the ball--remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.
The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling
light.
Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace.
How carefully it had inquired, "Who goes there? What's
the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and
whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in
an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which
bordered on a mechanical paranoia.
It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow
brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled,
flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!
The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big,
small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone
away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly,
uselessly.
_Twelve noon_.
A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The
dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered
with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud.
Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud,
angry at inconvenience.
For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the
wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed
swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized
in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There,
down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into
the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in
a dark corner.
The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door,
at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence
was here.
It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind
the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house
with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.
The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing,
its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at
its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for
an hour.
_Two o'clock_, sang a voice.
Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice
hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical
wind.
_Two-fifteen_.
The dog was gone.
In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl
of sparks leaped up the chimney.
_Two thirty-five_.
Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards
fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on
an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.
But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.
At four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies
back through the paneled walls.
_Four-thirty_.
The nursery walls glowed.
Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink
antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The
walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy.
Hidden films clocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the
walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp,
cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron
crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate
red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors!
There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees
within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And
there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh
jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched
grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed,
mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into
thorn brakes and water holes.
It was the children's hour.
_Five o'clock_. The bath filled with clear hot water.
_Six, seven, eight o'clock_. The dinner dishes manipulated
like magic tricks, and in the study a _click_. In the metal
stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly,
a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it,
smoking, waiting.
_Nine o'clock_. The beds warmed their hidden circuits,
for nights were cool here.
_Nine-five_. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:
"Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?"
The house was silent.
The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference,
I shall select a poem at random." Quiet music rose to back
the voice. "Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite. . . .
"_There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone_."
The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell
away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs
faced each other between the silent walls, and the music
played.
At ten o'clock the house began to die.
The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the
kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the
stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!
"Fire!" screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water
pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on
the linoleum, licking eating under the kitchen door, while
the voices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"
The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut,
but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and
sucked upon the fire.
The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry
sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up
the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the
walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall
sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.
But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a
stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which
had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was
gone.
The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos
and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off
the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black
shavings.
Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the
colors of drapes!
And then, reinforcements.
From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with
faucet mouths gushing green chemical.
The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight
of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over
the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green
froth.
But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the
house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion!
The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into
bronze shrapnel on the beams.
The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the
clothes hung there.
The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton
cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if
a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and
capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run,
run! Heat snapped mirrors like the brittle winter ice. And
the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery
rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a
forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped
their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four,
five voices died.
In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared,
purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in cirdes,
changing color, and ten million animals, running before the
fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river. . . .
Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the
fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard
announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn
by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out
and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand
things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the
hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac
confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning
mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And
one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read
poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools
burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down,
puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and
timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at
a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast,
twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the
stove working again, hysterically hissing!
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor.
The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze,
armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons
thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.
Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.
Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall
stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over
again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped
rubble and steam:
"Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today
is . . ."
October 2026: THE MILLION-YEAR PICNIC
Somehow the idea was brought up by Mom that perhaps the
whole family would enjoy a fishing trip. But they weren't Mom's
words; Timothy knew that. They were Dad's words, and Mom used
them for him somehow.
Dad shuffled his feet in a clutter of Martian pebbles
and agreed. So immediately there was a tumult and a shouting,
and very quickly the camp was tucked into capsules and
containers, Mom slipped into traveling jumpers and blouse,
Dad stuffed his pipe full with trembling hands, his eyes on
the Martian sky, and the three boys piled yelling into
the motorboat, none of them really keeping an eye on Mom and
Dad, except Timothy.
Dad pushed a stud. The water boat sent a humming sound up
into the sky. The water shook back and the boat nosed ahead,
and the family cried, "Hurrah!"
Timothy sat in the back of the boat with Dad, his small
fingers atop Dad's hairy ones, watching the canal twist,
leaving the crumbled place behind where they had landed in
their small family rocket all the way from Earth. He remembered
the night before they left Earth, the hustling and hurrying
the rocket that Dad had found somewhere, somehow, and the talk
of a vacation on Mars. A long way to go for a vacation, but
Timothy said nothing because of his younger brothers. They came
to Mars and now, first thing, or so they said, they were
going fishing.
Dad had a funny look in his eyes as the boat went
up-canal. A look that Timothy couldn't figure. It was made
of strong light and maybe a sort of relief. It made the deep
wrinkles laugh instead of worry or cry.
So there went the cooling rocket, around a bend, gone.
"How far are we going?" Robert splashed his hand. It
looked like a small crab jumping in the violet water.
Dad exhaled. "A million years."
"Gee," said Robert.
"Look, kids." Mother pointed one soft long arm. "There's
a dead city."
They looked with fervent anticipation, and the dead city
lay dead for them alone, drowsing in a hot silence of summer
made on Mars by a Martian weatherman.
And Dad looked as if he was pleased that it was dead.
