by Ray Bradbury
‘Was that how it was,’ asked Shumway quietly, ‘one hundred years ago?’
‘Yes.’ The time traveler held up the wine bottle as if it contained proof. He poured some into a glass, eyed it, inhaled, and went on. ‘You have seen the newsreels and read the books of that time. You know it all.
‘Oh, of course, there were a few bright moments. When Salk delivered the world’s children to life. Or the night when Eagle landed and that one great step for mankind trod the moon. But in the minds and out of the mouths of many, the fifth horseman was darkly cheered on. With high hopes, it sometimes seemed, of his winning. So all would be gloomily satisfied that their predictions of doom were right from day one. So the self-fulfilling prophecies were declared; we dug our graves and prepared to lie down in them.’
‘And you couldn’t allow that?’ asked the young reporter.
‘You know I couldn’t.’
‘And so you built the Toynbee Convector—’
‘Not all at once. It took years to brood on it.’
The old man paused to swirl the dark wine, gaze at it and sip, eyes closed.
‘Meanwhile, I drowned, I despaired, wept silently late nights thinking, What can I do to save us from ourselves? How to save my friends, my city, my state, my country, the entire world from this obsession with doom? Well, it was in my library late one night that my hand, searching along shelves, touched at last on an old and beloved book by H. G. Wells. His time device called, ghostlike, down the years. I heard! I understood. I truly listened. Then I blueprinted. I built. I traveled, or so it seemed. The rest, as you know, is history.’
The old time traveler drank his wine, opened his eyes.
‘Good God,’ the young reporter whispered, shaking his head. ‘Oh, dear God. Oh, the wonder, the wonder—’
There was an immense ferment in the lower gardens now and in the fields beyond and on the roads and in the air. Millions were still waiting. Where was the great arrival?
‘Well, now,’ said the old man, filling another glass with wine for the young reporter. ‘Aren’t I something? I made the machines, built miniature cities, lakes, ponds, seas. Erected vast architectures against crystal-water skies, talked to dolphins, played with whales, faked tapes, mythologized films. Oh, it took years, years of sweating work and secret preparation before I announced my departure, left and came back with good news!’
They drank the rest of the vintage wine. There was a hum of voices. All of the people below were looking up at the roof.
The time traveler waved at them and turned.
‘Quickly, now. It’s up to you from here on. You have the tape, my voice on it, just freshly made. Here are three more tapes, with fuller data. Here’s a film-cassette history of my whole inspired fraudulence. Here’s a final manuscript. Take, take it all, hand it on. I nominate you as son to explain the father. Quickly!’
Hustled into the elevator once more, Shumway felt the world fall away beneath. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so gave, at last, a great hoot.
The old man, surprised, hooted with him, as they stepped out below and advanced upon the Toynbee Convector.
‘You see the point, don’t you, son? Life has always been lying to ourselves! As boys, young men, old men. As girls, maidens, women, to gently lie and prove the lie true. To weave dreams and put brains and ideas and flesh and the truly real beneath the dreams. Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born. Here. Thus and so.’
He pressed the button that raised the plastic shield, pressed another that started the time machine humming, then shuffled quickly in to thrust himself into the Convector’s seat.
‘Throw the final switch, young man!’
‘But—’
‘You’re thinking,’ here the old man laughed, ‘if the time machine is a fraud, it won’t work, what’s the use of throwing a switch, yes? Throw it, anyway. This time, it will work!’
Shumway turned, found the control switch, grabbed hold, then looked at Craig Bennett Stiles.
‘I don’t understand. Where are you going?’
‘Why, to be one with the ages, of course. To exist now, only in the deep past.’
‘How can that be?’
‘Believe me, this time it will happen. Good-bye, dear, fine, nice young man.’
‘Good-bye.’
‘Now. Tell me my name.’
‘What?’
‘Speak my name and throw the switch.’
‘Time traveler?’
‘Yes! Now!’
The young man yanked the switch. The machine hummed, roared, blazed with power.
