by Ray Bradbury
They winked tremendously at each other. They flung up their hands to clap the air. ‘Hey!’
‘Hooray!’ said the crowd.
They set the Earth Men on a table. The shouting died.
The captain almost broke into tears. ‘Thank you. It’s good, it’s good.’
‘Tell us about yourselves,’ suggested Mr Uuu.
The captain cleared his throat.
The audience ohed and ahed as the captain talked. He introduced his crew; each made a small speech and was embarrassed by the thunderous applause.
Mr Uuu clapped the captain’s shoulder. ‘It’s good to see another man from Earth. I am from Earth also.’
‘How was that again?’
‘There are many of us here from Earth.’
‘You? From Earth?’ The captain stared. ‘But is that possible? Did you come by rocket? Has space travel been going on for centuries?’ His voice was disappointed. ‘What—what country are you from?’
‘Tuiereol. I came by the spirit of my body, years ago.’
‘Tuiereol.’ The captain mouthed the word. ‘I don’t know that country. What’s this about spirit of body?’
‘And Miss Rrr over here, she’s from Earth, too, aren’t you, Miss Rrr?’
Miss Rrr nodded and laughed strangely.
‘And so is Mr Www and Mr Qqq and Mr Vvv!’
‘I’m from Jupiter,’ declared one man, preening himself.
‘I’m from Saturn,’ said another, eyes glinting slyly.
‘Jupiter, Saturn,’ murmured the captain, blinking.
It was very quiet now; the people stood around and sat at the tables which were strangely empty for banquet tables. Their yellow eyes were glowing, and there were dark shadows under their cheekbones. The captain noticed for the first time that there were no windows; the light seemed to permeate the walls. There was only one door. The captain winced. ‘This is confusing. Where on Earth is this Tuiereol? Is it near America?’
‘What is America?’
‘You never heard of America! You say you’re from Earth and yet you don’t know!’
Mr Uuu drew himself up angrily. ‘Earth is a place of seas and nothing but seas. There is no land. I am from Earth, and know.’
‘Wait a minute.’ The captain sat back. ‘You look like a regular Martian. Yellow eyes. Brown skin.’
‘Earth is a place of all jungle,’ said Miss Rrr proudly. ‘I am from Orri, on Earth, a civilization built of silver!’
Now the captain turned his head from and then to Mr Uuu and then to Mr Www and Mr Zzz and Mr Nnn and Mr Hhh and Mr Bbb. He saw their yellow eyes waxing and waning in the light, focusing and unfocusing. He began to shiver. Finally he turned to his men and regarded them somberly.
‘Do you realize what this is?’
‘What, sir?’
‘This is no celebration,’ replied the captain tiredly. ‘This is no banquet. These aren’t government representatives. This is no surprise party. Look at their eyes. Listen to them!’
Nobody breathed. There was only a soft white move of eyes in the close room.
‘Now I understand’—the captain’s voice was far away—‘why everyone gave us notes and passed us on, one from the other, until we met Mr Iii, who sent us down a corridor with a key to open a door and shut a door. And here we are…’
‘Where are we, sir?’
The captain exhaled. ‘In an insane asylum.’
It was night. The large hall lay quiet and dimly illumined by hidden light sources in the transparent walls. The four Earth Men sat around a wooden table, their bleak heads bent over their whispers. On the floors, men and women lay huddled. There were little stirs in the dark corners, solitary men or women gesturing their hands. Every half-hour one of the captain’s men would try the silver door and return to the table. ‘Nothing doing, sir. We’re locked in proper.’
‘They think we’re really insane, sir?’
‘Quite. That’s why there was no hullabaloo to welcome us. They merely tolerated what, to them, must be a constantly recurring psychotic condition.’ He gestured at the dark sleeping shapes all about them. ‘Paranoids, every single one! What a welcome they gave us! For a moment there’—a little fire rose and died in his eyes—‘I thought we were getting our true reception. All the yelling and singing and speeches. Pretty nice, wasn’t it—while it lasted?’
‘How long will they keep us here, sir?’
‘Until we prove we’re not psychotics.’
‘That should be easy.’
‘I hope so.’
‘You don’t sound very certain, sir.’
