“It is good to renew one’s wonder,” said the philosopher.
“Space travel has again made children of us all.”
One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.
And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer’s ancient green lawns.
Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.
Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.
The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land ...
They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.
Mr. and Mrs. K had lived by the dead sea for twenty years, and their ancestors had lived in the same house, which turned and followed the sun, flower-like, for ten centuries.
Mr. and Mrs. K were not old. They had the fair, brownish skin of the true Martian, the yellow coin eyes, the soft musical voices. Once they had liked painting pictures with chemical fire, swimming in the canals in the seasons when the wine trees filled them with green liquors, and talking into the dawn together by the blue phosphorous portraits in the speaking room.
They were not happy now.
This morning Mrs. K stood between the pillars, listening to the desert sands heat, melt into yellow wax, and seemingly run on the horizon.
Something was going to happen.
She waited.
She watched the blue sky of Mars as if it might at any moment grip in on itself, contract, and expel a shining miracle down upon the sand.
Nothing happened.
Tired of waiting, she walked through the misting pillars. A gentle rain sprang from the fluted pillar tops, cooling the scorched air, falling gently on her. On hot days it was like walking in a creek. The floors of the house glittered with cool streams. In the distance she heard her husband playing his book steadily, his fingers never tired of the old songs. Quietly she wished he might one day again spend as much time holding and touching her like a little harp as he did his incredible books.
But no. She shook her head, an imperceptible, forgiving shrug. Her eyelids closed softly down upon her golden eyes. Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.
She lay back in a chair that moved to take her shape even as she moved. She closed her eyes tightly and nervously.
The dream occurred.
Her brown fingers trembled, came up, grasped at the air. A moment later she sat up, startled, gasping.
She glanced about swiftly, as if expecting someone there before her. She seemed disappointed; the space between the pillars was empty.
Her husband appeared in a triangular door. “Did you call?” he asked irritably.
“No!” she cried.
“I thought I heard you cry out.”
“Did I? I was almost asleep and had a dream!”
“In the daytime? You don’t often do that.”
She sat as if struck in the face by the dream. “How strange, how very strange,” she murmured. “The dream.”
“Oh?” He evidently wished to return to his book.
“I dreamed about a man.”
“A man?”
“A tall man, six feet one inch tall.”
“How absurd; a giant, a misshapen giant.”
“Somehow”—she tried the words—“he looked all right. In spite of being tall. And he had—oh, I know you’ll think it silly—he had blue eyes!”
“Blue eyes! Gods!” cried Mr. K. “What’ll you dream next? I suppose he had black hair?”
“How did you guess?” She was excited.
“I picked the most unlikely color,” he replied coldly.
“Well, black it was!” she cried. “And he had a very white skin; oh, he was most unusual! He was dressed in a strange uniform and he came down out of the sky and spoke pleasantly to me.” She smiled.
“Out of the sky; what nonsense!”
“He came in a metal thing that glittered in the sun,” she remembered. She closed her eyes to shape it again. “I dreamed there was the sky and something sparkled like a coin thrown into the air, and suddenly it grew large and fell down softly to land, a long silver craft, round and alien. And a door opened in the side of the silver object and this tall man stepped out.”
“If you worked harder you wouldn’t have these silly dreams.”
“I rather enjoyed it,” she replied, lying back. “I never suspected myself of such an imagination. Black hair, blue eyes, and white skin! What a strange man, and yet—quite handsome.”
“Wishful thinking.”
“You’re unkind. I didn’t think him up on purpose; he just came in my mind while I drowsed. It wasn’t like a dream. It was so unexpected and different. He looked at me and he said, ‘I’ve come from the third planet in my ship. My name is Nathaniel York—‘”
“A stupid name; it’s no name at all,” objected the husband.
“Of course it’s stupid, because it’s a dream,” she explained softly. “And he said, ‘This is the first trip across space. There are only two of us in our ship, myself and my friend Bert.’”
“_Another_ stupid name.”
“And he said, ‘We’re from a city on Earth; that’s the name of our planet,’” continued Mrs. K. “That’s what he said. ‘Earth’ was the name he spoke. And he used another language. Somehow I understood him. With my mind. Telepathy, I suppose.”
Mr. K turned away. She stopped him with a word. “Yll?” she called quietly. “Do you ever wonder if—well, if there are people living on the third planet?”
“The third planet is incapable of supporting life,” stated the husband patiently. “Our scientists have said there’s far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.”
“But wouldn’t it be fascinating if there were people? And they traveled through space in some sort of ship?”
“Really, Ylla, you know how I hate this emotional wailing. Let’s get on with our work.”
It was late in the day when she began singing the song as she moved among the whispering pillars of rain. She sang it over and over again.
“What’s that song?” snapped her husband at last, walking in to sit at the fire table.
“I don’t know.” She looked up, surprised at herself. She put her hand to her mouth, unbelieving. The sun was setting. The house was closing itself in, like a giant flower, with the passing of light. A wind blew among the pillars; the fire table bubbled its fierce pool of silver lava. The wind stirred her russet hair, crooning softly in her ears. She stood silently looking out into the great sallow distances of sea bottom, as if recalling something, her yellow eyes soft and moist, “Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine,” she sang, softly, quietly, slowly. “Or leave a kiss within the cup, and I’ll not ask for wine.” She hummed now, moving her hands in the wind ever so lightly, her eyes shut. She finished the song.
It was very beautiful.
“Never heard that song before. Did you compose it?” he inquired, his eyes sharp.
“No, Yes. No, I don’t know, really!” She hesitated wildly. “I don’t even know what the words are; they’re another language!”
“What language?”
She dropped portions of meat numbly into the simmering lava. “I don’t know.” She drew the meat forth a moment later, cooked, served on a plate for him. “It’s just a crazy thing I made up, I guess. I don’t know why.”
He said nothing. He watched her drown meats in the hissing fire pool. The sun was gone. Slowly, slowly the night came in to fill the room, swallowing the pillars and both of them, like a dark wine poured to the ceiling. Only the silver lava’s glow lit their faces.
She hummed the strange song again.
Instantly he leaped from his chair and stalked angrily from the room.
Later, in isolation, he finished supper.
When he arose he stretched, glanced at her, and suggested, yawning, “Let’s take the flame birds to town tonight to see an entertainment.”
“You don’t mean it?” she said. “Are you feeling well?”
“What’s so strange about that?”
“But we haven’t gone for an entertainment in six months!”
“I think it’s a good idea.”
“Suddenly you’re so solicitous,” she said.
“Don’t talk that way,” he replied peevishly. “Do you or do you not want to go?”
She looked out at the pale desert. The twin white moons were rising. Cool water ran softly about her toes. She began to tremble just the least bit. She wanted very much to sit quietly here, soundless, not moving until this thing occurred, this thing expected all day, this thing that could not occur but might. A drift of song brushed through her mind.
“I----“
“Do you good,” he urged. “Come along now.”
“I’m tired,” she said. “Some other night.”
“Here’s your scarf.” He handed her a phial. “We haven’t gone anywhere in months.”
“Except you, twice a week to Xi City.” She wouldn’t look at him.
“Business,” he said.
“Oh?” She whispered to herself.
From the phial a liquid poured, turned to blue mist, settled about her neck, quivering.
The flame birds waited, like a bed of coals, glowing on the cool smooth sands. The white canopy ballooned on the night wind, flapping softly, tied by a thousand green ribbons to the birds.
Ylla laid herself back in the canopy and, at a word from her husband, the birds leaped, burning, toward the dark sky. The ribbons tautened, the canopy lifted. The sand slid whining under; the blue hills drifted by, drifted by, leaving their home behind, the raining pillars, the caged flowers, the singing books, the whispering floor creeks. She did not look at her husband. She heard him crying out to the birds as they rose higher, like ten thousand hot sparkles, so many red-yellow fireworks in the heavens, tugging the canopy like a flower petal, burning through the wind.
She didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.
She watched only the sky.
The husband spoke.
She watched the sky.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“What?”
He exhaled. “You might pay attention.”
“I was thinking.”
“I never thought you were a nature lover, but you’re certainly interested in the sky tonight,” he said.
“It’s very beautiful.”
“I was figuring,” said the husband slowly. “I thought I’d call Hulle tonight. I’d like to talk to him about us spending some time, oh, only a week or so, in the Blue Mountains. It’s just an idea—“
“The Blue Mountains!” She held to the canopy rim with one hand, turning swiftly toward him.
“Oh, it’s just a suggestion.”
“When do you want to go?” she asked, trembling.
“I thought we might leave tomorrow morning. You know, an early start and all that,” he said very casually.
“But we never go this early in the year!”
“Just this once, I thought—“ He smiled. “Do us good to get away. Some peace and quiet. You know. You haven’t anything else planned? We’ll go, won’t we?”
She took a breath, waited, and then replied, “No.”
“What?” His cry startled the birds. The canopy jerked.
“No,” she said firmly. “It’s settled. I won’t go.”
He looked at her. They did not speak after that. She turned away.
The birds flew on, ten thousand flrebrands down the wind.
In the dawn the sun, through the crystal pillars, melted the fog that supported Ylla as she slept. All night she had hung above the floor, buoyed by the soft carpeting of mist that poured from the walls when she lay down to rest. All night she had slept on this silent river, like a boat upon a soundless tide. Now the fog burned away, the mist level lowered until she was deposited upon the shore of wakening.
She opened her eyes.
Her husband stood over her. He looked as if he had stood there for hours, watching. She did not know why, but she could not look him in the face.
“You’ve been dreaming again!” he said. “You spoke out and kept me awake. I really think you should see a doctor.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“You talked a lot in your sleep!”
“Did I?” She started up.
Dawn was cold in the room. A gray light filled her as she lay there.
“What was your dream?”
She had to think a moment to remember. “The ship. It came from the sky again, landed, and the tall man stepped out and talked to me, telling me little jokes, laughing, and it was pleasant.”
Mr. K touched a pillar. Founts of warm water leaped up, steaming; the chill vanished from the room. Mr. K’s face was impassive.
“And then,” she said, “this man, who said his strange name was Nathaniel York, told me I was beautiful and—and kissed me.”
“Ha!” cried the husband, turning violently away, his jaw working.
“It’s only a dream.” She was amused.
“Keep your silly, feminine dreams to yourself!”
“You’re acting like a child.” She lapsed back upon the few remaining remnants of chemical mist. After a moment she laughed softly. “I thought of some more of the dream,” she confessed.
“Well, what is it, what is it?” he shouted.
“Yll, you’re so bad-tempered.”
“Tell me!” he demanded. “You can’t keep secrets from me!” His face was dark and rigid as he stood over her.
“I’ve never seen you this way,” she replied, half shocked, half entertained. “All that happened was this Nathaniel York person told me—well, he told me that he’d take me away into his ship, into the sky with him, and take me back to his planet with him. It’s really quite ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous, is it!” he almost screamed. “You should have heard yourself, fawning on him, talking to him, singing with him, oh gods, all night; you should have heard yourself!”
