Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  “Back!” cried Mrs. Wilkes, alarmed. “They’ll crush my daughter like a spring berry!”

  “Stand off!” Jamie seized canes and crutches and threw them over the mob, which turned on itself to go seek their missing members.

  “Father, I fail, I fail,” gasped Camillia.

  “Father!” cried Jamie. “There’s but one way to stop this riot! Charge them! Make them pay to give us their mind on this ailment!”

  “Jamie, you are my son! Quick, boy, paint a sign! Listen, people! Tuppence! Queue up please, a line! Tuppence to speak your piece! Get your money out, yes! That’s it. You, sir. You, madame. And you, sir. Now, my quill! Begin!”

  The mob boiled in like a dark sea.

  Camillia opened one eye and swooned again.

  Sundown, the streets almost empty, only a few strollers now. Camillia moth-fluttered her eyelids at a familiar clinking jingle.

  “Three hundred and ninety-nine, four hundred pennies!” Mr. Wilkes counted the last money into a bag held by his grinning son. “There!”

  “It will buy me a fine black funeral coach,” said the pale girl.

  “Hush! Did you imagine, family, so many people, two hundred, would pay to give us their opinion?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Wilkes. “Wives, husbands, children, are deaf to each other. So people gladly pay to have someone listen. Poor things, each today thought he and he alone knew quinsy, dropsy, glanders, could tell the slaver from the hives. So tonight we are rich and two hundred people are happy, having unloaded their full medical kit at our door.”

  “Gods, instead of quelling the riot, we had to drive them off snapping like pups.”

  “Read us the list, Father,” said Jamie, “of two hundred remedies. Which one is true?”

  “I care not,” whispered Camillia, sighing. “It grows dark. My stomach is queasy from listening to the names! May I be taken upstairs?”

  “Yes, dear. Jamie, lift!”

  “Please,” said a voice.

  Half-bent, the men looked up.

  There stood a Dustman of no particular size or shape, his face masked with soot from which shone water-blue eyes and a white slot of an ivory smile. Dust sifted from his sleeves and his pants as he moved, as he talked quietly, nodding.

  “I couldn’t get through the mob earlier,” he said, holding his dirty cap in his hands. “Now, going home, here I am. Must I pay?”

  “No, Dustman, you need not,” said Camillia gently.

  “Hold on—” protested Mr. Wilkes.

  But Camillia gave him a soft look and he grew silent.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” The Dustman’s smile flashed like warm sunlight in the growing dusk. “I have but one advice.”

  He gazed at Camillia. She gazed at him.

  “Be this Saint Bosco’s Eve, sir, ma’am?”

  “Who knows? Not me, sir!” said Mr. Wilkes.

  “I think it is Saint Bosco’s Eve, sir. Also, it is the night of the Full Moon. So,” said the Dustman humbly, unable to take his eyes from the lovely haunted girl, “you must leave your daughter out in the light of that rising moon.”

  “Out under the moon!” said Mrs. Wilkes.

  “Doesn’t that make the lunatic?” asked Jamie.

  “Beg pardon, sir.” The Dustman bowed. “But the full moon soothes all sick animal, be they human or plain field beast. There is a serenity of color, a quietude of touch, a sweet sculpturing of mind and body in full moonlight.”

  “It may rain—” said the mother uneasily.

  “I swear,” said the Dustman quickly. “My sister suffered this same swooning paleness. We set her like a potted lily out one spring night with the moon. She lives today in Sussex, the soul of reconstituted health!”

  “Reconstituted! Moonlight! And will cost us not one penny of the four hundred we collected this day, Mother, Jamie, Camillia.”

  “No!” said Mrs. Wilkes. “I won’t have it!”

  “Mother,” said Camillia.

  She looked earnestly at the Dustman.

  From his grimed face the Dustman gazed back, his smile like a little scimitar in the dark.

  “Mother,” said Camillia. “I feel it. The moon will cure me, it will, it will....”

  The mother sighed. “This is not my day, nor night. Let me kiss you for the last time, then. There.”

  And the mother went upstairs.

  Now the Dustman backed off, bowing courteously to all.

  “All night, now, remember, beneath the moon, not the slightest disturbance until dawn. Sleep well, young lady. Dream, and dream the best. Good night.”

  Soot was lost in soot; the man was gone.

  Mr. Wilkes and Jamie kissed Camillia’s brow.

  “Father, Jamie,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  And she was left alone to stare off where at a great distance she thought she saw a smile hung by itself in the dark blink off and on, then go round a corner, vanishing.

  She waited for the rising of the moon.

  Night in London, the voices growing drowsier in the inns, the slamming of doors, drunken farewells, clocks chiming. Camillia saw a cat like a woman stroll by in her furs, saw a woman like a cat stroll by, both wise, both Egyptian, both smelling of spice. Every quarter hour or so a voice drifted down from above:

  “You all right, child?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Camillia?”

  “Mother, Jamie, I’m fine.”

  And at last. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  The last lights out. London asleep.

  The moon rose.

