by Jerry eBooks
The thought of Anna came to his mind. “Is Anna 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 Anna 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, all of the excitement was calmed. He could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the sight of familiar faces, the sick pounding of your heart. But—now . . .
How? He thought. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose? Out of the goodness of some kind God? Was God, then, really that fine and thoughtful of his children? How and why and what for?
He thought of 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, as through a dark water, now, turning, throwing out dull flashes of white light. Mars. Earth. Mom. Dad. Edward. Mars. Martians.
Who had lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been like this? Martians. He repeated the word quietly, inwardly.
He laughed out loud, almost. He had the most ridiculous theory, all of a sudden. It gave him a kind of a chilled feeling. It was really nothing to think of, 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 Earthmen with atom weapons?
The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory and imagination.
Suppose all these houses weren’t real at all, this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis by the Martians.
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, by his own emotions. Using his own mother and father as bait.
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 fiendishly clever plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then fool Hinkston, then gather a crowd around the rocket ship and wave. And all the men in the ship, seeing mothers, aunts, uncles, sweethearts dead ten, twenty years ago, naturally, disregarding orders, would rush out and abandon the ship. What more natural? What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A man doesn’t ask too many questions when his mother is suddenly brought back to life; he’s much too happy. And the brass band played and everybody was taken off to private homes. 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. Some time during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed, will change form, melt, shift, and become a one-eyed, green and yellowtoothed 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 out 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.
Very carefully he lifted the sheets, 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 and changing, came the grandmas and grandfathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, walking to the churchyard, where there were open holes dug freshly and new tombstones installed. Seventeen holes in all, and seventeen tombstones. Three of the tombstones said, CAPTAIN JOHN BLACK, ALBERT LUSTIG, and SAMUEL HINKSTON.
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 also shifting like wax, shivering as a thing does in waves of heat on a summer day.
The coffins were lowered. Somebody murmured about “the unexpected and sudden deaths of seventeen fine men during the night—”
Earth was shoveled in on the coffin tops.
After the funeral the brass band slammed and banged back into town and the crowd stood around and waved and shouted as the rocket was torn to pieces and strewn about and blown up.
The Long Years
Ray Bradbury
A shattered Earth suddenly remembered poor Hathaway, marooned on Mars by the mad rush homeward, all alone. But—was he alone?
When the wind came through the sky, he and his small family would sit in the stone hut and warm their hands over a small fire. The wind would stir the canal waters and almost blow the stars out of the sky, but Mr. Hathaway would sit contented and talk to his wife and his wife would talk back, and he would talk to his two daughters and his son about the old days on Earth, and they would all reply neatly.
It was the twentieth year after the Great War. Mars was a tomb planet. Whether or not Earth was the same was a matter for much silent debate for himself, or his family, on the long Martian nights. Then the dust storms came over the low hexagonal tomb buildings, whining past the great ancient gargoyles on the iron mountains, blowing between the last standing pillars of an old city, and tearing away the plastic walls of a newer, American-built city that was melting away into the sand, desolated.
Hathaway rose from the family circle from time to time and went out into the suddenly clear weather following the storm to look up and see Earth burning green there on the windy sky. He put his hand up for a moment, as one might reach up a hand to adjust a dimly burning light globe in the ceiling of a dark room. Then he said something, quietly, and looked across the long dead sea bottom not moving. Not another living thing on this entire planet, he thought Just myself. And then. He looked back inside the stone hut.
What was happening on Earth now? He stared up until his eyes watered with strain. Had the atom bomb eaten everybody there? He had seen no visible sign of change in the aspect of Earth through his thirty-inch telescope. Well, he thought, he was good for another twenty years if he was careful. Someone might come. Either across the dead seas, or out of space in a rocket, on a little thread of red flame.
He peered into the hut “I think I’ll take a walk,” he said.
His wife did not turn.
“I said,” he cried, “I think I’ll take a
walk.”
“All right,” his wife said.
“That’s better,” said Hathaway.
