Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (5 page)

 
          
 
Ann Leary, crying out, released from prison,
it seemed, raced up the moonlit path to her house and slammed the door.

 
          
 
Cecy lingered for only a little while. In the
eyes of a cricket she saw the spring night world. In the eyes of a frog she sat
for a lonely moment by a pool. In the eyes of a night bird she looked down from
a tall, moon-haunted elm and saw the lights go out in two farmhouses, one here,
one a mile away. She thought of herself and her family, and her strange power,
and the fact that no one in the family could ever marry any one of the people
in this vast world out here beyond the hills.

 
          
 
"Tom?" Her weakening mind flew in a
night bird under the trees and over deep fields of wild mustard. "Have you
still got the paper, Tom? Will you come by someday, some year, sometime, to see
me? Will you know me then? Will you look in my face and remember then where it
was you saw me last and know that you love me as I love you, with all my heart
for all time?"

 
          
 
She paused in the cool night air, a million
miles from towns and people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills.
"Tom?" Softly.

 
          
 
Tom was asleep. It was deep night; his clothes
were hung on chairs or folded neatly over the end of the bed. And in one
silent, carefully upflung hand upon the white pillow, by his head, was a small
piece of paper with writing on it. Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a
time, his fingers closed down upon and held it tightly. And he did not even
stir or notice when a blackbird, faintly, wondrously, beat softly for a moment
against the clear moon crystals of the windowpane, then, fluttering quietly,
stopped and flew away toward the east, over the sleeping earth.

 
          
 
''Oh, the Good Time has come at last—"

 
          
 
It was twilight, and Janice and Leonora packed
steadily in their summer house, singing songs, eating little, and holding to
each other when necessary. But they never glanced at the window where the night
gathered deep and the stars came out bright and cold.

 
          
 
"Listen!" said Janice.

 
          
 
A sound like a steamboat down the river, but
it was a rocket in the sky. And beyond that—banjos playing? No, only the
summer-night crickets in this year 2003. Ten thousand sounds breathed through
the town and the weather. Janice, head bent, listened. Long, long ago, 1849,
this very street had breathed the voices of ventriloquists, preachers,
fortunetellers, fools, scholars, gamblers, gathered at this selfsame
Independence, Missouri. Waiting for the moist earth to bake and the great tidal
grasses to come up heavy enough to hold the weight of their carts, their
wagons, their indiscriminate destinies, and their dreams.

 
          
 
“O, my the Good Time has come at last, To Mars
we are a-going, sir,

           
 
Five Thousand Women in the sky, That's quite a
springtime sowing, sir!"

 
          
 
"That's an old
Wyoming
song," said Leonora. "Change the words and
it's
fine for 2003,"

 
          
 
Janice lifted a matchbox of food pills,
calculating the totals of things carried in those high-axled, tall-bedded
wagons. For each man, each woman, incredible tonnages! Hams, bacon slabs,
sugar, salt, flour, dried fruits, "pilot" bread, citric acid, water,
ginger, pepper—a list as big as the land! Yet here, today, pills that fit a
wrist watch fed you not from
Fort
Laramie
to Hangtown, but all across a wilderness of stars.

 
          
 
Janice threw wide the closet door and almost
screamed. Darkness and night and all the spaces between the stars looked out at
her.

 
          
 
Long years ago two things had happened. Her
sister had locked her, shrieking, in a closet. And, at a party, playing
hide-and-seek, she had run through the kitchen and into a long dark hall. But
it wasn't a hall. It was an unlit stair well, a swallowing blackness. She had
run out upon empty air. She had pedaled her feet, screamed, and fallen!
Fallen in
midnight
blackness.
Into the cellar.
It
took a long while, a heartbeat, to fall. And she had smothered in that closet a
long, long time without daylight, without friends, no one to hear her
screamings.
Away from everything, locked in darkness.
Falling in darkness.
Shrieking!

 
          
 
The two memories.

 
          
 
Now, with the closet door wide, with darkness
like a velvet shroud hung before her to be stroked by a trembling hand, with
the darkness like a black panther breathing there, looking at her with unfit
eyes, the two memories rushed out. Space and a falling. Space and being locked
away, screaming. She and Leonora working steadily, packing, being careful not
to glance out the window at the frightening Milky Way and the vast emptiness.
Only to have the long-familiar closet, with its private night, remind them at
last of their destiny.

 
          
 
This was how it would be, out there, sliding
toward the stars,

 
          
 
in the night, in the great hideous black closet,
screaming, but no one to hear. Falling forever among meteor clouds and godless
comets. Down the elevator shaft. Down the nightmare coal chute into
nothingness.

 
          
 
She screamed. None of it came out of her
mouth. It collided upon itself in her chest and head. She screamed. She slammed
the closet door! She lay against it! She felt the darkness breathe and yammer
at the door and she held it tight, eyes watering. She stood there a long time,
until the trembling vanished, watching Leonora work. And the hysteria, thus
ignored, drained away and away, and at last was gone. A wrist watch ticked,
with a clean sound of normality, in the room.

 
          
 
"Sixty million miles." She moved at
last to the window as if it were a deep well. "I can't believe that men on
Mars, tonight, are building towns, waiting for us."

 
          
 
"The only thing to believe is catching
our Rocket tomorrow."

 
          
 
Janice raised a white gown like a ghost in the
room.

 
          
 
"Strange, strange. To marry—on another
world."

 
          
 
"Let's get to bed."

 
          
 
"No! The call comes at
midnight
. I couldn't sleep, thinking how to tell
Will I've decided to take the Mars Rocket. Oh, Leonora, think of it, my voice
traveling sixty million miles on the light-phone to him. I changed my mind so
quick—I'm scared!"

 
          
 
"Our last night on Earth."

