A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories

by Ray Bradbury

  As if to second this last thought, a sound startled his ear. He was in the midst of solemnly, with great dignity and grace, lifting his pants to belt them around his waist, when he heard this lovely sound. It was like the winging of soft doves in the air. It was applause.

  The small crowd, looking up at him, enacting the final scene of the play before the intermission for lunch, saw with what beauty and gentlemanly decorum he was elevating his trousers. The applause broke like a brief wave upon the shore of the nearby sea.

  Ricardo gestured and smiled to them all.

  On his way home up the hill he shook hands with the dog that had watered the wall.

  The Meadow

  A wall collapses, followed by another and another; with dull thunder, a city falls into ruin.

  The night wind blows.

  The world lies silent.

  London was torn down during the day. Port Said was destroyed. The nails were pulled out of San Francisco. Glasgow is no more.

  They are gone, forever.

  Boards clatter softly in the wind, sand whines and trickles in small storms upon the still air.

  Along the road toward the colorless ruins comes the old night watchman to unlock the gate in the high barbed-wire fence and stand looking in.

  There in the moonlight lie Alexandria and Moscow and New York. There in the moonlight lie Johannesburg and Dublin and Stockholm. And Clearwater, Kansas, and Provincetown, and Rio de Janeiro.

  Just this afternoon the old man saw it happen, saw the car roaring outside the barbed-wire fence, saw the lean, sun-tanned men in that car, the men with their luxurious charcoal-flannel suits, and winking gold-mask cuff links, and their burning-gold wristwatches, and eye-blinding rings, lighting their cork-tipped cigarettes with engraved lighters....

  “There it is, gentlemen. What a mess. Look what the weather’s done to it.”

  “Yes, sir, it’s bad, Mr. Douglas!”

  “We just might save Paris.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “But, hell! The rain’s warped it. That’s Hollywood for you! Tear it down! Clear it out! We can use that land. Send a wrecking crew in today!”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Douglas!”

  The car roaring off and gone away.

  And now it is night. And the old night watchman stands inside the gate.

  He remembers what happened this same still afternoon when the wreckers came.

  A hammering, ripping, clattering; a collapse and a roar. Dust and thunder, thunder and dust!

  And the whole of the entire world shook loose its nails and lath and plaster and sill and celluloid window as town after town following town banged over flat and lay still.

  A shuddering, a thunder fading away, and then, once more, only the quiet wind.

  The night watchman now walks slowly forward along the empty streets.

  And one moment he is in Baghdad, and beggars loll in wondrous filth, and women with clear sapphire eyes give veiled smiles from high thin windows.

  The wind blows sand and confetti.

  The women and beggars vanish.

  And it is all strutworks again, it is all papier-mâché and oil-painted canvas and props lettered with the name of this studio, and there is nothing behind any of the building fronts but night and space and stars.

  The old man pulls a hammer and a few long nails from his tool chest; he peers around in the junk until he finds a dozen good strong boards and some untorn canvas. And he takes the bright steel nails in his blunt fingers, and they are singleheaded nails.

  And he begins to put London back together again, hammering and hammering, board by board, wall by wall, window by window, hammering, hammering, louder, louder, steel on steel, steel in wood, wood against sky, working the hours toward midnight, with no end to his striking and fixing and striking again.

  “Hey there, you!”

  The old man pauses.

  “You, night watchman.!,”

  Out of the shadows hurries a stranger in overalls, calling:

  “Hey, what’s-your-name!”

  The old man turns. “The name’s Smith.”

  “Okay, Smith, what in hell’s the idea!”

  The watchman eyes the stranger quietly. “Who are you?”

  “Kelly, foreman of the wrecking gang.”

  The old man nods. “Ah. The ones who tear everything down. You’ve done plenty today. Why aren’t you home bragging about it?”

  Kelly hawks and spits. “There was some machinery over on the Singapore set I had to check.” He wipes his mouth.... “Now, Smith, what in Christ’s name you think you’re doing? Drop that hammer. You’re building it all up again! We tear it down and you put it up. You crazy?”

  The old man nods. “Maybe I am. But somebody has to put it up again.”

  “Look, Smith. I do my work, you do yours, everyone’s happy. But I can’t have you messing, see? I’m turning you in to Mr. Douglas.”

  The old man goes on with his hammering. “Call him up. Send him around. I want to talk to him. He’s the crazy one.”

  Kelly laughs. “You kidding? Douglas don’t see nobody.” He jerks his hand, then bends to examine Smith’s newly finished work. “Hey, wait a minute! What kind of nails you using? Single-heads! Now, cut that! It’ll be hell to pay tomorrow, trying to pull ’em out!”

  Smith turns his head and looks for a moment at the other man swaying there. “Well, it stands to reason you can’t put the world together with double-headed nails. They’re too easy to yank out. You got to use single-headed nails and hammer ’em way in. Like this!”

  He gives a steel nail one tremendous blow that buries it completely in the wood.

  Kelly works his hands on his hips. “I’ll give you one more chance. Quit putting things back together and I’ll play ball with you.”

