by Ray Bradbury
Silence.
"Think on that," said Timulty. "Answer the truth. Resemblances. Similarities. The long list of them runs off one hand and up the other arm. And well worth the mulling over before we leap about crying Jaisus and Mary and summoning the Guard."
Silence.
"I," said someone, after a long while, strangely, curiously, "would like ... to see them closer."
"I think you'll get your wish. Hist!"
All froze in a tableau.
And far off they heard a faint and fragile sound. It was like the wondrous morning you wake and lie in bed and know by a special feel that the first fall of snow is in the air, on its way down, tickling the sky, making the silence to stir aside and fall back in on nothing.
"Ah, God," said Finn, at last, "it's the first day of spring..."
And it was that, too. First the dainty snowfall of feet drifting on the cobbles, and then a choir of bird song.
And along the sidewalk and down the street and outside the pub came the sounds that were winter and spring. The doors sprang wide. The men reeled back from the impact of the meeting to come. They steeled their nerves. They balled their fists. They geared their teeth in their anxious mouths, and into the pub like children come into a Christmas place and everything a bauble or a toy, a special gift or color, there stood the tall thin older man who looked young and the small thin younger men who had old things in their eyes. The sound of snowfall stopped. The sound of spring birds ceased.
The strange children herded by the strange shepherd found themselves suddenly stranded as if they sensed a pulling away of a tide of people, even though the men at the bar had flinched but the merest hair.
The children of a warm isle regarded the short child-sized and runty full-grown men of this cold land and the full-grown men looked back in mutual assize.
Timulty and the men at the bar breathed long and slow. You could smell the terrible clean smell of the children way over here. There was too much spring in it.
Snell-Orkney and his young-old boy-men breathed swiftly as the heartbeats of birds trapped in a cruel pair of fists. You could smell the dusty, impacted, prolonged, and dark-clothed smell of the little men way over here. There was too much winter in it.
Each might have commented upon the other's choice of scent, but--
At this moment the double doors at the side banged wide and Garrity charged in full-blown, crying the alarm:
"Jesus, I've seen everything! Do you know where they are now, and what doing?"
Every hand at the bar flew up to shush him.
By the startled look in their eyes, the intruders knew they were being shouted about.
"They're still at St. Stephen's Green!" Garrity, on the move, saw naught that was before him. "I stopped by the hotel to spread the news. Now it's your turn. Those fellows--"
"Those fellows," said David Snell-Orkney, "are here in--" He hesitated.
"Heeber Finn's pub," said Heeber Finn, looking at his shoes.
"Heeber Finn's," said the tall man, nodding his thanks.
"Where," said Garrity, gone miserable, "we will all be having a drink instantly."
He flung himself at the bar.
But the six intruders were moving, also. They made a small parade to either side of Garrity and just by being amiably there made him hunch three inches smaller.
"Good afternoon," said Snell-Orkney.
"It is and it isn't," said Finn, carefully, waiting.
"It seems," said the tall man surrounded by the little boy-men, "there is much talk about what we are doing in Ireland."
"That would be putting the mildest interpretation on it," said Finn.
"Allow me to explain," said the stranger.
"Have you ever," continued Mr. David Snell-Orkney, "heard of the Snow Queen and the Summer King?"
Several jaws trapped wide down.
Someone gasped as if booted in the stomach.
Finn, after a moment in which he considered just where a blow might have landed upon him, poured himself a long slow drink with scowling precision. He took a stiff snort of the stuff and with the fire in his mouth, replied, carefully, letting the warm breath out over his tongue:
"Ah...what Queen is that again, and the King?"
"Well," said the tall pale man, "there was this Queen who lived in Iceland who had never seen summer, and this King who lived in the Isles of Sun who had never seen winter. The people under the King almost died of heat in the summers, and the people under the Snow Queen almost died of ice in the winters. But the people of both countries were saved from their terrible weathers. The Snow Queen and the Sun King met and fell in love and every summer when the sun killed people in the islands they moved North to the lands of ice and lived temperately. And every winter when the snow killed people in the North, all of the Snow Queen's people moved South and lived in the mild island sun. So there were no longer two nations, two peoples, but one race which commuted from land to land with the strange weathers and wild seasons. The end."
There was a round of applause, not from the canary boys, but from the men lined up at the bar who had been spelled. Finn saw his own hands out clapping on the air, and put them down. The others saw their own hands and dropped them.
But Timulty summed it up, "God, if you only had a brogue! What a teller of tales you would make."
"Many thanks, many thanks," said David Snell-Orkney.
"All of which brings us around to the point of the story," Finn said. "I mean, well, about that Queen and the King and all."
"The point is," said Snell-Orkney, "that we have not seen a leaf fall in five years. We hardly know a cloud when we see it. We have not felt snow in ten years, or hardly a drop of rain. Our story is the reverse. We must have rain or we'll perish, right, chums?"
"Oh, yes, right," said all five, in a sweet chirruping.
"We have followed summer around the world for six or seven years. We have lived in Jamaica and Nassau and Port-au-Prince and Calcutta, and Madagascar and Bali and Taormina but finally just today we said we must go north, we must have cold again. We didn't quite know what we were looking for, but we found it in St. Stephen's Green."
