The Illustrated Man Page 9

  "Well, be seeing you, Doug," he'd say, and we'd shake hands.

  "In about three months?"

  "Right."

  And he'd walk away down the street, not taking a helicopter or beetle or bus, just walking with his uniform hidden in his small underarm case; he didn't want anyone to think he was vain about being a Rocket Man.

  Mother would come out to eat breakfast, one piece of dry toast, about an hour later.

  But now it was tonight, the first night, the good night, and he wasn't looking at the stars much at all.

  "Let's go to the television carnival," I said.

  "Fine," said Dad.

  Mother smiled at me.

  And we rushed off to town in a helicopter and took Dad through a thousand exhibits, to keep his face and head down with us and not looking anywhere else. And as we laughed at the funny things and looked serious at the serious ones, I thought, My father goes to Saturn and Neptune and Pluto, but he never brings me presents. Other boys whose fathers go into space bring back bits of ore from Callisto and hunks of black meteor or blue sand. But I have to get my own collection, trading from other boys, the Martian rocks and Mercurian sands which filled my room, but about which Dad would never comment.

  On occasion, I remembered, he brought something for Mother. He planted some Martian sunflowers once in our yard, but after he was gone a month and the sunflowers grew large, Mom ran out one day and cut them all down.

  Without thinking, as we paused at one of the three-dimensional exhibits, I asked Dad the question I always asked:

  "What's it like, out in space?"

  Mother shot me a frightened glance. It was too late.

  Dad stood there for a full half minute trying to find an answer, then he shrugged.

  "It's the best thing in a lifetime of best things." Then he caught himself. "Oh, it's really nothing at all. Routine. You wouldn't like it." He looked at me, apprehensively.

  "But you always go back."

  "Habit."

  "Where're you going next?"

  "I haven't decided yet. I'll think it over."

  He always thought it over. In those days rocket pilots were rare and he could pick and choose, work when he liked. On the third night of his homecoming you could see him picking and choosing among the stars.

  "Come on," said Mother, "let's go home."

  It was still early when we got home. I wanted Dad to put on his uniform. I shouldn't have asked--it always made Mother unhappy--but I could not help myself. I kept at him, though he had always refused. I had never seen him in it, and at last he said, "Oh, all right."

  We waited in the parlor while he went upstairs in the air flue. Mother looked at me dully, as if she couldn't believe that her own son could do this to her. I glanced away. "I'm sorry," I said.

  "You're not helping at all," she said. "At all."

  There was a whisper in the air flue a moment later.

  "Here I am," said Dad quietly.

  We looked at him in his uniform.

  It was glossy black with silver buttons and silver rims to the heels of the black boots, and it looked as if someone had cut the arms and legs and body from a dark nebula, with little faint stars glowing through it. It fit as close as a glove fits to a slender long hand, and it smelled like cool air and metal and space. It smelled of fire and time.

  Father stood, smiling awkwardly, in the center of the room.

  "Turn around," said Mother.

  Her eyes were remote, looking at him.

  When he was gone, she never talked of him. She never said anything about anything but the weather or the condition of my neck and the need of a washcloth for it, or the fact that she didn't sleep nights. Once she said the light was too strong at night.

  "But there's no moon this week," I said.

  "There's starlight," she said.

  I went to the store and bought her some darker, greener shades. As I lay in bed at night, I could hear her pull them down tight to the bottom of the windows. It made a long rustling noise.

  Once I tried to mow the lawn.

  "No." Mom stood in the door. "Put the mower away."

  So the grass went three months at a time without cutting. Dad cut it when he came home.

  She wouldn't let me do anything else either, like repairing the electrical breakfast maker or the mechanical book reader. She saved everything up, as if for Christmas. And then I would see Dad hammering or tinkering, and always smiling at his work, and Mother smiling over him, happy.

  No, she never talked of him when he was gone. And as for Dad, he never did anything to make a contact across the millions of miles. He said once, "If I called you, I'd want to be with you. I wouldn't be happy."

