Bradbury Speaks Read online

  With a space station built not in space but on the good gray foundation ground of the Moon, we will send celebratory fireworks to at last landfall Mars, not to photo-scan but landfall flesh-and-blood astronauts on the rim of that grand abyss, longer and wider than the U.S.A., and stare deep in its mirror to spy more futures.

  In an essay published years ago, I described our destiny as “We are the Carpenters of an Unseen Cathedral,” first seen with our intuition and then rocket-assembled in place. An architecture of belief in future life that speaks this motto:

  Carpe diem, seize the day. But more: Witness and celebrate. We will ask ourselves why we were Earth-born in ignorance to lift our intelligence and outpace death. To what purpose?

  An old question repeated like a celebratory prayer wheel. Why mankind on Earth, faced with monkey-puzzle genetics? The answer is this:

  The Universe needs to be seen. It cannot exist without us. If we vanish, the Cosmos vanishes.

  Our ego speaks a superb lie to urge us to persist, to conquer time and its meltdown of flesh.

  Our souls cry thanks to the Universe, the Cosmos, the Godhead, for our birth and being. We need to prayerfully cry that thanks.

  Space travel, then, is a thanksgiving journey with a Vatican Shinto Muslim Baptist choir to outpace Beethoven and shake the stars in their gyres.

  We see, we know, we cry gratitudes and save the Universe from darkness by saving it with our sight, banking it in our souls, and speaking it in tongues. We do not go gentle into that good night, we go raving with joy and will settle for nothing less but reciprocal gratitude from the Cosmos, glad to be found and recognized.

  Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock puts it thus:

  Now lakes of liquid gold, Elysian scenes,

  And crystal domes and angels in machines.

  And the angels, and devils, in machines will be us. On our way to doomsday, or headlong for heaven, and that heaven’s name is Moon, Mars, and the Universe beyond, so small it nests in the human heart, so vast it explodes the human soul.

  And by the end of the third millennium, what?

  We will have footprinted the Moon, migrated to Mars, ricocheted off Saturn’s rings to reach out and touch a hoped-for world circumnavigating Alpha Centauri.

  We will do just that to seed the Universe with bad and good, hope and despair, carrying the memory of Hitler and the promise of Christ.

  We defy old Shakespeare’s cry that we are just sound and fury signifying nothing. Our sounding fury will signify something. A silent Universe speaks because we speak. A blind Universe sees because we see. An unknowing Universe knows because we know.

  Who says? I say.

  So you will say it, and your children’s children’s children.

  We will outlive war and shout-claim the Universe.

  And live forever, or a million years. Whichever comes first.

  THE RABBIT HOLE LOST AND FOUND BOOK SHOPPE (UNDATED)

  As you walk, behold!

  In the pavement below …

  A rather largish Rabbit Hole.

  We are, in fact, standing on the hole.

  It is, in further fact, a hole with a transparent crystal lid upon it so that we can seemingly stand upon mere nothingness, simple air, and look down at:

  Alice falling down the long hole.

  The White Rabbit falling down the deep shaft.

  Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, holding candles, falling after …

  Long John Silver falling, cursing.

  Nemo’s Nautilus falling, sailing.

  Ahab pursuing his White Whale, falling after the whole blasted mob.

  Black Beauty running, falling down, down …

  The Cyclops, falling …

  The Medusa, falling, along with Helen of Troy, Romeo and Juliet … The Hunchback of Notre Dame! Hamlet! Othello!

  And, pursuing the lot, a fleet of starships, rockets, interplanetary craft, flashing, firing down, down away.

  And as we look down at this vast hole that we stand upon and watch the waterfall, the cascade of famous characters, we hear them name themselves, so we can identify the person or persons thus tossed down the literary mine shaft:

  “Huck … Huck Finn … Tom … Tom Sawyer … Quasimodo … Romeo … Long John Silver … Rebecca of Sunnybrook—”

  And we look up at the sign over the bright storefront that, not surprisingly, reads:

  THE RABBIT HOLE LOST AND FOUND BOOK SHOPPE!

