Any newscast would tell him.
The only trouble was that for two weeks, until tonight, the newscasts had consistently told him wrong. They’d told him that the Martians were still around. Not that the newscasts opened with the statement, “The Martians are still with us,” but almost every story concerned them at least indirectly or concerned the Depression and the other troubles they were causing.
And Luke was trying everything he could think of, and almost going crazy trying.
He knew the Martians were imaginary, the product (like everything else) of his own imagination, that he had invented them that evening five months ago, in March, when he’d been trying to plot a science fiction novel. He’d invented them.
But he’d invented hundreds of other plots and none of there had really happened (or seemed really to happen) so there had been something different that evening, and he was trying everything to reconstruct the exact circumstances, the exact frame of mind, the exact everything.
Including, of course, the exact amount of drinking, the exact tinge of inebriety, since that might have been a factor. As he had done while he was here the period preceding that evening, he stayed strictly sober by day, no matter how badly hung over he might awaken—pacing the floor and getting desperate (then, for a plot; now, for an answer). Now, as then, he would let himself start drinking only after he’d made and fed himself a dinner and then he’d space his drinks and pace his drinking very carefully—at least until he’d given up in disgust for the evening.
What was wrong?
He’d invented Martians by imagining them, hadn’t he? Why couldn’t he un-invent them now that he’d ceased to imagine them, now that he’d learned the truth? He had, of course, as far as he himself was concerned. Why wouldn’t other people stop seeing and hearing them?
It must be a psychic block, he told himself. But naming it didn’t help.
He took a sip of his drink and stared at it. Trying, for the thousandth time since he’d been here, to remember exactly how many drinks he’d had that night in March. It wasn’t many, he knew; he hadn’t been feeling them, any more than he was feeling the two he’d already had tonight before this one.
Or didn’t the drinking have anything to do with it after all?
He took a second sip of his drink, put it down and started pacing. There aren’t any Martians, he thought. There never were any; they existed—like everything and everybody else—only while I imagined them. And I no longer imagine them.
Therefore—
Maybe that had done it. He went over to the radio and turned it on, waited for it to warm up. Listened to several discouraging items, realizing that even if he had just succeeded it would be at least minutes, since Martians weren’t seen everywhere all the time, before anyone began to realize that they were gone. Until the newscaster happened to say, “At this very moment, right here in the studio, a Martian is trying to…”
Luke flicked off the radio and swore.
Took another sip of his drink and paced some more.
Sat down and finished his drink and made another one.
Had a sudden idea.
Maybe he could outwit that psychic block by going around it instead of through it. The block could only be because, even though he knew he was right, he lacked sufficient faith in himself. Maybe he should imagine something else, something completely different, and when his imagination brought it into being, even his damned subconscious couldn’t deny it, and then in that moment of undeniability—
It was worth trying. There was nothing to lose.
But he’d imagine something that he really wanted, and what did be want—outside of getting rid of Martians—most right at this moment?
Margie, of course.
He was lonesome as hell after these two weeks of solitude. And if he could imagine Margie here, and by imagining bring her here, he knew he could break that psychic block. With one arm tied behind his back, or with both arms around Margie.
Let’s see, he thought. I’ll imagine that she’s driving here in her car, already through Indio and only half a mile away. Pretty soon I’ll hear the car.
Prey soon he heard the car.
He made himself walk, not run, to a door and open it. He could see headlights coming. Should he—now—?
No, he’d wait till lie was sure. Not even when the car came close enough that he thought he could recognize it as Margie’s; a lot of cars look alike. He’d wait until the car had stopped and Margie got out of it and he knew. And then, an that golden moment, he’d think There Aren’t Any Martians.
And there wouldn’t be.
In a few minutes, the car would be here.
It was approximately five minutes after nine o’clock (P.M.), Pacific Time. In Chicago it was five minutes after eleven and Mr. Oberdorffer sipped beer and waited for his subervibrator to build up potential; in equatorial Africa it was dawn and a witch doctor named Bugassi stood with crossed arms under the greatest juju ever made, waiting for the sun’s first rays to strike it.
Four minutes later, one hundred and forty-six days and fifty minutes after they appeared, the Martians disappeared. Simultaneously, from everywhere. Everywhere on Earth, that is.
Wherever they went, there is no authenticated instance of one having been seen since that moment. Seeing Martians in nightmares and in delirium tremens is still common, but such sightings can hardly be called authenticated.
To this day…
POSTLOGUE
To this day, nobody knows why they carne or why they left.
Not that a great many people do not think they know, or at least have very strong opinions on the subject. Millions of people still believe, as they believed then, that they were not Martians but devils and that they went back to hell arid not back to Mars. Because a God who sent them to punish us for our sins became again a merciful God as a result of our prayers to Him.
Even more millions accept that they came from Mars after all and returned there. Most, but not all, give credit to Yato Ishurti for their leaving these point out that even if Ishurti’s reasoning was right down the line and even though his proposition to the Martians was backed by that tremendous affirmative, the Martians could hardly have been expected to react instantaneously; somewhere a council of them would have had to meet and weigh their decision, make up their minds whether we were by now sufficiently sincere and sufficiently chastened. And that the Martians stayed only two weeks after Ishurti’s speech, which is certainly not too long a time for such a decision to have been reached.
At any rate, no standing armies have been built up again and no country is planning sending any rockets to Mars, just on the chance that lshurti was right, or partly right.
But not everybody, by any means, believes that either God or Ishurti had anything to do with the departure of the Martians.
One entire African tribe, for instance, knows that it was Bugassi’s juju that sent the gnajamkata back to the kat.
One janitor in Chicago knows perfectly well that he drove away the Martians with his anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator.
And of course those last two are, and were given as, only random examples of the hundreds of thousands of other scientists and mystics who, each in his own way, had been trying his best to accomplish the same thing. And each naturally thought that he had finally succeeded.