“Yll!”
“When’s he landing? Where’s he coming down with his damned ship?”
“Yll, lower your voice.’
“Voice be damned!” He bent stiffly over her. “And in this dream”—he seized her wrist—“didn’t the ship land over in Green Valley, didn’t it? Answer me!”
“Why, yes—“
“And it landed this afternoon, didn’t it?” he kept at her.
“Yes, yes, I think so, yes, but only in a dream!”
“Well”—he flung her hand away stiffly—“it’s good you’re truthful! I heard every word you said in your sleep. You mentioned the valley and the time.” Breathing hard, he walked between the pillars like a man blinded by a lightning bolt. Slowly his breath returned. She watched him as if he were quite insane. She arose finally and went to him. “Yll,” she whispered.
“I’m all right.”
“You’re sick.”
“No.” He forced a tired smile. “Just childish. Forgive me, darling.” He gave her a rough pat. “Too much work lately. I’m sorry. I think I’ll lie down awhile—“
“You were so excited.”
“I’m all right now. Fine.” He exhaled. “Let’s forget it. Say, I heard a joke about Uel yesterday, I meant to tell you. What do you say you fix breakfast, I’ll tell the joke, and let’s not talk about all this.”
“It was only a dream.”
“Of course,” He kissed her cheek mechanically. “Only a dream.”
At noon the sun was high and hot and the hills shimmered in the light.
“Aren’t you going to town?” asked Ylla.
“Town?” he raised his brows faintly.
“This is the day you always go.” She adjusted a flower cage on its pedestal. The flowers stirred, opening their hungry yellow mouths.
He closed his book. “No. It’s too hot, and it’s late.”
“Oh.” She finished her task and moved toward the door. “Well, I’ll be back soon.”
“Wait a minute! Where are you going?”
She was in the door swiftly. “Over to Pao’s. She invited me!”
“Today?”
“I haven’t seen her in a long time. It’s only a little way.”
“Over in Green Valley, isn’t it?”
“Yes, just a walk, not far, I thought I’d—“ She hurried.
“I’m sorry, really sorry,” he said, running to fetch her back, looking very concerned about his forgetfulness. “It slipped my mind. I invited Dr. Nlle out this afternoon.”
“Dr. Nile!” She edged toward the door.
He caught her elbow and drew her steadily in. “Yes.”
“But Pao—“
“Pan can wait, Ylla. We must entertain Nile.”
“Just for a few minutes—“
“No, Ylla.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “No. Besides, it’s a terribly long walk to Pao’s. All the way over through Green Valley and then past the big canal and down, isn’t it? And it’ll be very, very hot, and Dr. Nile would be delighted to see you. Well?”
She did not answer. She wanted to break and run. She wanted to cry out. But she only sat in the chair, turning her fingers over slowly, staring at them expressionlessly, trapped.
“Ylla?” he murmured. “You will be here, won’t you?”
“Yes,” she said after a long time. “I’ll be here.”
“All afternoon?”
Her voice was dull. “All afternoon.”
Late in the day Dr. Nile had not put in an appearance. Ylla’s husband did not seem overly surprised. When it was quite late he murmured something, went to a closet, and drew forth an evil weapon, a long yellowish tube ending in a bellows and a trigger. He turned, and upon his face was a mask, hammered from silver metal, expressionless, the mask that he always wore when he wished to hide his feelings, the mask which curved and hollowed so exquisitely to his thin cheeks and chin and brow. The mask glinted, and he held the evil weapon in his hands, considering it. It hummed constantly, an insect hum. From it hordes of golden bees could be flung out with a high shriek. Golden, horrid bees that stung, poisoned, and fell lifeless, like seeds on the sand.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“What?” He listened to the bellows, to the evil hum. “If Dr. Nile is late, I’ll be damned if I’ll wait. I’m going out to hunt a bit. I’ll be back. You be sure to stay right here now, won’t you?” The silver mask glimmered.
“Yes.”
“And tell Dr. Nile I’ll return. Just hunting.”
The triangular door closed. His footsteps faded down the hill.
She watched him walking through the sunlight until he was gone. Then she resumed her tasks with the magnetic dusts and the new fruits to be plucked from the crystal walls. She worked with energy and dispatch, but on occasion a numbness took hold of her and she caught herself singing that odd and memorable song and looking out beyond the crystal pillars at the sky.
She held her breath and stood very still, waiting.
It was coming nearer.
At any moment it might happen.
It was like those days when you heard a thunderstorm coming and there was the waiting silence and then the faintest pressure of the atmosphere as the climate blew over the land in shifts and shadows and vapors. And the change pressed at your ears and you were suspended in the waiting time of the coming storm. You began to tremble. The sky was stained and coloured; the clouds were thickened; the mountains took on an iron taint. The caged flowers blew with faint sighs of warning. You felt your hair stir softly. Somewhere in the house the voice-clock sang, “Time, time, time, time ... ” ever so gently, no more than water tapping on velvet.
And then the storm. The electric illumination, the engulfments of dark wash and sounding black fell down, shutting in, forever.
That’s how it was. A storm gathered, yet the sky was clear. Lightning was expected, yet there was no cloud.
Ylla moved through the breathless summer house. Lightning would strike from the sky any instant; there would be a thunderclap, a boil of smoke, a silence, footsteps on the path, a rap on the crystalline door, and her running to answer ...
Crazy Ylla! she scoffed. Why think these wild things with your idle mind?
And then it happened.
There was a warmth as of a great fire passing in the air. A whirling, rushing sound. A gleam in the sky, of metal.
Ylla cried out.
Running through the pillars, she flung wide a door. She faced the hills. But by this time there was nothing.
She was about to race down the hill when she stopped herself. She was supposed to stay here, go nowhere. The doctor was coming to visit, and her husband would be angry if she ran off.
She waited in the door, breathing rapidly, her hand out.
She strained to see over toward Green Valley, but saw nothing.
Silly woman. She went inside. You and your imagination, she thought. That was nothing but a bird, a leaf, the wind, or a fish in the canal. Sit down. Rest.
She sat down.
A shot sounded.
Very clearly, sharply, the sound of the evil insect weapon.
Her body jerked with it.
It came from a long way off. One shot. The swift humming distant bees. One shot. And then a second shot, precise and cold, and far away.
Her body winced again and for some reason she started up, screaming, and screaming, and never wanting to stop screaming. She ran violently through the house and once more threw wide the door.
The echoes were dying away, away.
Gone.
She waited in the yard, her face pale, for five minutes.
Finally, with slow steps, her head down, she wandered about the pillared rooms, laying her hand to things, her lips quivering, until finally she sat alone in the darkening wine room, waiting. She began to wipe an amber glass with the hem of her scarf.
And then, from far off, the sound of footsteps crunching on the thin, small rocks.
She rose up to stand in the center of the quiet room. The glass fell from her fingers, smashing to bits.
The footsteps hesitated outside the door.
Should she speak? Should she cry out, “Come in, oh, come in”?
She went forward a few paces.
The footsteps walked up the ramp. A hand twisted the door latch.
She smiled at the door.
The door opened. She stopped smiling.
It was her husband. His silver mask glowed dully.
He entered the room and looked at her for only a moment. Then he snapped the weapon bellows open, cracked out two dead bees, heard them spat on the floor as they fell, stepped on them, and placed the empty bellows gun in the corner of the room as Ylla bent down and tried, over and over, with no success, to pick up the pieces of the shattered glass. “What were you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said with his back turned. He removed the mask.
“But the gun—I heard you fire it. Twice.”
“Just hunting. Once in a while you like to hunt. Did Dr. Nile arrive?”
“No.”
“Wait a minute.” He snapped his fingers disgustedly. “Why, I remember now. He was supposed to visit us tomorrow afternoon. How stupid of me.”
They sat down to eat. She looked at her food and did not move her hands. “What’s wrong?” he asked, not looking up from dipping his meat in the bubbling lava.
“I don’t know. I’m not hungry,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know; I’m just not.”
The wind was rising across the sky; the sun was going down. The room was small and suddenly cold.
“I’ve been trying to remember,” she said in the silent room, across from her cold, erect, golden-eyed husband.
“Remember what?” He sipped his wine.
“That song. That fine and beautiful song.” She closed her eyes and hummed, but it was not the song. “I’ve forgotten it. And, somehow, I don’t want to forget it. It’s something I want always to remember.” She moved her hands as if the rhythm might help her to remember all of it. Then she lay back in her chair. “I can’t remember.” She began to cry.
“Why are you crying?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, but I can’t help it. I’m sad and I don’t know why, I cry and I don’t know why, but I’m crying.”
Her head was in her hands; her shoulders moved again and again.
“You’ll be all right tomorrow,” he said.
She did not look up at him; she looked only at the empty desert and the very bright stars coming out now on the black sky, and far away there was a sound of wind rising and canal waters stirring cold in the long canals. She shut her eyes, trembling.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be all right tomorrow.”
In the stone galleries the people were gathered in clusters and groups filtering up into shadows among the blue hills. A soft evening light shone over them from the stars and the luminous double moons of Mars. Beyond the marble amphitheater, in darkness and distances, lay little towns and villas; pools of silver water stood motionless and canals glittered from horizon to horizon. It was an evening in summer upon the placid and temperate planet Mars. Up and down green wine canals, boats as delicate as bronze flowers drifted. In the long and endless dwellings that curved like tranquil snakes across the hills, lovers lay idly whispering in cool night beds. The last children ran in torchlit alleys, gold spiders in their hands throwing out films of web. Here or there a late supper was prepared in tables where lava bubbled silvery and hushed. In the amphitheaters of a hundred towns on the night side of Mars the brown Martian people with gold coin eyes were leisurely met to fix their attention upon stages where musicians made a serene music flow up like blossom scent on the still air.
Upon one stage a woman sang.
The audience stirred.
She stopped singing. She put her hand to her throat. She nodded to the musicians and they began again.
The musicians played and she sang, and this time the audience sighed and sat forward, a few of the men stood up in surprise, and a winter chill moved through the amphitheater. For it was an odd and a frightening and a strange song this woman sang. She tried to stop the words from coming out of her lips, but the words were these:
“_She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes_ ... ”
The singer dasped her hands to her mouth. She stood, bewildered.
“What words are those?” asked the musicians.
“What song is that?”
“What language is that!”
And when they blew again upon their golden horns the strange music came forth and passed slowly over the audience, which now talked aloud and stood up.
“What’s wrong with you?” the musicians asked each other.
“What tune is that you played?”
“What tune did you play?”
The woman wept and ran from the stage, And the audience moved out of the amphitheater. And all around the nervous towns of Mars a similar thing had happened. A coldness had come, like white snow falling on the air.
