by Ray Bradbury
‘How did they do it?’ he cried. In so short a time. Nine hours, while he slept. Had they melted gold, fixed delicate watch springs, diamonds, glitter, confetti, rich rubies, liquid silver, copper thread? Had metal insects spun her hair? Had they poured yellow fire in molds and set it to freeze?
‘No,’ she said. ‘If you talk that way, I’ll go.’
‘Don’t!’
‘Come to business, then,’ she said, coldly. ‘You want to talk to me about Leonard.’
‘Give me time, I’ll get to it.’
‘Now,’ she insisted.
He knew no anger. It had washed out of him at her appearance. He felt childishly dirty.
‘Why did you come to see me?’ She was not smiling.
‘Please.’
‘I insist. Wasn’t it about Leonard? You know I love him, don’t you?’
‘Stop it!’ He put his hands to his ears.
She kept at him. ‘You know, I spend all of my time with him now. Where you and I used to go, now Leonard and I stay. Remember the picnic green on Mount Verde? We were there last week. We flew to Athens a month ago, with a case of champagne.’
He licked his lips. ‘You’re not guilty, you’re not.’ He rose and held her wrists. ‘You’re fresh, you’re not her. She’s guilty, not you. You’re different!’
‘On the contrary,’ said the woman. ‘I am her. I can act only as she acts. No part of me is alien to her. For all intents and purposes we are one.’
‘But you did not do what she has done!’
‘I did all those things. I kissed him.’
‘You can’t have, you’re just born!’
‘Out of her past and from your mind.’
‘Look,’ he pleaded, shaking her to gain her attention. ‘Isn’t there some way, can’t I—pay more money? Take you away with me? We’ll go to Paris or Stockholm or any place you like!’
She laughed. ‘The marionettes only rent. They never sell.’
‘But I’ve money!’
‘It was tried, long ago. It leads to insanity. It’s not possible. Even this much is illegal, you know that. We exist only through governmental sufferance.’
‘All I want is to live with you, Katie.’
‘That can never be, because I am Katie, every bit of me is her. We do not want competition. Marionettes can’t leave the premises; dissection might reveal our secrets. Enough of this. I warned you, we mustn’t speak of these things. You’ll spoil the illusion. You’ll feel frustrated when you leave. You paid your money, now do what you came to do.’
‘I don’t want to kill you.’
‘One part of you does. You’re walling it in, you’re trying not to let it out.’
He took the gun from his pocket. ‘I’m an old fool. I should never have come. You’re so beautiful.’
‘I’m going to see Leonard tonight.’
‘Don’t talk.’
‘We’re flying to Paris in the morning.’
‘You heard what I said!’
‘And then to Stockholm.’ She laughed sweetly and caressed his chin. ‘My little fat man.’
Something began to stir in him. His face grew pale. He knew what was happening. The hidden anger and revulsion and hatred in him were sending out faint pulses of thought. And the delicate telepathic web in her wondrous head was receiving the death impulse. The marionette. The invisible strings. He himself manipulating her body.
‘Plump, odd little man, who once was so fair.’
‘Don’t,’ he said.
‘Old while I am only thirty-one, ah, George, you were blind, working years to give me time to fall in love again. Don’t you think Leonard is lovely?’
He raised the gun blindly.
‘Katie.’
‘His head is as the most fine gold—’ she whispered.
‘Katie, don’t!’ he screamed.
‘His locks are bushy, and black as a raven…His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl—’
How could she speak those words! It was in his mind, how could she mouth it!
‘Katie, don’t make me do this!’
‘His cheeks are as a bed of spices,’ she murmured, eyes closed, moving about the room softly. ‘His belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires. His legs are as pillars of marble—’
‘Katie!’ he shrieked.
‘His mouth is most sweet—’
One shot.
‘—this is my beloved—’
Another shot.
She fell.
‘Katie, Katie, Katie!’
Four more times he pumped bullets into her body.
