by Ray Bradbury
Captain Wilder sniffed the air. “Is that gingerbread?”
“Will you have some?”
Everyone moved. Folding tables were hurried out while hot foods were rushed forth and plates and fine damask napkins and good silverware were laid. Captain Wilder stood looking first at Mrs. Hathaway and then at her son and her two tall, quiet-moving daughters. He looked into their faces as they darted past and he followed every move of their youthful hands and every expression of their wrinkleless faces. He sat upon a chair the son brought. “How old are you, John?”
The son replied, “Twenty-three.”
Wilder shifted his silverware clumsily. His face was suddenly pale. The man next to him whispered, “Captain Wilder, that can’t be right.”
The son moved away to bring more chairs.
“What’s that, Williamson?”
“I’m forty-three myself, Captain. I was in school the same time as young John Hathaway there, twenty years ago. He says he’s only twenty-three now; he only looks twenty-three. But that’s wrong. He should be forty-two, at least. What’s it mean, sir?”
“I don’t know.”
“You look kind of sick, sir.”
“I don’t feel well. The daughters, too, I saw them twenty years or so ago; they haven’t changed, not a wrinkle. Will you do me a favor? I want you to run an errand, Williamson. I’ll tell you where to go and what to check. Late in the breakfast, slip away. It should take you only ten minutes. The place isn’t far from here. I saw it from the rocket as we landed.”
“Here! What are you talking about so seriously?” Mrs. Hathaway ladled quick spoons of soup into their bowls. “Smile now; we’re all together, the trip’s over, and it’s like home!”
“Yes.” Captain Wilder laughed. “You certainly look very well and young, Mrs. Hathaway!”
“Isn’t that like a man!”
He watched her drift away, drift with her pink face warm, smooth as an apple, unwrinkled and colorful. She chimed her laugh at every joke, she tossed salads neatly, never once pausing for breath. And the bony son and curved daughters were brilliantly witty, like their father, telling of the long years and their secret life, while their father nodded proudly to each.
Williamson slipped off down the hill.
“Where’s he going?” asked Hathaway.
“Checking the rocket,” said Wilder. “But, as I was saying, Hathaway, there’s nothing on Jupiter, nothing at all for men. That includes Saturn and Pluto.” Wilder talked mechanically, not hearing his words, thinking only of Williamson running down the hill and climbing back to tell what he had found.
“Thanks.” Marguerite Hathaway was filling his water glass. Impulsively he touched her arm. She did not even mind. Her flesh was warm and soft.
Hathaway, across the table, paused several times, touched his chest with his fingers, painfully, then went on listening to the murmuring talk and sudden loud chattering, glancing now and again with concern at Wilder, who did not seem to like chewing his gingerbread.
Williamson returned. He sat picking at his food until the captain whispered aside to him, “Well?”
“I found it, sir.”
“And?”
Williamson’s cheeks were white. He kept his eyes on the laughing people. The daughters were smiling gravely and the son was telling a joke. Williamson said, “I went into the graveyard.”
“The four crosses were there?”
“The four crosses were there, sir. The names were still on them. I wrote them down to be sure.” He read from a white paper: “Alice, Marguerite, Susan, and John Hathaway. Died of unknown virus. July 2007.”
“Thank you, Williamson.” Wilder closed his eyes.
“Nineteen years ago, sir.” Williamson’s hand trembled.
“Yes.”
“Then who are these!”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“Will we tell the other men?”
“Later. Go on with your food as if nothing happened.”
“I’m not very hungry now, sir.”
The meal ended with wine brought from the rocket. Hathaway arose. “A toast to all of you; it’s good to be with friends again. And to my wife and children, without whom I couldn’t have survived alone. It is only through their kindness in caring for me that I’ve lived on, waiting for your arrival.” He moved his wineglass toward his family, who looked back self-consciously, lowering their eyes at last as everyone drank.
