R Is for Rocket

"Bob!"

  "I threw it away, Carrie, I swear, I threw it away on nothing. It was going to be a surprise. But now, tonight, there you are, and there are those blasted suitcases on the floor and . . ."

  "Bob," she said, turning around. "You mean we've gone through all this, on Mars, putting away extra money every week, only to have you burn it up in a few hours?"

  "I don't know," he said. "I'm a crazy fool. Look, it's not long till morning. We'll get up early. I'll take you down to see what I've done. I don't want to tell you, I want you to see. And if it's no go then, well, there's always those suitcases and the rocket to Earth four times a month."

  She did not move. "Bob, Bob," she murmured.

  "Don't say any more," he said.

  "Bob, Bob . . ." She shook her head slowly, unbelievingly. He turned away and lay back down on his own side of the bed, and she sat on the other side, looking at the bureau where her handkerchiefs and jewelry and clothing lay ready in neat stacks where she had left them. Outside a wind the color of moonlight stirred up the sleeping dust and powdered the air.

  At last she lay back, but said nothing more and was a cold weight in the bed, staring down the long tunnel of night toward the faintest sign of morning.

  They got up in the very first light and moved in the small quonset hut without a sound. It was a pantomime prolonged almost to the time when someone might scream at the silence, as the mother and father and the boys washed and dressed and ate a quiet breakfast of toast and fruit juice and coffee, with no one looking directly at anyone and everyone watching someone in the reflective surfaces of toaster, glassware, or cutlery, where all their faces were melted out of shape and made terribly alien in the early hour. Then, at last, they opened the quonset door and let in the air that blew across the cold blue-white Martian seas, where only the sand tides dissolved and shifted and made ghost patterns, and they stepped out under a raw and staring cold sky and began their walk toward a town, which seemed no more than a motion-picture set far on ahead of them on a vast, empty stage.

  "What part of town are we going to?" asked Carrie.

  "The rocket depot," he said. "But before we get there, I've a lot to say."

  The boys slowed down and moved behind their parents, listening. The father gazed ahead, and not once in all the time he was talking did he look at his wife or sons to see how they were taking all that he said.

  "I believe in Mars," he began quietly. "I guess I believe some day it'll belong to us. We'll nail it down. We'll settle in. We won't turn tail and run. It came to me one day a year ago, right after we first arrived. Why did we come? I asked myself.

  Because, I said, because. It's the same thing with the salmon every year. The salmon don't know why they go where they go, but they go, anyway. Up rivers they don't remember, up streams, jumping waterfalls, but finally making it to where they propagate and die, and the whole thing starts again. Call it racial memory, instinct, call it nothing, but there it is. And here we are."

  They walked in the silent morning with the great sky watching them and the strange blue and steam-white sands sifting about their feet on the new highway.

  "So here we are. And from Mars where? Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, and on out? Right. And on out. Why? Some day the sun will blow up like a leaky furnace. Boom - there goes Earth. But maybe Mars won't be hurt; or if Mars is hurt maybe Pluto won't be, or if Pluto's hurt, then where'll -we be, our sons' sons, that is?"

  He gazed steadily up into that flawless shell of plum-colored sky.

  "Why, we'll be on some world with a number maybe; planet 6 of star system 97, planet 2 of system 99! So darn far off from here you need a nightmare to take it in! We'll be gone, do you see, gone off away and safe! And I thought to myself, ah, ah. So that's the reason we came to Mars, so that's the reason men shoot off their rockets."

  "Bob - "

  "Let me finish; not to make money, no. Not to see the sights, no. Those are the lies men tell, the fancy reasons they give themselves. Get rich, get famous, they say. Have fun, jump around, they say. But all the while, inside, something else is ticking along the way it ticks in salmon or whales, the way it ticks, oh, Lord, in the smallest microbe you want to name. And that little clock that ticks in everything living, you know what it says? It says get away, spread out, move along, keep swimming. Run to so many worlds and build so many towns that nothing can ever kill man. You see, Carrie? It's not just us come to Mars, it's the race, the whole darn human race, depending on how we make out in our lifetime. This thing is so big I want to laugh, I'm so scared stiff of it."

  He felt the boys walking steadily behind him and he felt Carrie beside him and he wanted to see her face and how she was taking all this, but he didn't look there, either.

