Bradbury Speaks

by Ray Bradbury

I did some minor consulting work on the Orbitron ride at Euro Disney outside Paris, a few years ago. Attending the opening-day ceremonies, in the late afternoon I went up to the second floor of the Disneyland Hotel to sit with a cold beer and a fine view of the new park, musing on its many qualities.

  Halfway through my drink, a stranger walked up with his wife and asked permission to sit at my table. I agreed, amiably, and we chatted for a few minutes about the park, the happy celebration, and tonight’s fireworks. I looked around at the hotel and praised it, saying it was very fine.

  “But,” I added, “I know a hotel finer than this. The greatest, to me anyway, hotel in the world, and I’ve lived in dozens of them!”

  “What hotel is that?” said the stranger.

  “The Grand Floridian, at Disney World, Florida,” I said, working up steam. “Everything about it invites. The shape, the size, the colors, the restaurants. And the main lobby, which rises at least six floors above the conversational area below and gives kids notions about running up there to circle ’round and think about spitting down at their parents below. What a place! The Grand Floridian. Go there!”

  “I’ve been,” said the stranger. “That’s mine.”

  “Yours?”

  “Ours, I should say. Our architectural firm in Newport, California.”

  “My God!” I cried. “And here I’ve been shooting off my mouth … !”

  “It’s all right,” said Gerald Allison, reaching out to shake my hand, laughing. “Don’t stop.”

  I haven’t. I’m still saying the same, only more so. Since then I’ve stayed again at the Grand Floridian and see no reason to change. I’d still like to run up to the sixth floor to sail paper planes or spit. I always leave there a foot shorter and ten times louder than when I came through the door.

  Needless to say, Gerry Allison and I started the swiftest friendship in history that afternoon. And I haven’t changed my mind about him or his cohorts since. Little did I know that when I shook his hand, I was shaking the hand of a kid who once dreamed of clearing the jungle to fast-find a lost city. This was my blood brother, raised late nights on awful radio shows and reading Tarzan and the City of Gold with a flashlight, totally forbidden, under the covers halfway toward morn.

  So what you have here are not, as they claim, postcards of the future. They are good promises that can and will be kept.

  Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo, like Gaul, exists in four parts, but the four parts make a whole that can lick the bejesus out of a small part of the future.

  Can Gerry and his pals solve and improve everything? No way. But they can nibble and nick and munch around the edges of time and, bit by bit, change cities that have fallen to skeleton and skin, and make viral implants in dead tissue to watch long-dormant towns revitalize themselves, said viruses giving life rather than taking it.

  Politics seem to have no cure for our empty boulevards and parks, but corporate cash and architectural imagination can guarantee at least safe walking and living places. Schweitzer once said, Do something good, someone may imitate it. Allison and Associates can, then, set examples, near cities if not in them, to be seen and imitated.

  While a good part of Africa self-destroys, Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo discovers a civilization that never was and promise a future not over the rainbow but underfoot. I would go there, to their bee-loud glades.

  Big Brother will never be dead.

  But they’re giving him a rough time.

  HYSTERIA, GODDESS OF FLIGHT, OR ON TAKEOFF, DO NOT RUN UP AND DOWN THE AISLES SCREAMING (1993)

  Everyone knows, of course, that I do not fly, have never flown, and have no immediate plans for such madness.

  That is my myth.

  But at last the truth must come out.

  After sixty-two years, my romantic, if cowardly, image must be shattered.

  I have been flying secretly, and not so secretly, for one hundred and twenty months.

  Before that, Stan Freberg planned to star me in an advertisement, stepping into a jet. I was fooled into doing so by the fact that the airline had pasted a gigantic papier-mâché painting of a locomotive over the jet’s body while the pilot, in a train engineer’s cap, waved a lantern out the window, causing me to think I was boarding the Superchief.

  None of that, now.

  On October 17, 1982, propelled by three double martinis, I took off ahead of my jet, bound for L.A.

  But that’s the end of my story.

  What came first? How did I unknot my viscera and, egged on by some loony minor god of high winds and low morale, let myself be carried, writhing, onto a cross-country flight?

  It all began with my traveling by train, my usual tourist’s mode or venue (to use the latest “in” word). I arrived to lecture in New Orleans, prepared to head south to Orlando the next day for the grand opening of Epcot at Disney World. I had been a creative writer and consultant on its main Gulliver-size Spaceship Earth. I was to join dozens of cocreators for a three-day multimillion-dollar send-off.

  On arriving in New Orleans, what did I find? That Amtrak, in an act of brilliant ineptitude, had canceled all future train travel from Chicago to New Orleans to Orlando. The most-traveled, most-populated train system in the U.S.A. was shot dead in its tracks. In order to visit mid-Florida, I would have to entrain for Washington, D.C., and triangulate back to Miami. “Washington, D.C.!” I cried. “Do you mean to say I have to go where I don’t want to go in order to ricochet back south!?”

  I ordered a limousine and an old colored chauffeur. He wasn’t black, no, no. He was colored and old, somewhere in his seventies, and moved and talked like the old semidark retainers in childhood films.

  We set out for Orlando and never arrived. Along the way God whispered, “Fly, dummy!” A few moments later, we blew a tire in the middle of the freeway.

  Well, now. When was the last time you changed an automobile tire?

  When was the last time, for that matter, that you changed the tire on an elephantine limousine?

  When was the last time you changed an elephantine limousine tire in the middle of a freeway with cars shrieking by at sixty or seventy miles per hour?

  When was the last time you got the spare tire out of the limousine trunk only to find that there was only an hour’s worth of tread on same?

  And, finally, when was the last time you went searching to buy a spare tire for that great big limousine in and around and through Tallahassee?

  Right. You got the picture.

  It took about three hours of touching in and out of gas and tire stations, treating our spare tread gingerly, before we found a shop that took one look at the Martian visitor and his retainer and overcharged us for the last elephantine tire within reach. And all the while, God, leaning over my left shoulder, kept muttering, “Fly, dummy!”

  With the new tire in place and no spare in the trunk, since we had bought the last similar tire in a hundred miles, we headed south again.

  The dear Lord kept reasonably silent until around four in the afternoon, when he repeated his celestial advice and—

  The limousine engine rolled over stone cold and played dead elephant.

  No kicking, no reasoning, no oiling, no gassing, no cursing could cause the prone or perhaps even supine beast to rouse. We glided by happenstance into the courtyard of a not-very-festive-looking Holiday Inn, where the limo stuttered the last lines of Caesar dying and assumed rigor mortis. I had to restrain my retainer from putting a bullet behind the engine block.

  “It is the final night of the World Series,” I reasoned. “Let us rent a cheap room with two six-packs of expensive beer and drink toasts to a complete loss of memory.”

  I retired to do just that and watched the Series with much dubiety until the third Coors, which made the Series look ten times better than it was. Who was playing that night? Silly. Did I sleep well, even though I heard my chauffeur rampaging in, under, and on top of the funereal creature? You betcha.

  The next morning my chauffeur reported t
hat he was threatening the limo with the junkyard but so far had had no response. There was no use my hanging around for a prognosis. Why didn’t I call a local taxicab and buy four hundred dollars’ worth of travel to Orlando?

  Checking my wallet, I heard our dear Lord repeating his litany about skies, wings, travel, and time.

  The local taxi—there was only one in the nameless town nearby—arrived driven by the town sheriff, a near relative of the law in Smokey and the Bandit.

  Well, sir, I got the complete tour, on all sides in every community, proclaimed by the sheriff as we dusted the miles, of which ditch held the town drunks, where the ladies or women or girls of ill-after-midnight repute might be unearthed, and how many unlucky ones had been bruised or dashed to a finality on this particular stretch of highway. By the time we reached Orlando, I had the whole history of northern Florida in one ear, winding its way with a thick southern accent out the other. I said not a word, seeing as how it was my true encounter with a chicken-fried keeper of the law. He chanted facts as easily as a pachinko game spills its miniballs. I enjoyed being out in his rain.

  I hated saying good-bye to the sheriff, but there was important business. Listening to my Maker yet one more time, I flung myself into the arms of the Disney people and cried, “Feed me three double martinis, buy me a ticket, and fly me home in a jet!”

  There you have it. The moment you have been waiting for. The collapse of my morale. The ruination of my myth: a lifetime of catching trolleys, buses, and trains. As I babbled my desire to the Disney folks, I stared at the sky and wondered:

  Will I ever travel at twice the speed of sound?

  A frisson of premonition chilled my shoulder blades where tiny ice crystals budded and burst forth in wings.

  I had three long and most joyful days to brood over Kitty Hawk, bastard son of the Wright Brothers’ decision. Three days in which the gates of Epcot were flung open and thousands of special invitees from all over the world rode with me back through time and up into the future in Spaceship Earth, whose interior architecture I had prefigured with words, consulting with Disney, three years before. Three days of Harry James, Lionel Hampton and his vibes, youth bands, late-night Larry King talk shows, and a million bucks’ worth of fireworks delivered me at last to Day of the Birdman.

  Yes, yes, you mutter, but when was it you stopped being afraid?

  Not that day.

  The Disney people had warned the Orlando airport folks that they were toting me into Guillotine Seven, removing my shoes to lessen the drag.

  Shocked at the incredible news, more than one airline official was there to help me off the tumbrel. I think it was more than one official. After the first martini, they moved around a lot. I must add, I really don’t like martinis. But the immense jar they provided was called a Quick Fix, so I relented. It was then that the extra officials appeared out of nowhere, joking about my fear of crashing. They did not say crash-landing, you may notice. They gave me jovial punches in the arm to welcome me to my new age of heaven-inspired freedom. They noted but did not comment on the fresh chalk-white pallor of my usually pumpkin-colored cheeks. The jokes continued, the martinis deiced my hidden wings, and once I was in a fluid state, not unlike mercury skimming the surface of a cold plate, they siphoned me in the general direction of the jet. As I lurched into my seat, they offered me a belt. No thanks, I said, I’ve already had six! No, no, they said, around your middle, and tightened me in. Someone was whispering prayers to a passenger, unlisted, named Mary. That’s all right, I thought, go right ahead, even though I’m a Baptist!

  The airline officials put a Boy Scout knot in my belt, bussed me on both cheeks, and bade me what sounded like a truly final farewell.

  A radio voice advised that I must keep my seat belt on during the entire voyage.

  “Don’t worry!” I said.

  Some stranger came by and asked if I wanted to sit by the window.

  “Not necessarily,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you when we fly over the Mississippi,” someone else said.

  “I’d rather not know,” I said.

  The flight attendant asked, “What would you like to drink after takeoff?”

  “What’ve you got?” I said. Then, “Anything,” I added, like a good sport.

  “There are small paper bags, right there,” said a nurse—I think that’s what they called her—standing over me.

  “I’ll take three,” I said.

  “It’s all in your mind,” the amiable lady said.

  “Yes, but it wants out,” I said.

  “Sit back and relax,” she said.

  I tightened myself into a ball, and we took off.

  No, wait. First there were three hours of warming the engines. Then the takeoff.

  “The most dangerous time,” someone behind me said, “is taking off and landing.”

  I wish we could do both and get it over with, I thought.

  But, for the time being, we went in one direction: up!

  We were airborne!

  And suddenly the aisles were full of people. Not running up and down and screaming, no, but laughing quietly and patting my head or giving me hugs. I had been so busy with my private panics that I hadn’t noticed I was surrounded by Disney people returning to California after the Big Celebratory Bang. Animators, architectural consultants, storyboard specialists, musicians, composers, conductors, watercolorists, vice presidents—they all came by to say, “There, there, Ray, it’s okay. We’re in charge. We’ll keep the plane up.”

  Did I stare down at the Rocky Mountains as we flew over?

  Nope.