  Once Dad said to me, "Your mother treats me, sometimes, as if I weren't here--as if I were invisible."

  I had seen her do it. She would look just beyond him, over his shoulder, at his chin or hands, but never into his eyes. If she did look at his eyes, her eyes were covered with a film, like an animal going to sleep. She said yes at the right times, and smiled, but always a half second later than expected.

  "I'm not there for her," said Dad.

  But other days she would be there and he would be there for her, and they would hold hands and walk around the block, or take rides, with Mom's hair flying like a girl's behind her, and she would cut off all the mechanical devices in the kitchen and bake him incredible cakes and pies and cookies, looking deep into his face, her smile a real smile. But at the end of such days when he was there to her, she would always cry. And Dad would stand helpless, gazing about the room as if to find the answer, but never finding it.

  Dad turned slowly, in his uniform, for us to see.

  "Turn around again," said Mom.

  The next morning Dad came rushing into the house with handfuls of tickets. Pink rocket tickets for California, blue tickets for Mexico.

  "Come on!" he said. "We'll buy disposable clothes and burn them when they're soiled. Look, we take the noon rocket to L.A., the two-o'clock helicopter to Santa Barbara, the nine-o'clock plane to Ensenada, sleep overnight!"

  And we went to California and up and down the Pacific Coast for a day and a half, settling at last on the sands of Malibu to cook wieners at night. Dad was always listening or singing or watching things on all sides of him, holding onto things as if the world were a centrifuge going so swiftly that he might be flung off away from us at any instant.

  The last afternoon at Malibu Mom was up in the hotel room. Dad lay on the sand beside me for a long time in the hot sun. "Ah," he sighed, "this is it." His eyes were gently closed; he lay on his back, drinking the sun. "You miss this," he said.

  He meant "on the rocket," of course. But he never said "the rocket" or mentioned the rocket and all the things you couldn't have on the rocket. You couldn't have a salt wind on the rocket or a blue sky or a yellow sun or Mom's cooking. You couldn't talk to your fourteen-year-old boy on a rocket.

  "Let's hear it," he said at last.

  And I knew that now we would talk, as we had always talked, for three hours straight. All afternoon we would murmur back and forth in the lazy sun about my school grades, how high I could jump, how fast I could swim.

  Dad nodded each time I spoke and smiled and slapped my chest lightly in approval. We talked. We did not talk of rockets or space, but we talked of Mexico, where we had driven once in an ancient car, and of the butterflies we had caught in the rain forests of green warm Mexico at noon, seeing the hundred butterflies sucked to our radiator, dying there, beating their blue and crimson wings, twitching, beautiful, and sad. We talked of such Things instead of the things I wanted to talk about. And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sounds he could hear. He listened to the wind and the falling ocean and my voice, always with a rapt attention, a concentration that almost excluded physical bodies themselves and kept only the sounds. He shut his eyes to listen. I would see him listening to the lawn mower as he cut the grass by hand inst
ead of using the remote-control device, and I would see him smelling the cut grass as it sprayed up at him behind the mower in a green fount.

  "Doug," be said, about five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our towels and heading back along the beach near the surf, "I want you to promise me something."

  "What?"

  "Don't ever be a Rocket Man."

  I stopped.

  "I mean it," he said. "Because when you're out there you want to be here, and when you're here you want to be out there. Don't start that. Don't let it get hold of you."

  "But--"

  "You don't know what it is. Every time I'm out there I think, If I ever get back to Earth I'll stay there; I'll never go out again. But I go out, and I guess I'll always go out."

  "I've thought about being a Rocket Man for a long time," I said,

  He didn't hear me. "I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I started trying so damned hard to stay here."

  I remembered him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing and listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and the towns and the land and his family were the only real things and the good things. But I knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion from our front porch.

  "Promise me you won't be like me," he said.

