by Ray Bradbury
A billion bolts to be tightened. A billion motors to be tinkered! A billion iron tripes to lie under, a grand oil-dripped-upon orphan, alone, alone, alone with the always beautiful and never talking back hummingbird-commotion devices, accoutrements and miraculous contraptions.
His hands weighed him toward the tools. He clutched a wrench. He found a forty-wheeled low running sled. He lay down on it. He sculled the garage in a long whistling ride. The sled scuttled.
Parkhill vanished beneath a great car of some ancient design.
Out of sight, you could hear him working on the gut of the machine. On his back, he talked up at it. And when he slapped it to life, at last, the machine talked back.
Always the silver pathways ran somewhere.
Thousands of years now they had run empty, carrying only dust to destinations away and away among the high and dreaming buildings.
Now, on one traveling path, Aaronson came borne like an aging statue.
And the more the road propelled him, the faster the City exposed itself to his view, the more buildings that passed, the more parks that sprang into sight, the more his smile faded. His color changed.
"Toy," he heard himself whisper. The whisper was ancient. "Just another," and here his voice grew so small it faded away, "...another Toy."
A super-Toy, yes. But his life was full of such and had always been so. If it was not some slot machine it was the next-size dispenser or a jumbo-size razzmatazz hi-fi stereo speaker. From a lifetime of handling metallic sandpaper, he felt his arms rubbed away to a nub. Mere pips, his fingers. No, handless, and lacking wrists. Aaronson, the Seal Boy!!! His mindless flippers clapped applause to a city that was, in reality, no more and no less than an economy-size jukebox ravening under its idiot breath. And--he knew the tune! God help him. He knew the tune.
He blinked just once.
An inner eyelid came down like cold steel.
He turned and tread the silver waters of the path.
He found a moving river of steel to take him back toward the Great Gate itself.
On the way, he met the Corelli maid, wandering lost on her own silver stream.
As for the poet and his wife, their running battle tore echoes everywhere. They cried down thirty avenues, cracked panes in two hundred shops, battered leaves from seventy varieties of park bush and tree, and only ceased when drowned by a thundering fountain display they passed like a rise of clear fireworks upon the metropolitan air.
"The whole thing is," said his wife, punctuating one of his dirtier responses, "you only came along so you could lay hands on the nearest woman and spray her ears with bad breath and worse poetry."
The poet muttered a foul word.
"You're worse than the actor," said his wife. "Always at it. Don't you ever shut up?"
"Don't you?" he cried. "Ah God, I've curdled inside. Shut up, woman, or I'll throw myself in the founts!"
"No. You haven't bathed in years. You're the pig of the century! Your picture will grace the Swine Herder's Annual next month!"
"That did it!"
Doors slammed on a building.
By the time she got off and ran back and fisted the doors, they were locked.
"Coward!" she shrieked. "Open up!"
A foul word came echoing out, dimly.
"Ah, listen to that sweet silence," he whispered, to himself, in the great shelled dark.
Harpwell found himself in a soothing hugeness, a vast womb-like building, over which hung a canopy of pure serenity, a starless void.
In the middle of this room which was roughly a two-hundred-foot circle stood a device, a machine. In this machine were dials and rheostats and switches, a seat, and a steering wheel.
"What kind of vehicle is this?" whispered the poet, but edged near, and bent to touch. "Christ-off-the-cross-and-bearing-mercy, it smells of what? Blood and mere guts? No, for it's clean as a virgin's frock. Still it does fill the nose. Violence. Simple destruction. I can feel the damn carcass tremble like a nervous highbred hound. It's full of stuffs. Let's try a swig."
He sat in the machine.
"What do I swig first? This?"
He snapped a switch.
The Baskerville-hound machine whimpered in its dog slumberings.
"Good beast." He flicked another switch. "How do you go, brute? When the damn device is in full tilt, where to? You lack wheels. Well, surprise me. I dare."
The machine shivered.
The machine bolted.
It ran. It dashed.
