and hide in the hills, that’s where you belong, that’s where you’ve been. Why you come on down and bother me? Now, all of a sudden. Twice in one day.’
‘We mean you no harm.’
‘But I mean you harm!’ said Sam, backing up. ‘I don’t like strangers. I don’t like Martians. I never seen one before. It ain’t natural. All these years you guys hide, and all of a sudden you pick on me. Leave me alone.’
‘We come for an important reason,’ said the blue mask.
‘If it’s about this land, it’s mine. I built this hot-dog stand with my own hands.’
‘In a way it is about the land.’
‘Look here,’ said Sam. ‘I’m from New York City. Where I come from there’s ten million others just like me. You Martians are a couple dozen left, got no cities, you wander around in the hills, no leaders, no laws, and now you come tell me about this land. Well, the old got to give way to the new. That’s the law of give and take. I got a gun here. After you left this morning I got it out and loaded it.’
‘We Martians are telepathic,’ said the cold blue mask. ‘We are in contact with one of your towns across the dead sea. Have you listened on your radio?’
‘My radio’s busted.’
‘Then you don’t know. There’s big news. It concerns Earth—’
A silver hand gestured. A bronze tube appeared in it.
‘Let me show you this.’
‘A gun,’ cried Sam Parkhill.
An instant later he had yanked his own gun from his hip holster and fired into the mist, the robe, the blue mask.
The mask sustained itself a moment. Then, like a small circus tent pulling up its stakes and dropping soft fold on fold, the silks rustled, the mask descended, the silver claws tinkled on the stone path. The mask lay on a small huddle of silent white bones and material.
Sam stood gasping.
His wife swayed over the huddled pile.
‘That’s no weapon,’ she said, bending down. She picked up the bronze tube. ‘He was going to show you a message. It’s all written out in snake-script, all the blue snakes. I can’t read it. Can you?’
‘No, that Martian picture writing, it wasn’t anything. Let it go!’ Sam glanced hastily around. ‘There may be others! We’ve got to get him out of sight. Get the shovel!’
‘What’re you going to do?’
‘Bury him, of course!’
‘You shouldn’t have shot him.’
‘It was a mistake. Quick!’
Silently she fetched him the shovel.
At eight o’clock he was back sweeping the front of the hot-dog stand self-consciously. His wife stood, arms folded, in the bright doorway.
‘I’m sorry what happened,’ he said. He looked at her, then away. ‘You know it was purely the circumstances of Fate.’
‘Yes,’ said his wife.
‘I hated like hell to see him take out that weapon.’
‘What weapon?’
‘Well, I thought it was one! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! How many times do I say it!’
‘Ssh,’ said Elma, putting one finger to her lips. ‘Ssh.’
‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I got the whole Earth Settlements. Inc., back of me!’ He snorted. ‘These Martians won’t dare—’
‘Look,’ said Elma.
He looked out onto the dead sea bottom. He dropped his broom. He picked it up and his mouth was open, a little free drop of saliva flew on the air, and he was suddenly shivering.
‘Elma, Elma, Elma!’ he said.
‘Here they come,’ said Elma.
Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue ghosts, like blue smoke.
‘Sand ships! But there aren’t any more, Elma, no more sand ships.’
‘Those seem to be sand ships,’ she said.
‘But the authorities confiscated all of them! They broke them up, sold some at auction! I’m the only one in this whole damn territory’s got one and knows how to run one.’
‘Not any more,’ she said, nodding at the sea.
‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’
‘Why?’ she asked slowly, fascinated with the Martian vessels.
‘They’ll kill me! Get in our truck, quick!’
Elma didn’t move.
He had to drag her around back of the stand where the two machines stood, his truck, which he had used steadily until a month ago, and the old Martian sand ship which he had bid for at auction, smiling, and which, during the last three weeks, he had used to carry supplies back and forth over the glassy sea floor. He looked at his truck now and remembered. The engine was out on the ground; he had been puttering with it for two days.
‘The truck don’t seem to be in running condition,’ said Elma.
‘The sand ship. Get in!’
‘And let you drive me in a sand ship? Oh no.’
‘Get in! I can do it!’
He shoved her in, jumped in behind her, and flapped the tiller, let the cobalt sail up to take the evening wind.
The stars were bright and the blue Martian ships were skimming across the whispering sands. At first his own ship would not move, then he remembered the sand anchor and yanked it in.
‘There!’
The wind hurled the sand ship keening over the dead sea bottom, over long-buried crystals, past upended pillars, past deserted docks of marble and brass, past dead white chess cities, past purple foothills, into distance. The figures of the Martian ships receded and then began to pace Sam’s ship.
‘Guess I showed them, by God!’ cried Sam. ‘I’ll report to the Rocket Corporation. They’ll give me protection! I’m pretty quick.’
‘They could have stopped you if they wanted,’ Elma said tiredly. ‘They just didn’t bother.’
He laughed. ‘Come off it. Why should they let me get off? No, they weren’t quick enough, is all.’
‘Weren’t they?’ Elma nodded behind him.
He did not turn. He felt a cold wind blowing. He was afraid to turn. He felt something in the seat behind him, something as frail as your breath on a cold morning, something as blue as hickory-wood smoke at twilight, something like old white lace, something like a snowfall, something like the icy rime of winter on the brittle sedge.
There was a sound as of a thin plate of glass broken – laughter. Then silence. He turned.
The young woman sat at the tiller bench quietly. Her wrists were thin as icicles, her eyes as clear as the moons and as large, steady and white. The wind blew at her and, like an image on cold water, she rippled, silk standing out from her frail body in tatters of blue rain.
‘Go back,’ she said.
‘No.’ Sam was quivering, the fine, delicate fear-quivering of a hornet suspended in the air, undecided between fear and hate. ‘Get off my ship!’
‘This isn’t your ship,’ said the vision. ‘It’s old as our world. It sailed the sand seas ten thousand years ago when the seas were whispered away and the docks were empty, and you came and took it, stole it. Now turn it around, go back to the crossroad place. We have need to talk with you. Something important has happened.’
‘Get off my ship!’ said Sam. He took a gun from his holster with a creak of leather. He pointed it carefully. ‘Jump off before I count three or—’
‘Don’t!’ cried the girl. ‘I won’t hurt you. Neither will the others. We came in peace!’
‘One,’ said Sam.
‘Sam!’ said Elma.
‘Listen to me,’ said the girl.
‘Two,’ said Sam firmly, cocking the gun trigger.
‘Sam!’ cried Elma.
‘Three,’ said Sam.
‘We only—’ said the girl.
The gun went off.
In the sunlight, snow melts, crystals evaporate into a steam, into nothing. In the firelight, vapors dance and vanish. In the core of a volcano, fragile things burst and disappear. The girl, in the gunfire, in the heat, in the concussion, folded like a soft scarf, melted like a crystal figurine. What was left of her, ice, snowflake, smoke, blew away in the wind. The tiller seat was empty.
Sam holstered his gun and did not look at his wife.
‘Sam,’ she said after a minute more of traveling, whispering over the moon-colored sea of sand, ‘stop the ship.’
He looked at her and his face was pale. ‘No, you don’t. Not after all this time, you’re not pulling out on me.’
She looked at his hand on his gun. ‘I believe you would’ she said. ‘You actually would.’
He jerked his head from side to side, hand tight on the tiller bar. ‘Elma, this is crazy. We’ll be in town in a minute, we’ll be okay!’
‘Yes,’ said his wife, lying back cold in the ship.
‘Elma, listen to me.’
‘There’s nothing to hear, Sam.’
‘Elma!’
They were passing a little white chess city, and in his frustration, in his rage, he sent six bullets crashing among the crystal towers. The city dissolved in a shower of ancient glass and splintered quartz. It fell away like carved soap, shattered. It was no more. He laughed and fired again, and one last tower, one last chess piece, took fire, ignited, and in blue flinders went up to the stars.
‘I’ll show them! I’ll show everybody!’
‘Go ahead, show us, Sam.’ She lay in the shadows.
‘Here comes another city!’ Sam reloaded his gun. ‘Watch me fix it!’
The blue phantom ships loomed up behind them, drawing steadily apace. He did not see them at first. He was only aware of a whistling and a high windy screaming, as of steel on sand, and it was the sound of the sharp razor prows of the sand ships preening the sea bottoms, their red pennants, blue pennants unfurled. In the blue light ships were blue dark images, masked men, men with silvery faces, men with blue stars for eyes, men with carved golden ears, men with tinfoil cheeks and ruby-studded lips, men with arms folded, men following him, Martian men.
One, two, three, Sam counted. The Martian ships closed in.
‘Elma, Elma. I can’t hold them all off!’
Elma did not speak or rise from where she had slumped.
Sam fired his gun eight times. One of the sand ships fell apart, the sail, the emerald body, the bronze hull points, the moon-white tiller, and all the separate images in it. The masked men, all of them, dug into the sand and separated out into orange and then smoke-flame.
But the other ships closed in.
‘I’m outnumbered, Elma!’ he cried. ‘They’ll kill me!’
He threw out the anchor. It was no use. The sail fluttered down, folding unto itself, sighing. The ship stopped. The wind stopped. Travel stopped. Mars stood still as the majestic vessels of the Martians drew around and hesitated over him.
‘Earth Man,’ a voice called from a high seat somewhere. A silverine mask moved. Ruby-rimmed lips glittered with the words.
‘I didn’t do anything!’ Sam looked at all the faces, one hundred in all, that surrounded him. There weren’t many Martians left on Mars – one hundred, one hundred and fifty, all told. And most of them were here now, on the dead seas, in their resurrected ships, by their dead chess cities, one of which had just fallen like some fragile vase hit by a pebble. The silverine masks glinted.
‘It was all a mistake,’ he pleaded, standing out of his ship, his wife slumped behind him in the deeps of the hold, like a dead woman. ‘I came to Mars like any honest enterprising businessman. I took some surplus material from a rocket that crashed and I built me the finest little stand you ever saw right there on that land by the crossroads – you know where it is. You’ve got to admit it’s a good job of building.’ Sam laughed, staring around. ‘And that Martian – I know he was a friend of yours – came. His death was an accident. I assure you. All I wanted to do was have a hotdog stand, the only one on Mars, the first and most important one. You understand how it is? I was going to serve the best darned hot dogs there, with chili and onions and orange juice.’
The silver masks did not move. They burned in the moonlight. Yellow eyes shone upon Sam. He felt his stomach clench in, wither, become a rock. He threw his gun in the sand.
‘I give up.’
‘Pick up your gun,’ said the Martians in chorus.
‘What?’
‘Your gun.’ A jeweled hand waved from the prow of a blue ship. ‘Pick it up. Put it away.’
Unbelieving, he picked up the gun.
‘Now,’ said the voice, ‘turn your ship and go back to your stand.’
‘Now?’
‘Now,’ said the voice. ‘We will not harm you. You ran away before we were able to explain. Come.’
Now the great ships turned as lightly as moon thistles. Their wing-sails flapped with a sound of soft applause on the air. The masks were coruscating, turning, firing the shadows.
‘Elma!’ Sam tumbled into the ship. ‘Get up, Elma. We’re going back.’ He was excited. He almost gibbered with relief. ‘They aren’t going to hurt me, kill me, Elma. Get up, honey, get up.’
‘What – what?’ Elma blinked around and slowly, as the ship was sent into the wind again, she helped herself, as in a dream, back up to a seat and slumped there like a sack of stones, saying no more.
The sand slid under the ship. In half an hour they were back at the crossroads, the ships planted, all of them out of the ships.
The Leader stood before Sam and Elma, his mask beaten of polished bronze, the eyes only empty slits of endless blue-black, the mouth a slot out of which words drifted into the wind.
‘Ready your stand,’ said the voice. A diamond-gloved hand waved. ‘Prepare the viands, prepare the foods, prepare the strange wines, for tonight is indeed a great night!’
‘You mean,’ said Sam, ‘you’ll let me stay on here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not mad at me?’
The mask was rigid and carved and cold and sightless.
‘Prepare your place of food,’ said the voice softly. ‘And take this.’
‘What is it?’
Sam blinked at the silver-foil scroll that was handed him, upon which, in hieroglyph, snake figures danced.
‘It is the land grant to all of the territory from the silver mountains to the blue hills, from the dead salt sea there to the distant valleys of moonstone and emerald,’ said the Leader.
‘M-mine?’ said Sam, incredulous.
‘Yours.’
‘One hundred thousand miles of territory?’
‘Yours.’
‘Did you hear that, Elma?’
Elma was sitting on the ground, leaning against the aluminum hot-dog stand, eyes shut.
‘But why, why – why are you giving me all this?’ asked Sam, trying to look into the metal slots of the eyes.
‘That is not all, Here.’ Six other scrolls were produced. The names were declared, the territories announced.
‘Why, that’s half of Mars! I own half of Mars!’ Sam rattled the scrolls in his fists. He shook them at Elma, insane with laughing. ‘Elma, did you hear?’
‘I heard,’ said Elma, looking at the sky.
She seemed to be watching for something. She was becoming a little more alert now.
‘Thank you, oh, thank you,’ said Sam to the bronze mask.
‘Tonight is the night,’ said the mask. ‘You must be ready.’
‘I will be. What is it – a surprise? Are the rockets coming through earlier than we thought, a month earlier from Earth? All ten thousand rockets, bringing the settlers, the miners, the workers and their wives, all hundred thousand of them? Won’t that be swell, Elma? You see, I told you. I told you, that town there won’t always have just one thousand people in it. There’ll be fifty thousand more coming, and the month after that a hundred thousand more, and by the end of the year five million Earth Men. And me with the only hot-dog stand staked out on the busiest highway to the mines!’
The mask floated on the wind. ‘We leave you. Prepare. The land is yours.’
In the blowing moonlight, like metal petals of some ancient flower, like blue plumes, like cobalt butterflies immense and quiet, the old ships turned and moved over the shifting sands, the masks beaming and glittering, until the last shine, the last blue color, was lost among the hills.
‘Elma, why did they do it? Why didn’t they kill me? Don’t they know anything? What’s wrong with them? Elma, do you understand?’ He shook her shoulder. ‘I own half of Mars!’
She watched the night sky, waiting.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get the place fixed. All the hot dogs boiling, the buns warm, the chili cooking, the onions peeled and diced, the relish laid out, the napkins in the clips, the place spotless! Hey!’ He did a little wild dance, kicking his heels. ‘Oh boy, I’m happy; yes, sir, I’m happy,’ he sang, off key. ‘This is my lucky day!’
He boiled the hot dogs, cut the buns, sliced the onions in a frenzy.
‘Just think, that Martian said a surprise. That can only mean one thing. Elma. Those hundred thousand people coming in ahead of schedule, tonight, of all nights! We’ll be flooded! We’ll work long hours for days, what with tourists riding around seeing things. Elma. Think of the money!’
He went out and looked at the sky. He didn’t see anything.
‘In a minute, maybe,’ he said, snuffing the cool air gratefully, arms up, beating his chest. ‘Ah!’
Elma said nothing. She peeled potatoes for French fries quietly, her eyes always on the sky.
‘Sam,’ she said half an hour later. ‘There it is. Look.’
He looked and saw it.
Earth.
It rose full and green, like a fine-cut stone, above the hills.
‘Good old Earth,’ he whispered lovingly. ‘Good old wonderful Earth. Send me your hungry and your starved. Something, something – how does that poem go? Send me your hungry, old Earth. Here’s Sam Parkhill, his hot dogs all boiled, his chili cooking, everything neat as a pin. Come on, you Earth, send me your rockets!’
He went out to look at his place. There it sat, perfect as a fresh-laid egg on the dead sea bottom, the only nucleus of light and warmth in hundreds of miles of lonely wasteland. It was like a heart beating alone in a great dark body. He felt almost sorrowful with pride, gazing at it with wet eyes.
‘It sure makes you humble,’ he said among the cooking odors of wieners, warm buns, rich butter. ‘Step up,’ he invited the various stars in the sky. ‘Who’ll be the first to buy?’
‘Sam,’ said Elma.
Earth changed in the black sky.
It caught fire.
Part of it seemed to come apart in a million pieces, as if a gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an unholy dripping glare for a minute, three times normal size, then dwindled.
‘What was that?’ Sam looked at the green fire in the sky.
‘Earth,’ said Elma, holding her hands together.
‘That can’t be Earth, that’s not Earth! No, that ain’t Earth! It can’t be.’
‘You mean it couldn’t be Earth,’ said Elma, looking at him. ‘That just isn’t Earth. No, that’s not Earth: is that what you mean?’
‘Not Earth – oh no, it couldn’t be,’ he wailed.
He stood there, his hands at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes wide and dull, not moving.
‘Sam.’ She called his name. For the first time in days her eyes were bright. ‘Sam?’
He looked up at the sky.
‘Well,’ she said. She glanced around for a minute or so in silence. Then briskly she flapped a wet towel over her arm. ‘Switch on more lights, turn up the music, open the doors. There’ll be another batch of customers along in about a million years. Gotta be ready, yes, sir.’
Sam did not move.
‘What a swell spot for a hot-dog stand,’ she said. She reached over and picked a toothpick out of a jar and put it between her front teeth. ‘Let you in on a little secret, Sam,’ she whispered, leaning toward him. ‘This looks like it’s going to be an off season.’
The Million-Year Picnic (#ulink_d49435b0-8b3c-5982-aa5f-5dddf200cd7f)
Somehow the idea was brought up by Mom that perhaps the whole family would enjoy a fishing trip. But they weren’t Mom’s words: Timothy knew that. They were Dad’s words, and Mom used them for him somehow.
Dad shuffled his feet in a clutter of Martian pebbles and agreed. So immediately there was a tumult and a shouting, and very quickly the camp was tucked into capsules and containers. Mom slipped into traveling jumpers and blouse. Dad stuffed his pipe full with trembling hands, his eyes on the Martian sky, and the three boys piled yelling into the motorboat, none of them really keeping an eye on Mom and Dad, except Timothy.
Dad pushed a stud. The water boat sent a humming sound up into the sky. The water shook back and the boat nosed ahead, and the family cried, ‘Hurrah!’
Timothy sat in the back of the boat with Dad, his small fingers atop Dad’s hairy ones, watching the canal twist, leaving the crumbled place behind where they had landed in their small family rocket all the way from Earth. He remembered the night before they left Earth, the hustling and hurrying, the rocket that Dad had found somewhere, somehow, and the talk of a vacation on Mars. A long way to go for a vacation, but Timothy said nothing because of his younger brothers. They came to Mars and now, first thing, or so they said, they were going fishing.
Dad had a funny look in his eyes as the boat went up-canal. A look that Timothy couldn’t figure. It was made of strong light and maybe a sort of relief. It made the deep wrinkles laugh instead of worry or cry.
So there went the cooling rocket, around a bend, gone.
‘How far are we going?’ Robert splashed his hand. It looked like a small crab jumping in the violet water.
Dad exhaled. ‘A million years.’
‘Gee,’ said Robert.
‘Look, kids.’ Mother pointed one soft long arm. ‘There’s a dead city.’
They looked with fervent anticipation, and the dead city lay dead for them alone, drowsing in a hot silence of summer made on Mars by a Martian weatherman.
And Dad looked as if he was pleased that it was dead.
It was a futile spread of pink rocks sleeping on a rise of sand, a few tumbled pillars, one lonely shrine, and then the sweep of sand again. Nothing else for miles. A white desert around the canal and a blue desert over it.
Just then a bird flew up. Like a stone thrown across a blue pond, hitting, falling deep, and vanishing.
Dad got a frightened look when he saw it. ‘I thought it was a rocket.’
Timothy looked at the deep ocean sky, trying to see Earth and the war and the ruined cities and the men killing each other since the day he was born. But he saw nothing. The war was as removed and far off as two flies battling to the death in the arch of a great high and silent cathedral. And just as senseless.
William Thomas wiped his forehead and felt the touch of his son’s hand on his arm, like a young tarantula, thrilled. He beamed at his son. ‘How goes it, Timmy?’
‘Fine, Dad.’
Timothy hadn’t quite figured out what was ticking inside the vast adult mechanism beside him. The man with the immense hawk nose, sunburnt, peeling – and the hot blue eyes like agate marbles you play with after school in summer back on Earth, and the long thick columnar legs in the loose riding breeches.
‘What are you looking at so hard, Dad?’
‘I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace, and responsibility.’
‘All that up there?’
‘No, I didn’t find it. It’s not there any more. Maybe it’ll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it was ever there.’
‘Huh?’
‘See the fish,’ said Dad, pointing.
There rose a soprano clamor from all three boys as they rocked the boat in arching their tender necks to see. They oohed and ahed. A silver ring fish floated by them, undulating, and closing like an iris, instantly, around food particles, to assimilate them.
Dad looked at it. His voice was deep and quiet.
‘Just like war. War swims along, sees food, contracts. A moment later – Earth is gone.’
‘William,’ said Mom.
‘Sorry,’ said Dad.
They sat still and felt the canal water rush cool, swift, and glassy. The only sound was the motor hum, the glide of water, the sun expanding the air.
‘When do we see the Martians?’ cried Michael.
‘Quite soon, perhaps,’ said Father. ‘Maybe tonight.’
‘Oh, but the Martians are a dead race now,’ said Mom.
‘No, they’re not. I’ll show you some Martians, all right,’ Dad said presently.
Timothy scowled at that but said nothing. Everything was odd now. Vacations and fishing and looks between people.
The other boys were already engaged making shelves of their small hands and peering under them toward the seven-foot stone banks of the canal, watching for Martians.
‘What do they look like?’ demanded Michael.
‘You’ll know them when you see them.’ Dad sort of laughed, and Timothy saw a pulse beating time in his cheek.
Mother was slender and soft, with a woven plait of spun-gold hair over her head in a tiara, and eyes the color of the deep cool canal water where it ran in shadow, almost purple, with flecks of amber caught in it. You could see her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish – some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy, and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being nothing but color and nothing else. She sat in the boat’s prow, one hand resting on the side lip, the other on the lap of her dark blue breeches, and a line of sunburnt soft neck showing where her blouse opened like a white flower.
She kept looking ahead to see what was there, and, not being able to see it clearly enough, she looked backward toward her husband, and through his eyes, reflected then, she saw what was ahead; and since he added part of himself to this reflection, a determined firmness, her face relaxed and she accepted it and she turned back, knowing suddenly what to look for.
Timothy looked too. But all he saw was a straight pencil line of canal going violet through a wide shallow valley penned by low, eroded hills, and on until it fell over the sky’s edge. And this canal went on and on, through cities that would have rattled like beetles in a dry skull if you shook them. A hundred or two hundred cities dreaming hot summer-day dreams and cool summer-night dreams …
They had come millions of miles for this outing – to fish. But there had been a gun on the rocket. This was a vacation. But why all the food, more than enough to last them years and years, left hidden back there near the rocket? Vacation. Just behind the veil of the vacation was not a soft face of laughter, but something hard and bony and perhaps terrifying. Timothy could not lift the veil, and the two other boys were busy being ten and eight years old, respectively.
‘No Martians yet. Nuts.’ Robert put his V-shaped chin on his hands and glared at the canal.
Dad had brought an atomic radio along, strapped to his wrist. It functioned on an old-fashioned principle: you held it against the bones near your ear and it vibrated singing or talking to you. Dad listened to it now. His face looked like one of those fallen Martian cities, caved in, sucked dry, almost dead.
Then he gave it to Mom to listen. Her lips dropped open.
‘What—’ Timothy started to question, but never finished what he wished to say.
For at that moment there were two titanic, marrow-jolting explosions that grew upon themselves, followed by a half-dozen minor concussions.
Jerking his head up, Dad notched the boat speed higher immediately. The boat leaped and jounced and spanked. This shook Robert out of his funk and elicited yelps of frightened but ecstatic joy from Michael, who clung to Mom’s legs and watched the water pour by his nose in a wet torrent.
Dad swerved the boat, cut speed, and ducked the craft into a little branch canal and under an ancient, crumbling stone wharf that smelled of crab flesh. The boat rammed the wharf hard enough to throw them all forward, but no one was hurt, and Dad was already twisted to see if the ripples on the canal were enough to map their route into hiding. Water lines went across, lapped the stones, and rippled back to meet each other, settling, to be dappled by the sun. It all went away.
Dad listened. So did everybody.
Dad’s breathing echoed like fists beating against the cold wet wharf stones. In the shadow, Mom’s cat eyes just watched Father for some clue to what next.
Dad relaxed and blew out a breath, laughing at himself.
‘The rocket, of course. I’m getting jumpy. The rocket.’
Michael said, ‘What happened, Dad, what happened?’
‘Oh, we just blew up our rocket, is all,’ said Timothy, trying to sound matter-of-fact. ‘I’ve heard rockets blown up before. Ours just blew.’
‘Why did we blow up our rocket?’ asked Michael. ‘Huh, Dad?’
‘It’s part of the game, silly!’ said Timothy.
‘A game!’ Michael and Robert loved the word.
‘Dad fixed it so it would blow up and no one’d know where we landed or went! In case they ever came looking, see?’
‘Oh boy, a secret!’
‘Scared by my own rocket,’ admitted Dad to Mom. ‘I am nervous. It’s silly to think there’ll ever be any more rockets. Except one, perhaps, if Edwards and his wife get through with their ship.’
He put his tiny radio to his ear again. After two minutes he dropped his hand as you would drop a rag.
‘It’s over at last,’ he said to Mom. ‘The radio just went off the atomic beam. Every other world station’s gone. They dwindled down to a couple in the last few years. Now the air’s completely silent. It’ll probably remain silent.’
‘For how long?’ asked Robert.
‘Maybe – your great-grandchildren will hear it again,’ said Dad. He just sat there, and the children were caught in the center of his awe and defeat and resignation and acceptance.
Finally he put the boat out into the canal again, and they continued in the direction in which they had originally started.
It was getting late. Already the sun was down the sky, and a series of dead cities lay ahead of them.
Dad talked very quietly and gently to his sons. Many times in the past he had been brisk, distant, removed from them, but now he patted them on the head with just a word and they felt it.
‘Mike, pick a city.’
‘What, Dad?’
‘Pick a city, Son. Any one of these cities we pass.’
‘All right,’ said Michael. ‘How do I pick?’
‘Pick the one you like the most. You, too, Robert and Tim. Pick the city you like best.’
‘I want a city with Martians in it,’ said Michael.
‘You’ll have that,’ said Dad. ‘I promise.’ His lips were for the children, but his eyes were for Mom.
They passed six cities in twenty minutes. Dad didn’t say anything more about the explosions; he seemed much more interested in having fun with his sons, keeping them happy, than anything else.
Michael liked the first city they passed, but this was vetoed because everyone doubted quick first judgments. The second city nobody liked. It was an Earth Man’s settlement, built of wood and already rotting into sawdust. Timothy liked the third city because it was large. The fourth and fifth were too small and the sixth brought acclaim from everyone, including Mother, who joined in the Gees, Goshes, and Look-at thats!
There were fifty or sixty huge structures still standing, streets were dusty but paved, and you could see one or two old centrifugal fountains still pulsing wetly in the plazas. That was the only life – water leaping in the late sunlight.
‘This is the city,’ said everybody.
Steering the boat to a wharf, Dad jumped out.
‘Here we are. This is ours. This is where we live from now on!’
‘From now on?’ Michael was incredulous. He stood up, looking, and then turned to blink back at where the rocket used to be. ‘What about the rocket? What about Minnesota?’
‘Here,’ said Dad.
He touched the small radio to Michael’s blond head. ‘Listen.’
Michael listened.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘That’s right. Nothing. Nothing at all any more. No more Minneapolis, no more rockets, no more Earth.’
Michael considered the lethal revelation and began to sob little dry sobs.
‘Wait a moment,’ said Dad the next instant. ‘I’m giving you a lot more in exchange, Mike!’
‘What?’ Michael held off the tears, curious, but quite ready to continue in case Dad’s further revelation was as disconcerting as the original.
‘I’m giving you this city, Mike. It’s yours.’
‘Mine?’
‘For you and Robert and Timothy, all three of you, to own for yourselves.’
Timothy bounded from the boat. ‘Look, guys, all for us! All of that!’ He was playing the game with Dad, playing it large and playing it well. Later, after it was all over and things had settled, he could go off by himself and cry for ten minutes. But now it was still a game, still a family outing, and the other kids must be kept playing.
Mike jumped out with Robert. They helped Mom.
‘Be careful of your sister,’ said Dad, and nobody knew what he meant until later.
They hurried into the great pink-stoned city, whispering among themselves, because dead cities have a way of making you want to whisper, to watch the sun go down.
‘In about five days,’ said Dad quietly, ‘I’ll go back down to where our rocket was and collect the food hidden in the ruins there and bring it here; and I’ll hunt for Bert Edwards and his wife and daughters there.’
‘Daughters?’ asked Timothy. ‘How many?’
‘Four.’
‘I can see that’ll cause trouble later.’ Mom nodded slowly.
‘Girls.’ Michael made a face like an ancient Martian stone image. ‘Girls.’
‘Are they coming in a rocket, too?’
‘Yes. If they make it. Family rockets are made for travel to the Moon, not Mars. We were lucky we got through.’
‘Where did you get the rocket?’ whispered Timothy, for the other boys were running ahead.
‘I saved it. I saved it for twenty years, Tim. I had it hidden away, hoping I’d never have to use it. I suppose I should have given it to the government for the war, but I kept thinking about Mars …’
‘And a picnic!’
‘Right. This is between you and me. When I saw everything was finishing on Earth, after I’d waited until the last moment, I packed us up. Bert Edwards had a ship hidden, too, but we decided it would be safer to take off separately, in case anyone tried to shoot us down.’
‘Why’d you blow up the rocket, Dad?’
‘So we can’t go back, ever. And so if any of those evil men ever come to Mars they won’t know we’re here.’
‘Is that why you look up all the time?’
‘Yes, it’s silly. They won’t follow us, ever. They haven’t anything to follow with. I’m being too careful, is all.’
Michael came running back. ‘Is this really our city, Dad?’
‘The whole darn planet belongs to us, kids. The whole darn planet.’
They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.
Night came quickly in the thin atmosphere, and Dad left them in the square by the pulsing fountain, went down to the boat, and came walking back carrying a stack of paper in his big hands.
He laid the papers in a clutter in an old courtyard and set them afire. To keep warm, they crouched around the blaze and laughed, and Timothy saw the little letters leap like frightened animals when the flames touched and engulfed them. The papers crinkled like an old man’s skin, and the cremation surrounded innumerable words:
‘GOVERNMENT BONDS; Business Graph, 1999; Religious Prejudice: An Essay: The Science of Logistics; Problems of the Pan-American Unity; Stock Report for July 3, 1998; The War Digest …’
Dad had insisted on bringing these papers for this purpose. He sat there and fed them into the fire, one by one, with satisfaction, and told his children what it all meant.
‘It’s time I told you a few things. I don’t suppose it was fair, keeping so much from you. I don’t know if you’ll understand, but I have to talk, even if only part of it gets over to you.’
He dropped a leaf in the fire.
‘I’m burning a way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now. Forgive me if I talk like a politician. I am, after all, a former state governor, and I was honest and they hated me for it. Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets, emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That’s what the silent radio means. That’s what we ran away from.
‘We were lucky. There aren’t any more rockets left. It’s time you knew this isn’t a fishing trip at all. I put off telling you. Earth is gone. Interplanetary travel won’t be back for centuries, maybe never. But that way of life proved itself wrong and strangled itself with its own hands. You’re young. I’ll tell you this again every day until it sinks in.’
He paused to feed more papers to the fire.
‘Now we’re alone. We and a handful of others who’ll land in a few days. Enough to start over. Enough to turn away from all that back on Earth and strike out on a new line—’
The fire leaped up to emphasize his talking. And then all the papers were gone except one. All the laws and beliefs of Earth were burnt into small hot ashes which soon would be carried off in a wind.
Timothy looked at the last thing that Dad tossed in the fire. It was a map of the World, and it wrinkled and distorted itself hotly and went – flimpf – and was gone like a warm, black butterfly. Timothy turned away.
‘Now I’m going to show you the Martians,’ said Dad. ‘Come on, all of you. Here, Alice.’ He took her hand.
Michael was crying loudly, and Dad picked him up and carried him, and they walked down through the ruins toward the canal.
The canal. Where tomorrow or the next day their future wives would come up in a boat, small laughing girls now, with their father and mother.
The night came down around them, and there were stars. But Timothy couldn’t find Earth. It had already set. That was something to think about.
A night bird called among the ruins as they walked. Dad said. ‘Your mother and I will try to teach you. Perhaps we’ll fail. I hope not. We’ve had a good lot to see and learn from. We planned this trip years ago, before you were born. Even if there hadn’t been a war we would have come to Mars, I think, to live and form our own standard of living. It would have been another century before Mars would have been really poisoned by the Earth civilization. Now, of course—’
They reached the canal. It was long and straight and cool and wet and reflective in the night.
‘I’ve always wanted to see a Martian,’ said Michael. ‘Where are they, Dad? You promised.’
‘There they are,’ said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down.
The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver.
The Martians were there – in the canal – reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.
The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water …
The Fox and the Forest (#ulink_56d3e367-8b2d-5fc7-b1bc-3a3f50bf6563)
There were fireworks the very first night, things that you should be afraid of perhaps, for they might remind you of other more horrible things, but these were beautiful, rockets that ascended into the ancient soft air of Mexico and shook the stars apart in blue and white fragments. Everything was good and sweet, the air was that blend of the dead and the living, of the rains and the dusts, of the incense from the church, and the brass smell of the tuba on the bandstand which pulsed out vast rhythms of ‘La Paloma.’ The church doors were thrown wide and it seemed as if a giant yellow constellation had fallen from the October sky and lay breathing fire upon the church walls; a million candles sent their color and fumes about. Newer and better fireworks scurried like tight-rope walking comets across the cool-tiled square, banged against adobe café walls, then rushed on hot wires to bash the high church tower, in which boys naked feet alone could be seen kicking and re-kicking, clanging and tilting and re-tilting the monster bells into monstrous music. A flaming bull blundered about the plaza chasing laughing men and screaming children.
‘The year is 1938,’ said William Travis, standing by his wife on the edge of the yelling crowd, smiling. ‘A good year.’
The bull rushed upon them. Ducking, the couple ran, with fire balls pelting them, past the music and riot, the church, the band, under the stars, clutching each other, laughing. The bull passed, carried lightly on the shoulders of a charging Mexican, a framework of bamboo and sulphurous gunpowder.
‘I’ve never enjoyed myself so much in my life.’ Susan Travis had stopped for her breath.
‘It’s amazing,’ said William.
‘It will go on, won’t it?’
‘All night.’
‘No, I mean our trip.’
He frowned and patted his breast pocket. ‘I’ve enough traveler’s checks for a lifetime. Enjoy yourself. Forget it. They’ll never find us.’
‘Never?’
‘Never.’
Now someone was setting off giant crackers, hurling them from the great bell-tolling tower of the church in a sputter of smoke, while the crowd below fell back under the threat and the crackers exploded in wonderful concussions among their dancing feet and flailing bodies. A wondrous smell of frying tortillas hung all about, and in the cafés men sat at tables looking out, mugs of beer in their brown hands.
The bull was dead. The fire was out of the bamboo tubes and he was expended. The laborer lifted the framework from his shoulders. Little boys clustered to touch the magnificent paper-mâché head, the real horns.
‘Let’s examine the bull,’ said William.
As they walked past the café entrance Susan saw the man looking out at them, a white man in a salt-white suit, with a blue tie and blue shirt, and a thin, sunburned face. His hair was blond and straight and his eyes were blue, and he watched them as they walked.
She would never have noticed him if it had not been for the bottles at his immaculate elbow; a fat bottle of crème de menthe, a clear bottle of vermouth, a flagon of cognac, and seven other bottles of assorted liqueurs, and, at his finger tips, ten small half-filled glasses from which, without taking his eyes off the street, he sipped, occasionally squinting, pressing his thin mouth shut upon the savor. In his free hand a thin Havana cigar smoked, and on a chair stood twenty cartons of Turkish cigarettes, six boxes of cigars, and some packaged colognes.
‘Bill—’ whispered Susan.
‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘He’s nobody.’
‘I saw him in the plaza this morning.’
‘Don’t look back, keep walking. Examine the papier-mâché bull here. That’s it, ask questions.’
‘Do you think he’s from the Searchers?’
‘They couldn’t follow us!’
‘They might!’
‘What a nice bull,’ said William to the man who owned it.
‘He couldn’t have followed us back through two hundred years, could he?’
‘Watch yourself, for God’s sake,’ said William.
She swayed. He crushed her elbow tightly, steering her away.
‘Don’t faint.’ He smiled, to make it look good. ‘You’ll be all right. Let’s go right in that café, drink in front of him, so if he is what we think he is, he won’t suspect.’
‘No. I couldn’t.’
‘We’ve got to. Come on now. And so I said to David, that’s ridiculous!’ This last in a loud voice as they went up the café steps.
We are here, thought Susan. Who are we? Where are we going? What do we fear? Start at the beginning, she told herself, holding to her sanity, as she felt the adobe floor underfoot.
My name is Ann Kristen; my husband’s name is Roger. We were born in the year A.D. 2155. And we lived in a world that was evil. A world that was like a great black ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking two billion people with it, whether they wanted to go or not, to death, to fall over the edge of the earth and the sea into radioactive flame and madness.
They walked into the café. The man was staring at them.
A phone rang.
The phone startled Susan. She remembered a phone ringing two hundred years in the future, on that blue April morning in 2155, and herself answering it.
‘Ann, this is Rene! Have you heard? I mean about Travel in Time. Incorporated? Trips to Rome in 21 B.C., trips to Napoleon’s Waterloo – any time, any place!’
‘Rene, you’re joking.’
‘No, Clinton Smith left this morning for Philadelphia in 1776. Travel in Time, Inc., arranges everything. Costs money. But, think – to actually see the burning of Rome, Kubla Khan, Moses and the Red Sea! You’ve probably got an ad in your tube mail now.’
She had opened the suction mail tube and there was the metal foil advertisement:
ROME AND THE BORGIAS!
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS AT KITTY HAWK!
Travel in Time, Inc., can costume you, put you in a crowd during the assassination of Lincoln or Caesar! We guarantee to teach you any language you need to move freely in any civilization, in any year, without friction. Latin, Greek, ancient American colloquial. Take your vacation in Time as well as Place!
Rene’s voice was buzzing on the phone. ‘Tom and I leave for 1492 tomorrow. They’re arranging for Tom to sail with Columbus. Isn’t it amazing!’
‘Yes,’ murmured Ann, stunned. ‘What does the Government say about this Time Machine company?’
‘Oh, the police have an eye on it. Afraid people might evade the draft, run off and hide in the Past. Everyone has to leave a security bond behind, his house and belongings, to guarantee return. After all, the war’s on.’
‘Yes, the war,’ murmured Ann. ‘The war.’
Standing there, holding the phone, she had thought. Here is the chance my husband and I have talked and prayed over for so many years. We don’t like this world of 2155. We want to run away from his work at the bomb factory, I from my position with disease-culture units. Perhaps there is a chance for us to escape, to run for centuries into a wild country of years where they will never find and bring us back to burn our books, censor our thoughts, scald our minds with fear, march us, scream at us with radios …
They were in Mexico in the year 1938.
She looked at the stained café wall.
Good workers for the Future State were allowed vacations into the Past to escape fatigue. And so she and her husband had moved back into 1938, a room in New York City, and enjoyed the theaters and the Statue of Liberty which still stood green in the harbor. And on the third day they had changed their clothes, their names, and had flown off to hide in Mexico!
‘It must be him,’ whispered Susan, looking at the stranger seated at the table. ‘Those cigarettes, the cigars, the liquor. They give him away. Remember our first night in the Past?’
A month ago, their first night in New York, before their flight, drinking all the strange drinks, savoring and buying odd foods, perfumes, cigarettes of ten dozen rare brands, for they were rare in the Future, where war was everything. So they had made fools of themselves, rushing in and out of stores, salons, tobacconists, going up to their room to get wonderfully ill.
And now here was this stranger doing likewise, doing a thing that only a man from the Future would do who had been starved for liquors and cigarettes for many years.
Susan and William sat and ordered a drink.
The stranger was examining their clothes, their hair, their jewelry – the way they walked and sat.
‘Sit easily,’ said William under his breath. ‘Look as if you’ve worn this clothing style all your life.’
‘We should never have tried to escape.’
‘My God!’ said William. ‘He’s coming over. Let me do the talking.’
The stranger bowed before them. There was the faintest tap of heels knocking together. Susan stiffened. That military sound! – unmistakable as that certain ugly rap on your door at midnight.
‘Mr Roger Kristen,’ said the stranger, ‘you did not pull up your pant legs when you sat down.’
William froze. He looked at his hands lying on either leg, innocently. Susan’s heart was beating swiftly.
‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ said William quickly. ‘My name’s not Krisler.’
‘Kristen,’ corrected the stranger.
‘I’m William Travis,’ said William. ‘And I don’t see what my pant legs have to do with you.’
‘Sorry.’ The stranger pulled up a chair. ‘Let us say I thought I knew you because you did not pull your trousers up. Everyone does. If they don’t, the trousers bag quickly. I am a long way from home, Mr – Travis, and in need of company. My name is Simms.’
‘Mr Simms, we appreciate your loneliness, but we’re tired. We’re leaving for Acapulco tomorrow.’
‘A charming spot, I was just there, looking for some friends of mine. They are somewhere. I shall find them yet. Oh, is the lady a bit sick?’
‘Good night, Mr Simms.’
They started out the door, William holding Susan’s arm firmly. They did not look back when Mr Simms called, ‘Oh, just one other thing.’ He paused and then slowly spoke the words:
‘A.D. 2155.’
