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"Well, I haven't the forms with me here, I don't _think_."
He rummaged through the desk drawers. "Now, where _did_ I put
the forms?" He mused. "Somewhere. Somewhere. Oh, _here_ we are!
Now!" He handed the papers over crisply. "You'll have to sign
these papers, of course."
"Do we have to go through all this rigmarole?"
Mr. Iii gave him a thick glassy look. "You say you're
from Earth, don't you? Well, then there's nothing for it but
you sign."
The captain wrote his name. "Do you want my crew to sign
also?"
Mr. Iii looked at the captain, looked at the three others,
and burst into a shout of derision. "_Them_ sign! Ho! How
marvelous! Them, oh, _them_ sign!" Tears sprang from his eyes.
He slapped his knee and bent to let his laughter jerk out of
his gaping mouth. He held himself up with the desk. "_Them_
sign!"
The four men scowled. "What's funny?"
"Them sign!" sighed Mr. Iii, weak with hilarity. "So very
funny. I'll have to tell Mr. Xxx about this!" He examined
the filled-out form, still laughing. "Everything seems to be
in order." He nodded. "Even the agreement for euthanasia if
final decision on such a step is necessary." He chuckled.
"Agreement for _what?_"
"Don't talk. I have something for you. Here. Take this
key."
The captain flushed. "It's a great honor."
"Not the key to the city, you fool!" snapped Mr. Iii.
"Just a key to the House. Go down that corridor, unlock the
big door, and go inside and shut the door tight. You can spend
the night there. In the morning I'll send Mr. Xxx to see you."
Dubiously the captain took the key in hand. He stood
looking at the floor. His men did not move. They seemed to
be emptied of all their blood and their rocket fever. They
were drained dry.
"What is it? What's wrong?" inquired Mr. Iii. "What are
you waiting for? What do you want?" He came and peered up into
the captain's face, stooping. "Out with it, you!"
"I don't suppose you could even--" suggested the captain.
"I mean, that is, try to, or think about . . ." He hesitated.
"We've worked hard, we've come a long way, and maybe you could
just shake our hands and say 'Well done!' do you--think?" His
voice faded.
Mr. Iii stuck out his hand stiffly. "Congratulations!"
He smiled a cold smile. "Congratulations." He turned away. "I
must go now. Use that key."
Without noticing them again, as if they had melted down
through the floor, Mr. Iii moved about the room packing a
little manuscript case with papers. He was in the room another
five minutes but never again addressed the solemn quartet that
stood with heads down, their heavy legs sagging, the light
dwindling from their eyes. When Mr. Iii went out the door he
was busy looking at his fingernails. . . .
They straggled along the corridor in the dull, silent
afternoon light. They came to a large burnished silver door,
and the silver key opened it. They entered, shut the door,
and turned.
They were in a vast sunlit hall. Men and woman sat at
tables and stood in conversing groups. At the sound of the door
they regarded the four uniformed men.
One Martian stepped forward, bowing. "I am Mr. Uuu," he
said.
"And I am Captain Jonathan Williams, of New York City,
on Earth," said the captain without emphasis.
Immediately the hall exploded!
The rafters trembled with shouts and cries. The people,
rushing forward, waved and shrieked happily, knocking down
tables, swarming, rollicking, seizing the four Earth Men,
lifting them swiftly to their shoulders. They charged about the
hall six times, six times making a full and wonderful circuit
of the room, jumping, bounding, singing.
The Earth Men were so stunned that they rode the toppling
shoulders for a full minute before they began to laugh and
shout at each other:
"Hey! This is more _like_ it!"
"This is the life! Boy! Yay! Yow! Whoopee!"
They winked tremendously at each other. They flung up
their hands to clap the air. "Hey!"
"Hooray!" said the crowd.
They set the Earth Men on a table. The shouting died.
The captain almost broke into tears. "Thank you. It's
good, it's good."
"Tell us about yourselves," suggested Mr. Uuu.
The captain cleared his throat.
The audience ohed and ahed as the captain talked.
He introduced his crew; each made a small speech and was
embarrassed by the thunderous applause.
Mr. Uuu dapped the captain's shoulder, "It's good to
see another man from Earth. I am from Earth also."
"How was that again?"
"There are many of us here from Earth."
"You? From Earth?" The captain stared. "But is that
possible? Did you come by rocket? Has space travel been going
on for centuries?" His voice was disappointed. "What--what
country are you from?"
"Tuiereol. I came by the spirit of my body, years ago."
"Tuiereol." The captain mouthed the word. "I don't know
that country. What's this about spirit of body?"
"And Miss Rrr over here, she's from Earth, too, _aren't_
you, Miss Rrr?"
Miss Rrr nodded and laughed strangely.
"And so is Mr. Www and Mr. Qqq and Mr. Vvv!"
"I'm from Jupiter," declared one man, preening himself.
"I'm from Saturn," said another, eyes glinting slyly.
"Jupiter, Saturn," murmured the captain, blinking.
It was very quiet now; the people stood around and sat at
the tables which were strangely empty for banquet tables. Their
yellow eyes were glowing, and there were dark shadows under
their cheekbones. The captain noticed for the first time that
there were no windows; the light seemed to permeate the walls.
There was only one door. The captain winced. "This is
confusing. Where on Earth is this Tuiereol? Is it near
America?"
"What is America?"
"You never heard of America! You say you're from Earth and
yet you don't know!"
Mr. Uuu drew himself up angrily. "Earth is a place of seas
and nothing but seas. There is no land. I am from Earth, and
know."
"Wait a minute." The captain sat back. "You look like
a regular Martian. Yellow eyes. Brown skin."
"Earth is a place of all _jungle_," said Miss Rrr proudly.
"I'm from Orri, on Earth, a civilization built of silver!"
Now the captain turned his head from and then to Mr. Uuu
and then to Mr. Www and Mr. Zzz and Mr. Nnn and Mr. Hhh and Mr.
Bbb. He saw their yellow eyes waxing and waning in the light,
focusing and unfocusing. He began to shiver. Finally he turned
to his men and regarded them somberly.
"Do you realize what this is?"
"What, sir?"
"This is no celebration," replied the captain tiredly.
"This is no banquet. These aren't government representatives.
This is no surprise party. Look at their eyes. Listen to them!"
Nobody breathed. There was only a soft white move of eyes
in the close room.
"Now I understand"--the captain's voice was far away--
"why everyone gave us notes and passed us on, one from the
other, until we met Mr. Iii, who sent us down a corridor with
a key to open a door and shut a door. And here we are . . ."
"Where are we, sir?"
The captain exhaled. "In an insane asylum."
It was night. The large hall lay quiet and dimly
illuminated by hidden light sources in the transparent walls.
The four Earth Men sat around a wooden table, their bleak heads
bent over their whispers. On the floors, men and women lay
huddled. There were little stirs in the dark corners, solitary
men or women gesturing their hands. Every half-hour one of
the captain's men would try the silver door and return to the
table. "Nothing doing, sir. We're locked in proper."
"They think we're really insane, sir?"
"Quite. That's why there was no hullabaloo to welcome us.
They merely tolerated what, to them, must be a constantly
recurring psychotic condition." He gestured at the dark
sleeping shapes all about them. "Paranoids, every single one!
What a welcome they gave us! For a moment there"--a little fire
rose and died in his eyes--"I thought we were getting our
true reception. All the yelling and singing and speeches.
Pretty nice, wasn't it--while it lasted?"
"How long will they keep us here, sir?"
"Until we prove we're not psychotics."
"That should be easy."
"I _hope_ so."
"You don't sound very certain, sir."
"I'm not. Look in that corner."
A man squatted alone in darkness. Out of his mouth issued
a blue flame which turned into the round shape of a small naked
woman. It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt
light, whispering and sighing.
The captain nodded at another corner. A woman stood
there, changing. First she was embedded in a crystal pillar,
then she melted into a golden statue, finally a staff of
polished cedar, and back to a woman.
All through the midnight hall people were juggling thin
violet flames, shifting, changing, for nighttime was the time
of change and affliction.
"Magicians, sorcerers," whispered one of the Earth Men.
"No, hallucination. They pass their insanity over into us
so that we see their hallucinations too. Telepathy.
Autosuggestion and telepathy."
"Is that what worries you, sir?"
"Yes. If hallucinations can appear this 'real' to us,
to anyone, if hallucinations are catching and almost
believable, it's no wonder they mistook us for psychotics. If
that man can produce little blue fire women and that woman
there melt into a pillar, how natural if normal Martians think
_we_ produce our rocket ship with _our_ minds."
