The wrecked display windows in the Block of the Babes and Zoot-Suiters were all empty.
In the Street of the Neon Worms the colored crawlers all came swiftly toward her, buzzing loudly and angrily, more cracklingly than bees, swarming close to her feet in ribbons of rainbow fire and following her around the corner for half a block.
But none of these things, nor the perceptible dimming of her electric candle, ruffled for one instant her expression of calm security.
She mounted the iron stairs, crossed the boundless room, sat down on the cot and put the electric candle on the orange crate among the heaped dead batteries.
One of them rolled off and hit the floor with a little tump! She started, quivered her head and blinked her eyes. Wakefulness had at last come into them. She sat motionless for a while, remembering. She sighed once and smiled a little smile, then she sat up straighter and her thin silvery eyebrows drew together hi a frown of determination. She found a fountain pen and a small pad of onionskin paper among the batteries. She tucked a scrap of carbon paper under the top sheet and wrote rapidly for a minute. She tore off the top sheet, folded it and rolled it up tightly, then tucked it into an aluminum cylinder hardly bigger than a paper match.
She got up and went around the cot. She took the cover off the birdcage, opened the small door, and took out a black pigeon. Moaning to it affectionately, she wired the cylinder to one foot. Then she kissed its beak and threw it into the darkness. There was a flapping which grew steadily fainter, then suddenly broke off, as if the bird had winged through a window.
The dim globe of light had shrunk to half its original size, but it was still enough to show the little old lady’s face as she got into bed and pulled up the blankets. Her eyes were closed now. She sighed once more and the corners of her lips lifted in another little smile. She became still, the blankets rising and falling almost imperceptibly over her chest, and the smile stayed.
The light was also enough to show the carbon of her note, which read:
Dear Evangeline,
I was overjoyed to receive your note and discover that you too at last have a city of your own and of course your own things. How is Louisville since the Destruction? Quiet, I trust. Pittsburgh is so noisy. / am thinking of moving to Cincinnati. Do you know if it has a tenant?
Yours very truly,
Miss Macbeth
Mariana
MARIANA HAD been living in the big villa and hating the tall pine trees around it for what seemed like an eternity when she found the secret panel in the master control panel of the house.
The secret panel was simply a narrow blank of aluminum—she’d thought of it as room for more switches if they ever needed any, perish the thought!—between the air-conditioning controls and the gravity controls. Above the switches for the three-dimensional TV but below those for the robot butler and maids.
Jonathan had told her not to fool with the master control panel while he was in the city, because she would wreck anything electrical, so when the secret panel came loose under her aimlessly questing fingers and fell to the solid rock floor of the patio with a musical twing her first reaction was fear.
Then she saw it was only a small blank oblong of sheet aluminum that had fallen and that in the space it had covered was a column of six little switches. Only the top one was identified. Tiny glowing letters beside it spelled TREES and it was on.
When Jonathan got home from the city that evening she gathered her courage and told him about it. He was neither particularly angry nor impressed.
“Of course there’s a switch for the trees,” he informed her deflatingly, motioning the robot butler to cut his steak. “Didn’t you know they were radio trees? I didn’t want to wait twenty-five years for them and they couldn’t grow hi this rock anyway. A station hi the city broadcasts a master pine tree and sets like ours pick it up and project it around homes. It’s vulgar but convenient.”
After a bit she asked timidly, “Jonathan, are the radio pine trees ghostly as you drive through them?”
“Of course not! They’re solid as this house and the rock under it—to the eye and to the touch too. A person could even climb them. If you ever stirred outside you’d know these things. The city station transmits pulses of alternating matter at sixty cycles a second. The science of it is over your head.”
She ventured one more question: “Why did they have the tree switch covered up?”
“So you wouldn’t monkey with it—same as the fine controls on the TV. And so you wouldn’t get ideas and start changing the trees. It would unsettle me, let me tell you, to come home to oaks one day and birches the next. I like consistency and I like pines.” He looked at them out of the dining-room picture window and grunted with satisfaction.
She had been meaning to tell him about hating the pines, but that discouraged her and she dropped the topic.
About noon the next day, however, she went to the secret panel and switched off the pine trees and quickly turned around to watch them.
At first nothing happened and she was beginning to think that Jonathan was wrong again, as he so often was though would never admit, but then they began to waver and specks of pale green light churned across them and then they faded and were gone, leaving behind only an intolerably bright single point of light—just as when the TV is switched off. The star hovered motionless for what seemed a long time, then backed away and raced off toward the horizon.
Now that the pine trees were out of the way Mariana could see the real landscape. It was flat grey rock, endless miles of it, exactly the same as the rock on which the house was set and which formed the floor of the patio. It was the same hi every direction. One black two-lane road drove straight across it—
nothing more.
She disliked the view almost at once—it was dreadfully lonely and depressing. She switched the gravity to moon-normal and danced about dreamily, floating over the middle-of-the-room bookshelves and the grand piano and even having the robot maids dance with her, but it did not cheer her. About two o’clock she went to switch on the pine trees again, as she had intended to do in any case before Jonathan came home and was furious.
However, she found there had been changes in the column of six little switches. The TREES switch no longer had its glowing name. She remembered that it had been the top one, but the top one would not turn on again. She tried to force it from “off” to “on” but it would not move.
All the rest of the afternoon she sat on the steps outside the front door watching the black two-lane road. Never a car or a person came into view until Jonathan’s tan roadster appeared, seeming at first to hang motionless in the distance and then to move only like a microscopic snail although she knew he always drove at top speed—it was one of the reasons she would never get in the car with him.
Jonathan was not as furious as she had feared. “Your own damn fault for meddling with it,” he said curtly. “Now we’ll have to get a man out here. Dammit, I hate to eat supper looking at nothing but those rocks! Bad enough driving through them twice a day.”
She asked him haltingly about the barrenness of the landscape and the absence of neighbors.