Paradise

MARS IS HEAVEN!
by Ray Bradbury
First published in 1948

The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the
shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and
men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen
men, including a captain. The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into
the sunlight, and the rocket had bloomed out great flowers of heat and color and run away into
space on the third voyage to Mars!
Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a
thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea
leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness
following another. The men within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well
again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in
their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.
"Mars! Mars! Good old Mars, here we are!" cried Navigator Lustig.
"Good old Mars!" said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
"Well," said Captain John Black.

Musique par Agni_Agnelli et Intelligence artificielle