In the black alleys, under the torches, the children sang:
“--_and when she got there, the cupboard was bare,
And so her poor dog had none!_”
“Children!” voices cried. “What was that rhyme? Where did you learn it?”
“We just thought of it, all of a sudden. It’s just words we don’t understand.”
Doors slammed. The streets were deserted. Above the blue hills a green star rose.
All over the night side of Mars lovers awoke to listen to their loved ones who lay humming in the darkness.
“What is that tune?”
And in a thousand villas, in the middle of the night, women awoke, screaming. They had to be soothed while the tears ran down their faces, “There, there. Sleep. What’s wrong? A dream?”
“Something terrible will happen in the morning.”
“Nothing can happen, all is well with us.”
A hysterical sobbing. “It is coming nearer and nearer and nearer!”
“Nothing can happen to us. What could? Sleep now. Sleep.”
It was quiet in the deep morning of Mars, as quiet as a cool and black well, with stars shining in the canal waters, and, breathing in every room, the children curled with their spiders in closed hands, the lovers arm in arm, the moons gone, the torches cold, the stone amphitheaters deserted.
The only sound, just before dawn, was a night watchman, far away down a lonely street, walking along in the darkness, humming a very strange song ...
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 then. “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, eyeing 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 a 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. Ass 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. “Good-by!” 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 bed-time 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 woman 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 oh’ed and ah’ed as the captain talked. He introduced his crew; each made a small speech and was embarrassed by the thunderous applause.
Mr. Uuu dapped 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’m 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 illuminated 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.
He wanted to go to Mars on the rocket. He went down to the rocket field in the early morning and yelled in through the wire fence at the men in uniform that he wanted to go to Mars, He told them he was a taxpayer, his name was Pritchard, and he had a right to go to Mars. Wasn’t he born right here in Ohio? Wasn’t he a good citizen? Then why couldn’t he go to Mars? He shook his fists at them and told them that he wanted to get away from Earth; anybody with any sense wanted to get away from Earth. There was going to be a big atomic war on Earth in about two years, and he didn’t want to be here when it happened. He and thousands of others like him, if they had any sense, would go to Mars. See if they wouldn’t! To get away from wars and censorship and statism and conscription and government control of this and that, of art and science! You could have Earth! He was offering his good right hand, his heart, his head, for the opportunity to go to Mars! What did you have to do, what did you have to sign, whom did you have to know, to get on the rocket?
They laughed out through the wire screen at him. He didn’t want to go to Mars, they said. Didn’t he know that the First and Second Expeditions had failed, had vanished; the men were probably dead?
But they couldn’t prove it, they didn’t know for sure, he said, clinging to the wire fence. Maybe it was a land of milk and honey up there, and Captain York and Captain Williams had just never bothered to come back. Now were they going to open the gate and let him in to board the Third Expeditionary Rocket, or was he going to have to kick it down?
They told him to shut up.
He saw the men walking out to the rocket.
Wait for me! he cried. Don’t leave me here on this terrible world, I’ve got to get away; there’s going to be an atom war! Don’t leave me on Earth!
They dragged him, struggling, away. They slammed the policewagon door and drove him off into the early morning, his face pressed to the rear window, and just before they sirened over a hill, he saw the red fire and heard the big sound and felt the huge tremor as the silver rocket shot up and left him behind on an ordinary Monday morning on the ordinary planet Earth.
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, induding 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 a 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. Goodbye.”
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 coordination. “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 slammng.
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 flourished by the scent of jasmine pushing the lace curtains out 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 wears 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 soddenly 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.
It was so cold when they first came from the rocket into the night that Spender began to gather the dry Martian wood and build a small fire. He didn’t say anything about a celebration; he merely gathered the wood, set fire to it, and watched it burn.
In the flare that lighted the thin air of this dried-up sea of Mars he looked over his shoulder and saw the rocket that had brought them all, Captain Wilder and Cheroke and Hathaway and Sam Parkhill and himself, across a silent black space of stars to land upon a dead, dreaming world.
Jeff Spender waited for the noise. He watched the other men and waited for them to jump around and shout. It would happen as soon as the numbness of being the “first” men to Mars wore off. None of them said anything, but many of them were hoping, perhaps, that the other expeditions had failed and that this, the Fourth, would be the one. They meant nothing evil by it. But they stood thinking it, nevertheless, thinking of the honor and fame, while their lungs became accustomed to the thinness of the atmosphere, which almost made you drunk if you moved too quickly.
Gibbs walked over to the freshly ignited fire and said, “Why don’t we use the ship chemical fire instead of that wood?”
“Never mind,” said Spender, not looking up.
It wouldn’t be right, the first night on Mars, to make a loud noise, to introduce a strange, silly bright thing like a stove. It would be a kind of imported blasphemy. There’d be time for that later; time to throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the lone gray Martian sea bottoms; time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicate ruins of the old Martian valley towns. Plenty of time for that. And he gave a small inward shiver at the thought.
He fed the fire by hand, and it was like an offering to a dead giant, They had landed on an immense tomb. Here a civilization had died. It was only simple courtesy that the first night be spent quietly.
“This isn’t my idea of a celebration.” Gibbs turned to Captain Wilder. “Sir, I thought we might break out rations of gin and meat and whoop it up a bit.”
Captain Wilder looked off toward a dead city a mile away. “We’re all tired,” he said remotely, as if his whole attention was on the city and his men forgotten. “Tomorrow night, perhaps. Tonight we should be glad we got across all that space without getting a meteor in our bulkhead or having one man of us die.”
The men shifted around. There were twenty of them, holding to each other’s shoulders or adjusting their belts. Spender watched them. They were not satisfied. They had risked their lives to do a big thing. Now they wanted to be shouting drunk, firing off guns to show how wonderful they were to have kicked a hole in space and ridden a rocket all the way to Mars.
But nobody was yelling.
The captain gave a quiet order. One of the men ran into the ship and brought forth food tins which were opened and dished out without much noise. The men were beginning to talk now. The captain sat down and recounted the trip to them. They already knew it all, but it was good to hear about it, as something over and done and safely put away. They would not talk about the return trip. Someone brought that up, but they told him to keep quiet. The spoons moved in the double moonlight; the food tasted good and the wine was even better.
There was a touch of fire across the sky, and an instant later the auxiliary rocket landed beyond the camp. Spender watched as the small port opened and Hathaway, the physician-geologist—they were all men of twofold ability, to conserve space on the trip—stepped out. He walked slowly over to the captain.
“Well?” said Captain Wilder.
Hathaway gazed out at the distant cities twinkling in the starlight. After swallowing and focusing his eyes he said, “That city there, Captain, is dead and has been dead a good many thousand years. That applies to those three cities in the hills also. But that fifth city, two hundred miles over, sir—“
“What about it?”
“People were living in it last week, sir.”
Spender got to his feet.
“Martians,” said Hathaway.
“Where are they now?”
“Dead,” said Hathaway. “I went into a house on one street. I thought that it, like the other towns and houses, had been dead for centuries. My God, there were bodies there. It was like walking in a pile of autumn leaves. Like sticks and pieces of burnt newspaper, that’s all. And fresh. They’d been dead ten days at the outside.”
“Did you check other towns? Did you see anything alive?”
“Nothing whatever. So I went out to check the other towns. Four out of five have been empty for thousands of years. What happened to the original inhabitants I haven’t the faintest idea. But the fifth city always contained the same thing. Bodies. Thousands of bodies.”
“What did they die of?” Spender moved forward.
“You won’t believe it.”
“What killed them?”
Hathaway said simply, “Chicken pox.”
“My God, no!”
“Yes. I made tests. Chicken pox. It did things to the Martians it never did to Earth Men. Their metabolism reacted differently, I suppose. Burnt them black and dried them out to brittle flakes. But it’s chicken pox, nevertheless. So York and Captain Williams and Captain Black must have got through to Mars, all three expeditions. God knows what happened to them. But we at least know what they unintentionally did to the Martians.”
“You saw no other life?”
“Chances are a few of the Martians, if they were smart, escaped to the mountains. But there aren’t enough, I’ll lay you money, to be a native problem. This planet is through.”
Spender turned and went to sit at the fire, looking into it. Chicken pox, God, chicken pox, think of it! A race builds itself for a million years, refines itself, erects cities like those out there, does everything it can to give itself respect and beauty, and then it dies. Part of it dies slowly, in its own time, before our age, with dignity. But the rest! Does the rest of Mars die of a disease with a fine name or a terrifying name or a majestic name? No, in the name of all that’s holy, it has to be chicken pox, a child’s disease, a disease that doesn’t even kill children on Earth! It’s not right and it’s not fair. It’s like saying the Greeks died of mumps, or the proud Romans died on their beautiful hills of athlete’s foot! If only we’d given the Martians time to arrange their death robes, lie down, look fit, and think up some other excuse for dying. It can’t be a dirty, silly thing like chicken pox. It doesn’t fit the architecture; it doesn’t fit this entire world!
“All right, Hathaway, get yourself some food.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
And as quickly as that it was forgotten. The men talked among themselves.
Spender did not take his eyes off them. He left his food on his plate under his hands. He felt the land getting colder. The stars drew closer, very clear.
When anyone talked too loudly the captain would reply in a low voice that made them talk quietly from imitation.
The air smelled clean and new. Spender sat for a long time just enjoying the way it was made. It had a lot of things in it he couldn’t identify: flowers, chemistries, dusts, winds.
“Then there was that time in New York when I got that blonde, what’s her name?--Ginnie!” cried Biggs. “_That_ was it!”
Spender tightened in. His hand began to quiver. His eyes moved behind the thin, sparse lids.
“And Ginnie said to me—“ cried Biggs.
The men roared.
“So I smacked her!” shouted Biggs with a bottle in his hand.
Spender set down his plate. He listened to the wind over his ears, cool and whispering. He looked at the cool ice of the white Martian buildings over there on the empty sea lands.
“What a woman, what a woman!” Biggs emptied his bottle in his wide mouth. “Of all the women I ever knew!”
The smell of Biggs’s sweating body was on the air. Spender let the fire die. “Hey, kick her up there, Spender!” said Biggs, glancing at him for a moment, then back to his bottle. “Well, one night Ginnie and me—“
A man named Schoenke got out his accordion and did a kicking dance, the dust springing up around him.
“Ahoo—I’m alive!” he shouted.
“Yay!” roared the men. They threw down their empty plates. Three of them lined up and kicked like chorus maidens, joking loudly. The others, clapping hands, yelled for something to happen. Cheroke pulled off his shirt and showed his naked chest, sweating as he whirled about. The moonlight shone on his crewcut hair and his young, clean-shaven cheeks.
In the sea bottom the wind stirred along faint vapors, and from the mountains great stone visages looked upon the silvery rocket and the small fire.
