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Kitabı oku: «Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1», sayfa 17
‘All right, all right, Hitchcock,’ said the captain.
The doctor was bandaging a small cut on Hitchcock’s arm. Hitchcock looked up, his face pale, and saw Clemens there looking at him. ‘It tried to kill me,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Clemens.
Seventeen hours passed. The ship moved on in space.
Clemens stepped through a bulkhead and waited. The psychiatrist and the captain were there. Hitchcock sat on the floor with his legs drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped tight about them.
‘Hitchcock,’ said the captain.
No answer.
‘Hitchcock, listen to me,’ said the psychiatrist.
They turned to Clemens. ‘You’re his friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want to help us?’
‘If I can.’
‘It was that damned meteor,’ said the captain. ‘This might not have happened if it hadn’t been for that.’
‘It would’ve come anyway, sooner or later,’ said the doctor. To Clemens: ‘You might talk to him.’
Clemens walked quietly over and crouched by Hitchcock and began to shake his arm gently, calling in a low voice, ‘Hey there, Hitchcock.’
No reply.
‘Hey, it’s me. Me, Clemens,’ said Clemens. ‘Look, I’m here.’ He gave the arm a little slap. He massaged the rigid neck, gently, and the back of the bent-down head. He glanced at the psychiatrist, who sighed very softly. The captain shrugged.
‘Shock treatment, Doctor?’
The psychiatrist nodded. ‘We’ll start within the hour.’
Yes, thought Clemens, shock treatment. Play a dozen jazz records for him, wave a bottle of fresh green chlorophyll and dandelions under his nose, put grass under his feet, squirt Chanel on the air, cut his hair, clip his fingernails, bring him a woman, shout, bang and crash at him, fry him with electricity, fill the gap and the gulf, but where’s your proof? You can’t keep proving to him forever. You can’t entertain a baby with rattles and sirens all night every night for the next thirty years. Sometime you’ve got to stop. When you do that, he’s lost again. That is, if he pays any attention to you at all.
‘Hitchcock!’ he cried, as loud as he could, almost frantically, as if he himself were falling over a cliff. ‘It’s me. It’s your pal! Hey!’
Clemens turned and walked away out of the silent room.
Twelve hours later another alarm bell rang.
After all of the running had died down, the captain explained: ‘Hitchcock snapped out of it for a minute or so. He was alone. He climbed into a space suit. He opened an airlock. Then he walked out into space – alone.’
Clemens blinked through the immense glass port, where there was a blur of stars and distant blackness. ‘He’s out there now?’
‘Yes. A million miles behind us. We’d never find him. First time I knew he was outside the ship was when his helmet radio came in on our control-room beam. I heard him talking to himself.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Something like “No more space ship now. Never was any. No people. No people in all the universe. Never were any. No plants. No stars.” That’s what he said. And then he said something about his hands and feet and legs. “No hands,” he said. “I haven’t any hands any more. Never had any. No feet. Never had any. Can’t prove it. No body. Never had any. No lips. No face. No head. Nothing. Only space. Only space. Only the gap.’
The men turned quietly to look from the glass port out into the remote and cold stars.
Space, thought Clemens. The space that Hitchcock loved so well. Space, with nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, a lot of empty nothings between, and Hitchcock falling in the middle of the nothing, on his way to no particular night and no particular morning …
The City
The city waited twenty thousand years.
The planet moved through space and the flowers of the fields grew up and fell away, and still the city waited; and the rivers of the planet rose and waned and turned to dust. Still the city waited. The winds that had been young and wild grew old and serene, and the clouds of the sky that had been ripped and torn were left alone to drift in idle whitenesses. Still the city waited.
The city waited with its windows and its black obsidian walls and its sky towers and its unpennanted turrets, with its untrod streets and its untouched doorknobs, with not a scrap of paper or a fingerprint upon it. The city waited while the planet arced in space, following its orbit about a blue-white sun, and the seasons passed from ice to fire and back to ice and then to green fields and yellow summer meadows.
It was on a summer afternoon in the middle of the twenty thousandth year that the city ceased waiting.
In the sky a rocket appeared.
