But Cynthia was beginning to laugh now.
‘Oh, really, you don’t believe, do you, that this Great Bayou or Whatever Greenhouse Novelty Company that sent Tom his package is owned and operated by six-foot-tall mushrooms from another planet?’
‘If you put it that way, it sounds funny.’
‘Funny! It’s hilarious!’ She threw her head back, deliciously.
‘Good grief!’ he cried, suddenly irritated. ‘Something’s going on! Mrs Goodbody is rooting out and killing Marasmius oreades. What is Marasmius oreades? A certain kind of mushroom. Simultaneously, and I suppose you’ll call it coincidence, by special delivery, what arrives the same day? Mushrooms for Tom! What else happens? Roger fears he may soon cease to be! Within hours, he vanishes, then telegraphs us, warning us not to accept what? The special-delivery mushrooms for Tom! Has Roger’s son got a similar package in the last few days? He has! Where do the packages come from? New Orleans! And where is Roger going when he vanishes? New Orleans! Do you see, Cynthia, do you see? I wouldn’t be upset if all these separate things didn’t lock together! Roger, Tom, Joe, mushrooms, Mrs Goodbody, packages, destinations, everything in one pattern!’
She was watching his face now, quieter, but still amused. ‘Don’t get angry.’
‘I’m not!’ Fortnum almost shouted. And then he simply could not go on. He was afraid that if he did he would find himself shouting with laughter too, and somehow he did not want that. He stared at the surrounding houses up and down the block and thought of the dark cellars and the neighbor boys who read Popular Mechanics and sent their money in by the millions to raise the mushrooms hidden away. Just as he, when a boy, had mailed off for chemicals, seeds, turtles, numberless salves and sickish ointments. In how many million American homes tonight were billions of mushrooms rousing up under the ministrations of the innocent?
‘Hugh?’ His wife was touching his arm now. ‘Mushrooms, even big ones, can’t think, can’t move, don’t have arms and legs. How could they run a mail-order service and “take over” the world? Come on, now, let’s look at your terrible fiends and monsters!’
She pulled him toward the door. Inside, she headed for the cellar, but he stopped, shaking his head, a foolish smile shaping itself somehow to his mouth. ‘No, no, I know what we’ll find. You win. The whole thing’s silly. Roger will be back next week and we’ll all get drunk together. Go on up to bed now and I’ll drink a glass of warm milk and be with you in a minute.’
‘That’s better!’ She kissed him on both cheeks, squeezed him and went away up the stairs.
In the kitchen, he took out a glass, opened the refrigerator, and was pouring the milk when he stopped suddenly.
Near the front of the top shelf was a small yellow dish. It was not the dish that held his attention, however, it was what lay in the dish.
The fresh-cut mushrooms.
He must have stood there for half a minute, his breath frosting the air, before he reached out, took hold of the dish, sniffed it, felt the mushrooms, then at last, carrying the dish, went out into the hall. He looked up the stairs, hearing Cynthia moving about in the bedroom, and was about to call up to her. ‘Cynthia, did you put these in the refrigerator?’ Then he stopped. He knew her answer. She had not.
He put the dish of mushrooms on the newel-upright at the bottom of the stairs and stood looking at them. He imagined himself in bed later, looking at the walls, the open windows, watching the moonlight sift patterns on the ceiling. He heard himself saying, Cynthia? And her answering, Yes? And him saying, There is a way for mushrooms to grow arms and legs. What? she would say, silly, silly man, what? And he would gather courage against her hilarious reaction and go on, What if a man wandered through the swamp, picked the mushrooms and ate them…?
No response from Cynthia.
Once inside the man, would the mushrooms spread through his blood, take over every cell and change the man from a man to a—Martian? Given this theory, would the mushroom need its own arms and legs? No, not when it could borrow people, live inside and become them. Roger ate mushrooms given him by his son. Roger became ‘something else.’ He kidnapped himself. And in one last flash of sanity, of being himself, he telegraphed us, warning us not to accept the special-delivery mushrooms. The ‘Roger’ that telephoned later was no longer Roger but a captive of what he had eaten! Doesn’t that figure, Cynthia, doesn’t it, doesn’t it?
No, said the imagined Cynthia, no, it doesn’t figure, no, no, no…
There was the faintest whisper, rustle, stir from the cellar. Taking his eyes from the bowl. Fortunum walked to the cellar door and put his ear to it.
‘Tom?’
No answer.
‘Tom, are you down there?’
No answer.
‘Tom?’
After a long while. Tom’s voice came up from below.
‘Yes, Dad?’
‘It’s after midnight,’ said Fortunum, fighting to keep his voice from going high. ‘What are you doing down there?’
No answer.
‘I said—’
‘Tending to my crop,’ said the boy at last, his voice cold and faint.
‘Well, get the hell out of there! You hear me?’
Silence.
‘Tom? Listen! Did you put some mushrooms in the refrigerator tonight? If so, why?’
Ten seconds must have ticked by before the boy replied from below, ‘For you and Mom to eat, of course.’
Fortnum heard his heart moving swiftly and had to take three deep breaths before he could go on.
‘Tom? You didn’t…that is, you haven’t by any chance eaten some of the mushrooms yourself, have you?’
‘Funny you ask that,’ said Tom. ‘Yes. Tonight. On a sandwich. After supper. Why?’
Fortnum held to the doorknob. Now it was his turn not to answer. He felt his knees beginning to melt and he fought the whole silly senseless fool thing. No reason, he tried to say, but his lips wouldn’t move.
‘Dad?’ called Tom, softly from the cellar. ‘Come on down.’ Another pause. ‘I want you to see the harvest.’
Fortnum felt the knob slip in his sweaty hand. The knob rattled. He gasped.
‘Dad?’ called Tom softly.
Fortnum opened the door.
The cellar was completely black below.
He stretched his hand in toward the light switch.
As if sensing this from somewhere. Tom said, ‘Don’t. Light’s bad for the mushrooms.’
He took his hand off the switch.
He swallowed. He looked back at the stair leading up to his wife. I suppose, he thought. I should go say good-by to Cynthia. But why should I think that! Why, in God’s name, should I think that at all? No reason, is there?
None.
‘Tom?’ he said, affecting a jaunty air. ‘Ready or not, here I come!’
And stepping down in darkness, he shut the door.
The Vacation
It was a day as fresh as grass growing up and clouds going over and butterflies coming down can make it. It was a day compounded from silences of bee and flower and ocean and land, which were not silences at all, but motions, stirs, flutters, risings, fallings, each in its own time and matchless rhythm. The land did not move, but moved. The sea was not still, yet was still. Paradox flowed into paradox, stillness mixed with stillness, sound with sound. The flowers vibrated and the bees fell in separate and small showers of golden rain on the clover. The seas of hill and the seas of ocean were divided, each from the other’s motion, by a railroad track, empty, compounded of rust and iron marrow, a track on which, quite obviously, no train had run in many years. Thirty miles north it swirled on away to further mists of distance, thirty miles south it tunneled islands of cloud-shadow that changed their continental positions on the sides of far mountains as you watched.
Now, suddenly, the railroad track began to tremble.
A blackbird, standing on the rail, felt a rhythm grow faintly, miles away, like a heart beginning to beat.
The bla
ckbird leaped up over the sea.
The rail continued to vibrate softly until, at long last, around a curve and along the shore came a small workman’s handcar, its two-cylinder engine popping and spluttering in the great silence.
On top of this small four-wheeled car, on a double-sided bench facing in two directions and with a little surrey roof above for shade, sat a man, his wife and their small seven-year-old son. As the handcar traveled through lonely stretch after lonely stretch, the wind whipped their eyes and blew their hair, but they did not look back but only ahead. Sometimes they looked eagerly as a curve unwound itself, sometimes with great sadness, but always watchful, ready for the next scene.
As they hit a level straightaway, the machine engine gasped and stopped abruptly. In the now crushing silence, it seemed that the quiet of earth, sky and sea itself, by its friction, brought the car to a wheeling halt.
‘Out of gas.’
