August 3, 2025 • 21 mins
Immerse yourself in captivating science fiction short stories, delivered daily! Explore futuristic worlds, time travel, alien encounters, and mind-bending adventures. Perfect for sci-fi lovers looking for a quick and engaging listen each day. 🎧 Go to www.solgoodmedia.com to access ad-free listening, exclusive content, and more!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Hills of Home by Alfred Coppel. Normality is a
myth where all a little neurotic, and the study of
neurosis has been able to classify the general types of
disturbance which are most common, and some types, providing the
(00:21):
subject is not suffering so extreme a case as to
have crossed the border into psychosis, can be not only
useful but perhaps necessary for certain kinds of work. The
river ran still and deep, green and gray in the eddies,
with the warm smell of late summer rising out of
(00:44):
the slow water, madrone and birch and willow limp in
the evening quiet, and the taste of smoldering leaves. It
wasn't the Russian River. It was the Sacred iss. The
sun had touched the gem encrusted cliffs by the shores
of the Lost Sea of Chorus and had vanished, leaving
(01:07):
only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry
of the shore birds. From downstream came the faint sounds
of music. It might have been a phonograph playing in
one of the summer cabins with names like Pollannroost and
Patches and Seventh Heaven. But to Kimmi it was the
hated cry of the father of Thurns, calling the dreadful
(01:30):
plant men to their feast of victims born into this
valley door by the mysterious iss. Kimmie shifted the heavy
Martian pistol into his left hand and checked his harness.
A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed.
There was nothing he had to fear from the plant men.
(01:52):
His bare feet turned up stream, away from the sound
of the phonograph, toward the shallows in the river that
would permit him to cross and continue his search along
the base of the Golden cliffs. The sergeant's voice cut
through the pre dawn darkness. O. Three hundred, Colonel briefing
in thirty minutes. Kimball tried to see him in the
(02:13):
black gloom. He hadn't been asleep. It would have been
hard to waste this last night that way. Instead, he
had been remembering, all right, Sergeant, he said, coming up.
He swung to his feet to the bare boards and
sat for a moment, wishing he hadn't had to give
up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured taste of
(02:35):
the cigarette on his tongue. Oddly enough, he wasn't tired
he wasn't excited either, and that was much stranger. He
stood up and opened the window to look out into
the desert night. Overhead. The stars were brilliant and cold.
Mars gleamed russet colored against the sable sky. He smiled,
(02:56):
remembering again, so long a road, he thought, from then
to now. Then he stopped smiling and turned away from
the window. It hadn't been an easy path, and what
was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddamn
Sykes were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out
on the deal, because of their brain wave graphs and
word association tests and the rochard blots. You're a lonely man,
(03:20):
Colonel Kimball. Too much imagination could be bad for this job.
How could you sit there, with pentathal in your veins
and wires running out of your head and tell them
about the still waters of Chorus, or the pennons flying
from the twin towers of Greater Helium, or the way
the tiny slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigor
of a flier. Kimball snapped on a light and looked
(03:42):
at his watch. O three ten zero minus one fifty.
He opened the steel locker and began to dress. The
water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There behind
that madrone, he thought, was that a plant man. The
(04:03):
thick white trunk and the grasping, blood sucking arms. The
radium pistol's weight made his wrist ache, but he clung
to it tightly, knowing that he could never cope with
a plant man with a sword alone. The certainty of
coming battle made him smile a little, the way John
Carter would smile if he were here in the valley door,
(04:23):
ready to attack the white Thorns and their plant men.
For a moment, Kimmie felt a thrill of apprehension. The
deepening stillness of the river was closing in around him.
Even the music from the phonograph was very, very faint.
Above him, the great vault of the sky was changing
from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star
(04:46):
was breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew
it was Venus, the evening star. But let it be Earth,
he thought, and instead of white, let it be the
color of an emerald. He paused in mid street, letting
the water riffle around his feet, looking up at the
green beacon of his home planet. He thought, I've left
(05:07):
all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted.