Susan shut her eyes and felt the earth falter under her. She kept going, into the fiery plaza, seeing nothing.
They locked the door of their hotel room. And then she was crying and they were standing in the dark, and the room tilted under them. Far away firecrackers exploded, and there was laughter in the plaza.
‘What a damned, loud nerve,’ said William. ‘Him sitting there, looking us up and down like animals, smoking his damn cigarettes, drinking his drinks. I should have killed him then!’ His voice was nearly hysterical. ‘He even had the nerve to use his real name to us. The Chief of the Searchers. And the thing about my pant legs. My God, I should have pulled them up when I sat. It’s an automatic gesture of this day and age. When I didn’t do it, it set me off from the others: it made him think. Here’s a man who never wore pants, a man used to breech uniforms and future styles. I could kill myself for giving us away!’
‘No, no, it was my walk – these high heels – that did it. Our haircuts – so new, so fresh. Everything about us odd and uneasy.’
He turned on the light. ‘He’s still testing us. He’s not positive of us – not completely. We can’t run out on him, then. We can’t make him certain. We’ll go to Acapulco leisurely.’
‘Maybe he is sure of us, but is just playing.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s got all the time in the world. He can dally here if he wants, and bring us back to the Future sixty seconds after we left it. He might keep us wondering for days, laughing at us.’
Susan sat on the bed, wiping the tears from her face, smelling the old smell of charcoal and incense. ‘
They won’t make a scene, will they?’
‘They won’t dare. They’ll have to get us alone to put us in that Time Machine and send us back.’
‘There’s a solution then,’ she said. ‘We’ll never be alone: we’ll always be in crowds. We’ll make a million friends, visit markets, sleep in the Official Palaces in each town, pay the Chief of Police to guard us until we find a way to kill Simms and escape, disguise ourselves in new clothes, perhaps as Mexicans.’
Footsteps sounded outside their locked door.
They turned out the light and undressed in silence. The footsteps went away. A door closed.
Susan stood by the window looking down at the plaza in the darkness. ‘So that building there is a church?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve often wondered what a church looked like. It’s been so long since anyone saw one. Can we visit it tomorrow?’
‘Of course. Come to bed.’
They lay in the dark room.
Half an hour later their phone rang. She lifted the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘The rabbits may hide in the forest,’ said a voice, ‘but a fox can always find them.’
She replaced the receiver and lay back straight and cold in the bed.
Outside, in the year 1938, a man played three tunes upon a guitar, one following another.
During the night she put her hand out and almost touched the year 2155. She felt her fingers slide over cool space of time, as over a corrugated surface, and she heard the insistent thump of marching feet, a million bands playing a million military tunes, and she saw the fifty thousand rows of disease cultures in their aseptic glass tubes, her hand reaching out to them at her work in that huge factory in the Future; the tubes of leprosy, bubonic, typhoid, tuberculosis, and then the great explosion. She saw her hand burned to a wrinkled plum, felt it recoil from a concussion so immense that the world was lifted and let fall and all the buildings broke and people hemorrhaged and lay silent. Great volcanoes, machines, winds, avalanches slid down to silence and she awoke, sobbing, in the bed, in Mexico, many years away …
In the early morning, drugged with the single hour’s sleep they had finally been able to obtain, they awoke to the sound of loud automobiles in the street. Susan peered down from the iron balcony at a small crowd of eight people only now emerging, chattering, yelling, from trucks and cars with red lettering on them. A crowd of Mexicans had followed the trucks.
‘Qué pasa?’ Susan called to a little boy.
The boy replied.
Susan turned back to her husband. ‘An American motion-picture company, here on location.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ William was in the shower. ‘Let’s watch them. I don’t think we’d better leave today. We’ll try to lull Simms. Watch the films being made. They say the primitive film-making was something. Get our minds off ourselves.’
Ourselves, thought Susan. For a moment in the bright sun, she had forgotten that somewhere in the hotel, waiting, was a man smoking a thousand cigarettes, it seemed. She saw the eight loud happy Americans below and wanted to call to them: ‘Save me, hide me, help me! Color my hair, my eyes; clothe me in strange clothes. I need your help. I’m from the year 2155!’
But the words stayed in her throat. The functionaries of Travel in Time, Inc., were not foolish. In your brain, before you left on your trip, they placed a psychological bloc. You could tell no one your true time or birthplace, nor could you reveal any of the Future to those in the Past. The Past and the Future must be protected from each other. Only with this psychological bloc were people allowed to travel unguarded through the ages. The Future must be protected from any change brought about by her people traveling in the Past. Even if she wanted to with all her heart, she could not tell any of those happy people below in the plaza who she was, or what her predicament had become.
‘What about breakfast?’ said William.
Breakfast was being served in the immense dining room. Ham and eggs for everyone. The place was full of tourists. The film people entered, all eight of them – six men and two women, giggling, shoving chairs about. And Susan sat near them, feeling the warmth and protection they offered, even when Mr Simms came down the lobby stairs, smoking his Turkish cigarette with great intensity. He nodded at them from a distance, and Susan nodded back, smiling, because he couldn’t do anything to them here, in front of eight film people and twenty other tourists.
‘Those actors,’ said William. ‘Perhaps I could hire two of them, say it was a joke, dress them in our clothes, have them drive off in our car when Simms is in such a spot where he can’t see their faces. If two people pretending to be us could lure him off for a few hours, we might make it to Mexico City. It’d take him years to find us there!’
‘Hey!’
A fat man, with liquor on his breath, leaned on their table.
‘American tourists!’ he cried. ‘I’m so sick of seeing Mexicans, I could kiss you!’ He shook their hands. ‘Come on, eat with us. Misery loves company. I’m Misery, this is Miss Gloom, and Mr and Mrs Do-We-Hate-Mexico! We all hate it. But we’re here for some preliminary shots for a damn film. The rest of the crew arrives tomorrow. My name’s Joe Melton. I’m a director. And if this ain’t a hell of a country! Funerals in the streets, people dying. Come on, move over. Join the party; cheer us up!’
Susan and William were both laughing.
‘Am I funny?’ Mr Melton asked the immediate world.
‘Wonderful!’ Susan moved over.
Mr Simms was glaring across the dining room at them.
She made a face at him.
Mr Simms advanced among the tables.
‘Mr and Mrs Travis,’ he called. ‘I thought we were breakfasting together, alone.’
‘Sorry,’ said William.
‘Sit down, pal,’ said Mr Melton. ‘Any friend of theirs is a pal of mine.’
Mr Simms sat. The film people talked loudly, and while they talked, Mr Simms said quietly, ‘I hope you slept well.’
‘Did you?’
‘I’m not used to spring mattresses,’ replied Mr Simms wryly. ‘But there are compensations. I stayed up half the night trying new cigarettes and foods. Odd, fascinating. A whole new spectrum of sensation, these ancient vices.’
‘We don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Susan.
‘Always the play acting.’ Simms laughed. ‘It’s no use. Not is this strategem of crowds. I’ll get you alone soon enough. I’m immensely patient.’
‘Say,’ Mr Melton broke in, his face flushed, ‘is this guy giving you any trouble?’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Say the word and I’ll give him the bum’s rush.’
Melton turned back to yell at his associates. In the laughter, Mr Simms went on: ‘Let us come to the point. It took me a month of tracing you through towns and cities to find you, and all of yesterday to be sure of you. If you come with me quietly, I might be able to get you off with no punishment, if you agree to go back to work on the hydrogen-plus bomb.’
‘Science this guy talks at breakfast!’ observed Mr Melton, half listening.
Simms went on, imperturbably. ‘Think it over. You can’t escape. If you kill me, others will follow you.’
‘We don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Stop it!’ cried Simms irritably. ‘Use your intelligence! You know we can’t let you get away with this escape. Other people in the year 2155 might get the same idea and do what you’ve done. We need people.’
‘To fight you wars,’ said William at last.
‘Bill!’
‘It’s all right, Susan. We’ll talk on his terms now. We can’t escape.’
‘Excellent,’ said Simms. ‘Really, you’ve both been incredibly romantic, running away from your responsibilities.’
‘Running away from horror.’
‘Nonsense. Only a war.’
‘What are you guys talking about?’ asked Mr Melton.
Susan wanted to tell him. But you could only speak in generalities. The psychological bloc in your mind allowed that. Generalities, such as Simms and William were now discussing.
‘Only the war,’ said William. ‘Half the world dead of leprosy bombs!’
‘Nevertheless,’ Simms pointed out, ‘the inhabitants of the Future resent you two hiding on a tropical isle, as it were, while they drop off the cliff into hell. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave. I am the guardian of their collective resentment against you two.’
‘Look at the guardian of resentments!’ said Mr Melton to his companions.
‘The longer you keep me waiting, the harder it will go for you. We need you on the bomb project, Mr Travis. Return now – no torture. Later, we’ll force you to work, and after you’ve finished the bomb, we’ll try a number of complicated new devices on you, sir.’
‘I’ve a proposition,’ said William. ‘I’ll come back with you if my wife stays here alive, safe, away from that war.’
Mr Simms considered it. ‘All right. Meet me in the plaza in ten minutes. Pick me up in your car. Drive me to a deserted country spot. I’ll have the Travel Machine pick us up there.’
‘Bill!’ Susan held his arm tightly.
‘Don’t argue.’ He looked over at her. ‘It’s settled.’ To Simms: ‘One thing. Last night you could have gotten in our room and kidnapped us. Why didn’t you?’
‘Shall we say that I was enjoying myself?’ replied Mr Simms languidly, sucking his new cigar. ‘I hate giving up this wonderful atmosphere, this sun, this vacation. I regret leaving behind the wine and the cigarettes. Oh, how I regret it. The plaza then, in ten minutes. You wife will be protected and may stay here as long as she wishes. Say your good-bys.’
Mr Simms arose and walked out.
‘There goes Mr Big Talk!’ yelled Mr Melton at the departing gentleman. He turned and looked at Susan. ‘Hey. Someone’s crying. Breakfast’s no time for people to cry. Now is it?’
At nine-fifteen Susan stood on the balcony of their room, gazing down at the plaza. Mr Simms was seated there, his neat legs crossed, on a delicate bronze bench. Biting the tip from a cigar, he lit it tenderly.
Susan heard the throb of a motor, and far up the street, out of a garage and down the cobbled hill, slowly, came William in his car.
The car picked up speed. Thirty, now forty, now fifty miles an hour. Chickens scattered before it.
Mr Simms took off his white panama hat and mopped his pink forehead, put his hat back on, and then saw the car.
It was rushing sixty miles an hour, straight on for the plaza.
‘William!’ screamed Susan.
The car hit the low plaza curb, thundering: it jumped up, sped across the tiles toward the green bench where Mr Simms now dropped his cigar, shrieked, flailed his hands, and was hit by the car. His body flew up and up in the air, and down and down, crazily, into the street.
On the far side of the plaza, one front wheel broken, the car stopped. People were running.
Susan went in and closed the balcony doors.
They came down the Official Palace steps together, arm in arm, their faces pale, at twelve noon.
‘Adiós, señor,’ said the Mayor behind them. ‘Señora.’
They stood in the plaza where the crowd was pointing at the blood.
‘Will they want to see you again?’ asked Susan.
‘No, we went over and over it. It was an accident. I lost control of the car. I wept for them. God knows I had to get my relief out somewhere. I felt like weeping. I hated to kill him. I’ve never wanted to do anything like that in my life.’
‘They won’t prosecute you?’
‘They talked about it, but no. I talked faster. They believe me. It was an accident. It’s over.’
‘Where will we go? Mexico City? Uruapan?’
‘The car’s in the repair shop. It’ll be ready at four this afternoon. Then we’ll get the hell out.’
‘Will we be followed? Was Simms working alone?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll have a little head start on them, I think.’
The film people were coming out of the hotel as they approached. Mr Melton hurried up, scowling. ‘Hey I heard what happened. Too bad. Everything okay now? Want to get your minds off it? We’re doing some preliminary shots up the street. You want to watch, you’re welcome. Come on, do you good.’
They went.
They stood on the cobbled street while the film camera was being set up. Susan looked at the road leading down and away, and the highway going to Acapulco and the sea, past pyramids and ruins and little adobe towns with yellow walls, blue walls, purple walls, and flaming bougainvillea, and she thought, We shall take the roads, travel in clusters and crowds, in markets, in lobbies, bribe police to sleep near, keep double locks, but always the crowds, never alone again, always afraid the next person who passes may be another Simms. Never knowing if we’ve tricked and lost the Searchers. And always up ahead, in the Future, they’ll wait for us to be brought back, waiting with their bombs to burn us and disease to rot us, and their police to tell us to roll over, turn around, jump through the hoop! And so we’ll keep running through the forest, and we’ll never ever stop or sleep well again in our lives.
A crowd gathered to watch the film being made. And Susan watched the crowd and the streets.
‘Seen anyone suspicious?’
‘No. What time is it?’
‘Three o’clock. The car should be almost ready.’
The test film was finished at three forty-five. They all walked down to the hotel, talking. William paused at the garage. ‘The car’ll be ready at six,’ he said, coming out, worried.
‘But no later than that?’
‘It’ll be ready, don’t worry.’
In the hotel lobby they looked around for other men traveling alone, men who resembled Mr Simms, men with new haircuts and too much cigarette smoke and cologne smell about them, but the lobby was empty. Going up the stairs. Mr Melton said, ‘Well, it’s been a long hard day. Who’d like to put a header on it? You folks? Martini? Beer?’
‘Maybe one.’
The whole crowd pushed into Mr Melton’s room and the drinking began.
‘Watch the time,’ said William.
Time, thought Susan. If only they had time. All she wanted was to sit in the plaza all of a long bright day in October, with not a worry or a thought, with the sun on her face and arms, her eyes closed, smiling at the warmth, and never move. Just sleep in the Mexican sun, and sleep warmly and easily and slowly and happily for many, many days …
Mr Melton opened the champagne.
‘To a very beautiful lady, lovely enough for films,’ he said, toasting Susan. ‘I might even give you a test.’
She laughed.
‘I mean it,’ said Melton. ‘You’re very nice. I could make you a movie star.’
‘And take me to Hollywood?’ cried Susan.
‘Get the hell out of Mexico, sure!’
Susan glanced at William and he lifted an eyebrow and nodded. It would be a change of scene, clothing, locale, name, perhaps; and they would be traveling with eight other people, a good shield against any interference from the Future.
‘It sounds wonderful,’ said Susan.
She was feeling the champagne now. The afternoon was slipping by; the party was whirling about her. She felt safe and good and alive and truly happy for the first time in many years.
‘What kind of film would my wife be good for?’ asked William, refilling his glass.
Melton appraised Susan. The party stopped laughing and listened.
‘Well, I’d like to do a story of suspense,’ said Melton. ‘A story of a man and wife, like yourselves.’
‘Go on.’
‘Sort of a war story, maybe,’ said the director, examining the color of his drink against the sunlight.
Susan and William waited.
‘A story about a man and wife, who live in a little house on a little street in the year 2155, maybe,’ said Melton. ‘This is ad lib, understand. But this man and wife are faced with a terrible war, super-plus hydrogen bombs, censorship, death in that year, and – here’s the gimmick – they escape into the Past, followed by a man who they think is evil, but who is only trying to show them what their duty is.’
William dropped his glass to the floor.
Mr Melton continued: ‘And this couple take refuge with a group of film people whom they learn to trust. Safety in numbers, they say to themselves.’
Susan felt herself slip down into a chair. Everyone was watching the director. He took a little sip of champagne. ‘Ah, that’s fine. Well, this man and woman, it seems, don’t realize how important they are to the Future. The man, especially, is the keystone to a new bomb metal. So the Searchers, let’s call them, spare no trouble or expense to find, capture, and take home the man and wife, once they get them totally alone, in a hotel room, where no one can see. Strategy. The Searchers work alone, or in groups of eight. One trick or another will do it. Don’t you think it would make a wonderful film, Susan? Don’t you, Bill?’ He finished his drink.
Susan sat with her eyes straight ahead of her.
‘Have a drink?’ said Mr Melton.
William’s gun was out and fired three times, and one of the men fell, and the others ran forward. Susan screamed. A hand was clamped to her mouth. Now the gun was on the floor and William was struggling, held.
Mr Melton said, ‘Please,’ standing there where he had stood, blood showing on his fingers. ‘Let’s not make matters worse.’
Someone pounded on the hall door.
‘Let me in!’
‘The manager,’ said Mr Melton dryly. He jerked his head. ‘Everyone, let’s move!’
‘Let me in! I’ll call the police!’
Susan and William looked at each other quickly, and then at the door.
‘The manager wishes to come in,’ said Mr Melton. ‘Quick!’
A camera was carried forward. From it shot a blue light which encompassed the room instantly. It widened out and the people of the party vanished, one by one.
‘Quickly!’
Outside the window, in the instant before she vanished, Susan saw the green land and the purple and yellow and blue and crimson walls and the cobbles flowing down like a river, a man upon a burro riding into the warm hills, a boy drinking Orange Crush, she could feel the sweet liquid in her throat, a man standing under a cool plaza tree with a guitar, she could feel her hand upon the strings, and, far away, the sea, the blue and tender sea, she could feel it roll her over and take her in.
And then she was gone. Her husband was gone.
The door burst wide open. The manager and his staff rushed in.
The room was empty.
‘But they were just here! I saw them come in, and now – gone!’ cried the manager. ‘The windows are covered with iron grating. They couldn’t get out that way!’
In the late afternoon the priest was summoned and they opened the room again and aired it out, and had him sprinkle holy water through each corner and give it his blessing.
‘What shall we do with these?’ asked the charwoman.
She pointed to the closet, where there were 67 bottles of Chartreuse, cognac, crème de cacao, absinthe, vermouth, tequila, 106 cartons of Turkish cigarettes, and 198 yellow boxes of fifty-cent pure Havana-filler cigars …
Kaleidoscope (#ulink_fe1b47ca-23a7-5ab7-969c-d15a99d02fd5)
The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.
‘Barkley, Barkley, where are you?’
The sound of voices calling like lost children on a cold night.
‘Woode, Woode!’
‘Captain!’
‘Hollis, Hollis, this is Stone.’
‘Stone, this is Hollis. Where are you?’
‘I don’t know. How can I? Which way is up? I’m falling. Good God, I’m falling.’
They fell. They fell as pebbles fall down wells. They were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw. And now instead of men there were only voices – all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.
‘We’re going away from each other.’
This was true, Hollis, swinging head over heels, knew this was true. He knew it with a vague acceptance. They were parting to go their separate ways, and nothing could bring them back. They were wearing their sealed-tight space suits with the glass tubes over their pale faces, but they hadn’t had time to lock on their force units. With them they could be small lifeboats in space, saving themselves, saving others, collecting together, finding each other until they were an island of men with some plan. But without the force units snapped to their shoulders they were meteors, senseless, each going to a separate and irrevocable fate.
A period of perhaps ten minutes elapsed while the first terror died and a metallic calm took its place. Space began to weave its strange voices in and out, on a great dark loom, crossing, recrossing, making a final pattern.
‘Stone to Hollis. How long can we talk by phone?’
‘It depends on how fast you’re going your way and I’m going mine.’
‘An hour, I make it.’
‘That should do it,’ said Hollis, abstracted and quiet.
‘What happened?’ asked Hollis a minute later.
‘The rocket blew up, that’s all. Rockets do blow up.’
‘Which way are you going?’
‘It looks like I’ll hit the Moon.’
‘It’s Earth for me. Back to old Mother Earth at ten thousand miles per hour. I’ll burn like a match.’ Hollis thought of it with a queer abstraction of mind. He seemed to be removed from his body, watching it fall down and down through space, as objective as he had been in regard to the first falling snowflakes of a winter season long gone.
The others were silent, thinking of the destiny that had brought them to this, falling, falling, and nothing they could do to change it. Even the captain was quiet, for there was no command or plan he knew that could put things back together again.
‘Oh, it’s a long way down. Oh, it’s a long way down, a long, long, long way down,’ said a voice. ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, it’s a long way down.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Stimson, I think. Stimson, is that you?’
‘It’s a long, long way and I don’t like it. Oh. God. I don’t like it.’
‘Stimson, this is Hollis. Stimson, you hear me?’
A pause while they fell separate from one another.
‘Stimson?’
‘Yes.’ He replied at last.
‘Stimson, take it easy; we’re all in the same fix.’
‘I don’t want to be here. I want to be somewhere else.’
‘There’s a chance we’ll be found.’
‘I must be, I must be,’ said Stimson. ‘I don’t believe this; I don’t believe any of this is happening.’
‘It’s a bad dream,’ said someone.
‘Shut up!’ said Hollis.
‘Come and make me,’ said the voice. It was Applegate. He laughed easily, with a similar objectivity. ‘Come and shut me up.’
Hollis for the first time felt the impossibility of his position. A great anger filled him, for he wanted more than anything at this moment to be able to do something to Applegate. He had wanted for many years to do something and now it was too late. Applegate was only a telephonic voice.
