Dimensiion X

by Jerry eBooks

  Whitie was running up, screaming in fury.

  “No, Whitie,” said the captain. “I can’t let you do it. Nor the others. No, none of you. Only me.” He raised the gun and sighted it.

  Will I be clean after I do this? he thought. Is it right that it’s me who does it? Yes, it is. I know what I’m doing for what reason and it’s right, because I think I’m the right person. I hope and pray I can live up to this. He nodded his head in a jerking move at Spender.

  “Go on,” he called in a loud whisper which nobody heard. “I’ll give you thirty seconds more to get away, to escape. Thirty seconds, boy!”

  The watch ticked on his wrist. The captain watched it tick. The men were running. Spender did not move. The watch ticked for a long time, very loudly in his ears. “Go on, Spender, go on, get away!”

  The thirty seconds were up.

  The gun was sighted. The captain drew a deep breath. “Spender,” he said, exhaling.

  He pulled the trigger.

  All that happened was that a faint powdering of rock went up in the sunlight. The echoes of the report faded.

  THE captain stood up and called to his men. “He’s dead.”

  The other men did not believe him. Their angles had prevented their seeing that particular fissure in the rocks. They saw their captain run up the hill, alone, and thought him either very brave or insane.

  The men came after him a minute later.

  They gathered around the body and somebody said, “In the chest?”

  The captain looked down. “In the chest,” he said. He saw how the rocks had changed color under Spender. “I wonder why he waited, I wonder why he didn’t escape like he planned. I wonder why he stayed on and got himself killed?”

  “Who knows,” someone said.

  Spender lay there, with his hands clasped, one around the gun, another around an aluminum book that shone in the sun.

  Was it because of me? thought the captain. Was it because I refused to give in, myself? Did Spender hate the idea of killing me? Am I any different than these others here? Is that what did it? Did he figure he could trust me? What other answer is there?

  None. He squatted beside the silent body.

  I’ve got to live up to this, he thought. I can’t let him down, now. If he figured there was something in me that was like himself, and couldn’t kill me because of it, then what a job I have ahead of me! That’s it, all right. I’m Spender all over again, but I think before I shoot. I don’t shoot at all; I don’t kill. I do things with people. And he couldn’t kill me because I was himself under a slightly different condition.

  The captain felt the sunlight on the back of his neck. He heard himself saying, “If only he had come to me and talked it over before he shot anybody, we could have worked out something, somehow.”

  “Worked out what,” said Whitie. “What could we have worked out with his likes?”

  There was a singing of heat in the land, off the rocks and off the blue sky. “I guess you’re right,” said the captain. “We could never have got together. Spender and myself, maybe. But Spender and you and the others, no, never. He’s better off now. Let me have a drink of water from that canteen.”

  It was the captain who suggested the empty sarcophagus for Spender. They put him into it with waxes and wine, his hands folded over his chest. The last they saw of him was his peaceful face.

  They stood for a moment in the ancient vault. “I think it would be a good idea for you to think of Spender from time to time,” said the captain.

  They turned and walked from the hall and shut the marble door with the name Spender marked on it and the dates 1950-1978 under that.

  The next afternoon, Whitie did some target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers. The captain caught Whitie and knocked his teeth out.

  Mars is Heaven!

  Ray Bradbury

  The expression “all is illusion” may have originated on Earth, but it was really practical on Mars.

  THE STARSHIP CAME DOWN FROM space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain. The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket bad bloomed out great flowers of beat and cobs and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!

  Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.

  “Mars! Mars! Good old Mars, here we are!” cried Navigator Lustig.

  “Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.

  “Well,” said Captain John Black.

  The ship landed softly on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon the lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up the lawn, a tall brown Victorian house sat in the quiet sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze. At the top of the house was a cupola with diamond, leaded-glass windows, and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see an ancient piano with yellow keys and a piece of music titled Beautiful Ohio sitting on the music rest.

  Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring, There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.

  The men in the rocket looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held on to each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale and they blinked constantly, running from glass port to glass port of the ship.

  “I’ll be damned,” whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers, his eyes wet. “I’ll be damned, damned, damned.”