The rocket soared over, turned, came back, and landed in the shale meadow fifty yards from the obsidian wall.
There were booted footsteps in the thin grass and calling voices from men within the rocket to men without.
‘Ready?’
‘All right, men. Careful! Into the city. Jensen, you and Hutchinson patrol ahead. Keep a sharp eye.’
The city opened secret nostrils in its black walls and a steady suction vent deep in the body of the city drew storms of air back through channels, through thistle filters and dust collectors, to a fine and tremblingly delicate series of coils and webs which glowed with silver light. Again and again the immense suctions occurred; again and again the odors from the meadow were borne upon warm winds into the city.
‘Fire odor, the scent of a fallen meteor, hot metal. A ship has come from another world. The brass smell, the dusty fire smell of burned powder, sulphur, and rocket brimstone.’
This information, stamped on tapes which sprocketed into slots, slid down through yellow cogs into further machines.
Click-chakk-chakk-chakk.
A calculator made the sound of a metronome. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine men! An instantaneous typewriter inked this message on tape which slithered and vanished.
Clickety-click-chakk-chakk.
The city awaited the soft tread of their rubberoid boots.
The great city nostrils dilated again.
The smell of butter. In the city air, from the stalking men, faintly, the aura which wafted to the great Nose broke down into memories of milk, cheese, ice cream, butter, the effluvia of a dairy economy.
Click-click.
‘Careful, men!’
‘Jones, get your gun out. Don’t be a fool!’
‘The city’s dead; why worry?’
‘You can’t tell.’
Now, at the barking talk, the Ears awoke. After centuries of listening to winds that blew small and faint, of hearing leaves strip from trees and grass grow softly in the time of melting snows, now the Ears oiled themselves in a self-lubrication, drew taut, great drums upon which the heartbeat of the invaders might pummel and thud delicately as the tremor of a gnat’s wing. The Ears listened and the Nose siphoned up great chambers of odor.
The perspiration of frightened men arose. There were islands of sweat under their arms, and sweat in their hands as they held their guns.
The Nose sifted and worried this air, like a connoisseur busy with an ancient vintage.
Chikk-chikk-chakk-click.
Information rotated down on parallel check tapes. Perspiration; chlorides such-and-such percent; sulphates so-and-so; urea nitrogen, ammonia nitrogen, thus: creatinine, sugar, lactic acid, there!
Bells rang. Small totals jumped up.
The Nose whispered, expelling the tested air. The great Ears listened:
‘I think we should go back to the rocket, Captain.’
‘I give the orders, Mr Smith!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You, up there! Patrol! See anything?’
‘Nothing, sir. Looks like it’s been dead a long time!’
‘You see, Smith? Nothing to fear.’
‘I don’t like it. I don’t know why. You ever feel you’ve seen a place before? Well, this city’s too familiar.’
‘Nonsense. This planetary system’s billions of miles from Earth; we couldn’t possibly’ve been here ever before. Ours is the only light-year rocket in existence.’
‘That’s how I feel, anyway, sir. I think we should get out.’
The footsteps faltered. There was only the sound of the intruder’s breath on the still air.
The Ear heard and quickened. Rotors glided, liquids glittered in small creeks through valves and blowers. A formula and a concoction – one followed another. Moments later, responding to the summons of the Ear and Nose, through giant holes in the city walls a fresh vapor blew out over the invaders.
‘Smell that, Smith? Ahh. Green grass. Ever smell anything better? By God, I just like to stand here and smell it.’
Invisible chlorophyll blew among the standing men.
‘Ahh!’
The footsteps continued.
‘Nothing wrong with that, eh, Smith? Come on!’
The Ear and Nose relaxed a billionth of a fraction. The countermove had succeeded. The pawns were proceeding forward.
Now the cloudy Eyes of the city moved out of fog and mist.
‘Captain, the windows!’
‘What?’
‘Those house windows, there! I saw them move!’
‘I didn’t see it.’
‘They shifted. They changed color. From dark to light.’
‘Look like ordinary square windows to me.’
Blurred objects focused. In the mechanical ravines of the city oiled shafts plunged, balance wheels dipped over into green oil pools. The window frames flexed. The windows gleamed.
