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The boy Ben, thirteen years old, sits tense and wide-eyed before the screen of the theater, in the town in Tarlac. His heart thumps in awe and excitement, and his hands are balled into unconscious fists, as the spaceship burns its blue-flamed journey through the night of the universe that is forever silent with a high metallic hum.

Enclosed in time within the rocket, the ship itself surrounded by timelessness, which is in turn framed by the boundaries of the cinema screen, the last men and women and children of Earth watch the asteroids, the streams of cosmic dust, the barren planets drift past the portholes like luminous flowers at once beautiful and monstrous, floating in the ocean of space. The travelers search the night for another world of air and greenness, remembering the end of Earth, the Final War, the flickering radioactive fires upon the lifeless continents. Beyond the dead seas of Mars, and beyond the ice-bound tomb of Neptune, past the orbit of Pluto and out into the black immeasurable depths, the rocket flashes onward, through years of space and time: a moving speck among the untwinkling stars, propelled by the flame of its engines and a certain destiny. A sun looms up from the blackness, more golden and more gentle than the star they have always known; and as a globe of shining water and green-shadowed land appears through the viewports, they break out into jubilant cries and dazed whispers of thanks to God.

Cradled by a final blast of power, the spacecraft lands on a meadow: a quiet moment before the airlocks open, a sigh of wind in the nearby trees. The survivors of Earth climb down onto the grass, and the filmed prophecy ends with them gathered as on a pilgrimage beneath the vertical cylinder of their rocket, looking out across the plain to the hills green in the light of the new sun.

The curtains close the window of the screen and an amplified phonograph scratches out a tired rhumba: there is a brief scramble for vacated seats, the usual reluctant shuffling toward the exits after a show. Ben thinks of staying for one more screening, but his friend Pepe has stood up to leave, waving to him from the aisle; besides, the picture is rather long, and he would be late for supper. He would come back tomorrow, anyway; he had saved enough for a month of weekend movies.

He and Pepe go up the aisle, stepping on brittle peanut shells and candy tinfoil: in the diffuse light, the audience waits for the lovely and terrible dream. They make way for Mr. Rodriguez and Dr. Concepcion coming in through the door, and they come upon his cousin Teddy at the ticket-booth. Good show? Ben nods half-absently, not quite released from the influence of the dream.

It is early evening in the town: night has fallen upon half of Earth.

The main street is busy and bright with the lights of the evening: horse-drawn calesas jingle by and the jeepneys, bound for the neighboring town, belch their dusty gasoline smell into the warm air. The two boys linger before the moviehouse and look up at the photo stills tacked on the display board: the nuclear-bombed cities, New York and Paris and London, where no man would ever breathe and walk again; tomorrow’s spaceship, flaming meteor-like in the night of space; the faces of the last people, brave before the vast and unexplored night.

Ben looks up at the pictures, and he feels again, deep in a silence within him, like the vibration of invisible wires, the hum of the universe, the movement of planets and stars. He turns to his friend in a kind of impatience, his eyes bright, his chest tightening: he begins to speak, but the hum and the movement cannot be uttered. C’mon, Ben, says Pepe, and they cross the street away from the sound and glare of the theater, through the small belling tinkle of the calesas and the warm gasoline dust, while the strangeness within him strains almost like a pain for utterance.

*  *  *  *  *

They saunter down the main street in the manner of boys who have no immediate reason for hurry, lazy-legged and curious-eyed. It is Saturday evening, and there are more than the ordinary number of pedestrians on the street; his father would not be home till after eight, and supper would be delayed for him. They pause to examine the window display of the Victory Bazaar, arranged around an air-rifle, smooth-stacked and steel-blue-barreled: he wonders how long it would take to save for the gun’s price.

A bus has just arrived at the terminal shed in front of the Vilmar Cafe, and the passengers are coming out into the street with the luggage and the fatigue of their journey. A man carrying a sleeping child counts his bags on the steel-matting floor of the station: a tall beautiful woman shakes loose her long hair, and an old man is blinking at the lights of the town. Above the general clamor, the hot oil exhaust of the trucks, there is a sense of countless miles of road, of distances reached or still untraveled. Even as the newly-arrived brush the dust off their clothes, another bus is set to roll out of the shed, packed with people going away and going home.

