The Lost Bradbury (24 page)

“Well?”

The old man petted the phone, pitifully. “How’s Earth? How’s New York? Is the war over? Who’s President now? What happened?”

“Plenty of time for gossip when you arrive.”

“Is everything fine?”

“Fine.”

“Thank God.” The old man listened to the far voice. “Are you sure you’re Captain Rockwell?”

“Damn it, man!”

“I’m sorry!”

He hung up and ran.

They were here, after many years, unbelievable, his own, who would take him back to Earth seas and skies and mountains.

He started the car. He would drive all night. Could he do it? What of his heart—It would be worth a risk, to see people, to shake hands, to hear them near you.

The car thundered in the hills.

That voice. Captain Rockwell. It couldn’t be himself, forty years ago. He had never made a recording like that. Or had he? In one of his depressive fits, in a spell of drunken cynicism, hadn’t he once made a false tape of a false landing on Mars with a synthetic captain, an imaginary crew? He jerked his grey head, savagely. No. He was a suspicious fool. Now was no time to doubt. He must run under the moons of Mars, hour on hour. What a party they would have!

The sun rose. He was immensely tired, full of thorns and brambles of weakness, his heart plunging and aching, his fingers fumbling the wheel, but the thing that pleased him most was the thought of one last phone call: Hello, young Barton, this is old Barton. I’m leaving for Earth today! Rescued! He chuckled weakly.

He drove into the shadowy limits of New Schenectady at sundown. Stepping from his car he stood staring at the rocket tarmac, rubbing his reddened eyes.

The rocket field was empty. No one ran to meet him. No one shook his hand, shouted, or laughed.

He felt his heart roar into pain. He knew blackness and a sensation of falling through the open sky. He stumbled toward an office.

Inside, six phones sat in a neat row.

He waited, gasping.

Finally.

Brrrrinnnng.

He lifted the heavy receiver.

A voice said, “I was wondering if you’d get there alive.”

The old man did not speak but stood with the phone in his hands.

The voice continued, “An elaborate joke. Captain Rockwell reporting for duty, sir. Your orders, sir?”

“You,” groaned the old man.

“How’s your heart, old man?”

“No!”

“Hoped the trip would kill you. Had to eliminate you some way, so I could live, if you call a transcription living.”

“I’m going out now,” replied the old man, “and blow it all up. I don’t care. I’ll blow up everything until you’re all dead!”

“You haven’t the strength. Why do you think I had you travel so far, so fast? This is your last trip!”

The old man felt his heart falter. He would never make the other towns. The war was lost. He slid into a chair and made low sobbing, mournful noises from his loose mouth. He glared at the five other silent phones. As if at a signal, they burst into silver chorus! A nest of ugly birds screaming!

Automatic receivers popped up.

The office whirled. “Barton, Barton, Barton!!”

He throttled the phone in his hands, the voice, the youth, the time of long ago. He mashed, choked it and still it laughed at him. He throttled it. He beat it. He kicked at it. He hated it with hands and mouth and blind raging eye. He furled the hot wire like serpentine in his fingers, ripped it into red bits which fell about his stumbling feet.

He destroyed three other phones. There was a sudden silence.

And as if his body now discovered a thing which it had long kept secret, it seemed to decay upon his tired bones. The flesh of his eyelids fell away like flower petals. His mouth became a withered rose. The lobes of his ears melting wax. He pushed his chest with his hands and fell face down. He lay still. His breathing stopped. His heart stopped.

After a long spell, the remaining two phones rang.

Twice. Three times.

A relay snapped somewhere. The two phone voices were connected, one to the other.

“Hello, Barton?”

“Yes, Barton?”

“Aged twenty-four.”

“I’m twenty-six. We’re both young. What’s happened?”

“I don’t know. Listen.”

The silent room. The old man did not stir on the floor. The wind blew in the broken window. The air was cool.

“Congratulate me, Barton, this is my twenty-sixth birthday!”

“Congratulations!”

Laughter drifted out the window into the dead city.

 
THE ONE WHO WAITS

First published in
Arkham Sampler
in the summer of 1949, this little story has been reprinted and collected multiple times from 1951 up to 2000 in over 25 publications, including magazines, books, textbooks, and even appeared in comic form. However, this has remained an unchronicled Martian tale.

* * * *

I live in a well. I live like smoke in the well. Like vapour in a stone throat. I don’t move. I don’t do anything but wait. Overhead, I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when I don’t know? I cannot. I am simply waiting. I am mist and moonlight and memory. I am sad and I am old. Sometimes I fall like rain into the well. Spider webs are startled into forming where my rain falls fast, on the water surface. I wait in cool silence and there will be a day when I no longer wait.

Now it is morning. I hear a great thunder. I smell red fire from a distance. I hear a metal crashing. I wait. I listen. Voices. Far away.

“All right!”

One voice. An alien voice. An alien tongue. I cannot know. No word is familiar. I listen.

“Send the men out!”

A crunching in crystal sands.

“So this is Mars!”

“Where’s the flag?”

“Here you are, Sir.”

“Good, good.”

The sun is high in the blue sky and its golden rays fill the well and I hang like a flower pollen, invisible and misting in the warm light.

Voices.

“In the name of the Government of Earth, I proclaim this to be the Martian Territory, to be equally divided between the member nations.”

“Amen.”

What are they saying? I turn in the sun, like a wheel, invisible and lazy, golden and tireless.

“What’s over here?”

“A well!”

“No?”

“Come on and see.”

The approach of warmth. Three objects bend over the well-mouth and my coolness rises to the objects.

“Good!”

“Think it’s good water?”

“We’ll see.”

“Someone get a bucket.”

“I will!”

A sound of running. The return.

“Here we are.”

I wait.

“Let it down on the rope. Easy.”

The water ripples softly as the bucket touches and fills. I rise in the warm air toward the well-mouth.

“Here we are. You want to test this water, Regent?”

“Let’s have it.”

“What a beautiful well. Look at that construction. How old do you think it is?”

“God knows. When we landed in that other town yesterday Smith said there hasn’t been life on Mars in ten thousand years.”

“Imagine.”

“How is it, Regent? The water.”

“Pure as silver. Have a glass.”

The sound of water in the hot sunlight. Now I hover like a dust, a cinnamon, upon the soft wind.

“What’s the matter, Jones?”

“I don’t know. Got a terrific headache. All of a sudden.”

“Did you drink the water yet?”

“No, I haven’t. It’s not that. I was just bending over the well and all of a sudden, my head split. I feel better now.”

Now I know who I am.

My name is Stephen Leonard Jones and I am twenty-three years old and I have just come in a rocket from a planet called Earth and I am standing with my good friends Regent and Shaw by an old well on the planet Mars.

I look down at my golden fingers, tan and strong. I look at my long legs and my silver uniform and at my friends.

“What’s wrong, Jones?” they say.

“Nothing,” I say, looking at them. “Nothing at all.”

The food is good. It has been ten thousand years since food. It touches the tongue in a fine way and the wine with the food is warming. I listen to the sound of voices. I make words that I do not understand but somehow understand. I test the air.

“What’s the matter, Jones?”

I tilt this head of mine and rest my hands holding the silver utensils of eating. I feel everything.

“What do you mean?” this voice, this new thing of mine, says.

“You keep breathing funny. Coughing,” says the other one.

I pronounce exactly. “Maybe a little cold coming on.”

“Check with the doc later.”

I nod my head and it is good to nod. It is good to do several things after ten thousand years. It is good to breathe the air and it is good to feel the sun in the flesh deep and going deeper and it is good to feel the structure of ivory, the fine skeleton hidden in the warming flesh, and it is good to hear sounds much clearer and more immediate than they were in the stone deepness of a well. I sit enchanted.

“Come out of it, Jones. Snap it. We got to move!”

“Yes,” I say, hypnotized with the way the word forms like water on the tongue and falls with slow beauty out into the air.

I walk and it is good walking. I stand high and it is a long way to the ground when I look down from my eyes and my head. It is like living on a fine cliff and being happy there.

Regent stands by the stone wall, looking down. The others have gone murmuring to the silver ship from which they came.

I feel the fingers of my hand and the smile of my mouth.

“It is deep,” I say.

“Yes.”

“It is called a Soul Well.”

Regent raises his head and looks at me. “How do you know that?”

“Doesn’t it look like one?”

“I never heard of a Soul Well.”

“A place where waiting things, things that once had flesh, wait and wait,” I say touching his arm.

* * * *

The sand is fire and the ship is silver fire in the hotness of the day and the heat is good to feel. The sound of my feet in the hard sand. I listen. The sound of the wind and the sun burning the valleys. I smell the smell of the rocket boiling in the noon. I stand below the port.

“Where’s Regent?” someone says.

“I saw him by the well,” I reply.

One of them runs towards the well. I am beginning to tremble. A fine shivering tremble, hidden deep, but becoming very strong. And for the first time I hear it, as if it, too, were hidden in a well. A voice calling deep within me tiny and afraid. And the voice cries, Let me go, let me go, and there is a feeling as if something was trying to get free, a pounding of labyrinthine doors, a rushing down dark corridors and up passages, echoing and screaming.

“Regent’s in the well!”

The men are running, all five of them. I run with them but now I am sick and the trembling is violent.

“He must have fallen. Jones, you were here with him. Did you see? Jones? Well, speak up, man.”

“What’s wrong, Jones?”

I fall to my knees, the trembling is so bad.

“He’s sick. Here, help me with him.”

“The sun.”

“No, not the sun,” I murmur.

They stretch me out and the seizures come and go like earthquakes and the deep hidden voice in me cries This is Jones, this is me, that’s not him, that’s not him, don’t believe him, let me out, let me out! And I look up at the bent figures and my eyelids flicker. They touch my wrists.

“His heart is acting up.”

I close my eyes. The screaming stops. The shivering ceases.

I rise, as in a cool well, released.

“He’s dead,” says someone.

“Jones is dead.”

“From what?”

“Shock, it looks like.”

“What kind of shock?” I say, and my name is Sessions and my lips move crisply, and I am the captain of these men. I stand among them and I am looking down at a body which lies cooling on the sands. I clap both hands to my head.

“Captain!”

“It’s nothing,” I say, crying out. “Just a headache. I’ll be all right. There. There,” I whisper. “It’s all right now.”

“We’d better get out of the sun, sir.”

“Yes,” I say, looking down at Jones. “We should never have come. Mars doesn’t want us.”