‘I’m not. Look in that corner.’
A man squatted alone in darkness. Out of his mouth issued a blue flame which turned into the round shape of a small naked woman. It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt light, whispering and sighing.
The captain nodded at another corner. A woman stood there, changing. First she was embedded in a crystal pillar, then she melted into a golden statue, finally a staff of polished cedar, and back to a woman.
All through the midnight hall people were juggling thin violet flames, shifting, changing, for nighttime was the time of change and affliction.
‘Magicians, sorcerers,’ whispered one of the Earth Men.
‘No, hallucination. They pass their insanity over into us so that we see their hallucinations too. Telepathy. Autosuggestion and telepathy.’
‘Is that what worries you, sir?’
‘Yes. If hallucinations can appear this “real” to us, to anyone, if hallucinations are catching and almost believable, it’s no wonder they mistook us for psychotics. If that man can produce little blue fire women and that woman there melt into a pillar, how natural if normal Martians think we produce our rocket ship with our minds.’
‘Oh,’ said his men in the shadows.
Around them, in the vast hall, flames leaped blue, flared, evaporated. Little demons of red sand ran between the teeth of sleeping men. Women became oily snakes. There was a smell of reptiles and animals.
In the morning everyone stood around looking fresh, happy, and normal. There were no flames or demons in the room. The captain and his men waited by the silver door, hoping it would open.
Mr Xxx arrived after about four hours. They had a suspicion that he had waited outside the door, peering in at them for at least three hours before he stepped in, beckoned, and led them to his small office.
He was a jovial, smiling man, if one could believe the mask he wore, for upon it was painted not one smile, but three. Behind it, his voice was the voice of a not so smiling psychologist. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’
‘You think we’re insane, and we’re not,’ said the captain.
‘Contrarily, I do not think all of you are insane.’ The psychologist pointed a little wand at the captain. ‘No. Just you, sir. The others are secondary hallucinations.’
The captain slapped his knee. ‘So that’s it! That’s why Mr Iii laughed when I suggested my men sign the papers too!’
‘Yes, Mr Iii told me.’ The psychologist laughed out of the carved, smiling mouth. ‘A good joke. Where was I? Secondary hallucinations, yes. Women come to me with snakes crawling from their ears. When I cure them, the snakes vanish.’
‘We’ll be glad to be cured. Go right ahead.’
Mr Xxx seemed surprised. ‘Unusual. Not many people want to be cured. The cure is drastic, you know.’
‘Cure ahead! I’m confident you’ll find we’re all sane.’
‘Let me check your papers to be sure they’re in order for a “cure.”’ He checked a file. ‘Yes. You know, such cases as yours need special “curing.” The people in that hall are simpler forms. But once you’ve gone this far, I must point out, with primary, secondary, auditory, olfactory, and labial hallucinations, as well as tactile and optical fantasies, it is pretty bad business. We have to resort to euthanasia.’
The captain leaped up with a roar. ‘Look here, we’ve stood quite enough! Test us, tap our kn
ees, check our hearts, exercise us, ask questions!’
‘You are free to speak.’
The captain raved for an hour. The psychologist listened.
‘Incredible,’ he mused. ‘Most detailed dream fantasy I’ve ever heard.’
‘God damn it, we’ll show you the rocket ship!’ screamed the captain.
‘I’d like to see it. Can you manifest it in this room?’
‘Oh, certainly. It’s in that file of yours, under R.’
Mr Xxx peered seriously into his file. He went ‘Tsk’ and shut the file solemnly. ‘Why did you tell me to look? The rocket isn’t there.’
‘Of course not, you idiot! I was joking. Does an insane man joke?’
‘You find some odd senses of humor. Now, take me out to your rocket. I wish to see it.’
It was noon. The day was very hot when they reached the rocket.
‘So.’ The psychologist walked up to the ship and tapped it. It gonged softly. ‘May I go inside?’ he asked slyly.
‘You may.’
Mr Xxx stepped in and was gone for a long time.
‘Of all the silly, exasperating things.’ The captain chewed a cigar as he waited. ‘For two cents I’d go back home and tell people not to bother with Mars. What a suspicious bunch of louts.’
