by Ray Bradbury
‘You …’ she said, dazedly.
She began to cry. Very silently, with no noise, her shoulders moved, as she sank down on a chair.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, lamely, hating the scene. ‘I didn’t mean to say that, Lisa. Forgive me.’ He came and laid a hand upon her quivering body.
‘I won’t leave you,’ she said, finally.
And closing her eyes, she began to think.
It was much later in the day when she returned from a shopping trip to town with bulging grocery sacks and a large gleaming bottle of champagne.
David looked at it and laughed aloud. ‘Celebrating, are we?’
‘Yes,’ she said, giving him the bottle and an opener. ‘Celebrating you as the world’s greatest poet!’
‘I detect sarcasm, Lisa,’ he said, pouring drinks. ‘Here’s a toast to the – the universe.’ He drank. ‘Good stuff.’ He pointed at hers. ‘Drink up. What’s wrong?’ Her eyes looked wet and sad about something.
She refilled his glass and lifted her own. ‘May we always be together. Always.’
The room tilted. ‘It’s hitting me,’ he observed very seriously, sitting down so as not to fall. ‘On an empty stomach I drank. Oh, Lord!’
He sat for ten minutes while she refilled his glass. She seemed very happy suddenly, for no reason. He sat scowling, thinking, looking at his pen and ink and paper, trying to make a decision. ‘Lisa?’
‘Yes?’ She was now preparing supper, singing.
‘I feel in a mood. I have been considering all afternoon and—’
‘And what, darling?’
‘I am going to write the greatest poem in history – NOW!’
She felt her heart flutter.
‘Will your poem be about the valley?’
He smirked. ‘No. No! Bigger than that. Much bigger!’
‘I’m afraid I’m not much good at guessing,’ she confessed.
‘Simple,’ he said, gulping another drink of champagne. Nice of her to think of buying it, it stimulated his thoughts. He held up his pen and dipped it in ink. ‘I shall write my poem about the universe! Let me see now …’
‘David!’
He winced. ‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just, have some more champagne, darling.’
‘Eh?’ He blinked fuzzily. ‘Don’t mind if I do. Pour.’
She sat beside him, trying to be casual.
‘Tell me again. What is it you’ll write?’
‘About the universe, the stars, the epileptic shamblings of comets, the blind black seekings of meteors, the heated embraces and spawnings of giant suns, the cold, graceful excursions of polar planets, asteroids plummeting like paramecium under a gigantic microscope, all and everything and anything my mind lays claim to! Earth, sun, stars!’ he exclaimed.
‘No!’ she said, but caught herself. ‘I mean, darling, don’t do it all at once. One thing at a time—’
‘One at a time.’ He made a face. ‘That’s the way I’ve been doing things and I’m tied to dandelions and daisies.’
He wrote upon the paper with the pen.
‘What’re you doing?’ she demanded, catching his elbow.
‘Let me alone!’ He shook her off.
She saw the black words form:
‘Illimitable universe, with stars and planets and suns—’
She must have screamed.
‘No, David, cross it out, before it’s too late. Stop it!’
He gazed at her as through a long dark tube, and her far away at the other end, echoing. ‘Cross it out?’ he said. ‘Why, it’s GOOD poetry! Not a line will I cross out. I want to be a GOOD poet!’
She fell across him, groping, finding the pen. With one instantaneous slash, she wiped out the words.
‘Before the ink dries, before it dries!’
‘Fool!’ he shouted. ‘Let me alone!’
She ran to the window. The first evening stars were still there, and the crescent moon. She sobbed with relief. She swung about to face him and walked toward him. ‘I want to help you write your poem—’
‘Don’t need your help!’
‘Are you blind? Do you realize the power of your pen!’
To distract him, she poured more champagne, which he welcomed and drank. ‘Ah,’ he sighed, dizzily. ‘My head spins.’
But it didn’t stop him from writing, and write he did, starting again on a new sheet of paper.
‘UNIVERSE – VAST UNIVERSE – BILLION STARRED AND WIDE—’
She snatched frantically at shreds of things to say, things to stave off his writing.
‘That’s poor poetry,’ she said.
‘What do you mean “poor”?’ he wanted to know, writing.
‘You’ve got to start at the beginning and build up,’ she explained logically. ‘Like a watch spring being wound or the universe starting with a molecule building on up through stars into a stellar cartwheel—’
He slowed his writing and scowled with thought.
She hurried on, seeing this. ‘You see, darling, you’ve let emotion run off with you. You can’t start with the big things. Put them at the end of your poem. Build to a climax!’
The ink was drying. She stared at it as it dried. In another sixty seconds—
He stopped writing. ‘Maybe you’re right. Just maybe you are.’ He put aside the pen a moment.
‘I know I’m right,’ she said, lightly, laughing. ‘Here. I’ll just take the pen and – there—’
She had expected him to stop her, but he was holding his pale brow and looking pained with the ache in his eyes from the drink.
