Bradbury Stories Read online

  “You and Francine. Honestly!”

  “I feel so guilty. I’ll be drinking some hot cocoa just as you reach the ravine bottom and walk on the bridge.”

  “Drink a cup for me. Good night.”

  Lavinia Nebbs walked alone down the midnight street, down the late summer-night silence. She saw houses with the dark windows and far away she heard a dog barking. In five minutes, she thought, I’ll be safe at home. In five minutes I’ll be phoning silly little Francine. I’ll—”

  She heard the man’s voice.

  A man’s voice singing far away among the trees.

  “Oh, give me a June night, the moonlight and you . . .”

  She walked a little faster.

  The voice sang, “In my arms . . . with all your charms . . .”

  Down the street in the dim moonlight a man walked slowly and casually along.

  I can run knock on one of these doors, thought Lavinia, if I must.

  “Oh, give me a June night,” sang the man, and he carried a long club in his hand. “The moonlight and you. Well, look who’s here! What a time of night for you to be out, Miss Nebbs!”

  “Officer Kennedy!”

  And that’s who it was, of course.

  “I’d better see you home!”

  “Thanks, I’ll make it.”

  “But you live across the ravine. . . .”

  Yes, she thought, but I won’t walk through the ravine with any man, not even an officer. How do I know who the Lonely One is? “No,” she said, “I’ll hurry.”

  “I’ll wait right here,” he said. “If you need any help, give a yell. Voices carry good here. I’ll come running.”

  “Thank you.”

  She went on, leaving him under a light, humming to himself, alone.

  Here I am, she thought.

  The ravine.

  She stood on the edge of the one hundred and thirteen steps that went down the steep hill and then across the bridge seventy yards and up the hills leading to Park Street. And only one lantern to see by. Three minutes from now, she thought, I’ll be putting my key in my house door. Nothing can happen in just one hundred eighty seconds.

  She started down the long dark-green steps into the deep ravine.

  “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten steps,” she counted in a whisper.

  She felt she was running, but she was not running.

  “Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty steps,” she breathed.

  “One fifth of the way!” she announced to herself.

  The ravine was deep, black and black, black! And the world was gone behind, the world of safe people in bed, the locked doors, the town, the drugstore, the theater, the lights, everything was gone. Only the ravine existed and lived, black and huge, about her.

  “Nothing’s happened, has it? No one around, is there? Twenty-four, twenty-five steps. Remember that old ghost story you told each other when you were children?”

  She listened to her shoes on the steps.

  “The story about the dark man coming in your house and you upstairs in bed. And now he’s at the first step coming up to your room. And now he’s at the second step. And now he’s at the third step and the fourth step and the fifth! Oh, how you used to laugh and scream at that story! And now the horrid dark man’s at the twelfth step and now he’s opening the door of your room and now he’s standing by your bed. ‘I GOT YOU!’”

  She screamed. It was like nothing she’d ever heard, that scream. She had never screamed that loud in her life. She stopped, she froze, she clung to the wooden banister. Her heart exploded in her. The sound of the terrified beating filled the universe.

  “There, there!” she screamed to herself. “At the bottom of the steps. A man, under the light! No, now he’s gone! He was waiting there!”

  She listened.

  Silence.

  The bridge was empty.

  Nothing, she thought, holding her heart. Nothing. Fool! That story I told myself. How silly. What shall I do?

  Her heartbeats faded.

  Shall I call the officer—did he hear me scream?

  She listened. Nothing. Nothing.

  I’ll go the rest of the way. That silly story.

  She began again, counting the steps.

  “Thirty-five, thirty-six, careful, don’t fall. Oh, I am a fool. Thirty-seven steps, thirty-eight, nine and forty, and two makes forty-two—almost halfway.”

  She froze again.

  Wait, she told herself.

  She took a step. There was an echo.

  She took another step.

  Another echo. Another step, just a fraction of a moment later.

