Bradbury Stories (74 page)

There, in the moonlight, hill after slow-rising hill of wheat blew in tidal winds with the motion of waves. An immense Pacific of grain shimmered off beyond seeing, with his house, his now-recognized ship, becalmed in its midst.

He stayed out half the night, striding here, standing there, stunned with the discovery, lost in the deeps of this inland sea. And with the following years, tackle by tackle, timber by timber, the house shaped itself to the size, feel, and thrust of ships he had sailed in crueler winds and deeper waters.

“How long, Hanks, since we last saw water?”

“Twenty years, Captain.”

“No, yesterday morning.”

Coming back through the door, his heart pounded. The wall barometer clouded over, flickered with a faint lightning that played along the rims of his eyelids.

“No coffee, Hanks. Just—a cup of clear water.”

Hanks went away and came back.

“Hanks? Promise. Bury me where she is.”

“But, Captain, she's—” Hanks stopped. He nodded. “Where she is. Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now give me the cup.”

The water was fresh. It came from the islands beneath the earth. It tasted of sleep.

“One cup. She was right, Hanks, you know. Not to touch land, ever again. She was right. But I brought her one cup of water from the land, and the land was in water that touched her lips. One cup. Oh, if
only
. . .!”

He shifted it in his rusted hands. A typhoon swarmed from nowhere, filling the cup. It was a black storm raging in a small place.

He raised the cup and drank the typhoon.

“Hanks!” someone cried.

But not he. The typhoon, storming, had gone, and he with it.

The cup fell empty to the floor.

It was a mild morning. The air was sweet and the wind steady. Hanks had worked half the night digging and half the morning filling. Now the work was done. The town minister helped, and then stood back as Hanks jigsawed the final square of sod into place. Piece after piece, he fitted neatly and tamped and joined. And on each piece, as Hanks had made certain, was the golden, the full rich ripe-grained wheat, as high as a ten-year-old boy.

Hanks bent and put the last piece to rest.

“No marker?” asked the minister.

“Oh, no, sir, and never will be one.”

The minister started to protest, when Hanks took his arm, and walked him up the hill a way, then turned and pointed back.

They stood a long moment. The minister nodded at last, smiled quietly and said, “I see. I understand.”

For there was just the ocean of wheat going on and on forever, vast tides of it blowing in the wind, moving east and ever east beyond, and not a line or seam or ripple to show where the old man sank from sight.

“It was a sea burial,” said the minister.

“It was,” said Hanks. “As I promised. It was, indeed.”

Then they turned and walked off along the hilly shore, saying nothing again until they reached and entered the creaking house.

T
HEY ATE SIX SUPPERS IN THE OPEN
, talking back and forth over the small campfire. The light shone high on the silver rocket in which they had traveled across space. From a long way off in the blue hills, their campfire seemed like a star that had landed beside the long Martian canals under the clear and windless Martian sky.

On the sixth night the two men sat by the fire, looking tensely in all directions.

“Cold?” asked Drew, for the other was shivering.

“What?” Smith looked at his arms. “No.”

Drew looked at Smith's forehead. It was covered with sweat.

“Too warm?”

“No, not that either.”

“Lonely?”

“Maybe.” His hand jerked as he put another piece of wood on the fire.

“Game of cards?”

“Can't concentrate.”

Drew listened to Smith's quick shallow breathing. “We've our information. Each day we took pictures and ore samples. We're about loaded. Why don't we start the trip home tonight?”

Smith laughed. “You're not
that
lonely, are you?”

“Cut it.”

They shifted their boots in the cool sand. There was no wind. The fire burned steadily, straight up, fed by the oxygen hose from the ship. They themselves wore transparent glass masks over their faces, very thin, through which a soft oxygen film pulsed up from the oxygen vests under their jackets. Drew checked his wrist dial. Six more hours of oxygen in his jacket. Fine.

He pulled out his ukelele and started to strum on it carelessly, eyes half closed, leaning back to look at the stars.