She drew a bold line through his poem. Her heart slowed.
‘Now,’ she said, solicitously, ‘you take the pen, and I’ll help you. Start out with small things and build, like an artist.’
His eyes were gray-filmed. ‘Maybe you’re right, maybe, maybe.’
The wind howled outside.
‘Catch the wind!’ she cried, to give him a minor triumph to satisfy his ego. ‘Catch the wind!’
He stroked the pen. ‘Caught it!’ he bellowed, drunkenly, weaving. ‘Caught the wind! Made a cage of ink!’
‘Catch the flowers!’ she commanded, excitedly. ‘Every one in the valley! And the grass!’
‘There! Caught the flowers!’
‘The hill next!’ she said.
‘The hill!’
‘The valley!’
‘The valley!’
‘The sunlight, the odors, the trees, the shadows, the house and the garden, and the things inside the house!’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he cried, going on and on and on.
And while he wrote quickly she said, ‘David, I love you. Forgive me for what I do next, darling—’
‘What?’ he asked, not having heard her.
‘Nothing at all. Except that we are never satisfied and want to go on beyond proper limits. You tried to do that, David, and it was wrong.’
He nodded over his work. She kissed him on the cheek. He reached up and patted her chin. ‘Know what, lady?’
‘What?’
‘I think I like you, yes, sir, I think I like you.’
She shook him. ‘Don’t go to sleep, David, don’t.’
‘Want to sleep. Want to sleep.’
‘Later, darling. When you’ve finished your poem, your last great poem, the very finest one, David. Listen to me—’
He fumbled with the pen. ‘What’ll I say?’
She smoothed his hair, touched his cheek with her fingers and kissed him, tremblingly. Then, closing her eyes, she began to dictate.
‘There lived a fine man named David and his wife’s name was Lisa and—’
The pen moved slowly, achingly, tiredly forming words.
‘Yes?’ he prompted.
‘– and they lived in a house in the garden of Eden—’
He wrote again, tediously. She watched.
He raised his eyes. ‘Well? What’s next?’
She looked at the house, and the night outside, and the win
d returned to sing in her ears and she held his hands and kissed his sleepy lips.
‘That’s all,’ she said, ‘the ink is drying.’
The publishers from New York visited the valley months later and went back to New York with only three pieces of paper they had found blowing in the wind around and about the raw, scarred, empty valley.
The publishers stared at one another, blankly:
‘Why, why, there was nothing left at all,’ they said. ‘Just bare rock, not a sign of vegetation or humanity. The home he lived in – gone! The road, everything! He was gone! His wife, she was gone, too! Not a word out of them. It was like a river flood had washed through, scraping away the whole countryside! Gone! Washed out! And only three last poems to show for the whole thing!’
No further word was ever received from the poet or his wife. The Agricultural College experts traveled hundreds of miles to study the starkly denuded valley, and went away, shaking their heads and looking pale.
But it is all simply found again.
You turn the pages of his last small thin book and read the three poems.
She is there, pale and beautiful and immortal, you smell the sweet warm flash of her, young forever, hair blowing golden upon the wind.
And next to her, upon the opposite page, he stands gaunt, smiling, firm, hair like raven’s hair, hands on hips, face raised to look about him.
And on all sides of them, green with an immortal green, under a sapphire sky, with the odor of fat wine grapes, with the grass knee-high and bending to touch of exploring feet, with the trails waiting for any reader who takes them, one finds the valley, and the house, and the deep rich peace of sunlight and of moonlight and many stars, and the two of them, he and she, walking through it all, laughing together, forever and forever.
April 2026: The Long Years
Whenever the wind came through the sky, he and his small family would sit in the stone hut and warm their hands over a wood 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 reply, and he would speak to his two daughters and his son about the old days on Earth, and they would all answer 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 Hathaway and his family on the long Martian nights.
This night one of the violent Martian dust storms had come over the low Martian graveyards, blowing through ancient towns and tearing away the plastic walls of the newer, American-built city that was melting down into the sand, desolated.
The storm abated. Hathaway went out into the cleared weather to see Earth burning green on the windy sky. He put his hand up as one might reach to adjust a dimly burning globe in the ceiling of a dark room. He looked across the long-dead sea bottoms. Not another living thing on this entire planet, he thought. Just myself. And them. He looked back within the stone hut.
What was happening on Earth now? He had seen no visible sign of change in Earth’s aspect through his thirty-inch telescope. Well, he thought, I’m good for another twenty years if I’m careful. Someone might come. Either across the dead seas or out of space in a rocket on a little thread of red flame.
He called into the hut, ‘I’m going to take a walk.’
‘All right,’ his wife said.
He moved quietly down through a series of ruins. ‘Made in New York,’ he read from a piece of metal as he passed. ‘And all these things from Earth will be gone long before the old Martian towns.’ He looked toward the fifty-centuries-old village that lay among the blue mountains.