Mars is where I belong with my friends Tars, Tarkas,
the Great Green Jeddak, and Carter the Warlord, and all
the beautiful, brave people. The phonograph sang, with Vali's voice,
cradle me, where southern skies can watch me with the
(05:31):
million eyes. Kimi's eyes narrowed, and he waded stealthily across
the sacred river that would be Matai Shang, the father
of the Holy Therns, spreading his arms to the sunset
and standing safely on his high balcony in the golden
cliffs where the plant men gathered to attack. The poor
Pilgrim's hiss had brought to this cursed valley. Sing me
(05:53):
to sleep, Lullaby of the Leaves. The phonograph sang, Kimmi stay,
kept cautiously ashore, and moved into the cover of a
clump of willows. The sky was darkening first, other stars
were shining through. There wasn't much time left. Kimball now
(06:14):
stood in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a
strange figure in blood colored plastic. The representatives of the
press had been handed the mimeographed releases by the p RO,
and now they sat in silence, studying the red figure
of the man who was to ride the rocket. They
were thinking, why him? Out of all the scores of applicants,
(06:35):
because there are always applicants for a sure death job,
and all the qualified pilots, why this one? The public
relations officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeod release,
as though these civilians couldn't be trusted to get the
sparse information given them straight without his help. Given grudgingly
and without expression. Kimball listened, only half aware of what
(06:57):
was being said. He watched the faces of the men
sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes
like wounds, read from the early morning hour and the
murmuring reception of the night before in the officer's club.
They are wondering how I feel, he was thinking, and
asking themselves why I want to go on The dais
near by, listening to the p r O but watching Kimball,
(07:19):
sat Steinhardt, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze,
thinking they start out burning with desire to cure the
human mind, and end with the shadow of the images,
the words become the fact, the therapy, the aim. What
could Steinhardt know of longing? No, he thought, I'm not
being fair. Steinhardt was only doing his job. The big
(07:42):
clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said
three fifty five zero minus one hour and five minutes.
Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the
open mouths. What have I to do with you now?
He thought? Outside, the winter night lay cold and still
(08:02):
over the base. Floodlets spilt brilliance over the dunes and
the scrubby earth high fences, casting laced shadows across the
burning white expanses of ferro concrete. As they filed out
of the briefing shack, Steinhardt climbed into the command car
with Kimball. Chance or design. Kimball wondered. The others he
(08:23):
noticed were leaving both of them alone. We haven't gotten
on too well, have we, Colonel Steinhardt observed in a
quiet voice. Kimball thought, he's pale skinned and very blond.
What is it that he reminds me of? Shouldn't there
be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled vaguely into
the rumbling night. That's what It was odd that he
(08:46):
should have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were
weaned on Burrow's books, and how many remembered now that
the Thurn priests all wore yellow wings and a circlet
of gold with some fantastic jewel on their forehead. We've
done a well as could be expected, he said. Steinhardt
reached for a cigarette and then stopped, remembering that Kimball
(09:06):
had had to give them up because of the flight.
Kimball caught the movement and half smiled. I didn't try
to kill the assignment for you, kim The sike said,
it doesn't matter now, no, I suppose not. You just
didn't think I was the man for the job. Your
record is good all the way. You know that, Steinhardt said,
(09:30):
it's just some of the things. Kimball said, I talked
too much. You had to. You wouldn't think my secret
life was so dangerous, would you? The colonel said, smiling,
You were married, kim What happened more therapy? I'd like
to know this is for me. Kimball shrugged. It didn't work.
(09:53):
She was a fine girl, but she finally told me
it was no go. You don't live here was the
way she put it. She knew you were a career officer.
What did she expect? That isn't what she meant? You
know that, yes, the sike said slowly, I know that.
They rode in silence across the dark base, between the
(10:16):
concrete sheds and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like
dust across the sky. Kimball, swathed in plastic, A fantastic
figure not of earth, watched them wheel across the clear,
deep night. I wish you luck, kim Steinhardt said, I
mean that, thanks, vaguely, as though from across a deep
(10:38):
and widening gulf. What will you do? You know? The
answers as well as I. The colonel said, impatiently, set
up the camp and wait for the next rocket if
it comes in two years. In two years, the plastic
figure said, didn't he know that? It didn't matter? He
glanced at his watch zero minus fifty. Kim Steinhardt said, slowly,
(11:04):
there's something you should know about, something you really should
be prepared for. Yes, disinterest in his voice. Now, Steinhardt noted,
clinically natural under the circumstances or neurosis building up already,
our tests showed you to be a schizoid well compensated.