The sound of the ukelele came up Drew's arms into his earphones. Smith could not hear the instrument, only Drew's singing. The atmosphere was too thin.

“She's the sweetheart of Sigma Chi—”

“Aw, cut it out!” cried Smith.

“What's eating you?”

“I said cut it out, is all!” Smith sat back, glaring at the other man.

“Okay, okay, don't get excited.”

Drew put the ukelele down and lay back, thinking. He knew what it was. It was in him, too. The cold loneliness, the midnight loneliness, the loneliness of distance and time and space, of stars and travel and months and days.

Only too well he remembered Anna's face looking in at him through the space port of the rocket a minute before blast-off time. It was like a vivid, clear-cut blue cameo—the blue round glass and her lovely face, her hand uplifted to wave, her smiling lips and her bright eyes. She had kissed her hand to him. Then she had vanished.

He looked idly over at Smith. Smith's eyes were closed. He was turning over a thought of his own in his mind. Marguerite, of course. Wonderful Marguerite, the brown eyes and the soft brown hair. Sixty million miles away on some improbable world where they had been born.

“I wonder what they're doing tonight?” Drew said.

Smith opened his eyes and looked across the fire. Without even questioning Drew's meaning, he replied, “Going to a television concert, swimming, playing badminton, lots of things.”

Drew nodded. He withdrew into himself again and he felt the sweat starting to come out in his hands and his face. He began to tremble and there was a shrill whining emotion deep inside himself. He didn't want to sleep tonight. It would be like other nights. Out of nothing, the lips and the warmth and the dream. And, all too soon, the empty morning, the arising into the nightmare of reality.

He jumped up violently.

Smith fell back, staring.

“Let's take a walk, do something,” said Drew heartily.

“All right.”

They walked through the pink sands of the empty sea bottom, saying nothing, only walking. Drew felt part of the tightness vanish. He cleared his throat.

“Suppose,” he said, “just to be supposing, of course, you met up with a Martian woman? Now. Some time in the next hour?”

Smith snorted. “Don't be silly. There aren't any.”

“But just suppose.”

“I don't know,” replied Smith, looking ahead as he walked. He put his head down and rubbed his hand along the thin warm glass mask over his face. “Marguerite's waiting for me in New York.”

“And Anna's waiting for me. But let's be practical. Here we are, two very human men, a year away from earth, cold, lonely, isolated, in need of consolation, hand-holding. No wonder we're brooding over the women we left behind.”

“It's plain silly to brood, and we ought to quit it. There's no women around anyway, drat it!”

They walked onward for a distance.

“Anyway,” Smith continued at last, after a time of thinking, “If we did find a woman here, I'm sure Marguerite would be the first to comprehend the situation and forgive me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely!”

“Or are you rationalizing?”

“No!”

“Let me show you something, then. Turn back. Over there.” Drew took Smith's arm and guided him back and to one side about fifty paces. “The reason I brought the whole subject up is this.” He pointed.

Smith gasped.

A footprint lay like a tiny soft valley in the sand.

The two men bent, put their fingers eagerly down, brushing nervously to each side of it. Their breath hissed in their nostrils. Smith's eyes glittered.

They looked into each other's faces for a long time.

“A woman's footstep!” cried Smith.

“Perfect in every detail,” said Drew, nodding solemnly. “I happen to know. I once worked in a shoe store. I'd know a woman's print anywhere. Perfect, perfect!”

They swallowed the thickened knots in their dry throats. Their hearts began to beat wildly.

Smith opened and closed his hands into fists. “Glory, it's small! Look at the toes! Gosh, it's dainty!”

He stood up and looked ahead, eyes squinted. Then, crying out, he began to run. “Here's another, and another. More. They go on, that way!”

“Take it easy,” Drew caught up with him. He took hold of Smith's arm. “Where you think you're going?”

“Let go; blast it!” Smith pointed. “I'm following them up, of course.

“What about Marguerite?”

