Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (53 page)

 
          
 
"I wanted to run get help." The
first boy seemed not to want to raise his voice. "But Skip said she was
dead and there's no help for that. Is she?"

 
          
 
"She was never alive," said
Chico
.
"Sure," he went on, feeling their eyes on him suddenly. "It's
something left over from a movie studio. Liquid rubber skinned over a steel
frame.
A prop, a dummy."

 
          
 
"Oh, no, it's real!"

 
          
 
"We'll find a label somewhere," said
Chico
. "Here."

 
          
 
"Don't!"
cried
the first boy.

 
          
 
"Hell."
Chico
touched the body to turn it, and stopped. He knelt there, his face changing.

 
          
 
"What's the matter?" asked Tom.

 
          
 
Chico
took his hand away and looked at it. "I was wrong." His voice faded.

 
          
 
Tom took the woman's wrist. "There's a
pulse."

 
          
 
"You're feeling your own heartbeat."

 
          
 
"I just don't know . . . maybe . . .
maybe ..."

 
          
 
The woman was there and her upper body was all
moon pearl and tidal cream and her lower body all slithering ancient
green-black coins that slid upon themselves in the shift of wind and water.

 
          
 
"There's a trick somewhere!" cried
Chico
,
suddenly.

 
          
 
"No. No!" Just as suddenly Tom burst
out in laughter. "No trick! My God, my God, I feel great! I haven't felt
so great since I was a kid!"

 
          
 
They walked slowly around her. A wave touched
her white hand so the fingers faintly softly waved. The gesture was that of
someone asking for another and another wave to come in and lift the fingers and
then the wrist and then the arm and then the head and finally the body and take
all of them together back down out to sea.

 
          
 
"Tom."
Chico
's
mouth opened and closed. "Why don't you go get our truck?"

 
          
 
Tom didn't move.

 
          
 
"You hear me?" said
Chico
.

 
          
 
"Yes, but—"

 
          
 
"But what? We could sell this somewhere,
I don't know—the university, that aquarium at
Seal Beach
or . . . well, hell, why couldn't we just set up a place? Look." He shook
Tom's arm. "Drive to the pier. Buy us three hundred pounds of chipped ice.
When you take anything out of the water you need ice, don't you?"

 
          
 
"I never thought."

 
          
 
"Think about it! Get moving!"

 
          
 
"I don't know,
Chico
."

 
          
 
"What you mean? She's real, isn't
she?" He turned to the boys. *'You say she's real, don't you? Well, then,
what are we waiting for?"

 
          
 
"
Chico
,"
said Tom. "You better go get the ice yourself."

 
          
 
"Someone's got to stay and make sure she
don't
go back out with the tide!"

 
          
 
"
Chico
,"
said Tom. "I don't know how to explain. I don't want to get that ice for
you."

 
          
 
"I'll go myself, then. Look, boys, build
the sand up here to keep the waves back. I'll give you five bucks apiece. Hop
to it!"

 
          
 
The sides of the boys' faces were bronze-pink
from the sun which was touching the horizon now. Their eyes were a bronze color
looking at
Chico
.

 
          
 
"My God!" said
Chico
.
"This is better than finding ambergris!" He ran to the top of the
nearest dune, called, "Get to work!" and was gone.

 
          
 
Now Tom and the two boys were left with the
lonely woman by the North Rock and the sun was one-fourth of the way below the
western horizon. The sand and the woman were pink-gold.

 
          
 
"Just a little line," whispered the
second boy. He drew his fingernail along under his own chin, gently. He nodded
to the woman, Tom bent again to see the faint line under either side of her firm
white chin, the small, almost invisible line where the gills were or had been
and were now almost sealed shut, invisible.

 
          
 
He looked at the face and the great strands of
hair spread out in a lyre on the shore.

 
          
 
"She's beautiful," he said.

 
          
 
The boys nodded without knowing it.

 
          
 
Behind them, a gull leaped up quickly from the
dunes. The boys gasped and turned to stare.

 
          
 
Tom felt himself trembling. He saw the boys
were trembling too. A car horn hooted. Their eyes blinked, suddenly afraid.
They looked up toward the highway.

 
          
 
A wave poured about the body, framing it in a
clear white pool of water.

 
          
 
Tom nodded the boys to one side.

 
          
 
The wave moved the body an inch in and two
inches out toward the sea.

 
          
 
The next wave came and moved the body two inches
in and six inches out toward the sea.