Falling, falling, falling …
Now, as if they had discovered the horror, two of the men began to scream. In a nightmare Hollis saw one of them float by, very near, screaming and screaming.
‘Stop it!’ The man was almost at his fingertips, screaming insanely. He would never stop. He would go on screaming for a million miles, as long as he was in radio range, disturbing all of them, making it impossible for them to talk to one another.
Hollis reached out. It was best this way. He made the extra effort and touched the man. He grasped the man’s ankle and pulled himself up along the body until he reached the head. The man screamed and clawed frantically, like a drowning swimmer. The screaming filled the universe.
One way or the other, thought Hollis. The Moon or Earth or meteors will kill him, so why not now?
He smashed the man’s glass mask with his iron fist. The screaming stopped. He pushed off from the body and let it spin away on its own course, falling.
Falling, falling down space Hollis and the rest of them went in the long, endless dropping and whirling of silence.
‘Hollis, you still there?’
Hollis did not speak, but felt the rush of heat in his face.
‘This is Applegate again.’
‘All right, Applegate.’
‘Let’s talk. We haven’t anything else to do.’
The captain cut in. ‘That’s enough of that. We’ve got to figure a way out of this.’
‘Captain, why don’t you shut up?’ said Applegate.
‘What!’
‘You heard me, Captain. Don’t pull your rank on me, you’re ten thousand miles away by now, and let’s not kid ourselves. As Stimson puts it, it’s a long way down.’
‘See here, Applegate!’
‘Can it. This is a mutiny of one. I haven’t a damn thing to lose. Your ship was a bad ship and you were a bad captain and I hope you break when you hit the Moon.’
‘I’m ordering you to stop!’
‘Go on, order me again.’ Applegate smiled across ten thousand miles. The captain was silent. Applegate continued. ‘Where were we. Hollis? Oh yes, I remember. I hate you too. But you know that. You’ve known it for a long time.’
Hollis clenched his fists, helplessly.
‘I want to tell you something,’ said Applegate. ‘Make you happy. I was the one who blackballed you with the Rocket Company five years ago.’
A meteor flashed by. Hollis looked down and his left hand was gone. Blood spurted. Suddenly there was no air in his suit. He had enough air in his lungs to move his right hand over and twist a knob at his left elbow, tightening the joint and sealing the leak. It had happened so quickly that he was not surprised. Nothing surprised him any more. The air in the suit came back to normal in an instant now that the leak was sealed. And the blood that had flowed so swiftly was pressured as he fastened the knob yet tighter, until it made a tourniquet.
All of this took place in a terrible silence on his part. And the other men chatted. That one man, Lespere, went on and on with his talk about his wife on Mars, his wife on Venus, his wife on Jupiter, his money, his wondrous times, his drunkenness, his gambling, his happiness. On and on, while they all fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.
It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the center of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.
‘Are you angry, Hollis?’
‘No.’ And he was not. The abstraction had returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere.
‘You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. You always wondered what happened. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.’
‘That isn’t important,’ said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out. ‘There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,’ the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.
From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?
One of the other men, Lespere, was talking. ‘Well, I had me a good time: I had a wife on Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Each of them had money and treated me swell. I got drunk and once I gambled away twenty thousand dollars.’
But you’re here now, thought Hollis. I didn’t have any of those things. When I was living I was jealous of you, Lespere; when I had another day ahead of me I envied you your women and your good times. Women frightened me and I went into space, always wanting them and jealous of you for having them, and money, and as much happiness as you could have in your own wild way. But now, falling here, with everything over, I’m not jealous of you any more, because it’s over for you as it is for me, and right now it’s like it never was. Hollis craned his face forward and shouted into the telephone.
‘It’s all over, Lespere!’
Silence.
‘It’s just as if it never was, Lespere!’
‘Who’s that?’ Lespere’s faltering voice.
‘This is Hollis.’
He was being mean. He felt the meanness, the senseless meanness of dying. Applegate had hurt him; now he wanted to hurt another. Applegate and space had both wounded him.
‘You’re out here, Lespere. It’s all over. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?’
‘Yes, it’s better!’
‘How!’
‘Because I got my thoughts, I remember!’ cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.
And he was right. With a feeling of cold water rushing through his head and body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.
‘What good does it do you?’ he cried to Lespere. ‘Now? When a thing’s over it’s not good any more. You’re no better off than I.’
‘I’m resting easy,’ said Lespere. ‘I’ve had my turn. I’m not getting mean at the end, like you.’
‘Mean?’ Hollis turned the word on his tongue. He had never been mean, as long as he could remember, in his life. He had never dared to be mean. He must have saved it all of these years for such a time as this. ‘Mean.’ He rolled the word into the back of his mind. He felt tears start into his eyes and roll down his face. Someone must have heard his gasping voice.
‘Take it easy, Hollis.’
It was, of course, ridiculous. Only a minute before he had been giving advice to others, to Stimson: he had felt a braveness which he had thought to be the genuine thing, and now he knew that it had been nothing but shock and the objectivity possible in shock. Now he was trying to pack a lifetime of suppressed emotion into an interval of minutes.
‘I know how you feel, Hollis,’ said Lespere, now twenty thousand miles away, his voice fading. ‘I don’t take it personally.’
But aren’t we equal? he wondered. Lespere and I? Here, now? If a thing’s over, it’s done, and what good is it? You die anyway. But he knew he was rationalizing, for it was like trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse. There was a spark in one, and not in the other – an aura, a mysterious element.
So it was with Lespere and himself; Lespere had lived a good full life, and it made him a different man now, and he, Hollis, had been as good as dead for many years. They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were kinds of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?
It was a second later that he discovered his right foot was cut sheer away. It almost made him laugh. The air was gone from his suit again. He bent quickly, and there was blood, and the meteor had taken flesh and suit away to the ankle. Oh, death in space was most humorous. It cut you away, piece by piece, like a black and invisible butcher. He tightened the valve at the knee, his head whirling into pain, fighting to remain aware, and with the valve tightened, the blood retained, the air kept, he straightened up and went on falling, falling, for that was all there was left to do.
‘Hollis?’
Hollis nodded sleepily, tired of waiting for death.
‘This is Applegate again,’ said the voice.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve had time to think. I listened to you. This isn’t good. It makes us bad. This is a bad way to die. It brings all the bile out. You listening, Hollis?’
‘Yes.’
‘I lied. A minute ago. I lied. I didn’t blackball you. I don’t know why I said that. Guess I wanted to hurt you. You seemed the one to hurt. We’ve always fought. Guess I’m getting old fast and repenting fast. I guess listening to you be mean made me ashamed. Whatever the reason. I want you to know I was an idiot too. There’s not an ounce of truth in what I said. To hell with you.’
Hollis felt his heart begin to work again. It seemed as if it hadn’t worked for five minutes, but now all of his limbs began to take color and warmth. The shock was over, and the successive shocks of anger and terror and loneliness were passing. He felt like a man emerging from a cold shower in the morning, ready for breakfast and a new day.
‘Thanks, Applegate.’
‘Don’t mention it. Up your nose, you bastard.’
‘Hey,’ said Stone.
‘What?’ Hollis called across space; for Stone, of all of them, was a good friend.
‘I’ve got myself into a meteor swarm, some little asteroids.’
‘Meteors?’
‘I think it’s the Myrmidone cluster that goes out past Mars and in toward Earth once every five years. I’m right in the middle. It’s like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colors and shapes and sizes. God, it’s beautiful, all that metal.’
Silence.
‘I’m going with them,’ said Stone. ‘They’re taking me off with them. I’ll be damned.’ He laughed.
Hollis looked to see, but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires. There was a kind of wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the meteor swarm, out past Mars for years and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet’s ken for the next million centuries. Stone and the Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colors when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and gave it a twirl.
‘So long. Hollis.’ Stone’s voice, very faint now. ‘So long.’
‘Good luck,’ shouted Hollis across thirty thousand miles.
‘Don’t be funny,’ said Stone, and was gone.
The stars closed in.
Now all the voices were fading, each on his own trajectory, some to Mars, others into farthest space. And Hollis himself … He looked down. He, of all the others, was going back to Earth alone.
‘So long.’
‘Take it easy.’
‘So long, Hollis.’ That was Applegate.
The many good-bys. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying. Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body, no longer to be despised and worked against. The brain was exploded, and the senseless, useless fragments of it were far scattered. The voices faded and now all of space was silent. Hollis was alone, falling.
They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep. There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.
And I? thought Hollis. What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If only I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me! But there’s no one here but myself and how can you do good all alone? You can’t. Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth’s atmosphere.
I’ll burn, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.
He fell swiftly, like a bullet, like a pebble, like an iron weight, objective, objective all of the time now, not sad or happy or anything, but only wishing he could do a good thing now that everything was gone, a good thing for just himself to know about.
When I hit the atmosphere, I’ll burn like a meteor.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if anyone’ll see me?’
The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. ‘Look, Mom, look! A falling star!’
The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois.
‘Make a wish,’ said his mother. ‘Make a wish.’
The Rocket Man (#ulink_c05e2e2c-b82c-50f8-b722-a5aae4c5c093)
The electrical fireflies were hovering above Mother’s dark hair to light her path. She stood in her bedroom door looking out at me as I passed in the silent hall. ‘You will help me keep him here this time, won’t you?’ she asked.
‘I guess so,’ I said.
‘Please.’ The fireflies cast moving bits of light on her white face. ‘This time he mustn’t go away again.’
‘All right,’ I said, after standing there a moment. ‘But it won’t do any good: it’s no use.’
She went away, and the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered after her like an errant constellation, showing her how to walk in darkness. I heard her say, faintly, ‘We’ve got to try, anyway.’
Other fireflies followed me to my room. When the weight of my body cut a circuit in the bed, the fireflies winked out. It was midnight, and my mother and I waited, our rooms separated by darkness, in bed. The bed began to rock me and sing to me. I touched a switch; the singing and rocking stopped. I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to sleep at all.
This night was no different from a thousand others in our time. We would wake nights and feel the cool air turn hot, feel the fire in the wind, or see the walls burned a bright color for an instant, and then we knew his rocket was over our house – his rocket, and the oak trees swaying from the concussion. And I would lie there, eyes wide, panting, and Mother in her room. Her voice would come to me over the interroom radio:
‘Did you feel it?’
And I would answer, ‘That was him, all right.’
That was my father’s ship passing over our town, a small town where space rockets never came, and we would lie awake for the next two hours, thinking. ‘Now Dad’s landed in Springfield, now he’s on the tarmac, now he is signing the papers, now he’s in the helicopter, now he’s over the river, now the hills, now he’s settling the helicopter in at the little airport at Green Village here …’ And the night would be half over when, in our separate cool beds, Mother and I would be listening, listening. ‘Now he’s walking down Bell Street. He always walks … never takes a cab … now across the park, now turning the corner of Oakhurst and now …’
I lifted my head from my pillow. Far down the street, coming closer and closer, smartly, quickly, briskly – footsteps. Now turning in at our house, up the porch steps. And we were both smiling in the cool darkness, Mom and I, when we heard the front door open in recognition, speak a quiet word of welcome, and shut, downstairs …
Three hours later I turned the brass knob to their room quietly, holding my breath, balancing in a darkness as big as the space between the planets, my hand out to reach the small black case at the foot of my parents’ sleeping bed. Taking it, I ran silently to my room, thinking. He won’t tell me, he doesn’t want me to know.
And from the opened case spilled his black uniform, like a black nebula, stars glittering here or there, distantly, in the material. I kneaded the dark stuff in my warm hands; I smelled the planet Mars, an iron smell, and the planet Venus, a green ivy smell, and the planet Mercury, a scent of sulphur and fire: and I could smell the milky Moon and the hardness of stars. I pushed the uniform into a centrifuge machine I’d built in my ninth-grade shop that year, set it whirling. Soon a fine powder precipitated into a retort. This I slid under a microscope. And while my parents slept unaware, and while our house was asleep, all the automatic bakers and servers and robot cleaners in an electric slumber, I stared down upon brilliant motes of meteor dust, comet tail, and loam from far Jupiter glistening like worlds themselves which drew me down the tube a billion miles into space, at terrific accelerations.
At dawn, exhausted with my journey and fearful of discovery, I returned the boxed uniform to their sleeping room.
Then I slept, only to waken at the sound of the horn of the dry-cleaning car which stopped in the yard below. They took the black uniform box with them. It’s good I didn’t wait. I thought. For the uniform would be back in an hour, clean of all its destiny and travel.
I slept again, with the little vial of magical dust in my pajama pocket, over my beating heart.
When I came downstairs, there was Dad at the breakfast table, biting into his toast. ‘Sleep good, Doug?’ he said, as if he had been here all the time, and hadn’t been gone for three months.
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Toast?’
He pressed a button and the breakfast table made me four pieces, golden brown.
I remember my father that afternoon, digging and digging in the garden, like an animal after something, it seemed. There he was with his long dark arms moving swiftly, planting, tamping, fixing, cutting, pruning, his dark face always down to the soil, his eyes always down to what he was doing, never up to the sky, never looking at me, or Mother, even, unless we knelt with him to feel the earth soak up through the overalls at our knees, to put our hands into the black dirt and not look at the bright, crazy sky. Then he would glance to either side, to Mother or me, and give us a gentle wink, and go on, bent down, face down, the sky staring at his back.
That night we sat on the mechanical porch swing which swung us and blew a wind upon us and sang to us. It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to drink, and we held the cold glasses in our hands, and Dad read the stereo-newspapers inserted into the special hat you put on your head and which turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three times in succession. Dad smoked cigarettes and told me about how it was when he was a boy in the year 1997. After a while he said, as he had always said. ‘Why aren’t you out playing kick-the-can, Doug?’
I didn’t say anything, but Mom said, ‘He does, on nights when you’re not here.’
Dad looked at me and then, for the first time that day, at the sky. Mother always watched him when he glanced at the stars. The first day and night when he got home he wouldn’t look at the sky much. I thought about him gardening and gardening so furiously, his face almost driven into the earth. But the second night he looked at the stars a little more. Mother wasn’t afraid of the sky in the day so much, but it was the night stars that she wanted to turn off, and sometimes I could almost see her reaching for a switch in her mind, but never finding it. And by the third night maybe Dad’d be out here on the porch until way after we were all ready for bed, and then I’d hear Mom call him in, almost like she called me from the street at times. And then I would hear Dad fitting the electric-eye door lock in place, with a sigh. And the next morning at breakfast I’d glance down and see his little black case near his feet as he buttered his toast and Mother slept late.
‘Well, be seeing you, Doug,’ he’d say, and we’d shake hands.
‘In about three months?’
‘Right.’
And he’d walk away down the street, not taking a helicopter or beetle or bus, just walking with his uniform hidden in his small underarm case: he didn’t want anyone to think he was vain about being a Rocket Man.
Mother would come out to eat breakfast, one piece of dry toast, about an hour later.
But now it was tonight, the first night, the good night, and he wasn’t looking at the stars much at all.
‘Let’s go to the television carnival,’ I said.
‘Fine,’ said Dad.
Mother smiled at me.
And we rushed off to town in a helicopter and took Dad through a thousand exhibits, to keep his face and head down with us and not looking anywhere else. And as we laughed at the funny things and looked serious at the serious ones, I thought, My father goes to Saturn and Neptune and Pluto, but he never brings me presents. Other boys’ fathers who go into space bring back bits of ore from Callisto and hunks of black meteor or blue sand. But I have to get my own collection, trading from other boys, the Martian rocks and Mercurian sands which filled my room, but about which Dad would never comment.
On occasion, I remembered, he brought something for Mother. He planted some Martian sunflowers once in our yard, but after he was gone a month and the sunflowers grew large, Mom ran out one day and cut them all down.
Without thinking, as we paused at one of the three-dimensional exhibits, I asked Dad the question I always asked:
‘What’s it like, out in space?’
Mother shot me a frightened glance. It was too late.
Dad stood there for a full half-minute trying to find an answer, then he shrugged.
‘It’s the best thing in a lifetime of best things.’ Then he caught himself. ‘Oh, it’s really nothing at all. Routine. You wouldn’t like it.’ He looked at me, apprehensively.
‘But you always go back.’
‘Habit.’
‘Where’re you going next?’
‘I haven’t decided yet. I’ll think it over.’
He always thought it over. In those days rocket pilots were rare and he could pick and choose, work when he liked. On the third night of his homecoming you could see him picking and choosing among the stars.
‘Come on,’ said Mother, ‘let’s go home.’
It was still early when we got home. I wanted Dad to put on his uniform. I shouldn’t have asked – it always made Mother unhappy – but I could not help myself. I kept at him, though he had always refused. I had never seen him in it, and at last he said, ‘Oh, all right.’
We waited in the parlor while he went upstairs in the air flue. Mother looked at me dully, as if she couldn’t believe that her own son could do this to her. I glanced away. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘You’re not helping at all,’ she said. ‘At all.’
There was a whisper in the air flue a moment later.
‘Here I am,’ said Dad quietly.
We looked at him in his uniform.
It was glossy black with silver buttons and silver rims to the heels of the black boots, and it looked as if someone had cut the arms and legs and body from a dark nebula, with little faint stars glowing through it. It fit as close as a glove fits to a slender long hand, and it smelled like cool air and metal and space. It smelled of fire and time.
Father stood, smiling awkwardly, in the center of the room.
‘Turn around,’ said Mother.
Her eyes were remote, looking at him.
When he was gone, she never talked of him. She never said anything about anything but the weather or the condition of my neck and the need of a washcloth for it, or the fact that she didn’t sleep nights. Once she said the light was too strong at night.
‘But there’s no moon this week,’ I said.
‘There’s starlight,’ she said.
I went to the store and bought her some darker, greener shades. As I lay in bed at night. I could hear her pull them down tight to the bottom of the windows. It made a long rustling noise.
Once I tried to mow the lawn.
‘No.’ Mom stood in the door. ‘Put the mower away.’
So the grass went three months at a time without cutting. Dad cut it when he came home.
She wouldn’t let me do anything else either, like repairing the electrical breakfast maker or the mechanical book reader. She saved everything up, as if for Christmas. And then I would see Dad hammering or tinkering, and always smiling at his work, and Mother smiled over him, happy.
No, she never talked of him when he was gone. And as for Dad, he never did anything to make a contact across the millions of miles. He said once, ‘If I called you, I’d want to be with you. I wouldn’t be happy.’
Once Dad said to me, ‘Your mother treats me, sometimes, as if I weren’t here – as if I were invisible.’
I had seen her do it. She would look just beyond him, over his shoulder, at his chin or hands, but never into his eyes. If she did look at his eyes, her eyes were covered with a film, like an animal going to sleep. She said yes at the right times, and smiled, but always a half second later than expected.
‘I’m not there for her,’ said Dad.
But other days she would be there and he would be there for her, and they would hold hands and walk around the block, or take rides, with Mom’s hair flying like a girl’s behind her, and she would cut off all the mechanical devices in the kitchen and bake him incredible cakes and pies and cookies, looking deep into his face, her smile a real smile. But at the end of such days when he was there to her, she would always cry. And Dad would stand helpless, gazing about the room as if to find the answer, but never finding it.
Dad turned slowly, in his uniform for us to see.
‘Turn around again,’ said Mom.
The next morning Dad came rushing into the house with handfuls of tickets. Pink rocket tickets for California, blue tickets for Mexico.
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘We’ll buy disposable clothes and burn them when they’re soiled. Look, we take the noon rocket to L.A., the two-o’clock helicopter to Santa Barbara, the nine o’clock plane to Ensenada, sleep overnight!’
And we went to California and up and down the Pacific Coast for a day and a half, settling at last on the sands of Malibu to cook wieners at night. Dad was always listening or singing or watching things on all sides of him, holding on to things as if the world were a centrifuge going so swiftly that he might be flung off away from us at any instant.
The last afternoon at Malibu Mom was up in the hotel room. Dad lay on the sand beside me for a long time in the hot sun. ‘Ah,’ he sighed, ‘this is it.’ His eyes were gently closed; he lay on his back, drinking the sun. ‘You miss this,’ he said.
He meant ‘on the rocket,’ of course. But he never said ‘the rocket’ or mentioned the rocket and all the things you couldn’t have on the rocket. You couldn’t have a salt wind on the rocket or a blue sky or a yellow sun or Mom’s cooking. You couldn’t talk to your fourteen-year-old boy on a rocket.
‘Let’s hear it,’ he said at last.
And I knew that now we would talk, as we had always talked, for three hours straight. All afternoon we would murmur back and forth in the lazy sun about my school grades, how high I could jump, how fast I could swim.
Dad nodded each time I spoke and smiled and slapped my chest lightly in approval. We talked. We did not talk of rockets or space, but we talked of Mexico, where we had driven once in an ancient car, and of the butterflies we had caught in the rain forests of green warm Mexico at noon, seeing the hundred butterflies sucked to our radiator, dying there, beating their blue and crimson wings, twitching, beautiful, and sad. We talked of such things instead of the things I wanted to talk about. And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear. He listened to the wind and the falling ocean and my voice, always with a rapt attention, a concentration that almost excluded physical bodies themselves and kept only the sounds. He shut his eyes to listen. I would see him listening to the lawn mower as he cut the grass by hand instead of using the remote-control device, and I would see him smelling the cut grass as it sprayed up at him behind the mower in a green fount.
