‘Will, Will …’ She shook her head slowly, unbelievingly. He turned away and lay back down on his own side of the bed, and she sat on the other side, and for a moment did not lie down, but only sat looking at the bureau where her handkerchiefs and jewellery and clothing lay ready in neat stacks where she had left them. Outside a wind the colour of moonlight stirred up the sleeping dust and powdered the air.
At last she lay back, but said nothing more and was a cold weight in the bed, staring down the long tunnel of night towards the faintest sign of morning.
They got up in the very first light and moved in the small quonset hut without a sound. It was a pantomime prolonged almost to the time when someone might scream at the silence, as the mother and father and the boys washed and dressed and ate a quiet breakfast of toast and fruit-juice and coffee, with no one looking directly at anyone and everyone watching someone in the reflective surfaces of toaster, glassware, or cutlery, where all their faces were melted out of shape and made terribly alien in the early hour. Then, at last, they opened the quonset door and let in the air that blew across the cold blue-white Martian seas, where only the sand tides dissolved and shifted and made ghost patterns, and they stepped out under a raw and staring cold sky and began their walk towards a town, which seemed no more than a motion-picture set far on ahead of them on a vast, empty stage.
‘What part of town are we going to?’ asked Carrie.
‘The rocket depot,’ he said. ‘But before we get there, I’ve a lot to say.’
The boys slowed down and moved behind their parents, listening. The father gazed ahead, and not once in all the time he was talking did he look at his wife or sons to see how they were taking all that he said.
‘I believe in Mars,’ he began, quietly. I guess I believe some day it’ll belong to us. We’ll nail it down. We’ll settle in. We won’t turn tail and run. It came to me one day a year ago, right after we first arrived. Why did we come? I asked myself. Because, I said, because. It’s the same thing with the salmon every year. The salmon don’t know why they go where they go, but they go, anyway. Up rivers they don’t remember, up streams, jumping waterfalls, but finally making it to where they propagate and die, and the whole thing starts again. Call it racial memory, instinct, call it nothing, but there it is. And here we are.’
They walked in the silent morning with the great sky watching them and the strange blue and steam-white sands sifting about their feet on the new highway.
‘So here we are. And from Mars where? Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, and on out? Right. And on out. Why? Some day the sun will blow up like a leaky furnace. Boom – there goes Earth. But maybe Mars won’t be hurt; or if Mars is hurt maybe Pluto won’t be, or if Pluto’s hurt, then where’ll we be, our sons’ sons, that is?’
He gazed steadily up into that flawless shell of plum-coloured sky.
‘Why, we’ll be on some world with a number maybe; planet 6 of star system 97, planet 2 of system 99! So damn far off from here you need a nightmare to take it in! We’ll be gone, do you see, gone off away and safe! And I thought to myself, ah, ah. So that’s the reason we came to Mars, so that’s the reason men shoot off their rockets.’
‘Will –’
‘Let me finish. Not to make money, no. Not to see the sights, no. Those are the lies men tell, the fancy reasons they give themselves. Get rich, get famous, they say. Have fun, jump around, they say. But all the while, inside, something else is ticking along the way it ticks in salmon or whales, the way it ticks, by God, in the smallest microbe you want to name. And that little clock that ticks in everything living, you know what it says? It says get away, spread out, move along, keep swimming. Run to so many worlds and build so many towns that nothing can ever kill man. You see, Carrie? It’s not just us come to Mars, it’s the race, the whole darn human race, depending on how we make out in our lifetime. This thing is so big I want to laugh, I’m so scared stiff of it.’
He felt the boys walking steadily behind him and he felt Carrie beside him and he wanted to see her face and how she was taking all this, but he didn’t look there, either.
‘All this is no different than me and Dad walking the fields when I was a boy, casting seed by hand when our seeder broke down and we’d no money to fix it. It had to be done somehow, for the later crops. My God, Carrie, my God, you remember those Sunday-supplement articles, THE EARTH WILL FREEZE IN A MILLION YEARS! I bawled once, as a boy, reading articles like that. My mother asked why. I’m bawling for all those poor people up ahead, I said. Don’t worry about them, mother said. But, Carrie, that’s my whole point; we are worrying about them. Or we wouldn’t be here. It matters if Man with a capital M keeps going. There’s nothing better than Man with a capital M in my books. I’m prejudiced, of course, because I’m one of the breed. But if there’s any way to get hold of that immortality men are always talking about, this is the way – spread out – seed the universe. Then you got a harvest against crop failures anywhere down the line. No matter if Earth has famines or the rust comes in. You got the new wheat lifting on Pluto or where-in-hell-ever man gets to in the next thousand years. I’m crazy with the idea, Carrie, crazy. When I finally hit on it I got so excited I wanted to grab people, you, the boys, and tell them. But hell, I knew that wasn’t necessary. I knew a day or night would come when you’d hear that ticking in yourselves, too, and then you’d see, and no one’d have to say anything again about all this. It’s big talk, Carrie, I know, and big thoughts for a man short of five feet five, but by all that’s holy, it’s true.’
They moved through the deserted streets of the town and listened to the echoes of their walking feet.
‘And this morning?’ said Carrie.
‘I’m coming to this morning,’ he said. ‘Part of me wants to go home, too. But the other part says if we go, everything’s lost. So I thought, what bothers us most? Some of the things we once had. Some of the boys’ things, your things, mine. And I thought, if it takes an old thing to get a new thing started, by God, I’ll use the old thing. I remember from history books that a thousand years ago they put charcoals in a hollowed-out cow-horn, blew on them during the day, so they carried their fire on marches from place to place, to start a fire every night from the sparks left over from morning. Always a new fire, but always something of the old in it. So I weighed and balanced it off. Is the Old worth all our money? I asked. No! It’s only the things we did with the Old that have any worth. Well, then, is the New worth all our money? I asked. Do you feel like investing in the day after the middle of next week? Yes! I said. If I can fight this thing that makes us want to go back to Earth, I’d dip my money in kerosene and strike a match!’
Carrie and the two boys did not move. They stood on the street, looking at him as if he were a storm that had passed over and around, almost blowing them from the ground, a storm that was now dying away.
‘The freight rocket came in this morning,’ he said, quietly. ‘Our delivery’s on it. Let’s go and pick it up.’
They walked slowly up the three steps into the rocket depot and across the echoing floor towards the freight room that was just sliding back its doors, opening for the day.
‘Tell us again about the salmon,’ said one of the boys.
In the middle of the warm morning they drove out of town in a rented truck filled with great crates and boxes and parcels and packages, long ones, tall ones, short ones, flat ones, all numbered and neatly addressed to one William Prentiss, New Toledo, Mars.
‘Will,’ said Carrie, over and over again. ‘Will.’
They stopped the truck by the quonset hut and the boys jumped down and helped their mother out. For a moment Will sat behind the wheel, and then slowly got out himself, to walk around and look into the back of the truck at the crates.
And by noon all but one of the boxes were opened and their contents placed on the sea-bottom where the family stood among them.
‘Carrie …’
And he led her up the old porch steps that now stood uncrated on the edge of town.
‘Listen to ’em, Carrie.’
The steps squeaked and whispered underfoot.