The Day it Rained Forever (16 page)

‘I was joking.' The man behind put his hand on the boy's head. The boy shook it away coldly. ‘I just thought it strange, a boy out of bed so early.'

‘This boy's an appreciator of arts, I'll have you know,' said the boy's defender, a man named Grigsby. ‘What's your name, lad?'

‘Tom.'

‘Tom here is going to spit clean and true, right, Tom?'

‘I sure am!'

Laughter passed down the line.

A man was selling cracked cups of hot coffee up ahead. Tom looked and saw the little hot fire and the brew bubbling in a rusty pan. It wasn't really coffee. It was made from some berry that grew on the meadowlands beyond town, and it sold a penny a cup to warm their stomachs; but not many were buying, not many had the wealth.

Tom stared ahead to the place where the line ended, beyond a bombed-out stone wall.

‘They say she
smiles
,' said the boy.

‘Aye, she does,' said Grigsby.

‘They say she's made of oil and canvas.'

‘True. And that's what makes me think she's not the original one. The original, now, I've heard, was painted on wood a long time ago.'

‘They say she's four centuries old.'

‘Maybe more. No one knows what year this is, to be sure.'

‘It's 2061!'

‘That's what they say, boy, yes. Liars. Could be 3,000 or 5,000, for all we know. Things were in a fearful mess there for a while. All we got now is bits and pieces.'

They shuffled along the cold stones of the street.

‘How much longer before we see her?' asked Tom, uneasily.

‘Just a few more minutes. They got her set up with four brass poles and velvet rope, all fancy, to keep folks back. Now mind, no rocks, Tom; they don't allow rocks thrown at her.'

‘Yes, sir.'

The sun rose higher in the heavens, bringing heat which made the men shed their grimy coats and greasy hats.

‘Why're we all here in line?' asked Tom, at last. ‘Why're we all here to spit?'

Grigsby did not glance down at him, but judged the sun. ‘Well, Tom, there's lots of reasons.' He reached absently for a pocket that was long gone, for a cigarette that wasn't there. Tom had seen the gesture a million times. ‘Tom, it has to do with hate. Hate for everything in the Past. I ask you, Tom, how did we get in such a state, cities all junk, roads like jigsaws from bombs, and half the cornfields glowing with radio-activity at night? Ain't that a lousy stew, I ask you?'

‘Yes, sir, I guess so.'

‘It's this way, Tom. You hate whatever it was that got you all knocked down and ruined. That's human nature. Unthinking, maybe, but human nature anyway.'

‘There's hardly nobody or nothing we don't hate,' said Tom.

‘Right! The whole blooming caboodle of them people in the Past who run the world. So here we are on a Thursday morning with our guts plastered to our spines, cold, live in caves and such, don't smoke, don't drink, don't nothing except have our festivals, Tom, our festivals.'

And Tom thought of the festivals in the past few years. The year they tore up all the books in the square and burned them and everyone was drunk and laughing. And the festival of science a month ago when they dragged in the last motor-car and picked lots and each lucky man who won was allowed one smash of a sledge-hammer at the car.

‘Do I remember
that
, Tom? Do I
remember
? Why, I got to smash the front window, the window, you hear? My God, it made a lovely sound!
Crash
!'

Tom could hear the glass falling in glittering heaps.

‘And Bill Henderson, he got to bash the engine. Oh, he did a smart job of it, with great efficiency. Wham!'

But the best of all, recalled Grigsby, there was the time they smashed a factory that was still trying to turn out aeroplanes.

‘Lord, did we feel good blowing it up!' said Grigsby. ‘And then we found that newspaper plant and the munitions depot and exploded them together. Do you understand, Tom?'

Tom puzzled over it. ‘I guess.'

It was high noon. Now the odours of the ruined city stank on the hot air and things crawled among the tumbled buildings.

‘Won't it ever come back, mister?'

‘What, civilization? Nobody wants it. Not me!'

‘I could stand a bit of it,' said the man behind another man. ‘There were a few spots of beauty in it.'

‘Don't worry your heads,' shouted Grigsby. ‘There's no room for that, either.'