‘Doug,’ he said, about five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our towels and heading back along the beach near the surf, ‘I want you to promise me something.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t ever be a Rocket Man.’
I stopped.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Because when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that. Don’t let it get hold of you.’
‘But—’
‘You don’t know what it is. Every time I’m out there I think. If I ever get back to Earth I’ll stay there; I’ll never go out again. But I go out, and I guess I’ll always go out.’
‘I’ve thought about being a Rocket Man for a long time,’ I said.
He didn’t hear me. ‘I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I started trying so damned hard to stay here.’
I remembered him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing and listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and the towns and the land and his family were the only real things and the good things. But I knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion from our front porch.
‘Promise me you won’t be like me,’ he said.
I hesitated awhile. ‘Okay,’ I said.
He shook my hand. ‘Good boy,’ he said.
The dinner was fine that night. Mom had run about the kitchen with handfuls of cinnamon and dough and pots and pans tinkling, and now a great turkey fumed on the table, with dressing, cranberry sauce, peas, and pumpkin pie.
‘In the middle of August?’ said Dad, amazed.
‘You won’t be here for Thanksgiving.’
‘So I won’t.’
He sniffed it. He lifted each lid from each tureen and let the flavor steam over his sunburned face. He said ‘Ah’ to each. He looked at the room and his hands. He gazed at the pictures on the wall, the chairs, the table, me, and Mom. He cleared his throat. I saw him make up his mind. ‘Lilly?’
‘Yes?’ Mom looked across her table which she had set like a wonderful silver trap, a miraculous gravy pit in which, like a struggling beast of the past caught in a tar pool, her husband might at last be caught and held, gazing out through a jail of wishbones, safe forever. Her eyes sparkled.
‘Lilly,’ said Dad.
Go on, I thought crazily. Say it quick: say you’ll stay home this time, for good, and never go away; say it!
Just then a passing helicopter jarred the room and the windowpane shook with a crystal sound. Dad glanced at the window.
The blue stars of evening were there, and the red planet Mars was rising in the East.
Dad looked at Mars a full minute. Then he put his hand out blindly toward me. ‘May I have some peas,’ he said.
‘Excuse me,’ said Mother. ‘I’m going to get some bread.’
She rushed out into the kitchen.
‘But there’s bread on the table,’ I said.
Dad didn’t look at me as he began his meal.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I came downstairs at one in the morning and the moonlight was like ice on all the housetops, and dew glittered in a snow field on our grass. I stood in the doorway in my pajamas, feeling the warm night wind, and then I knew that Dad was sitting in the mechanical porch swing, gliding gently. I could see his profile tilted back, and he was watching the stars wheel over the sky. His eyes were like gray crystal there, the Moon in each one.
I went out and sat beside him.
We glided awhile in the swing.
At last I said, ‘How many ways are there to die in space?’
‘A million.’
‘Name some.’
‘The meteors hit you. The air goes out of your rocket. Or comets take you along with them. Concussion. Strangulation. Explosion. Centrifugal force. Too much acceleration. Too little. The heat, the cold, the sun, the Moon, the stars, the planets, the asteroids, the planetoids, radiation …’
‘And do they bury you?’
‘They never find you.’
‘Where do you go?’
‘A billion miles away. Traveling graves, they call them. You become a meteor or a planetoid traveling forever through space.’
I said nothing.
‘One thing,’ he said later, ‘it’s quick in space. Death. It’s over like that. You don’t linger. Most of the time you don’t even know it. You’re dead and that’s it.’
We went up to bed.
It was morning.
Standing in the doorway, Dad listened to the yellow canary singing in its golden cage.
‘Well, I’ve decided,’ he said. ‘Next time I come home, I’m home to stay.’
‘Dad!’ I said.
‘Tell your mother that when she gets up,’ he said.
‘You mean it!’
He nodded gravely. ‘See you in about three months.’
And there he went off down the street, carrying his uniform in its secret box, whistling and looking at the tall green trees and picking chinaberries off the chinaberry bush as he brushed by, tossing them ahead of him as he walked away into the bright shade of early morning …
I asked Mother about a few things that morning after Father had been gone a number of hours. ‘Dad said that sometimes you don’t act as if you hear or see him,’ I said.
And then she explained everything to me quietly.
‘When he went off into space ten years ago, I said to myself, He’s dead. Or as good as dead. So think of him dead. And when he comes back, three or four times a year, it’s not him at all, it’s only a pleasant little memory or a dream. And if a memory stops or a dream stops, it can’t hurt half as much. So most of the time I think of him dead—’
‘But other times—’
‘Other times I can’t help myself. I bake pies and treat him as if he were alive, and then it hurts. No, it’s better to think he hasn’t been here for ten years and I’ll never see him again. It doesn’t hurt as much.’
‘Didn’t he say next time he’d settle down?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘No, he’s dead. I’m very sure of that.’
‘He’ll come alive again, then,’ I said.
‘Ten years ago,’ said Mother. ‘I thought, What if he dies on Venus? Then we’ll never be able to see Venus again. What if he dies on Mars? We’ll never be able to look at Mars again, all red in the sky, without wanting to go in and lock the door. Or what if he died on Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune? On those nights when those planets were high in the sky, we wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the stars.’
‘I guess not.’ I said.
The message came the next day.
The messenger gave it to me and I read it standing on the porch. The sun was setting. Mom stood in the screen door behind me, watching me fold the message and put it in my pocket.
‘Mom,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell me anything I don’t already know,’ she said.
She didn’t cry.
Well, it wasn’t Mars, and it wasn’t Venus, and it wasn’t Jupiter or Saturn that killed him. We wouldn’t have to think of him every time Jupiter or Saturn or Mars lit up the evening sky.
This was different.
His ship had fallen into the sun.
And the sun was big and fiery and merciless, and it was always in the sky and you couldn’t get away from it.
So for a long time after my father died my mother slept through the days and wouldn’t go out. We had breakfast at midnight and lunch at three in the morning, and dinner at the cold dim hour of 6 A.M. We went to all-night shows and went to bed at sunrise.
And, for a long while, the only days we ever went out to walk were the days when it was raining and there was no sun.
Marionettes, Inc. (#ulink_9cfc2eb7-fa6c-5426-80da-202d82da9942)
They walked slowly down the street at about ten in the evening, talking calmly. They were both about thirty-five, both eminently sober.
‘But why so early?’ said Smith.
‘Because,’ said Braling.
‘Your first night out in years and you go home at ten o’clock.’
‘Nerves, I suppose.’
‘What I wonder is how you ever managed it. I’ve been trying to get you out for ten years for a quiet drink. And now, on the one night, you insist on turning in early.’
‘Mustn’t crowd my luck,’ said Braling.
‘What did you do, put sleeping powder in your wife’s coffee?’
‘No, that would be unethical. You’ll see soon enough.’
They turned a corner. ‘Honestly, Braling, I hate to say this, but you have been patient with her. You may not admit it to me, but marriage has been awful for you, hasn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘It’s got around, anyway, here and there, how she got you to marry her. That time back in 1979 when you were going to Rio—’
‘Dear Rio. I never did see it after all my plans.’
‘And how she tore her clothes and rumpled her hair and threatened to call the police unless you married her.’
‘She always was nervous, Smith, understand.’
‘It was more than unfair. You didn’t love her. You told her as much, didn’t you?’
‘I recall that I was quite firm on the subject.’
‘But you married her anyhow.’
‘I had my business to think of, as well as my mother and father. A thing like that would have killed them.’
‘And it’s been ten years.’
‘Yes,’ said Braling, his gray eyes steady. ‘But I think perhaps it might change now. I think what I’ve waited for has come about. Look here.’
He drew forth a long blue ticket.
‘Why, it’s a ticket for Rio on the Thursday rocket!’
‘Yes, I’m finally going to make it.’
‘But how wonderful! You do deserve it! But won’t she object? Cause trouble?’
Braling smiled nervously. ‘She won’t know I’m gone. I’ll be back in a month and no one the wiser, except you.’
Smith sighed. ‘I wish I were going with you.’
‘Poor Smith, your marriage hasn’t exactly been roses, has it?’
‘Not exactly, married to a woman who overdoes it. I mean, after all, when you’ve been married ten years, you don’t expect a woman to sit on your lap for two hours every evening, call you at work twelve times a day and talk baby talk. And it seems to me that in the last month she’s gotten worse. I wonder if perhaps she isn’t a little simple-minded?’
‘Ah, Smith, always the conservative. Well, here’s my house. Now, would you like to know my secret? How I made it out this evening?’
‘Will you really tell?’
‘Look up, there!’ said Braling.
They both stared up through the dark air.
In the window above them, on the second floor, a shade was raised. A man about thirty-five years old, with a touch of gray at either temple, sad gray eyes, and a small thin mustache looked down at them.
‘Why, that’s you!’ cried Smith.
‘Sh-h-h, not so loud!’ Braling waved upward. The man in the window gestured significantly and vanished.
‘I must be insane,’ said Smith.
‘Hold on a moment.’
They waited.
The street door of the apartment opened and the tall spare gentleman with the mustache and the grieved eyes came out to meet them.
‘Hello, Braling,’ he said.
‘Hello, Braling,’ said Braling.
They were identical.
Smith stared. ‘Is this your twin brother? I never knew—’
‘No, no,’ said Braling quietly. ‘Bend close. Put your ear to Braling Two’s chest.’
Smith hesitated and then leaned forward to place his head against the uncomplaining ribs.
Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
‘Oh no! It can’t be!’
‘It is.’
‘Let me listen again.’
Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
Smith staggered back and fluttered his eyelids, appalled. He reached out and touched the warm hands and the cheeks of the thing.
‘Where’d you get him?’
‘Isn’t he excellently fashioned?’
‘Incredible. Where?’
‘Give the man your card, Braling Two.’
Braling Two did a magic trick and produced a white card:
MARIONETTES, INC.
Duplicate self or friends: new humanoid plastic 1990 models, guaranteed against all physical wear. From $7,600 to our $15,000 de luxe model.
‘No,’ said Smith.
‘Yes,’ said Braling.
‘Naturally,’ said Braling Two.
‘How long has this gone on?’
‘I’ve had him for a month. I keep him in the cellar in a toolbox. My wife never goes downstairs, and I have the only lock and key to that box. Tonight I said I wished to take a walk to buy a cigar. I went down cellar and took Braling Two out of his box and sent him back up to sit with my wife while I came on out to see you, Smith.’
‘Wonderful! He even smells like you: Bond Street and Melachrinos!’
‘It may be splitting hairs, but I think it highly ethical. After all, what my wife wants most of all is me. This marionette is me to the hairiest detail. I’ve been home all evening. I shall be home with her for the next month. In the meantime another gentleman will be in Rio after ten years of waiting. When I return from Rio, Braling Two here will go back in his box.’
Smith thought that over a minute or two. ‘Will he walk around without sustenance for a month?’ he finally asked.
‘For six months if necessary. And he’s built to do everything – eat, sleep, perspire – everything, natural as natural is. You’ll take good care of my wife, won’t you, Braling Two?’
‘Your wife is rather nice,’ said Braling Two. ‘I’ve grown rather fond of her.’
Smith was beginning to tremble. ‘How long has Marionettes, Inc., been in business?’
‘Secretly, for two years.’
‘Could I – I mean, is there a possibility—’ Smith took his friend’s elbow earnestly. ‘Can you tell me where I can get one, a robot, a marionette, for myself? You will give me the address, won’t you?’
‘Here you are.’
Smith took the card and turned it round and round. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what this means. Just a little respite. A night or so, once a month even. My wife loves me so much she can’t bear to have me gone an hour. I love her dearly, you know, but remember the old poem: “Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly.” I just want her to relax her grip a little bit.’
‘You’re lucky, at least, that your wife loves you. Hate’s my problem. Not so easy.’
‘Oh, Nettie loves me madly. It will be my task to make her love me comfortably.’
‘Good luck to you, Smith. Do drop around while I’m in Rio. It will seem strange, if you suddenly stop calling by, to my wife. You’re to treat Braling Two, here, just like me.’
‘Right! Good-by. And thank you.’
Smith went smiling down the street. Braling and Braling Two turned and walked into the apartment hall.
On the crosstown bus Smith whistled softly, turning the white card in his fingers:
Clients must be pledged to secrecy, for while an act is pending in Congress to legalize Marionettes, Inc., it is still a felony, if caught, to use one.
‘Well,’ said Smith.
Clients must have a mold made of their body and a color index check of their eyes, lips, hair, skin, etc. Clients must expect to wait for two months until their model is finished.
Not so long, thought Smith. Two months from now my ribs will have a chance to mend from the crushing they’ve taken. Two months from now my hand will heal from being so constantly held. Two months from now my bruised underlip will begin to reshape itself. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful … He flipped the card over.
Marionettes, Inc., is two years old and has a fine record of satisfied customers behind it. Our motto is ‘No Strings Attached.’ Address: 43 South Wesley Drive.
The bus pulled to his stop; he alighted, and while humming up the stairs he thought, Nettie and I have fifteen thousand in our joint bank account. I’ll just slip eight thousand out as a business venture, you might say. The marionette will probably pay back my money, with interest, in many ways. Nettie needn’t know. He unlocked the door and in a minute was in the bedroom. There lay Nettie, pale, huge, and piously asleep.
‘Dear Nettie.’ He was almost overwhelmed with remorse at her innocent face there in the semidarkness. ‘If you were awake you would smother me with kisses and coo in my ear. Really, you make me feel like a criminal. You have been such a good, loving wife. Sometimes it is impossible for me to believe you married me instead of that Bud Chapman you once liked. It seems that in the last month you have loved me more wildly than ever before.’
Tears came to his eyes. Suddenly he wished to kiss her, confess his love, tear up the card, forget the whole business. But as he moved to do this, his hand ached and his ribs cracked and groaned. He stopped, with a pained look in his eyes, and turned away. He moved out into the hall and through the dark rooms. Humming, he opened the kidney desk in the library and filched the bankbook. ‘Just take eight thousand dollars is all,’ he said. ‘No more than that.’ He stopped. ‘Wait a minute.’
He rechecked the bankbook frantically. ‘Hold on here!’ he cried. ‘Ten thousand dollars is missing!’ He leaped up. ‘There’s only five thousand left! What’s she done? What’s Nettie done with it? More hats, more clothes, more perfume! Or, wait – I know! She bought that little house on the Hudson she’s been talking about for months, without so much as a by your leave!’
He stormed into the bedroom, righteous and indignant. What did she mean, taking their money like this? He bent over her. ‘Nettie!’ he shouted. ‘Nettie, wake up!’
She did not stir. ‘What’ve you done with my money!’ he bellowed.
She stirred fitfully. The light from the street flushed over her beautiful cheeks.
There was something about her. His heart throbbed violently. His tongue dried. He shivered. His knees suddenly turned to water. He collapsed. ‘Nettie, Nettie!’ he cried. ‘What’ve you done with my money!’
And then, the horrid thought. And then the terror and the loneliness engulfed him. And then the fever and disillusionment. For, without desiring to do so, he bent forward and yet forward again until his fevered ear was resting firmly and irrevocably upon her round pink bosom. ‘Nettie!’ he cried.
Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
As Smith walked away down the avenue in the night, Braling and Braling Two turned in at the door to the apartment. ‘I’m glad he’ll be happy too,’ said Braling.
‘Yes,’ said Braling Two abstractedly.
‘Well, it’s the cellar box for you, B-Two.’ Braling guided the other creature’s elbow down the stairs to the cellar.
‘That’s what I want to talk to you about,’ said Braling Two, as they reached the concrete floor and walked across it. ‘The cellar. I don’t like it. I don’t like that toolbox.’
‘I’ll try and fix up something more comfortable.’
‘Marionettes are made to move, not lie still. How would you like to lie in a box most of the time?’
‘Well—’
‘You wouldn’t like it at all. I keep running. There’s no way to shut me off. I’m perfectly alive and I have feelings.’
‘It’ll only be a few days now. I’ll be off to Rio and you won’t have to stay in the box. You can live upstairs.’
Braling Two gestured irritably. ‘And when you come back from having a good time, back in the box I go.’
Braling said, ‘They didn’t tell me at the marionette shop that I’d get a difficult specimen.’
‘There’s a lot they don’t know about us,’ said Braling Two. ‘We’re pretty new. And we’re sensitive. I hate the idea of you going off and laughing and lying in the sun in Rio while we’re stuck here in the cold.’
‘But I’ve wanted that trip all my life,’ said Braling quietly.
He squinted his eyes and could see the sea and the mountains and the yellow sand. The sound of the waves was good to his inward mind. The sun was fine on his bared shoulders. The wine was most excellent.
‘I’ll never get to go to Rio,’ said the other man. ‘Have you thought of that?’
‘No, I—’
‘And another thing. Your wife.’
‘What about her?’ asked Braling, beginning to edge toward the door.
‘I’ve grown quite fond of her.’
‘I’m glad you’re enjoying your employment.’ Braling licked his lips nervously.
‘I’m afraid you don’t understand. I think – I’m in love with her.’
Braling took another step and froze. ‘You’re what?’
‘And I’ve been thinking,’ said Braling Two, ‘how nice it is in Rio and how I’ll never get there, and I’ve thought about your wife and – I think we could be very happy.’
‘Th-that’s nice.’ Braling strolled as casually as he could to the cellar door. ‘You won’t mind waiting a moment, will you? I have to make a phone call.’
‘To whom?’ Braling Two frowned.
‘No one important.’
‘To Marionettes, Incorporated? To tell them to come get me?’
‘No, no – nothing like that!’ He tried to rush out the door.
A metal-firm grip seized his wrists. ‘Don’t run!’
‘Take your hands off!’
‘No.’
‘Did my wife put you up to this?’
‘No.’
‘Did she guess? Did she talk to you? Does she know? Is that it?’ He screamed. A hand clapped over his mouth.
‘You’ll never know, will you?’ Braling Two smiled delicately. ‘You’ll never know.’
Braling struggled. ‘She must have guessed; she must have affected you!’
Braling Two said, ‘I’m going to put you in the box, lock it, and lose the key. Then I’ll buy another Rio ticket for your wife.’
‘Now, now, wait a minute. Hold on. Don’t be rash. Let’s talk this over!’
‘Good-by. Braling.’
Braling stiffened. ‘What do you mean, “good-by”?’
Ten minutes later Mrs Braling awoke. She put her hand to her cheek. Someone had just kissed it. She shivered and looked up. ‘Why – you haven’t done that in years,’ she murmured.
‘We’ll see what we can do about that,’ someone said.
No Particular Night or Morning (#ulink_1fe1446b-885c-59ed-b904-a28cd1997a32)
He had smoked a packet of cigarettes in two hours.
‘How far out in space are we?’
‘A billion miles.’
‘A billion miles from where?’ said Hitchcock.
‘It all depends,’ said Clemens, not smoking at all. ‘A billion miles from home, you might say.’
‘Then say it.’
‘Home. Earth. New York. Chicago. Wherever you were from.’
‘I don’t even remember,’ said Hitchcock. ‘I don’t even believe there is an Earth now, do you?’
‘Yes,’ said Clemens. ‘I dreamt about it this morning.’
‘There is no morning in space.’
‘During the night then.’
‘It’s always night,’ said Hitchcock quietly. ‘Which night do you mean?’
‘Shut up,’ said Clemens irritably. ‘Let me finish.’
Hitchcock lit another cigarette. His hand did not shake, but it looked as if, inside the sunburned flesh, it might be tremoring all to itself, a small tremor in each hand and a large invisible tremor in his body. The two men sat on the observation corridor floor, looking out at the stars. Clemens’s eyes flashed, but Hitchcock’s eyes focused on nothing; they were blank and puzzled.
‘I woke up at 0500 hours myself,’ said Hitchcock, as if he were talking to his right hand. ‘And I heard myself screaming, “Where am I? where am I?” And the answer was “Nowhere!” And I said, “Where’ve I been?” And I said, “Earth!” “What’s Earth?” I wondered. “Where I was born,” I said. But it was nothing and worse than nothing. I don’t believe in anything I can’t see or hear or touch. I can’t see Earth, so why should I believe in it? It’s safer this way, not to believe.’
‘There’s Earth.’ Clemens pointed, smiling. ‘That point of light there.’
‘That’s not Earth; that’s our sun. You can’t see Earth from here.’
‘I can see it. I have a good memory.’
‘It’s not the same, you fool,’ said Hitchcock suddenly. There was a touch of anger in his voice. ‘I mean see it. I’ve always been that way. When I’m in Boston, New York is dead. When I’m in New York, Boston is dead. When I don’t see a man for a day, he’s dead. When he comes walking down the street, my God, it’s a resurrection. I do a dance, almost, I’m so glad to see him. I used to, anyway. I don’t dance any more. I just look. And when the man walks off, he’s dead again.’