‘Oh,’ said the old man, shutting his eyes. His mouth smiled gently. ‘Yes.’
His head fell forward on his chest.
Shumway yelled, banged the switch off and leaped forward to tear at the straps binding the old man in his device.
In the midst of so doing, he stopped, felt the time traveler’s wrist, put his fingers under the neck to test the pulse there and groaned. He began to weep.
The old man had, indeed, gone back in time, and its name was death. He was traveling in the past now, forever.
Shumway stepped back and turned the machine on again. If the old man were to travel, let the machine – symbolically, anyway – go with him. It made a sympathetic humming. The fire of it, the bright sun fire, burned in all of its spider grids and armatures and lighted the cheeks and the vast brow of the ancient traveler, whose head seemed to nod with the vibrations and whose smile, as he traveled into darkness, was the smile of a child much satisfied.
The reporter stood for a long moment more, wiping his cheeks with the backs of his hands. Then, leaving the machine on, he turned, crossed the room, pressed the button for the glass elevator and, while he was waiting, took the time traveler’s tapes and cassettes from his jacket pockets and, one by one, shoved them into the incinerator trash flue set in the wall.
The elevator doors opened, he stepped in, the doors shut. The elevator hummed now, like yet another time device, taking him up into a stunned world, a waiting world, lifting him up into a bright continent, a future land, a wondrous and surviving planet …
That one man with one lie had created.
Forever and the Earth
After seventy years of writing short stories that never sold, Mr Henry William Field arose one night at eleven-thirty and burned ten million words. He carried the manuscripts downstairs through his dark old mansion and threw them into the furnace.
‘That’s that,’ he said, and thinking about his lost art and his misspent life, he put himself to bed, among his rich antiques. ‘My mistake was in ever trying to picture this wild world of A.D. 2257. The rockets, the atom wonders, the travels to planets and double suns. Nobody can do it. Everyone’s tried. All of our modern authors have failed.’
Space was too big for them, and rockets too swift, and atomic science too instantaneous, he thought. But at least the other writers, while failing, had been published, while he, in his idle wealth, had used the years of his life for nothing.
After an hour of feeling this way, he fumbled through the night rooms to his library and switched on a green hurricane lamp. At random, from a collection untouched in fifty years, he selected a book. It was a book three centuries yellow and three centuries brittle, but he settled into it and read hungrily until dawn.…
At nine the next morning, Henry William Field staggered from his library, called his servants, televised lawyers, scientists, litterateurs.
‘Come at once!’ he cried.
By noon, a dozen people had stepped into the study where Henry William Field sat, very disreputable and hysterical with an odd, feeding joy, unshaven and feverish. He clutched a thick book in his brittle arms and laughed if anyone even said good morning.
‘Here you see a book,’ he said at last, holding it out, ‘written by a giant, a man born in Asheville, North Carolina, in the year 1900. Long gone to dust, he published four huge novels. He was a whirlwind. He lif
ted up mountains and collected winds. He left a trunk of penciled manuscripts behind when he lay in bed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the year 1938, on September fifteenth, and died of pneumonia, an ancient and awful disease.’
They looked at the book.
Look Homeward, Angel.
He drew forth three more. Of Time and the River. The Web and the Rock. You Can’t Go Home Again.
‘By Thomas Wolfe,’ said the old man. ‘Three centuries cold in the North Carolina earth.’
‘You mean you’ve called us simply to see four books by a dead man?’ his friends protested.
‘More than that! I’ve called you because I feel Tom Wolfe’s the man, the necessary man, to write of space, of time, huge things like nebulae and galactic war, meteors and planets, all the dark things he loved and put on paper were like this. He was born out of his time. He needed really big things to play with and never found them on Earth. He should have been born this afternoon instead of one hundred thousand mornings ago.’
‘I’m afraid you’re a bit late,’ said Professor Bolton.
‘I don’t intend to be late!’ snapped the old man. ‘I will not be frustrated by reality. You, professor, have experimented with time travel. I expect you to finish your time machine as soon as possible. Here’s a check, a blank check, fill it in. If you need more money, ask for it. You’ve done some traveling already, haven’t you?’
‘A few years, yes, but nothing like centuries—’
‘We’ll make it centuries! You others’ – he swept them with a fierce and shining glance –’will work with Bolton. I must have Thomas Wolfe.’
‘What!’ They fell back before him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the plan. Wolfe is to be brought to me. We will collaborate in the task of describing the flight from Earth to Mars, as only he could describe it!’
They left him in his library with his books, turning the dry pages, nodding to himself. ‘Yes. Oh, dear Lord yes, Tom’s the boy, Tom is the very boy for this.’
The months passed slowly. Days showed a maddening reluctance to leave the calendar, and weeks lingered on until Mr Henry William Field began to scream silently.
At the end of four months, Mr Field awoke one midnight. The phone was ringing. He put his hand out in the darkness.
‘Yes?’
‘This is Professor Bolton calling.’
‘Yes, Bolton?’
‘I’ll be leaving in an hour,’ said the voice.
‘Leaving? Leaving where? Are you quitting? You can’t do that!’
‘Please, Mr Field, leaving means leaving.’
‘You mean, you’re actually going?’
‘Within the hour.’
‘To 1938? To September fifteenth?’
‘Yes!’
‘You’re sure you’ve the date fixed correctly? You’ll arrive before he dies? Be sure of it! Good Lord, you’d better get there a good hour before his death, don’t you think?’
‘Two hours. On the way back, we’ll mark time in Bermuda, borrow ten days of free floating continuum, inject him, tan him, swim him, vitaminize him, make him well.’
‘I’m so excited I can’t hold the phone. Good luck, Bolton. Bring him through safely!’
‘Thank you, sir. Good-bye.’
The phone clicked.
Mr Henry William Field lay through the ticking night. He thought of Tom Wolfe as a lost brother to be lifted intact from under a cold, chiseled stone, to be restored to blood and fire and speaking. He trembled each time he thought of Bolton whirling on the time wind back to other calendars and other days, bearing medicines to change flesh and save souls.
Tom, he thought, faintly, in the half-awake warmth of an old man calling after his favorite and long-gone child, Tom, where are you tonight, Tom? Come along now, we’ll help you through, you’ve got to come, there’s need for you. I couldn’t do it, Tom, none of us here can. So the next best thing to doing it myself, Tom, is helping you to do it. You can play with rockets like jackstraws, Tom, and you can have the stars, like a handful of crystals. Anything your heart asks, it’s here. You’d like the fire and the travel, Tom, it was made for you. Oh, we’ve a pale lot of writers today, I’ve read them all, Tom, and they’re not like you. I’ve waded in libraries of their stuff and they’ve never touched space, Tom; we need you for that! Give an old man his wish then, for God knows I’ve waited all my life for myself or some other to write the really great book about the stars, and I’ve waited in vain. So, wherever you are tonight, Tom Wolfe, make yourself tall. It’s that book you were going to write. It’s that good book the critics said was in you when you stopped breathing. Here’s your chance, will you do it, Tom? Will you listen and come through to us, will you do that tonight, and be here in the morning when I wake? Will you, Tom?
His eyelids closed down over the fever and the demand. His tongue stopped quivering in his sleeping mouth.
The clock struck four.
Awakening to the white coolness of morning, he felt the excitement rising and welling in himself. He did not wish to blink, for fear that the thing which awaited him somewhere in the house might run off and slam a door, gone forever. His hands reached up to clutch his thin chest.
Far away … footsteps …
A series of doors opened and shut. Two men entered the bedroom.
Field could hear them breathe. Their footsteps took on identities. The first steps were those of a spider, small and precise: Bolton. The second steps were those of a big man, a large man, a heavy man.
‘Tom?’ cried the old man. He did not open his eyes.
‘Yes,’ said a voice, at last.
Tom Wolfe burst the seams of Field’s imagination, as a huge child bursts the lining of a too-small coat.
