His forefinger underlined the words:
“Marasmius oreades: a mushroom commonly found on lawns in summer and early autumn.”
He let the book fall shut.
Outside, in the deep summer night, he lit a cigarette and smoked quietly.
A meteor fell across space, burning itself out quickly. The trees rustled softly.
The front door tapped shut.
Cynthia moved toward him in her robe.
“Can’t sleep?”
“Too warm, I guess.”
“It’s not warm.”
“No,” he said, feeling his arms. “In fact, it’s cold.” He sucked on the cigarette twice, then, not looking at her, said, “Cynthia … What if … ?” He snorted and had to stop. “Well, what if Roger was right this morning? Mrs. Goodbody, what if she’s right, too? Something terrible is happening. Like—well—” he nodded at the sky and the million stars—“Earth being invaded by things from other worlds, maybe.”
“Hugh!”
“No, let me run wild.”
“It’s quite obvious we’re not being invaded or we’d notice.”
“Let’s say we’ve only half-noticed, become uneasy about something. What? How could we be invaded? By what means would creatures invade?”
Cynthia looked at the sky and was about to try something when he interrupted.
“No, not meteors or flying saucers. Not things we can see. What about bacteria? That comes from outer space, too, doesn’t it?”
“I read once, yes—”
“Spores, seeds, pollens, viruses probably bombard our atmosphere by the billions every second and have done so for millions of years. Right now we’re sitting out under an invisible rain. It falls all over the country, the cities, the towns, and right now … our lawn.”
“Our lawn?”
“And Mrs. Goodbody’s. But people like her are always pulling weeds, spraying poison, kicking toadstools off their grass. It would be hard for any strange life form to survive in cities. Weather’s a problem, too. Best climate might be South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana. Back in the damp bayous, they could grow to a fine size.”
But Cynthia was beginning to laugh now.
“Oh, really, you don’t believe, do you, that this Great Bayou or whatever Greenhouse Novelty Company that sent Tom his package is owned and operated by six-foot-tall mushrooms from another planet?”
“If you put it that way, it sounds funny,” he admitted.
“Funny! It’s hilarious!” She threw her head back deliciously.
“Good grief!” he cried, suddenly irritated. “Something’s going on! Mrs. Goodbody is rooting out and killing marasmius oreades. What is marasmius oreades? A certain kind of mushroom. Simultaneously, and I suppose you’ll call it coincidence, by special delivery, what arrives the same day? Mushrooms for Tom! What else happens? Roger fears he may soon cease to be! Within hours, he vanishes, then telegraphs us, warning us not to accept what? The special delivery mushrooms for Tom! Has Roger’s son got a similar package in the last few days? He has! Where do the packages come from? New Orleans! And where is Roger going when he vanishes? New Orleans! Do you see, Cynthia, do you see? I wouldn’t be upset if all these separate things didn’t lock together! Roger, Tom, Joe, mushrooms, Mrs. Goodbody, packages, destinations, everything in one pattern!”
She was watching his face now, quieter, but still amused. “Don’t get angry.”
“I’m not!” Fortnum almost shouted. And then he simply could not go on. He was afraid that if he did, he would find himself shouting with laughter, too, and somehow he did not want that. He stared at the surrounding houses up and down the block and thought of the dark cellars and the neighbor boys who read Popular Mechanics and sent their money in by the millions to raise the mushrooms hidden away. Just as he, when a boy, had mailed off for chemicals, seeds, turtles, numberless salves and sickish ointments. In how many million American homes tonight were billions of mushrooms rousing up under the ministrations of the innocent?
“Hugh?” His wife was touching his arm now. “Mushrooms, even big ones, can’t think. They can’t move. They don’t have arms and legs. How could they run a mail-order service and ‘take over’ the world? Come on, now. Let’s look at your terrible fiends and monsters!”
She pulled him toward the door. Inside, she headed for the cellar, but he stopped, shaking his head, a foolish smile shaping itself somehow to his mouth. “No, no, I know what we’ll find. You win. The whole thing’s silly. Roger will be back next week and we’ll all get drunk together. Go on up to bed now and I’ll drink a glass of warm milk and be with you in a minute … well, a couple of minutes …”
“That’s better!” She kissed him on both cheeks, squeezed him, and went away up the stairs.
In the kitchen, he took out a glass, opened the refrigerator, and was pouring the milk when he stopped suddenly.
Near the front of the top shelf was a small yellow dish. It was not the dish that held his attention, however. It was what lay in the dish.
The fresh-cut mushrooms.
He must have stood there for half a minute, his breath frosting the refrigerated air, before he reached out, took hold of the dish, sniffed it, felt the mushrooms, then at last, carrying the dish, went out into the hall. He looked up the stairs, hearing Cynthia moving about in the bedroom, and was about to call up to her, “Cynthia, did you put these in the refrigerator!?”
