Dangerous Visions (30 page)

One final reason why Rodman's appearance here is a delight. He is a fighter, not merely a parlor liberal. His admonition to me never to be afraid was capped with an order to fight for what I had written. I've tried to do it, sometimes successfully. It's difficult in Hollywood. But my mentor, Howard Rodman, is the man who once threw a heavy ashtray at a man who had aborted one of his scripts, and had to be restrained from tearing the man's head from his shoulders. On another occasion he sent a very powerful producer, who had butchered one of his shows, a large package wrapped in black crêpe. Inside was a pair of scissors with a note that said
Requiescat in Pace
, and the name of the teleplay. There is a legend around the studios: if you aren't getting enough of a headache from Ellison writing for you, call in Rodman and work with the original item.

It is visible testimony to the quality of his work that Howard Rodman is one of the busiest writers in Hollywood.

The first time Marshall Kiss went to the moon, he was nine years old, and the trip was accidental. A captive balloon broke loose at the county fair, and away it went, with Marshall in it.

It never came down till twelve hours later.

"Where've you been?" Marshall's pa asked.

"Up to the moon," Marshall answered.

"You don't say," Pa said, with his mouth slightly open and hanging. And off he went to tell the neighbors.

Marshall's ma, being of a more practical turn of mind, just put a heaping bowl of good hot cereal on the table in front of Marshall. "You must be good and hungry after a trip like that. You better have some supper before you go to bed."

"I guess I will," said Marshall, setting to work to clear out the bowl. He was hard at work when the reporters came—a big man with a little mustache, and a dry young man working on the newspaper for his tuition at the Undertakers' College.

"Well," said the mustache, "so you've been to the moon."

Marshall got timid and nodded without speaking.

The undertaker smirked, but he stopped that when Marshall's ma threw him a hot glare.

"What was it like?" the mustache asked.

"Very nice," Marshall answered politely. "Cold and fresh and lots of singing."

"What sort of singing?"

"Just singing. Nice tunes."

The undertaker leered, but he stopped that when Marshall's ma set the glass of milk down on the table with a bang and a scowl.

"Nice tunes," Marshall repeated. "Just like church hymns."

Three neighbors came by to take a look at Marshall. They stood back from the table a ways, gaping a little at the boy who'd been to the moon. "Who'd believe it?" one of them whispered. "He looks so young."

Marshall blushed with pride and ducked his head down toward his bowl of cereal.

Just then four schoolmates sneaked through the kitchen door and pushed their faces into the spaces between the neighbors. "Ask him!" the smallest schoolmate demanded.

"Hey, Marsh," the bravest one called out, "you gonna play ball tomorrow?"

"Sure," Marshall answered.

"He's all right," the bravest one told the others. "It ain't changed him at all."

Marshall's pa came back with two more neighbors, and a woman brought her husband and eight children from two and a half miles down the road. A horse poked his head through the kitchen window, and a chicken hopped in and hid under the stove.

Marshall's teacher rang the front doorbell, marched through the house into the kitchen by herself, when no one answered her ring.

Everybody looked at Marshall in a joyful and prideful sort of way, but nobody seemed to be able to think of anything to say. Even when the mayor arrived, freshly shaven and bursting to make a speech, something happened to him, and he closed his mouth without a word.

The kitchen got warm with so many people pressing in together, but it was a pleasant sort of warmth—cheerful and happy, and nobody jostled anybody else. Marshall's ma just grinned and glowed, and his pa puffed up on a corncob pipe, setting himself on an upturned crate beside the stove.

The reporter who was studying for the profession of undertaking started to ask Marshall, "How do you know you been to the moon?" But that was as far as he got, and somehow he found himself at the back of the crowd, looking out over everybody's head by standing on tiptoe.

Finally the chicken
cut-cutted
, and everybody thought that was funny, so they all laughed out loud, and clear.

Marshall finished his cereal and his milk, and looked up to see, through the window, that the yard outside was packed with people too: from miles around, by horse and buckboard, on foot and otherwise. He could see that they were waiting for word from him, so he stood up and made a speech.