“This is a devil of a time to talk of her. Let go before I crack you one!”

Musingly, Drew dropped his hand. “Okay. Go ahead.”

They ran together. . . .

Fresh footsteps, fresh and deep and delicately defined. Footsteps that rushed, swirled, pelted on before them, coming and going, alone, across the dry sea bottom. Glance at the wrist watch. Five minutes, then. Hurry. Rush. Run. Drew panted, laughing. Ridiculous. Silly. Two men plunging forward. Really, if it weren't such a lonely, serious thing, he would sit down and laugh until he cried. Two supposedly intelligent men, two Robinson Crusoes racing after a feminine and as yet invisible girl Friday! Ha!

“What's funny?” shouted Smith, far ahead.

“Nothing. Watch the time. Oxygen gives out, you know.”

“We've plenty.”

“Watch it, though!”

Did she realize when she came by here, thought Drew amusedly, putting her footfalls so delicately into the earth, that by so doing, so innocently laying her gentle small feet, she would cause a crisis among men? No. Totally unaware. Totally.

He must run anyway and keep up with that insane Smith. Silly, silly. And yet—not so silly.

As Drew ran, a warmness filled his head. After all, it would be swell to sit by the fire tonight beside a beautiful woman, holding her hand, kissing her and touching her.

“What if she's blue?”

Smith turned as he ran. “What?”

“What if her skin's blue? Like the hills? What then?”

“Blast you, Drew!”

“Ha!” Drew shouted his laugh and they pelted into an old river draw and along a canal, both lying empty in the seasonless time.

The footprints moved delicately on and on to the foothills. They had to stop when they reached the climb.

“Dibs,” said Drew, eyes sharp and yellow.

“What?”

“I said ‘Dibs on her.' That means I get to speak to her first. Remember when we were kids? We said ‘Dibs.' Okay. I just said ‘Dibs.' That makes it official.”

Smith was not smiling.

“What's wrong, Smith? 'Fraid of competition?” said Drew.

Smith did not speak.

“I've got quite a profile,” Drew pointed out. “Also, I'm four inches taller.”

Smith looked coldly at him. His eyes were still.

“Yes, sir, competition,” Drew went on. “Tell you what, Smith—if she's got a friend, I'll let you have the friend.”

“Shut up,” said Smith glaring at him.

Drew stopped smiling and stood back. “Look here, Smith, you better take it slow. You're getting all het up. I don't like to see you this way. Everything's been fine until now.”

“I'll act anyway I please. You just keep out of my business. After all,
I
found the footprints!”

“Say that again.”

“Well, you found them, maybe, but it was
my
idea to follow them up!”

“
Was
it?” Drew said slowly.

“You know it was.”

“
Do
I?”

“Holy Pete, a year in space, no company, nothing, traveling, and now when something like this happens, someone human—”

“Someone
feminine
.”

Smith cocked his fist. Drew caught it, twisted it, slapped Smith's face.

“Wake up!” he shouted into the blank face. “Wake up!” He seized Smith's shirt front. He shook him like a kid. “Listen, listen, you fool! Maybe she's somebody else's woman. Think of that. Where there's a Martian woman, there's going to be a Martian man, you chump.”

“Let go of me!”

“Think of it, you idiot, that's all.” Drew gave Smith a shove. Smith toppled, almost fell, reached for his gun, thought better of it, shoved it back.

But Drew had seen the gesture. He looked at Smith. “So it's come to that, has it? You really are in a bad way, aren't you? The old cave man himself.”

“Shut up!” Smith started to walk on, climbing. “You don't understand.”

“No, I've been nowhere the last year. I've been home with Anna every night. I've been warm and safe in New York. You went on the trip all by your lonely little self!” Drew snorted violently and swore. “You sure are an egocentric little squirt!”

They climbed a hill of sand and were among other hills where the footprints led them. They found an abandoned fireplace, charred sticks of wood, a small metal tin which had once, from its arrangement, contained oxygen to feed the fire. They looked new.