The noise got louder, more men jumped up, someone sucked on a mouth organ, someone else blew on a tissue-papered comb. Twenty more bottles were opened and drunk. Biggs staggered about, wagging his arms to direct the dancing men.
“Come on, sir!” cried Cheroke to the captain, wailing a song.
The captain had to join the dance. He didn’t want to. His face was solemn. Spender watched, thinking: You poor man, what a night this is! They don’t know what they’re doing. They should have had an orientation program before they came to Mars to tell them how to look and how to walk around and be good for a few days.
“That does it.” The captain begged off and sat down, saying he was exhausted. Spender looked at the captain’s chest. It wasn’t moving up and down very fast. His face wasn’t sweaty, either.
Accordion, harmonica, wine, shout, dance, wail, roundabout, dash of pan, laughter.
Biggs weaved to the rim of the Martian canal. He carried six empty bottles and dropped them one by one into the deep blue canal waters. They made empty, hollow, drowning sounds as they sank.
“I christen thee, I christen thee, I christen thee—“ said Biggs thickly. “I christen thee Biggs, Biggs, Biggs Canal—“
Spender was on his feet, over the fire, and alongside Biggs before anyone moved. He hit Biggs once in the teeth and once in the ear. Biggs toppled and fell down into the canal water. After the splash Spender waited silently for Biggs to climb back up onto the stone bank. By that time the men were holding Spender.
“Hey, what’s eating you, Spender? Hey?” they asked.
Biggs climbed up and stood dripping. He saw the men holding Spender. “Well,” he said, and started forward.
“That’s enough,” snapped Captain Wilder. The men broke away from Spender. Biggs stopped and glanced at the captain.
“All right, Biggs, get some dry clothes. You men, carry on your party! Spender, come with me!”
The men took up the party. Wilder moved off some distance and confronted Spender. “Suppose you explain what just happened,” he said.
Spender looked at the canal. “I don’t know, I was ashamed. Of Biggs and us and the noise. Christ, what a spectacle.”
“It’s been a long trip. They’ve got to have their fling.”
“Where’s their respect, sir? Where’s their sense of the right thing?”
“You’re tired, and you’ve a different way of seeing things, Spender. That’s a fifty-dollar fine for you.”
“Yes, sir. It was just the idea of Them watching us make fools of ourselves.”
“Them?”
“The Martians, whether they’re dead or not.”
“Most certainly dead,” said the captain. “Do you think They know we’re here?”
“Doesn’t an old thing always know when a new thing comes?”
“I suppose so. You sound as if you believe in spirits.”
“I believe in the things that were done, and there are evidences of many things done on Mars. There are streets and houses, and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and docks and places for stabling, if not horses, well, then some domestic animal, perhaps with twelve legs, who knows? Everywhere I look I see things that were used. They were touched and handled for centuries,
“Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I’ll say yes. They’re all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we’ll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we’ll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.”
“We won’t ruin Mars,” said the captain. “It’s too big and too good.”
“You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose. And Egypt is a small part of Earth. But here, this whole thing is ancient and different, and we have to set down somewhere and start fouling it up. We’ll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and the mountain King George Mountain and the sea the Dupont sea, and there’ll be Roosevelt and Lincoln and Coolidge cities and it won’t ever be right, when there are the proper names for these places.”
“That’ll be your job, as archaeologists, to find out the old names, and we’ll use them.”
“A few men like us against all the commercial interests.” Spender looked at the iron mountains. “_They_ know we’re here tonight, to spit in their wine, and I imagine they hate us.”
The captain shook his head. “There’s no hatred here.” He listened to the wind. “From the look of their cities they were a graceful, beautiful, and philosophical people. They accepted what came to them. They acceded to racial death, that much we know, and without a last-moment war of frustration to tumble down their cities. Every town we’ve seen so far has been flawlessly intact. They probably don’t mind us being here any more than they’d mind children playing on the lawn, knowing and understanding children for what they are. And, anyway, perhaps all this will change us for the better.
“Did you notice the peculiar quiet of the men, Spender, until Biggs forced them to get happy? They looked pretty humble and frightened. Looking at all this, we know we’re not so hot; we’re kids in rompers, shouting with our play rockets and atoms, loud and alive. But one day Earth will be as Mars is today. This will sober us. It’s an object lesson in civilizations. We’ll learn from Mars. Now suck in your chin. Let’s go back and play happy. That fifty-dollar fine still goes.”
The party was not going too well. The wind kept coming in off the dead sea. It moved around the men and it moved around the captain and Jeff Spender as they returned to the group. The wind pulled at the dust and the shining rocket and pulled at the accordion, and the dust got into the vamped harmonica. The dust got in their eyes and the wind made a high singing sound in the air. As suddenly as it had come the wind died.
But the party had died too.
The men stood upright against the dark cold sky.
“Come on, gents, come on!” Biggs bounded from the ship in a fresh uniform, not looking at Spender even once. His voice was like someone in an empty auditorium. It was alone. “Come on!”
Nobody moved.
“Come on, Whitie, your harmonica!”
Whitie blew a chord. It sounded funny and wrong. Whitie knocked the moisture from his harmonica and put it away.
“What kinda party is this?” Biggs wanted to know.
Someone hugged the accordion. It gave a sound like a dying animal. That was all.
“Okay, me and my bottle will go have our own party.” Biggs squatted against the rocket, drinking from a flask.
Spender watched him. Spender did not move for a long time. Then his fingers crawled up along his trembling leg to his holstered pistol, very quietly, and stroked and tapped the leather sheath.
“All those who want to can come into the city with me,” announced the captain. “We’ll post a guard here at the rocket and go armed, just in case.”
The men counted off. Fourteen of them wanted to go, including Biggs, who laughingly counted himself in, waving his bottle. Six others stayed behind.
“Here we go!” Biggs shouted.
The party moved out into the moonlight, silently. They made their way to the outer rim of the dreaming dead city in the light of the racing twin moons. Their shadows, under them, were double shadows. They did not breathe, or seemed not to, perhaps, for several minutes. They were waiting for something to stir in the dead city, some gray form to rise, some ancient, ancestral shape to come galloping across the vacant sea bottom on an ancient, armored steel of impossible lineage, of unbelievable derivation.
Spender filled the streets with his eyes and his mind. People moved like blue vapor lights on the cobbled avenues, and there were faint murmurs of sound, and odd animals scurrying across the gray-red sands. Each window was given a person who leaned from it and waved slowly, as if under a timeless water, at some moving form in the fathoms of space below the moon-silvered towers. Music was played on some inner ear, and Spender imagined the shape of such instruments to evoke such music. The land was haunted.
“Hey!” shouted Biggs, standing tall, his hands around his open mouth. “Hey, you people in the city there, you!”
“Biggs!” said the captain.
Biggs quieted.
They walked forward on a tiled avenue. They were all whispering now, for it was like entering a vast open library or a mausoleum in which the wind lived and over which the stars shone. The captain spoke quietly. He wondered where the people had gone, and what they had been, and who their kings were, and how they had died. And he wondered, quietly aloud, how they had built this city to last the ages through, and had they ever come to Earth? Were they ancestors of Earth Men ten thousand years removed? And had they loved and hated similar loves and hates, and done similar silly things when silly things were done?
Nobody moved. The moons held and froze them; the wind beat slowly around them.
“Lord Byron,” said Jeff Spender.
“Lord who?” The captain turned and regarded him.
“Lord Byron, a nineteenth-century poet. He wrote a poem a long time ago that fits this city and how the Martians must feel, if there’s anything left of them to feel. It might have been written by the last Martian poet.”
The men stood motionless, their shadows under them.
The captain said, “How does the poem go, Spender?”
Spender shifted, put out his hand to remember, squinted silently a moment; then, remembering, his slow quiet voice repeated the words and the men listened to everything he said:
“_So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright_.”
The city was gray and high and motionless. The men’s faces were turned in the light.
“_For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself must rest.
“Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon_.”
Without a word the Earth Men stood in the center of the city. It was a clear night. There was not a sound except the wind. At their feet lay a tile court worked into the shapes of ancient animals and peoples. They looked down upon it.
Biggs made a sick noise in his throat. His eyes were dull. His hands went to his mouth; he choked, shut his eyes, bent, and a thick rush of fluid filled his mouth, spilled out, fell to splash on the tiles, covering the designs. Biggs did this twice, A sharp winy stench filled the cool air.
No one moved to help Biggs. He went on being sick.
Spender stared for a moment, then turned and walked off into the avenues of the city, alone in the moonlight. Never once did he pause to look back at the gathered men there.
They turned in at four in the morning. They lay upon blankets and shut their eyes and breathed the quiet air. Captain Wilder sat feeding little sticks into the fire.
McClure opened his eyes two hours later. “Aren’t you sleeping, sir?”
“I’m waiting for Spender.” The captain smiled faintly.
McClure thought it over. “You know, sir, I don’t think he’ll ever come back. I don’t know how I know, but that’s the way I feel about him, sir; he’ll never come back.”
McClure rolled over into sleep. The fire crackled and died.
Spender did not return in the following week. The captain sent searching parties, but they came back saying they didn’t know where Spender could have gone. He would be back when he got good and ready. He was a sorehead, they said. To the devil with him!
The captain said nothing but wrote it down in his log ...
It was a morning that might have been a Monday or a Tuesday or any day on Mars. Biggs was on the canal rim; his feet hung down into the cool water, soaking, while he took the sun on his face.
A man walked along the bank of the canal. The man threw a shadow down upon Biggs. Biggs glanced up.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Biggs.
“I’m the last Martian,” said the man, taking out a gun.
“What did you say?” asked Biggs.
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Cut it. What kind of joke’s that, Spender?”
“Stand up and take it in the stomach.”
“For Christ’s sake, put that gun away.”
Spender pulled the trigger only once. Biggs sat on the edge of the canal for a moment before he leaned forward and fell into the water. The gun had made only a whispering hum. The body drifted with slow unconcern under the slow canal tides. It made a hollow bubbling sound that ceased after a moment.
Spender shoved his gun into its holster and walked soundlessly away. The sun was shining down upon Mars. He felt it burn his hands and slide over the sides of his tight face. He did not run; he walked as if nothing were new except the daylight. He walked down to the rocket, and some of the men were eating a freshly cooked breakfast under a shelter built by Cookie.
“Here comes The Lonely One,” someone said.
“Hello, Spender! Long time no see!”
The four men at the table regarded the silent man who stood looking back at them.
“You and them goddamn ruins,” laughed Cookie, stirring a black substance in a crock. “You’re like a dog in a bone yard.”
“Maybe,” said Spender, “I’ve been finding out things. What would you say if I said I’d found a Martian prowling around?”
The four men laid down their forks.
“Did you? Where?”
“Never mind. Let me ask you a question. How would you feel if you were a Martian and people came to your land and started tearing it up?”
