‘God, what a waste. What a shame. A billion dollars spent to send us. What do we tell the senators at home, that we were cowards?’
‘At times, cowardice is the only thing left. A man can take only so much, then it’s time for him to run, unless he can find someone to do his running for him. We’ll see.’
The sun rose. The double moons were gone. But Mars was no more comfortable by day than by night. One of the men fired off a gun at some animal he saw behind him. Another stopped work with a blinding headache, and retired to the ship. Though they slept most of the day, it was a fitful sleeping, with many calls on the doctor for sedatives and brandy rations. At nightfall, the doctor and the captain conferred.
‘We’d better pull out,’ said Walton. ‘This man Sorenson is another. I give him twenty-four hours. Ditto Bernard. A damn shame. Good men, both of them. Fine men. But there was no way to duplicate Mars in our Earth offices. No test can duplicate the unknown. Isolation-shock, loneliness-shock,severe. Well, it was a good try. Better to be happy cowards than raving lunatics. Myself? I hate it here. As the man said, I want to go home.’
‘Shall I give the order, then?’ asked the captain.
The psychiatrist nodded.
‘Jesus, God, I hate to give up without a fight.’
‘Nothing to fight but wind and dust. We could give it a decent fight with the relief ship, but that doesn’t seem to be—’
‘Captain, sir!’ someone shouted.
‘Eh?’ The captain and psychiatrist turned.
‘Look there, sir! In the sky! The relief rocket!’
This was no more than the truth. The men ran out of the ship and the tents. The sun was set and the wind was cold, but they stood there, straining their eyes up, watched the fire grow large, larger, larger.
The Second Rocket beat a drum and let out a long plume of red color. It landed. It cooled. The men of the First Rocket ran across the sea bottom toward it, yelling.
‘Well?’ asked the captain, standing back. ‘What does this mean? Do we go or stay?’
‘I think,’ said the psychiatrist, ‘that we’ll stay.’
‘For twenty-four hours?’
‘For a little longer than that,’ Walton replied.
They hoisted immense crates out of the Second Rocket.
‘Careful! Careful there!’
They held up blueprints and wielded hammers and pries and levers. The psychiatrist supervised. ‘This way! Crate 75? Here. Box 067?Here!That’s it. Open ’er up. Tab A into Slot B. Tab B into Slot C. Right, fine,good!’
They put it all up before dawn. In eight hours they assembled the miracles out of boxes and crates. They took away the serpentines, wax papers, cardboards, brushed and dusted every part and portion of the whole. When the time came, the men of the First Rocket stood on the outer rim of the miracle, gazed in at it, incredulous and awed.
‘Ready, Captain?’
‘I’ll be damned! Yes!’
‘Throw the switch.’
The captain threw the switch.
The little town lit up.
‘Good Lord!’ said the captain.
He walked into the single main street of the town.
It was a street of no more than six buildings on a side, false fronts, strung with bright red, yellow, green lights. Music played from a half-dozen hidden jukeboxes, somewhere. Doors slammed.
A man in a white smock emerged from a barbershop, blue shears and a black comb in hand. A peppermint-stick pole rotated slowly behind him. Next was a drugstore, a magazine rack out front, newspapers fluttering in the wind, a fan turning in the ceiling, the snakelike hiss of soda water sounding inside. As they passed the door they looked in. A girl smiled there, a crisp green starched cap on her head.
A pool hall, with green tables, like jungle glades, soft, inviting. Billiard balls, multicolored, triangled, waiting. Across the street, a church, with candied-root-beer, strawberry, lemon-glass windows. A man there, too, in dark suit, white collar. Next to that, a library. Next to that, a hotel. SOFT BEDS. FIRST NIGHT FREE. AIR-CONDITIONING.
A clerk behind a desk with his hand on a silver bell. But the place they were going to, that drew them like the smell of water draws cattle across a dusty prairie, was the building at the head of the street.
THE MILLED BUCK SALOON.
