The Martian Chronicles: September 2005 - November 2005

It’s just I miss driving out to Green Lawn Park every Sunday to put flowers on his marker. It used to be our only excursion.
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

“Tom, if that’s you, if by some chance it is you, Tom, I’ll leave the door unlatched. And if you’re cold and want to come in to warm yourself, just come in later and lie by the hearth; there’s some fur rugs there.”
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

“Why can’t you accept me and stop talking?” cried the boy. His hands completely shielded his face. “Don’t doubt, please don’t doubt me!”
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

Who is this, he thought, in need of love as much as we? Who is he and what is he that, out of loneliness, he comes into the alien camp and assumes the voice and face of memory and stands among us, accepted and happy at last?
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

Perhaps this is wrong to keep Tom but a little while, when nothing can come of it but trouble and sorrow, but how are we to give up the very thing we’ve wanted, no matter if it stays only a day and is gone, making the emptiness emptier, the dark nights darker, the rainy nights wetter?
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

He looked at the throngs coming and going, and it worried him also.
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

They crossed a street, and three drunken men careened into them. There was much confusion, a separation, a wheeling about, and then LaFarge stood stunned.
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

As he walked he recalled the boy’s constant references to being trapped, his fear of crowds and cities.
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

“The thoughts are too strong in this house; it’s like being imprisoned. I can’t change myself back.”
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

You don’t question Providence. If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

The swift figure meaning everything to them, all identities, all persons, all names. How many different names had been uttered in the last five minutes? How many different faces shaped over Tom’s face, all wrong?
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

He was melting wax shaping to their minds. They shouted, they pressed forward, pleading. He screamed, threw out his hands, his face dissolving to each demand.
—from "September 2005: The Martian"

It was a very remote thing, when the luggage-store proprietor heard the news on the night radio, received all the way from Earth on a light-sound beam. The proprietor felt how remote it was.
—from "November 2005: The Luggage Store"

“Well,” said the proprietor, “I’d better get my luggage dusted off. I got a feeling there’ll be a rush sale here any time.”
—from "November 2005: The Luggage Store"

“Come to think of it, you’d better give me a new valise. My old one’s in pretty bad condition....”
—from "November 2005: The Luggage Store"

This was a crossroads where two dead highways came and went in darkness. Here Sam Parkhill had flung up this riveted aluminum structure, garish with white light, trembling with juke-box melody.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

“Customers.” He lingered on the word. “One hundred thousand hungry people.”
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

The mask sustained itself a moment. Then, like a small circus tent pulling up its stakes and dropping soft fold on fold, the silks rustled, the mask descended, the silver claws tinkled on the stone path. The mask lay on a small huddle of silent white bones and material.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

“But the authorities confiscated all of them! They broke them up, sold some at auction! I’m the only one in this whole damn territory’s got one and knows how to run one.”
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

He had to drag her around back of the stand where the two machines stood, his truck, which he had used steadily until a month ago, and the old Martian sand ship which he had bid for at auction, smiling, and which, during the last three weeks, he had used to carry supplies back and forth over the glassy sea floor.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

He felt something in the seat behind him, something as frail as your breath on a cold morning, something as blue as hickory-wood smoke at twilight, something like old white lace, something like a snowfall, something like the icy rime of winter on the brittle sedge.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

Her wrists were thin as icicles, her eyes as clear as the moons and as large, steady and white. The wind blew at her and, like an image on cold water, she rippled, silk standing out from her frail body in tatters of blue rain.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

The girl, in the gunfire, in the heat, in the concussion, folded like a soft scarf, melted like a crystal figurine.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

They were passing a little white chess city, and in his frustration, in his rage, he sent six bullets crashing among the crystal towers.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

He was only aware of a whistling and a high windy screaming, as of steel on sand, and it was the sound of the sharp razor prows of the sand ships preening the sea bottoms, their red pennants, blue pennants unfurled.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

There weren’t many Martians left on Mars—one hundred, one hundred and fifty, all told. And most of them were here now, on the dead seas, in their resurrected ships, by their dead chess cities, one of which had just fallen like some fragile vase hit by a pebble.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

I came to Mars like any honest enterprising businessman.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

I took some surplus material from a rocket that crashed and I built me the finest little stand you ever saw right there on that land by the crossroads—you know where it is.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

And that Martian—I know he was a friend of yours—came. His death was an accident, I assure you. All I wanted to do was have a hot-dog stand, the only one on Mars, the first and most important one.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

The masks were coruscating, turning, firing the shadows.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

“Prepare the viands, prepare the foods, prepare the strange wines, for tonight is indeed a great night!”
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

“It is the land grant to all of the territory from the silver mountains to the blue hills, from the dead salt sea there to the distant valleys of moonstone and emerald,” said the Leader.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

He went out to look at his place. There it sat, perfect as a fresh-laid egg on the dead sea bottom, the only nucleus of light and warmth in hundreds of miles of lonely wasteland.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

Part of it seemed to come apart in a million pieces, as if a gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an unholy dripping glare for a minute, three times normal size, then dwindled.
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

“Switch on more lights, turn up the music, open the doors. There’ll be another batch of customers along in about a million years. Gotta be ready, yes, sir.”
—from "November 2005: The Off Season"

They left their suppers or their washing up or their dressing for the show and they came out upon their now-not-quite-as-new porches and watched the green star of Earth there. It was a move without conscious effort; they all did it, to help them understand the news they had heard on the radio a moment before.
—from "November 2005: The Watchers"

They stood on the porches and tried to believe in the existence of Earth, much as they had once tried to believe in the existence of Mars; it was a problem reversed.
—from "November 2005: The Watchers"

Space was an anesthetic; seventy million miles of space numbed you, put memory to sleep, depopulated Earth, erased the past, and allowed these people here to go on with their work.
—from "November 2005: The Watchers"

By midnight the fire was extinguished. Earth was still there.
—from "November 2005: The Watchers"

AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT ATOMIZED IN PREMATURE EXPLOSION OF ATOMIC STOCKPILE. LOS ANGELES, LONDON BOMBED. WAR. COME HOME. COME HOME. COME HOME.
—from "November 2005: The Watchers"