"Oh," said his men in the shadows.
Around them, in the vast hall, flames leaped blue,
flared, evaporated. Little demons of red sand ran between the
teeth of sleeping men. Women became oily snakes. There was a
smell of reptiles and animals.
In the morning everyone stood around looking fresh, happy,
and normal. There were no flames or demons in the room. The
captain and his men waited by the silver door, hoping it would
open.
Mr. Xxx arrived after about four hours. They had a
suspicion that he had waited outside the door, peering in at
them for at least three hours before he stepped in, beckoned,
and led them to his small office.
He was a jovial, smiling man, if one could believe the
mask he wore, for upon it was painted not one smile, but three.
Behind it, his voice was the voice of a not so smiling
psychologist. "What seems to be the trouble?"
"You think we're insane, and we're not," said the captain.
"Contrarily, I do not think _all_ of you are insane."
The psychologist pointed a little wand at the captain. "No.
Just _you_, sir. The others are secondary hallucinations."
The captain slapped his knee, "So _that's_ it! That's why
Mr. Iii laughed when I suggested my men sign the papers too!"
"Yes, Mr. Iii told me." The psychologist laughed out of
the carved, smiling mouth. "A good joke. Where was I?
Secondary hallucinations, yes. Women come to me with snakes
crawling from their ears. When I cure them, the snakes vanish."
"We'll be glad to be cured. Go right ahead."
Mr. Xxx seemed surprised. "Unusual. Not many people want
to be cured. The cure is drastic, you know."
"Cure ahead! I'm confident you'll find we're all sane."
"Let me check your papers to be sure they're in order for
a 'cure.'" He checked a file. "Yes. You know, such cases as
yours need special 'curing.' The people in that hall are
simpler forms. But once you've gone this far, I must point out,
with primary, secondary, auditory, olfactory, and
labial hallucinations, as well as tactile and optical
fantasies, it is pretty bad business. We have to resort
to euthanasia."
The captain leaped up with a roar. "Look here, we've stood
quite enough! Test us, tap our knees, check our hearts,
exercise us, ask questions!"
"You are free to speak."
The captain raved for an hour. The psychologist listened.
"Incredible," he mused. "Most detailed dream fantasy I've
ever heard."
"God damn it, we'll show you the rocket ship!" screamed
the captain.
"I'd like to see it. Can you manifest it in this room?"
"Oh, certainly. It's in that file of yours, under R."
Mr. Xxx peered seriously into his file. He went "Tsk" and
shut the file solemnly. "Why did you tell me to look? The
rocket isn't there."
"Of course not, you idiot! I was joking. Does an insane
man joke?"
"You find some odd senses of humor. Now, take me out to
your rocket. I wish to see it."
It was noon. The day was very hot when they reached the
rocket.
"So." The psychologist walked up to the ship and tapped
it. It gonged softly. "May I go inside?" he asked slyly.
"You may."
Mr. Xxx stepped in and was gone for a long time.
"Of all the silly, exasperating things." The captain
chewed a cigar as he waited. "For two cents I'd go back home
and tell people not to bother with Mars. What a suspicious
bunch of louts."
"I gather that a good number of their population are
insane, sir. That seems to be their main reason for doubting."
"Nevertheless, this is all so damned irritating."
The psychologist emerged from the ship after half an hour
of prowling, tapping, listening, smelling, tasting.
"_Now_ do you believe!" shouted the captain, as if he were
deaf.
The psychologist shut his eyes and scratched his nose.
"This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination
and hypnotic suggestion I've ever encountered. I went through
your 'rocket,' as you call it." He tapped the hull. "I hear
it. Auditory fantasy." He drew a breath. "I smell it.
Olfactory hallucination, induced by sensual telepathy." He
kissed the ship. "I taste it. Labial fantasy!"
He shook the captain's hand. "May I congratulate you? You
are a psychotic genius! You have done a most complete job! The
task of projecting your psychotic image life into the mind
of another via telepathy and keeping the hallucinations from
becoming sensually weaker is almost impossible. Those people in
the House usually concentrate on visuals or, at the most,
visuals and auditory fantasies combined. You have balanced the
whole conglomeration! Your insanity is beautifully complete!"
"My insanity." The captain was pale.
"Yes, yes, what a lovely insanity. Metal, rubber,
gravitizers, foods, clothing, fuel, weapons, ladders, nuts,
bolts, spoons. Ten thousand separate items I checked on your
vessel. Never have I seen such a complexity. There were even
shadows under the bunks and under _everything!_ Such
concentration of will! And everything, no matter how or when
tested, had a smell, a solidity, a taste, a sound! Let me
embrace you!"
He stood back at last. "I'll write this into my greatest
monograph! I'll speak of it at the Martian Academy next month!
_Look_ at you! Why, you've even changed your eye color from
yellow to blue, your skin to pink from brown. And those
clothes, and your hands having five fingers instead of
six! Biological metamorphosis through psychological imbalance!
And your three friends.--"
He took out a little gun. "Incurable, of course. You
poor, wonderful man. You will be happier dead. Have you any
last words?"
"Stop, for God's sake! Don't shoot!"
"You sad creature. I shall put you out of this misery
which has driven you to imagine this rocket and these three
men. It will be most engrossing to watch your friends and your
rocket vanish once I have killed you. I will write a neat paper
on the dissolvement of neurotic images from what I perceive
here today."
"I'm from Earth! My name is Jonathan Williams, and
these--"
"Yes, I know," soothed Mr. Xxx, and fired his gun.
The captain fell with a bullet in his heart. The other
three men screamed.
Mr. Xxx stared at them. "You continue to exist? This
is superb! Hallucinations with time and spatial persistence!"
He pointed the gun at them. "Well, I'll scare you into
dissolving."
"No!" cried the three men,
"An auditory appeal, even with the patient dead," observed
Mr. Xxx as he shot the three men down.
They lay on the sand, intact, not moving.
He kicked them. Then he rapped on the ship.
"_It_ persists! _They_ persist!" He fired his gun again
and again at the bodies. Then he stood back. The smiling mask
dropped from his face.
Slowly the little psychologist's face changed. His jaw
sagged. The gun dropped from his fingers. His eyes were dull
and vacant He put his hands up and turned in a blind cirde.
He fumbled at the bodies, saliva filling his mouth.
"Hallucinations," he mumbled frantically. "Taste. Sight.
Smell. Sound. Feeling." He waved his hands. His eyes bulged.
His mouth began to give off a faint froth.
"Go away!" he shouted at the bodies. "Go away!" he
screamed at the ship. He examined his trembling hands.
"Contaminated," he whispered wildly. "Carried over into
me. Telepathy. Hypnosis. Now _I'm_ insane, Now _I'm_
contaminated. Hallucinations in all their sensual forms."
He stopped and searched around with his numb hands for the gun.
"Only one cure. Only one way to make them go away, vanish."
A shot rang out, Mr. Xxx fell.
The four bodies lay in the sun. Mr. Xxx lay where he fell.
The rocket reclined on the little sunny hill and didn't
vanish.
When the town people found the rocket at sunset they
wondered what it was. Nobody knew, so it was sold to a junkman
and hauled off to be broken up for scrap metal.
That night it rained all night. The next day was fair and
warm.
March 2000: THE TAXPAYER
He wanted to go to Mars on the rocket. He went down to
the rocket field in the early morning and yelled in through the
wire fence at the men in uniform that he wanted to go to Mars,
He told them he was a taxpayer, his name was Pritchard, and he
had a right to go to Mars. Wasn't he born right here in Ohio?
Wasn't he a good citizen? Then why couldn't _he_ go to Mars?
He shook his fists at them and told them that he wanted to get
away from Earth; anybody with any sense wanted to get away
from Earth. There was going to be a big atomic war on Earth
in about two years, and he didn't want to be here when it
happened. He and thousands of others like him, if they had
any sense, would go to Mars. See if they wouldn't! To get away
from wars and censorship and statism and conscription and
government control of this and that, of art and science! You
could have Earth! He was offering his good right hand, his
heart, his head, for the opportunity to go to Mars! What did
you have to do, what did you have to sign, whom did you have
to know, to get on the rocket?
They laughed out through the wire screen at him. He didn't
want to go to Mars, they said. Didn't he know that the First
and Second Expeditions had failed, had vanished; the men
were probably dead?
