R is for Rocket (13 page)

    He stood for a moment looking about. Behind him the rain whirled at the door. Ahead of him, upon a low table, stood a silver pot of hot chocolate, steaming, and a cup, full, with a marshmallow in it. And beside that, on another tray, stood thick sandwiches of rich chicken meat and fresh-cut tomatoes and green onions. And on a rod just before his eyes was a great thick green Turkish towel, and a bin in which to throw wet clothes, and, to his right, a small cubicle in which heat rays might dry you instantly. And upon a chair, a fresh change of uniform, waiting for anyone — himself, or any lost one — to make use of it. And farther over, coffee in steaming copper urns, and a phonograph from which music would soon play quietly, and books bound in red and brown leather. And near the books a cot, a soft deep cot upon which one might lie, exposed and bare, to drink in the rays of the one great bright thing which dominated the long room.

    He put his hands to his eyes. He saw other men moving toward him, but said nothing to them. He waited, and opened his eyes, and looked. The water from his uniform pooled at his feet, and he felt it drying from his hair and his face and his chest and his arms and his legs.

    He was looking at the sun.

    It hung in the center of the room, large and yellow and warm. It made not a sound, and there was no sound in the room. The door was shut and the rain only a memory to his tingling body. The sun hung high in the blue sky of the room, warm, hot, yellow
,
and very fine.

    He walked forward, tearing off his clothes as he went.

Their eyes were fire and the breath flamed out the witches' mouths as they bent to probe the caldron with greasy stick and bony finger.

"When shall we three meet again

In thunder, lightning,
or
in rain?"

    They danced drunkenly on the shore of an empty sea, fouling the air with their three tongues, and burning it with their cats' eyes malevolently aglitter:

"Round about the cauldron go:

In the poison'd entrails throw.
. . .

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble."

    They paused and cast a glance about. "Where's the crystal? here the needles?"

    "Here!"

    "Good!"

    "Is the yellow wax thickened?" "Yes!"

    "Pour it in the iron mold!"

    "Is the wax figure done?" They shaped it like molasses drip on their green hands.

    "Shove the needle through the heart!"

    "The crystal, the crystal; fetch it from the tarot bag. Dust it off; have a look!"

    They bent to the crystal, their faces white.

"See, see, see . . ."

    A rocket ship moved through space from the planet Earth to the planet Mars. On the rocket ship men were dying.

    The captain raised his head, tiredly. "We'll have to use the morphine."

    "But, Captain-"

    "You see yourself this man's condition." The captain lifted the wool blanket and the man restrained beneath the wet sheet moved and groaned. The air was full of sulfurous thunder.

    "I saw it — I saw it." The man opened his eyes and stared at the port where there were only black spaces, reeling stars, Earth far removed, and the planet Mars rising large and red. "I saw it — a bat, a huge thing, a bat with a man's face, spread over the front port. Fluttering and fluttering, fluttering and fluttering."

    "Pulse?" asked the captain.

    The orderly measured it. "One hundred and thirty."

    "He can't go on with that. Use the morphine. Come along, Smith."

    They moved away. Suddenly the floor plates were laced with bone and white skulls that screamed. The captain did not dare look down, and over the screaming he said, "Is this where Perse is?" turning in at a hatch,

    A white-smocked surgeon stepped away from a body. "I just don't understand it."

    "How did Perse die?"

    "We don't know, Captain. It wasn't his heart, his brain, or shock. He just — died."

    The captain felt the doctor's wrist, which changed to a hissing snake and bit him. The captain did not flinch. "Take care of yourself. You've a pulse too."

    The doctor nodded. "Perse complained of pains — needles, he said — in his wrists and legs. Said he felt like wax, melting. He fell. I helped him up. He cried like a child. Said he had a silver needle in his heart. He died. Here he is. We can repeat the autopsy for you. Everything's physically normal."

    "That's impossible! He died of
something!"

    The captain walked to a port. He smelled of menthol and iodine and green soap on his polished and manicured hands. His white teeth were dentifriced, and his ears scoured to a pinkness, as were his cheeks. His uniform was the color of new salt, and his boots were black mirrors shining below him. His crisp crew-cut hair smelled of sharp alcohol. Even his breath was sharp and new and clean. There was no spot to him. He was a fresh instrument, honed and ready, still hot from the surgeon's oven.

