Bradbury Stories.
100 of His Most Celebrated Tales.
Ray Bradbury.
INTRODUCTION.
IT IS HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE that in one lifetime I have written so many stories.
But on the other hand I often wonder what other writers do with their time.
Writing, for me, is akin to breathing. It is not something I plan or schedule; it"s something I just do. All the stories collected in this book seized on me at the strangest hours, compelling me to head for my typewriter and put them down on paper before they went away.
A good example of this is "Banshee." When I was working for John Huston in Ireland on the screenplay of Moby-d.i.c.k, we spent many late evenings, sitting around the fire, drinking Irish whiskey, which I did not much care for, but only drank because he loved it. And sometimes Huston would pause in the middle of drinking and talking and close his eyes to listen to the wind wailing outside the house. Then his eyes would snap open and he would point a finger at me and cry that the banshees were out in the Irish weather and maybe I should go outdoors and see if it was true and bring them in.
He did this so often to scare me that it lodged in my mind and when I got home to America I finally wrote a story in response to his antics.
"The Toynbee Convector" was born because of my reaction to the bombardment of despair we so frequently find in our newspaper headlines and television reportage, and the feeling of imminent doom in a society that has triumphed over circ.u.mstances again and again, but fails to look back and realize where it has come from, and what it has achieved.
One day, overcome with this feeling, I had to do something about it and so created a character to speak my thoughts.
"The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair" comes from a lifetime of the affection I have for this wonderful team.
When I arrived in Ireland many years ago I opened the Irish Times and discovered therein a small ad, which read: TODAY.
ONE TIME ONLY!.
A BENEFIT FOR THE IRISH ORPHANS.
LAUREL & HARDY.
IN PERSON!.
I ran down to the theater and was fortunate enough to purchase the last available ticket, front row center! The curtain went up and those dear men performed the most wonderful scenes from their greatest films. I sat there in joy and amazement, with tears rolling down my cheeks.
When I got home I looked back on all this and remembered an occasion when a friend of mine took me to the stairs up which Laurel and Hardy had carried the piano box, only to be chased down the hill by it. My story had to follow.
"The Pedestrian" was a precursor to Fahrenheit 451. I had dinner with a friend fifty-five years ago and after dining we decided to take a walk along Wilshire Boulevard. Within minutes we were stopped by a police car. The policeman asked us what we were doing. I replied, "Putting one foot in front of the other," which was the wrong answer. The policeman looked at me suspiciously because, after all, the sidewalks were empty: n.o.body in the whole city of Los Angeles was using them as a walkway.
I went home, sorely irritated at being stopped for simply walking-a natural, human activity-and wrote a story about a pedestrian in the future who is arrested and executed for doing just that.
A few months later I took that pedestrian for a walk in the night, had him turn a corner and meet a young girl named Clarisse McClellan. Nine days later, Fahrenheit 451 was born as a short novella called "The Firemen."
"The Garbage Collector" was inspired by my reaction to a newspaper item that appeared in the Los Angeles newspapers in early 1952, when the mayor announced that if an atomic bomb fell on Los Angeles, the resulting bodies would be picked up by garbage collectors. I was so inflamed by this remark that I sat down and wrote the story, fueled by my outrage.
"By the Numbers!" has its roots in reality. At one time, many years ago, I went, on occasional afternoons, to swim at the Amba.s.sador Hotel pool with friends. The man in charge of that pool was a strict disciplinarian and used to stand his young son by the edge of the pool and give him all sorts of rigid instructions about life. Watching this ongoing lecture, day after day, I could not help but think that at some future time the son would react violently. Brooding at this seemingly unavoidable scenario, I sat down and wrote the story.
"Lafayette, Farewell" is based on a real and tragic tale told to me by a cinematographer who lived next door to Maggie and me for many years. Occasionally he came over to my house to visit with me and have a gla.s.s of wine. He told me how, way back in time, during the last months of World War I in 1918, he had been a member of the Lafayette Escadrille. As we talked, tears streamed down his face as he remembered shooting down German bi-planes; the faces of the doomed, handsome young men still haunted him after all those years. I could do nothing but offer my services as a storywriter to try to help him in the middle of his haunting.
At home, later that night, I wrote a letter to a friend of mine in Paris and said I had the most wonderful experience that afternoon of hearing the crowds of Mexico City over the telephone. As I wrote the letter to my friend it turned into a short story about an old man who listens to far places with long distance calls.