It was a futile spread of pink rocks sleeping on a rise
of sand, a few tumbled pillars, one lonely shrine, and then
the sweep of sand again. Nothing else for miles. A white desert
around the canal and a blue desert over it.
Just then a bird flew up. Like a stone thrown across a
blue pond, hitting, falling deep, and vanishing.
Dad got a frightened look when he saw it. "I thought it
was a rocket."
Timothy looked at the deep ocean sky, trying to see Earth
and the war and the ruined cities and the men killing each
other since the day he was born. But he saw nothing. The war
was as removed and far off as two flies battling to the death
in the arch of a great high and silent cathedral. And just
as senseless.
William Thomas wiped his forehead and felt the touch of
his son's hand on his arm, like a young tarantula, thrilled.
He beamed at his son. "How goes it, Timmy?"
"Fine, Dad."
Timothy hadn't quite figured out what was ticking inside
the vast adult mechanism beside him. The man with the immense
hawk nose, sunburnt, peeling--and the hot blue eyes like agate
marbles you play with after school in summer back on Earth, and
the long thick columnar legs in the loose riding breeches.
"What are you looking at so hard, Dad?"
"I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense,
good government, peace, and responsibility."
"All that up there?"
"No. I didn't find it. It's not there any more. Maybe
it'll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it
was ever there."
"Huh?"
"See the fish," said Dad, pointing.
There rose a soprano clamor from all three boys as they
rocked the boat in arching their tender necks to see. They
_oohed_ and _ahed_. A silver ring fish floated by them,
undulating, and closing like an iris, instantly, around
food partides, to assimilate them.
Dad looked at it. His voice was deep and quiet.
"Just like war. War swims along, sees food, contracts.
A moment later--Earth is gone."
"William," said Mom.
"Sorry," said Dad.
They sat still and felt the canal water rush cool, swift,
and glassy. The only sound was the motor hum, the glide of
water, the sun expanding the air.
"When do we see the Martians?" cried Michael.
"Quite soon, perhaps," said Father. "Maybe tonight."
"Oh, but the Martians are a dead race now," said Mom.
"No, they're not. I'll show you some Martians, all right,"
Dad said presently.
Timothy scowled at that but said nothing. Everything was
odd now. Vacations and fishing and looks between people.
The other boys were already engaged making shelves of
their small hands and peering under them toward the seven-foot
stone banks of the canal, watching for Martians.
"What do they look like?" demanded Michael.
"You'll know them when you see them." Dad sort of laughed,
and Timothy saw a pulse beating time in his cheek.
Mother was slender and soft, with a woven plait of
spungold hair over her head in a tiara, and eyes the color of
the deep cool canal water where it ran in shadow, almost
purple, with flecks of amber caught in it. You could see
her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish--some
bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy,
and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being
nothing but color and nothing else. She sat in the boat's prow,
one hand resting on the side lip, the other on the lap of her
dark blue breeches, and a line of sunburnt soft neck showing
where her blouse opened like a white flower.
She kept looking ahead to see what was there, and, not
being able to see it clearly enough, she looked backward toward
her husband, and through his eyes, reflected then, she saw what
was ahead; and since he added part of himself to this
reflection, a determined firmness, her face relaxed and she
accepted it and she turned back, knowing suddenly what to look
for.
Timothy looked too. But all he saw was a straight pencil
line of canal going violet through a wide shallow valley penned
by low, eroded hills, and on until it fell over the sky's edge.
And this canal went on and on, through cities that would have
rattled like beetles in a dry skull if you shook them. A
hundred or two hundred cities dreaming hot summer-day dreams
and cool summer-night dreams . . .
They had come millions of miles for this outing--to fish.
But there had been a gun on the rocket. This was a vacation.
But why all the food, more than enough to last them years and
years, left hidden back there near the rocket? Vacation. Just
behind the veil of the vacation was not a soft face of
laughter, but something hard and bony and perhaps terrifying.
Timothy could not lift the veil, and the two other boys were
busy being ten and eight years old, respectively.
"No Martians yet. Nuts." Robert put his V-shaped chin on
his hands and glared at the canal.
Dad had brought an atomic radio along, strapped to his
wrist. It functioned on an old-fashioned principle: you held
it against the bones near your ear and it vibrated singing
or talking to you. Dad listened to it now. His face looked like
one of those fallen Martian cities, caved in, sucked. dry,
almost dead.
Then he gave it to Mom to listen. Her lips dropped open.
"What--" Timothy started to question, but never finished
what he wished to say.
For at that moment there were two titanic, marrow-jolting
explosions that grew upon themselves, followed by a half dozen
minor concussions.
Jerking his head up, Dad notched the boat speed
higher immediately. The boat leaped and jounced and spanked.
This shook Robert out of his funk and elicited yelps of
frightened but esctatic joy from Michael, who clung to Mom's
legs and watched the water pour by his nose in a wet torrent.
