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Looking at the small white cottage for a long moment, he was filled with a desire to rush to it, touch it, say good-bye to it, for he felt as if he were going away on a long journey, leaving something to which he could never quite return, never understand again.
Just then Sam and his family drove by in another truck.
‘Hi, Bittering! Here we go!’
The truck swung down the ancient highway out of town. There were sixty others travelling the same direction. The town filled with a silent, heavy dust from their passage. The canal waters lay blue in the sun, and a quiet wind moved in the strange trees.
‘Good-bye, town!’ said Mr Bittering.
‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ said the family, waving to it.
They did not look back again.
Summer burned the canals dry. Summer moved like flame upon the meadows. In the empty Earth settlement, the painted houses flaked and peeled. Rubber tyres upon which children had swung in back yards hung suspended like stopped clock pendulums in the blazing air.
At the metal shop, the rocket frame began to rust.
In the quiet autumn, Mr Bittering stood, very dark now, very golden-eyed, upon the slope above his villa, looking at the valley.
‘It’s time to go back,’ said Cora.
‘Yes, but we’re not going,’ he said, quietly. ‘There’s nothing there any more.’
‘Your books,’ she said. ‘Your fine clothes.’
‘Your Illes and your fine ior uele rre,’ she said.
‘The town’s empty. No one’s going back,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason to, none at all.’
The daughter wove tapestries and the sons played songs on ancient flutes and pipes, their laughter echoing in the marble villa.
Mr Bittering gazed at the Earth settlement far away in the low valley. ‘Such odd, such ridiculous houses the Earth people built.’
‘They didn’t know any better,’ his wife mused. ‘Such ugly people. I’m glad they’ve gone.’
They both looked at each other, startled by all they had just finished saying. They laughed.
‘Where did they go?’ he wondered. He glanced at his wife. She was golden and slender as his daughter. She looked at him, and he seemed almost as young as their eldest son.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘We’ll go back to town maybe next year, or the year after, or the year after that,’ he said, calmly. ‘Now – I’m warm. How about taking a swim?’
They turned their backs to the valley. Arm in arm they walked silently down a path of clear running spring water.
Five years later, a rocket fell out of the sky. It lay steaming in the valley. Men leaped out of it, shouting.
‘We won the war on Earth! We’re here to rescue you! Hey!’
But the American-built town of cottages, peach trees, and theatres was silent. They found a half-finished rocket frame, rusting in an empty shop.
The rocket men searched the hills. The captain established headquarters in an abandoned bar. His lieutenant came back to report.
‘The town’s empty, but we found native life in the hills, sir. Dark people. Yellow eyes. Martians. Very friendly. We talked a bit, not much. They learn English fast. I’m sure our relations will be most friendly with them, sir.’
‘Dark, eh?’ mused the captain. ‘How many?’
‘Six, eight hundred, I’d say, living in those marble ruins in the hills, sir. Tall, healthy. Beautiful women.’
