A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

“Harry, Harry,” she said, helplessly.

“We’ve got to get away, Cora. We’ve got to!”

The nights were full of wind that blew down the empty moonlit sea meadows past the little white chess cities lying for their twelve-thousandth year in the shallows. In the Earthmen’s settlement, the Bittering house shook with a feeling of change.

Lying abed, Mr. Bittering felt his bones shifted, shaped, melted like gold. His wife, lying beside him, was dark from many sunny afternoons. Dark she was, and golden-eyed, burnt almost black by the sun, sleeping, and the children metallic in their beds, and the wind roaring forlorn and changing through the old peach trees, the violet grass, shaking out green rose petals.

The fear would not be stopped. It had his throat and heart. It dripped in a wetness of the arm and the temple and the trembling palm.

A green star rose in the east.

A strange word emerged from Mr. Bittering’s lips.

“Iorrt. Iorrt.” He repeated it.

It was a Martian word. He knew no Martian.

In the middle of the night he arose and dialed a call through to Simpson, the archaeologist.

“Simpson, what does the word Iorrt mean?”

“Why that’s the old Martian word for our planet Earth. Why?”

“No special reason.”

The telephone slipped from his hand.

“Hello, hello, hello, hello,” it kept saying while he sat gazing out at the green star. “Bittering? Harry, are you there?”

The days were full of metal sound. He laid the frame of the rocket with the reluctant help of three indifferent men. He grew very tired in an hour or so and had to sit down.

“The altitude,” laughed a man.

“Are you eating, Harry?” asked another.

“I’m eating,” he said, angrily.

“From your Deepfreeze?”

“Yes!”

“You’re getting thinner, Harry.”

“I’m not!”

“And taller.”

“Liar!”

His wife took him aside a few days later. “Harry, I’ve used up all the food in the Deepfreeze. There’s nothing left. I’ll have to make sandwiches using food grown on Mars.”

He sat down heavily.

“You must eat,” she said. “You’re weak.”

“Yes,” he said.

He took a sandwich, opened it, looked at it, and began to nibble at it.