 
          
 
Now they really knew and accepted it; now the
knowledge had found them out. They were going away, and they might never come
back. They were leaving the town of
Independence
in the state of
Missouri
on the
continent of
North America
, surrounded by one ocean
which was the
Atlantic
and
another the
Pacific, none of which could be put in their traveling cases. They had shrunk
from this final knowledge. Now it was facing them. And they were struck numb.

 
          
 
"Our children, they won't be
Americans,
or Earth people at all. We'll all be Martians,
the rest of our lives."

 
          
 
"I don't want to go!" cried Janice
suddenly.

 
          
 
The panic froze her.

 
          
 
"I'm afraid! The space, the darkness, the
Rocket, the meteors! Everything gone! Why should I go out there?"

 
          
 
Leonora took hold of her shoulders and held
her close, rocking her. "It's a new world. It's like the old days. The men
first and the women after."

 
          
 
"Why, why should I go, tell me!"

 
          
 
"Because," said Leonora at last,
quietly, seating her on the bed, "Will is up there."

 
          
 
His name was good to hear. Janice quieted.

 
          
 
"These men make it so hard," said
Leonora. "Used to be if a woman ran two hundred miles for a man it was
something. Then they made it a thousand miles. And now they put a whole
universe between us. But that can't stop us, can it?"

 
          
 
"I'm afraid I'll be a fool on the
Rocket."

 
          
 
"I'll be a fool with you." Leonora
got up. "Now, let's walk around town, let's see everything one last
time."

 
          
 
Janice stared out at the town. "Tomorrow
night this'll all be here, but we won't. People'll wake up, eat, work, sleep,
wake again, but we won't know it, and they'll never miss us."

 
          
 
Leonora and Janice moved around each other as
if they couldn't find the door.

 
          
 
"Come on."

 
          
 
They opened the door, switched off the lights,
stepped out, and shut the door behind them.

 
          
 
In the sky there was a great coming-in and
coming-in. Vast flowering motions, huge whistlings and whirlings, snowstorms
falling. Helicopters, white flakes, dropping quietly. From west and east and
north and south the women were arriving, arriving. Through all of the night sky
you saw helicopters blizzard down. The hotels were full, private homes were
making accommodations, tent cities rose in meadows and pastures like strange,
ugly flowers, and the town and the country were warm with more than summer
tonight. Warm with women's pink faces and the sunburnt faces of new men
watching the sky. Beyond the hills rockets tried their fire, and a sound like a
giant organ, all its keys pressed upon at once, shuddered every crystal window
and every hidden bone. You felt it in your jaw, your toes, your fingers, a
shivering.

 
          
 
Leonora and Janice sat in the drugstore among
unfamiliar women.

 
          
 
"You ladies look very pretty, but you
sure look sad," said the soda-fountain man.

 
          
 
"Two chocolate malteds." Leonora
smiled for both of them, as if Janice were mute.

 
          
 
They gazed at the chocolate drink as if it
were a rare museum painting. Malts would be scarce for many years on Mars.

 
          
 
Janice fussed in her purse and took out an
envelope reluctantly and laid it on the marble counter.

 
          
 
"This is from Will to me. It came in the
Rocket mail two days ago. It was this that made up my mind for me, made me
decide to go. I didn't tell you. I want you to see it now. Go ahead, read the
note."

 
          
 
Leonora shook the note out of the envelope and
read it aloud:

 
          
 
"Dear Janice: This is our house if you
decide to come to Mars, Will"

 
          
 
Leonora tapped the envelope again, and a color
photograph dropped out, glistening, on the counter. It was a picture of a
house, a dark, mossy, ancient, caramel-brown, comfortable house with red
flowers and green cool ferns bordering it, and a disreputably hairy ivy on the
porch.

 
          
 
"But, Janice!"

 
          
 
"What?"

 
          
 
"This is a picture of your house, here on
Earth, here on
Elm Street
!"

 
          
 
"No. Look close."

 
          
 
And they looked again, together, and on both
sides of the comfortable dark house and behind it was scenery that was not
Earth scenery. The soil was a strange color of violet, and the grass was the
faintest bit red, and the sky glowed like a gray diamond, and a strange crooked
tree grew to one side, looking like an old woman with crystals in her white
hair.

 
          
 
"That's the house Will's built for
me," said Janice, "on Mars. It helps to look at it. All yesterday,
when I had the chance, alone, and was most afraid and panicky, I took out this
picture and looked at it,"

 
          
 
They both gazed at the dark comfortable house
sixty million miles away, familiar but unfamiliar, old but new, a yellow light
shining in the right front parlor window.

 
          
 
"That man Will," said Leonora,
nodding her head, "knows just what he's doing."

 
          
 
They finished their drinks. Outside, a vast
warm crowd of strangers wandered by and the "snow" fell steadily in
the summer sky.

 
          
 
They bought many silly things to take with
them, bags of lemon candy, glossy women's magazines, fragile perfumes; and then
they walked out into the town and rented two belted jackets that refused to
recognize gravity and imitated only the moth, touched the delicate controls,
and felt themselves whispered like white blossom petals over the town.
"Anywhere," said Leonora, "anywhere at all."

 
          
 
They let the wind blow them where it would;
they let the wind take them through the night of summer apple trees and the
night of warm preparation, over the lovely town, over the houses of childhood
and other days, over schools and avenues, over creeks and meadows and farms so
familiar that each grain of wheat was a golden coin. They blew as leaves must
blow before the threat of a fire-wind, with warning whispers and summer
lightning crackling among the folded hills. They saw the milk-dust country
roads where not so long ago they had drifted in moonlit helicopters in great
whorls of sound spiraling down to touch beside cool night streams with the
young men who were now gone.