nce, and he imagined the seeds he had placed today sprouting up with green and taking hold on the sky, pushing out branch after branch, until Mars was an afternoon forest, Mars was a shining orchard. In the early morning, with the small sun lifting faintly among the folded hills, he would be up and finished with a smoky breakfast in a few minutes and, trodding out the fire ashes, be on his way with knapsacks, testing, digging, placing seed or sprout, tamping lightly, watering, going on, whistling, looking at the clear sky brightening toward a warm noon. "You need the air," he told his night fire. The fire was a ruddy, lively companion that snapped back at you, that slept close by with drowsy pink eyes warm through the chilly night. "We all need the air. It's a thin air here on Mars. You get tired so soon. It's like living in the Andes, in South America, high. You inhale and don't get anything. It doesn't satisfy." He felt his rib case. In thirty days, how it had grown. To take in more air, they would all have to build their lungs. Or plant more trees. "That's what I'm here for," he said. The fire popped. "In school they told a story about Johnny Appleseed walking across America planting apple trees. Well, I'm doing more. I'm planting oaks, elms, and maples, every kind of tree, aspens and deodars and chestnuts. Instead of making just fruit for the stomach, I'm making air for the lungs. When those trees grow up some year, _think_ of the oxygen they'll make!" He remembered his arrival on Mars. Like a thousand others, he had gazed out upon a still morning and thought, How do I fit here? What will I do? Is there a job for me? Then he had fainted. Someone pushed a vial of ammonia to his nose and, coughing, he came around. "You'll be all right," said the doctor. "What happened?" "The air's pretty thin. Some can't take it. I think you'll have to go back to Earth." "No!" He sat up and almost immediately felt his eyes darken and Mars revolve twice around under him. His nostrils dilated and he forced his lungs to drink in deep nothingness. "I'll be all right. I've got to stay here!" They let him lie gasping in horrid fishlike motions. And he thought, Air, air, air. They're sending me back because of air. And he turned his head to look across the Martian fields and hills. He brought them to focus, and the first thing he noticed was that there were no trees, no trees at all, as far as you could look in any direction. The land was down upon itself, a land of black loam, but nothing on it, not even grass. Air, he thought, the thin stuff whistling in his nostrils. Air, air. And on top of hills, or in their shadows, or even by little creeks, not a tree and not a single green blade of grass. Of course! He felt the answer came not from his mind, but his lungs and his throat. And the thought was like a sudden gust of pure oxygen, raising him up. Trees and grass. He looked down at his hands and turned them over. He would plant trees and grass. That would be his job, to fight against the very thing that might prevent his staying here. He would have a private horticultural war with Mars. There lay the old soil, and the plants of it so ancient they had worn themselves out. But what if new forms were introduced? Earth trees, great mimosas and weeping willows and magnolias and magnificent eucalyptus. What then? There was no guessing what mineral wealth hid in the soil, untapped because the old ferns, flowers, bushes, and trees had tired themselves to death. "Let me up!" he shouted. "I've got to see the Co-ordinator!" He and the Co-ordinator had talked an entire morning about things that grew and were green. It would be months, if not years, before organized planting began. So far, frosted food was brought from Earth in flying icicles; a few community gardens were greening up in hydroponic plants. "Meanwhile," said the Co-ordinator, "it's your job. We'll get what seed we can for you, a little equipment. Space on the rockets is mighty precious now. I'm afraid, since these first towns are mining communities, there won't be much sympathy for your tree planting--" "But you'll let me do it?" They let him do it. Provided with a single motorcycle, its bin full of rich seeds and sprouts, he had parked his vehicle in the valley wilderness and struck out on foot over the land. That had been thirty days ago, and he had never glanced back. For looking back would have been sickening to the heart. The weather was excessively dry; it was doubtful if any seeds had sprouted yet. Perhaps his entire campaign, his four weeks of bending and scooping were lost. He kept his eyes only ahead of him, going on down this wide shallow valley under the sun, away from First Town, waiting for the rains to come. Clouds were gathering over the dry mountains now as he drew his blanket over his shoulders. Mars was a place as unpredictable as time. He felt the baked hills