So there you have it. Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply. The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all, isn't that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people's heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that's how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.
Here is my celebration, then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first "novel."
A final memory.
Fire balloons.
You rarely see them these days, though in some countries, I hear, they are still made and filled with warm breath from a small straw fire hung beneath.
But in 1925 Illinois, we still had them, and one of the last memories I have of my grandfather is the last hour of a Fourth of July night forty-eight years ago when Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself.
I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.
No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. Someone finally had to say, though, didn't
they? And that one is me.
The wine still waits in the cellars below.
My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.
The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.
Why and how?
Because I say it is so.
1974
THE LONG ROAD TO MARS
How did I get from Waukegan, Illinois, to Red Planet, Mars?
Perhaps two men could tell you.
Their names appear on the dedication page of the Fortieth Anniversary Edition of The Martian Chronicles.
For it was my friend Norman Corwin who first listened to me tell my Martian stories, and my future editor Walter I. Bradbury (no relation) who saw what I was up to, even though I was unaware of what I was doing, and persuaded me to finish a novel I didn't know I had written.
How I traveled to that spring night in 1949 when Walter Bradbury surprised me with myself is an unguided pathway of What Ifs.
What if I had never heard and fallen in love with Norman Corwin's radio dramas when I was nineteen?
What if I had never sent my first book of stories to Corwin, who then became a lifetime friend?
And what if I hadn't taken his advice to go to New York City in June 1949?
Then, very simply, The Martian Chronicles might never have existed.
But Norman argued again and again that I should be underfoot in the publishing houses of Manhattan and that he and his wife Katie would be there to lead and protect me in and around the Big Town. Because of his persuasion, I traveled across the country, four long days and nights on a Greyhound Bus, fermenting into a large ball of fungus, with a pregnant wife left behind in Los Angeles with $40 in the bank, and the YMCA ($5 a week) waiting for me on Forty-second Street.
The Corwins, good to their promise, toured and introduced me to a clutch of editors who asked: "Did you bring a novel?"
I confessed that I was a sprinter and had brought only fifty short stories and an ancient, battered portable typewriter. Were they in need of fifty superimaginative tales, mostly brilliant? They were not.
Which brings me to my final, most important What If.
What if I had never dined with the last editor I met, Walter I. Bradbury from Doubleday, who asked the old depressing question-"Is there a novel in you somewhere?"-only to hear me describe the four-minute mile I paced each day, stepping on a land mine idea at breakfast, picking up the pieces, and fusing them to cool by lunch.