The Martian Chronicles: June 2003 - August 2005

Far up the street the levee seemed to have broken. The black warm waters descended and engulfed the town. Between the blazing white banks of the town stores, among the tree silences, a black tide flowed.
—from "June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air"

Teece grasped the man’s suspenders like two harp strings, playing them now and again, contemptuously, snorting at the sky, pointing one bony finger straight at God. “Belter, you know anything about what’s up there?”
—from "June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air"

“Belter, you fly up and up like a July Fourth rocket, and bang! There you are, cinders, spread all over space. Them crackpot scientists, they don’t know nothin’, they kill you all off!”
—from "June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air"

“Crash! All them rockets fallin’! Screamin’, dyin’! Bang! God Almighty, I’m glad I’m right here on old terra firma. As they says in that old joke, the more firma, the less terra! Ha, ha!”
—from "June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air"

Here’s the poll tax gone, and more and more states passin’ anti-lynchin' bills, and all kinds of equal rights. What more they want?
—from "June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air"

I know just how you feel, Silly; yes, sir, I sympathize with you, boy. But we’ll treat you good and give you good food, boy.
—from "June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air"

None of it flung down, no, but deposited gently and with feeling, with decorum, upon the dusty edges of the road, as if a whole city had walked here with hands full, at which time a great bronze trumpet had sounded, the articles had been relinquished to the quiet dust, and one and all, the inhabitants of the earth had fled straight up into the blue heavens.
—from "June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air"

In the cotton fields the wind blew idly among the snow clusters. In still farther meadows the watermelons lay, unfingerprinted, striped like tortoise cats lying in the sun.
—from "June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air"

The old Martian names were names of water and air and hills. They were the names of snows that emptied south in stone canals to fill the empty seas. And the names of sealed and buried sorcerers and towers and obelisks.
—from "2004-2005: The Naming of Names"

And the rockets struck at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old towns, in the rubble of which great pylons were plunged with new names: IRON TOWN, STEEL TOWN, ALUMINUM CITY, ELECTRIC VILLAGE, CORN TOWN, GRAIN VILLA, DETROIT II, all the mechanical names and the metal names from Earth.
—from "2004-2005: The Naming of Names"

They came on parties and vacations, on little shopping trips for trinkets and photographs and the “atmosphere”; they came to study and apply sociological laws; they came with stars and badges and rules and regulations, bringing some of the red tape that had crawled across Earth like an alien weed, and letting it grow on Mars wherever it could take root.
—from "2004-2005: The Naming of Names"

They began to plan people’s lives and libraries; they began to instruct and push about the very people who had come to Mars to get away from being instructed and ruled and pushed about.
And it was inevitable that some of these people pushed back....
—from "2004-2005: The Naming of Names"

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
—from "April 2005: Usher II" (quoting Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher")

“Is the color right? Is it desolate and terrible?”
“Very desolate, very terrible!”
“The walls are—bleak?”
“Amazingly so!”
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

“The tarn, is it ‘black and lurid’ enough?”
“Most incredibly black and lurid.”
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

You notice, it’s always twilight here, this land, always October, barren, sterile, dead. It took a bit of doing. We killed everything. Ten thousand tons of DDT. Not a snake, frog, or Martian fly left!
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

Stendahl drank it in, the dreariness, the oppression, the fetid vapors, the whole “atmosphere,” so delicately contrived and fitted.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

And that House! That crumbling horror, that evil lake, the fungi, the extensive decay! Plastic or otherwise, who could guess?
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

I came to Mars to get away from you Clean-Minded people, but you’re flocking in thicker every day, like flies to offal.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

“I’m Garrett, Investigator of Moral Climates.”
“So you finally got to Mars, you Moral Climate people? I wondered when you’d appear.”
“We arrived last week. We’ll soon have things as neat and tidy as Earth.”
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

In this year of our Lord 2005 I have built a mechanical sanctuary. In it copper bats fly on electronic beams, brass rats scuttle in plastic cellars, robot skeletons dance; robot vampires, harlequins, wolves, and white phantoms, compounded of chemical and ingenuity, live here.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

We can have the Dismantlers and Burning Crew here by supper. By midnight your place will be razed to the cellar.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

“You know the law. Strict to the letter. No books, no houses, nothing to be produced which in any way suggests ghosts, vampires, fairies, or any creature of the imagination.”
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

“It was enough just to be able to create this place. To be able to say I did it. To say I nurtured a medieval atmosphere in a modern, incredulous world.”
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

Garrett watched a mist drift by, whispering and whispering, shaped like a beautiful and nebulous woman.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

Stendahl confronted the robot Garrett. “You have your orders, Garrett?”
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

“I’m to return to Moral Climates. I’ll file a complimentary report. Delay action for at least forty-eight hours. Say I’m investigating more fully.”
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

Then he leaned back, closed his eyes, and considered the entire affair. How he would savor this in his old age.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

This paying back of the antiseptic government for its literary terrors and conflagrations.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away! Did it feel as bad as having some fifty thousand books annihilated with no recompense?
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

Eminent, eminent people, one and all, members of the Society for the Prevention of Fantasy, advocators of the banishment of Halloween and Guy Fawkes, killers of bats, burners of books, bearers of torches; good clean citizens, every one
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

Guests poured from the booths, transformed from one age into another, their faces covered with dominoes, the very act of putting on a mask revoking all their licenses to pick a quarrel with fantasy and horror.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

And through these rooms the guests ran, drunk at last, among the robot fantasies, amid the Dormice and Mad Hatters, the Trolls and Giants, the Black Cats and White Queens, and under their dancing feet the floor gave off the massive pumping beat of a hidden and telltale heart.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

Into a pit went Mr. Steffens, where, bound and tied, he was left to face the advancing razor steel of a great pendulum which now whirled down, down, closer and closer to his outraged body.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

“Where’s my duplicate? Don’t we see him killed?”
“There’s no duplicate.”
“But the others!”
“The others are dead. The ones you saw killed were the real people. The duplicates, the robots, stood by and watched.”
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

Because you burned Mr. Poe’s books without really reading them. You took other people’s advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you’d have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

They looked at the great House, smiling. It began to crack down the middle, as with an earthquake, and as Stendahl watched the magnificent sight he heard Pikes reciting behind him in a low, cadenced voice
—from "April 2005: Usher II"

And what more natural than that, at last, the old people come to Mars, following in the trail left by the loud frontiersmen, the aromatic sophisticates, and the professional travelers and romantic lecturers in search of new grist.
—from "August 2005: The Old Ones"

And so the dry and crackling people, the people who spent their time listening to their hearts and feeling their pulses and spooning syrups into their wry mouths, these people who once had taken chair cars to California in November and third-class steamers to Italy in April, the dried-apricot people, the mummy people, came at last to Mars....
—from "August 2005: The Old Ones"