She lay shuddering. Her senseless mouth clicked wide and some insanely warped mechanism had caused her to repeat again and again. ‘Beloved, beloved, beloved, beloved, beloved…’
George Hill fainted.
He awakened to a cool cloth on his brow.
‘It’s all over,’ said the dark man.
‘Over?’ George Hill whispered.
The dark man nodded.
George Hill looked weakly down at his hands. They had been covered with blood. When he fainted he had dropped to the floor. The last thing he remembered was the feeling of the real blood pouring upon his hands in a freshet.
His hands were now clean-washed.
‘I’ve got to leave,’ said George Hill.
‘If you feel capable.’
‘I’m all right.’ He got up. ‘I’ll go to Paris now, start over. I’m not to try to phone Katie or anything, am I.’
‘Katie is dead.’
‘Yes. I killed her, didn’t I? God, the blood, it was real!’
‘We are proud of that touch.’
He went down in the elevator to the street. It was raining, and he wanted to walk for hours. The anger and destruction were purged away. The memory was so terrible that he would never wish to kill again. Even if the real Katie were to appear before him now, he would only thank God, and fall senselessly to his knees. She was dead now. He had had his way. He had broken the law and no one would know.
The rain fell cool on his face. He must leave immediately, while the purge was in effect. After all, what was the use of such purges if one took up the old threads? The marionettes’ function was primarily to prevent actual crime. If you wanted to kill, hit, or torture someone, you took it out on one of those unstringed automatons. It wouldn’t do to return to the apartment now. Katie might be there. He wanted only to think of her as dead, a thing attended to in deserving fashion.
He stopped at the curb and watched the traffic flash by. He took deep breaths of the good air and began to relax.
‘Mr Hill?’ said a voice at his elbow.
‘Yes?’
A manacle was snapped to Hill’s wrist. ‘You’re under arrest.’
‘But—’
‘Come along. Smith, take the other men upstairs, make the arrests!’
‘You can’t do this to me,’ said George Hill.
‘For murder, yes, we can.’
Thunder sounded in the sky.
It was eight-fifteen at night. It had been raining for ten days. It rained now on the prison walls. He put his hands out to feel the drops gather in pools on his trembling palms.
A door clanged and he did not move but stood with his hands in the rain. His lawyer looked up at him on his chair and said. ‘It’s all over. You’ll be executed tonight.’
George Hill listened to the rain.
‘She wasn’t real. I didn’t kill her.’
‘It’s the law, anyhow. You remember. The others are sentenced, too. The president of Marionettes, Incorporated, will die at midnight. His three assistants will die at one. You’ll go about one-thirty.’
‘Thanks,’ said George. ‘You did all you could. I guess it was murder, no matter how you look at it, image or not. The idea was there, the plot and the plan were there. It lacked only the real Katie herself.’
‘It’s a matter of timing, too,’ said the lawyer. ‘Ten years ago you wouldn’t have got the death penalty. Ten years from now you wouldn’t
, either. But they had to have an object case, a whipping boy. The use of marionettes has grown so in the last year it’s fantastic. The public must be scared out of it, and scared badly. God knows where it would all wind up if it went on. There’s the spiritual side of it, too, where does life begin or end? are the robots alive or dead? More than one church has been split up the seams on the question. If they aren’t alive, they’re the next thing to it; they react, they even think. You know the “live robot” law that was passed two months ago: you come under that. Just bad timing, is all, bad timing.’
‘The government’s right. I see that now,’ said George Hill.
‘I’m glad you understand the attitude of the law.’
‘Yes. After all, they can’t let murder be legal. Even if it’s done with machines and telepathy and wax. They’d be hypocrites to let me get away with my crime. For it was a crime. I’ve felt guilty about it ever since. I’ve felt the need of punishment. Isn’t that odd? That’s how society gets to you. It makes you feel guilty even when you see no reason to be…’
‘I have to go now. Is there anything you want?’
‘Nothing, thanks.’
‘Good-by then, Mr Hill.’
The door shut.
George Hill stood up on the chair, his hands twisting together, wet, outside the window bars. A red light burned in the wall suddenly. A voice came over the audio; ‘Mr Hill, your wife is here to see you.’
