When anyone talked too loudly the captain would reply in a low voice that made them talk quietly from imitation.
The air smelled clean and new. Spender sat for a long time just enjoying the way it was made. It had a lot of things in it he couldn’t identify: flowers, chemistries, dusts, winds.
“Then there was that time in New York when I got that blonde, what’s her name? — Ginnie!” cried Biggs. “That was it!”
Spender tightened in. His hand began to quiver. His eyes moved behind the thin, sparse lids.
“And Ginnie said to me — ” cried Biggs.
The men roared.
“So I smacked her!” shouted Biggs with a bottle in his hand.
Spender set down his plate. He listened to the wind over his ears, cool and whispering. He looked at the cool ice of the white Martian buildings over there on the empty sea lands.
“What a woman, what a woman!” Biggs emptied his bottle in his wide mouth. “Of all the women I ever knew!”
The smell of Biggs’s sweating body was on the air. Spender let the fire die. “Hey, kick her up there, Spender!” said Biggs, glancing at him for a moment, then back to his bottle. “Well, one night Ginnie and me — ”
A man named Schoenke got out his accordion and did a kicking dance, the dust springing up around him.
“Ahoo — I’m alive!” he shouted.
“Yay!” roared the men. They threw down their empty plates. Three of them lined up and kicked like chorus maidens, joking loudly. The others, clapping hands, yelled for something to happen. Cheroke pulled off his shirt and showed his naked chest, sweating as he whirled about. The moonlight shone on his crewcut hair and his young, clean-shaven cheeks.
In the sea bottom the wind stirred along faint vapors, and from the mountains great stone visages looked upon the silvery rocket and the small fire.
The noise got louder, more men jumped up, someone sucked on a mouth organ, someone else blew on a tissue-papered comb. Twenty more bottles were opened and drunk. Biggs staggered about, wagging his arms to direct the dancing men.
“Come on, sir!” cried Cheroke to the captain, wailing a song.
The captain had to join the dance. He didn’t want to. His face was solemn. Spender watched, thinking: You poor man, what a night this is! They don’t know what they’re doing. They should have had an orientation program before they came to Mars to tell them how to look and how to walk around and be good for a few days.
“That does it.” The captain begged off and sat down, saying he was exhausted. Spender looked at the captain’s chest. It wasn’t moving up and down very fast. His face wasn’t sweaty, either.
Accordion, harmonica, wine, shout, dance, wail, roundabout, dash of pan, laughter.
Biggs weaved to the rim of the Martian canal. He carried six empty bottles and dropped them one by one into the deep blue canal waters. They made empty, hollow, drowning sounds as they sank.
“I christen thee, I christen thee, I christen thee — ” said Biggs thickly. “I christen thee Biggs, Biggs, Biggs Canal — ”
Spender was on his feet, over the fire, and alongside Biggs before anyone moved. He hit Biggs once in the teeth and once in the ear. Biggs toppled and fell down into the canal water. After the splash Spender waited silently for Biggs to climb back up onto the stone bank. By that time the men were holding Spender.
“Hey, what’s eating you, Spender? Hey?” they asked.
Biggs climbed up and stood dripping. He saw the men holding Spender. “Well,” he said, and started forward.
“That’s enough,” snapped Captain Wilder. The men broke away from Spender. Biggs stopped and glanced at the captain.
“All right, Biggs, get some dry clothes. You men, carry on your party! Spender, come with me!”
The men took up the party. Wilder moved off some distance and confronted Spender. “Suppose you explain what just happened,” he said.
Spender looked at the canal. “I don’t know, I was ashamed. Of Biggs and us and the noise. Christ, what a spectade.”
“It’s been a long trip. They’ve got to have their fling.”
“Where’s their respect, sir? Where’s their sense of the right thing?”
“You’re tired, and you’ve a different way of seeing things, Spender. That’s a fifty-dollar fine for you.”
“Yes, sir. It was just the idea of Them watching us make fools of ourselves.”
“Them?”
“The Martians, whether they’re dead or not.”
“Most certainly dead,” said the captain. “Do you think They know we’re here?”
“Doesn’t an old thing always know when a new thing comes?”
“I suppose so. You sound as if you believe in spirits.”
“I believe in the things that were done, and there are evidences of many things done on Mars. There are streets and houses, and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and docks and places for stabling, if not horses, well, then some domestic animal, perhaps with twelve legs, who knows? Everywhere I look I see things that were used. They were touched and handled for centuries. Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I’ll say yes. They’re all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we’ll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we’ll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.”
“We won’t ruin Mars,” said the captain. “It’s too big and too good.”
“You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose. And Egypt is a small part of Earth. But here, this whole thing is ancient and different, and we have to set down somewhere and start fouling it up. We’ll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and the mountain King George Mountain and the sea the Dupont sea, and there’ll be Roosevelt and Lincoln and Coolidge cities and it won’t ever be right, when there are the proper names for these places.”
“That’ll be your job, as archaeologists, to find out the old names, and we’ll use them.”
“A few men like us against all the commercial interests.” Spender looked at the iron mountains. “They know we’re here tonight, to spit in their wine, and I imagine they hate us.”
The captain shook his head. “There’s no hatred here.” He listened to the wind. “From the look of their cities they were a graceful, beautiful, and philosophical people. They accepted what came to them. They acceded to racial death, that much we know, and without a last-moment war of frustration to tumble down their cities. Every town we’ve seen so far has been flawlessly intact. They probably don’t mind us being here any more than they’d mind children playing on the lawn, knowing and understanding children for what they are. And, anyway, perhaps all this will change us for the better”.
“Did you notice the peculiar quiet of the men, Spender, until Biggs forced them to get happy? They looked pretty humble and frightened. Looking at all this, we know we’re not so hot; we’re kids in rompers, shouting with our play rockets and atoms, loud and alive. But one day Earth will be as Mars is today. This will sober us. It’s an object lesson in civilizations. We’ll learn from Mars. Now suck in your chin. Let’s go back and play happy. That fifty-dollar fine still goes.”
The party was not going too well. The wind kept coming in off the dead sea. It moved around the men and it moved around the captain and Jeff Spender as they returned to the group. The wind pulled at the dust and the shining rocket and pulled at the accordion, and the dust got into the vamped harmonica. The dust got in their eyes and the wind made a high singing sound in the air. As suddenly as it had come the wind died.