Рэй Брэдбери. Марсианские хроники (engl)
страница №4
...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
Parkhiil and knocked his teeth out.
August 2001: THE SETTLERS
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.
December 2001: THE GREEN MORNING
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.
February 2002: THE LOCUSTS
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. . . .
August 2002: NIGHT MEETING
Before going up into the blue hills, Tomбs Gomez stopped
for gasoline at the lonely station.
"Kind of alone out here, aren't you, Pop?" said Tomбs.
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 Tomбs, 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."
Tomбs 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--Tomбs 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.
Tomбs 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 Tomбs as if he were looking
into a well.
Tomбs raised his hand and thought Hello! automatically but
did not move his lips, for this _was_ a Martian. But Tomбs 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 Tomis 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 Tomбs 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 Tomбs 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!" Tomбs 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 Tomбs.
"Please."
The Martian slid down from his machine.
A second cup was produced and filled, steaming. Tomбs held
it out.
Their hands met and--like mist--fell through each other.
"Jesus Christ!" cried Tomбs, 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 Tomбs.
"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 Tomбs.
"You misunderstand, catch!" said the Martian, and tossed it.
Tomбs cupped his hands. The knife fell through his flesh. It
hit the ground. Tomбs 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 Tomбs.
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 Tomбs.
"And I through you!" said the Martian, stepping back.
Tomбs 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."
Tomбs 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 Tomбs. 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." Tomбs 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.
Tomбs 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 Tomбs.
"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." Tomбs walked him to the edge of
the hill and pointed down. "See?"
"No."
"Damn it, there they _are!_ Those long silver things."
"No."
Now Tomбs 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."
Tomбs 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 Tomбs, 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?_"
Tomбs 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 Tomбs 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."
Tomгs 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 Tomбs.
"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 Tomбs, 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.
October 2002: THE SHORE
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. . . .
February 2003: INTERIM
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.
April 2003: THE MUSICIANS
The boys would hike far out into the Martian country.
They carried odorous paper bags into which from time to time
upon the long walk they would insert their noses to inhale the
rich smell of the ham and mayonnaised pickles, and to listen to
the liquid gurgle of the orange soda in the warming bottles.
Swinging their grocery bags full of clean watery green onions
and odorous liverwurst and red catsup and white bread, they
would dare each other on past the limits set by their stem
mothers. They would run, yelling:
"First one there gets to kick!"
They biked in summer, autumn, or winter. Autumn was most
fun, because then they imagined, like on Earth, they were
scuttering through autumn leaves.
They would come like a scatter of jackstones on the marble
flats beside the canals, the candy-cheeked boys with blue-agate
eyes, panting onion-tainted commands to each other. For now
that they had reached the dead, forbidden town it was no longer
a matter of "Last one there's a girl!" or "First one gets to
play Musician!" Now the dead town's doors lay wide and they
thought they could hear the faintest crackle, like autumn
leaves, from inside. They would hush themselves forward, by
each other's elbows, carrying sticks, remembering their parents
had told them, "Not there! No, to none of the old towns! Watch
where you hike. You'll get the beating of your life when you
come home. We'll check your shoes!"
And there they stood in the dead city, a heap of boys,
their hiking lunches half devoured, daring each other in
shrieky whispers.
"Here goes nothing!" And suddenly one of them took off,
into the nearest stone house, through the door, across the
living room, and into the bedroom where, without half looking,
he would kick about, thrash his feet, and the black leaves
would fly through the air, brittle, thin as tissue cut from
midnight sky. Behind him would race six others, and the first
boy there would be the Musician, playing the white xylophone
bones beneath the outer covering of black flakes. A great skull
would roll to view, like a snowball; they shouted! Ribs, like
spider legs, plangent as a dull harp, and then the black flakes
of mortality blowing all about them in their scuffling dance;
the boys pushed and heaved and fell in the leaves, in the death
that had turned the dead to flakes and dryness, into a game
played by boys whose stomachs gurgled with orange pop.
And then out of one house into another, into seventeen
houses, mindful that each of the towns in its turn was being
burned clean of its horrors by the Firemen, antiseptic warriors
with shovels and bins, shoveling away at the ebony tatters
and peppermint-stick bones, slowly but assuredly separating
the terrible from the normal; so they must play very hard,
these boys, the Firemen would soon be here!
Then, luminous with sweat, they gnashed at their
last sandwiches. With a final kick, a final marimba concert,
a final autumnal lunge through leaf stacks, they went home.
Their mothers examined their shoes for black flakelets
which, when discovered, resulted in scalding baths and fatherly
beatings.
By the year's end the Firemen had raked the autumn leaves
and white xylophones away, and it was no more fun.
June 2003: WAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR
"Did you hear about it?"
"About what?"
"The niggers, the niggers!"
"What about 'em?"
"Them leaving, pulling out, going away; did you hear?"
"What you mean, pulling out? How can they do that?"
"They can, they will, they are."
"Just a couple?"
"Every single one here in the South!"
"No."
"Yes!"
