However, the town built by the Americans is empty. People who leave it shout that the war is over. Five years pass, and the rocket falls from the sky. Looking at the homes of earthlings, his wife and children Harry consider them funny, and people – an ugly people, and rejoice that they are no longer on Mars. Over the summer to the bottom, canals dry out, paint is falling off the walls of houses, the skeleton of the rocket begins to rust. Something in the depths of the creature Harry desperately resists, but under the onslaught of the family, he agrees to move to the villa until the fall, planning then to take up work again. A week later, all begin to move to the villas. The same evening, at work, Harry recalls the villa. Going to an abandoned Martian villa, his wife offers to move there for the summer. Sitting on the edge of the canal, Dan asks his father to give him another name – Lynl. A few days later, Kora says that the food supplies from the Earth are over, encourages him to eat a Martian sandwich and go with his family to swim in the canal. He learns from his friend that this is the ancient Martian name of the Earth. At night, the unfamiliar word “Yorkt” flies from his lips. He agrees to eat only what they have taken from the Earth, the rest rejects. Harry is in the workshop and begins to build a rocket. Looking in the mirror, he notices the same changes in himself. They became tall, thin, in the depths of their eyes, barely perceptible golden sparks. Here he pays attention to their appearance. On their proposal to build a rocket, they only laugh. Bitering decides to do something and goes to the city. Vegetables and fruits have become somehow different, the roses have turned green, the grass has acquired a purple hue. A few days after that, Harry wanders around the garden, alone fighting fear. The next day, Harry’s daughter runs in tears and shows his father a newspaper from which he learns about the onset of an atomic war on Earth and the destruction of all missiles that brought the necessary supplies for survival on Mars. Bittering anticipates misfortune, which soon happens. He does not belong here, and he understands this. Harry feels like a grain of salt, which was thrown into a mountain stream. Harry Bitering, his wife Kora and their children Dan, Laura and David are some of the pioneers. On Mars, the first landing in the world was made to develop new lands. But there are those who find the strength to reject him – they are those who leave Omelas. They find reasons to put up with this order of things. Most continue to enjoy life, although memories of the unfortunate poison their being. Neither the inhabitant of the town dares to change the life of this child, nor even just to approach him with a kind word of comfort – otherwise the happiness for the whole town will end. The well-being of this town in some mysterious way turned out to be connected with the life of a child who drags out living in complete solitude in a dark basement. The parable is a description of the happy life of the town called Omelas. In this form, this theme already sounded in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov (reflections on the “tear of a child”) and in William James in The Moral Philosopher and Moral Life (passage about the “lost soul”). The parable raises one of the eternal problems – is it justified the existence of a society in which those who have found themselves in the backyard of life coexist, and the prosperous majority, proud of the gusts of compassion for them. The author’s subtitle – “variations on a theme from the works of William James” – is omitted in most Russian editions, as is the author’s foreword. The author in his foreword defines the work as a psychomyth whose central idea is the theme of a “scapegoat”, which means thinking about the price that people are willing to pay for their prosperous existence.
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