Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed

“He wanted to strike Laura, cry, ‘No, you’re lying! The rockets will come back!’ Instead, he stroked Laura’s head against him and said, ‘The rockets will get through someday.”

After news comes that an atomic bomb has hit New York, Harry is inwardly devasted but calmly tells his family that they will keep on living. His matter-of-fact and practical dialogue is markedly different from the emotional tone of his thought, which is repetitive and exclamatory. Harry’s desire to keep up appearances is evident in how he maintains decorum in front of his family.

“He perspired. He glanced about. No one watching. He removed his tie. Pretty bold, he thought. First your coat off, now your tie. He hung it neatly on a peach tree he had imported as a sapling from Massachusetts.”

Harry removes his tie to be more comfortable while working outdoors in the hot Martian climate, but in doing so he also breaks from the custom of how men are expected to dress. The removal of the tie symbolizes that he is slowly adapting to life on Mars and leaving behind Earth’s culture. It foreshadows the Bitterings and other settlers’ ultimate adoption of a “Martian” way of life, developing the theme of Change as Death, Change as Survival.

“Onions but not onions, carrots but not carrots. Taste: the same but different. Smell: not like it used to be.”

Harry discovers that the vegetables growing in his garden are subtly different from those grown on Earth. The repetition of “onions” and “carrots” suggests that the names are ill-suited to these new Martian vegetables, but he does not describe precisely how their taste or smell has changed—only that it is different from what it was before. The inability to voice the difference contributes to the story’s exploration of The Meaning of Names, as the language Harry has access to cannot capture what is happening in this strange environment.

“Bittering wanted to cry. ‘You’ve got to work with me. If we stay here, we’ll all change. The air. Don’t you smell it? Something in the air. A Martian virus, maybe; some seed, or a pollen. Listen to me!”

As Harry implores the other men in town to help him build a rocket to return to Earth, he tries to convey the necessity by describing the threat that he perceives around them. The imperceptibility and insubstantiality of the “something” driving the change—it is invisible and airborne, it is “maybe” a virus or a pollen—serves as a metaphor for the imperceptibility of change itself. Just as Harry cannot point to what he believes is altering the Earth people, so is change in general difficult to pin down.

“Harry Bittering moved into the metal shop and began to build the rocket. Men stood in the open door and talked and joked without raising their voices. Once in a while they gave him a hand on lifting something. But mostly they just idled and watched him with their yellowing eyes.”

Harry works busily, often raising his voice in concern about the changes happening to people and other Earth life forms on Mars. By contrast, the other men in the village are described as idle and never depicted working. Their “yellowing eyes” are a sign that they are becoming increasingly “Martian,” suggesting that their idleness is related to their assimilation to their new home, while Harry remains bound to the industriousness of American culture.

“The nights were full of wind that blew down the empty moonlit sea meadows past the little white chess cities lying for their twelve-thousandth year in the shallows. In the Earthmen’s settlement, the Bittering house shook with a feeling of change.”

These lines exemplify the story’s frequent changes in scale between microcosm and macrocosm. The long-dormant Martian cities inhabit a timescale of thousands of years, while the Bittering household shakes with change in the immediate present. The contrast suggests that the house is a foreign element in an otherwise uniform landscape and that Mars will soon assimilate it, perhaps as a ruin like the cities.

“‘And take the rest of the day off,’ she said. ‘It’s hot. The children want to swim in the canals and hike. Please come along.’

‘I can’t waste time. This is a crisis!’

‘Just for an hour,’ she urged. ‘A swim’ll do you good.’”

Harry’s shouting appears ridiculous in comparison with his wife’s calm insistence that everything is fine. His wife meets his insistence that he “can’t waste time” with an assurance that it will be “just for an hour,” but she does not seem especially concerned with how long they will be away; indeed, Harry spends much more time away that afternoon. The contrasting timeframes that each appears to be working within suggest their paces are out of sync, as Harry remains unwilling to adapt to Mars.

“He saw the sky submerged above him, the sun made Martian by atmosphere and time and space. Up there, a big river, he thought, a Martian river, all of us lying deep in it, in our pebble houses, in our sunken boulder houses, like crayfish hidden, and the water washing away our old bodies and lengthening the bones and—”

As Harry swims, he imagines that the atmosphere he has been so worried about breathing is an ocean where he and the other Earthmen live like fish. In that ocean, the sun is made different, “made Martian,” even though it is the same sun that shines on Earth. The image of stones and small fish in a great river builds on metaphors of fossilization that are present throughout the story; Harry views their settlement as being carried and eroded like tiny organisms over long periods of time.

“The other day you called Dan, Dan, Dan. I didn’t even hear. I said to myself, That’s not my name. I’ve a new name I want to use.”

Dan’s speech to his mother and father further develops the connection between a name and the thing that it names. Altered by his life on an alien planet, Dan no longer feels like his Earth name describes him; his new, Martian name better represents the person he has become.

“‘What about your encyclopedia? You’re taking it along, surely.’

Mr. Bittering glanced away. ‘I’ll come and get it next week.’”

As the Bitterings prepare to leave for the Martian villas, his wife asks him if he’s bringing his encyclopedia. This is presumably another project that Harry has been working on, perhaps to catalog his memories of Earth. Like the rocket, it symbolizes Harry’s attachment to Earth and his resistance to adapting to Mars. That he doesn’t look his wife in the eye when telling her he’ll come back for it suggests that he will not; like leaving the rocket for the summer, this signals Harry’s willingness to join the other villagers and adopt a new way of life.

“Looking at the small white cottage for a long moment, he was filled with a desire to rush to it, touch it, say good-by to it, for he felt as if he were going away on a long journey, leaving something to which he could never quite return, never understand again.”

Harry here leaves the cottage, a symbol of his attachment to Earth, for the last time. The long, run-on sentence indicates Harry’s emotional thoughts in this tumultuous moment. His feeling that he will never be able to go back suggests that from this point forward he will no longer be connected enough to Earth to return, or perhaps even remain human enough to think about Earth in the same way.

“In the empty Earth settlement, the painted houses flicked and peeled. Rubber tires upon which children had swung in back yards hung suspended like stopped clock pendulums in the blazing air.”

This image of the abandoned town, ostensibly left only for a summer, is reminiscent of one hit by disaster; it particularly evokes the bombed cities back on Earth, similarly emptied and decaying. The halted time suggested by the still tire swings fits within the story’s consideration of time and history, raising the question of whether history stops when the Earthmen become Martian.

“The daughter wove tapestries and the sons played songs on ancient flutes and pipes, their laughter echoing in the marble villa.”

The now-Martian children adopt activities that evoke an ancient but also nonspecific past. This turning back of time or anachronism underscores the idea that time halts as the people become Martian, no longer moving forward in history but somehow stalling within it.