Dr. Martinez stands by the door of his wife’s drugstore and Ben and Pepe say good evening, and the doctor says hello there, boys, laughing his baritone, indulgent laugh. A jeep parks before the Plaza Cool Spot and two boys and three girls get off and crowd about the counter: Ben hears one of the boys ordering chocolate ice-cream, and the girls teasing, Ay, is that all? They come to the plaza: children are roller-skating around the bandstand, and the stars are clear in the sudden night over the town.

The two boys get up on a bench and sit on the backrest and watch the skating children. In the white light of the neon lamps, the continuous rumbling sound of the skates rises and falls with the quality of the cemented rink: now hollow and receding, now full and ascending, going around, seemingly unending. Tito comes by and joins them atop the bench; they talk of a swim in San Miguel tomorrow morning; they agree to meet here, at the kiosko, after the nine o’clock Mass. After a few random topics, from basketball to the new swept-winged jets that passed over the town during the day, the talk shifts to the movie Ben and Pepe have just seen. Tito does not go for that kind of picture, so fantastic, he says, so untrue to life. Better the war movies, and the Westerns, and any film with sharks or alligators.

With every second the night deepens in the sky. As though in obedience to some secret signal, Ben looks up at the stars. The Southern Cross hangs in the meridian: the half-man and half-horse in Centaurus rides over the acacias, and the Milky Way is a pale misted river dividing the sky. The stars are faraway suns . . . The strangeness stirs in silence within him: the unknowable words die stillborn in his mind, and the boy joins in the casual joking conversation, while the rumble of the skates rises and falls, around and around, as if forever, and the stars swing across the sky.

I wonder if there are people on Mars — like in the comics . . .

If there are any, says Tito, they’d look like Mr. Guzman.

Just because he flunked you in Algebra.

Do you think people will ever get to the moon?

Aah, nobody’s going to land on the moon; says Tito, there’s no air up there.

They’ll bring their oxygen in the rocketship.

Moon, rocketship, Mars — what kind of crazy talk is that?

All right, says Pepe, tell us about that love letter you sent Marita.

Letter? Marita? I didn’t write her any letter, says Tito. Who told you I did?

The girls in class were passing it around yesterday, didn’t you know that?

The three boys hoot and shake with laughter: Tito loses his balance and falls exaggeratedly on the grass and pretends to pass out cold from the shock of the news. Ben and Pepe tickle him to life, and they wrestle on the grass: an old man and two women strolling by peer at them frowningly, and suddenly shy, they rise from their mock struggle, weak with laughter. By a common impulse, habitual with the young, bewildering to the grown-up, they race across the plaza to where the main street curves before the church, and they sit panting on the low guard of the culvert, warm and happy from their running.

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With comic farewells, the three boys part ways, Ben walks home alone, back across the plaza, past the skaters and the lampposts of the kiosko, the border of trees and the town hall. The empty house on Romulo Street stares at him through a veil of vines, like a sick old woman abandoned by her children. The electric plant by the river thunders compressedly as he goes by, the massive dynamos producing heat and light: it is as though he were discovering the power of the machines for the first time, quivering in the air, trembling underground.

On the bridge, he stops to gaze up at the sky: the far edge of the river, without trees or houses, planes into a horizon; the stars seem to rise from the dark of the land and the water.

He stands alone on the bridge, and he is suddenly lonely, the vast humming turning within him, waiting: for a streak of blue flame, a signal-flare among the stars. Where and why . . . Thousands of years away by the speed of light, the other worlds . . . He recalls the view of the heavens through the portholes of the rocket, and the photographs of the galaxies, the whirlpooled suns in the book his father gave him one Christmas. The spaceship, an atom wandering in the outer reaches of unknown space: to be lost and lonely forever in the starry night. . .

He feels very tiny, only a boy, shrinking, helpless, standing between the dark river and the lights in the sky.

A calesa clip-clops over the bridge, startling him, and he shivers in the warm evening and walks more briskly now, swinging his arms. His father might have come home early after all, and now they would be waiting for him: his father and mother and his aunt, his sister and brother and his brother’s wife: the faces and the voices of his home.

The street is familiar with the lights of the houses: here the trellised gates, the mail-boxes, the sprinkled grass. Mr. Macapinlac is reading a newspaper on his front porch. A dog is barking, someone is calling out a name. He catches a whiff of cooking from a kitchen, the scent of crushed pepper, the sputter of lard, and he wonders what Pining has prepared for supper. He passes by a group saying goodbye, good night at a gate: the throbbing of a car going down the street, a blend of voices talking, and Mrs. Aquino, their next-door neighbor, sweeping leaves into a smouldering pile, the smoke curling faintly up into the windless evening.

