The rain began splatting onto the windshield in fat, heavy drops just before
the Fiat's motor gave a series of lurching coughs, and died. George swore
violently as he coasted onto the grassy median, next to a large pine tree
whose upper branches tossed in the rising winds, and some twenty miles from
the radio station where he worked. He pumped the gas a few times to prime
the carburetor, and tried to start the motor. For thirty seconds the starter
ground, and then began to lag as the indifferently mainatained battery gave
up its last reserves of power.
The storm was gathering strength, and for a moment, George sat in the warm,
dead car, watching the heavy drops increase into a torrential downpour the
drummed heavily on the canvas top. He swore again, a tired and irritable
oath, removed his tie and his watch, and placed them both in the glove compartment.
His day, like many before it, had been long, hard and unrewarding, and this
last incident made him want to smash his fist into the walnut dashboard.
He opened the door and got out instead.
Outside the car, the wind drove the rain into his face. He shielded his
eyes with one hand as he turned the key in the lock, and then he started
across the road, into the wind. There were no other cars in sight, and George
resigned himself to a walk of over a mile back to the service station he
had passed not forty seconds before the Fiat began choking like a child
with a bone in its throat.
He crossed the road and stood looking across the open field to its right.
In the distance through the cold, drifiting mists of rain, he could see
a large building, and the dim glow of streetlights over a parking lot. It
was considerably closer than the service station; a field of tall grass
perhaps half a mile across separated him from what he hoped was civilization,
and a phone. He stood for a moment more, and then, as the rain pelted down
with increasing intensity, he started down the embankment toward the field.
He was nearly halfway down when he heard a car approaching. Frantically,
he tried to reverse course and scramble back up the incline, but, just as
headlights swept over the guardrail, he slipped on the rain-slickened grass
and tumbled ignominiously into the gutter at the bottom of the embankment.
He lay cursing as cold water trickled past him, and then crawled out of
the mucky runoff and got to his feet. He was unhurt, but covered in mud
from head to foot, and the gutter was not full of nice clean mud, oh no.
He stank of barely diluted sewage, and it was raining harder, if that were
possible.
George trotted across the narrow frontage road and into the tall grass,
his shoes squelching miserably. He kept up a half-run for some distance,
until he was forced to slow his pace, gasping for breath. He began to see
tiny white hailstones come rocketing down. The building was noticeably closer.
He reached it, finally, after falling once again into a muddy puddle hidden
by the tall grass in the field. It was nearly a foot deep, and, with another
six inches of mud on the bottom, George had nearly submerged. He emerged
spluttering, with bits of grass and other less describable matter on his
face and in his hair. His suit was quite ruined.
The building was white brick, and on the back side was a green door. Drenched
and thoroughly miserable, he took this first opportunity for shelter, and
went in.
It was very dark inside, and as his eyes adjusted, he could make out huge,
vague shapes filling it. There was also a sound near at hand, a soft, huge,
many-voiced sound that filled the chill air with an eldritch wavering. George
stood a moment, a ghost of apprehension wending its way down his spine,
and then he began to see a dim, square outline of light on the far side
of the room. It was another door.
George crossed to it, stumbling over slat-like obstructions scattered on
the floor, and opened it a crack. The corridor beyond was long, and nearly
as dark as the room behind him. A single bare bulb screwed high in the wall
cast an anemic circle of light at the far end of the hall. The throbbing,
swollen sound was much louder now, as of many voices chanting.
George stood irresolute for a moment, but the thought of warm clothes and
a warm bed and his warm wife (who, although not so warm as of old, was much
warmer than the cold rainwater currently trickling down his collar) decided
him, and he stepped into the corridor. He put a hand out toward the wall
on his right to guide himself, and when the wall failed to be there, he
nearly fell. He blundered into a heavy, clinging drape that immediately
wrapped itself around him. Panicked, he thrashed about inside its musty
embrace, and finally stooped and grabbed the hem of the drape just as two
men walked beneath the bare bulb into the corridor. He dropped to his knees
and crawled underneath.
On the other side, he got to his feet. He took a step and then froze, and
the hot grip of terror wrapped itself around his bowels. He saw where he
was, and even as he turned to dash beneath the concealment of the curtain,
a dazzling brilliance suddenly enveloped him.
He was standing on a hardwood stage in front of maybe eight thousand
people, and an orchestra, whose conductor was looking at him quizzically.
