‘Carrie,’ he whispered.
She did not hear.
‘Carrie,’ he whispered. ‘There’s something I want to tell you. For a month now I’ve been wanting to say … tomorrow … tomorrow morning, there’s going to be …’
But his wife sat all to herself in the blue starlight and would not look at him.
He closed his eyes tight.
If only the sun stayed up, he thought, if only there was no night. For during the day, he nailed the settlement town together, the boys were in school, and Carrie had cleaning, gardening, cooking to do.
But when the sun was gone and their hands were empty of flowers or hammers and nails and arithmetics, their memories, like night birds, came home in the dark. You heard them rustle the black roof like the first rain of a new season of endless rains. You woke to the cool pattering, which was not rain, but only the slow dipping down, the flicking, brushing, touching, the whispered flight and glide of remembering towards dawn.
His wife moved, a slight turn of her head.
‘Will,’ she said at last, ‘I want to go home.’
‘Carrie!’
‘This isn’t home,’ she said.
He saw that her eyes were wet and brimming. ‘Carrie, hold on awhile.’
‘I’ve got no fingernails from holding on now!’
As if she still moved in her sleep, she opened her bureau drawers and took out layers of handkerchiefs, shirts, underclothing and put it all on top of the bureau, not seeing it, letting her fingers touch and bring it out and put it down. The routine was long familiar now. She would talk and put things out and stand quietly awhile, and then later put all the things away and come, dry-faced, back to bed and dreams. He was afraid that some night she would empty every drawer, and reach for the few ancient suitcases against the wall.
‘Will …’ Her voice was not bitter, but soft, featureless, and as uncoloured as the moonlight that showed what she was doing. ‘So many nights for six months I’ve talked this way; I’m ashamed. You work hard building houses in town. A man who works so hard shouldn’t have to listen to a wife gone sad on him. But there’s nothing to do but talk it out. It’s the little things I miss most of all. I don’t know – silly things.
Our front porch swing. The wicker rocking-chair, summer nights. Looking at the people walk or ride by those evenings, back in Ohio. Our black upright piano, out of tune. My Swedish cut glass. Our parlour furniture – oh, it was like a herd of elephants, I know, and all of it old. And the Chinese hanging crystals that hit when the wind blew. And talking to neighbours there on the front porch, July nights. All those crazy, silly things … they’re not important. But it seems those are things that come to mind around three in the morning. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘Mars is a far place. It smells funny, looks funny, and feels funny. I think to myself nights, too. We came from a nice town.’
‘It was green,’ she said. ‘In the spring and summer. And yellow and red in the fall. And ours was a nice house; my, it was old, eighty-ninety years or so. Used to hear the house talking at night, whispering away. All the dry wood, the banisters, the front porch, the sills. Wherever you touched, it talked to you. Every room a different way. And when you had the whole house talking, it was a family around you in the dark, putting you to sleep. No other house, the kind they build nowadays, can be the same.
A lot of people have got to go through and live in a house to make it mellow down all over. This place here, now, this hut, it doesn’t know I’m in it, doesn’t care if I live or die. It makes a noise like tin, and tin’s cold.
It’s got no pores for the years to sink in. It’s got no cellar for you to put things away for next year and the year after that. It’s got no attic where you keep things from last year and all the other years before you were born; and without an attic, you’ve got no past.
If we only had a little bit up here that was familiar, Will, then we could make room for all that’s strange. But when everything, every single thing is strange, then it takes forever to make things familiar.’
He nodded in the dark. ‘There’s nothing: you say that I haven’t thought.’
She was looking at the moonlight where it lay upon the suitcases against the wall. He saw her move her hand down towards them.
‘Carrie!’
‘What?’
He swung his legs out of bed. ‘Carrie, I’ve done a crazy dam-fool thing. All these months I heard you dreaming away, scared, and the boys at night and the wind, and Mars out there, the sea-bottoms and all, and …’ He stopped and swallowed. ‘You got to understand what I did and why I did it. All the money we had in the bank a month ago, all the money we saved for ten years, I spent.’
‘Will!’
‘I threw it away, Carrie, I swear, I threw it away on nothing. It was going to be a surprise. But now, tonight, there you are, and there are those damned suitcases on the floor and …’
‘Will,’ she said, turning around. ‘You mean we’ve gone through all this, on Mars, putting away extra money every week, only to have you burn it up in a few hours?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m a crazy fool. Look, it’s not long till morning. We’ll get up early. I’ll take you down to see what I’ve done. I don’t want to tell you, I want you to see. And if it’s no go, then, well, there’s always those suitcases and the rocket to Earth four times a week.’
She did not move. ‘Will, Will,’ she murmured.
‘Don’t say any more,’ he said.
‘Will, Will …’ She shook her head slowly, unbelievingly. He turned away and lay back down on his own side of the bed, and she sat on the other side, and for a moment did not lie down, but only sat looking at the bureau where her handkerchiefs and jewellery and clothing lay ready in neat stacks where she had left them. Outside a wind the colour of moonlight stirred up the sleeping dust and powdered the air.
At last she lay back, but said nothing more and was a cold weight in the bed, staring down the long tunnel of night towards the faintest sign of morning.
They got up in the very first light and moved in the small quonset hut without a sound. It was a pantomime prolonged almost to the time when someone might scream at the silence, as the mother and father and the boys washed and dressed and ate a quiet breakfast of toast and fruit-juice and coffee, with no one looking directly at anyone and everyone watching someone in the reflective surfaces of toaster, glassware, or cutlery, where all their faces were melted out of shape and made terribly alien in the early hour.
Then, at last, they opened the quonset door and let in the air that blew across the cold blue-white Martian seas, where only the sand tides dissolved and shifted and made ghost patterns, and they stepped out under a raw and staring cold sky and began their walk towards a town, which seemed no more than a motion-picture set far on ahead of them on a vast, empty stage.
‘What part of town are we going to?’ asked Carrie.
‘The rocket depot,’ he said. ‘But before we get there, I’ve a lot to say.’
The boys slowed down and moved behind their parents, listening. The father gazed ahead, and not once in all the time he was talking did he look at his wife or sons to see how they were taking all that he said.
‘I believe in Mars,’ he began, quietly. I guess I believe some day it’ll belong to us. We’ll nail it down. We’ll settle in. We won’t turn tail and run. It came to me one day a year ago, right after we first arrived. Why did we come?
I asked myself. Because, I said, because. It’s the same thing with the salmon every year. The salmon don’t know why they go where they go, but they go, anyway.
Up rivers they don’t remember, up streams, jumping waterfalls, but finally making it to where they propagate and die, and the whole thing starts again. Call it racial memory, instinct, call it nothing, but there it is. And here we are.’
They walked in the silent morning with the great sky watching them and the strange blue and steam-white sands sifting about their feet on the new highway.
‘So here we are. And from Mars where? Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, and on out? Right. And on out. Why? Some day the sun will blow up like a leaky furnace. Boom – there goes Earth. But maybe Mars won’t be hurt; or if Mars is hurt maybe Pluto won’t be, or if Pluto’s hurt, then where’ll we be, our sons’ sons, that is?’
He gazed steadily up into that flawless shell of plum-coloured sky.
‘Why, we’ll be on some world with a number maybe; planet 6 of star system 97, planet 2 of system 99! So damn far off from here you need a nightmare to take it in! We’ll be gone, do you see, gone off away and safe! And I thought to
