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-webe, our sons’ sons, that is?”
He gazed steadily up into that flawless shell of plum-colored sky.
“Why, we’ll be on some world with a number maybe; planet 6 of star system 97, planet 2 of system 99! So darn 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 myself, ah, ah. So that’s the reason we came to Mars, sothat’sthe reason men shoot off their rockets.”
“Bob — “
“Let me finish; not to make money, no. Not to see the sights, no. Those are the lies men tell, the fancy reasons they give themselves. Get rich, get famous, they say. Have fun, jump around, they say. But all the while, inside, something else is ticking along the way it ticks in salmon or whales, the way it ticks, oh, Lord, in the smallest microbe you want to name.
And that little clock that ticks in everything living, you know what it says? It says get away, spread out, move along, keep swimming. Run to so many worlds and build so many towns thatnothingcan ever kill man. Yousee,Carrie?
It’s not just us come to Mars, it’s the race, the whole darn human race, depending on howwemake out in our lifetime. This thing is so big I want to laugh, I’m so scared stiff of it.”
He felt the boys walking steadily behind him and he felt Carrie beside him and he wanted to see her face and how she was taking all this, but he didn’t look there, either.
“All this is no different than me and Dad walking the fields when I was a boy, casting seed by hand when our seeder broke down and we’d no money to fix it. It had to be done, somehow, for the later crops.
Why now, Carrie, why, do yourememberthose Sunday-supplement articles, the earth will freeze in A million years! I bawled once, as a boy, reading articles like that. My mother asked why. I’m bawling for all those poor people up ahead, I said. Don’t worry about them, Mother said. But, Carrie, that’s my whole point; weareworrying about them.
Or we wouldn’t be here. It matters if Man with a capital M keeps going. There’s nothing better than Man with a capital M in my books. I’m prejudiced, of course, because I’m one of the breed.
But if there’s any way to get hold of that immortality men are always talking about, this is the way — spread out — seed the universe. Then you got a harvest against crop failures anywhere down the line.
No matter if Earth has famines or the rust comes in. You got the new wheat lifting on Venus or where-in-blazes-ever man gets to in the next thousand years, I’m crazy with the idea, Carrie, crazy. When I finally hit on it I got so excited I wanted to grab people, you, the boys, and tell them.
But well, I knew that wasn’t necessary. I knew a day or night would come when you’d hear that ticking in yourselves too, and then you’d see, and no one’d have to say anything again about all this. It’s big talk, Carrie, I know, and big thoughts for a man just short of five feet five, but by all that’s holy, it’s true.”
They moved through the deserted streets of the town and listened to the echoes of their walking feet.
“And this morning?” said Carrie.
“I’m coming to this morning,” he said. “Part ofmewants to go home too. But the other part says if we go, everything’s lost. So I thought, what bothers us most? Some of the things we once had. Some of the boys’ things, your things, mine.
And I thought, if it takes an old thing to get a new thing started, why then, I’ll use the old thing. I remember from history books that a thousand years ago they put charcoals in a hollowed out cow horn, blew on them during the day, so they carried their fire on marches from place to place, to start a fire every night with the sparks left over from morning. Always a new fire, but always something of the old in it. So I weighed and balanced it off.
Is the Old worth all our money? I asked. No! It’s only the things wedidwith the Old that have any worth. Well, then, is the New worthallour money? I asked. Do you feel like investing in the day after the middle of next week? Yes! I said. If I can fight this thing that makes us want to go back to Earth, I’d dip my money in kerosene and strike a match!”
Carrie and the two boys did not move. They stood on the street, looking at him as if he were a storm that had passed over and around, almost blowing them from the ground, a storm that was now dying away.
“The freight rocket came in this morning,” he said, quietly. “Our delivery’s on it. Let’s go and pick it up.”
They walked slowly up the three steps into the rocket depot and across the echoing floor toward the freight room that was just sliding back its doors, opening for the day.
“Tell us again about the salmon,” said one of the boys.
In the middle of the warm morning they drove out of town in a rented truck filled with great crates and boxes and parcels and packages, long ones, tall ones, short ones, flat ones, all numbered and neatly addressed to one Robert Prentiss, New Toledo, Mars.
They stopped the truck by the quonset hut and the boys jumped down and helped their mother out. For a moment Bob sat behind the wheel, and then slowly got out himself to walk around and look into the back of the truck at the crates.
And by noon all but one of the boxes were opened and their contents placed on the sea-bottom where the family stood among them.
“Carrie . . .”
And he led her up the old porch steps that now stood un-crated on the edge of town.
“Listen to ’em, Carrie.”
The steps squeaked and whispered underfoot.
“What do they say, tell me what they say?”
She stood on the ancient wooden steps, holding to herself, and could not tell him.
He waved his hand. “Front porch here, living room there, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms. Most we’ll build new, part we’ll bring. Of course all we got here now is the front steps, some parlor furniture, and the old bed.”
“All that money, Bob!”
He turned, smiling. “You’re not mad, now, look at me! You’re not mad. We’ll bring it all up, next year, five years! The cut-glass vases, that Armenian carpet your mother gave us in 1975! Justletthe sun explode!”
They looked at the other crates, numbered and lettered: Front-porch swing, front-porch wicker rocker, hanging Chinese crystals . . .
“I’ll blow them myself to make them ring.”
And then they set the front door, with its little panes of colored glass, on the top of the stairs, and Carrie looked through the strawberry window.
“What do you see?”
But he knew what she saw, for he gazed through the colored glass, too. And there was Mars, with its cold sky warmed and its dead seas fired with color, with its hills like mounds of strawberry ice, and its sand like burning charcoals sifted by wind.
The strawberry window, the strawberry window, breathed soft rose colors on the land and filled the mind and the eye with the light of a never-ending dawn. Bent there, looking through, he heard himself say:
“The town’ll be out this way in a year. This’ll be a shady street, you’ll have your porch, and you’ll have friends. You won’tneedall this so much, then. But starting right here, with this little bit that’s familiar, watch it spread, watch Mars change so you’ll know it as if you’ve known it all your life.”
He ran down the steps to the last and as-yet unopened canvas-covered crate. With his pocket knife he cut a hole in the canvas. “Guess!” he said.
“My kitchen stove? My sewing machine?”
“Not in a million years.” He smiled very gently. “Sing me a song,” he said.
“Bob, you’re clean off your head.”
“Sing me a song worth all the money we had in the bank and now don’t have, but who gives a blast in hades,” he said.
“I don’t know anything but ‘Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve!'”
“Sing that,” he said.
But she could not open her mouth and start the song. He saw her lips move and try, but there was no sound.
He ripped the canvas wider and shoved his hand into the crate and touched around for a quiet moment, and started to sing the words himself until he moved his hand a last time and then a single clear piano chord sprang out on the morning air.
“There,” he said. “Let’s take it right on to the end. Every-one! Here’s the harmony.”
The End