His father is not yet home. His mother and aunt rock slightly in the roofed swing in the front yard, and his sister Luz and Chitong, her fiance, lean on their elbows over the veranda rail, sharing their endless secrets. He kisses his mother’s hand, and his Tia Dora’s: his aunt is relating something, with gasps of amusement, and she offers him her fat hand limply. He hops up the steps, and Chitong turns around to say hello, Ben, how was the movie?

Okay, he replies, and opens the screen door with a nudge of his shoulder, after the style of a government agent crashing into a gangster’s hideout: but the make-believe, even for the boy, dissolves abruptly before the benign portraits of his grandparents, the upright piano, the pedestaled plants. In the alcove under the stairs, his brother Pol, stripped to the waist and sweating, writes at his father’s desk piled high with law books: the smoke from his pipe is blue and fragrant under the shaded lamp.

He dribbles an imaginary basketball toward the kitchen, skidding on the floor, feints and jack-knifes a neat shot through the door. His sister-in-law Remy is giving her baby his supper of porridge from a cup. The child gurgles a vigorous greeting at the boy, and Remy laughs at the wonder of her son’s knowing, the infant-accents of his language.

The kitchen is bright and intimate with its rich cooking smells: Pining bustles about the old Mayon stove, and the girl with the pigtails smiles her crooked-toothed smile from the lithographed calendar on the wall.

You want to tell Uncle Ben something? says Remy. You want to talk to him, ah, Baby?

Ben brings his eyes close to the child’s, as though to hypnotize him, and Baby spews a glob of gruel on his face. Ay, Baby, that’s no-o-o good, says Remy, and Ben, howling in humorous outrage, stumbles to the sink to wash his face.

You do that again and I’ll give you a whack.

Oh no, you don’t, says Remy. Only Mama can give you a spanking, not even Papa, isn’t that right, Baby?

The child blubbers a wet, unintelligible answer, and Remy, pleased, rewards him with a loud kiss, there. Ben opens the refrigerator for a drink of ice-cold water: he feels warmer now inside the house, and he gulps the water down thirstily.

Hold, you drink and drink, says Pining, and it’s almost time for supper.

You went to the cine, Ben? asks Remy.

About the Third World War. A rocketship got away and landed on another planet. There are thousands of them, but you have to find the right one, with trees and rivers and all. Like on Earth . . .

That picture Pol and I saw last week, that was beautiful. What a love story . . . It made me cry, really.

Love, says Ben, sniffing disgustedly, love.

You just wait till you’re a few years older. Tell him, Baby, tell him to wait and see.

But Baby is at the moment fascinated by the cat, perched proudly on a ledge by the stove: they examine each other over the table, the child and the cat, until Pining shoos it away with her ladle, and Baby expresses his protest in a long piercing wail.

Ben goes down the back steps and around the water-tank to the front yard. A breeze touches the santol tree and is gone and the evening is as warm as ever. From the house across the street come the simple dancing piano notes of a child’s waltz. He lies down flat on his back on the grass, beside the swing: the stars seem brighter now, nearer, as he looks up at the zenith, pillowing his head in his hands.

Baby’s crying, says his mother.

He wanted to play with the cat, but Pining drove it away.

Oh, I thought something… Ben, don’t lie down there like that, you’ll dirty your clothes.

The grass is clean, Ma.

Let him be, says Tia Dora, he’s big enough to know what’s good for him. Now, as I was saying, her nephew quit school and married this girl from Laguna . . .

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The little piano music, the voices of his mother and aunt talking in the dusky light from the porch lap at him comfortingly as warm tides of a sea: he is safe, lying floating in the cove of home, and he can gaze at the stars now with more assurance, without loneliness. Close to the front eaves of the house, he spots the individual gleam of Mars: he thinks of the canals pictured in the book, crisscrossing the face of the planet: the polar ice and the red deserts, the green maps of vegetation. Do they also train their telescopes Earthward, those beings on Mars? In their sky, Earth, with the sun reflected on its clouds and seas, must shine brighter than Venus . . . The wheeling hum descends upon him, trembles tightly within him: now it is like the echo of a name he cannot remember, the name of Someone who might have known him ages before he was born. He, lying on the grass, in front of his father’s house, looking up at the stars: and the stars shining down their ancient light on him and the house and the town . . .

