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‘Go back to Earth?’
‘Yes! Listen!’
The wind blew, whining. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone.
He looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. He saw the old cities, lost and lying like children’s delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass.
‘Chin up, Harry,’ said his wife. ‘It’s too late. We’ve come at least sixty-five million miles or more.’
The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There was no answer but the racing hiss of wind through the stiff grass.
He picked up the luggage in his cold hands. ‘Here we go,’ he said – a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned.
They walked into town.
Their name was Bittering. Harry and his wife Cora; Tim, Laura, and David. They built a small white cottage and ate good breakfasts there, but the fear was never gone. It lay with Mr Bittering and Mrs Bittering, a third unbidden partner at every midnight talk, at every dawn awakening.
‘I feel like a salt crystal,’ he often said, ‘in a mountain stream, being washed away. We don’t belong here. We’re Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martians. For heaven’s sake, Cora, let’s buy tickets for home!’
But she only shook her head. ‘One day the atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we’ll be safe here.’
‘Safe and insane!’
Tick-tock, seven o’clock sang the voice clock; time to get up. And they did.
Something made him check everything each morning – warm hearth, potted blood-geraniums – precisely as if he expected something to be amiss. The morning paper was toast-warm from the six a.m. Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted it at his breakfast plate. He forced himself to be convivial.
‘Colonial days all over again,’ he declared. ‘Why, in another year there’ll be a million Earthmen on Mars. Big cities, everything ! They said we’d fail. Said the Martians would resent our invasion. But did we find any Martians? Not a living soul! Oh, we found their empty cities, but no one in them. Right?’
A river of wind submerged the house. When the windows ceased rattling, Mr Bittering swallowed and looked at the children.
‘I don’t know,’ said David. ‘Maybe there’re Martians around we don’t see. Sometimes nights I think I hear ’em. I hear the wind. The sand hits my window. I get scared. And I see those towns way up in the mountains where the Martians lived a long time ago. And I think I see things moving around those towns, Papa. And I wonder if those Martians mind us living here. I wonder if they won’t do something to us for coming here.’
‘Nonsense!’ Mr Bittering looked out of the windows. ‘We’re clean, decent people.’ He looked at his children. ‘All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean.’ He stared at the hills. ‘You see a staircase and you wonder what Martians looked like climbing it. You see Martian paintings and you wonder what the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind, a memory. It’s quite natural. Imagination.’ He stopped. ‘You haven’t been prowling up in those ruins, have you?’
‘No, Papa.’ David looked at his shoes.
‘See that you stay away from them. Pass the jam.’
‘Just the same,’ said little David, ‘I bet something happens.’
Something happened that afternoon.
Laura stumbled through the settlement, crying. She dashed blindly on to the porch.
‘Mother, Father – the war, Earth!’ she sobbed. ‘A radio flash just came. Atom bombs hit New York! All the space rockets blown up. No more rockets to Mars, ever!’
‘Oh, Harry!’ The mother held on to her husband and daughter.
‘Are you sure, Laura?’ asked the father quietly.
Laura wept. ‘We’re stranded on Mars, for ever and ever!’
For a long time there was only the sound of the wind in the late afternoon.
Alone, thought Bittering. Only a thousand of us here. No way back. No way. No way. Sweat poured from his face and his hands and his body; he was drenched in the hotness of his fear. He wanted to strike Laura, cry, ‘No, you’re lying! The rockets will come back!’ Instead, he stroked Laura’s head against him and said, ‘The rockets will get through, some day.’
‘In five years maybe. It takes that long to build one. Father, Father, what will we do?’
