A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (3 page)

“But,” said Tom, blinking, “tonight you’re here, you’re there. One minute one way, the next minute another. I wanted to take you to the dance tonight for old times’ sake. I meant nothing by it when I first asked you. And then, when we were standing at the well, I knew something had changed, really changed, about you. You were different. There was something new and soft, something …” He groped for a word. “I don’t know, I can’t say. The way you looked. Something about your voice. And I know I’m in love with you again.”

“No,” said Cecy. “With me, with
me
.”

“And I’m afraid of being in love with you,” he said. “You’ll hurt me again.”

“I might,” said Ann.

No, no, I’d love you with all my heart! thought Cecy. Ann, say it to him, say it for me. Say you’d love him with all your heart.

Ann said nothing.

Tom moved quietly closer and put his hand up to hold her chin. “I’m going away. I’ve got a job a hundred miles from here. Will you miss me?”

“Yes,” said Ann and Cecy.

“May I kiss you good-by, then?”

“Yes,” said Cecy before anyone else could speak.

He placed his lips to the strange mouth. He kissed the strange mouth and he was trembling.

Ann sat like a white statue.

“Ann!” said Cecy. “Move your arms,
hold
him!”

She sat like a carved wooden doll in the moonlight.

Again he kissed her lips.

“I do love you,” whispered Cecy. “I’m here, it’s me you saw in her eyes, it’s me, and I love you if she never will.”

He moved away and seemed like a man who had run a long distance. He sat beside her. “I don’t know what’s happening. For a moment there … ”

“Yes?” asked Cecy.

“For a moment I thought—” He put his hands to his eyes. “Never mind. Shall I take you home now?”

“Please,” said Ann Leary.

He clucked to the horse, snapped the reins tiredly, and drove the rig away. They rode in the rustle and slap and motion of the moonlit rig in the still early, only eleven o’clock spring night, with the shining meadows and sweet fields of clover gliding by.

And Cecy, looking at the fields and meadows, thought, It would be worth it, it would be worth everything to be with him from this night on. And she heard her parents’ voices again, faintly, “Be careful. You wouldn’t want to lose your magical powers, would you—married to a mere mortal? Be careful. You wouldn’t want that.”

Yes, yes, thought Cecy, even that I’d give up, here and now, if he would have me. I wouldn’t need to roam the spring nights then, I wouldn’t need to live in birds and dogs and cats and foxes, I’d need only to be with him. Only him. Only him.

The road passed under, whispering.

“Tom,” said Ann at last.

“What?” He stared coldly at the road, the horse, the trees, the sky, the stars.

“If you’re ever, in years to come, at any time, in Green Town, Illinois, a few miles from here, will you do me a favor?”

“Perhaps.”

“Will you do me the favor of stopping and seeing a friend of mine?” Ann Leary said this haltingly, awkwardly.

“Why?”

“She’s a good friend. I’ve told her of you. I’ll give you her address. Just a moment.” When the rig stopped at her farm she drew forth a pencil and paper from her small purse and wrote in the moonlight, pressing the paper to her knee. “There it is. Can you read it?”

He glanced at the paper and nodded bewilderedly.

“Cecy Elliott, 12 Willow Street, Green Town, Illinois,” he said.

“Will you vist her someday?” asked Ann.

“Someday,” he said.

“Promise?”

“What has this to do with us?” he cried savagely. “What do I want with names and papers?” He crumpled the paper into a tight ball and shoved it in his coat.

“Oh, please promise!” begged Cecy.

“… promise … ” said Ann.

“All right, all right, now let me be!” he shouted.

I’m tired, thought Cecy. I can’t stay. I have to go home. I’m weakening. I’ve only the power to stay a few hours out like this in the night, traveling, traveling. But before I go …

“… before I go,” said Ann.

She kissed Tom on the lips.

“This is
me
kissing you,” said Cecy.

Tom held her off and looked at Ann Leary and looked deep, deep inside. He said nothing, but his face began to relax slowly, very slowly, and the lines vanished away, and his mouth softened from its hardness, and he looked deep again into the moonlit face held here before him.

Then he put her off the rig and without so much as a good night was driving swiftly down the road.

Cecy let go.