(11:24):
Of course, you know there's no such thing as a
normal human being. We will have tendencies towards one or
more types of psychoses. In your case, the symptoms are
overly active imagination and in some cases an inability to
distinguish reality from well fancy. Kimball turned to regard the
psych coolly. What's reality, Steinhardt, do you know? The analyst flushed. No,
(11:51):
I didn't think so. You lived pretty much in your
mind when you were a child, Steinhardt went on, doggedly.
You were a solitary, lonely child. Kimball was watching the
sky again. Steinhardt felt futile and out of his depth.
We know so little about the psychology of space flight,
kim Silence, the rumble of the tires on the packed
(12:17):
sand of the road, the murmur of the command car's
engine spinning oilily and lit by tiny sun bright flashes
deep in the hollows of the hot metal. You're glad
to be leaving, aren't you, Steinhardt said, finally, happy to
be the first man to try for the planets. Kimball nodded, absently,
(12:38):
wishing the man would be quiet. Mars a dull, rusty
point of light low on the horizon seemed to beckon.
They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the
lighted bowl of the launching sight. The rocket towered, winged,
and monstrously checkered in white and orange against the first
flickerings of the false dawn. Kimmie saw the girls before
(13:03):
they saw him. In their new, low waisted middies and skirts,
they looked strange and out of place, standing by the
pebbled shore of the River iss. They were his sisters,
Rose and Margaret, older than he at fifteen and seventeen,
but they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him,
he could hear the rustling sound of the plant men
as the evening breeze came up. Kimmie. They were calling
(13:29):
him in the deepening dusk. Their voices carried far down
the river. Kim Me. He knew he should answer them,
but he did not. Behind him, he could hear the
awful plant men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror. He
stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their
(13:51):
voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers
of the valley door. Where is that little brat? Anyway,
he always wanders off just at dinner time, and then
we have to find him playing with that old forcet
mimicry my radium pistol cracked, just cracked. Oh where is
(14:11):
he anyway, kimmey, you answer, something died in him. It
wasn't a forcet, It was a radium pistol. He looked
at his sisters with dismay. They weren't really his sisters.
They were thurns with their yellow hair and their pale skins.
He and John Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them
(14:32):
many times, piling their bodies for barricades and weaving a
flashing pattern of skillful swords in the shifting light of
the two moons. Kimmy, one's going to be mad at
you answer us. If only Tars Tarkas would come now,
if only the great Green Jeddak would come splashing across
the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords clashing.
(14:56):
He's up there in that clump of willows, hiding. Kimmi,
you come down here this instant. The valley door was blurring, fading,
The golden cliffs were turning into sandy river worn banks.
The faucet felt heavy, in his grimy hand. He shivered,
not with horror, now with cold. He walked slowly out
(15:20):
of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks. He
lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship,
protected and quite alone. The plastic sack contained him, fed him,
and the rocket, silent now coursed through the airless, deep,
like a questing thought. Time was measured by the ticking
(15:41):
of the telemeters and the timers. But Kimball slept, insulated
and complete, and he dreamed. He dreamed of that summer
when the river lay still and deep under the hanging willows.
He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures as
he remembered them through the eyes of a nine year old,
and his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch
(16:04):
of the rented cottage and saying, exasperatedly, why do you
run off by yourself, KIMMI, I worry about you. So
and his sisters, playing with his wooden sword and his
radiant pistol, and never wanted to take his nose out
of those awful books. He dreamed of the low beamed
ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the heat of the
(16:25):
summer nights, and the thick longing in his throat for
red hills and a sky that burned deep blue through
the long, long days, and canals, clear and still, a
land that he knew, somehow never was, but which lived
for him through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed
of Mars and Steinehart. What is reality, Kimmie. The hours
(16:50):
stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn't. Time
was a deep night and a star shot void and dreams.
He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sack
and the tender care of the ship were more real
than the routine jobs of telemetering information back to the
base across the empty miles, across the rim of the world.
(17:14):
He dreamed of his wife. You don't live here, Kim.
She was right, of course. He wasn't of earth, never
had been. My love is in the sky, he thought,
filled with an immense satisfaction, and time slipped by. The
weeks into months, the sun dwindled and earth was gone.
(17:35):
All around him lay the stunning, star dusted night. He
lay curled in the plastic womb. When the ship turned,
he awoke sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness. I've changed,
he thought aloud. My face is younger. I feel different.