simmering down into frosty night, and he thought of the rich, inky soil, a soil so black and shiny it almost crawled and stirred in your fist, a rank soil from which might sprout gigantic beanstalks from which, with bone-shaking concussion, might drop screaming giants. The fire fluttered into sleepy ash. The air tremored to the distant roll of a cartwheel. Thunder. A sudden odor of water. Tonight, he thought, and put his hand out to feel for rain. Tonight. He awoke to a tap on his brow. Water ran down his nose into his lips. Another drop hit his eye, blurring it, Another splashed his chin. The rain. Raw, gentle, and easy, it mizzled out of the high air, a special elixir, tasting of spells and stars and air, carrying a peppery dust in it, and moving like a rare light sherry on his tongue. Rain. He sat up. He let the blanket fall and his blue denim shirt spot, while the rain took on more solid drops. The fire looked as though an invisible animal were dancing on it, crushing it, until it was angry smoke. The rain fell. The great black lid of sky cracked in six powdery blue chips, like a marvelous crackled glaze, and rushed down. He saw ten billion rain crystals, hesitating long enough to be photographed by the electrical display. Then darkness and water. He was drenched to the skin, but he held his face up and let the water hit his eyelids, laughing. He clapped his hands together and stepped up and walked around his little camp, and it was one o'clock in the morning. It rained steadily for two hours and then stopped. The stars came out, freshly washed and clearer than ever. Changing into dry clothes from his cellophane pack, Mr. Benjamin Driscoll lay down and went happily to sleep. The sun rose slowly among the hills. It broke out upon the land quietly and wakened Mr. Driscoll where he lay. He waited a moment before arising. He had worked and waited a long hot month, and now, standing up, he turned at last and faced the direction from which he had come. It was a green morning. As far as he could see the trees were standing up against the sky. Not one tree, not two, not a dozen, but the thousands he had planted in seed and sprout. And not little trees, no, not saplings, not little tender shoots, but great trees, huge trees, trees as tall as ten men, green and green and huge and round and full, trees shimmering their metallic leaves, trees whispering, trees in a line over hills, lemon trees, lime trees, redwoods and mimosas and oaks and elms and aspens, cherry, maple, ash, apple, orange, eucalyptus, stung by a tumultuous rain, nourished by alien and magical soil and, even as he watched, throwing out new branches, popping open new buds. "Impossible!" cried Mr. Benjamin Driscoll. But the valley and the morning were green. And the air! All about, like a moving current, a mountain river, came the new air, the oxygen blowing from the green trees. You could see it shimmer high in crystal billows. Oxygen, fresh, pure, green, cold oxygen turning the valley into a river delta. In a moment the town doors would flip wide, people would run out through the new miracle of oxygen, sniffing, gusting in lungfuls of it, cheeks pinking with it, noses frozen with it, lungs revivified, hearts leaping, and worn bodies lifted into a dance. Mr. Benjamin Driscoll took one long deep drink of green water air and fainted. Before he woke again five thousand new trees had climbed up into the yellow sun. February 2002: THE LOCUSTS The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmitted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night. And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flowerpots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamor to cover the silence that Mars made waiting outside the door and the shaded window. In six months a dozen small towns had been laid down upon the naked planet, filled with sizzling neon tubes and yellow electric bulbs. In all, some ninety thousand people came to Mars, and more, on Earth, were packing their grips. . . . August 2002: NIGHT MEETING Before going up into the blue hills, Tom¡s Gomez stopped for gasoline at the lonely station. "Kind of alone out here, aren't you, Pop?" said Tom¡s. The old man wiped off the windshield of the small truck. "Not bad." "How do you like Mars, Pop?" "Fine. Always something new. I made up my mind when I came here last year I wouldn't expect nothing, nor ask nothing, nor be surprised at nothing. We've got to forget Earth and how things were. We've got to look at what we're in here, and how _different_ it is. I get a hell of a lot of fun out of just the weather here. It's _Martian_ weather. Hot as hell daytimes, cold as hell nights. I get a big kick out of the different flowers and different rain. I came to Mars to retire and I wanted to retire in a place where everything is different. An old man needs to have things different. Young people don't