“I know exactly how I’d feel,” said Cheroke. “I’ve got some Cherokee blood in me. My grandfather told me lots of things about Oklahoma Territory. If there’s a Martian around, I’m all for him.”
“What about you other men?” asked Spender carefully.
Nobody answered; their silence was talk enough. Catch as catch can, finder’s keepers, if the other fellow turns his cheek slap it hard, etc ...
“Well,” said Spender, “I’ve found a Martian.”
The men squinted at him.
“Up in a dead town. I didn’t think I’d find him. I didn’t intend looking him up. I don’t know what he was doing there. I’ve been living in a little valley town for about a week, learning how to read the ancient books and looking at their old art forms. And one day I saw this Martian. He stood there for a moment and then he was gone. He didn’t come back for another day. I sat around, learning how to read the old writing, and the Martian came back, each time a little nearer, until on the day I learned how to decipher the Martian language—it’s amazingly simple and there are picturegraphs to help you—the Martian appeared before me and said, ‘Give me your boots.’ And I gave him my boots and he said, ‘Give me your uniform and all the rest of your apparel.’ And I gave him all of that, and then he said, ‘Give me your gun,’ and I gave him my gun. Then he said, ‘Now come along and watch what happens.’ And the Martian walked down into camp and he’s here now.”
“I don’t see any Martian,” said Cheroke.
“I’m sorry.”
Spender took out his gun. It hummed softly. The first bullet got the man on the left; the second and third bullets took the men on the right and the center of the table. Cookie turned in horror from the fire to receive the fourth bullet. He fell back into the fire and lay there while his clothes caught fire.
The rocket lay in the sun. Three men sat at breakfast, their hands on the table, not moving, their food getting cold in front of them. Cheroke, untouched, sat alone, staring in numb disbelief at Spender.
“You can come with me,” said Spender.
Cheroke said nothing.
“You can be with me on this.” Spender waited.
Finally Cheroke was able to speak. “You killed them,” he said, daring to look at the men around him.
“They deserved it.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Maybe I am. But you can come with me.”
“Come with you, for what?” cried Cheroke, the color gone from his face, his eyes watering. “Go on, get out!”
Spender’s face hardened. “Of all of them, I thought you would understand.”
“Get out!” Cheroke reached for his gun.
Spender fired one last time. Cheroke stopped moving.
Now Spender swayed. He put his hand to his sweating face. He glanced at the rocket and suddenly began to shake all over. He almost fell, the physical reaction was so overwhelming. His face held an expression of one awakening from hypnosis, from a dream. He sat down for a moment and told the shaking to go away.
“Stop it, stop it!” he commanded of his body. Every fiber of him was quivering and shaking. “Stop it!” He crushed his body with his mind until all the shaking was squeezed out of it. His hands lay calmly now upon his silent knees.
He arose and strapped a portable storage locker on his back with quiet efficiency. His hand began to tremble again, just for a breath of an instant, but he said, “No!” very firmly, and the trembling passed. Then, walking stiffly, he moved out between the hot red hills of the land, alone.
The sun burned farther up the sky. An hour later the captain climbed down out of the rocket to get some ham and eggs. He was just saying hello to the four men sitting there when he stopped and noticed a faint smell of gun fumes on the air. He saw the cook lying on the ground, with the campfire under him. The four men sat before food that was now cold.
A moment later Parkhill and two others climbed down. The captain stood in their way, fascinated by the silent men and the way they sat at their breakfast.
“Call the men, all of them,” said the captain.
Parkhill hurried off down the canal rim.
The captain touched Cheroke. Cheroke twisted quietly and fell from his chair. Sunlight burned in his bristled short hair and on his high cheekbones.
The men came in.
“Who’s missing?”
“It’s still Spender, sir. We found Biggs floating in the canal.”
“Spender!”
The captain saw the hills rising in the daylight, The sun showed his teeth in a grimace. “Damn him,” he said tiredly. “Why didn’t he come and talk to me?”
“He should’ve talked to me,” cried Parkhill, eyes blazing. “I’d have shot his bloody brains out, that’s what I’d have done, by God!”
Captain Wilder nodded at two of his men. “Get shovels,” he said.
It was hot digging the graves. A warm wind came from over the vacant sea and blew the dust into their faces as the captain turned the Bible pages. When the captain closed the book someone began shoveling slow streams of sand down upon the wrapped figures.
They walked back to the rocket, clicked the mechanisms of their rifles, put thick grenade packets on their backs, and checked the free play of pistols in their holsters. They were each assigned part of the hills. The captain directed them without raising his voice or moving his hands where they hung at his sides.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Spender saw the thin dust rising in several places in the valley and he knew the pursuit was organized and ready. He put down the thin silver book that he had been reading as he sat easily on a flat boulder. The book’s pages were tissue-thin, pure silver, hand-painted in black and gold. It was a book of philosophy at least ten thousand years old he had found in one of the villas of a Martian valley town. He was reluctant to lay it aside.
For a time he had thought, What’s the use? I’ll sit here reading until they come along and shoot me.
The first reaction to his killing the six men this morning had caused a period of stunned blankness, then sickness, and now, a strange peace. But the peace was passing, too, for he saw the dust billowing from the trails of the hunting men, and he experienced the return of resentment.
He took a drink of cool water from his hip canteen. Then he stood up, stretched, yawned, and listened to the peaceful wonder of the valley around him. How very fine if he and a few others he knew on Earth could be here, live out their lives here, without a sound or a worry.
He carried the book with him in one hand, the pistol ready in his other. There was a little swift-running stream filled with white pebbles and rocks where he undressed and waded in for a brief washing. He took all the time he wanted before dressing and picking up his gun again.
The firing began about three in the afternoon. By then Spender was high in the hills. They followed him through three small Martian hill towns. Above the towns, scattered like pebbles, were single villas where ancient families had found a brook, a green spot, and laid out a tile pool, a library, and a court with a pulsing fountain. Spender took half an hour, swimming in one of the pools which was filled with the seasonal rain, waiting for the pursuers to catch up with him.
Shots rang out as he was leaving the little villa. Tile chipped up some twenty feet behind him, exploded. He broke into a trot, moved behind a series of small bluffs, turned, and with his first shot dropped one of the men dead in his tracks.
They would form a net, a circle; Spender knew that. They would go around and close in and they would get him. It was a strange thing that the grenades were not used. Captain Wilder could easily order the grenades tossed.
But I’m much too nice to be blown to bits, thought Spender. That’s what the captain thinks. He wants me with only one hole in me. Isn’t that odd? He wants my death to be clean. Nothing messy. Why? Because he understands me. And because he understands, he’s willing to risk good men to give me a clean shot in the head. Isn’t that it?
Nine, ten shots broke out in a rattle. Rocks around him jumped up. Spender fired steadily, sometimes while glancing at the silver book he carried in his hand.
The captain ran in the hot sunlight with a rifle in his hands. Spender followed him in his pistol sights but did not fire. Instead he shifted and blew the top off a rock where Whitie lay, and heard an angry shout.
Suddenly the captain stood up. He had a white handkerchief in his hands. He said something to his men and came walking up the mountain after putting aside his rifle. Spender lay there, then got to his feet, his pistol ready.
The captain came up and sat down on a warm boulder, not looking at Spender for a moment.
The captain reached into his blouse pocket. Spender’s fingers tightened on the pistol.
The captain said, “Cigarette?”
“Thanks.” Spender took one.
“Light?”
“Got my own.”
They took one or two puffs in silence.
“Warm,” said the captain.
“It is.”
“You comfortable up here?”
“Quite.”
“How long do you think you can hold out?”
“About twelve men’s worth.”
“Why didn’t you kill all of us this morning when you had the chance? You could have, you know.”
“I know. I got sick. When you want to do a thing badly enough you lie to yourself. You say the other people are all wrong. Well, soon after I started killing people I realized they were just fools and I shouldn’t be killing them. But it was too late. I couldn’t go on with it then, so I came up here where I could lie to myself some more and get angry, to build it all up again.
“Is it built up?”
“Not very high. Enough.”
The captain considered his cigarette. “Why did you do it?”
Spender quietly laid his pistol at his feet. “Because I’ve seen that what these Martians had was just as good as anything we’ll ever hope to have. They stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago. I’ve walked in their cities and I know these people and I’d be glad to call them my ancestors.”
“They have a beautiful city there.” The captain nodded at one of several places.
“It’s not that alone. Yes, their cities are good. They knew how to blend art into their living. It’s always been a thing apart for Americans. Art was something you kept in the crazy son’s room upstairs. Art was something you took in Sunday doses, mixed with religion, perhaps. Well, these Martians have art and religion and everything.”
“You think they knew what it was all about, do you?”
“For my money.”
“And for that reason you started shooting people.”
“When I was a kid my folks took me to visit Mexico City. I’ll always remember the way my father acted—loud and big. And my mother didn’t like the people because they were dark and didn’t wash enough. And my sister wouldn’t talk to most of them. I was the only one really liked it. And I can see my mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here.
“Anything that’s strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn’t have Chicago plumbing, it’s nonsense. The thought of that! Oh God, the thought of that! And then—the war. You heard the congressional speeches before we left. If things work out they hope to establish three atomic research and atom bomb depots on Mars. That means Mars is finished; all this wonderful stuff gone. How would you feel if a Martian vomited stale liquor on the White House floor?”
The captain said nothing but listened.
Spender continued: “And then the other power interests coming up. The mineral men and the travel men. Do you remember what happened to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? A whole civilization destroyed by greedy, righteous bigots. History will never forgive Cortez.”
“You haven’t acted ethically yourself today,” observed the captain.
“What could I do? Argue with you? It’s simply me against the whole crooked grinding greedy setup on Earth. They’ll be flopping their filthy atoms bombs up here, fighting for bases to have wars. Isn’t it enough they’ve ruined one planet, without ruining another; do they have to foul someone else’s manger? The simple-minded windbags. When I got up here I felt I was not only free of their so-called culture, I felt I was free of their ethics and their customs. I’m out of their frame of reference, I thought. All I have to do is kill you all off and live my own life.”
“But it didn’t work out,” said the captain.
“No. After the fifth killing at breakfast, I discovered I wasn’t all new, all Martian, after all. I couldn’t throw away everything I had learned on Earth so easily. But now I’m feeling steady again. I’ll kill you all off. That’ll delay the next trip in a rocket for a good five years. There’s no other rocket in existence today, save this one. The people on Earth will wait a year, two years, and when they hear nothing from us, they’ll be very afraid to build a new rocket. They’ll take twice as long and make a hundred extra experimental models to insure themselves against another failure.”
“You’re correct.”
“A good report from you, on the other hand, if you returned, would hasten the whole invasion of Mars. If I’m lucky I’ll live to be sixty years old. Every expedition that lands on Mars will be met by me. There won’t be more than one ship at a time coming up, one every year or so, and never more than twenty men in the crew. After I’ve made friends with them and explained that our rocket exploded one day—I intend to blow it up after I finish my job this week—I’ll kill them off, every one of them. Mars will be untouched for the next half century. After a while, perhaps the Earth people will give up trying. Remember how they grew leery of the idea of building Zeppelins that were always going down in flames?”
