Long After Midnight

The Official reached into his breast pocket and drew out an expensive ball-point pen capped with a rifle shell. He flourished the pen and started filling in a form. “I want you to take this to Dr. Mathews this afternoon, for a complete checkup. Not that I expect anything really bad, understand. But don’t you feel you should see a doctor?”

“You think I’m lying about my machine,” said the sergeant. “I’m not. It’s so small it can be hidden in this cigarette package. The effect of it extends for nine hundred miles. I could tour this country in a few days, with the machine set to a certain type of steel. The other nations couldn’t take advantage of us because I’d rust their weapons as they approach us. Then I’d fly to Europe. By this time next month the world would be free of war forever. I don’t know how I found this invention. It’s impossible. Just as impossible as the atom bomb. I’ve waited a month now, trying to think it over. I worried about what would happen if I did rip off the carapace, as you say. But now I’ve just about decided. My talk with you has helped clarify things. Nobody thought an airplane would ever fly, nobody thought an atom would ever explode, and nobody thinks that there can ever be Peace, but there will be.”

“Take that paper over to Dr. Mathews, will you?” said the Official hastily.

The sergeant got up. “You’re not going to assign me to any new Zone then?”

“Not right away, no. I’ve changed my mind. We’ll let Mathews decide.”

“I’ve decided then,” said the young man. “I’m leaving the Post within the next few minutes. I’ve a pass. Thank you very much for giving me your valuable time, sir.”

“Now look here, Sergeant, don’t take things so seriously. You don’t have to leave. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“That’s right. Because nobody would believe me. Good-bye, sir.” The sergeant opened the office door and stepped out.

The door shut and the Official was alone. He stood for a moment looking at the door. He sighed. He rubbed his hands over his face. The phone rang. He answered it abstractedly.

“Oh, hello, Doctor. I was just going to call you.” A pause. “Yes, I was going to send him over to you. Look, is it all right for that young man to be wandering about? It is all right? If you say so, Doctor. Probably needs a rest, a good long one. Poor boy has a delusion of rather an interesting sort. Yes, yes. It’s a shame. But that’s what a Sixteen-Year War can do to you, I suppose.”

The phone voice buzzed in reply.

The Official listened and nodded. “I’ll make a note on that. Just a second.” He reached for his ball-point pen. “Hold on a moment. Always mislaying things.” He patted his pocket. “Had my pen here a moment ago. Wait.” He put down the phone and searched his desk, pulling out drawers. He checked his blouse pocket again. He stopped moving. Then his hands twitched slowly into his pocket and probed down. He poked his thumb and forefinger deep and brought out a pinch of something.

He sprinkled it on his desk blotter: a small filtering powder of yellow-red rust.

He sat staring at it for a moment. Then he picked up the phone. “Mathews,” he said, “get off the line, quick.” There was a click of someone hanging up and then he dialed another call. “Hello, Guard Station, listen, there’s a man coming past you any minute now, you know him, name of Sergeant Hollis, stop him, shoot him down, kill him if necessary, don’t ask any questions, kill the son of a bitch, you heard me, this is the Official talking! Yes, kill him, you hear!”

“But, sir,” said a bewildered voice on the other end of the line. “I can’t, I just can’t….”

“What do you mean you can’t, God damn it!”

“Because …” The voice faded away. You could hear the guard breathing into the phone a mile away.

The Official shook the phone. “Listen to me, listen, get your gun ready!”

“I can’t shoot anyone,” said the guard.

The Official sank back in his chair. He sat blinking for half a minute, gasping.

Out there even now—he didn’t have to look, no one had to tell him—the hangars were dusting down in soft red rust, and the airplanes were blowing away on a brown-rust wind into nothingness, and the tanks were sinking, sinking slowly into the hot asphalt roads, like dinosaurs (isn’t that what the man had said?) sinking into primordial tar pits. Trucks were blowing away into ocher puffs of smoke, their drivers dumped by the road, with only the tires left running on the highways.

