Bradbury Stories 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Part 79

"Kate, Kate, oh, Kate!"

He could not leave her here, lost to the tidal flows between the j.a.pan Sea and the Golden Gate. Weeping that night, he stormed himself out of the storm. Gripped to the wheel, he circled the s.h.i.+p again and again around that wound that had healed with untimely swiftness. Then he knew a calm that lasted the rest of his days. He never raised his voice or clenched his fist again to any man. And with that pale voice and unclenched fist, he turned the s.h.i.+p away at last from the unscarred ground, circled the earth, delivered his goods, then turned his face from the sea for all time. Leaving his s.h.i.+p to nudge the green-mantled dock, he walked and rode inland twelve hundred miles. Blindly, he bought land, blindly he built, with Hanks, not knowing for a long while what he had bought or built. Only knowing that he had always been too old, and had been young for a short hour with Kate, and now was very old indeed and would never chance such an hour again.

So, in mid-continent, a thousand miles from the sea on the east, a thousand miles from the hateful sea on the west, he d.a.m.ned the life and the water he had known, remembering not what had been given but what had been so swiftly taken away.

On this land, then, he walked out and cast forth seed, prepared himself for his first harvest and called himself farmer.

But one night in that first summer of living as far from the sea as any man could get, he was waked by an incredible, a familiar, sound. Trembling in his bed, he whispered, No, no, it can't be-I'm mad! But . . . listen!

He opened the farmhouse door to look upon the land. He stepped out on the porch, spelled by this thing he had done without knowing it. He held to the porch rail and blinked, wet-eyed, out beyond his house.

There, in the moonlight, hill after slow-rising hill of wheat blew in tidal winds with the motion of waves. An immense Pacific of grain s.h.i.+mmered off beyond seeing, with his house, his now-recognized s.h.i.+p, becalmed in its midst.

He stayed out half the night, striding here, standing there, stunned with the discovery, lost in the deeps of this inland sea. And with the following years, tackle by tackle, timber by timber, the house shaped itself to the size, feel, and thrust of s.h.i.+ps he had sailed in crueler winds and deeper waters.

"How long, Hanks, since we last saw water?"

"Twenty years, Captain."

"No, yesterday morning."

Coming back through the door, his heart pounded. The wall barometer clouded over, flickered with a faint lightning that played along the rims of his eyelids.

"No coffee, Hanks. Just-a cup of clear water."

Hanks went away and came back.

"Hanks? Promise. Bury me where she is."

"But, Captain, she's-" Hanks stopped. He nodded. "Where she is. Yes, sir."

"Good. Now give me the cup."

The water was fresh. It came from the islands beneath the earth. It tasted of sleep.

"One cup. She was right, Hanks, you know. Not to touch land, ever again. She was right. But I brought her one cup of water from the land, and the land was in water that touched her lips. One cup. Oh, if only . . .!"

He s.h.i.+fted it in his rusted hands. A typhoon swarmed from nowhere, filling the cup. It was a black storm raging in a small place.

He raised the cup and drank the typhoon.

"Hanks!" someone cried.

But not he. The typhoon, storming, had gone, and he with it.

The cup fell empty to the floor.

It was a mild morning. The air was sweet and the wind steady. Hanks had worked half the night digging and half the morning filling. Now the work was done. The town minister helped, and then stood back as Hanks jigsawed the final square of sod into place. Piece after piece, he fitted neatly and tamped and joined. And on each piece, as Hanks had made certain, was the golden, the full rich ripe-grained wheat, as high as a ten-year-old boy.

Hanks bent and put the last piece to rest.

"No marker?" asked the minister.

"Oh, no, sir, and never will be one."

The minister started to protest, when Hanks took his arm, and walked him up the hill a way, then turned and pointed back.

They stood a long moment. The minister nodded at last, smiled quietly and said, "I see. I understand."

For there was just the ocean of wheat going on and on forever, vast tides of it blowing in the wind, moving east and ever east beyond, and not a line or seam or ripple to show where the old man sank from sight.

"It was a sea burial," said the minister.

"It was," said Hanks. "As I promised. It was, indeed."

Then they turned and walked off along the hilly sh.o.r.e, saying nothing again until they reached and entered the creaking house.

THE LONELY ONES.

THEY ATE SIX SUPPERS IN THE OPEN, talking back and forth over the small campfire. The light shone high on the silver rocket in which they had traveled across s.p.a.ce. From a long way off in the blue hills, their campfire seemed like a star that had landed beside the long Martian ca.n.a.ls under the clear and windless Martian sky.

On the sixth night the two men sat by the fire, looking tensely in all directions.

"Cold?" asked Drew, for the other was s.h.i.+vering.

"What?" Smith looked at his arms. "No."

Drew looked at Smith's forehead. It was covered with sweat.

"Too warm?"

"No, not that either."

"Lonely?"

"Maybe." His hand jerked as he put another piece of wood on the fire.

"Game of cards?"