“You’ve got it all planned,” admitted the captain.
“I have.”
“Yet you’re outnumbered. In an hour we’ll have you surrounded. In an hour you’ll be dead.”
“I’ve found some underground passages and a place to live you’ll never find. I’ll withdraw there to live for a few weeks. Until you’re off guard. I’ll come out then to pick you off, one by one.”
The captain nodded. “Tell me about your civilization here,” he said, waving his hand at the mountain towns.
“They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn’t try too hard to be all men and no animal. That’s the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn’t mix. Or at least we didn’t think they did, We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn’t move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion.
“We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.”
“And these Martians are a found people?” inquired the captain.
“Yes. They knew how to combine science and religion so the two worked side by side, neither denying the other, each enriching the other.”
“That sounds ideal.”
“It was. I’d like to show you how the Martians did it.”
“My men are waiting.”
“We’ll be gone half an hour. Tell them that, sir.”
The captain hesitated, then rose and called an order down the hill.
Spender led him over into a little Martian village built all of cool perfect marble. There were great friezes of beautiful animals, white-limbed cat things and yellow-limbed sun symbols, and statues of bull-like creatures and statues of men and women and huge fine-featured dogs.
“There’s your answer, Captain.”
“I don’t see.”
“The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life. You see—the statuary, the animal symbols, again and again.”
“It looks pagan.”
“On the contrary, those are God symbols, symbols of life. Man had become too much man and not enough animal on Mars too. And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life is possible. The Martians realized that they asked the question ‘Why live at all?’ at the height of some period of war and despair, when there was no answer. But once the civilization calmed, quieted, and wars ceased, the question became senseless in a new way. Life was now good and needed no arguments.”
“It sounds as if the Martians were quite naive.”
“Only when it paid to be naive. They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It’s all simply a matter of degree. An Earth Man thinks: ‘In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of things I happen to see.’ A Martian, far cleverer, would say: “This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and the mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good.’”
There was a pause. Sitting in the afternoon sun, the captain looked curiously around at the little silent cool town.
“I’d like to live here,” he said.
“You may if you want.”
“You ask me that?”
“Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They’re professional cynics, and it’s too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands? There’s a little patio down here with a reel of Martian music in it at least fifty thousand years old. It still plays. Music you’ll never hear in your life. You could hear it. There are books. I’ve gotten on well in reading them already. You could sit and read.”
“It all sounds quite wonderful, Spender.”
“But you won’t stay?”
“No. Thanks, anyway.”
“And you certainly won’t let me stay without trouble. I’ll have to kill you all.”
“You’re optimistic.”
“I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I’ve got what amounts to a religion, now. It’s learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?”
The captain shifted his feet. He shook his head. “I’m sorry this is happening. I’m sorry about it all.”
“I am too. I guess I’d better take you back now so you can start the attack.”
“I guess so.”
“Captain, I won’t kill you. When it’s all over, you’ll still be alive.”
“What?”
“I decided when I started that you’d be untouched.”
“Well ... ”
“I’ll save you out from the rest. When they’re dead, perhaps you’ll change your mind.”
“No,” said the captain. “There’s too much Earth blood in me. I’ll have to keep after you.”
“Even when you have a chance to stay here?”
“It’s funny, but yes, even with that. I don’t know why. I’ve never asked myself. Well, here we are.” They had returned to their meeting place now. “Will you come quietly, Spender? This is my last offer.”
“Thanks, no.” Spender put out his hand. “One last thing. If you win, do me a favor. See what can be done to restrict tearing this planet apart, at least for fifty years, until the archaeologists have had a decent chance, will you?”
“Right.”
“And last—if it helps any, just think of me as a very crazy fellow who went berserk one summer day and never was right again. It’ll be a little easier on you that way.”
“I’ll think it over. So long, Spender. Good luck.”
“You’re an odd one,” said Spender as the captain walked back down the trail in the warm-blowing wind.
The captain returned like something lost to his dusty men. He kept squinting at the sun and breathing bard.
“Is there a drink?” he said. He felt a bottle put cool into his hand. “Thanks.” He drank. He wiped his mouth.
“All right,” he said. “Be careful. We have all the time we want. I don’t want any more lost. You’ll have to kill him. He won’t come down. Make it a clean shot if you can. Don’t mess him. Get it over with.”
“I’ll blow his damned brains out,” said Sam Parkhill.
“No, through the chest,” said the captain. He could see Spender’s strong, clearly determined face.
“His bloody brains,” said Parkhill.
The captain handed him the bottle jerkingly. “You heard what I said. Through the chest.”
Parkhill muttered to himself.
“Now,” said the captain.
They spread again, walking and then running, and then walking on the hot hillside places where there would be sudden cool grottoes that smelled of moss, and sudden open blasting places that smelled of sun on stone.
I hate being clever, thought the captain, when you don’t really feel clever and don’t want to be clever. To sneak around and make plans and feel big about making them. I hate this feeling of thinking I’m doing right when I’m not really certain I am. Who are we, anyway? The majority? Is that the answer? The majority is always holy, is it not? Always, always; just never wrong for one little insignificant tiny moment, is it? Never ever wrong in ten million years? He thought: What is this majority and who are in it? And what do they think and how did they get that way and will they ever change and how the devil did I get caught in this rotten majority? I don’t feel comfortable. Is it claustrophobia, fear of crowds, or common sense? Can one man be right, while all the world thinks they are right? Let’s not think about it. Let’s crawl around and act exciting and pull the trigger. There, and there!
The men ran and ducked and ran and squatted in shadows and showed their teeth, gasping, for the air was thin, not meant for running; the air was thin and they had to sit for five minutes at a time, wheezing and seeing black lights in their eyes, eating at the thin air and wanting more, tightening their eyes, and at last getting up, lifting their guns to tear holes in that thin summer air, holes of sound and heat.
Spender remained where he was, firing only on occasion.
“Damned brains all over!” Parkhill yelled, running uphill.
The captain aimed his gun at Sam Parkhill. He put it down and stared at it in horror. “What were you doing?” he asked of his limp hand and the gun.
He had almost shot Parkhill in the back.
“God help me.”
He saw Parkhill still running, then falling to lie safe.
Spender was being gathered in by a loose, running net of men. At the hilltop, behind two rocks, Spender lay, grinning with exhaustion from the thin atmosphere, great islands of sweat under each arm. The captain saw the two rocks. There was an interval between them of some four inches, giving free access to Spender’s chest.
“Hey, you!” cried Parkhill. “Here’s a slug for your head!”
Captain Wilder waited. Go on, Spender, he thought. Get out, like you said you would. You’ve only a few minutes to escape. Get out and come back later. Go on. You said you would. Go down in the tunnels you said you found, and lie there and live for months and years, reading your fine books and bathing in your temple pools. Go on, now, man, before it’s too late.
Spender did not move from his position.
“What’s wrong with him?” the captain asked himself.
The captain picked up his gun. He watched the running, hiding men. He looked at the towers of the little clean Martian village, like sharply carved chess pieces lying in the afternoon. He saw the rocks and the interval between where Spender’s chest was revealed.
Parkhill was charging up, screaming in fury.
“No, Parkhill,” said the captain. “I can’t let you do it. Nor the others. No, none of you. Only me.” He raised the gun and sighted it.
Will I be clean after this? he thought. Is it right that it’s me who does it? Yes, it is. I know what I’m doing for what reason and it’s right, because I think I’m the right person. I hope and pray I can live up to this.
He nodded his head at Spender. “Go on,” he called in a loud whisper which no one heard. “I’ll give you thirty seconds more to get away. Thirty seconds!”
The watch ticked on his wrist, The captain watched it tick. The men were running. Spender did not move. The watch ticked for a long time, very loudly in the captain’s ears. “Go on, Spender, go on, get away!”
The thirty seconds were up.
The gun was sighted. The captain drew a deep breath. “Spender,” he said, exhaling.
He pulled the trigger.
All that happened was that a faint powdering of rock went up in the sunlight. The echoes of the report faded.
The captain arose and called to his men: “He’s dead.”
The other men did not believe it. Their angles had prevented their seeing that particular. fissure in the rocks. They saw their captain run up the hill, alone, and thought him either very brave or insane.
The men came after him a few minutes later.
They gathered around the body and someone said, “In the chest?”
The captain looked down. “In the chest,” he said, He saw how the rocks had changed color under Spender. “I wonder why he waited. I wonder why he didn’t escape as he planned. I wonder why he stayed on and got himself killed.”
“Who knows?” someone said.
Spender lay there, his hands clasped, one around the gun, the other around the silver book that glittered in the sun.
Was it because of me? thought the captain. Was it because I refused to give in myself? Did Spender hate the idea of killing me? Am I any different from these others here? Is that what did it? Did he figure he could trust me? What other answer is there?
None. He squatted by the silent body.
I’ve got to live up to this, he thought. I can’t let him down now. If he figured there was something in me that was like himself and couldn’t kill me because of it, then what a job I have ahead of me! That’s it, yes, that’s it. I’m Spender all over again, but I think before I shoot. I don’t shoot at all, I don’t kill. I do things with people. And he couldn’t kill me because I was himself under a slightly different condition.
The captain felt the sunlight on the back of his neck. He heard himself talking: “If only he had come to me and talked it over before he shot anybody, we could have worked it out somehow.”
“Worked what out?” said Parkhill. “What could we have worked out with his likes?”
There was a singing of heat in the land, off the rocks and off the blue sky. “I guess you’re right,” said the captain. “We could never have got together. Spender and myself, perhaps. But Spender and you and the others, no, never, He’s better off now. Let me have a drink from that canteen.”
It was the captain who suggested the empty sarcophagus for Spender. They had found an ancient Martian tomb yard. They put Spender into a silver case with waxes and wines which were ten thousand years old, his hands folded on his chest. The last they saw of him was his peaceful face.
They stood for a moment in the ancient vault. “I think it would be a good idea for you to think of Spender from time to time,” said the captain.
They walked from the vault and shut the marble door.
The next afternoon Parkhill did some target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers. The captain caught Parkhill and knocked his teeth out.
The men of Earth came to Mars.
They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad jobs or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all. But a government finger pointed from four-color posters in many towns: THERE’S WORK FOR YOU IN THE SKY: SEE MARS! and the men shuffled forward, only a few at first, a double-score, for most men felt the great illness in them even before the rocket fired into space. And this disease was called The Loneliness, because when you saw your home town dwindle the size of your fist and then lemon-size and then pin-size and vanish in the fire-wake, you felt you had never been born, there was no town, you were nowhere, with space all around, nothing familiar, only other strange men. And when the state of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, or Montana vanished into cloud seas, and, doubly, when the United States shrank to a misted island and the entire planet Earth became a muddy baseball tossed away, then you were alone, wandering in the meadows of space, on your way to a place you couldn’t imagine.
