Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles

He boiled the hot dogs, cut the buns, sliced the onions in a frenzy.

“Just think, that Martian said a surprise. That can only mean one thing, Elma. Those hundred thousand people coming in ahead of schedule, tonight, of all nights! We’ll be flooded! We’ll work long hours for days, what with tourists riding around seeing things, Elma. Think of the money!”

He went out and looked at the sky. He didn’t see anything.

“In a minute, maybe,” he said, snuffing the cool air gratefully, arms up, beating his chest. “Ah!”

Elma said nothing. She peeled potatoes for French fries quietly, her eyes always on the sky.

“Sam,” she said half an hour later. “There it is. Look.”

He looked and saw it.

Earth.

It rose full and green, like a fine-cut stone, above the hills.

“Good old Earth,” he whispered lovingly. “Good old wonderful Earth. Send me your hungry and your starved. Something something — how does that poem go? Send me your hungry, old Earth. Here’s Sam Parkhill, his hot dogs all boiled, his chili cooking, everything neat as a pin. Come on, you Earth, send me your rocket!”

He went out to look at his place. There it sat, perfect as a fresh-laid egg on the dead sea bottom, the only nucleus of light and warmth in hundreds of miles of lonely wasteland. It was like a heart beating alone in a great dark body. He felt almost sorrowful with pride, gazing at it with wet eyes.

“It sure makes you humble,” he said among the cooking odors of wieners, warm buns, rich butter. “Step up,” he invited the various stars in the sky. “Who’ll be the first to buy?”

“Sam,” said Elma.

Earth changed in the black sky.

It caught fire.

Part of it seemed to come apart in a million pieces, as if a gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an unholy dripping glare for a minute, three times normal size, then dwindled.

“What was that?” Sam looked at the green fire in the sky.

“Earth,” said Elma, holding her hands together.

“That can’t be Earth, that’s not Earth! No, that ain’t Earth! It can’t be.”

“You mean it couldn’t be Earth,” said Elma, looking at him. “That just isn’t Earth. No, that’s not Earth; is that what you mean?”

“Not Earth — oh no, it couldn’t be,” he wailed.

He stood there, his hands at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes wide and dull, not moving.

“Sam.” She called his name. For the first time in days her eyes were bright. “Sam?”

He looked up at the sky.

“Well,” she said. She glanced around for a minute or so in silence. Then briskly she flapped a wet towel over her arm. “Switch on more lights, turn up the music, open the doors, There’ll be another batch of customers along in about a million years. Gotta be ready, yes, sir.”

Sam did not move.

“What a swell spot for a hot-dog stand,” she said. She reached over and picked a toothpick out of a jar and put it between her front teeth. “Let you in on a little secret, Sam,” she whispered, leaning toward him. “This looks like it’s going to be an off season.”

They all came out and looked at the sky that night. They left their suppers or their washing up or their dressing for the show and they came out upon their now-not-quite-as-new porches and watched the green star of Earth there. It was a move without conscious effort; they all did it, to help them understand the news they had heard on the radio a moment before. There was Earth and there the coming war, and there hundreds of thousands of mothers or grandmothers or fathers or brothers or aunts or uncles or cousins. They stood on the porches and tried to believe in the existence of Earth, much as they had once tried to believe in the existence of Mars; it was a problem reversed. To all intents and purposes, Earth now was dead; they had been away from it for three or four years. Space was an anesthetic; seventy million miles of space numbed you, put memory to sleep, depopulated Earth, erased the past, and allowed these people here to go on with their work. But now, tonight, the dead were risen, Earth was reinhabited, memory awoke, a million names were spoken: What was so-and-so doing tonight on Earth? What about this one and that one? The people on the porches glanced sidewise at each other’s faces.

At nine o’clock Earth seemed to explode, catch fire, and burn.

The people on the porches put up their hands as if to beat the fire out.

They waited.

By midnight the fire was extinguished. Earth was still there. There was a sigh, like an autumn wind, from the porches.

“We haven’t heard from Harry for a long time.”

“He’s all right.”

“We should send a message to Mother.”

“She’s all right.”

“ Is she?”

“Now, don’t worry.”

“Will she be all right, do you think?”

“Of course, of course; now come to bed.”

But nobody moved. Late dinners were carried out onto the night lawns and set upon collapsible tables, and they picked at these slowly until two o’clock and the light-radio message flashed from Earth. They could read the great Morse-code flashes which flickered like a distant firefly:

AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT ATOMIZED IN PREMATURE

EXPLOSION OF ATOMIC STOCKPILE. LOS ANGELES,

LONDON BOMBED. WAR. COME HOME. COME HOME.

COME HOME.

They stood up from their tables.

COME HOME. COME HOME. COME HOME.

“Have you heard from your brother Ted this year?”

“You know. With mail rates five bucks a letter to Earth, I don’t write much.”

COME HOME.

“I’ve been wondering about Jane; you remember Jane, my kid sister?”

COME HOME.

At three in the chilly morning the luggage-store proprietor glanced up. A lot of people were coming down the street.

“Stayed open late on purpose. What’ll it be, mister?”

By dawn the luggage was gone from his shelves.

There was a little white silent town on the edge of the dead Martian sea. The town was empty. No one moved in it. Lonely lights burned in the stores all day. The shop doors were wide, as if people had run off without using their keys. Magazines, brought from Earth on the silver rocket a month before, fluttered, untouched, burning brown, on wire racks fronting the silent drugstores.

The town was dead. Its beds were empty and cold. The only sound was the power hum of electric lines and dynamos, still alive, all by themselves. Water ran in forgotten bathtubs, poured out into living rooms, onto porches, and down through little garden plots to feed neglected flowers. In the dark theaters, gum under the many seats began to harden with tooth impressions still in it.

Across town was a rocket port. You could still smell the hard, scorched smell where the last rocket blasted off when it went back to Earth. If you dropped a dime in the telescope and pointed it at Earth, perhaps you could see the big war happening there. Perhaps you could see New York explode. Maybe London could be seen, covered with a new kind of fog. Perhaps then it might be understood why this small Martian town is abandoned. How quick was the evacuation? Walk in any store, bang the NO SALE key. Cash drawers jump out, all bright and jingly with coins. That war on Earth must be very bad…

Along the empty avenues of this town, now whistling softly, kicking a tin can ahead of him in deepest concentration, came a tall, thin man. His eyes glowed with a dark, quiet look of loneliness. He moved his bony hands in his pockets, which were tinkling with new dimes. Occasionally he tossed a dime to the ground. He laughed temperately, doing this, and walked on, sprinkling bright dimes everywhere.