Dad swerved the boat, cut speed, and ducked the craft into
a little branch canal and under an ancient, crumbling stone
wharf that smelled of crab flesh. The boat rammed the wharf
hard enough to throw them all forward, but no one was hurt, and
Dad was already twisted to see if the ripples on the canal
were enough to map their route into hiding. Water lines went
across, lapped the stones, and rippled back to meet each
other, settling, to be dappled by the sun. It all went away.
Dad listened. So did everybody.
Dad's breathing echoed like fists beating against the cold
wet wharf stones. In the shadow, Mom's cat eyes just watched
Father for some clue to what next.
Dad relaxed and blew out a breath, laughing at himself.
"The rocket, of course. I'm getting jumpy. The rocket."
Michael said, "What happened, Dad, what happened?"
"Oh, we just blew up our rocket, is all," said Timothy,
trying to sound matter-of-fact. "I've heard rockets blown
up before. Ours just blew."
"Why did we blow up our rocket?" asked Michael. "Huh,
Dad?"
"It's part of the game, silly!" said Timothy.
"A game!" Michael and Robert loved the word.
"Dad fixed it so it would blow up and no one'd know where
we landed or went! In case they ever came looking, see?"
"Oh boy, a secret!"
"Scared by my own rocket," admitted Dad to Mom. "I _am_
nervous. It's silly to think there'll ever be any more rockets.
Except _one_, perhaps, if Edwards and his wife get through
with _their_ ship."
He put his tiny radio to his ear again. After two mintes
he dropped his hand as you would drop a rag.
"It's over at last," he said to Mom. "The radio just went
off the atomic beam. Every other world station's gone. They
dwindled down to a couple in the last few years. Now the
air's completely silent. It'll probably remain silent."
"For how long?" asked Robert.
"Maybe--your great-grandchildren will hear it again," said
Dad. He just sat there, and the children were caught in the
center of his awe and defeat and resignation and acceptance.
Finally he put the boat out into the canal again, and
they continued in the direction in which they had originally
started.
It was getting late. Already the sun was down the sky, and
a series of dead cities lay ahead of them.
Dad talked very quietly and gently to his sons. Many times
in the past he had been brisk, distant, removed from them, but
now he patted them on the head with just a word and they felt
it.
"Mike, pick a city."
"What, Dad?"
"Pick a city, Son. Any one of these cities we pass."
"All right," said Michael. "How do I pick?"
"Pick the one you like the most. You, too, Robert and Tim.
Pick the city you like best."
"I want a city with Martians in it," said Michael.
"You'll have that," said Dad. "I promise." His lips were
for the children, but his eyes were for Mom.
They passed six cities in twenty minutes. Dad didn't
say anything more about the explosions; he seemed much
more interested in having fun with his sons, keeping them
happy, than anything else.
Michael liked the first city they passed, but this was
vetoed because everyone doubted quick first judgments. The
second city nobody liked. It was an Earth Man's settlement,
built of wood and already rotting into sawdust. Timothy liked
the third city because it was large. The fourth and fifth were
too small and the sixth brought acclaim from everyone, induding
Mother, who joined in the Gees, Goshes, and Look-at-thats!
There were fifty or sixty huge structures still standing,
streets were dusty but paved, and you could see one or two
old centrifugal fountains still pulsing wetly in the plazas.
That was the only life--water leaping in the late sunlight.
"This is the city," said everybody.
Steering the boat to a wharf, Dad jumped out.
"Here we are. This is ours. This is where we live from now
on!"
"From now on?" Michael was incredulous. He stood up,
looking, and then turned to blink back at where the rocket used
to be. "What about the rocket? What about Minnesota?"
"Here," said Dad.
He touched the small radio to Michael's blond head.
"Listen."
Michael listened.
"Nothing," he said.
"That's right. Nothing. Nothing at all any more. No
more Minneapolis, no more rockets, no more Earth."
Michael considered the lethal revelation and began to
sob little dry sobs.
"Wait a moment," said Dad the next instant. "I'm giving
you a lot more in exchange, Mike!"
"What?" Michael held off the tears, curious, but quite
ready to continue in case Dad's further revelation was
as disconcerting as the original.
"I'm giving you this city, Mike. It's yours."
"Mine?"
"For you and Robert and Timothy, all three of you, to own
for yourselves."
Timothy bounded from the boat "Look, guys, all for _us!_
All of _that!_" He was playing the game with Dad, playing it
large and playing it well. Later, after it was all over and
things had settled, he could go off by himself and cry for
ten minutes. But now it was still a game, still a family
outing, and the other kids must be kept playing.
Mike jumped out with Robert. They helped Mom.
"Be careful of your sister," said Dad, and nobody knew
what he meant until later.
They hurried into the great pink-stoned city, whispering
among themselves, because dead cities have a way of making you
want to whisper, to watch the sun go down.