But they couldn't prove it, they didn't know for sure,
he said, clinging to the wire fence. Maybe it was a land of
milk and honey up there, and Captain York and Captain Williams
had just never bothered to come back. Now were they going to
open the gate and let him in to board the Third Expeditionary
Rocket, or was he going to have to kick it down?
They told him to shut up.
He saw the men walking out to the rocket.
Wait for me! he cried. Don't leave me here on this
terrible world, I've got to get away; there's going to be an
atom war! Don't leave me on Earth!
They dragged him, struggling, away. They slammed
the policewagon door and drove him off into the early morning,
his face pressed to the rear window, and just before they
sirened over a hill, he saw the red fire and heard the big
sound and felt the huge tremor as the silver rocket shot up and
left him behind on an ordinary Monday morning on the ordinary
planet Earth.
April 2000: THE THIRD EXPEDITION
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and
the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent
gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and
men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence,
fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, induding a captain.
The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands
up into the sunlight, and the rocket had bloomed out great
flowers of heat and color and run away into space on the
_third_ voyage to Mars!
Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the
upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty
and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like
a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown
itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men
within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well
again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the
remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and
their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars
swing up under them.
"Mars!" cried Navigator Lustig.
"Good old Mars!" said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
"Well," said Captain John Black.
The rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon
this lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up on the green stood
a tall brown Victorian house, quiet in the sunlight, all
covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and
pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were
hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the
porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and
forth, in a little breeze. At the summit of the house was a
cupola with diamond leaded-glass windows and a dunce-cap roof!
Through the front window you could see a piece of music
titled "Beautiful Ohio" sitting on the music rest.
Around the rocket in four directions spread the little
town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were
white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in
the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church
steeples with golden bells silent in them.
The rocket men looked out and saw this. Then they looked
at one another and then they looked out again. They held to
each other's elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed,
Their faces grew pale.
"I'll be damned," whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with
his numb fingers. "I'll be damned."
"It just can't be," said Samuel Hinkston.
"Lord," said Captain John Black.
There was a call from the chemist. "Sir, the atmosphere
is thin for breathing. But there's enough oxygen. It's safe."
"Then we'll go out," said Lustig.
"Hold on," said Captain John Black. "How do we know what
this is?"
"It's a small town with thin but breathable air in it,
sir."
"And it's a small town the like of Earth towns," said
Hinkston, the archaeologist "Incredible. It can't be, but it
_is_."
Captain John Black looked at him idly. "Do you think that
the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate
and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?"
"I wouldn't have thought so, sir."
Captain Black stood by the port. "Look out there.
The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has
only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the
thousands of years it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if
it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded-glass
windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument
that looks like a piano and probably is a piano; and five, if
you look closely through this telescopic lens here, is it
logical that a Martian composer would have published a piece
of music titled, strangely enough, 'Beautiful Ohio'? All of
which means that we have an Ohio River on Mars!"
"Captain Williams, of course!" cried Hinkston,
"What?"
"Captain Williams and his crew of three men! Or Nathaniel
York and his partner. That would explain it!"
"That would explain absolutely nothing. As far as we've
been able to figure, the York expedition exploded the day
it reached Mars, killing York and his partner. As for Williams
and his three men, their ship exploded the second day after
their arrival. At least the pulsations from their radios ceased
at that time, so we figure that if the men were alive after
that they'd have contacted us. And anyway, the York expedition
was only a year ago, while Captain Williams and his men landed
here some time during last August. Theorizing that they are
still alive, could they, even with the help of a brilliant
Martian race, have built such a town as this and _aged_ it in
so short a time? Look at that town out there; why, it's been
standing here for the last seventy years. Look at the wood on
the porch newel; look at the trees, a century old, all of them!
No, this isn't York's work or Williams'. It's something else.
I don't like it. And I'm not leaving the ship until I know what
it is."
"For that matter," said Lustig, nodding, "Williams and his
men, as well as York, landed on the _opposite_ side of Mars.
We were very careful to land on _this_ side."
"An excellent point. Just in case a hostile local tribe
of Martians killed off York and Williams, we have instructions
to land in a further region, to forestall a recurrence of such
a disaster. So here we are, as far as we know, in a land
that Williams and York never saw."
"Damn it," said Hinkston, "I want to get out into this
town, sir, with your permission. It may be there are similar
thought patterns, civilization graphs on every planet in our
sun system. We may be on the threshold of the greatest
psychological and metaphysical discovery of our age!"
"I'm willing to wait a moment," said Captain John Black.
"It may be, sir, that we're looking upon a phenomenon
that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence
of God, sir."
"There are many people who are of good faith without such
proof, Mr. Hinkston."
"I'm one myself, sir. But certainly a town like this could
not occur without divine intervention. The _detail_. It fills
me with such feelings that I don't know whether to laugh or
cry."
"Do neither, then, until we know what we're up against."
"Up against?" Lustig broke in. "Against nothing, Captain.
It's a good, quiet green town, a lot like the old-fashioned one
I was born in. I like the looks of it."
"When were you born, Lustig?"
"Nineteen-fifty, sir."
"And you, Hinkston?"
"Nineteen fifty-five, sir. Grinnell, Iowa. And this looks
like home to me."
"Hinkston, Lustig, I could be either of your fathers. I'm
just eighty years old. Born in 1920 in Illinois, and through
the grace of God and a science that, in the last fifty years,
knows how to make _some_ old men young again, here I am on
Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but infinitely
more suspicious. This town out here looks very peaceful and
cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens
me. It's too _much_ like Green Bluff." He turned to the
radioman. "Radio Earth. Tell them we've landed. That's all.
Tell them we'll radio a full report tomorrow."
"Yes, sir."
Captain Black looked out the rocket port with his face
that should have been the face of a man eighty but seemed like
the face of a man in his fortieth year. "Tell you what we'll
do, Lustig; you and I and Hinkston'll look the town over. The
other men'll stay aboard. If anything happens they can get the
hell out. A loss of three men's better than a whole ship.
If something bad happens, our crew can warn the next rocket.
That's Captain Wilder's rocket, I think, due to be ready to
take off next Christmas. if there's something hostile about
Mars we certainly want the next rocket to be well armed."
"So are we. We've got a regular arsenal with us."
"Tell the men to stand by the guns then. Come on,
Lustig, Hinkston."
The three men walked together down through the levels of
the ship.
It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming
apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted
down when the wind touched the green branches, and the blossom
scent drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town someone
was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and
went, softly, drowsily. The song was "Beautiful Dreamer."
Somewhere else a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing
out a record of "Roamin' in the Gloamin'," sung by Harry
Lauder.
The three men stood outside the ship. They sucked and
gasped at the thin, thin air and moved slowly so as not to
tire themselves.
Now the phonograph record being played was:
"_Oh, give me a June night
The moonlight and you_ . . ."
Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.
The sky was serene and quiet, and somewhere a stream of
water ran through the cool caverns and tree shadings of a
ravine. Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by,
bumping.
"Sir," said Samuel Hinkston, "it must be, it _has_ to be,
that rocket travel to Mars began in the years before the first
World War!"
"No."
"How else can you explain these houses, the iron deer,
the pianos, the music?" Hinkston took the captain's elbow
persuasively and looked into the captain's face. "Say that
there were people in the year 1905 who hated war and got
together with some scientists in secret and built a rocket and
came out here to Mars--"
"No, no, Hinkston."
"Why not? The world was a different world in 1905; they
could have kept it a secret much more easily."
"But a complex thing like a rocket, no, you couldn't keep
it secret."
"And they came up here to live, and naturally the houses
they built were similar to Earth houses because they brought
the culture with them."
"And they've lived here all these years?" said the
captain.
"In peace and quiet, yes. Maybe they made a few trips,
enough to bring enough people here for one small town, and
then stopped for fear of being discovered. That's why this town
seems so old-fashioned. I don't see a thing, myself, older than
the year 1927, do you? Or maybe, sir, rocket travel is older
than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world
centuries ago and was kept secret by the small number of men
who came to Mars with only occasional visits to Earth over
the centuries."
"You make it sound almost reasonable."
"It has to be. We've the proof here before us; all we have
to do is find some people and verify it."
Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green
grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself,
Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had
been thirty years since he had been in a small town, and the
buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and
the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.
They set foot upon the porch. Hollow echoes sounded from
under the boards as they walked to the screen door. Inside they
could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a
crystal chandelier and a Maxfield Parrish painting framed on
one wall over a comfortable Morris chair. The house smelled
old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could
hear the tinkle of ice in a lemonade pitcher. In a distant
kitchen, because of the heat of the day, someone was preparing
a cold lunch. Someone was humming under her breath, high and
sweet.
