Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 18
Friend Hale:
May I add my gratitude to Sam’s for your help in this matter. I have tried to convince him it is almost certain to degenerate into a purely political office as a party whip and will bring him as many headaches as it will dollars or honors. However, as “Poor Richard” says, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”
Cordially,
Ben
The multimillionaire was frank. “If this letter and cover are genuine, they have, from the collector’s viewpoint, almost incalculable historic and philatelic value.” He showed such sound business sense (plus the aid of two world wars and marriage to a wealthy widow) that he had been able to pyramid a few loaves of bread and seven pounds of hamburger into a restaurant and chain-grocery empire. “But I won’t pay a penny more than, say, two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. And that only after an expert of my choice has authenticated both the letter and the cover.”
Weinfield, the dealer to whom Ephraim had gone, swallowed hard. “That will be satisfactory.”
“E-yah,” Ephraim agreed.
He went directly to Eighty-second Street to press his suit with Gertie. It wasn’t a difficult courtship. Gertie was tired of reading the Kinsey report and eager to learn more about life at first hand. The Bastard of Bastogne was less enthusiastic. If another male was to be added to the family, he would have preferred one from the Eagle or 10th Armored Division or the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion. However, on learning his prospective brother-in-law was about to come into a quarter of a million dollars, minus Weinfield’s commission, he thawed to the extent of loaning Ephraim a thousand dollars, three hundred and seventy-five of which Gertie insisted Ephraim pay down on a second-hand car.
It was a busy but happy week. There was the matter of learning to drive. There were blood tests to take. There was an apartment to find. Ephraim bought a marriage license, a car license, a driver’s license, and a dog license for the blond cocker spaniel that Gertie saw and admired. The principle of easy credit explained to him, he paid twenty-five dollars down and agreed to pay five dollars a week for four years, plus a nominal carrying charge, for a one-thousand-five-hundred-dollar diamond engagement ring. He paid ten dollars more on a three-piece living room suite and fifteen dollars down on a four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar genuine waterfall seven-piece bedroom outfit. Also, at Gertie’s insistence, he pressed a one-hundred-dollar bill into a rental agent’s perspiring palm to secure a two-room apartment because it was still under something Gertie called rent control.
His feet solidly on the ground of the brave new America in which he had awakened, Ephraim, for the life of him, couldn’t see what Silovitz had been beefing about. E-yah. Neither a man nor a nation could stay stationary. Both had to move with the times. They’d had Silovitzes at Valley Forge, always yearning for the good old days. Remembering their conversation, however, and having reserved the bridal suite at a swank Catskill resort, Ephraim, purely as a precautionary measure, along with his other permits and licenses, purchased a fishing license to make certain nothing would deter or delay the inception of the new family he intended to found.
The sale of Sam Osgood’s letter was consummated the following Monday at ten o’clock in Mr. Le Due Neimors’ office. Ephraim and Gertie were married at nine in the City Hall, and after a quick breakfast of dry Martinis she waited in the car with Mr. Gorgeous while Ephraim went up to get the money. The multimillionaire had it waiting, in cash.
“And there you are. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Ephraim reached for the stacked sheaves of bills, wishing he’d brought a sack, and a thin-faced man with a jaundiced eye introduced himself. “Jim Carlyle is the name.” He showed his credentials. “Of the Internal Revenue Bureau. And to save any possible complication, I’ll take Uncle Sam’s share right now.” He sorted the sheaves of bills into piles. “We want $156,820 plus $25,000, or a total of $179,570, leaving a balance of $45,430.”
Ephraim looked at the residue sourly, and a jovial man slapped his back and handed him a card. “New York State income tax, Mr. Hale. But we won’t be hogs. We’ll let you off easy. All we want is two per cent up to the first thousand dollars, three per cent on the next two thousand, four per cent on the next two thousand, five per cent on the next two thousand, six per cent on the next two thousand, and seven per cent on everything over nine thousand. If my figures are correct, and they are, I’ll take $2,930.10.” He took it. Then, slapping Ephraim’s back again, he laughed. “Leaving $42,499.90.”
“Ha, ha,” Ephraim laughed weakly.
