The Leader stood before Sam and Elma, his mask beaten of polished bronze, the eyes only empty slits of endless blue-black, the mouth a slot out of which words drifted into the wind.
“Ready your stand,” said the voice. A diamond-gloved hand waved. “Prepare the viands, prepare the foods, prepare the strange wines, for tonight is indeed a great night!”
“You mean,” said Sam, “you’ll let me stay on here?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not mad at me?”
The mask was rigid and carved and cold and sightless.
“Prepare your place of food,” said the voice softly. “And take this.”
“What is it?”
Sam blinked at the silver-foil scroll that was handed him, upon which, in hieroglyph, snake figures danced.
“It is the land grant to all of the territory from the silver mountains to the blue hills, from the dead salt sea there to the distant valleys of moonstone and emerald,” said the Leader.
“M-mine?” said Sam, incredulous.
“Yours.”
“One hundred thousand miles of territory?”
“Yours.”
“Did you hear that, Elma?”
Elma was sitting on the ground, leaning against the aluminum hot-dog stand, eyes shut.
“But why, why — why are you giving me all this?” asked Sam, trying to look into the metal slots of the eyes.
“That is not all. Here.” Six other scrolls were produced. The names were declared, the territories announced.
“Why, that’s half of Mars! I own half of Mars!” Sam rattled the scrolls in his fists. He shook them at Elma, insane with laughing. “Elma, did you hear?”
“I heard,” said Elma, looking at the sky.
She seemed to be watching for something. She was becoming a little more alert now.
“Thank you, oh, thank you,” said Sam to the bronze mask.
“Tonight is the night,” said the mask. “You must be ready.”
“I will be. What it is — a surprise? Are the rockets coming through earlier than we thought, a month earlier from Earth? All ten thousand rockets, bringing the settlers, the miners, the workers and their wives, all hundred thousand of them? Won’t that be swell, Elma? You see, I told you. I told you, that town there won’t always have just one thousand people in it. There’ll be fifty thousand more coming, and the month after that a hundred thousand more, and by the end of the year five million Earth Men. And me with the only hot-dog stand staked out on the busiest highway to the mines!”
The mask floated on the wind. “We leave you. Prepare. The land is yours.”
In the blowing moonlight, like metal petals of some ancient flower, like blue plumes, like cobalt butterflies immense and quiet, the old ships turned and moved over the shifting sands, the masks beaming and glittering, until the last shine, the last blue color, was lost among the hills.
“Elma, why did they do it? Why didn’t they kill me? Don’t they know anything? What’s wrong with them? Elma, do you understand?” He shook her shoulder. “I own half of Mars!”
She watched the night sky, waiting.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get the place fixed. All the hot dogs boiling, the buns warm, the chili cooking, the onions peeled and diced, the relish laid out, the napkins in the dips, the place spotless! Hey!” He did a little wild dance, kicking his heels. “Oh boy, I’m happy; yes, sir, I’m happy,” he sang off key. “This is my lucky day!”
He boiled the hot dogs, cut the buns, sliced the onions in a frenzy.
“Just think, that Martian said a surprise. That can only mean one thing, Elma. Those hundred thousand people coming in ahead of schedule, tonight, of all nights! We’ll be flooded! We’ll work long hours for days, what with tourists riding around seeing things, Elma. Think of the money!”
He went out and looked at the sky. He didn’t see anything.
“In a minute, maybe,” he said, snuffing the cool air gratefully, arms up, beating his chest. “Ah!”
Elma said nothing. She peeled potatoes for French fries quietly, her eyes always on the sky.
“Sam,” she said half an hour later. “There it is. Look.”
He looked and saw it.
Earth.
It rose full and green, like a fine-cut stone, above the hills.
“Good old Earth,” he whispered lovingly. “Good old wonderful Earth. Send me your hungry and your starved. Something something — how does that poem go? Send me your hungry, old Earth. Here’s Sam Parkhill, his hot dogs all boiled, his chili cooking, everything neat as a pin. Come on, you Earth, send me your rocket!”
