Beck handed him the bottle.
"Amazing. Really amazing," said the plump man. "I can't believe it was as simple as this, to walk in, hear two men talking, and to have the Blue Bottle simply handed to me. Amazing!" And he wandered off down the hall, out into the daylight, chuckling to himself.
Under the cool double moons of Mars the midnight cities were bone and dust. Along the scattered highway the landcar bumped and rattled, past cities where the fountains, the gyrostats, the furniture, the metal-singing books, the paintings lay powdered over with mortar and insect wings. Past cities that were cities no longer, but only things rubbed to a fine silt that flowered senselessly back and forth on the wine winds between one land and another, like the sand in a gigantic hourglass, endlessly pyramiding and repyramiding. Silence opened to let the car pass, and closed swiftly in behind.
Craig said, "We'll never find him. These damned roads. So old. Potholes, lumps, everything wrong. He's got the advantage with the cycle; he can dodge and weave. Damn!"
They swerved abruptly, avoiding a bad stretch. The car moved over the old highway like an eraser, coming upon blind soil, passing over it, dusting it away to reveal the emerald and gold colors of ancient Martian mosaics worked into the road surface.
"Wait," cried Beck. He throttled the car down. "I saw something back there."
"Where?"
They drove back a hundred yards.
"There. You see. It's him."
In a ditch by the side of the road the plump man lay folded over his cycle. He did not move. His eyes were wide, and when Beck flashed a torch down, the eyes burned dully.
"Where's the bottle?" asked Craig.
Beck jumped into the ditch and picked up the man's gun. "I don't know. Gone."
"What killed him?"
"I don't know that either."
"The cycle looks okay. Not an accident."
Beck rolled the body over. "No wounds. Looks like he just--stopped, of his own accord."
"Heart attack, maybe," said Craig. "Excited over the bottle. He gets down here to hide. Thought he'd be all right, but the attack finished him."
"That doesn't account for the Blue Bottle."
"Someone came along. Lord, you know how many searchers there are...."
They scanned the darkness around them. Far off, in the starred blackness, on the blue hills, they saw a dim movement.
"Up there." Beck pointed. "Three men on foot."
"They must have..."
"My God, look!"
Below them, in the ditch, the figure of the plump man glowed, began to melt. The eyes took on the aspect of moonstones under a sudden rush of water. The face began to dissolve away into fire. The hair resembled small firecracker strings, lit and sputtering. The body fumed as they watched. The fingers jerked with flame. Then, as if a gigantic hammer had struck a glass statue, the body cracked upward and was gone in a blaze of pink shards, becoming mist as the night breeze carried it across the highway.
"They must have--done something to him," said Craig. "Those three, with a new kind of weapon."
"But it's happened before," said Beck. "Men I knew about who had the Blue Bottle. They vanished. And the bottle passed on to others who vanished." He shook his head. "Looked like a million fireflies when he broke apart...."
"You going after them?"
Beck returned to the car. He judged the desert mounds, the hills of bone-silt and silence. "It'll be a tough job, but I think I can poke the car through after them. I have to, now." He paused, not speaking to Craig. "I think I know what's in the Blue Bottle.... Finally, I realize that what I want most of all is in there. Waiting for me."
"I'm not going," said Craig, coming up to the car where Beck sat in the dark, his hands on his knees. "I'm not going out there with you, chasing three armed men. I just want to live, Beck. That bottle means nothing to me. I won't risk my skin for it. But I'll wish you luck."
"Thanks," said Beck. And he drove away, into the dunes.
The night was as cool as water coming over the glass hood of the landcar.
Beck throttled hard over dead river washes and spills of chalked pebble, driving between great cliffs. Ribbons of double moonlight painted the bas-reliefs of gods and animals on the cliff sides all yellow gold: mile-high faces upon which Martian histories were etched and stamped in symbols, incredible faces with open cave eyes and gaping cave mouths.
The motor's roar dislodged rocks, boulders. In a whole rushing downpour of stone, golden segments of ancient cliff sculpture slid out of the moons' rays at the top of the cliff and vanished into blue cool-well darkness.