  “It can’t be, it just can’t be,” said Samuel Hinkston.

  “Lord,” said Captain John Black.

  There was a call from the chemist. “Sir, the atmosphere is fine for breathing, sir.”

  Black turned slowly. “Are you sure?”

  “No doubt of it, sir.”

  “Then we’ll go out,” said Lustig.

  “Lord, yes,” said Samuel Hinkston.

  “Hold on,” said Captain John Black. “Just a moment, nobody gave any orders.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Sir, nothing. How do we know what this is?”

  “We know what it is, sir,” said the chemist. “It’s a small town with good air in it, sir.”

  “And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,” said Samuel Hinkston, the archaeologist.

  “Incredible. It can’t be, but it is.”

  Captain John Black looked at him, idly. “Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.”

  Captain Black stood by the port. “Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years of time it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like, a piano and probably is a piano; and, five, if you loo
k closely, if a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, Beautiful Ohio. All of which means that we have an Ohio River here on Mars!”

  “It is quite strange, sir.”

  “Strange, hell, it’s absolutely impossible, and I suspect the whole bloody shooting setup.

  Something’s wrong here, and I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is.”

  “Oh, sir,” said Lustig.

  “Dammit,” said Samuel Hinkston. “Sir, I want to investigate this at first hand. It may be that there are similar patterns of thought, movement, civilization on every planet in our system. We may be on the threshold of the great psychological and metaphysical discovery In our time, sir, don’t you think?”

  “I’m willing to wait a moment,” said Captain John Black.

  “It may be, sir, that we are looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of a God, sir.”

  “There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr. Hinkston.”

  “I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a thing like this, out there,” said Hinkston, “could not occur without divine intervention, sir. It fills me with such terror and elation. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, sir.”

  “Do neither, then, until we know what we’re up against.”

  “Up against, sir?” inquired Lustig. “I see that we’re up against nothing. It’s a good quiet, green town, much like the one I was born in, and I like the looks of It.”

  “When were you born, Lustig?”

  “In 1910, sir.”

  “That makes you fifty years old, now, doesn’t it?”

  “This being 1960, yes, sir.”

  “And you, Hinkston?”

  “1920, sir. In Illinois. And this looks swell to me, sir.”

  “This couldn’t be Heaven,” said the captain, ironically. “Though, I must admit, it looks peaceful and cool, and pretty much like Green Bluff, where I was born, in 1915.”

  He looked at the chemist. “The air’s all right, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, then, tell you what we’ll do. Lustig, you and Hinkston and I will fetch ourselves out to look this town over. The other 14 men will stay aboard ship. If anything untoward happens, lift the Ship and get the hell out, do you hear what I say, Craner?”

  “Yes, sir. The hell out we’ll go, sir. Leaving you?”,

  “A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens get back to Earth and warn the next Rocket, that’s Lingle’s Rocket, I think, which will be completed and ready to take off some time around next Christmas, what he has to meet up with. If there’s something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next expedition to be well armed.”

  “So are we, sir. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.”

  “Tell the men to stand by the guns, then, as Lustig and Hinkston and I go out.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “Come along, Lustig, Hinkston.”

  The three men walked together, down through the levels of the ship.

  IT WAS a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously.

  Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the apple tree, and the blossom smell drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town, somebody was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was Beautiful Dreamer. Somewhere else, a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of Roamin’ In The Gloamin’, sung by Harry Lapder.

  The three men stood outside the ship. The port closed behind them. At every window, a face pressed, looking out. The large metal guns pointed this way and that, ready.

  Now the phonograph record being played was:

  ”Oh give me a June night

  The moonlight and you—”

  Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.

  Hinkston’s voice was so feeble and uneven that the captain had to ask him to repeat what he had said. “I said, sir, that I think I have solved this, all of this, sir!”

  “And what is the solution, Hinkston?”

  The soft wind blew. The sky was serene and quiet and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and tree-shadings of a ravine. Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by, bumping.

  “Sir, it must be, it has to be, this is the only solution! Rocket travel began to Mars in the years before the first World War, sir!”

  The captain stared at his archaeologist. “No!”

  “But, yes, sir! You must admit, look at all of this! How else explain it, the houses, the lawns, the iron deer, the flowers, the pianos, the music!”