Ann Leary, crying out, released from prison, it seemed, raced up the moonlit path to her house and slammed the door.

Cecy lingered for only a little while. In the eyes of a cricket she saw the spring night world. In the eyes of a frog she sat for a lonely moment by a pool. In the eyes of a night bird she looked down from a tall, moon-haunted elm and saw the light go out in two farmhouses, one here, one a mile away. She thought of herself and her family, and her strange power, and the fact that no one in the family could ever marry any one of the people in this vast world out here beyond the hills.

“Tom?” Her weakening mind flew in a night bird under the trees and over deep fields of wild mustard. “Have you still got the paper, Tom? Will you come by someday, some year, sometime, to see me? Will you know me then? Will you look in my face and remember then where it was you saw me last and know that you love me as I love you, with all my heart for all time?”

She paused in the cool night air, a million miles from towns and people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills. “Tom?” Softly.

Tom was asleep. It was deep night; his clothes were hung on chairs or folded neatly over the end of the bed. And in one silent, carefully upflung hand upon the white pillow, by his head, was a small piece of paper with writing on it. Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, his fingers closed down upon and held it tightly. And he did not even stir or notice when a blackbird, faintly, wondrously, beat softly for a moment against the clear moon crystals of the windowpane, then, fluttering quietly, stopped and flew away toward the east, over the sleeping earth.

The Wilderness

“O
h, the Good Time has come at last”

It was twilight, and Janice and Leonora packed steadily in their summer house, singing songs, eating little, and holding to each other when necessary. But they never glanced at the window where the night gathered deep and the stars came out bright and cold.

“Listen!” said Janice.

A sound like a steamboat down the river, but it was a rocket in the sky. And beyond that—banjos playing? No, only the summer-night crickets in this year 2003. Ten thousand sounds breathed through the town and the weather. Janice, head bent, listened. Long, long ago, 1849, this very street had breathed the voices of ventriloquists, preachers, fortunetellers, fools, scholars, gamblers, gathered at this selfsame Independence, Missouri. Waiting for the moist earth to bake and the great tidal grasses to come up heavy enough to hold the weight of their carts, their wagons, their indiscriminate destinies, and their dreams.

“
Oh, the Good Time has come at last,
To Mars we are a-going, sir,
Five Thousand Women in the sky,
That’s quite a springtime sowing, sir!
”

“That’s an old Wyoming song,” said Leonora. “Change the words and it’s fine for 2003.”

Janice lifted a matchbox of food pills, calculating the totals of things carried in those high-axled, tall-bedded wagons. For each man, each woman, incredible tonnages! Hams, bacon slabs, sugar, salt, flour, dried fruits, “pilot” bread, citric acid, water, ginger, pepper—a list as big as the land! Yet here, today, pills that fit a wristwatch fed you not from Fort Laramie to Hangtown, but all across a wilderness of stars.

Janice threw wide the closet door and almost screamed. Darkness and night and all the spaces between the stars looked out at her.

Long years ago two things had happened. Her sister had locked her, shrieking, in a closet. And, at a party, playing hide-and-seek, she had run through the kitchen and into a long dark hall. But it wasn’t a hall. It was an unlit stairwell, a swallowing blackness. She had run out upon empty air. She had pedaled her feet, screamed, and fallen! Fallen in midnight blackness. Into the cellar. It took a long while, a heartbeat, to fall. And she had smothered in that closet a long, long time without daylight, without friends, no one to hear her screamings. Away from everything, locked in darkness. Falling in darkness. Shrieking!

The two memories.

Now, with the closet door wide, with darkness like a velvet shroud hung before her to be stroked by a trembling hand, with the darkness like a black panther breathing there, looking at her with unlit eyes, the two memories rushed out. Space and a falling. Space and being locked away, screaming. She and Leonora working steadily, packing, being careful not to glance out the window at the frightening Milky Way and the vast emptiness. Only to have the long-familiar closet, with its private night, remind them at last of their destiny.

This was how it would be, out there, sliding toward the stars, in the night, in the great hideous black closet, screaming, but no one to hear. Falling forever among meteor clouds and godless comets. Down the elevator shaft. Down the nightmare coal chute into nothingness.

