by Anthology
“Well,” said the mustache, “so you’ve been to the moon.”
Marshall got timid and nodded without speaking.
The undertaker smirked, but he stopped that when Marshall’s ma threw him a hot glare.
“What was it like?” the mustache asked.
“Very nice,” Marshall answered politely. “Cold and fresh and lots of singing.”
“What sort of singing?”
“Just singing. Nice tunes.”
The undertaker leered, but he stopped that when Marshall’s ma set the glass of milk down on the table with a bang and a scowl.
“Nice tunes,” Marshall repeated. “Just like church hymns.”
Three neighbors came by to take a look at Marshall. They stood back from the table a ways, gaping a little at the boy who’d been to the moon. “Who’d believe it?” one of them whispered. “He looks so young.”
Marshall blushed with pride and ducked his head down toward his bowl of cereal.
Just then four schoolmates sneaked through the kitchen door and pushed their faces into the spaces between the neighbors. “Ask him!” the smallest schoolmate demanded.
“Hey, Marsh,” the bravest one called out, “you gonna play ball tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Marshall answered.
“He’s all right,” the bravest one told the others. “It ain’t changed him at all.”
Marshall’s pa came back with two more neighbors, and a woman brought her husband and eight children from two and a half miles down the road. A horse poked his head through the kitchen window, and a chicken hopped in and hid under the stove.
Marshall’s teacher rang the front doorbell, marched through the house into the kitchen by herself, when no one answered her ring.
Everybody looked at Marshall in a joyful and prideful sort of way, but nobody seemed to be able to think of anything to say. Even when the mayor arrived, freshly shaven and bursting to make a speech, something happened to him, and he closed his mouth without a word.
The kitchen got warm with so many people pressing in together, but it was a pleasant sort of warmth—cheerful and happy, and nobody jostled anybody else. Marshall’s ma just grinned and glowed, and his pa puffed up on a corncob pipe, setting himself on an upturned crate beside the stove.
The reporter who was studying for the profession of undertaking started to ask Marshall, “How do you know you been to the moon?” But that was as far as he got, and somehow he found himself at the back of the crowd, looking out over everybody’s head by standing on tiptoe.
Finally the chicken cut-cutted, and everybody thought that was funny, so they all laughed out loud, and clear.
Marshall finished his cereal and his milk, and looked up to see, through the window, that the yard outside was packed with people too: from miles around, by horse and buckboard, on foot and otherwise. He could see that they were waiting for word from him, so he stood up and made a speech.
“I never intended deliberately to go to the moon,” Marshall started. “It just happened that way. The balloon kept going up and I kept going up with it. Pretty soon I was looking down on the tops of mountains, and that was something. But I just kept on going up and up anyway. On the way I got an eagle mad. He was trying to fly as high as me, but he just couldn’t do it. He was hopping mad, that eagle. Screamed his head off.”
All the people in the kitchen, and outside in the yard too, nodded approval.
“In the end,” Marshall went on, “I got to the moon. Like I said, it was pretty nice.” He stopped speeching, because he’d said everything he had to.
“Was you scared?” somebody asked.
“Somewhat,” Marshall answered. “But the air was bracing, and I got over it.”
“Well,” said the mayor, bound to say something, “we’re glad to have you back.” And he stuck out his hand to shake with Marshall.
After that, Marshall shook hands all around and everybody went back to his own home. The horse took his head out the window and went back to cropping grass in the yard. The hen hopped out the door again, leaving an egg behind under the stove. The house was empty but still cheerful. It was as if everybody had come and brought their happiness and left it behind as a present, the way the chicken left the egg.
“Been a big day for you,” Marshall’s pa said.
“I guess you’d better go to bed now,” Marshall’s ma said.
“Might be,” Marshall’s pa went on, talking his thinking out loud, “might be you’ll turn out to be a big explorer, time to come.”
Marshall looked at his ma, saw her fear that the boy would turn out to be a gadabout. He answered for his mother’s benefit. “I’ll tell you, Pa. Seems more likely I’d just settle down now and stay put.” Of course he winked at his father to show him that maybe he was right at that.
“Good night, Pa. Good night, Ma.”
“Good night, son.”
His ma kissed him good night.
Then Marshall went into his room, closed the door, and undressed, and put on his pajamas. He knelt by the side of his bed and folded his fingers for prayer.
“Been a happy day, O Lord. Happy as I can remember. Thanks.”
He climbed into bed and went to sleep.
Well, you know the way time goes on. Marshall came to be a man, married and settled. He had children, and his children had children. His children grew up and just naturally went off their own ways, and his wife died a natural death. And there was Marshall Kiss left alone in the world, living on his farm and doing as much or as little work as he felt like.
Sometimes he went into town and sat by the stove in the general store and talked, and sometimes he stayed home and listened to the rain talking to the windowpanes. There came to be a time when Marshall was pushing ninety pretty hard. Most everybody who’d been alive when he was a boy had passed on.
The people in town were a new generation, and while they weren’t unkind, they weren’t very friendly, either. That’s the way it is with a new generation—it doesn’t look back—it keeps looking forward.