"I never intended deliberately to go to the moon," Marshall started. "It just happened that way. The balloon kept going up and I kept going up with it. Pretty soon I was looking down on the tops of mountains, and that was something. But I just kept on going up and up anyway. On the way I got an eagle mad. He was trying to fly as high as me, but he just couldn't do it. He was hopping mad, that eagle. Screamed his head off."

All the people in the kitchen, and outside in the yard too, nodded approval.

"In the end," Marshall went on, "I got to the moon. Like I said, it was pretty nice." He stopped speeching, because he'd said everything he had to.

"Was you scared?" somebody asked.

"Somewhat," Marshall answered. "But the air was bracing, and I got over it."

"Well," said the mayor, bound to say something, "we're glad to have you back." And he stuck out his hand to shake with Marshall.

After that, Marshall shook hands all around and everybody went back to his own home. The horse took his head out the window and went back to cropping grass in the yard. The hen hopped out the door again, leaving an egg behind under the stove. The house was empty but still cheerful. It was as if everybody had come and brought their happiness and left it behind as a present, the way the chicken left the egg.

"Been a big day for you," Marshall's pa said.

"I guess you'd better go to bed now," Marshall's ma said.

"Might be," Marshall's pa went on, talking his thinking out loud, "might be you'll turn out to be a big explorer, time to come."

Marshall looked at his ma, saw her fear that the boy would turn out to be a gadabout. He answered for his mother's benefit. "I'll tell you, Pa. Seems more likely I'd just settle down now and stay put." Of course he winked at his father to show him that maybe he was right at that.

"Good night, Pa. Good night, Ma."

"Good night, son."

His ma kissed him good night.

Then Marshall went into his room, closed the door, and undressed, and put on his pajamas. He knelt by the side of his bed and folded his fingers for prayer.

"Been a happy day, O Lord. Happy as I can remember. Thanks."

He climbed into bed and went to sleep.

Well, you know the way time goes on. Marshall came to be a man, married and settled. He had children, and his children had children. His children grew up and just naturally went off their own ways, and his wife died a natural death. And there was Marshall Kiss left alone in the world, living on his farm and doing as much or as little work as he felt like.

Sometimes he went into town and sat by the stove in the general store and talked, and sometimes he stayed home and listened to the rain talking to the windowpanes. There came to be a time when Marshall was pushing ninety pretty hard. Most everybody who'd been alive when he was a boy had passed on.

The people in town were a new generation, and while they weren't unkind, they weren't very friendly, either. That's the way it is with a new generation—it doesn't look back—it keeps looking forward.

The time came when Marshall could walk through the town from one end to the other and not see a face he knew or that knew him. He'd nod and get nodded back at, but it wasn't a real, close, human thing—it was just a polite thing to do. And you know what the end is, when a man has to live like that—he gets lonely.

That's just what Marshall did—he got lonely.

First he thought he could forget his loneliness by staying off by himself. And there was a whole month when Marshall never showed his face around at all, expecting that somebody might show some curiosity and maybe come by to see how he was. But nobody ever did. So Marshall went back into town.

The clerk at the store seemed to have some vague recollection about not having seen Marshall, but he wasn't too sure. "You haven't been around for a couple of days or so, have you?" he asked Marshall.

"More like a month," Marshall said.

"You don't say," the clerk remarked, as he toted up the figures on Marshall's bill.

"Been away," said Marshall.

"Seeing your relatives?" the clerk asked.

"Been to the moon," Marshall said.

The clerk looked a little bored, and not at all interested, and not at all impressed. In fact, he didn't look as if he believed Marshall to begin with. But he was a polite man, so he commented. "Must be a nice trip," he commented, never thinking any more about it than that.

Marshall went stomping out of the store and down to have his hair trimmed.

"Pretty heavy growth, Mr. Kiss," the barber said.

