The Stories of Ray Bradbury

by Ray Bradbury

  ‘Don’t expect my sympathy. You’re like a stranger, off in another country, I can’t be sad. I’m alive when I make these tapes. And you’re alive when you hear them. Both of us, to the other, incomprehensible. Neither can warn the other, even though both respond, one to the other, one automatically, the other warmly and humanly. I’m human now. You’re human later. It’s insane. I can’t cry, because not knowing the future I can only be optimistic. These hidden tapes can only react to a certain number of stimuli from you. Can you ask a dead man to weep?’

  ‘Stop it!’ cried the old man. He felt the familiar seizures of pain. Nausea moved through him, and blackness. ‘Oh God, but you were heartless. Go away!’

  ‘Were, old man? I am. As long as the tapes glide on, as long as spindles and hidden electronic eyes read and select and convert words to send to you. I’ll be young and cruel. I’ll go on being young and cruel long after you’re dead. Good-by.’

  ‘Wait!’ cried the old man.

  Click.

  Barton sat holding the silent phone a long time. His heart gave him intense pain.

  What insanity it had been. In his youth how silly, how inspired, those first secluded years, fixing the telephonic brains, the tapes, the circuits, scheduling calls on time relays:

  The phone bell.

  ‘Morning, Barton. This is Barton. Seven o’clock. Rise and shine!’

  Again!

  ‘Barton? Barton calling. You’re to go to Mars Town at noon. Install a telephonic brain. Thought I’d remind you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The bell!

  ‘Barton? Barton. Have lunch with me? The Rocket Inn?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘See you. So long!’

  Brrrrinnnnng!

  ‘That you, B.? Thought I’d cheer you. Firm chin, and all that. The rescue rocket might come tomorrow, to save us.’

  ‘Yes, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’

  Click.

  But the years had burned into smoke. Barton had muted the insidious phones and their clever, clever repartee. They were to call him only after he was eighty, if he still lived. And now today, the phone ringing, the past breathing in his ear, whispering, remembering.

  The phone!

  He let it ring.

  I don’t have to answer it, he thought.

  The bell!

  There’s no one there at all, he thought.

  The ringing!

  It’s like talking to yourself, he thought. But different. Oh God, how different.

  He felt his hands lift the phone.

  ‘Hello, old Barton, this is young Barton. I’m twenty-one today! In the last year I’ve put voice-brains in two hundred more towns. I’ve populated Mars with Bartons!’

  ‘Yes.’ The old man remembered those nights six decades ago, rushing over blue hills and into iron valleys, with a truckful of machinery, whistling, happy. Another telephone, another relay. Something to do. Something clever and wonderful and sad. Hidden voices. Hidden, hidden. In those young days when death was not death, time was not time, old age a faint echo from the long cavern of years ahead. That young idiot, that sadistic fool, never thinking someday he might reap this harvest.

  ‘Last night,’ said Barton, aged twenty-one, ‘I sat alone in a movie theater in an empty town. I played an old Laurel and Hardy. God, how I laughed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I got an idea. I recorded my voice one thousand times on one tape. Broadcast from the town, it sounds like a thousand people. A comforting noise, the noise of a crowd. I fixed it so doors slam in town, children sing, music boxes play, all by clockworks. If I don’t look out the window, if I just listen, it’s all right. But if I look, it spoils the illusion. I guess I’m getting lonely.’

  The old man said. ‘That was your first sign.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The first time you admitted you were lonely.’

  ‘I’ve experimented with smells. As I walk the empty streets, the smell of bacon, eggs, ham, fillets, come from the houses. All done with hidden machines.’

  ‘Madness.’

  ‘Self-protection!’

  ‘I’m tired.’ Abruptly, the old man hung up. It was too much. The past drowning him…

  Swaying, he moved down the tower stairs to the streets of the town.

  The town was dark. No longer did red neons burn, music play, or cooking smells linger. Long ago he had abandoned the fantasy of the mechanical lie. Listen! Are those footsteps? Smell! Isn’t that strawberry pie! He had stopped it all.

