The Illustrated Man

“I’m sorry,” Saul said. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m all right now.”

“We’ll see,” said Mark. “Let’s give ourselves a month, shall we?”

The other men grinned at Saul.

Saul said nothing. He sat staring at the floor of the cave.

“Let’s see now,” said Mark. “On Mondays it’s your day, Smith.”

Smith nodded.

“On Tuesdays I’ll take Peter there, for an hour or so.

Peter nodded.

“On Wednesdays I’ll finish up with Johnson, Holtzman, and Jim, here.”

The last three men looked at each other.

“The rest of the week I’m to be left strictly alone, do you hear?” Mark told them. “A little should be better than nothing. If you don’t obey, I won’t perform at all.”

“Maybe we’llmake you perform,” said Johnson. He caught the other men’s eye. “Look, we’re five against his one. We can make him do anything we want. If we co-operate, we’ve got a great thing here.”

“Don’t be idiots,” Mark warned the other men.

“Let me talk,” said Johnson. “He’s telling us what he’ll do. Why don’t we tellhim! Are we bigger than him, or not? And him threatening not to perform! Well, just let me get a sliver of wood under his toenails and maybe burn his fingers a bit with a steel file, and we’ll see if he performs! Why shouldn’t we have performances, I want to know, every night in the week?”

“Don’t listen to him!” said Mark. “He’s crazy. He can’t be depended on. You know what he’ll do, don’t you? He’ll get you all off guard, one by one, and kill you; yes, kill all of you, so that when he’s done, he’ll be alone—just him and me! That’s his sort.”

The listening men blinked. First at Mark, then at Johnson.

“For that matter,” observed Mark, “none of you can trust the others. This is a fool’s conference. The minute your back is turned one of the other men will murder you. I dare say, at the week’s end, you’ll all be dead or dying.”

A cold wind blew into the mahogany room. It began to dissolve and became a cave once more. Mark was tired of his joke. The marble table splashed and rained and evaporated.

The men gazed suspiciously at each other with little bright animal eyes. What was spoken was true. They saw each other in the days to come, surprising one another, killing—until that last lucky one remained to enjoy the intellectual treasure that walked among them.

Saul watched them and felt alone and disquieted. Once you have made a mistake, how hard to admit your wrongness, to go back, start fresh. They wereall wrong. They had been lost a long time. Now they were worse than lost.

“And to make matters very bad,” said Mark at last, “one of you has a gun. All the rest of you have only knives. But one of you, I know, has a gun.

Everybody jumped up. “Search!” said Mark. “Find the one with the gun or you’re all dead!”

That did it. The men plunged wildly about, not knowing whom to search first. Their hands grappled, they cried out, and Mark watched them in contempt.

Johnson fell back, feeling in his jacket. “All right,” he said. “We might as well have it over now! Here, you, Smith.”

And he shot Smith through the chest. Smith fell. The other men yelled. They broke apart. Johnson aimed and fired twice more.

“Stop!” cried Mark.

New York soared up around them, out of rock and cave and sky. Sun glinted on high towers. The elevated thundered; tugs blew in the harbor. The green lady stared across the bay, a torch in her hand.

“Look, you fools!” said Mark. Central Park broke out constellations of spring blossoms. The wind blew fresh-cut lawn smells over them in a wave.

And in the center of New York, bewildered, the men stumbled. Johnson fired his gun three times more. Saul ran forward. He crashed against Johnson, bore him down, wrenched the gun away. It fired again.

The men stopped milling.

They stood. Saul lay across Johnson. They ceased struggling.

There was a terrible silence. The men stood watching. New York sank down into the sea. With a hissing, bubbling, sighing; with a cry of ruined metal and old time, the great structures leaned, warped, flowed, collapsed.

Mark stood among the buildings. Then, like a building, a neat red hole drilled into his chest, wordless, he fell.

Saul lay staring at the men, at the body.

He got up, the gun in his hand.

Johnson did not move—was afraid to move.

They all shut their eyes and opened them again, thinking that by so doing they might reanimate the man who lay before them.

The cave was cold.

Saul stood up and looked, remotely, at the gun in his hand. He took it and threw it far out over the valley and did not watch it fall.

They looked down at the body as if they could not believe it. Saul bent down and took hold of the limp hand. “Leonard!” he said softly. “Leonard?” He shook the hand. “Leonard!”

Leonard Mark did not move. His eyes were shut; his chest had ceased going up and down. He was getting cold.

Saul got up. “We’ve killed him,” he said, not looking at the men. His mouth was filling with a raw liquor now. “The only one we didn’t want to kill, we killed.” He put his shaking hand to his eyes. The other men stood waiting.

“Get a spade,” said Saul. “Bury him.” He turned away. “I’ll have nothing to do with you.”

Somebody walked off to find a spade.

Saul was so weak he couldn’t move. His legs were grown into the earth, with roots feeding deep of loneliness and fear and the cold of the night. The fire had almost died out and now there was only the double moonlight riding over the blue mountains.

There was the sound of someone digging in the earth with a spade.

“We don’t need him anyhow,” said somebody, much too loudly.

The sound of digging went on. Saul walked off slowly and let himself slide down the side of a dark tree until he reached and was sitting blankly on the sand, his hands blindly in his lap.

Sleep, he thought. We’ll all go to sleep now. We have that much, anyway. Go to sleep and try to dream of New York and all the rest.

He closed his eyes wearily, the blood gathering in his nose and his mouth and in his quivering eyes.

“How did he do it?” he asked in a tired voice. His head fell forward on his chest. “How did he bring New York up here and make us walk around in it? Lct’s try. It shouldn’t be too hard. Think! Think of New York,” he whispered, falling down into sleep. “New York and Central Park and then Illinois in the spring, apple blossoms and green grass.

It didn’t work. It wasn’t the same. New York was gone and nothing he could do would bring it back. He would rise every morning and walk on the dead sea looking for it, and walk forever around Mars, looking for it, and never find it. And finally lie, too tired to walk, trying to find New York in his head, but not finding it.

The last thing he heard before he slept was the spade rising and falling and digging a hole into which, with a tremendous crash of metal and golden mist and odor and color and sound, New York collapsed, fell, and was buried.

He cried all night in his sleep.