Clemens laughed. ‘It’s simply that your mind works on a primitive level. You can’t hold on to things. You’ve got no imagination. Hitchcock, old man. You’ve got to learn to hold on.’
‘Why should I hold on to things I can’t use?’ said Hitchcock, his eyes wide, still staring into space. ‘I’m practical. If Earth isn’t here for me to walk on, you want me to walk on a memory? That hurts. Memories, as my father once said, are porcupines. To hell with them! Stay away from them. They make you unhappy. They ruin your work. They make you cry.’
‘I’m walking on Earth right now,’ said Clemens, squinting to himself, blowing smoke.
‘You’re kicking porcupines. Later in the day you won’t be able to eat lunch, and you’ll wonder why,’ said Hitchcock in a dead voice. ‘And it’ll be because you’ve got a footful of quills aching in you. To hell with it! If I can’t drink it, pinch it, punch it, or lie on it, then I say drop it in the sun. I’m dead to Earth. It’s dead to me. There’s no one in New York weeping for me tonight. Shove New York. There isn’t any season here; winter and summer are gone. So is spring, and autumn. It isn’t any particular night or morning: it’s space and space. The only thing right now is you and me and this rocket ship. And the only thing I’m positive of is me. That’s all of it.’
Clemens ignored this. ‘I’m putting a dime in the phone slot right now,’ he said, pantomiming it with a slow smile. ‘And calling my girl in Evanston. Hello, Barbara!’
The rocket sailed on through space.
The lunch bell rang at 1305 hours. The men ran by on soft rubber sneakers and sat at the cushioned tables.
Clemens wasn’t hungry.
‘See, what did I tell you!’ said Hitchcock. ‘You and your damned porcupines! Leave them alone, like I told you. Look at me, shoveling away food.’ He said this with a mechanical, slow, and unhumorous voice. ‘Watch me.’ He put a big piece of pie in his mouth and felt it with his tongue. He looked at the pie on his plate as if to see the texture. He moved it with his fork. He felt the fork handle. He mashed the lemon filling and watched it jet up between the tines. Then he touched a bottle of milk all over and poured out half a quart into a glass, listening to it. He looked at the milk as if to make it whiter. He drank the milk so swiftly that he couldn’t have tasted it. He had eaten his entire lunch in a few minutes, cramming it in feverishly, and now he looked around for more, but it was gone. He gazed out the window of the rocket, blankly. ‘Those aren’t real either,’ he said.
‘What?’ asked Clemens.
‘The stars. Who’s ever touched one? I can see them, sure, but what’s the use of seeing a thing that’s a million or a billion miles away? Anything that far off isn’t worth bothering with.’
‘Why did you come on this trip?’ asked Clemens suddenly.
Hitchcock peered into his amazingly empty milk glass and clenched it tight, then relaxed his hand and clenched it again. ‘I don’t know.’ He ran his tongue on the glass rim. ‘I just had to, is all. How do you know why you do anything in this life?’
‘You liked the idea of space travel? Going places?’
‘I don’t know. Yes. No. It wasn’t going places. It was being between.’ Hitchcock for the first time tried to focus his eyes upon something, but it was so nebulous and far off that his eyes couldn’t make the adjustment, though he worked his face and hands. ‘Mostly it was space. So much space. I liked the idea of nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, and a lot of nothing in between, and me in the middle of the nothing.’
‘I never heard it put that way before.’
‘I just put it that way; I hope you listened.’
Hitchcock took out his cigarettes and lit up and began to suck and blow smoke, again and again.
Clemens said, ‘What sort of childhood did you have, Hitchcock?’
‘I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That’s more of your quills. I don’t want a hideful, thanks. I’ve always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you’ve died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that’s a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don’t know or understand or want to understand.’
‘You’re cutting yourself off, that way.’
‘Why should I have anything to do with that younger Hitchcock? He was a fool, and he was yanked around and taken advantage of and used. His father was no good, and he was glad when his mother died, because she was the same. Should I go back and see his face on that day and gloat over it? He was a fool.’
‘We’re all fools,’ said Clemens. ‘all the time. It’s just we’re a different kind each day. We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact that we’re not perfect and live accordingly.’
‘I don’t want to remember imperfect things,’ said Hitchcock. ‘I can’t shake hands with that younger Hitchcock, can I? Where is he? Can you find him for me? He’s dead, so to hell with him! I won’t shape what I do tomorrow by some lousy thing I did yesterday.’
‘You’ve got it wrong.’
‘Let me have it then.’ Hitchcock sat, finished with his meal, looking out the port. The other men glanced at him.
‘Do meteors exist?’ asked Hitchcock.
‘You know damn well they do.’
‘In our radar machines – yes, as streaks of light in space. No, I don’t believe in anything that doesn’t exist and act in my presence. Sometimes’ – he nodded at the men finishing their food – ‘sometimes I don’t believe in anyone or anything but me.’ He sat up. ‘Is there an upstairs to this ship?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got to see it immediately.’
‘Don’t get excited.’
‘You wait here; I’ll be right back.’ Hitchcock walked out swiftly. The other men sat nibbling their food slowly. A moment passed. One of the men raised his head. ‘How long’s this been going on? I mean Hitchcock.’
‘Just today.’
‘He acted funny the other day too.’
‘Yes, but it’s worse today.’
‘Has anyone told the psychiatrist?’
‘We thought he’d come out of it. Everyone has a little touch of space the first time out. I’ve had it. You get wildly philosophical, then frightened. You break into a sweat, then you doubt your parentage, you don’t believe in Earth, you get drunk, wake up with a hangover, and that’s it.’
‘But Hitchcock don’t get drunk,’ said someone. ‘I wish he would.’
‘How’d he ever get past the examining board?’
‘How’d we all get past? They need men. Space scares the hell out of most people. So the board lets a lot of borderlines through.’
‘That man isn’t a borderline,’ said someone. ‘He’s a fall-off-a-cliff-and-no-bottom-to-hit.’
They waited for five minutes. Hitchcock didn’t come back.
Clemens finally got up and went out and climbed the circular stair to the flight deck above. Hitchcock was there, touching the wall tenderly.
‘It’s here,’ he said.
‘Of course it is.’
‘I was afraid it might not be.’ Hitchcock peered at Clemens. ‘And you’re alive.’
‘I have been for a long time.’
‘No,’ said Hitchcock. ‘Now, just now, this instant, while you’re here with me, you’re alive. A moment ago you weren’t anything.’
‘I was to me,’ said the other.
‘That’s not important. You weren’t here with me,’ said Hitchcock. ‘Only that’s important. Is the crew down below?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you prove it?’
‘Look, Hitchcock, you’d better see Dr Edwards. I think you need a little servicing.’
‘No. I’m all right. Who’s the doctor, anyway? Can you prove he’s on this ship?’
‘I can. All I have to do is call him.’
‘No. I mean, standing here, in this instant, you can’t prove he’s here, can you?’
‘Not without moving, I can’t.’
‘You see. You have no mental evidence. That’s what I want, a mental evidence I can feel. I don’t want physical evidence, proof you have to go out and drag in. I want evidence that you can carry in your mind and always touch and smell and feel. But there’s no way to do that. In order to believe in a thing you’ve got to carry it with you. You can’t carry the Earth, or a man, in your pocket. I want a way to do that, carry things with me always, so I can believe in them. How clumsy to have to go to all the trouble of going out and bringing in something terribly physical to prove something. I hate physical things because they can be left behind and it becomes impossible to believe in them.’
‘Those are the rules of the game.’
‘I want to change them. Wouldn’t it be fine if we could prove things with our mind, and know for certain that things are always in their place? I’d like to know what a place is like when I’m not there. I’d like to be sure.’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘You know,’ said Hitchcock, ‘I first got the idea of coming out into space about five years ago. About the time I lost my job. Did you know I wanted to be a writer? Oh yes, one of those men who always talk about writing but rarely write. And too much temper. So I lost my good job and left the editorial business and couldn’t get another job and went on downhill. Then my wife died. You see, nothing stays where you put it – you can’t trust material things. I had to put my boy in an aunt’s trust, and things got worse; then one day I had a story published with my name on it, but it wasn’t me.’
‘I don’t get you.’
Hitchcock’s face was pale and sweating.
‘I can only say that I looked at the page with my name under the title. By Joseph Hitchcock. But it was some other man. There was no way to prove – actually prove, really prove – that that man was me. The story was familiar – I knew I had written it – but that name on the paper still was not me. It was a symbol, a name. It was alien. And then I realized that even if I did become successful at writing, it would never mean a thing to me, because I couldn’t identify myself with that name. It would be soot and ashes. So I didn’t write any more. I was never sure, anyway, that the stories I had in my desk a few days later were mine, though I remembered typing them. There was always that gap of proof. That gap between doing and having done. What is done is dead and is not proof, for it is not an action. Only actions are important. And pieces of paper were remains of actions done and over and now unseen. The proof of doing was over and done. Nothing but memory remained, and I didn’t trust my memory. Could I actually prove I’d written these stories? No. Can any author? I mean proof. I mean action as proof. No. Not really. Not unless someone sits in the room while you type, and then maybe you’re doing it from memory. And once a thing is accomplished there is no proof, only memory. So then I began to find gaps between everything. I doubted I was married or had a child or ever had a job in my life. I doubted that I had been born in Illinois and had a drunken father and swinish mother. I couldn’t prove anything. Oh yes, people could say, ‘You are thus-and-so and such-and-such,’ but that was nothing.’
‘You should get your mind off stuff like that,’ said Clemens.
‘I can’t. All the gaps and spaces. And that’s how I got to thinking about the stars. I thought how I’d like to be in a rocket ship in space, in nothing, in nothing, going on into nothing with just a thin something, a thin eggshell of metal holding me, going on away from all the somethings with gaps in them that couldn’t prove themselves. I knew then that the only happiness for me was space. When I get to Aldebaran ll I’ll sign up to return on the five-year journey to Earth and so go back and forth like a shuttlecock all the rest of my life.’
‘Have you talked about this to the psychiatrist?’
‘So he could try to mortar up the gaps for me, fill in the gulfs with noise and warm water and words and hands touching me, and all that? No, thanks.’ Hitchcock stopped. ‘I’m getting worse, aren’t I? I thought so. This morning when I woke up I thought. I’m getting worse. Or is it better?’ He paused again and cocked an eye at Clemens. ‘Are you there? Are you really there? Go on, prove it.’
Clemens slapped him on the arm, hard.
‘Yes,’ said Hitchcock, rubbing his arm, looking at it very thoroughly, wonderingly, massaging it. ‘You were there. For a brief fraction of an instant. But I wonder if you are – now.’
‘See you later,’ said Clemens. He was on his way to find the doctor. He walked away.
A bell rang. Two bells, three bells rang. The ship rocked as if a hand had slapped it. There was a sucking sound, the sound of a vacuum cleaner turned on. Clemens heard the screams and felt the air thin. The air hissed away about his ears. Suddenly there was nothing in his nose or lungs. He stumbled and then the hissing stopped.
He heard someone cry, ‘A meteor!’ Another said. ‘It’s patched!’ And this was true. The ship’s emergency spider, running over the outside of the hull, had slapped a hot patch on the hole in the metal and welded it tight.
Someone was talking and talking and then beginning to shout at a distance. Clemens ran along the corridor through the freshening, thickening air. As he turned in at a bulkhead he saw the hole in the steel wall, freshly sealed; he saw the meteor fragments lying about the room like bits of a toy. He saw the captain and the members of the crew and a man lying on the floor. It was Hitchcock. His eyes were closed and he was crying. ‘It tried to kill me,’ he said, over and over. ‘It tried to kill me.’ They got him on his feet. ‘It can’t do that,’ said Hitchcock. ‘That’s not how it should be. Things like that can’t happen, can they? It came in after me. Why did it do that?’
‘All right, all right, Hitchcock,’ said the captain.
The doctor was bandaging a small cut on Hitchcock’s arm. Hitchcock looked up, his face pale, and saw Clemens there looking at him. ‘It tried to kill me,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Clemens.
Seventeen hours passed. The ship moved on in space.
Clemens stepped through a bulkhead and waited. The psychiatrist and the captain were there. Hitchcock sat on the floor with his legs drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped tight about them.
‘Hitchcock,’ said the captain.
No answer.
‘Hitchcock, listen to me,’ said the psychiatrist.
They turned to Clemens. ‘You’re his friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want to help us?’
‘If I can.’
‘It was that damned meteor,’ said the captain. ‘This might not have happened if it hadn’t been for that.’
‘It would’ve come anyway, sooner or later,’ said the doctor. To Clemens: ‘You might talk to him.’
Clemens walked quietly over and crouched by Hitchcock and began to shake his arm gently, calling in a low voice, ‘Hey there, Hitchcock.’
No reply.
‘Hey, it’s me. Me, Clemens,’ said Clemens. ‘Look, I’m here.’ He gave the arm a little slap. He massaged the rigid neck, gently, and the back of the bent-down head. He glanced at the psychiatrist, who sighed very softly. The captain shrugged.
‘Shock treatment, Doctor?’
The psychiatrist nodded. ‘We’ll start within the hour.’
Yes, thought Clemens, shock treatment. Play a dozen jazz records for him, wave a bottle of fresh green chlorophyll and dandelions under his nose, put grass under his feet, squirt Chanel on the air, cut his hair, clip his fingernails, bring him a woman, shout, bang and crash at him, fry him with electricity, fill the gap and the gulf, but where’s your proof? You can’t keep proving to him forever. You can’t entertain a baby with rattles and sirens all night every night for the next thirty years. Sometime you’ve got to stop. When you do that, he’s lost again. That is, if he pays any attention to you at all.
‘Hitchcock!’ he cried, as loud as he could, almost frantically, as if he himself were falling over a cliff. ‘It’s me. It’s your pal! Hey!’
Clemens turned and walked away out of the silent room.
Twelve hours later another alarm bell rang.
After all of the running had died down, the captain explained: ‘Hitchcock snapped out of it for a minute or so. He was alone. He climbed into a space suit. He opened an airlock. Then he walked out into space – alone.’
Clemens blinked through the immense glass port, where there was a blur of stars and distant blackness. ‘He’s out there now?’
‘Yes. A million miles behind us. We’d never find him. First time I knew he was outside the ship was when his helmet radio came in on our control-room beam. I heard him talking to himself.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Something like “No more space ship now. Never was any. No people. No people in all the universe. Never were any. No plants. No stars.” That’s what he said. And then he said something about his hands and feet and legs. “No hands,” he said. “I haven’t any hands any more. Never had any. No feet. Never had any. Can’t prove it. No body. Never had any. No lips. No face. No head. Nothing. Only space. Only space. Only the gap.’
The men turned quietly to look from the glass port out into the remote and cold stars.
Space, thought Clemens. The space that Hitchcock loved so well. Space, with nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, a lot of empty nothings between, and Hitchcock falling in the middle of the nothing, on his way to no particular night and no particular morning …
The City (#ulink_dd88b1a4-cd91-5085-b503-a887d3a791bd)
The city waited twenty thousand years.
The planet moved through space and the flowers of the fields grew up and fell away, and still the city waited; and the rivers of the planet rose and waned and turned to dust. Still the city waited. The winds that had been young and wild grew old and serene, and the clouds of the sky that had been ripped and torn were left alone to drift in idle whitenesses. Still the city waited.
The city waited with its windows and its black obsidian walls and its sky towers and its unpennanted turrets, with its untrod streets and its untouched doorknobs, with not a scrap of paper or a fingerprint upon it. The city waited while the planet arced in space, following its orbit about a blue-white sun, and the seasons passed from ice to fire and back to ice and then to green fields and yellow summer meadows.
It was on a summer afternoon in the middle of the twenty thousandth year that the city ceased waiting.
In the sky a rocket appeared.
The rocket soared over, turned, came back, and landed in the shale meadow fifty yards from the obsidian wall.
There were booted footsteps in the thin grass and calling voices from men within the rocket to men without.
‘Ready?’
‘All right, men. Careful! Into the city. Jensen, you and Hutchinson patrol ahead. Keep a sharp eye.’
The city opened secret nostrils in its black walls and a steady suction vent deep in the body of the city drew storms of air back through channels, through thistle filters and dust collectors, to a fine and tremblingly delicate series of coils and webs which glowed with silver light. Again and again the immense suctions occurred; again and again the odors from the meadow were borne upon warm winds into the city.
‘Fire odor, the scent of a fallen meteor, hot metal. A ship has come from another world. The brass smell, the dusty fire smell of burned powder, sulphur, and rocket brimstone.’
This information, stamped on tapes which sprocketed into slots, slid down through yellow cogs into further machines.
Click-chakk-chakk-chakk.
A calculator made the sound of a metronome. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine men! An instantaneous typewriter inked this message on tape which slithered and vanished.
Clickety-click-chakk-chakk.
The city awaited the soft tread of their rubberoid boots.
The great city nostrils dilated again.
The smell of butter. In the city air, from the stalking men, faintly, the aura which wafted to the great Nose broke down into memories of milk, cheese, ice cream, butter, the effluvia of a dairy economy.
Click-click.
‘Careful, men!’
‘Jones, get your gun out. Don’t be a fool!’
‘The city’s dead; why worry?’
‘You can’t tell.’
Now, at the barking talk, the Ears awoke. After centuries of listening to winds that blew small and faint, of hearing leaves strip from trees and grass grow softly in the time of melting snows, now the Ears oiled themselves in a self-lubrication, drew taut, great drums upon which the heartbeat of the invaders might pummel and thud delicately as the tremor of a gnat’s wing. The Ears listened and the Nose siphoned up great chambers of odor.
The perspiration of frightened men arose. There were islands of sweat under their arms, and sweat in their hands as they held their guns.
The Nose sifted and worried this air, like a connoisseur busy with an ancient vintage.
Chikk-chikk-chakk-click.
Information rotated down on parallel check tapes. Perspiration; chlorides such-and-such percent; sulphates so-and-so; urea nitrogen, ammonia nitrogen, thus: creatinine, sugar, lactic acid, there!
Bells rang. Small totals jumped up.
The Nose whispered, expelling the tested air. The great Ears listened:
‘I think we should go back to the rocket, Captain.’
‘I give the orders, Mr Smith!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You, up there! Patrol! See anything?’
‘Nothing, sir. Looks like it’s been dead a long time!’
‘You see, Smith? Nothing to fear.’
‘I don’t like it. I don’t know why. You ever feel you’ve seen a place before? Well, this city’s too familiar.’
‘Nonsense. This planetary system’s billions of miles from Earth; we couldn’t possibly’ve been here ever before. Ours is the only light-year rocket in existence.’
‘That’s how I feel, anyway, sir. I think we should get out.’
The footsteps faltered. There was only the sound of the intruder’s breath on the still air.
The Ear heard and quickened. Rotors glided, liquids glittered in small creeks through valves and blowers. A formula and a concoction – one followed another. Moments later, responding to the summons of the Ear and Nose, through giant holes in the city walls a fresh vapor blew out over the invaders.
‘Smell that, Smith? Ahh. Green grass. Ever smell anything better? By God, I just like to stand here and smell it.’
Invisible chlorophyll blew among the standing men.
‘Ahh!’
The footsteps continued.
‘Nothing wrong with that, eh, Smith? Come on!’
The Ear and Nose relaxed a billionth of a fraction. The countermove had succeeded. The pawns were proceeding forward.
Now the cloudy Eyes of the city moved out of fog and mist.
‘Captain, the windows!’
‘What?’
‘Those house windows, there! I saw them move!’
‘I didn’t see it.’
‘They shifted. They changed color. From dark to light.’
‘Look like ordinary square windows to me.’
Blurred objects focused. In the mechanical ravines of the city oiled shafts plunged, balance wheels dipped over into green oil pools. The window frames flexed. The windows gleamed.
Below, in the street, walked two men, a patrol, followed, at a safe interval, by seven more. Their uniforms were white, their faces as pink as if they had been slapped: their eyes were blue. They walked upright, upon hind legs, carrying metal weapons. Their feet were booted. They were males, with eyes, ears, mouths, noses.
The windows trembled. The windows thinned. They dilated imperceptibly, like the irises of numberless eyes.
‘I tell you. Captain, it’s the windows!’
‘Get along.’
‘I’m going back, sir.’
‘What?’
‘I’m going back to the rocket.’
‘Mr Smith!’
‘I’m not falling into any trap!’
‘Afraid of an empty city?’
The others laughed, uneasily.
‘Go on, laugh!’
The street was stone-cobbled, each stone three inches wide, six inches long. With a move unrecognizable as such, the street settled. It weighed the invaders.
In a machine cellar a red wand touched a numeral: 178 pounds … 210, 154, 201, 198 – each man weighed, registered and the record spooled down into a correlative darkness.
Now the city was fully awake!
Now the vents sucked and blew air, the tobacco odor from the invaders’ mouths, the green soap scent from their hands. Even their eyeballs had a delicate odor. The city detected it, and this information formed totals which scurried down to total other totals. The crystal windows glittered, the Ear tautened and skinned the drum of its hearing tight, tighter – all of the senses of the city swarming like a fall of unseen snow, counting the respiration and the dim hidden heartbeats of the men, listening, watching, tasting.