  He moved to the canal where the stars shone in the quivering waters.

  Under water, in row after fishlike row, rusting, were the robot population of Mars he had constructed over the years, and, in a wild realization of his own insane inadequacy, had commanded to march, one two three four! into the canal deeps, plunging, bubbling like sunken bottles. He had killed them and shown no remorse.

  Faintly a phone rang in a lightless cottage.

  He walked on. The phone ceased.

  Another cottage ahead rang its bell as if it knew of his passing. He began to run. The ringing stayed behind. Only to be taken up by a ringing from now this house—now that, now here, there! He darted on. Another phone!

  ‘All right!’ he shrieked, exhausted. ‘I’m coming!’

  ‘Hello, Barton.’

  ‘What do you want!’

  ‘I’m lonely. I only live when I speak. So I must speak. You can’t shut me up forever.’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ said the old man, in horror. ‘Oh, my heart!’

  ‘This is Barton, age twenty-four. Another couple of years gone. Waiting. A little lonelier. I’ve read War and Peace, drunk sherry, run restaurants with myself as waiter, cook, entertainer. Tonight. I star in a film at the Tivoli—Emil Barton in Love’s Labor Lost, playing all the parts, some with wigs!’

  ‘Stop calling me—or I’ll kill you!’

  ‘You can’t kill me. You’ll have to find me, first!’

  ‘I’ll find you!’

  ‘You’ve forgotten where you hid me. I’m everywhere, in boxes, houses, cables, towers, underground! Go ahead, try! What’ll you call it? Telecide? Suicide? Jealous, are you? Jealous of me here, only twenty-four, brighteyed, strong, young. All right, old man, it’s war! Between us. Between me! A whole regiment of us, all ages form against you, the real one. Go ahead, declare war!’

  ‘I’ll kill you!’

  Click. Silence.

  He threw the phone out the window.

  In the midnight cold, the automobile moved in deep valleys. Under Barton’s feet on the floorboard were revolvers, rifles, dynamite. The roar of the car was in his thin, tired bones.

  I’ll find them, he thought, and destroy all of them. Oh, God, how can he do this to me?

  He stopped the car. A strange town lay under the late moons. There was no wind.

  He held the rifle in his cold hands. He peered at the poles, the towers, the boxes. Where was this town’s voice hidden? That tower? Or that one there! So many years ago. He turned his head now this way, now that, wildly.

  He raised the rifle.

  The tower fell with the first bullet.

  All of them, he thought. All of the towers in this town will have to be cut apart, I’ve forgotten. Too long.

  The car moved along the silent street.

  A phone rang.

  He looked at the deserted drugstore.

  A phone.

  Pistol in hand, he shot the lock off the door, and entered.

  Click.

  ‘Hello, Barton? Just a warning. Don’t try to rip down all the towers, blow things up. Cut your own throat that way. Think it over…’

  Click.

  He stepped out of the phone booth slowly and moved into the street and listened to the telephone towers humming high in the air, still alive, still untouched. He looked at them and then he understood.

  He could not destroy the towers. Suppose a rocket came from Earth, impossible idea, but suppose it came tonigh
t, tomorrow, next week? And landed on the other side of the planet, and used the phones to try to call Barton, only to find the circuits dead?

  Barton dropped his gun.

  ‘A rocket won’t come,’ he argued, softly with himself. ‘I’m old. It’s too late.’

  But suppose it came, and you never knew, he thought. No, you’ve got to keep the lines open.

  Again, a phone ringing.

  He turned dully. He shuffled back into the drugstore and fumbled with the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’ A strange voice.

  ‘Please,’ said the old man, ‘don’t bother me.’

  ‘Who’s this, who’s there? Who is it? Where are you?’ cried the voice, surprised.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ The old man staggered. ‘This is Emil Barton, who’s that?’

  ‘This is Captain Rockwell, Apollo Rocket 48. Just arrived from Earth.’

  ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘Are you there, Mr Barton?’

  ‘No, no, it can’t be.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘You’re lying!’ The old man had to lean against the booth. His eyes were cold blind. ‘It’s you, Barton, making fun of me, lying again!’

