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 6 A.M. Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted it at his breakfast place. He forced himself to be convivial.
“Colonial days all over again,” he declared. “Why, in ten years 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 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 onto 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 onto her husband and daughter.
“Are you sure, Laura?” asked the father quietly.
Laura wept. “We’re stranded on Mars, forever 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 someday.”
“Father, what will we do?”
“Go about our business, of course. Raise crops and children. Wait. Keep thi
ngs going until the war ends and the rockets come again.”
The two boys stepped out onto the porch.
“Children,” he said, sitting there, looking beyond them, “I’ve something to tell you.”
“We know,” they said.
In the following days, Bittering wandered often through the garden to stand alone in his fear. As long as the rockets had spun a silver web across space, he had been able to accept Mars. For he had always told himself: Tomorrow, if I want, I can buy a ticket and go back to Earth.
But now: The web gone, the rockets lying in jigsaw heaps of molten girder and unsnaked wire. Earth people left to the strangeness of Mars, the cinnamon dusts and wine airs, to be baked like gingerbread shapes in Martian summers, put into harvested storage by Martian winters. What would happen to him, the others? This was the moment Mars had waited for. Now it would eat them.
He got down on his knees in the flower bed, a spade in his nervous hands. Work, he thought, work and forget.
He glanced up from the garden to the Martian mountains. He thought of the proud old Martian names that had once been on those peaks. Earthmen, dropping from the sky, had gazed upon hills, rivers, Martian seats left nameless in spite of names. Once Martians had built cities, named cities; climbed mountains, named mountains; sailed seas, named seas. Mountains melted, seas drained, cities tumbled. In spite of this, the Earthmen had felt a silent guilt at putting new names to these ancient hills and valleys.
Nevertheless, man lives by symbol and label. The names were given.