He gripped the bars.
She’s dead, he thought.
‘Mr Hill?’ asked the voice.
‘She’s dead. I killed her.’
‘Your wife is waiting in the anteroom, will you see her?’
‘I saw her fall, I shot her, I saw her fall dead!’
‘Mr Hill, do you hear me?’
‘Yes!’ he shouted, pounding at the wall with his fists. ‘I hear you. I hear you! She’s dead, she’s dead, can’t she let me be! I killed her. I won’t see her, she’s dead!’
A pause. ‘Very well, Mr Hill,’ murmured the voice.
The red light winked off.
Lightning flashed through the sky and lit his face. He pressed his hot cheeks to the cold bars and waited, while the rain fell. After a long time, a door opened somewhere onto the street and he saw two caped figures emerge from the prison office below. They paused under an arc light and glanced up.
It was Katie. And beside her, Leonard Phelps.
‘Katie!’
Her face turned away. The man took her arm. They hurried across the avenue in the black rain and got into a low car.
‘Katie!’ He wrenched at the bars. He screamed and beat and pulled at the concrete ledge. ‘She’s alive! Guard! Guard! I saw her! She’s not dead, I didn’t kill her, now you can let me out! I didn’t murder anyone, it’s all a joke, a mistake, I saw her, I saw her! Katie, come back, tell them, Katie, say you’re alive! Katie!’
The guards came running.
‘You can’t kill me! I didn’t do anything! Katie’s alive. I saw her!’
‘We saw her, too, sir.’
‘But let me free, then! Let me free!’ It was insane. He choked and almost fell.
‘We’ve been through all that, sir, at the trial.’
‘It’s not fair!’ He leaped up and clawed at the window, bellowing.
The car drove away. Katie and Leonard inside it. Drove away to Paris and Athens and Venice and London next spring and Stockholm next summer and Vienna in the fall.
‘Katie, come back, you can’t do this to me!’
The red taillights of the car dwindled in the cold rain. Behind him, the guards moved forward to take hold of him while he screamed.
A Piece of Wood
‘Sit down, young man,’ said the Official.
‘Thanks.’ The young man sat.
‘I’ve been hearing rumors about you,’ the Official said pleasantly. ‘Oh, nothing much. Your nervousness. Your not getting on so well. Several months now I’ve heard about you, and I thought I’d call you in. Thought maybe you’d like your job changed. Like to go overseas, work in some other War Area? Desk job killing you off, like to get right in on the old fight?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said the young sergeant.
‘What do you want?’
The sergeant shrugged and looked at his hands. ‘To live in peace. To learn that during the night, somehow, the guns of the world had rusted, the bacteria had turned sterile in their bomb casings, the tanks had sunk like prehistoric monsters into roads suddenly made tar pits. That’s what I’d like.’
‘That’s what we’d all like, of course,’ said the Official. ‘Now stop all that idealistic chatter and tell me where you’d like to be sent. You have your choice—the Western or the Northern War Zone.’ The Official tapped a pink map on his desk.
But the sergeant was talking at his hands, turning them over, looking at the fingers: ‘What would you officers do, what would we men do, what would the world do if we all woke tomorrow with the guns in flaking ruin?’
The Official saw that he would have to deal carefully with the sergeant. He smiled quietly. ‘That’s an interesting question. I like to talk about such theories, and my answer is that there’d be mass panic. Each nation would think itself the only unarmed nation in the world, and would blame its enemies for the disaster. There’d be waves of suicide, stocks collapsing, a million tragedies.’
‘But after that,’ the sergeant said. ‘After they realized it was true, that every nation was disarmed and there was nothing more to fear, if we were all clean to start over fresh and new, what then?’
‘They’d rearm as swiftly as possible.’
‘What if they could be stopped?’
