Giving the horn a blow, he shot out of town.
He drove all night. He thought, What if she isn’t in Marlin Village waiting, when I arrive?
He wouldn’t think of that. She must be there. And he would run up and hold her and perhaps even kiss her, once, on the lips.
Genevieve, sweet Genevieve, he whistled, stepping it up to one hundred miles an hour.
Marlin Village was quiet at dawn. Yellow lights were still burning in several stores, and a juke box that had played steadily for one hundred hours finally, with a crackle of electricity, ceased, making the silence complete. The sun warmed the streets and warmed the cold and vacant sky.
Walter turned down Main Street, the car lights still on, honking the horn a double toot, six times at one corner, six times at another. He peered at the store names. His face was white and tired, and his hands slid on the sweaty steering wheel.
“Genevieve!” he called in the empty street.
The door to a beauty salon opened.
“Genevieve!” He stopped the car.
Genevieve Selsor stood in the open door of the salon as he ran across the street. A box of cream chocolates lay open in her arms. Her fingers, cuddling it, were plump and pallid. Her face, as he stepped into the light, was round and thick, and her eyes were like two immense eggs stuck into a white mess of bread dough.
Her legs were as big around as the stumps of trees, and she moved with an ungainly shuffle. Her hair was an indiscriminate shade of brown that had been made and remade, it appeared, as a nest for birds. She had no lips at all and compensated this by stenciling on a large red, greasy mouth that now popped open in delight, now shut in sudden alarm. She had plucked her brows to thin antenna lines.
Walter stopped. His smile dissolved. He stood looking at her.
She dropped her candy box to the sidewalk.
“Are you—Genevieve Selsor?” His ears rang.
“Are you Walter Griff?” she asked.
“Gripp.”
“Gripp,” she corrected herself.
“How do you do,” he said with a restrained voice.
“How do you do.” She shook his hand.
Her fingers were sticky with chocolate.
“Well,” said Walter Gripp.
“What?” asked Genevieve Selsor.
“I just said, ‘Well,’” said Walter.
“Oh.”
It was nine o’clock at night. They had spent the day picnicking, and for supper he had prepared a filet mignon which she didn’t like because it was too rare, so he broiled it some more and it was too much broiled or fried or something.
He laughed and said, “We’ll see a movie!” She said okay and put her chocolaty fingers on his elbow. But all she wanted to see was a fifty-year-old film of Clark Gable. “Doesn’t he just kill you?” She giggled. “Doesn’t he kill you, now?” The film ended. “Run it off again,” she commanded. “Again?” he asked. “Again,” she said.
And when he returned she snuggled up and put her paws all over him. “You’re not quite what I expected, but you’re nice,” she admitted. “Thanks,” he said, swallowing. “Oh, that Gable,” she said, and pinched his leg. “Ouch,” he said.
After the film they went shopping down the silent streets. She broke a window and put on the brightest dress she could find. Dumping a perfume bottle on her hair, she resembled a drowned sheep dog. “How old are you?” he inquired. “Guess.” Dripping, she led him down the street. “Oh, thirty,” he said. “Well,” she announced stiffly, “I’m only twenty-seven, so there!
“Here’s another candy store!” she said. “Honest, I’ve led the life of Reilly since everything exploded. I never liked my folks, they were fools. They left for Earth two months ago. I was supposed to follow on the last rocket, but I stayed on; you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because everyone picked on me. So I stayed where I could throw perfume on myself all day and drink ten thousand malts and eat candy without people saying, ‘Oh, that’s full of calories!’ So here I am!”
“Here you are.” Walter shut his eyes.
“It’s getting late,” she said, looking at him.
“Yes.”
“I’m tired,” she said.
“Funny. I’m wide awake.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I feel like staying up all night,” he said. “Say, there’s a good record at Mike’s. Come on, I’ll play it for you.”
“I’m tired.” She glanced up at him with sly, bright eyes.
“I’m very alert,” he said. “Strange.”