  "All this is no different than me and Dad walking the fields when I was a boy, casting seed by hand when our seeder broke down and we'd no money to fix it. It had to be done, somehow, for the later crops. Why now, Carrie, why, do you remember those Sunday-supplement articles, THE EARTH WILL FREEZE IN A MILLION YEARS! I bawled once, as a boy, reading articles like that. My mother asked why. I'm bawling for all those poor people up ahead, I said. Don't worry about them, Mother said. But, Carrie, that's my whole point; we are worrying about them. Or we wouldn't be here. It matters if Man with a capital M keeps going. There's nothing better than Man with a capital M in my books. I'm prejudiced, of course, because I'm one of the breed. But if there's any way to get hold of that immortality men are always talking about, this is the way - spread out - seed the universe. Then you got a harvest against crop failures anywhere down the line. No matter if Earth has famines or the rust comes in. You got the new wheat lifting on Venus or where-in-blazes-ever man gets to in the next thousand years, I'm crazy with the idea, Carrie, crazy. When I finally hit on it I got so excited I wanted to grab people, you, the boys, and tell them. But well, I knew that wasn't necessary. I knew a day or night would come when you'd hear that ticking in yourselves too, and then you'd see, and no one'd have to say anything again about all this. It's big talk, Carrie, I know, and big thoughts for a man just short of five feet five, but by all that's holy, it's true."

  They moved through the deserted streets of the town and listened to the echoes of their walking feet.

  "And this morning?" said Carrie.

  "I'm coming to this morning," he said. "Part of me wants to go home too. But the other part says if we go, everything's lost. So I thought, what bothers us most? Some of the things we once had. Some of the boys' things, your things, mine. And I thought, if it takes an old thing to get a new thing started, why then, I'll use the old thing. I remember from history books that a thousand years ago they put charcoals in a hollowed out cow horn, blew on them during the day, so they carried their fire on marches from place to place, to start a fire every night with the sparks left over from morning. Always a new fire, but always something of the old in it. So I weighed and balanced it off. Is the Old worth all our money? I asked. No! It's only the things we did with the Old that have any worth. Well, then, is the New worth all our money? I asked. Do you feel like investing in the day after the middle of next week? Yes! I said. If I can fight this thing that makes us want to go back to Earth, I'd dip my money in kerosene and strike a match!"

  Carrie and the two boys did not move. They stood on the street, looking at him as if he were a storm that had passed over and around, almost blowing them from the ground, a storm that was now dying away.

  "The freight rocket came in this morning," he said, quietly. "Our delivery's on it. Let's go and pick it up."

  They walked slowly up the three steps into the rocket depot and across the echoing floor toward the freight room that was just sliding back its doors, opening for the day.

  "Tell us again about the salmon," said one of the boys.

  In the middle of the warm morning they drove out of town in a rented truck filled with great crates and boxes and
parcels and packages, long ones, tall ones, short ones, flat ones, all numbered and neatly addressed to one Robert Prentiss, New Toledo, Mars.

  They stopped the truck by the quonset hut and the boys jumped down and helped their mother out. For a moment Bob sat behind the wheel, and then slowly got out himself to walk around and look into the back of the truck at the crates.

  And by noon all but one of the boxes were opened and their contents placed on the sea-bottom where the family stood among them.

  "Carrie . . ."

  And he led her up the old porch steps that now stood un-crated on the edge of town.

  "Listen to 'em, Carrie."

  The steps squeaked and whispered underfoot.

  "What do they say, tell me what they say?"

  She stood on the ancient wooden steps, holding to herself, and could not tell him.

  He waved his hand. "Front porch here, living room there, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms. Most we'll build new, part we'll bring. Of course all we got here now is the front steps, some parlor furniture, and the old bed."

  "All that money, Bob!"

  He turned, smiling. "You're not mad, now, look at me! You're not mad. We'll bring it all up, next year, five years! The cut-glass vases, that Armenian carpet your mother gave us in 1975! Just let the sun explode!"

  They looked at the other crates, numbered and lettered: Front-porch swing, front-porch wicker rocker, hanging Chinese crystals . . .

  "I'll blow them myself to make them ring."

  And then they set the front door, with its little panes of colored glass, on the top of the stairs, and Carrie looked through the strawberry window.

  "What do you see?"

  But he knew what she saw, for he gazed through the colored glass, too. And there was Mars, with its cold sky warmed and its dead seas fired with color, with its hills like mounds of strawberry ice, and its sand like burning charcoals sifted by wind. The strawberry window, the strawberry window, breathed soft rose colors on the land and filled the mind and the eye with the light of a never-ending dawn. Bent there, looking through, he heard himself say:

  "The town'll be out this way in a year. This'll be a shady street, you'll have your porch, and you'll have friends. You won't need all this so much, then. But starting right here, with this little bit that's familiar, watch it spread, watch Mars change so you'll know it as if you've known it all your life."

  He ran down the steps to the last and as-yet unopened canvas-covered crate. With his pocket knife he cut a hole in the canvas. "Guess!" he said.

  "My kitchen stove? My sewing machine?"

  "Not in a million years." He smiled very gently. "Sing me a song," he said.

  "Bob, you're clean off your head."

  "Sing me a song worth all the money we had in the bank and now don't have, but who gives a blast in hades," he said.

  "I don't know anything but 'Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve!'"

  "Sing that," he said.

  But she could not open her mouth and start the song. He saw her lips move and try, but there was no sound.