‘Ah,' said the man behind the man. ‘Someone'll come along some day with imagination and patch it up. Mark my words. Someone with a heart.'

‘No,' said Grigsby.

‘I say yes. Someone with a soul for pretty things. Might give us back a kind of
limited
sort of civilization, the kind we could live in in peace.'

‘First thing you know there's war!'

‘But maybe next time it'd be different.'

At last they stood in the main square. A man on horseback was riding from the distance into the town. He had a piece of paper in his hand. In the centre of the square was the roped-off area. Tom, Grigsby, and the others were collecting their spittle and moving forward – moving forward prepared and ready, eyes wide. Tom felt his heart beating very strongly and excitedly, and the earth was hot under his bare feet.

‘Here we go, Tom, let fly!'

Four policemen stood at the corners of the roped area, four men with bits of yellow twine on their wrists to show their authority over other men. They were there to prevent rocks being hurled.

‘This way,' said Grigsby at the last moment, ‘everyone feels he's had his chance at her, you see, Tom? Go on, now!'

Tom stood before the painting and looked at it for a long time.

‘Tom, spit!'

His mouth was dry.

‘Get on, Tom! Move!'

‘But,' said Tom, slowly, ‘she's
BEAUTIFUL
!'

‘Here, I'll spit for you!' Grigsby spat and the missile flew in the sunlight. The woman in the portrait smiled serenely, secretly, at Tom, and he looked back at her, his heart beating, a kind of music in his ears.

‘She's beautiful,' he said.

The line fell silent. One moment they were berating Tom for not moving forward, now they were turning to the man on horseback.

‘What do they call it, sir?' asked Tom, quietly.

‘The picture?
Mono. Lisa
, Tom, I think. Yes, the
Mona Lisa
.'

‘I have an announcement,' said the man on horseback. ‘The authorities have decreed that as of high noon today the portrait in the square is to be given over into the hands of the populace there, so they may participate in the destruction of –'

Tom hadn't even time to scream before the crowd bore him, shouting and pummelling about, stampeding towards the portrait. There was a sharp ripping sound. The police ran to escape. The crowd was in full cry, their hands like so many hungry birds pecking away at the portrait. Tom felt himself thrust almost through the broken thing. Reaching out in blind imitation of the others, he snatched a scrap of oily canvas, yanked, felt the canvas give, then fell, was kicked, sent rolling to the outer rim of the mob. Bloody, his clothing torn, he watched old women chew pieces of canvas, men break the frame, kick the ragged cloth, and rip it into confetti.

Only Tom stood apart, silent in the moving square. He looked down at his hand. It clutched the piece of canvas close to his chest, hidden.

‘Hey there, Tom!' cried Grigsby.

Without a word, sobbing, Tom ran. He ran out and down the bomb-pitted road, into a field, across a shallow stream, not looking back, his hand clenched tightly, tucked under his coat.

At sunset he reached the small village and passed on through. By nine o'clock he came to the ruined farm dwelling. Around back, in the half-silo, in the part that still remained upright, tented over, he heard the sounds of sleeping, the family – his mother, father, and brother. He slipped quickly, silently, through the small door and lay down, panting.

‘Tom?' called his mother in the dark.

‘Yes.'

‘Where've you been?' snapped his father. ‘I'll beat you in the morning.'

Someone kicked him. His brother, who had been left behind to work their little patch of ground.

‘Go to sleep,' cried his mother, faintly.

Another kick.

Tom lay getting his breath. All was quiet. His hand was pushed to his chest, tight, tight. He lay for half an hour this way, eyes closed.

Then he felt something, and it was a cold white light. The moon rose very high and the little square of light moved in the silo and crept slowly over Tom's body. Then, and only then, did his hand relax. Slowly, carefully, listening to those who slept about him, Tom drew his hand forth. He hesitated, sucked in his breath, and then, waiting, opened his hand and uncrumpled the tiny fragment of painted canvas.

All the world was asleep in the moonlight.

And there on his hand was the Smile.

He looked at it in the white illumination from the midnight sky. And he thought, over and over to himself, quietly,
the Smile, the lovely Smile
.