He went out to look at his place. There it sat, perfect as a fresh-laid egg on the dead sea bottom, the only nucleus of light and warmth in hundreds of miles of lonely wasteland. It was like a heart beating alone in a great dark body. He felt almost sorrowful with pride, gazing at it with wet eyes.
“It sure makes you humble,” he said among the cooking odors of wieners, warm buns, rich butter. “Step up,” he invited the various stars in the sky. “Who’ll be the first to buy?”
“Sam,” said Elma.
Earth changed in the black sky.
It caught fire.
Part of it seemed to come apart in a million pieces, as if a gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an unholy dripping glare for a minute, three times normal size, then dwindled.
“What was that?” Sam looked at the green fire in the sky.
“Earth,” said Elma, holding her hands together.
“That can’t be Earth, that’s not Earth! No, that ain’t Earth! It can’t be.”
“You mean it couldn’t be Earth,” said Elma, looking at him. “That just isn’t Earth. No, that’s not Earth; is that what you mean?”
“Not Earth — oh no, it couldn’t be,” he wailed.
He stood there, his hands at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes wide and dull, not moving.
“Sam.” She called his name. For the first time in days her eyes were bright. “Sam?”
He looked up at the sky.
“Well,” she said. She glanced around for a minute or so in silence. Then briskly she flapped a wet towel over her arm. “Switch on more lights, turn up the music, open the doors, There’ll be another batch of customers along in about a million years. Gotta be ready, yes, sir.”
Sam did not move.
“What a swell spot for a hot-dog stand,” she said. She reached over and picked a toothpick out of a jar and put it between her front teeth. “Let you in on a little secret, Sam,” she whispered, leaning toward him. “This looks like it’s going to be an off season.”
November 2005: THE WATCHERS
They all came out and looked at the sky that night. They left their suppers or their washing up or their dressing for the show and they came out upon their now-not-quite-as-new porches and watched the green star of Earth there. It was a move without conscious effort; they all did it, to help them understand the news they had heard on the radio a moment before. There was Earth and there the coming war, and there hundreds of thousands of mothers or grandmothers or fathers or brothers or aunts or uncles or cousins. They stood on the porches and tried to believe in the existence of Earth, much as they had once tried to believe in the existence of Mars; it was a problem reversed. To all intents and purposes, Earth now was dead; they had been away from it for three or four years. Space was an anesthetic; seventy million miles of space numbed you, put memory to sleep, depopulated Earth, erased the past, and allowed these people here to go on with their work. But now, tonight, the dead were risen, Earth was reinhabited, memory awoke, a million names were spoken: What was so-and-so doing tonight on Earth? What about this one and that one? The people on the porches glanced sidewise at each other’s faces.
At nine o’clock Earth seemed to explode, catch fire, and burn.
The people on the porches put up their hands as if to beat the fire out.
They waited.
By midnight the fire was
extinguished. Earth was still there. There was a sigh, like an autumn wind, from the porches.
“We haven’t heard from Harry for a long time.”
“He’s all right.”
“We should send a message to Mother.”
“She’s all right.”
“Is she?”
“Now, don’t worry.”
“Will she be all right, do you think?”
“Of course, of course; now come to bed.”
But nobody moved. Late dinners were carried out onto the night lawns and set upon collapsible tables, and they picked at these slowly until two o’clock and the light-radio message flashed from Earth. They could read the great Morse-code flashes which flickered like a distant firefly:
AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT ATOMIZED IN PREMATURE
EXPLOSION OF ATOMIC STOCKPILE. LOS ANGELES,
LONDON BOMBED. WAR. COME HOME. COME HOME.
COME HOME.
They stood up from their tables.
COME HOME. COME HOME. COME HOME.
“Have you heard from your brother Ted this year?”
“You know. With mail rates five bucks a letter to Earth, I don’t write much.”
COME HOME.
