Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  If Mars had inhabitants, they certainly rejoiced, for there was created in their chilly firmament a small but profligate sun where the earth had circled, blue-green, for two billion years. A little sun that grew large—and a million times brighter than earth—and sent to them, across the reaches, additional heat and more light for their dim, red sandstone plains. To the Martians came the spectacular comfort of a new, radiant companion. If there were thoughtful creatures alive in the steaming hurricanes of Venus, they must have marveled and perhaps worried over the phenomenon: it is dangerous to be too near a sun birth. It is dangerous, when a close neighbor grows ten times its size and spurts incredible energy into space. If the Martians became glad, surely the Venutians grew anxious.

  In due course, the earth’s moon was engulfed and added as fuel to the atomic holocaust. Due course. It was not long. The atomic principle involves velocities which the average terrestrial man had not taken the trouble to understand, even at the year of his dissolution.

  Indeed, the time which elapsed after the first, great light sprang from the Everson-Dunn machine, and until the earth became an expanding sphere heated to trillions of degrees, was slightly less than one-nineteenth of a second.

  Ray Bradbury (1920- ) is a Middlewesterner now living in California. His work has appeared in a variety of markets, including Collier’s, Weird Tales, The American Mercury, Mademoiselle, Charm, Harper’s, Planet Stories, and others, and has been reprinted in many anthologies. His first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, teas published last year by Arkham House. Stories by him appeared in The Best Short Stories of 1946 and in The O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories: 1947. Mr. Bradbury is at present working on a novel.

  THE MILLION YEAR PICNIC

  Ray Bradbury

  SOMEHOW THE IDEA WAS BROUGHT UP BY Mom that perhaps the whole family would enjoy a fishing trip. But they weren’t Mom’s words; Timothy knew that. They were Dad’s words, and Mom used them for him, somehow.

  Dad shuffled his feet in a clutter of Martian pebbles, and agreed. So immediately there was a tumult and a shouting, and quick as jets the camp was tucked into capsules and containers; Mom slipped into traveling jumpers and blouse, Dad stuffed his pipe full with trembling hands, his eyes on the Martian sky, and the three boys piled yelling into the motorboat, none of them really keeping an eye on Mom and Dad, except Timothy.

  Dad pushed a stud. The water-boat sent a humming sound up into the sky. The water shook back and the boat nosed ahead, and the family cried, “Hurrah!”

  Timothy sat in the back of the boat with Dad, his small fingers on top of Dad’s large hairy ones, watching the canal twist, leaving the crumbled place behind where they had landed their small tourist rocket.

  Dad had a funny look in his eyes as the boat went up-canal. A look that Timothy couldn’t figure. It was made of strong light and maybe a lot of joy. It made the deep wrinkles laugh instead of worry or cry.

  So there went the tourist rocket, around a bend, gone.

  “How far are we going?” Robert splashed his hand. It looked like a small crab jumping in the violet water.

  Dad exhaled. “A million years.”

  “Gee,” said Robert.

  “Yeah,” said Michael.

  “Look, kids.” Mother pointed one soft long arm. “There’s a dead city.”

  They looked with fervent anticipation, and the dead city lay dead for them and them alone, drowsing in a hot silence of summer made on Mars by a Martian weatherman.

  And Dad looked as if he was pleased that it was dead.

  It was a futile spread of pink rocks sleeping on a rise of sand, stretching lazy crumbled arms out three miles, petering finally into a dribble of collapsed pillars, a few tumbled wharves, one lonely shrine with images stolen from it, and then the sweep of sand again. Nothing else for miles. A white desert around the canal, and a blue desert over it, with a sun drifting on the blue one.

  Just then, a rocket went up. Like a stone thrown across a blue pond, hitting with a scar of flame, falling deep, deeper, and vanishing.

  Dad got a scared look in his eyes when he saw it, and added speed to the boat, gritting his teeth.

  That was the last Earth Rocket for one hundred days.

  Looking up at the sky that was an ocean, you couldn’t see a trace of war. Couldn’t see men fighting and slaughtering each other like hung pig carcasses, gushing hot, salt blood.

  Space dimensions narrowed that all down to one specule of matter, a dot against the cosmos labeled Earth. As removed and far off as two flies battling to the death in the arch of a great high and silent cathedral. And just as senseless.

  William Thomas wiped his forehead, and felt the touch of his son’s hand on his arm, like a young tarantula, thrilled. He beamed at his son. “How goes it, Timmy?”

  “Fine, Dad.”

  Timothy hadn’t quite figured out what was ticking inside the vast adult mechanism beside him. The man with the immense hawk nose, sun-burnt, peeling—and the hot blue eyes like agate marbles you play with after school in summer back on Earth, and the long thick columnar legs in the loose riding breeches.

  “What are you looking at so hard, Dad?”

  “I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace and responsibility.”

  “All that up there?”

  “No. I didn’t find it. It’s not there any more. Maybe it’ll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it was ever there.”

  “Huh?”

  “See the fish,” said Dad, pointing.

