Not only that, but where weeds had always been, now cabbages, green onions, and lettuce crammed every yard, crowds of curious sunflowers clocked the noon sky, and pansies lay under unnumbered trees cool as summer puppies, their great damp eyes peering over rolled lawns mint-green as Irish travel posters. To top it all, ten boys, faces scrubbed, hair brilliantined, shirts, pants, and tennis shoes clean as chunks of snow, raced by.
‘The town,’ said Willy, watching them run, ‘has gone mad. Mystery. Mystery everywhere. Samuel, what kind of tyrant’s come to power? What law was passed that keeps boys clean, drives people to paint every toothpick, every geranium pot? Smell that smell? There’s fresh wallpaper in all those houses! Doom in some horrible shape has tried and tested these people. Human nature doesn’t just get this picky perfect overnight. I’ll bet all the gold I panned last month those attics, those cellars are cleaned out, all shipshape. I’ll bet you a real Thing fell on this town.’
‘Why, I can almost hear the cherubim singing in the Garden,’ Samuel protested. ‘How you figure Doom? Shake my hand, put ’er there. I’ll bet and take your money!’
The jalopy swerved around a corner through a wind that smelled of turpentine and whitewash. Samuel threw out a gum wrapper, snorting. He was somewhat surprised at what happened next. An old man in new overalls, with mirror-bright shoes, ran out in the street, grabbed the crumpled gum wrapper and shook his fist after the departing jalopy.
‘Doom …’ Samuel Fitts looked back, his voice fading. ‘Well … the bet still stands.’
They opened the door upon a barber-shop teeming with customers whose hair had already been cut and oiled, whose faces were shaved close and pink, yet who sat waiting to vault back into the chairs where three barbers flourished their shears and combs. A stock-market uproar filled the room as customers and barbers all talked at once.
When Willy and Samuel entered, the uproar ceased instantly. It was as if they had fired a shotgun blast through the door.
‘Sam … Willy …’
In the silence some of the sitting men stood up and some of the standing men sat down, slowly, staring.
‘Samuel,’ said Willy out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I feel like the Red Death standing here.’ Aloud he said, ‘Howdy! Here I am to finish my lecture on the “Interesting Flora and Fauna of the Great American Desert,” and –’
‘No!’
Antonelli, the head barber, rushed frantically at Willy, seized his arm, clapped his hand over Willy’s mouth like a snuffer on a candle. ‘Willy,’ he whispered, looking apprehensively over his shoulder at his customers. ‘Promise me one thing: buy a needle and thread, sew up your lips. Silence, man, if you value your life!’
Willy and Samuel felt themselves hurried forward. Two already neat customers leapt out of the barber chairs without being asked. As they stepped into the chairs, the two miners glimpsed their own images in the flyspecked mirror.
‘Samuel, there we are! Look! Compare!’
‘Why,’ said Samuel, blinking, ‘we’re the only men in all Rock Junction who really need a shave and a haircut.’
‘Strangers!’ Antonelli laid them out in the chairs as if to anaesthetize them quickly. ‘You don’t know what strangers you are!’
‘Why, we’ve only been gone a couple of months….’ A steaming towel inundated Willy’s face; he subsided with muffled cries. In steaming darkness he heard Antonelli’s low and urgent voice.
‘We’ll fix you to look like everyone else. Not that the way you look is dangerous, no, but the kind of talk you miners talk might upset folks at a time like this….’
‘Time like this, hell!’ Willy lifted the seething towel. One bleary eye fixed Antonelli. ‘What’s wrong with Rock Junction?’
‘Not just Rock Junction.’ Antonelli gazed off at some incredible mirage beyond the horizon. ‘Phoenix, Tucson, Denver. All the cities in America! My wife and I are going as tourists to Chicago next week. Imagine Chicago all painted and clean and new. The Pearl of the Orient they call it! Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Buffalo, the same! All because … well … get up now, walk over, and switch on that television set against the wall.’
Willy handed Antonelli the steaming towel, walked over, switched on the television set, listened to it hum, fiddled with the dials, and waited. White snow drifted down the screen.
‘Try the radio now,’ said Antonelli.
Willy felt everyone watch as he twisted the radio dial from station to station.
‘Hell,’ he said at last, ‘both your television and radio are broken.’
‘No,’ said Antonelli, simply.
