The Martian Chronicles

by Ray Douglas Bradbury

  The men sat on the hardware porch, not blinking or swallowing.

  “I can’t figure why they left now. With things lookin’ up. I mean, every day they got more rights. What they want, anyway? Here’s the poll tax gone, and more and more states passin’ anti-lynchin’ bills, and all kinds of equal rights. What more they want? They make almost as good money as a white man, but there they go.”

  Far down the empty street a bicycle came.

  “I’ll be goddamned. Teece, here comes your Silly now.”

  The bicycle pulled up before the porch, a seventeen-year-old colored boy on it, all arms and feet and long legs and round watermelon head. He looked up at Samuel Teece and smiled.

  “So you got a guilty conscience and came back,” said Teece.

  “No, sir, I just brought the bicycle.”

  “What’s wrong, couldn’t get it on the rocket?”

  “That wasn’t it, sir.”

  “Don’t tell me what it was! Get off, you’re not goin’ to steal my property!” He gave the boy a push. The bicycle fell. “Get inside and start cleaning the brass.”

  “Beg pardon?” The boy’s eyes widened.

  “You heard what I said. There’s guns need unpacking there, and a crate of nails just come from Natchez — ”

  “Mr. Teece.”

  “And a box of hammers need fixin’ — ”

  “Mr. Teece, sir?”

  “You still standin’ there!” Teece glared.

  “Mr. Teece, you don’t mind I take the day off,” he said apologetically.

  “And tomorrow and day after tomorrow and the day after the day after that,” said Teece.

  “I’m afraid so, sir.”

  “You should be afraid, boy. Come here.” He marched the boy across the porch and drew a paper out of a desk. “Remember this?”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s your workin’ paper. You signed it, there’s your X right there, ain’t it? Answer me.”

  “I didn’t sign that, Mr. Teece.” The boy trembled. “Anyone can make an X.”

  “Listen to this, Silly. Contract: «I will work for Mr. Samuel Teece two years, starting July 15, 2001, and if intending to leave will give four weeks’ notice and continue working until my position is filled.» There.” Teece slapped the paper, his eyes glittering. “You cause trouble, we’ll take it to court.”

  “I can’t do that,” wailed the boy, tears starting to roll down his face, “If I don’t go today, I don’t go.”

  “I know just how you feel, Silly; yes, sir, I sympathize with you, boy. But we’ll treat you good and give you good food, boy. Now you just get inside and start working and forget all about that nonsense, eh, Silly? Sure.” Teece grinned and patted the boy’s shoulder.

  The boy turned and looked at the old men sitting on the porch. He could hardly see now for his tears. “Maybe — maybe one of these gentlemen here…” The men looked up in the hot, uneasy shadows, looking first at the boy and then at Teece.

  “You meanin’ to say you think a white man should take your place, boy?” asked Teece coldly.

  Grandpa Quartermain took his red hands off his knees. He looked out at the horizon thoughtfully and said, “Teece, what about me?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll take Silly’s job.”

  The porch was silent.

  Teece balanced himself in the air. “Grandpa,” he said warningly.

  “Let the boy go. I’ll clean the brass.”

  “Would you, would you, really?” Silly ran over to Grandpa, laughing, tears on his cheeks, unbelieving.

  “Sure.”

  “Grandpa,” said Teece, “keep your damn trap outa this.”

  “Give the kid a break, Teece.”

  Teece walked over and seized the boy’s arm. “He’s mine. I’m lockin’ him in the back room until tonight.”

  “Don’t, Mr. Teece!”

  The boy began to sob now. His crying filled the air of the porch. His eyes were tight. Far down the street an old tin Ford was choking along, approaching, a last load of colored people in it. “Here comes my family, Mr. Teece, oh please, please, oh God, please!”

  “Teece,” said one of the other men on the porch, getting up, “let him go.”

  Another man rose also. “That goes for me too.”

  “And me,” said another.

