by Ray Bradbury
“Tonight,” said Bodoni, “would be fine. Yes, I would like to have a rocket ship tonight.”
There was a moon. The rocket was white and big in the junkyard. It held the whiteness of the moon and the blueness of the stars. Bodoni looked at it and loved all of it. He wanted to pet it and lie against it, pressing it with his cheek, telling it all the secret wants of his heart.
He stared up at it. “You are all mine,” he said. “Even if you never move or spit fire, and just sit there and rust for fifty years, you are mine.”
The rocket smelled of time and distance. It was like walking into a clock. It was finished with Swiss delicacy. One might wear it on one’s watch fob. “I might even sleep here tonight,” Bodoni whispered excitedly.
He sat in the pilot’s seat.
He touched a lever.
He hummed in his shut mouth, his eyes closed.
The humming grew louder, louder, higher, higher, wilder, stranger, more exhilarating, trembling in him and leaning him forward and pulling him and the ship in a roaring silence and in a kind of metal screaming, while his fists flew over the controls, and his shut eyes quivered, and the sound grew and grew until it was a fire, a strength, a lifting and a pushing of power that threatened to tear him in half. He gasped. He hummed again and again, and did not stop, for it could not be stopped, it could only go on, his eyes tighter, his heart furious. “Taking off!” he screamed. The jolting concussion! The thunder! “The Moon!” he cried, eyes blind, tight. “The meteors!” The silent rush in volcanic light. “Mars. Oh, yes! Mars! Mars!”
He fell back, exhausted and panting. His shaking hands came loose of the controls and his head tilted wildly. He sat for a long time, breathing out and in, his heart slowing.
Slowly, slowly, he opened his eyes.
The junkyard was still there.
He sat motionless. He looked at the heaped piles of metal for a minute, his eyes never leaving them. Then, leaping up, he kicked the levers. “Take off, blast you!”
The ship was silent.
“I’ll show you!” he cried.
Out in the night air, stumbling, he started the fierce motor of his terrible wrecking machine and advanced upon the rocket. He maneuvered the massive weights into the moonlit sky. He readied his trembling hands to plunge the weights, to smash, to rip apart this insolently false dream, this silly thing for which he had paid his money, which would not move, which would not do his bidding. “I’ll teach you!” he shouted.
But his hand stayed.
The silver rocket lay in the light of the Moon. And beyond the rocket stood the yellow lights of his home, a block away, burning warmly. He heard the family radio playing some distant music. He sat for half an hour considering the rocket and the house lights, and his eyes narrowed and grew wide. He stepped down from the wrecking machine and began to walk, and as he walked he began to laugh, and when he reached the back door of his house he took a deep breath and called, “Maria, Maria, start packing. We’re going to Mars!”
“Oh!”
“Ah!”
“I can’t believe it!”
“You will, you will.”
The children balanced in the windy yard, under the glowing rocket, not touching it yet. They started to cry.
Maria looked at her husband. “What have you done?” she said. “Taken our money for this? It will never fly.”
“It will fly,” he said, looking at it.
“Rocket ships cost millions. Have you millions?”
“It will fly,” he repeated steadily. “Now, go to the house, all of you. I have phone calls to make, work to do. Tomorrow we leave! Tell no one, understand? It is a secret.”
The children edged off from the rocket, stumbling. He saw their small, feverish faces in the house windows, far away.
Maria had not moved. “You have ruined us,” she said. “Our money used for this—this thing. When it should have been spent on equipment.”
“You will see,” he said.
Without a word she turned away.
“God help me,” he whispered, and started to work.
Through the midnight hours trucks arrived, packages were delivered, and Bodoni, smiling, exhausted his bank account. With blowtorch and metal stripping he assaulted the rocket, added, took away, worked fiery magics and secret insults upon it. He bolted nine ancient automobile motors into the rocket’s empty engine room. Then he welded the engine room shut, so none could see his hidden labor.
At dawn he entered the kitchen. “Maria,” he said, “I’m ready for breakfast.”
She would not speak to him.
At sunset he called to the children. “We’re ready! Come on!” The house was silent.
“I’ve locked them in the closet,” said Maria.
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
“You’ll be killed in that rocket,” she said. “What kind of rocket can you buy for two thousand dollars? A bad one!”
“Listen to me, Maria.”
“It will blow up. Anyway, you are no pilot.”
“Nevertheless, I can fly this ship. I have fixed it.”
“You have gone mad,” she said.
“Where is the key to the closet?”
“I have it here.”
He put out his hand. “Give it to me.”
She handed it to him. “You will kill them.”
“No, no.”
“Yes, you will. I feel it.”
He stood before her. “You won’t come along?”
“I’ll stay here,” she said.
“You will understand; you will see then,” he said, and smiled. He unlocked the closet. “Come, children. Follow your father.”
“Good-bye, good-bye, Mama!”
She stayed in the kitchen window, looking out at them, very straight and silent.
At the door of the rocket the father said, “Children, this is a swift rocket. We will be gone only a short while. You must come back to school, and I to my business.” He took each of their hands in turn. “Listen. This rocket is very old and will fly only one more journey. It will not fly again. This will be the one trip of your life. Keep your eyes wide.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Listen, keep your ears clean. Smell the smells of a rocket. Feel. Remember. So when you return you will talk of it all the rest of your lives.”
“Yes, Papa.”
The ship was quiet as a stopped clock. The airlock hissed shut behind them. He strapped them all, like tiny mummies, into rubber hammocks. “Ready? he called.
“Ready!” all replied.
“Blast-off!” He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming. “We’re moving! We’re off! Look!”
“Here comes the Moon!”
The moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports. “There’s Earth!” “There’s Mars!”
The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their cocoon hammocks.
“Good,” whispered Bodoni, alone.
He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.
He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into the inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?
No. Bodoni smiled.
All about the quivering rocket lay the junkyard.
Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junkyard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junkyard, manufacturing a magic dream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.
Maria stood in the kitchen window.
He waved to her and smiled.
He could not see if she waved or
not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.
The sun was rising.
Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Silence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed, Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion in the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars come up under our ship, and the moons of Mars, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimensions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mirrors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.
He awoke.
Red Mars floated near the rocket.
“Papa!” The children thrashed to be free.
Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.
At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.
“We are home,” said Bodoni.
They walked across the junkyard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing. Perhaps they knew what he had done. Perhaps they guessed his wonderful magic trick. But if they knew, if they guessed, they never said. Now they only laughed and ran.
“I have ham and eggs for all of you,” said Maria, at the kitchen door.
“Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!”
“Yes,” she said.
At bedtime the children gathered before Bodoni. “We want to thank you, Papa.”
“It was nothing.”
“We will remember it for always, Papa. We will never forget.”
Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. “What’s this?” he cried.
“You’re the best father in the world,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“Now I see,” she said. “I understand.”
She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. “Is it a very lovely journey?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?”
“Just a little one, perhaps,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “Good night.”
“Good night,” said Fiorello Bodoni.
SEASON OF DISBELIEF
HOW IT BEGAN WITH THE CHILDREN, old Mrs. Bentley never knew. She often saw them, like moths and monkeys, at the grocer’s, among the cabbages and hung bananas, and she smiled at them and they smiled back. Mrs. Bentley watched them making footprints in winter snow, filling their lungs with autumn smoke, shaking down blizzards of spring apple-blossoms, but felt no fear of them. As for herself, her house was in extreme good order, everything set to its station, the floors briskly swept, the foods neatly tinned, the hatpins thrust through cushions, and the drawers of her bedroom bureaus crisply filled with the paraphernalia of years.
Mrs. Bentley was a saver. She saved tickets, old theater programs, bits of lace, scarves, rail transfers; all the tags and tokens of existence.
“I’ve a stack of records,” she often said. “Here’s Caruso. That was in 1916, in New York; I was sixty and John was still alive. Here’s June Moon, 1924, I think, right after John died.”
That was the huge regret of her life, in a way. The one thing she had most enjoyed touching and listening to and looking at she hadn’t saved. John was far out in the meadow country, dated and boxed and hidden under grasses, and nothing remained of him but his high silk hat and his cane and his good suit in the closet. So much of the rest of him had been devoured by moths.
But what she could keep she had kept. Her pink-flowered dresses crushed among moth balls in vast black trunks, and cut-glass dishes from her childhood—she had brought them all when she moved to this town five years ago. Her husband had owned rental property in a number of towns, and, like a yellow ivory chess piece, she had moved and sold one after another, until now she was here in a strange town, left with only the trunks and furniture, dark and ugly, crouched about her like the creatures of a primordial zoo.
The thing about the children happened in the middle of summer. Mrs. Bentley, coming out to water the ivy upon her front porch, saw two cool-colored sprawling girls and a small boy lying on her lawn, enjoying the immense prickling of the grass.
At the very moment Mrs. Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wineglasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun.
Mrs. Bentley called, “Would you like some? Here!” The ice-cream wagon stopped and she exchanged money for pieces of the original Ice Age. The children thanked her with snow in their mouths, their eyes darting from her buttoned-up shoes to her white hair.
“Don’t you want a bite?” said the boy.
“No, child. I’m old enough and cold enough; the hottest day won’t thaw me,” laughed Mrs. Bentley.
They carried the miniature glaciers up and sat, three in a row, on the shady porch glider.
“I’m Alice, she’s Jane, and that’s Tom Spaulding.”
“How nice. And I’m Mrs. Bentley. They called me Helen.”
They stared at her.
“Don’t you believe they called me Helen?” said the old lady.
“I didn’t know old ladies had first names,” said Tom, blinking.
Mrs. Bentley laughed dryly.
“You never hear them used, he means,” said Jane.
“My dear, when you are as old as I, they won’t call you Jane, either. Old age is dreadfully formal. It’s always ‘Mrs.’ Young People don’t like to call you ‘Helen.’ It seems much too flip.”
“How old are you?” asked Alice.
“I remember the pterodactyl.” Mrs. Bentley smiled.
“No, but how old?”
“Seventy-two.”
They gave their cold sweets an extra long suck, deliberating.
“That’s old,” said Tom.
“I don’t feel any different now than when I was your age,” said the old lady.
“Our age?”
“Yes. Once I was a pretty little girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice.”
They did not speak.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” Jane got up.
“Oh, you don’t have to go so soon, I hope. You haven’t finished eating. . . . Is something the matter?”
“My mother says it isn’t nice to fib,” said Jane.
“Of course it isn’t. It’s very bad,” agreed Mrs. Bentley.
“And not to listen to fibs.”
“Who was fibbing to you, Jane?”
Jane looked at her and then glanced nervously away. “You were.”
“I?” Mrs. Bentley laughed and put her withered claw to her small bosom. “About what?”
“About your age. About being a little girl.”
Mrs. Bentley stiffened. “But I was, many years ago, a little girl just like you.”
“Come on, Alice, Tom.”
“Just a moment,” said Mrs. Bentley. “Don’t you believe me?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane. “No.”
“But how ridiculous! It’s perfectly obvious. Everyone was young once!”
“Not you,” whispered Jane, eyes down, almost to herself. Her empty ice stick had fallen in a vanilla puddle on the porch floor.
“But of course I was eight, nine, ten years old, like all of you.”
The two girls gave a short, quickly-sealed-up laugh.
Mrs. Bentley’s eyes glittered. “Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year-olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.”
The two girls laughed. Tom looked uneasy.
“You’re joking with us,” giggled Jane. “You weren’t really ten ev
er, were you, Mrs. Bentley?”
“You run on home!” the woman cried suddenly, for she could not stand their eyes. “I won’t have you laughing.”
“And your name’s not really Helen?”
“Of course it’s Helen!”
“Good-bye,” said the two girls, giggling away across the lawn under the seas of shade, Tom followed them slowly. “Thanks for the ice cream!”
“Once I played hopscotch!” Mrs. Bentley cried after them, but they were gone.
Mrs. Bentley spent the rest of the day slamming teakettles about, loudly preparing a meager lunch, and from time to time going to the front door, hoping to catch those insolent fiends on their laughing excursions through the late day. But if they had appeared, what could she say to them, why should she worry about them?
“The idea!” said Mrs. Bentley to her dainty, rose-clustered teacup. “No one ever doubted I was a girl before. What a silly, horrible thing to do. I don’t mind being old—not really—but I do resent having my childhood taken away from me.”
She could see the children racing off under the cavernous trees with her youth in their frosty fingers, invisible as air.
After supper, for no reason at all, with a senseless certainty of motion, she watched her own hands, like a pair of ghostly gloves at a séance, gather together certain items in a perfumed kerchief. Then she went to her front porch and stood there stiffly for half an hour.
As suddenly as night birds the children flew by, and Mrs. Bentley’s voice brought them to a fluttering rest.
“Yes, Mrs. Bentley?”
“Come up on this porch!” she commanded them, and the girls climbed the steps, Tom trailing after.
“Yes, Mrs. Bentley?” They thumped the “Mrs.” like a bass piano chord, extra heavily, as if that were her first name.
“I’ve some treasures to show you.” She opened the perfumed kerchief and peered into it as if she herself might be surprised. She drew forth a hair comb, very small and delicate, its rim twinkling with rhinestones.
“I wore this when I was nine,” she said.
Jane turned it in her hand and said, “How nice.”
“Let’s see!” cried Alice.
“And here is a tiny ring I wore when I was eight,” said Mrs. Bentley. “It doesn’t fit my finger now. You look through it and see the Tower of Pisa ready to fall.”
