"Listen to 'em, Carrie."
The steps squeaked and whispered underfoot.
"What do they say, tell me what they say?"
She stood on the ancient wooden steps, holding to herself, and could not tell him.
He waved his hand. "Front porch here, living room there, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms. Most we'll build new, part we'll bring. Of course all we got here now is the front steps, some parlor furniture, and the old bed."
"All that money, Bob!"
He turned, smiling. "You're not mad, now, look at me! You're not mad. We'll bring it all up, next year, five years! The cut-glass vases, that Armenian carpet your mother gave us in 1975! Just let the sun explode!"
They looked at the other crates, numbered and lettered: Front-porch swing, front-porch wicker rocker, hanging Chinese crystals . . .
"I'll blow them myself to make them ring."
And then they set the front door, with its little panes of colored glass, on the top of the stairs, and Carrie looked through the strawberry window.
"What do you see?"
But he knew what she saw, for he gazed through the colored glass, too. And there was Mars, with its cold sky warmed and its dead seas fired with color, with its hills like mounds of strawberry ice, and its sand like burning charcoals sifted by wind. The strawberry window, the strawberry window, breathed soft rose colors on the land and filled the mind and the eye with the light of a never-ending dawn. Bent there, looking through, he heard himself say:
"The town'll be out this way in a year. This'll be a shady street, you'll have your porch, and you'll have friends. You won't need all this so much, then. But starting right here, with this little bit that's familiar, watch it spread, watch Mars change so you'll know it as if you've known it all your life."
He ran down the steps to the last and as-yet unopened canvas-covered crate. With his pocket knife he cut a hole in the canvas. "Guess!" he said.
"My kitchen stove? My sewing machine?"
"Not in a million years." He smiled very gently. "Sing me a song," he said.
"Bob, you're clean off your head."
"Sing me a song worth all the money we had in the bank and now don't have, but who gives a blast in hades," he said.
"I don't know anything but 'Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve!'"
"Sing that," he said.
But she could not open her mouth and start the song. He saw her lips move and try, but there was no sound.
He ripped the canvas wider and shoved his hand into the crate and touched around for a quiet moment, and started to sing the words himself until he moved his hand a last time and then a single clear piano chord sprang out on the morning air.
"There," he said. "Let's take it right on to the end. Every-one! Here's the harmony."
THE DRAGON
The night blew in the short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky. Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.
Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other's faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.
"Don't, idiot; you'll give us away!"
"No matter," said the second man. "The dragon can smell us miles off anyway. God's breath, it's cold. I wish I was back at the castle."
"It's death, not sleep, we're after. . . ."
"Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!"