He held tight to the steering wheel.
"Holy God!"
For he was on a highway, racing fast.
Air sluiced by. The sky flashed over in running colors.
The speedometer read seventy, eighty.
And the highway ribboned away ahead, flashing toward him. Invisible wheels slapped and banged on an increasingly rough road.
Far away, ahead, a car appeared.
It was running fast. And--
"It's on the wrong side of the road! Do you see that, wife? The wrong side."
Then he realized his wife was not here.
He was alone in a car racing--ninety miles an hour now--toward another car racing at a similar speed.
He veered the wheel.
His vehicle moved to the left.
Almost instantly the other car did a compensating move, and ran back over to the right.
"The damn fool, what does he think--where's the blasted brake?"
He stomped the floor. There was no brake. Here was a strange machine indeed. One that ran as fast as you wished, but never stopped until what? it ran itself down? There was no brake. Nothing but--further accelerators. A whole series of round-buttons on the floor, which, as he tromped them, surged power into the motor.
Ninety, one hundred, one hundred twenty miles an hour.
"God in heaven!" he screamed. "We're going to hit! How do you like that, girl?"
And in the last instant before collision, he imagined she rather liked it fine.
The cars hit. They erupted in gaseous flame. They burst apart in flinders. They tumbled. He felt himself jerked now this way and that. He was a torch hurtled skyward. His arms and legs danced a crazy rigadoon in midair as he felt his peppermint stick bones snap in brittle and agonizing ecstasies. Then, clutching death as a dark mate, gesticulating, he fell away in a black surprise, drifting toward further nothings.
He lay dead.
He lay dead a long while.
Then he opened one eye.
He felt the slow burner under his soul. He felt the bubbled water rising to the top of his mind like tea brewing.
"I'm dead," he said, "but alive. Did you see all that, wife? Dead but alive."
He found himself sitting in the vehicle, upright.
He sat there for ten minutes thinking about all that had happened.
"Well now," he mused. "Was that not interesting? Not to say fascinating? Not to say, almost exhilarating? I mean, sure, it knocked the stuff out of me, scared the soul out one ear and back in the other, hit my wind and tore my gut, broke the bones and shook the wits, but, but, but, wife, but, but, but, dear sweet Meg, Meggy, Megan, I wish you were here, it might tamp the tobacco tars out of your half-ass lungs and bray the mossy graveyard backbreaking meanness from your marrow. Let me see here now, wife, let's have a look, Harpwell-my-husband-the-poet."
He tinkered with the dials.
He thrummed the great hound motor.
"Shall we chance another diversion? Try another embattled picnic excursion? Let's."
And he set the car on its way.
Almost immediately, the vehicle was traveling one hundred and then one hundred fifty miles per hour.
Almost immediately, the opposing car appeared ahead.
"Death," said the poet. "Are you always here, then? Do you hang about? Is this your questing place? Let's test your mettle!"
The car raced. The other car hurtled.
He wheeled over into the other lane.
The other car
followed, homing toward Destroy.
"Yes, I see, well, then, this," said the poet.
And switched a switch and jumped another throttle.
In the instant before impact, the two cars transformed themselves. Shuttering through illusory veils, they became jet craft at take-off. Shrieking, the two jets banged flame, tore air, yammered back sound-barrier explosions before the mightiest one of all--as the two bullets impacted, fused, interwove, interlaced blood, mind, and eternal blackness, and fell away into a net of strange and peaceful midnight.
I'm dead, he thought again.
And it feels fine, thanks.
He awoke to feel a smile on his face.
He was seated in the vehicle.
Twice dead, he thought, and feeling better each time. Why? isn't that odd? Curiouser and curiouser. Queer beyond queerness.
He thrummed the motor again.
What this time?
Does it locomote? he wondered. How about a big black choo-choo train out of half-primordial times?
