Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  All day yesterday they had read in class about the sun. About how like a lemon it was, and how hot. And they had written small stories or essays or poems about it:

  I think the sun is a flower,

  That blooms for just one hour.

  That was Margot’s poem, read in a quiet voice in the still classroom while the rain was falling outside.

  “Aw, you didn’t write that!” protested one of the boys.

  “I did,” said Margot. “I did.”

  “William!” said the teacher.

  But that was yesterday. Now the rain was slackening, and the children were crushed in the great thick windows.

  “Where’s teacher?”

  “She’ll be back.”

  “She’d better hurry, we’ll miss it!”

  They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes.

  Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.

  “What’re you looking at?” said William.

  Margot said nothing.

  “Speak when you’re spoken to.” He gave her a shove. But she did not move; rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else.

  They edged away from her, they would not look at her. She felt them go away. And this was because she would play no games with them in the echoing tunnels of the underground city. If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips barely moved. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move as she watched the drenched windows.

  And then, of course, the biggest crime of all was that she had come here only five years ago from Earth, and she remembered the sun and the way the sun was and the sky was when she was four in Ohio. And they, they had been on Venus all their lives, and they had been only two years old when last the sun came out and had long since forgotten the color and heat of it and the way it really was. But Margot remembered.

  “It’s like a penny,” she said once, eyes closed.

  “No it’s not!” the children cried.

  “It’s like a fire,” she said, “in the stove.”

  “You’re lying, you don’t remember!” cried the children.

  But she remembered and stood quietly apart from all of them and watched the patterning windows. And once, a month ago, she had refused to shower in the school shower rooms, had clutched her hands to her ears and over her head, screaming the water mustn’t touch her head. So after that, dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different and they knew her difference and kept away.

  There was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next year; it seemed vital to her that they do so, though it would mean the loss of thousands of dollars to her family. And so, the children hated her for all these reasons of big and little consequence. They hated her pale snow face, her waiting silence, her thinness, and her possible future.

  “Get away!” The boy gave her another push. “What’re you waiting for?”

  Then, for the first time, she turned and looked at him. And what she was waiting for was in her eyes.

  “Well, don’t wait around here!” cried the boy savagely. “You won’t see nothing!”

  Her lips moved.

  “Nothing!” he cried. “It was all a joke, wasn’t it?” He turned to the other children. “Nothing’s happening today. Is it?”

  They all blinked at him and then, understanding, laughed and shook their heads. “Nothing, nothing!”

  “Oh, but,” Margot whispered, her eyes helpless. “But this is the day, the scientists predict, they say, they know, the sun …”

  “All a joke!” said the boy, and seized her roughly. “Hey, everyone, let’s put her in a closet before teacher comes!”

  “No,” said Margot, falling back.

  They surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door. They stood looking at the door and saw it tremble from her beating and throwing herself against it. They heard her muffled cries. Then, smiling, they turned and went out and back down the tunnel, just as the teacher arrived.

  “Ready, children?” She glanced at her watch.

  “Yes!” said everyone.

  “Are we all here?”

  “Yes!”

  The rain slackened still more.

  They crowded to the huge door.

  The rain stopped.

  It was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had, first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, second, ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a peaceful tropical slide which did not move or tremor. The world ground to a standstill. The silence was so immense and unbelievable that you felt your ears had been stuffed or you had lost your hearing altogether. The children put their hands to their ears. They stood apart. The door slid back and the smell of the silent, waiting world came in to them.

  The sun came out.

  It was the color of flaming bronze and it was very large. And the sky around it was a blazing blue tile color. And the jungle burned with sunlight as the children, released from their spell, rushed out, yelling, into the springtime.

  “Now, don’t go too far,” called the teacher after them. “You’ve only two hours, you know. You wouldn’t want to get caught out!”

  But they were running and turning their faces up to the sky and feeling the sun on their cheeks like a warm iron; they were taking off their jackets and letting the sun burn their arms.

  “Oh, it’s better than the sun lamps, isn’t it?”

  “Much, much better!”

  They stopped running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and never stopped growing, tumultuously, even as you watched it. It was a nest of octopi, clustering up great arms of fleshlike weed, wavering, flowering in this brief spring. It was the color of rubber and ash, this jungle, from the many years without sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink, and it was the color of the moon.

  The children lay out, laughing, on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh and squeak under them, resilient and alive. They ran among the trees, they slipped and fell, they pushed each other, they played hide-and-seek and tag, but most of all they squinted at the sun until tears ran down their faces, they put their hands up to that yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh, fresh air and listened and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea of no sound and no motion. They looked at everything and savored everything. Then, wildly, like animals escaped from their caves, they ran and ran in shouting circles. They ran for an hour and did not stop running.

