I, Mars

Alone on Mars, yet not alone ... For old Barton’s younger selves lived on, hating, tormenting him for his living proof that their hopes were dead!

The phone rang.

A grey hand lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Barton?”

“Yes.”

“This is Barton!”

“What?”

“This is Barton!”

“It can’t be. This phone hasn’t rung in twenty years.”

The old man hung up.

Brrrrinnnng!

His grey hand seized the phone.

“Hello, Barton,” laughed the voice. “You have forgotten, haven’t you?”

The old man felt his heart grow small and like a cool stone. He felt the wind blowing in off the dry Martian seas and the blue hills of Mars. After twenty years of silence and cobwebs and now, tonight, on his eightieth birthday, with a ghastly scream, this phone had wailed to life.

“Who did you think it was?” said the voice. “A rocket captain? Did you think someone had come to rescue you?”

“No.”

“What’s the date?”

Numbly, “July 20th, 2097.”

“Good Lord. Sixty years! Have you been sitting there that long? Waiting for a rocket to come from Earth to rescue you?”

The old man nodded.

“Now, old man, do you know who I am? Think!”

“Yes.” The dry pale lips trembling. “I understand. I remember. We are one. I am Emil Barton and you are Emil Barton.”

“With one difference. You are eighty. I am only twenty. All of life before me!”

The old man began to laugh and then to cry. He sat holding the phone like a lost and silly child in his fingers. The conversation was impossible, and should not be continued, and yet he went on with it. When he got hold of himself he held the phone close to his withered lips and said, in deepest anguish, “Listen! You there! Listen, oh God, if I could warn you! How can I? You’re only a voice. If I could show you how lonely the years are. End it, kill yourself! Don’t wait! If you knew what it is to change from the thing you are to the thing that is me, today, here, now, at this end.”

“Impossible.” The voice of the young Barton laughed, far away. “I’ve no way to tell if you ever get this call. This is all mechanical. You’re talking to a transcription, no more. This is 2037. Sixty years in your past. Today, the atom war started on Earth. All colonials were called home from Mars, by rocket. I got left behind!”

“I remember,” whispered the old man.

“Alone on Mars,” laughed the young voice. “A month, a year, who cares? There are foods and books. In my spare time I’ve made transcription libraries of ten thousand words, responses, my voice, connected to phone relays. In later months I’ll call, have someone to talk with.”

“Yes,” murmured the old man, remembering.

“Forty-sixty years from now my own transcripto-tapes will ring me up. I don’t really think I’ll be here on Mars that long, it’s just a beautifully ironic idea of mine, something to pass the time. Is that really you, Barton? Is that really me?”

Tears fell from the old man’s eyes. “Yes!”

“I’ve made a thousand Bartons, tapes, sensitive to all questions, my voice, in one thousand Martian towns. An army of Bartons over Mars, while I wait for the rockets to return.”

“You fool,” the old man shook his head, wearily. “You waited sixty years. You grew old waiting, always alone. And now you’ve become me and you’re still alone in the empty cities.”

“Don’t expect my sympathy. You’re like a stranger, off in another country. I can’t be sad. I’m alive when I make these tapes. And you’re alive when you hear them. Both of us, to the other, incomprehensible. Neither can warn the other, even though both respond, one to the other, one automatically, the other warmly and humanly. I’m human now. You’re human later. It’s insane. I can’t cry, because not knowing the future I can only be optimistic. These hidden tapes can only react to a certain number of stimuli from you. Can you ask a dead man to weep?”

“Stop it!” cried the old man, for his heart was sickening in him. He felt the familiar great seizures of pain. Nausea moved through him, and blackness. “Stop it! Oh God, but you were heartless. Go away!”

“Were, old man? I am. As long as the tapes glide on, as long as secret spindles and hidden electronic eyes read and select and convert words to send to you, I’ll be young, cruel, blunt. I’ll go on being young and cruel long after you’re dead. Goodby.”

“Wait!” cried the old man.

Click.