Captain John Black rang the bell.
Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hall, and
a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in a sort of
dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"Beg your pardon," said Captain Black uncertainly. "But
we're looking for--that is, could you help us--" He stopped.
She looked out at him with dark, wondering eyes.
"If you're selling something--" she began.
"No, wait!" he cried. "What town is this?"
She looked him up and down. "What do you mean, what town
is it? How could you be in a town and not know the name?"
The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady
apple tree. "We're strangers here. We want to know how this
town got here and how you got here."
"Are you census takers?"
"No."
"Everyone knows," she said, "this town was built in 1868.
Is this a game?"
"No, not a game!" cried the captain. "We're from Earth."
"Out of the _ground_, do you mean?" she wondered.
"No, we came from the third planet, Earth, in a ship. And
we've landed here on the fourth planet, Mars--"
"This," explained the woman, as if she were addressing
a child, "is Green Bluff, Illinois, on the continent of
America, surrounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on a
place called the world, or, sometimes, the Earth. Go away
now. Goodby."
She trotted down the hall, running her fingers through
the beaded curtains.
The three men looked at one another.
"Let's knock the screen door in," said Lustig.
"We can't do that. This is private property. Good God!"
They went to sit down on the porch step.
"Did it ever strike you, Hinkston, that perhaps we
got ourselves somehow, in some way, off track, and by accident
came back and landed on Earth?"
"How could we have done that?"
"I don't know, I don't know. Oh God, let me think."
Hinkston said, "But we checked every mile of the way.
Our chronometers said so many miles. We went past the Moon and
out into space, and here we are. I'm _positive_ we're on Mars."
Lustig said, "But suppose, by accident, in space, in time,
we got lost in the dimensions and landed on an Earth that is
thirty or forty years ago."
"Oh, go away, Lustig!"
Lustig went to the door, rang the bell, and called into
the cool dim rooms: "What year is this?"
"Nineteen twenty-six, of course," said the lady, sitting
in a rocking chair, taking a sip of her lemonade.
"Did you hear that?" Lustig turned wildly to the others.
"Nineteen twenty-six! We _have_ gone back in time! This _is_
Earth!"
Lustig sat down, and the three men let the wonder and
terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred
fitfully on their knees. The captain said, "I didn't ask for
a thing like this. It scares the hell out of me. How can a
thing like this happen? I wish we'd brought Einstein with us."
"Will anyone in this town believe us?" said Hinkston. "Are
we playing with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn't
we just take off and go home?"
"No. Not until we try another house."
They walked three houses down to a little white cottage
under an oak tree. "I like to be as logical as I can be," said
the captain. "And I don't believe we've put our finger on it
yet. Suppose, Hinkston, as you originally suggested, that
rocket travel occurred years ago? And when the Earth people
lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for
Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged
psychosis. Then threatened insanity. What would you do as
a psychiatrist if faced with such a problem?"
Hinkston thought "Well, I think I'd rearrange the
civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each
day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every
road, and every lake, and even an ocean, I'd do so. Then by
some vast crowd hypnosis I'd convince everyone in a town this
size that this really _was_ Earth, not Mars at all."
"Good enough, Hinkston. I think we're on the right track
now. That woman in that house back there just _thinks_ she's
living on Earth. It protects her sanity. She and all the others
in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment
in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay eyes on in your
life."
"That's _it_, sir!" cried Lustig.
"Right!" said Hinkston.
"Well." The captain sighed. "Now we've got somewhere. I
feel better. It's all a bit more logical. That talk about time
and going back and forth and traveling through time turns
my stomach upside down. But _this_ way--" The captain smiled.
"Well, well, it looks as if we'll be fairly popular here."
"Or will we?" said Lustig. "After all, like the Pilgrims,
these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won't be
too happy to see us. Maybe they'll try to drive us out or kill
us."
"We have superior weapons. This next house now. Up we go."
But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped
and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming
afternoon street. "Sir," he said.
"What is it, Lustig?"
"Oh, sir, _sir_, what I _see_--" said Lustig, and he began
to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and shaking, and his face
was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if at
any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked
down the street and began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling,
picking himself up, and running on. "Look, look!"
"Don't let him get away!" The captain broke into a run.
Now Lustig was running swiftly, shouting. He turned into
a yard halfway down the shady street and leaped up upon the
porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof.
He was beating at the door, hollering and crying, when
Hinkston and the captain ran up behind him. They were all
gasping and wheezing, exhausted from their run in the thin
air. "Grandma! Grandpa!" cried Lustig.
Two old people stood in the doorway.
"David!" their voices piped, and they rushed out to
embrace and pat him on the back and move around him. "David,
oh, David, it's been so many years! How you've grown, boy; how
big you are, boy. Oh, David boy, how are you?"
"Grandma, Grandpa!" sobbed David Lustig. "You look fine,
fine!" He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them,
cried on them, held them out again, blinking at the little
old people. The sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass
was green, the screen door stood wide.
"Come in, boy, come in. There's iced tea for you, fresh,
lots of it!"
"I've got friends here." Lustig turned and waved at the
captain and Hinkston frantically, laughing. "Captain, come on
up."
"Howdy," said the old people. "Come in. Any friends of
David's are our friends too. Don't stand there!"
In the living room of the old house it was cool, and
a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one
corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls
filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern, and
iced tea in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue.
"Here's to our health." Grandma tipped her glass to
her porcelain teeth.
"How long you been here, Grandma?" said Lustig.
"Ever since we died," she said tartly.
"Ever since you what?" Captain John Black set down his
glass.
"Oh yes." Lustig nodded. "They've been dead thirty years."
"And you sit there calmly!" shouted the captain.
"Tush." The old woman winked glitteringly. "Who are you
to question what happens? Here we are. What's life, anyway? Who
does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive
again, and no questions asked. A second chance." She toddled
over and held out her thin wrist. "Feel." The captain felt.
"Solid, ain't it?" she asked. He nodded. "Well, then," she
said triumphantly, "why go around questioning?"
"Well," said the captain, "it's simply that we never
thought we'd find a thing like this on Mars."
"And now you've found it. I dare say there's lots on every
planet that'll show you God's infinite ways."
"Is this Heaven?" asked Hinkston.
"Nonsense, no. It's a world and we get a second chance.
Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on
Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from.
How do we know there wasn't _another_ before _that_ one?"
"A good question," said the captain.
Lustig kept smiling at his grandparents. "Gosh, it's good
to see you. Gosh, it's good."
The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in
a casual fashion. "We've got to be going. Thank you for the
drinks."
"You'll be back, of course," said the old people. "For
supper tonight?"
"We'll try to make it, thanks. There's so much to be done.
My men are waiting for me back at the rocket and--"
He stopped. He looked toward the door, startled.
Far away in the sunlight there was a sound of voices,
a shouting and a great hello.
"What's that?" asked Hinkston,
"We'll soon find out." And Captain John Black was out the
front door abruptly, running across the green lawn into the
street of the Martian town.
He stood looking at the rocket. The ports were open and
his crew was streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of
people had gathered, and in and through and among these people
the members of the crew were hurrying, talking, laughing,
shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The
rocket lay empty and abandoned.
A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay
tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of
drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair
jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, "Hooray!" Fat men
passed around ten-cent cigars. The town mayor made a speech.
Then each member of the crew, with a mother on one arm, a
father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street
into little cottages or big mansions.
"Stop!" cried Captain Black.
The doors slammed shut.
The heat rose in the clear spring sky, and all was silent.
The brass band banged off around a corner, leaving the rocket
to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight
"Abandoned!" said the captain. "They abandoned the ship,
they did! I'll have their skins, by God! They had orders!"
"Sir," said Lustig, "don't be too hard on them. Those were
all old relatives and friends."
"That's no exuse!"
"Think how they felt, Captain, seeing familiar faces
outside the ship!"
"They had their orders, damn it!"
"But how would you have felt, Captain?"
"I would have obeyed orders--" The captain's mouth
remained open.
Striding along the sidewalk under the Martian sun, tall,
smiling, eyes amazingly clear and blue, came a young man of
some twenty-six years. "John!" the man called out, and broke
into a trot.
"What?" Captain John Black swayed.
"John, you old son of a bitch!"
The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him on
the back.
"It's you," said Captain Black.
"Of course, who'd you _think_ it was?"