Hathaway drank down his wine. He did not cry out as he fell forward onto the table and slipped to the ground. Several men eased him to rest. The doctor bent to him and listened. Wilder touched the doctor’s shoulder. The doctor looked up and shook his head. Wilder knelt and took the old man’s hand. “Wilder?” Hathaway’s voice was barely audible. “I spoiled the breakfast.”
“Nonsense.”
“Say good-bye to Alice and the children for me.”
“Just a moment, I’ll call them.”
“No, no, don’t!” gasped Hathaway. “They wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t want them to understand! Don’t!”
Wilder did not move.
Hathaway was dead.
Wilder waited for a long time. Then he arose and walked away from the stunned group around Hathaway. He went to Alice Hathaway, looked into her face, and said, “Do you know what has just happened?”
“Something about my husband?”
“He’s just passed away; his heart,” said Wilder, watching her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“He didn’t want us to feel badly. He told us it would happen one day and he didn’t want us to cry. He didn’t teach us how, you know. He didn’t want us to know. He said it was the worst thing that could happen to a man to know how to be lonely and know how to be sad and then to cry. So we’re not to know what crying is, or being sad.”
Wilder glanced at her hands, the soft warm hands and the fine manicured nails and the tapered wrists. He saw her slender, smooth white neck and her intelligent eyes. Finally he said, “Mr. Hathaway did a fine job on you and your children.”
“He would have liked to hear you say that. He was so proud of us. After a while he even forgot that he had made us. At the end he loved and took us as his real wife and children. And, in a way, we are.”
“You gave him a good deal of comfort.”
“Yes, for years on end we sat and talked. He so much loved to talk. He liked the stone hut and the open fire. We could have lived in a regular house in the town, but he liked it up here, where he could be primitive if he liked, or modern if he liked. He told me all about his laboratory and the things he did in it. He wired the entire dead American town below with sound speakers. When he pressed a button the town lit up and made noises as if ten thousand people lived in it. There were airplane noises and car noises and the sounds of people talking. He would sit and light a cigar and talk to us, and the sounds of the town would come up to us, and once in a while the phone would ring and a recorded voice would ask Mr. Hathaway scientific and surgical questions and he would answer them. With the phone ringing and us here and the sounds of the town and his cigar, Mr. Hathaway was quite happy. There’s only one thing he couldn’t make us do,” she said. “And that was to grow old. He got older every day, but we stayed the same. I guess he didn’t mind. I guess he wanted us this way.”
“We’ll bury him down in the yard where the other four crosses are. I think he would like that.”
She put her hand on his wrist, lightly. “I’m sure he would.”
Orders were given. The family followed the little procession down the hill. Two men carried Hathaway on a covered stretcher. They passed the stone hut and the storage shed where Hathaway, many years before, had begun his work. Wilder paused within the workshop door.
How would it be, he wondered, to live on a planet with a wife and three children and have them die, leaving you al
one with the wind and silence? What would a person do? Bury them with crosses in the graveyard and then come back up to the workshop and, with all the power of mind and memory and accuracy of finger and genius, put together, bit by bit, all those things that were wife, son, daughters. With an entire American city below from which to draw needed supplies, a brilliant man might do anything.
The sound of their footsteps was muffled in the sand. At the graveyard, as they turned in, two men were already spading out the earth.
They returned to the rocket in the late afternoon.
Williamson nodded at the stone hut. “What are we going to do about them?”
“I don’t know,” said the captain.
“Are you going to turn them off?”
“Off?” The captain looked faintly surprised. “It never entered my mind.”
“You’re not taking them back with us?”
“No, it would be useless.”
“You mean you’re going to leave them here, like that, as they are!”
The captain handed Williamson a gun. “If you can do anything about this, you’re a better man than I.”
Five minutes later Williamson returned from the hut, sweating. “Here, take your gun. I understand what you mean now. I went in the hut with the gun. One of the daughters smiled at me. So did the others. The wife offered me a cup of tea. Lord, it’d be murder!”
