We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down toward us. We ducked under the stairs into the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The monster crashed upon the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I, holding tight, while our world exploded.
Then it was over, and there was nothing but darkness and the wash of the sea on the raw stones.
That and the other sound.
“Listen,” said McDunn quietly. “Listen.”
We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone’s thickness away from our cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had called to it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. The sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night, must’ve thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All’s well. We’ve rounded the cape.
And so it went for the rest of that night.
The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the rescuers came out to dig us from our stoned-under cellar.
“It fell apart, is all,” said Mr. McDunn gravely. “We had a few bad knocks from the waves and it just crumbled.” He pinched my arm.
There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing was a great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the fallen tower stones and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed empty on the shore.
The next year they built a new lighthouse, but by that time I had a job in the little town and a wife and a good small warm house that glowed yellow on autumn nights, the doors locked, the chimney puffing smoke. As for McDunn, he was master of the new lighthouse, built to his own specifications, out of steel-reinforced concrete. “Just in case,” he said.
The new lighthouse was ready in November. I drove down alone one evening late and parked my car and looked across the gray waters and listened to the new horn sounding, once, twice, three, four times a minute far out there, by itself.
The monster?
It never came back.
“It’s gone away,” said McDunn. “It’s gone back to the Deeps. It’s learned you can’t love anything too much in this world. It’s gone into the deepest Deeps to wait another million years. Ah, the poor thing! Waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. Waiting and waiting.”
I sat in my car, listening. I couldn’t see the lighthouse or the light standing out in Lonesome Bay. I could only hear the Horn, the Horn, the Horn. It sounded like the monster calling.
I sat there wishing there was something I could say.
Many nights Fiorello Bodoni would awaken to hear the rockets sighing in the dark sky. He would tiptoe from bed, certain that his kind wife was dreaming, to let himself out into the night air. For a few moments he would be free of the smells of old food in the small house by the river. For a silent moment he would let his heart soar alone into space, following the rockets.
Now, this very night, he stood half naked in the darkness, watching the fire fountains murmuring in the air. The rockets on their long wild way to Mars and Saturn and Venus!
“Well, well, Bodoni.”
Bodoni started.
On a milk crate, by the silent river, sat an old man who also watched the rockets through the midnight hush.
“Oh, it’s you, Bramante!”
“Do you come out every night, Bodoni?”
“Only for the air.”
“So? I prefer the rockets myself,” said old Bramante. “I was a boy when they started. Eighty years ago, and I’ve never been on one yet.”
“I will ride up in one someday,” said Bodoni.
“Fool!” cried Bramante. “You’ll never go. This is a rich man’s world.” He shook his gray head, remembering. “When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters: THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE! Science, Comfort, and New Things for All! Ha! Eighty years. The Future becomes Now! Do we fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us.”
“Perhaps my sons—” said Bodoni.
“No, nor their sons!” the old man shouted. “It’s the rich who have dreams and rockets!”
Bodoni hesitated. “Old man, I’ve saved three thousand dollars. It took me six years to save it. For my business, to invest in machinery. But every night for a month now I’ve been awake. I hear the rockets. I think. And tonight I’ve made up my mind. One of us will fly to Mars!” His eyes were shining and dark.
“Idiot,” snapped Bramante. “How will you choose? Who will go? If you go, your wife will hate you, for you will be just a bit nearer God, in space. When you tell your amazing trip to her, over the years, won’t bitterness gnaw at her?”
“No, no!”
“Yes! And your children? Will their lives be filled with the memory of Papa, who flew to Mars while they stayed here? What a senseless task you will set your boys. They will think of the rocket all their lives. They will lie awake. They will be sick with wanting it. Just as you are sick now. They will want to die if they cannot go. Don’t set that goal, I warn you. Let them be content with being poor. Turn their eyes down to their hands and to your junkyard, not up to the stars.”
“But—”
“Suppose your wife went? How would you feel, knowing she had seen and you had not? She would become holy. You would think of throwing her in the river. No, Bodoni, buy a new wrecking machine, which you need, and pull your dreams apart with it, and smash them to pieces.”
The old man subsided, gazing at the river in which, drowned, images of rockets burned down the sky.
“Good night,” said Bodoni.
“Sleep well,” said the other.
When the toast jumped from its silver box, Bodoni almost screamed. The night had been sleepless. Among his nervous children, beside his mountainous wife, Bodoni had twisted and stared at nothing. Bramante was right. Better to invest the money. Why save it when only one of the family could ride the rocket, while the others remained to melt in frustration?
“Fiorello, eat your toast,” said his wife, Maria.
“My throat is shriveled,” said Bodoni.
The children rushed in, the three boys fighting over a toy rocket, the two girls carrying dolls which duplicated the inhabitants of Mars, Venus, and Neptune, green mannequins with three yellow eyes and twelve fingers.
“I saw the Venus rocket!” cried Paolo.
“It took off, whoosh!” hissed Antonello.
“Children!” shouted Bodoni, hands to his ears.
They stared at him. He seldom shouted.
Bodoni arose. “Listen, all of you,” he said. “I have enough money to take one of us on the Mars rocket.”
Everyone yelled.
“You understand?” he asked. “Only one of us. Who?”
“Me, me, me!” cried the children.
“You,”