~ * ~
Mr. Weinfield dry-washed his hands. “Now, we agreed on a fifteen per cent commission. That is, fifteen per cent of the whole. And fifteen per cent of $225,000 is $32,750 you owe me.”
“Take it,” Ephraim said. Mr. Weinfield did, and Ephraim wished he hadn’t eaten the olive in his second Martini. It felt as though it had gone to seed and was putting out branches in his stomach. In less than five minutes his quarter of a million dollars had shrunk to $9,749.90. By the time he paid for the things he had purchased and returned Benny’s thousand dollars, he would be back where he’d started.
Closing his case, Mr. Carlyle asked, “By the way, Mr. Hale. Just for the record. Where did you file your report last year?”
“I didn’t,” Ephraim admitted. “This is the first time I ever paid income tax.”
Mr. Le Due Neimors looked shocked. The New York State man looked shocked. Mr. Weinfield looked shocked.
“Oh,” Carlyle said. “I see. Well in that case I’d better take charge of this, too.” He added the sheaves remaining on the desk to those already in his case and fixed Ephraim with his jaundiced eye. “We’ll expect you down at the bureau as soon as it’s convenient, Mr. Hale. If there was no deliberate intent on your part to defraud, it may be that your lawyers still can straighten this out without us having to resort to criminal prosecution.”
Gertie was stroking the honey-colored Mr. Gorgeous when Ephraim got back to the car. “Ya got it, honey?”
“Yeah,” Ephraim said shortly. “I got it.”
He jerked the car away from the curb so fast he almost tore out the aged rear end. Her feelings hurt, Gertie sniveled audibly until they’d crossed the George Washington bridge. Then, having suffered in comparative silence as long as she could, she said, “Ya didn’t need to bite my head off, Ephraim. And on our honeymoon, too. All I done was ast ya a question.”
“Did,” Ephraim corrected her.
“Did what?” Gertie asked.
Ephraim turned his head to explain the difference between the past tense and the participle “have done,” and Gertie screamed as he almost collided head on with a car going the other way. Mr. Gorgeous yelped and bit Ephraim on the arm. Then, both cars and excitement being new to the twelve-week-old puppy, he was most inconveniently sick.
On their way again, Ephraim apologized. “I’m sorry I was cross.” He was. None of this was Gertie’s fault. She couldn’t help it if he’d been a fool. There was no need of spoiling her honeymoon. The few hundred in his pockets would cover their immediate needs. And he’d work this out somehow. Things had looked black at Valley Forge, too.
Gertie snuggled closer to him. “Ya do love me, don’t ya?”
“Devotedly,” Ephraim assured her. He tried to put his arm around her. Still suspicious, Mr. Gorgeous bit him again. Mr. Gorgeous, Ephraim could see, was going to be a problem.
His mind continued to probe the situation as he drove. Things had come to a pretty pass when a nation this size was insolvent, when outgo and deficit spending so far exceeded current revenue that taxes had become confiscatory. There was mismanagement somewhere. There were too many feet under the table. Too many were eating too high off the hog. Perhaps what Congress needed was some of the spirit of ‘76 and ‘89. A possible solution of his own need for a job occurred to him. “How,” he asked Gertie, “would you like to be the wife of a congressman ?”
“I think we have a flat tire,” she answered. “Either that, honey, or one of the wheels isn’t quite round on the bottom.”
~ * ~
She walked Mr. Gorgeous while he changed the tire. It was drizzling by the time they got back in the car. Both the cowl and the top leaked. A few miles past Bear Mountain, it rained. It was like riding in a portable needle shower. All human habitation blotted out by the rain, the rugged landscape was familiar to Ephraim. He’d camped under that great oak when it had been a young tree. He’d fought on the crest of that hill overlooking the river. But what in the name of time had he been fighting for?
He felt a new wave of tenderness for Gertie. This was the only world the child had ever known. A world of Video and installment payments, of automobiles and war, of atom bombs and double talk and meaningless jumbles of figures. A world of confused little men and puzzled, barren women.
“I love you, Gertie,” he told her.
