Mars Is Heaven
Storyboard Text
- The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the blackvelocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. In it were seventeen men, including a captain.
- Mars!
- Good Old Mars!
- The rocket landed on ahe rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring
- Hold on, How do we know what this is?
- It’s a small town with thin but breathable air in it, sir. And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns
- Look at the wood on the porch newel; look at the trees, a century old, all of them! No, this isn’t York’s work or Williams’. It’s something else. I don’t like it. And I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is
- I want to get out into this town, sir, with your permission. We may be on the threshold oft he greatest psychological and metaphysical discovery of our age!
- Certainly a town like this could not occurwithout divine intervention. The detail. It fills me with such feelings that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry
- When were you born?
- Nineteen fifty, sir
- Nineteen fifty-five, sir. Grinnell, Iowa. And this looks like home tome.
- John Black rang the bell. Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hall, and a kind-faced lady of some 40 years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them
- I’m just 80 years old. Born in 1920 in Illinois, and here I am on Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but infinitely more suspicious. This town out here looks very peaceful and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens me.
- Tell you what we’ll do, the three of us will look the town over. The other men’ll stay aboard. If anything happens they can get the hell out. A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens, our crew can warn the next rocket.
- Sir, it must be, it has to be, that rocket travel to Mars began in the years before the First World War
- And they came up here to live, and naturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they brought the culture with them
- Maybe they made a few trips, enough to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped for fear of being discovered. That’s why this town seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see anything, myself, older than the year 1927, do you?
- You make it sound almost reasonable. All we have to do is find some people and verify it
- Can I help you?
- What town is this? We're from earth
- This is Green Bluff, Illinois, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on a place called the world, or, sometimes, the Earth. Go away now. Good-bye
- We went past the Moon and out into space, and here we are. I’m positive we’re on Mars.
- Did it ever strike you that perhaps we got ourselvessomehow, in some way, off track, and by accident came back and landed on Earth
- 1926, of course
- What year is this?
- 1926! We have gone back in time! This is Earth
- Will anyone in this town believe us? Are we playing with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn’t we just take off and go home?
- Not until we try another house
- Look! Look!
- Grandma! Grandpa!
- David, oh, David, it’s been so many years! How you’ve grown, boy; how big you are, boy. Oh, David boy!
- How long have you been here, grandpa?
- Ever since you what?!
- Yes, we've been dead 30 years.
- Ever since we died.
- We’ve got to be going. Thank you for the drinks
- Is this heaven?
- Nonsense, no. It’s a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. I mean. The one you came from
- They abandoned the ship, they did! I’ll have their skins, by God! They had orders
- Don’t be too hard on them. Those were all old relatives and friends. Think how they felt, Captain, seeing familiar faces outside the ship
- Mom and Dad are waiting!
- John!!
- Ed, what is this? You haven’t changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you were 26 and I was 19!
- Ed! This is my brother Edward. Ed, meet my men
- Mom and Dad!
- No, don’t think that, Don’t question. God’s good to us. Let’s be happy
- I fear that I’ll wake in the morning,’ And I’ll be in my rocket, in space, and all this will be gone
- You’re tired. Son. Your old bedroom’s waiting for you, brass bed and all
- Yes. She’s out of town. But she’ll be here in the morning
- This is it.
- So this is mars?
- Is Marilyn here?
- How? How was all this made? And why? For what purpose? Out of the goodness of some divine intervention? Was God, then, really that thoughtful of his children? How and why and what for?
- Goodnight Ed.
- Goodnight John.
- From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes, and along the sun-filled street, weeping, came the grandmas and mothers and sisters and brothers and uncles and fathers, walking to the churchyard
- Who had lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been the way it was today?
- Suppose all of these houses aren’t real at all, this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians. Suppose these houses are really some othershape, a Martian shape, but, by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old hometown, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions. What better way tof ool a man, using his own mother and father as bait?
- First, fool Lustig, then Hinkston, then gather a crowd; and all the men int he rocket, seeing family , dead 10, 20 years ago, naturally, disregarding orders, rush out and abandon ship. What more natural? What more unsuspecting? And here we all are tonight, in various houses, with no weapons to protect us. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us?
- Sixteen holes in all, and sixteen tombstones
- perhaps my brother here on this bed will change form, melt, shift, and become a Martian. It would be very simple for him just to turn over in bed and put a knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street, a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth
- Mother and Father Black, Edward, Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping, their faces shifting like wax, shimmering as all things shimmer on a hot day. Their faces melting now from a familiar face into something else.
- Yes, Yes I am.
- For a drink of water
- But Captain John Black never reached the door...
- where do you think you’re going?
- But you’re not thirsty
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