by Ray Bradbury
Pietà Summer
‘Gosh, I can hardly wait!’ I said.
‘Why don’t you shut up?’ my brother replied.
‘I can’t sleep,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe what’s happening tomorrow. Two circuses in just one day! Ringling Brothers coming in on that big train at five in the morning, and Downey Brothers coming by truck a couple hours later. I can’t stand it.’
‘Tell you what,’ my brother said. ‘Go to sleep. We gotta get up at four-thirty.’
I rolled over but I just couldn’t sleep because I could hear those circuses coming over the edge of the world, rising with the sun.
Before we knew it, it was 4:30 A.M. and my brother and I were up in the cold darkness, getting dressed, grabbing an apple for breakfast, and then running out in the street and heading down the hill toward the train yards.
As the sun began to rise the big Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey train of ninety-nine cars loaded with elephants, zebras, horses, lions, tigers, and acrobats arrived; the huge engines steaming in the dawn, puffing out great clouds of black smoke, and the freight cars sliding open to let the horses hoof out into the darkness, and the elephants stepping down, very carefully, and the zebras, in huge striped flocks, gathering in the dawn, and my brother and I standing there, shivering, waiting for the parade to start, for there was going to be a parade of all the animals up through the dark morning town toward the distant acres where the tents would whisper upward toward the stars.
Sure enough my brother and I walked with the parade up the hill and through the town that didn’t know we were there. But there we were, walking with ninety-nine elephants and one hundred zebras and two hundred horses, and the big bandwagon, soundless, out to the meadow that was nothing at all, but suddenly began to flower with the big tents sliding up.
Our excitement increased by the minute because where just hours ago there had been nothing at all, now there was everything in the world.
By seven-thirty Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey had pretty well got its tents up and it was time for me and my brother to race back to where the motorcars were unloading the tiny Downey Brothers circus; a miniature version of the large miracle, it poured out of trucks instead of trains, with only ten elephants instead of nearly one hundred, and just a few zebras, and the lions, drowsing in their separate cages, looked old and mangy and exhausted. That applied to the tigers, too, and the camels that looked as if they’d been walking a hundred years, their pelts beginning to drop off.
My brother and I worked through the morning carrying cases of Coca-Cola, in real glass bottles, instead of plastic, so that lugging one of those cases meant carrying fifty pounds. By nine o’clock in the morning I was exhausted because I had had to move forty or more cases, taking care to avoid being trampled by one of the monster elephants.
At noon we raced home for a sandwich and then back to the small circus for two hours of explosions, acrobats, trapeze performers, mangy lions, clowns, and Wild West horse riding.
With the first circus done, we raced home and tried to rest, had another sandwich, then walked back to the big circus with our father at eight o’clock.
Another two hours of brass thunder followed, avalanches of sound and racing horses, expert marksmen, and a cage full of truly irritable and brand-new dangerous lions. At some point my brother ran off, laughing, with some friends, but I stayed fast by my father’s side.
By ten o’clock the avalanches and explosions came to a stunned halt. The parade I had witnessed at dawn was now reversed, and the tents were sighing down to lie like great pelts on the grass. We stood at the edge of the circus as it exhaled, collapsed its tents, and began to move away in the night, the darkness filled with a procession of elephants huffing their way back to the train yard. My father and I stood there, quiet, watching.
I put my right foot forward to start the long walk home when, suddenly, a strange thing happened: I went to sleep on my feet. I didn’t collapse, I felt no terror, but quite suddenly I simply could not move. My eyes clamped shut and I began to fall, when suddenly I felt strong arms catch me and I was lifted into the air. I could smell the warm nicotine breath of my father as he cradled me in his arms, turned, and began the long shuffling walk home.
Incredible, the whole thing, for we were more than a mile from our house and it was truly late and the circus had almost vanished and all its strange people were gone.
On that empty sidewalk my father marched, cradling me in his arms for that great distance, impossible, for after all I was a thirteen-year-old boy weighing ninety-two pounds.
I could feel his difficult gasps as he gripped me, yet I could not fully wake. I struggled to blink my eyes and move my arms, but soon I was fast asleep and for the next half hour I had no way of knowing that I was being toted, a strange burden, through a town that was dousing its lights.
From far off I vaguely heard voices and someone saying, ‘Come sit down, rest for a moment.’
I struggled to listen and felt my father jolt and sit. I sensed that somewhere on the homeward journey we had passed a friend’s house and that the voice had called to my father to come rest on the porch.
We were there for five minutes, maybe more, my father holding me on his lap and me, still half asleep, listening to the gentle laughter of my father’s friend, commenting on our strange odyssey.
At last the gentle laughter subsided. My father sighed, rose, and my half slumber continued. Half in and half out of dreams, I felt myself carried the final mile home.
The image I still have, seventy years later, is of my fine father, not for a moment making anything but a wry comment, carrying me through the night streets; probably the most beautiful memory a son ever had of someone who cared for him and loved him and didn’t mind the long walk home through the night.
