Bradbury, Ray - SSC 13 (29 page)

 
          
“Go
to sleep,” cried his mother, faintly.

 
          
Another
kick.

 
          
Tom
lay getting his breath. All was quiet. His hand was pushed to his chest, tight,
tight. He lay for half an hour this way, eyes closed.

 
          
Then
he felt something, and it was a cold white light. The moon rose very high and
the little square of light moved in the silo and crept slowly over Tom’s body.
Then, and only then, did his hand relax. Slowly, carefully, listening to those
who slept about him, Tom drew his hand forth. He hesitated, sucked in his
breath, and then, waiting, opened his hand and uncrumpled the tiny fragment of
painted canvas.

 
          
All
the world was asleep in the moonlight.

 
          
And
there on his hand was the Smile.

 
          
He
looked at it in the white illumination from the
midnight
sky. And he thought, over and over to
himself, quietly,
the Smile, the lovely
Smile
.

 
          
An
hour later he could still see it, even after he had folded it carefully and
hidden it. He shut his eyes and the Smile was there in the darkness. And it was
still there, warm and gentle, when he went to sleep and the world was silent
and the moon sailed up and then down the cold sky toward morning.

 
          
T
he rocket metal cooled in the meadow
winds. Its lid gave a bulging
pop
.
From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other
passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone
among his family.

 
          
The
man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were
standing at the center of a vacuum. His wife, before him, seemed almost to
whirl away in smoke. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to
all the Martian climes.

 
          
The
children looked up at him, as people look to the sun to tell what time of their
life it is. His face was cold.

 
          
“What’s
wrong?” asked his wife.

 
          
“Let’s
get back on the rocket.”

 
          
“Go
back to Earth?”

 
          
“Yes!
Listen!”

 
          
The
wind blew as if to flake away their identities. At any moment the Martian air
might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone. He felt
submerged in a chemical that could dissolve his intellect and burn away his
past.

 
          
They
looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years.
They saw the old cities, lost in their meadows, lying like children’s delicate
bones among the blowing lakes of grass.

 
          
“Chin
up, Harry,” said his wife. “It’s too late. We’ve come over sixty million
miles.”

 
          
The
children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There
was no answer but the racing hiss of wind through the stiff grass.

 
          
He
picked up the luggage in his cold hands. “Here we go,” he said—a man standing
on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned.

 
          
They
walked into town.

 
          
Their
name was Bittering. Harry and his wife Cora; Dan, Laura, and David. They built
a small white cottage and ate good breakfasts there, but the fear was never
gone. It lay with Mr. Bittering and Mrs. Bittering, a third unbidden partner at
every
midnight
talk, at every dawn awakening.

 
          
“I
feel like a salt crystal,” he said, “in a mountain stream, being washed away.
We don’t belong here. We’re Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martians.
For heaven’s sake, Cora, let’s buy tickets for home!”

 
          
But
she only shook her head. “One day the atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we’ll be
safe here.”

 
          
“Safe
and insane!”

 
          
Tick-tock,
seven o’clock
sang the voice-clock;
time to get
up
. And they did.

 
          
Something
made him check everything each morning—warm hearth, potted
blood-geraniums—precisely as if he expected something to be amiss. The morning
paper was toast-warm from the
6 A.M.
Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted
it at his breakfast place. He forced himself to be convivial.

 
          
“Colonial
days all over again,” he declared. “Why, in ten years there’ll be a million
Earthmen on Mars. Big cities, everything! They said we’d fail. Said the
Martians would resent our invasion. But did we find any Martians? Not a living
soul! Oh, we found their empty cities, but no one in them. Right?”

 
          
A
river of wind submerged the house. When the windows ceased rattling Mr.
Bittering swallowed and looked at the children.

 
          
“I
don’t know,” said David. “Maybe there’re Martians around we don’t see.
Sometimes nights I think I hear ’em. I hear the wind. The sand hits my window.
I get scared. And I see those towns way up in the mountains where the Martians
lived a long time ago. And I think I see things moving around those towns,
Papa. And I wonder if those Martians
mind
us living here. I wonder if they won’t do something to us for coming here.”

 
          
“Nonsense!”
Mr. Bittering looked out the windows. “We’re clean, decent people.” He looked
at his children. “All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I
mean.” He stared at the hills. “You see a staircase and you wonder what
Martians looked like climbing it. You see Martian paintings and you wonder what
the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind, a memory. It’s
quite natural. Imagination.” He stopped. “You haven’t been prowling up in those
ruins, have you?”

 
          
“No,
Papa.” David looked at his shoes.

 
          
“See
that you stay away from them. Pass the jam.”

 
          
“Just
the same,” said little David, “I bet something happens.”

 
          
Something
happened that afternoon.

 
          
Laura
stumbled through the settlement, crying. She dashed blindly onto the porch.

 
          
“Mother,
Father—the war, Earth!” she sobbed. “A radio flash just came. Atom bombs hit
New York
! All the space rockets blown up. No more
rockets to Mars, ever!”

 
          
“Oh,
Harry!” The mother held onto her husband and daughter.

 
          
“Are
you sure, Laura?” asked the father quietly.

 
          
Laura
wept. “We’re stranded on Mars, forever and ever!”

 
          
For
a long time there was only the sound of the wind in the late afternoon.

 
          
Alone,
thought Bittering. Only a thousand of us here. No way back. No way. No way.
Sweat poured from his face and his hands and his body; he was drenched in the
hotness of his fear. He wanted to strike Laura, cry, “No, you’re lying! The
rockets will come back!” Instead, he stroked Laura’s head against him and said,
“The rockets will get through someday.”

 
          
“Father,
what will we do?”

 
          
“Go
about our business, of course. Raise crops and children. Wait. Keep things
going until the war ends and the rockets come again.”

 
          
The
two boys stepped out onto the porch.

 
          
“Children,”
he said, sitting there, looking beyond them, “I’ve something to tell you.”

 
          
“We
know,” they said.

 
          
In
the following days, Bittering wandered often through the garden to stand alone
in his fear. As long as the rockets had spun a silver web across space, he had
been able to accept Mars. For he had always told himself: Tomorrow, if I want,
I can buy a ticket and go back to Earth.

 
          
But
now: The web gone, the rockets lying in jigsaw heaps of molten girder and
unsnaked wire. Earth people left to the strangeness of Mars, the cinnamon dusts
and wine airs, to be baked like gingerbread shapes in Martian summers, put into
harvested storage by Martian winters. What would happen to him, the others?
This was the moment Mars had waited for. Now it would eat them.

 
          
He
got down on his knees in the flower bed, a spade in his nervous hands. Work, he
thought, work and forget.

 
          
He
glanced up from the garden to the Martian mountains. He thought of the proud
old Martian names that had once been on those peaks. Earthmen, dropping from
the sky, had gazed upon hills, rivers, Martian seats left nameless in spite of
names. Once Martians had built cities, named cities; climbed mountains, named
mountains; sailed seas, named seas. Mountains melted, seas drained, cities
tumbled. In spite of this, the Earthmen had felt a silent guilt at putting new
names to these ancient hills and valleys.

 
          
Nevertheless,
man lives by symbol and label. The names were given.

 
          
Mr.
Bittering felt very alone in his garden under the Martian sun, anachronism bent
here, planting Earth flowers in a wild soil.

 
          
Think.
Keep thinking. Different things. Keep your mind free of Earth, the atom war,
the lost rockets.

 
          
He
perspired. He glanced about. No one watching. He removed his tie. Pretty bold,
he thought. First your coat off, now your tie. He hung it neatly on a peach
tree he had imported as a sapling from
Massachusetts
.

 
          
He
returned to his philosophy of names and mountains. The Earthmen had changed
names. Now there were
Hormel
Valleys
,
Roosevelt
Seas
, Ford Hills, Vanderbilt Plateaus,
Rockefeller
Rivers
, on Mars. It wasn’t right. The American
settlers had shown wisdom, using old Indian prairie names:
Wisconsin
,
Minnesota
,
Idaho
,
Ohio
,
Utah
,
Milwaukee
,
Waukegan
, Osseo. The old names, the old meanings.

 
          
Staring
at the mountains wildly, he thought: Are you up there? All the dead ones, you
Martians? Well, here we are, alone, cut off! Come down, move us out! We’re
helpless!

 
          
The
wind blew a shower of peach blossoms.

 
          
He
put out his sun-browned hand and gave a small cry. He touched the blossoms and
picked them up. He turned them, he touched them again and again. Then he
shouted for his wife.

 
          
“Cora!”

 
          
She
appeared at a window. He ran to her.

 
          
“Cora,
these blossoms!”

 
          
She
handled them.

 
          
“Do
you see? They’re different. They’ve changed! They’re not peach blossoms any
more!”

 
          
“Look
all right to me,” she said.

 
          
“They’re
not. They’re wrong! I can’t tell how. An extra petal, a leaf, something, the
color, the smell!”

 
          
The
children ran out in time to see their father hurrying about the garden, pulling
up radishes, onions, and carrots from their beds.

 
          
“Cora,
come look!”

 
          
They
handled the onions, the radishes, the carrots among them.

 
          
“Do
they look like carrots?”

 
          
“Yes
… no.” She hesitated. “I don’t know.”

 
          
“They’re
changed.”

 
          
“Perhaps.”