For the streets were like tongues, and where the men passed, the taste of their heels ebbed down through stone pores to be calculated on litmus. This chemical totality, so subtly collected, was appended to the now increasing sums waiting the final calculation among the whirling wheels and whispering spokes.
Footsteps. Running.
‘Come back! Smith!’
‘No, blast you!’
‘Get him, men!’
Footsteps rushing.
A final test. The city, having listened, watched, tasted, felt, weighed, and balanced, must perform a final task.
A trap flung wide in the street. The captain, unseen by the others, running, vanished.
Hung by his feet, a razor drawn across his throat, another down his chest, his carcass instantly emptied of its entrails, exposed upon a table under the street, in a hidden cell, the captain died. Great crystal microscopes stared at the red twines of muscle; bodiless fingers probed the still-pulsing heart. The flaps of his sliced skin were pinned to the table while hands shifted parts of his body like a quick and curious player of chess, using the red pawns and the red pieces.
Above on the street the men ran. Smith ran, men shouted. Smith shouted, and below in this curious room blood flowed into capsules, was shaken, spun, shoved on smear slides under further microscopes, counts made, temperatures taken, heart cut in seventeen sections, liver and kidneys expertly halved. Brain was drilled and scooped from bone socket, nerves pulled forth like the dead wires of a switchboard, muscles plucked for elasticity, while in the electric subterrene of the city the Mind at last totaled out its grandest total and all of the machinery ground to a monstrous and momentary halt.
The total.
These are men. These are men from a far world, a certain planet, and they have certain eyes, certain ears, and they walk upon legs in a specified way and carry weapons and think and fight, and they have particular hearts and all such organs as are recorded from long ago.
Above, men ran down the street toward the rocket.
Smith ran.
The total.
These are our enemies. These are the ones we have waited for twenty thousand years to see again. These are the men upon whom we waited to visit revenge. Everything totals. These are the men of a planet called Earth, who declared war upon Taollan twenty thousand years ago, who kept us in slavery and ruined us and destroyed us with a great disease. Then they went off to live in another galaxy to escape that disease which they visited upon us after ransacking our world. They have forgotten that war and that time, and they have forgotten us. But we have not forgotten them. These are our enemies. This is certain. Our waiting is done.
‘Smith, come back!’
Quickly. Upon the red table, with the spread-eagled captain’s body empty, new hands began a flight of motion. Into the wet interior were placed organs of copper, brass, silver, aluminum, rubber and silk; spiders spun gold web which was stung into the skin: a heart was attached, and into the skull case was fitted a platinum brain which hummed and fluttered small sparkles of blue fire, and the wires led down through the body to the arms and legs. In a moment the body was sewn tight, the incisions waxed, healed at neck and throat and about the skull – perfect, fresh, new.
The captain sat up and flexed his arms.
‘Stop!’
On the street the captain reappeared, raised his gun and fired.
Smith fell, a bullet in his heart.
The other men turned.
The captain ran to them.
‘That fool! Afraid of a city!’
They looked at the body of Smith at their feet.
They looked at their captain, and their eyes widened and narrowed.
‘Listen to me,’ said the captain. ‘I have something important to tell you.’
Now the city, which had weighed and tasted and smelled them, which had used all its powers save one, prepared to use its final ability, the power of speech. It did not speak with the rage and hostility of its massed walls or towers, nor with the bulk of its cobbled avenues and fortresses of machinery. It spoke with the quiet voice of one man.
‘I am no longer your captain,’ he said. ‘Nor am I a man.’
The men moved back.
‘I am the city,’ he said, and smiled.
‘I’ve waited two hundred centuries,’ he said, ‘I’ve waited for the sons of the sons of the sons to return.’
‘Captain, sir!’
‘Let me continue. Who built me? The city. The men who died built me. The old race who once lived here. The people whom the Earth Men left to die of a terrible disease, a form of leprosy with no cure. And the men of that old race, dreaming of the day when Earth Men might return, built this city, and the name of this city was and is Revenge, upon the Planet of Darkness, near the shore of the Sea of Centuries, by the Mountains of the Dead; all very poetic. This city was to be a balancing machine, a litmus, an antenna to test all future space travelers. In twenty thousand years only two other rockets landed here. One from a distant galaxy called Ennt, and the inhabitants of that craft were tested, weighed, found wanting, and let free, unscathed, from the city. As were the visitors in the second ship. But today! At long last, you’ve come! The revenge will be carried out to the last detail. Those men have been dead two hundred centuries, but they left a city here to welcome you.’
‘Captain, sir, you’re not feeling well. Perhaps you’d better come back to the ship, sir.’
The city trembled.
The pavements opened and the men fell, screaming. Falling, they saw bright razors flash to meet them!
Time passed. Soon came the call:
‘Smith?’
‘Here!’
‘Jensen?’
‘Here!’
‘Jones, Hutchinson, Springer?’
‘Here!’ ‘Here!’ ‘Here!’
They stood by the door of the rocket.
‘We return to Earth immediately.’
‘Yes, sir!’
The incisions on their necks were invisible, as were their hidden brass hearts and silver organs and the fine golden wire of their nerves. There was a faint electric hum from their heads.
‘On the double!’
Nine men hurried the golden bombs of disease culture into the rocket.
‘These are to be dropped on Earth.’
‘Right, sir!’
The rocket valve slammed. The rocket jumped into the sky.
As the thunder faded, the city lay upon the summer meadow. Its glass eyes were dulled over. The Ear relaxed, the great nostril vents stopped, the streets no longer weighed or balanced, and the hidden machinery paused in its bath of oil.
In the sky the rocket dwindled.
Slowly, pleasurably, the city enjoyed the luxury of dying.
The Fire Balloons (#ulink_cd6aa1c8-50ef-590f-8c09-d790d254f9ba)
Fire exploded over summer night lawns. You saw sparkling faces of uncles and aunts. Skyrockets fell up in the brown shining eyes of cousins on the porch, and the cold charred sticks thumped down in dry meadows far away.
The Very Reverend Father Joseph Daniel Peregrine opened his eyes. What a dream: he and his cousins with their fiery play at his grandfather’s ancient Ohio home so many years ago!
He lay listening to the great hollow of the church, the other cells where other Fathers lay. Had they, too, on the eve of the flight of the rocket Crucifix, lain with memories of the Fourth of July? Yes. This was like those breathless Independence dawns when you waited for the first concussion and rushed out on the dewy sidewalks, your hands full of loud miracles.
So here they were, the Episcopal Fathers, in the breathing dawn before they pinwheeled off to Mars, leaving their incense through the velvet cathedral of space.
‘Should we go at all?’ whispered Father Peregrine. ‘Shouldn’t we solve our own sins on Earth? Aren’t we running from our lives here?’
He arose, his fleshy body, with its rich look of strawberries, milk, and steak, moving heavily.
‘Or is it sloth?’ he wondered. ‘Do I dread the journey?’
He stepped into the needle-spray shower.
‘But I shall take you to Mars, body.’ He addressed himself. ‘Leaving old sins here. And on to Mars to find new sins?’ A delightful thought, almost. Sins no one had ever thought of. Oh, he himself had written a little book: The Problem of Sin on Other Worlds, ignored as somehow not serious enough by his Episcopal brethren.
Only last night, over a final cigar, he and Father Stone had talked of it.
‘On Mars sin might appear as virtue. We must guard against virtuous acts there that, later, might be found to be sins!’ said Father Peregrine, beaming. ‘How exciting! It’s been centuries since so much adventure has accompanied the prospect of being a missionary!’
‘I will recognize sin,’ said Father Stone bluntly. ‘even on Mars.’
‘Oh, we priests pride ourselves on being litmus paper, changing color in sin’s presence,’ retorted Father Peregrine, ‘but what if Martian chemistry is such we do not color at all! If there are new senses on Mars, you must admit the possibility of unrecognizable sin.’
‘If there is no malice aforethought, there is no sin or punishment for same – the Lord assures us that,’ Father Stone replied.
‘On Earth, yes. But perhaps a Martian sin might inform the subconscious of its evil, telepathically, leaving the conscious mind of man free to act, seemingly without malice! What then?’
‘What could there be in the way of new sins?’
Father Peregrine leaned heavily forward. ‘Adam alone did not sin. Add Eve and you add temptation. Add a second man and you make adultery possible. With the addition of sex or people, you add sin. If men were armless they could not strangle with their hands. You would not have that particular sin of murder. Add arms, and you add the possibility of a new violence. Amoebas cannot sin because they reproduce by fission. They do not covet wives or murder each other. Add sex to amoebas, add arms and legs, and you would have murder and adultery. Add an arm or leg or person, or take away each, and you add or subtract possible evil. On Mars, what if there are five new senses, organs, invisible limbs we can’t conceive of – then mightn’t there be five new sins?’
Father Stone gasped. ‘I think you enjoy this sort of thing!’
‘I keep my mind alive, Father; just alive, is all.’
‘Your mind’s always juggling, isn’t it? – mirrors, torches, plates.’
‘Yes. Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don’t you, Father Stone?’
Father Stone had moved away. ‘I think we’d better go to bed. In a few hours we’ll be jumping up to see your new sins, Father Peregrine.’
The rocket stood ready for the firing.
The Fathers walked from their devotions in the chilly morning, many a fine priest from New York or Chicago or Los Angeles – the Church was sending its best – walking across town to the frosty field. Walking, Father Peregrine remembered the Bishop’s words:
‘Father Peregrine, you will captain the missionaries, with Father Stone at your side. Having chosen you for this serious task, I find my reasons deplorably obscure, Father, but your pamphlet on planetary sin did not go unread. You are a flexible man. And Mars is like that uncleaned closet we have neglected for millenniums. Sin has collected there like bric-a-brac. Mars is twice Earth’s age and has had double the number of Saturday nights, liquor baths, and eye-poppings at women as naked as white seals. When we open that closet door, things will fall on us. We need a quick, flexible man – one whose mind can dodge. Anyone a little too dogmatic might break in two. I feel you’ll be resilient. Father, the job is yours.’
The Bishop and the Fathers knelt.
The blessing was said and the rocket given a little shower of holy water. Arising, the Bishop addressed them:
‘I know you will go with God, to prepare the Martians for the reception of His Truth. I wish you all a thoughtful journey.’
They filed past the Bishop, twenty men, robes whispering, to deliver their hands into his kind hands before passing into the cleansed projectile.
‘I wonder,’ said Father Peregrine, at the last moment, ‘if Mars is Hell? Only waiting for our arrival before it bursts into brimstone and fire.’
‘Lord, be with us,’ said Father Stone.
The rocket moved.
Coming out of space was like coming out of the most beautiful cathedral they had ever seen. Touching Mars was like touching the ordinary pavement outside the church five minutes after having really known your love for God.
The Fathers stepped gingerly from the steaming rocket and knelt upon Martian sand while Father Peregrine gave thanks.
‘Lord, we thank Thee for the journey through Thy rooms. And, Lord, we have reached a new land, so we must have new eyes. We shall hear new sounds and must needs have new ears. And there will be new sins, for which we ask the gift of better and firmer and purer hearts. Amen.’
They arose.
And here was Mars like a sea under which they trudged in the guise of submarine biologists, seeking life. Here the territory of hidden sin. Oh, how carefully they must all balance, like gray feathers, in this new element, afraid that walking itself might be sinful; or breathing, or simple fasting!
And here was the mayor of First Town come to meet them with outstretched hand. ‘What can I do for you, Father Peregrine?’
‘We’d like to know about the Martians. For only if we know about them can we plan our church intelligently. Are they ten feet tall? We will build large doors. Are their skins blue or red or green? We must know when we put human figures in the stained glass so we may use the right skin color. Are they heavy? We will build sturdy seats for them.’
‘Father,’ said the mayor, ‘I don’t think you should worry about the Martians. There are two races. One of them is pretty well dead. A few are in hiding. And the second race – well, they’re not quite human.’
‘Oh?’ Father Peregrine’s heart quickened.
‘They’re round luminous globes of light, Father, living in those hills. Man or beast, who can say? But they act intelligently, I hear.’ The mayor shrugged. ‘Of course, they’re not men, so I don’t think you’ll care—’
‘On the contrary,’ said Father Peregrine swiftly. ‘Intelligent, you say?’
‘There’s a story. A prospector broke his leg in those hills and would have died there. The blue spheres of light came at him. When he woke, he was down on a highway and didn’t know how he got there.’
‘Drunk,’ said Father Stone.
‘That’s the story,’ said the mayor. ‘Father Peregrine, with most of the Martians dead, and only these blue spheres, I frankly think you’d be better off in First City. Mars is opening up. It’s a frontier now, like in the old days on Earth, out West, and in Alaska. Men are pouring up here. There’s a couple thousand black Irish mechanics and miners and day laborers in First Town who need saving, because there’re too many wicked women came with them, and too much ten-century-old Martian wine—’
Father Peregrine was gazing into the soft blue hills.
Father Stone cleared his throat. ‘Well, Father?’
Father Peregrine did not hear. ‘Spheres of blue fire?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Ah,’ Father Peregrine sighed.
‘Blue balloons.’ Father Stone shook his head. ‘A circus!’
Father Peregrine felt his wrists pounding. He saw the little frontier town with raw, fresh-built sin, and he saw the hills, old with the oldest and yet perhaps an even newer (to him) sin.
‘Mayor, could your black Irish laborers cook one more day in hellfire?’
‘I’d turn and baste them for you, Father.’
Father Peregrine nodded to the hills. ‘Then that’s where we’ll go.’
There was a murmur from everyone.
‘It would be so simple,’ explained Father Peregrine, ‘to go into town. I prefer to think that if the Lord walked here and people said, “Here is the beaten path,” He would reply, “Show me the weeds. I will make a path.”’
‘But—’
‘Father Stone, think how it would weigh upon us if we passed sinners by and did not extend our hands.’
‘But globes of fire!’
‘I imagine man looked funny to other animals when we first appeared. Yet he has a soul, for all his homeliness. Until we prove otherwise, let us assume that these fiery spheres have souls.’
‘All right,’ agreed the mayor, ‘but you’ll be back to town.’
‘We’ll see. First, some breakfast. Then you and I, Father Stone, will walk alone into the hills. I don’t want to frighten those fiery Martians with machines or crowds. Shall we have breakfast?’
The Fathers ate in silence.
At nightfall Father Peregrine and Father Stone were high in the hills. They stopped and sat upon a rock to enjoy a moment of relaxation and waiting. The Martians had not as yet appeared and they both felt vaguely disappointed.
‘I wonder—’ Father Peregrine mopped his face. ‘Do you think if we called “Hello!” they might answer?’
‘Father Peregrine, won’t you ever be serious?’
‘Not until the good Lord is. Oh, don’t look so terribly shocked, please. The Lord is not serious. In fact, it is a little hard to know just what else He is except loving. And love has to do with humor, doesn’t it? For you cannot love someone unless you put up with him, can you? And you cannot put up with someone constantly unless you can laugh at him. Isn’t that true? And certainly we are ridiculous little animals wallowing in the fudge bowl, and God must love us all the more because we appeal to His humor.’
‘I never thought of God as humorous,’ said Father Stone.
‘The Creator of the platypus, the camel, the ostrich, and man? Oh, come now!’ Father Peregrine laughed.
But at this instant, from among the twilight hills, like a series of blue lamps lit to guide their way, came the Martians.
Father Stone saw them first. ‘Look!’
Father Peregrine turned and the laughter stopped in his mouth.
The round blue globes of fire hovered among the twinkling stars, distantly trembling.
‘Monsters!’ Father Stone leaped up. But Father Peregrine caught him. ‘Wait!’
‘We should’ve gone to town!’
‘No, listen, look!’ pleaded Father Peregrine.
‘I’m afraid!’
‘Don’t be. This is God’s work!’
‘The devil’s!’
‘No, now, quiet!’ Father Peregrine gentled him and they crouched with the soft blue light on their upturned faces as the fiery orbs drew near.
And again. Independence Night, thought Father Peregrine, tremoring. He felt like a child back in those July Fourth evenings, the sky blowing apart, breaking into powdery stars and burning sound, the concussions jingling house windows like the ice on a thousand thin ponds. The aunts, uncles, cousins crying, ‘Ah!’ as to some celestial physician. The summer sky colors. And the Fire Balloons, lit by an indulgent grandfather, steadied in his massively tender hands. Oh, the memory of those lovely Fire Balloons, softly lighted, warmly billowed bits of tissue, like insect wings, lying like folded wasps in boxes and, last of all, after the day of riot and fury, at long last from their boxes, delicately unfolded, blue, red, white, patriotic – the Fire Balloons! He saw the dim faces of dear relatives long dead and mantled with moss as Grandfather lit the tiny candle and let the warm air breathe up to form the balloon plumply luminous in his hands, a shining vision which they held, reluctant to let it go; for, once released, it was yet another year gone from life, another Fourth, another bit of Beauty vanished. And then up, up, still up through the warm summer night constellations, the Fire Balloons had drifted, while red-white-and-blue eyes followed them, wordless, from family porches. Away into deep Illinois country, over night rivers and sleeping mansions the Fire Balloons dwindled, forever gone …
Father Peregrine felt tears in his eyes. Above him the Martians, not one but a thousand whispering Fire Balloons, it seemed, hovered. Any moment he might find his long-dead and blessed grandfather at his elbow, staring up at Beauty.
But it was Father Stone.
‘Let’s go, please, Father!’
‘I must speak to them.’ Father Peregrine rustled forward, not knowing what to say, for what had he ever said to the Fire Balloons of time past except with his mind: you are beautiful, you are beautiful, and that was not enough now. He could only lift his heavy arms and call upward, as he had often wished to call after the enchanted Fire Balloons, ‘Hello!’
But the fiery spheres only burned like images in a dark mirror. They seemed fixed, gaseous, miraculous, forever.
‘We come with God,’ said Father Peregrine to the sky.
‘Silly, silly, silly.’ Father Stone chewed the back of his hand. ‘In the name of God, Father Peregrine, stop!’
But now the phosphorescent spheres blew away into the hills. In a moment they were gone.
Father Peregrine called again, and the echo of his last cry shook the hills above. Turning, he saw an avalanche shake out dust, pause, and then, with a thunder of stone wheels, crash down the mountain upon them.
‘Look what you’ve done!’ cried Father Stone.
Father Peregrine was almost fascinated, then horrified. He turned, knowing they could run only a few feet before the rocks crushed them into ruins. He had time to whisper, Oh, Lord! and the rocks fell!
‘Father!’
They were separated like chaff from wheat. There was a blue shimmering of globes, a shift of cold stars, a roar, and then they stood upon a ledge two hundred feet away watching the spot where their bodies should have been buried under tons of stone.
The blue light evaporated.
The two Fathers clutched each other. ‘What happened?’
‘The blue fires lifted us!’
‘We ran, that was it!’
‘No, the globes saved us.’
‘They couldn’t!’
‘They did.’
The sky was empty. There was a feel as if a great bell had just stopped tolling. Reverberations lingered in their teeth and marrow.
‘Let’s get away from here. You’ll have us killed.’
‘I haven’t feared death for a good many years, Father Stone.’
‘We’ve proved nothing. Those blue lights ran off at the first cry. It’s useless.’
‘No.’ Father Peregrine was suffused with a stubborn wonder. ‘Somehow, they saved us. That proves they have souls.’
‘It proves only that they might have saved us. Everything was confused. We might have escaped, ourselves.’
‘They are not animals, Father Stone. Animals do not save lives, especially of strangers. There is mercy and compassion here. Perhaps, tomorrow, we may prove more.’
‘Prove what? How?’ Father Stone was immensely tired now; the outrage to his mind and body showed on his stiff face. ‘Follow them in helicopters, reading chapter and verse? They’re not human. They haven’t eyes or ears or bodies like ours.’
‘But I feel something about them,’ replied Father Peregrine. ‘I know a great revelation is at hand. They saved us. They think. They had a choice; let us live or die. That proves free will!’
Father Stone set to work building a fire, glaring at the sticks in his hands, choking on the gray smoke. ‘I myself will open a convent for nursling geese, a monastery for sainted swine, and I shall build a miniature apse in a microscope so that paramecium can attend services and tell their beads with their flagella.’
‘Oh, Father Stone.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Father Stone blinked redly across the fire. ‘But this is like blessing a crocodile before he chews you up. You’re risking the entire missionary expedition. We belong in First Town, washing liquor from men’s throats and perfume off their hands!’
‘Can’t you recognize the human in the inhuman?’
‘I’d much rather recognize the inhuman in the human.’
‘But if I prove these things sin, know sin, know a moral life, have free will and intellect, Father Stone?’
‘That will take much convincing.’
