He felt the boys walking steadily behind him, and he felt Carrie beside him and he wanted to see her face and how she was taking all this, but he didn’t look there, either.
“All this is no different than me and Dad walking the fields when I was a boy, casting seed by hand when our seeder broke down and we’d no money to fix it. It had to be done, do you remember those Sunday-supplement articles, THE EARTH WILL FREEZE IN A MILLION YEARS! I bawled once, as a boy, reading articles like that. My mother asked why. I’m bawling for all those poor people up ahead, I said. Don’t worry about them, Mother said. But, Carrie, that’s my whole point; we are worrying about them. Or we wouldn’t be here. It matters if Man with a capital M keeps going. There’s nothing better than Man with a capital M in my books. I’m prejudiced, of course, because I’m one of the breed. But if there’s any way to get hold of that immortality men are always talking about, this is the way—spread out—seed the universe. Then you got a harvest against crop failures anywhere down the line. No matter if Earth has famines or the rust comes in. You got the new wheat lifting on Venus or where-in-blazes-ever man gets to in the next thousand years. I’m crazy with the idea, Carrie, crazy. When I finally hit on it I got so excited I wanted to grab people, you, the boys, and tell them. But well, I knew that wasn’t necessary. I knew a day or night would come when you’d hear that ticking in yourselves too, and then you’d see, and no one’d have to say anything again about all this. It’s big talk, Carrie, I know, and big thoughts for a man just short of five feet five, but by all that’s holy, it’s true.”
They moved through the deserted streets of the town and listened to the echoes of their walking feet.
“And this morning?” said Carrie.
“I’m coming to this morning,” he said. “Part of me wants to go home too. But the other part says if we go, everything’s lost. So I thought, what bothers us most? Some of the things we once had. Some of the boys’ things, your things, mine. And I thought, if it takes an old thing to get a new thing started, why then, I’ll use the old thing. I remember from history books that a thousand years ago they put charcoals in a hollowed out cow horn, blew on them during the day, so they carried their fire on marches from place to place, to start a fire every night with the sparks left over from morning. Always a new fire, but always something of the old in it. So I weighed and balanced it off. Is the Old worth all our money? I asked. No! It’s only the things we did with the Old that have any worth. Well, then, is the New worth all our money? I asked. Do you feel like investing in the day after the middle of next week? Yes! I said. If I can fight this thing that makes us want to go back to Earth, I’d dip my money in kerosene and strike a match!”
Carrie and the two boys did not move. They stood on the street, looking at him as if he were a storm that had passed over and around, almost blowing them from the ground, a storm that was now dying away.
“The freight rocket came in this morning,” he said, quietly. “Our delivery’s on it. Let’s go and pick it up.”
They walked slowly up the three steps into the rocket depot and across the echoing floor toward the freight room that was just sliding back its doors, opening for the day.
“Tell us again about the salmon,” said one of the boys.
In the middle of the warm morning they drove out of town in a rented truck filled with great crates and boxes and parcels and packages, long ones, tall ones, short ones, flat ones, all numbered and neatly addressed to one Robert Prentiss, New Toledo, Mars.
They stopped the truck by the quonset hut and the boys jumped down and helped their mother out. For a moment Bob sat behind the wheel, and then slowly got out himself to walk around and look into the back of the truck at the crates.
And by noon all but one of the boxes were opened and their contents placed on the sea-bottom where the family stood among them.
“Carrie …”
And he led her up the old porch steps that now stood uncrated on the edge of town.
“Listen to ’em, Carrie.”
The steps squeaked and whispered underfoot.
“What do they say, tell me what they say?”
She stood on the ancient wooden steps, holding to herself, and could not tell him.
He waved his hand. “Front porch here, living room there, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms. Most we’ll build new, part we’ll bring. Of course all we got here now is the front steps, some parlor furniture, and the old bed.”
“All that money, Bob!”
He turned, smiling. “You’re not mad, now, look at me! You’re not mad. We’ll bring it up, next year, five years! The cut-glass vases, that Armenian carpet your mother gave us in 1975! Just let the sun explode!”
They looked at the other crates, numbered and lettered: Frontporch swing, front-porch wicker rocker, hanging Chinese crystals …
“I’ll blow them myself to make them ring.”
And then they set the front door, with its little panes of colored glass, on the top of the stairs, and Carrie looked through the strawberry window.
“What do you see?”
But he knew what she saw, for he gazed through the colored glass, too. And there was Mars, with its cold sky warmed and its dead seas fired with color, with its hills like mounds of strawberry ice, and its sand like burning charcoals sifted by wind. The strawberry window, the strawberry window, breathed soft rose colors on the land and filled the mind and the eye with the light of a never-ending dawn. Bent there, looking through, he heard himself say:
“The town’ll be out this way in a year. This’ll be a shady street, you’ll have your porch, and you’ll have friends. You won’t need all this so much, then. But starting right here, with this little bit that’s familiar, watch it spread, watch Mars change so you’ll know it as if you’ve known it all your life.”
He ran down the steps to the last and as-yet unopened canvas-covered crate. With his pocket knife he cut a hole in the canvas. “Guess!” he said.