"The mysterious thing?" Nolan burst out. "I mean--"
"Your friend here will tell you," said the tall man.
"Our friend? You mean--Garrity?"
Everyone looked at Garrity.
"As I was going to say," said Garrity, "when I came in the door. They was in the park standing there...watching the leaves turn colors."
"Is that all?" said Nolan, dismayed.
"It seemed sufficient unto the moment," said Snell-Orkney.
"Are the leaves changing color up at St. Stephen's?" asked Kilpatrick.
"Do you know," said Timulty numbly, "it's been twenty years since I looked."
"The most beautiful sight in all the world," said David Snell-Orkney, "lies up in the midst of St. Stephen's this very hour."
"He speaks deep," murmured Nolan.
"The drinks are on me," said David Snell-Orkney.
"He's touched bottom," said MaGuire.
"Champagne all around!"
"Don't mind if I do!" said everyone.
And not ten minutes later they were all up at the park, together.
And well now, as Timulty said years after, did you ever see as many damned leaves on a tree as there was on the first tree just inside the gate at St. Stephen's Green? No! cried all. And what, though, about the second tree? Well, that had a billion leaves on it. And the more they looked the more they saw it was a wonder. And Nolan went around craning his neck so hard he fell over on his back and had to be helped up by two or three others, and there were general exhalations of awe and proclamations of devout inspiration as to the fact that as far as they could remember there had never been any goddamn leaves on the trees to begin with, but now they were there! Or if they had been there they had never had any color, or if they had had color, well, it was so long ago ... Ah, what the hell, shut up, said everyone, and look!
Which is exactly where Father Leary found them.
But before he could say anything, three out of the six summer invaders asked him if he would hear their confessions.
And next thing you know with a look of great pain and alarm the father was taking Snell-Orkney & Co. back to see the stained glass at the church and the way the apse was put together by a master architect, and they liked his church so much and said so out loud again and again that he cut way down on their Hail Marys and the rigamaroles that went with.
But the top of the entire day was when one of the young-old boy-men back at the pub asked what would it be? Should he sing "Mother Machree" or "My Buddy"?
Arguments followed, and with polls taken and results announced, he sang both.
He had a dear voice, all said, eyes melting bright. A sweet high clear voice.
And as Nolan put it, "He wouldn't make much of a son. But there's a great daughter there somewhere!"
And all said "aye" to that.
And suddenly it was time to leave.
"But great God!" said Finn, "you just arrived!"
"We found what we came for, there's no need to stay," announced the tall sad happy old young man. "It's back to the hothouse with the flowers ... or they wilt overnight. We never stay. We are always flying and jumping and running. We are always on the move."
The airport being fogged-in, there was nothing for it but the birds cage themselves on the Dun Laoghaire boat bound for England, and there was nothing for it but the inhabitants of Finn's should be down at the dock to watch them pull away in the middle of the evening. There they stood, all six, on the top deck, waving their thin hands down, and there stood Timulty and Nolan and Garrity and the rest waving their thick hands up. And as the boat hooted and pulled away the keeper-of-the-birds nodded once, and winged his right hand on the air and all sang forth: "As I was walking through Dublin City, about the hour of twelve at night, I saw a maid, so fair was she ... combing her hair by candelight."
"Jesus," said Timulty, "do you hear?"
"Sopranos, every one of them!" cried Nolan.
"Not Irish sopranos, but real real sopranos," said Kelly. "Damn, why didn't they say? If we'd known, we'd have had a good hour of that out of them before the boat."
Timulty nodded and added, listening to the music float over the waters. "Strange. Strange. I hate to see them go. Think. Think. For a hundred years or more people have said we had none. But now they have returned, if but for a little time."
"We had none of what?" asked Garrity. "And what returned?"
"Why," said Timulty, "the fairies, of course, the fairies that once lived in Ireland, and live here no more, but who came this day and changed our weather, and there they go again, who once stayed all the while."
"Ah, shut up!" cried Kilpatrick. "And listen!"
And listen they did, nine men on the end of a dock as the boat sailed out and the voices sang and the fog came in and they did not move for a long time until the boat was far gone and the voices faded like a scent of papaya on the mist.
By the time they walked back to Finn's it had begun to rain.
Night Call, Collect
What made the old poem run in his mind he could not guess, but run it did:
Suppose and then suppose and then suppose That wires on the far-slung telephone black poles Sopped up the billion-flooded words they heard Each night all night and saved the sense And meaning of it all.
He stopped. What next? Ah, yes...
Then, jigsaw in the night, Put all together and
In philosophic phase
Tried words like moron child.
Again he paused. How did the thing end? Wait--
Thus mindless beast
All treasuring of vowels and consonants Saves up a miracle of bad advice And lets it filter whisper, heartbeat out One lisping murmur at a time.
So one night soon someone sits up Hear sharp bell ring, lifts phone And hears a Voice like Holy Ghost Gone far in nebulae
That Beast upon the wire, Which with sibilance and savorings Down continental madnesses of time
Says Hell and O
And then Hell-o.
