The Martian Chronicles: December 2005 - October 2026

Water ran in forgotten bathtubs, poured out into living rooms, onto porches, and down through little garden plots to feed neglected flowers.
—from "December 2005: The Silent Towns"

You could still smell the hard, scorched smell where the last rocket blasted off when it went back to Earth.
—from "December 2005: The Silent Towns"

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.
—from "December 2005: The Silent Towns"

He entered the Elite Theater to show himself a film, to distract his mind from his isolation. The theater was hollow, empty, like a tomb with phantoms crawling gray and black on the vast screen.
—from "December 2005: The Silent Towns"

He wandered to the strange kitchen, thawed some iced huckleberries, ate them disconsolately.
—from "December 2005: The Silent Towns"

He phoned Mars Junction, New Boston, Arcadia, and Roosevelt City exchanges, theorizing that they would be logical places for persons to dial from; after that he contacted local city halls and other public institutions in each town.
—from "December 2005: The Silent Towns"

Her face, as he stepped into the light, was round and thick, and her eyes were like two immense eggs stuck into a white mess of bread dough. Her legs were as big around as the stumps of trees, and she moved with an ungainly shuffle.
—from "December 2005: The Silent Towns"

The car whirled away down the silent street, regardless of her stompings and shriekings.
—from "December 2005: The Silent Towns"

The wind would stir the canal waters and almost blow the stars out of the sky, but Mr. Hathaway would sit contented and talk to his wife, and his wife would reply, and he would speak to his two daughters and his son about the old days on Earth, and they would all answer neatly.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

What was happening on Earth now? He had seen no visible sign of change in Earth’s aspect through his thirty-inch telescope.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

He stumbled and fell, picked himself up, ran behind the hut, swiveled the telescope, and pointed it at the sky.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

He took a torch and moved into the plastic city and with the flame touched the walls here or there. The city bloomed up in great tosses of heat and light. It was a square mile of illumination, big enough to be seen out in space. It would beckon the rocket down to Mr. Hathaway and his family.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

Inside was the cold-storage unit and power plant he had repaired and restored with his efficient, small, nervous fingers over the years, just as he had repaired clocks, telephones, and spool recorders in his spare time.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

The shed was full of things he had built, some senseless mechanisms the functions of which were a mystery even to himself now as he looked upon them.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

He stood in the hot atmosphere generated by the fiery rocket.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

“I heard they had kicked you upstairs so you wouldn’t interfere with colonial policy here on Mars.”
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

I take it most of Earth’s a shambles, but the war goes on.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

“You know,” he said as the doctor placed a stethoscope to him, “it’s as if I kept alive all these years just for this day, and now you’re here to take me back to Earth, I’m satisfied and I can just lie down and quit.”
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

Wilder glanced at her hands, the soft warm hands and the fine manicured nails and the tapered wrists. He saw her slender, smooth white neck and her intelligent eyes. Finally he said, “Mr. Hathaway did a fine job on you and your children.”
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

We could have lived in a regular house in the town, but he liked it up here, where he could be primitive if he liked, or modern if he liked.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

Bury them with crosses in the graveyard and then come back up to the workshop and, with all the power of mind and memory and accuracy of finger and genius, put together, bit by bit, all those things that were wife, son, daughter.
—from "April 2026: The Long Years"

At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places.
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches.
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

Six, seven, eight o’clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a click.
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: “Fire, fire, fire!”
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air.
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!
—from "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"

So immediately there was a tumult and a shouting, and very quickly the camp was tucked into capsules and containers, Mom slipped into traveling jumpers and blouse, Dad stuffed his pipe full with trembling hands, his eyes on the Martian sky, and the three boys piled yelling into the motorboat
—from "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic"

He remembered the night before they left Earth, the hustling and hurrying, the rocket that Dad had found somewhere, somehow, and the talk of a vacation on Mars.
—from "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic"

They looked with fervent anticipation, and the dead city lay dead for them alone, drowsing in a hot silence of summer made on Mars by a Martian weatherman.
—from "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic"

“I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace, and responsibility.”
—from "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic"

A silver ring fish floated by them, undulating, and closing like an iris, instantly, around food particles, to assimilate them.
—from "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic"

He just sat there, and the children were caught in the center of his awe and defeat and resignation and acceptance.
—from "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic"

“From now on?” Michael was incredulous. He stood up, looking, and then turned to blink back at where the rocket used to be. “What about the rocket? What about Minnesota?”
—from "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic"

They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.
—from "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic"