And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer's ancient green lawns.
Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.
Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.
They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.
Mr. and Mrs. K had lived by the dead sea for twenty years, and their ancestors had lived in the same house, which turned and followed the sun, flower-like, for ten centuries.
Mr. and Mrs. K were not old. They had the fair, brownish skin of the true Martian, the yellow coin eyes, the soft musical voices. Once they had liked painting pictures with chemical fire, swimming in the canals in the seasons when the wine trees filled them with green liquors, and talking into the dawn together by the blue phosphorous portraits in the speaking room.
They were not happy now.
This morning Mrs. K stood between the pillars, listening to the desert sands heat, melt into yellow wax, and seemingly run on the horizon.
She watched the blue sky of Mars as if it might at any moment grip in on itself, contract, and expel a shining miracle down upon the sand.
Tired of waiting, she walked through the misting pillars. A gentle rain sprang from the fluted pillar tops, cooling the scorched air, falling gently on her. On hot days it was like walking in a creek. The floors of the house glittered with cool streams. In the distance she heard her husband playing his book steadily, his fingers never tired of the old songs. Quietly she wished he might one day again spend as much time holding and touching her like a little harp as he did his incredible books.
But no. She shook her head, an imperceptible, forgiving shrug. Her eyelids closed softly down upon her golden eyes. Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.
She lay back in a chair that moved to take her shape even as she moved. She closed her eyes tightly and nervously.
Her brown fingers trembled, came up, grasped at the air. A moment later she sat up, startled, gasping.
She glanced about swiftly, as if expecting someone there before her. She seemed disappointed; the space between the pillars was empty.
Her husband appeared in a triangular door. "Did you call?" he asked irritably.
"I thought I heard you cry out."
"Did I? I was almost asleep and had a dream!"
"In the daytime? You don't often do that."
She sat as if struck in the face by the dream. "How strange, how very strange," she murmured. "The dream."
"Oh?" He evidently wished to return to his book.
"I dreamed about a man."
"A tall man, six feet one inch tall."
"How absurd; a giant, a misshapen giant."
"Blue eyes! Gods!" cried Mr. K. "What'll you dream next? I suppose he had black hair?"
"How did you guess?" She was excited.
"I picked the most unlikely color," he replied coldly.
"Well, black it was!" she cried. "And he had a very white skin; oh, he was most unusual! He was dressed in a strange uniform and he came down out of the sky and spoke pleasantly to me." She smiled.
"Out of the sky; what nonsense!"
"He came in a metal thing that glittered in the sun," she remembered. She closed her eyes to shape it again. "I dreamed there was the sky and something sparkled like a coin thrown into the air, and suddenly it grew large and fell down softly to land, a long silver craft, round and alien. And a door opened in the side of the silver object and this tall man stepped out."
"The red planet Mars has fascinated humans for centuries. Many books and movies have been made about travel to it-the very best being Ray Bradbury's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES."
"A poetic and beautiful fantasy."
"THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES holds up well to a reading half a century after it was first published….Bradbury stage-manages remarkable sensual and emotional verbal effects that evoke vast tides of beauty, nostalgia, and hope, and he does this verve and simplicity and a profound sincerity….Much of the writing is breathtaking in a delicate sense, and there are passages that made me wish today, as longingly as that 11 - or 12-year-old did many years ago to ride a jade-green insect to the Blue Mountains, to sleep amid the rain trees, and to hold an ancient manuscript that sang its words as my hand passed over its surface."
"Not only is Bradbury the best author in the entire world, this book is his greatest piece of work. Story after story, he leaves you in total wonderment. His stories are so well-written that when you're done reading them, you think you were actually there in the first colony on Mars."
"More than the 'hard science' fiction of contemporaries like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Bradbury's MARTIAN CHRONICLES put the romance in space flight…. Bradbury's Mars stories work because they are about people, not machines."