The Stories of Ray Bradbury (15 page)

‘Genevieve!’ he called in the empty street.

The door to a beauty salon opened.

‘Genevieve!’ He stopped the car.

Genevieve Selsor stood in the open door of the salon as he ran across the street. A box of cream chocolates lay open in her arms. Her fingers, cuddling it, were plump and pallid. Her face, as she stepped into the light, was round and thick, and her eyes were like two immense eggs stuck into a white mess of bread dough. Her legs were as big around as the stumps of trees, and she moved with an ungainly shuffle. Her hair was an indiscriminate shade of brown that had been made and remade, it appeared, as a nest for birds. She had no lips at all and compensated this by stenciling on a large red, greasy mouth that now popped open in delight, now shut in sudden alarm. She had plucked her brows to thin antenna lines.

Walter stopped. His smile dissolved. He stood looking at her.

She dropped her candy box to the sidewalk.

‘Are you—Genevieve Selsor?’ His ears rang.

‘Are you Walter Griff?’ she asked.

‘Gripp.’

‘Gripp,’ she corrected herself.

‘How do you do,’ he said with a restrained voice.

‘How do you do.’ She shook his hand.

Her fingers were sticky with chocolate.

‘Well,’ said Walter Gripp.

‘What?’ asked Genevieve Selsor.

‘I just said, “Well,”’ said Walter.

‘Oh.’

It was nine o’clock at night. They had spent the day picnicking, and for supper he had prepared a filet mignon which she didn’t like because it was too rare, so he broiled it some more and it was too much broiled or fried or something. He laughed and said, ‘We’ll see a movie!’ She said okay and put her chocolaty fingers on his elbow. But all she wanted to
see was a fifty-year-old film of Clark Gable. ‘Doesn’t he just kill you?’ She giggled. ‘Doesn’t he
kill
you, now?’ The film ended. ‘Run it off again,’ she commanded. ‘Again?’ he asked. ‘Again,’ she said. And when he returned she snuggled up and put her paws all over him. ‘You’re not quite what I expected, but you’re nice,’ she admitted. ‘Thanks,’ he said, swallowing. ‘Oh, that Gable,’ she said, and pinched his leg. ‘Ouch,’ he said.

After the film they went shopping down the silent streets. She broke a window and put on the brightest dress she could find. Dumping a perfume bottle on her hair, she resembled a drowned sheep dog. ‘How old are you?’ he inquired. ‘Guess.’ Dripping, she led him down the street. ‘Oh, thirty,’ he said. ‘Well,’ she announced stiffly, ‘I’m only twenty-seven, so there!

‘Here’s another candy store!’ she said. ‘Honest, I’ve led the life of Riley since everything exploded. I never liked my folks, they were fools. They left for Earth two months ago. I was supposed to follow on the last rocket, but I stayed on: you know why?’

‘Why?’

‘Because everyone picked on me. So I stayed where I could throw perfume on myself all day and drink ten thousand malts and eat candy without people saying. ‘Oh, that’s full of calories!’ So here I
am
!’

‘Here you are.’ Walter shut his eyes.

‘It’s getting late,’ she said, looking at him.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m tired,’ she said.

‘Funny. I’m wide awake.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘I feel like staying up all night,’ he said. ‘Say, there’s a good record at Mike’s. Come on, I’ll play it for you.’

‘I’m tired.’ She glanced up at him with sly, bright eyes.

‘I’m very alert,’ he said. ‘Strange.’

‘Come back to the beauty shop,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something.’

She took him in through the glass door and walked him over to a large white box. ‘When I drove from Texas City,’ she said. ‘I brought this with me.’ She untied the pink ribbon. ‘I thought: Well, here I am, the only lady on Mars, and here is the only man, and, well…’ She lifted the lid and folded back crisp layers of whispery pink tissue paper. She gave it a pat. ‘There.’

Walter Gripp stared.

‘What is it?’ he asked, beginning to tremble.

‘Don’t you know, silly? It’s all lace and all white and all fine and everything.’

‘No, I don’t know what it is.’

‘It’s a wedding dress, silly!’

‘Is it?’ His voice cracked.

He shut his eyes. Her voice was still soft and cool and sweet, as it had been on the phone. But when he opened his eyes and looked at her…

He backed up. ‘How nice,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Genevieve.’ He glanced at the door.

‘Yes?’

‘Genevieve, I’ve something to tell you.’

‘Yes?’ She drifted toward him, the perfume smell thick about her round white face.

‘The thing I have to say to you is…’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Good-by!’

And he was out the door and into his car before she could scream.

She ran and stood on the curb as he swung the car about.

‘Walter Griff, come back here!’ she wailed, flinging up her

arms.

‘Gripp,’ he corrected her.

‘Gripp!’ she shouted.