In the roar, as he drove, Beck cast his mind back--to all the nights in the last ten years, nights when he had built red fires on the sea bottoms, and cooked slow, thoughtful meals. And dreamed. Always those dreams of wanting. And not knowing what. Ever since he was a young man, the hard life on Earth, the great panic of 2130, the starvation, chaos, riot, want. Then bucking through the planets, the womanless, loveless years, the alone years. You come out of the dark into the light, out of the womb into the world, and what do you find that you really want?
What about that dead man back there in the ditch? Wasn't he always looking for something extra? Something he didn't have. What was there for men like himself? Or for anyone? Was there anything at all to look forward to?
The Blue Bottle.
He quickly braked the car, leaped out, gun ready. He ran, crouching, into the dunes. Ahead of him, the three men lay on the cold sand, neatly. They were Earthmen, with tan faces and rough clothes and gnarled hands. Starlight shone on the Blue Bottle, which lay among them.
As Beck watched, the bodies began to melt. They vanished away into rises of steam, into dewdrops and crystals. In a moment they were gone.
Beck felt the coldness in his body as the flakes rained across his eyes, flicking his lips and his cheeks.
He did not move.
The plump man. Dead and vanishing. Craig's voice: "Some new weapon..."
No. Not a weapon at all.
The Blue Bottle.
They had opened it to find what they most desired. All of the unhappy, desiring men down the long and lonely years had opened it to find what they most wanted in the planets of the universe. And all had found it, even as had these three. Now it could be understood, why the bottle passed on so swiftly, from one to another, and the men vanishing behind it. Harvest chaff fluttering on the sand, along the dead sea rims. Turning to flame and fireflies. To mist.
Beck picked up the bottle and held it away from himself for a long moment. His eyes shone clearly. His hands trembled.
So this is what I've been looking for, he thought. He turned the bottle and it flashed blue starlight.
So this is what all men really want? The secret desire, deep inside, hidden all away where we never guess? The subliminal urge? So this is what each man seeks, through some private guilt, to find?
Death.
An end to doubt, to torture, to monotony, to want, to loneliness, to fear, an end to everything.
All men?
No. Not Craig. Craig was, perhaps, far luckier. A few men were like animals in the universe, not questioning, drinking at pools and breeding and raising their young and not doubting for a moment that life was anything but good. That was Craig. There were a handful like him. Happy animals on a great reservation, in the hand of God, with a religion and a faith that grew like a set of special nerves in them. The unneurotic men in the midst of the billionfold neurotics. They would only want death, later, in a natural manner. Not now. Later.
Beck raised the bottle. How simple, he thought, and how right. This is what I've always wanted. And nothing else.
Nothing.
The bottle was open and blue in the starlight. Beck took an immense draught of the air coming from the Blue Bottle, deep into his lungs.
I have it at last, he thought.
He relaxed. He felt his body become wonderfully cool and then wonderfully warm. He knew he was dropping down a long s
lide of stars into a darkness as delightful as wine. He was swimming in blue wine and white wine and red wine. There were candles in his chest, and fire wheels spinning. He felt his hands leave him. He felt his legs fly away, amusingly. He laughed. He shut his eyes and laughed.
He was very happy for the first time in his life.
The Blue Bottle dropped onto the cool sand.
At dawn, Craig walked along, whistling. He saw the bottle lying in the first pink light of the sun on the empty white sand. As he picked it up, there was a fiery whisper. A number of orange and red-purple fireflies blinked on the air, and passed on away.
The place was very still.
"I'll be damned." He glanced toward the dead windows of a nearby city. "Hey, Beck!"
A slender tower collapsed into powder.
"Beck, here's your treasure! I don't want it. Come and get it!"
"...and get it," said an echo, and the last tower fell.
Craig waited.
"That's rich," he said. "The bottle right here, and old Beck not even around to take it." He shook the blue container.
It gurgled.
"Yes, sir! Just the way it was before. Full of bourbon, by God!" He opened it, drank, wiped his mouth.
He held the bottle carelessly.
"All that trouble for a little bourbon. I'll wait right here for old Beck and give him his damn bottle. Meanwhile--have another drink, Mr. Craig. Don't mind if I do."
