The Toynbee Convector

She lifted her glass and finished the champagne, then got up and walked to open the door to her apartment and stand by it, waiting.

“So soon?” he said, bleakly.

“Hard to believe it’s been five years. But—so soon.”

He got up and looked around as if he had left something, and then realized it was really her and came to stand before her, his hands at his sides. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his arms or his body.

“Do you forgive me?”

“No, not now. But soon, yes, I must. Either that, or stop going to church. Give me time to really think about your daughter and her dying almost, and yes, I will. It’s a terrible week for all of us. Fart of me knows that you are being cut right down the middle. Goodbye.” Her mouth whispered, darling, but she couldn’t say it out loud.

She kissed him once, for a long moment, and when she felt the slight pull of her gravity moving him closer, broke off and stepped away.

He went out the door and halfway down the stairs turned and looked at her and said:

“Goodbye.”

He turned and went the rest of the way down.

Tears exploded from her eyes. She flung herself forward to seize the top stair rail and stare blindly down. “How dare you!” she shrieked, and stopped. She stared at the empty stairwell, stifling her breath.

The next words fell out of their own accord:

“—love your daughter—” And then the rest, which only she could hear: “—more than me?” She backed up, groped round, found herself inside, and slammed the door, hard.

Downstairs, he heard. And it was like the sound of the shutting of a tomb.

The Love Affair

All morning long the scent was in the clear air, of cut grain or green grass or flowers, Sio didn’t know which, he couldn’t tell. He would walk down the hill from his secret cave and turnabout and raise his fine head and strain his eyes to see, and the breeze blew steadily, raising the tide of sweet odor about him. It was like a spring in autumn. He looked for the dark flowers that clustered under the hard rocks, probing up, but found none. He searched for a sign of grass, that swift tide that rolled over Mars for a brief week each spring, but the land was bone and pebble and the color of blood.

Sio returned to his cave, frowning. He watched the sky and saw the rockets of the Earthmen blaze down, far away, near the newly building towns. Sometimes, at night, he crept in a quiet, swimming silence down the canals by boat, lodged the boat in a hidden place, and then swam, with quiet hands and limbs, to the edge of the fresh towns, and there peered out at the hammering, nailing, painting men, at the men shouting late into the night at their labor of constructing a strange thing upon this plan et. He would listen to their odd language and try to understand, and watch the rockets gather up great

plumes of beautiful fire and go booming into the stars; an incredible people. And then, alive and undiseased, alone, Sio would return to his cave. Sometimes he walked many miles through the mountains to find others of his own hiding race, a few men, fewer women, to talk to, but now he had a habit of solitude, and lived alone, thinking on the destiny that had finally killed his people. He did not blame the Earthmen; it had been an accidental tiling, the disease that had burned his father and mother in their sleep, and burned the fathers and mothers of great multitudes of sons.

He sniffed the air again. That strange aroma. That sweet, drifting scent of compounded flowers and green moss. “What is it?” He narrowed his golden eyes in four directions.

He was tall and a boy still, though eighteen summers had lengthened the muscles in his arms and his legs were long from seasons of swimming in the canals and daring to run, take cover, run again, take swift cover, over the blazing dead sea bottoms or going on the long patrols with silver cages to bring back assassin-flowers and fire-lizards to feed them. It seemed that his life had been full of swimming and marching, the things young men do to take their energies and passions, until they are married and a woman soon does what mountains and rivers once did. He had carried the passion for distance and walking later into young manhood than most, and while many another man had been drifting off down the dying canals in a slim boat with a woman like a bas-relief across his body, Sio had continued leaping and sporting, much of the time by himself, often speaking alone to himself. The worry of his parents, he had been, and the despair of women who had watched his shadow lengthening handsomely from the hour of his fourteenth birthday, and nodded to each other, watching the calendar for another year and just another year to pass....

But since the invasion and the disease, he had slowed to stillness. His universe was sunken away by death. The sawed and hammered and freshly painted towns were carriers of disease. The weight of so much dying rested heavily on his dreams. Often he woke weeping and put his hands out on the night air. But his parents were gone and it was time, past time, for one special friend, one touching, one love.

The wind was circling and spreading the bright odor.

Sio took a deeper breath and felt his flesh warm.

And then there was a sound. It was like a small orchestra playing. The music came up through the narrow stone valley to his cave.

A puff of smoke idled into the sky about a half mile away. Below, by the ancient canal, stood a small house that the men of Earth had built for an archaeological crew, a year ago. It had been abandoned and Sio had crept down to peer into the empty rooms several times, not entering, for he was afraid of the black disease that might touch him.

The music was coming from that house.

“An entire orchestra in that small house?” he wondered, and ran silently down the valley in the early afternoon light

The house looked empty, despite the music which poured out the open windows. Sio scrambled from rock to rock, taking half an hour to lie within thirty yards of the frightful, dinning house. He lay on his stomach, keeping close to the canal. If anything happened, he could leap into the water and let the current rush him swiftly back into the hills.

The music rose, crashed over the rocks, hummed in the hot air, quivered in his bones. Dust shook from the quaking roof of the house. Paint fell in a soft snowstorm from the peeling wood.

Sio leapt up and dropped back. He could see no orchestra within. Only flowery curtains. The front door stood wide.