and the moooooon be still as bright

There's a story I'm going to be discussing in The Martian Chronicles entitled "-- And the Moon Be Still as Bright." This is about humanity's fourth expedition to the alien planet Mars. This expedition, unlike the previous ones, is successful. The team's physician, Hathaway, reports that all the martians died from chicken pox. There's confusion because no one expected an entire race to go out by such a lowly disease. A disease that children can beat. The captain, Captain Wilder, allows the crew to cheer, dance, and drink. This makes their archaeologist, Jeff Spender, angry because they're soiling the dirt of the new world this quickly and easily. He is disgusted that people have the decency to dump beer bottles into the river and ends up punching one of his crewmen. When everyone is sobered up, they explore the town. Spender is amazed by these martians and leaves the team on his own to study the martians himself. This confuses and angers the team because they feel as if he is betraying them, and they send search teams to find him. Unfortunately, there isn't any luck. Eventually, he comes back to the campsite and declares himself as a Martian. He shoots many of the people, killing them. Spender starts feeling sick so he runs to the hills for recovery. Wilder and his remaining team find him and Wilder attempts to convince Spender to stop his actions but he won't falter. He wants to kill all humans so that they won't destroy Mars with their industrialized buildings and pollution. At this point, it is inevitable that Wilder has to shoot Spender. Wilder promises Spender that he will continue his mission and preserve the civilization and life of Mars. Spender doesn't fight Wilder, and accepts his death. He keeps true to his promise as he catches one of his subordinates using ruins to practice shooting, and he ends up knocking his teeth out.

The setting for this story is revealed in the very beginning. "It was so cold when they first came from the rocket into the night that Spender began to gather the dry Martian wood and build a small fire. He didn't say anything about a celebration; he merely grabbed the wood, set fire to it, and watched it burn. In the flare that lighted the thin air of this dried-up sea of Mars he looked over his shoulder and saw the rocket that had brought them all, Captain Wilder and Cheroke and Hathaway and Sam Parkhill and himself, across a silent black space of stars to land upon a dead, dreaming world" (pg. 48).

Bradbury uses this setting to illustrate the environment and connections of the characters. The celebration of arriving at night and gathering firewood, unaware of this celebration and can be seen as apathetic, is an example. The mention of the dried-up sea shows how desolate and empty Mars is. There is nothing but a rocket in the area, which signals the arrival of humans invading a territory that is fine the way it is. Bradbury creates tension because the reader can infer that these humans are going to mess up the empty territory, but there is one person that is against it.