  “Someone’s following me,” she whispered to the ravine, to the black crickets and dark-green hidden frogs and the black stream. “Someone’s on the steps behind me. I don’t dare turn around.”

  Another step, another echo.

  “Every time I take a step, they take one.”

  A step and an echo.

  Weakly she asked of the ravine, “Officer Kennedy, is that you?”

  The crickets were still.

  The crickets were listening. The night was listening to her. For a change, all of the far summer-night meadows and close summer-night trees were suspending motion; leaf, shrub, star, and meadow grass ceased their particular tremors and were listening to Lavinia Nebbs’s heart. And perhaps a thousand miles away, across locomotive-lonely country, in an empty way station, a single traveler reading a dim newspaper under a solitary naked bulb, might raise up his head, listen, and think, What’s that? and decide, Only a woodchuck, surely, beating on a hollow log. But it was Lavinia Nebbs, it was most surely the heart of Lavinia Nebbs.

  Silence. A summer-night silence which lay for a thousand miles, which covered the earth like a white and shadowy sea.

  Faster, faster! She went down the steps.

  Run!

  She heard music. In a mad way, in a silly way, she heard the great surge of music that pounded at her, and she realized as she ran, as she ran in panic and terror, that some part of her mind was dramatizing, borrowing from the turbulent musical score of some private drama, and the music was rushing and pushing her now, higher and higher, faster, faster, plummeting and scurrying, down, and down into the pit of the ravine.

  Only a little way, she prayed. One hundred eight, nine, one hundred ten steps! The bottom! Now, run! Across the bridge!

  She told her legs what to do, her arms, her body, her terror; she advised all parts of herself in this white and terrible moment, over the roaring creek waters, on the hollow, thudding, swaying almost alive, resilient bridge planks she ran, followed by the wild footsteps behind, behind, with the music following, too, the music shrieking and babbling.

  He’s following, don’t turn, don’t look, if you see him, you’ll not be able to move, you’ll be so frightened. Just run, run!

  She ran across the bridge.

  Oh, God, God, please, please let me get up the hill! Now up the path, now between the hills, oh God, it’s dark, and everything so far away. If I screamed now it wouldn’t help; I can’t scream anyway. Here’s the top of the path, here’s the street, oh, God, please let me be safe, if I get home safe I’ll never go out alone; I was a fool, let me admit it, I was a fool, I didn’t know what terror was, but if you let me get home from this I’ll never go without Helen or Francine again! Here’s the street. Across the street!

  She crossed the street and rushed up the sidewalk.

  Oh God, the porch! My house! Oh God, please give me time to get inside and lock the door and I’ll be safe!

  And there—silly thing to notice—why did she notice, instantly, no time, no time—but there it was anyway, flashing by—there on the porch rail, the half-filled glass of lemonade she had abandoned a long time, a year, half an evening ago! The lemonade glass sitting calmly, imperturbably there on the rail . . . and . . .

  She heard her clumsy feet on the porch and listened and felt her hands scrabbling and ripping
at the lock with the key. She heard her heart. She heard her inner voice screaming.

  The key fit.

  Unlock the door, quick, quick!

  The door opened.

  Now, inside. Slam it!

  She slammed the door.

  “Now lock it, bar it, lock it!” she gasped wretchedly.

  “Lock it, tight, tight!”

  The door was locked and bolted tight.

  The music stopped. She listened to her heart again and the sound of it diminishing into silence.

  Home! Oh God, safe at home! Safe, safe and safe at home! She slumped against the door. Safe, safe. Listen. Not a sound. Safe, safe, oh thank God, safe at home. I’ll never go out at night again. I’ll stay home. I won’t go over that ravine again ever. Safe, oh safe, safe home, so good, so good, safe! Safe inside, the door locked. Wait.

  Look out the window.

  She looked.

  Why, there’s no one there at all! Nobody. There was nobody following me at all. Nobody running after me. She got her breath and almost laughed at herself. It stands to reason If a man had been following me, he’d have caught me! I’m not a fast runner. . . . There’s no one on the porch or in the yard. How silly of me. I wasn’t running from anything. That ravine’s as safe as anyplace. Just the same, it’s nice to be home. Home’s the really good warm place, the only place to be.

  She put her hand out to the light switch and stopped.

  “What?” she asked. “What, what?”

  Behind her in the living room, someone cleared his throat.

  THE ROCKET

  MANY NIGHTS FIORELLO BODONI WOULD AWAKEN to hear the rockets sighing in the dark sky. He would tiptoe from bed, certain that his kind wife was dreaming, to let himself out into the night air. For a few moments he would be free of the smells of old food in the small house by the river. For a silent moment he would let his heart soar alone into space, following the rockets.

  Now, this very night, he stood half naked in the darkness, watching the fire fountains murmuring in the air. The rockets on their long wild way to Mars and Saturn and Venus!

  “Well, well, Bodoni.”

  Bodoni started.

  On a milk crate, by the silent river, sat an old man who also watched the rockets through the midnight hush.

  “Oh, it’s you, Bramante!”

  “Do you come out every night, Bodoni?”

  “Only for the air.”

  “So? I prefer the rockets myself,” said old Bramante. “I was a boy when they started. Eighty years ago, and I’ve never been on one yet.”

  “I will ride up in one someday,” said Bodoni.

  “Fool!” cried Bramante. “You’ll never go. This is a rich man’s world.” He shook his gray head, remembering. “When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters: THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE! Science, Comfort, and New Things for All! Ha! Eighty years. The Future becomes Now! Do we fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us.”

  “Perhaps my sons—” said Bodoni.

  “No, nor their sons!” the old man shouted. “It’s the rich who have dreams and rockets!”

  Bodoni hesitated. “Old man, I’ve saved three thousand dollars. It took me six years to save it. For my business, to invest in machinery. But every night for a month now I’ve been awake. I hear the rockets. I think. And tonight I’ve made up my mind. One of us will fly to Mars!” His eyes were shining and dark.

  “Idiot,” snapped Bramante. “How will you choose? Who will go? If you go, your wife will hate you, for you will be just a bit nearer God, in space. When you tell your amazing trip to her, over the years, won’t bitterness gnaw at her?”

  “No, no!”

  “Yes! And your children? Will their lives be filled with the memory of Papa, who flew to Mars while they stayed here? What a senseless task you will set your boys. They will think of the rocket all their lives. They will lie awake. They will be sick with wanting it. Just as you are sick now. They will want to die if they cannot go. Don’t set that goal, I warn you. Let them be content with being poor. Turn their eyes down to their hands and to your junkyard, not up to the stars.”

  “But—”

  “Suppose your wife went? How would you feel, knowing she had seen and you had not? She would become holy. You would think of throwing her in the river. No, Bodoni, buy a new wrecking machine, which you need, and pull your dreams apart with it, and smash them to pieces.”

  The old man subsided, gazing at the river in which, drowned, images of rockets burned down the sky.

  “Good night,” said Bodoni.

  “Sleep well,” said the other.

  When the toast jumped from its silver box, Bodoni almost screamed. The night had been sleepless. Among his nervous children, beside his mountainous wife, Bodoni had twisted and stared at nothing. Bramante was right. Better to invest the money. Why save it when only one of the family could ride the rocket, while the others remained to melt in frustration?

  “Fiorello, eat your toast,” said his wife, Maria.

  “My throat is shriveled,” said Bodoni.

  The children rushed in, the three boys fighting over a toy rocket, the two girls carrying dolls which duplicated the inhabitants of Mars, Venus, and Neptune, green mannequins with three yellow eyes and twelve fingers.

  “I saw the Venus rocket!” cried Paolo.

  “It took off, whoosh!” hissed Antonello.

  “Children!” shouted Bodoni, hands to his ears.

  They stared at him. He seldom shouted.

  Bodoni arose. “Listen, all of you,” he said. “I have enough money to take one of us on the Mars rocket.”

  Everyone yelled.

  “You understand?” he asked. “Only one of us. Who?”

  “Me, me, me!” cried the children.

  “You,” said Maria.

  “You,” said Bodoni to her.

  They all fell silent.

  The children reconsidered. “Let Lorenzo go—he’s oldest.”

  “Let Miriamne go—she’s a girl!”

  “Think what you would see,” said Bodoni’s wife to him. But her eyes were strange. Her voice shook. “The meteors, like fish. The universe. The Moon. Someone should go who could tell it well on returning. You have a way with words.”

  “Nonsense. So have you,” he objected.

  Everyone trembled.

  “Here,” said Bodoni unhappily. From a broom he broke straws of various lengths. “The short straw wins.” He held out his tight fist. “Choose.”

  Solemnly each took his turn.

  “Long straw.”

  “Long straw.”

  Another.

  “Long straw.”

  The children finished. The room was quiet.

  Two straws remained. Bodoni felt his heart ache in him. “Now,” he whispered. “Maria.”

  She drew.

  “The short straw,” she said.

  “Ah,” sighed Lorenzo, half happy, half sad. “Mama goes to Mars.”

  Bodoni tried to smile. “Congratulations. I will buy your ticket today.”

  “Wait, Fiorello—”

  “You can leave next week,” he murmured.

  She saw the sad eyes of her children upon her, with the smiles beneath their straight, large noses. She returned the straw slowly to her husband. “I cannot go to Mars.”

  “But why not?”

  “I will be busy with another child.”

  “What!”

  She would not look at him. “It wouldn’t do for me to travel in my condition.”

  He took her elbow. “Is this the truth?”

  “Draw again. Start over.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” he said incredulously.

  “I didn’t remember.”

  “Maria, Maria,” he whispered, patting her face. He turned to the children. “Draw again.”

  Paolo immediately drew the short straw.

  “I go to Mars!” He danced wildly. “Thank you, Father!”

  The other childr
en edged away. “That’s swell, Paolo.”

  Paolo stopped smiling to examine his parents and his brothers and sisters. “I can go, can’t I?” he asked uncertainly.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll like me when I come back?”

  “Of course.”

  Paolo studied the precious broomstraw on his trembling hand and shook his head. He threw it away. “I forgot. School starts. I can’t go. Draw again.”

  But no one would draw. A full sadness lay on them.

  “None of us will go,” said Lorenzo.

  “That’s best,” said Maria.

  “Bramante was right,” said Bodoni.

  With his breakfast curdled within him, Fiorello Bodoni worked in his junkyard, ripping metal, melting it, pouring out usable ingots. His equipment flaked apart; competition had kept him on the insane edge of poverty for twenty years.

  It was a very bad morning.

  In the afternoon a man entered the junkyard and called up to Bodoni on his wrecking machine. “Hey, Bodoni, I got some metal for you!”

  “What is it, Mr. Mathews?” asked Bodoni, listlessly.

  “A rocket ship. What’s wrong? Don’t you want it?”

  “Yes, yes!” He seized the man’s arm, and stopped, bewildered.

  “Of course,” said Mathews, “it’s only a mockup. You know. When they plan a rocket they build a full-scale model first, of aluminum. You might make a small profit boiling her down. Let you have her for two thousand—”

  Bodoni dropped his hand. “I haven’t the money.”

  “Sorry. Thought I’d help you. Last time we talked you said how everyone outbid you on junk. Thought I’d slip this to you on the q.t. Well—”

  “I need new equipment. I saved money for that.”

  “I understand.”

  “If I bought your rocket, I wouldn’t even be able to melt it down. My aluminum furnace broke down last week—”

  “Sure.”

  “I couldn’t possibly use the rocket if I bought it from you.”

  “I know.”

  Bodoni blinked and shut his eyes. He opened them and looked at Mr. Mathews. “But I am a great fool. I will take my money from the bank and give it to you.”

  “But if you can’t melt the rocket down—”

  “Deliver it,” said Bodoni.

  “All right, if you say so. Tonight?”