The car whirled away down the silent street, regardless of her stompings and shriekings. The exhaust from it fluttered the white dress she crumpled in her plump hands, and the stars shone bright, and the car vanished out onto the desert and away into blackness.

He drove all night and all day for three nights and days. Once he thought he saw a car following, and he broke into a shivering sweat and took another highway, cutting off across the lonely Martian world, past little dead cities, and he drove and drove for a week and a day, until he had put ten thousand miles between himself and Marlin Village. Then he pulled into a small town named Holtville Springs, where there were some tiny stores he could light up at night and restaurants to sit in, ordering meals. And he’s lived there ever since, with two deep freezes packed with food to last him one hundred years, and enough cigars to last ten thousand days, and a good bed with a soft mattress.

And when once in a while over the long years the phone rings—he doesn’t answer.

Whoever was knocking at the door didn’t want to stop.

Mrs Ttt threw the door open. ‘Well?’

‘You speak
English
!’ The man standing there was astounded.

‘I speak what I speak,’ she said.

‘It’s wonderful
English
!’ The man was in uniform. There were three men with him, in a great hurry, all smiling, all dirty.

‘What do you want?’ demanded Mrs Ttt.

‘You are a
Martian
!’ The man smiled. ‘The word is not familiar to you, certainly. It’s an Earth expression.’ He nodded at his men. ‘We are from Earth. I’m Captain Williams. We’ve landed on Mars within the hour. Here we are, the
Second
Expedition! There was a First Expedition, but we don’t know what happened to it. But here we are, anyway. And you are the first Martian we’ve met!’

‘Martian?’ Her eyebrows went up.

‘What I mean to say is, you live on the fourth planet from the sun. Correct?’

‘Elementary,’ she snapped, eying them.

‘And we’—he pressed his chubby pink hand to his chest—‘we are from Earth, Right, men?’

‘Right, sir!’ A chorus.

‘This is the planet Tyrr,’ she said, ‘if you want to use the proper name.’

‘Tyrr, Tyrr.’ The captain laughed exhaustedly. ‘What a
fine
name! But, my good woman, how is it you speak such perfect English?’

‘I’m not speaking, I’m thinking,’ she said. ‘Telepathy! Good day!’ And she slammed the door.

A moment later there was that dreadful man knocking again.

She whipped the door open. ‘What now?’ she wondered.

The man was still there, trying to smile, looking bewildered. He put out his hands. ‘I don’t think you
understand
—’

‘What?’ she snapped.

The man gazed at her in surprise. ‘We’re from
Earth
!’

‘I haven’t time,’ she said. ‘I’ve a lot of cooking today and there’s cleaning and sewing and all. You evidently wish to see Mr Ttt; he’s upstairs in his study.’

‘Yes,’ said the Earth Man confusedly, blinking. ‘By all means, let us see Mr Ttt.’

‘He’s busy.’ She slammed the door again.

This time the knock on the door was most impertinently loud.

‘See here!’ cried the man when the door was thrust open again. He jumped in as if to surprise her. ‘This is no way to treat visitors!’

‘All over my clean floor!’ she cried. ‘Mud! Get out! If you come in my house, wash your boots first.’

The man looked in dismay at his muddy boots. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is no time for trivialities. I think,’ he said, ‘we should be celebrating.’ He looked at her for a long time, as if looking might make her understand.

‘If you’ve made my crystal buns fall in the oven,’ she exclaimed, ‘I’ll hit you with a piece of wood!’ She peered into a little hot oven. She came back, red, steamy-faced. Her eyes were sharp yellow, her skin was soft brown, she was thin and quick as an insect. Her voice was metallic and sharp. ‘Wait here. I’ll see if I can let you have a moment with Mr Ttt. What was your business?’

The man swore luridly, as if she’d hit his hand with a hammer. ‘Tell him we’re from Earth and it’s never been done before!’

‘What hasn’t?’ She put her brown hand up. ‘Never mind. I’ll be back.’

The sound of her feet fluttered through the stone house.

Outside, the immense blue Martian sky was hot and still as warm deep sea water. The Martian desert lay broiling like a prehistoric mud pot, waves of heat rising and shimmering. There was a small rocket ship reclining upon a hilltop nearby. Large footprints came from the rocket to the door of this stone house.

Now there was a sound of quarreling voices upstairs. The men within the door stared at one another, shifting on their boots, twiddling their fingers, and holding onto their hip belts. A man’s voice shouted upstairs. The woman’s voice replied. After fifteen minutes the Earth Men began walking in and out the kitchen door, with nothing to do.

‘Cigarette?’ said one of the men.

Somebody got out a pack and they lit up. They puffed slow streams of pale white smoke. They adjusted their uniforms, fixed their collars. The voices upstairs continued to mutter and chant. The leader of the men looked at his watch.

