Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (54 page)

 
          
 
"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, somehow, for the later
crops. My God, Carrie, my God, 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-hell-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 hell, 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, by God, 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. Part we'll build new,
part we'll bring. Of course all we got here now is the front porch, 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 all up, next year, five years! The
cut-glass vases, that Armenian carpet your mother gave us in 1961! Just let the
sun explode!"

 
          
 
They looked at the other crates, numbered and
lettered: Front-porch swing, front-porch wicker rocker, hanging Chinese
crystals . . ,

 
          
 
"I'll blow them myself to make them
ring."

 
          
 
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 famihar, 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 furnace?"

 
          
 
"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 hell," 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 hotel stood like a hollowed dry bone under
the very center of the desert sky where the sun burned the roof all day. All
night, the memory of the sun stirred in every room like the ghost of an old
forest fire. Long after dusk, since light meant heat, the hotel lights stayed
off. The inhabitants of the hotel preferred to feel their way blind through the
halls in their never-ending search for cool air.

 
          
 
This one particular evening Mr. Terle, the
proprietor, and his only boarders, Mr. Smith and Mr. Fremley, who looked and
smelled like two ancient rags of cured tobacco, stayed late on the long
veranda. In their creaking glockenspiel rockers they gasped back and forth in
the dark, trying to rock up a wind.

 
          
 
"Mr. Terle . . . ? Wouldn't it be really
nice . . . someday ... if you could buy ... air conditioning . . . ?"

 
          
 
Mr. Terle coasted awhile, eyes shut.

 
          
 
"Got no money for such things, Mr.
Smith."

 
          
 
The two old boarders flushed; they hadn't paid
a bill now in twenty-one years.

 
          
 
Much later Mr. Fremley sighed a grievous sigh.
"Why, why don't we all just quit, pick up, get outa here, move to a decent
city? Stop this swelterin' and fryin' and sweatin'."

 
          
 
"Who'd buy a dead hotel in a ghost
town?" said Mr. Terle quietly. "No. No, we'll just set here and wait,
wait for that great day, January 29."

 
          
 
Slowly, all three men stopped rocking.

 
          
 
January 29.

 
          
 
The one day in all the year when it really let
go and rained.

 
          
 
"Won't wait long." Mr. Smith tilted his
gold railroad watch like the warm summer moon in his palm. "Two hours and
nine minutes from now it'll be January 29. But I don't see nary a cloud in ten
thousand miles."

 
          
 
"It's rained every January 29 since I was
bom!" Mr. Terle stopped, surprised at his own loud voice. "If it's a
day late this year, I won't pull God's shirttail."

 
          
 
Mr. Fremley swallowed hard and looked from
east to west across the desert toward the hills. "I wonder . . . will
there ever be a gold rush hereabouts again?"

 
          
 
"No gold," said Mr. Smith. "And
what's more, I'll make you a bet—no rain. No rain tomorrow or the day after the
day after tomorrow. No rain all the rest of this year."

 
          
 
The three old men sat staring at the big
sun-yellowed moon that burned a hole in the high stillness.

 
          
 
After a long while, painfully, they began to
rock again.

 
          
 
The first hot morning breezes curled the
calendar pages like a dried snake skin against the flaking hotel front.

 
          
 
The three men, thumbing their suspenders up
over their hat rack shoulders, came barefoot downstairs to blink out at that
idiot sky.

 
          
 
"January 29 . . ."

 
          
 
"Not a drop of mercy there."

 
          
 
"Day's young."

 
          
 
"I’m not." Mr. Fremley turned and
went away.

 
          
 
It took him five minutes to find his way up
through the delirious hallways to his hot, freshly baked bed.

 
          
 
At
noon
,
Mr. Terle peered in.

 
          
 
"Mr. Fremley . . . ?"

 
          
 
"Damn desert cactus, that's us!"
gasped Mr. Fremley, lying there, his face looking as if at any moment it might
fall away in a blazing dust on the raw plank floor. "But even the best
damn cactus got to have just a sip of water before it goes back to another year
of the same damn furnace. I tell you I won't move again, I’ll lie here an' die
if I don't hear more than birds pattin' around up on that roof!"

 
          
 
"Keep your prayers simple and your
umbrella handy," said Mr, Terle and tiptoed away.

 
          
 
At dusk, on the hollow roof a faint pattering
sounded.

 
          
 
Mr, Fremley's voice sang out mournfully from
his bed,

 
          
 
"Mr, Terle, that ain't rain! That's you
with the garden hose sprinklin' well water on the roof! Thanks for tryin', but
cut it out, now."

 
          
 
The pattering sound stopped. There was a sigh
from the yard below.

 
          
 
Coming around the side of the hotel a moment
later, Mr. Terle saw the calendar fly out and down in the dust.

 
          
 
"Damn January 29!" cried a voice.
"Twelve more months! Have to wait twelve more months, now!"

 
          
 
Mr. Smith was standing there in the doorway.
He stepped inside and brought out two dilapidated suitcases and thumped them on
the porch.

 
          
 
"Mr. Smith!" cried Mr. Terle.
"You can't leave after thkty years!"