Wilder nodded. “There’ll never be anything as fine as them again. They’re built to last; ten, fifty, two hundred years. Yes, they’ve as much right to—to life as you or I or any of us.” He knocked out his pipe. “Well, get aboard. We’re taking off. This city’s done for, we’ll not be using it.”
It was late in the day. A cold wind was rising. The men were aboard. The captain hesitated. Williamson said, “Don’t tell me you’re going back to say—good-bye—to them?”
The captain looked at Williamson coldly. “None of your business.”
Wilder strode up toward the hut through the darkening wind. The men in the rocket saw his shadow lingering in the stone-hut doorway. They saw a woman’s shadow. They saw the captain shake her hand.
Moments later he came running back to the rocket.
On nights when the wind comes over the dead sea bottoms and through the hexagonal graveyard, over four old crosses and one new one, there is a light burning in the low stone hut, and in that hut, as the wind roars by and the dust whirls and the cold stars burn, are four figures, a woman, two daughters, a son, tending a low fire for no reason and talking and laughing.
Night after night for every year and every year, for no reason at all, the woman comes out and looks at the sky, her hands up, for a long moment, looking at the green burning of Earth, not knowing why she looks, and then she goes back and throws a stick on the fire, and the wind comes up and the dead sea goes on being dead.
ICARUS MONTGOLFIER WRIGHT
HE LAY ON HIS BED AND THE WIND BLEW through the window over his ears and over his half-opened mouth so it whispered to him in his dream. It was like the wind of time hollowing the Delphic caves to say what must be said of yesterday, today, tomorrow. Sometimes one voice gave a shout far off away, sometimes two, a dozen, an entire race of men cried out through his mouth, but their words were always the same:
“Look, look, we’ve done it!”
For suddenly he, they, one or many, were flung in the dream, and flew. The air spread in a soft warm sea where he swam, disbelieving.
“Look, look! It’s done!”
But he didn’t ask the world to watch, he was only shocking his senses wide to see, taste, smell, touch the air, the wind, the rising Moon. He swam along in the sky. The heavy Earth was gone.
But wait, he thought, wait now!
Tonight—what night is this?
The night before, of course. The night before the first flight of a rocket to the Moon. Beyond this room on the baked desert floor one hundred yards away the rocket waits for me.
Well, does it now? Is there really a rocket?
Hold on! he thought, and twisted, turned, sweating, eyes tight, to the wall, the fierce whisper in his teeth. Be certain-sure! You, now, who are you?
Me? he thought. My name?
Jedediah Prentiss, born 1938, college graduate 1959, licensed rocket pilot, 1971. Jedediah Prentiss . . . Jedediah Prentiss. . . .
The wind whistled his name away! He grabbed for it, yelling.
Then, gone quiet, he waited for the wind to bring his name back. He waited a long while, and there was only silence, and then after a thousand heartbeats he felt motion.
The sky opened out like a soft blue flower. The Aegean Sea stirred soft white fans through a distant wine-colored surf.
In the wash of the waves on the shore, he heard his name.
Icarus.
And again in a breathing whisper.
Icarus.
Someone shook his arm and it was his father saying his name and shaking away the night. And he himself lay small, half-turned to the window and the shore below and the deep sky, feeling the first wind of morning ruffle the golden feathers bedded in amber wax lying by the side of his cot. Golden wings stirred half-alive in his father’s arms, and the faint down on his own shoulders quilled trembling as he looked at these wings and beyond them to the cliff.
“Father, how’s the wind?”
“Enough for me, but never enough for you. . . .”
“Father, don’t worry. The wings seem clumsy now, but my bones in the feathers will make them strong, my blood in the wax will make it live!”
“My blood, my bones too, remember; each man lends his flesh to his children, asking that they tend it well. Promise you’ll not go high, Icarus. The sun or my son, the heat of one, the fever of the other, could melt these wings. Take care!”
And they carried the splendid golden wings into the morning and heard them whisper in their arms, whisper his name or a name or some name that blew, spun, and settled like a feather on the soft air.
Montgolfier.
His hands touched fiery rope, bright linen, stitched thread gone hot as summer. His hands fed wool and straw to a breathing flame.