And he was on his way, an engineer. The sky flicked over, and the motion-picture screens or whatever they were pressed in with swift illusions of pouring smoke and steaming whistle and huge wheel within wheel on grinding track, and the track ahead wound through hills, and far on up around a mountain came another train, black as a buffalo herd, pouring belches of smoke, on the same two rails, the same track, heading toward wondrous accident.
"I see," said the poet. "I do begin to see. I begin to know what this and what used for, for such as me, the poor wandering idiots of a world, confused, and sore put upon by mothers as soon as dropped from wombs, insulted with Christian guilt, and gone mad from the need of destruction, and collecting a pittance of hurt here and scar tissue there, and a larger portable wife grievance beyond, but one thing sure, we do want to die, we do want to be killed, and here's the very thing for it, in convenient quick pay! So pay it out, machine, dole it out, sweet raving device! Rape away, death! I'm your very man."
And the two locomotives met and climbed each other. Up a black ladder of explosion they wheeled and locked their drive shafts and plastered their slick Negro bellies together and rubbed boilers and beautifully banged the night in a single outflung whirl and flurry of shrapnel and flame. Then the locomotives, in a cumbrous rapine dance, seized and melted together with their violence and passion, gave a monstrous curtsy and fell off the mountain and took a thousand years to go all the way down to the rocky pits.
The poet awoke and immediately grabbed the controls. He was humming under his breath, stunned. He was singing wild tunes. His eyes flashed. His heart beat swiftly.
"More, more, I see it now, I know what to do, more, more, please, Oh God, more, for the truth shall set me free, more!"
He hoofed three, four, five pedals.
He snapped six switches.
The vehicle was auto-jet-locomotive-glider-missile-rocket.
He ran, he steamed, he roared, he soared, he flew. Cars veered toward him. Locomotives loomed. Jets rammed. Rockets screamed.
And in one wild three-hour spree he hit two hundred cars, rammed twenty trains, blew up ten gliders, exploded forty missiles, and, far out in space, gave up his glorious soul in a final Fourth of July Death celebration as an interplanetary rocket going two hundred thousand miles an hour struck an iron meteor and went beautifully to hell.
In all, in a few short hours he figured he must have been torn apart and put back together a few times less than five hundred.
When it was all over, he sat not touching the wheel, his feet free of the pedals.
After a half hour of sitting there, he began to laugh. He threw his head back and let out great warwhoops. Then he got up, shaking his head, drunker than ever in his life, really drunk now, and he knew he would stay that way forever, and never need drink again.
I'm punished, he thought, really punished at last. Really hurt at last, and hurt enough, over and over, so I will never need hurt again, never need to be destroyed again, never have to collect another insult, or take another wound, or ask for a simple grievance. God bless the genius of man and the inventors of such machines, that enable the guilty to pay and at last be rid of the dark albatross and the awful burden. Thank you, City, thank you, old blueprinter of needful souls. Thank you. And which way out?
A door slid open.
His wife stood waiting for him.
"Well, there you are," she said. "And still drunk."
"No," he said. "Dead."
"Drunk."
"Dead," he said, "beautifully dead at last. Which means, free. I won't need you anymore, dead Meg, Meggy-Megan. You're set free, also, like an awful conscience. Go haunt someone else, girl. Go destroy. I forgive you your sins on me, for I have at last forgiven myself. I am off the Christian hook. I am the dear wandering dead who, dead, can at last live. Go and do likewise, lady. Inside with you. Be punished and set free. So long, Meg. Farewell. Toodleoo."
He wandered away.
"Where do you think you're going?" she cried.
"Why, out into life and the blood of life and happy at last."
"Come back here!" she screamed.
"You can't stop the dead, for they wander the universe, happy as children in the dark field."
"Harpwell!" she brayed. "Harpwell!"
But he stepped on a river of silver metal.
And let the dear river bear him laughing until the tears glittered on his cheeks, away and away from the shriek and the bray and the scream of that woman, what was her name? no matter, back there, and gone.
And when he reached the Gate he walked out and along the canal in the fine day, heading toward the far towns.
By that time, he was singing every old tune he had known as a child of six.