The time came when Marshall could walk through the town from one end to the other and not see a face he knew or that knew him. He’d nod and get nodded back at, but it wasn’t a real, close, human thing—it was just a polite thing to do. And you know what the end is, when a man has to live like that—he gets lonely.
That’s just what Marshall did—he got lonely.
First he thought he could forget his loneliness by staying off by himself. And there was a whole month when Marshall never showed his face around at all, expecting that somebody might show some curiosity and maybe come by to see how he was. But nobody ever did. So Marshall went back into town.
The clerk at the store seemed to have some vague recollection about not having seen Marshall, but he wasn’t too sure. “You haven’t been around for a couple of days or so, have you?” he asked Marshall.
“More like a month,” Marshall said.
“You don’t say,” the clerk remarked, as he toted up the figures on Marshall’s bill.
“Been away,” said Marshall.
“Seeing your relatives?” the clerk asked.
“Been to the moon,” Marshall said.
The clerk looked a little bored, and not at all interested, and not at all impressed. In fact, he didn’t look as if he believed Marshall to begin with. But he was a polite man, so he commented. “Must be a nice trip,” he commented, never thinking any more about it than that.
Marshall went stomping out of the store and down to have his hair trimmed.
“Pretty heavy growth, Mr. Kiss,” the barber said.
“Should be,” Marshall answered. “There ain’t no barbershops on the moon, you know.”
“Expect not,” the barber said, and went ahead, busily clicking his shears and making believe he was clipping a hair here and a hair there, but never saying another word about the moon, never even having the common decency to ask what it was like on the moon.
So Marshall fell asleep till th
e barber should be finished.
The mayor came in for his daily shave. He was a young man with a heavy beard, and he glanced casually at Marshall. “Old-timer,” he said to the barber.
The barber nodded as he worked.
“Looks tuckered out,” the mayor said.
“Should be,” the barber told him. “He just got back from the moon.” He snickered loud.
“You don’t say,” the mayor said.
“That’s what he claims.” The barber snickered again. “Just got back from the moon.”
“Well, no wonder he’s tired, then.” But the way the mayor laughed and the way the barber laughed, Marshall could tell that they were just making fun of him. For Marshall wasn’t really sleeping, of course.
It got Marshall mad, and he sprang up and threw the sheet off of him and stomped on down to the newspaper office.
“My name is Marshall Kiss,” Marshall said to the fresh cub at the desk, “and I’ve just come back from a trip to the moon!”
“Thanks for the tip, Pop,” the reporter said, smiling a little crookedly. “I’ll look into it when I get the time.” And, saying that, he planted his big feet plump on the desk and clasped his hands behind his head.
Tears sprang up in Marshall’s eyes. “I been to the moon twice,” he shouted. “Once when I was nine years old, and it’s been printed in your paper, too, at the time. Why, people came from twelve miles around just to look at me. I went up there in an old balloon and busted an eagle’s heart when he tried to get up as high as I was.” He looked at the reporter hard, and he could see that the reporter didn’t believe him and wasn’t going to try. “There’s no pity left in the world any more,” said Marshall, “and no joy.” And with that, he walked out.
The road home was mostly rocky and uphill, and it seemed to take Marshall a long time to walk a short distance. “Can’t figure out how people changed so much,” Marshall thought. “Grass is still green, and horses have tails, and hens lay eggs—” He was interrupted by a little boy who came running up from behind, pretending to gallop and hitting himself on the rump as if he were a horse.
“Hello,” the little boy said, “where are you going?”
“Just up the hill a way, back to my farm,” Marshall answered.
“Where’ve you been?” the little boy asked.
“Just to town,” Marshall said.
“Is that all?” the little boy asked, disappointed. “Ain’t you never been nowhere else?”
“I been to the moon,” Marshall said, a little timidly.
The boy’s eyes opened and shone brightly.
“Twice,” Marshall added.
The boy’s eyes opened even wide. “How do you like that!” the little boy shouted, excited. “H-h-how do you like that?” He was so excited, he stammered.
“Matter of fact,” Marshall said, “I just come back from the moon.”
The little boy was silent for a second. “Say, mister,” he asked finally, “do you mind if I bring my friend to see you?”
“Not at all. I live right back there, in that house you see.” Marshall turned off to get to his house.
“I’ll be right back,” the little boy promised and ran away as fast as he could to get his friend.
It must have been about a half hour later that the little boy and the little girl got to Marshall’s house. They knocked on the door, but there wasn’t any answer, so they just walked in. “It’s all right,” the little boy said, “he’s very friendly.”
The kitchen was empty, so they looked in the parlor, and that was empty too.
“Maybe he’s gone back to the moon,” the little girl whispered, awed.
“Maybe he has,” the little boy admitted, but just the same they looked in the bedroom.
There was Marshall, lying on the bed, and at first they thought he was sleeping. But after a while, when he didn’t move or breathe, the little boy and the little girl knew he was further away than that.
“Guess you were right,” the little boy said.
He and the little girl just looked and looked with their eyes as wide as wide can be, at the man who had been to the moon twice.