‘Tom Wolfe, let me look at you!’ If Field said it once he said it a dozen times as he fumbled from bed, shaking violently. ‘Put up the blinds, for God’s sake, I want to see this! Tom Wolfe, is that you?’
Tom Wolfe looked down from his tall thick body, with big hands out to balance himself in a world that was strange. He looked at the old man and the room and his mouth was trembling.
‘You’re just as they said you were, Tom!’
Thomas Wolfe began to laugh and the laughing was huge, for he must have thought himself insane or in a nightmare, and he came to the old man and touched him and he looked at Professor Bolton and felt of himself, his arms and legs, he coughed experimentally and touched his own brow. ‘My fever’s gone,’ he said. ‘I’m not sick anymore.’
‘Of course not, Tom.’
‘What a night,’ said Tom Wolfe. ‘It hasn’t been easy. I thought I was sicker than any man ever was. I felt myself floating and I thought, This is fever. I felt myself traveling, and thought, I’m dying fast. A man came to me. I thought, This is the Lord’s messenger. He took my hands. I smelled electricity. I flew up and over, and I saw a brass city. I thought, I’ve arrived. This is the city of heaven, there is the Gate! I’m numb from head to toe, like someone left in the snow to freeze. I’ve got to laugh and do things or I might think myself insane. You’re not God, are you? You don’t look like Him.’
The old man laughed. ‘No, no, Tom, not God, but playing at it. I’m Field.’ He laughed again. ‘Lord, listen to me. I said it as if you should know who Field is. Field, the financier, Tom, bow low, kiss my ring finger. I’m Henry Field. I like your work, I brought you here. Come along.’
The old man drew him to an immense crystal window.
‘Do you see those lights in the sky, Tom?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Those fireworks?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re not what you think, son. It’s not July Fourth, Tom. Not in the usual way. Every day’s Independence Day now. Man has declared his Freedom from Earth. Gravitation without representation has been overthrown. The Revolt has long since been successful. That green Roman Candle’s going to Mars. That red fire, that’s the Venus rocket. And the others, you see the yellow and the blue
? Rockets, all of them!’
Thomas Wolfe gazed up like an immense child caught amid the colorized glories of a July evening when the set-pieces are awhirl with phosphorous and glitter and barking explosion.
‘What year is this?’
‘The year of the rocket. Look here.’ And the old man touched some flowers that bloomed at his touch. The blossoms were like blue and white fire. They burned and sparkled their cold, long petals. The blooms were two feet wide, and they were the color of an autumn moon. ‘Moon-flowers,’ said the old man. ‘From the other side of the Moon.’ He brushed them and they dripped away into a silver rain, a shower of white sparks on the air. ‘The year of the rocket. That’s a title for you, Tom. That’s why we brought you here, we’ve need of you. You’re the only man could handle the sun without being burned to a ridiculous cinder. We want you to juggle the sun, Tom, and the stars, and whatever else you see on your trip to Mars.’
‘Mars?’ Thomas Wolfe turned to seize the old man’s arm, bending down to him, searching his face in unbelief.
‘Tonight. You leave at six o’clock.’
The old man held a fluttering pink ticket on the air, waiting for Tom to think to take it.
It was five in the afternoon. ‘Of course, of course I appreciate what you’ve done,’ cried Thomas Wolfe.
‘Sit down, Tom. Stop walking around.’
‘Let me finish, Mr Field, let me get through with this, I’ve got to say it.’
‘We’ve been arguing for hours,’ pleaded Mr Field, exhaustedly.
They had talked from breakfast until lunch until tea, they had wandered through a dozen rooms and ten dozen arguments, they had perspired and grown cold and perspired again.
‘It all comes down to this,’ said Thomas Wolfe, at last. ‘I can’t stay here, Mr Field. I’ve got to go back. This isn’t my time. You’ve no right to interfere—’
‘But, I—’
‘I was deep in my work, my best yet to come, and now you run me off three centuries. Mr Field, I want you to call Mr Bolton back. I want you to have him put me in his machine, whatever it is, and return me to 1938, my rightful place and year. That’s all I ask of you.’