The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill.
(17:57):
Below him, a great curving disc of red and browns
and yellows. He could see dust storms raging, and the heavy,
darkened lines of the canals. There was skill in his hands.
He righted the rocket, balanced it began the tricky task
of landing. It took all of his talent, all of
his training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand. Slowly,
(18:22):
the internal fires dyed. Kimball stood in the control room,
his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports opened through the thick quartz.
He could see the endless plain, reddish brown, empty, the
basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,
(18:43):
burning blue, with stars shining at mid day at the zenith.
It looked unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.
What is reality? Kimmi Steinhardt was right, he thought vaguely.
A tear streaked his cheek. He had never been so alone,
And then he imagined he saw something moving on the
(19:05):
great plane. He scrambled down through the ship, past the
empty fuel tanks and lashed supplies. His hands were clawing
desperately at the dogs of the outer valve. Suddenly the
pressure jerked the hatch from his hands, and he gasped
at the icy air, his lungs laboring to breathe. He
dropped to one knee and sucked at the thin, frigid air.
(19:28):
His vision was cloudy and his head felt light. But
there was something moving on the plane, a shadowy cavalcade,
strange monstrous men on fantastic warm outs, long spears and
fluttering pennons, huge golden chariots with sighs flashing on the
circling hubs, and armored giants, the figments of a long
(19:49):
remembered dream. He dropped to the sand and dug his
hands into the dry, powdery soil. He could scarcely see now,
for blackness was flickering at the edges of his vision,
and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse. Gimie,
a huge green warrior on a gray monster of thoat,
(20:10):
was beckoning to him, pointing towards the low hills on
the oddly near horizon. Gim me. The voice was thin
and distant on the icy wind. Kimbal knew that voice.
He knew it from long ago, in the valley door
from the shores of the lost Sea of Chorus, where
the tideless waters lay black and deep. He began stumbling
(20:34):
across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice, he
knew the man, and he knew the hills that he
must reach quickly now or die. They were the Hills
of Home. End of the Hills of Home by Alfred
(20:58):
Copple
The Hills of Home by Alfred Coppel. Normality is a
myth where all a little neurotic, and the study of
neurosis has been able to classify the general types of
disturbance which are most common, and some types, providing the
(00:21):
subject is not suffering so extreme a case as to
have crossed the border into psychosis, can be not only
useful but perhaps necessary for certain kinds of work. The
river ran still and deep, green and gray in the eddies,
with the warm smell of late summer rising out of
(00:44):
the slow water, madrone and birch and willow limp in
the evening quiet, and the taste of smoldering leaves. It
wasn't the Russian River. It was the Sacred iss. The
sun had touched the gem encrusted cliffs by the shores
of the Lost Sea of Chorus and had vanished, leaving
(01:07):
only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry
of the shore birds. From downstream came the faint sounds
of music. It might have been a phonograph playing in
one of the summer cabins with names like Pollannroost and
Patches and Seventh Heaven. But to Kimmi it was the
hated cry of the father of Thurns, calling the dreadful
(01:30):
plant men to their feast of victims born into this
valley door by the mysterious iss. Kimmie shifted the heavy
Martian pistol into his left hand and checked his harness.
A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed.
There was nothing he had to fear from the plant men.
(01:52):
His bare feet turned up stream, away from the sound
of the phonograph, toward the shallows in the river that
would permit him to cross and continue his search along
the base of the Golden cliffs. The sergeant's voice cut
through the pre dawn darkness. O. Three hundred, Colonel briefing
in thirty minutes. Kimball tried to see him in the
(02:13):
black gloom. He hadn't been asleep. It would have been
hard to waste this last night that way. Instead, he
had been remembering, all right, Sergeant, he said, coming up.
He swung to his feet to the bare boards and
sat for a moment, wishing he hadn't had to give
up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured taste of
(02:35):
the cigarette on his tongue. Oddly enough, he wasn't tired
he wasn't excited either, and that was much stranger. He
stood up and opened the window to look out into
the desert night. Overhead. The stars were brilliant and cold.
Mars gleamed russet colored against the sable sky. He smiled,
(02:56):
remembering again, so long a road, he thought, from then
to now. Then he stopped smiling and turned away from
the window. It hadn't been an easy path, and what
was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddamn
Sykes were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out
on the deal, because of their brain wave graphs and
word association tests and the rochard blots. You're a lonely man,
(03:20):
Colonel Kimball. Too much imagination could be bad for this job.