  And then—

  In the midst of their running one of the girls wailed.

  Everyone stopped.

  The girl, standing in the open, held out her hand.

  “Oh, look, look,” she said, trembling.

  They came slowly to look at her opened palm.

  In the center of it, cupped and huge, was a single raindrop.

  She began to cry, looking at it.

  They glanced quietly at the sky.

  “Oh. Oh.”

  A few cold drops fell on their noses and their cheeks and their mouths. The sun faded behind a stir of mist. A wind blew cool around them. They turned and started to walk back toward the underground house, their hands at their sides, their smiles vanishing away.

  A boom of thunder startled them and like leaves before a new hurricane, they tumble
d upon each other and ran. Lightning struck ten miles away, five miles away, a mile, a half mile. The sky darkened into midnight in a flash.

  They stood in the doorway of the underground for a moment until it was raining hard. Then they closed the door and heard the gigantic sound of the rain falling in tons and avalanches, everywhere and forever.

  “Will it be seven more years?”

  “Yes. Seven.”

  Then one of them gave a little cry.

  “Margot!”

  “What?”

  “She’s still in the closet where we locked her.”

  “Margot.”

  They stood as if someone had driven them, like so many stakes, into the floor. They looked at each other and then looked away. They glanced out at the world that was raining now and raining and raining steadily. They could not meet each other’s glances. Their faces were solemn and pale. They looked at their hands and feet, their faces down.

  “Margot.”

  One of the girls said, “Well …?”

  No one moved.

  “Go on,” whispered the girl.

  They walked slowly down the hall in the sound of cold rain. They turned through the doorway to the room in the sound of the storm and thunder, lightning on their faces, blue and terrible. They walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by it.

  Behind the closet door was only silence.

  They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out.

  In a Season of Calm Weather, by Ray Bradbury

  George and Alice Smith detrained at Biarritz one summer noon and in an hour had run through their hotel onto the beach into the ocean and back out to bake upon the sand.

  To see George Smith sprawled burning there, you’d think him only a tourist flown fresh as iced lettuce to Europe and soon to be transshipped home. But here was a man who loved art more than life itself.

  “There …” George Smith sighed. Another ounce of perspiration trickled down his chest. Boil out the Ohio tap water, he thought, then drink down the best Bordeaux. Silt your blood with rich French sediment so you’ll see with native eyes!

  Why? Why eat, breathe, drink everything French? So that, given time, he might really begin to understand the genius of one man.

  His mouth moved, forming a name.

  “George?” His wife loomed over him. “I know what you’ve been thinking. I can read your lips.”

  He lay perfectly still, waiting.

  “And?”

  “Picasso,” she said.

  He winced. Someday she would learn to pronounce that name.

  “Please,” she said. “Relax. I know you heard the rumor this morning, but you should see your eyes—your tic is back. All right, Picasso’s here, down the coast a few miles away, visiting friends in some small fishing town. But you must forget it or our vacation’s ruined.”

  “I wish I’d never heard the rumor,” he said honestly.

  “If only,” she said, “you liked other painters.”

  Others? Yes, there were others. He could breakfast most congenially on Caravaggio still lifes of autumn pears and midnight plums. For lunch: those fire-squirting, thick-wormed Van Gogh sunflowers, those blooms a blind man might read with one rush of scorched fingers down fiery canvas. But the great feast? The paintings he saved his palate for? There, filling the horizon like Neptune risen, crowned with limeweed, alabaster, coral, paint-brushes clenched like tridents in horn-nailed fists, and with fishtail vast enough to fluke summer showers out over all Gibraltar—who else but the creator of Girl Before a Mirror and Guernica?

  “Alice,” he said patiently, “how can I explain? Coming down on the train, I thought, Good lord, it’s all Picasso country!”

  But was it really? he wondered. The sky, the land, the people, the flushed pink bricks here, scrolled electric-blue ironwork balconies there, a mandolin ripe as a fruit in some man’s thousand fingerprinting hands, billboard tatters blowing like confetti in night winds—how much was Picasso, how much George Smith staring round the world with wild Picasso eyes? He despaired of answering. That old man had distilled turpentines and linseed oil so thoroughly through George Smith that they shaped his being, all Blue Period at twilight, all Rose Period at dawn.

  “I keep thinking,” he said aloud, “if we saved our money …”

  “We’ll never have five thousand dollars.”

  “I know,” he said quietly. “But it’s nice thinking we might bring it off someday. Wouldn’t it be great to just step up to him, say ‘Pablo, here’s five thousand! Give us the sea, the sand, that sky, or any old thing you want, we’ll be happy …’”

  After a moment his wife touched his arm.

  “I think you’d better go in the water now,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’d better do just that.”

  White fire showered up when he cut the water.

  During the afternoon George Smith came out and went into the ocean with the vast spilling motions of now warm, now cool people who at last, with the sun’s decline, their bodies all lobster colors and colors of broiled squab and guinea hen, trudged for their wedding-cake hotels.

  The beach lay deserted for endless mile on mile save for two people. One was George Smith, towel over shoulder, out for a last devotional.

  Far along the shore another shorter, square-cut man walked alone in the tranquil weather. He was deeper-tanned, his close-shaven head dyed almost mahogany by the sun, and his eyes were clear and bright as water in his face.

  So the shore-line stage was set, and in a few minutes the two men would meet. And once again Fate fixed the scales for shocks and surprises, arrivals and departures. And all the while these two solitary strollers did not for a moment think on coincidence, that unswum stream which lingers at man’s elbow with every crowd in every town. Nor did they ponder the fact that if man dares dip into that stream he grabs a wonder in each hand. Like most, they shrugged at such folly and stayed well up the bank lest Fate should shove them in.

  The stranger stood alone. Glancing about, he saw his aloneness, saw the waters of the lovely bay, saw the sun sliding down the late colors of the day, and then, half turning, spied a small wooden object on the sand. It was no more than the slender stick from a lime ice cream delicacy long since melted away. Smiling, he picked the stick up. With another glance around to reinsure his solitude, the man stooped again and, holding the stick gently, with light sweeps of his hand began to do the one thing in all the world he knew best how to do.

  He began to draw incredible figures along the sand.

  He sketched one figure and then moved over and, still looking down, completely focused on his work now, drew a second and a third figure, and after that a fourth and a fifth and a sixth.

  George Smith, printing the shore line with his feet, gazed here, gazed there, and then saw the man ahead. George Smith, drawing nearer, saw that the man, deeply tanned, was bending down. Nearer yet, and it was obvious what the man was up to. George Smith chuckled. Of course … Alone on the beach this man—how old? Sixty-five? Seventy?—was scribbling and doodling away. How the sand flew! How the wild portraits flung themselves out there on the shore! How …

  George Smith took one more step and stopped, very still.

  The stranger was drawing and drawing and did not seem to sense that anyone stood immediately behind him and the world of his drawings in the sand. By now he was so deeply enchanted with his solitudinous creation that depth bombs set off in the bay might not have stopped his flying hand nor turned him round.

  George Smith looked down at the sand. And after a long while, looking, he began to tremble.

  For there on the flat shore were pictures of Grecian lions and Mediterranean goats and maidens with flesh of sand like powdered gold and satyrs piping on hand-carved horns and children dancing, strewing flowers along and along the beach with lambs gamboling after, and musicians skipping to their harps and lyres and unicorns racing youths toward distant meadows, woodlands, ruined temples, and volcanoes. Along the sho
re in a never-broken line, the hand, the wooden stylus of this man, bent down in fever and raining perspiration, scribbled, ribboned, looped around over and up, across, in, out, stitched, whispered, stayed, then hurried on as if this traveling bacchanal must flourish to its end before the sun was put out by the sea. Twenty, thirty yards or more the nymphs and dryads and summer founts sprang up in unraveled hieroglyphs. And the sand in the dying light was the color of molten copper on which was now slashed a message that any man in any time might read and savor down the years. Everything whirled and poised in its own wind and gravity. Now wine was being crushed from under the grape-blooded feet of dancing vintners’ daughters, now steaming seas gave birth to coin-sheathed monsters while flowered kites strewed scent on blowing clouds … now … now … now …

  The artist stopped.

  George Smith drew back and stood away.

  The artist glanced up, surprised to find someone so near. Then he simply stood there, looking from George Smith to his own creations flung like idle footprints down the way. He smiled at last and shrugged as if to say, Look what I’ve done; see what a child? You will forgive me, won’t you? One day or another we are all fools … You too, perhaps? So allow an old fool this, eh? Good! Good!

  But George Smith could only look at the little man with the sun-dark skin and the clear sharp eyes and say the man’s name once, in a whisper, to himself.

  They stood thus for perhaps another five seconds. George Smith staring at the sand-frieze, and the artist watching George Smith with amused curiosity. George Smith opened his mouth, closed it, put out his hand, took it back. He stepped toward the pictures, stepped away. Then he moved along the line of figures, like a man viewing a precious series of marbles cast up from some ancient ruin on the shore. His eyes did not blink, his hand wanted to touch but did not dare to touch. He wanted to run but did not run.