I’ve often referred to it, somewhat fancifully, as our pietà, the love of a father for his son–the walk on that long sidewalk, surrounded by those unlit houses as the last of the elephants vanished down the main avenue toward the train yards, where a locomotive whistled and the train steamed, getting ready to rush off into the night, carrying a tumult of sound and light that would live in my memory forever.
The next day I slept through breakfast, slept through the morning, slept through lunch, slept all afternoon, and finally wakened at five o’clock and staggered in to sit at dinner with my brother and my folks.
My father sat quietly, cutting his steak, and I sat across from him, examining my food.
‘Papa,’ I suddenly cried, tears falling from my eyes. ‘Oh, thank you, Papa, thank you!’
My father cut another piece of steak and looked at me, his eyes shining very brightly.
‘For what?’ he said.
Fly Away Home
‘Take good care. That’s it, that’s it.’
The cargo was most especially precious. It had been assembled and disassembled with the tenderest care here at the rocket port and given over to the workmen in immense packing cases, boxes as large as rooms, wrapped, double-wrapped, cottoned and serpentined and velveted over to prevent breakage. For all the tenderness and concern with the cartons and bales and parceled property, everyone rushed.
‘On the double! Quick now!’
This was the Second Rocket. This was the Relief Rocket. The First Rocket had leaped up toward Mars the previous day. It was out booming now in the great black grasslands of space, lost from sight. And this Second Rocket must follow, as a bloodhound through a haunted moor, seeking a faint smell of iron and burned atom and phosphor. This Second Rocket, of a fat, overpacked size and shape, and with an odd and ridiculous series of people aboard, must not delay.
The Second Rocket was stuffed full. It trembled, shuddered, gathered itself like the hound of heaven, and bounded with a full and graceful leap, into the sky. It shook down avalanches of fire in its track. It rained coals and flame like furnaces suddenly heaven-borne. When the cinders died on the tarmac-concrete, the rocket was gone.
‘Hope it gets t
here safely,’ said a psychologist’s aide, watching the sky.
The First Rocket arrived from a night sky and landed on the planet Mars. There was a great gasping sound as its machines drank of the cool air. After sniffing it through mechanical nostrils and lungs, the rocket pronounced the air of the finest vintage, ten million years old, intoxicating, but pure.
The rocket men stepped out.
They were alone.
Thirty men and a captain in a land where the wind blew forever across dust seas and around dead cities that had been dead when Earth was opening out like a jungle flower three times twenty million miles away. The sky was immensely clear, like a vat of crystal alcohol in which the stars blazed without a twinkle. The air knifed the throat and the lungs. You jerked it in with a gasp. It was thin, a ghost, gone when sought after. The men felt giddy and doubly alone. Sand moaned over their rocket. In time, said the night wind, if you stand quietly, I could bury you, as I did the stone cities and the mummified people hidden there, bury you like a needle and a few bright bits of thread, before you have a chance to make a pattern here.
‘All right!’ cried the captain, snapping it up.
The wind blew his voice away, end over end, a scrap of ghostly paper.
‘Let’s make a line there!’ he cried against the loneliness.
The men moved in a numbed series of motions. They collided and milled and at last found their positions.
The captain faced them. The planet was under and all about them. They were at the bottom of a dry sea. A tide of years and centuries poured over and crushed them. They were the only living things here. Mars was dead and so far away from everything that a trembling began, imperceptibly, among them.
‘Well,’ cried the captain heartily. ‘Here we are!’
‘Here we are,’ said a ghostly voice.
The men jerked about. Behind them, the walls of a half-buried town, a town dreamed full of dust and sand and old moss, a town that had drowned in time up to its highest turrets, tossed back an echo. The black walls quivered as running water does with sand.
‘You all have your work to do!’ cried the captain.
‘To do,’ said the city walls. ‘To do.’
The captain showed his irritation. The men did not turn again, but the backs of their necks were cool and each hair felt separate and stirring.
‘Sixty million miles,’ whispered Anthony Smith, a corporal at the end of the line.
‘No talking there!’ cried the captain.
‘Sixty million miles,’ said Anthony Smith again, to himself, turning. In the cold dark sky, high above, Earth shone, a star, no more than a star, remote, beautiful, but only a star. There was nothing in the shape or the light to suggest a sea, a continent, a state, a city.
‘Let’s have it quiet!’ shouted the captain angrily, surprised at his anger.
The men glanced down the line at Smith.
He was looking at the heavens. They looked where he looked and they saw Earth, infinitely removed over a distance of six months of time, and millions fired upon millions of miles in distance. Their thoughts whirled. Long years ago, men went to the arctic regions of Earth in boats, ships, balloons, and airplanes, took with them the bravest men, handpicked, psychologically clean, alert, the noncrackables, the well adjusted. But pick as they would, some men cracked, some went off into the arctic whiteness, into the long nights or the insanity of monthlong days. It was so alone. It was so alone. And herd-man, cut off from life, from women, from homes and towns, felt his mind melt away. Everything was bad and lonely.