The boy hears the approaching purr of his father’s car, and in an instant, he is up on his feet and running to open the driveway gate. The headlights turn toward the garage, enormous eyes sweeping over him, dazzling him pleasantly. His father races the Chevy as he drives in, tires crunching on the gravel: the sweetish gasoline odor drifts across the yard, a good warm smell to the boy: it is of the same order as the smoke of his father’s cigar and his brother’s pipe, or of blue-yellow mornings of sun after a long rain.

He takes the briefcase from his father: the simple act is also a ceremony between father and son, implicit with perfect affection. His father and mother go up the front steps together, their arms about each other’s waist: his father has just made one of his clever remarks, and his mother is laughing: he is a huge, jocose, smiling man. Luz tries to take her father’s hand, but he is too fast for her, tracing a quick, humorous benediction in the air.

Good evening, sir, says Chitong.

Hello, Chitong, how are you?

Fine, sir, thank you.

Well… Tell your father we’ll be working together on that irrigation project in San Miguel. I got the word today.

Yes, I’ll tell him.

Luz here treating you right?

Yes, sir, she’s — she’s very good, I mean, she —

Well… You’ll have to excuse me now. I’ve been on the road all day.

I was just leaving, sir.

Stay for supper, Chitong.

Thank you, ma’am, but I have to go now. Good evening, sir, ma’am.

See you, Ben.

‘Bye, Chitong.

Good night.

Luz walks Chitong to the gate, and the boy and his father and mother go into the house. His father rolls up his sleeves and flexes his arms tiredly, standing tall in the sala: he has been away all week on a construction job in La Union, and Ben smiles his gladness. He settles down in his favorite chair, and Ben brings him his slippers, and the family is gathered about the chair: the lights seem brighter now, the voices more loving, the faces all smiling.

Say, where’s my little friend?

Already sleeping, says Remy.

I brought something for the rascal.

What is it, Pa? asks Pol.

A dump truck, with a trailer. Here, I got it in Dagupan.

Ay, another toy, says Remy. He’ll only throw it around, like the others.

That’s what these things are for. Open them up, see what makes them tick. He’ll grow up to be a first class engineer. Like his grandfather — the best engineer in the province of Tarlac.

Hear, hear, says his mother.

You’re one against so many thousands, Ma… Ben, you still in school?

Sure, Papa.

The Cine Oriente, that’s what he means, says Luz. Ben never misses class there.

That’s not true, only on weekends. This film that’s showing now, you should see it, Papa. The hydrogen bombs burned up everything, the cities and all the air.

Don’t let them put a scare into you now, says his father. The world’s going to last a long while yet.

A few got away, in a spaceship. It’s like in the book, the one you gave me, only the stars had lots of colors, green, and red, and blue, is that right, Papa?

Well, now, I don’t know. Green and blue stars would be a pretty sight, though.

There is something else the boy wants to say and know at last: a name perhaps, and a searching: he bites his lip, blinking his eyes, and for the briefest moment, there in the living room, he is aware of the silent vibrating hum inside him and far away. . . somewhere, moving across the world. . . When his father comes back downstairs from his shower, Tia Dora and Luz have set the table: the table cloth is crisply fresh for the occasion of the homecoming, and the aroma of Pining’s cooking reminds Ben that he is hungry. They sit down at the circular table, his family: his mother says grace, and Pining brings in the rice smoking off the stove, timed for the start of supper, and the way his father likes it.

Here, Ben, take the heart and liver. Vitamins.

Thanks, Papa.

How’s the case going, Pol?

The guy’s lawyers came up with something new. But we’ll get around it.

You will. But don’t let it land you in jail now.

Are you finished with the job up north, Alfredo?

I’ll have to go back Monday.

We’re invited to a wedding Tuesday. Seniong’s daughter.

That’s just too bad. Remind me to call him tomorrow.

By the way, Father Panlilio has been asking about you. He wants to talk to you about the fund drive. For the parochial school.

I’ll see him tomorrow, after Mass.

Papa, I wish I could come with you Monday.

School will be over pretty soon. What do you say we go fishing?

Oh boy!. That would be fine. Papa, I saw an air-rifle downtown, just this evening. You’ll get it for me, huh, Papa?

