Bradbury, Ray - SSC 13 (32 page)

 
          
Mr.
Bittering gazed at the Earth settlement far away in the low valley. “Such odd,
such ridiculous houses the Earth people built.”

 
          
“They
didn’t know any better,” his wife mused. “Such ugly people. I’m glad they’ve
gone.”

 
          
They
both looked at each other, startled by all they had just finished saying. They
laughed.

 
          
“Where
did they go?” he wondered. He glanced at his wife. She was golden and slender
as his daughter. She looked at him, and he seemed almost as young as their
eldest son.

 
          
“I
don’t know,” she said.

 
          
“We’ll
go back to town maybe next year, or the year after, or the year after that,” he
said, calmly. “Now—I’m warm. How about taking a swim?”

 
          
They
turned their backs to the valley. Arm in arm they walked silently down a path
of clear-running spring water.

 
          
Five
years later a rocket fell out of the sky. It lay steaming in the valley. Men
leaped out of it, shouting.

 
          
“We
won the war on Earth! We’re here to rescue you! Hey!”

 
          
But
the American-built town of cottages, peach trees, and theaters was silent. They
found a flimsy rocket frame rusting in an empty shop.

 
          
The
rocket men searched the hills. The captain established headquarters in an
abandoned bar. His lieutenant came back to report.

 
          
“The
town’s empty, but we found native life in the hills, sir. Dark people. Yellow
eyes. Martians. Very friendly. We talked a bit, not much. They learn English
fast. I’m sure our relations will be most friendly with them, sir.”

 
          
“Dark,
eh?” mused the captain. “How many?”

 
          
“Six,
eight hundred, I’d say, living in those marble ruins in the hills, sir. Tall,
healthy. Beautiful women.”

 
          
“Did
they tell you what became of the men and women who built this Earth settlement,
Lieutenant?”

 
          
“They
hadn’t the foggiest notion of what happened to this town or its people.”

 
          
“Strange.
You think those Martians killed them?”

 
          
“They
look surprisingly peaceful. Chances are a plague did this town in, sir.”

 
          
“Perhaps.
I suppose this is one of those mysteries we’ll never solve. One of those
mysteries you read about.”

 
          
The
captain looked at the room, the dusty windows, the blue mountains rising
beyond, the canals moving in the light, and he heard the soft wind in the air.
He shivered. Then, recovering, he tapped a large fresh map he had thumbtacked
to the top of an empty table.

 
          
“Lots
to be done, Lieutenant.” His voice droned on and quietly on as the sun sank
behind the blue hills. “New settlements. Mining sites, minerals to be looked
for. Bacteriological specimens taken. The work, all the work. And the old
records were lost. We’ll have a job of remapping to do, renaming the mountains
and rivers and such. Calls for a little imagination.

 
          
“What
do you think of naming those mountains the
Lincoln
Mountains
, this canal the
Washington
Canal
, those hills—we can name those hills for
you, Lieutenant. Diplomacy. And you, for a favor, might name a town for me.
Polishing the apple. And why not make this the
Einstein
Valley
, and farther over … are you
listening
, Lieutenant?”

 
          
The
lieutenant snapped his gaze from the blue color and the quiet mist of the hills
far beyond the town.

 
          
“What?
Oh,
yes
, sir!”

 
          
T
he first light on the roof outside;
very early morning. The leaves on all the trees tremble with a soft awakening
to any breeze the dawn may offer. And then, far off, around a curve of silver
track, comes the trolley, balanced on four small steel-blue wheels, and it is
painted the color of tangerines. Epaulets of shimmery brass cover it, and
pipings of gold; and its chrome bell bings if the ancient motorman taps it with
a wrinkled shoe. The numerals on the trolley’s front and sides are bright as
lemons. Within, its seats prickle with cool green moss. Something like a buggy
whip flings up from its roof to brush the spider thread high in the passing
trees from which it takes its juice. From every window blows an incense, the
all-pervasive blue and secret smell of summer storms and lightning.

 
          
Down
the long, elm-shadowed streets the trolley moves, alone, the motorman’s gray
gloves touched gently, timelessly, to the controls.

 
          
At
noon
the motorman stopped his car in the middle
of the block and leaned out. “Hey!”

 
          
And
Douglas and Charlie and Tom and all the boys and girls on the block saw the
gray glove waving, and dropped from trees and left skip ropes in white snakes
on lawns, to run and sit in the green plush seats, and there was no charge. Mr.
Tridden, the conductor, kept his glove over the mouth of the money box as he
moved the trolley on down the shady block. “Hey,” said Charlie. “Where are we
going?”

 
          
“Last
ride,” said Mr. Tridden, eyes on the high electric wire ahead. “No more trolley.
Bus starts tomorrow. Going to retire me with a pension, they are. So—a free
ride for everyone! Watch out!”