want to talk to him, other old people bore hell out of him. So I thought the best thing for me is a place so different that all you got to do is open your eyes and you're entertained. I got this gas station. If business picks up too much, I'll move on back to some other old highway that's not so busy, where I can earn just enough to live on and still have time to feel the _different_ things here." "You got the right idea, Pop," said Tom¡s, his brown hands idly on the wheel. He was feeling good. He had been working in one of the new colonies for ten days straight and now he had two days off and was on his way to a party. "I'm not surprised at anything any more," said the old man. "I'm just looking. I'm just experiencing. If you can't take Mars for what she is, you might as well go back to Earth. Everything's crazy up here, the soil, the air, the canals, the natives (I never saw any yet, but I hear they're around), the clocks. Even my clock acts funny. Even _time_ is crazy up here. Sometimes I feel I'm here all by myself, no one else on the whole damn planet. I'd take bets on it. Sometimes I feel about eight years old, my body squeezed up and everything else tall. Jesus, it's just the place for an old man. Keeps me alert and keeps me happy. You know what Mars is? It's like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago--don't know if you ever had one--they called them kaleidoscopes, bits of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that's Mars. Enjoy it. Don't ask it to be nothing else but what it is. Jesus, you know that highway right there, built by the Martians, is over sixteen centuries old and still in good condition? That's one dollar and fifty cents, thanks and good night." Tom¡s drove off down the ancient highway, laughing quietly. It was a long road going into darkness and hills and he held to the wheel, now and again reaching into his lunch bucket and taking out a piece of candy. He had been driving steadily for an hour, with no other car on the road, no light, just the road going under, the hum, the roar, and Mars out there, so quiet. Mars was always quiet, but quieter tonight than any other. The deserts and empty seas swung by him, and the mountains against the stars. There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time _look_ like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight--Tom¡s shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck--tonight you could almost _touch_ Time. He drove the truck between hills of Time. His neck prickled and he sat up, watching ahead. He pulled into a little dead Martian town, stopped the engine, and let the silence come in around him. He sat, not breathing, looking out at the white buildings in the moonlight. Uninhabited for centuries. Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect, nevertheless. He started the engine and drove on another mile or more before stopping again, climbing out, carrying his lunch bucket, and walking to a little promontory where he could look back at that dusty city. He opened his thermos and poured himself a cup of coffee. A night bird flew by. He felt very good, very much at peace. Perhaps five minutes later there was a sound. Off in the hills, where the ancient highway curved, there was a motion, a dim light, and then a murmur. Tom¡s turned slowly with the coffee cup in his hand. And out of the hills came a strange thing. It was a machine like a jade-green insect, a praying mantis, delicately rushing through the cold air, indistinct, countless green diamonds winking over its body, and red jewels that glittered with multifaceted eyes. Its six legs fell upon the ancient highway with the sounds of a sparse rain which dwindled away, and from the back of the machine a Martian with melted gold for eyes looked down at Tom¡s as if he were looking into a well. Tom¡s raised his hand and thought Hello! automatically but did not move his lips, for this _was_ a Martian. But Tom¡s had swum in blue rivers on Earth, with strangers passing on the road, and eaten in strange houses with strange people, and his weapon had always been his smile. He did not carry a gun. And he did not feel the need of one now, even with the little fear that gathered about his heart at this moment The Martian's hands were empty too. For a moment they looked across the cool air at each other. It was Tomis who moved first. "Hello!" he called. "Hello!" called the Martian in his own language. They did not understand each other. "Did you say hello?" they both asked. "What did you say?" they said, each in a different tongue. They scowled. "Who are you?" said Tom¡s in English. "What are you doing here?" In Martian; the stranger's lips moved. "Where are you going?" they said, and looked bewildered. "I'm Tom¡s Gomez." "I'm Muhe Ca." Neither understood, but they tapped their chests with the words and then it became clear. And then the Martian