He turned and walked quietly down through a series of low ruins. “Made in New York,” he read from a piece of metal as he passed. “This will all be gone long before the old Martian ruins.” He waved at a city ten thousand years old, intact, that lay on the rim of the dead sea twenty miles over, in a mist. “Did anything like that ever happen on Earth? Well, the Egyptians, almost. They came nearest, because they took their time.
He quieted. He came to the Martian graveyard. It was a series of small hexagonal stones and buildings set in the top of a hill. The drifting sand had never covered them because the hill was too high and swept by the winds.
There were four graves with crude wooden crosses on them, and names. He stood for a moment looking down at them. He did nothing with his eyes, they would do nothing. They had dried up long ago.
“Do you forgive me for what I have done?” he asked of the crosses. “I had to do it. I was so lonely,” he said. “You do forgive me, don’t you? You don’t mind. No. No, you don’t mind. I’m glad.”
He walked back down the hill, looking at the sea bottom. If only something would come; even a monster of some sort would be welcome. Something to run from, perhaps, would be a change.
He reached the stone hut and, once more, just before going inside, he shaded his eyes with his hands, searching the sky.
“You keep waiting and waiting and looking and looking,” he said. “And one night, perhaps——”
There was a tiny point of red flame on the sky.
“And you keep looking,” he said. “And you look,” he said. He stopped. He looked down at the ground. Then he stepped away from the light of the stone hut. “and you look again,” he whispered.
The tiny flame point was still there.
“It wasn’t there last night,” he murmured.
“It is red,” he said, finally.
And then his eyes were wet with pain.
“It is a rocket,” he said. “My telescope.” He stumbled and fell, picked himself up, got around back of the hut and swiveled the telescope so that it pointed into the sky.
A minute later, after a long wild staring, he appeared in the low doorway and he came in to sit by the fireplace. He looked at the fire. The wife and the two daughters and the son looked at him. Finally he said, “I have good news. A ship is coming to take us all home. It will be here in the early morning.”
He put his hands down and put his head into his hands and began to cry, gently, with long waiting pain, like a child.
He burned what was left of New York that morning at three.
He took a torch and moved into the plastic and wood city and tapped the walls here or there and the city went up in great tosses of heat and light. When he walked back out of the city it was a square mile of illumination, big enough to be seen out in space. It would beckon the rocket down to him and his family.
His heart beating rapidly, he returned to the hut where the family waited. “See,” he said. He held up an old bottle into the light. “Wine I saved. Just for tonight. I knew, that perhaps one day someone would come. And so I saved this. I hid it in the storage Shed. We’ll have a drink and celebrate!” And he popped the cork out and poured five glasses full. His wife and the three children picked up their glasses, smiling.
“It’s been a long time,” he said gravely, looking into his drink. “Remember the day the War broke? How long ago? Nineteen years and seven months, exactly. And all the rodcets were called home from Mars, and you and I and the children were out in the mountains, doing archaeological work, doing research on the ancient methods of surgery used by the Martians; it helped me a lot in my own work. And we ran our horses, almost killing them, but got back here to the city a week late. Everyone was gone. America had been destroyed; every rocket had left without waiting for stragglers, remember, remember? And, it turned out, we were the only ones left? Lord, Lord, how the years pass. It seems only a day, now. I couldn’t have stood it without you here, all of you. I couldn’t have stood it at all. I’d have killed myself without you. But, with you, it was worth waiting. Here’s to us, then.” He raised his drink. “And to our long wait together. And here’s to them.” He gestured at the sky. “May they land safely and—” A troubled frown.
“—may they be friends to us when they land. He drank his wine.
The wife and the three children raised their glasses to their lips.
The wine ran down over the chins of all four of them.
By morning the city was blowing in great black soft flakes across the sea bottom. The fire was exhausted, but it had served its purpose; the red spot on the sky enlarged and came down.
From the stone hut came the rich brown smell of baked ginger bread. His wife stood over the table, setting down the hot pans of new bread as Hathaway entered. The two daughters were gently sweeping the bare stone floor with stiff brooms, and the son was polishing the silverware. “We will have a breakfast for them, for everyone in the crew,” said Hathaway. “You must all put on your best clothes.”