The only sound in the dead land was the sound of liquid running into a parched throat. The Blue Bottle flashed in the sun.
Craig smiled happily and drank again.
One Timeless Spring
That week, so many years ago, I thought my mother and father were poisoning me. And now, twenty years later, I'm not so sure they didn't. There's no way of telling.
It all comes back to me through the simple expedient of an examined trunk in the attic. This morning I pulled back the brass hasps and lifted the lid, and the immemorial odor of mothballs shrouded the unstrung tennis rackets, the worn sneakers, the shattered toys, the rusty roller skates. These implements of play, seen again through older eyes, make it seem only an hour ago that I rushed in from the shady streets, all asweat, the cry of "Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free!" still excitedly trembling on my lips.
I was a weird and ridiculous boy then with brooding and uncommon ideas; the poison and the fear were only part of me in those years. I began making notes in a lined nickel tablet when I was only twelve. I can feel the stubby pencil in my fingers now, writing in those timeless spring mornings.
I paused to lick my pencil, thoughtfully. I sat in my upstairs room at the beginning of a clear endless day, blinking at the rose-stamped wallpaper, my feet bare, my hair shorn to a hairbrush stubble, thinking.
"I didn't know I was sick until this week," I wrote. "I've been sick for a long time. Since I was ten. I'm twelve now."
I scrouged up my face, bit my lips hard, focused blurrily on the tablet. "Mom and Dad have made me sick. Teachers at school also gave this--" I hesitated. Then I wrote: "Disease to me! The only ones who don't scare me are the other kids. Isabel Skelton and Willard Bowers and Clarisse Mellin; they aren't very sick yet. But I'm really bad off...."
I laid the pencil down. I went to the bathroom mirror to see myself. My mother called me from downstairs to come to breakfast. I pressed close to the mirror, breathing so fast I made a big damp fog on the glass. I saw how my face was--changing.
The bones of it. Even the eyes. The pores of my nose. My ears. My forehead. My hair. All the things that'd been me for such a long time, starting to become something else. ("Douglas, come to breakfast, you'll be late for school!") As I took a quick wash I saw my body floating under me. I was inside it. There was no escape. And the bones of it were doing things, shifting, mixing around!
Then I began singing and whistling loud, so I wouldn't think about it; until Father, rapping on the door, told me to quiet down and come eat.
I sat at the breakfast table. There was a yellow box of cereal and milk, white-cold in a pitcher, and shining spoons and knives, and eggs planked with bacon, Dad reading his paper, Mom moving around the kitchen. I sniffed. I felt my stomach lie down like a whipped dog.
"What's wrong, son?" Dad looked at me casually. "Not hungry?"
"No, sir."
"A boy should be hungry in the morning," said Father.
"You go ahead and eat," said Mother at me. "Go on now. Hurry."
I looked at the eggs. They were poison. I looked at the butter. It was poison. The milk was so white and creamy and poisonous in its pitcher, and the cereal was brown and crisp and tasty in a green dish with pink flowers on it.
Poison, all of them, poison! The thought ran in my head like ants at a picnic. I caught my lip in my teeth.
"Unh?" said Dad, blinking at me. "You said?"
"Nothing," I said. "Except I'm not hungry."
I couldn't say I was ill and that food made me ill. I couldn't say that cookies, cakes, cereals and soups and vegetables had done this to me, could I? No. I had to sit, swallowing nothing, my heart beginning to pound.
"Well, drink your milk at least, and go on," said Mother. "Dad, give him money for a good lunch at school. Orange juice, meat, and milk. No candy."
She didn't have to warn me on candy. It was worst of all the poisons. I wouldn't touch it again, ever!
I strapped my books and went to the door.
"Douglas, you didn't kiss me," said Mom.
"Oh," I said, and shuffled to kiss her.
"What's wrong with you?" she asked.
"Nothing." I said. "'Bye. So long, Dad."
Everybody said good-bye. I walked to school, thinking deep inside, like shouting down a long, cold well.