laughed. "Wait!" Tom¡s felt his head touched, but no hand had touched him. "There!" said the Martian in English. "That is better!" "You learned my language, so quick!" "Nothing at all!" They looked, embarrassed with a new silence, at the steaming coffee he had in one hand. "Something different?" said the Martian, eying him and the coffee, referring to them both, perhaps. "May I offer you a drink?" said Tom¡s. "Please." The Martian slid down from his machine. A second cup was produced and filled, steaming. Tom¡s held it out. Their hands met and--like mist--fell through each other. "Jesus Christ!" cried Tom¡s, and dropped the cup. "Name of the gods!" said the Martian in his own tongue. "Did you see what happened?" they both whispered. They were very cold and terrified. The Martian bent to touch the cup but could not touch it. "Jesus!" said Tom¡s. "Indeed." The Martian tried again and again to get hold of the cup, but could not. He stood up and thought for a moment, then took a knife from his belt. "Hey!" cried Tom¡s. "You misunderstand, catch!" said the Martian, and tossed it. Tom¡s cupped his hands. The knife fell through his flesh. It hit the ground. Tom¡s bent to pick it up but could not touch it, and he recoiled, shivering. Now he looked at the Martian against the sky. "The stars!" he said. "The stars!" said the Martian, looking, in turn, at Tom¡s. The stars were white and sharp beyond the flesh of the Martian, and they were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphorescent membrane of a gelatinous sea fish. You could see stars flickering like violet eyes in the Martian's stomach and chest, and through his wrists, like jewelry. "I can see through you!" said Tom¡s. "And I through you!" said the Martian, stepping back. Tom¡s felt of his own body and, feeling the warmth, was reassured. _I_ am real, he thought The Martian touched his own nose and lips. "_I_ have flesh," he said, half aloud. "_I_ am alive." Tom¡s stared at the stranger. "And if _I_ am real, then _you_ must be dead." "No, you!" "A ghost!" "A phantom!" They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds. I'm drunk, thought Tom¡s. I won't tell anyone of this tomorrow, no, no. They stood there on the ancient highway, neither of them moving. "Where are you from?" asked the Martian at last. "Earth." "What is that?" "There." Tom¡s nodded to the sky. "When?" "We landed over a year ago, remember?" "No." "And all of you were dead, all but a few. You're rare, don't you _know_ that?" "That's not true." "Yes, dead. I saw the bodies. Black, in the rooms, in the houses, dead. Thousands of them." "That's ridiculous. We're _alive!_" "Mister, you're invaded, only you don't know it. You must have escaped." "I haven't escaped; there was nothing to escape. What do you mean? I'm on my way to a festival now at the canal, near the Eniall Mountains. I was there last night. Don't you see the city there?" The Martian pointed. Tom¡s looked and saw the ruins. "Why, that city's been dead thousands of years." The Martian laughed. "Dead. I slept there yesterday!" "And I was in it a week ago and the week before that, and I just drove through it now, and it's a heap. See the broken pillars?" "Broken? Why, I see them perfectly. The moonlight helps. And the pillars are upright." "There's dust in the streets," said Tom¡s. "The streets are clean!" "The canals are empty right there." "The canals are full of lavender wine!" "It's dead." "It's alive!" protested the Martian, laughing more now. "Oh, you're quite wrong. See all the carnival lights? There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets there. That's where I'm going now, to the festival; we'll float on the waters all night long; we'll sing, we'll drink, we'll make love, Can't you see it?" "Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. Ask any of our party. Me, I'm on my way to Green City tonight; that's the new colony we just raised over near Illinois Highway. You're mixed up. We brought in a million board feet of Oregon lumber and a couple dozen tons of good steel nails and hammered together two of the nicest little villages you ever saw. Tonight we're warming one of them. A couple rockets are coming in from Earth, bringing our wives and girl friends. There'll be barn dances and whisky--" The Martian was now disquieted. "You say it is over that way?" "There are the rockets." Tom¡s walked him to the edge of the hill and pointed down. "See?" "No." "Damn it, there they _are!_ Those long silver things." "No." Now Tom¡s laughed. "You're blind!" "I see very well. You are the one who does not see." "But you see the new _town_, don't you?" "I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low tide." "Mister, that water's been evaporated for forty centuries." "Ah, now, now, that _is_ enough." "It's true, I tell you." The Martian grew very serious. "Tell me again. You do not see the city the way I describe it? The pillars very white, the boats very slender, the festival lights--oh, I see them _clearly!