The Martian Chronicles Read online

  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 circle. 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 t
he 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.