"In about five days," said Dad quietly, "I'll go back down
to where our rocket was and collect the food hidden in the
ruins there and bring it here; and I'll hunt for Bert Edwards
and his wife and daughters there."
"Daughters?" asked Timothy. "How many?"
"Four."
"I can see that'll cause trouble later." Mom nodded
slowly.
"Girls." Michael made a face like an ancient Martian stone
image. "Girls."
"Are they coming in a rocket too?"
"Yes. If they make it. Family rockets are made for travel
to the Moon, not Mars. We were lucky we got through."
"Where did you get the rocket?" whispered Timothy, for
the other boys were running ahead.
"I saved it. I saved it for twenty years, Tim. I had it
hidden away, hoping I'd never have to use it. I suppose I
should have given it to the government for the war, but I
kept thinking about Mars. . . ."
"And a picnic!"
"Right. This is between you and me. When I saw everything
was finishing on Earth, after I'd waited until the last moment,
I packed us up. Bert Edwards had a ship hidden, too, but we
decided it would be safer to take off separately, in case
anyone tried to shoot us down."
"Why'd you blow up the rocket, Dad?"
"So we can't go back, ever. And so if any of those evil
men ever come to Mars they won't know we're here."
"Is that why you look up all the time?"
"Yes, it's silly. They won't follow us, ever. They haven't
anything to follow with. I'm being too careful, is all."
Michael came running back. "Is this really _our_ city,
Dad?"
"The whole darn planet belongs to us, kids. The whole
darn planet."
They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler
of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents,
trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big
a world really was.
Night came quickly in the thin atmosphere, and Dad left
them in the square by the pulsing fountain, went down to the
boat, and came walking back carrying a stack of paper in his
big hands.
He laid the papers in a clutter in an old courtyard and
set them afire. To keep warm, they crouched around the blaze
and laughed, and Timothy saw the little letters leap like
frightened animals when the flames touched and engulfed them.
The papers crinkled like an old man's skin, and the cremation
surrounded innumerable words:
"GOVERNMENT BONDS; Business Graph, 1999; Religious
Prejudice: An Essay; The Science of Logistics; Problems of
the Pan-American Unity; Stock Report for July 3, 1998; The
War Digest . . ."
Dad had insisted on bringing these papers for this
purpose. He sat there and fed them into the fire, one by one,
with satisfaction, and told his children what it all meant.
"It's time I told you a few things. I don't suppose it
was fair, keeping so much from you. I don't know if you'll
understand, but I have to talk, even if only part of it gets
over to you."
He dropped a leaf in the fire.
"I'm burning a way of life, just like that way of life
is being burned clean of Earth right now. Forgive me if I talk
like a politician. I am, after all, a former state governor,
and I was honest and they hated me for it. Life on Earth never
settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far
ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a
mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things,
gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items,
emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars
got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That's what
the silent radio means. That's what we ran away from.
"We were lucky. There aren't any more rockets left. It's
time you knew this isn't a fishing trip at all. I put off
telling you. Earth is gone. Interplanetary travel won't be back
for centuries, maybe never. But that way of life proved itself
wrong and strangled itself with its own hands. You're young.
I'll tell you this again every day until it sinks in."
He paused to feed more papers to the fire.
"Now we're alone. We and a handful of others who'll land
in a few days. Enough to start over. Enough to turn away from
all that back on Earth and strike out on a new line--"
The fire leaped up to emphasize his talking. And then all
the papers were gone except one. All the laws and beliefs of
Earth were burnt into small hot ashes which soon would be
carried off inawind.
Timothy looked at the last thing that Dad tossed in the
fire. It was a map of the World, and it wrinkled and distorted
itself hotly and went--flimpf--and was gone like a warm,
black butterfly. Timothy turned away.
"Now I'm going to show you the Martians," said Dad. "Come
on, all of you. Here, Alice." He took her hand.
Michael was crying loudly, and Dad picked him up and
carried him, and they walked down through the ruins toward
the canal.
The canal. Where tomorrow or the next day their future
wives would come up in a boat, small laughing girls now, with
their father and mother.
The night came down around them, and there were stars.
But Timothy couldn't find Earth. It had already set. That
was something to think about.
A night bird called among the ruins as they walked. Dad
said, "Your mother and I will try to teach you. Perhaps we'll
fail. I hope not. We've had a good lot to see and learn from.
We planned this trip years ago, before you were born. Even if
there hadn't been a war we would have come to Mars, I think,
to live and form our own standard of living. It would have
been another century before Mars would have been really
poisoned by the Earth civilization. Now, of course--"
They reached the canal. It was long and straight and cool
and wet and reflective in the night.
"I've always wanted to see a Martian," said Michael.
"Where are they, Dad? You promised."
"There they are," said Dad, and he shifted Michael on
his shoulder and pointed straight down.
The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver.
The Martians were there--in the canal--reflected in the
water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.
The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long
silent time from the rippling water. . . .
Origin: Рэй Брэдбери .RU
http://www.raybradbury.ru
The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling
light.
Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace.
How carefully it had inquired, "Who goes there? What's
the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and
whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in
an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which
bordered on a mechanical paranoia.
It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow
brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled,
flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!
The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big,
small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone
away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly,
uselessly.
_Twelve noon_.
A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The
dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered
with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud.
Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud,
angry at inconvenience.
For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the
wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed
swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized
in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There,
down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into
the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in
a dark corner.
The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door,
at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence
was here.
It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind
the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house
with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.
The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing,
its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at
its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for
an hour.
_Two o'clock_, sang a voice.
Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice
hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical
wind.
_Two-fifteen_.
The dog was gone.
In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl
of sparks leaped up the chimney.
_Two thirty-five_.
Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards
fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on
an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.
But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.
At four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies
back through the paneled walls.
_Four-thirty_.
The nursery walls glowed.
Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink
antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The
walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy.
Hidden films clocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the
walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp,
cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron
crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate
red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors!
There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees
within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And
there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh
jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched
grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed,
mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into
thorn brakes and water holes.
It was the children's hour.
_Five o'clock_. The bath filled with clear hot water.
_Six, seven, eight o'clock_. The dinner dishes manipulated
like magic tricks, and in the study a _click_. In the metal
stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly,
a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it,
smoking, waiting.
_Nine o'clock_. The beds warmed their hidden circuits,
for nights were cool here.
_Nine-five_. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:
"Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?"
The house was silent.
The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference,
I shall select a poem at random." Quiet music rose to back
the voice. "Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite. . . .
"_There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone_."
The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell
away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs
faced each other between the silent walls, and the music
played.
At ten o'clock the house began to die.
The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the
kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the
stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!
"Fire!" screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water
pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on
the linoleum, licking eating under the kitchen door, while
the voices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"
The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut,
but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and
sucked upon the fire.
The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry
sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up
the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the
walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall
sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.
But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a
stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which
had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was
gone.
The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos
and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off
the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black
shavings.
Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the
colors of drapes!
And then, reinforcements.
From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with
faucet mouths gushing green chemical.
The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight
of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over
the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green
froth.
But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the
house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion!
The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into
bronze shrapnel on the beams.
The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the
clothes hung there.
The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton
cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if
a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and
capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run,
run! Heat snapped mirrors like the brittle winter ice. And
the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery
rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a
forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped
their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four,
five voices died.
In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared,
purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in cirdes,
changing color, and ten million animals, running before the
fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river. . . .
Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the
fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard
announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn
by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out
and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand
things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the
hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac
confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning
mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And
one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read
poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools
burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down,
puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and
timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at
a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast,
twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the
stove working again, hysterically hissing!
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor.
The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze,
armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons
thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.
Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.
Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall
stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over
again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped
rubble and steam:
"Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today
is . . ."
October 2026: THE MILLION-YEAR PICNIC
Somehow the idea was brought up by Mom that perhaps the
whole family would enjoy a fishing trip. But they weren't Mom's
words; Timothy knew that. They were Dad's words, and Mom used
them for him somehow.
Dad shuffled his feet in a clutter of Martian pebbles
and agreed. So immediately there was a tumult and a shouting,
and very quickly the camp was tucked into capsules and
containers, Mom slipped into traveling jumpers and blouse,
Dad stuffed his pipe full with trembling hands, his eyes on
the Martian sky, and the three boys piled yelling into
the motorboat, none of them really keeping an eye on Mom and
Dad, except Timothy.
Dad pushed a stud. The water boat sent a humming sound up
into the sky. The water shook back and the boat nosed ahead,
and the family cried, "Hurrah!"
Timothy sat in the back of the boat with Dad, his small
fingers atop Dad's hairy ones, watching the canal twist,
leaving the crumbled place behind where they had landed in
their small family rocket all the way from Earth. He remembered
the night before they left Earth, the hustling and hurrying
the rocket that Dad had found somewhere, somehow, and the talk
of a vacation on Mars. A long way to go for a vacation, but
Timothy said nothing because of his younger brothers. They came
to Mars and now, first thing, or so they said, they were
going fishing.
Dad had a funny look in his eyes as the boat went
up-canal. A look that Timothy couldn't figure. It was made
of strong light and maybe a sort of relief. It made the deep
wrinkles laugh instead of worry or cry.
So there went the cooling rocket, around a bend, gone.
"How far are we going?" Robert splashed his hand. It
looked like a small crab jumping in the violet water.
Dad exhaled. "A million years."
"Gee," said Robert.
"Look, kids." Mother pointed one soft long arm. "There's
a dead city."
They looked with fervent anticipation, and the dead city
lay dead for them alone, drowsing in a hot silence of summer
made on Mars by a Martian weatherman.
And Dad looked as if he was pleased that it was dead.