The man, sighing, reached for the extra can in the small storage bin and began to pour it into the tank.
His wife and son sat quietly looking at the sea, listening to the muted thunder, the whisper, the drawing back of huge tapestries of sand, gravel, green weed, and foam.
‘Isn’t the sea nice?’ said the woman.
‘I like it,’ said the boy.
‘Shall we picnic here, while we’re at it?’
The man focused some binoculars on the green peninsula ahead.
‘Might as well. The rails have rusted badly. There’s a break ahead. We may have to wait while I set a few back in place.’
‘As many as there are,’ said the boy, ‘we’ll have picnics!’
The woman tried to smile at this, then turned her grave attention to the man. ‘How far have we come today?’
‘Not ninety miles.’ The man still peered through the glasses, squinting. ‘I don’t like to go farther than that any one day, anyway. If you rush, there’s no time to see. We’ll reach Monterey day after tomorrow, Palo Alto the next day, if you want.’
The woman removed her great shadowing straw hat, which had been tied over her golden hair with a bright yellow ribbon, and stood perspiring faintly, away from the machine. They had ridden so steadily on the shuddering handcar that the motion was sewn into their bodies. Now, with the stopping, they felt odd, on the verge of unraveling.
‘Let’s eat!’
The boy ran the wicker lunch basket down to the shore.
The boy and the woman were already seated by a spread tablecloth when the man came down to them, dressed in his business suit and vest and tie and hat as if he expected to meet someone along the way. As he dealt out the sandwiches and exhumed the pickles from their cool green Mason jars, he began to loosen his tie and unbutton his vest, always looking around as if he should be careful and ready to button up again.
‘Are we all alone, Papa?’ said the boy, eating.
‘Yes.’
‘No one else, anywhere?’
‘No one else.’
‘Where there people before?’
‘Why do you keep asking that? It wasn’t that long ago. Just a few months. You remember.’
‘Almost. If I try hard, then I don’t remember at all.’ The boy let a handful of sand fall through his fingers. ‘Were there as many people as there is sand here on the beach? What happened to them?’
‘I don’t know,’ the man said, and it was true.
They had wakened one morning and the world was empty. The neighbors’ clothesline was still strung with blowing white wash, cars gleamed in front of other seven-A.M. cottages, but there were no farewells, the city did not hum with its mighty arterial traffics, phones did not alarm themselves, children did not wail in sunflower wildernesses.
Only the night before, he and his wife had been sitting on the front porch when the evening paper was delivered, and, not even daring to open the headlines out, he had said, ‘I wonder when He will get tired of us and just rub us all out?’
‘It has gone pretty far,’ she said. ‘On and on. We’re such fools, aren’t we?’
‘Wouldn’t it be nice’—he lit his pipe and puffed it—‘if we woke tomorrow and everyone in the world was gone and everything was startig over?’ He sat smoking, the paper folded in his hand, his head resting back on the chair.
‘If you could press a button right now and make it happen, would you?’
‘I think I would,’ he said. ‘Nothing violent. Just have everyone vanish off the face of the earth, just leave the land and the sea and the growing things, like flowers and grass and fruit trees. And the animals, of course, let them stay. Everything except man, who hunts when he isn’t hungry, eats when full, and is mean when no one’s bothered him.’
‘Naturally, we would be left.’ She smiled quietly.
‘I’d like that,’ he mused. ‘All of time ahead. The longest summer vacation in history. And us out for the longest picnic-basket lunch in memory. Just you, me and Jim. No commuting. No keeping up with the Joneses. Not even a car. I’d like to find another way of traveling, an older way. Then, a hamper full of sandwiches, three bottles of pop, pick up supplies where you need them from empty grocery stores in empty towns, and summertime forever up ahead…’
They sat a long while on the porch in silence, the newspaper folded between them.
At last she opened her mouth.
‘Would we be lonely?’ she said.
