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by Noel Keyes

  “That’s the story,” said the mayor. “Father Peregrine, with most of the Martians dead, and only these blue spheres, I frankly think you’d be better off in First City. Mars is opening up. It’s a frontier now, like in the old days on Earth, out West, and in Alaska. Men are pouring up here. There’s a couple thousand black Irish mechanics and miners and day laborers in First Town who need saving, because there’re too many wicked women came with them, and too much ten-century-old Martian win——”

  Father Peregrine was gazing into the soft blue hills. Father Stone cleared his throat. “Well, Father?”

  Father Peregrine did not hear. “Spheres of blue fire?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Ah,” Father Peregrine sighed.

  “Blue balloons.” Father Stone shook his head. “A circus!” Father Peregrine felt his wrists pounding. He saw the little frontier town with raw, fresh-built sin, and he saw the hills, old with the oldest and yet perhaps an even newer (to him) sin.

  “Mayor, could your black Irish laborers cook one more day in hellfire?”

  “I’d turn and baste them for you, Father.”

  Father Peregrine nodded to the hills. “Then that’s where we’ll go.”

  There was a murmur from everyone.

  “It would be so simple,” explained Father Peregrine, “to go into town. I prefer to think that if the Lord walked here and people said, ‘Here is the beaten path,’ He would reply, ‘Show me the weeds. I will make a path.’ ”

  “But——”

  “Father Stone, think how it would weigh upon us if we passed sinners by and did not extend our hands.”

  “But globes of fire!”

  “I imagine man looked funny to other animals when we first appeared. Yet he has a soul, for all his homeliness. Until we prove otherwise, let us assume that these fiery spheres have souls.”

  “All right,” agreed the mayor, “but you’ll be back to town.”

  “We’ll see. First, some breakfast. Then you and I, Father Stone, will walk alone into the hills. I don’t want to frighten those fiery Martians with machines or crowds. Shall we have breakfast?”

  The Fathers ate in silence.

  At nightfall Father Peregrine and Father Stone were high in the hills. They stopped and sat upon a rock to enjoy a moment of relaxation and waiting. The Martians had not as yet appeared and they both felt vaguely disappointed.

  “I wonder—” Father Peregrine mopped his face. “Do you think if we called ‘Hello!’ they might answer?”

  “Father Peregrine, won’t you ever be serious?”

  “Not until the good Lord is. Oh, don’t look so terribly shocked, please. The Lord is not serious. In fact, it is a little hard to know just what else He is except loving. And love has to do with humor, doesn’t it? For you cannot love someone unless you put up with him, can you? And you cannot put up with someone constantly unless you can laugh at him. Isn’t that true? And certainly we are ridiculous little animals wallowing in the fudge bowl, and God must love us all the more because we appeal to His humor.”

  “I never thought of God as humorous,” said Father Stone. “The Creator of the platypus, the camel, the ostrich, and man? Oh, come now!” Father Peregrine laughed.

  But at this instant, from among the twilight hills, like a series of blue lamps lit to guide their way, came the Martians. Father Stone saw them first. “Look!”

  Father Peregrine turned and the laughter stopped in his mouth.

  The round blue globes of fire hovered among the twinkling stars, distantly trembling.

  “Monsters!” Father Stone leaped up. But Father Peregrine caught him. “Wait!”

  “We should’ve gone to town!”

  “No, listen, look!” pleaded Father Peregrine.

  “I’m afraid!”

  “Don’t be. This is God’s work!”

  “The devil’s!”

  “No, now, quiet!” Father Peregrine gentled him and they crouched with the soft blue light on their upturned faces as the fiery orbs drew near.