  “What’s the use?” The men all talked now. “Cut it out, Teece.”

  “Let him go.”

  Teece felt for his gun in his pocket. He saw the men’s faces. He took his hand away and left the gun in his pocket and said, “So that’s how it is?”

  “That’s how it is,” someone said.

  Teece let the boy go. “All right. Get out.” He jerked his hand back in the store. “But I hope you don’t think you’re gonna leave any trash behind to clutter my store.”

  “No, sir!”

  “You clean everything outa your shed in back; burn it.”

  Silly shook his head. “I’ll take it with.”

  “They won’t let you put it on that damn rocket.”

  “I’ll take it with,” insisted the boy softly.

  He rushed back through the hardware store. There were sounds of sweeping and cleaning out, and a moment later he appeared, his hands full of tops and marbles and old dusty kites and junk collected through the years. Just then the old tin Ford drove up and Silly climbed in and the door slammed. Teece stood on the porch with a bitter smile. “What you goin’ to do up there?”

  “Startin’ new,” said Silly. “Gonna have my own hardware.”

  “God damn it, you been learnin’ my trade so you could run off and use it!”

  “No, sir, I never thought one day this’d happen, sir, but it did. I can’t help it if I learned, Mr. Teece.”

  “I suppose you got names for your rockets?”

  They looked at their one clock on the dashboard of the car.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Like Elijah and the Chariot, The Big Wheel and The Little Wheel, Faith, Hope, and Charity, eh?”

  “We got names for the ships, Mr. Teece.”

  “God the Son and the Holy Ghost, I wouldn’t wonder? Say, boy, you got one named the First Baptist Church?”

  “We got to leave now, Mr. Teece.”

  Teece laughed. “You got one named Swing Low, and another named Sweet Chariot?”

  The car started up. “Good-by, Mr. Teece.”

  “You got one named Roll Dem Bones?”

  “Good-by, mister!”

  “And another called Over Jordan! Ha! Well, tote that rocket, boy, lift that rocket, boy, go on, get blown up, see if I care!”

  The car churned off into the dust. The boy rose and cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted one last time at Teece: “Mr. Teece, Mr. Teece, what you goin’ to do nights from now on? What you goin’ to do nights, Mr. Teece?”

  Silence. The car faded down the road. It was gone. “What in hell did he mean?” mused Teece. “What am I goin’ to do nights?”

  He watched the dust settle, and it suddenly came to him.

  He remembered nights when men drove to his house, their knees sticking up sharp and their shotguns sticking up sharper, like a carful of cranes under the night trees of summer, their eyes mean. Honking the horn and him slamming his door, a gun in his hand, laughing to himself, his heart racing like a ten-year-old’s, driving off down the summer-night road, a ring of hemp rope coiled on the car floor, fresh shell boxes making every man’s coat look bunchy. How many nights over the years, how many nights of the wind rushing in the car, flopping their hair over their mean eyes, roaring, as they picked a tree, a good strong tree, and rapped on a shanty door!

  “So that’s what the son of a bitch meant?” Teece leaped out into the sunlight. “Come back, you bastard! What am I goin’ to do nights? Why, that lousy, insolent son of a…”

  It was a good question. He sickened and was empty. Yes. What will we do nights? he thought. Now they’re gone, what? He was absolutely empty and numb.
r />   He pulled the pistol from his pocket, checked its load.

  “What you goin’ to do, Sam?” someone asked.

  “Kill that son of a bitch.”

  Grandpa said, “Don’t get yourself heated.”

  But Samuel Teece was gone around behind the store. A moment later he drove out the drive in his open-top car. “Anyone comin’ with me?”

  “I’d like a drive,” said Grandpa, and got up.

  “Anyone else?”

  Nobody replied.

  Grandpa got in and slammed the door. Samuel Teece gutted the car out in a great whorl of dust. They didn’t speak as they rushed down the road under the bright sky. The heat from the dry meadows was shimmering.

  They stopped at a crossroad. “Which way’d they go, Grandpa?”

