Imagine that you died. And there, as you are leaving your body, you are welcomed with long dead friends, and relatives. They welcome you, and it is a joyous time. They take you by the hand and lead you towards the bright tunnel of light.
Would you go with them?
This is a story that ponders that question.
…
Without a doubt one of the Bradbury stories that has made the biggest impression on me. It’s about strategy.
And horror.
The story is taken from Bradbury’s amazing The Martian Chronicles, a collection of short stories strung together to tell the story of what happens when human beings try to colonize Mars.
In this particular tale, an expedition from Earth to Mars encounters a town that seems eerily, yet comfortingly, familiar to them. It’s even populated by long-lost relatives and family.
But, of course, it doesn’t have a happy ending.
The Third Expedition by Ray Bradbury
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,
holding the stranger’s hand. “This is my brother Edward. Ed,
meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston! My brother!”
They tugged at each other’s hands and arms and then
finally embraced.
“Ed!”
“John, you bum, you!”
“You’re looking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what _is_ this? You
haven’t changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you
were twenty-six and I was nineteen. Good God, so many years
ago, and here you are and, Lord, what goes on?”
“Mom’s waiting,” said Edward Black, grinning.
“Mom?”
“And Dad too.”
“Dad?” The captain almost fell as if he had been hit by
a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and without co.ordination.
“Mom and Dad alive? Where?”
“At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue.”
“The old house.” The captain stared in delighted amaze.
“Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?”
Hinkston was gone. He had seen his own house down the
street and was running for it. Lustig was laughing. “You
see, Captain, what happened to everyone on the rocket? They
couldn’t help themselves.”
“Yes. Yes.” The captain shut his eyes. “When I open my
eyes you’ll be gone.” He blinked. “You’re still there. God, Ed,
but you look _fine!_”
“Come on, lunch’s waiting. I told Mom.”
Lustig said, “Sir, I’ll be with my grandfolks if you need
me.”
“What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then.”
Edward seized his arm and marched him. “There’s the
house. Remember it?”
“Hell! Bet I can beat you to the front porch!”
They ran. The trees roared over Captain Black’s head; the
earth roared under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward
Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw
the house rush forward, the screen door swing wide. “Beat you!”
cried Edward. “I’m an old man,” panted the captain, “and you’re
still young. But then, you _always_ beat me, I remember!”
In the doorway, Mom, pink, plump, and bright. Behind
her, pepper-gray, Dad, his pipe in his hand.
“Mom, Dad!”
He ran up the steps like a child to meet them.
It was a fine long afternoon. They finished a late lunch
and they sat in the parlor and he told them all about his
rocket and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just
the same and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted
it thoughtfully in his old fashion. There was a big turkey
dinner at night and time flowing on. When the drumsticks were
sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain
leaned back and exhaled his deep satisfaction, Night was in all
the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of
pink light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down
the street came sounds of music, pianos playing, doors slammng.
Mom put a record on the victrola, and she and Captain John
Black had a dance. She was wearing the same perfume he
remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in
the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they
danced lightly to the music. “It’s not every day,” she said,
“you get a second chance to live.”
“I’ll wake in the morning,” said the captain. “And I’ll be
in my rocket, in space, and all this will be gone.”
“No, don’t think that,” she cried softly. “Don’t question.
God’s good to us. Let’s be happy.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
The record ended in a circular hissing.
“You’re tired, Son.” Dad pointed with his pipe. “Your
old bedroom’s waiting for you, brass bed and all.”
“But I should report my men in.”
“Why?”
“Why? Well, I don’t know. No reason, I guess. No, none at
all. They’re all eating or in bed. A good night’s sleep won’t
hurt them.”
“Good night, Son.” Mom kissed his cheek. “It’s good to
have you home.”
“It’s good to _be_ home.”
He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books
and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking
with Edward. Edward pushed a door open, and there was the
yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college and
a very musty raccoon coat which he stroked with muted
affection. “It’s too much,” said the captain. “I’m numb and
I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been
out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an
umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.”
Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the
pillows. He slid the window up and let the night-blooming
jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant
dancing and whispering.
“So this is Mars,” said the captain, undressing.
“This is it.” Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves,
drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders
and the good muscular neck.
The lights were out; they were in bed, side by side, as in
the days how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was
flourished by the scent of jasmine pushing the lace curtains
out upon the dark air of the room. Among the trees, upon a
lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it
was playing softly, “Always.”
The thought of Marilyn came to his mind.
“Is Marilyn here?”
His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from
the window, waited and then said, “Yes. She’s out of town.
But she’ll be here in the morning.”
The captain shut his eyes. “I want to see Marilyn very
much.”
The room was square and quiet except for their breathing.
“Good night, Ed.”
A pause. “Good night, John.”
He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the
first time the stress of the day was moved aside; he could
think logically now, It had all been emotion. The bands
playing, the familiar faces. But now . . .
How? he wondered. How was all this made? And why? For
what purpose? Out of the goodness of some divine intervention?
Was God, then, really that thoughtful of his children? How and
why and what for?
He considered the various theories advanced in the first
heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds
of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind,
turning, throwing out dull flashes of light. Mom. Dad. Edward.
Mars. Earth. Mars. Martians.
Who had lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians?
Or had this always been the way it was today?
Martians. He repeated the word idly, inwardly.
He laughed out loud almost. He had the most ridiculous
theory quite suddenly. It gave him a kind of chill. It was
really nothing to consider, of course. Highly improbable.
Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous.
But, he thought, just _suppose_ . . . Just suppose, now,
that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship
coming and saw us inside our ship and hated us, Suppose, now,
just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us,
as invaders, as unwanted ones, and they wanted to do it in a
very clever way, so that we would be taken off guard. Well,
what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against
Earth Men with atomic weapons?
The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory,
and imagination.
Suppose all of these houses aren’t real at all, this bed
not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given
substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians,
thought Captain John Black. Suppose these houses are really
some _other_ shape, a Martian shape, but, by playing on my
desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my
old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions.
What better way to fool a man, using his own mother and father
as bait?
And this town, so old, from the year 1926, long before
_any_ of my men were born. From a year when I was six years old
and there _were_ records of Harry Lauder, and Maxfield Parrish
paintings _still_ hanging, and bead curtains, and “Beautiful
Ohio,” and turn-of-the-century architecture. What if the
Martians took the memories of a town _exclusively_ from _my_
mind? They say childhood memories are the clearest. And after
they built the town from my mind, they populated it with
the most-loved people from all the minds of the people on
the rocket!
And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are
not my mother and father at all, But two Martians, incredibly
brilliant, with the ability to keep me under this dreaming
hypnosis all of the time.
And that brass band today? What a startlingly wonderful
plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then Hinkston, then
gather a crowd; and all the men in the rocket, seeing mothers,
aunts, uncles, sweethearts, dead ten, twenty wears ago,
naturally, disregarding orders, rush out and abandon ship. What
more natural? What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A
man doesn’t ask too many questions when his mother is soddenly
brought back to life; he’s much too happy. And here we all
are tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no
weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight,
empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover
that all of this was part of some great clever plan by the
Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us? Sometime during
the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed will change
form, melt, shift, and become another thing, a terrible thing,
a Martian. It would be very simple for him just to turn over in
bed and put a knife into my heart. And in all those other
houses down the street, a dozen other brothers or fathers
suddenly melting away and taking knives and doing things to
the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth. . . .
His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was
cold. Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very
afraid.
He lifted himself in bed and listened. The night was very
quiet The music had stopped. The wind had died. His brother
lay sleeping beside him.
Carefully he lifted the covers, rolled them back. He
slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when
his brother’s voice said, “Where are you going?”
“What?”
His brother’s voice was quite cold. “I said, where do you
think you’re going?”
“For a drink of water.”
“But you’re not thirsty.”
“Yes, yes, I am.”
“No, you’re not.”
Captain John Black broke and ran across the room. He
screamed. He screamed twice.
He never reached the door.
In the morning the brass band played a mournful dirge.
From every house in the street came little solemn processions
bearing long boxes, and along the sun-filled street, weeping,
came the grandmas and mothers and sisters and brothers and
uncles and fathers, walking to the churchyard, where there were
new holes freshly dug and new tombstones installed. Sixteen
holes in all, and sixteen tombstones.
The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes
looking like the mayor, sometimes looking like something else.
Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward,
and they cried, their faces melting now from a familiar face
into something else.
Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping, their
faces shifting like wax, shimmering as all things shimmer on a
hot day.
The coffins were lowered. Someone murmured about “the
unexpected and sudden deaths of sixteen fine men during the
night–”
Earth pounded down on the coffin lids.
The brass band, playing “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,”
marched and slammed back into town, and everyone took the day
off.
Conclusion
And this is only the beginning.
Who knows what greatness, and strange mysteries lie in the future ahead of you?
Do you want more?
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Ray Bradbury.
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