  Our eye is further drawn on our right to view:

  In his own window arcade display:

  Edgar Allan Poe, an audioanimatronic life-size figure, with pale full-moon brow, sad mustache, seated with pen and ink and parchment paper.

  Upon his shoulder sits the Raven, dictating:

  And as the Raven dictates lines from various Poe stories, from the top of Poe’s head in a cloud of nocturnal steams and fog brewings, a misting of phantom shapes, ghosts, cats, witches, beasts, monsters drawn and etched by our old Spanish friend Goya. These nightmares fly up and away into the night winds above Poe’s head, monster after monster, beast after beast … some from Goya’s black-period paintings.

  So we combine literature and drawing/etching/painting.

  Finally, as we watch, the Raven quotes the ending of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and all, all of the images, mixed with masonry, towers, windows, doors, the whole architecture of miserable doom sinks down into the dark tarn within Poe’s head.

  The Raven shuts up. Great sounds of cataclysm. Great surges of water. Poe shuts his eyes. His hand stops moving. He rests.

  Thus riven, we turn our eyes to our left.

  On the opposite side of the entrance, we find another, greater display, a window filled with galaxies of stars toward which, in which, fly fleets of rockets, starships, away and away, mixed perhaps with floating, flying, sinking book covers of the authors the mighty ships represent.

  So we have three visual enticements, each of a size imaginatively large or large within smallness: Rabbit Hole, Poe, and View of the Entire Galactic Empire, what is there for us to do but … raise the crystal lid and …

  Rush down and slide to a halt in the Rabbit Hole Lost and Found Book Shoppe!

  Where we find intermixed with soaring shelves, spiral staircases, and walls with mysterious poke holes in them:

  Embedded in the floor here and there all through the future-world book shoppe, a series of further crystal-lidded Rabbit Holes. For instance:

  In the middle of a Younger Children’s Section, an uproar, uppour of beasts, dragons, chimeras, monsters would fall out of a bright/dark sky to strike against our soles, vanish, to be replaced by more beasts falling toward us out of a sky beneath our feet.

  In the Aviation Section, a Rabbit Hole sky in which a parade of all the grandest aircraft from the Wright Brothers on up to our shuttle into space would parade by, endlessly.

  In the Archaeology Section, we would peer directly down into Tutankhamen’s tomb with all its glorious junk-room display of gold, turquoise, and lapis lazuli.

  Nearby would stand a replica, above the surface of the floor, above the hole, of the Tutankhamen mummy with its incredible golden mask. The lips of the mask would move from time to time, and we would hear it whisper if we bent near:

  Would you know the ages? Would you know the tomb? Would you dig bones? Find mummies? Seek the past? Climb the pyramids? Be lost in the dead valley of the kings? Here lie Egyptian bones in Egyptian tombs with Egyptian curses. Find it. Know it. Put your hand to the shelf. Winnow the bones. Choose among mummies. Read the books … !

  And, of course, on either side of the mummy case are displayed books on archaeology and, along the top of the shelf, a small replica of the golden Sphinx.

  Moving on into the Science-Fiction Section, we would find various robots by various shelves, each capable of speech when touched, to describe books, events in books, grand cataclysms, births of suns and moons, deaths of stars. These robots stand guard over yet another Rabbit Hole in which spaceships and ar
madas fight titanic wars or strange beasts parade into a strange star-bound ark, two by two, all colors, all sizes, from all kinds of far planets.

  Interspersed through the bookstore would be spiral staircases, some of them leading up into cliffs of stacks about … er … mountains, so you do indeed climb that spiral of steps to reach a lofty perch to get your alpine books … or … conversely … the spiral steps go down, down into the floor to a special subterranean room full of books on … of course … the sea!

  The spiral staircases going up would have, embedded in a corkscrew crystal shield glass, painted pictures of mountain climbs that would spin upward as the images in a barber pole spin up, so that readers would be visually induced to climb up with the moving-upward gliding climbers.

  The staircases going down would have images of sea divers going down, spiraling down, so, conversely, our readers would be drawn down into the room below the book shoppe’s floor.

  At the main entrance of the shoppe would be a computer robot that, spoken to, or touched/typed for data, would supply said information either by voice or by printout … TYPE IN YOUR NEEDS and the robot would instruct you to go past THE RED STACKS, THE YELLOW STACKS, and to BLUE STACK, SHELF 3 or SHELF 4. Also printed out would be additional information on similar books at your local library, plus recordings/tapes/films of same.

  Interspersed throughout our book shoppe, similar computers either as silver and gold futuristic robots or shapes like King Tut or inside ancient sea divers’ helmets, would answer our questions, give us directions.

  Here and there throughout the shoppe would be conveniently placed window seats where readers can sit or curl up with books and look out upon green rolling Irish hills or Sahara dunes or the lamasery in Tibet, or look upon Oz itself with its roads leading off to four different-colored countries, or upon the Mad King Ludwig’s castle or on Spanish pirate sea coves where corsair ships are putting in. There should be at least eight such windows where readers can pause, sit, rest, and read awhile.

  On display as we move we find:

  The Michelangelo inkwell in which a twenty-inch-tall wax figurine Boy David is suspended in a light blue ink so we can look through the transparent sides of the inkwell and see the small figure there, surrounded by calibrated walls. At the touch of a button, we can lower the ink, even as Michelangelo did. At the instant of our doing so, a thirty-foot-tall oblong of marble standing nearby shrapnels itself away under the blows of an invisible chisel and hammer. With concussions of sound, we watch the gigantic Boy David broken out of his stone prison, revealed inch by inch as the ink is lowered in the inkwell so we can measure small against large and prove a history of Michelangelo’s birthing David at a touch of our hand.

  And then again:

  Either inside the shoppe in an alcove or outside as a monolithic display, we should construct a gigantic light/electric sketch board whose translucent surface would be lit by a thousand small, embedded lights in primary colors of red/blue/yellow, mixtures of which would give us our purples, greens, and oranges … super Georges Seurat! A person standing at a small computer sketch pad below, utilizing a stylus, could draw a quick sketch instantly reproduced on the large image screen. The sketch would be photographed instantly, and the “artist” would have a permanent record of his or her large “masterpiece” created by light. Depending on the ability of the individual artists, of course, we would have some highly original or awful light works on display during an electric encounter.

  Throughout the book shoppe, in various walls, would be literary poke holes … holes where children or adults could stick their heads into darkness.

  As soon as a person stuck his or her head into such a poke-hole place, his head would intercept an invisible light beam, causing a film to run or a small audioanimatronic figurine to shout up at him.

  In one poke hole, Captain Bligh down below in his boat would cry, “I’ll be back, Mr. Christian, to make you pay!”

  In another, Cathy would stand in a snowstorm crying, “Heathcliff … oh, Heathcliff!”

  In yet another, once you got your head in, you would see all about, below, a Parisian mob, with Madame Defarge knitting, looking up at you. A quiet voice would say, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done....” And CHOMP. The sound of a guillotine sliding down, with a gentle touch on the back of your neck … !

  Another poke hole and you see, laid out before you: a pit, a young man, and a … descending … pendulum!

  Or … Huck and Tom gliding by on a river on a raft, calling up, “Hey, come on, water’s fine … fishing’s fancy fine!”

  BEYOND 1984 (1979)

  Don’t look now, but the eighties are almost upon us. Which means that the usual Chicken Little end-of-the-world doomsters are rushing in circles, colliding with themselves and shouting, “Head for the hills, the dam is broke!” Here comes 1984. Watch out, there’s Big Brother.

  Bulrushes and sauerkraut.

  Nineteen eighty-four will show up, but not as a Kremlin gargoyle or an Orwellian beast. We have, for the time being anyway, knocked Big Brother into the next century. With luck, and if we keep our eye on the ballot box and our chameleon politicos, he may never recover. Meanwhile, just beyond 1984, a truly grand year awaits us. Nineteen eighty-six will be a special time. Why special and why grand? If 1984 once symbolized the worst of man, 1986 might just possibly symbolize nothing but the best. For that is the year we earthlings will enjoy a close encounter of the fourth kind.