‘I gather that a good number of their population are insane, sir. That seems to be their main reason for doubting.’
‘Nevertheless, this is all so damned irritating.’
The psychologist emerged from the ship after half an hour of prowling, tapping, listening, smelling, tasting.
‘Now do you believe!’ shouted the captain, as if he were deaf.
The psychologist shut his eyes and scratched his nose. ‘This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination and hypnotic suggestion I’ve ever encountered. I went through your “rocket,” as you call it.’ He tapped the hull. ‘I hear it. Auditory fantasy.’ He drew a breath. ‘I smell it. Olfactory hallucination, induced by sensual telepathy.’ He kissed the ship. ‘I taste it. Labial fantasy!’
He shook the captain’s hand. ‘May I congratulate you? You are a psychotic genius! You have done a most complete job! The task of projecting your psychotic image life into the mind of another via telepathy and keeping the hallucinations from becoming sensually weaker is almost impossible. Those people in the House usually concentrate on visuals or, at the most, visuals and auditory fantasies combined. You have balanced the whole conglomeration! Your insanity is beautifully complete!’
‘My insanity.’ The captain was pale.
‘Yes, yes, what a lovely insanity. Metal, rubber, gravitizers, foods, clothing, fuel, weapons, ladders, nuts, bolts, spoons. Ten thousand separate items I checked on your vessel. Never have I seen such a complexity. There were even shadows under the bunks and under everything! Such concentration of will! And everything, no matter how or when tested, had a smell, a solidity, a taste, a sound! Let me embrace you!’
He stood back at last. ‘I’ll write this into my greatest monograph! I’ll speak of it at the Martian Academy next month! Look at you! Why, you’ve even changed your eye color from yellow to blue, your skin to pink from brown. And those clothes, and your hands having five fingers instead of six! Biological metamorphosis through psychological imbalance! And your three friends—’
He took out a little gun. ‘Incurable, of course. You poor, wonderful man. You will be happier dead. Have you any last words?’
‘Stop, for God’s sake! Don’t shoot!’
‘You sad creature. I shall put you out of this misery which has driven you to imagine this rocket and these three men. It will be most engrossing to watch your friends and your rocket vanish once I have killed you. I will write a neat paper on the dissolvement of neurotic images from what I perceive here today.’
‘I’m from Earth! My name is Jonathan Williams, and these—’
‘Yes, I know,’ soothed Mr Xxx, and fired his gun.
The captain fell with a bullet in his heart. The other three men screamed.
Mr Xxx stared at them. ‘You continue to exist? This is superb! Hallucinations with time and spatial persistence!’ He pointed the gun at them. ‘Well. I’ll scare you into dissolving.’
‘No!’ cried the three men.
‘An auditory appeal, even with the patient dead,’ observed Mr Xxx as he shot the three men down.
They lay on the sand, intact, not moving.
He kicked them. Then he rapped on the ship.
‘It persists! They persist!’ He fired his gun again and again at the bodies. Then he stood back. The smiling mask dropped from his face.
Slowly the little psychologist’s face changed. His jaw sagged. The gun dropped from his fingers. His eyes were dull and vacant. He put his hands up and turned in a blind circle. He fumbled at the bodies, saliva filling his mouth.
‘Hallucinations,’ he mumbled frantically. ‘Taste. Sight. Smell. Sound. Feeling.’ He waved his hands. His eyes bulged. His mouth began to give off a faint froth.
‘Go away!’ he shouted at the bodies. ‘Go away!’ he screamed at the ship. He examined his trembling hands. ‘Contaminated,’ he whispered wildly. ‘Carried over into me. Telepathy. Hypnosis. Now I’m insane. Now I’m contaminated. Hallucinations in all their sensual forms.’ He stopped and searched around with his numb hands for the gun. ‘Only one cure. Only one way to make them go away, vanish.’
A shot rang out. Mr Xxx fell.
The four bodies lay in the sun. Mr Xxx lay where he fell.
The rocket reclined on the little sunny hill and didn’t vanish.
When the town people found the rocket at sunset they wondered what it was. Nobody knew, so it was sold to a junkman and hauled off to be broken up for scrap metal.