‘Twenty-five minutes,’ he said. ‘I wonder what they’re up to up there.’ He went to a window and looked out.

‘Hot day,’ said one of the men.

‘Yeah,’ said someone else in the slow warm time of early afternoon. The voices had faded to a murmur and were now silent. There was not a sound in the house. All the men could hear was their own breathing.

An hour of silence passed. ‘I hope we didn’t cause any trouble,’ said the captain. He went and peered into the living room.

Mrs Ttt was there, watering some flowers that grew in the center of the room.

‘I knew I had forgotten something,’ she said when she saw the captain. She walked out to the kitchen. ‘I’m sorry.’ She handed him a slip of paper. ‘Mr Ttt is much too busy.’ She turned to her cooking. ‘Anyway, it’s not Mr Ttt you want to see: it’s Mr Aaa. Take that paper over to the next farm, by the blue canal, and Mr Aaa’ll advise you about whatever it is you want to know.’

‘We don’t want to know anything,’ objected the captain, pouting out his thick lips. ‘We already
know
it.’

‘You have the paper, what more do you want?’ she asked him straight off. And she would say no more.

‘Well,’ said the captain, reluctant to go. He stood as if waiting for something. He looked like a child staring at an empty Christmas tree. ‘Well,’ he said again. ‘Come on, men.’

The four men stepped out into the hot silent day.

Half an hour later, Mr Aaa, seated in his library sipping a bit of electric fire from a metal cup, heard the voices outside in the stone causeway. He leaned over the window sill and gazed at the four uniformed men who squinted up at him.

‘Are you Mr Aaa?’ they called.

‘I am.’

‘Mr Ttt sent us to see you!’ shouted the captain.

‘Why did he do that?’ asked Mr Aaa.

‘He was busy!’

‘Well, that’s a shame,’ said Mr Aaa sarcastically. ‘Does he think I have nothing else to do but entertain people he’s too busy to bother with?’

‘That’s not the important thing, sir,’ shouted the captain.

‘Well, it is to me. I have much reading to do. Mr Ttt is inconsiderate. This is not the first time he has been this thoughtless of me. Stop waving your hands, sir, until I finish. And pay attention. People usually listen to me when I talk. And you’ll listen courteously or I won’t talk at all.’

Uneasily the four men in the court shifted and opened their mouths, and once the captain, the veins on his face bulging, showed a few little tears in his eyes.

‘Now,’ lectured Mr Aaa, ‘do you think it fair of Mr Ttt to be so illmannered?’

The four men gazed up through the heat. The captain said, ‘We’re from Earth!’

‘I think it very ungentlemanly of him,’ brooded Mr Aaa.

‘A rocket ship. We came in it. Over there!’

‘Not the first time Ttt’s been unreasonable, you know.’

‘All the way from Earth.’

‘Why, for half a mind, I’d call him up and tell him off.’

‘Just the four of us; myself and these three men, my crew.’

‘I’ll call him up, yes, that’s what I’ll do!’

‘Earth. Rocket. Men. Trip. Space.’

‘Call him and give him a good lashing!’ cried Mr Aaa. He vanished like a puppet from a stage. For a minute there were angry voices back and forth over some weird mechanism or other. Below, the captain and his crew glanced longingly back at their pretty rocket ship lying on the hillside, so sweet and lovely and fine.

Mr Aaa jerked up in the window, wildly triumphant. ‘Challenged him to a duel, by the gods! A duel!’

‘Mr Aaa—’ the captain started all over again, quietly.

‘I’ll shoot him dead, do you hear!’

‘Mr Aaa, I’d like to
tell
you. We came sixty million miles.’

Mr Aaa regarded the captain for the first time. ‘Where’d you say you were from?’

The captain flashed a white smile. Aside to his men he whispered, ‘
Now
we’re getting someplace!’ To Mr Aaa he called, ‘We traveled sixty million miles. From Earth!’

Mr Aaa yawned. ‘That’s only
fifty
million miles this time of year.’ He picked up a frightful-looking weapon. ‘Well, I have to go now. Just take that silly note, though I don’t know what good it’ll do you, and go over that hill into the little town of Iopr and tell Mr Iii all about it.
He’s
the man you want to see. Not Mr Ttt, he’s an idiot; I’m going to kill him. Not me, because you’re not in my line of work.’

‘Line of work, line of work!’ bleated the captain. ‘Do you have to be in a certain line of work to welcome Earth Men!’

‘Don’t be silly, everyone knows
that
!’ Mr Aaa rushed downstairs. ‘Goodby!’ And down the causeway he raced, like a pair of wild calipers.

The four travelers stood shocked. Finally the captain said, ‘We’ll find someone yet who’ll listen to us.’

‘Maybe we could go out and come in again,’ said one of the men in a dreary voice. ‘Maybe we should take off and land again. Give them time to organize a party.’