  ‘This is Captain Rockwell. Just landed. In New Chicago. Where are you?’

  ‘In Green Villa,’ he gasped. ‘That’s six hundred miles from you.’

  ‘Look, Barton, can you come here?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve repairs on our rocket. Exhausted from the flight. Can you come help?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘We’re at the field outside town. Can you come by tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Well?’

  The old man petted the phone. ‘How’s Earth? How’s New York? Is the war over? Who’s President now? What happened?’

  ‘Plenty of time for gossip when you arrive.’

  ‘Is everything fine?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Thank God.’ The old man listened to the far voice. ‘Are you sure you’re Captain Rockwell?’

  ‘Dammit, man!’

  ‘I’m sorry!’

  He hung up and ran.

  They were here, after many years, unbelievable, his own people who would take him back to Earth’s seas and skies and mountains.

  He started the car. He would drive all night. It would be worth a risk, to see people, to shake hands, to hear them again.

  The car thundered in the hills.

  That voice. Captain Rockwell. It couldn’t be himself, forty years ago. He had never made a recording like that. Or had he? In one of his depressive fits, in a spell of drunken cynicism, hadn’t he once made a false tape of a false landing on Mars with a synthetic captain, an imaginary crew? He jerked his head, savagely. No. He was a suspicious fool. Now was no time to doubt. He must run with the moons of Mars, all night. What a party they would have!

  The sun rose. He was immensely tired, full of thorns and brambles, his heart plunging, his fingers fumbling the wheel, but the thing that pleased him most was the thought of one last phone call: Hello, young Barton, this is old Barton. I’m leaving for Earth today! Rescued! He smiled weakly.

  He drove into the shadowy limits of New Chicago at sundown. Stepping from his car he stood staring at the rocket tarmac, rubbing his reddened eyes.

  The rocket field was empty. No one ran to meet him. No one shook his hand, shouted, or laughed.

  He felt his heart roar. He knew blackness and a sensation of falling through the open sky. He stumbled toward an office.

  Inside, six phones sat in a neat row.

  He waited, gasping.

  Finally: the bell.

  He lifted the heavy receiver.

  A voice said, ‘I was wondering if you’d get there alive.’

  The old man did not speak but stood with the phone in his hands.

  The voice continued: ‘Captain Rockwell reporting for duty. Your orders, sir?’

  ‘You,’ groaned the old man.

  ‘How’s your heart, old man?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Had to eliminate you some way, so I could live, if you call a transcription living.’

  ‘I’m going out now,’ replied the old man. ‘I don’t care. I’ll blow up everything until you’re all dead!’

  ‘You haven’t the strength. Why do you think I had you travel so far, so fast? This is your last trip!’

  The old man felt his heart falter. He would never make the other towns. The war was lost. He slid into a chair and made low, mournful noises with his mouth. He glared at the five other phones. As if at a signal, they burst into chorus! A nest of ugly birds screaming!

  Automatic receivers popped up.

  The office whirled. ‘Barton, Barton, Barton!’

  He throttled a phone in his hands. He choked it and still it laughed at him. He beat it. He kicked it. He furled the hot wire like serpentine in his fingers, ripped it. It fell about his stumbling feet.

  He destroyed three other phones. There was a sudden silence.

  And as if his body now discovered a thing which it had long kept secret, it seemed to sink upon his tired bones. The flesh of his eyelids fell away like petals. His mouth withered. The lobes of his ears were melting wax. He pushed his chest with his hands and fell face down. He lay still. His breathing stopped. His heart stopped.

  After a long spell, the remaining two phones rang.

  A relay snapped somewhere. The two phone voices were connected, one to the other.

  ‘Hello, Barton?’

  ‘Yes, Barton?’

  ‘Aged twenty-four.’

  ‘I’m twenty-six. We’re both young. What’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. Listen.’

  The silent room. The old man did not stir on the floor. The wind blew in the broken window. The air was cool.

  ‘Congratulate me, Barton, this is my twenty-sixth birthday!’