Montgolfier.
And his eye soared up along the swell and sway, the oceanic tug and pull, the immensely wafted silver pear still filling with the shimmering tidal airs channeled up from the blaze. Silent as a god tilted slumbering above French countryside, this delicate linen envelope, this swelling sack of oven-baked air would soon pluck itself free. Drafting upward to blue worlds of silence, his mind and his brother’s mind would sail with it, muted, serene among island clouds where uncivilized lightnings slept. Into that uncharted gulf and abyss where no bird-song or shout of man could follow, the balloon would hush itself. So cast adrift, he, Montgolfier, and all men, might hear the unmeasured breathing of God and the cathedral tread of eternity.
“Ah . . .” He moved, the crowd moved, shadowed by the warm balloon. “Everything’s ready, everything’s right. . . .”
Right. His lips twitched in his dream. Right. Hiss, whisper, flutter, rush. Right.
From his father’s hands a toy jumped to the ceiling, whirled in its own wind, suspended, while he and his brother stared to see it flicker, rustle, whistle, heard it murmuring their names.
Wright.
Whispering: wind, sky, cloud, space, wing, fly . . .
“Wilbur, Orville? Look, how’s that?”
Ah. In his sleep, his mouth sighed.
The toy helicopter hummed, bumped the ceiling, murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk; murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk. Whispered eagle, whispered raven, and at last, fluttering to their hands with a susurration, a wash of blowing weather from summers yet to come, with a last whir and exhalation, whispered hawk.
Dreaming, he smiled.
He saw the clouds rush down the Aegean sky.
He felt the balloon sway drunkenly, its great bulk ready for the clear running wind.
He felt the sand hiss up the Atlantic shelves from the soft dunes t
hat might save him if he, a fledgling bird, should fall. The framework struts hummed and chorded like a harp, and himself caught up in its music.
Beyond this room he felt the primed rocket glide on the desert field, its fire wings folded, its fire breath kept, held ready to speak for three billion men. In a moment he would wake and walk slowly out to that rocket.
And stand on the rim of the cliff.
Stand cool in the shadow of the warm balloon.
Stand whipped by tidal sands drummed over Kitty Hawk.
And sheathe his boy’s wrists, arms, hands, fingers with golden wings in golden wax.
And touch for a final time the captured breath of man, the warm gasp of awe and wonder siphoned and sewn to lift their dreams.
And spark the gasoline engine.
And take his father’s hand and wish him well with his own wings, flexed and ready, here on the precipice.
Then whirl and jump.
Then cut the cords to free the great balloon.
Then rev the motor, prop the plane on air.
And crack the switch, to fire the rocket fuse.
And together in a single leap, swim, rush, flail, jump, sail, and glide, upturned to sun, moon, stars, they would go above Atlantic, Mediterranean; over country, wilderness, city, town; in gaseous silence, riffling feather, rattle-drum frame, in volcanic eruption, in timid, sputtering roar; in start, jar, hesitation, then steady ascension, beautifully held, wondrously transported, they would laugh and cry each his own name to himself. Or shout the names of others unborn or others long dead and blown away by the wine wind or the salt wind or the silent hush of balloon wind or the wind of chemical fire. Each feeling the bright feathers stir and bud deep-buried and thrusting to burst from their riven shoulder blades! Each leaving behind the echo of their flying, a sound to encircle, recircle the Earth in the winds and speak again in other years to the sons of the sons of their sons, asleep but hearing the restless midnight sky.
Up, yet farther up, higher, higher! A spring tide, a summer flood, an unending river of wings!
A bell rang softly.
No, he whispered, I’ll wake in a moment. Wait . . .
The Aegean slid away below the window, gone; the Atlantic dunes, the French countryside, dissolved down to New Mexico desert. In his room near his cot stirred no plumes in golden wax. Outside, no wind-sculpted pear, no trapdrum butterfly machine. Outside only a rocket, a combustible dream, waiting for the friction of his hand to set it off.