  Grandpa squinted. “Straight on ahead, I figure.”

  They went on. Under the summer trees their car made a lonely sound. The road was empty, and as they drove along they began to notice something. Teece slowed the car and bent out, his yellow eyes fierce.

  “God damn it, Grandpa, you see what them bastards did?”

  “What?” asked Grandpa, and looked.

  Where they had been carefully set down and left, in neat bundles every few feet along the empty country road, were old roller skates, a bandanna full of knicknacks, some old shoes, a cartwheel, stacks of pants and coats and ancient hats, bits of oriental crystal that had once tinkled in the wind, tin cans of pink geraniums, dishes of waxed fruit, cartons of Confederate money, washtubs, scrubboards, wash lines, soap, somebody’s tricycle, someone else’s hedge shears, a toy wagon, a jack-in-the-box, a stained-glass window from the Negro Baptist Church, a whole set of brake rims, inner tubes, mattresses, couches, rocking chairs, jars of cold cream, hand mirrors. None of it flung down, no, but deposited gently and with feeling, with decorum, upon the dusty edges of the road, as if a whole city had walked here with hands full, at which time a great bronze trumpet had sounded, the articles had been relinquished to the quiet dust, and one and all, the inhabitants of the earth had fled straight up into the blue heavens.

  “Wouldn’t burn them, they said,” cried Teece angrily. “No, wouldn’t burn them like I said, but had to take them along and leave them where they could see them for the last time, on the road, all together and whole. Them niggers think they’re smart.”

  He veered the car wildly, mile after mile, down the road, tumbling, smashing, breaking, scattering bundles of paper, jewel boxes, mirrors, chairs. “There, by damn, and there!”

  The front tire gave a whistling cry. The car spilled crazily off the road into a ditch, flinging Teece against the glass.

  “Son of a bitch!” He dusted himself off and stood out of the car, almost crying with rage.

  He looked at the silent, empty road. “We’ll never catch them now, never, never.” As far as he could see there was nothing but bundles and stacks and more bundles neatly placed like little abandoned shrines in the late day, in the warm-blowing wind.

  Teece and Grandpa came walking tiredly back to the hardware store an hour later. The men were still sitting there, listening, and watching the sky. Just as Teece sat down and eased his tight shoes off someone cried, “Look!”

  “I’ll be damned if I will,” said Teece.

  But the others looked. And they saw the golden bobbins rising in the sky, far away. Leaving flame behind, they vanished.

  In the cotton fields the wind blew idly among the snow dusters. In still farther meadows the watermelons lay, unfingerprinted, striped like tortoise cats lying in the sun.

  The men on the porch sat down, looked at each other, looked at the yellow rope piled neat on the store shelves, glanced at the gun shells glinting shiny brass in their cartons, saw the silver pistols and long black metal shotguns hung high and quiet in the shadows. Somebody put a straw in his mouth, Someone else drew a figure in the dust.

  Finally Samuel Teece held his empty shoe up in triumph, turned it over, stared at it, and said, “Did you notice? Right up to the very last, by God, he said «Mister»!”

  2004-05: THE NAMING OF NAMES

  They came to the strange blue lands and put their names upon the lands. Here was Hinkston Creek and Lustig Corners and Black River and Driscoll Forest and Peregrine Mountain and Wilder Town, all the names of people and the things that the people did. Here was the place where Martians killed the first Earth Men, and it was Red Town and had to do with blood. And here where the second expedition was destroyed, and it was named Second Try, and each of the other places where the rocket men had set down their fiery caldrons to burn the land, the names were left like cinders, and of course there was a Spender Hill and a Nathaniel York Town…

  The old Martian names were names of water and air and hills. They were the names of snows that emptied south in stone canals to fill the empty seas. And the names of sealed and buried sorcerers and towers and obeisks. And the rockets struck at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old towns, in the rubble of which great pylons were plunged with new names: IRON TOWN, STEEL TOWN, ALUMINUM CITY, ELECTRIC VILLAGE, CORN TOWN, GRAIN VILLA, DETROIT II, all the mechanical names and the metal names from Earth.