It was a futile spread of pink rocks sleeping on a rise
of sand, a few tumbled pillars, one lonely shrine, and then
the sweep of sand again. Nothing else for miles. A white desert
around the canal and a blue desert over it.
Just then a bird flew up. Like a stone thrown across a
blue pond, hitting, falling deep, and vanishing.
Dad got a frightened look when he saw it. "I thought it
was a rocket."
Timothy looked at the deep ocean sky, trying to see Earth
and the war and the ruined cities and the men killing each
other since the day he was born. But he saw nothing. The war
was as removed and far off as two flies battling to the death
in the arch of a great high and silent cathedral. And just
as senseless.
William Thomas wiped his forehead and felt the touch of
his son's hand on his arm, like a young tarantula, thrilled.
He beamed at his son. "How goes it, Timmy?"
"Fine, Dad."
Timothy hadn't quite figured out what was ticking inside
the vast adult mechanism beside him. The man with the immense
hawk nose, sunburnt, peeling--and the hot blue eyes like agate
marbles you play with after school in summer back on Earth, and
the long thick columnar legs in the loose riding breeches.
"What are you looking at so hard, Dad?"
"I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense,
good government, peace, and responsibility."
"All that up there?"
"No. I didn't find it. It's not there any more. Maybe
it'll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it
was ever there."
"Huh?"
"See the fish," said Dad, pointing.
There rose a soprano clamor from all three boys as they
rocked the boat in arching their tender necks to see. They
_oohed_ and _ahed_. A silver ring fish floated by them,
undulating, and closing like an iris, instantly, around
food partides, to assimilate them.
Dad looked at it. His voice was deep and quiet.
"Just like war. War swims along, sees food, contracts.
A moment later--Earth is gone."
"William," said Mom.
"Sorry," said Dad.
They sat still and felt the canal water rush cool, swift,
and glassy. The only sound was the motor hum, the glide of
water, the sun expanding the air.
"When do we see the Martians?" cried Michael.
"Quite soon, perhaps," said Father. "Maybe tonight."
"Oh, but the Martians are a dead race now," said Mom.
"No, they're not. I'll show you some Martians, all right,"
Dad said presently.
Timothy scowled at that but said nothing. Everything was
odd now. Vacations and fishing and looks between people.
The other boys were already engaged making shelves of
their small hands and peering under them toward the seven-foot
stone banks of the canal, watching for Martians.
"What do they look like?" demanded Michael.
"You'll know them when you see them." Dad sort of laughed,
and Timothy saw a pulse beating time in his cheek.
Mother was slender and soft, with a woven plait of
spungold hair over her head in a tiara, and eyes the color of
the deep cool canal water where it ran in shadow, almost
purple, with flecks of amber caught in it. You could see
her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish--some
bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy,
and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being
nothing but color and nothing else. She sat in the boat's prow,
one hand resting on the side lip, the other on the lap of her
dark blue breeches, and a line of sunburnt soft neck showing
where her blouse opened like a white flower.
She kept looking ahead to see what was there, and, not
being able to see it clearly enough, she looked backward toward
her husband, and through his eyes, reflected then, she saw what
was ahead; and since he added part of himself to this
reflection, a determined firmness, her face relaxed and she
accepted it and she turned back, knowing suddenly what to look
for.
Timothy looked too. But all he saw was a straight pencil
line of canal going violet through a wide shallow valley penned
by low, eroded hills, and on until it fell over the sky's edge.
And this canal went on and on, through cities that would have
rattled like beetles in a dry skull if you shook them. A
hundred or two hundred cities dreaming hot summer-day dreams
and cool summer-night dreams . . .
They had come millions of miles for this outing--to fish.
But there had been a gun on the rocket. This was a vacation.
But why all the food, more than enough to last them years and
years, left hidden back there near the rocket? Vacation. Just
behind the veil of the vacation was not a soft face of
laughter, but something hard and bony and perhaps terrifying.
Timothy could not lift the veil, and the two other boys were
busy being ten and eight years old, respectively.
"No Martians yet. Nuts." Robert put his V-shaped chin on
his hands and glared at the canal.
Dad had brought an atomic radio along, strapped to his
wrist. It functioned on an old-fashioned principle: you held
it against the bones near your ear and it vibrated singing
or talking to you. Dad listened to it now. His face looked like
one of those fallen Martian cities, caved in, sucked. dry,
almost dead.
Then he gave it to Mom to listen. Her lips dropped open.
"What--" Timothy started to question, but never finished
what he wished to say.
For at that moment there were two titanic, marrow-jolting
explosions that grew upon themselves, followed by a half dozen
minor concussions.
Jerking his head up, Dad notched the boat speed
higher immediately. The boat leaped and jounced and spanked.
This shook Robert out of his funk and elicited yelps of
frightened but esctatic joy from Michael, who clung to Mom's
legs and watched the water pour by his nose in a wet torrent.
Dad swerved the boat, cut speed, and ducked the craft into
a little branch canal and under an ancient, crumbling stone
wharf that smelled of crab flesh. The boat rammed the wharf
hard enough to throw them all forward, but no one was hurt, and
Dad was already twisted to see if the ripples on the canal
were enough to map their route into hiding. Water lines went
across, lapped the stones, and rippled back to meet each
other, settling, to be dappled by the sun. It all went away.
Dad listened. So did everybody.
Dad's breathing echoed like fists beating against the cold
wet wharf stones. In the shadow, Mom's cat eyes just watched
Father for some clue to what next.
Dad relaxed and blew out a breath, laughing at himself.
"The rocket, of course. I'm getting jumpy. The rocket."
Michael said, "What happened, Dad, what happened?"
"Oh, we just blew up our rocket, is all," said Timothy,
trying to sound matter-of-fact. "I've heard rockets blown
up before. Ours just blew."
"Why did we blow up our rocket?" asked Michael. "Huh,
Dad?"
"It's part of the game, silly!" said Timothy.
"A game!" Michael and Robert loved the word.
"Dad fixed it so it would blow up and no one'd know where
we landed or went! In case they ever came looking, see?"
"Oh boy, a secret!"
"Scared by my own rocket," admitted Dad to Mom. "I _am_
nervous. It's silly to think there'll ever be any more rockets.
Except _one_, perhaps, if Edwards and his wife get through
with _their_ ship."
He put his tiny radio to his ear again. After two mintes
he dropped his hand as you would drop a rag.
"It's over at last," he said to Mom. "The radio just went
off the atomic beam. Every other world station's gone. They
dwindled down to a couple in the last few years. Now the
air's completely silent. It'll probably remain silent."
"For how long?" asked Robert.
"Maybe--your great-grandchildren will hear it again," said
Dad. He just sat there, and the children were caught in the
center of his awe and defeat and resignation and acceptance.
Finally he put the boat out into the canal again, and
they continued in the direction in which they had originally
started.
It was getting late. Already the sun was down the sky, and
a series of dead cities lay ahead of them.
Dad talked very quietly and gently to his sons. Many times
in the past he had been brisk, distant, removed from them, but
now he patted them on the head with just a word and they felt
it.
"Mike, pick a city."
"What, Dad?"
"Pick a city, Son. Any one of these cities we pass."
"All right," said Michael. "How do I pick?"
"Pick the one you like the most. You, too, Robert and Tim.
Pick the city you like best."
"I want a city with Martians in it," said Michael.
"You'll have that," said Dad. "I promise." His lips were
for the children, but his eyes were for Mom.
They passed six cities in twenty minutes. Dad didn't
say anything more about the explosions; he seemed much
more interested in having fun with his sons, keeping them
happy, than anything else.
Michael liked the first city they passed, but this was
vetoed because everyone doubted quick first judgments. The
second city nobody liked. It was an Earth Man's settlement,
built of wood and already rotting into sawdust. Timothy liked
the third city because it was large. The fourth and fifth were
too small and the sixth brought acclaim from everyone, induding
Mother, who joined in the Gees, Goshes, and Look-at-thats!
There were fifty or sixty huge structures still standing,
streets were dusty but paved, and you could see one or two
old centrifugal fountains still pulsing wetly in the plazas.
That was the only life--water leaping in the late sunlight.
"This is the city," said everybody.
Steering the boat to a wharf, Dad jumped out.
"Here we are. This is ours. This is where we live from now
on!"
"From now on?" Michael was incredulous. He stood up,
looking, and then turned to blink back at where the rocket used
to be. "What about the rocket? What about Minnesota?"
"Here," said Dad.
He touched the small radio to Michael's blond head.
"Listen."
Michael listened.
"Nothing," he said.
"That's right. Nothing. Nothing at all any more. No
more Minneapolis, no more rockets, no more Earth."
Michael considered the lethal revelation and began to
sob little dry sobs.
"Wait a moment," said Dad the next instant. "I'm giving
you a lot more in exchange, Mike!"
"What?" Michael held off the tears, curious, but quite
ready to continue in case Dad's further revelation was
as disconcerting as the original.
"I'm giving you this city, Mike. It's yours."
"Mine?"
"For you and Robert and Timothy, all three of you, to own
for yourselves."
Timothy bounded from the boat "Look, guys, all for _us!_
All of _that!_" He was playing the game with Dad, playing it
large and playing it well. Later, after it was all over and
things had settled, he could go off by himself and cry for
ten minutes. But now it was still a game, still a family
outing, and the other kids must be kept playing.
Mike jumped out with Robert. They helped Mom.
"Be careful of your sister," said Dad, and nobody knew
what he meant until later.
They hurried into the great pink-stoned city, whispering
among themselves, because dead cities have a way of making you
want to whisper, to watch the sun go down.
"In about five days," said Dad quietly, "I'll go back down
to where our rocket was and collect the food hidden in the
ruins there and bring it here; and I'll hunt for Bert Edwards
and his wife and daughters there."
"Daughters?" asked Timothy. "How many?"
"Four."
"I can see that'll cause trouble later." Mom nodded
slowly.
"Girls." Michael made a face like an ancient Martian stone
image. "Girls."
"Are they coming in a rocket too?"
"Yes. If they make it. Family rockets are made for travel
to the Moon, not Mars. We were lucky we got through."
"Where did you get the rocket?" whispered Timothy, for
the other boys were running ahead.
"I saved it. I saved it for twenty years, Tim. I had it
hidden away, hoping I'd never have to use it. I suppose I
should have given it to the government for the war, but I
kept thinking about Mars. . . ."
"And a picnic!"
"Right. This is between you and me. When I saw everything
was finishing on Earth, after I'd waited until the last moment,
I packed us up. Bert Edwards had a ship hidden, too, but we
decided it would be safer to take off separately, in case
anyone tried to shoot us down."
"Why'd you blow up the rocket, Dad?"
"So we can't go back, ever. And so if any of those evil
men ever come to Mars they won't know we're here."
"Is that why you look up all the time?"
"Yes, it's silly. They won't follow us, ever. They haven't
anything to follow with. I'm being too careful, is all."
Michael came running back. "Is this really _our_ city,
Dad?"
"The whole darn planet belongs to us, kids. The whole
darn planet."
They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler
of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents,
trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big
a world really was.
Night came quickly in the thin atmosphere, and Dad left
them in the square by the pulsing fountain, went down to the
boat, and came walking back carrying a stack of paper in his
big hands.
He laid the papers in a clutter in an old courtyard and
set them afire. To keep warm, they crouched around the blaze
and laughed, and Timothy saw the little letters leap like
frightened animals when the flames touched and engulfed them.
The papers crinkled like an old man's skin, and the cremation
surrounded innumerable words:
"GOVERNMENT BONDS; Business Graph, 1999; Religious
Prejudice: An Essay; The Science of Logistics; Problems of
the Pan-American Unity; Stock Report for July 3, 1998; The
War Digest . . ."
Dad had insisted on bringing these papers for this
purpose. He sat there and fed them into the fire, one by one,
with satisfaction, and told his children what it all meant.
"It's time I told you a few things. I don't suppose it
was fair, keeping so much from you. I don't know if you'll
understand, but I have to talk, even if only part of it gets
over to you."
He dropped a leaf in the fire.
"I'm burning a way of life, just like that way of life
is being burned clean of Earth right now. Forgive me if I talk
like a politician. I am, after all, a former state governor,
and I was honest and they hated me for it. Life on Earth never
settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far
ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a
mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things,
gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items,
emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars
got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That's what
the silent radio means. That's what we ran away from.
"We were lucky. There aren't any more rockets left. It's
time you knew this isn't a fishing trip at all. I put off
telling you. Earth is gone. Interplanetary travel won't be back
for centuries, maybe never. But that way of life proved itself
wrong and strangled itself with its own hands. You're young.
I'll tell you this again every day until it sinks in."
He paused to feed more papers to the fire.
"Now we're alone. We and a handful of others who'll land
in a few days. Enough to start over. Enough to turn away from
all that back on Earth and strike out on a new line--"
The fire leaped up to emphasize his talking. And then all
the papers were gone except one. All the laws and beliefs of
Earth were burnt into small hot ashes which soon would be
carried off inawind.
Timothy looked at the last thing that Dad tossed in the
fire. It was a map of the World, and it wrinkled and distorted
itself hotly and went--flimpf--and was gone like a warm,
black butterfly. Timothy turned away.
"Now I'm going to show you the Martians," said Dad. "Come
on, all of you. Here, Alice." He took her hand.
Michael was crying loudly, and Dad picked him up and
carried him, and they walked down through the ruins toward
the canal.
The canal. Where tomorrow or the next day their future
wives would come up in a boat, small laughing girls now, with
their father and mother.
The night came down around them, and there were stars.
But Timothy couldn't find Earth. It had already set. That
was something to think about.
A night bird called among the ruins as they walked. Dad
said, "Your mother and I will try to teach you. Perhaps we'll
fail. I hope not. We've had a good lot to see and learn from.
We planned this trip years ago, before you were born. Even if
there hadn't been a war we would have come to Mars, I think,
to live and form our own standard of living. It would have
been another century before Mars would have been really
poisoned by the Earth civilization. Now, of course--"
They reached the canal. It was long and straight and cool
and wet and reflective in the night.
"I've always wanted to see a Martian," said Michael.
"Where are they, Dad? You promised."
"There they are," said Dad, and he shifted Michael on
his shoulder and pointed straight down.
The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver.
The Martians were there--in the canal--reflected in the
water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.
The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long
silent time from the rippling water. . . .
Origin: Рэй Брэдбери .RU
http://www.raybradbury.ru