So it was not unusual that the first men were few. The number grew steadily in proportion to the census of Earth Men already on Mars. There was comfort in numbers. But the first Lonely Ones had to stand by themselves.
When the sun set he crouched by the path and cooked a small supper and listened to the fire crack while he put the food in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. It had been a day not unlike thirty others, with many neat holes dug in the dawn hours, seeds dropped in, and water brought from the bright canals. Now, with an iron weariness in his slight body, he lay and watched the sky color from one darkness to another.
His name was Benjamin Driscoll, and he was thirty-one years old. And the thing that be wanted was Mars grown green and tall with trees and foliage, producing air, more air, growing larger with each season; trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children’s playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound.
He lay listening to the dark earth gather itself, waiting for the sun, for the rains that hadn’t come yet. His ear to the ground, he could hear the feet of the years ahead moving at a distance, and he imagined the seeds he had placed today sprouting up with green and taking hold on the sky, pushing out branch after branch, until Mars was an afternoon forest, Mars was a shining orchard.
In the early morning, with the small sun lifting faintly among the folded hills, he would be up and finished with a smoky breakfast in a few minutes and, trodding out the fire ashes, be on his way with knapsacks, testing, digging, placing seed or sprout, tamping lightly, watering, going on, whistling, looking at the clear sky brightening toward a warm noon.
“You need the air,” he told his night fire. The fire was a ruddy, lively companion that snapped back at you, that slept close by with drowsy pink eyes warm through the chilly night. “We all need the air. It’s a thin air here on Mars. You get tired so soon. It’s like living in the Andes, in South America, high. You inhale and don’t get anything. It doesn’t satisfy.”
He felt his rib case. In thirty days, how it had grown. To take in more air, they would all have to build their lungs. Or plant more trees.
“That’s what I’m here for,” he said. The fire popped. “In school they told a story about Johnny Appleseed walking across America planting apple trees. Well, I’m doing more. I’m planting oaks, elms, and maples, every kind of tree, aspens and deodars and chestnuts. Instead of making just fruit for the stomach, I’m making air for the lungs. When those trees grow up some year, think of the oxygen they’ll make!”
He remembered his arrival on Mars. Like a thousand others, he had gazed out upon a still morning and thought, How do I fit here? What will I do? Is there a job for me?
Then he had fainted.
Someone pushed a vial of ammonia to his nose and, coughing, he came around.
“You’ll be all right,” said the doctor.
“What happened?”
“The air’s pretty thin. Some can’t take it. I think you’ll have to go back to Earth.”
“No!” He sat up and almost immediately felt his eyes darken and Mars revolve twice around under him. His nostrils dilated and he forced his lungs to drink in deep nothingness. “I’ll be all right. I’ve got to stay here!”
They let him lie gasping in horrid fishlike motions. And he thought, Air, air, air. They’re sending me back because of air. And he turned his head to look across the Martian fields and hills. He brought them to focus, and the first thing he noticed was that there were no trees, no trees at all, as far as you could look in any direction. The land was down upon itself, a land of black loam, but nothing on it, not even grass. Air, he thought, the thin stuff whistling in his nostrils. Air, air. And on top of hills, or in their shadows, or even by little creeks, not a tree and not a single green blade of grass. Of course! He felt the answer came not from his mind, but his lungs and his throat. And the thought was like a sudden gust of pure oxygen, raising him up. Trees and grass. He looked down at his hands and turned them over. He would plant trees and grass. That would be his job, to fight against the very thing that might prevent his staying here. He would have a private horticultural war with Mars. There lay the old soil, and the plants of it so ancient they had worn themselves out. But what if new forms were introduced? Earth trees, great mimosas and weeping willows and magnolias and magnificent eucalyptus. What then? There was no guessing what mineral wealth hid in the soil, untapped because the old ferns, flowers, bushes, and trees had tired themselves to death.
“Let me up!” he shouted. “I’ve got to see the Co-ordinator!”
He and the Co-ordinator had talked an entire morning about things that grew and were green. It would be months, if not years, before organized planting began. So far, frosted food was brought from Earth in flying icicles; a few community gardens were greening up in hydroponic plants.
“Meanwhile,” said the Co-ordinator, “it’s your job. We’ll get what seed we can for you, a little equipment. Space on the rockets is mighty precious now. I’m afraid, since these first towns are mining communities, there won’t be much sympathy for your tree planting—“
“But you’ll let me do it?”
They let him do it. Provided with a single motorcycle, its bin full of rich seeds and sprouts, he had parked his vehicle in the valley wilderness and struck out on foot over the land.
That had been thirty days ago, and he had never glanced back. For looking back would have been sickening to the heart. The weather was excessively dry; it was doubtful if any seeds had sprouted yet. Perhaps his entire campaign, his four weeks of bending and scooping were lost. He kept his eyes only ahead of him, going on down this wide shallow valley under the sun, away from First Town, waiting for the rains to come.
Clouds were gathering over the dry mountains now as he drew his blanket over his shoulders. Mars was a place as unpredictable as time. He felt the baked hills simmering down into frosty night, and he thought of the rich, inky soil, a soil so black and shiny it almost crawled and stirred in your fist, a rank soil from which might sprout gigantic beanstalks from which, with bone-shaking concussion, might drop screaming giants.
The fire fluttered into sleepy ash. The air tremored to the distant roll of a cartwheel. Thunder. A sudden odor of water. Tonight, he thought, and put his hand out to feel for rain. Tonight.
He awoke to a tap on his brow.
Water ran down his nose into his lips. Another drop hit his eye, blurring it, Another splashed his chin.
The rain.
Raw, gentle, and easy, it mizzled out of the high air, a special elixir, tasting of spells and stars and air, carrying a peppery dust in it, and moving like a rare light sherry on his tongue.
Rain.
He sat up. He let the blanket fall and his blue denim shirt spot, while the rain took on more solid drops. The fire looked as though an invisible animal were dancing on it, crushing it, until it was angry smoke. The rain fell. The great black lid of sky cracked in six powdery blue chips, like a marvelous crackled glaze, and rushed down. He saw ten billion rain crystals, hesitating long enough to be photographed by the electrical display. Then darkness and water.
He was drenched to the skin, but he held his face up and let the water hit his eyelids, laughing. He clapped his hands together and stepped up and walked around his little camp, and it was one o’clock in the morning.
It rained steadily for two hours and then stopped. The stars came out, freshly washed and clearer than ever.
Changing into dry clothes from his cellophane pack, Mr. Benjamin Driscoll lay down and went happily to sleep.
The sun rose slowly among the hills. It broke out upon the land quietly and wakened Mr. Driscoll where he lay.
He waited a moment before arising. He had worked and waited a long hot month, and now, standing up, he turned at last and faced the direction from which he had come.
It was a green morning.
As far as he could see the trees were standing up against the sky. Not one tree, not two, not a dozen, but the thousands he had planted in seed and sprout. And not little trees, no, not saplings, not little tender shoots, but great trees, huge trees, trees as tall as ten men, green and green and huge and round and full, trees shimmering their metallic leaves, trees whispering, trees in a line over hills, lemon trees, lime trees, redwoods and mimosas and oaks and elms and aspens, cherry, maple, ash, apple, orange, eucalyptus, stung by a tumultuous rain, nourished by alien and magical soil and, even as he watched, throwing out new branches, popping open new buds.
“Impossible!” cried Mr. Benjamin Driscoll.
But the valley and the morning were green.
And the air!
All about, like a moving current, a mountain river, came the new air, the oxygen blowing from the green trees. You could see it shimmer high in crystal billows. Oxygen, fresh, pure, green, cold oxygen turning the valley into a river delta. In a moment the town doors would flip wide, people would run out through the new miracle of oxygen, sniffing, gusting in lungfuls of it, cheeks pinking with it, noses frozen with it, lungs revivified, hearts leaping, and worn bodies lifted into a dance.
Mr. Benjamin Driscoll took one long deep drink of green water air and fainted.
Before he woke again five thousand new trees had climbed up into the yellow sun.
The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmitted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night. And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flowerpots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamor to cover the silence that Mars made waiting outside the door and the shaded window.
In six months a dozen small towns had been laid down upon the naked planet, filled with sizzling neon tubes and yellow electric bulbs. In all, some ninety thousand people came to Mars, and more, on Earth, were packing their grips ...
Before going up into the blue hills, Tomás Gomez stopped for gasoline at the lonely station.
“Kind of alone out here, aren’t you, Pop?” said Tomás.
The old man wiped off the windshield of the small truck. “Not bad.”
“How do you like Mars, Pop?”
“Fine. Always something new. I made up my mind when I came here last year I wouldn’t expect nothing, nor ask nothing, nor be surprised at nothing. We’ve got to forget Earth and how things were. We’ve got to look at what we’re in here, and how different it is. I get a hell of a lot of fun out of just the weather here. It’s Martian weather. Hot as hell daytimes, cold as hell nights. I get a big kick out of the different flowers and different rain. I came to Mars to retire and I wanted to retire in a place where everything is different. An old man needs to have things different. Young people don’t want to talk to him, other old people bore hell out of him. So I thought the best thing for me is a place so different that all you got to do is open your eyes and you’re entertained. I got this gas station. If business picks up too much, I’ll move on back to some other old highway that’s not so busy, where I can earn just enough to live on and still have time to feel the different things here.”
“You got the right idea, Pop,” said Tomás, his brown hands idly on the wheel. He was feeling good. He had been working in one of the new colonies for ten days straight and now he had two days off and was on his way to a party.
“I’m not surprised at anything any more,” said the old man. “I’m just looking. I’m just experiencing. If you can’t take Mars for what she is, you might as well go back to Earth. Everything’s crazy up here, the soil, the air, the canals, the natives (I never saw any yet, but I hear they’re around), the clocks. Even my clock acts funny. Even time is crazy up here. Sometimes I feel I’m here all by myself, no one else on the whole damn planet. I’d take bets on it. Sometimes I feel about eight years old, my body squeezed up and everything else tall. Jesus, it’s just the place for an old man. Keeps me alert and keeps me happy. You know what Mars is? It’s like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago—don’t know if you ever had one—they called them kaleidoscopes, bits of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that’s Mars. Enjoy it. Don’t ask it to be nothing else but what it is. Jesus, you know that highway right there, built by the Martians, is over sixteen centuries old and still in good condition? That’s one dollar and fifty cents, thanks and good night.”
Tomás drove off down the ancient highway, laughing quietly.