She screamed. None of it came out of her mouth. It collided upon itself in her chest and head. She screamed. She slammed the closet door! She lay against it! She felt the darkness breathe and yammer at the door and she held it tight, eyes watering. She stood there a long time, until the trembling vanished, watching Leonora work. And the hysteria, thus ignored, drained away and away, and at last was gone. A wristwatch ticked, with a clean sound of normality, in the room.

“Sixty
million
miles.” She moved at last to the window as if it were a deep well. “I can’t believe that men on Mars, tonight, are building towns, waiting for us.”

“The only thing to believe is catching our Rocket tomorrow.”

Janice raised a white gown like a ghost in the room.

“Strange, strange. To marry—on another world.”

“Let’s get to bed.”

“No! The call comes at midnight. I couldn’t sleep, thinking how to tell Will I’ve decided to take the Mars Rocket. Oh, Leonora, think of it, my voice traveling sixty million miles on the lightphone to him. I changed my mind so quick—I’m scared!”

“Our
last
night on Earth.”

Now they really knew and accepted it; now the knowledge had found them out. They were going away, and they might never come back. They were leaving the town of Independence in the state of Missouri on the continent of North America, surrounded by one ocean which was the Atlantic and another the Pacific, none of which could be put in their traveling cases. They had shrunk from this final knowledge. Now it was facing them. And they were struck numb.

“Our children, they won’t be Americans, or Earth people at all. We’ll all be Martians, the rest of our lives.”

“I don’t want to go!” cried Janice suddenly.

The panic froze her.

“I’m afraid! The space, the darkness, the Rocket, the meteors!
Everything
gone! Why should I go out there?”

Leonora took hold of her shoulders and held her close, rocking her. “It’s a new world. It’s like the old days. The men first and the women after.”

“Why, why should I go, tell me!”

“Because,” said Leonora at last, quietly, seating her on the bed, “Will is up there.”

His name was good to hear. Janice quieted.

“These men make it so hard,” said Leonora. “Used to be if a woman ran two hundred miles for a man it was something. Then they made it a thousand miles. And now they put a whole universe between us. But that can’t stop us, can it?”

“I’m afraid I’ll be a fool on the Rocket.”

“I’ll be a fool with you.” Leonora got up. “Now, let’s walk around town, let’s see everything one last time.”

Janice stared out at the town. “Tomorrow night this’ll all be here, but we won’t. People’ll wake up, eat, work, sleep, wake again, but we won’t know it, and they’ll never miss us.”

Leonora and Janice moved around each other as if they couldn’t find the door.

“Come on.”

They opened the door, switched off the lights, stepped out, and shut the door behind them.

In the sky there was a great coming-in and coming-in. Vast flowering motions, huge whistlings and whirlings, snowstorms falling. Helicopters, white flakes, dropping quietly. From west and east and north and south the women were arriving, arriving. Through all the night sky you saw helicopters blizzard down. The hotels were full, private homes were making accommodations, tent cities rose in meadows and pastures like strange, ugly flowers, and the town and the country were warm with more than summer tonight. Warm with women’s pink faces and the sunburnt faces of new men watching the sky. Beyond the hills rockets tried their fire, and a sound like a giant organ, all its keys pressed upon at once, shuddered every crystal window and every hidden bone. You felt it in your jaw, your toes, your fingers, a shivering.

Leonora and Janice sat in the drugstore among unfamiliar women.

“You ladies look very pretty, but you sure look sad,” said the soda-fountain man.

“Two chocolate malteds.” Leonora smiled for both of them, as if Janice were mute.

They gazed at the chocolate drink as if it were a rare museum painting. Malts would be scarce for many years on Mars.

Janice fussed in her purse and took out an envelope reluctantly and laid it on the marble counter.

“This is from Will to me. It came in the Rocket mail two days ago. It was this that made up my mind for me, made me decide to go. I didn’t tell you. I want you to see it now. Go ahead, read the note.”

Leonora shook the note out of the envelope and read it aloud:

“
Dear Janice: This is our house if you decide to come to Mars. Will.
”

Leonora tapped the envelope again, and a color photograph dropped out, glistening, on the counter. It was a picture of a house, a dark, mossy, ancient, caramel-brown, comfortable house with red flowers and green cool ferns bordering it, and a disreputably hair ivy on the porch.

