Martians, Go Home

by Fredric Brown

  “When sun strike juju,” he said solemnly if a bit hoarsely, “gnajamkata go.”

  The red rim of the sun came into sight over the horizon; its first rays struck the top of the tree in which the juju hung, moved downward.

  In a very few minutes now, the first rays of the sun would reach the juju.

  By coincidence or otherwise it was the exact moment when, in Chicago, Illinois, United States or America, one Hiram Pedro Oberdorffer, janitor and inventor, sat sipping beer and waiting for his anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator to build up potential.

  4.

  And as near as matters to three quarters of an hour before that exact moment, at about 9:15 P.M. Pacific Time in a shack on the desert near Indio, California, Luke Devereaux was making his third drink of the evening.

  It was his fourteenth thwarting evening at the shack.

  It was the fifteenth evening since his escape, if one can call so simple a walk-away an escape, from the sanitarium. The first evening had been thwarting too, but for a different reason. His car, the old ’57 Mercury he had bought for a hundred dollars, had broken down in Riverside, about half-way between Long Beach and Indio. He’d had it towed to a garage, where they’d told him it couldn’t possibly be fixed until the next afternoon. He’d spent a dull evening and a bad night (it seemed so strange and so lonesome to be sleeping alone again) at a Riverside hotel.

  He’d spent the following morning shopping and carrying his purchases to the garage to load them in the car while a mechanic was working on it. He’d bought a used portable typewriter, of course, and some stationery. (He’d been in the process of choosing the typewriter when, at 10 A.M. Pacific Time, Yato Ishurti’s speech had come on the air, and business had been suspended while the proprietor turned on a radio and everyone in the store had gathered around it. Knowing Ishurti’s fundamental premise—that there really were Martians—to be completely wrong, Luke had been mildly annoyed at the interruption to his shopping, but had found himself quite amused at Ishurti’s ridiculous reasoning.)

  He bought a suitcase and some extra clothing, razor, soap and comb, and enough food and liquor so he wouldn’t have to make a shopping trip into Indio for at least a few days after he got to the shack. He hoped what he had to accomplish there wouldn’t take any longer than that.

  He got his car back—with a repair bill almost half as much as the original cost of it—in midafternoon and reached his destination just before dark. He found himself too tired to try very hard that evening, and, anyway, he realized that he had forgotten something: Alone, he had no way of telling whether or not he had succeeded. The next morning he drove back to Indio and bought himself the best and most expensive table model radio he could find, a set that would bring in programs from all over the country, a set on which he could find newscasts emaciating from somewhere or other almost any tune of day or evening.

  Any newscast would tell him.

  The only trouble was that for two weeks, until tonight, the newscasts had consistently told him wrong. They’d told him that the Martians were still around. Not that the newscasts opened with the statement, “The Martians are still with us,” but almost every story concerned them at least indirectly or concerned the Depression and the other troubles they were causing.

  And Luke was trying everything he could think of, and almost going crazy trying.

  He knew the Martians were imaginary, the product (like everything else) of his own imagination, that he had invented them that evening five months ago, in March, when he’d been trying to plot a science fiction novel. He’d invented them.

  But he’d invented hundreds of other plots and none of there had really happened (or seemed really to happen) so there had been something different that evening, and he was trying everything to reconstruct the exact circumstances, the exact frame of mind, the exact everything.

  Including, of course, the exact amount of drinking, the exact tinge of inebriety, since that might have been a factor. As he had done while he was here the period preceding that evening, he stayed strictly sober by day, no matter how badly hung over he might awaken—pacing the floor and getting desperate (then, for a plot; now, for an answer). Now, as then, he would let himself start drinking only after he’d made and fed himself a dinner and then he’d space his drinks and pace his drinking very carefully—at least until he’d given up in disgust for the evening.

  What was wrong?

  He’d invented Martians by imagining them, hadn’t he? Why couldn’t he un-invent them now that he’d ceased to imagine them, now that he’d learned the truth? He had, of course, as far as he himself was concerned. Why wouldn’t other people stop seeing and hearing them?

  It must be a psychic block, he told himself. But naming it didn’t help.

  He took a sip of his drink and stared at it. Trying, for the thousandth time since he’d been here, to remember exactly how many drinks he’d had that night in March. It wasn’t many, he knew; he hadn’t been feeling them, any more than he was feeling the two he’d already had tonight before this one.

  Or didn’t the drinking have anything to do with it after all?

  He took a second sip of his drink, put it down and started pacing. There aren’t any Martians, he thought. There never were any; they existed—like everything and everybody else—only while I imagined them. And I no longer imagine them.

  Therefore—

  Maybe that had done it. He went over to the radio and turned it on, waited for it to warm up. Listened to several discouraging items, realizing that even if he had just succeeded it would be at least minutes, since Martians weren’t seen everywhere all the time, before anyone began to realize that they were gone. Until the newscaster happened to say, “At this very moment, right here in the studio, a Martian is trying to…”

  Luke flicked off the radio and swore.

  Took another sip of his drink and paced some more.

  Sat down and finished his drink and made another one.

  Had a sudden idea.