A man with greased, curled hair, his shirtsleeves gartered with red elastic above his hairy elbows, leaned against a post there. He vanished behind swinging doors. When they hit the swinging doors, he was polishing the bar and tipping rye into thirty glasses all lined up glittering on the beautiful long bar. A crystal chandelier blazed warmly overhead. There was a stairway leading up and a number of doors above, on a balcony, and the faintest smell of perfume.
They all went to the bar. They were quiet. They took up the rye and drank it straight down, not wiping their mouths. Their eyes stung.
The captain said, in a whisper, to the psychiatrist, standing by the door, ‘Good God! The expense!’
‘Film sets, knockdowns, collapsibles. A real minister next door in the church of course. Three real barbers. A piano player.’
The man at the yellow-toothed piano began to play ‘St. Louis Woman with Your Diamond Rings.’
‘A druggist, two fountain girls, a pool-hall proprietor, shoeshine boy, rack boy, two librarians, odds and ends, workmen, electricians, et cetera. Totals up another two million dollars. The hotel isallreal. Every room with bath. Comfort. Good beds. Other buildings are three-quarters false front. All of it so beautifully constructed, with slots and tabs, a child could put up the whole toy-works in an hour.’
‘But will it work?’
‘Look at their faces, beginning to relax already.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?!’
‘Because, if it’d got out, spending money this silly, ridiculous way, the papers would’ve jumped me–senators, Congress, God would have gotten in the act. It’s silly, damn silly, but itworks. It’sEarth.
That’s all I care about. It’sEarth. It’s a piece of Earth the men can hold in their hand and say, “This is Illinois, this is a town Iknew.These arebuildingsI knew. This is a little piece of Earth that’s here for me to hold on to until we bringmoreof it up and make the loneliness run away forever.”’
‘Ingenious, devilish, clever.’
The men ordered a second rye all around, smiling.
‘The men on our ship, Captain, are from fourteen small towns. Picked them that way. One of each of these buildings in this little street here is from one of those towns. The bartender, ministers, grocery-store owner, all thirty of the people on the Second Rocket, are from those towns.’
‘Thirty?Besidesthe relief crew?’
The psychiatrist glanced happily at the steps leading up to the balcony and the series of shut doors. One of the doors opened a trifle and a beautiful blue eye gazed out for a moment.
‘We’ll rush in more lights and more towns every month, more people, more Earth. Priority on familiarity. Familiarity breeds sanity. We’ve won the first round. We’ll keep winning if we keep moving.’
Now the men were beginning to laugh and talk and slap one another on the shoulders. Some of them walked out and across the street for a haircut, some went to play pool, some to buy groceries, some into the quiet church, you could hear organ music for a moment just before the piano player here in the crystal-chandeliered saloon began ‘Frankie and Johnny.’ Two men walked laughingly up the stairs to the doors along the balcony.
‘I’m no drinking man, Captain. How about a pineapple malt at the drugstore over the way?’
‘What? Oh. I was thinking…Smith.’ The captain turned. ‘Back in the ship. Do you think–I mean–could we get Smith, bring him here, with us, would it do any good, would helikeit, mightn’t it make himhappy?’
‘We could certainly try,’ said the doctor.
The pianist was playing, very loud, ‘That Old Gang of Mine.’ Everybody singing, some of them starting to dance, and the city like a jewel blazing in the wilderness, darkness all around.
Mars lonely, the sky black and full of stars, the wind rushing, the moons rising, the seas and old cities dead. But the barber pole whirled brightly, and the church windows were the color of Coca-Cola and lemonade and boysenberry phosphate.
The piano was tinkling ‘Skip to My Lou’ half an hour later when the captain, the psychiatrist, and a third man walked into the drugstore and sat.
‘Three pineapple malts,’ said the captain.
And they sat, reading magazines, turning slowly on the stools, until the girl behind the fountain set three beautiful pineapple malts at their elbows.
They all reached for the straws.
The End