Willy lay back down in the chair and closed his eyes.
Antonelli leaned forward, breathing hard.
‘Listen,’ he said.
‘Imagine four weeks ago, a late Saturday morning, women and children staring at clowns and magicians on TV. In beauty shops, women staring at TV fashions. In the barber-shop and hardware stores, men staring at baseball or trout fishing. Everybody everywhere in the civilized world staring. No sound, no motion, except on the little black and white screens.
‘And then, in the middle of all that staring …’
Antonelli paused to lift up one corner of the broiling cloth.
‘Sunspots on the sun,’ he said.
Willy stiffened.
‘Biggest damn sunspots in the history of mortal man,’ said Antonelli. ‘Whole damn world flooded with electricity. Wiped evry TV scren clear as a whistle, leaving nothing, and, after that, more nothing.’
His voice was remote as the voice of a man describing an Arctic landscape. He lathered Willy’s face not looking at what he was doing. Willy peered across the barber-shop, at the soft snow falling down and down that humming screen in an eternal winter. He could almost hear the rabbit-thumping of all the hearts in the shop.
Antonelli continued his funeral oration.
‘It took us all that first day to realize what had happened. Two hours after that first sunspot storm hit, every TV repairman in the United States was on the road. Everyone figured it was just their own set. With the radios conked out too it was only that night when newsboys, like in the old days, ran headlines through the streets that we got the shock about the sun-spots maybe going on – for the rest of our lives!’
The customers murmured.
Antonelli’s hand, holding the razor, shook. He had to wait.
‘All that blankness, that empty stuff falling down, falling down inside our television sets, oh, I tell you, it gave everyone the willies. It was like a good friend who talks to you in your front room and suddenly shuts up and lies there, pale, and you know he’s dead and you begin to turn cold yourself.
‘That first night, there was a run on the town’s movie houses. Films weren’t much, but it was like the Oddfellows’ Ball downtown till midnight. Drug-store fizzed up two hundred vanilla, three hundred chocolate sodas that first night of the Calamity. But you can’t buy movies and sodas every night. What then? Phone your in-laws for canasta or parchesi?’
‘Might as well,’ observed Willy, ‘blow your brains out.’
‘Sure, but people had to get out of their haunted houses. Walking through their parlours was like whistling past a graveyard. All that silence –’
Willy sat up a little. ‘Speaking of silence –’
‘On the third night,’ said Antonelli, quickly, ‘we were all still in shock. We were saved from outright lunacy by one woman. Somewhere in this town this woman strolled out of the house, and came back a minute later. In one hand she held a paintbrush. And in the other …’
‘A bucket of paint,’ said Willy.
Everyone smiled, seeing how well he understood.
‘If those psychologists ever strike off gold medals, they should pin one on that woman and every woman like her in every little town who saved our world from coming to an end. Those women who instinctively wandered in at twilight, and brought us the miracle cure …’
Willy imagined it. There were the glaring fathers and the
scowling sons slumped by their dead TV sets waiting for the damn things to shout Ball One, or Strike Two! And then they looked up from their wake and there in the twilight saw the fair women of great purpose and dignity standing and waiting with brushes and paint. And a glorious light kindled their cheeks and eyes …’
‘Lord, it spread like wildfire!’ said Antonelli. ‘House to house, city to city. Jigsaw-puzzle craze, 1932; yo-yo craze, 1928, were nothing compared with the Everybody Do Everything Craze that blew this town to smithereens and glued it back again. Men everywhere slapped paint on anything that stood still ten seconds; men everywhere climbed steeples, straddled fences, fell off roofs and ladders by the hundreds. Women painted cupboards, closets; kids painted Tinkertoys, wagons, kites. If they hadn’t kept busy, you could have built a wall around this town and renamed it Babbling Brook. All towns, everywhere, the same, where people had forgotten how to waggle their jaws, make their own talk. I tell you, men were moving in mindless circles, dazed, until their wives shoved a brush in their hand and pointed them towards the nearest unpainted wall!’
‘Looks like you finished the job,’ said Willy.