  Maybe he could outwit that psychic block by going around it instead of through it. The block could only be because, even though he knew he was right, he lacked sufficient faith in himself. Maybe he should imagine something else, something completely different, and when his imagination brought it into being, even his damned subconscious couldn’t deny it, and then in that moment of undeniability—

  It was worth trying. There was nothing to lose.

  But he’d imagine something that he really wanted, and what did be want—outside of getting rid of Martians—most right at this moment?

  Margie, of course.

  He was lonesome as hell after these two weeks of solitude. And if he could imagine Margie here, and by imagining bring her here, he knew he could break that psychic block. With one arm tied behind his back, or with both arms around Margie.

  Let’s see, he thought. I’ll imagine that she’s driving here in her car, already through Indio and only half a mile away. Pretty soon I’ll hear the car.

  Prey soon he heard the car.

  He made himself walk, not run, to a door and open it. He could see headlights coming. Should he—now—?

  No, he’d wait till lie was sure. Not even when the car came close enough that he thought he could recognize it as Margie’s; a lot of cars look alike. He’d wait until the car had stopped and Margie got out of it and he knew. And then, an that golden moment, he’d think There Aren’t Any Martians.

  And there wouldn’t be.

  In a few minutes, the car would be here.

  It was approximately five minutes after nine o’clock (P.M.), Pacific Time. In Chicago it was five minutes after eleven and Mr. Oberdorffer sipped beer and waited for his subervibrator to build up potential; in equatorial Africa it was dawn and a witch doctor named Bugassi stood with crossed arms under the greatest juju ever made, waiting for the sun’s first rays to strike it.

  Four minutes later, one hundred and forty-six days and fifty minutes after they appeared, the Martians disap
peared. Simultaneously, from everywhere. Everywhere on Earth, that is.

  Wherever they went, there is no authenticated instance of one having been seen since that moment. Seeing Martians in nightmares and in delirium tremens is still common, but such sightings can hardly be called authenticated.

  To this day…

  POSTLOGUE

  To this day, nobody knows why they carne or why they left.

  Not that a great many people do not think they know, or at least have very strong opinions on the subject. Millions of people still believe, as they believed then, that they were not Martians but devils and that they went back to hell arid not back to Mars. Because a God who sent them to punish us for our sins became again a merciful God as a result of our prayers to Him.

  Even more millions accept that they came from Mars after all and returned there. Most, but not all, give credit to Yato Ishurti for their leaving these point out that even if Ishurti’s reasoning was right down the line and even though his proposition to the Martians was backed by that tremendous affirmative, the Martians could hardly have been expected to react instantaneously; somewhere a council of them would have had to meet and weigh their decision, make up their minds whether we were by now sufficiently sincere and sufficiently chastened. And that the Martians stayed only two weeks after Ishurti’s speech, which is certainly not too long a time for such a decision to have been reached.

  At any rate, no standing armies have been built up again and no country is planning sending any rockets to Mars, just on the chance that lshurti was right, or partly right.

  But not everybody, by any means, believes that either God or Ishurti had anything to do with the departure of the Martians.

  One entire African tribe, for instance, knows that it was Bugassi’s juju that sent the gnajamkata back to the kat.

  One janitor in Chicago knows perfectly well that he drove away the Martians with his anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator.

  And of course those last two are, and were given as, only random examples of the hundreds of thousands of other scientists and mystics who, each in his own way, had been trying his best to accomplish the same thing. And each naturally thought that he had finally succeeded.

  And of course Luke knows that they’re all wrong. But that it doesn’t matter what they think since they all exist only in his mind anyway. And since he is now a very successful writer of Westerns, with four best sellers under his belt in four years and with a beautiful Beverly Hills mansion, two Cadillacs, a loved and loving wife and a pair of two-year-old twin sons, Luke is being very careful indeed how he lets his imagination work. He is very satisfied with the universe as he imagines it right now, and takes no chances.

  And on one point concerning the Martians, Luke Devereaux agrees with everybody else, including Obersdorffer, Bugassi and the Scandinavian.

  Nobody, but nobody, misses them or wants them back.

  AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT

  My publishers write me:

  Before sending the manuscript of MARTIANS, GO HOME to the printer, we would like to suggest that you supply the story with a postscript to tell us and your other readers the truth about those Martians.

  Since you wrote the book, you, if anyone, must know whether they were really from Mars or hell, or whether your character Luke Devereaux was right in believing that the Martians, along with everything else in the universe, existed only an his imagination.

  It is unfair to your readers not to tell them.

  Many things are unfair, including and particularly that request of my publishers!

  I had wanted to avoid being definitive here, for the truth can be a frightening thing, and in this case it is a frightening thing if you believe it. But here it is:

  Luke is right; the universe and all therein exists only in his imagination. He invented it, and the Martians.

  But then again, I invented Luke. So where does that leave him or the Martians?

  Or any of the rest of you?

  FREDRIC BROWN

  Tuscon, Arizona, 1955

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: fbd-8b17ec-56b7-1447-aba0-7219-09db-d45cf7

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 24.01.2011

  Created using: Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software

  Document authors :

  Verdi1

  About

  This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.

  (This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)

  Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.

  (Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)

  http://www.fb2epub.net

  https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/