  And again, Independence Night, thought Father Peregrine, tremoring. He felt like a child back in those July Fourth evenings, the sky blowing apart, breaking into powdery stars and burning sound, the concussions jingling house windows like the ice on a thousand thin ponds. The aunts, uncles, cousins crying, “Ah!” as to some celestial physician. The summer sky colors. And the Fire Balloons, lit by an indulgent grandfather, steadied in his massively tender hands. Oh, the memory of those lovely Fire Balloons, softly lighted, warmly billowed bits of tissue, like insect wings, lying like folded wasps in boxes and, last of all, after the day of riot and fury, at long last from their boxes, delicately unfolded, blue, red, white, patriotic—the Fire Balloons! He saw the dim faces of dear relatives long dead and mantled with moss as Grandfather lit the tiny candle and let the warm air breathe up to form the balloon plumply luminous in his hands, a shining vision which they held, reluctant to let it go; for, once released, it was yet another year gone from life, another Fourth, another bit of Beauty vanished. And then up, up, still up through the warm summer night constellations, the Fire Balloons had drifted, while red-white-and-blue eyes followed them, wordless, from family porches. Away into deep Illinois country, over night rivers and sleeping mansions the Fire Balloons dwindled, forever gone. . . .

  Father Peregrine felt tears in his eyes. Above him the Martians, not one but a thousand whispering Fire Balloons, it seemed, hovered. Any moment he might find his long-dead and blessed grandfather at his elbow, staring up at Beauty.

  But it was Father Stone.

  “Let’s go, please, Father!”

  “I must speak to them.” Father Peregrine rustled forward, not knowing what to say, for what had he ever said to the Fire Balloons of time past except with his mind: you are beautiful, you are beautiful, and that was not enough now. He could only lift his heavy arms and call upward, as he had often wished to call after the enchanted Fire Balloons, “Hello!”

  But the fiery spheres only burned like images in a dark mirror. They seemed fixed, gaseous, miraculous, forever.

  “We come with God,” said Father Peregrine to the sky.

  “Silly, silly, silly.” Father Stone chewed the back of his hand. “In the name of God, Father Peregrine, stop!”

  But now the phosphorescent spheres blew away into the hills. In a moment they were gone.

  Father Peregrine called again, and the echo of his last cry shook the hills above. Turning, he saw an avalanche shake out dust, pause, and then, with a thunder of stone wheels, crash down the mountain upon them.

  “Look what you’ve done!” cried Father Stone.

  Father Peregrine was almost fascinated, then horrified. He turned, knowing they could run only a few feet before the rocks crushed them into ruins. He had time to whisper, Oh, Lord! and the rocks fell!

  “Father!”

  They were separated like chaff from wheat. There was a blue shimmering of globes, a shift of cold stars, a roar, and then they stood upon a ledge two hundred feet away watching the spot where their bodies should have been buried under tons of stone.

  The blue light evaporated.

  The two Fathers clutched each other. “What happened?”

  “The blue fires lifted us!”

  “We ran, that was it!”

  “No, the globes saved us.”

  “They couldn’t!”

  “They did.”

  The sky was empty. There was a feel as if a great bell had just stopped tolling. Reverberations fingered in their teeth and marrows.

  “Let’s get away from here. You’ll have us killed.”

  “I haven’t feared death for a good many years, Father Stone.”

  “We’ve proved nothing. Those blue fights ran off at the first cry. It’s useless.”

  “No.” Father Peregrine was suffused with a stubborn wonder. “Somehow, they saved us. That proves they have souls.”

  “It proves only that they might have saved us. Everything was confused. We m
ight have escaped, ourselves.”

  “They are not animals, Father Stone. Animals do not save fives, especially of strangers. There is mercy and compassion here. Perhaps, tomorrow, we may prove more.”

  “Prove what? How?” Father Stone was immensely tired now; the outrage to his mind and body showed on his stiff face. “Follow them in helicopters, reading chapter and verse? They’re not human. They haven’t eyes or ears or bodies like ours.”

  “But I feel something about them,” replied Father Peregrine. “I know a great revelation is at hand. They saved us. They think. They had a choice; let us five or die. That proves free will!”

  Father Stone set to work building a fire, glaring at the sticks in his hands, choking on the gray smoke. “I myself will open a convent for nursling geese, a monastery for sainted swine, and I shall build a miniature apse in a microscope so that paramecium can attend services and tell their beads with their fiagella.”

  “Oh, Father Stone.”

  “I’m sorry.” Father Stone blinked redly across the fire. “But this is like blessing a crocodile before he chews you up. You’re risking the entire missionary expedition. We belong in First Town, washing liquor from men’s throats and perfume off their hands!”