  A visitor from beyond will park itself on our solar doorstep for some few months, then vanish like some Christmas ghost. We will not see it again for another seventy-six years. How shall we react? In one scenario we will toss ourselves high in celebrations to meet this ghost. We will stand forth in space and wave the cold beast in. We will laugh in its face. We will probe its icy flesh and swirl our technological matador’s cape as it rushes by us at some hundred thousand miles per hour. We will pierce its heart with the finest, brightest swords that science can forge, then offer to crowds around the world the secret of the birth of the solar system.

  In another scenario we will watch an artist’s conception of the event on television, our faces illuminated by the pale light of the tube. A commentator will mourn, “Maybe next time.”

  The visitor, of course, is Halley’s comet. The villain is Congress, which must approve the funds for this grand scheme. And who are the people who would play tag with the cosmic train? The amiable “mad” scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

  Those are the same wild folks who helped bring you Mars Viking landings I and II. The folks who remind me of the old Bob Hope–Jerry Colonna routine in which Hope shouts at the sky, “Colonna, what are you doing up there?”

  “Building a bridge—starting at the top.”

  “But,” cries Hope, “you can’t do that!”

  Colonna shrugs and turns to his workers. “All right, boys, tear it down.”

  But the blueprinters at JPL won’t tear anything down. They are used to building imaginary bridges, starting at the top, then riveting a foundation under the dream before it blows away.

  Those are the folks who want to build a bridge to Mars, who would send a probe there that would return with samples from the surface. Those are the folks who want to build a bridge to Titan to sample the atmosphere of Saturn’s most literary moon. They would orbit Jupiter, land on Mercury, and send a robot to summer camp on Mars. They are dreamers who, when they awake, try to sell their dreams to NASA and a skinflint Congress.

  If Congress wants to share the dream of a Halley’s-comet encounter, it will have to reach into its purse and pull out some $500 million. And it will have to do so in the near future. If it waits too long, there won’t be time for the experimental draftings, the many test failures, and the final successes that plague and reward such grandiose exercises. The bureaucracy that made Big Brother possible will kill the dream.

  One plan to rendezvous with Halley’s comet has already bitt
en the dust. In 1977, scientists at JPL were toying with the idea of a solar sail, a giant kite, a stringless wonder, with all our souls as its endless tail. The sail was to be powered by the light of the sun.

  Pure sunlight can do that? It can. Light rays exert pressure in the form of protons—massless particles. When these particles strike a surface, they are, in effect, a supersonic wind blowing against a sail.

  The original comet-intercept plan was simple and elegant. The sail would be a thin breath of Mylar plastic skinned out over some aluminum spider that might well measure as much as half a mile wide. This vast experiment would be tucked in special shuttles and launched into space. There astronauts would scramble to unfurl the beauty, raise the sail, finish out the kite, then hop back into the shuttles and let the sun push the sail with its massless winds. Set free, the sail would be controlled and balanced by vanes.

  Slowly it would build speed, until it reached the hundred thousand miles per hour necessary to make the rendezvous. Unlike normal rockets, which are limited in the amount of fuel they can carry and in their final speed, the solar sail would find its fuel in space.

  To reach rendezvous speed, a launch would have to have been made by 1981. The seed money should have been granted in 1978. It didn’t happen. NASA looked at the comet-intercept project, compared the benefits with other priority projects (including another comet project), and crossed off the solar sail from its 1978 shopping list.

  The scientists at JPL were undaunted. They had an alternative propulsion system on the drawing boards: the ion drive, a galactic butterfly that can spin sunlight into electricity, to emit a soft violet blast. Like the solar sail, it finds its fuel in space. Dr. Ken Atkins, head of the comet-intercept program at JPL, pulled the ion drive out of the hat and said, “Lo, we can’t build up speed to rendezvous, but we can cut across the path of the visitor and drop an instrument package down the throat of the comet.”

  And just for a touch of class, the JPL plan offered a two-for-one shot: The ion-drive craft could fly by Halley’s comet and then, two years later, rendezvous with Tempel 2, a bright little visitor that drops by every 5.3 years. We could pace the comet past Mercury without setting ourselves aflame, then tag along when it moved back out to hide itself in the mine-shaft universe.