She wiped the rain out of her eyes and smiled at him. “I love you, too. And it’s all right with me to go on. But I think we’d better stop pretty soon. I heard Mr. Gorgeous sneeze and I’m afraid he’s catching cold.”
“Damn Mr. Gorgeous,” Ephraim thought. Still, there was sense in what she said. The rain was blinding. He could barely see the road. And somewhere he’d made a wrong turning. They’d have to stop where they could.
The hotel was small and old and might once have been an inn. Ephraim got Gertie inside, signed the yellowed ledger, and saw her and Mr. Gorgeous installed in a room with a huge four-poster bed before going back for the rest of the luggage.
A dried-up descendant of Cotton Mather, the tobacco-chewing proprietor was waiting at the foot of the stairs when he returned sodden with rain and his arms and hands filled with bags.
“Naow, don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Hale,” the old witch-burner said, “I don’t like t’ poke m’ nose intuh other people’s business. But I run a respectable hotel an’ I don’t cater none t’ fly-b’-nights or loose women.” He adjusted the glasses on his nose. “Y’ sure y’ an’ Mrs. Hale are married? Y’ got anythin’t’ prove it?”
Ephraim counted to ten. Then still half-blinded by the rain dripping from the brim of his Homburg, he set the bags on the floor, took an envelope from his pocket, selected a crisp official paper, gave it to the hotel man, picked up the bags again, and climbed the stairs to Gertie.
She’d taken off her wet dress and put on a sheer negligee that set Ephraim’s pulse to pounding. He took off his hat, eased out of his sodden coat, and tossed it on a chair.
“Did I ever tell you I loved you?”
Gertie ran her fingers through his hair. “Go ahead. Tell me again.”
Tilting her chin, Ephraim kissed her. This was good. This was right. This was all that mattered. He’d make Gertie a good husband. He—
A furtive rap on the door sidetracked his train of thought. He opened it to find the old man in the hall, shaking as with palsy. “Now a look a yere, mister,” he whispered. “If y’ ain’t done it, don’t do it. Jist pack yer bags and git.” One palsied hand held out the crisp piece of paper Ephraim had given him. “This yere fishin’ license ain’t for it.”
Ephraim looked from the fishing license to his coat. The envelope had fallen on the floor, scattering its contents. A foot away, under the edge of the bed, his puppy eyes sad, Mr. Gorgeous was thoughtfully masticating the last of what once had been another crisp piece of paper. As Ephraim watched, Mr. Gorgeous burped and swallowed. It was, as Silovitz had said, the little things.
~ * ~
It was three nights later, at dusk, when Mickey spotted the apparition. For a moment he was startled. Then he knew it for what it was. It was Nature Boy, back in costume, clutching a jug of rum to his bosom.
“Hey, mister,” Mickey stopped Ephraim. “I been looking all over for you. My cousin’s a scout for the Yankees. And when I told him about your whip he said for you to come down to the stadium and show ‘em what you got.”
Ephraim looked at the boy glass-eyed.
Mickey was hurt by his lack of enthusiasm. “Gee. Ain’t you excited? Wouldn’t you like to be a big league ball player, the idol of every red-blooded American boy? Wouldn’t you like to make a lot of money and have the girls crazy about you?”
The words reached through Ephraim’s fog and touched a responsive chord. Drawing himself up to his full height, he clutched the jug still tighter to his bosom with all of the dignity possible to a man without pants.
“Ya fadder’s mustache,” he said.
Then, staggering swiftly into the cave, he closed the rock door firmly and finally behind him.
>
~ * ~
Ray Bradbury
NIGHT MEETING
Is it a “real” ghost? Is it two kinds of time crossing? Is it just a delusion? Whatever it is, it is not the sort of event about which one can be pedantically logical. Ray Bradbury has an uncanny ability to make poetic reality out of impossibles and illogicals; and in this tale, one of his long series of dreams about the planet Mars, he has taken a handful of the merest gossamer and woven a quietly luminescent thing of it, a thing you cannot forget.
~ * ~
BEFORE going on up into the blue hills, Tomás Gómez stopped for gasoline at the lonely station.
“Kind of alone out here, aren’t you, Pop?” said Tomás.
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 Tomás, 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.”
Tomás 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—Tomás 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.
May I add my gratitude to Sam’s for your help in this matter. I have tried to convince him it is almost certain to degenerate into a purely political office as a party whip and will bring him as many headaches as it will dollars or honors. However, as “Poor Richard” says, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”
Cordially,
Ben
The multimillionaire was frank. “If this letter and cover are genuine, they have, from the collector’s viewpoint, almost incalculable historic and philatelic value.” He showed such sound business sense (plus the aid of two world wars and marriage to a wealthy widow) that he had been able to pyramid a few loaves of bread and seven pounds of hamburger into a restaurant and chain-grocery empire. “But I won’t pay a penny more than, say, two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. And that only after an expert of my choice has authenticated both the letter and the cover.”
Weinfield, the dealer to whom Ephraim had gone, swallowed hard. “That will be satisfactory.”
“E-yah,” Ephraim agreed.
He went directly to Eighty-second Street to press his suit with Gertie. It wasn’t a difficult courtship. Gertie was tired of reading the Kinsey report and eager to learn more about life at first hand. The Bastard of Bastogne was less enthusiastic. If another male was to be added to the family, he would have preferred one from the Eagle or 10th Armored Division or the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion. However, on learning his prospective brother-in-law was about to come into a quarter of a million dollars, minus Weinfield’s commission, he thawed to the extent of loaning Ephraim a thousand dollars, three hundred and seventy-five of which Gertie insisted Ephraim pay down on a second-hand car.
It was a busy but happy week. There was the matter of learning to drive. There were blood tests to take. There was an apartment to find. Ephraim bought a marriage license, a car license, a driver’s license, and a dog license for the blond cocker spaniel that Gertie saw and admired. The principle of easy credit explained to him, he paid twenty-five dollars down and agreed to pay five dollars a week for four years, plus a nominal carrying charge, for a one-thousand-five-hundred-dollar diamond engagement ring. He paid ten dollars more on a three-piece living room suite and fifteen dollars down on a four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar genuine waterfall seven-piece bedroom outfit. Also, at Gertie’s insistence, he pressed a one-hundred-dollar bill into a rental agent’s perspiring palm to secure a two-room apartment because it was still under something Gertie called rent control.
His feet solidly on the ground of the brave new America in which he had awakened, Ephraim, for the life of him, couldn’t see what Silovitz had been beefing about. E-yah. Neither a man nor a nation could stay stationary. Both had to move with the times. They’d had Silovitzes at Valley Forge, always yearning for the good old days. Remembering their conversation, however, and having reserved the bridal suite at a swank Catskill resort, Ephraim, purely as a precautionary measure, along with his other permits and licenses, purchased a fishing license to make certain nothing would deter or delay the inception of the new family he intended to found.
The sale of Sam Osgood’s letter was consummated the following Monday at ten o’clock in Mr. Le Due Neimors’ office. Ephraim and Gertie were married at nine in the City Hall, and after a quick breakfast of dry Martinis she waited in the car with Mr. Gorgeous while Ephraim went up to get the money. The multimillionaire had it waiting, in cash.
“And there you are. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Ephraim reached for the stacked sheaves of bills, wishing he’d brought a sack, and a thin-faced man with a jaundiced eye introduced himself. “Jim Carlyle is the name.” He showed his credentials. “Of the Internal Revenue Bureau. And to save any possible complication, I’ll take Uncle Sam’s share right now.” He sorted the sheaves of bills into piles. “We want $156,820 plus $25,000, or a total of $179,570, leaving a balance of $45,430.”
Ephraim looked at the residue sourly, and a jovial man slapped his back and handed him a card. “New York State income tax, Mr. Hale. But we won’t be hogs. We’ll let you off easy. All we want is two per cent up to the first thousand dollars, three per cent on the next two thousand, four per cent on the next two thousand, five per cent on the next two thousand, six per cent on the next two thousand, and seven per cent on everything over nine thousand. If my figures are correct, and they are, I’ll take $2,930.10.” He took it. Then, slapping Ephraim’s back again, he laughed. “Leaving $42,499.90.”
“Ha, ha,” Ephraim laughed weakly.
