They came to a small deserted Martian villa with a good view of the valley. It was on top of a hill. Blue marble halls, large murals, a swimming pool. It was refreshing in this hot summertime. The Martians hadn’t believed in large cities.
‘How nice,’ said Mrs Bittering, ‘if we could move up here to this villa for the summer.’
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re going back to town. There’s work to be done on the rocket.’
But as he worked that night, the thought of the cool blue marble villa entered his mind. As the hours passed, the rocket seemed less important.
In the flow of days and weeks, the rocket receded and dwindled. The old fever was gone. It frightened him to think he had let it slip this way. But somehow the heat, the air, the working conditions—
He heard the men murmuring on the porch of his metal shop.
‘Everyone’s going. You heard?’
‘All going. That’s right.’
Bittering came out. ‘Going where?’ He saw a couple of trucks, loaded with children and furniture, drive down the dusty street.
‘Up to the villas,’ said the man.
‘Yeah, Harry. I’m going. So is Sam. Aren’t you, Sam?’
‘That’s right, Harry. What about you?’
‘I’ve got work to do here.’
‘Work! You can finish that rocket in the autumn, when it’s cooler.’
He took a breath. ‘I got the frame all set up.’
‘In the autumn is better.’ Their voices were lazy in the heat.
‘Got to work,’ he said.
‘Autumn,’ they reasoned. And they sounded so sensible, so right.
Autumn would be best, he thought. Plenty of time, then.
No! cried part of himself, deep down, put away, locked tight, suffocating. No! No!
‘In the autumn,’ he said.
‘Come on, Harry,’ they all said.
‘Yes,’ he said, feeling his flesh melt in the hot liquid air. ‘Yes, in the autumn. I’ll begin work again then.’
‘I got a villa near the Tirra Canal,’ said someone.
‘You mean the Roosevelt Canal, don’t you?’
‘Tirra. The old Martian name.’
‘But on the map—’
‘Forget the map. It’s Tirra now. Now I found a place in the Pillan mountains—’
‘You mean the Rockefeller range,’ said Bittering.
‘I mean the Pillan mountains,’ said Sam.
‘Yes,’ said Bittering, buried in the hot, swarming air. ‘The Pillan mountains.’
Everyone worked at loading the truck in the hot, still afternoon of the next day.
Laura, Dan, and David carried packages. Or, as they preferred to be known. Ttil, Linnl, and Werr carried packages.
The furniture was abandoned in the little white cottage.
‘It looked just fine in Boston,’ said the mother. ‘And here in the cottage. But up at the villa? No. We’ll get it when we come back in the autumn.’
Bittering himself was quiet.
‘I’ve some ideas on furniture for the villa,’ he said after a time. ‘Big, lazy furniture.’
‘What about your encyclopedia? You’re taking it along, surely?’
Mr Bittering glanced away. ‘I’ll come and get it next week.’
They turned to their daughter. ‘What about your New York dresses?’
The bewildered girl stared. ‘Why, I don’t want them any more.’
They shut off the gas, the water, they locked the doors and walked away. Father peered into the truck.
‘Gosh, we’re not taking much,’ he said. ‘Considering all we brought to Mars, this is only a handful!’
He started the truck.
Looking at the small white cottage for a long moment, he was filled with a desire to rush to it, touch it, say good-by to it, for he felt as if he were going away on a long journey, leaving something to which he could never quite return, never understand again.
Just then Sam and his family drove by in another truck.
‘Hi, Bittering! Here we go!’
The truck swung down the ancient highway out of town. There were sixty others traveling the same direction. The town filled with a silent, heavy dust from their passage. The canal waters lay blue in the sun, and a quiet wind moved in the strange trees.
‘Good-by, town!’ said Mr Bittering.
‘Good-by, good-by,’ said the family, waving to it.
They did not look back again.
Summer burned the canals dry. Summer moved like flame upon the meadows. In the empty Earth settlement, the painted houses flaked and peeled. Rubber tires upon which children had swung in back yards hung suspended like stopped clock pendulums in the blazing air.
At the metal shop, the rocket frame began to rust.
In the quiet autumn Mr Bittering stood, very dark now, very goldeneyed, upon the slope above his villa, looking at the valley.