_ And listen! I can hear them singing. It's no space away at all." Tom¡s listened and shook his head. "No." "And I, on the other hand," said the Martian, "cannot see what you describe. Well." Again.they were cold. An ice was in their flesh. "Can it be . . . ?" "What?" "You say 'from the sky'?" "Earth." "Earth, a name, nothing," said the Martian. "_But_ . . . as I came up the pass an hour ago. . ." He touched the back of his neck. "I felt . . ." "Cold?" "Yes." "And now?" "Cold again. Oddly. There was a thing to the light, to the hills, the road," said the Martian. "I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if I were the last man alive on this world. . . ." "So did I!" said Tom¡s, and it was like talking to an old and dear friend, confiding, growing warm with the topic. The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. "This can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are a figment of the Past!" "No, you are from the Past," said the Earth Man, having had time to think of it now. "You are so _certain_. How can you prove who is from the Past, who from the Future? What year is it?" "Two thousand and one!" "What does that mean to _me?_" Tom¡s considered and shrugged. "Nothing." "It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S.E.C. It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show us how the stars stand?" "But the ruins prove it! They prove that _I_ am the Future, _I_ am alive, _you_ are dead!" "Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it. Two strangers passing. Ruins, you say?" "Yes. You're afraid?" "Who wants to see the Future, who _ever_ does? A man can face the Past, but to think--the pillars _crumbled_, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then he looked on ahead. "But there they _are_. I _see_ them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter _what_ you say." And for Tom¡s the rockets, far away, waiting for _him_, and the town and the women from Earth. "We can never agree," he said. "Let us agree to disagree," said the Martian. "What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don't ask. But the night is very short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds." Tom£s put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in imitation. Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other. "Will we meet again?" "Who knows? Perhaps some other night." "I'd like to go with you to that festival." "And I wish I might come to your new town, to see this ship you speak of, to see these men, to hear all that has happened." "Good-by," said Tom¡s. "Good night." The Martian rode his green metal vehicle quietly away into the hills, The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently in the opposite direction. "Good lord, what a dream that was," sighed Tom¡s, his hands on the wheel, thinking of the rockets, the women, the raw whisky, the Virginia reels, the party. How strange a vision was that, thought the Martian, rushing on, thinking of the festival, the canals, the boats, the women with golden eyes, and the songs. The night was dark. The moons had gone down. Starlight twinkled on the empty highway where now there was not a sound, no car, no person, nothing. And it remained that way all the rest of the cool dark night. October 2002: THE SHORE Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves. Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The first wave carried with it men accustomed to spaces and coldness and being alone, the coyote and cattlemen, with no fat on them, with faces the years had worn the flesh off, with eyes like nailheads, and hands like the material of old gloves, ready to touch anything. Mars could do nothing to them, for they were bred to plains and prairies as open as the Martian fields. They came and made things a little less empty, so that others would find courage to follow. They put panes in hollow windows and lights behind the panes. They were the first men. Everyone knew who the first women would be. The second men should have traveled from other countries with other accents and other ideas. But the rockets were American and the men were American and it stayed that way, while Europe and Asia and South America and Australia and the islands watched the Roman candles leave them behind. The rest of the world was buried in war or the thoughts of war. So the second men were Americans also. And they came from the cabbage tenements and subways, and they found much rest and vacation in the company of silent men from the tumbleweed states who knew how to use silences so they filled you up with peace after long years crushed in tubes, tins and boxes in New York. And among the second men were men who looked, by their eyes, as if they were on their way to God. . . . February 