No one moved.
He looked down into their faces, and perhaps he saw but did not see the guns and the ropes, and perhaps he smelled the paint. No one ever asked him. He began to talk. He started very quietly and slowly, expecting no interruptions, and receiving none, and his voice was very tired and old and pale.
‘It doesn’t matter who I am,’ he said. ‘I’d be just a name to you, anyhow. I don’t know your names, either. That’ll come later.’ He paused, closed his eyes for a moment, and then continued:
‘Twenty years ago you left Earth. That’s a long, long time. It’s more like twenty centuries, so much has happened. After you left, the War came.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, the big one. The Third One. It went on for a long time. Until last year. We bombed all of the cities of the world. We destroyed New York and London and Moscow and Paris and Shanghai and Bombay and Alexandria. We ruined it all. And when we finished with the big cities we went to the little cities and atom-bombed and burned them.’
Now he began to name cities and places, and streets. And as he named them, a murmur rose up in his audience.
‘We destroyed Natchez …’
A murmur.
‘And Columbus, Georgia …’
Another murmur.
‘We burned New Orleans …’
A sigh.
‘And Atlanta …’
Still another.
‘And there was nothing left of Greenwater, Alabama.’
Willie Johnson jerked his head and his mouth opened. Hattie saw this gesture, and the recognition coming into his dark eyes.
‘Nothing was left,’ said the old man in the port, speaking slowly. ‘Cotton fields, burned.’
‘Oh,’ said everyone.
‘Cotton mills bombed out –’
‘Oh.’
‘And the factories, radioactive; everything radioactive. All the roads and the farms and the foods, radioactive. Everything.’ He named more names of towns and villages.
‘Tampa.’
‘That’s my town,’ someone whispered.
‘Fulton.’
‘That’s mine,’ someone else said.
‘Memphis.’
‘Memphis. Did they burn Memphis?’ A shocked query.
‘Memphis, blown up.’
‘Fourth Street in Memphis?’
‘All of it,’ said the old man.
It was stirring them now. After twenty years it was rushing back. The towns and the places, the trees and the brick buildings, the signs and the churches and the familiar stores, all of it was coming to the surface among the gathered people. Each name touched memory, and there was no one present without a thought of another day. They were all old enough for that, save the children.
‘Laredo.’
‘I remember Laredo.’
‘New York City.’
‘I had a store in Harlem.’
‘Harlem, bombed out.’
The ominous words. The familiar, remembered places. The struggle to imagine all of those places in ruins.
Willie Johnson murmured the words, ‘Greenwater, Alabama. That’s where I was born, I remember.’
Gone. All of it gone. The man said so.
The man continued, ‘So we destroyed everything and ruined everything, like the fools that we were and the fools that we are. We killed millions. I don’t think there are more than five hundred thousand people left in the world, all kinds and types. And out of all the wreckage we salvaged enough metal to build this rocket, and we came to Mars in it this month to seek your help.’
He hesitated and looked down among the faces to see what could be found there, but he was uncertain.
Hattie Johnson felt her husband’s arm tense, saw his fingers grip the rope.
‘We’ve been fools,’ said the old man quietly. ‘We’ve brought the Earth and civilization down about our heads. None of the cities are worth saving – they’ll be radioactive for a century. Earth is over and done with. Its age is through. You have rockets here which you haven’t tried to use to return to Earth in twenty years. Now I’ve come to ask you to use them. To come to Earth, to pick up the survivors and bring them back to Mars. To help us go on at this time. We’ve been stupid. Before God we admit our stupidity and our evilness. All the Chinese and the Indians and the Russians and the British and the Americans. We’re asking to be taken in. Your Martian soil has lain fallow for numberless centuries; there’s room for everyone; it’s good soil – I’ve seen your fields from above. We’ll come and work it for you. Yes, we’ll even do that. We deserve anything you want to do to us, but don’t shut us out. We can’t force you to act now. If you want I’ll get into my ship and go back and that will be all there is to it. We won’t bother you again. But we’ll come here and we’ll work for you and do the things you did for us – clean your houses, cook your meals, shine your shoes, and humble ourselves in the sight of God for the things we have done over the centuries to ourselves, to others, to you.’
He was finished.
There was a silence of silences. A silence you could hold in your hand and a silence that came down like a pressure of a distant storm over the crowd. Their long arms hung like dark pendulums in the sunlight, and their eyes were upon the old man and he did not move now, but waited.
Willie Johnson held the rope in his hands. Those around him watched to see what he might do. His wife Hattie waited, clutching his arm.
She wanted to get at the hate of them all, to pry at it and work at it until she found a little chink, and then pull out a pebble or a stone or a brick and then a part of the wall, and, once started, the whole edifice might roar down and be done away with. It was teetering now. But which was the keystone, and how to get at it? How to touch them and get a thing started in all of them to make a ruin of their hate?
She looked at Willie there in the strong silence and the only thing she knew about the situation was him and his life and what had happened to him, and suddenly he was the keystone; suddenly she knew that if he could be pried loose, then the thing in all of them might be loosened and torn away.
‘Mister –’ She stepped forward. She didn’t even know the first words to say. The crowd stared at her back; she felt them staring. ‘Mister –’
The man turned to her with a tired smile.
‘Mister,’ she said, ‘do you know Knockwood Hill in Greenwater, Alabama?’