  There rose a soprano clamor from all three boys as they rocked the boat in arching their tender necks to see. They oohed and ahhed. A silver ring-fish floated by them, undulating, and closing like an iris, instantly, around food particles, to assimilate them.

  Dad looked at it. His voice was deep and quiet.

  “Just like war. War swims along, sees food, contracts. A moment later—Earth is gone.”

  “William,” said Mother.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Dad.

  Another ring-fish came by, drawing more noise from them, and more pointing. And then they sat still and felt the canal water rush cool under them, swift and glassy. The only sound was the motor-hum, the rush of the water, and the sun heating the air—which wasn’t much. Once in a great while a bird would come singing and go singing and drop from hearing and sight.

  On both sides of the canal now they saw the great oxygen vines and bushes, planted in irregular diagrams upon sand; plants with deep-reaching roots thrusting miles after the withered water-gut of the planet; sowed by far-seeing scientists of Earth fifty years before, and only now profuse enough, active enough to give Mars a thin atmospheric shell.

  Dad looked at them and shook his head. He caught himself when he saw Mom staring at him, and this was another symbol that Timothy couldn’t fathom.

  “When do we see the Martians?” cried Michael, who was ten years old and decorated conspicuously with the medals of Mendelian skin-coloration—freckles. “When do we see the Martians?”

  “Quite soon, perhaps,” said Father. “Maybe this afternoon. Maybe tonight.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Mom. “The Martians are a dead race.”

  “Oh, no, they’re not. I’ll show you some Martians, all right,” William Thomas said, presently.

  Timothy scowled at that, but said nothing. There was no questioning the alien thought patterns of grownups. And he had found it far happier circumstance to place his questions only intermittently, and then when he was certain his parents would humor them.

  The other boys were already engaged making shelves of their small hands and peering under them toward the seven-foot stone banks of the canal, watching for Martians.

  “What do they look like?” demanded Michael.

  “You’ll know them when you see them.” Dad sort of laughed, and Timothy saw a pulse beating time in his cheek.

  Mother was slender and soft, with a woven plait of spun gold hair over her head
in a tiara, and eyes the color of the deep cool canal water where it ran in shadow, almost purple, with flocks of amber caught in it. You could see her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish—some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy, and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being nothing but color and nothing else.

  She sat in the boat’s prow, one hand resting on the side-lip, the other on the lap of her dark blue breeches, and a line of sunburnt soft neck showing where her blouse opened like a white flower.

  She kept looking ahead to see what was there, and not being able to see it clearly enough, she looked backward toward her husband, and through his eyes, reflected then, she saw what was ahead; and since he added part of himself to this reflection, a determined firmness, her face relaxed and she accepted it, and she turned back knowing, suddenly, what to look for.

  Timothy looked, too. But all he saw was a straight pencil line of canal going violet through a wide shallow valley penned by low, eroded hills, and on until it fell over the sky’s edge. And this canal went on and on, through cities that would have rattled like beetles in a dry skull if you shook them. A hundred or two hundred cities dreaming hot summer day dreams and cool summer night dreams

  They were going far on this outing—to fish. But there was a gun in the boat. This was a vacation. But why all the food, more than enough to last them years and years, left hidden back there near the rocket? Vacation. But just behind the veil of the vacation was not a soft face of laughter, but something hard and bony and perhaps terrifying. Timothy could not lift the veil, and the two other boys were busy being ten years old and eight years old, respectively.

  “No Martians yet. Nuts!” declared Robert, seriously miffed. He put his v-shaped chin on his hands and glared at the canal.

  Dad had brought an atomic-radio along, strapped to his wrist. It functioned on an old-fashioned principle; you held it against the bones near your ear, and it vibrated singing or talking to you. Dad listened to it now. His face looked like one of those fallen Martian cities, caved in, sucked dry, almost dead.

  Then he gave it to Mom to listen. Her lips dropped open.

  “What?” Timothy started to question, but withdrew tactfully, to watch.

  Glancing hastily upward, Dad notched the boat speed higher, immediately. The boat leaped and jounced and spanked. This shook Robert out of his funk, and elicited yelps of frightened but ecstatic joy from Michael, who clung to Mom’s legs and watched the water pour by his nose in a wet torrent.

  Dad must have seen something, because he cut speed, swerved the boat, curved and ducked it into a little branch canal and under an ancient crumbling stone wharf dwelling that smelled like crab flesh.

  Air-brakes stopped the boat, and Dad twisted to see if the ripples on the canal were enough to map their route into hiding. Water lines went across, lapped the stones, and came back to meet each other, settling to be dappled by the sun. It all went away.

  Dad listened. So did everybody.

  High in the sky there was a sound like a metal spider spinning a web of noise over and across, down and around, over and across; a swift weaving over the whole land again and again. The spider was a rocket, and the web was flame and noise from its jets.

  Dad’s breathing echoed like fists beating against the cold wet wharf stones. In the shadow, Mom’s cat-eyes just watched Father for some clue to—what next?

  The sky spider stopped spinning its web and went away. Father sank back, sighing, and Timothy put out his hand and patted the dark hair on his arm.