~ * ~
Mr. Weinfield dry-washed his hands. “Now, we agreed on a fifteen per cent commission. That is, fifteen per cent of the whole. And fifteen per cent of $225,000 is $32,750 you owe me.”
“Take it,” Ephraim said. Mr. Weinfield did, and Ephraim wished he hadn’t eaten the olive in his second Martini. It felt as though it had gone to seed and was putting out branches in his stomach. In less than five minutes his quarter of a million dollars had shrunk to $9,749.90. By the time he paid for the things he had purchased and returned Benny’s thousand dollars, he would be back where he’d started.
Closing his case, Mr. Carlyle asked, “By the way, Mr. Hale. Just for the record. Where did you file your report last year?”
“I didn’t,” Ephraim admitted. “This is the first time I ever paid income tax.”
Mr. Le Due Neimors looked shocked. The New York State man looked shocked. Mr. Weinfield looked shocked.
“Oh,” Carlyle said. “I see. Well in that case I’d better take charge of this, too.” He added the sheaves remaining on the desk to those already in his case and fixed Ephraim with his jaundiced eye. “We’ll expect you down at the bureau as soon as it’s convenient, Mr. Hale. If there was no deliberate intent on your part to defraud, it may be that your lawyers still can straighten this out without us having to resort to criminal prosecution.”
Gertie was stroking the honey-colored Mr. Gorgeous when Ephraim got back to the car. “Ya got it, honey?”
“Yeah,” Ephraim said shortly. “I got it.”
He jerked the car away from the curb so fast he almost tore out the aged rear end. Her feelings hurt, Gertie sniveled audibly until they’d crossed the George Washington bridge. Then, having suffered in comparative silence as long as she could, she said, “Ya didn’t need to bite my head off, Ephraim. And on our honeymoon, too. All I done was ast ya a question.”
“Did,” Ephraim corrected her.
“Did what?” Gertie asked.
Ephraim turned his head to explain the difference between the past tense and the participle “have done,” and Gertie screamed as he almost collided head on with a car going the other way. Mr. Gorgeous yelped and bit Ephraim on the arm. Then, both cars and excitement being new to the twelve-week-old puppy, he was most inconveniently sick.
On their way again, Ephraim apologized. “I’m sorry I was cross.” He was. None of this was Gertie’s fault. She couldn’t help it if he’d been a fool. There was no need of spoiling her honeymoon. The few hundred in his pockets would cover their immediate needs. And he’d work this out somehow. Things had looked black at Valley Forge, too.
Gertie snuggled closer to him. “Ya do love me, don’t ya?”
“Devotedly,” Ephraim assured her. He tried to put his arm around her. Still suspicious, Mr. Gorgeous bit him again. Mr. Gorgeous, Ephraim could see, was going to be a problem.
His mind continued to probe the situation as he drove. Things had come to a pretty pass when a nation this size was insolvent, when outgo and deficit spending so far exceeded current revenue that taxes had become confiscatory. There was mismanagement somewhere. There were too many feet under the table. Too many were eating too high off the hog. Perhaps what Congress needed was some of the spirit of ‘76 and ‘89. A possible solution of his own need for a job occurred to him. “How,” he asked Gertie, “would you like to be the wife of a congressman ?”
“I think we have a flat tire,” she answered. “Either that, honey, or one of the wheels isn’t quite round on the bottom.”
~ * ~
She walked Mr. Gorgeous while he changed the tire. It was drizzling by the time they got back in the car. Both the cowl and the top leaked. A few miles past Bear Mountain, it rained. It was like riding in a portable needle shower. All human habitation blotted out by the rain, the rugged landscape was familiar to Ephraim. He’d camped under that great oak when it had been a young tree. He’d fought on the crest of that hill overlooking the river. But what in the name of time had he been fighting for?
He felt a new wave of tenderness for Gertie. This was the only world the child had ever known. A world of Video and installment payments, of automobiles and war, of atom bombs and double talk and meaningless jumbles of figures. A world of confused little men and puzzled, barren women.
“I love you, Gertie,” he told her.