So that’s how it was the morning of the new world. They had awakened to the soft sounds of an earth that was now no more than a meadow, and the cities of the earth sinking back into seas of sabergrass, marigold, marguerite and morning-glory. They had taken it with remarkable calm at first, perhaps because they had not liked the city for so many years, and had had so many friends who were not truly friends, and had lived a boxed and separate life of their own within a mechanical hive.
The husband arose and looked out the window and observed very calmly, as if it were a weather condition, ‘Everyone’s gone,’ knowing this just by the sounds the city had ceased to make.
They took their time over breakfast, for the boy was still asleep, and then the husband sat back and said. ‘Now I must plan what to do.’
‘Do? Why…why, you’ll go to work, of course.’
‘You still don’t believe it, do you?’ He laughed. ‘That I won’t be rushing off each day at eight-ten, that Jim won’t go to school ever again. School’s out for all of us! No more pencils, no more books, no more boss’s sassy looks! We’re let out, darling, and we’ll never come back to the silly damn dull routines. Come on!’
And he had walked her through the still and empty city streets.
‘They didn’t die,’ he said. ‘They just…went away.’
‘What about the other cities?’
He went to an outdoor phone booth and dialed Chicago, then New York, then San Francisco.
Silence. Silence. Silence.
‘That’s it,’ he said, replacing the receiver.
‘I feel guilty,’ she said. ‘Them gone and us here. And…I feel happy. Why? I should be unhappy.’
‘Should you? It’s no tragedy. They weren’t tortured or blasted or burned. They went easily and they didn’t know. And now we owe nothing to no one. Our only responsibility is being happy. Thirty more years of happiness, wouldn’t that be good?’
‘But…then we must have more children!’
‘To repopulate the world?’ He shook his head slowly, calmly. ‘No. Let Jim be the last. After he’s grown and gone let the horses and cows and ground squirrels and garden spiders have the world. They’ll get on. And someday some other species that can combine a natural happiness with a natural curiosity will build cities that won’t even look like cities to us, and survive. Right now, let’s go pack a basket, wake Jim, and get going on that long thirty-year summer vacation. I’ll beat you to the house!’
He took a sledge hammer from the small handcar, and while he worked alone for half an hour fixing the rusted rails into place, the woman and the boy ran along the shore. They cam
e back with dripping shells, a dozen or more, and some beautiful pink pebbles, and sat and the boy took school from the mother, doing homework on a pad with a pencil for a time, and then at high noon the man came down, his coat off, his tie thrown aside, and they drank orange pop, watching the bubbles surge up, glutting, inside the bottles. It was quiet. They listened to the sun tune the old iron rails. The smell of hot tar on the ties moved about them in the salt wind, as the husband tapped his atlas map lightly and gently.
‘We’ll go to Sacramento next month, May, then work up toward Seattle. Should make that by July first, July’s a good month in Washington, then back down as the weather cools, to Yellowstone, a few miles a day, hunt here, fish there…’
The boy, bored, moved away to throw sticks into the sea and wade out like a dog to retrieve them.
The man went on: ‘Winter in Tucson, then, part of the winter, moving toward Florida, up the coast in the spring, and maybe New York by June. Two years from now, Chicago in the summer. Winter, three years from now, what about Mexico City? Anywhere the rails lead us, anywhere at all, and if we come to an old offshoot rail line we don’t know anything about, what the hell, we’ll just take it, go down it, to see where it goes. And some year, by God, we’ll boat down the Mississippi, always wanted to do that. Enough to last us a lifetime, And that’s just how long I want to take to do it all…’
His voice faded. He started to fumble the map shut, but, before he could move, a bright thing fell through the air and hit the paper. It rolled off into the sand and made a wet lump.
His wife glanced at the wet place in the sand and then swiftly searched his face. His solemn eyes were too bright. And down one cheek was a track of wetness.
She gasped. She took his hand and held it, tight.
He clenched her hand very hard, his eyes shut now, and slowly he said, with difficulty, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we went to sleep tonight and in the night, somehow, it all came back. All the foolishness, all the noise, all the hate, all the terrible things, all the nightmares, all the wicked people and stupid children, all the mess, all the smallness, all the confusion, all the hope, all the need, all the love. Wouldn’t it be nice.’