He took a breath and finished:
To such Creation
Such dumb brute lost Electric Beast, What is your wise reply?
He sat silently.
He sat, a man eighty years old. He sat in an empty room in an empty house on an empty street in an empty town on the empty planet Mars.
He sat as he had sat now for fifty years, waiting.
On the table in front of him lay a telephone that had not rung for a long, long time.
It trembled now with some secret preparation. Perhaps that trembling had summoned forth the poem...
His nostrils twitched. His eyes flared wide.
The phone shivered ever so softly.
He leaned forward, staring at it.
The phone...rang.
He leapt up and back, the chair fell to the floor. He cried out: cried out: "No!"
The phone rang again.
"No!"
He wanted to reach out, he did reach out and knock the thing off the table. It fell out of the cradle at the exact moment of its third ring.
"No ... oh, no, no," he said softly, hands covering his chest, head wagging, the telephone at his feet. "It can't be ... can't be..."
For after all, he was alone in a room in an empty house in an empty town on the planet Mars where no one was alive, only he lived, he was King of the Barren Hill...
And yet...
"...Barton..."
Someone called his name.
No. Some thing buzzed and made a noise of crickets and cicadas in far desertlands.
Barton? he thought. Why ... why that's me!
He hadn't heard anyone say his name in so long he had quite forgot. He was not one for ambling about calling himself by name. He had never--
"Barton," said the phone. "Barton. Barton. Barton."
"Shut up!!" he cried.
And kicked the receiver and bent sweating, panting, to put the phone back on its cradle.
No sooner did he do this than the damned thing rang again.
This time he made a fist around it, squeezed it, as if to throttle the sound, but at last, seeing his knuckles burn color away to whiteness, let go and picked up the receiver.
"Barton," said a far voice, a billion miles away.
He waited until his heart had beat another three times and then said: "Barton here." he said.
"Well, well," said the voice, only a million miles away now. "Do you know who this is?"
"Christ." said the old man. "The first call I've had in half a lifetime, and we play games."
"Sorry. How stupid of me. Of course you wouldn't recognize your own voice on the telephone. No one ever does. We are accustomed, all of us, to hearing our voice conducted through the bones of our head. Barton, this is Barton."
"What?"
"Who did you think it was?" said the voice. "A rocket captain? Did you think someone had come to rescue you?"
"No."
"What's the date?"
"July 20, 2097."
"Good Lord. Fifty years! Have you been sitting there that long waiting for a rocket to come from Earth?"
The old man nodded.
"Now, old man, do you know who I am?"
"Yes." He trembled. "I remember. We are one. I am Emil Barton and you are Emil Barton."
"With one difference. You're eighty, I'm only twenty. All of life before me!"
The old man began to laugh and then to cry. He sat holding the phone like a lost and silly child in his fingers. The conversation was impossible, and should not be continued, yet he went on with it. When he got hold of himself he held the phone close and said, "Yo
u there! Listen, oh God. if I could warn you! How can I? You're only a voice. If I could show you how lonely the years are. End it, kill yourself! Don't wait! If you knew what it is to change from the thing you are to the thing that is me, today, here, now, at this end."
"Impossible!" The voice of the young Barton laughed, far away. "I've no way to tell if you ever get this call. This is all mechanical. You're talking to a transcription, no more. This is 2037. Sixty years in your past. Today, the atom war started on Earth. All colonials were called home from Mars, by rocket. I got left behind!"
"I remember." whispered the old man.
"Alone on Mars." laughed the young voice. "A month, a year, who cares? There are foods and books. In my spare time I've made transcription libraries of ten thousand words, responses, my voice, connected to phone relays. In later months I'll call, have someone to talk with."
"Yes."
"Sixty years from now my own tapes will ring me up. I don't really think I'll be here on Mars that long, it's just a beautifully ironic idea of mine, something to pass the time. Is that really you. Barton? Is that really me?"
Tears fell from the old man's eyes. "Yes."
"I've made a thousand Bartons, tapes, sensitive to all questions, in one thousand Martian towns. An army of Bartons over Mars, while I wait for the rockets to return."
"Fool." The old man shook his head, wearily. "You waited sixty years. You grew old waiting, always alone. And now you've become me and you're still alone in the empty cities."
"Don't expect my sympathy. You're like a stranger, off in another country. I can't be sad. I'm alive when I make these tapes. And you're alive when you hear them. Both of us, to the other, incomprehensible. Neither can warn the other, even though both respond, one to the other, one automatically, the other warmly and humanly. I'm human now. You're human later. It's insane. I can't cry, because not knowing the future I can only be optimistic. These hidden tapes can only react to a certain number of stimuli from you. Can you ask a dead man to weep?"
"Stop it!" cried the old man. He felt the familiar seizures of pain. Nausea moved through him, and blackness. "Oh God, but you were heartless. Go away!"
"Were, old man? I am. As long as the tapes glide on, as long as spindles and hidden electronic eyes read and select and convert words to send to you, I'll be young and cruel. I'll go on being young and cruel long after you're dead. Good-bye."
