They walked in the silent morning with the great sky watching them and the strange blue and steam-white sands sifting about their feet on the new highway.
"So here we are. And from Mars where? Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, and on out? Right. And on out. Why? Some day the sun will blow up like a leaky furnace. Boom—there goes Earth. But maybe Mars won't be hurt; or if Mars is hurt maybe Pluto won't be, or if Pluto's hurt, then where'll we be, our sons' sons, that is?"
He gazed steadily up into that flawless shell of plum-colored sky.
"Why, we'll be on some world with a number maybe; planet 6 of star system 97, planet 2 of system 99! So damn far off from here you need a nightmare to take it in! We'll be gone, do you see, gone off away and safe! And I thought to myself, ah, ah. So that's the reason we came to Mars, so that’s the reason men shoot off their rockets."
"Bob—"
"Let me finish; not to make money, no. Not to see the sights, no. Those are the lies men tell, the fancy reasons they give themselves. Get rich, get famous, they say. Have fun, jump around, they say. But all the while, inside, something else is ticking along the way it ticks in salmon or whales, the way it ticks, by God, in the smallest microbe you want to name. And that little clock that ticks in everything living, you know what it says? It says get away, spread out, move along, keep swimming. Run to so many worlds and build so many towns that nothing can ever kill man. You see, Carrie? It's not just us come to Mars, it's the race, the whole dam human race, depending on how we make out in our lifetime. This thing is so big I want to laugh, I'm so scared stiff of it."
He felt the boys walking steadily behind him and he felt Carrie beside him and he wanted to see her face and how she was taking all this, but he didn't look there, either.
"All this is no different than me and Dad walking the fields when I was a boy, casting seed by hand when our seeder broke down and we'd no money to fix it. It had to be done, somehow, for the later crops. My God, Carrie, my God, you remember those Sunday-supplement articles, THE EARTH WILL FREEZE IN A MILLION YEARS! I bawled once, as a boy, reading articles like that. My mother asked why. I'm bawling for all those poor people up ahead, I said. Don't worry about them. Mother said. But, Carrie, that's my whole point; we are worrying about them. Or we wouldn't be here. It matters if Man with a capital M keeps going. There's nothing better than Man with a capital M in my books. I'm prejudiced, of course, because I'm one of the breed. But if there's any way to get hold of that immortality men are always talking about, this is the way—spread out—seed the universe. Then you got a harvest against crop failures anywhere down the line. No matter if Earth has famines or the rust comes in. You got the new wheat lifting on Venus or where-in-hell-ever man gets to in the next thousand years, I'm crazy with the idea, Carrie, crazy. When I finally hit on it I got so excited I wanted to grab people, you, the boys, and tell them. But hell, I knew that wasn't necessary. I knew a day or night would come when you'd hear that ticking in yourselves too, and then you'd see, and no one'd have to say anything again about all this. It's big talk, Carrie, I know, and big thoughts for a man just short of five feet five, but by all that's holy, it's true."
They moved through the deserted streets of the town and listened to the echoes of their walking feet.
"And this morning?" said Carrie.
"I'm coming to this morning," he said. "Part of me wants to go home too. But the other part says if we go, everything's lost. So I thought, what bothers us most? Some of the things we once had. Some of the boys' things, your things, mine. And I thought, if it takes an old thing to get a new thing started, by God, I'll use the old thing. I remember from history books that a thousand years ago they put charcoals in a hollowed out cow horn, blew on them during the day, so they carried their fire on marches from place to place, to start a fire every night with the sparks left over from morning. Always a new fire, but always something of the old in it. So I weighed and balanced it off. Is the Old worth all our money? I asked. No! It's only the things we did with the Old that have any worth. Well, then, is the New worth all our money? I asked. Do you feel like investing in the day after the middle of next week? Yes! I said. If I can fight this thing that makes us want to go back to Earth, I'd dip my money in kerosene and strike a match!"
Carrie and the two boys did not move. They stood on the street, looking at him as if he were a storm that had passed over and around, almost blowing them from the ground, a storm that was now dying away.