“Sir …” said the guard, who was seeing all this, far away. “Oh, God …”

“Listen, listen!” screamed the Official. “Go after him, get him, with your hands, choke him, with your fists, beat him, use your feet, kick his ribs in, kick him to death, do anything, but get that man. I’ll be right out!” He hung up the phone.

By instinct he jerked open the bottom desk drawer to get his service pistol. A pile of brown rust filled the new leather holster. He swore and leaped up.

On the way out of the office he grabbed a chair. It’s wood, he thought. Good old-fashioned wood, good old-fashioned maple. He hurled it against the wall twice, and it broke. Then he seized one of the legs, clenched it hard in his fist, his face bursting red, the breath snorting in his nostrils, his mouth wide. He struck the palm of his hand with the leg of the chair, testing it. “All right, God damn it, come on!” he cried.

He rushed out, yelling, and slammed the door.

The Messiah (#ulink_b6c55fa3-067e-53e0-a5d6-634d4bd21374)

“We all have that special dream when we are young,” said Bishop Kelly.

The others at the table murmured, nodded.

“There is no Christian boy,” the Bishop continued, “who does not some night wonder: am I Him? Is this the Second Coming at long last, and am I It? What, what, oh, what, dear God, if I were Jesus? How grand!”

The Priests, the Ministers, and the one lonely Rabbi laughed gently, remembering things from their own childhoods, their own wild dreams, and being great fools.

“I suppose,” said the young Priest, Father Niven, “that Jewish boys imagine themselves Moses?”

“No, no, my dear friend,” said Rabbi Nittler. “The Messiah! The Messiah!”

More quiet laughter, from all.

“Of course,” said Father Niven out of his fresh pink-and-cream face, “how stupid of me. Christ wasn’t the Messiah, was he? And your people are still waiting for Him to arrive. Strange. Oh, the ambiguities.”

“And nothing more ambiguous than this.” Bishop Kelly rose to escort them all out onto a terrace which had a view of the Martian hills, the ancient Martian towns, the old highways, the rivers of dust, and Earth, sixty million miles away, shining with a clear light in this alien sky.

“Did we ever in our wildest dreams,” said the Reverend Smith, “imagine that one day each of us would have a Baptist Church, a St. Mary’s Chapel, a Mount Sinai Synagogue here, here on Mars?”

The answer was no, no, softly, from them all.

Their quiet was interrupted by another voice which moved among them. Father Niven, as they stood at the balustrade, had tuned his transistor radio to check the hour. News was being broadcast from the small new American-Martian wilderness colony below. They listened:

“—rumored near the town. This is the first Martian reported in our community this year. Citizens are urged to respect any such visitor. If—”

Father Niven shut the news off.

“Our elusive congregation,” sighed the Reverend Smith. “I must confess, I came to Mars not only to work with Christians, but hoping to invite one Martian to Sunday supper, to learn of his theologies, his needs.”

“We are still too new to them,” said Father Lipscomb. “In another year or so I think they will understand we’re not buffalo hunters in search of pelts. Still, it is hard to keep one’s curiosity in hand. After all, our Mariner photographs indicated no life whatsoever here. Yet life there is, very mysterious and half-resembling the human.”

“Half, Your Eminence?” The Rabbi mused over his coffee. “I feel they are even more human than ourselves. They have let us come in. They have hidden in the hills, coming among us only on occasion, we guess, disguised as Earthmen—”

“Do you really believe they have telepathic powers, then, and hypnotic abilities which allow them to walk in our towns, fooling us with masks and visions, and none of us the wiser?”

“I do so believe.”

“Then this,” said the Bishop, handing around brandies and crème-de-menthes, “is a true evening of frustrations. Martians who will not reveal themselves so as to be Saved by Us the Enlightened—”

Many smiles at this.

“—and Second Comings of Christ delayed for several thousand years. How long must we wait, O Lord?”

“As for myself,” said young Father Niven, “I never wished to be Christ, the Second Coming. I just always wanted, with all my heart, to meet Him. Ever since I was eight I have thought on that. It might well be the first reason I became a priest.”