Everyone worked at loading the truck in the hot, still afternoon of the next day.
Laura, Tim, and David carried packages. Or, as they preferred to be known, Ttil, Linnl, and Werr carried packages.
The furniture was abandoned in the little white cottage.
‘It looked just fine in Boston,’ said the mother. ‘And here in the cottage. But up at the villa? No. We’ll get it when we come back in the autumn.’
Bittering himself was quiet.
‘I’ve some ideas on furniture for the villa,’ he said, after a time. ‘Big, lazy furniture.’
‘What about your Encyclopedia? You’re taking it along, surely?’
Mr Bittering glanced away. ‘I’ll come and get it next week.’
They turned to their daughter. ‘What about your New York dresses?’
The bewildered girl stared. ‘Why, I don’t want them any more.’
They shut off the gas, the water, they locked the doors and walked away. Father peered into the truck.
‘Gosh, we’re not taking much,’ he said. ‘Considering all we brought to Mars, this is only a handful!’
He started the truck.
Looking at the small white cottage for a long moment, he was filled with a desire to rush to it, touch it, say good-bye to it, for he felt as if he were going away on a long journey, leaving something to which he could never quite return, never understand again.
Just then Sam and his family drove by in another truck.
‘Hi, Bittering! Here we go!’
The truck swung down the ancient highway out of town. There were sixty others travelling the same direction. The town filled with a silent, heavy dust from their passage. The canal waters lay blue in the sun, and a quiet wind moved in the strange trees.
‘Good-bye, town!’ said Mr Bittering.
‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ said the family, waving to it.
They did not look back again.
Summer burned the canals dry. Summer moved like flame upon the meadows. In the empty Earth settlement, the painted houses flaked and peeled. Rubber tyres upon which children had swung in back yards hung suspended like stopped clock pendulums in the blazing air.
At the metal shop, the rocket frame began to rust.
In the quiet autumn, Mr Bittering stood, very dark now, very golden-eyed, upon the slope above his villa, looking at the valley.
‘It’s time to go back,’ said Cora.
‘Yes, but we’re not going,’ he said, quietly. ‘There’s nothing there any more.’
‘Your books,’ she said. ‘Your fine clothes.’
‘Your Illes and your fine ior uele rre,’ she said.
‘The town’s empty. No one’s going back,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason to, none at all.’
The daughter wove tapestries and the sons played songs on ancient flutes and pipes, their laughter echoing in the marble villa.
Mr Bittering gazed at the Earth settlement far away in the low valley. ‘Such odd, such ridiculous houses the Earth people built.’
‘They didn’t know any better,’ his wife mused. ‘Such ugly people. I’m glad they’ve gone.’
They both looked at each other, startled by all they had just finished saying. They laughed.
‘Where did they go?’ he wondered. He glanced at his wife. She was golden and slender as his daughter. She looked at him, and he seemed almost as young as their eldest son.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘We’ll go back to town maybe next year, or the year after, or the year after that,’ he said, calmly. ‘Now – I’m warm. How about taking a swim?’
They turned their backs to the valley. Arm in arm they walked silently down a path of clear running spring water.
Five years later, a rocket fell out of the sky. It lay steaming in the valley. Men leaped out of it, shouting.
‘We won the war on Earth! We’re here to rescue you! Hey!’
But the American-built town of cottages, peach trees, and theatres was silent. They found a half-finished rocket frame, rusting in an empty shop.
The rocket men searched the hills. The captain established headquarters in an abandoned bar. His lieutenant came back to report.
‘The town’s empty, but we found native life in the hills, sir. Dark people. Yellow eyes. Martians. Very friendly. We talked a bit, not much. They learn English fast. I’m sure our relations will be most friendly with them, sir.’
‘Dark, eh?’ mused the captain. ‘How many?’
‘Six, eight hundred, I’d say, living in those marble ruins in the hills, sir. Tall, healthy. Beautiful women.’
‘Did they tell you what became of the men and women who built this Earth settlement, Lieutenant?’
‘They hadn’t the foggiest notion of what happened to this town or its people.’
‘Strange. You think those Martians killed them?’
‘They look surprisingly peaceful. Chances are a plague did this town in, sir.’
‘Perhaps. I suppose this is one of those mysteries we’ll never solve. One of those mysteries you read about.’
