R is for Rocket (18 page)

    "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 un-crated 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 all 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: Front-porch 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. Every-one! Here's the harmony."

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 the 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 signed. "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.

    This 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 a
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.

Tomorrow would be Christmas, and even while the three of them rode to the rocket port the mother and father were worried. It was the boy's first flight into space, his very first time in a rocket, and they wanted everything to be perfect. So when, at the custom's table, they were forced to leave behind his gift which exceeded the weight limit by no more than a few ounces and the little tree with the lovely white candles, they felt themselves deprived of the season and their love.

    The boy was waiting for them in the Terminal room. Walking toward him, after their unsuccessful clash with the Interplanetary officials, the mother and father whispered to each other.

    "What shall we do?"

    "Nothing, nothing. What
can
we do?"

    "Silly rules!"

    "And he so wanted the tree!"

    The siren gave a great howl and people pressed forward into the Mars Rocket. The mother and father walked at the very last, their small pale son between them, silent.

    "I'll think of something," said the father.

    "What . . . ?" asked the boy.

    And the rocket took off and they were flung headlong into dark space.

    The rocket moved and left fire behind and left Earth behind on which the date was December 24, 2052, heading out into a place where there was no time at all, no month, no year, no hour. They slept away the rest of the first "day." Near midnight, by their Earth-time New York watches, the boy awoke and said, "I want to go look out the porthole."

    There was only one port, a "window" of immensely thick glass of some size, up on the next deck.

    "Not quite yet," said the father. "I'll take you up later."

    "I want to see where we are and where we're going."

    "I want you to wait for a reason," said the father.

    He had been lying awake, turning this way and that, thinking of the abandoned gift, the problem of the season, the lost tree and the white candles. And at last, sitting up, no more than five minutes ago, he believed he had found a plan. He need only carry it out and this journey would be fine and joyous indeed.

    "Son," he said, "in exactly one half hour it will be Christmas."

    "Oh," said the mother, dismayed that he had mentioned it. Somehow she had rather hoped that the boy would forget.

    The boy's face grew feverish and his lips trembled. "I know, I know. Will I get a present, will I? Will I have a tree? You promised — "

    "Yes, yes, all that, and more," said the father.

    The mother started. "But — "

    "I mean it," said the father. "I really mean it. All and more, much more. Excuse me, now. I'll be back."

    He left them for about twenty minutes. When he came back he was smiling. "Almost time."

    "Can I hold your watch?" asked the boy, and the watch was handed over and he held it ticking in his fingers as the rest of the hour drifted by in fire and silence and unfelt motion.

    "It's Christmas
now!
Christmas! Where's my present?"

    "Here we go," said the father and took his boy by the shoulder and led him from the room, down the hall, up a rampway, his wife following.

    "I don't understand," she kept saying.

    "You will. Here we are," said the father.

    They had stopped at the closed door of a large cabin. The father tapped three times and then twice in a code. The door opened and the light in the cabin went out and there was a whisper of voices.

    "Go on in, son," said the father.

    "It's dark."

    "I'll hold your hand. Come on, Mama."

    They stepped into the room and the door shut, and the room was very dark indeed. And before them loomed a great glass eye, the porthole, a window four feet high and
six
feet wide, from which they could look out into space.

    The boy gasped.

    Behind him, the father and the mother gasped with him, and then in the dark room some people began to sing.

    "Merry Christmas, son," said the father.

    And the voices in the room sang the old, the familiar carols, and the boy moved forward slowly until his face was pressed against the cool glass of the port. And he stood there for a long long time, just looking and looking out into space and the deep night «t the burning and the burning of ten billion billion white and lovely candles. . . .