‘It’s time to go back,’ said Cora.
‘Yes, but we’re not going,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s nothing there any more.’
‘Your books,’ she said. ‘Your fine clothes.’
‘Your Illes and your fine ior uele rre,’ she said.
‘The town’s empty. No one’s going back,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason to, none at all.’
The daughter wove tapestries and the sons played songs on ancient flutes and pipes, their laughter echoing in the marble villa.
Mr Bittering gazed at the Earth settlement far away in the low valley. ‘Such odd, such ridiculous houses the Earth people built.’
‘They didn’t know any better,’ his wife mused. ‘Such ugly people. I’m glad they’ve gone.’
They both looked at each other, startled by all they had just finished saying. They laughed.
‘Where did they go?’ he wondered. He glanced at his wife. She was golden and slender as his daughter. She looked at him, and he seemed almost as young as their eldest son.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘We’ll go back to town maybe next year, or the year after, or the year after that,’ he said, calmly. ‘Now—I’m warm. How about taking a swim?’
They turned their backs to the valley. Arm in arm they walked silently down a path of clear-running spring water.
Five years later a rocket fell out of the sky. It lay steaming in the valley. Men leaped out of it, shouting.
‘We won the war on Earth! We’re here to rescue you! Hey!’
But the American-built town of cottages, peach trees, and theaters was silent. They found a flimsy rocket frame rusting in an empty shop.
The rocket men searched the hills. The captain established headquarters in an abandoned bar. His lieutenant came back to report.
‘The town’s empty, but we found native life in the hills, sir. Dark people. Yellow eyes. Martians. Very friendly. We talked a bit, not much. They learn English fast. I’m sure our relations will be most friendly with them, sir.’
‘Dark, eh?’ mused the captain. ‘How many?’
‘Six, eight hundred, I’d say, living in those marble ruins in the hills, sir. Tall, healthy. Beautiful women.’
‘Did they tell you what became of the men and women who built this Earth settlement, Lieutenant?’
‘They hadn’t the foggiest notion of what happened to this town or its people.’
‘Strange. You think those Martians killed them?’
‘They look surprisingly peaceful. Chances are a plague did this town in, sir.’
‘Perhaps. I suppose this is one of those mysteries we’ll never solve. One of those mysteries you read about.’
The captain looked at the room, the dusty windows, the blue mountains rising beyond, the canals moving in the light, and he heard the soft wind in the air. He shivered. Then, recovering, he tapped a large fresh map he had thumbtacked to the top of an empty table.
‘Lots to be done, Lieutenant.’ His voice droned on and quietly on as the sun sank behind the blue hills. ‘New settlements. Min
ing sites, minerals to be looked for. Bacteriological specimens taken. The work, all the work. And the old records were lost. We’ll have a job of remapping to do, renaming the mountains and rivers and such. Calls for a little imagination.
‘What do you think of naming those mountains the Lincoln Mountains, this canal the Washington Canal, those hills—we can name those hills for you, Lieutenant. Diplomacy. And you, for a favor, might name a town for me. Polishing the apple. And why not make this the Einstein Valley, and further over…are you listening, Lieutenant?’
The lieutenant snapped his gaze from the blue color and the quiet mist of the hills far beyond the town.
‘What? Oh, yes, sir!’
The Strawberry Window
In his dream he was shutting the front door with its strawberry windows and lemon windows and windows like white clouds and windows like clear water in a country stream. Two dozen panes squared round the one big pane, colored of fruit wines and gelatins and cool water ices. He remembered his father holding him up as a child. ‘Look!’ And through the green glass the world was emerald, moss, and summer mint. ‘Look!’ The lilac pane made livid grapes of all the passersby. And at last the strawberry glass perpetually bathed the town in roseate warmth, carpeted the world in pink sunrise, and made the cut lawn seem imported from some Persian rug bazaar. The strawberry window, best of all, cured people of their paleness, warmed the cold rain, and set the blowing, shifting February snows afire.
‘Yes, yes! There—!’
He awoke.
He heard his boys talking before he was fully out of his dream and he lay in the dark now, listening to the sad sound their talk made, like the wind blowing the white sea-bottoms into the blue hills, and then he remembered.