2003: INTERIM They brought in fifteen thousand lumber feet of Oregon pine to build Tenth City, and seventy-nine thousand feet of California redwood and they hammered together a clean, neat little town by the edge of the stone canals. On Sunday nights you could see red, blue, and green stained-glass light in the churches and hear the voices singing the numbered hymns. "We will now sing 79. We will now sing 94." And in certain houses you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist at work; or the scratch of a pen, the poet at work; or no sound at all, the former beachcomber at work. It was as if, in many ways, a great earthquake had shaken loose the roots and cellars of an Iowa town, and then, in an instant, a whirlwind twister of Oz-like proportions had carried the entire town off to Mars to set it down without a bump. April 2003: THE MUSICIANS The boys would hike far out into the Martian country. They carried odorous paper bags into which from time to time upon the long walk they would insert their noses to inhale the rich smell of the ham and mayonnaised pickles, and to listen to the liquid gurgle of the orange soda in the warming bottles. Swinging their grocery bags full of clean watery green onions and odorous liverwurst and red catsup and white bread, they would dare each other on past the limits set by their stem mothers. They would run, yelling: "First one there gets to kick!" They biked in summer, autumn, or winter. Autumn was most fun, because then they imagined, like on Earth, they were scuttering through autumn leaves. They would come like a scatter of jackstones on the marble flats beside the canals, the candy-cheeked boys with blue-agate eyes, panting onion-tainted commands to each other. For now that they had reached the dead, forbidden town it was no longer a matter of "Last one there's a girl!" or "First one gets to play Musician!" Now the dead town's doors lay wide and they thought they could hear the faintest crackle, like autumn leaves, from inside. They would hush themselves forward, by each other's elbows, carrying sticks, remembering their parents had told them, "Not there! No, to none of the old towns! Watch where you hike. You'll get the beating of your life when you come home. We'll check your shoes!" And there they stood in the dead city, a heap of boys, their hiking lunches half devoured, daring each other in shrieky whispers. "Here goes nothing!" And suddenly one of them took off, into the nearest stone house, through the door, across the living room, and into the bedroom where, without half looking, he would kick about, thrash his feet, and the black leaves would fly through the air, brittle, thin as tissue cut from midnight sky. Behind him would race six others, and the first boy there would be the Musician, playing the white xylophone bones beneath the outer covering of black flakes. A great skull would roll to view, like a snowball; they shouted! Ribs, like spider legs, plangent as a dull harp, and then the black flakes of mortality blowing all about them in their scuffling dance; the boys pushed and heaved and fell in the leaves, in the death that had turned the dead to flakes and dryness, into a game played by boys whose stomachs gurgled with orange pop. And then out of one house into another, into seventeen houses, mindful that each of the towns in its turn was being burned clean of its horrors by the Firemen, antiseptic warriors with shovels and bins, shoveling away at the ebony tatters and peppermint-stick bones, slowly but assuredly separating the terrible from the normal; so they must play very hard, these boys, the Firemen would soon be here! Then, luminous with sweat, they gnashed at their last sandwiches. With a final kick, a final marimba concert, a final autumnal lunge through leaf stacks, they went home. Their mothers examined their shoes for black flakelets which, when discovered, resulted in scalding baths and fatherly beatings. By the year's end the Firemen had raked the autumn leaves and white xylophones away, and it was no more fun. June 2003: WAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR "Did you hear about it?" "About what?" "The niggers, the niggers!" "What about 'em?" "Them leaving, pulling out, going away; did you hear?" "What you mean, pulling out? How can they do that?" "They can, they will, they are." "Just a couple?" "Every single one here in the South!" "No." "Yes!" "I got to see that. I don't believe it. Where they going-- Africa?" A silence. "Mars." "You mean the _planet_ Mars?" "That's right." The men stood up in the hot shade of the hardware porch. Someone quit lighting a pipe. Somebody else spat out into the hot dust of noon. "They can't leave, they can't do that." "They're doing it, anyways." "Where'd you hear this?" "It's everywhere, on the radio a minute ago, just come through." Like a series of dusty statues, the men came