"Should be," Marshall answered. "There ain't no barbershops on the moon, you know."

"Expect not," the barber said, and went ahead, busily clicking his shears and making believe he was clipping a hair here and a hair there, but never saying another word about the moon, never even having the common decency to ask what it was like on the moon.

So Marshall fell asleep till the barber should be finished.

The mayor came in for his daily shave. He was a young man with a heavy beard, and he glanced casually at Marshall. "Old-timer," he said to the barber.

The barber nodded as he worked.

"Looks tuckered out," the mayor said.

"Should be," the barber told him. "He just got back from the moon." He snickered loud.

"You don't say," the mayor said.

"That's what he claims." The barber snickered again. "Just got back from the moon."

"Well, no wonder he's tired, then." But the way the mayor laughed and the way the barber laughed, Marshall could tell that they were just making fun of him. For Marshall wasn't really sleeping, of course.

It got Marshall mad, and he sprang up and threw the sheet off of him and stomped on down to the newspaper office.

"My name is Marshall Kiss," Marshall said to the fresh cub at the desk, "and I've just come back from a trip to the moon!"

"Thanks for the tip, Pop," the reporter said, smiling a little crookedly. "I'll look into it when I get the time." And, saying that, he planted his big feet plump on the desk and clasped his hands behind his head.

Tears sprang up in Marshall's eyes. "I been to the moon twice," he shouted. "Once when I was nine years old, and it's been printed in your paper, too, at the time. Why, people came from twelve miles around just to look at me. I went up there in an old balloon and busted an eagle's heart when he tried to get up as high as I was." He looked at the reporter hard, and he could see that the reporter didn't believe him and wasn't going to try. "There's no pity left in the world any more," said Marshall, "and no joy." And with that, he walked out.

The road home was mostly rocky and uphill, and it seemed to take Marshall a long time to walk a short distance. "Can't figure out how people changed so much," Marshall thought. "Grass is still green, and horses have tails, and hens lay eggs—" He was interrupted by a little boy who came running up from behind, pretending to gallop and hitting himself on the rump as if he were a horse.

"Hello," the little boy said, "where are you going?"

"Just up the hill a way, back to my farm," Marshall answered.

"Where've you been?" the little boy asked.

"Just to town," Marshall said.

"Is that all?" the little boy asked, disappointed. "Ain't you never been nowhere else?"

"I been to the moon," Marshall said, a little timidly.

The boy's eyes opened and shone brightly.

"Twice," Marshall added.

The boy's eyes opened even wide. "How do you like that!" the little boy shouted, excited. "H-h-how do you like that?" He was so excited, he stammered.

"Matter of fact," Marshall said, "I just come back from the moon."

The little boy was silent for a second. "Say, mister," he asked finally, "do you mind if I bring my friend to see you?"

"Not at all. I live right back there, in that house you see." Marshall turned off to get to his house.

"I'll be right back," the little boy promised and ran away as fast as he could to get his friend.

It must have been about a half hour later that the little boy and the little girl got to Marshall's house. They knocked on the door, but there wasn't any answer, so they just walked in. "It's all right," the little boy said, "he's very friendly."

The kitchen was empty, so they looked in the parlor, and that was empty too.

"Maybe he's gone back to the moon," the little girl whispered, awed.

"Maybe he has," the little boy admitted, but just the same they looked in the bedroom.

There was Marshall, lying on the bed, and at first they thought he was sleeping. But after a while, when he didn't move or breathe, the little boy and the little girl knew he was further away than that.

"Guess you were right," the little boy said.

He and the little girl just looked and looked with their eyes as wide as wide can be, at the man who had been to the moon twice.

"I guess this makes three times now," the little girl said.

And suddenly, without knowing why, they became frightened and ran off, leaving the door opened behind them. They ran silently, hand in hand, frightened, but happy too, as if something very wonderful had happened that they couldn't understand.

After a while, though it was the first time it had ever happened on that farm, the horse wandered into the house and stuck his head through the bedroom door and looked.