Below, in the street, walked two men, a patrol, followed, at a safe interval, by seven more. Their uniforms were white, their faces as pink as if they had been slapped: their eyes were blue. They walked upright, upon hind legs, carrying metal weapons. Their feet were booted. They were males, with eyes, ears, mouths, noses.
The windows trembled. The windows thinned. They dilated imperceptibly, like the irises of numberless eyes.
‘I tell you. Captain, it’s the windows!’
‘Get along.’
‘I’m going back, sir.’
‘What?’
‘I’m going back to the rocket.’
‘Mr Smith!’
‘I’m not falling into any trap!’
‘Afraid of an empty city?’
The others laughed, uneasily.
‘Go on, laugh!’
The street was stone-cobbled, each stone three inches wide, six inches long. With a move unrecognizable as such, the street settled. It weighed the invaders.
In a machine cellar a red wand touched a numeral: 178 pounds … 210, 154, 201, 198 – each man weighed, registered and the record spooled down into a correlative darkness.
Now the city was fully awake!
Now the vents sucked and blew air, the tobacco odor from the invaders’ mouths, the green soap scent from their hands. Even their eyeballs had a delicate odor. The city detected it, and this information formed totals which scurried down to total other totals. The crystal windows glittered, the Ear tautened and skinned the drum of its hearing tight, tighter – all of the senses of the city swarming like a fall of unseen snow, counting the respiration and the dim hidden heartbeats of the men, listening, watching, tasting.
For the streets were like tongues, and where the men passed, the taste of their heels ebbed down through stone pores to be calculated on litmus. This chemical totality, so subtly collected, was appended to the now increasing sums waiting the final calculation among the whirling wheels and whispering spokes.
Footsteps. Running.
‘Come back! Smith!’
‘No, blast you!’
‘Get him, men!’
Footsteps rushing.
A final test. The city, having listened, watched, tasted, felt, weighed, and balanced, must perform a final task.
A trap flung wide in the street. The captain, unseen by the others, running, vanished.
Hung by his feet, a razor drawn across his throat, another down his chest, his carcass instantly emptied of its entrails, exposed upon a table under the street, in a hidden cell, the captain died. Great crystal microscopes stared at the red twines of muscle; bodiless fingers probed the still-pulsing heart. The flaps of his sliced skin were pinned to the table while hands shifted parts of his body like a quick and curious player of chess, using the red pawns and the red pieces.
Above on the street the men ran. Smith ran, men shouted. Smith shouted, and below in this curious room blood flowed into capsules, was shaken, spun, shoved on smear slides under further microscopes, counts made, temperatures taken, heart cut in seventeen sections, liver and kidneys expertly halved. Brain was drilled and scooped from bone socket, nerves pulled forth like the dead wires of a switchboard, muscles plucked for elasticity, while in the electric subterrene of the city the Mind at last totaled out its grandest total and all of the machinery ground to a monstrous and momentary halt.
The total.
These are men. These are men from a far world, a certain planet, and they have certain eyes, certain ears, and they walk upon legs in a specified way and carry weapons and think and fight, and they have particular hearts and all such organs as are recorded from long ago.
Above, men ran down the street toward the rocket.
Smith ran.
The total.
These are our enemies. These are the ones we have waited for twenty thousand years to see again. These are the men upon whom we waited to visit revenge. Everything totals. These are the men of a planet called Earth, who declared war upon Taollan twenty thousand years ago, who kept us in slavery and ruined us and destroyed us with a great disease. Then they went off to live in another galaxy to escape that disease which they visited upon us after ransacking our world. They have forgotten that war and that time, and they have forgotten us. But we have not forgotten them. These are our enemies. This is certain. Our waiting is done.
‘Smith, come back!’
Quickly. Upon the red table, with the spread-eagled captain’s body empty, new hands began a flight of motion. Into the wet interior were placed organs of copper, brass, silver, aluminum, rubber and silk; spiders spun gold web which was stung into the skin: a heart was attached, and into the skull case was fitted a platinum brain which hummed and fluttered small sparkles of blue fire, and the wires led down through the body to the arms and legs. In a moment the body was sewn tight, the incisions waxed, healed at neck and throat and about the skull – perfect, fresh, new.
The captain sat up and flexed his arms.
‘Stop!’
On the street the captain reappeared, raised his gun and fired.
Smith fell, a bullet in his heart.
The other men turned.
The captain ran to them.
‘That fool! Afraid of a city!’
They looked at the body of Smith at their feet.
They looked at their captain, and their eyes widened and narrowed.
‘Listen to me,’ said the captain. ‘I have something important to tell you.’
Now the city, which had weighed and tasted and smelled them, which had used all its powers save one, prepared to use its final ability, the power of speech. It did not speak with the rage and hostility of its massed walls or towers, nor with the bulk of its cobbled avenues and fortresses of machinery. It spoke with the quiet voice of one man.
‘I am no longer your captain,’ he said. ‘Nor am I a man.’
The men moved back.
‘I am the city,’ he said, and smiled.
‘I’ve waited two hundred centuries,’ he said, ‘I’ve waited for the sons of the sons of the sons to return.’
‘Captain, sir!’
‘Let me continue. Who built me? The city. The men who died built me. The old race who once lived here. The people whom the Earth Men left to die of a terrible disease, a form of leprosy with no cure. And the men of that old race, dreaming of the day when Earth Men might return, built this city, and the name of this city was and is Revenge, upon the Planet of Darkness, near the shore of the Sea of Centuries, by the Mountains of the Dead; all very poetic. This city was to be a balancing machine, a litmus, an antenna to test all future space travelers. In twenty thousand years only two other rockets landed here. One from a distant galaxy called Ennt, and the inhabitants of that craft were tested, weighed, found wanting, and let free, unscathed, from the city. As were the visitors in the second ship. But today! At long last, you’ve come! The revenge will be carried out to the last detail. Those men have been dead two hundred centuries, but they left a city here to welcome you.’
‘Captain, sir, you’re not feeling well. Perhaps you’d better come back to the ship, sir.’
The city trembled.
The pavements opened and the men fell, screaming. Falling, they saw bright razors flash to meet them!
Time passed. Soon came the call:
‘Smith?’
‘Here!’
‘Jensen?’
‘Here!’
‘Jones, Hutchinson, Springer?’
‘Here!’ ‘Here!’ ‘Here!’
They stood by the door of the rocket.
‘We return to Earth immediately.’
‘Yes, sir!’
The incisions on their necks were invisible, as were their hidden brass hearts and silver organs and the fine golden wire of their nerves. There was a faint electric hum from their heads.
‘On the double!’
Nine men hurried the golden bombs of disease culture into the rocket.
‘These are to be dropped on Earth.’
‘Right, sir!’
The rocket valve slammed. The rocket jumped into the sky.
As the thunder faded, the city lay upon the summer meadow. Its glass eyes were dulled over. The Ear relaxed, the great nostril vents stopped, the streets no longer weighed or balanced, and the hidden machinery paused in its bath of oil.
In the sky the rocket dwindled.
Slowly, pleasurably, the city enjoyed the luxury of dying.
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 Ohio 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 find new 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!’
‘I will 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 color at 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! What then?’
‘What could there be in the way of new sins?’
Father Peregrine leaned heavily forward. ‘Adam alone did not sin. Add Eve and you add temptation. Add a second man and you make adultery possible. With the addition of sex or people, you add sin. If men were armless they could not strangle with their hands. You would not have that particular sin of murder. Add arms, and you add the possibility of a new violence. Amoebas cannot sin because they reproduce by fission. They do not covet wives or murder each other. Add sex to amoebas, add arms and legs, and you would have murder and adultery. Add an arm or leg or person, or take away each, and you add or subtract possible evil. On Mars, what if there are five new senses, organs, invisible limbs we can’t conceive of – then mightn’t there be five new sins?’
Father Stone gasped. ‘I think you enjoy this sort of thing!’
‘I keep my mind alive, Father; just alive, is all.’
‘Your mind’s always juggling, isn’t it? – mirrors, torches, plates.’
‘Yes. Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don’t you, Father Stone?’
Father Stone had moved away. ‘I think we’d better go to bed. In a few hours we’ll be jumping up to see your new sins, Father Peregrine.’