It was a long road going into darkness and hills and he held to the wheel, now and again reaching into his lunch bucket and taking out a piece of candy. He had been driving steadily for an hour, with no other car on the road, no light, just the road going under, the hum, the roar, and Mars out there, so quiet. Mars was always quiet, but quieter tonight than any other. The deserts and empty seas swung by him, and the mountains against the stars.
There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight—Tomás shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck—tonight you could almost touch Time.
He drove the truck between hills of Time. His neck prickled and he sat up, watching ahead.
He pulled into a little dead Martian town, stopped the engine, and let the silence come in around him. He sat, not breathing, looking out at the white buildings in the moonlight. Uninhabited for centuries. Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect, nevertheless.
He started the engine and drove on another mile or more before stopping again, climbing out, carrying his lunch bucket, and walking to a little promontory where he could look back at that dusty city. He opened his thermos and poured himself a cup of coffee. A night bird flew by. He felt very good, very much at peace.
Perhaps five minutes later there was a sound. Off in the hills, where the ancient highway curved, there was a motion, a dim light, and then a murmur.
Tomás turned slowly with the coffee cup in his hand.
And out of the hills came a strange thing.
It was a machine like a jade-green insect, a praying mantis, delicately rushing through the cold air, indistinct, countless green diamonds winking over its body, and red jewels that glittered with multifaceted eyes. Its six legs fell upon the ancient highway with the sounds of a sparse rain which dwindled away, and from the back of the machine a Martian with melted gold for eyes looked down at Tomás as if he were looking into a well.
Tomás raised his hand and thought Hello! automatically but did not move his lips, for this was a Martian. But Tomás had swum in blue rivers on Earth, with strangers passing on the road, and eaten in strange houses with strange people, and his weapon had always been his smile. He did not carry a gun. And he did not feel the need of one now, even with the little fear that gathered about his heart at this moment
The Martian’s hands were empty too. For a moment they looked across the cool air at each other.
It was Tomas who moved first.
“Hello!” he called.
“Hello!” called the Martian in his own language.
They did not understand each other.
“Did you say hello?” they both asked.
“What did you say?” they said, each in a different tongue.
They scowled.
“Who are you?” said Tomás in English.
“What are you doing here?” In Martian; the stranger’s lips moved.
“Where are you going?” they said, and looked bewildered.
“I’m Tomás Gomez.”
“I’m Muhe Ca.”
Neither understood, but they tapped their chests with the words and then it became clear.
And then the Martian laughed. “Wait!” Tomás felt his head touched, but no hand had touched him. “There!” said the Martian in English. “That is better!”
“You learned my language, so quick!”
“Nothing at all!”
They looked, embarrassed with a new silence, at the steaming coffee he had in one hand.
“Something different?” said the Martian, eying him and the coffee, referring to them both, perhaps.
“May I offer you a drink?” said Tomás.
“Please.”
The Martian slid down from his machine.
A second cup was produced and filled, steaming. Tomás held it out.
Their hands met and—like mist—fell through each other.
“Jesus Christ!” cried Tomás, and dropped the cup.
“Name of the gods!” said the Martian in his own tongue.
“Did you see what happened?” they both whispered.
They were very cold and terrified.
The Martian bent to touch the cup but could not touch it.
“Jesus!” said Tomás.
“Indeed.” The Martian tried again and again to get hold of the cup, but could not. He stood up and thought for a moment, then took a knife from his belt. “Hey!” cried Tomás. “You misunderstand, catch!” said the Martian, and tossed it. Tomás cupped his hands. The knife fell through his flesh. It hit the ground. Tomás bent to pick it up but could not touch it, and he recoiled, shivering.
Now he looked at the Martian against the sky.
“The stars!” he said.
“The stars!” said the Martian, looking, in turn, at Tomás.
The stars were white and sharp beyond the flesh of the Martian, and they were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphorescent membrane of a gelatinous sea fish. You could see stars flickering like violet eyes in the Martian’s stomach and chest, and through his wrists, like jewelry.
“I can see through you!” said Tomás.
“And I through you!” said the Martian, stepping back.
Tomás felt of his own body and, feeling the warmth, was reassured. I am real, he thought
The Martian touched his own nose and lips. “_I_ have flesh,” he said, half aloud. “_I_ am alive.”
Tomás stared at the stranger. “And if I am real, then you must be dead.”
“No, you!”
“A ghost!”
“A phantom!”
They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds.
I’m drunk, thought Tomás. I won’t tell anyone of this tomorrow, no, no.
They stood there on the ancient highway, neither of them moving.
“Where are you from?” asked the Martian at last.
“Earth.”
“What is that?”
“There.” Tomás nodded to the sky.
“When?”
“We landed over a year ago, remember?”
“No.”
“And all of you were dead, all but a few. You’re rare, don’t you know that?”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, dead. I saw the bodies. Black, in the rooms, in the houses, dead. Thousands of them.”
“That’s ridiculous. We’re alive!”
“Mister, you’re invaded, only you don’t know it. You must have escaped.”
“I haven’t escaped; there was nothing to escape. What do you mean? I’m on my way to a festival now at the canal, near the Eniall Mountains. I was there last night. Don’t you see the city there?” The Martian pointed.
Tomás looked and saw the ruins. “Why, that city’s been dead thousands of years.”
The Martian laughed. “Dead. I slept there yesterday!”
“And I was in it a week ago and the week before that, and I just drove through it now, and it’s a heap. See the broken pillars?”
“Broken? Why, I see them perfectly. The moonlight helps. And the pillars are upright.”
“There’s dust in the streets,” said Tomás.
“The streets are clean!”
“The canals are empty right there.”
“The canals are full of lavender wine!”
“It’s dead.”
“It’s alive!” protested the Martian, laughing more now. “Oh, you’re quite wrong. See all the carnival lights? There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets there. That’s where I’m going now, to the festival; we’ll float on the waters all night long; we’ll sing, we’ll drink, we’ll make love, Can’t you see it?”
“Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. Ask any of our party. Me, I’m on my way to Green City tonight; that’s the new colony we just raised over near Illinois Highway. You’re mixed up. We brought in a million board feet of Oregon lumber and a couple dozen tons of good steel nails and hammered together two of the nicest little villages you ever saw. Tonight we’re warming one of them. A couple rockets are coming in from Earth, bringing our wives and girl friends. There’ll be barn dances and whisky—“
The Martian was now disquieted. “You say it is over that way?”
“There are the rockets.” Tomás walked him to the edge of the hill and pointed down. “See?”
“No.”
“Damn it, there they are! Those long silver things.”
“No.”
Now Tomás laughed. “You’re blind!”
“I see very well. You are the one who does not see.”
“But you see the new town, don’t you?”
“I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low tide.”
“Mister, that water’s been evaporated for forty centuries.”
“Ah, now, now, that is enough.”
“It’s true, I tell you.”
The Martian grew very serious. “Tell me again. You do not see the city the way I describe it? The pillars very white, the boats very slender, the festival lights—oh, I see them clearly! And listen! I can hear them singing. It’s no space away at all.”
Tomás listened and shook his head. “No.”
“And I, on the other hand,” said the Martian, “cannot see what you describe. Well.”
Again they were cold. An ice was in their flesh.
“Can it be ... ?”
“What?”
“You say ‘from the sky’?”
“Earth.”
“Earth, a name, nothing,” said the Martian. “_But_ ... as I came up the pass an hour ago ... ” He touched the back of his neck. “I felt ... ”
“Cold?”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
“Cold again. Oddly. There was a thing to the light, to the hills, the road,” said the Martian. “I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if I were the last man alive on this world ...”
“So did I!” said Tomás, and it was like talking to an old and dear friend, confiding, growing warm with the topic.
The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. “This can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are a figment of the Past!”
“No, you are from the Past,” said the Earth Man, having had time to think of it now.
“You are so certain. How can you prove who is from the Past, who from the Future? What year is it?”
“Two thousand and one!”
“What does that mean to me?”
Tomás considered and shrugged. “Nothing.”
“It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S.E.C. It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show us how the stars stand?”
“But the ruins prove it! They prove that I am the Future, I am alive, you are dead!”
“Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it. Two strangers passing. Ruins, you say?”
“Yes. You’re afraid?”
“Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think—the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?” The Martian was silent, but then he looked on ahead. “But there they are. I see them. Isn’t that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.”
And for Tomás the rockets, far away, waiting for him, and the town and the women from Earth. “We can never agree,” he said.
“Let us agree to disagree,” said the Martian. “What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don’t ask. But the night is very short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds.”
Tomãs put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in imitation.
Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other.
“Will we meet again?”
“Who knows? Perhaps some other night.”
“I’d like to go with you to that festival.”
“And I wish I might come to your new town, to see this ship you speak of, to see these men, to hear all that has happened.”
“Good-by,” said Tomás.
“Good night.”
The Martian rode his green metal vehicle quietly away into the hills, The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently in the opposite direction.
“Good lord, what a dream that was,” sighed Tomás, his hands on the wheel, thinking of the rockets, the women, the raw whisky, the Virginia reels, the party.
How strange a vision was that, thought the Martian, rushing on, thinking of the festival, the canals, the boats, the women with golden eyes, and the songs.
The night was dark. The moons had gone down. Starlight twinkled on the empty highway where now there was not a sound, no car, no person, nothing. And it remained that way all the rest of the cool dark night.
Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves. Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The first wave carried with it men accustomed to spaces and coldness and being alone, the coyote and cattlemen, with no fat on them, with faces the years had worn the flesh off, with eyes like nailheads, and hands like the material of old gloves, ready to touch anything. Mars could do nothing to them, for they were bred to plains and prairies as open as the Martian fields. They came and made things a little less empty, so that others would find courage to follow. They put panes in hollow windows and lights behind the panes.
They were the first men.
Everyone knew who the first women would be.
The second men should have traveled from other countries with other accents and other ideas. But the rockets were American and the men were American and it stayed that way, while Europe and Asia and South America and Australia and the islands watched the Roman candles leave them behind. The rest of the world was buried in war or the thoughts of war.
So the second men were Americans also. And they came from the cabbage tenements and subways, and they found much rest and vacation in the company of silent men from the tumbleweed states who knew how to use silences so they filled you up with peace after long years crushed in tubes, tins and boxes in New York.
And among the second men were men who looked, by their eyes, as if they were on their way to God ...
They brought in fifteen thousand lumber feet of Oregon pine to build Tenth City, and seventy-nine thousand feet of California redwood and they hammered together a clean, neat little town by the edge of the stone canals. On Sunday nights you could see red, blue, and green stained-glass light in the churches and hear the voices singing the numbered hymns. “We will now sing 79. We will now sing 94.” And in certain houses you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist at work; or the scratch of a pen, the poet at work; or no sound at all, the former beachcomber at work. It was as if, in many ways, a great earthquake had shaken loose the roots and cellars of an Iowa town, and then, in an instant, a whirlwind twister of Oz-like proportions had carried the entire town off to Mars to set it down without a bump.