‘Paint stores ran out of paint three times the first week.’ Antonelli surveyed the town with pride. ‘The painting could only last so long, of course, unless you start painting hedges and spraying grass blades one by one. Now that the attics and cellars are cleaned out, too, our fire is seeping off into, well – women canning fruit again, making tomato pickles, raspberry, strawberry preserves. Basement shelves are loaded. Big church doings, too. Organized bowling, night donkey baseball, box socials, beer busts. Music shop sold five hundred ukeleles, two hundred twelve steel guitars, four hundred sixty ocarins and kazoos in four weeks. I’m studying trombone. Mac, there, the flute. Band concerts Thursday and Sunday nights. Hand-crank ice-cream machines? Bert Tyson’s sold two hundred last week alone. Twenty-eight days, Willy, Twenty-eight Days That Shook the World!’
Willy Bersinger and Samuel Fitts sat there, trying to imagine and feel the shock, the crushing blow.
‘Twenty-eight days, the barber-shop jammed with men, getting shaved twice a day so they can sit and stare at customers like they might say something,’ said Antonelli, shaving Willy now. ‘Once, remember, before TV, barbers were supposed to be great talkers. Well, this month it took us one whole week to warm up, get the rust out. Now we’re spouting fourteen to the dozen. No quality, but our quantity is ferocious. When you came in you heard the commotion. Oh, it’ll simmer down when we get used to the great Oblivion ’
‘Is that what everyone calls it?’
‘It sure looked that way to most of us, there for a while.’
Willy Bersinger laughed quietly and shook his head.
‘Now I know why you didn’t want me to start lecturing when I walked in that door.’
Of course, thought Willy, why didn’t I see it right off? Four short weeks ago the wilderness fell on this town and shook it good and scared it plenty. Because of the sunspots, all the towns in all the western world have had enough silence to last them ten years. And here I come by with another dose of silence, my easy talk about deserts and nights with no moon and only stars and just the little sound of the sand blowing along the empty river bottoms. No telling what might have happened if Antonelli hadn’t shut me up. I see me, tarred and feathered, leaving town.
‘Antonelli,’ he said aloud. ‘Thanks.’
‘For nothing,’ said Antonelli. He picked up his comb and shears. ‘Now, short on the sides, long in back?’
‘Long on the sides,’ said Willy Bersinger, closing his eyes again, ‘short in back.’
An hour later Willy and Samuel climbed back into their jalopy, which someone, they never knew who, had washed and polished while they were in the barber-shop.
‘Doom.’ Samuel handed over a small sack of gold-dust. ‘With a capital D.’
‘Keep it.’ Willy sat, thoughtful, behind the wheel. ‘Let’s take this money and hit out for Phoenix, Tucson, Kansas City, why not? Right now, we’re a surplus commodity around here. We won’t be welcome again until those little sets begin to herring-bone and dance and sing. Sure as hell, if we stay, we’ll open our traps and the Gila monsters and chicken hawks and the wilderness will slip out and make us trouble.’
Willy squinted at the highway straight ahead.
‘Pearl of the Orient, that’s what he said. Can you imagine that dirty old town, Chicago, all painted up fresh and new as a babe in the morning light? We just got to go see Chicago, by God!’
He started the car, let it idle, and looked at the town.
‘Man survives,’ he murmured. ‘Man endures. Too bad we missed the big change. It must have been a fierce thing, a time of trials and testings. Samuel, I don’t recall, do you? What have we ever seen on TV?’
‘Saw a woman wrestle a bear two falls out of three, one night.’
‘Who won?’
‘Damned if I know. She –’
But then the jalopy moved and took Willy Bersinger and Samuel Fitts with it, their hair cut, oiled, and neat on their sweet-smelling skulls, their cheeks pink-shaven, their fingernails flashing the sun. They sailed under clipped green, fresh-watered trees, through flowered lanes, past daffodil, lilac, violet, rose, and peppermint-coloured houses on the dustless road.
‘Pearl of the Orient, here we come!’
A perfumed dog, with permed hair, ran out, nipped their tyres, and barked, until they were gone away and completely out of sight.
Dark They were and Golden-eyed
THE rocket’s 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 centre of a vacuum. His wife, before him, trembled. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes.
The children looked up at him. 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, whining. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone.
He looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. He saw the old cities, lost and 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 at least sixty-five million miles or more.’
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; Tim, 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 often 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 six a.m. Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted it at his breakfast plate. He forced himself to be convivial.
‘Colonial days all over again,’ he declared. ‘Why, in another year 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 of 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 on to 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 on to her husband and daughter.
‘Are you sure, Laura?’ asked the father quietly.