  “Can’t you recognize the human in the inhuman?”

  “I’d much rather recognize the inhuman in the human.”

  “But if I prove these things sin, know sin, know a moral life, have free will and intellect, Father Stone?”

  “That will take much convincing.”

  The night grew rapidly cold and they peered into the fire to find their wildest thoughts, while eating biscuits and berries, and soon they were bundled for sleep under the chiming stars. And just before turning over one last time Father Stone, who had been thinking for many minutes to find something to bother Father Peregrine about, stared into the soft pink charcoal bed and said, “No Adam and Eve on Mars. No original sin. Maybe the Martians live in a state of God’s grace. Then we can go back down to town and start work on the Earthmen.”

  Father Peregrine reminded himself to say a little prayer for Father Stone, who got so mad and who was now being vindictive, God help him. “Yes, Father Stone, but the Martians killed some of our settlers. That’s sinful. There must have been an Original Sin and a Martian Adam and Eve. We’ll find them. Men are men, unfortunately, no matter what their shape, and inclined to sin.”

  But Father Stone was pretending sleep.

  Father Peregrine did not shut his eyes.

  Of course they couldn’t let these Martians go to hell, could they? With a compromise to their consciences, could they go back to the new colonial towns, those towns so full of sinful gullets and women with scintilla eyes and white oyster bodies rollicking in beds with lonely laborers? Wasn’t that the place for the Fathers? Wasn’t this trek into the hills merely a personal whim? Was he really thinking of God’s Church, or was he quenching the thirst of a spongelike curiosity? Those blue round globes of St. Anthony’s fire—how they burned in his mind! What a challenge, to find the man behind the mask, the human behind the inhuman. Wouldn’t he be proud if he could say, even to his secret self, that he had converted a rolling huge pool table full of fiery spheres! What a sin of pride! Worth doing penance for! But then one did many prideful things out of Love, and he loved the Lord so much and was so happy at it that he wanted everyone else to be happy too.

  The last thing he saw before sleep was the return of the blue fires, like a flight of burning angels silently singing him to his worried rest.

  The blue round dreams were still there in the sky when Father Peregrine awoke in the early morning.

  Father Stone slept like a stiff bundle, quietly. Father Peregrine watched the Martians floating and watching him. They were human—he knew it. But he must prove it or face a dry-mouthed, dry-eyed Bishop telling him kindly to step aside.

  But how to prove humanity if they hid in the high vaults of the sky? How to bring them nearer and provide answers to the many questions?

  “They saved us from the avalanche.”

  Father Peregrine arose, moved off among the rocks, and began to climb the nearest hill until he came to a place where a cliff dropped sheerly to a floor two hundred feet below. He was choking from his vigorous climb in the frosty air. He stood, getting his breath.

  “If I fell from here, it would surely kill me.”

  He let a pebble drop. Moments later it clicked on the rocks below.

  “The Lord would never forgive me.”

  He tossed another pebble.

  “It wouldn’t be suicide, would it, if I did it out of Love . . .?” He lifted his gaze to the blue spheres. “But first, another try.” He called to them: “Hello, hello!”

  The echoes tumbled upon each other, but the blue fires did not blink or move.

  He talked to them for five minutes. When he stopped, he peered down and saw Father Stone, still indignantly asleep, below in the little camp.

  “I must prove everything.” Father Peregrine stepped to the cliff rim. “I am an old man. I am not afraid. Surely the Lord will understand that I am doing this for Him?”

  He drew a deep breath. All his life swam through his eyes and he thought, In a moment shall I die? I am afraid that I love living much too much. But I love other things more. And, thinking thus, he stepped off the cliff.

  He fell.

  “Fool!” he cried. He tumbled end over end. “You were wrong!” The rocks rushed up at him and he saw himself dashed on them and sent to glory. “Why did I do this thing?” But he knew the answer, and an instant later was calm as he fell. The wind roared around him and the rocks hurtled to meet him.

  And then there was a shift of stars, a glimmering of blue light, and he felt himself surrounded by blueness and suspended. A moment later he was deposited, with a gentle bump, upon the rocks, where he sat a full moment, alive, and touching himself, and looking up at those blue lights that had withdrawn instantly.