‘That might be a good idea,’ murmured the tired captain.

The little town was full of people drifting in and out of doors, saying hello to one another, wearing golden masks and blue masks and crimson
masks for pleasant variety, masks with silver lips and bronze eyebrows, masks that smiled or masks that frowned, according to the owners’ dispositions.

The four men, wet from their long walk, paused and asked a little girl where Mr Iii’s house was.

‘There.’ The child nodded her head.

The captain got eagerly, carefully down on one knee, looking into her sweet young face. ‘Little girl, I want to talk to you.’

He seated her on his knee and folded her small brown hands neatly in his own big ones, as if ready for a bedtime story which he was shaping in his mind slowly and with a great patient happiness in details.

‘Well, here’s how it is, little girl. Six months ago another rocket came to Mars. There was a man named York in it, and his assistant. Whatever happened to them, we don’t know. Maybe they crashed. They came in a rocket. So did we. You should see it! A
big
rocket! So we’re the
Second
Expedition, following up the First. And we came all the way from Earth…’

The little girl disengaged one hand without thinking about it, and clapped an expressionless golden mask over her face. Then she pulled forth a golden spider toy and dropped it to the ground while the captain talked on. The toy spider climbed back up to her knee obediently, while she speculated upon it coolly through the slits of her emotionless mask and the captain shook her gently and urged his story upon her.

‘We’re Earth Men,’ he said. ‘Do you believe me?’

‘Yes.’ The little girl peeped at the way she was wiggling her toes in the dust.

‘Fine.’ The captain pinched her arm, a little bit with joviality, a little bit with meanness to get her to look at him. ‘We built our own rocket ship. Do you believe
that
?’

The little girl dug in her nose with a finger. ‘Yes.’

‘And—take your finger out of your nose, little girl—
I
am the captain, and—’

‘Never before in history has anybody come across space in a big rocket ship,’ recited the little creature, eyes shut.

‘Wonderful! How did you know?’

‘Oh, telepathy.’ She wiped a casual finger on her knee.

‘Well, aren’t you just
ever
so excited?’ cried the captain. ‘Aren’t you glad?’

‘You just better go see Mr Iii right away.’ She dropped her toy to the ground. ‘Mr Iii will like talking to you.’ She ran off, with the toy spider scuttling obediently after her.

The captain squatted there looking after her with his hand out. His eyes were watery in his head. He looked at his empty hands. His mouth hung
open. The other three men stood with their shadows under them. They spat on the stone street…

Mr Iii answered his door. He was on his way to a lecture, but he had a minute, if they would hurry inside and tell him what they desired…

‘A little attention,’ said the captain, red-eyed and tired. ‘We’re from Earth, we have a rocket, there are four of us, crew and captain, we’re exhausted, we’re hungry, we’d like a place to sleep. We’d like someone to give us the key to the city or something like that, and we’d like somebody to shake our hands and say ‘Hooray’ and say ‘Congratulations, old man!’ That about sums it up.’

Mr Iii was a tall, vaporous, thin man with thick blind blue crystals over his yellowish eyes. He bent over his desk and brooded upon some papers, glancing now and again with extreme penetration at his guests.

‘Well, I haven’t the forms with me here, I don’t
think
.’ He rummaged through the desk drawers. ‘Now, where
did
I put the forms?’ He mused. ‘Somewhere. Somewhere. Oh,
here
we are! Now!’ He handed the papers over crisply. ‘You’ll have to sign these papers, of course.’

‘Do we have to go through all this rigmarole?’

Mr Iii gave him a thick glassy look. ‘You say you’re from Earth, don’t you? Well, then there’s nothing for it but you sign.’

The captain wrote his name. ‘Do you want my crew to sign also?’

Mr Iii looked at the captain, looked at the three others, and burst into a shout of derision. ‘
Them
sign! Ho! How marvelous! Them, oh,
them
sign!’ Tears sprang from his eyes. He slapped his knee and bent to let his laughter jerk out of his gaping mouth. He held himself up with the desk. ‘
Them
sign!’

The four men scowled. ‘What’s funny?’

‘Them sign!’ sighed Mr Iii, weak with hilarity. ‘So very funny. I’ll have to tell Mr Xxx about this!’ He examined the filled-out form, still laughing. ‘Everything seems to be in order.’ He nodded. ‘Even the agreement for euthanasia if final decision on such a step is necessary.’ He chuckled.

‘Agreement for
what
?’

‘Don’t talk. I have something for you. Here. Take this key.’

The captain flushed. ‘It’s a great honor.’

‘Not the key to the city, you fool!’ snapped Mr Iii. ‘Just a key to the House. Go down that corridor, unlock the big door, and go inside and shut the door tight. You can spend the night there. In the morning I’ll send Mr Xxx to see you.’