  And the higher the moon, the larger grew Camillia’s eyes as she watched the alleys, the courts, the streets, until at last, at midnight, the moon moved over her to show her like a marble figure atop an ancient tomb.

  A motion in darkness.

  Camillia pricked her ears.

  A faint melody sprang out on the air.

  A man stood in the shadows of the court.

  Camillia gasped.

  The man stepped forth into moonlight, carrying a lute which he strummed softly. He was a man well-dressed, whose face was handsome and, now anyway, solemn.

  “A troubadour,” said Camillia aloud.

  The man, his finger on his lips, moved slowly forward and soon stood by her cot.

  “What are you doing out so late?” asked the girl, unafraid but not knowing why.

  “A friend sent me to make you well.” He touched the lute strings. They hummed sweetly. He was indeed handsome there in the silver light.

  “That cannot be,” she said, “for it was told me, the moon is my cure.”

  “And so it will be, maiden.”

  “What songs do you sing?”

  “Songs of spring nights, aches and ailments without name. Shall I name your fever, maiden?”

  “If you know it, yes.”

  “First, the symptoms: raging temperatures, sudden cold, heart fast then slow, storms of temper, then sweet calms, drunkenness from having sipped only well water, dizziness from being touched only thus—”

  He touched her wrist, saw her melt toward delicious oblivion, drew back.

  “Depressions, elations,” he went on. “Dreams—”

  “Stop!” she cried, enthralled. “You know me to the letter. Now, name my ailment!”

  “I will.” He pressed his lips to the palm of her hand so she quaked suddenly. “The name of the ailment is Camillia Wilkes.”

  “How strange.” She shivered, her eyes glinting lilac fires. “Am I then my own affliction? How sick I make myself! Even now, feel my heart!”

  “I feel it, so.”

  “My limbs, they burn with summer heat!”

  “Yes. They scorch my fingers.”

  “But now, the night wind, see how I shudder, cold! I die, I swear it, I die!”

  “I will not let you,” he said quietly.

  “Are you a doctor, then?”

  “No, just your plain, your ordinary physician, like another who guessed
your trouble this day. The girl who would have named it but ran off in the crowd.”

  “Yes, I saw in her eyes she knew what had seized me. But, now, my teeth chatter. And no extra blanket!”

  “Give room, please. There. Let me see: two arms, two legs, head and body. I’m all here!”

  “What, sir!”

  “To warm you from the night, of course.”

  “How like a hearth! Oh, sir, sir, do I know you? Your name?”

  Swiftly above her, his head shadowed hers. From it his merry clear-water eyes glowed as did his white ivory slot of a smile.

  “Why, Bosco, of course,” he said.

  “Is there not a saint by that name?”

  “Given an hour, you will call me so, yes.”

  His head bent closer. Thus sooted in shadow, she cried with joyous recognition to welcome her Dustman back.

  “The world spins! I pass away! The cure, sweet Doctor, or all is lost!”

  “The cure,” he said. “And the cure is this …”

  Somewhere, cats sang. A shoe, shot from a window, tipped them off a fence. Then all was silence and the moon …

  “Shh …”

  Dawn. Tiptoeing downstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes peered into their courtyard.

  “Frozen stone dead from the terrible night, I know it!”

  “No, wife, look! Alive! Roses in her cheeks! No, more! Peaches, persimmons! She glows all rosy-milky! Sweet Camillia, alive and well, made whole again!”

  They bent by the slumbering girl.

  “She smiles, she dreams; what’s that she says?”

  “The sovereign,” sighed the girl, “remedy.”

  “What, what?”

  The girl smiled again, a white smile, in her sleep.

  “A medicine,” she murmured, “for melancholy.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “Oh, Mother, Father!”

  “Daughter! Child! Come upstairs!”

  “No.” She took their hands, tenderly. “Mother? Father?”

  “Yes?”

  “No one will see. The sun but rises. Please. Dance with me.”

  They did not want to dance.

  But, celebrating they knew not what, they did.

  Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed, by Ray Bradbury

  This is one of Bradbury’s delicately dreamy stories about a father living on Mars who wants to return to earth with his family. The characters transform in this tale, losing their fear and their memories and their human form as they slowly turn into Martians. This can easily be called a “green” story today, as the characters forsake the human houses for the Martian villas. What makes this tale so good is that it promotes the idea that man cannot control outer space – that no matter how many rockets the humans build or how many colonists they send into the stars, humans will be forced to adapt to the new environment instead of the other way around.

  The rocket metal cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family.

  The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the center of a vacuum. His wife, before him, seemed almost to whirl away in smoke. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes.

  The children looked up at him, as people look to the sun to tell what time of their life it is. His face was cold.

  “What’s wrong?” asked his wife.

  “Let’s get back on the rocket.”

  “Go back to Earth?”

  “Yes! Listen!”

  The wind blew as if to flake away their identities. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone. He felt submerged in a chemical that could dissolve his intellect and burn away his past.

  They looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. They saw the old cities, lost in their meadows, lying like children’s delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass.

  “Chin up, Harry,” said his wife. “It’s too late. We’ve come over sixty million miles.”

  The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There was no answer but the racing hiss of wind through the stiff grass.

  He picked up the luggage in his cold hands. “Here we go,” he said—a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned.

  They walked into town.

  Their name was Bittering. Harry and his wife Cora; Dan, Laura, and David. They built a small white cottage and ate good breakfasts there, but the fear was never gone. It lay with Mr. Bittering and Mrs. Bittering, a third unbidden partner at every midnight talk, at every dawn awakening.

  “I feel like a salt crystal,” he said, “in a mountain stream, being washed away. We don’t belong here. We’re Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martians. For heaven’s sake, Cora, let’s buy tickets for home!”

  But she only shook her head. “One day the atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we’ll be safe here.”

  “Safe and insane!”

  Tick-tock, seven o’clock sang the voice-clock; time to get up. And they did.

  Something made him check everything each morning—warm hearth, potted blood-geraniums—precisely as if he expected something to be amiss. The morning paper was toast-warm from the 6 A.M. Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted it at his breakfast place. He forced himself to be convivial.

  “Colonial days all over again,” he declared. “Why, in ten years there’ll be a million Earthmen on Mars. Big cities, everything! They said we’d fail. Said the Martians would resent our invasion. But did we find any Martians? Not a living soul! Oh, we found their empty cities, but no one in them. Right?”

  A river of wind submerged the house. When the windows ceased rattling Mr. Bittering swallowed and looked at the children.

  “I don’t know,” said David. “Maybe there’re Martians around we don’t see. Sometimes nights I think I hear ’em. I hear the wind. The sand hits my window. I get scared. And I see those towns way up in the mountains where the Martians lived a long time ago. And I think I see things moving around those towns, Papa. And I wonder if those Martians mind us living here. I wonder if they won’t do something to us for coming here.”

  “Nonsense!” Mr. Bittering looked out the windows. “We’re clean, decent people.” He looked at his children. “All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean.” He stared at the hills. “You see a staircase and you wonder what Martians looked like climbing it. You see Martian paintings and you wonder what the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind, a memory. It’s quite natural. Imagination.” He stopped. “You haven’t been prowling up in those ruins, have you?”

  “No, Papa.” David looked at his shoes.

  “See that you stay away from them. Pass the jam.”

  “Just the same,” said little David, “I bet something happens.”

  Something happened that afternoon.

  Laura stumbled through the settlement, crying. She dashed blindly onto the porch.

  “Mother, Father—the war, Earth!” she sobbed. “A radio flash just came. Atom bombs hit New York! All the space rockets blown up. No more rockets to Mars, ever!”

  “Oh, Harry!” The mother held onto her husband and daughter.

  “Are you sure, Laura?” asked the father quietly.

  Laura wept. “We’re stranded on Mars, forever and ever!”

  For a long time there was only the sound of the wind in the late afternoon.

  Alone, thought Bittering. Only a thousand of us here. No way back. No way. No way. Sweat poured from his face and his hands and his body; he was drenched in the hotness of his fear. He wanted to strike Laura, cry, “No, you’re lying! The rockets will come back!” Instead, he stroked Laura’s head against him and said, “The rockets will get through someday.”

  “Father
, what will we do?”

  “Go about our business, of course. Raise crops and children. Wait. Keep things going until the war ends and the rockets come again.”

  The two boys stepped out onto the porch.

  “Children,” he said, sitting there, looking beyond them, “I’ve something to tell you.”

  “We know,” they said.

  In the following days, Bittering wandered often through the garden to stand alone in his fear. As long as the rockets had spun a silver web across space, he had been able to accept Mars. For he had always told himself: Tomorrow, if I want, I can buy a ticket and go back to Earth.

  But now: The web gone, the rockets lying in jigsaw heaps of molten girder and unsnaked wire. Earth people left to the strangeness of Mars, the cinnamon dusts and wine airs, to be baked like gingerbread shapes in Martian summers, put into harvested storage by Martian winters. What would happen to him, the others? This was the moment Mars had waited for. Now it would eat them.

  He got down on his knees in the flower bed, a spade in his nervous hands. Work, he thought, work and forget.

  He glanced up from the garden to the Martian mountains. He thought of the proud old Martian names that had once been on those peaks. Earthmen, dropping from the sky, had gazed upon hills, rivers, Martian seats left nameless in spite of names. Once Martians had built cities, named cities; climbed mountains, named mountains; sailed seas, named seas. Mountains melted, seas drained, cities tumbled. In spite of this, the Earthmen had felt a silent guilt at putting new names to these ancient hills and valleys.

  Nevertheless, man lives by symbol and label. The names were given.

  Mr. Bittering felt very alone in his garden under the Martian sun, anachronism bent here, planting Earth flowers in a wild soil.

  Think. Keep thinking. Different things. Keep your mind free of Earth, the atom war, the lost rockets.

  He perspired. He glanced about. No one watching. He removed his tie. Pretty bold, he thought. First your coat off, now your tie. He hung it neatly on a peach tree he had imported as a sapling from Massachusetts.