"Edward!" The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston,
He rummaged through the desk drawers. "Now, where _did_ I put
the forms?" He mused. "Somewhere. Somewhere. Oh, _here_ we are!
Now!" He handed the papers over crisply. "You'll have to sign
these papers, of course."
"Do we have to go through all this rigmarole?"
Mr. Iii gave him a thick glassy look. "You say you're
from Earth, don't you? Well, then there's nothing for it but
you sign."
The captain wrote his name. "Do you want my crew to sign
also?"
Mr. Iii looked at the captain, looked at the three others,
and burst into a shout of derision. "_Them_ sign! Ho! How
marvelous! Them, oh, _them_ sign!" Tears sprang from his eyes.
He slapped his knee and bent to let his laughter jerk out of
his gaping mouth. He held himself up with the desk. "_Them_
sign!"
The four men scowled. "What's funny?"
"Them sign!" sighed Mr. Iii, weak with hilarity. "So very
funny. I'll have to tell Mr. Xxx about this!" He examined
the filled-out form, still laughing. "Everything seems to be
in order." He nodded. "Even the agreement for euthanasia if
final decision on such a step is necessary." He chuckled.
"Agreement for _what?_"
"Don't talk. I have something for you. Here. Take this
key."
The captain flushed. "It's a great honor."
"Not the key to the city, you fool!" snapped Mr. Iii.
"Just a key to the House. Go down that corridor, unlock the
big door, and go inside and shut the door tight. You can spend
the night there. In the morning I'll send Mr. Xxx to see you."
Dubiously the captain took the key in hand. He stood
looking at the floor. His men did not move. They seemed to
be emptied of all their blood and their rocket fever. They
were drained dry.
"What is it? What's wrong?" inquired Mr. Iii. "What are
you waiting for? What do you want?" He came and peered up into
the captain's face, stooping. "Out with it, you!"
"I don't suppose you could even--" suggested the captain.
"I mean, that is, try to, or think about . . ." He hesitated.
"We've worked hard, we've come a long way, and maybe you could
just shake our hands and say 'Well done!' do you--think?" His
voice faded.
Mr. Iii stuck out his hand stiffly. "Congratulations!"
He smiled a cold smile. "Congratulations." He turned away. "I
must go now. Use that key."
Without noticing them again, as if they had melted down
through the floor, Mr. Iii moved about the room packing a
little manuscript case with papers. He was in the room another
five minutes but never again addressed the solemn quartet that
stood with heads down, their heavy legs sagging, the light
dwindling from their eyes. When Mr. Iii went out the door he
was busy looking at his fingernails. . . .
They straggled along the corridor in the dull, silent
afternoon light. They came to a large burnished silver door,
and the silver key opened it. They entered, shut the door,
and turned.
They were in a vast sunlit hall. Men and woman sat at
tables and stood in conversing groups. At the sound of the door
they regarded the four uniformed men.
One Martian stepped forward, bowing. "I am Mr. Uuu," he
said.
"And I am Captain Jonathan Williams, of New York City,
on Earth," said the captain without emphasis.
Immediately the hall exploded!
The rafters trembled with shouts and cries. The people,
rushing forward, waved and shrieked happily, knocking down
tables, swarming, rollicking, seizing the four Earth Men,
lifting them swiftly to their shoulders. They charged about the
hall six times, six times making a full and wonderful circuit
of the room, jumping, bounding, singing.
The Earth Men were so stunned that they rode the toppling
shoulders for a full minute before they began to laugh and
shout at each other:
"Hey! This is more _like_ it!"
"This is the life! Boy! Yay! Yow! Whoopee!"
They winked tremendously at each other. They flung up
their hands to clap the air. "Hey!"
"Hooray!" said the crowd.
They set the Earth Men on a table. The shouting died.
The captain almost broke into tears. "Thank you. It's
good, it's good."
"Tell us about yourselves," suggested Mr. Uuu.
The captain cleared his throat.
The audience ohed and ahed as the captain talked.
He introduced his crew; each made a small speech and was
embarrassed by the thunderous applause.
Mr. Uuu dapped the captain's shoulder, "It's good to
see another man from Earth. I am from Earth also."
"How was that again?"
"There are many of us here from Earth."
"You? From Earth?" The captain stared. "But is that
possible? Did you come by rocket? Has space travel been going
on for centuries?" His voice was disappointed. "What--what
country are you from?"
"Tuiereol. I came by the spirit of my body, years ago."
"Tuiereol." The captain mouthed the word. "I don't know
that country. What's this about spirit of body?"
"And Miss Rrr over here, she's from Earth, too, _aren't_
you, Miss Rrr?"
Miss Rrr nodded and laughed strangely.
"And so is Mr. Www and Mr. Qqq and Mr. Vvv!"
"I'm from Jupiter," declared one man, preening himself.
"I'm from Saturn," said another, eyes glinting slyly.
"Jupiter, Saturn," murmured the captain, blinking.
It was very quiet now; the people stood around and sat at
the tables which were strangely empty for banquet tables. Their
yellow eyes were glowing, and there were dark shadows under
their cheekbones. The captain noticed for the first time that
there were no windows; the light seemed to permeate the walls.
There was only one door. The captain winced. "This is
confusing. Where on Earth is this Tuiereol? Is it near
America?"
"What is America?"
"You never heard of America! You say you're from Earth and
yet you don't know!"
Mr. Uuu drew himself up angrily. "Earth is a place of seas
and nothing but seas. There is no land. I am from Earth, and
know."
"Wait a minute." The captain sat back. "You look like
a regular Martian. Yellow eyes. Brown skin."
"Earth is a place of all _jungle_," said Miss Rrr proudly.
"I'm from Orri, on Earth, a civilization built of silver!"
Now the captain turned his head from and then to Mr. Uuu
and then to Mr. Www and Mr. Zzz and Mr. Nnn and Mr. Hhh and Mr.
Bbb. He saw their yellow eyes waxing and waning in the light,
focusing and unfocusing. He began to shiver. Finally he turned
to his men and regarded them somberly.
"Do you realize what this is?"
"What, sir?"
"This is no celebration," replied the captain tiredly.
"This is no banquet. These aren't government representatives.
This is no surprise party. Look at their eyes. Listen to them!"
Nobody breathed. There was only a soft white move of eyes
in the close room.
"Now I understand"--the captain's voice was far away--
"why everyone gave us notes and passed us on, one from the
other, until we met Mr. Iii, who sent us down a corridor with
a key to open a door and shut a door. And here we are . . ."
"Where are we, sir?"
The captain exhaled. "In an insane asylum."
It was night. The large hall lay quiet and dimly
illuminated by hidden light sources in the transparent walls.
The four Earth Men sat around a wooden table, their bleak heads
bent over their whispers. On the floors, men and women lay
huddled. There were little stirs in the dark corners, solitary
men or women gesturing their hands. Every half-hour one of
the captain's men would try the silver door and return to the
table. "Nothing doing, sir. We're locked in proper."
"They think we're really insane, sir?"
"Quite. That's why there was no hullabaloo to welcome us.
They merely tolerated what, to them, must be a constantly
recurring psychotic condition." He gestured at the dark
sleeping shapes all about them. "Paranoids, every single one!
What a welcome they gave us! For a moment there"--a little fire
rose and died in his eyes--"I thought we were getting our
true reception. All the yelling and singing and speeches.
Pretty nice, wasn't it--while it lasted?"
"How long will they keep us here, sir?"
"Until we prove we're not psychotics."
"That should be easy."
"I _hope_ so."
"You don't sound very certain, sir."
"I'm not. Look in that corner."
A man squatted alone in darkness. Out of his mouth issued
a blue flame which turned into the round shape of a small naked
woman. It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt
light, whispering and sighing.
The captain nodded at another corner. A woman stood
there, changing. First she was embedded in a crystal pillar,
then she melted into a golden statue, finally a staff of
polished cedar, and back to a woman.
All through the midnight hall people were juggling thin
violet flames, shifting, changing, for nighttime was the time
of change and affliction.
"Magicians, sorcerers," whispered one of the Earth Men.
"No, hallucination. They pass their insanity over into us
so that we see their hallucinations too. Telepathy.
Autosuggestion and telepathy."
"Is that what worries you, sir?"
"Yes. If hallucinations can appear this 'real' to us,
to anyone, if hallucinations are catching and almost
believable, it's no wonder they mistook us for psychotics. If
that man can produce little blue fire women and that woman
there melt into a pillar, how natural if normal Martians think
_we_ produce our rocket ship with _our_ minds."