  He ripped the canvas wider and shoved his hand into the crate and touched around for a quiet moment, and started to sing the words himself until he moved his hand a last time and then a single clear piano chord sprang out on the morning air.

  "There," he said. "Let's take it right on to the end. Every-one! Here's the harmony."

  THE DRAGON

  The night blew in the short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky. Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.

  Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other's faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.

  "Don't, idiot; you'll give us away!"

  "No matter," said the second man. "The dragon can smell us miles off anyway. God's breath, it's cold. I wish I was back at the castle."

  "It's death, not sleep, we're after. . . ."

  "Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!"

  "Quiet, fool! He eats men traveling alone from our town to the next!"

  "Let them be eaten and let us get home!"

  "Wait now; listen!"

  The two men froze.

  They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses' nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.

  "Ah." The second man signed. "What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it's night. And then, and then, oh, sweet mortality, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulfur and thunder and kindles the grass. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon's fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?"

  "Enough of that!"

  "More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!"

  "Nine hundred years since the Nativity."

  "No, no," whispered the second man, eyes shut. "On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don't ask how I know; the moor knows and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, God save us!"

  "Be you afraid, then gird on your armor!"

  "What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog; we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armor, we'll die well dressed."

  Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.

  Across the dim country, full of night and nothingness from the heart of the moor itself, the wind sprang full of dust from clocks that used dust for telling time. There were black suns burning in the heart of this new wind and a million burnt leaves shaken from some autumn tree beyond the horizon.

  This wind melted landscapes, lengthened bones like white wax, made the blood roil and thicken to a muddy deposit in the brain. The wind was a thousand souls dying and all time confused and in transit. It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man's place and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of sudden frost, storm and white thunder which moved behind the great falling pane of green glass that was the lightning. A squall of rain drenched the turf; all faded away until there was unbreathing hush and the two men waiting alone with their warmth in a cool season.

  "There," whispered the first man, "Oh, there . . ."

  Miles off, rushing with a great chant and a roar - the dragon.

  In silence the men buckled on their armor and mounted their horses. The midnight wilderness was split by a monstrous gushing as the dragon roared nearer, nearer; its flashing yellow glare spurted above a hill and then, fold on fold of dark body, distantly seen, therefore indistinct, flowed over that hill and plunged vanishing into a valley.

  "Quick!"

  They spurred their horses forward to a small hollow.

  "This is where it passes!"

  They seized their lances with mailed fists and blinded their horses by flipping the visors down over their eyes.

  "Lord!"

  "Yes, let us use His name."

  On the instant, the dragon rounded a hi
ll. Its monstrous amber eye fed on them, fired their armor in red glints and glitters. With a terrible wailing cry and a grinding rush it flung itself forward.

  "Mercy, mercy!"

  The lance struck under the unlidded yellow eye, buckled, tossed the man through the air. The dragon hit, spilled him over, down, ground him under. Passing, the black brunt of its shoulder smashed the remaining horse and rider a hundred feet against the side of a boulder, wailing, wailing, the dragon shrieking, the fire all about, around, under it, a pink, yellow, orange sun-fire with great soft plumes of blinding smoke.

  "Did you see it?" cried a voice. "Just like I told you!"

  "The same! The same! A knight in armor, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!"

  "You goin' to stop?"

  "Did once; found nothing. Don't like to stop on this moor. I get the willies. Got a feel, it has."

  "But we hit something!"

  "Gave him plenty of whistle; chap wouldn't budge!"

  A steaming blast cut the mist aside.

  "We'll make Stokely on time. More coal, eh, Fred?"

  Another whistle shook dew from the empty sky. The night train, in fire and fury, shot through a gully, up a rise, and vanished away over cold earth toward the north, leaving black smoke and steam to dissolve in the numbed air minutes after it had passed and gone forever.

  THE GIFT

  Tomorrow would be Christmas, and even while the three of them rode to the rocket port the mother and father were worried. It was the boy's first flight into space, his very first time in a rocket, and they wanted everything to be perfect. So when, at the custom's table, they were forced to leave behind his gift which exceeded the weight limit by no more than a few ounces and the little tree with the lovely white candles, they felt themselves deprived of the season and their love.

  The boy was waiting for them in the Terminal room. Walking toward him, after their unsuccessful clash with the Interplanetary officials, the mother and father whispered to each other.

  "What shall we do?"

  "Nothing, nothing. What can we do?"

  "Silly rules!"

  "And he so wanted the tree!"

  The siren gave a great howl and people pressed forward into the Mars Rocket. The mother and father walked at the very last, their small pale son between them, silent.

  "I'll think of something," said the father.

  "What . . . ?" asked the boy.

  And the rocket took off and they were flung headlong into dark space.

  The rocket moved and left fire behind and left Earth behind on which the date was December 24, 2052, heading out into a place where there was no time at all, no month, no year, no hour. They slept away the rest of the first "day." Near midnight, by their Earth-time New York watches, the boy awoke and said, "I want to go look out the porthole."