"I got to see that. I don't believe it. Where they going--
Africa?"
A silence.
"Mars."
"You mean the _planet_ Mars?"
"That's right."
The men stood up in the hot shade of the hardware porch.
Someone quit lighting a pipe. Somebody else spat out into the
hot dust of noon.
"They can't leave, they can't do that."
"They're doing it, anyways."
"Where'd you hear this?"
"It's everywhere, on the radio a minute ago, just come
through."
Like a series of dusty statues, the men came to life.
Samuel Teece, the hardware proprietor, laughed uneasily.
"I _wondered_ what happened to Silly. I sent him on my bike an
hour ago. He ain't come back from Mrs. Bordman's yet. You think
that black fool just pedaled off to Mars?"
The men snorted.
"All I say is, he better bring back my bike. I don't
take stealing from no one, by God."
"Listen!"
The men collided irritably with each other, turning.
Far up the street the levee seemed to have broken. The
black warm waters descended and engulfed the town. Between
the blazing white banks of the town stores, among the tree
silences, a black tide flowed. Like a kind of summer molasses,
it poured turgidly forth upon the cinnamon-dusty road. It
surged slow, slow, and it was men and women and horses and
barking dogs, and it was little boys and girls. And from the
mouths of the people partaking of this tide came the sound of
a river. A summer-day river going somewhere, murmuring
and irrevocable. And in that slow, steady channel of darkness
that cut across the white glare of day were touches of alert
white, the eyes, the ivory eyes staring ahead, glancing aside,
as the river, the long and endless river, took itself from
old channels into a new one. From various and uncountable
tributaries, in creeks and brooks of color and motion, the
parts of this river had joined, become one mother current,
and flowed on. And brimming the swell were things carried by
the river: grandfather clocks chiming, kitchen clocks ticking,
caged hens screaming, babies wailing; and swimming among
the thickened eddies were mules and cats, and sudden excursions
of burst mattress springs floating by, insane hair stuffing
sticking out, and boxes and crates and pictures of dark
grandfathers in oak frames-- the river flowing it on while the
men sat like nervous hounds on the hardware porch, too late to
mend the levee, their hands empty.
Samuel Teece wouldn't believe it. "Why, hell, where'd they
get the transportation? How they goin' to _get_ to Mars?"
"Rockets," said Grandpa Quartermain.
"All the damn-fool things. Where'd they get rockets?"
"Saved their money and built them."
"I never heard about it."
"Seems these niggers kept it secret, worked on the rockets
all themselves, don't know where--in Africa, maybe."
"Could they _do_ that?" demanded Samuel Teece, pacing
about the porch. "Ain't there a law?"
"It ain't as if they're declarin' war," said Grandpa
quietly.
"Where do they get off, God damn it, workin' in secret,
plottin'?" shouted Teece.
"Schedule is for all this town's niggers to gather out by
Loon Lake. Rockets be there at one o'clock, pick 'em up, take
'em to Mars."
"Telephone the governor, call out the militia," cried
Teece. "They should've given notice!"
"Here comes your woman, Teece."
The men turned again.
As they watched, down the hot road in the windless light
first one white woman and then another arrived, all of them
with stunned faces, all of them rustling like ancient papers.
Some of them were crying, some were stern. All came to find
their husbands. They pushed through barroom swing doors,
vanishing. They entered cool, quiet groceries. They went in at
drug shops and garages. And one of them, Mrs. Clara Teece, came
to stand in the dust by the hardware porch, blinking up at her
stiff and angry husband as the black river flowed full behind
her.
"It's Lucinda, Pa; you got to come home!"
"I'm not comin' home for no damn darkie!"
"She's leaving. What'll I do without her?"
"Fetch for yourself, maybe. I won't get down on my knees
to stop her."
"But she's like a family member," Mrs. Teece moaned.
"Don't shout! I won't have you blubberin' in public this
way about no goddamn--"
His wife's small sob stopped him. She dabbed at her eyes.
"I kept telling her, 'Lucinda,' I said, 'you stay on and I
raise your pay, and you get _two_ nights off a week, if you
want,' but she just looked set! I never seen her so set, and
I said, 'Don't you _love_ me, Lucinda?' and she said yes, but
she had to go because that's the way it was, is all. She
cleaned the house and dusted it and put luncheon on the table
and then she went to the parlor door and--and stood there with
two bundles, one by each foot, and shook my hand and said,
'Good-by, Mrs. Teece.' And she went out the door. And there was
her luncheon on the table, and all of us too upset to even eat
it. It's still there now, I know; last time I looked it was
getting cold."
Teece almost struck her. "God damn it, Mrs. Teece, you get
the hell home. Standin' there makin' a sight of yourself!"
"But, Pa . . ."
He strode away into the hot dimness of the store. He came
back out a few seconds later with a silver pistol in his hand.
His wife was gone.
The river flowed black between the buildings, with a
rustle and a creak and a constant whispering shuffle. It was
a very quiet thing, with a great certainty to it; no laughter,
no wildness, just a steady, decided, and ceasel...