The captain looked at the room, the dusty windows, the blue mountains rising beyond, the canals moving in the light, and he heard the soft wind in the air. He shivered. Then, recovering, he tapped a large fresh map he had thumb-tacked to the top of an empty table.
‘Lots to be done, Lieutenant.’ His voice droned on and quietly on as the sun sank behind the blue hills. ‘New settlements. Mining sites, minerals to be looked for. Bacteriological specimens taken. The work, all the work.
And the old records were lost. We’ll have a job of remapping to do, renaming the mountains and rivers and such. Calls for a little imagination.
‘What do you think of naming those mountains the Lincoln Mountains, this canal the Washington Canal, those hills – we can name those hills for you, Lieutenant. Diplomacy. And you, for a favour, might name a town for me. Polishing the apple. And why not make this the Einstein Valley, and further over … are you listening, Lieutenant?’
The lieutenant snapped his gaze from the blue colour and the quiet mist of the hills far beyond the town.
‘What? Oh, yes, sir!’
The Smile
IN the town square the queue had formed at five in the morning, while cocks were crowing far out in the rimed country and there were no fires. All about, among the ruined buildings, bits of mist had clung at first, but now with the new light of seven o’clock it was beginning to disperse. Down the road, in twos and threes, more people were gathering in for the day of marketing, the day of festival.
The small boy stood immediately behind two men who had been talking loudly in the clear air, and all of the sounds they made seemed twice as loud because of the cold. The small boy stamped his feet and blew on his red, chapped hands, and looked up at the soiled gunny-sack clothing of the men, and down the long line of men and women ahead.
‘Here, boy, what’re you doing out so early?’ said the man behind him.
‘Got my place in line, I have,’ said the boy.
‘Whyn’t you run off, give your place to someone who appreciates?’
‘Leave the boy alone,’ said the man ahead, suddenly turning.
‘I was joking.’ The man behind put his hand on the boy’s head. The boy shook it away coldly. ‘I just thought it strange, a boy out of bed so early.’
‘This boy’s an appreciator of arts, I’ll have you know,’ said the boy’s defender, a man named Grigsby. ‘What’s your name, lad?’
‘Tom.’
‘Tom here is going to spit clean and true, right, Tom?’
‘I sure am!’
Laughter passed down the line.
A man was selling cracked cups of hot coffee up ahead. Tom looked and saw the little hot fire and the brew bubbling in a rusty pan. It wasn’t really coffee. It was made from some berry that grew on the meadowlands beyond town, and it sold a penny a cup to warm their stomachs; but not many were buying, not many had the wealth.
Tom stared ahead to the place where the line ended, beyond a bombed-out stone wall.
‘They say she smiles,’ said the boy.
‘Aye, she does,’ said Grigsby.
‘They say she’s made of oil and canvas.’
‘True. And that’s what makes me think she’s not the original one. The original, now, I’ve heard, was painted on wood a long time ago.’
‘They say she’s four centuries old.’
‘Maybe more. No one knows what year this is, to be sure.’
‘It’s 2061!’
‘That’s what they say, boy, yes. Liars. Could be 3,000 or 5,000, for all we know. Things were in a fearful mess there for a while. All we got now is bits and pieces.’
They shuffled along the cold stones of the street.
‘How much longer before we see her?’ asked Tom, uneasily.
‘Just a few more minutes. They got her set up with four brass poles and velvet rope, all fancy, to keep folks back. Now mind, no rocks, Tom; they don’t allow rocks thrown at her.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The sun rose higher in the heavens, bringing heat which made the men shed their grimy coats and greasy hats.
‘Why’re we all here in line?’ asked Tom, at last. ‘Why’re we all here to spit?’
Grigsby did not glance down at him, but judged the sun. ‘Well, Tom, there’s lots of reasons.’ He reached absently for a pocket that was long gone, for a cigarette that wasn’t there. Tom had seen the gesture a million times. ‘Tom, it has to do with hate. Hate for everything in the Past. I ask you, Tom, how did we get in such a state, cities all junk, roads like jigsaws from bombs, and half the cornfields glowing with radio-activity at night? Ain’t that a lousy stew, I ask you?’
‘Yes, sir, I guess so.’
‘It’s this way, Tom. You hate whatever it was that got you all knocked down and ruined. That’s human nature. Unthinking, maybe, but human nature anyway.’
‘There’s hardly nobody or nothing we don’t hate,’ said Tom.
‘Right! The whole blooming caboodle of them people in the Past who run the world. So