The night grew rapidly cold and they peered into the fire to find their wildest thoughts, while eating biscuits and berries, and soon they were bundled for sleep under the chiming stars. And just before turning over one last time Father Stone, who had been thinking for many minutes to find something to bother Father Peregrine about, stared into the soft pink charcoal bed and said, ‘No Adam and Eve on Mars. No Original Sin. Maybe the Martians live in a state of God’s grace. Then we can go back down to town and start work on the Earth Men.’
Father Peregrine reminded himself to say a little prayer for Father Stone, who got so mad and who was now being vindictive, God help him. ‘Yes, Father Stone, but the Martians killed some of our settlers. That’s sinful. There must have been an Original Sin and a Martian Adam and Eve. We’ll find them. Men are men, unfortunately, no matter what their shape, and inclined to sin.’
But Father Stone was pretending sleep.
Father Peregrine did not shut his eyes.
Of course they couldn’t let these Martians go to Hell, could they? With a compromise to their consciences, could they go back to the new colonial towns, those towns so full of sinful gullets and women with scintilla eyes and white oyster bodies rollicking in beds with lonely laborers? Wasn’t that the place for the Fathers? Wasn’t this trek into the hills merely a personal whim? Was he really thinking of God’s Church, or was he quenching the thirst of a spongelike curiosity? Those blue round globes of St Anthony’s fire – how they burned in his mind! What a challenge, to find the man behind the mask, the human behind the inhuman. Wouldn’t he be proud if he could say, even to his secret self, that he had converted a rolling huge pool table full of fiery spheres! What a sin of pride! Worth doing penance for! But then one did many prideful things out of Love, and he loved the Lord so much and was so happy at it that he wanted everyone else to be happy too.
The last thing he saw before sleep was the return of the blue fires, like a flight of burning angels silently singing him to his worried rest.
The blue round dreams were still there in the sky when Father Peregrine awoke in the early morning.
Father Stone slept like a stiff bundle, quietly. Father Peregrine watched the Martians floating and watching him. They were human – he knew it. But he must prove it or face a dry-mouthed, dry-eyed Bishop telling him kindly to step aside.
But how to prove humanity if they hid in the high vaults of the sky? How to bring them nearer and provide answers to the many questions?
‘They saved us from the avalanche.’
Father Peregrine arose, moved off among the rocks, and began to climb the nearest hill until he came to a place where a cliff dropped sheerly to a floor two hundred feet below. He was choking from his vigorous climb in the frosty air. He stood, getting his breath.
‘If I fell from here, it would surely kill me.’
He let a pebble drop. Moments later it clicked on the rocks below.
‘The Lord would never forgive me.’
He tossed another pebble.
‘It wouldn’t be suicide, would it, if I did it out of Love … ?’
He lifted his gaze to the blue spheres. ‘But first, another try.’ He called to them: ‘Hello, hello!’
The echoes tumbled upon each other, but the blue fires did not blink or move.
He talked to them for five minutes. When he stopped, he peered down and saw Father Stone, still indignantly asleep, below in the little camp.
‘I must prove everything.’ Father Peregrine stepped to the cliff rim. ‘I am an old man. I am not afraid. Surely the Lord will understand that I am doing this for Him?’
He drew a deep breath. All his life swam through his eyes and he thought, In a moment shall I die? I am afraid that I love living much too much. But I love other things more.
And, thinking thus, he stepped off the cliff.
He fell.
‘Fool!’ he cried. He tumbled end over end. ‘You were wrong!’ The rocks rushed up at him and he saw himself dashed on them and sent to glory. ‘Why did I do this thing?’ But he knew the answer, and an instant later was calm as he fell. The wind roared around him and the rocks hurtled to meet him.
And then there was a shift of stars, a glimmering of blue light, and he felt himself surrounded by blueness and suspended. A moment later he was deposited, with a gentle bump, upon the rocks, where he sat a full moment, alive, and touching himself, and looking up at those blue lights that had withdrawn instantly.
‘You saved me!’ he whispered. ‘You wouldn’t let me die. You knew it was wrong.’
He rushed over to Father Stone, who still lay quietly asleep. ‘Father, Father, wake up!’ He shook him and brought him round. ‘Father, they saved me!’
‘Who saved you?’ Father Stone blinked and sat up.
Father Peregrine related his experience.
‘A dream, a nightmare; go back to sleep,’ said Father Stone irritably. ‘You and your circus balloons.’
‘But I was awake!’
‘Now, now, Father, calm yourself. There now.’
‘You don’t believe me? Have you a gun? Yes, there, let me have it.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Father Stone handed over the small pistol they had brought along for protection against snakes or other similar and unpredictable animals.
Father Peregrine seized the pistol. ‘I’ll prove it!’
He pointed the pistol at his own hand and fired.
‘Stop!’
There was a shimmer of light, and before their eyes the bullet stood upon the air, poised an inch from his open palm. It hung for a moment, surrounded by a blue phosphorescence. Then it fell, hissing, into the dust.
Father Peregrine fired the gun three times – at his hand, at his leg, at his body. The three bullets hovered, glittering, and, like dead insects, fell at their feet.
‘You see?’ said Father Peregrine, letting his arm fall, and allowing the pistol to drop after the bullets. ‘They know. They understand. They are not animals. They think and judge and live in a moral climate. What animal would save me from myself like this? There is no animal would do that. Only another man, Father. Now, do you believe?’
Father Stone was watching the sky and the blue lights, and now, silently, he dropped to one knee and picked up the warm bullets and cupped them in his hand. He closed his hand tight.
The sun was rising behind them.
‘I think we had better go down to the others and tell them of this and bring them back up here,’ said Father Peregrine.
By the time the sun was up, they were well on their way back to the rocket.
Father Peregrine drew the round circle in the center of the blackboard.
‘This is Christ, the Son of the Father.’
He pretended not to hear the other Fathers’ sharp intake of breath.
‘This is Christ, in all His Glory,’ he continued.
‘It looks like a geometry problem,’ observed Father Stone.
‘A fortunate comparison, for we deal with symbols here. Christ is no less Christ, you must admit, in being represented by a circle or a square. For centuries the cross has symbolized His love and agony. So this circle will be the Martian Christ. This is how we shall bring Him to Mars.’
The Fathers stirred fretfully and looked at each other.
‘You, Brother Mathias, will create, in glass, a replica of this circle, a globe, filled with bright fire. It will stand upon the altar.’
‘A cheap magic trick,’ muttered Father Stone.
Father Peregrine went on patiently: ‘On the contrary. We are giving them God in an understandable image. If Christ had come to us on Earth as an octopus, would we have accepted Him readily?’ He spread his hands. ‘Was it then a cheap magic trick of the Lord’s to bring us Christ through Jesus, in man’s shape? After we bless the church we build here and sanctify its altar and this symbol, do you think Christ would refuse to inhabit the shape before us? You know in your hearts He would not refuse.’
‘But the body of a soulless animal!’ said Brother Mathias.
‘We’ve already gone over that, many times since we returned this morning. Brother Mathias. These creatures saved us from the avalanche. They realized that self-destruction was sinful, and prevented it, time after time. Therefore we must build a church in the hills, live with them, to find their own special ways of sinning, the alien ways, and help them to discover God.’
The Fathers did not seem pleased at the prospect.
‘Is it because they are so odd to the eye?’ wondered Father Peregrine. ‘But what is a shape? Only a cup for the blazing soul that God provides us all. If tomorrow I found that sea lions suddenly possessed free will, intellect, knew when not to sin, knew what life was and tempered justice with mercy and life with love, then I would build an undersea cathedral. And if the sparrows should, miraculously, with God’s will, gain everlasting souls tomorrow, I would freight a church with helium and take after them, for all souls, in any shape, if they have free will and are aware of their sins, will burn in Hell unless given their rightful communions. I would not let a Martian sphere burn in Hell either, for it is a sphere only in mine eyes. When I close my eyes it stands before me, an intelligence, a love, a soul – and I must not deny it.’
‘But that glass globe you wish placed on the altar,’ protested Father Stone.
‘Consider the Chinese,’ replied Father Peregrine imperturbably. ‘What sort of Christ do Christian Chinese worship? An oriental Christ, naturally. You’ve all seen oriental Nativity scenes. How is Christ dressed? In Eastern robes. Where does He walk? In Chinese settings of bamboo and misty mountain and crooked tree. His eyelids taper. His cheekbones rise. Each country, each race adds something to Our Lord. I am reminded of the Virgin of Guadalupe, to whom all Mexico pays its love. Her skin? Have you noticed the paintings of her? A dark skin, like that of her worshipers. Is this blasphemy? Not at all. It is not logical that men should accept a God, no matter how real, of another color. I often wonder why our missionaries do well in Africa, with a snow-white Christ. Perhaps because white is a sacred color, in albino, or any other form, to the African tribes. Given time, mightn’t Christ darken there too? The form does not matter. Content is everything. We cannot expect these Martians to accept an alien form. We shall give them Christ in their own image.’
‘There’s a flaw in your reasoning, Father,’ said Father Stone. ‘Won’t the Martians suspect us of hypocrisy? They will realize that we don’t worship a round, globular Christ, but a man with limbs and a head. How do we explain the difference?’
‘By showing there is none. Christ will fill any vessel that is offered. Bodies or globes, He is there, and each will worship the same thing in a different guise. What is more, we must believe in this globe we give the Martians. We must believe in a shape which is meaningless to us as to form. This spheroid will be Christ. And we must remember that we ourselves, and the shape of our Earth Christ, would be meaningless, ridiculous, a squander of material to these Martians.’
Father Peregrine laid aside his chalk. ‘Now let us go into the hills and build our church.’
The Fathers began to pack their equipment.
The church was not a church but an area cleared of rocks, a plateau on one of the low mountains, its soil smoothed and brushed, and an altar established whereon Brother Mathias placed the fiery globe he had constructed.
At the end of six days of work the ‘church’ was ready.
‘What shall we do with this?’ Father Stone tapped an iron bell they had brought along. ‘What does a bell mean to them?’
‘I imagine I brought it for our own comfort,’ admitted Father Peregrine. ‘We need a few familiarities. This church seems so little like a church. And we feel somewhat absurd here – even I; for it is something new, this business of converting the creatures of another world. I feel like a ridiculous play actor at times. And then I pray to God to lend me strength.’
‘Many of the Fathers are unhappy. Some of them joke about all this, Father Peregrine.’
‘I know. We’ll put this bell in a small tower for their comfort, anyway.’
‘What about the organ?’
‘We’ll play it at the first service, tomorrow.’
‘But, the Martians—’
‘I know. But again, I suppose, for our own comfort, our own music. Later we may discover theirs.’
They arose very early on Sunday morning and moved through the coldness like pale phantoms, rime tinkling on their habits: covered with chimes they were, shaking down showers of silver water.
‘I wonder if it is Sunday here on Mars?’ mused Father Peregrine, but seeing Father Stone wince, he hastened on, ‘It might be Tuesday or Thursday – who knows? But no matter. My idle fancy. It’s Sunday to us. Come.’
The Fathers walked into the flat wide area of the ‘church’ and knelt, shivering and blue-lipped.
Father Peregrine said a little prayer and put his cold fingers to the organ keys. The music went up like a flight of pretty birds. He touched the keys like a man moving his hands among the weeds of a wild garden, startling up great soarings of Beauty into the hills.
The music calmed the air. It smelled the fresh smell of morning. The music drifted into the mountains and shook down mineral powders in a dusty rain.
The Fathers waited.
‘Well, Father Peregrine.’ Father Stone eyed the empty sky where the sun was rising, furnace-red. ‘I don’t see our friends.’
‘Let me try again.’ Father Peregrine was perspiring.
He built an architecture of Bach, stone by exquisite stone, raising a music cathedral so vast that its furthest chancels were in Nineveh, its furthest dome at St Peter’s left hand. The music stayed and did not crash in ruin when it was over, but partook of a series of white clouds and was carried away among other lands.
The sky was still empty.
‘They’ll come!’ But Father Peregrine felt the panic in his chest, very small, growing. ‘Let us pray. Let us ask them to come. They read minds; they know.’
The Fathers lowered themselves yet again, in rustlings and whispers. They prayed.
And to the East, out of the icy mountains of seven o’clock on Sunday morning or perhaps Thursday morning or maybe Monday morning on Mars, came the soft fiery globes.
They hovered and sank and filled the area around the shivering priests. ‘Thank you: oh, thank you, Lord.’ Father Peregrine shut his eyes tight and played the music, and when it was done he turned and gazed upon his wondrous congregation.
And a voice touched his mind, and the voice said:
‘We have come for a little while.’
‘You may stay,’ said Father Peregrine.
‘For a little while only,’ said the voice quietly. ‘We have come to tell you certain things. We should have spoken sooner. But we had hoped that you might go on your way if left alone.’
Father Peregrine started to speak, but the voice hushed him.
‘We are the Old Ones,’ the voice said, and it entered him like a blue gaseous flare and burned in the chambers of his head. ‘We are the old Martians, who left our marble cities and went into the hills, forsaking the material life we had lived. So very long ago we became these things that we now are. Once we were men, with bodies and legs and arms such as yours. The legend has it that one of us, a good man, discovered a way to free man’s soul and intellect, to free him of bodily ills and melancholies, of deaths and transfigurations, of ill humors and senilities, and so we took on the look of lightning and blue fire and have lived in the winds and skies and hills forever after that, neither prideful nor arrogant, neither rich nor poor, passionate nor cold. We have lived apart from those we left behind, those other men of this world, and how we came to be has been forgotten, the process lost; but we shall never die, nor do harm. We have put away the sins of the body and live in God’s grace. We covet no other property; we have no property. We do not steal, nor kill, nor lust, nor hate. We live in happiness. We cannot reproduce; we do not eat or drink or make war. All the sensualities and childishnesses and sins of the body were stripped away when our bodies were put aside. We have left sin behind. Father Peregrine, and it is burned like the leaves in the autumn, and it is gone like the soiled snow of an evil winter, and it is gone like the sexual flowers of a red-and-yellow spring, and it is gone like the panting nights of hottest summer, and our season is temperate and our clime is rich in thought.’
Father Peregrine was standing now, for the voice touched him at such a pitch that it almost shook him from his senses. It was an ecstasy and a fire washing through him.
‘We wish to tell you that we appreciate your building this place for us, but we have no need of it, for each of us is a temple unto himself and needs no place wherein to cleanse himself. Forgive us for not coming to you sooner, but we are separate and apart and have talked to no one for ten thousand years, nor have we interfered in any way with the life of this planet. It has come into your mind now that we are the lilies of the field; we toil not, neither do we spin. You are right. And so we suggest that you take the parts of this temple into your own new cities and there cleanse others. For, rest assured, we are happy and at peace.’
The Fathers were on their knees in the vast blue light, and Father Peregrine was down, too, and they were weeping, and it did not matter that their time had been wasted; it did not matter to them at all.
The blue spheres murmured and began to rise once more, on a breath of cool air.
‘May I’ – cried Father Peregrine, not daring to ask, eyes closed – ‘may I come again, someday, that I may learn from you?’
The blue fires blazed. The air trembled.
Yes, Someday he might come again. Someday.
And then the Fire Balloons blew away and were gone, and he was like a child, on his knees, tears streaming from his eyes, crying to himself, ‘Come back, come back!’ And at any moment Grandfather might lift him and carry him upstairs to his bedroom in a long-gone Illinois town …
They filed down out of the hills at sunset. Looking back, Father Peregrine saw the blue fires burning. No, he thought, we couldn’t build a church for the likes of you. You’re beauty itself. What church could compete with the fireworks of the pure soul?
Father Stone moved in silence beside him. And at last he spoke:
‘The way I see it is there’s a Truth on every planet. All parts of the Big Truth. On a certain day they’ll all fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw. This has been a shaking experience. I’ll never doubt again, Father Peregrine. For this Truth here is as true as Earth’s Truth, and they lie side by side. And we’ll go on to other worlds, adding the sum of the parts of the Truth until one day the whole Total will stand before us like the light of a new day.’
‘That’s a lot, coming from you, Father Stone.’
‘I’m sorry now, in a way, we’re going down to the town to handle our own kind. Those blue lights now. When they settled about us, and that voice …’ Father Stone shivered.
Father Peregrine reached out to take the other’s arm. They walked together.
‘And you know,’ said Father Stone finally, fixing his eyes on Brother Mathias, who strode ahead with the glass sphere tenderly carried in his arms, that glass sphere with the blue phosphorous light glowing forever inside it, ‘you know, Father Peregrine, that globe there—’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Him. It is Him, after all.’
Father Peregrine smiled, and they walked down out of the hills toward the new town.
The Last Night of the World (#ulink_ad309d42-d0ca-592b-8720-8cd75ea55e69)
‘What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?’
‘What would I do? You mean seriously?’
‘Yes, seriously.’
‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.’
He poured some coffee. In the background the two girls were playing blocks on the parlor rug in the light of the green hurricane lamps. There was an easy, clean aroma of the brewed coffee in the evening air.
‘Well, better start thinking about it,’ he said.
‘You don’t mean it!’
He nodded.
‘A war?’
He shook his head.
‘Not the hydrogen or atom bomb?’
‘No.’
‘Or germ warfare?’
‘None of those at all,’ he said, stirring his coffee slowly. ‘But just, let’s say, the closing of a book.’
‘I don’t think I understand.’
‘No, nor do I, really; it’s just a feeling. Sometimes it frightens me, sometimes I’m not frightened at all but at peace.’ He glanced in at the girls and their yellow hair shining in the lamplight. ‘I didn’t say anything to you. It first happened about four nights ago.’
‘What?’
‘A dream I had. I dreamed that it was all going to be over, and a voice said it was; not any kind of voice I can remember, but a voice anyway, and it said things would stop here on Earth. I didn’t think too much about it the next day, but then I went to the office and caught Stan Willis looking out the window in the middle of the afternoon, and I said, A penny for your thoughts, Stan, and he said, I had a dream last night, and before he even told me the dream I knew what it was. I could have told him, but he told me and I listened to him.’
‘It was the same dream?’
‘The same. I told Stan I had dreamed it too. He didn’t seem surprised. He relaxed, in fact. Then we started walking through the office, for the hell of it. It wasn’t planned. We didn’t say, Let’s walk around. We just walked on our own, and everywhere we saw people looking at their desks or their hands or out windows. I talked to a few. So did Stan.’
‘And they all had dreamed?’
‘All of them. The same dream, with no difference.’
‘Do you believe in it?’
‘Yes. I’ve never been more certain.’
‘And when will it stop? The world, I mean.’
‘Sometime during the night for us, and then as the night goes on around the world, that’ll go too. It’ll take twenty-four hours for it all to go.’
They sat awhile not touching their coffee. Then they lifted it slowly and drank, looking at each other.
‘Do we deserve this?’ she said.
‘It’s not a matter of deserving; it’s just that things didn’t work out. I notice you didn’t even argue about this. Why not?’
‘I guess I’ve a reason,’ she said.
‘The same one everyone at the office had?’
She nodded slowly. ‘I didn’t want to say anything. It happened last night. And the women on the block talked about it, among themselves, today. They dreamed. I thought it was only a coincidence.’ She picked up the evening paper. ‘There’s nothing in the paper about it.’
‘Everyone knows, so there’s no need.’
He sat back in his chair, watching her. ‘Are you afraid?’
‘No. I always thought I would be, but I’m not.’
‘Where’s that spirit called self-preservation they talk so much about?’
‘I don’t know. You don’t get too excited when you feel things are logical. This is logical. Nothing else but this could have happened from the way we’ve lived.’
‘We haven’t been too bad, have we?’
‘No, nor enormously good. I suppose that’s the trouble – we haven’t been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of quite awful things.’
The girls were laughing in the parlor.
‘I always thought people would be screaming in the streets at a time like this.’
‘I guess not. You don’t scream about the real thing.’
‘Do you know, I won’t miss anything but you and the girls. I never liked cities or my work or anything except you three. I won’t miss a thing except perhaps the change in the weather, and a glass of ice water when it’s hot, and I might miss sleeping. How can we sit here and talk this way?’
‘Because there’s nothing else to do.’
‘That’s it, of course; for if there were, we’d be doing it. I suppose this is the first time in the history of the world that everyone has known just what they were going to do during the night.’
‘I wonder what everyone else will do now, this evening, for the next few hours.’
‘Go to a show, listen to the radio, watch television, play cards, put the children to bed, go to bed themselves, like always.’
‘In a way that’s something to be proud of – like always.’
They sat a moment and then he poured himself another coffee. ‘Why do you suppose it’s tonight?’
‘Because.’
‘Why not some other night in the last century, or five centuries ago, or ten?’
‘Maybe because it was never October 19, 1969, ever before in history, and now it is and that’s it; because this date means more than any other date ever meant; because it’s the year when things are as they are all over the world and that’s why it’s the end.’
‘There are bombers on their schedules both ways across the ocean tonight that’ll never see land.’
‘That’s part of the reason why.’
‘Well,’ he said, getting up, ‘what shall it be? Wash the dishes?’
They washed the dishes and stacked them away with special neatness. At eight-thirty the girls were put to bed and kissed good night and the little lights by their beds turned on and the door left open just a trifle.
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