Then he stopped. He knew her answer. She had not.
He put the dish of mushrooms on the newel at the bottom of the stairs and stood looking at them. He imagined himself, in bed later, looking at the walls, the open windows, watching the moonlight sift patterns on the ceiling. He heard himself saying, Cynthia? And her answering, yes? And him saying, there is a way for mushrooms to grow arms and legs … What? she would say, silly, silly man, what? And he would gather courage against her hilarious reaction and go on, what if a man wandered through the swamp, picked the mushrooms, and ate them…?
No response from Cynthia.
Once inside the man, would the mushrooms spread through his blood, take over every cell, and change the man from a man to a—Martian? Given this theory, would the mushroom need its own arms and legs? No, not when it could borrow people, live inside and become them. Roger ate mushrooms given him by his son. Roger became “something else.” He kidnaped himself. And in one last flash of sanity, of being “himself,” he telegraphed us, warning us not to accept the special delivery mushrooms. The “Roger” that telephoned later was no longer Roger but a captive of what he had eaten! Doesn’t that figure, Cynthia? Doesn’t it, doesn’t it?
No, said the imagined Cynthia, no, it doesn’t figure, no, no, no …
There was the faintest whisper, rustle, stir from the cellar. Taking his eyes from the bowl, Fortnum walked to the cellar door and put his ear to it.
“Tom?”
No answer.
“Tom, are you down there?”
No answer.
“Tom?”
After a long while, Tom’s voice came up from below.
“Yes, Dad?”
“It’s after midnight,” said Fortnum, fighting to keep his voice from going high. “What are you doing down there?”
No answer.
“I said—”
“Tending to my crop,” said the boy at last, his voice cold and faint.
“Well, get up out of there! You hear me?!”
Silence.
“Tom? Listen! Did you put some mushrooms in the refrigerator tonight? If so, why?”
Ten seconds must have ticked by before the boy replied from below. “For you and Mom to eat, of course.”
Fortnum heard his heart moving swiftly, and had to take three deep breaths before he could go on.
“Tom? You didn’t … that is … you haven’t by any chance eaten some of the mushrooms yourself, have you?”
“Funny you ask that,” said Tom. “Yes. Tonight. On a sandwich after supper. Why?”
Fortnum held to the
doorknob. Now it was his turn not to answer. He felt his knees beginning to melt and he fought the whole silly senseless fool thing. No reason, he tried to say, but his lips wouldn’t move.
“Dad?” called Tom softly from the cellar. “Come on down.” Another pause. “I want you to see the harvest.”
Fortnum felt the knob slip in his sweaty hand. The knob rattled. He gasped.
“Dad?” called Tom softly.
Fortnum opened the door.
The cellar was completely black below.
He stretched his hand in toward the light switch. As if sensing this intrusion, from somewhere Tom said:
“Don’t. Light’s bad for the mushrooms.”
Fortnum took his hand off the switch.
He swallowed. He looked back at the stair leading up to his wife. I suppose, he thought, I should go say good-by to Cynthia. But why should I think that! Why should I think that at all? No reason, is there?
None.
“Tom?” he said, affecting a jaunty air. “Ready or not, here I come!”
And stepping down in darkness, he shut the door.
The Million-Year Picnic
Somehow the idea was brought up by Mom that perhaps the whole family would enjoy a fishing trip. But they weren’t Mom’s words; Timothy knew that. They were Dad’s words, and Mom used them for him somehow.
Dad shuffled his feet in a clutter of Martian pebbles and agreed. So immediately there was a tumult and a shouting, and very quickly the camp was tucked into capsules and containers, Mom slipped into traveling jumpers and blouse, Dad stuffed his pipe full with trembling hands, his eyes on the Martian sky, and the three boys piled yelling into the motorboat, none of them really keeping an eye on Mom and Dad, except Timothy.
Dad pushed a stud. The water boat sent a humming sound up into the sky. The water shook back and the boat nosed ahead, and the family cried, “Hurrah!”
Timothy sat in the back of the boat with Dad, his small fingers atop Dad’s hairy ones, watching the canal twist, leaving the crumbled place behind where they had landed in their small family rocket all the way from Earth. He remembered the night before they left Earth, the hustling and hurrying, the rocket that Dad had found somewhere, somehow, and the talk of a vacation on Mars. A long way to go for a vacation, but Timothy said nothing because of his younger brothers. They came to Mars and now, first thing, or so they said, they were going fishing.
Dad had a funny look in his eyes as the boat went up-canal. A look that Timothy couldn’t figure. It was made 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, sunburned, 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 oohed and aahed. A silver ring fish floated by them, undulating, and closing like an iris, instantly, around food particles, to assimilate them.
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 spun-gold 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 sun-burned 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 chi
n 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 ecstatic 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.