    The men with him were from the same mold. One expected huge brass keys spiraling slowly from their backs. They were expensive, talented, well-oiled toys, obedient and quick.

    The captain watched the planet Mars grow very large in space.

    "We'll be landing in an hour on that blasted place. Smith, did you see any bats, or have other nightmares?"

    "Yes, sir. The month before our rocket took off from New York, sir. White rats biting my neck, drinking my blood. I didn't tell. I was afraid you wouldn't let me come on this trip."

    "Never mind," sighed the captain. "I had dreams too. In all of my fifty years I never had a dream until that week before we took off from Earth. And then every night I dreamed I was a white wolf. Caught on a snowy hill. Shot with a silver bullet. Buried with a stake in my heart." He moved his head toward Mars. "Do you think, Smith,
they
know we're coming?"

    "We don't know if there
are
Martian people, sir."

    "Don't we? They began frightening us off eight weeks ago, before we started. They've killed Perse and Reynolds now. Yesterday they made Grenville go blind. How? I don't know. Bats, needles, dreams, men dying for no reason. I'd call it witchcraft in another day. But this is the year 2120, Smith. We're rational men. This all can't be happening. But it is! Whoever they are, with their needles and their bats, they'll try to finish us all." He swung about. "Smith, fetch those books from my file. I want them when we land."

    Two hundred books were piled on the rocket deck.

    "Thank you, Smith. Have you glanced at them? Think I'm insane? Perhaps. It's a crazy hunch. At that last moment I ordered these books from the Historical Museum. Because of my dreams. Twenty nights I was stabbed, butchered, a screaming bat pinned to a surgical mat, a thing rotting underground in a black box; bad, wicked dreams. Our whole crew dreamed of witch-things and were-things, vampires and phantoms, things they
couldn't
know anything about. Why? Because books on such ghastly subjects were destroyed a century ago. By law. Forbidden for anyone to own the grisly volumes. These books you see here are the
last
copies, kept for historical purposes in the locked museum vaults."

    Smith bent to read the dusty titles:

    
"Tales of Mystery and Imagination,
by Edgar Allan Poe.
Dracula,
by Bram Stoker.
Frankenstein,
by Mary Shelley.
The Turn of the Screw,
by Henry James.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
by Washington Irving.
Rappaccini's Daughter,
by Nathaniel Hawthorne. An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,
by Ambrose Bierce.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
by Lewis Carroll.
The Willows,
by Algernon Blackwood.
The Wizard of Oz,
by L. Frank Baum.
The Weird Shadow over Innsmouth,
by H. P. Lovecraft. And more! Books by Walter de la Mare, Wakefield,  Harvey,  Wells,  Asquith, Huxley — all forbidden authors. All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned! But, sir, what good are these to us on the rocket?"

    "I don't know," sighed the captain, "yet"

    The three hags lifted the crystal where the captain's image flickered, his tiny voice tinkling out of the glass:

    "I don't know," sighed the captain, "yet."

    The three witches glared redly into one another's faces.

    "We haven't much time," said one.

    "Better warn
Them
in the City."

    "They'll want to know about the books. It doesn't look good. That fool of a captain!"

    "In an hour they'll land their rocket."

    The three hags shuddered and blinked up at the Emerald City by the edge of the dry Martian sea. In its highest window a small man held a blood-red drape aside. He watched the wastelands where the three witches fed their caldron and shaped the waxes. Farther along, ten thousand other blue fires and laurel incenses, black tobacco smokes and fir weeds, cinnamons and bone dusts rose soft as moths through the Martian night. The man counted the angry, magical fires. Then, as the three witches stared, he turned. The crimson drape, released, fell, causing the distant portal to wink, like a yellow eye.

    Mr. Edgar Allan Poe stood in the tower window, a faint vapor of spirits upon his breath. "Hecate's friends are busy tonight," he said, seeing the witches, far below.

    A voice behind him said, "I saw Will Shakespeare at the shore, earlier, whipping them on. All along the sea Shakespeare's army alone, tonight, numbers thousands: the three witches, Oberon, Hamlet's father, Puck — all, all of them — thousands! Good Lord, a regular sea of people."