"The freight rocket came in this morning," he said, quietly. "Our delivery's on it. Let's go and pick it up."
They walked slowly up the three steps into the rocket depot and across the echoing floor toward the freight room that was just sliding back its doors, opening for the day.
"Tell us again about the salmon," said one of the boys.
In the middle of the warm morning they drove out of town in a rented truck filled with great crates and boxes and parcels and packages, long ones, tall ones, short ones, flat ones, all numbered and neatly addressed to one Robert Prentiss, New Toledo, Mars.
They stopped the truck by the quonset hut and the boys jumped down and helped their mother out. For a moment Bob sat behind the wheel, and then slowly got out himself to walk around and look into the back of the truck at the crates.
And by noon all but one of the boxes were opened and their contents placed on the sea-bottom where the family stood among them.
"Carrie . . ."
And he led her up the old porch steps that now stood uncrated on the edge of town.
"Listen to 'em, Carrie."
The steps squeaked and whispered underfoot.
"What do they say, tell me what they say?"
She stood on the ancient wooden steps, holding to herself, and could not tell him.
He waved his hand. "Front porch here, living room there, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms. Part we'll build new, part we'll bring. Of course all we got here now is the front porch, some parlor furniture, and the old bed."
"All that money. Bob!"
He turned, smiling. "You're not mad, now, look at me! You're not mad. We'll bring it all up, next year, five years! The cut-glass vases, that Armenian carpet your mother gave us in 1961! Just let the sun explode!"
They looked at the other crates, numbered and lettered: Front-porch swing, front-porch wicker rocker, hanging Chinese crystals . . ,
"I'll blow them myself to make them ring."
They set the front door, with its little panes of colored glass, on the top of the stairs, and Carrie looked through the strawberry window.
"What do you see?"
But he knew what she saw, for he gazed through the colored glass, too. And there was Mars, with its cold sky warmed and its dead seas fired with color, with its hills like mounds of strawberry ice, and its sand like burning charcoals sifted by wind. The strawberry window, the strawberry window, breathed soft rose colors on the land and filled the mind and the eye with the light of a never-ending dawn. Bent there, looking through, he heard himself say:
"The town'll be out this way in a year. This'll be a shady street, you'll have your porch, and you'll have friends. You won't need all this so much, then. But starting right here, with this little bit that's famihar, watch it spread, watch Mars change so you'll know it as if you've known it all your life."
He ran down the steps to the last and as-yet unopened canvas-covered crate. With his pocket knife he cut a hole in the canvas. "Guess!" he said.
"My kitchen stove? My furnace?"
"Not in a million years." He smiled very gently. "Sing me a song," he said.
"Bob, you're clean off your head."
"Sing me a song worth all the money we had in the bank and now don't have, but who gives a blast in hell," he said.
"I don't know anything but 'Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve!'"
"Sing that," he said.
But she could not open her mouth and start the song. He saw her lips move and try, but there was no sound.
He ripped the canvas w
ider and shoved his hand into the crate and touched around for a quiet moment, and started to sing the words himself until he moved his hand a last time and then a single clear piano chord sprang out on the morning air.
"There," he said. "Let's take it right on to the end. Everyone! Here's the harmony."
22 THE DAY IT RAINED FOREVER
The hotel stood like a hollowed dry bone under the very center of the desert sky where the sun burned the roof all day. All night, the memory of the sun stirred in every room like the ghost of an old forest fire. Long after dusk, since light meant heat, the hotel lights stayed off. The inhabitants of the hotel preferred to feel their way blind through the halls in their never-ending search for cool air.
This one particular evening Mr. Terle, the proprietor, and his only boarders, Mr. Smith and Mr. Fremley, who looked and smelled like two ancient rags of cured tobacco, stayed late on the long veranda. In their creaking glockenspiel rockers they gasped back and forth in the dark, trying to rock up a wind.
"Mr. Terle . . . ? Wouldn't it be really nice . . . someday ... if you could buy ... air conditioning . . . ?"
Mr. Terle coasted awhile, eyes shut.