That night it rained all night. The next day was fair and warm.
The Off Season
Sam Parkhill motioned with the broom, sweeping away the blue Martian sand.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Yes, sir, look at that!’ He pointed. ‘Look at that sign. SAM’S HOT DOGS! Ain’t that beautiful, Elma?’
‘Sure, Sam,’ said his wife.
‘Boy, what a change for me. If the boys from the Fourth Expedition could see me now. Am I glad to be in business myself while all the rest of them guys’re off soldiering around still. We’ll make thousands, Elma, thousands.’
His wife looked at him for a long time, not speaking. ‘Whatever happened to Captain Wilder?’ she asked finally. ‘That captain that killed that guy who thought he was going to kill off every other Earth Man, what was his name?’
‘Spender, that nut. He was too damn particular. Oh, Captain Wilder? He’s off on a rocket to Jupiter, I hear. They kicked him upstairs. I think he was a little batty abouts Mars too. Touchy, you know. He’ll be back down from Jupiter and Pluto in about twenty years if he’s lucky. That’s what he gets for shooting off his mouth. And while he’s freezing to death, look at me, look at this place!’
This was a crossroads where two dead highways came and went in darkness. Here Sam Parkhill had flung up this riveted aluminum structure, garish with white light, trembling with juke-box melody.
He stooped to fix a border of broken glass he had placed on the footpath. He had broken the glass from some old Martian buildings in the hills. ‘Best hot dogs on two worlds! First man on Mars with a hot-dog stand! The best onions and chili and mustard! You can’t say I’m not alert. Here’s the main highways, over there is the dead city and the mineral deposits. Those trucks from Earth Settlement 101 will have to pass here twenty-four hours a day! Do I know my locations, or don’t I?’
His wife looked at her fingernails.
‘You think those ten thousand new-type work rockets will come through to Mars?’ she said at last.
‘In a month,’ he said loudly. ‘Why you look so funny?’
‘I don’t trust those Earth people,’ she said. ‘I’ll believe it when I see them ten thousand rockets arrive with the one hundred thousand Mexicans and Chinese on
them.’
‘Customers.’ He lingered on the word. ‘One hundred thousand hungry people.’
‘If,’ said his wife slowly, watching the sky, ‘there’s no atomic war. I don’t trust no atom bombs. There’s so many of them on Earth now, you never can tell.’
‘Ah,’ said Sam, and went on sweeping.
From the corners of his eyes he caught a blue flicker. Something floated in the air gently behind him. He heard his wife say, ‘Sam. A friend of yours to see you.’
Sam whirled to see the mask seemingly floating in the wind.
‘So you’re back again!’ And Sam held his broom like a weapon.
The mask nodded. It was cut from pale blue glass and was fitted above a thin neck, under which were blowing loose robes of thin yellow silk. From the silk two mesh silver hands appeared. The mask mouth was a slot from which musical sounds issued now as the robes, the mask, the hands increased to a height, decreased.
‘Mr Parkhill, I’ve come back to speak to you again,’ the voice said from behind the mask.
‘I thought I told you I don’t want you near here!’ cried Sam. ‘Go on, I’ll give you the Disease!’
‘I’ve already had the Disease,’ said the voice. ‘I was one of the few survivors. I was sick a long time.’
‘Go on and hide in the hills, that’s where you belong, that’s where you’ve been. Why you come on down and bother me? Now, all of a sudden. Twice in one day.’
‘We mean you no harm.’
‘But I mean you harm!’ said Sam, backing up. ‘I don’t like strangers. I don’t like Martians. I never seen one before. It ain’t natural. All these years you guys hide, and all of a sudden you pick on me. Leave me alone.’
‘We come for an important reason,’ said the blue mask.
‘If it’s about this land, it’s mine. I built this hot-dog stand with my own hands.’
‘In a way it is about the land.’
‘Look here,’ said Sam. ‘I’m from New York City. Where I come from there’s ten million others just like me. You Martians are a couple dozen left, got no cities, you wander around in the hills, no leaders, no laws, and now you come tell me about this land. Well, the old got to give way to the new. That’s the law of give and take. I got a gun here. After you left this morning I got it out and loaded it.’