  A moment later there were two titanic, marrow-jolting explosions that grew upon themselves. Followed by half a dozen others.

  “The ship,” said Dad. “They found the rocket.”

  Michael said, “What happened, Dad, what happened?”

  “Oh, they just blew up our rocket, that’s all,” said Timothy, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “I’ve heard rockets blown up before. Ours just blew. Not only ours, but four others.”

  Timothy thought about it and added, “There were only four others on Mars. Down by the Science Colony where those one hundred men lived.”

  “Why did they do that?” asked Michael. “Huh, Dad?”

  Dad still listened, the audio to his ear, blinking wet eyes. After two minutes he dropped his hand like you would drop a rag.

  “It’s all over,” he said to Mom. “The radio just went off the atomic beam. Every other world station’s gone. The air is completely silent. It’ll probably remain silent.”

  “For how long?” asked Robert.

  “Maybe—your great-grandchildren will hear it again,” said Dad. He just sat there, and the kids were caught in the center of his awe and defeat and resignation and acceptance.

  Finally, he put the boat out into the canal again and they continued in the direction in which they had originally started.

  It was beginning to get late. Already the sun was down the sky, and a series of dead cities was ahead of them.

  Dad talked very quietly and gently to the kids. Many times in the past he had been brief, distant, removed from them, but now he patted them on the head with just a word and they felt it. “Mike, pick a city.”

  “What, Dad?”

  “Pick a city, son. Any one of these cities we pass by.”

  “All right,” said Michael. “How do I pick?”

  “Pick the one you like the most. You, too, Robert, and Tim. Pick the city you like the most.”

  “I want a city with Martians in it,” said Michael.

  “You’ll have that. I promise,” said Dad. His lips were for the kids, but his eyes were for Mom.

  They passed six cities in twenty minutes. Dad didn’t say anything more about the explosions; he seemed much more interested in having fun with the kids, keeping them happy, than anything else.

  Michael liked the first city they passed, but this was vetoed because everyone doubted quick, first judgments. The second city nobody liked. Timothy liked the third because it was fairly large. The fourth and fifth were too small, and’ the sixth brought acclaim from everyone, including Mother, who joined in the Gees, Goshes and Look-at-Thats.

  There were fifty or sixty huge structures still standing; streets were dusty, but paved, and you could see one or two old centrifugal fountains still pulsing wetly in the plazas. That was the only life—water leaping in the settling sun.

  “This is the city,” said Timothy.

  “Yes, this is it,” agreed Dad. “Yes, Alice?”

  Mom nodded swiftly, her face an exact replica of Dad’s expression.

  Steering the boat to a landing flat, Dad jumped out.

  “Here we are, kids. This is ours. This is where we live from now on.”

  “From now on?” Michael was incredulous. He stood up, looking, and then turned to stare back at where the rocket used to be. “What about the rocket, what about New York City?”

  “Here,” said Dad.

  He placed the wrist audio against Michael’s blond, pear-shaped skull. “Listen.”

  Michael listened.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “That’s right. Nothing. Nothing at all any more. No more New York, no more Earth, no more Rocket.”

  Michael considered the lethal revelation and began to sob little dry sobs, unoiled as yet by tears.

  “Wait a moment,” said Dad, the next instant. “I’m giving you a whole lot more in exchange, Mike!”

  “What?” Michael held off the tears, curious, but quite ready to continue in case Dad’s further revelation was as disconcerting as the original.

  “I’m giving you this city, Mike. It’s yours.”

  “M-mine . . .”

  “For you and Robert and Timothy, all three of you, to own for yourselves.”

  Timothy bounded out of the boat. “Look, guys, all for us; all of that!” He was playing the game with Dad, playing it good and big, and without a tear. Later, after it was all over and things had settled, he could go off by himself and cry for ten
minutes. But now it was still a game, still a family outing, and the other kids must be kept playing.

  Mike jumped out, with Robert. They helped Mom out.

  “Be careful of your sister,” said Dad, and nobody knew what he meant until later.

  They hurried into the great, pink-stoned city, whispering among themselves, because dead cities have a way of making you want to whisper, to watch the sun go down.

  “In about five days,” Dad said, quietly, “I’ll go back down to where our rocket was and collect the food hidden in the ruins there, and bring it up; and I’ll hunt for Ralph Edwards and his daughters and his wife there.”

  “Daughters?” asked Timothy. “How many?”

  “Four,” said Dad.

  “I can see that’ll cause trouble later,” said Mother, cryptically.

  “Girls,” Michael made a face like an old Mars stone image. “Girls. Gahh!”

  “Is this really ours, Dad?”

  “The whole planet belongs to us, kids. The whole darn planet.”

  They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world, and how big a world really was.

  Night came quickly in the thin atmosphere, and Dad left them in the square by the pulsing fountain, went down to the boat, came walking back carrying a pile of papers in his big hands.

  He laid the papers in a clutter in the old courtyard and set them afire. To keep warm, they crouched around them and laughed, and Timothy saw the little letters leap like frightened animals when the flames touched and engulfed them. The papers crinkled like an old man’s skin and the cremation surrounded words like this: