“What’s wrong with ‘at?”
“Nothing—nothing.”
“You know what you talk like, mister?” she said. “A Communist! Yes, sir, that’s the kinda talk nobody stands for, by gosh. Nothing wrong with our little old system. We was good enough to let you Martians invade, and we never raised even our bitty finger, did we?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to understand,” said Ettil. “Why did you let us?”
“’Cause we’re bighearted, mister; that’s why! Just remember that, bighearted.” She walked off to look for someone else.
Gathering courage to himself, Ettil began to write a letter to his wife, moving the pen carefully over the paper on his knee.
“Dear Tylla——”
But again he was interrupted. A small-little-girl-of-an-old-woman, with a pale round wrinkled little face, shook her tambourine in front of his nose, forcing him to glance up.
“Brother,” she cried, eyes blazing. “Have you been saved?”
“Am I in danger?” Ettil dropped his pen, jumping.
“Terrible danger!” she wailed, clanking her tambourine, gazing at the sky. “You need to be saved, brother, in the worst way!”
“I’m inclined to agree,” he said, trembling.
“We saved lots already today. I saved three myself, of you Mars people. Ain’t that nice?” She grinned at him.
“I guess so.”
She was acutely suspicious. She leaned forward with her secret whisper. “Brother,” she wanted to know, “you been baptized?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered back.
“You don’t know?” she cried, flinging up hand and tambourine.
“Is it like being shot?” he asked.
“Brother,” she said, “you are in a bad and sinful condition. I blame it on your ignorant bringing up. I bet those schools on Mars are terrible—don’t teach you no truth at all. Just a pack of made-up lies. Brother, you got to be baptized if you want to be happy.”
“Will it make me happy even in this world here?” he said. “Don’t ask for everything on your platter,” she said. “Be satisfied with a wrinkled pea, for there’s another world we’re all going to that’s better than this one.”
“I know that world,” he said.
“It’s peaceful,” she said.
“Yes.”
“There’s quiet,” she said.
“Yes.”
“There’s milk and honey flowing.”
“Why, yes,” he said.
“And everybody’s laughing.”
“I can see it now,” he said.
“A better world,” she said.
“Far better,” he said. “Yes, Mars is a great planet.”
“Mister,” she said, tightening up and almost flinging the tambourine in his face, “you been joking with me?”
“Why, no.” He was embarrassed and bewildered. “I thought you were talking about——”
“Not about mean old nasty Mars, I tell you, mister! It’s your type that is going to boil for years, and suffer and break out in black pimples and be tortured——”
“I must admit Earth isn’t very nice. You’ve described it beautifully.”
“Mister, you’re funning me again!” she cried angrily.
“No, no—please. I plead ignorance.”
“Well,” she said, “you’re a heathen, and heathens are improper. Here’s a paper. Come to this address tomorrow night and be baptized and be happy. We shouts and we stomps and we talk in voices, so if you want to hear our all-cornet, all-brass band, you come, won’t you now?”
“I’ll try,” he said hesitantly.
Down the street she went, patting her tambourine, singing at the top of her voice, “Happy Am I, I’m Always Happy.”
Dazed, Ettil returned to his letter.
“Dear Tylla: To think that in my naivete I imagined that the Earthmen would have to counterattack with guns and bombs. No, no. I was sadly wrong. There is no Rick or Mick or Jick or Bannon—those lever fellows who save worlds. No.
“There are blond robots with pink rubber bodies, real, but somehow unreal, alive but somehow automatic in all responses, living in caves all of their lives. Their
“And it is not only these, my dear Tylla, but the entire civilization into which we have been dropped like a shovelful of seeds into a large concrete mixer. Nothing of us will survive. We will be killed not by the gun but by the glad-hand. We will be destroyed not by the rocket but by the automobile …”
Somebody screamed. A crash, another crash. Silence.
Ettil leaped up from his letter. Outside, on the street two ears had crashed. One full of Martians, another with Earthmen. Ettil returned to his letter:
“Dear, dear Tylla, a few statistics if you will allow. Forty-five thousand people killed every year on this continent of America; made into jelly right in the can, as it were, in the automobiles. Red blood jelly, with white marrow bones like sudden thoughts, ridiculous horror thoughts, transfixed in the immutable jelly. The cars roll up in tight neat sardine rolls—all sauce, all silence.
“Blood manure for green buzzing summer flies, all over the highways. Faces made into Halloween masks by sudden stops. Halloween is one of their holidays. I think they worship the automobile on that night—something to do with death, anyway.
“You look out your window and see two people lying atop each other in friendly fashion who, a moment ago, had never met before, dead. I foresee our army mashed, diseased, trapped in cinemas by witches and gum. Sometime in the next day I shall try to escape back to Mars before it is too late.
“Somewhere on Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save the World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle.
“The women of this evil planet are drowning us in a tide of banal sentimentality, misplaced romance, and one last fling before the makers of glycerin boil them down for usage. Good night, Tylla. Wish me well, for I shall probably die trying to escape. My love to our child.”
Weeping silently, he folded the letter and reminded himself to mail it later at the rocket post.
He left the park. What was there to do? Escape? But how? Return to the post late tonight, steal one of the rockets alone and go back to Mars? Would it be possible? He shook his head. He was much too confused.
All that he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of a lot of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night. No, no.
He looked at the haunted faces of the Earthmen drifting violently along in their mechanical death boxes. Soon —yes, very soon—they would invent an auto with six silver handles on it!
“Hey, there!”
An auto horn. A large long hearse of a car, black and ominous pulled to the curb. A man leaned out.
“You a Martian?”
“Yes.”
