“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. 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 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: Frontporch 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. Everyone! Here’s the harmony.”
T
he 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 this 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 sighed. “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. The 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
& 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.
I
D
uring the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.
Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.
There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.
Sim’s mother, trembling now and again, staring at the man, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.
The man in the comer of the cave was his father! The man’s eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered hands and his jaw hung loose and senseless.
Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the old people sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.
Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desiccation and burning away of their fresh occurred.
Sim thrashed in his mother’s grasp. She held him. “No, no,” she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.
With a soft swift padding of naked feet, Sim’s father ran across the cave. Sim’s mother screamed. Sim felt himself torn loose from her grasp. He fell upon the stones, rolling, shrieking with his new, moist lungs!
The webbed face of his father jerked over him, the knife was poised. It was like one of those prenatal nightmares he’d had again and again while still in his mother’s flesh. In the next few blazing, impossible instants questions flicked through his brain. The knife was high, suspended, ready to destroy him. But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim’s new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead!
His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. “Let me kill him!” shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. “What has he to live for?”
“No, no!” insisted the mother, and her body, frail and old as it was, stretched across the huge body of the father, tearing at his weapon. “He must live! There may be a future for him! He may live longer than us, and be young!”
The father fell back against a stone crib. Lying there, staring, eyes glittering, Sim saw another figure inside that stone crib. A girl-child, quietly feeding itself, moving its delicate hands to procure food. His sister.
The mother wrenched the dagger from her husband’s grasp, stood up, weeping and pushing back her cloud of stiffening gray hair. Her mouth trembled and jerked. “I’ll kill you!” she said, glaring down at her husband. “Leave my children alone.”
The old man spat tiredly, bitterly, and looked vacantly into the stone crib, at the little girl. “One-eighth of
her
life’s over already,” he gasped. “And she doesn’t know it. What’s the use?”
As Sim watched, his own mother seemed to shift and take a tortured, smoke-like form. The thin bony face broke out into a maze of wrinkles. She was shaken with pain and had to sit by him, shuddering and cuddling the knife to her shriveled breasts. She, like the old people in the tunnel, was aging, dying.
Sim cried steadily. Everywhere he looked was horror. A mind came to meet his own. Instinctively he glanced toward the stone crib. Dark, his sister returned his glance. Their minds brushed like straying fingers. He relaxed somewhat. He began to learn.
The father sighed, shut his lids down over his green eyes. “Feed the child,” he said, exhaustedly. “Hurry. It is almost dawn and it is our last day of living, woman. Feed him. Make him grow.”
Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him.
This was a planet next to the sun. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. The people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and then the cave peoples brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day fire died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the people lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living done in the brief hour of respite.
It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.
And he would live exactly eight days.
The
violence
of this thought! Eight days. Eight
short
days. It was wrong, impossible, but a fact. Even while in his mother’s flesh some racial knowledge of some strange far wild voice had told him he was being formed rapidly, shaped and propelled out swiftly.
Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lighting. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.
Eight days from now he’d stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.
This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must search his parents’ thoughts for knowledge.
Because in a few hours they’d be dead.
This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn’t he dreamed of
long
lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he’d dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?
How had his people gotten into such a condition?
As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumbled men and women.
When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world’s wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.
So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. Somewhere along the line, they
had
developed telepathy, plus racial memory, the only good gifts, the only hope in all this terror. So thought Sim, I’m the five-thousandth in a long fine of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?
His eyes widened, another image came to focus.
Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all those that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.
His mind flexed.
In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists. To these men, when he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metal so perfect it did not rust or age.
The cliff groaned.
Sim’s father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.
“Dawn’s coming,” he said.
II
Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.
The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand shrapnels and frictionheated nuggets.
Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.
The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too head-long, too dangerous.
Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father’s eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. “Wait! Be careful!” she cried to her husband.
Sim felt his father crouch, listening.
High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.
“Now!” bellowed his father, and leaped out.
An avalanche fell down at them!
Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.
With one last step, Sim’s father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.
The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim’s father burst out into laughter. “Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!” And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. “Pagh!”
Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. “Fool! You might have killed Sim!”
“I may yet,” retorted the father.
Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. Blood trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing more to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.
Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.
The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.
This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.
Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.
The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim to his mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim’s tongue.
His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity and telepathy that fed upon every mind and every wind had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.