‘Paint stores ran out of paint three times the first week.’ Antonelli surveyed the town with pride. ‘The painting could only last so long, of course, unless you start painting hedges and spraying grass blades one by one. Now that the attics and cellars are cleaned out, too, our fire is seeping off into, well – women canning fruit again, making tomato pickles, raspberry, strawberry preserves. Basement shelves are loaded. Big church doings, too. Organized bowling, night donkey baseball, box socials, beer busts. Music shop sold five hundred ukeleles, two hundred twelve steel guitars, four hundred sixty ocarins and kazoos in four weeks. I’m studying trombone. Mac, there, the flute. Band concerts Thursday and Sunday nights. Hand-crank ice-cream machines? Bert Tyson’s sold two hundred last week alone. Twenty-eight days, Willy, Twenty-eight Days That Shook the World!’
Willy Bersinger and Samuel Fitts sat there, trying to imagine and feel the shock, the crushing blow.
‘Twenty-eight days, the barber-shop jammed with men, getting shaved twice a day so they can sit and stare at customers like they might say something,’ said Antonelli, shaving Willy now. ‘Once, remember, before TV, barbers were supposed to be great talkers. Well, this month it took us one whole week to warm up, get the rust out. Now we’re spouting fourteen to the dozen. No quality, but our quantity is ferocious. When you came in you heard the commotion. Oh, it’ll simmer down when we get used to the great Oblivion’
‘Is that what everyone calls it?’
‘It sure looked that way to most of us, there for a while.’
Willy Bersinger laughed quietly and shook his head.
‘Now I know why you didn’t want me to start lecturing when I walked in that door.’
Of course, thought Willy, why didn’t I see it right off? Four short weeks ago the wilderness fell on this town and shook it good and scared it plenty. Because of the sunspots, all the towns in all the western world have had enough silence to last them ten years. And here I come by with another dose of silence, my easy talk about deserts and nights with no moon and only stars and just the little sound of the sand blowing along the empty river bottoms. No telling what might have happened if Antonelli hadn’t shut me up. I see me, tarred and feathered, leaving town.
‘Antonelli,’ he said aloud. ‘Thanks.’
‘For nothing,’ said Antonelli. He picked up his comb and shears. ‘Now, short on the sides, long in back?’
‘Long on the sides,’ said Willy Bersinger, closing his eyes again, ‘short in back.’
An hour later Willy and Samuel climbed back into their jalopy, which someone, they never knew who, had washed and polished while they were in the barber-shop.
‘Doom.’ Samuel handed over a small sack of gold-dust. ‘With a capital D.’
‘Keep it.’ Willy sat, thoughtful, behind the wheel. ‘Let’s take this money and hit out for Phoenix, Tucson, Kansas City, why not? Right now, we’re a surplus commodity around here. We won’t be welcome again until those little sets begin to herring-bone and dance and sing. Sure as hell, if we stay, we’ll open our traps and the Gila monsters and chicken hawks and the wilderness will slip out and make us trouble.’
Willy squinted at the highway straight ahead.
‘Pearl of the Orient, that’s what he said. Can you imagine that dirty old town, Chicago, all painted up fresh and new as a babe in the morning light? We just got to go see Chicago, by God!’
He started the car, let it idle, and looked at the town.
‘Man survives,’ he murmured. ‘Man endures. Too bad we missed the big change. It must have been a fierce thing, a time of trials and testings. Samuel, I don’t recall, do you? What have we ever seen on TV?’
‘Saw a woman wrestle a bear two falls out of three, one night.’
‘Who won?’
‘Damned if I know. She –’
But then the jalopy moved and took Willy Bersinger and Samuel Fitts with it, their hair cut, oiled, and neat on their sweet-smelling skulls, their cheeks pink-shaven, their fingernails flashing the sun. They sailed under clipped green, fresh-watered trees, through flowered lanes, past daffodil, lilac, violet, rose, and peppermint-coloured houses on the dustless road.
‘Pearl of the Orient, here we come!’
A perfumed dog, with permed hair, ran out, nipped their tyres, and barked, until they were gone away and completely out of sight.
Dark They were and Golden-eyed
THE rocket’s metal cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family.
The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the centre of a vacuum. His wife, before him, trembled. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes.
The children looked up at him. His face was cold.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked his wife.
‘Let’s get back on the rocket.’