‘Then they’d beat each other with their fists. If it got down to that. Huge armies of men with boxing gloves of steel spikes would gather at the national borders. And if you took the gloves away they’d use their fingernails and feet. And if you cut their legs off they’d spit on each other. And if you cut off their tongues and stopped their mouths with corks they’d fill the atmosphere so full of hate that mosquitoes would drop to the ground and birds would fall dead from telephone wires.’
‘Then you don’t think it would do any good?’ the sergeant said.
‘Certainly not. It’d be like ripping the carapace off a turtle. Civilization would gasp and die from the shock.’
The young man shook his head. ‘Or are you lying to yourself and me because you’ve a nice comfortable job?’
‘Let’s call it ninety per cent cynicism, ten per cent rationalizing the situation. Go put your Rust away and forget about it.’
The sergeant jerked his head up. ‘How’d you know I had it?’ he said.
‘Had what?’
‘The Rust, of course.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘I can do it, you know. I could start the Rust tonight if I wanted to.’
The Official laughed. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘I am. I’ve been meaning to come talk to you. I’m glad you called me in. I’ve worked on this invention for a long time. It’s been a dream of mine. It has to do with the structure of certain atoms. If you study them you find that the arrangement of atoms in steel armor is such-and-such an arrangement. I was looking for an imbalance factor. I majored in physics and metallurgy, you know. It came to me, there’s a Rust factor in the air all the time. Water vapor. I had to find a way to give steel a “nervous breakdown.” Then the water vapor everywhere in the world would take over. Not on all metal, of course. Our civilization is built on steel, I wouldn’t want to destroy most buildings. I’d just eliminate guns and shells, tanks, planes, battleships. I can set the machine to work on copper and brass and aluminum, too, if necessary. I’d just walk by all of those weapons and just being near them I’d make them fall away.’
The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant. ‘May I ask you a question?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you ever thought you were Christ?’
&
nbsp; ‘I can’t say that I have. But I have considered that God was good to me to let me find what I was looking for, if that’s what you mean.’
The Official reached into his breast pocket and drew out an expensive ball-point pen capped with a rifle shell. He flourished the pen and started filling in a form. ‘I want you to take this to Dr Mathews this afternoon, for a complete checkup. Not that I expect anything really bad, understand. But don’t you feel you should see a doctor?’
‘You think I’m lying about my machine,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’m not. It’s so small it can be hidden in this cigarette package. The effect of it extends for nine hundred miles. I could tour this country in a few days, with the machine set to a certain type of steel. The other nations couldn’t take advantage of us because I’d rust their weapons as they approach us. Then I’d fly to Europe. By this time next month the world would be free of war forever. I don’t know how I found this invention. It’s impossible. Just as impossible as the atom bomb. I’ve waited a month now, trying to think it over. I worried about what would happen if I did rip off the carapace, as you say. But now I’ve just about decided. My talk with you has helped clarify things. Nobody thought an airplane would ever fly, nobody thought an atom would ever explode, and nobody thinks that there can ever be Peace, but there will be.’
‘Take that paper over to Dr Mathews, will you?’ said the Official hastily.
The sergeant got up. ‘You’re not going to assign me to any new Zone then?’
‘Not right away, no. I’ve changed my mind. We’ll let Mathews decide.’
‘I’ve decided then,’ said the young man. ‘I’m leaving the post within the next few minutes. I’ve a pass. Thank you very much for giving me your valuable time, sir.’
‘Now look here, Sergeant, don’t take things so seriously. You don’t have to leave. Nobody’s going to hurt you.’
‘That’s right. Because nobody would believe me. Good-by, sir.’ The sergeant opened the office door and stepped out.
The door shut and the Official was alone. He stood for a moment looking at the door. He sighed. He rubbed his hands over his face. The phone rang. He answered it abstractedly.
‘Oh, hello, Doctor. I was just going to call you.’ A pause. ‘Yes, I was going to send him over to you. Look, is it all right for that young man to be wandering about? It is all right? If you say so, Doctor. Probably needs a rest, a good long one. Poor boy has a delusion of rather an interesting sort. Yes, yes. It’s a shame. But that’s what a Sixteen-Year War can do to you, I suppose.’