  Did I witness the Grand Canyon from forty thousand feet?

  Not really.

  Did I look out at the five-hundred-square-mile spread of Los Angeles by night and all those millions of lights?

  The lady next to me described it.

  “I would rather not hear,” I finally said.

  Did I run to the bathroom just once during the entire five-hour trip?

  You’ve got to be kidding!

  In any event, I and my mob of mobile Disney psychologists made it across the perfectly friendly skies of someone else’s airline for a blind landing at LAX. Blind meaning me, of course, with my eyes shut, praying that the pilots had theirs open.

  Another airline official was there to greet me. He held a bottle of Mumm’s in his hands. I feared he might crack it across my prow and christen me Child of Lucky Lindy out of Earhart. Before I could move, I seized the champagne while the Time magazine photographers’ cameras flashed at me in my seat, white-knuckled the armrests, and kept muttering, “Is it back, is it back?”

  “Is what back?” the Time people said.

  “The earth,” I said, eyes shut.

  They must’ve looked out the window. “Yup,” they said. “There it is.”

  “Take me out there where I can feel it,” I said.

  I did not kiss the tarmac. Knowing that the pope would want to do that in later years, I refrained.

  So far, so good. My conversion to the sky did not start on that day, but it grew over a period of months and years. I did not fly again for a year, and then gradually I took jets at three-month and then two-month and then one-month intervals.

  And one morning about two years ago, it finally happened. I took off as a nonbeliever and landed sober.

  That was the giveaway. I looked down at my empty hand and nonexistent glass.

  Holy moly! I thought. I’ve stopped drinking!

  A small lightbulb did not switch on in my brain. To put it mildly, a Bible-size Revelation crash-landed between my ears and skidded to a halt in a surf of fire-repellent foam.

  I was not afraid of flying!

  No, not at all.

  All those years I’d been fearful of, frightened of, terrified by … me.

  Playing Medusa to myself, every time I envisioned me flying, I froze myself in place.

  It was me all the time!

  Not the jet, the sky, the flight, the takeoff
, or the landing.

  But that shortly after takeoff, I might bound up with a yell and go screaming down the aisles, out of control.

  That I would babble, “Stop everything, hold ’er, Newt, this milquetoast wants out!”

  Commensurate with ordering a rowboat and waving bye to the Queen Elizabeth II in mid-Atlantic.

  In my dreams I had seen myself leaping over legs, spilling drinks, and shrieking, “Whose idea was this?!”

  And someone tying a wet sheet over me.

  I gazed at that image of myself for a long time and then murmured, “I’ll be damned. So that’s it?”

  And after a while, not ordering any martinis for the flight, I began to laugh.

  There you have it at last. Not much of a story perhaps, but my own.

  That first flight was in October 1982. Since then I have made thirty flights across country and fifteen flights on the Concorde to Paris. If I drink at all, it is some of those fine French or equally fine California wines.

  So?

  So look in the mirror. Maybe your fear was once mine. Maybe you’re playing Medusa to yourself and are frozen in place with a shriek locked under your tongue and no deicer.

  Maybe.

  Meanwhile, I wish someone would buy me a license. And teach me to drive.

  TIME TO EXPLORE AGAIN: WHERE IS THE MADMAN WHO’LL TAKE US TO MARS? (2004)

  In this time when our freeways are frozen in place, space travel suffers the same terrible winter. Years have passed since Apollo 11, with only faint cries for a lunar rediscovery, then Mars and beyond.

  How can we thaw this deep freeze to unlock our vision so that we see the stars once more with the same fever that we knew that fabulous night we took the first Giant Step?

  Let’s look at the situation five hundred years ago.

  Columbus, financed by Spain’s royalty, sailed for India. King Henry VIII, jealous, paid Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) to track Columbus. Francis I of France, thus provoked, hired Verrazano to do the same. Of the three, only Verrazano made landfall at what became Kitty Hawk. Incredible! Verrazano sailed west, and five centuries on, the Wright Brothers soared east to explore space and time.