“Chatterton. What about him?”
As if to answer this, someone cried from a distance. The two men who had flown off to find Chatterton were waving at the edge of the woods.
Forester, Driscoll, and Koestler flew down alone.
“What’s up?”
The men pointed into the forest. “Thought you’d want to see this, Captain. It’s eerie.” One of the men indicated a pathway. “Look here, sir.”
The marks of great claws stood on the path, fresh and clear.
“And over here.”
A few drops of blood.
A heavy smell of some feline animal hung in the air.
“Chatterton?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever find him, Captain.”
Faintly, faintly, moving away, now gone in the breathing silence of twilight, came the roar of a tiger.
The men lay on the resilient grass by the rocket and the night was warm. “Reminds me of nights when I was a kid,” said Driscoll. “My brother and I waited for the hottest night in July and then we slept on the Court House lawn, counting the stars, talking; it was a great night, the best night of my life.” Then he added, “Not counting tonight, of course.”
“I keep thinking about Chatterton,” said Koestler.
“Don’t,” said Forester. “We’ll sleep a few hours and take off. We can’t chance staying here another day. I don’t mean the danger that got Chatterton. No. I mean, if we stayed on we’d get to liking this world too much. We’d never want to leave.”
A soft wind blew over them.
“I don’t want to leave now.” Driscoll put his hands behind his head, lying quietly. “And it doesn’t want us to leave.”
“If we go back to Earth and tell everyone what a lovely planet it is, what then, Captain? They’ll come smashing in here and ruin it.”
“No,” said Forester idly. “First, this planet wouldn’t put up with a full-scale invasion. I don’t know what it’d do, but it could probably think of some interesting things. Secondly, I like this planet too much; I respect it. We’ll go back to Earth and lie about it. Say it’s hostile. Which it would be to the average man, like Chatterton, jumping in here to hurt it. I guess we won’t be lying after all.”
“Funny thing,” said Koestler. “I’m not afraid. Chatterton vanishes, is killed most horribly, perhaps, yet we he here, no one runs, no one trembles. It’s idiotic. Yet it’s right. We trust it and it trusts us.”
“Did you notice, after you drank just so much of the winewater, you didn’t want more? A world of moderation.”
They lay listening to something like the great heart of this earth beating slowly and warmly under their bodies.
Forester thought, I’m thirsty.
A drop of rain splashed on his lips.
He laughed quietly.
I’m lonely, he thought.
Distantly, he heard soft, high voices.
He turned his eyes in upon a vision. There was a group of hills from which flowed a clear river, and in the shallows of that river, sending up spray, their faces shimmering, were the beautiful women. They played like children on the shore. And it came to Forester to know about them and their life. They were nomads, roaming the face of this world as was their desire. There were no highways or cities, there were only hills and plains and winds to carry them like white feathers where they wished. As Forester shaped the questions, some invisible answerer whispered the answers. There were no men. These women, alone, produced their race. The man had vanished fifty thousand years ago. And where were these women now? A mile down from the green forest, a mile over on the wine stream by the six white stones, and a third mile to the large river. There, in the shallows, were the women who would make fine wives, and raise beautiful children.
Forester opened his eyes. The other men were sitting up.
“I had a dream.”
They had all dreamed.
“A mile down from the green forest … ”
“… a mile over on the wine stream …”
“… by the six white stones … ” said Koestler. ”
… and a third mile to the large river,” said Driscoll, sitting there.
Nobody spoke again for a moment. They looked at the silver rocket standing there in the starlight.
“Do we walk or fly, Captain?”
Forester said nothing.
Driscoll said, “Captain, let’s stay. Let’s never go back to Earth. They’ll never come and investigate to see what happened to us; they’ll think we were destroyed here. What do you say?”
Forester’s face was perspiring. His tongue moved again and again on his lips. His hands twitched over his knees. The crew sat waiting.
“It’d be nice,” said the captain.
“Sure.”
“But… ” Forester sighed. “We’ve got our job to do. People invested in our ship. We owe it to them to go back.”
Forester got up. The men still sat on the ground, not listening to him.
“It’s such a fine, nice, wonderful night,” said Koestler.
They stared at the soft hills and the trees and the rivers running off to other horizons.
“Let’s get aboard ship,” said Forester, with difficulty.
“Captain … ”
“Get aboard,” he said.
The rocket rose into the sky. Looking back, Forester saw every valley and every tiny lake.
“We should’ve stayed,” said Koestler.
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s not too late to turn back.”
“I’m afraid it is.” Forester made an adjustment on the port telescope. “Look now.”
Koestler looked.
The face of the world was changed. Tigers, dinosaurs, mammoths appeared. Volcanoes erupted, cyclones and hurricanes tore over the hills in a welter and fury of weather.
“Yes, she was a woman all right,” said Forester. “Waiting for visitors for millions of years, preparing herself, making herself beautiful. She put on her best face for us. When Chatterton treated her badly, she warned him a few times, and then, when he tried to ruin her beauty, eliminated him. She wanted to be loved, like every woman, for herself, not for her wealth. So now, after she had offered us everything, we turn our backs. She’s the woman scorned. She let us go, yes, but we can never come back. She’ll be waiting for us with those …” He nodded to the tigers and the cyclones and the boiling seas.
“Captain,” said Koestler.
“Yes.”
“It’s a little late to tell you this. But just before we took off, I was in charge of the air lock. I let Driscoll slip away from the ship. He wanted to go. I couldn’t refuse him. I’m responsible. He’s back there now, on that planet.”
They both turned to the viewing port.
After a long while, Forester said, “I’m glad. I’m glad one of us had enough sense to stay.”
“But he’s dead by now!”
“No, that display down there is for us, perhaps a visual hallucination. Underneath all the tigers and lions and hurricanes, Driscoll is quite safe and alive, because he’s her only audience now. Oh, she’ll spoil him rotten. He’ll lead a wonderful life, he will, while we’re slugging it out up and down the system looking for but never finding a planet quite like this again. No, we won’t try to go back and ‘rescue’ Driscoll. I don’t think ‘she’ would let us anyway. Full speed ahead, Koestler, make it full speed.”
The rocket leaped forward into greater accelerations.
And just before the planet dwindled away in brightness and mist, Forester imagined that he could see Driscoll very clearly, walking away down from the green forest, whistling quietly, all of the fresh planet around him, a wine creek flowing for him, baked fish lolling in the hot springs, fruit ripening in the midnight trees, and distant forests and lakes waiting for him to happen by. Driscoll walked away across the endless green lawns near the six white stones, beyond the forest, to the edge of the large bright river....
The Strawberry Window
&nbs
p; 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 passers-by. 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 me 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 lame-brain 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 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, a
nd 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 someday 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? Someday 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.”