"Got no money for such things, Mr. Smith."
The two old boarders flushed; they hadn't paid a bill now in twenty-one years.
Much later Mr. Fremley sighed a grievous sigh. "Why, why don't we all just quit, pick up, get outa here, move to a decent city? Stop this swelterin' and fryin' and sweatin'."
"Who'd buy a dead hotel in a ghost town?" said Mr. Terle quietly. "No. No, we'll just set here and wait, wait for that great day, January 29."
Slowly, all three men stopped rocking.
January 29.
The one day in all the year when it really let go and rained.
"Won't wait long." Mr. Smith tilted his gold railroad watch like the warm summer moon in his palm. "Two hours and nine minutes from now it'll be January 29. But I don't see nary a cloud in ten thousand miles."
"It's rained every January 29 since I was bom!" Mr. Terle stopped, surprised at his own loud voice. "If it's a day late this year, I won't pull God's shirttail."
Mr. Fremley swallowed hard and looked from east to west across the desert toward the hills. "I wonder . . . will there ever be a gold rush hereabouts again?"
"No gold," said Mr. Smith. "And what's more, I'll make you a bet—no rain. No rain tomorrow or the day after the day after tomorrow. No rain all the rest of this year."
The three old men sat staring at the big sun-yellowed moon that burned a hole in the high stillness.
After a long while, painfully, they began to rock again.
The first hot morning breezes curled the calendar pages like a dried snake skin against the flaking hotel front.
The three men, thumbing their suspenders up over their hat rack shoulders, came barefoot downstairs to blink out at that idiot sky.
"January 29 . . ."
"Not a drop of mercy there."
"Day's young."
"I’m not." Mr. Fremley turned and went away.
It took him five minutes to find his way up through the delirious hallways to his hot, freshly baked bed.
At noon, Mr. Terle peered in.
"Mr. Fremley . . . ?"
"Damn desert cactus, that's us!" gasped Mr. Fremley, lying there, his face looking as if at any moment it might fall away in a blazing dust on the raw plank floor. "But even the best damn cactus got to have just a sip of water before it goes back to another year of the same damn furnace. I tell you I won't move again, I’ll lie here an' die if I don't hear more than birds pattin' around up on that roof!"
"Keep your prayers simple and your umbrella handy," said Mr, Terle and tiptoed away.
At dusk, on the hollow roof a faint pattering sounded.
Mr, Fremley's voice sang out mournfully from his bed,
"Mr, Terle, that ain't rain! That's you with the garden hose sprinklin' well water on the roof! Thanks for tryin', but cut it out, now."
The pattering sound stopped. There was a sigh from the yard below.
Coming around the side of the hotel a moment later, Mr. Terle saw the calendar fly out and down in the dust.
"Damn January 29!" cried a voice. "Twelve more months! Have to wait twelve more months, now!"
Mr. Smith was standing there in the doorway. He stepped inside and brought out two dilapidated suitcases and thumped them on the porch.
"Mr. Smith!" cried Mr. Terle. "You can't leave after thkty years!"
"They say it rains twenty days a month in Ireland," said Mr. Smith. "I'll get a job there and run around with my hat off and my mouth open."
"You can't go!" Mr. Terle tried frantically to think of something; he snapped his fingers. "You owe me nine thousand dollars rent!"
Mr. Smith recoiled; his eyes got a look of tender and unexpected hurt in them.
"I'm sorry." Mr. Terle looked away. "I didn't mean that. Look now—you just head for Seattle. Pours two inches a week there. Pay me when you can, or never. But do me a favor: wait till midnight. It's cooler then, anyhow. Get you a good night's walk toward the city."
"Nothin'll happen between now and midnight."
"You got to have faith. When everything else is gone, you got to believe a thing'll happen. Just stand here with me, you don't have to sit, just stand here and think of rain. That's the last thing I'll ever ask of you."
On the desert sudden little whirlwinds of dust twisted up, sifted down. Mr. Smith's eyes scanned the sunset horizon.
"What do I think? Rain, oh you rain, come along here? Stuff like that?"