The rocket stood ready for the firing.
The Fathers walked from their devotions in the chilly morning, many a fine priest from New York or Chicago or Los Angeles – the Church was sending its best – walking across town to the frosty field. Walking, Father Peregrine remembered the Bishop’s words:
‘Father Peregrine, you will captain the missionaries, with Father Stone at your side. Having chosen you for this serious task, I find my reasons deplorably obscure, Father, but your pamphlet on planetary sin did not go unread. You are a flexible man. And Mars is like that uncleaned closet we have neglected for millenniums. Sin has collected there like bric-a-brac. Mars is twice Earth’s age and has had double the number of Saturday nights, liquor baths, and eye-poppings at women as naked as white seals. When we open that closet door, things will fall on us. We need a quick, flexible man – one whose mind can dodge. Anyone a little too dogmatic might break in two. I feel you’ll be resilient. Father, the job is yours.’
The Bishop and the Fathers knelt.
The blessing was said and the rocket given a little shower of holy water. Arising, the Bishop addressed them:
‘I know you will go with God, to prepare the Martians for the reception of His Truth. I wish you all a thoughtful journey.’
They filed past the Bishop, twenty men, robes whispering, to deliver their hands into his kind hands before passing into the cleansed projectile.
‘I wonder,’ said Father Peregrine, at the last moment, ‘if Mars is Hell? Only waiting for our arrival before it bursts into brimstone and fire.’
‘Lord, be with us,’ said Father Stone.
The rocket moved.
Coming out of space was like coming out of the most beautiful cathedral they had ever seen. Touching Mars was like touching the ordinary pavement outside the church five minutes after having really known your love for God.
The Fathers stepped gingerly from the steaming rocket and knelt upon Martian sand while Father Peregrine gave thanks.
‘Lord, we thank Thee for the journey through Thy rooms. And, Lord, we have reached a new land, so we must have new eyes. We shall hear new sounds and must needs have new ears. And there will be new sins, for which we ask the gift of better and firmer and purer hearts. Amen.’
They arose.
And here was Mars like a sea under which they trudged in the guise of submarine biologists, seeking life. Here the territory of hidden sin. Oh, how carefully they must all balance, like gray feathers, in this new element, afraid that walking itself might be sinful; or breathing, or simple fasting!
And here was the mayor of First Town come to meet them with outstretched hand. ‘What can I do for you, Father Peregrine?’
‘We’d like to know about the Martians. For only if we know about them can we plan our church intelligently. Are they ten feet tall? We will build large doors. Are their skins blue or red or green? We must know when we put human figures in the stained glass so we may use the right skin color. Are they heavy? We will build sturdy seats for them.’
‘Father,’ said the mayor, ‘I don’t think you should worry about the Martians. There are two races. One of them is pretty well dead. A few are in hiding. And the second race – well, they’re not quite human.’
‘Oh?’ Father Peregrine’s heart quickened.
‘They’re round luminous globes of light, Father, living in those hills. Man or beast, who can say? But they act intelligently, I hear.’ The mayor shrugged. ‘Of course, they’re not men, so I don’t think you’ll care—’
‘On the contrary,’ said Father Peregrine swiftly. ‘Intelligent, you say?’
‘There’s a story. A prospector broke his leg in those hills and would have died there. The blue spheres of light came at him. When he woke, he was down on a highway and didn’t know how he got there.’
‘Drunk,’ said Father Stone.
‘That’s the story,’ said the mayor. ‘Father Peregrine, with most of the Martians dead, and only these blue spheres, I frankly think you’d be better off in First City. Mars is opening up. It’s a frontier now, like in the old days on Earth, out West, and in Alaska. Men are pouring up here. There’s a couple thousand black Irish mechanics and miners and day laborers in First Town who need saving, because there’re too many wicked women came with them, and too much ten-century-old Martian wine—’
Father Peregrine was gazing into the soft blue hills.
Father Stone cleared his throat. ‘Well, Father?’
Father Peregrine did not hear. ‘Spheres of blue fire?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Ah,’ Father Peregrine sighed.
‘Blue balloons.’ Father Stone shook his head. ‘A circus!’