"Oh," said his men in the shadows.
Around them, in the vast hall, flames leaped blue,
flared, evaporated. Little demons of red sand ran between the
teeth of sleeping men. Women became oily snakes. There was a
smell of reptiles and animals.
In the morning everyone stood around looking fresh, happy,
and normal. There were no flames or demons in the room. The
captain and his men waited by the silver door, hoping it would
open.
Mr. Xxx arrived after about four hours. They had a
suspicion that he had waited outside the door, peering in at
them for at least three hours before he stepped in, beckoned,
and led them to his small office.
He was a jovial, smiling man, if one could believe the
mask he wore, for upon it was painted not one smile, but three.
Behind it, his voice was the voice of a not so smiling
psychologist. "What seems to be the trouble?"
"You think we're insane, and we're not," said the captain.
"Contrarily, I do not think _all_ of you are insane."
The psychologist pointed a little wand at the captain. "No.
Just _you_, sir. The others are secondary hallucinations."
The captain slapped his knee, "So _that's_ it! That's why
Mr. Iii laughed when I suggested my men sign the papers too!"
"Yes, Mr. Iii told me." The psychologist laughed out of
the carved, smiling mouth. "A good joke. Where was I?
Secondary hallucinations, yes. Women come to me with snakes
crawling from their ears. When I cure them, the snakes vanish."
"We'll be glad to be cured. Go right ahead."
Mr. Xxx seemed surprised. "Unusual. Not many people want
to be cured. The cure is drastic, you know."
"Cure ahead! I'm confident you'll find we're all sane."
"Let me check your papers to be sure they're in order for
a 'cure.'" He checked a file. "Yes. You know, such cases as
yours need special 'curing.' The people in that hall are
simpler forms. But once you've gone this far, I must point out,
with primary, secondary, auditory, olfactory, and
labial hallucinations, as well as tactile and optical
fantasies, it is pretty bad business. We have to resort
to euthanasia."
The captain leaped up with a roar. "Look here, we've stood
quite enough! Test us, tap our knees, check our hearts,
exercise us, ask questions!"
"You are free to speak."
The captain raved for an hour. The psychologist listened.
"Incredible," he mused. "Most detailed dream fantasy I've
ever heard."
"God damn it, we'll show you the rocket ship!" screamed
the captain.
"I'd like to see it. Can you manifest it in this room?"
"Oh, certainly. It's in that file of yours, under R."
Mr. Xxx peered seriously into his file. He went "Tsk" and
shut the file solemnly. "Why did you tell me to look? The
rocket isn't there."
"Of course not, you idiot! I was joking. Does an insane
man joke?"
"You find some odd senses of humor. Now, take me out to
your rocket. I wish to see it."
It was noon. The day was very hot when they reached the
rocket.
"So." The psychologist walked up to the ship and tapped
it. It gonged softly. "May I go inside?" he asked slyly.
"You may."
Mr. Xxx stepped in and was gone for a long time.
"Of all the silly, exasperating things." The captain
chewed a cigar as he waited. "For two cents I'd go back home
and tell people not to bother with Mars. What a suspicious
bunch of louts."
"I gather that a good number of their population are
insane, sir. That seems to be their main reason for doubting."
"Nevertheless, this is all so damned irritating."
The psychologist emerged from the ship after half an hour
of prowling, tapping, listening, smelling, tasting.
"_Now_ do you believe!" shouted the captain, as if he were
deaf.
The psychologist shut his eyes and scratched his nose.
"This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination
and hypnotic suggestion I've ever encountered. I went through
your 'rocket,' as you call it." He tapped the hull. "I hear
it. Auditory fantasy." He drew a breath. "I smell it.
Olfactory hallucination, induced by sensual telepathy." He
kissed the ship. "I taste it. Labial fantasy!"
He shook the captain's hand. "May I congratulate you? You
are a psychotic genius! You have done a most complete job! The
task of projecting your psychotic image life into the mind
of another via telepathy and keeping the hallucinations from
becoming sensually weaker is almost impossible. Those people in
the House usually concentrate on visuals or, at the most,
visuals and auditory fantasies combined. You have balanced the
whole conglomeration! Your insanity is beautifully complete!"
"My insanity." The captain was pale.
"Yes, yes, what a lovely insanity. Metal, rubber,
gravitizers, foods, clothing, fuel, weapons, ladders, nuts,
bolts, spoons. Ten thousand separate items I checked on your
vessel. Never have I seen such a complexity. There were even
shadows under the bunks and under _everything!_ Such
concentration of will! And everything, no matter how or when
tested, had a smell, a solidity, a taste, a sound! Let me
embrace you!"
He stood back at last. "I'll write this into my greatest
monograph! I'll speak of it at the Martian Academy next month!
_Look_ at you! Why, you've even changed your eye color from
yellow to blue, your skin to pink from brown. And those
clothes, and your hands having five fingers instead of
six! Biological metamorphosis through psychological imbalance!
And your three friends.--"
He took out a little gun. "Incurable, of course. You
poor, wonderful man. You will be happier dead. Have you any
last words?"
"Stop, for God's sake! Don't shoot!"
"You sad creature. I shall put you out of this misery
which has driven you to imagine this rocket and these three
men. It will be most engrossing to watch your friends and your
rocket vanish once I have killed you. I will write a neat paper
on the dissolvement of neurotic images from what I perceive
here today."
"I'm from Earth! My name is Jonathan Williams, and
these--"
"Yes, I know," soothed Mr. Xxx, and fired his gun.
The captain fell with a bullet in his heart. The other
three men screamed.
Mr. Xxx stared at them. "You continue to exist? This
is superb! Hallucinations with time and spatial persistence!"
He pointed the gun at them. "Well, I'll scare you into
dissolving."
"No!" cried the three men,
"An auditory appeal, even with the patient dead," observed
Mr. Xxx as he shot the three men down.
They lay on the sand, intact, not moving.
He kicked them. Then he rapped on the ship.
"_It_ persists! _They_ persist!" He fired his gun again
and again at the bodies. Then he stood back. The smiling mask
dropped from his face.
Slowly the little psychologist's face changed. His jaw
sagged. The gun dropped from his fingers. His eyes were dull
and vacant He put his hands up and turned in a blind cirde.
He fumbled at the bodies, saliva filling his mouth.
"Hallucinations," he mumbled frantically. "Taste. Sight.
Smell. Sound. Feeling." He waved his hands. His eyes bulged.
His mouth began to give off a faint froth.
"Go away!" he shouted at the bodies. "Go away!" he
screamed at the ship. He examined his trembling hands.
"Contaminated," he whispered wildly. "Carried over into
me. Telepathy. Hypnosis. Now _I'm_ insane, Now _I'm_
contaminated. Hallucinations in all their sensual forms."
He stopped and searched around with his numb hands for the gun.
"Only one cure. Only one way to make them go away, vanish."
A shot rang out, Mr. Xxx fell.
The four bodies lay in the sun. Mr. Xxx lay where he fell.
The rocket reclined on the little sunny hill and didn't
vanish.
When the town people found the rocket at sunset they
wondered what it was. Nobody knew, so it was sold to a junkman
and hauled off to be broken up for scrap metal.
That night it rained all night. The next day was fair and
warm.
March 2000: THE TAXPAYER
He wanted to go to Mars on the rocket. He went down to
the rocket field in the early morning and yelled in through the
wire fence at the men in uniform that he wanted to go to Mars,
He told them he was a taxpayer, his name was Pritchard, and he
had a right to go to Mars. Wasn't he born right here in Ohio?
Wasn't he a good citizen? Then why couldn't _he_ go to Mars?
He shook his fists at them and told them that he wanted to get
away from Earth; anybody with any sense wanted to get away
from Earth. There was going to be a big atomic war on Earth
in about two years, and he didn't want to be here when it
happened. He and thousands of others like him, if they had
any sense, would go to Mars. See if they wouldn't! To get away
from wars and censorship and statism and conscription and
government control of this and that, of art and science! You
could have Earth! He was offering his good right hand, his
heart, his head, for the opportunity to go to Mars! What did
you have to do, what did you have to sign, whom did you have
to know, to get on the rocket?
They laughed out through the wire screen at him. He didn't
want to go to Mars, they said. Didn't he know that the First
and Second Expeditions had failed, had vanished; the men
were probably dead?