  I hesitated awhile. "Okay," I said.

  He shook my hand. "Good boy," he said.

  The dinner was fine that night. Mom had run about the kitchen with handfuls of cinnamon and dough and pots and pans tinkling, and now a great turkey fumed on the table, with dressing, cranberry sauce, peas, and pumpkin pie.

  "In the middle of August?" said Dad, amazed.

  "You won't be here for Thanksgiving."

  "So I won't."

  He sniffed it. He lifted each lid from each tureen and let the flavor steam over his sunburned face. He said "Ah" to each. He looked at the room and his hands. He gazed at the pictures on the wall, the chairs, the table, me, and Mom. He cleared his throat. I saw him make up his mind. "Lilly?"

  "Yes?" Mom looked across her table which she had set like a wonderful silver trap, a miraculous gravy pit into which, like a struggling beast of the past caught in a tar pool, her husband might at last be caught and held, gazing out through a jail of wishbones, safe forever. Her eyes sparkled.

  "Lilly," said Dad.

  Go on, I thought crazily. Say it, quick; say you'll stay home this time, for good, and never go away; say it!

  Just then a passing helicopter jarred the room and the windowpane shook with a crystal sound. Dad glanced at the window.

  The blue stars of evening were there, and the red planet Mars was rising in the East.

  Dad looked at Mars a full minute. Then he put his hand out blindly toward me. "May I have some peas," he said.

  "Excuse me," said Mother. "I'm going to get some bread."

  She rushed out into the kitchen.

  "But there's bread on the table," I said.

  Dad didn't look at me as he began his meal.

  I couldn't sleep that night. I came downstairs at one in the morning and the moonlight was like ice on all the housetops, and dew glittered in a snow field on our grass. I stood in the doorway in my pajamas, feeling the warm night wind, and then I knew that Dad was sitting in the mechanical porch swing, gliding gently. I could see his profile tilted back, and he was watching the stars wheel over the sky. His eyes were like gray crystal there, the moon in each one.

  I went out and sat beside him.

  We glided awhile in the swing.

  At last I said, "How many ways are there to die in space?"

  "A million."

  "Name some."

  "The meteors hit you. The air goes out of your rocket. Or comets take you along with them. Concussion. Strangulation. Explosion. Centrifugal force. Too much acceleration. Too little. The heat, the cold, the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, the asteroids, the planetoids, radiation . . ."

  "And do they bury you?"

  "They never find you."

  "Where do you go?"

  "A billion miles away. Traveling graves, they call them. You become a meteor or a planetoid traveling forever through space."

  I said nothing.

  "One thing," he said later, "it's quick in space. Death. It's over like that. You don't linger. Most of the time you don't even know it. You're dead and that's it."

  We went up to bed.

  It was morning.

  Standing in the doorway, Dad listened to the yellow canary singing in its golden cage.

  "Well, I've decided," he said. "Next time I come home, I'm home to stay."

  "Dad!" I said.

  "Tell your mother that when she gets up," he said.

  "You mean it!"

  He nodded gravely. "See you in about three months."

  And there he went off down the street, carrying his uniform in its secret box, whistling and looking at the tall green trees and picking chinaberries off the chinaberry bush as he brushed by, tossing them ahead of him as he walked away into the bright shade of early morning. . . .

  I asked Mother about a few things that morning after Father had been gone a number of hours. "Dad said that sometimes you don't act as if you hear or see him," I said.

  And then she explained everything to me quietly.

  "When he went off into space ten years ago, I said to myself, 'He's dead.' Or as good as dead. So think of him dead. And when he comes back, three or four times a year, it's not him at all, it's only a pleasant little memory or a dream. And if a memory stops or a dream stops, it can't hurt half as much. So most of the time I think of him dead----"

  "But other times--"

  "Other times I can't help myself. I bake pies and treat him as if he were alive, and then it hurts. No, it's better to think he hasn't been here for ten years and I'll never see him again. It doesn't hurt as much."