He came to a solitary Martian graveyard, a series of small hexagonal stones on a hill swept by the lonely wind.
He stood looking down at four graves with crude wooden crosses on them, and names. Tears did not come to his eyes. They had dried long ago.
‘Do you forgive me for what I’ve done?’ he asked of the crosses. ‘I was very much alone. You do understand, don’t you?’
He returned to the stone hut and once more, just before going in, shaded his eyes, searching the black sky.
‘You keep waiting and waiting and looking,’ he said, ‘and one night, perhaps—’
There was a tiny red flame on the sky.
He stepped away from the light of the hut.
‘– and you look again,’ he whispered.
The tiny red flame was still there.
‘It wasn’t there last night,’ he whispered.
He stumbled and fell, picked himself up, ran behind the hut, swiveled the telescope, and pointed it at the sky.
A minute later, after a long, wild staring, he appeared in the low door of the hut. The wife and the two daughters and the son turned their heads to him. Finally he was able to speak.
‘I have good news,’ he said. ‘I have looked at the sky. A rocket 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.
He burned what was left of New New York that morning at three.
He took a torch and moved into the plastic city and with the flame touched the walls here or there. The city bloomed up in great tosses of heat and light. It was a square mile of illumination, big enough to be seen out in space. It would beckon the rocket down to Mr Hathaway and his family.
His heart beating rapidly with pain, he returned to the hut. ‘See?’ He held up a dusty bottle into the light. ‘Wine I saved, just for tonight. I knew that someday someone would find us! We’ll have a drink to celebrate!’
He poured five glasses full.
‘It’s been a long time,’ he said, gravely looking into his drink. ‘Remember the day the war broke? Twenty years and seven months ago. And all the rockets were called home from Mars. And you and I and the children were out in the mountains, doing archaeological work, research on the ancient surgical methods of the Martians. We ran our horses, almost killing them, remember? But we got 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. I couldn’t have stood it without you here, all of you. I’d have killed myself without you. But with you, it was worth waiting. Here’s to us, then.’ He lifted his glass. ‘And to our long wait together.’ He drank.
The wife and the two daughters and the son 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 grew larger.
From the stone hut came the rich brown smell of baked gingerbread. 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’ll have a huge breakfast for them,’ laughed Hathaway. ‘Put on your best clothes!’
He hurried 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, telephones, and spool recorders in his spare time. The shed was full of things he had built, some senseless mechanisms the functions of which were a mystery even to himself now as he looked upon them.
From the deep freeze he fetched rimed cartons of beans and strawberries, twenty years old. Lazarus come forth, he thought, and pulled out a cool chicken.
The air was full of cooking odors when the rocket landed.
Like a boy, Hathaway raced down the hill. He stopped once because of a sudden sick pain in his chest. He sat on a rock to regain his breath, then ran all the rest of the way.
He stood in the hot atmosphere generated by the fiery rocket. A port opened. A
man looked down.
Hathaway shielded his eyes and at last said, ‘Captain Wilder!’
‘Who is it?’ asked Captain Wilder, and jumped down and stood there looking at the old man. He put his hand out. ‘Good lord, it’s Hathaway!’
‘That’s right.’ They looked into each other’s faces.
‘Hathaway, from my old crew, from the Fourth Expedition.’
‘It’s been a long time, Captain.’
‘Too long. It’s good to see you.’
‘I’m old,’ said Hathaway simply.
‘I’m not young myself anymore. I’ve been out to Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune for twenty years.’
‘I heard they had kicked you upstairs so you wouldn’t interfere with colonial policy here on Mars.’ The old man looked around. ‘You’ve been gone so long you don’t know what’s happened—’
Wilder said, ‘I can guess. We’ve circled Mars twice. Found only one other man, name of Walter Gripp, about ten thousand miles from here. We offered to take him with us, but he said no. The last we saw of him he was sitting in the middle of the highway in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe, waving to us. Mars is pretty well dead, not even a Martian alive. What about Earth?’
‘You know as much as I do. Once in a while I get the Earth radio, very faintly. But it’s always in some other language. I’m sorry to say I only know Latin. A few words come through. I take it most of Earth’s a shambles, but the war goes on. Are you going back, sir?’
‘Yes. We’re curious, of course. We had no radio contact so far out in space. We’ll want to see Earth, no matter what.’
‘You’ll take us with you?’
The captain started. ‘Of course, your wife, I remember her. Twenty-five years ago, wasn’t it? When they opened First Town and you quit the service and brought her up here. And there were children—’
‘My son and two daughters.’
‘Yes, I remember. They’re here?’
‘Up at our hut. There’s a fine breakfast waiting all of you up the hill. Will you come?’
‘We would be honored, Mr Hathaway.’ Captain Wilder called to the rocket, ‘Abandon ship!’