The Lost Bradbury (22 page)

“Can you see all those asteroids, Nibley. Are you sure?”

“Sure. Lots of ‘em. Every single one going every which way! Keep straight ahead until two hours from now, after that last direction of mine—then slide off at an angle toward Jupiter, slow down to ninety thousand for ten minutes, then up to a hundred ten thousand for fifteen minutes. After that, one hundred fifty thousand all the way!”

Flame poured out of the rocket jets. It moved swiftly away, growing small and distant.

“Give me a read on dial 67!”

“Four.”

“Make it six! And set your automatic pilot to 61 and 14 and 35. Now—everything’s okay. Keep your chronometer reading this way—seven, nine, twelve. There’ll be a few tight scrapes, but you’ll hit Jupiter square on in 24 hours, if you jump your speed to 700,000 six hours from now and hold it that way.”

“Square on it is, Mr. Nibley.”

Nibley just lay there a moment. His voice was easy and not so high and shrill any more. “And on the way back to Mars, later, don’t try to find me. I’m going out in the dark on this metal rock. Nothing but dark for me. Back to perihelion and sun for you. Know—know where
I’m
going?”

“Where?”

“Centaurus!” Nibley laughed. “So help me God I am. No lie!”

He watched the ship going out, then, and he felt the compact, collected trajectories of all the men in it. It was a good feeling to know that he was guiding them. Like in the old days….

Douglas’ voice broke in again.

“Hey, Pop. Pop, you still there?”

A little silence. Nibley felt blood pulsing down inside his suit. “Yep.” he said.

“We just gave Bruno your little note to read. Whatever it was, when he finished reading it, he went insane.”

Nibley said, quiet-like. “Burn that there paper. Don’t let anybody else read it.”

A pause.
“It’s burnt. What was it?”

“Don’t be inquisitive,” snapped the old man. “Maybe I proved to Bruno that he didn’t really exist. To hell with it!”

The rocket reached its constant speed. Douglas radioed back:
“All’s well. Sweet calculating, Pop. I’ll tell the Rocket Officials back at Marsport. They’ll be glad to know about you. Sweet, sweet calculating. Thanks. How goes it? I said—how goes it? Hey, Pop! Pop!”

Nibley raised a trembling hand and waved it at nothing. The ship was gone. He couldn’t even see the jet-wash now, he could only feel, that hard metal movement out there among the stars, going on and on through a course he had set for it. He couldn’t speak. There was just emotion in him. He had finally, by God, heard a compliment from a mechanic of radar-computators!

He waved his hand at nothing. He watched nothing moving on and on into the crossed orbits of other invisible nothings. The silence was now complete.

He put his hand down. Now he had only to chart that one last personal orbit. The one he had wanted to finish only in space and not grounded back on Mars.

It didn’t take lightning calculation to set it out for certain.

Life and death were the parabolic ends to his trajectory. The long life, first swinging in from darkness, arcing to the inevitable perihelion, and now moving back out, out and away—

Into the soft, encompassing dark.  

“By God,” he thought weakly, quietly. “Right up to the last, my reputation’s good. Never fluked a calculation yet, and I never will….”

He didn’t.

 
HOLIDAY

This Martian tale has not been chronicled, although it was included in the 1965 British anthology of
Far Boundaries
. “Holiday” was first published in
Arkham Sampler
in the autumn of 1949.

* * * *

Someone suggested wine for dinner. So Charlie fetched a dusty bottle from the cellar and uncorked it.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Let’s see.” Bill raised his watch. “About seven.”

The three men in the stone room had drunk beer all afternoon with the radio murmuring in the hot silence. Now, with the sun set, they buttoned their shirts again.

“I’m glad my sister’s away in the mountains tonight” said Walter.

“She’ll hear about it, anyway, won’t she? They have a telegraph up at the villa?”

“Last I heard, it was out of order.” Walter tapped his fingers on the stone table. “It’s this waiting kills me. I wish I didn’t know. I wish I could just look up and see it happen and be surprised and not have time to think.”

“Suppose it’ll happen tonight?” Bill handed around glasses of the cool wine. He was frying a large omelette on the office stove, with tomato sauce and crisp bacon.

“Who knows?” said Charlie.

“They said it might in the last radiogram that came through before the silence.”

Walter opened the large window. The sky was clear, dark, filling with stars. A still quiet warmth as of breathing hung over the village down hill. Distantly, a canal lay near the horizon, shining.

“Mars is a funny planet,” observed Walter, looking out. “I never dreamed I’d wind up living here, a couple million miles from home.”

Voices sounded below; two dim figures careened along the alley.

“There go Johnson and Remington,” said Walter. “Drunker than owls, already. God, how I envy them.”

“If there’s one time I don’t want to be drunk, it’s tonight,” said Bill, spooning out omelette on three stone plates. “Where’s your son, Walt?”

Walter called out the window into the dark, evening street. “Joe!” After a moment, a small voice replied, far away, “Can’t I stay out, dad?” “No!” Walter called back. “Come eat!” “But I might miss it,” complained Joe, trudging up the back stairs, slowly. “Eat and you can run back out,” said Waiter, as
they all sat down to the table. The boy, ten years old and blond, watched the door and ate rapidly with his spoon. “Slow down,” suggested his father. “Some more wine, anybody?” The wine was poured quietly.

They did little conversing during the supper hour.

“My plate’s clean; can I go now, dad?”

Walter nodded and the boy ran. His footsteps faded down the alley. Bill said, “He wasn’t born on Earth, was he?”