"Can't concentrate."

Drew listened to Smith's quick shallow breathing. "We've our information. Each day we took pictures and ore samples. We're about loaded. Why don't we start the trip home tonight?"

Smith laughed. "You're not that lonely, are you?"

"Cut it."

They s.h.i.+fted their boots in the cool sand. There was no wind. The fire burned steadily, straight up, fed by the oxygen hose from the s.h.i.+p. They themselves wore transparent gla.s.s masks over their faces, very thin, through which a soft oxygen film pulsed up from the oxygen vests under their jackets. Drew checked his wrist dial. Six more hours of oxygen in his jacket. Fine.

He pulled out his ukelele and started to strum on it carelessly, eyes half closed, leaning back to look at the stars.

The girl of my dreams is the sweetest girl Of all the girls I know- Each sweet coed, like a rainbow red Fades in the afterglow.

The blue of her eyes and the gold of her hair. . . .

The sound of the ukelele came up Drew's arms into his earphones. Smith could not hear the instrument, only Drew's singing. The atmosphere was too thin.

"She's the sweetheart of Sigma Chi-"

"Aw, cut it out!" cried Smith.

"What's eating you?"

"I said cut it out, is all!" Smith sat back, glaring at the other man.

"Okay, okay, don't get excited."

Drew put the ukelele down and lay back, thinking. He knew what it was. It was in him, too. The cold loneliness, the midnight loneliness, the loneliness of distance and time and s.p.a.ce, of stars and travel and months and days.

Only too well he remembered Anna's face looking in at him through the s.p.a.ce port of the rocket a minute before blast-off time. It was like a vivid, clear-cut blue cameo-the blue round gla.s.s and her lovely face, her hand uplifted to wave, her smiling lips and her bright eyes. She had kissed her hand to him. Then she had vanished.

He looked idly over at Smith. Smith's eyes were closed. He was turning over a thought of his own in his mind. Marguerite, of course. Wonderful Marguerite, the brown eyes and the soft brown hair. Sixty million miles away on some improbable world where they had been born.

"I wonder what they're doing tonight?" Drew said.

Smith opened his eyes and looked across the fire. Without even questioning Drew's meaning, he replied, "Going to a television concert, swimming, playing badminton, lots of things."

Drew nodded. He withdrew into himself again and he felt the sweat starting to come out in his hands and his face. He began to tremble and there was a shrill whining emotion deep inside himself. He didn't want to sleep tonight. It would be like other nights. Out of nothing, the lips and the warmth and the dream. And, all too soon, the empty morning, the arising into the nightmare of reality.

He jumped up violently.

Smith fell back, staring.

"Let's take a walk, do something," said Drew heartily.

"All right."

They walked through the pink sands of the empty sea bottom, saying nothing, only walking. Drew felt part of the tightness vanish. He cleared his throat.

"Suppose," he said, "just to be supposing, of course, you met up with a Martian woman? Now. Some time in the next hour?"

Smith snorted. "Don't be silly. There aren't any."

"But just suppose."

"I don't know," replied Smith, looking ahead as he walked. He put his head down and rubbed his hand along the thin warm gla.s.s mask over his face. "Marguerite's waiting for me in New York."

"And Anna's waiting for me. But let's be practical. Here we are, two very human men, a year away from earth, cold, lonely, isolated, in need of consolation, hand-holding. No wonder we're brooding over the women we left behind."

"It's plain silly to brood, and we ought to quit it. There's no women around anyway, drat it!"

They walked onward for a distance.

"Anyway," Smith continued at last, after a time of thinking, "If we did find a woman here, I'm sure Marguerite would be the first to comprehend the situation and forgive me."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely!"

"Or are you rationalizing?"

"No!"

"Let me show you something, then. Turn back. Over there." Drew took Smith's arm and guided him back and to one side about fifty paces. "The reason I brought the whole subject up is this." He pointed.

Smith gasped.

A footprint lay like a tiny soft valley in the sand.

The two men bent, put their fingers eagerly down, brus.h.i.+ng nervously to each side of it. Their breath hissed in their nostrils. Smith's eyes glittered.

They looked into each other's faces for a long time.

"A woman's footstep!" cried Smith.

"Perfect in every detail," said Drew, nodding solemnly. "I happen to know. I once worked in a shoe store. I'd know a woman's print anywhere. Perfect, perfect!"

They swallowed the thickened knots in their dry throats. Their hearts began to beat wildly.

Smith opened and closed his hands into fists. "Glory, it's small! Look at the toes! Gosh, it's dainty!"

He stood up and looked ahead, eyes squinted. Then, crying out, he began to run. "Here's another, and another. More. They go on, that way!"

"Take it easy," Drew caught up with him. He took hold of Smith's arm. "Where you think you're going?"

"Let go; blast it!" Smith pointed. "I'm following them up, of course.

"What about Marguerite?"

"This is a devil of a time to talk of her. Let go before I crack you one!"