“I guess this makes three times now,” the little girl said.
And suddenly, without knowing why, they became frightened and ran off, leaving the door opened behind them. They ran silently, hand in hand, frightened, but happy too, as if something very wonderful had happened that they couldn’t understand.
After a while, though it was the first time it had ever happened on that farm, the horse wandered into the house and stuck his head through the bedroom door and looked.
And then a chicken hopped in and hid under the bed.
And a long time later, a lot of people came to look at the contented smile on Marshall’s face.
“That’s him,” the little boy said, pointing. “That’s the man who’s been to the moon twice.”
And somehow, with Marshall’s smile, and the horse standing there swishing his tail, and the sudden cut-cutt of the chicken under the bed—somehow, nobody corrected the little boy.
That was the day the Mars rocket went on a regular three-a-day schedule. Hardly anybody went to the moon at all, any more. There wasn’t enough to see.
Afterword
This particular story came out of a sudden, strongly personal understanding of certain aspects of my father’s life—the enormous changes which took place in the history of his time: technological developments beyond dreaming when he was a boy.
He had told me of sitting and listening to a phonograph which was carried on the back of a man who went from village to village in Poland, where my father was born. For a kopek the man wound the handle, the disc turned, the needle scratched, and if you put your ear close to the horn there was the miracle of a voice, a music, a recitation.
Now, in 1928 or ‘29, my father stepped into an airplane which landed in a cornfield in the Catskill Mountains. For five dollars my father flew for five minutes.
If this was my father’s story, it was the story of his generation. Within what seems to me an incredibly short time, the mystery and the miracle were lost. There is small marvel to television, despite the fact that the extraordinary complexity of the sending and reception of a television signal is beyond the understanding and capability of the tens and hundred of millions of television watchers. The television set is successful because the marvel has been eliminated. Because the set is truly an idiot box; not so much in its content as in the manner in which the controls have been simplified, so that the viewing may be had by anyone with the sense to push a button and twist a dial. The dial itself, so devised that one has merely to twist it: not even to a specific number. But, ipso facto, if one wants to see the show on channel 8, all one has to do is keep twisting the dial until that show appears on the screen. Ergo, one has dialed to channel 8.
And the marvel is gone.
Because the sweep of modern history seems to me to have a feeling of wonder; because it has a sense of fairy tale and unbelievability to me; because the miracle of the changes wrought from the time of my father’s boyhood to my own seemed to me to have been lost, I wrote this story.
It is simply a reminder that fantasy lies in the day-to-day of our lives as much as it lies in the wonder of the future. And it is a reminder that the best of our civilization goes far beyond the comprehension of the ordinary of our citizens. The wonder is that there is so much civilization when so few are civilized.
In another mood I might have written a sharper story. But this time I thought simply that form should follow content. Hence, a fairy tale; old-fashioned and sentimental, written on an electric typewriter.
FAITH OF OUR FATHERS
Philip K. Dick
Introduction
There was no doubt about it. If the book was to approach new concepts and taboo subjects, stories that would be difficult to sell to mass market magazines or more particularly the insulated specialist magazines of the science fiction field, it had to get the writers who
were not afraid to walk into the dark. Philip K. Dick has been lighting up his own landscape for years, casting illumination by the klieg lights of his imagination on a terra incognita of staggering dimensions. I asked for Phil Dick and got him. A story to be written about, and under the influence of (if possible), LSD. What follows, like his excellent offbeat novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, is the result of such a hallucinogenic journey.
Dick has the uncomfortable habit of shaking up one’s theories. For instance, mine own about the value of artificial stimuli to encourage the creative process. (It’s a cop-out on my part, I suppose, because I am unable to write without music blasting away in the background. Matters not if it’s Honegger or the Tijuana Brass or Archie Shepp or the New Vaudeville Band doing “Winchester Cathedral”. I must have it.) When I was a lot younger, and was making the rounds of the various jazz clubs in New York, both as critic and reviewer and plain listener, I became tight with many musicians who swore they needed either weed or speed to get into the proper bag. Then, after fixing or getting high, they settled down to blow; what emerged was lunacy. I’ve known ballerinas who were grassheads because they couldn’t get the “in the air” feeling without their nickel bag; psychiatrists who were able to support their own habits with self-signed narcotics prescriptions—habits they had built on the delusion that junk freed their minds for more penetrating analyses; artists who were on acid constantly, whose work under the “mind-expanding” influences were something you’d scour out with Comet if you found it at the bottom of your wading pool. My theory, developed over years of seeing people deluding themselves for the bounce they got, was that the creative process is at its most lively when it merges clean and unfogged from whatever wells exist within the minds of the creators. Philip K. Dick puts the lie to that theory.
His experiments with LSD and other hallucinogens, plus stimulants of the amphetamine class, have borne such fruit as the story you are about to read, in every way a “dangerous” vision. The question now poses itself: how valid is the totality for the exception of rare successes like the work of Phil Dick? I don’t presume to know. All I can venture is that proper administration of mind-expanding drugs might open whole new areas to the creative intellect. Areas that have been, till now, the country of the blind.
