RAY BRADBURY
Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed
Although not the first author to write fiction set on Mars, Ray Bradbury staked a major claim to one of the most fertile landscapes in all science fiction with a series of stories published in pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s in which he envisioned the Red Planet as a new frontier where humanity might leave its imprint, for better or for worse. His collection The Martian Chronicles (1950), for which these stories served as a foundation, was a breakthrough success that alerted a mainstream audience to the value of science fiction as a modern mythology that embodies timeless human dreams and fears. Frail and fallible human beings are the foremost concern of Bradbury’s fiction, whether in the persona of the fireman in the future dystopia Fahrenheit 451 who comes to doubt the merits of his job—destroying ideas by burning books—or the ordinary middle-class Americans in the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes who allow fear of their own mortality to coerce them into Faustian pacts with a Mephistophelian owner of a traveling carnival. Bradbury’s lyrical stories have been collected in The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, A Medicine for Melancholy, The Machineries of Joy, and numerous other volumes including the definitive Stories of Ray Bradbury. The modern Gothic stories in his collections Dark Carnival and The October Country were a major influence on contemporary horror and dark fantasy fiction. Dandelion Wine, his novel of a midcentury Midwestern childhood, and the loose trilogy comprised of Death Is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and Green Shadows, White Whale, drawn from his experiences as a young writer, are quintessentially Bradburyesque explorations of the magic possibilities of everyday life. He has written the children’s books Switch on the Night, The Halloween Tree, and Ahmed and the Oblivion Machine, hundreds of poems collected in The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury, a score of plays, including The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, and the essay collection Yestermorrow. Many of his stories have been adapted for stage, screen, television, musical theater, and the comics. His own screenwriting credits include It Came from Outer Space and the screenplay for John Huston’s adaptation of Moby Dick. His many awards include the Nebula Grand Master Award and the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement from the Horror Writers Association.
THE ROCKET METAL cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family.
The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the center of a vacuum. His wife, before him, seemed almost to whirl away in smoke. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes.
The children looked up at him, as people look to the sun to tell what time of their life it is. His face was cold.
“What’s wrong?” asked his wife.
“Let’s get back on the rocket.”
“Go back to Earth?”
“Yes! Listen!”
The wind blew as if to flake away their identities. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone. He felt submerged in a chemical that could dissolve his intellect and burn away his past.
They looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. They saw the old cities, lost in their meadows, lying like children’s delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass.
“Chin up, Harry,” said his wife. “It’s too late. We’ve come over sixty million miles.”
The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There was no answer but the racing hiss of wind through the stiff grass.
He picked up the luggage in his cold hands. “Here we go,” he said—a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned.
They walked into town.
THEIR NAME WAS Bittering. Harry and his wife Cora; Dan, Laura, and David. They built a small white cottage and ate good breakfasts there, but the fear was never gone. It lay with Mr. Bittering and Mrs. Bittering, a third unbidden partner at every midnight talk, at every dawn awakening.
“I feel like a salt crystal,” he said, “in a mountain stream, being washed away. We don’t belong here. We’re Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martians. For heaven’s sake, Cora, let’s buy tickets for home!”
But she only shook her head. “One day the atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we’ll be safe here.”
“Safe and insane!”
Tick-tock, seven o’clock sang the voice-clock; time to get up. And they did.
Something made him check everything each morning—warm hearth, potted blood-geraniums—precisely as if he expected something to be amiss. The morning paper was toast-warm from the 6 A.M. Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted it at his breakfast place. He forced himself to be convivial.
“Colonial days all over again,” he declared. “Why, in ten years there’ll be a million Earthmen on Mars. Big cities, everything! They said we’d fail. Said the Martians would resent our invasion. But did we find any Martians? Not a living soul! Oh, we found their empty cities, but no one in them. Right?”
A river of wind submerged the house. When the windows ceased rattling, Mr. Bittering swallowed and looked at the children.
“I don’t know,” said David. “Maybe there’re Martians around we don’t see. Sometimes nights I think I hear ’em. I hear the wind. The sand hits my window. I get scared. And I see those towns way up in the mountains where the Martians lived a long time ago. And I think I see things moving around those towns, Papa. And I wonder if those Martians mind us living here. I wonder if they won’t do something to us for coming here.”
“Nonsense!” Mr. Bittering looked out the windows. “We’re clean, decent people.” He looked at his children. “All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean.” He stared at the hills. “You see a staircase and you wonder what Martians looked like climbing it. You see Martian paintings and you wonder what the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind, a memory. It’s quite natural. Imagination.” He stopped. “You haven’t been prowling up in those ruins, have you?”
“No, Papa.” David looked at his shoes.
“See that you stay away from them. Pass the jam.”
“Just the same,” said little David, “I bet something happens.”
SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT afternoon.
Laura stumbled through the settlement, crying. She dashed blindly onto the porch.
“Mother, Father—the war, Earth!” she sobbed. “A radio flash just came. Atom bombs hit New York! All the space rockets blown up. No more rockets to Mars, ever!”
“Oh, Harry!” The mother held onto her husband and daughter.
“Are you sure, Laura?” asked the father quietly.
Laura wept. “We’re stranded on Mars, forever and ever!”
For a long time there was only the sound of the wind in the late afternoon.
Alone, thought Bittering. Only a thousand of us here. No way back. No way. No way. Sweat poured from his face and his hands and his body; he was drenched in the hotness of his fear. He wanted to strike Laura, cry, “No, you’re lying! The rockets will come back!” Instead, he stroked Laura’s head against him and said, “The rockets will get through someday.”