 
          
 
"They say it rains twenty days a month in
Ireland
,"
said Mr. Smith. "I'll get a job there and run around with my hat off and
my mouth open."

 
          
 
"You can't go!" Mr. Terle tried frantically
to think of something; he snapped his fingers. "You owe me nine thousand
dollars rent!"

 
          
 
Mr. Smith recoiled; his eyes got a look of
tender and unexpected hurt in them.

 
          
 
"I'm sorry." Mr. Terle looked away.
"I didn't mean that. Look now—you just head for
Seattle
.
Pours two inches a week there.
Pay me when you can, or
never. But do me a favor: wait till
midnight
.
It's cooler then, anyhow. Get you a good night's walk toward the city."

 
          
 
"Nothin'll happen between now and
midnight
."

 
          
 
"You got to have faith. When everything
else is gone, you got to believe a thing'll happen. Just stand here with me,
you don't have to sit, just stand here and think of rain. That's the last thing
I'll ever ask of you."

 
          
 
On the desert sudden little whirlwinds of dust
twisted up, sifted down. Mr. Smith's eyes scanned the sunset horizon.

 
          
 
"What do I think? Rain, oh you rain, come
along here? Stuff like that?"

 
          
 
"Anything. Anything at all!"

 
          
 
Mr. Smith stood for a long time between his
two mangy suitcases and did not move. Five, six minutes ticked by. There was no
sound, save the two men's breathing in the dusk.

 
          
 
Then at last, very firmly, Mr. Smith stooped
to grasp the luggage handles.

 
          
 
Just then, Mr. Terle blinked. He leaned
forward, cupping his hand to his ear.

 
          
 
Mr. Smith froze, his hands still on the
luggage.

 
          
 
From away among the hills, a murmur, a soft
and tremulous rumble.

 
          
 
"Storm coming!" hissed Mr. Terle.

 
          
 
The sound grew louder; a kind of whitish cloud
rose up from the hills.

 
          
 
Mr. Smith stood tall on tiptoe.

 
          
 
Upstairs Mr. Fremley sat up like Lazarus.

 
          
 
Mr. Terle's eyes grew wider and yet wider to
take hold of what was coming. He held to the porch rail like the captain of a
calm-foundered vessel feeling the first stir of some tropic breeze that smelled
of lime and the ice-cool white meat of coconut. The smallest wind stroked over
his aching nostrils as over the flues of a white-hot chimney.

 
          
 
"There!" cried Mr. Terle.
"There!"

 
          
 
And over the last hill, shaking out feathers
of fiery dust, came the cloud, the thunder, the racketing storm.

 
          
 
Over the hill the first car to pass in twenty
days flung itself down the valley with a shriek, a thud, and a wail.

 
          
 
Mr. Terle did not dare to look at Mr. Smith.

 
          
 
Mr. Smith looked up, thinking of Mr. Fremley
in his room.

 
          
 
Mr. Fremley, at the window, looked down and
saw the car expire and die in front of the hotel.

 
          
 
For the sound that the car made was curiously
final. It had come a very long way on blazing sulphur roads, across salt flats
abandoned ten million years ago by the shingling of of waters. Now, with
wire-ravelings like cannibal hair sprung up from seams, with a great eyelid of
canvas top thrown back and melted to spearmint gum over the rear seat, the
auto, a Kissel car, vintage 1924, gave a final shuddering as if to expel its
ghost upon the air.

 
          
 
The old woman in the front seat of the car
waited patiently, looking in at the three men and the hotel as if to say.
Forgive me, my friend is ill; I've known him a long while, and now I must see
him through his final hour. So she just sat in the car waiting for the faint
convulsions to cease and for the great relaxation of all the bones which
signifies that the final process is over. She must have sat a full half minute
longer listening to her car, and there was something so peaceful about her that
Mr. Terle and Mr. Smith leaned slowly toward her. At last she looked at them
with a grave smile and raised her hand.

 
          
 
Mr. Fremley was surprised to see his hand go
out the window, above and wave back to her.

 
          
 
On the porch Mr. Smith murmured,
"Strange. It's not a storm. And I'm not disappointed. How come?"

 
          
 
But Mr. Terle was down the path and to the
car.

 
          
 
"We thought you were . . . that is. .
." He trailed off. "Terie's my name, Joe Terle."

 
          
 
She took his hand and looked at him with
absolutely clear and unclouded light blue eyes like water that has melted from
snow a thousand miles off and come a long way, purified by wind and sun.

 
          
 
"Miss Blanche Hillgood," she said,
quietly. "Graduate of the
Grinnell
College
, unmarried teacher of
music, thirty years high-

 
          
 
school glee club and student orchestra
conductor, Green City, Iowa, twenty years private teacher of piano, harp, and
voice, one month retired and living on a pension and now, taking my roots with
me, on my way to California."

 
          
 
"Miss Hillgood, you don't look to be
going anywhere from here."

 
          
 
"I had a feeHng about that." She
watched the two men circle the car cautiously. She sat like a child on the lap
of a rheumatic grandfather, undecided. "Is there nothing we can do?"

 
          
 
"Make a fence of the wheels, dinner gong
of the brake drums, the rest'll make a fine rock garden."