How could you sit there, with pentathal in your veins
and wires running out of your head and tell them
about the still waters of Chorus, or the pennons flying
from the twin towers of Greater Helium, or the way
the tiny slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigor
of a flier. Kimball snapped on a light and looked
(03:42):
at his watch. O three ten zero minus one fifty.
He opened the steel locker and began to dress. The
water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There behind
that madrone, he thought, was that a plant man. The
(04:03):
thick white trunk and the grasping, blood sucking arms. The
radium pistol's weight made his wrist ache, but he clung
to it tightly, knowing that he could never cope with
a plant man with a sword alone. The certainty of
coming battle made him smile a little, the way John
Carter would smile if he were here in the valley door,
(04:23):
ready to attack the white Thorns and their plant men.
For a moment, Kimmie felt a thrill of apprehension. The
deepening stillness of the river was closing in around him.
Even the music from the phonograph was very, very faint.
Above him, the great vault of the sky was changing
from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star
(04:46):
was breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew
it was Venus, the evening star. But let it be Earth,
he thought, and instead of white, let it be the
color of an emerald. He paused in mid street, letting
the water riffle around his feet, looking up at the
green beacon of his home planet. He thought, I've left
(05:07):
all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted.
Mars is where I belong with my friends Tars, Tarkas,
the Great Green Jeddak, and Carter the Warlord, and all
the beautiful, brave people. The phonograph sang, with Vali's voice,
cradle me, where southern skies can watch me with the
(05:31):
million eyes. Kimi's eyes narrowed, and he waded stealthily across
the sacred river that would be Matai Shang, the father
of the Holy Therns, spreading his arms to the sunset
and standing safely on his high balcony in the golden
cliffs where the plant men gathered to attack. The poor
Pilgrim's hiss had brought to this cursed valley. Sing me
(05:53):
to sleep, Lullaby of the Leaves. The phonograph sang, Kimmi stay,
kept cautiously ashore, and moved into the cover of a
clump of willows. The sky was darkening first, other stars
were shining through. There wasn't much time left. Kimball now
(06:14):
stood in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a
strange figure in blood colored plastic. The representatives of the
press had been handed the mimeographed releases by the p RO,
and now they sat in silence, studying the red figure
of the man who was to ride the rocket. They
were thinking, why him? Out of all the scores of applicants,
(06:35):
because there are always applicants for a sure death job,
and all the qualified pilots, why this one? The public
relations officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeod release,
as though these civilians couldn't be trusted to get the
sparse information given them straight without his help. Given grudgingly
and without expression. Kimball listened, only half aware of what
(06:57):
was being said. He watched the faces of the men
sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes
like wounds, read from the early morning hour and the
murmuring reception of the night before in the officer's club.
They are wondering how I feel, he was thinking, and
asking themselves why I want to go on The dais
near by, listening to the p r O but watching Kimball,
(07:19):
sat Steinhardt, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze,
thinking they start out burning with desire to cure the
human mind, and end with the shadow of the images,
the words become the fact, the therapy, the aim. What
could Steinhardt know of longing? No, he thought, I'm not
being fair. Steinhardt was only doing his job. The big
(07:42):
clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said
three fifty five zero minus one hour and five minutes.
Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the
open mouths. What have I to do with you now?
He thought? Outside, the winter night lay cold and still
(08:02):
over the base. Floodlets spilt brilliance over the dunes and
the scrubby earth high fences, casting laced shadows across the
burning white expanses of ferro concrete. As they filed out
of the briefing shack, Steinhardt climbed into the command car
with Kimball. Chance or design. Kimball wondered. The others he
(08:23):
noticed were leaving both of them alone. We haven't gotten
on too well, have we, Colonel Steinhardt observed in a
quiet voice. Kimball thought, he's pale skinned and very blond.
What is it that he reminds me of? Shouldn't there
be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled vaguely into
the rumbling night. That's what It was odd that he
(08:46):
should have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were
weaned on Burrow's books, and how many remembered now that
the Thurn priests all wore yellow wings and a circlet
of gold with some fantastic jewel on their forehead. We've
done a well as could be expected, he said. Steinhardt
reached for a cigarette and then stopped, remembering that Kimball
(09:06):
had had to give them up because of the flight.