  “Young man,” says the night watchman, and keeps on hammering while he talks, and thinks about it, and talks some more, “I was here long before you were born. I was here when all this was only a meadow. And there was a wind set the meadow running in waves. For more than thirty years I watched it grow, until it was all of the world together. I lived here with it. I lived nice. This is the real world to me now. That world out there, beyond the fence, is where I spend time sleeping. I got a little room on a little street, and I see headlines and read about wars and strange, bad people. But here? Here I have the whole world together and it’s all peace. I been walking through the cities of this world since 1920. Any night I feel like it, I have a one-o’clock snack at a bar on the Champs Élysées! I can get me some fine amontillado sherry at a sidewalk cafe in Madrid, if I want. Or else me and the stone gargoyles, high up there—you see them, on top Notre Dame?—we can turn over great state matters and reach big political decisions!”

  “Yeah, Pop, sure.” Kelly waves impatiently.

  “And now you come and kick it down and leave only that world out there which hasn’t learned the first thing about peace that I know from seeing this land here inside the barbed wire. And so you come and rip it up and there’s no peace anymore, anywhere. You and your wreckers so proud of your wrecking. Pulling down towns and cities and whole lands!”

  “A guy’s got to live,” says Kelly. “I got a wife and kids.”

  “That’s what they all say. They got wives and kids. And they go on, pulling apart, tearing down, killing. They had orders! Somebody told them. They had to do it!”

  “Shut up and gimme mat hammer!”

  “Don’t come any closer!”

  “Why, you crazy old——”

  “This hammer’s good for more than nails!” The old man whistles the hammer through the air; the wrecker jumps back.

  “Hell,” says Kelly, “you’re insane! I’m putting a call through to the main studio; we’ll get some cops here quick. My God, one minute you’re building things up and talking crazy, but how do I know two minutes from now you won’t run wild and start pouring kerosene and lighting matches!”

  “I wouldn’t harm the smallest piece of kindling i
n this place, and you know it,” says the old man.

  “Might burn the whole goddam place down, hell,” says Kelly. “Listen, old man, you just wait right there!”

  The wrecker spins about and runs off into the villages and the ruined cities and the sleeping two-dimensional towns of this night world, and after his footsteps fade there is a music that the wind plays on the long silver barbed wires of the fence, and the old man hammering and hammering and selecting long boards and rearing walls until a time finally comes when his mouth is gasping, his heart is exploding; the hammer drops from his open fingers, steel nails tinkle like coins on the pavement, and the old man cries out to himself alone:

  “It’s no use, no use. I can’t put it all back up before they come. I need so very much help I don’t know what to do.”

  The old man leaves his hammer lying on the road and begins to walk with no direction, with no purpose, it seems, save that he is thinking to make one last round and take one last look at everything and say good-by to whatever there is or was in this world to say good-by to. And so he walks with the shadows all around and the shadows all through this land where time has grown late indeed, and the shadows are of all kinds and types and sizes, shadows of buildings, and shadows of people. And he doesn’t look straight at them, no, because if he looked at them straight, they would all blow away. No, he just walks, down the middle of Piccadilly Circus … the echo of his steps … or the Rue de la Paix … the sound of him clearing his throat … or Fifth Avenue … and he doesn’t look right or left. And all around him, in dark doorways and empty windows, are his many friends, his good friends, his very good friends. Far away there are the hiss and steam and soft whispering of a caffè espresso machine, all silver and chrome, and soft Italian singing … the flutter of hands in darkness over the open mouths of balalaikas, the rustle of palm trees, a touching of drums with the chimes chiming and small bells belling, and a sound of summer apples dropped in soft night grass which are not apples at all but the motion of women’s bared feet slowly dancing a circle to the chimes’ faint chiming and the belling of the tiny golden bells. There is the munch of maize kernels crushed on black volcanic stone, the sizzle of tortillas drowned in hot fat, the whisk of charcoals tossing up a thousand fireflies of spark at the blowing of a mouth and the wave of a papaya frond; everywhere faces and forms, everywhere stirs and gestures and ghost fires which float the magical torch-colored faces of Spanish gypsies in air as on a fiery water, the mouths crying out the songs that tell of the oddness and the strangeness and the sadness of living. Everywhere shadows and people, everywhere people and shadows and singing to music.

  Just that very trite thing—the wind?

  No. The people are all here. They have been here for many years. And tomorrow?

  The old man stops, presses his hands to his chest.

  They will not be here anymore.

  A horn blows!

  Outside the barbed-wire gate—the enemy! Outside the gate a small black police car and a large black limousine from the studio itself, three miles away.

  The horn blares!

  The old man seizes the rungs of a ladder and climbs, the sound of the horn pushing him higher and higher. The gate crashes wide; the enemy roars in.

  “There he goes!”

  The glaring lights of the police shine in upon the cities of the meadow; the lights reveal the stark canvas set-pieces of Manhattan, Chicago, and Chungking! The light glitters on the imitation stone towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, fixes on a tiny figure balancing on the catwalks of Notre Dame, climbing and climbing up where the night and the stars are turning slowly by.

  “There he is, Mr. Douglas, at the top!”

  “Good God. It’s getting so a man can’t spend an evening at a quiet party without——”

  “He’s striking a match! Call the fire department!”

  On top of Notre Dame, the night watchman, looking down, shielding the match from the softly blowing wind, sees the police, the workmen, and the producer in a dark suit, a big man, gazing up at him. Then the night watchman slowly turns the match, cupping it, applies it to the tip of his cigar. He lights the cigar in slow puffs.

  He calls: “Is Mr. Douglas down there?”

  A voice calls back: “What do you want with me?”

  The old man smiles. “Come up, alone! Bring a gun if you want! I just want a little talk!”

  The voices echo in the vast churchyard:

  “Don’t do it, Mr. Douglas!”

  “Give me your gun. Let’s get this over with so I can get back to the party. Keep me covered, I’ll play it safe. I don’t want these sets burned. There’s two million dollars in lumber alone here. Ready? I’m on my way.”

  The producer climbs high on the night ladders, up through the half shell of Notre Dame to where the old man leans against a plaster gargoyle, quietly smoking a cigar. The producer stops, gun pointed, half through an open trap door.

  “All right, Smith. Stay where you are.”

  Smith removes the cigar from his mouth quietly. “Don’t you be afraid of me. I’m all right.”

  “I wouldn’t bet money on that.”

  “Mr. Douglas,” says the night watchman, “did you ever read that story about the man who traveled to the future and found everyone there insane? Everyone. But since they were all insane they didn’t know they were insane. They all acted alike and so they thought themselves normal. And since our hero was the only sane one among them, he was abnormal; therefore, he was the insane one. To them, at least. Yes, Mr. Douglas, insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”

  The producer swears under his breath. “I didn’t climb up here to talk all night. What do you want?”

  “I want to talk with the Creator. That’s you, Mr. Douglas. You created all this. You came here one day and struck the earth with a magical checkbook and cried, ‘Let there be Paris!’ And there was Paris: streets, bistros, flowers, wine, outdoor bookshops and all. And you clapped your hands again: ‘Let there be Constantinople!’ And there it was! You clapped your hands a thousand times, and each time made something new, and now you think just by clapping your hands one last time you can drop it all down in ruins. But, Mr. Douglas, it’s not as easy as that!”

  “I own fifty-one percent of the stock in this studio!”

  “But did the studio ever belong to you, really? Did you ever think to drive here late some night and climb up on this cathedral and see what a wonderful world you created? Did you ever wonder if it might not be a good idea for you to sit up here with me and my friends and have a cup of amontillado sherry with us? All right—so the amontillado smells and looks and tastes like coffee. Imagination, Mr. Creator, imagination. But no, you never came around, you never climbed up, you never looked or listened or cared. There was always a party somewhere else. And now, very late, without asking us, you want to destroy it all. You may own fifty-one percent of the studio stock, but you don’t own them.”

  “Them!” cries the producer. “What’s all this business about ‘them’?”

  “It’s hard to put in words. The people who live here.” The night watchman moves his hand in the empty air toward the half-cities and the night. “So many films were made here in all the long years. Extras moved in the streets in costumes, they talked a thousand tongues, they smoked cigarettes and meerschaums and Persian hookahs, even. Dancing girls danced. They glittered, oh, how they glittered! Women with veils smiled down from high balconies. Soldiers marched. Children played. Knights in silver armor fought. There were orange-tea shops. People sipped tea in them and dropped their h’s. Gongs were beaten. Viking ships sailed the inland seas.”

  The producer lifts himself up through the trap door and sits on the plankings, the gun cradled more easily in his hand. He seems to be looking at the old man first with one eye, then the other, listening to him with one ear, then the other, shaking his head a little to himself.

  The night watchman continues:

  “And somehow, after the extras an
d the men with the cameras and microphones and all the equipment walked away and the gates were shut and they drove off in big cars, somehow something of all those thousands of different people remained. The things they had been, or pretended to be, stayed on. The foreign languages, the costumes, the things they did, the things they thought about, their religions and their music, all those little things and big things stayed on. The sights of far places. The smells. The salt wind. The sea. It’s all here tonight if you listen.”

  The producer listens and the old man listens in the drafty strutworks of the cathedral, with the moonlight blinding the eyes of the plaster gargoyles and the wind making the false stone mouths to whisper, and the sound of a thousand lands within a land below blowing and dusting and leaning in that wind, a thousand yellow minarets and milk-white towers and green avenues yet untouched among the hundred new ruins, and all of it murmuring its wires and lathings like a great steel-and-wooden harp touched in the night, and the wind bringing that self-made sound high up here in the sky to these two men who stand listening and apart.

  The producer laughs shortly and shakes his head.

  “You heard,” says the night watchman. “You did hear, didn’t you? I see it in your face.”

  Douglas shoves the gun in his coat pocket. “Anything you listen for you can hear. I made the mistake of listening. You should have been a writer. You could throw six of my best ones out of work. Well, what about it—are you ready to come down out of here now?”