I struggled to listen and felt my father jolt and sit. I sensed that somewhere on the homeward journey we had passed a friend’s house and that the voice had called to my father to come rest on the porch.
We were there for five minutes, maybe more, my father holding me on his lap and me, still half asleep, listening to the gentle laughter of my father’s friend, commenting on our strange odyssey.
At last the gentle laughter subsided. My father sighed, rose, and my half slumber continued. Half in and half out of dreams, I felt myself carried the final mile home.
The image I still have, seventy years later, is of my fine father, not for a moment making anything but a wry comment, carrying me through the night streets; probably the most beautiful memory a son ever had of someone who cared for him and loved him and didn’t mind the long walk home through the night.
I’ve often referred to it, somewhat fancifully, as our pietà, the love of a father for his son–the walk on that long sidewalk, surrounded by those unlit houses as the last of the elephants vanished down the main avenue toward the train yards, where a locomotive whistled and the train steamed, getting ready to rush off into the night, carrying a tumult of sound and light that would live in my memory forever.
The next day I slept through breakfast, slept through the morning, slept through lunch, slept all afternoon, and finally wakened at five o’clock and staggered in to sit at dinner with my brother and my folks.
My father sat quietly, cutting his steak, and I sat across from him, examining my food.
‘Papa,’ I suddenly cried, tears falling from my eyes. ‘Oh, thank you, Papa, thank you!’
My father cut another piece of steak and looked at me, his eyes shining very brightly.
‘For what?’ he said.
Fly Away Home
‘Take good care. That’s it, that’s it.’
The cargo was most especially precious. It had been assembled and disassembled with the tenderest care here at the rocket port and given over to the workmen in immense packing cases, boxes as large as rooms, wrapped, double-wrapped, cottoned and serpentined and velveted over to prevent breakage. For all the tenderness and concern with the cartons and bales and parceled property, everyone rushed.
‘On the double! Quick now!’
This was the Second Rocket. This was the Relief Rocket. The First Rocket had leaped up toward Mars the previous day. It was out booming now in the great black grasslands of space, lost from sight. And this Second Rocket must follow, as a bloodhound through a haunted moor, seeking a faint smell of iron and burned atom and phosphor. This Second Rocket, of a fat, overpacked size and shape, and with an odd and ridiculous series of people aboard, must not delay.
The Second Rocket was stuffed full. It trembled, shuddered, gathered itself like the hound of heaven, and bounded with a full and graceful leap, into the sky. It shook down avalanches of fire in its track. It rained coals and flame like furnaces suddenly heaven-borne. When the cinders died on the tarmac-concrete, the rocket was gone.
‘Hope it gets there safely,’ said a psychologist’s aide, watching the sky.
The First Rocket arrived from a night sky and landed on the planet Mars. There was a great gasping sound as its machines drank of the cool air. After sniffing it through mechanical nostrils and lungs, the rocket pronounced the air of the finest vintage, ten million years old, intoxicating, but pure.
The rocket men stepped out.
They were alone.
Thirty men and a captain in a land where the wind blew forever across dust seas and around dead cities that had been dead when Earth was opening out like a jungle flower three times twenty million miles away.
The sky was immensely clear, like a vat of crystal alcohol in which the stars blazed without a twinkle. The air knifed the throat and the lungs. You jerked it in with a gasp. It was thin, a ghost, gone when sought after. The men felt giddy and doubly alone. Sand moaned over their rocket.
In time, said the night wind, if you stand quietly, I could bury you, as I did the stone cities and the mummified people hidden there, bury you like a needle and a few bright bits of thread, before you have a chance to make a pattern here.
‘All right!’ cried the captain, snapping it up.
The wind blew his voice away, end over end, a scrap of ghostly paper.
‘Let’s make a line there!’ he cried against the loneliness.
The men moved in a numbed series of motions. They collided and milled and at last found their positions.
The captain faced them. The planet was under and all about them. They were at the bottom of a dry sea. A tide of years and centuries poured over and crushed them. They were the only living things here. Mars was dead and so far away from everything that a trembling began, imperceptibly, among them.