    "Good William." Poe turned. He let the crimson drape fall shut. He stood for a moment to observe the raw stone room, the black-timbered table, the candle flame, the other man, Mr. Ambrose Bierce, sitting very idly there, lighting matches and watching them burn down, whistling under his breath, now and then laughing to himself.

    "We'll have to tell Mr. Dickens now," said Mr. Poe. "We've put it off too long. It's a matter of hours. Will you go down to his home with me, Bierce?"

    Bierce glanced up merrily. "I've just been thinking — what'll happen to us?"

    "If we can't kill the rocket men off, frighten them away, then we'll have to leave, of course. We'll go on to Jupiter, and when they come to Jupiter, we'll go on to Saturn, and when they come to Saturn, we'll go to Uranus, or Neptune, and then on out to Pluto — "

    "Where then?"

    Mr. Poe's face was weary; there were fire coals remaining, fading, in his eyes, and a sad wildness in the way he talked, and a uselessness of his hands and the way his hair fell lankly over his amazing white brow. He was like a satan of some lost dark cause, a general arrived from a derelict invasion. His silky, soft, black mustache was worn away by his musing lips. He was so small his brow seemed to float, vast and phosphorescent, by itself, in the dark room.

    "We have the advantages of superior forms of travel," he said. "We can always hope for one of their atomic wars, dissolution, the dark ages come again. The return of superstition. We could go back then to Earth, all of us, in one night." Mr. Poe's black eyes brooded under his round and luminant brow. He gazed at the ceiling. "So they're coming to ruin
this
world too? They won't leave
anything
undefiled, will they?"

    "Does a wolf pack stop until it's killed its prey and eaten the guts?" said Bierce. "It should be quite a war. I shall sit on the side lines and be the scorekeeper. So many Earthmen boiled in oil, so many Mss. Found in Bottles burnt, so many Earthmen stabbed with needles, so many Red Deaths put to flight by a battery of hypodermic syringes — ha!"

    Poe swayed angrily, faintly drunk with wine. "What did we do? Be
with
us, Bierce, in the name of God! Did we have a fair trial before a company of literary critics? No! Our books were plucked up by neat, sterile, surgeon's pliers, and flung into vats, to boil, to be killed of all their mortuary germs. Damn them all!"

    "I find our situation amusing," said Bierce.

    They were interrupted by a hysterical shout from the tower stair.

    "Mr. Poe! Mr. Bierce!"

    "Yes, yes, we're coming!" Poe and Bierce descended to find a man gasping against the stone passage wall.

    "Have you heard the news?" he cried immediately, clawing at them like a man about to fall over a cliff. "In an hour they'll land! They're bringing books with them —
old
books, the witches said! What're you doing in the tower at a time like this? Why aren't you acting?"

    Poe said: "We're doing everything we can, Blackwood. You're new to all this. Come along, we're going to Mr. Charles Dickens' place — "

    " — to contemplate our doom, our black doom," said Mr. Bierce, with a wink.

    They moved down the echoing throats of the castle, level after dim green level, down into mustiness and decay and spiders and dreamlike webbing. "Don't worry," said Poe, his brow like a huge white lamp before them, descending, sinking. "All along the dead sea tonight I've called the others. Your friends and mine, Blackwood — Bierce. They're all there. The animals and the old women and the tall men with the sharp white teeth. The traps are waiting; the pits, yes, and the pendulums. The Red Death." Here he laughed quietly. "Yes, even the Red Death. I never thought — no, I never thought the time would come when a thing like the Red Death would actually
be.
But
they
asked for it, and they shall have it!"

    "But are we strong enough?" wondered Blackwood.

    "How strong is strong? They won't be prepared for us, at least. They haven't the imagination. Those clean young rocket men with their antiseptic bloomers and fish-bowl helmets, with their new religion. About their necks, on gold chains, scalpels. Upon their heads, a diadem of microscopes. In their holy fingers, steaming incense urns which in reality are only germicidal ovens for steaming out superstition. The names of Poe, Bierce, Hawthorne, Blackwood — blasphemy to their clean lips."