Read Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 for Free Online Page B

and took out an
envelope reluctantly and laid it on the marble counter.
                   "This is from Will to me. It came in the
Rocket mail two days ago. It was this that made up my mind for me, made me
decide to go. I didn't tell you. I want you to see it now. Go ahead, read the
note."
                   Leonora shook the note out of the envelope and
read it aloud:
                   "Dear Janice: This is our house if you
decide to come to Mars, Will"
                   Leonora tapped the envelope again, and a color
photograph dropped out, glistening, on the counter. It was a picture of a
house, a dark, mossy, ancient, caramel-brown, comfortable house with red
flowers and green cool ferns bordering it, and a disreputably hairy ivy on the
porch.
                   "But, Janice!"
                   "What?"
                   "This is a picture of your house, here on
Earth, here on Elm Street !"
                   "No. Look close."
                   And they looked again, together, and on both
sides of the comfortable dark house and behind it was scenery that was not
Earth scenery. The soil was a strange color of violet, and the grass was the
faintest bit red, and the sky glowed like a gray diamond, and a strange crooked
tree grew to one side, looking like an old woman with crystals in her white
hair.
                   "That's the house Will's built for
me," said Janice, "on Mars. It helps to look at it. All yesterday,
when I had the chance, alone, and was most afraid and panicky, I took out this
picture and looked at it,"
                   They both gazed at the dark comfortable house
sixty million miles away, familiar but unfamiliar, old but new, a yellow light
shining in the right front parlor window.
                   "That man Will," said Leonora,
nodding her head, "knows just what he's doing."
                   They finished their drinks. Outside, a vast
warm crowd of strangers wandered by and the "snow" fell steadily in
the summer sky.
                   They bought many silly things to take with
them, bags of lemon candy, glossy women's magazines, fragile perfumes; and then
they walked out into the town and rented two belted jackets that refused to
recognize gravity and imitated only the moth, touched the delicate controls,
and felt themselves whispered like white blossom petals over the town.
"Anywhere," said Leonora, "anywhere at all."
                   They let the wind blow them where it would;
they let the wind take them through the night of summer apple trees and the
night of warm preparation, over the lovely town, over the houses of childhood
and other days, over schools and avenues, over creeks and meadows and farms so
familiar that each grain of wheat was a golden coin. They blew as leaves must
blow before the threat of a fire-wind, with warning whispers and summer
lightning crackling among the folded hills. They saw the milk-dust country
roads where not so long ago they had drifted in moonlit helicopters in great
whorls of sound spiraling down to touch beside cool night streams with the
young men who were now gone.
                   They floated in an immense sigh above a town
already made remote by the little space between themselves and the earth, a
town receding behind them in a black river and coming up in a tidal wave of
lights and color ahead, untouchable and a dream now, already smeared in their
eyes with nostalgia, with a panic of memory that began before the thing itself
was gone.
                   Blown quietly, eddying, they gazed secretly at
a hundred faces of dear friends they were leaving behind, the lamplit people
held and framed by windows which slid by on the wind, it seemed; all of Time
breathing them along. There was no tree they did not examine for old
confessions of love carved and whittled there, no sidewalk they did not