"The Sound of Summer Running" began with a bang. I was on a bus crossing Westwood Village when a young boy jumped on the bus, jammed his money in the box, ran down the aisle, and threw himself into a seat across from me. I looked at him with great admiration thinking, my G.o.d, if I had that much energy I could write a short story every day, three poems each night, and a novel by the end of the month. I looked down at his feet and saw there the reason for his vitality: a pair of wonderful bright new tennis shoes. And I suddenly remembered those special days of my growing up years-the beginning of every summer-when my father would take me down to the shoe store and buy me a new pair of tennis shoes, which gave me back the energy of the world. I could hardly wait to get home to sit down and write a story about a boy whose main desire is to own a pair of tennis shoes so he can run through summer.
"The Great Collision of Monday Last" was caused by my picking up a copy of the Irish Times in Dublin and reading the terrible fact that during the year 1953, 375 bike riders had been killed in Ireland. I thought, how amazing. We rarely read anything like that at home; it was always people dying in car accidents. Investigating further I discovered the reason. There were tens of thousands of bicycles all over Ireland; people going 40 or 50 miles an hour and colliding head on, so that when their heads struck, they sustained serious skull injuries. I thought: n.o.body in the world knows this! Maybe I should write a short story about it. Which is what I did.
"The Drummer Boy of Shiloh" had its genesis in an obituary in the Los Angeles Times concerning a bit player in motion pictures named Olin How-land. I"d seen him in scores of films over the years and now I was reading his death notice, which mentioned the fact that his grandfather had been the drummer boy at Shiloh. Those words were so magical, so evocative, so sad, that I was shocked into going immediately to my typewriter and putting those words down. This short story followed within the next hour.
"Darling Adolf" was caused very simply. Crossing a Universal Studios lot one afternoon I encountered a movie extra dressed in a n.a.z.i uniform and wearing a Hitler mustache. I wondered what might happen to him wandering around the studio or out in the street, what kind of reaction there might be to a person who resembles. .h.i.tler. The story was written that night.
I"ve never been in charge of my stories, they"ve always been in charge of me. As each new one has called to me, ordering me to give it voice and form and life, I"ve followed the advice I"ve shared with other writers over the years: Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
Over a period of more than sixty years I"ve jumped off many cliffs and struggled wildly on my typewriter to finish a story so as to make a soft landing. And, during the last few years I"ve looked back at the time when I was a teenager standing on a street corner, selling newspapers, and writing every day, not realizing how terrible my efforts were. Why did I do it, why did I keep jumping off those cliffs?
The answer is an immense cliche: Love.
I was so busy rushing headlong into the future, loving libraries and books and authors with all my heart and soul, was so consumed with becoming myself that I simply didn"t notice that I was short, homely, and untalented. Perhaps, in some corner of my mind, I did know. But I persisted-the need to write, to create, coursed like blood through my body, and still does.
I always dreamed of someday going into a library and looking up and seeing a book of mine leaning against the shoulder of L. Frank Baum or Edgar Rice Burroughs, and down below my other heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne. My wild love for them and their worlds, and for others like Somerset Maugham and John Steinbeck kept me so invigorated with pa.s.sion that I could not see that I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame in their grand company.
But as the years pa.s.sed I slipped my skins, one by one, and finally became a short story writer, an essayist, a poet, and a playwright. It took all those years to leave my other selves behind, but love was the thing that called me on.
Within this collection you will find representative tales from the many years of my long career. For all those years and for that great love that has kept me going, I am deeply grateful. My eyes fill with tears as I review the table of contents of this volume-all my dear, dear friends-the monsters and angels of my imagination.
Here they all are. A grand collection. I hope you will agree.
Ray Bradbury.
DECEMBER 2002.
THE WHOLE TOWN"S SLEEPING.
THE COURTHOUSE CLOCK CHIMED SEVEN TIMES. The echoes of the chimes faded.
Warm summer twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. The stores closing and the streets shadowed. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.
In the drugstore fans whispered in the high ceiling. In the rococo shade of porches, a few invisible people sat. Cigars glowed pink, on occasion. Screen doors whined their springs and slammed. On the purple bricks of the summer-night streets, Douglas Spaulding ran; dogs and boys followed after.
"Hi, Miss Lavinia!"
The boys loped away. Waving after them quietly, Lavinia Nebbs sat all alone with a tall cool lemonade in her white fingers, tapping it to her lips, sipping, waiting.
"Here I am, Lavinia."
She turned and there was Francine, all in snow white, at the bottom steps of the porch, in the smell of zinnias and hibiscus.
Lavinia Nebbs locked her front door and, leaving her lemonade gla.s.s half empty on the porch, said, "It"s a fine night for the movie."