"Anything. Anything at all!"
Mr. Smith stood for a long time between his two mangy suitcases and did not move. Five, six minutes ticked by. There was no sound, save the two men's breathing in the dusk.
Then at last, very firmly, Mr. Smith stooped to grasp the luggage handles.
Just then, Mr. Terle blinked. He leaned forward, cupping his hand to his ear.
Mr. Smith froze, his hands still on the luggage.
From away among the hills, a murmur, a soft and tremulous rumble.
"Storm coming!" hissed Mr. Terle.
The sound grew louder; a kind of whitish cloud rose up from the hills.
Mr. Smith stood tall on tiptoe.
Upstairs Mr. Fremley sat up like Lazarus.
Mr. Terle's eyes grew wider and yet wider to take hold of what was coming. He held to the porch rail like the captain of a calm-foundered vessel feeling the first stir of some tropic breeze that smelled of lime and the ice-cool white meat of coconut. The smallest wind stroked over his aching nostrils as over the flues of a white-hot chimney.
"There!" cried Mr. Terle. "There!"
And over the last hill, shaking out feathers of fiery dust, came the cloud, the thunder, the racketing storm.
Over the hill the first car to pass in twenty days flung itself down the valley with a shriek, a thud, and a wail.
Mr. Terle did not dare to look at Mr. Smith.
Mr. Smith looked up, thinking of Mr. Fremley in his room.
Mr. Fremley, at the window, looked down and saw the car expire and die in front of the hotel.
For the sound that the car made was curiously final. It had come a very long way on blazing sulphur roads, across salt flats abandoned ten million years ago by the shingling of of waters. Now, with wire-ravelings like cannibal hair sprung up from seams, with a great eyelid of canvas top thrown back and melted to spearmint gum over the rear seat, the auto, a Kissel car, vintage 1924, gave a final shuddering as if to expel its ghost upon the air.
The old woman in the front seat of the car waited patiently, looking in at the three men and the hotel as if to say. Forgive me, my friend is ill; I've known him a long while, and now I must see him through his final hour. So she just sat in the car waiting for the faint convulsions to cease and for the great relaxation of all the bones which signifies that the final process is over. She must have sat a full half minute longer listening to her car, and the
re was something so peaceful about her that Mr. Terle and Mr. Smith leaned slowly toward her. At last she looked at them with a grave smile and raised her hand.
Mr. Fremley was surprised to see his hand go out the window, above and wave back to her.
On the porch Mr. Smith murmured, "Strange. It's not a storm. And I'm not disappointed. How come?"
But Mr. Terle was down the path and to the car.
"We thought you were . . . that is. . ." He trailed off. "Terie's my name, Joe Terle."
She took his hand and looked at him with absolutely clear and unclouded light blue eyes like water that has melted from snow a thousand miles off and come a long way, purified by wind and sun.
"Miss Blanche Hillgood," she said, quietly. "Graduate of the Grinnell College, unmarried teacher of music, thirty years high-
school glee club and student orchestra conductor, Green City, Iowa, twenty years private teacher of piano, harp, and voice, one month retired and living on a pension and now, taking my roots with me, on my way to California."
"Miss Hillgood, you don't look to be going anywhere from here."
"I had a feeHng about that." She watched the two men circle the car cautiously. She sat like a child on the lap of a rheumatic grandfather, undecided. "Is there nothing we can do?"
"Make a fence of the wheels, dinner gong of the brake drums, the rest'll make a fine rock garden."
Mr. Fremley shouted from the sky. "Dead? I say, is the car dead? I can feel it from here! Well—it's way past time for supper!"
Mr. Terle put out his hand. "Miss Hillgood, that there is Joe Terle's Desert Hotel, open twenty-six hours a day. Gila monsters and road runners please register before going upstairs. Get you a night's sleep, free, we'll knock our Ford off its blocks and drive you to the city come morning."
She let herself be helped from the car. The machine groaned as if in protest at her going. She shut the door carefully with a soft click.
"One friend gone, but the other still with me. Mr. Terle, could you please bring her in out of the weather?"
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