Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1

‘Smith, come back!’

Quickly. Upon the red table, with the spread-eagled captain’s body empty, new hands began a flight of motion. Into the wet interior were placed organs of copper, brass, silver, aluminum, rubber and silk; spiders spun gold web which was stung into the skin: a heart was attached, and into the skull case was fitted a platinum brain which hummed and fluttered small sparkles of blue fire, and the wires led down through the body to the arms and legs. In a moment the body was sewn tight, the incisions waxed, healed at neck and throat and about the skull – perfect, fresh, new.

The captain sat up and flexed his arms.

‘Stop!’

On the street the captain reappeared, raised his gun and fired.

Smith fell, a bullet in his heart.

The other men turned.

The captain ran to them.

‘That fool! Afraid of a city!’

They looked at the body of Smith at their feet.

They looked at their captain, and their eyes widened and narrowed.

‘Listen to me,’ said the captain. ‘I have something important to tell you.’

Now the city, which had weighed and tasted and smelled them, which had used all its powers save one, prepared to use its final ability, the power of speech. It did not speak with the rage and hostility of its massed walls or towers, nor with the bulk of its cobbled avenues and fortresses of machinery. It spoke with the quiet voice of one man.

‘I am no longer your captain,’ he said. ‘Nor am I a man.’

The men moved back.

‘I am the city,’ he said, and smiled.

‘I’ve waited two hundred centuries,’ he said, ‘I’ve waited for the sons of the sons of the sons to return.’

‘Captain, sir!’

‘Let me continue. Who built me? The city. The men who died built me. The old race who once lived here. The people whom the Earth Men left to die of a terrible disease, a form of leprosy with no cure. And the men of that old race, dreaming of the day when Earth Men might return, built this city, and the name of this city was and is Revenge, upon the Planet of Darkness, near the shore of the Sea of Centuries, by the Mountains of the Dead; all very poetic. This city was to be a balancing machine, a litmus, an antenna to test all future space travelers. In twenty thousand years only two other rockets landed here. One from a distant galaxy called Ennt, and the inhabitants of that craft were tested, weighed, found wanting, and let free, unscathed, from the city. As were the visitors in the second ship. But today! At long last, you’ve come! The revenge will be carried out to the last detail. Those men have been dead two hundred centuries, but they left a city here to welcome you.’

‘Captain, sir, you’re not feeling well. Perhaps you’d better come back to the ship, sir.’

The city trembled.

The pavements opened and the men fell, screaming. Falling, they saw bright razors flash to meet them!

Time passed. Soon came the call:

‘Smith?’

‘Here!’

‘Jensen?’

‘Here!’

‘Jones, Hutchinson, Springer?’

‘Here!’ ‘Here!’ ‘Here!’

They stood by the door of the rocket.

‘We return to Earth immediately.’

‘Yes, sir!’

The incisions on their necks were invisible, as were their hidden brass hearts and silver organs and the fine golden wire of their nerves. There was a faint electric hum from their heads.

‘On the double!’

Nine men hurried the golden bombs of disease culture into the rocket.

‘These are to be dropped on Earth.’

‘Right, sir!’

The rocket valve slammed. The rocket jumped into the sky.

As the thunder faded, the city lay upon the summer meadow. Its glass eyes were dulled over. The Ear relaxed, the great nostril vents stopped, the streets no longer weighed or balanced, and the hidden machinery paused in its bath of oil.

In the sky the rocket dwindled.

Slowly, pleasurably, the city enjoyed the luxury of dying.

The Fire Balloons (#ulink_cd6aa1c8-50ef-590f-8c09-d790d254f9ba)

Fire exploded over summer night lawns. You saw sparkling faces of uncles and aunts. Skyrockets fell up in the brown shining eyes of cousins on the porch, and the cold charred sticks thumped down in dry meadows far away.

The Very Reverend Father Joseph Daniel Peregrine opened his eyes. What a dream: he and his cousins with their fiery play at his grandfather’s ancient Ohio home so many years ago!

He lay listening to the great hollow of the church, the other cells where other Fathers lay. Had they, too, on the eve of the flight of the rocket Crucifix, lain with memories of the Fourth of July? Yes. This was like those breathless Independence dawns when you waited for the first concussion and rushed out on the dewy sidewalks, your hands full of loud miracles.

So here they were, the Episcopal Fathers, in the breathing dawn before they pinwheeled off to Mars, leaving their incense through the velvet cathedral of space.

‘Should we go at all?’ whispered Father Peregrine. ‘Shouldn’t we solve our own sins on Earth? Aren’t we running from our lives here?’

He arose, his fleshy body, with its rich look of strawberries, milk, and steak, moving heavily.

‘Or is it sloth?’ he wondered. ‘Do I dread the journey?’

He stepped into the needle-spray shower.