She wiped the rain out of her eyes and smiled at him. “I love you, too. And it’s all right with me to go on. But I think we’d better stop pretty soon. I heard Mr. Gorgeous sneeze and I’m afraid he’s catching cold.”
“Damn Mr. Gorgeous,” Ephraim thought. Still, there was sense in what she said. The rain was blinding. He could barely see the road. And somewhere he’d made a wrong turning. They’d have to stop where they could.
The hotel was small and old and might once have been an inn. Ephraim got Gertie inside, signed the yellowed ledger, and saw her and Mr. Gorgeous installed in a room with a huge four-poster bed before going back for the rest of the luggage.
A dried-up descendant of Cotton Mather, the tobacco-chewing proprietor was waiting at the foot of the stairs when he returned sodden with rain and his arms and hands filled with bags.
“Naow, don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Hale,” the old witch-burner said, “I don’t like t’ poke m’ nose intuh other people’s business. But I run a respectable hotel an’ I don’t cater none t’ fly-b’-nights or loose women.” He adjusted the glasses on his nose. “Y’ sure y’ an’ Mrs. Hale are married? Y’ got anythin’t’ prove it?”
Ephraim counted to ten. Then still half-blinded by the rain dripping from the brim of his Homburg, he set the bags on the floor, took an envelope from his pocket, selected a crisp official paper, gave it to the hotel man, picked up the bags again, and climbed the stairs to Gertie.
She’d taken off her wet dress and put on a sheer negligee that set Ephraim’s pulse to pounding. He took off his hat, eased out of his sodden coat, and tossed it on a chair.
“Did I ever tell you I loved you?”
Gertie ran her fingers through his hair. “Go ahead. Tell me again.”
Tilting her chin, Ephraim kissed her. This was good. This was right. This was all that mattered. He’d make Gertie a good husband. He—
A furtive rap on the door sidetracked his train of thought. He opened it to find the old man in the hall, shaking as with palsy. “Now a look a yere, mister,” he whispered. “If y’ ain’t done it, don’t do it. Jist pack yer bags and git.” One palsied hand held out the crisp piece of paper Ephraim had given him. “This yere fishin’ license ain’t for it.”
Ephraim looked from the fishing license to his coat. The envelope had fallen on the floor, scattering its contents. A foot away, under the edge of the bed, his puppy eyes sad, Mr. Gorgeous was thoughtfully masticating the last of what once had been another crisp piece of paper. As Ephraim watched, Mr. Gorgeous burped and swallowed. It was, as Silovitz had said, the little things.
~ * ~
It was three nights later, at dusk, when Mickey spotted the apparition. For a moment he was startled. Then he knew it for what it was. It was Nature Boy, back in costume, clutching a jug of rum to his bosom.
“Hey, mister,” Mickey stopped Ephraim. “I been looking all over for you. My cousin’s a scout for the Yankees. And when I told him about your whip he said for you to come down to the stadium and show ‘em what you got.”
Ephraim looked at the boy glass-eyed.
Mickey was hurt by his lack of enthusiasm. “Gee. Ain’t you excited? Wouldn’t you like to be a big league ball player, the idol of every red-blooded American boy? Wouldn’t you like to make a lot of money and have the girls crazy about you?”
The words reached through Ephraim’s fog and touched a responsive chord. Drawing himself up to his full height, he clutched the jug still tighter to his bosom with all of the dignity possible to a man without pants.
“Ya fadder’s mustache,” he said.
Then, staggering swiftly into the cave, he closed the rock door firmly and finally behind him.
>
~ * ~
Ray Bradbury
NIGHT MEETING
Is it a “real” ghost? Is it two kinds of time crossing? Is it just a delusion? Whatever it is, it is not the sort of event about which one can be pedantically logical. Ray Bradbury has an uncanny ability to make poetic reality out of impossibles and illogicals; and in this tale, one of his long series of dreams about the planet Mars, he has taken a handful of the merest gossamer and woven a quietly luminescent thing of it, a thing you cannot forget.
~ * ~
BEFORE going on up into the blue hills, Tomás Gómez stopped for gasoline at the lonely station.
“Kind of alone out here, aren’t you, Pop?” said Tomás.
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 Tomás, 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.”
Tomás 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—Tomás 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.