It was a church.
No, not a church.
Wilder let the door swing shut.
He stood in cathedral darkness, waiting.
The roof, if roof there was, breathed up in a great suspense, flowed up beyond reach or sight.
The floor, if floor there was, was a mere firmness beneath. It, too, was black.
And then, the stars came out. It was like that first night of childhood when his father had taken him out beyond the city to a hill where the lights could not diminish the Universe. And there were a thousand, no ten thousand, no ten million billion stars filling the darkness. The stars were manifold and bright, and they did not care. Even then he had known: they do not care. If I breathe or do not breathe, live or die, the eyes that look from all around don't care. And he had seized his father's hand and gripped tight, as if he might fall up into that abyss.
Now, in this building, he was full of the old terror and the old sense of beauty and the old silent crying out after mankind. The stars filled him with pity for small men lost in so much size.
Then yet another thing happened.
Beneath his feet, space opened wide and let through yet another billion sparks of light.
He was suspended as a fly is held upon a vast telescopic lens. He walked on a water of space. He stood upon a transparent flex of great eye, and all about him, as on a night in winter, beneath foot and above head, in all directions, were nothing but stars.
So, in the end, it was a church, it was a cathedral, a multitude of farflung universal shrines, here a worshipping of Horsehead Nebula, there Orion's galaxy, and there Andromeda, like the head of God, fiercely gazed and thrust through the raw dark stuffs of night to stab his soul and pin it writhing against the backside of his flesh.
God, everywhere, fixed him with shutterless and unblinking eyes.
And he, a bacterial shard of that same Flesh, stared back and winced but the slightest.
He waited. And a planet drifted upon the void. It spun by once with a great mellow autumn face. It circled and came under him.
And he stood upon a far world of green grass and great lush trees, where the air was fresh, and a river ran by like the rivers of childhood, flashing the sun and leaping with fish.
He k
new that he had traveled very far to reach this world. Behind him lay the rocket. Behind lay a century of travel, of sleeping, of waiting, and now, here was the reward.
"Mine?" he asked the simple air, the simple grass, the long simplicity of water that spelled by in the shallow sands.
And the world answered wordless: yours.
Yours without the long travel and the boredom, yours without ninety-nine years of flight from Earth, of sleeping in kept tubes, of intravenous feedings, of nightmares dreamt of Earth lost and gone, yours without torture, without pain, yours without trial and error, failure and destruction. Yours without sweat and terror. Yours without a falling down of tears. Yours. Yours.
But Wilder did not put out his hands to accept.
And the sun dimmed in the alien sky.
And the world drifted from under his feet.
And yet another world swam up and passed in a huge parade of even brighter glories.
And this world, too, spun up to take his weight. And here, if anything, the fields were richer green, the mountains capped with melting snows, far fields ripening with strange harvests, and scythes waiting on the edge of fields for him to lift and sweep and cut the grain and live out his life any way that he might.
Yours. The merest touch of weather upon the hairs within his ear said this. Yours.
And Wilder, without shaking his head, moved back. He did not say no. He thought his rejection.
And the grass died in the fields.
The mountains crumbled.
The river shallows ran to dust.
And the world sprang away.
And Wilder stood again in space where God had stood before creating a world out of Chaos.
And at last he spoke and said to himself:
"It would be easy. O Lord, yes, I'd like that. No work, nothing, just accept. But ... You can't give me what I want."
He looked at the stars.
"Nothing can be given, ever."
The stars were growing dim.
"It's really very simple. I must borrow, I must earn. I must take."
The stars quivered and died.
"Much obliged and thank you, no."
The stars were all gone.
He turned and, without looking back, walked upon darkness. He hit the door with his palm. He strode out into the City.
He refused to hear if the machine universe behind him cried out in a great chorus, all cries and wounds, like a woman scorned. The crockery in a vast robot kitchen fell. By the time it his the floor, he was gone.
It was a Museum of Weapons.
The hunter walked among the cases.