. Behind him was the wine-red curtain that he had blundered through, and
before him, a single microphone stood. He noted with a strange detachment
that it was one of those old-style radio microphones, the kind with the
big slots. Pale footlights snapped on, and the sparse applause died completely
away as the audience got a good look at him. A risiing murmur began to be
heard, and George stood, wet and muddy and dripping, in horror. Unable to
exit with his dignity, and owing more to some long-forgotten reflex from
his childhood than to any conscious thought, he made a bow, and stepped
back toward the curtain.
A ripple of applause ran through the audience, and swelled into a sea of
clapping hands. George, suddenly puzzled, turned back to the audience for
a moment, and saw many smiling faces, smiles of welcome, and the clapping
continued.
George was rather a proud man, at least at better times. He let go of the
curtain, and, without knowing what he was going to say, walked to the microphone.
The man on the kettledrums twenty feet away looked at him, and then at the
trail of water and muddy footprints. He shrugged, and rubbed his nose with
the tip of a drumstick.
George spoke.
"Good Evening, ladies and gentlemen," he said, and as he spoke a thrill so great rushed through him, that he trembled slightly, and following it, an idea.
There was scattered applause.
George cast back in his mind for a treasure of memory.
When he was young, a child with a child's delight in monsters and Martians and great machines, he received a tape of a certain radio broacast, made many years before, when the world was as yet unstained by the blood and fire of the Second World War, when a young broadcaster named Orson Welles told a story of a Martian invasion on Halloween, and struck delicious terror into the hearts of many. Years later, when George was a young boy, he heard the recording, and listened again, and again, and again, and each time he listened, he imagined himself as the grave young man who, thirty years before, broadcast The War of the Worlds. When he was grown, he became that man, a broadcaster, and once, he had reproduced that historic story.
George grasped the microphone stand. "Welcome to the Park Plaza Hotel ," he said, his voice rolling away into the corners of the theatre." Tonight, October 30, 1938, as our guests, we have Raymond Ricello and his orchestra, performing La Cumparsita!"
He pointed at the conductor, who with a puzzled face, gestured to the orchestra, and they broke into the familiar tune.
In the wings, the real performer (a famous Mark Twain impersonator) and the manager stared at the muddy, disheveled apparition on stage. The manager started out, but the other man laid a hand on his arm.
"Wait a moment," he said. "I want to see what he's going to do!"
The manager subsided.
George could sense the old excitement building, the ecstasy he used to feel whenever he held the mike in his hands that took his words to be carried across miles of air, to be picked up by radio sets everywhere. He closed his eyes, and spoke. A Voice came from his mouth, the Voice of another broadcaster, the newsman Carl Phillips. That Voice became the astronomer, the megalomaniac artilleryman, and as the audience sat breathless, George became Professor Pearson, with his spectacles and his mud. They sat, hushed, as George remembered what he once was, and what he had as a child dreamed of being, a man who sent moods over the airways with his words. He took them back to the days when war hung, swollen and evil, just over the horizon, and life had to be lived to its fullest. He made them feel the helpless terror of the crowd at Grover's Mill and the horrors of the Martians' power, and, finally, the breathless, unexpected triumph as Professor Pearson discovered the line of defeated Martian machines. He would not forget.
"Strange to watch children playing in the streets...strange to see young people strolling on the green where the new spring grass heals the last black scars of the bruised earth...strange to see sightseers enter the museum where the disassembled parts of a Martian machine are kept on display.....strange to recall a time when I first saw it bright, clean-cut, hard, and silent, under the dawn of that last great day."
George stopped, and as if on cue, the lights died, leaving only the dim glow of the footlights. Then a roar of applause swept through the high-ceilinged room, shouts of "bravo!" suffusing the noise with a warm glow. The spotlight came on again, and George caught a glimpse of people leaping to their feet, applauding wildly. He bowed low, with mud drying to a fine crack-glaze on his skin. The conductor of the orchestra pushed his way to the edge of the stage and shouted "bravo! bravo!" George gave him the thumbs-up, dizzy with the rush of love he felt for all these people. A rose landed on the stage in front of him, and he took it up, and bowed again with it held to his breast, and he knew he would no longer live in the slavish pattern his life had taken, would never forget what he loved.
He took a step back, holding the rose, bowed again, and slipped behind the curtain.