I ran down through the ravine and swung on a vine, way out; the ground dropped away, I smelled the cool morning air, sweet and high, and I screamed with laughter, and the wind threw away my thoughts. I tossed myself in a flip against the embankment and rolled down as birds whistled at me and a squirrel hopped like brown fuzz blown by the wind up around a tree trunk. Down the path the other kids fell like a small avalanche, yelling. "Ahh--eee--yah!" Pounding their chests, skipping rocks on the water, jumping their hands down to catch at crayfish. The crayfish jetted away in dusty spurts. We all laughed and joked.
A girl passed by on the green wooden bridge above us. Her name was Clarisse Mellin. We all hee-hawed at her, told her to go on, go on, we didn't want her with us, go on, go on! But my voice caught and trailed off, and I watched her going, slowly, I didn't look away.
From way off in the morning we heard the school bell ring.
We scrambled up trails we'd made during many summers over the years. The grass was worn; we knew each snake hole and bump, each tree, every vine, every weed of it. After school we'd made tree huts here, high up over the shining creek, jumped in the water naked, gone on long hikes down the ravine to where it emptied lonely and abandoned into the big blue of Lake Michigan, near the tannery and the asbestos works and the docks.
Now, as we panted up to school, I stopped, afraid again. "You go on ahead," I said.
The last bell tolled. The kids ran. I looked at the school with vines growing on it. I heard the voices inside, making a high, all-the-time noise. I heard little desk bells tinkle and sharp teacher voices reaching out.
Poison, I thought. The teachers, too! They want me sick! They teach you how to be sicker and sicker! And--and how to enjoy being sick!
"Good morning, Douglas."
I heard high-heeled shoes on the cement walk. Miss Adams, the principal, with her pince-nez and wide, pale face and close-cropped dark hair, stood behind me.
"Come along in," she said, holding my shoulder firmly. "You're late. Come along."
She guided me, one two, one two, one two, upstairs, up the stairs to my fate....
Mr. Jordan was a plump man with thinning hair and serious green eyes and a way of rocking on his heels before his charts. Today he had a large illustration of a body with all
its skin off. Exposed were green, blue, pink, and yellow veins, capillaries, muscles, tendons, organs, lungs, bones, and fatty tissues.
Mr. Jordan nodded before the chart. "There's a great similarity between cancer and normal cell reproduction. Cancer is simply a normal function gone wild. Overproduction of cellular material--"
I raised my hand. "How does food--I mean--what makes the body grow?"
"A good question, Douglas." He tapped the chart. "Food, taken into the body, is broken down, assimilated, and--"
I listened and I knew what Mr. Jordan was trying to do to me. My childhood was in my mind like a fossil imprint on soft shale rock. Mr. Jordan was trying to polish and smooth it away. Eventually it would all be gone, all my beliefs and imaginings. My mother changed my body with food, Mr. Jordan worked on my mind with words.
So I began to draw pictures on paper, not listening. I hummed little songs, made up a language all my own. The rest of the day I heard nothing. I resisted the attack, I counteracted the poison.
But then after school I passed Mrs. Singer's store and I bought candy. I couldn't help it. And after I ate it I wrote on the back of the wrapper: "This is the last candy I'm going to eat. Even at the Saturday matinee, when Tom Mix comes on the screen with Tony, I won't eat candy again."
I looked at the candy bars stacked like a harvest on the shelves. Orange wrappers with sky-blue words saying "Chocolate." Yellow and violet wrappers with little blue words on them. I felt the candy in my body, making my cells grow. Mrs. Singer sold hundreds of candy bars each day. Was she in conspiracy? Did she know what she was doing to children with them? Was she jealous of them being so young? Did she want them to grow old? I wanted to kill her!
"What you doing?"
Bill Arno had come up behind me while I was writing on the candy wrapper. Clarisse Mellin was with him. She looked at me with her blue eyes and said nothing.
I hid the paper. "Nothing," I said.
We all walked along. We saw kids playing hopscotch and kick the can and playing mibs on the hard ground, and I turned to Bill and I said, "We won't be allowed to do that next year, or maybe the year after."
Bill only laughed and said, "Sure, we will. Who'll stop us?"
"They will," I said.
"Who's they?" asked Bill.
"Never mind," I said. "Just wait and see."