“Come back to the beauty shop,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
She took him in through the glass door and walked him over to a large white box. “When I drove from Texas City,” she said, “I brought this with me.” She untied the pink ribbon. “I thought: Well, here I am, the only lady on Mars, and here is the only man, and, well … ” She lifted the lid and folded back crisp layers of whispery pink tissue paper. She gave it a pat. “There.”
Walter Gripp stared.
“What is it?” he asked, beginning to tremble.
“Don’t you know, silly? It’s all lace and all white and all fine and everything.”
“No, I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s a wedding dress, silly!”
“Is it?” His voice cracked.
He shut his eyes. Her voice was still soft and cool and sweet, as it had been on the phone. But when he opened his eyes and looked at her …
He backed up. “How nice,” he said.
“Isn’t it?”
“Genevieve.” He glanced at the door.
“Yes?”
“Genevieve, I’ve something to tell you.”
“Yes?” She drifted toward him, the perfume smell thick about her round white face.
“The thing I have to say to you is … ” he said.
“Yes?”
“Good-by!”
And he was out the door and into his car before she could scream.
She ran and stood on the curb as he swung the car about.
“Walter Griff, come back here!” she wailed, flinging up her arms.
“Gripp,” he corrected her.
“Gripp!” she shouted.
The car whirled away down the silent street, regardless of her stompings and shriekings. The exhaust from it fluttered the white dress she crumpled in her plump hands, and the stars shone bright, and the car vanished out onto the desert and away into blackness.
He drove all night and all day for three nights and days. Once he thought he saw a car following, and he broke into a shivering sweat and took another highway, cutting off across the lonely Martian world, past little dead cities, and he drove and drove for a week and a day, until he had put ten thousand miles between himself and Marlin Village.
Then he pulled into a small town named Holtville Springs, where there were some tiny stores he could light up at night and restaurants to sit in, ordering meals. And he’s lived there ever since, with two deep freezes packed with food to last him one hundred years, and enough cigars to last ten thousand days, and a good bed with a soft mattress.
And when once in a while over the long years the phone rings—he doesn’t answer.
April 2026 The Long Years
Whenever the wind came through the sky, he and his small family would sit in the stone hut and warm their hands over a wood fire. The wind would stir the canal waters and almost blow the stars out of the sky, but Mr. Hathaway would sit contented and talk to his wife, and his wife would reply, and he would speak to his two daughters and his son about the old days on Earth, and they would all answer neatly.
It was the twentieth year after the Great War. Mars was a tomb, planet. Whether or not Earth was the same was a matter for much silent debate for Hathaway and his family on the long Martian nights.
This night one of the violent Martian dust storms had come over the low Martian graveyards, blowing through ancient towns and tearing away the plastic walls of the newer, American-built city that was melting down into the sand, desolated.
The storm abated. Hathaway went out into the cleared weather to see Earth burning green on the windy sky. He put his hand up as one might reach to adjust a dimly burning globe in the ceiling of a dark room.
He looked across the long-dead sea bottoms. Not another living thing on this entire planet, he thought. Just myself. And them. He looked back within the stone hut.
What was happening on Earth now? He had seen no visible sign of change in Earth’s aspect through his thirty-inch telescope. Well, he thought, I’m good for another twenty years if I’m careful. Someone might come. Either across the dead seas or out of space in a rocket on a little thread of red flame.
He called into the hut, “I’m going to take a walk.”
“All right,” his wife said.
He moved quietly down through a series of ruins. “Made in New York,” he read from a piece of metal as he passed. “And all these things from Earth will be gone long before the old Martian towns.” He looked toward the fifty-centuries-old village that lay among the blue mountains.
He came to a solitary Martian graveyard, a series of small hexagonal stones on a hill swept by the lonely wind.
He stood looking down at four graves with crude wooden crosses on them, and names. Tears did not come to his eyes. They had dried long ago.
“Do you forgive me for what I’ve done?” he asked of the crosses. “I was very much alone. You do understand, don’t you?”
He returned to the stone hut and once more, just before going in, shaded his eyes, searching the black sky.
“You keep waiting and waiting and looking,” he said, “and one night, perhaps—“
There was a tiny red flame