 
          
He
moved the brass handle, the trolley groaned and swung round an endless green
curve, and all the time in the world held still, as if only the children and
Mr. Tridden and his miraculous machine were riding an endless river, away.

 
          
“Last
day?” asked
Douglas
, stunned. “They can’t
do
that! They can’t take off the trolley! Why,” said
Douglas
, “no matter how you look at it, a bus ain’t
a trolley. Don’t make the same kind of noise. Don’t have tracks or wires, don’t
throw sparks, don’t pour sand on the tracks, don’t have the same colors, don’t
have a bell, don’t let down a step like a trolley does!”

 
          
“Hey,
that’s right,” said Charlie. “I always get a kick watching a trolley let down
the step, like an accordion.”

 
          
“Sure,”
said Douglas.

 
          
And
then they were at the end of the line; the tracks, abandoned for thirty years,
ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman’s
Park with vast picnic hampers. The track still lay rusting among the hills.

 
          
“Here’s
where we turn around,” said Charlie.

 
          
“Here’s
where you’re wrong!” Mr. Tridden snapped the emergency generator switch. “Now!”

 
          
The
trolley, with a bump and a sailing glide, swept past the city limits, turned
off the street, and swooped downhill through intervals of odorous sunlight and
vast acreages of shadow that smelled of toadstools. Here and there creek waters
flushed the tracks and sun filtered through trees like green glass. They slid
whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers, past abandoned way stations
empty of all save transfer-punched confetti, to follow a forest stream into a
summer country, while
Douglas
talked. “Why, just the
smell
of a trolley,
that’s
different. I been on
Chicago
buses; they smell funny.”

 
          
“Trolleys
are too slow,” said Mr. Tridden. “Going to put buses on. Buses for people and
buses for school.”

 
          
The
trolley whined to a stop. From overhead Mr. Tridden reached down huge picnic
hampers. Yelling, the children helped him carry the baskets out by a creek that
emptied into a silent lake, where an ancient bandstand stood crumbling into
termite dust.

 
          
They
sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges, and Mr.
Tridden told them how it had been forty years ago: the band playing on that
ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump
conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies
running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours
treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the
walk now, all softened into a fiber mush through the years. The lake was silent
and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the
motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with
Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue
and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing, and the forest all
about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden’s voice rose and fell, and
a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching, designs both
golden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming. The
trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell upon it.
The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The
bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.

 
          
A
loon flew over the sky, crying.

 
          
Somebody
shivered.

 
          
Mr.
Tridden worked on his gloves. “Well, time to go. Parents’ll think I stole you
all for good.”

 
          
The
trolley was silent and cool-dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore.
With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children
so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand, and
the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on
them into other lands.

 
          
Bing!
went the soft bell under Mr. Tridden’s foot, and they soared back over
sun-abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that
seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when
Mr. Tridden stopped to let the children out.

 
          
Charlie
and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the
folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Tridden’s gloves on the brass
controls.

 
          
Douglas
ran his fingers over the green creek moss,
looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling.

 
          
“Well
… So long again, Mr. Tridden.”

 
          
“Good-bye,
boys.”

 
          
“See
you around, Mr. Tridden.”

 
          
“See
you around.”

 
          
There
was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed gently shut, tucking up its
corrugated tongue. The trolley sailed slowly down the late afternoon, brighter
than the sun, all tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far corner,
wheeling, and vanished, gone away.

 
          
“School
buses.” Charlie walked to the curb. “Won’t even give us a chance to be late for
school. Come get you at your front door. Never be late again in all our lives.
Think of that nightmare, Doug, just think it all over.”

 
          
But
Douglas
, standing on the lawn, was seeing how it
would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so
you would never know a trolley had ever run this way. He knew it would take as
many years as he could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply
buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter, he knew he’d wake, and if he
didn’t go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm in his bed, he
would hear it, faint and faraway.

 
          
And
around the bend of the morning street, up the avenue, between the even rows of
sycamore, elm, and maple, in the quietness before the start of living, past his
house, he would hear the familiar sounds. Like the ticking of a clock, the
rumble of a dozen metal barrels rolling, the hum of a single immense dragonfly
at dawn. Like a merry-go-round, like a small electrical storm, the color of
blue lightning, coming, here, and gone. The trolley’s chime. The hiss like a
soda-fountain spigot as it let down and took up its step, and the starting of
the dream again, as on it sailed along its way, traveling a hidden and buried
track to some hidden and buried destination....

 
          
“Kick-the-can
after supper?” asked Charlie.

 
          
“Sure,”
said
Douglas
. “Kick-the-can.”