“No. Here in Mars Village, in 1991. His mother divorced me two years later. She went back to Earth. Joe stayed on; the psychologist pointed out that space travel and the change in environments would be too much for Joe. So he stayed here with me.”

“This must be quite a night for Joe.”

“Yes, he’s excited. Means nothing to him, of course; just another entertainment, something new, different.”

“Why can’t we change the subject?” Charles slammed down his knife and fork. “What time is it?” Somebody told him. “More wine,” he gasped, holding the bottle, his hand trembling.

“The Martians are throwing a big shindig in the village tonight,” said Bill, helping clear the table. “I don’t blame them. We came here to colonize Mars in our rockets and never asked if they wanted us or not. How many Earthmen are here on Mars now, Charlie?”

“A thousand; no more than that.”

“Well, that makes us a neat minority, doesn’t it? Those two million Martians will certainly deserve their celebration on a night like this. They’ve declared a planet-wide holiday! children out of school and everything. The Big Set-Piece Day they call it. Fireworks and all.”

They walked out onto the balcony of the stone house to sit smoking their cigarettes. “I’m sure it won’t happen tonight,” said Charlie, smiling, sweat on his upper lip.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said Walt, taking out his pipe.

“My kid’s down in the town now running and screaming with the Martian kids in the big holiday. He’s almost a Martian himself. Oh, it’ll be tonight all right.”

“I wonder what the Martians will do to us?”

Walt shrugged. “Nothing. God, how they must feel about all this. Without having to lift a finger, without having anything to do with the Fireworks, the Martian can watch the display. I think it’ll amuse them to let us live on; remnants of a civilization, as it were, that set fire to its own tail.”

Bill puffed slowly. “I’ve got a father, living in Illinois, Lake Bluff, tonight. God how he hated Communists.”

“No kidding?” Charlie laughed, shortly. “I went through Lake Bluff three times in the summer of 1980, when I was twelve.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Bill.

They sat in darkness, cigarettes glowing. Far away, the running feet, the shouts, the laughs, grew louder. Carnival music sounded, firecrackers exploded, whistles blew. In all the tilted stone houses candles flickered out as shadows moved into the streets.

“They’re climbing on their rooftops for the performance,” said Bill, quietly. “There’re some going up in the hills. They can make a night of it; take a picnic lunch, sit on a hilltop, wait for the big show, and maybe make a little love. Fine.”

“Nice night. Were you ever in Chicago in the summer?” asked Charlie, suddenly. “Hot. I thought I’d die.”

The town lights were all gone now. On the silent hills, the people watched the sky.

“Funny,” said Bill. “I just thought of Central School, in Mellin Town, Wisconsin. Haven’t thought of it in years. We had an old maid teacher named Larribee and—” He stopped, drank his wine, and said nothing else.

Walt’s son ran upstairs, panting.

“Is it time?” He flopped on his father’s knee.

“Aren’t you spending the night with the village boys?” asked Walt. “No, I’ll be with you,” said Joe. “After all,” he explained. “You were born in New York.”

“Thanks,” said Walt.

“Who planned the show tonight, the fireworks, dad?”

“I wish I knew.”

In the east, a green star rose.

Below, in the town, a murmur sounded.

“Is that Earth in the sky, dad?”

“Tell me about the set-piece and the fireworks, huh?”

“Well, it took a lot of money, people and time to build.”

“How long?”

“Fifty years, I guess.”

“That’s pretty long.”

Walt held his son and the night wind rose across the alleys, slow and trembling. “I don’t see nothing,” said Joe. “Hush,” whispered his father. They held their breath.

Earth was clear and green in the heavens.

“Hell,” said Charlie. “It’s a false alarm. I’ll open a new bottle and—” He started to stand up.

The sky exploded.

“There!” cried Bill.

They fell back as the whiteness burned the sky.

Earth grew violently, flaming, twice, four times normal size. Fire pushed away darkness with no sound. Like a great green-red flare, the illumination rushed over upturned faces on the hills, in house windows, on rooftops, in valleys, by the rivers and the long canals and the dead seas. The white flame burned briefly in the eyes of the three waiting men.

The light faded.

On the hillsides a vast exultant sigh went up, there was a dinning of drums, a shouting. Joe turned to his father. “Is that all?”

The three men held cigarettes unlit in their slumped hands.

“That’s all,” said Walt, eyes shut. “Show’s over.”

“When will it happen again?” asked Joe.

Walt got up swiftly. “Look; here’s the cellar key. Run down and carry up four bottles of wine. That’s a good boy. Hurry.”

They sat without a word on the cold balcony until the boy brought the bottles up from the cellar.

 
I, MARS

This is another Martian tale which has somehow remained unchronicled. Also published as “Night Call, Collect,” it first came out in
Super Science Stories
(April 1949) and reprinted/anthologized several times in
A Wilderness of Stars
(1969),
Tales of Terror from Outer Space
(1975), and
The Weekend Book of Science Fiction
(1981).

* * * *

The phone rang.

A grey hand lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Barton?”

“Yes.”

“This is Barton!”

“What?”

“This is Barton!”

“It can’t be. This phone hasn’t rung in twenty years.”

The old man hung up.

Brrrrinnnng!

His grey hand seized the phone.

“Hello, Barton,” laughed the voice. “You have forgotten, haven’t you?”

The old man felt his heart grow small and like a cool stone. He felt the wind blowing in off the dry Martian seas and the blue hills of Mars. After twenty years of silence and cobwebs and now, tonight, on his eightieth birthday, with a ghastly scream, this phone had wailed to life.

“Who did you think it was?” said the voice. “A rocket captain? Did you think someone had come to rescue you?”