They walked down the street.
"Where you going, girls?" cried Miss Fern and Miss Roberta from their porch over the way.
Lavinia called back through the soft ocean of darkness: "To the Elite Theater to see CHARLIE CHAPLIN!"
"Won"t catch us out on no night like this," wailed Miss Fern. "Not with the Lonely One strangling women. Lock ourselves up in our closet with a gun."
"Oh, bosh!" Lavinia heard the old women"s door bang and lock, and she drifted on, feeling the warm breath of summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalks. It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not unpleasant sense of invasion.
"Lavinia, you don"t believe all that about the Lonely One, do you?"
"Those women like to see their tongues dance."
"Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsell"s disappeared. . . ."
"Hattie McDollis was a silly girl, walked off with a traveling man, I bet."
"But the others, all of them, strangled, their tongues sticking out their mouths, they say."
They stood upon the edge of the ravine that cut the town half in two. Behind them were the lit houses and music, ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies and dark.
"Maybe we shouldn"t go to the show tonight," said Francine. "The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don"t like that ravine. Look at it, will you!"
Lavinia looked and the ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day; there was a great moving hum, a b.u.mbling and murmuring of creature, insect, or plant life. It smelled like a greenhouse, of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quicksands. And always the black dynamo humming, with sparkles like great electricity where fireflies moved on the air.
"It won"t be me coming back through this old ravine tonight late, so darned late; it"ll be you, Lavinia, you down the steps and over the bridge and maybe the Lonely One there."
"Bosh!" said Lavinia Nebbs.
"It"ll be you alone on the path, listening to your shoes, not me. You all alone on the way back to your house. Lavinia, don"t you get lonely living in that house?"
"Old maids love to live alone." Lavinia pointed at the hot shadowy path leading down into the dark. "Let"s take the short cut."
"I"m afraid!"
"It"s early. Lonely One won"t be out till late." Lavinia took the other"s arm and led her down and down the crooked path into the cricket warmth and frog sound and mosquito-delicate silence. They brushed through summer-scorched gra.s.s, burs p.r.i.c.kling at their bare ankles.
"Let"s run!" gasped Francine.
"No!"
They turned a curve in the path-and there it was.
In the singing deep night, in the shade of warm trees, as if she had laid herself out to enjoy the soft stars and the easy wind, her hands at either side of her like the oars of a delicate craft, lay Elizabeth Ramsell!
Francine screamed.
"Don"t scream!" Lavinia put out her hands to hold onto Francine, who was whimpering and choking. "Don"t! Don"t!"
The woman lay as if she had floated there, her face moonlit, her eyes wide and like flint, her tongue sticking from her mouth.
"She"s dead!" said Francine. "Oh, she"s dead, dead! She"s dead!"
Lavinia stood in the middle of a thousand warm shadows with the crickets screaming and the frogs loud.
"We"d better get the police," she said at last.
Hold me, Lavinia, hold me, I"m cold, oh, I"ve never been so cold in all my life!"
Lavinia held Francine and the policemen were brushing through the crackling gra.s.s, flashlights ducked about, voices mingled, and the night grew toward eight-thirty.
"It"s like December. I need a sweater," said Francine, eyes shut, against Lavinia.
The policeman said, "I guess you can go now, ladies. You might drop by the station tomorrow for a little more questioning."
Lavinia and Francine walked away from the police and the sheet over the delicate thing upon the ravine gra.s.s.
Lavinia felt her heart going loudly in her and she was cold, too, with a February cold; there were bits of sudden snow all over her flesh, and the moon washed her brittle fingers whiter, and she remembered doing all the talking while Francine just sobbed against her.
A voice called from far off, "You want an escort, ladies?"
"No, we"ll make it," said Lavinia to n.o.body, and they walked on. They walked through the nuzzling, whispering ravine, the ravine of whispers and clicks, the little world of investigation growing small behind them with its lights and voices.
"I"ve never seen a dead person before," said Francine.
Lavinia examined her watch as if it was a thousand miles away on an arm and wrist grown impossibly distant. "It"s only eight-thirty. We"ll pick up Helen and get on to the show."
"The show!" Francine jerked.
"It"s what we need. We"ve got to forget this. It"s not good to remember. If we went home now we"d remember. We"ll go to the show as if nothing happened."
"Lavinia, you don"t mean it!"
"I never meant anything more in my life. We need to laugh now and forget."
"But Elizabeth"s back there-your friend, my friend-"
"We can"t help her; we can only help ourselves. Come on."