Maybe, said their eyes, they're already here.
Charles Halloway stepped back into the machinery of the merry-go-round, found a wrench, and knocked the flywheels and cogs to pieces. Then he took the boys out and he hit the control box one or two times until it broke and scattered fitful lightnings.
"Maybe this isn't necessary," said Charles Halloway. "Maybe it wouldn't run anyway, without the freaks to give it power. But--" He hit the box a last time and threw down the wrench.
"It's late. Must be midnight straight up."
Obediently, the City Hall clock, the Baptist church clock, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Catholic church, all the clocks, struck twelve. The wind was seeded with Time.
"Last one to the railroad semaphore at Green Crossing is an old lady!"
The boys fired themselves off like pistols.
The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it. So, there went the boys ... and why not ... follow?
He did just that.
And Lord! it was fine printing their life in the dew on the cool fields that new dark suddenly-like-Christmas morning. The boys ran as tandem ponies, knowing that someday one would touch base first, and the other second or not at all, but now this first minute of the new morning was not the minute or the day or morning of ultimate loss. Now was not the time to study faces to see if one was older and the other too much younger. Today was just another day in October in a year suddenly better than anyone supposed it could ever be just a short hour ago, with the moon and the stars moving in a grand rotation toward inevitable dawn, and them loping, and the last of this night's weeping done, and Will laughing and singing and Jim giving answer line by line, as they breasted the waves of dry stubble toward a town where they might live another few years across from each other.
And behind them jogged a middle-aged man with his own now solemn, now amiable, thoughts.
Perhaps the boys slowed. They never knew. Perhaps Charles Halloway quickened his pace. He could not say.
But, running even with the boys, the middle-aged man reached out.
Will slapped, Jim slapped, Dad slapped the semaphore signal base at the same instant.
Exultant, they banged a trio of shouts down the wind.
Then, as the moon watched, the three of them together left the wilderness behind and walked into the town.
A Brief Afterword
IT MAY seem peculiar to some to find Gene Kelly's name on the dedication page of this book. But his films and his friendship were a catalyst that caused this novel to be born.
Not long after I published The Martian Chronicles in 1950, my friend Sy Gomberg took me and my wife, Maggie, over to Gene Kelly's home one evening, and on many evenings after that, when Gene and his friends often performed songs from their films and Broadway musicals with composers like Harold Arlen and Yip Harberg in attendance. Most importantly, during that period. Gene danced and sang in what I consider to be the finest musical in film history, Singin' in the Rain. On top of which, it was a science-fiction musical!
How so? you quickly ask.
Well now, didn't it describe how silent films reinvented themselves as a technology of sound? Dreaming a concept and then birthing it? It did! It started with a fiction and ended with a science.
All the more reason then for Gene Kelly to become a friend and inventor in my work.
In 1955, Gene invited Maggie and myself over to MGM Studios for a private screening of his Invitation to the Dance, a collection of musical dance numbers with no connecting plotline, ending with Gene and Jerry, the cartoon-animation mouse, out-dancing one another.
Maggie and I walked home from the screening (we still did not own an automobile that year) and on the way I kept saying over and over again how I would give half an arm and part of my soul to work with Gene Kelly.
"Well," Maggie said, "why don't you go through your files; you have dozens of ideas stashed away. Find som
ething that strikes you as absolutely right, do a screenplay-treatment, and send it over to Gene."
Which is exactly what I did. Searching some forty or fifty stories or ideas for stories, I found The Black Ferris, no more than ten typewritten pages, the tale of a strange carnival and two small boys and a night with no dawn in sight. I spent the next four or five weeks turning it into an eighty page outline treatment-script and brought it directly to Gene Kelly.
He telephoned me the next day and said, "This is it. This must be the next picture I direct. Do I have your permission to take it to Paris and London next week to try to arrange financing?"
"Take it!" I said.
Gene came back from overseas a month later with the bad news. No one wanted to finance my script.