  “Hinkston, Hinkston, oh,” and the captain put his hand to his face, shaking his head, his hand shaking now, his lips blue.

  “Sir, listen to me.” Hinkston took his elbow persuasively and looked up into the captain’s face, pleading. “Say that there were some people in the year 1905, perhaps, who hated wars and wanted to get away from Earth and they got together, some scientists, in secret, and built a rocket and came out here to Mars.”

  “No, no, Hinkston.”

  “Why not? The world was a different place in 1905, they could have kept it a secret much more easily.”

  “But the work, Hinkston, the work of building a complex thing like a rocket, oh, no, no.” The captain looked at his shoes, looked at his hands, looked at the houses, and then at Hinkston.

  “And they came up here, and naturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they brought the cultural architecture with them, and here it is!”

  “And they’ve lived here all these years?” said the captain.

  “In peace and quiet, sir, yes. Maybe they made a few trips, to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped, for fear of being discovered. That’s why the town seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see a thing, myself, that is older than the year 1927, do you?”

  “No, frankly, I don’t, Hinkston.”

  “These are our people, sir. This is an American city; it’s definitely not European!”

  “That—that’s right, too, Hinkston.”

  “Or maybe, just maybe, sir, rocket travel is older than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world hundreds of years ago, was discovered and kept secret by a small number of men, and they came to Mars, with only occasional visits to Earth over the centuries.”

  “You make it sound almost reasonable.”

  “It is, sir. It has to be. We have the proof here before us, all we have to do now, is find some people and verify it!”

  “You’re right there, of course. We can’t just stand here and talk. Did you bring your gun?”

  “Yes, but we won’t need it.”

  “We’ll see about it. Come along, we’ll ring that doorbell and see if anyone is home.”

  Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. it smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had been in a small town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.

  THEY set foot upon the porch. Hollow echoes sounded from under the boards as they walked across the porch and stood before the screen door. Inside, they could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a crystal chandelier and a Maxfield Parrish painting framed on one wall over a comfortable Morris Chair. The house smelled old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could hear the tinkle of ice rattling in a lemonade pitcher. In a distant kitchen, because of the heat of the day, someone was preparing a soft, lemon drink. Someone was humming under their breath, high and sweet.

  Captain John Black rang the bell.

  FOOTSTEPS, dainty and thin, came along the hall and a kind faced lady of some forty years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.

  “C
an I help you?” she asked.

  “Beg your pardon,” said Captain Black, uncertainly. “But we’re looking for, that is, could you help us, I mean.” He stopped. She looked out at him with dark wondering eyes.

  “If you’re selling something,” she said. “I’m much too busy and I haven’t time.” She turned to go.

  “No, wait,” he cried, bewilderedly. “What town is this?”

  She looked him up and down as if he were crazy, “What do you mean, what town is it? How could you be in a town and not know what town it was?”

  The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady apple tree. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “But we’re strangers here. We’re from Earth, and we want to know how this town got here and you got here.”

  “Are you census takers?” she asked. “No,” he said.

  “What do you want then?” she demanded.

  “Well,” said the captain.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “How long has this town been here?” he wondered.

  “It was built in 1868,” she snapped at them.

  “Is this a game?”

  “No, not a game,” cried the captain. “Oh, God,” he said. “Look here. We’re from Earth!”

  “From where?” she said.

  “From Earth!” he said.

  “Where’s that?” she said.

  “From Earth,” he cried.

  “Out of the ground, do you mean?” she wondered.

  “No, from the planet Earth!” he almost shouted. “Here,” he insisted, “come out on the porch and I’ll show you.”

  “No,” she said, “I won’t come out there, you are all evidently quite mad from the sun.”

  Lustig and Hinkston stood behind the captain. Hinkston now spoke up. “Mrs.,” he said. “We came in a flying ship across space, among the stars. We came from the third planet from the sun, Earth, to this planet, which is Mars. Now do you understand, Mrs.?”

  “Mad from the sun,” she said, taking hold of the door. “Go away now, before I call my husband who’s upstairs taking a nap, and he’ll beat you all with iris fists.”