Long After Midnight

Craig didn’t move. “For the same reason?”

Beck nodded.

“For a damned bottle! I don’t understand. Why does everyone want it?”

Beck got out of the car. “Those that found it, they never told, they never explained. But—it’s old. Old as the desert, as the dead seas—and it might contain anything. That’s what the legend says. And because it could hold anything—well, that stirs a man’s hunger.”

“Yours, not mine,” said Craig. His mouth barely moved; his eyes were half-shut, faintly amused. He stretched lazily. “I’m just along for the ride. Better watching you than sitting in the heat.”

Beck had stumbled upon the old landcar a month back, before Craig had joined him. It was part of the flotsam of the First Industrial Invasion of Mars that had ended when the race moved on toward the stars. He had worked on the motor and run it from city to dead city, through the lands of the idlers and roustabouts, the dreamers and lazers, men caught in the backwash of space, men like himself and Craig who had never wanted to do much of anything and had found Mars a fine place to do it in.

“Five thousand, ten thousand years back the Martians made the Blue Bottle,” said Beck. “Blown from Martian glass—and lost and found and lost and found again and again.”

He stared into the wavering heat shimmer of the dead city. All my life, thought Beck, I’ve done nothing and nothing inside the nothing. Others, better men, have done big things, gone off to Mercury, or Venus, or out beyond the System. Except me. Not me. But the Blue Bottle can change all that.

He turned and walked away from the silent car.

Craig was out and after him, moving easily along. “What is it now, ten years you’ve hunted? You twitch when you sleep, wake up in fits, sweat through the days. You want the damn bottle that bad, and don’t know what’s in it. You’re a fool, Beck.”

“Shut up, shut up,” said Beck, kicking a slide of pebbles out of his way.

They walked together into the ruined city, over a mosaic of cracked tiles shaped into a stone tapestry of fragile Martian creatures, long-dead beasts which appeared and disappeared as a slight breath of wind stirred the silent dust.

“Wait,” said Beck. He cupped his hands to his mouth and gave a great shout. “You there!”

“… there,” said an echo, and towers fell. Fountains and stone pillars folded into themselves. That was the way of these cities. Sometimes towers as beautiful as a symphony would fall at a spoken word. It was like watching a Bach cantata disintegrate before your eyes.

A moment later: bones buried in bones. The dust settled. Two structures remained intact.

Beck stepped forward, nodding to his friend.

They moved in search.

And, searching, Craig paused, a faint smile on his lips. “In that bottle,” he said, “is there a little accordion woman, all folded up like one of those tin cups, or like one of those Japanese flowers you put in water and it opens out?”

“I don’t need a woman.”

“Maybe you do. Maybe you never had a real woman, a woman who loved you, so, secretly, that’s what you hope is in it.” Craig pursed his mouth. “Or maybe, in that bottle, something from your childhood. All in a tiny bundle—a lake, a tree you climbed, green grass, some crayfish. How’s that sound?”

Beck’s eyes focused on a distant point. “Sometimes—that’s almost it. The past—Earth. I don’t know.”

Craig nodded. “What’s in the bottle would depend, maybe, on who’s looking. Now, if there was a shot of whiskey in it …”

“Keep looking,” said Beck.

There were seven rooms filled with glitter and shine; from floor to tiered ceiling there were casks, crocks, magnums, urns, vases—fashioned of red, pink, yellow, violet, and black glass. Beck shattered them, one by one, to eliminate them, to get them out of the way so he would never have to go through them again.

Beck finished his room, stood ready to invade the next. He was almost afraid to go on. Afraid that this time he would find it; that the search would be over and the meaning would go out of his life. Only after he had heard of the Blue Bottle from fire-travelers all the way from Venus to Jupiter, ten years ago, had life begun to take on a purpose. The fever had lit him and he had burned steadily ever since. If he worked it properly, the prospect of finding the bottle might fill his entire life to the brim. Another thirty years, if he was careful and not too diligent, of search, never admitting aloud that it wasn’t the bottle that counted at all, but the search, the running and the hunting, the dust and the cities and the going-on.

Beck heard a muffled sound. He turned and walked to a window looking out into the courtyard. A small gray sand cycle had purred up almost noiselessly at the end of the street. A plump man with blond hair eased himself off the spring seat and stood looking into the city. Another searcher. Beck sighed. Thousands of them, searching and searching. But there were thousands of brittle cities and towns and villages and it would take a millennium to sift them all.

“How you doing?” Craig appeared in a doorway.

“No luck.” Beck sniffed the air. “Do you smell anything?”

“What?” Craig looked about.

“Smells like—bourbon.”

“Ho!” Craig laughed. “That’s me!”

“You?”

“I just took a drink. Found it in the other room. Shoved some stuff around, a mess of bottles, like always, and one of them had some bourbon in it, so I had myself a drink.”

Beck was staring at him, beginning to tremble. “What—what would bourbon be doing here, in a Martian bottle?” His hands were cold. He took a slow step forward. “Show me!”

“I’m sure that …”

“Show me, damn you!”

It was there, in one corner of the room, a container of Martian glass as blue as the sky, the size of a small fruit, light and airy in Beck’s hand as he set it down upon a table.

“It’s half-full of bourbon,” said Craig.

“I don’t see anything inside,” said Beck.

“Then shake it.”

Beck picked it up, gingerly shook it.

“Hear it gurgle?”

“No.”

“I can hear it plain.”

Beck replaced it on the table. Sunlight spearing through a side window struck blue flashes off the slender container. It was the blue of a star held in the hand. It was the blue of a shallow ocean bay at noon. It was the blue of a diamond at morning.

“This is it,” said Beck quietly. “I know it is. We don’t have to look anymore. We’ve found the Blue Bottle.”

Craig looked skeptical. “Sure you don’t see anything in it?”

“Nothing … But—” Beck bent close and peered deeply into the blue universe of glass. “Maybe if I open it up and let it out, whatever it is, I’ll know.”

“I put the stopper in tight. Here.” Craig reached out.

“If you gentlemen will excuse me,” said a voice in the door behind them.