“I’ve been wondering about Jane; you remember Jane, my kid sister?”
COME HOME.
At three in the chilly morning the luggage-store proprietor glanced up. A lot of people were coming down the street.
“Stayed open late on purpose. What’ll it be, mister?”
By dawn the luggage was gone from his shelves.
December 2005: THE SILENT TOWNS
There was a little white silent town on the edge of the dead Martian sea. The town was empty. No one moved in it. Lonely lights burned in the stores all day. The shop doors were wide, as if people had run off without using their keys. Magazines, brought from Earth on the silver rocket a month before, fluttered, untouched, burning brown, on wire racks fronting the silent drugstores.
The town was dead. Its beds were empty and cold. The only sound was the power hum of electric lines and dynamos, still alive, all by themselves. Water ran in forgotten bathtubs, poured out into living rooms, onto porches, and down through little garden plots to feed neglected flowers. In the dark theaters, gum under the many seats began to harden with tooth impressions still in it.
Across town was a rocket port. You could still smell the hard, scorched smell where the last rocket blasted off when it went back to Earth. If you dropped a dime in the telescope and pointed it at Earth, perhaps you could see the big war happening there. Perhaps you could see New York explode. Maybe London could be seen, covered with a new kind of fog. Perhaps then it might be understood why this small Martian town is abandoned. How quick was the evacuation? Walk in any store, bang the NO SALE key. Cash drawers jump out, all bright and jingly with coins. That war on Earth must be very bad…
Along the empty avenues of this town, now whistling softly, kicking a tin can ahead of him in deepest concentration, came a tall, thin man. His eyes glowed with a dark, quiet look of loneliness. He moved his bony hands in his pockets, which were tinkling with new dimes. Occasionally he tossed a dime to the ground. He laughed temperately, doing this, and walked on, sprinkling bright dimes everywhere.
His name was Walter Gripp. He had a placer mine and a remote shack far up in the blue Martian hills and he walked to town once every two weeks to see if he could marry a quiet and intelligent woman. Over the years he had always returned to his shack, alone and disappointed. A week ago, arriving in town, he had found it this way!
That day he had been so surprised that he rushed to a delicatessen, flung wide a case, and ordered a triple-decker beef sandwich.
“Coming up!” he cried, a towel on his arm.
He flourished meats and bread baked the day before, dusted a table, invited himself to sit, and ate until he had to go find a soda fountain, where he ordered a bicarbonate. The druggist, being one Walter Gripp, was astoundingly polite and fizzed one right up for him!
He stuffed his jeans with money, all he could find. He loaded a boy’s wagon with ten-dollar bills and ran lickety-split through town. Reaching the suburbs, he suddenly realized how shamefully silly he was. He didn’t need money. He rode the ten-dollar bills back to where he’d found them, counted a dollar from his own wallet to pay for the sandwiches, dropped it in the delicatessen till, and added a quarter tip.
That night he enjoyed a hot Turkish bath, a succulent filet carpeted with delicate mushrooms, imported dry sherry, and strawberries in wine. He fitted himself for a new blue flannel suit, and a rich gray Homburg which balanced oddly atop his gaunt head. He slid money into a juke box which played “That Old Gang of Mine.” He dropped nickels in twenty boxes all over town. The lonely streets and the night were full of the sad music of “That Old Gang of Mine” as he walked, tall and thin and alone, his new shoes clumping softly, his cold hands in his pockets.
But that was a week past. He slept in a good house on Mars Avenue, rose mornings at nine, bathed, and idled to town for ham and eggs. No morning passed that he didn’t freeze a ton of meats, vegetables, and lemon cream pies, enough to last ten years, until the rockets came back from Earth, if they ever came.
Now, tonight, he drifted up and down, seeing the wax women in every colorful shop window, pink and beautiful. For the first time he knew how dead the town was. He drew a glass of beer and sobbed gently.
“Why,” he said, “I’m all alone.”