He walked across his land to the vast metal storage shed. Inside, was the cold storage unit and power plant he had repaired and restored with his efficient, small, nervous fingers over the years, just as he had repaired clocks and telephones and spool recorders in his spare time. The shed was full of things he had built, some of them senseless mechanisms the functions of which were a mystery even to himself now as he looked at them. There were jars of liquid and jars of gelatin and other substances.
One day, just for a joke, he had laid telephone wires all the way from the hut to the dead city twenty miles away. He had installed a phone in an empty Martian tower room of the highest cupola in the city and come back, whistling quietly to a freshly fixed dinner of cold storage turnips and filet mignon. Many nights, for the hell of it, he dialed the dead city number, which, with a shine to his eye, he had fixed at 00-000-00.
It would have been interesting if someone had answered.
From the storage deep freeze compartment he now carried frozen cartons of beans and strawberries, twenty years old. Lazarus, come forth, he thought, as he pulled out a cool chicken.
Then the Rocket landed.
Hathaway ran down the hill like a young boy. He had to stop once, because of a sudden sickening pain in his chest. He sat on a rock and breathed out and in. Then he got up and ran all the rest of the way.
“Hello, hello!”
He stood in the hot air of summer that had been caused by the fiery heat of the rocket exhausts. A vent opened in the side of the rocket and a man stood in the round entrance looking down.
“You’re . . . ah . . . American!” the man shouted.
“So are you; hello!” cried Hathaway, pink-cheeked.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” The man leaped down and walked across the sand swiftly, his hand out. “We expected nothing, and here you are!”
Their hands clasped and held, they looked into each other’s faces.
“Why, you’re Hathaway, I know you.” The man was amazed. His grip tightened. His mouth was open and Shut and open again, speechless. “Hathaway! When I was a kid, twenty years ago, I saw you in the television set at school. I watched you perform a difficult surgery for a cerebral tumor!”
“Thank you, thank you, I had almost forgotten.”
The man from the rocket looked beyond Hathaway. “You’re alone? Your wife, I remember her. And there were children . . .”
“My son, my daughters, my wife, they are at our hut.”
“Good, good, splendid. You look fine, sir.”
“Cold storage and a lot of work. I’ve kept myself busy. I’ve had time for my hobbies. I was always interested in machines as they relate to physiology and physiology as it relates to machines, you know. But, your name?”
“Captain Ernest Parsons of Joliet, Illinois, sir.”
“Captain Parsons.” They were not done with the handshaking yet. “How man
y in your crew?”
“Twenty, sir.”
“Fine, there’s a good breakfast waiting all of you up the hill. “Will you come?”
“Will we come?” asked the captain. He turned and looked at the rocket. “Abandon ship!” And it was done in half a minute.
They walked up the hill together, Hathaway and the captain, the men following dutifully and talkatively behind, taking in deep breaths of the thin Martian air. The sun rose and it was a good day. It would be warm later. Smoke lifted from the stone hut.
“I’m sorry.” Hathaway sat down, his hand on his chest “All the excitement.
I’ll have to wait.” He felt his heart moving under his hand. He counted the beats. It was not good.
“We have a doctor with us,” said Parsons. “I beg your pardon, sir, I know you are one, but we’d best check you with our own, and if you need anything.
“I’ll be all right, the excitement, the waiting.” Hathaway could hardly breathe. His face was pale and wet, his lips blue. His hand trembled. “You know,” he said, as the doctor came up and put a stethoscope against him, “it’s as if I’ve kept alive just for this day, all those years, and now that you’re here and I know Earth is still alive—well, I can lie down and quit.”
“You can’t do that, sir, there’s the breakfast to eat,” insisted Parsons, gently. “A fine host that would be.”
“Here we are,” and the doctor gave Hathaway a small yellow pellet. “I suggest this. You’re badly overexcited. It might be a good idea if we carried you the rest of the way.”
“Nonsense, just let me sit here a moment. It’s good to see you all. It’s good to hear your names. What were they again? You introduced me, but when you’re excited you don’t see or hear or do any thing right. Parsons and Glasbow and Williamson and Hamilton and Spaulding and Ellison and Smith and someone named Brackett and that’s all I remember.” He smiled weakly, his eyes squinted. “See how good I am?”