  And after the towns were built and named, the graveyards were built and named, too: Green Hill, Moss Town, Boot Hill, Bide a Wee; and the first dead went into their graves.

  But after everything was pinned down and neat and in its place, when everything was safe and certain, when the towns were well enough fixed and the loneliness was at a minimum, then the sophisticates came in from Earth. They came on parties and vacations, on little shopping trips for trinkets and photographs and the “atmosphere”; they came to study and apply sociological laws; they came with stars and badges and rules and regulations, bringing some of the red tape that had rawled across Earth like an alien weed, and letting it grow on Mars wherever it could take root. They began to plan people’s lives and libraries; they began to instruct and push about the very people who had come to Mars to get away from being instructed and ruled and pushed about.

  And it was inevitable that some of these people pushed back…

  April 2005: USHER II

  “’During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback. through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher…’”

  Mr. William Stendahl paused in his quotation. There, upon a low black hill, stood the House, its cornerstone bearing the inscription 2005 A.D.

  Mr. Bigelow, the architect, said, “It’s completed. Here’s the key, Mr. Stendahl.”

  The two men stood together silently in the quiet autumn afternoon. Blueprints rustled on the raven grass at their feet.

  “The House of Usher,” said Mr. Stendahl with pleasure. “Planned, built, bought, paid for. Wouldn’t Mr. Poe be delighted?”

  Mr. Bigelow squinted. “Is it everything you wanted, sir?”

  “Yes!”

  “Is the color right? Is it desolate and terrible?”

  “Very desolate, very terrible!”

  “The walls are — bleak?”

  “Amazingly so!”

  “The tarn, is it «black and lurid» enough?”

  “Most incredibly black and lurid.”

  “And the sedge — we’ve dyed it, you know — is it the proper gray and ebon?”

  “Hideous!”

  Mr. Bigelow consulted his architectural plans. From these he quoted in part: “Does the whole structure cause an ’iciness, a sickening of the heart, a dreariness of thought’? The House, the lake, the land, Mr. Stendahl?”

  “Mr. Bigelow, it’s worth every penny! My God, it’s beautiful!”

  “Thank you. I had to work in total ignorance. Thank the Lord you had your own private rockets or we’d never have been allowed to bring most of the equ
ipment through. You notice, it’s always twilight here, this land, always October, barren, sterile, dead. It took a bit of doing. We killed everything. Ten thousand tons of DDT. Not a snake, frog, or Martian fly left! Twilight always, Mr. Stendahl; I’m proud of that. There are machines, hidden, which blot out the sun. It’s always properly «dreary».”

  Stendahl drank it in, the dreariness, the oppression, the fetid vapors, the whole “atmosphere,” so delicately contrived and fitted. And that House! That crumbling horror, that evil lake, the fungi, the extensive decay! Plastic or otherwise, who could guess?

  He looked at the autumn sky. Somewhere above, beyond, far off, was the sun. Somewhere it was the month of April on the planet Mars, a yellow month with a blue sky. Somewhere above, the rockets burned down to civilize a beautifully dead planet. The sound of their screaming passage was muffled by this dim, soundproofed world, this ancient autumn world.

  “Now that my job’s done,” said Mr. Bigelow uneasily, “I feel free to ask what you’re going to do with all this.”

  “With Usher? Haven’t you guessed?”

  “No.”

  “Does the name Usher mean nothing to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, what about this name: Edgar Allan Poe?”

  Mr. Bigelow shook his head.

  “Of course.” Stendahl snorted delicately, a combination of dismay and contempt. “How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe? He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. That’s thirty years ago — 1975.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Bigelow wisely. “One of those!”

  “Yes, one of those, Bigelow. He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future were burned. Heartlessly. They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. In 1950 and ’60 it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religions prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”