But they couldn't prove it, they didn't know for sure,
he said, clinging to the wire fence. Maybe it was a land of
milk and honey up there, and Captain York and Captain Williams
had just never bothered to come back. Now were they going to
open the gate and let him in to board the Third Expeditionary
Rocket, or was he going to have to kick it down?
They told him to shut up.
He saw the men walking out to the rocket.
Wait for me! he cried. Don't leave me here on this
terrible world, I've got to get away; there's going to be an
atom war! Don't leave me on Earth!
They dragged him, struggling, away. They slammed
the policewagon door and drove him off into the early morning,
his face pressed to the rear window, and just before they
sirened over a hill, he saw the red fire and heard the big
sound and felt the huge tremor as the silver rocket shot up and
left him behind on an ordinary Monday morning on the ordinary
planet Earth.
April 2000: THE THIRD EXPEDITION
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and
the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent
gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and
men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence,
fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, induding a captain.
The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands
up into the sunlight, and the rocket had bloomed out great
flowers of heat and color and run away into space on the
_third_ voyage to Mars!
Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the
upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty
and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like
a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown
itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men
within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well
again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the
remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and
their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars
swing up under them.
"Mars!" cried Navigator Lustig.
"Good old Mars!" said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
"Well," said Captain John Black.
The rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon
this lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up on the green stood
a tall brown Victorian house, quiet in the sunlight, all
covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and
pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were
hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the
porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and
forth, in a little breeze. At the summit of the house was a
cupola with diamond leaded-glass windows and a dunce-cap roof!
Through the front window you could see a piece of music
titled "Beautiful Ohio" sitting on the music rest.
Around the rocket in four directions spread the little
town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were
white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in
the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church
steeples with golden bells silent in them.
The rocket men looked out and saw this. Then they looked
at one another and then they looked out again. They held to
each other's elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed,
Their faces grew pale.
"I'll be damned," whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with
his numb fingers. "I'll be damned."
"It just can't be," said Samuel Hinkston.
"Lord," said Captain John Black.
There was a call from the chemist. "Sir, the atmosphere
is thin for breathing. But there's enough oxygen. It's safe."
"Then we'll go out," said Lustig.
"Hold on," said Captain John Black. "How do we know what
this is?"
"It's a small town with thin but breathable air in it,
sir."
"And it's a small town the like of Earth towns," said
Hinkston, the archaeologist "Incredible. It can't be, but it
_is_."
Captain John Black looked at him idly. "Do you think that
the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate
and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?"
"I wouldn't have thought so, sir."
Captain Black stood by the port. "Look out there.
The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has
only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the
thousands of years it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if
it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded-glass
windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument
that looks like a piano and probably is a piano; and five, if
you look closely through this telescopic lens here, is it
logical that a Martian composer would have published a piece
of music titled, strangely enough, 'Beautiful Ohio'? All of
which means that we have an Ohio River on Mars!"
"Captain Williams, of course!" cried Hinkston,
"What?"
"Captain Williams and his crew of three men! Or Nathaniel
York and his partner. That would explain it!"
"That would explain absolutely nothing. As far as we've
been able to figure, the York expedition exploded the day
it reached Mars, killing York and his partner. As for Williams
and his three men, their ship exploded the second day after
their arrival. At least the pulsations from their radios ceased
at that time, so we figure that if the men were alive after
that they'd have contacted us. And anyway, the York expedition
was only a year ago, while Captain Williams and his men landed
here some time during last August. Theorizing that they are
still alive, could they, even with the help of a brilliant
Martian race, have built such a town as this and _aged_ it in
so short a time? Look at that town out there; why, it's been
standing here for the last seventy years. Look at the wood on
the porch newel; look at the trees, a century old, all of them!
No, this isn't York's work or Williams'. It's something else.
I don't like it. And I'm not leaving the ship until I know what
it is."
"For that matter," said Lustig, nodding, "Williams and his
men, as well as York, landed on the _opposite_ side of Mars.
We were very careful to land on _this_ side."
"An excellent point. Just in case a hostile local tribe
of Martians killed off York and Williams, we have instructions
to land in a further region, to forestall a recurrence of such
a disaster. So here we are, as far as we know, in a land
that Williams and York never saw."
"Damn it," said Hinkston, "I want to get out into this
town, sir, with your permission. It may be there are similar
thought patterns, civilization graphs on every planet in our
sun system. We may be on the threshold of the greatest
psychological and metaphysical discovery of our age!"
"I'm willing to wait a moment," said Captain John Black.
"It may be, sir, that we're looking upon a phenomenon
that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence
of God, sir."
"There are many people who are of good faith without such
proof, Mr. Hinkston."
"I'm one myself, sir. But certainly a town like this could
not occur without divine intervention. The _detail_. It fills
me with such feelings that I don't know whether to laugh or
cry."
"Do neither, then, until we know what we're up against."
"Up against?" Lustig broke in. "Against nothing, Captain.
It's a good, quiet green town, a lot like the old-fashioned one
I was born in. I like the looks of it."
"When were you born, Lustig?"
"Nineteen-fifty, sir."
"And you, Hinkston?"
"Nineteen fifty-five, sir. Grinnell, Iowa. And this looks
like home to me."
"Hinkston, Lustig, I could be either of your fathers. I'm
just eighty years old. Born in 1920 in Illinois, and through
the grace of God and a science that, in the last fifty years,
knows how to make _some_ old men young again, here I am on
Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but infinitely
more suspicious. This town out here looks very peaceful and
cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens
me. It's too _much_ like Green Bluff." He turned to the
radioman. "Radio Earth. Tell them we've landed. That's all.
Tell them we'll radio a full report tomorrow."
"Yes, sir."
Captain Black looked out the rocket port with his face
that should have been the face of a man eighty but seemed like
the face of a man in his fortieth year. "Tell you what we'll
do, Lustig; you and I and Hinkston'll look the town over. The
other men'll stay aboard. If anything happens they can get the
hell out. A loss of three men's better than a whole ship.
If something bad happens, our crew can warn the next rocket.
That's Captain Wilder's rocket, I think, due to be ready to
take off next Christmas. if there's something hostile about
Mars we certainly want the next rocket to be well armed."
"So are we. We've got a regular arsenal with us."
"Tell the men to stand by the guns then. Come on,
Lustig, Hinkston."
The three men walked together down through the levels of
the ship.
It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming
apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted
down when the wind touched the green branches, and the blossom
scent drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town someone
was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and
went, softly, drowsily. The song was "Beautiful Dreamer."
Somewhere else a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing
out a record of "Roamin' in the Gloamin'," sung by Harry
Lauder.
The three men stood outside the ship. They sucked and
gasped at the thin, thin air and moved slowly so as not to
tire themselves.
Now the phonograph record being played was:
"_Oh, give me a June night
The moonlight and you_ . . ."
Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.
The sky was serene and quiet, and somewhere a stream of
water ran through the cool caverns and tree shadings of a
ravine. Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by,
bumping.
"Sir," said Samuel Hinkston, "it must be, it _has_ to be,
that rocket travel to Mars began in the years before the first
World War!"
"No."
"How else can you explain these houses, the iron deer,
the pianos, the music?" Hinkston took the captain's elbow
persuasively and looked into the captain's face. "Say that
there were people in the year 1905 who hated war and got
together with some scientists in secret and built a rocket and
came out here to Mars--"
"No, no, Hinkston."
"Why not? The world was a different world in 1905; they
could have kept it a secret much more easily."
"But a complex thing like a rocket, no, you couldn't keep
it secret."
"And they came up here to live, and naturally the houses
they built were similar to Earth houses because they brought
the culture with them."
"And they've lived here all these years?" said the
captain.
"In peace and quiet, yes. Maybe they made a few trips,
enough to bring enough people here for one small town, and
then stopped for fear of being discovered. That's why this town
seems so old-fashioned. I don't see a thing, myself, older than
the year 1927, do you? Or maybe, sir, rocket travel is older
than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world
centuries ago and was kept secret by the small number of men
who came to Mars with only occasional visits to Earth over
the centuries."
"You make it sound almost reasonable."
"It has to be. We've the proof here before us; all we have
to do is find some people and verify it."
Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green
grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself,
Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had
been thirty years since he had been in a small town, and the
buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and
the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.
They set foot upon the porch. Hollow echoes sounded from
under the boards as they walked to the screen door. Inside they
could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a
crystal chandelier and a Maxfield Parrish painting framed on
one wall over a comfortable Morris chair. The house smelled
old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could
hear the tinkle of ice in a lemonade pitcher. In a distant
kitchen, because of the heat of the day, someone was preparing
a cold lunch. Someone was humming under her breath, high and
sweet.