  ‘Congratulations!’

  The voices sang together, about birthdays, and the singing blew out the window, faintly, faintly, into the dead city.

  The Tombling Day

  It was the Tombling day, and all the people had walked up the summer road, including Grandma Loblilly, and they stood now in the green day and the high sky country of Missouri, and there was a smell of the seasons changing and the grass breaking out in flowers.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Grandma Loblilly, over her cane, and she gave them all a flashing look of her yellow-brown eyes and spat into the dust.

  The graveyard lay on the side of a quiet hill. It was a place of sunken mounds and wooden markers; bees hummed all about in quietudes of sound and butterflies withered and blossomed on the clear blue air. The tall sunburnt men and ginghamed women stood a long silent time looking in at their deep and buried relatives.

  ‘Well, let’s get to work!’ said Grandma, and she hobbled across the moist grass, sticking it rapidly, here and there, with her cane.

  The others brought the spades and special crates, with daisies and lilacs tied brightly to them. The government was cutting a road through here in August and since this graveyard had gone unused in fifty years the relatives had agreed to untuck all the old bones and pat them snug somewhere else.

  Grandma Loblilly got right down on her knees and trembled a spade in her hand. The others were busy at their own places.

  ‘Grandma,’ said Joseph Pikes, making a big shadow on her working. ‘Grandma, you shouldn’t be workin’ on this place. This’s William Simmons’s grave, Grandma.’

  At the sound of his voice, everyone stopped working, and listened, and there was just the sound of butterflies on the cool afternoon air.

  Grandma looked up at Pikes. ‘You think I don’t know it’s his place? I ain’t seen William Simmons in sixty years, but I intend to visit him today.’ She patted out trowel after trowel of rich soil and she grew quiet and introspective and said things to the day and those who might listen. ‘Sixty years ago, and him a fine man, only twenty-three. And me, I was twenty and al
l golden about the head and all milk in my arms and neck and persimmon in my cheeks. Sixty years and a planned marriage and then a sickness and him dying away. And me alone, and I remember how the earth mound over him sank in the rains—’

  Everybody stared at Grandma.

  ‘But still, Grandma—’ said Joseph Pikes.

  The grave was shallow. She soon reached the long iron box.

  ‘Gimme a hand!’ she cried.

  Nine men helped lift the iron box out of the earth, Grandma poking at them with her cane. ‘Careful!’ she shouted. ‘Easy!’ she cried. ‘Now.’ They set it on the ground. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘if you be so kindly, you gentlemen might fetch Mr Simmons on up to my house for a spell.’

  ‘We’re takin’ him on to the new cemetery,’ said Joseph Pikes.

  Grandma fixed him with her needle eye. ‘You just trot that box right up to my house. Much obliged.’

  The men watched her dwindle down the road. They looked at the box, looked at each other, and then spat on their hands.

  Five minutes later the men squeezed the iron coffin through the front door of Grandma’s little white house and set the box down by the potbelly stove.

  She gave them a drink all around. ‘Now, let’s lift the lid,’ she said. ‘It ain’t every day you see old friends.’

  The men did not move.

  ‘Well, if you won’t, I will.’ She thrust at the lid with her cane, again and again, breaking away the earth crust. Spiders went touching over the floor. There was a rich smell, like plowed spring earth. Now the men fingered the lid. Grandma stood back. ‘Up!’ she said. She gestured her cane, like an ancient goodess. And up in the air went the lid. The men set it on the floor and turned.

  There was a sound like wind sighing in October, from all their mouths.

  There lay William Simmons as the dust filtered bright and golden through the air. There he slept, a little smile on his lips, hands folded, all dressed up and no place in all the world to go.

  Grandma Loblilly gave a low moaning cry.

  ‘He’s all there!’

  There he was, indeed. Intact as a beetle in his shell, his skin all fine and white, his small eyelids over his pretty eyes like flower petals put there, his lips still with color to them, his hair combed neat, his tie tied, his fingernails pared clean. All in all, he was as complete as the day they shoveled the earth upon his silent case.