of strong light and maybe a sort of relief. It made the deep wrinkles laugh instead of worry or cry.
So there went the cooling rocket, around a bend, gone.
“How far are we going?” Robert splashed his hand. It looked like a small crab jumping in the violet water.
Dad exhaled. “A million years.”
“Gee,” said Robert.
“Look, kids.” Mother pointed one soft long arm. “There’s a dead city.”
They looked with fervent anticipation, and the dead city lay dead for them alone, drowsing in a hot silence of summer made on Mars by a Martian weatherman.
And Dad looked as if he was pleased that it was dead.
It was a futile spread of pink rocks sleeping on a rise of sand, a few tumbled pillars, one lonely shrine, and then the sweep of sand again. Nothing else for miles. A white desert around the canal and a blue desert over it.
Just then a bird flew up. Like a stone thrown across a blue pond, hitting, falling deep, and vanishing.
Dad got a frightened look when he saw it. “I thought it was a rocket.”
Timothy looked at the deep ocean sky, trying to see Earth and the war and the ruined cities and the men killing each other since the day he was born. But he saw nothing. The war was as removed and far off as two flies battling to the death in the arch of a great high and silent cathedral. And just as senseless.
William Thomas wiped his forehead and felt the touch of his son’s hand on his arm, like a young tarantula, thrilled. He beamed at his son. “How goes it, Timmy?”
“Fine, Dad.”
Timothy hadn’t quite figured out what was ticking inside the vast adult mechanism beside him. The man with the immense hawk nose, sunburnt, peeling — and the hot blue eyes like agate marbles you play with after school in summer back on Earth, and the long thick columnar legs in the loose riding breeches.
“What are you looking at so hard, Dad?”
“I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace, and responsibility.”
“All that up there?”
“No. I didn’t find it. It’s not there any more. Maybe it’ll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it was ever there.”
“Huh?”
“See the fish,” said Dad, pointing.
There rose a soprano clamor from all three boys as they rocked the boat in arching their tender necks to see. They
Dad looked at it. His voice was deep and quiet.
“Just like war. War swims along, sees food, contracts. A moment later — Earth is gone.”
“William,” said Mom.
“Sorry,” said Dad.
They sat still and felt the canal water rush cool, swift, and glassy. The only sound was the motor hum, the glide of water, the sun expanding the air.
“When do we see the Martians?” cried Michael.
“Quite soon, perhaps,” said Father. “Maybe tonight.”
“Oh, but the Martians are a dead race now,” said Mom.
“No, they’re not. I’ll show you some Martians, all right,” Dad said presently.
Timothy scowled at that but said nothing. Everything was odd now. Vacations and fishing and looks between people.
The other boys were already engaged making shelves of their small hands and peering under them toward the seven-foot stone banks of the canal, watching for Martians.
“What do they look like?” demanded Michael.
“You’ll know them when you see them.” Dad sort of laughed, and Timothy saw a pulse beating time in his cheek.
Mother was slender and soft, with a woven plait of spungold hair over her head in a tiara, and eyes the color of the deep cool canal water where it ran in shadow, almost purple, with flecks of amber caught in it. You could see her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish — some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy, and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being nothing but color and nothing else. She sat in the boat’s prow, one hand resting on the side lip, the other on the lap of her dark blue breeches, and a line of sunburnt soft neck showing where her blouse opened like a white flower.
She kept looking ahead to see what was there, and, not being able to see it clearly enough, she looked backward toward her husband, and through his eyes, reflected then, she saw what was ahead; and since he added part of himself to this reflection, a determined firmness, her face relaxed and she accepted it and she turned back, knowing suddenly what to look for.
Timothy looked too. But all he saw was a straight pencil line of canal going violet through a wide shallow valley penned by low, eroded hills, and on until it fell over the sky’s edge. And this canal went on and on, through cities that would have rattled like beetles in a dry skull if you shook them. A hundred or two hundred cities dreaming hot summer-day dreams and cool summer-night dreams…
They had come millions of miles for this outing — to fish. But there had been a gun on the rocket. This was a vacation. But why all the food, more than enough to last them years and years, left hidden back there near the rocket? Vacation. Just behind the veil of the vacation was not a soft face of laughter, but something hard and bony and perhaps terrifying. Timothy could not lift the veil, and the two other boys were busy being ten and eight years old, respectively.
“No Martians yet. Nuts.” Robert put his V-shaped chin on his hands and glared at the canal.
Dad had brought an atomic radio along, strapped to his wrist. It functioned on an old-fashioned principle: you held it against the bones near your ear and it vibrated singing or talking to you. Dad listened to it now. His face looked like one of those fallen Martian cities, caved in, sucked. dry, almost dead.
Then he gave it to Mom to listen. Her lips dropped open.
“What — ” Timothy started to question, but never finished what he wished to say.
For at that moment there were two titanic, marrow-jolting explosions that grew upon themselves, followed by a half dozen minor concussions.
Jerking his head up, Dad notched the boat speed higher immediately. The boat leaped and jounced and spanked. This shook Robert out of his funk and elicited yelps of frightened but esctatic joy from Michael, who clung to Mom’s legs and watched the water pour by his nose in a wet torrent.
Dad swerved the boat, cut speed, and ducked the craft into a little branch canal and under an ancient, crumbling stone wharf that smelled of crab flesh. The boat rammed the wharf hard enough to throw them all forward, but no one was hurt, and Dad was already twisted to see if the ripples on the canal were enough to map their route into hiding. Water lines went across, lapped the stones, and rippled back to meet each other, settling, to be dappled by the sun. It all went away.
Dad listened. So did everybody.
Dad’s breathing echoed like fists beating against the cold wet wharf stones. In the shadow, Mom’s cat eyes just watched Father for some clue to what next.
Dad relaxed and blew out a breath, laughing at himself.
“The rocket, of course. I’m getting jumpy. The rocket.”
Michael said, “What happened, Dad, what happened?”
“Oh, we just blew up our rocket, is all,” said Timothy, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “I’ve heard rockets blown up before. Ours just blew.”
“Why did we blow up our rocket?” asked Michael. “Huh, Dad?”
“It’s part of the game, silly!” said Timothy.
“A game!” Michael and Robert loved the word.
“Dad fixed it so it would blow up and no one’d know where we landed or went! In case they ever came looking, see?”