“But, Janice!”

“What?”

“This is a picture of your house, here on Earth, here on Elm Street!”

“No. Look close.”

And they looked again, together, and on both sides of the comfortable dark house and behind it was scenery that was not Earth scenery. The soil was a strange color of violet, and the grass was the faintest bit red, and the sky glowed like a gray diamond, and a strange crooked tree grew to one side, looking like an old woman with crystals in her white hair.

“That’s the house Will’s built for me,” said Janice, “on Mars. It helps to look at it. All yesterday, when I had the chance, alone, and was most afraid and panicky, I took out this picture and looked at it.”

They both gazed at the dark comfortable house sixty million miles away, familiar but unfamiliar, old but new, a yellow light shining in the right front parlor window.

“That man Will,” said Leonora, nodding her head, “knows just what he’s doing.”

They finished their drinks. Outside, a vast warm crowd of strangers wandered by and the “snow” fell steadily in the summer sky.

They bought many silly things to take with them, bags of lemon candy, glossy women’s magazines, fragile perfumes; and then they walked out into the town and rented two belted jackets that refused to recognize gravity and imitated only the moth, touched the delicate controls, and felt themselves whispered like white blossom petals over the town. “Anywhere,” said Leonora, “anywhere at all.”

They let the wind blow them where it would; they let the wind take them through the night of summer apple trees and the night of warm preparation, over the lovely town, over the houses of childhood and other days, over schools and avenues, over creeks and meadows and farms so familiar that each grain of wheat was a golden coin. They blew as leaves must blow below the threat of a fire-wind, with warning whispers and summer lightning crackling among the folded hills. They saw the milk-dust country roads where not so long ago they had drifted in moonlit helicopters in great whirls of sound spiraling down to touch beside cool night streams with the young men who were now gone.

They floated in an immense sigh above a town already made remote by the little space between themselves and the Earth, a town receding behind them in a black river and coming up in a tidal wave of lights and color ahead, untouchable and a dream now, already smeared in their eyes with nostalgia, with a panic of memory that began before the thing itself was gone.

Blown quietly, eddying, they gazed secretly at a hundred faces of dear friends they were leaving behind, the lamp-lit people held and framed by windows which slid by on the wind, it seemed; all of Time breathing them along. There was no tree they did not examine for old confessions of love carved and whittled there, no sidewalk they did not skim across as over fields of mica-snow. For the first time they knew their town was beautiful, and the lonely lights and the ancient bricks beautiful, and they both felt their eyes grow large with the beauty of this feast they were giving themselves. All floated upon an evening carousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely haunted by television.

The two women passed like needles, sewing one tree to the next with their perfume. Their eyes were too full, and yet they kept putting away each detail, each shadow, each solitary oak and elm, each passing car upon the small snaking streets below, until not only their eyes but their heads and then their hearts were too full.

I feel like I’m dead, thought Janice, and in the graveyard on a spring night and everything alive but me and everyone moving and ready to go on with life without me. It’s like I felt each spring when I was sixteen, passing the graveyard and weeping for them because they were dead and it didn’t seem fair, on nights as soft as that, that I was alive. I was guilty of living. And now, here, tonight, I feel they have taken me from the graveyard and let me go above the town just once more to see what it’s like to be living, to be a town and a people, before they slam the black door on me again.

Softly, softly, like two white paper lanterns on a night wind, the women moved over their lifetime and their past, and over the meadows where the tent cities glowed and the highways where supply trucks would be clustered and running until dawn. They hovered above it all for a long time.

The courthouse clock was booming eleven forty-five when they came like spider webs floating from the stars, touching on the moonlit pavement before Janice’s old house. The city was asleep, and Janice’s house waited for them to come in searching for
their
sleep, which was not there.

“Is this
us,
here?” asked Janice. “Janice Smith and Leonora Holmes, in the year 2003?”

“Yes.”

Janice licked her lips and stood straight. “I wish it was some other year.”

“1492? 1612?” Leonora sighed, and the wind in the trees sighed with her, moving away. “It’s always Columbus Day or Plymouth Rock Day, and I’ll be darned if I know what we women can do about it.”