‘Well,’ cried the captain heartily. ‘Here we are!’
‘Here we are,’ said a ghostly voice.
The men jerked about. Behind them, the walls of a half-buried town, a town dreamed full of dust and sand and old moss, a town that had drowned in time up to its highest turrets, tossed back an echo. The black walls quivered as running water does with sand.
‘You all have your work to do!’ cried the captain.
‘To do,’ said the city walls. ‘To do.’
The captain showed his irritation. The men did not turn again, but the backs of their necks were cool and each hair felt separate and stirring.
‘Sixty million miles,’ whispered Anthony Smith, a corporal at the end of the line.
‘No talking there!’ cried the captain.
‘Sixty million miles,’ said Anthony Smith again, to himself, turning. In the cold dark sky, high above, Earth shone, a star, no more than a star, remote, beautiful, but only a star. There was nothing in the shape or the light to suggest a sea, a continent, a state, a city.
‘Let’s have it quiet!’ shouted the captain angrily, surprised at his anger.
The men glanced down the line at Smith.
He was looking at the heavens. They looked where he looked and they saw Earth, infinitely removed over a distance of six months of time, and millions fired upon millions of miles in distance. Their thoughts whirled.
Long years ago, men went to the arctic regions of Earth in boats, ships, balloons, and airplanes, took with them the bravest men, handpicked, psychologically clean, alert, the noncrackables, the well adjusted. But pick as they would, some men cracked, some went off into the arctic whiteness, into the long nights or the insanity of monthlong days. It was so alone. It was so alone. And herd-man, cut off from life, from women, from homes and towns, felt his mind melt away. Everything was bad and lonely.
‘Sixty million miles!’ said Anthony Smith, louder.
Then take thirty men. Shape, size, box, and parcel them. Antitoxin them, mind and body, purify and psychoanalyze, clap these hardies in a pistol, fire it at a target! At the end, in the final accounting, what do you have? You have thirty men in a line, one man beginning to talk under his breath, then louder, thirty men gazing up at the sky, seeing at a distant star, knowing that Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, and California are gone.
Gone the cities, women, children, everything good, comfortable, and dear. Here you are, by God, on some terrible world where the wind never stops, where all is dead, where the captain is trying to be hearty. Suddenly, as if you had never considered it before, you say to yourself:
‘Good Lord, I’m on Mars!’
Anthony Smith said it.
‘I’m not home, I’m not on Earth, I’m on Mars! Where’s Earth? There it is! See that damn small pinpoint of light? That’s it! Isn’t it silly? What’re we doing here?’
The men stiffened. The captain jerked his head at Walton, the psychiatrist. They went down the line quickly, trying to be casual.
‘All right, Smith, what seems to be the trouble?’
‘I don’t want to be here.’ Smith’s face was white. ‘Good God, why did I come? This isn’t Earth.’
‘You took all the exams, you knew what you’d be up against.’
‘No, I didn’t. I blocked it off.’
The captain turned to the psychiatrist with a look of irritation and hatred, as if the doctor had failed. The doctor shrugged. ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ he would have said, but stopped himself.
The young corporal was beginning to cry.
The psychiatrist turned instantly. ‘Get to your jobs! Build a fire! Set up your tents! On the double!’
The men broke, mumbling. They walked off stiffly, looking back. ‘Afraid of this,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘I was afraid. Space travel’s so new, damn it. So damn new. No telling how many sixty million miles’ll affect a person.’ He took hold of the young corporal. ‘Here we are. Everything’s all right. You’d better get to your job, Corporal. Get busy. Get on the ball.’
The corporal had his hands to his face. ‘It’s a Christ-awful feeling. To know we’re so far away from everything. And this whole damn planet is dead. Nothing else here but us.’
They started him unloading packets of frozen food.
The psychiatrist and the captain stood on a sand dune nearby for a moment, watching the men move.
‘He’s right, of course,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘I don’t like it, either. It really hits you. It hits hard. It’s lonely here. It’s awfully dead and far away. And that wind. And the empty cities. I feel lousy.’
‘I don’t feel so well myself,’ said the captain. ‘What do you
