"Cotton mills bombed out----"
"Oh?"
"And the factories, radioactive; everything radioactive. All the roads and the farms and the foods, radioactive. Everything." He named more names of towns and villages.
"Tampa."
"That's my town," someone whispered.
"Fulton."
"That's mine," someone else said.
"Memphis."
"Memphis. Did they burnMemphis?" A shocked query.
"Memphis, blown up.
"FourthStreet in Memphis?"
"All of it," said the old man.
It was stirring them now. After twenty years it was rushing back. The towns and the places, the trees and the brick buildings, the signs and the churches and the familiar stores, all of it was coming to the surface among the gathered people. Each name touched memory, and there was no one present without a thought of another day. They were all old enough for that, save the children.
"Laredo."
"I remember Laredo."
"New York City."
"I had a store in Harlem."
"Harlem, bombed out."
The ominous words. The familiar, remembered places. The struggle to imagine all of those places in ruins.
Willie Johnson murmured the words, "Greenwater, Alabama. That's where I was born. I remember."
Gone. All of it gone. The man said so.
The man continued, "So we destroyed everything and ruined everything, like the fools that we were and the fools that we are. We killed millions. I don't think there are more than five hundred thousand people left in the world, all kinds and types. And out of all the wreckage we salvaged enough metal to build this one rocket, and we came to Mars in it this month to seek your help."
He hesitated and looked down among the faces to see what could be found there, but he was uncertain.
Hattie Johnson felt her husband's arm tense, saw his fingers grip the rope.
"We've been fools," said the old man quietly. "We've brought the Earth and civilization down about our heads. None of the cities are worth saving--they'll be radioactive for a century. Earth is over and done with. Its age is through. You have rockets here which you haven't tried to use to return to Earth in twenty years. Now I've come to ask you to use them. To come to Earth, to pick up the survivors and bring them back to Mars. To help us go on at this time. We've been stupid. Before God we admit our stupidity and our evilness. All the Chinese and the Indians and the Russians and the British and the Americans. We're asking to be taken in. Your Martian soil has lain fallow for numberless centuries; there's room for everyone; it's good soil--I've seen your fields from above. We'll come and work itfor you. Yes, we'll even do that. We deserve anything you want to do to us, but don't shut us out. We can't force you to act now. If you want I'll get into my ship and go back and that will be all there is to it. We won't bother you again. But we'll come here and we'll work for you and do the things you did for us--clean your houses, cook your meals, shine your shoes, and humble ourselves in the sight of God for the things we have done over the centuries to ourselves, to others, to you.
He was finished.
There was a silence of silences. A silence you could hold in your hand and a silence that came down like a pressure of a distant storm over the crowd. Their long arms hung like dark pendulums in the sunlight, and their eyes were upon the old man and he did not move now, but waited.
Willie Johnson held the rope in his hands. Those around him watched to see what he might do. His wife Hattie waited, clutching his arm.
She wanted to get at the hate of them all, to pry at it and work at it until she found a little chink, and then pull out a pebble or a stone or a brick and then a part of the wall, and, once started, the whole edifice might roar down and be done away with. It was teetering now. But which was the keystone, and how to get at it? How to touch them and get a thing started in all of them to make a ruin of their hate?
She looked at Willie there in the strong silence and the only thing she knew about the situation was him and his life and what had happened to him, and suddenly he was the keystone; suddenly she knew that if he could be pried loose, then the thing in all of them might be loosened and torn away.