The Illustrated Man

‘I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,’ said the father.

‘Nothing ever likes to die – even a room.’

‘I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?’

‘Paranoia is thick around here today,’ said David McClean. ‘You can follow it like a spoor. Hello.’ He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. ‘This yours?’

‘No.’ George Hadley’s face was rigid. ‘It belongs to Lydia.’

They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.

The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.

‘You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!’

‘Now, children.’

The children flung themselves on to a couch, weeping.

‘George,’ said Lydia Hadley, ‘turn on the nursery, just for a few moments. You can’t be so abrupt.’

‘No.’

‘You can’t be so cruel.’

‘Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We’ve been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!’

And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lacers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and every other machine he could put his hand to.

The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

‘Don’t let them do it!’ wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. ‘Don’t let Father kill everything.’ He turned to his father. ‘Oh, I hate you!’

‘Insults won’t get you anywhere.’

‘I wish you were dead!’

‘We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live.’

Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. ‘Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery,’ they wailed.

‘Oh, George,’ said the wife, ‘it can’t hurt.’

‘All right – all right, if they’ll only just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off forever.’

‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’ sang the children, smiling with wet faces.

‘And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you.’

And the three of them went babbling off while he let himself be vacuumed upstairs through the air flue and set about dressing himself. A minute later Lydia appeared.

‘I’ll be glad when we get away,’ she sighed.

‘Did you leave them in the nursery?’

‘I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrid Africa. What can they see in it?’

‘Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare?’

‘Pride, money, foolishness.’

‘I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids get engrossed with those damned beasts again.’

Just then they heard the children calling, ‘Daddy, Mommy, come quick – quick!’

They went downstirs in the air flue and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. ‘Wendy? Peter!’

They ran into the nursery. The veldland was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. ‘Peter, Wendy?’

The door slammed.

‘Wendy, Peter!’

George Hadley and his wife whirled and ran back to the door.

‘Open the door!’ cried George Hadley, trying the knob. ‘Why, they’ve locked it from the outside! Peter!’ He beat at the door. ‘Open up!’

He heard Peter’s voice outside, against the door.

‘Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house,’ he was saying.

Mr and Mrs George Hadley beat at the door. ‘Now, don’t be ridiculous, children. It’s time to go. Mr McClean’ll be here in a minute and …’

And then they heard the sounds.

The lions on three sides of them, in the yellow veld grass, padding through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats.

The lions.

Mr Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward, crouching, tails stiff.

Mr and Mrs Hadley screamed.

And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.

‘Well, here I am,’ said David McClean in the nursery doorway. ‘Oh, hello.’ He stared at the two children seated in the centre of the open glade eating a little picnic lunch. Beyond them was the water hole and the yellow veldland; above was the hot sun. He began to perspire. ‘Where are your father and mother?’

The children looked up and smiled. ‘Oh, they’ll be here directly.’