  "Didn't he say next time he'd settle down."

  She shook her head slowly. "No, he's dead. I'm very sure of that."

  "He'll come alive again, then," I said.

  "Ten years ago," said Mother, "I thought, What if he dies on Venus? Then we'll never be able to see Venus again. What if he dies on Mars? We'll never be able to look at Mars again, all red in the sky, without wanting to go in and lock the door. Or what if he died on Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune? On those nights when those planets were high in the sky, we wouldn't want to have anything to do with the stars."

  "I guess not," I said.

  The message came the next day.

  The messenger gave it to me and I read it standing on the porch. The sun was setting. Mom stood in the screen door behind me, watching me fold the message and put it in my pocket.

  "Mom," I said.

  "Don't tell me anything I don't already know," she said.

  She didn't cry.

  Well, it wasn't Mars, and it wasn't Venus, and it wasn't Jupiter or Saturn that killed him. We wouldn't have to think of him every time Jupiter or Saturn or Mars lit up the evening sky.

  This was different.

  His ship had fallen into the sun.

  And the sun was big and fiery and merciless, and it was always in the sky and you couldn't get away from it.

  So for a long time after my father died my mother slept through the days and wouldn't go out. We had breakfast at midnight and lunch at three in the morning, and dinner at the cold dim hour of 6 A.M. We went to all-night shows and went to bed at sunrise.

  And, for a long while, the only days we ever went out to walk were the days when it was raining and there was no sun.

  * * *

  The Fire Balloons

  FIRE exploded over summer night lawns. You saw sparkling faces of uncles and aunts. Skyrockets fell up in the brown shining eyes of cousins on the porch, and the cold charred sticks thumped down in dry meadows far away.

  The Very Reverend Father Joseph Daniel Peregrine opened his eyes. What a dream: he and his cousins with their fiery play at his grandfather's ancient O
hio home so many years ago!

  He lay listening to the great hollow of the church, the other cells where other Fathers lay. Had they, too, on the eve of the flight of the rocket Crucifix, lain with memories of the Fourth of July? Yes. This was like those breathless Independence dawns when you waited for the first concussion and rushed out on the dewy sidewalks, your hands full of loud miracles.

  So here they were, the Episcopal Fathers, in the breathing dawn before they pinwheeled off to Mars, leaving their incense through the velvet cathedral of space.

  "Should we go at all?" whispered Father Peregrine. "Shouldn't we solve our own sins on Earth? Aren't we running from our lives here?"

  He arose, his fleshy body, with its rich look of strawberries, milk, and steak, moving heavily.

  "Or is it sloth?" he wondered. "Do I dread the journey?"

  He stepped into the needle-spray shower.

  "But I shall take you to Mars, body." He addressed himself. "Leaving old sins here. And on to Mars to findnew sins?" A delightful thought almost. Sins no one had ever thought of.

  Oh, he himself had written a little book:The Problem of Sin on Other Worlds , ignored as somehow not serious enough by his Episcopal brethren.

  Only last night, over a final cigar, he and Father Stone had talked of it.

  "On Mars sin might appear as virtue. We must guard against virtuous acts there that, later, might be found to be sins!" said Father Peregrine, beaming. "How exciting! It's been centuries since so much adventure has accompanied the prospect of being a missionary!"

  "Iwill recognize sin," said Father Stone bluntly, "even on Mars."

  "Oh, we priests pride ourselves on being litmus paper, changing color in sin's presence," retorted Father Peregrine, "but what if Martian chemistry is such we do not colorat all! If there are new senses on Mars, you must admit the possibility of unrecognizable sin."

  "If there is no malice aforethought, there is no sin or punishment for same--the Lord assures us that," Father Stone replied.

  "On Earth, yes. But perhaps a Martian sin might inform the subconscious of its evil, telepathically, leaving the conscious mind of man free to act, seemingly without malice! Whatthen?"