to life. Samuel Teece, the hardware proprietor, laughed uneasily. "I _wondered_ what happened to Silly. I sent him on my bike an hour ago. He ain't come back from Mrs. Bordman's yet. You think that black fool just pedaled off to Mars?" The men snorted. "All I say is, he better bring back my bike. I don't take stealing from no one, by God." "Listen!" The men collided irritably with each other, turning. Far up the street the levee seemed to have broken. The black warm waters descended and engulfed the town. Between the blazing white banks of the town stores, among the tree silences, a black tide flowed. Like a kind of summer molasses, it poured turgidly forth upon the cinnamon-dusty road. It surged slow, slow, and it was men and women and horses and barking dogs, and it was little boys and girls. And from the mouths of the people partaking of this tide came the sound of a river. A summer-day river going somewhere, murmuring and irrevocable. And in that slow, steady channel of darkness that cut across the white glare of day were touches of alert white, the eyes, the ivory eyes staring ahead, glancing aside, as the river, the long and endless river, took itself from old channels into a new one. From various and uncountable tributaries, in creeks and brooks of color and motion, the parts of this river had joined, become one mother current, and flowed on. And brimming the swell were things carried by the river: grandfather clocks chiming, kitchen clocks ticking, caged hens screaming, babies wailing; and swimming among the thickened eddies were mules and cats, and sudden excursions of burst mattress springs floating by, insane hair stuffing sticking out, and boxes and crates and pictures of dark grandfathers in oak frames-- the river flowing it on while the men sat like nervous hounds on the hardware porch, too late to mend the levee, their hands empty. Samuel Teece wouldn't believe it. "Why, hell, where'd they get the transportation? How they goin' to _get_ to Mars?" "Rockets," said Grandpa Quartermain. "All the damn-fool things. Where'd they get rockets?" "Saved their money and built them." "I never heard about it." "Seems these niggers kept it secret, worked on the rockets all themselves, don't know where--in Africa, maybe." "Could they _do_ that?" demanded Samuel Teece, pacing about the porch. "Ain't there a law?" "It ain't as if they're declarin' war," said Grandpa quietly. "Where do they get off, God damn it, workin' in secret, plottin'?" shouted Teece. "Schedule is for all this town's niggers to gather out by Loon Lake. Rockets be there at one o'clock, pick 'em up, take 'em to Mars." "Telephone the governor, call out the militia," cried Teece. "They should've given notice!" "Here comes your woman, Teece." The men turned again. As they watched, down the hot road in the windless light first one white woman and then another arrived, all of them with stunned faces, all of them rustling like ancient papers. Some of them were crying, some were stern. All came to find their husbands. They pushed through barroom swing doors, vanishing. They entered cool, quiet groceries. They went in at drug shops and garages. And one of them, Mrs. Clara Teece, came to stand in the dust by the hardware porch, blinking up at her stiff and angry husband as the black river flowed full behind her. "It's Lucinda, Pa; you got to come home!" "I'm not comin' home for no damn darkie!" "She's leaving. What'll I do without her?" "Fetch for yourself, maybe. I won't get down on my knees to stop her." "But she's like a family member," Mrs. Teece moaned. "Don't shout! I won't have you blubberin' in public this way about no goddamn--" His wife's small sob stopped him. She dabbed at her eyes. "I kept telling her, 'Lucinda,' I said, 'you stay on and I raise your pay, and you get _two_ nights off a week, if you want,' but she just looked set! I never seen her so set, and I said, 'Don't you _love_ me, Lucinda?' and she said yes, but she had to go because that's the way it was, is all. She cleaned the house and dusted it and put luncheon on the table and then she went to the parlor door and--and stood there with two bundles, one by each foot, and shook my hand and said, 'Good-by, Mrs. Teece.' And she went out the door. And there was her luncheon on the table, and all of us too upset to even eat it. It's still there now, I know; last time I looked it was getting cold." Teece almost struck her. "God damn it, Mrs. Teece, you get the hell home. Standin' there makin' a sight of yourself!" "But, Pa . . ." He strode away into the hot dimness of the store. He came back out a few seconds later with a silver pistol in his hand. His wife was gone. The river flowed black between the buildings, with a rustle and a creak and a constant whispering shuffle. It was a very quiet thing, with a great certainty to it; no laughter, no wildness, just a steady, decided, and ceasel