Episode 1

The rocket metal cooled in the meadow winds. It's lid gave a bulging pop. From it's clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The passengers whirled away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family.

The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the center of a vacuum. His wife, before him, seemed almost to whirl away in smoke. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes.

The children looked up at him, as people look to the sun to tell what time of their life it is. His face was cold.

"What's wrong?" asked his wife.

"Let's get back on the rocket."

"Go back to Earth?"

" Yes! Listen!"

The wind blew as if to flake away their identities. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone. He felt submerged in a chemical that could dissolve his intellect and burn away his past.

They looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. They saw the old cities, lost in their meadows, lying like children's delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass.

"Chin up, Harry," said his wife. "It's too late. We've come over sixty million miles."

The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. Therr was no answer but the racing hiss of wind thought the stiff grass.

He picked up the luggage in his cold hands. "Here we go," he said-a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned.

They walked into town.

Their names were Bittering - Harry and his wife; Cora, Dan, Laura and David. They built a small white cottage and ate good breakfasts therr, but the fear was never gone. It lay with Mr. Bittering and Mrs. Bittering, a third unbidden partner at every midnight talk, at every dawn awakening.

"I feel like salt crystal," he said, "in a mountain stream, being washed away. We don't belong here. We're Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martian. For heaven's sake, cora, let's buy tickets for home!"

But she only shook her head. " One day the atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we'll be safe here."

" Safe and insane!"

" Nonsense!" Mr. Bittering looked out of the windows. We're clean, decent people." He looked at his children. " All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, i mean.:" He stared at the hills. "You  see a staircase and you wonder what Martian looked like climbing it. You see Martian painting and you wonder what the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind. A memory. It's quite natural. Imagination." He stopped. " You haven't been prowling up in those ruins, have you."

" No papa," David looked at his shoes.

"See that you stay away from them, pass the jam."

" Just the same, said little David, I bet something happens."

Something happened that afternoon.

Laura stumble through the settlement, crying. She dashed blindly into the porch.

" Mother, Father - the war, Earth!" " A radio flash just came. Atom bomb hit New York! All the space rockets have blown up. No more rockets to Mars, ever!"

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***