An hour later he could still see it, even after he had folded it carefully and hidden it. He shut his eyes and the Smile was there in the darkness. And it was still there, warm and gentle, when he went to sleep and the world was silent and the moon sailed up and then down the cold sky towards morning.

‘Y
OU
have to beat a planet at its own game,' said Chatterton. ‘Get in, rip it up, poison its animals, dam its rivers, sow its fields, depollinate its air, mine it, nail it down, hack away at it, and get the hell out from under when you have what you want. Otherwise, a planet will fix you good. You can't trust planets. They're bound to be different, bound to be bad, bound to be out to get you, especially this far off, a billion miles from nowhere, so you get them first. Tear their skin off, I say. Drag out the minerals and run away before the damn world explodes in your face. That's the way to treat them.'

The rocket ship sank down towards planet 7 cf star system 84. They had travelled millions upon millions of miles. Earth was far away, her system and her sun forgotten, her system settled and investigated and profited on, and other systems rummaged through and milked and tidied up, and now the rockets of these tiny men from an impossibly remote planet were probing out to far universes. In a few months, a few years, they could travel anywhere, for the speed of their rocket was the speed of a god, and now for the ten thousandth time one of the rockets of the far-circling hunt was feathering down towards an alien world.

‘No,' said Captain Forester. ‘I have too much respect for other worlds to treat them the way you want to, Chatterton. It's not my business to rape or ruin, anyway, thank God. I'm glad I'm just a rocket man. You're the anthropologist-mineralogist. Go ahead, do your mining and ripping and scraping. I'll just watch. I'll just go around looking at this new world, whatever it is, however it seems. I like to look. All rocket men are lookers or they wouldn't be rocket men. You like to smell new airs, if you're a rocket man, and see new colours and new people if there are new people to see, and new oceans and islands.'

‘Take your gun along,' said Chatterton.

‘In my holster,' said Forester.

They turned to the port together and saw the green world rising to meet their ship. ‘I wonder what
it
thinks of us?' said Forester.

‘It won't like me,' said Chatterton. ‘By God, I'll see to it it won't like me. And I don't care, you know. I don't give a damn. I'm out for the money. Land us over there, will you, Captain; that looks like iron country if I ever saw it.'

It was the freshest green colour they had seen since childhood.

Lakes lay like clear blue water droplets through the soft hills; there were no loud highways, signboards, or cities. It's a sea of green golf-links, thought Forester, which goes on for ever. Putting greens, driving greens, you could walk ten thousand miles in any direction and never finish your game. A Sunday planet, a croquet-lawn world, where you could lie on your back, clover in your lips, eyes half-shut, smiling at the sky, smelling the grass, drowse through an eternal Sabbath, rousing only on occasion to turn the Sunday paper or crack the red-striped wooden ball through the hoop.

‘If ever a planet was a woman, this one is.'

‘Woman on the outside, man on the inside,' said Chatterton. ‘All hard underneath, all male iron, copper, uranium, black sod. Don't let the cosmetics fool you.'

He walked to the bin where the Earth Drill waited. Its great screw-snout glittered bluely, ready to stab seventy feet deep and suck out corks of earth, deeper still with extensions into the heart of the planet. Chatterton winked at it. ‘We'll fix your woman, Forester, but good.'

‘Yes, I know you will,' said Forester, quietly.

The rocket landed.

‘It's too green, too peaceful,' said Chatterton. ‘I don't like it.' He turned to the captain. ‘We'll go out with our rifles.'

‘I give orders, if you don't mind.'

‘Yes, and my company pays our way with millions of dollars of machinery we must protect; quite an investment.'

The air on the new planet 7 in star system 84 was good. The port swung wide. The men filed out into the greenhouse world.

The last man to emerge was Chatterton, gun in hand.

As Chatterton set foot to the green lawn, the earth trembled. The grass shook. The distant forest rumbled. The sky seemed to blink and darken imperceptibly. The men were watching Chatterton when it happened.

‘An earthquake, by God!'

Chatterton's face paled. Everyone laughed.

‘It doesn't like you, Chatterton!'

‘Nonsense!'

The trembling died away at last.