Captain John Black rang the bell.
Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hall, and
a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in a sort of
dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"Beg your pardon," said Captain Black uncertainly. "But
we're looking for--that is, could you help us--" He stopped.
She looked out at him with dark, wondering eyes.
"If you're selling something--" she began.
"No, wait!" he cried. "What town is this?"
She looked him up and down. "What do you mean, what town
is it? How could you be in a town and not know the name?"
The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady
apple tree. "We're strangers here. We want to know how this
town got here and how you got here."
"Are you census takers?"
"No."
"Everyone knows," she said, "this town was built in 1868.
Is this a game?"
"No, not a game!" cried the captain. "We're from Earth."
"Out of the _ground_, do you mean?" she wondered.
"No, we came from the third planet, Earth, in a ship. And
we've landed here on the fourth planet, Mars--"
"This," explained the woman, as if she were addressing
a child, "is Green Bluff, Illinois, on the continent of
America, surrounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on a
place called the world, or, sometimes, the Earth. Go away
now. Goodby."
She trotted down the hall, running her fingers through
the beaded curtains.
The three men looked at one another.
"Let's knock the screen door in," said Lustig.
"We can't do that. This is private property. Good God!"
They went to sit down on the porch step.
"Did it ever strike you, Hinkston, that perhaps we
got ourselves somehow, in some way, off track, and by accident
came back and landed on Earth?"
"How could we have done that?"
"I don't know, I don't know. Oh God, let me think."
Hinkston said, "But we checked every mile of the way.
Our chronometers said so many miles. We went past the Moon and
out into space, and here we are. I'm _positive_ we're on Mars."
Lustig said, "But suppose, by accident, in space, in time,
we got lost in the dimensions and landed on an Earth that is
thirty or forty years ago."
"Oh, go away, Lustig!"
Lustig went to the door, rang the bell, and called into
the cool dim rooms: "What year is this?"
"Nineteen twenty-six, of course," said the lady, sitting
in a rocking chair, taking a sip of her lemonade.
"Did you hear that?" Lustig turned wildly to the others.
"Nineteen twenty-six! We _have_ gone back in time! This _is_
Earth!"
Lustig sat down, and the three men let the wonder and
terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred
fitfully on their knees. The captain said, "I didn't ask for
a thing like this. It scares the hell out of me. How can a
thing like this happen? I wish we'd brought Einstein with us."
"Will anyone in this town believe us?" said Hinkston. "Are
we playing with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn't
we just take off and go home?"
"No. Not until we try another house."
They walked three houses down to a little white cottage
under an oak tree. "I like to be as logical as I can be," said
the captain. "And I don't believe we've put our finger on it
yet. Suppose, Hinkston, as you originally suggested, that
rocket travel occurred years ago? And when the Earth people
lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for
Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged
psychosis. Then threatened insanity. What would you do as
a psychiatrist if faced with such a problem?"
Hinkston thought "Well, I think I'd rearrange the
civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each
day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every
road, and every lake, and even an ocean, I'd do so. Then by
some vast crowd hypnosis I'd convince everyone in a town this
size that this really _was_ Earth, not Mars at all."
"Good enough, Hinkston. I think we're on the right track
now. That woman in that house back there just _thinks_ she's
living on Earth. It protects her sanity. She and all the others
in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment
in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay eyes on in your
life."
"That's _it_, sir!" cried Lustig.
"Right!" said Hinkston.
"Well." The captain sighed. "Now we've got somewhere. I
feel better. It's all a bit more logical. That talk about time
and going back and forth and traveling through time turns
my stomach upside down. But _this_ way--" The captain smiled.
"Well, well, it looks as if we'll be fairly popular here."
"Or will we?" said Lustig. "After all, like the Pilgrims,
these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won't be
too happy to see us. Maybe they'll try to drive us out or kill
us."
"We have superior weapons. This next house now. Up we go."
But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped
and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming
afternoon street. "Sir," he said.
"What is it, Lustig?"
"Oh, sir, _sir_, what I _see_--" said Lustig, and he began
to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and shaking, and his face
was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if at
any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked
down the street and began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling,
picking himself up, and running on. "Look, look!"
"Don't let him get away!" The captain broke into a run.
Now Lustig was running swiftly, shouting. He turned into
a yard halfway down the shady street and leaped up upon the
porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof.
He was beating at the door, hollering and crying, when
Hinkston and the captain ran up behind him. They were all
gasping and wheezing, exhausted from their run in the thin
air. "Grandma! Grandpa!" cried Lustig.
Two old people stood in the doorway.
"David!" their voices piped, and they rushed out to
embrace and pat him on the back and move around him. "David,
oh, David, it's been so many years! How you've grown, boy; how
big you are, boy. Oh, David boy, how are you?"
"Grandma, Grandpa!" sobbed David Lustig. "You look fine,
fine!" He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them,
cried on them, held them out again, blinking at the little
old people. The sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass
was green, the screen door stood wide.
"Come in, boy, come in. There's iced tea for you, fresh,
lots of it!"
"I've got friends here." Lustig turned and waved at the
captain and Hinkston frantically, laughing. "Captain, come on
up."
"Howdy," said the old people. "Come in. Any friends of
David's are our friends too. Don't stand there!"
In the living room of the old house it was cool, and
a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one
corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls
filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern, and
iced tea in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue.
"Here's to our health." Grandma tipped her glass to
her porcelain teeth.
"How long you been here, Grandma?" said Lustig.
"Ever since we died," she said tartly.
"Ever since you what?" Captain John Black set down his
glass.
"Oh yes." Lustig nodded. "They've been dead thirty years."
"And you sit there calmly!" shouted the captain.
"Tush." The old woman winked glitteringly. "Who are you
to question what happens? Here we are. What's life, anyway? Who
does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive
again, and no questions asked. A second chance." She toddled
over and held out her thin wrist. "Feel." The captain felt.
"Solid, ain't it?" she asked. He nodded. "Well, then," she
said triumphantly, "why go around questioning?"
"Well," said the captain, "it's simply that we never
thought we'd find a thing like this on Mars."
"And now you've found it. I dare say there's lots on every
planet that'll show you God's infinite ways."
"Is this Heaven?" asked Hinkston.
"Nonsense, no. It's a world and we get a second chance.
Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on
Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from.
How do we know there wasn't _another_ before _that_ one?"
"A good question," said the captain.
Lustig kept smiling at his grandparents. "Gosh, it's good
to see you. Gosh, it's good."
The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in
a casual fashion. "We've got to be going. Thank you for the
drinks."
"You'll be back, of course," said the old people. "For
supper tonight?"
"We'll try to make it, thanks. There's so much to be done.
My men are waiting for me back at the rocket and--"
He stopped. He looked toward the door, startled.
Far away in the sunlight there was a sound of voices,
a shouting and a great hello.
"What's that?" asked Hinkston,
"We'll soon find out." And Captain John Black was out the
front door abruptly, running across the green lawn into the
street of the Martian town.
He stood looking at the rocket. The ports were open and
his crew was streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of
people had gathered, and in and through and among these people
the members of the crew were hurrying, talking, laughing,
shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The
rocket lay empty and abandoned.
A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay
tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of
drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair
jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, "Hooray!" Fat men
passed around ten-cent cigars. The town mayor made a speech.
Then each member of the crew, with a mother on one arm, a
father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street
into little cottages or big mansions.
"Stop!" cried Captain Black.
The doors slammed shut.
The heat rose in the clear spring sky, and all was silent.
The brass band banged off around a corner, leaving the rocket
to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight
"Abandoned!" said the captain. "They abandoned the ship,
they did! I'll have their skins, by God! They had orders!"
"Sir," said Lustig, "don't be too hard on them. Those were
all old relatives and friends."
"That's no exuse!"
"Think how they felt, Captain, seeing familiar faces
outside the ship!"
"They had their orders, damn it!"
"But how would you have felt, Captain?"
"I would have obeyed orders--" The captain's mouth
remained open.
Striding along the sidewalk under the Martian sun, tall,
smiling, eyes amazingly clear and blue, came a young man of
some twenty-six years. "John!" the man called out, and broke
into a trot.
"What?" Captain John Black swayed.
"John, you old son of a bitch!"
The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him on
the back.
"It's you," said Captain Black.
"Of course, who'd you _think_ it was?"
"Edward!" The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston,