The Martian Chronicles: June 2001 - April 2003

It wouldn’t be right, the first night on Mars, to make a loud noise, to introduce a strange, silly bright thing like a stove. It would be a kind of imported blasphemy.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

There’d be time for that later; time to throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the lone gray Martian sea bottoms; time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicate ruins of the old Martian valley towns.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

He fed the fire by hand, and it was like an offering to a dead giant. They had landed on an immense tomb. Here a civilization had died.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

Spender watched as the small port opened and Hathaway, the physician-geologist—they were all men of twofold ability, to conserve space on the trip—stepped out.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

Chicken pox. It did things to the Martians it never did to Earth Men. Their metabolism reacted differently, I suppose. Burnt them black and dried them out to brittle flakes.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

Part of it dies slowly, in its own time, before our age, with dignity. But the rest! Does the rest of Mars die of a disease with a fine name or a terrifying name or a majestic name? No, in the name of all that’s holy, it has to be chicken pox, a child’s disease, a disease that doesn’t even kill children on Earth! It’s not right and it’s not fair.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

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.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

I was ashamed. Of Biggs and us and the noise. Christ, what a spectacle.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

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.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

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.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

They were all whispering now, for it was like entering a vast open library or a mausoleum in which the wind lived and over which the stars shone. The captain spoke quietly. He wondered where the people had gone, and what they had been, and who their kings were, and how they had died.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

If things work out they hope to establish three atomic research and atom bomb depots on Mars. That means Mars is finished; all this wonderful stuff gone.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

When I got up here I felt I was not only free of their so-called culture, I felt I was free of their ethics and their customs. I’m out of their frame of reference, I thought. All I have to do is kill you all off and live my own life.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

I’ll kill them off, every one of them. Mars will be untouched for the next half century. After a while, perhaps the Earth people will give up trying. Remember how they grew leery of the idea of building Zeppelins that were always going down in flames?
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

They’re professional cynics, and it’s too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

The majority is always holy, is it not? Always, always; just never wrong for one little insignificant tiny moment, is it? Never ever wrong in ten million years? He thought: What is this majority and who are in it? And what do they think and how did they get that way and will they ever change and how the devil did I get caught in this rotten majority?
—from "June 2001: —and the Moon Be Still as Bright"

But a government finger pointed from four-color posters in many towns: THERE’S WORK FOR YOU IN THE SKY: SEE MARS! and the men shuffled forward, only a few at first, a double-score, for most men felt the great illness in them even before the rocket fired into space.
—from "August 2001: The Settlers"

And this disease was called The Loneliness, because when you saw your home town dwindle the size of your fist and then lemon-size and then pin-size and vanish in the fire-wake, you felt you had never been born, there was no town, you were nowhere, with space all around, nothing familiar, only other strange men.
—from "August 2001: The Settlers"

So it was not unusual that the first men were few. The number grew steadily in proportion to the census of Earth Men already on Mars. There was comfort in numbers.
—from "August 2001: The Settlers"

And the thing that he wanted was Mars grown green and tall with trees and foliage, producing air, more air, growing larger with each season; trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children’s playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree.
—from "December 2001: The Green Morning"

He would have a private horticultural war with Mars. There lay the old soil, and the plants of it so ancient they had worn themselves out. But what if new forms were introduced? Earth trees, great mimosas and weeping willows and magnolias and magnificent eucalyptus.
—from "December 2001: The Green Morning"

Oxygen, fresh, pure, green, cold oxygen turning the valley into a river delta. In a moment the town doors would flip wide, people would run out through the new miracle of oxygen, sniffing, gusting in lungfuls of it, cheeks pinking with it, noses frozen with it, lungs revivified, hearts leaping, and worn bodies lifted into a dance.
—from "December 2001: The Green Morning"

The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.
—from "February 2002: The Locusts"

And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night.
—from "February 2002: The Locusts"

And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flowerpots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamor to cover the silence that Mars made waiting outside the door and the shaded window.
—from "February 2002: The Locusts"

You know what Mars is? It’s like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago—don’t know if you ever had one—they called them kaleidoscopes, bits of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns!
—from "August 2002: Night Meeting"

It was a machine like a jade-green insect, a praying mantis, delicately rushing through the cold air, indistinct, countless green diamonds winking over its body, and red jewels that glittered with multifaceted eyes.
—from "August 2002: Night Meeting"

Its six legs fell upon the ancient highway with the sounds of a sparse rain which dwindled away, and from the back of the machine a Martian with melted gold for eyes looked down at Tomas as if he were looking into a well.
—from "August 2002: Night Meeting"

The knife fell through his flesh. It hit the ground. Tomas bent to pick it up but could not touch it, and he recoiled, shivering.
—from "August 2002: Night Meeting"

The stars were white and sharp beyond the flesh of the Martian, and they were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphorescent membrane of a gelatinous sea fish. You could see stars flickering like violet eyes in the Martian’s stomach and chest, and through his wrists, like jewelry.
—from "August 2002: Night Meeting"

They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds.
—from "August 2002: Night Meeting"

Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more like it.
—from "August 2002: Night Meeting"

“Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think—the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?”
—from "August 2002: Night Meeting"

So the second men were Americans also. And they came from the cabbage tenements and subways, and they found much rest and vacation in the company of silent men from the tumbleweed states who knew how to use silences so they filled you up with peace after long years crushed in tubes, tins, and boxes in New York.
—from "October 2002: The Shore"

It was as if, in many ways, a great earthquake had shaken loose the roots and cellars of an Iowa town, and then, in an instant, a whirlwind twister of Oz-like proportions had carried the entire town off to Mars to set it down without a bump....
—from "February 2003: Interim"

And there they stood in the dead city, a heap of boys, their hiking lunches half devoured, daring each other in shrieky whispers.
—from "April 2003: The Musicians"

Ribs, like spider legs, plangent as a dull harp, and then the black flakes of mortality blowing all about them in their scuffling dance; the boys pushed and heaved and fell in the leaves, in the death that had turned the dead to flakes and dryness, into a game played by boys whose stomachs gurgled with orange pop.
—from "April 2003: The Musicians"

And then out of one house into another, into seventeen houses, mindful that each of the towns in its turn was being burned clean of its horrors by the Firemen, antiseptic warriors with shovels and bins, shoveling away at the ebony tatters and peppermint-stick bones, slowly but assuredly separating the terrible from the normal; so they must play very hard, these boys, the Firemen would soon be here!
—from "April 2003: The Musicians"