We’ll see. Maybe this summer we can do some hunting too.

Isn’t that dangerous, now? There’s enough shooting going on in the world as it is.

Nothing to worry about, Ma, says his father. The birds aren’t going to shoot back.

Pass the dessert to your father, Ben, says Tia Dora.

Pining, says his father, patting his stomach, you’re the best cook in the province of Tarlac.

The best engineer, says his mother, the best cook…

And the best lawyer, says Pol, winking. You ask Remy here.

You’ll do for an ambulance-chaser. But Luz has another fellow for the title, ah, Luz?

Ay, ay, Chitong —

Ben, you watch out, warns his sister.

And Ma, says his father, you’re the best wife and mother in the whole world. He smiles at her, his large gentle hand on her shoulder.

He leans back and lights a cigar. Let’s sit on the porch, shall we? It’s warm in here.

*  *  *  *  *

The boy follows his father and mother to the porch: his father switches off the overhead bulb, and in the soft-toned light, the night is lucid and palpable around the house, the stars sprayed distinctly above the rooftops. Nimble, cowboy-like, Ben straddles the rail: he is on a white stallion, galloping across a starlit prairie, flying. He rests back against the corner-post and glances about him, waiting.

An upstairs window in the next house is a moon captured in a net of santol leaves. A group passes by, chattering, wooden shoes scuffing, rustling away gradually down the street.

His father and mother sit together on the sofa, talking gently: Remy and Pol come to the veranda and Ben listens to their voices, near and familiar in the night. The coal of his father’s cigar, tracing slow arcs in the pale darkness, reminds the boy of the time the power failed in their section of the town and they had supper by candlelight, and he had thought the shadows alive and friendly, only a magic spell removed from speech.

The street is quiet now but for the faint crooning of a radio somewhere down the block, and a cricket stitching its tiny whir upon the warm restful breathing of Earth. From the far edge of town blow the last whistles of a train: now the travelers would be looking out their lighted windows, watching the receding glow of the town, and then only the night and the stars over the summer fields.

He catches the streak of a shooting star from the corner of his eye.

Instantly his waiting becomes a sharp alertness: he holds his breath, and the strangeness comes into him once more, the echo of an endless vibration. But it is no longer an abstract ache straining for the relief of words: it speaks within him, in a language full of silence, becoming one with his breathing, his being, and the night, and the turning of Earth: incomprehensible, a wordless thought, an unthought-of Word: like the unseen presence of One who loves him infinitely and tenderly. The fear has gone, the lonely helpless shrinking he felt on the bridge, walking home: love surrounds him, and no evil can touch him here, in his father’s house.

With confident imagination, he sees a vision of Earth, whole and entire, the globe revolving on its axis, journeying around the sun, through October and December and the months of the summertime. Earth: he pronounces the word to himself, as if to savor its taste upon his tongue.

Third planet from the sun. . . Asia, and Europe, and America, westward. . . the cities and the towns and the villages, and all the people, millions of them, living now on Earth. . . And all the stars in the sky. . . .

Someday, far away from this night in this town, his boyhood the remotest of remembrances and dreams, he may feel this vibration again, this hum like the echo of an eternal name: then he may come to understand a portion of the mystery at last, although humanly unutterable: revealing, in time, not the terror of the universe, but its purpose and glory. But that would still be years away from this night, perhaps a whole lifetime and more; perhaps, through his most grievous fault, never. Now the boy looks up at the lights of the encircling night: the constellations of the southern sky, the mists of the Milky Way, and beyond, unseen, the galaxies ablaze with their myriad suns: while Earth moves like a ship through space and night toward dawn and morning, and his father and mother and Remy and Pol talk gently in the soft darkness, and Luz is helping Pining with the dishes, and Tia Dora is in the living room reading her interminable serials, and Baby is sleeping a child’s untroubled sleep, and the street and the houses are quiet now in the peaceful night.

It’s getting late, Ben.

Early Mass tomorrow.

Go up to bed now, son, a growing boy needs his sleep.

His father is home, all of them are safe and home in the night, in the long summer of the year. Tomorrow, Sunday, they will go to Mass, all of them together. Then, he will go swimming with Tito and Pepe in San Miguel, in the clear wide morning, and in the afternoon, he will see the film again, perhaps with his father: the ruined, poisoned countries of man, and the new world, the hills green in the light of another sun.