‘Sixty million miles!’ said Anthony Smith, louder.
Then take thirty men. Shape, size, box, and parcel them. Antitoxin them, mind and body, purify and psychoanalyze, clap these hardies in a pistol, fire it at a target! At the end, in the final accounting, what do you have? You have thirty men in a line, one man beginning to talk under his breath, then louder, thirty men gazing up at the sky, seeing at a distant star, knowing that Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, and California are gone. Gone the cities, women, children, everything good, comfortable, and dear. Here you are, by God, on some terrible world where the wind never stops, where all is dead, where the captain is trying to be hearty. Suddenly, as if you had never considered it before, you say to yourself:
‘Good Lord, I’m on Mars!’
Anthony Smith said it.
‘I’m not home, I’m not on Earth, I’m on Mars! Where’s Earth? There it is! See that damn small pinpoint of light? That’s it! Isn’t it silly? What’re we doing here?’
The men stiffened. The captain jerked his head at Walton, the psychiatrist. They went down the line quickly, trying to be casual.
‘All right, Smith, what seems to be the trouble?’
‘I don’t want to be here.’ Smith’s face was white. ‘Good God, why did I come? This isn’t Earth.’
‘You took all the exams, you knew what you’d be up against.’
‘No, I didn’t. I blocked it off.’
The captain turned to the psychiatrist with a look of irritation and hatred, as if the doctor had failed. The doctor shrugged. ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ he would have said, but stopped himself.
The young corporal was beginning to cry.
The psychiatrist turned instantly. ‘Get to your jobs! Build a fire! Set up your tents! On the double!’
The men broke, mumbling. They walked off stiffly, looking back. ‘Afraid of this,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘I was afraid. Space travel’s so new, damn it. So damn new. No telling how many sixty million miles’ll affect a person.’ He took hold of the young corporal. ‘Here we are. Everything’s all right. You’d better get to your job, Corporal. Get busy. Get on the ball.’
The corporal had his hands to his face. ‘It’s a Christ-awful feeling. To know we’re so far away from everything. And this whole damn planet is dead. Nothing else here but us.’
They started him unloading packets of frozen food.
The psychiatrist and the captain stood on a sand dune nearby for a moment, watching the men move.
‘He’s right, of course,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘I don’t like it, either. It really hits you. It hits hard. It’s lonely here. It’s awfully dead and far away. And that wind. And the empty cities. I feel lousy.’
‘I don’t feel so well myself,’ said the captain. ‘What do you think? About Smith? Will he stay on this side of the cliff or will he fall over?’
‘I’ll stick with him. He needs friends now. If he falls over, I’m afraid he’ll take some others with him. We’re all tied together by ropes, even if you can’t see them. I hope to hell the second rocket comes through. See you later.’
The psychiatrist went away and the rocket stood on the sea bottom in the night in the center of the planet Mars, as the two white moons rose suddenly, like terrors and memories, and flung themselves in a race over the sky. The captain stood looking up at the sky and Earth burning there.
During the night, Smith went mad. He fell over into darkness, but took no one with him. He pulled hard at the ropes, caused terrible secret panics all night, with screams, shouts, warning of terror and death. But the others stood firm positioned in the dark, working, perspiring. None was blown with him to his secret place at the bottom of a long cliff. He fell all night. He hit in the morning. Under sedatives, eyes shut, coiled upon himself, he was bunked in the ship, where his cries whispered away. There was silence, with only the wind and the men working. The psychiatrist passed extra rations of food, chocolate, cigarettes, brandy. He watched. The captain watched with him.
‘I don’t know. I’m beginning to think—’
‘What?’
‘Men were never meant to go so far alone. Space travel asks too much. Isolation, completely unnatural, a form of realistic insanity, space itself, if you ask me,’ said the captain. ‘Watch out, I’m going balmy myself.’
‘Keep talking,’ said the doctor.
‘What do you think? Can we stick it out here?’
‘We’ll hold on. The me
n look bad, I admit. If they don’t improve in twenty-four hours, and if our relief ship doesn’t show up, we’d best get back into space. Just knowing they’re heading home will snap them out of it.’
‘God, what a waste. What a shame. A billion dollars spent to send us. What do we tell the senators at home, that we were cowards?’
‘At times, cowardice is the only thing left. A man can take only so much, then it’s time for him to run, unless he can find someone to do his running for him. We’ll see.’
The sun rose. The double moons were gone. But Mars was no more comfortable by day than by night. One of the men fired off a gun at some animal he saw behind him. Another stopped work with a blinding headache, and retired to the ship. Though they slept most of the day, it was a fitful sleeping, with many calls on the doctor for sedatives and brandy rations. At nightfall, the doctor and the captain conferred.