We’re on Mars, he thought.
‘What?’ His wife cried out in her sleep.
He hadn’t realized he had spoken: he lay as still as he possibly could. But now, with a strange kind of numb reality, he saw his wife rise to haunt the room, her pale face staring through the small, high windows of their quonset hut at the clear but unfamiliar stars.
‘Carrie,’ he whispered.
She did not hear.
‘Carrie,’ he whispered. ‘There’s something I want to tell you. For a month now I’ve been wanting to say…tomorrow…tomorrow morning, there’s going to be…’
But his wife sat all to herself in the blue starlight and would not look at him.
If only the sun stayed up, he thought, if only there was no night. For during the day he nailed the settlement town together, the boys were in school, and Carrie had cleaning, gardening, cooking to do. But when the sun was gone and their hands were empty of flowers or hammers and nails and arithmetics, their memories, like night birds, came home in the dark.
His wife moved, a slight turn of her head.
‘Bob,’ she said at last, ‘I want to go home.’
‘Carrie!’
‘This isn’t home,’ she said.
He saw that her eyes were wet and brimming. ‘Carrie, hold on awhile.’
‘I’ve got no fingernails from holding on now!’
As if she still moved in her sleep, she opened her bureau drawers and took out layers of handkerchiefs, shirts, underclothing, and put it all on top of the bureau, not seeing it, letting her fingers touch and bring it out and put it down. The routine was long familiar now. She would talk and put things out and stand quietly awhile, and then later put all the things away and come, dry-faced, back to bed and dreams. He was afraid that some night she would empty every drawer and reach for the few ancient suitcases against the wall.
‘Bob…’ Her voice was not bitter, but soft, featureless, and as uncolored as the moonlight that showed what she was doing. ‘So many nights for six months I’ve talked this way; I’m ashamed. You work hard building houses in town. A man who works so hard shouldn’t have to listen to a wife gone sad on him. But there’s nothing to do but talk it out. It’s the little things I miss most of all. I don’t know—silly things. Our front-porch swing. The wicker rocking chair, summer nights. Looking at the people walk or ride by those evenings, back in Ohio. Our black upright piano, out of tune. My Swedish cut glass. Our parlor furniture—oh, it was like a herd of elephants. I know, and all of it old. And the Chinese hanging crystals that hit when the wind blew. And talking to neighbors there on the front porch, July nights. All those crazy, silly things…they’re not important. But it seems those are things that come to mind around three in the morning. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘Mars is a far place. It smells funny, looks funny, and feels funny, I think to myself nights too. We came from a nice town.’
‘It was green,’ she said. ‘In the spring and summer. And yellow and red in the fall. And ours was a nice house; my, it was old, eighty-ninety years or so. Used to hear the house talking at night, whispering away. All the dry wood, the banisters, the front porch, the sills. Wherever you touched, it talked to you. Every room a different way. And when you had the whole house talking, it was a family around you in the dark, putting you to sleep. No other house, the kind they build nowadays, can be the same. A lot of people have got to go through and live in a house to make it mellow down all over. This place here, now, this hut, it doesn’t know I’m in it, doesn’t care if I live or die. It makes a noise like tin, and tin’s cold. It’s got no pores for the years to sink in. It’s got no cellar for you to put things away for next year and the year after that. It’s got no attic where you keep things from last year and all the other years before you were born. If we only had a little bit up here that was familiar, Bob, then we could make room for all that’s strange. But when everything, every single thing is strange, then it takes forever to make things familiar.’
He nodded in the dark. ‘There’s nothing you say that I haven’t thought.’
She was looking at the moonlight where it lay upon the suitcases against the wall. He saw her move her hand down toward them.
‘Carrie!’
‘What?’
He swung his legs out of bed. ‘Carrie, I’ve done a crazy damn-fool thing. All these months I heard you dreaming away, scared, and the boys at night and the wind, and Mars out there, the sea-bottoms and all, and…’ He stopped and swallowed. ‘You got to understand what I did and why I did it. All the money we had in the bank a month ago, all the money we saved for ten years, I spent.’
‘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 damned 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 week.’
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, and for a moment did not lie down, but only sat 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.