“My kitchen stove? My sewing machine?”
“Not in a million years.” He smiled very gently. “Sing me a song,” he said.
“Bob, you’re clean off your head.”
“Sing me a song worth all the money we had in the bank and now don’t have, but who gives a blast in Hades,” he said.
“I don’t know anything but ‘Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve!”
“Sing that,” he said.
But she could not open her mouth and start the song. He saw her lips move and try, but there was no sound.
He ripped the canvas wider and shoved his hand into the crate and touched around for a quiet moment, and started to sing the words himself until he moved his hand a last time and then a single clear piano chord sprang out on the morning air.
“There,” he said. “Let’s take it right on to the end. Everyone! Here’s the harmony.”
The Dragon
The night blew in the short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky. Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.
Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other’s faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.
“Don’t, idiot; you’ll give us away!”
“No matter,” said this second man. “The dragon can smell us miles off anyway. God’s breath, it’s cold. I wish I was back at the castle.”
“It’s death, not sleep we’re after.... ”
“Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!”
“Quiet, fool! He eats men traveling alone from our town to the next!”
“Let them be eaten and let us get home!”
“Wait
now; listen!”
The two men froze.
They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses’ nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.
“Ah.” The second man sighed. “What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it’s night. And then, and then, oh, sweet mortality, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulfur and thunder and kindles the grass. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon’s fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?”
“Enough of that!”
“More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!”
“Nine hundred years since the Nativity.”
“No, no,” whispered the second man, eyes shut. “On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don’t ask how I know; the moor knows and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, God save us!”
“Be you afraid, then gird on your armor!”
“What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog; we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armor, we’ll die well dressed.”
Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.
Across the dim country, full of night and nothingness from the heart of the moor itself, the wind sprang full of dust from clocks that used dust for telling time. There were black suns burning in the heart of this new wind and a million burnt leaves shaken from some autumn tree beyond the horizon. The wind melted landscapes, lengthened bones like white wax, made the blood roil and thicken to a muddy deposit in the brain. The wind was a thousand souls dying and all time confused and in transit. It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man’s place and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of sudden frost, storm and white thunder which moved behind the great falling pane of green glass that was the lightning. A squall of rain drenched the turf; all faded away until there was unbreathing hush and the two men waiting alone with their warmth in a cool season.
“There,” whispered the first man, “Oh, there … ”
Miles off, rushing with a great chant and a roar—the dragon.
In silence the men buckled on their armor and mounted their horses. The midnight wilderness was split by a monstrous gushing as the dragon roared nearer, nearer; its flashing yellow glare spurted above a hill and then, fold on fold of dark body, distantly seen, therefore indistinct, flowed over that hill and plunged vanishing into a valley.
“Quick!”
They spurred their horses forward to a small hollow.
“This is where it passes!”
They seized their lances with mailed fists and blinded their horses by flipping the visors down over their eyes.
“Lord!”
“Yes, let us use His name.”
On the instant, the dragon rounded a hill. Its monstrous amber eye fed on them, fired their armor in red glints and glitters. With a terrible wailing cry and a grinding rush it flung itself forward.
“Mercy, mercy!”
The lance struck under the unlidded yellow eye, buckled, tossed the man through the air. The dragon hit, spilled him over, down, ground him under. Passing, the black brunt of its shoulder smashed the remaining horse and rider a hundred feet against the side of a boulder, wailing, wailing, the dragon shrieking, the fire all about, around, under it, a pink, yellow, orange sun-fire with great soft plumes of blinding smoke.
“Did you see it?” cried a voice. “Just like I told you!”
“The same! The same! A knight in armor, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!”
“You goin’ to stop?”
‘Did once; found nothing. Don’t like to stop on this moor. I get the willies. Got & feel, it has.”
“But we hit something!”
“Gave him plenty of whistle; chap wouldn’t budge!”
A steaming blast cut the mist aside.
“We’ll make Stokely on time. More coal, eh, Fred?”
Another whistle shook dew from the empty sky. The night train, in fire and fury, shot through a gully, up a rise, and vanished away over cold earth toward the north, leaving black smoke and steam to dissolve in the numbed air minutes after it had passed and gone forever.
Frost and Fire
I
During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.
Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.
There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.
Sim’s mother, trembling now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.
The man in the comer of the cave was his father! The man’s eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.
Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.
Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desiccation and burning away of their fresh occurred.
Sim thrashed in his mother’s grasp. She held him. “No, no,” she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.
With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim’s father ran across the cave. Sim’s mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!
The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he’d had again and again while still in his mother’s flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim’s new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!
His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. “Let me kill him!” shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. “What has he to live for?”
“No, no!” insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon. “He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!”
The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hand
s to procure food. His sister.
The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband’s grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. “I’ll kill you!” she said, glaring down at her husband. “Leave my children alone.”
The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. “One-eighth of her life’s over already,” he gasped. “And she doesn’t know it. What’s the use?”
As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.
Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.
The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. “Feed the child,” he said, exhaustedly. “Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.”
Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.
This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day fire died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living done in the brief hour of respite.