Father Peregrine felt his wrists pounding. He saw the little frontier town with raw, fresh-built sin, and he saw the hills, old with the oldest and yet perhaps an even newer (to him) sin.
‘Mayor, could your black Irish laborers cook one more day in hellfire?’
‘I’d turn and baste them for you, Father.’
Father Peregrine nodded to the hills. ‘Then that’s where we’ll go.’
There was a murmur from everyone.
‘It would be so simple,’ explained Father Peregrine, ‘to go into town. I prefer to think that if the Lord walked here and people said, “Here is the beaten path,” He would reply, “Show me the weeds. I will make a path.”’
‘But—’
‘Father Stone, think how it would weigh upon us if we passed sinners by and did not extend our hands.’
‘But globes of fire!’
‘I imagine man looked funny to other animals when we first appeared. Yet he has a soul, for all his homeliness. Until we prove otherwise, let us assume that these fiery spheres have souls.’
‘All right,’ agreed the mayor, ‘but you’ll be back to town.’
‘We’ll see. First, some breakfast. Then you and I, Father Stone, will walk alone into the hills. I don’t want to frighten those fiery Martians with machines or crowds. Shall we have breakfast?’
The Fathers ate in silence.
At nightfall Father Peregrine and Father Stone were high in the hills. They stopped and sat upon a rock to enjoy a moment of relaxation and waiting. The Martians had not as yet appeared and they both felt vaguely disappointed.
‘I wonder—’ Father Peregrine mopped his face. ‘Do you think if we called “Hello!” they might answer?’
‘Father Peregrine, won’t you ever be serious?’
‘Not until the good Lord is. Oh, don’t look so terribly shocked, please. The Lord is not serious. In fact, it is a little hard to know just what else He is except loving. And love has to do with humor, doesn’t it? For you cannot love someone unless you put up with him, can you? And you cannot put up with someone constantly unless you can laugh at him. Isn’t that true? And certainly we are ridiculous little animals wallowing in the fudge bowl, and God must love us all the more because we appeal to His humor.’
‘I never thought of God as humorous,’ said Father Stone.
‘The Creator of the platypus, the camel, the ostrich, and man? Oh, come now!’ Father Peregrine laughed.
But at this instant, from among the twilight hills, like a series of blue lamps lit to guide their way, came the Martians.
Father Stone saw them first. ‘Look!’
Father Peregrine turned and the laughter stopped in his mouth.
The round blue globes of fire hovered among the twinkling stars, distantly trembling.
‘Monsters!’ Father Stone leaped up. But Father Peregrine caught him. ‘Wait!’
‘We should’ve gone to town!’
‘No, listen, look!’ pleaded Father Peregrine.
‘I’m afraid!’
‘Don’t be. This is God’s work!’
‘The devil’s!’
‘No, now, quiet!’ Father Peregrine gentled him and they crouched with the soft blue light on their upturned faces as the fiery orbs drew near.
And again. Independence Night, thought Father Peregrine, tremoring. He felt like a child back in those July Fourth evenings, the sky blowing apart, breaking into powdery stars and burning sound, the concussions jingling house windows like the ice on a thousand thin ponds. The aunts, uncles, cousins crying, ‘Ah!’ as to some celestial physician. The summer sky colors. And the Fire Balloons, lit by an indulgent grandfather, steadied in his massively tender hands. Oh, the memory of those lovely Fire Balloons, softly lighted, warmly billowed bits of tissue, like insect wings, lying like folded wasps in boxes and, last of all, after the day of riot and fury, at long last from their boxes, delicately unfolded, blue, red, white, patriotic – the Fire Balloons! He saw the dim faces of dear relatives long dead and mantled with moss as Grandfather lit the tiny candle and let the warm air breathe up to form the balloon plumply luminous in his hands, a shining vision which they held, reluctant to let it go; for, once released, it was yet another year gone from life, another Fourth, another bit of Beauty vanished. And then up, up, still up through the warm summer night constellations, the Fire Balloons had drifted, while red-white-and-blue eyes followed them, wordless, from family porches. Away into deep Illinois country, over night rivers and sleeping mansions the Fire Balloons dwindled, forever gone …