He entered the Elite Theater to show himself a film, to distract his mind from his isolation. The theater was hollow, empty, like a tomb with phantoms crawling gray and black on the vast screen. Shivering, he hurried from the haunted place.
Having decided to return home, he was striking down the middle of a side street, almost running, when he heard the phone.
He listened.
“Phone ringing in someone’s house.”
He proceeded briskly.
“Someone should answer that phone,” he mused.
He sat on a curb to pick a rock from his shoe, idly.
“Someone!” he screamed, leaping. “Me! Good lord, what’s wrong with me!” he shrieked. He whirled. Which house? That one!
He raced over the lawn, up the steps, into the house, down a dark hall.
He yanked up the receiver.
“Hello!” he cried.
Buzzzzzzzzz.
“Hello, hello!”
They had hung up.
“Hello!” he shouted, and banged the phone. “You stupid idiot!” he cried to himself. “Sitting on that curb, you fool! Oh, you damned and awful fool!” He squeezed the phone. “Come on, ring again! Come on!”
He had never thought there might be others left on Mars. In the entire week he had seen no one. He had figured that all other towns were as empty as this one.
Now, staring at this terrible little black phone, he trembled. Interlocking dial systems connected every town on Mars. From which of thirty cities had the call come?
He didn’t know.
He waited. He wandered to the strange kitchen, thawed some iced huckleberries, ate them disconsolately.
“There wasn’t anyone on the other end of that call,” he murmured. “Maybe a pole blew down somewhere and the phone rang by itself.”
But hadn’t he heard a click, which meant someone had hung up far away?
He stood in the hall the rest of the night. “Not because of the phone,” he told himself. “I just haven’t anything else to do.”
He listened to his watch tick.
“She won’t phone back,” he said. “She won’t ever call a number that didn’t answer. She’s probably dialing other houses in town right now! And here I sit — Wait a minute!” He laughed. “Why do I keep saying «she»?”
He blinked. “It could as easily be a «he,» couldn’t it?”
His heart slowed. He felt very cold and hollow.
He wanted very much for it to be a “she.”
He walked out of the house and s
tood in the center of the early, dim morning street.
He listened. Not a sound. No birds. No cars. Only his heart beating. Beat and pause and beat again. His face ached with strain. The wind blew gently, oh so gently, flapping his coat.
“Sh,” he whispered. “Listen.”
He swayed in a slow cirde, turning his head from one silent house to another.
She’ll phone more and more numbers, he thought. It must be a woman. Why? Only a woman would call and call. A man wouldn’t. A man’s independent. Did I phone anyone? No! Never thought of it. It must be a woman. It has to be, by God!
Listen.
Far away, under the stars, a phone rang.
He ran. He stopped to listen. The ringing, soft. He ran a few more steps. Louder. He raced down an alley. Louder still! He passed six houses, six more. Much louder! He chose a house and its door was locked.
The phone rang inside.
“Damn you!” He jerked the doorknob.
The phone screamed.
He heaved a porch chair through a parlor window, leaped in after it.
Before he even touched the phone, it was silent.
He stalked through the house then and broke mirrors, tore down drapes, and kicked in the kitchen stove.
Finally, exhausted, he picked up the thin directory which listed every phone on Mars. Fifty thousand names.
He started with number one.
Amelia Ames. He dialed her number in New Chicago, one hundred miles over the dead sea.
No answer.
Number two lived in New New York, five thousand miles across the blue mountains.
No answer.
He called three, four, five, six, seven, eight, his fingers jerking, unable to grip the receiver.
A woman’s voice answered, “Hello?”
Walter cried back at her, “Hello, oh lord, hello!”
“This is a recording,” recited the woman’s voice. “Miss Helen Arasumian is not home. Will you leave a message on the wire spool so she may call you when she returns? Hello? This is a recording. Miss Arasumian is not home. Will you leave a message — ”
He hung up.
He sat with his mouth twitching.
On second thought he redialed that number.
The Martian Chronicles Page 17