 
          
 
"But—" said the first boy.

 
          
 
Tom shook his head.

 
          
 
The third wave lifted the body two feet down
toward the sea. The wave after that drifted the body another foot down the
shingles and the next three moved it six feet down.

 
          
 
The first boy cried out and ran after it.

 
          
 
Tom reached him and held his arm. The boy
looked helpless and afraid and sad.

 
          
 
For a moment there were no more waves. Tom
looked at the woman, thinking, she's true, she's real, she's mine . . . but . .
. she's dead. Or will be if she stays here.

 
          
 
"We can't let her go," said the
first boy. "We can't, we just can't!"

 
          
 
The other boy stepped between the woman and
the sea. "What would we do with her?" he wanted to know, looking at
Tom, "if we kept her?"

 
          
 
The first boy tried to think. "We
could—we could—" He stopped and shook his head. "Oh, my Gosh."

 
          
 
The second boy stepped out of the way and left
a path from the woman to the sea.

 
          
 
The next wave was a big one. It came in and
went out and the sand was empty. The whiteness was gone and the black diamonds
and the great threads of the harp.

 
          
 
They stood by the edge of the sea, looking
out, the man and the two boys, until they heard the truck driving up on the
dunes behind them.

 
          
 
The last of the sun was gone.

 
          
 
They heard footsteps running on the dunes and
someone yelling.

 
          
 
They drove back down the darkening beach in
the light truck with the big treaded tires in silence. The two boys sat in the
rear on the bags of chipped ice. After a long while,
Chico
began to swear steadily, half to
himself
, spitting out
the window.

 
          
 
"Three hundred pounds
of ice.
Three hundred pounds of ice! What do I do with it now? And I'm
soaked to the skin, soaked! You didn't even move when I jumped in and swam out to
look around! Idiot, idiot! You haven't changed! Like every other time, like
always, you do nothing, nothing, just stand there, stand there, do nothing,
nothing, just stare!"

 
          
 
"And what did you do, I ask, what?"
said Tom, in a tired voice, looking ahead. "The same as you always did,
just the same, no different, no different at all. You should've seen
yourself."

 
          
 
They dropped the boys off at their beach
house. The youngest spoke in a voice you could hardly hear against the wind.
"Gosh, nobody'11 ever believe ..."

 
          
 
The two men drove down the coast and parked.

 
          
 
Chico
sat for two or three minutes waiting for his fists to relax on his lap, and
then he snorted.

 
          
 
"Hell. I guess things turn out for the
best." He took a deep breath. "It just came to me. Funny. Twenty,
thirty years from now, middle of the night, our phone'll ring. It'll be one of
those two boys, grown-up, calling long-distance from a bar somewhere. Middle of
the night, them calling to ask one question. It's true, isn't it? they'll say.
It did happen, didn't it? Back in 1958, it really happened to us? And we'll sit
there on the edge of the bed, middle of the night, saying. Sure, boy, sure, it
really happened to us in 1958. And they'll say, Thanks, and we'll say, Don't
mention it, any old time. And we'll all say good night. And maybe they won't
call again for a couple of years."

 
          
 
The two men sat on their front-porch steps in
the dark.

 
          
 
"Tom?"

 
          
 
"What?"

 
          
 
Chico
waited a moment.

 
          
 
"Tom, next week—you're not going
away."

 
          
 
It was not a question but a quiet statement.

 
          
 
Tom thought about it, his cigarette dead in
his fingers. And he knew that now he could never go away. For tomorrow and the
day after the day after that he would walk down and go swimming there in all
the green and white fires and the dark caverns in the hollows under the strange
waves. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

 
          
 
"Yes,
Chico
.
I'm
staying here,"

 
          
 
Now the silver looking glasses advanced in a
crumpling line all along the coast from a thousand miles north to a thousand
miles south. The mirrors did not reflect so much as one building or one tree or
one highway or one car or even one man himself.

 
          
 
The mirrors reflected only the quiet moon and
then shattered into a billion bits of glass that spread out in a glaze on the
shore. Then the sea was dark awhile, preparing another line of mirrors to rear
up and surprise the two men who sat there for a long time never once blinking
their eyes, waiting.

 
          
 
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 bum 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 he 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 fight 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've 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.

 
          
 
"Why, we'll be on some world with a
number maybe; planet 6 of star system 97, planet 2 of system 99! So damn 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, by God, 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 dam 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."

 
          
 
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.