Kimball caught the movement and half smiled. I didn't try
to kill the assignment for you, kim The sike said,
it doesn't matter now, no, I suppose not. You just
didn't think I was the man for the job. Your
record is good all the way. You know that, Steinhardt said,
(09:30):
it's just some of the things. Kimball said, I talked
too much. You had to. You wouldn't think my secret
life was so dangerous, would you? The colonel said, smiling,
You were married, kim What happened more therapy? I'd like
to know this is for me. Kimball shrugged. It didn't work.
(09:53):
She was a fine girl, but she finally told me
it was no go. You don't live here was the
way she put it. She knew you were a career officer.
What did she expect? That isn't what she meant? You
know that, yes, the sike said slowly, I know that.
They rode in silence across the dark base, between the
(10:16):
concrete sheds and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like
dust across the sky. Kimball, swathed in plastic, A fantastic
figure not of earth, watched them wheel across the clear,
deep night. I wish you luck, kim Steinhardt said, I
mean that, thanks, vaguely, as though from across a deep
(10:38):
and widening gulf. What will you do? You know? The
answers as well as I. The colonel said, impatiently, set
up the camp and wait for the next rocket if
it comes in two years. In two years, the plastic
figure said, didn't he know that? It didn't matter? He
glanced at his watch zero minus fifty. Kim Steinhardt said, slowly,
(11:04):
there's something you should know about, something you really should
be prepared for. Yes, disinterest in his voice. Now, Steinhardt noted,
clinically natural under the circumstances or neurosis building up already,
our tests showed you to be a schizoid well compensated.
(11:24):
Of course, you know there's no such thing as a
normal human being. We will have tendencies towards one or
more types of psychoses. In your case, the symptoms are
overly active imagination and in some cases an inability to
distinguish reality from well fancy. Kimball turned to regard the
psych coolly. What's reality, Steinhardt, do you know? The analyst flushed. No,
(11:51):
I didn't think so. You lived pretty much in your
mind when you were a child, Steinhardt went on, doggedly.
You were a solitary, lonely child. Kimball was watching the
sky again. Steinhardt felt futile and out of his depth.
We know so little about the psychology of space flight,
kim Silence, the rumble of the tires on the packed
(12:17):
sand of the road, the murmur of the command car's
engine spinning oilily and lit by tiny sun bright flashes
deep in the hollows of the hot metal. You're glad
to be leaving, aren't you, Steinhardt said, finally, happy to
be the first man to try for the planets. Kimball nodded, absently,
(12:38):
wishing the man would be quiet. Mars a dull, rusty
point of light low on the horizon seemed to beckon.
They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the
lighted bowl of the launching sight. The rocket towered, winged,
and monstrously checkered in white and orange against the first
flickerings of the false dawn. Kimmie saw the girls before
(13:03):
they saw him. In their new, low waisted middies and skirts,
they looked strange and out of place, standing by the
pebbled shore of the River iss. They were his sisters,
Rose and Margaret, older than he at fifteen and seventeen,
but they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him,
he could hear the rustling sound of the plant men
as the evening breeze came up. Kimmie. They were calling
(13:29):
him in the deepening dusk. Their voices carried far down
the river. Kim Me. He knew he should answer them,
but he did not. Behind him, he could hear the
awful plant men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror. He
stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their
(13:51):
voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers
of the valley door. Where is that little brat? Anyway,
he always wanders off just at dinner time, and then
we have to find him playing with that old forcet
mimicry my radium pistol cracked, just cracked. Oh where is
(14:11):
he anyway, kimmey, you answer, something died in him. It
wasn't a forcet, It was a radium pistol. He looked
at his sisters with dismay. They weren't really his sisters.
They were thurns with their yellow hair and their pale skins.
He and John Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them
(14:32):
many times, piling their bodies for barricades and weaving a
flashing pattern of skillful swords in the shifting light of
the two moons. Kimmy, one's going to be mad at
you answer us. If only Tars Tarkas would come now,
if only the great Green Jeddak would come splashing across
the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords clashing.
(14:56):
He's up there in that clump of willows, hiding. Kimmi,
you come down here this instant. The valley door was blurring, fading,
The golden cliffs were turning into sandy river worn banks.