  “You saved me!” he whispered. “You wouldn’t let me die. You knew it was wrong.”

  He rushed over to Father Stone, who still lay quietly asleep. “Father, Father, wake up!” He shook him and brought him round. “Father, they saved me!”

  “Who saved you?” Father Stone blinked and sat up.

  Father Peregrine related his experience.

  “A dream, a nightmare; go back to sleep,” said Father Stone irritably. “You and your circus balloons.”

  “But I was awake!”

  “Now, now, Father, calm yourself. There now.”

  “You don’t believe me? Have you a gun? Yes, there, let me have it.”

  “What are you going to do?” Father Stone handed over the small pistol they had brought along for protection against snakes or other similar and unpredictable animals.

  Father Peregrine seized the pistol. “I’ll prove it!”

  He pointed the pistol at his own hand and fired.

  “Stop!”

  There was a shimmer of light, and before their eyes the bullet stood upon the air, poised an inch from his open palm. It hung for a moment, surrounded by a blue phosphorescence. Then it fell, hissing, into the dust.

  Father Peregrine fired the gun three times—at his hand, at his leg, at his body. The three bullets hovered, glittering, and, like dead insects, fell at their feet.

  “You see?” said Father Peregrine, letting his arm fall, and allowing the pistol to drop after the bullets. “They know. They understand. They are not animals. They think and judge and live in a moral climate. What animal would save me from myself like this? There is no animal would do that. Only another man, Father. Now, do you believe?”

  Father Stone was watching the sky and the blue lights, and now, silently, he dropped to one knee and picked up the warm bullets and cupped them in his hand. He closed his hand tight.

  The sun was rising behind them.

  “I think we had better go down to the others and tell them of this and bring them back up here,” said Father Peregrine.


  By the time the sun was up, they were well on their way back to the rocket.

  Father Peregrine drew the round circle in the center of the blackboard.

  “This is Christ, the son of the Father.”

  He pretended not to hear the other Fathers’ sharp intake of breath.

  “This is Christ, in all his Glory,” he continued.

  “It looks like a geometry problem,” observed Father Stone.

  “A fortunate comparison, for we deal with symbols here. Christ is no less Christ, you must admit, in being represented by a circle or a square. For centuries the cross has symbolized his love and agony. So this circle will be the Martian Christ. This is how we shall bring Him to Mars.”

  The Fathers stirred fretfully and looked at each other.

  “You, Brother Mathias, will create, in glass, a replica of this circle, a globe, filled with bright fire. It will stand upon the altar.”

  “A cheap magic trick,” muttered Father Stone.

  Father Peregrine went on patiently: “On the contrary. We are giving them God in an understandable image. If Christ had come to us on Earth as an octopus, would we have accepted him readily?” He spread his hands. “Was it then a cheap magic trick of the Lord’s to bring us Christ through Jesus, in man’s shape? After we bless the church we build here and sanctify its altar and this symbol, do you think Christ would refuse to inhabit the shape before us? You know in your hearts He would not refuse.”

  “But the body of a soulless animal!” said Brother Mathias.

  “We’ve already gone over that, many times since we returned this morning, Brother Mathias. These creatures saved us from the avalanche. They realized that self-destruction was sinful, and prevented it, time after time. Therefore we must build a church in the hills, live with them, to find their own special ways of sinning, the alien ways, and help them to discover God.”

  The Fathers did not seem pleased at the prospect.

  “Is it because they are so odd to the eye?” wondered Father Peregrine. “But what is a shape? Only a cup for the blazing soul that God provides us all. If tomorrow I found that sea lions suddenly possessed free will, intellect, knew when not to sin, knew what life was and tempered justice with mercy and fife with love, then I would build an undersea cathedral. And if the sparrows should, miraculously, with God’s will, gain everlasting souls tomorrow, I would freight a church with helium and take after them, for all souls, in any shape, if they have free will and are aware of their sins, will burn in hell unless given their rightful communions. I would not let a Martian sphere burn in hell, either, for it is a sphere only in mine eyes. When I close my eyes it stands before me, an intelligence, a love, a soul—and I must not deny it.”