The faucet felt heavy, in his grimy hand. He shivered,
not with horror, now with cold. He walked slowly out
(15:20):
of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks. He
lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship,
protected and quite alone. The plastic sack contained him, fed him,
and the rocket, silent now coursed through the airless, deep,
like a questing thought. Time was measured by the ticking
(15:41):
of the telemeters and the timers. But Kimball slept, insulated
and complete, and he dreamed. He dreamed of that summer
when the river lay still and deep under the hanging willows.
He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures as
he remembered them through the eyes of a nine year old,
and his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch
(16:04):
of the rented cottage and saying, exasperatedly, why do you
run off by yourself, KIMMI, I worry about you. So
and his sisters, playing with his wooden sword and his
radiant pistol, and never wanted to take his nose out
of those awful books. He dreamed of the low beamed
ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the heat of the
(16:25):
summer nights, and the thick longing in his throat for
red hills and a sky that burned deep blue through
the long, long days, and canals, clear and still, a
land that he knew, somehow never was, but which lived
for him through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed
of Mars and Steinehart. What is reality, Kimmie. The hours
(16:50):
stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn't. Time
was a deep night and a star shot void and dreams.
He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sack
and the tender care of the ship were more real
than the routine jobs of telemetering information back to the
base across the empty miles, across the rim of the world.
(17:14):
He dreamed of his wife. You don't live here, Kim.
She was right, of course. He wasn't of earth, never
had been. My love is in the sky, he thought,
filled with an immense satisfaction, and time slipped by. The
weeks into months, the sun dwindled and earth was gone.
(17:35):
All around him lay the stunning, star dusted night. He
lay curled in the plastic womb. When the ship turned,
he awoke sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness. I've changed,
he thought aloud. My face is younger. I feel different.
The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill.
(17:57):
Below him, a great curving disc of red and browns
and yellows. He could see dust storms raging, and the heavy,
darkened lines of the canals. There was skill in his hands.
He righted the rocket, balanced it began the tricky task
of landing. It took all of his talent, all of
his training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand. Slowly,
(18:22):
the internal fires dyed. Kimball stood in the control room,
his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports opened through the thick quartz.
He could see the endless plain, reddish brown, empty, the
basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,
(18:43):
burning blue, with stars shining at mid day at the zenith.
It looked unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.
What is reality? Kimmi Steinhardt was right, he thought vaguely.
A tear streaked his cheek. He had never been so alone,
And then he imagined he saw something moving on the
(19:05):
great plane. He scrambled down through the ship, past the
empty fuel tanks and lashed supplies. His hands were clawing
desperately at the dogs of the outer valve. Suddenly the
pressure jerked the hatch from his hands, and he gasped
at the icy air, his lungs laboring to breathe. He
dropped to one knee and sucked at the thin, frigid air.
(19:28):
His vision was cloudy and his head felt light. But
there was something moving on the plane, a shadowy cavalcade,
strange monstrous men on fantastic warm outs, long spears and
fluttering pennons, huge golden chariots with sighs flashing on the
circling hubs, and armored giants, the figments of a long
(19:49):
remembered dream. He dropped to the sand and dug his
hands into the dry, powdery soil. He could scarcely see now,
for blackness was flickering at the edges of his vision,
and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse. Gimie,
a huge green warrior on a gray monster of thoat,
(20:10):
was beckoning to him, pointing towards the low hills on
the oddly near horizon. Gim me. The voice was thin
and distant on the icy wind. Kimbal knew that voice.
He knew it from long ago, in the valley door
from the shores of the lost Sea of Chorus, where
the tideless waters lay black and deep. He began stumbling
(20:34):
across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice, he
knew the man, and he knew the hills that he
must reach quickly now or die. They were the Hills
of Home. End of the Hills of Home by Alfred
(20:58):
Copple
Popular Podcasts
Law & Order: Criminal Justice System - Season 1 & Season 2
Season Two Out Now! Law & Order: Criminal Justice System tells the real stories behind the landmark cases that have shaped how the most dangerous and influential criminals in America are prosecuted. In its second season, the series tackles the threat of terrorism in the United States. From the rise of extremist political groups in the 60s to domestic lone wolves in the modern day, we explore how organizations like the FBI and Joint Terrorism Take Force have evolved to fight back against a multitude of terrorist threats.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.