Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (11 page)

 
          
 
"That's better!" She kissed him on
both cheeks, squeezed him and went away up the stairs.

 
          
 
In the kitchen, he took out a glass, opened
the refrigerator, and was pouring the milk when he stopped suddenly.

 
          
 
Near the front of the top shelf was a small
yellow dish. It was not the dish that held his attention, however. It was what
lay in the dish.

 
          
 
The fresh-cut mushrooms.

 
          
 
He must have stood there for half a minute,
his breath frosting the air, before he reached out, took hold of the dish,
sniffed it, felt the mushrooms, then at last, carrying the dish, went out into
the hall. He looked up the stairs, hearing Cynthia moving about in the bedroom,
and was about to call up to her, "Cynthia, did you put these in the
refrigerator?" Then he stopped. He knew her answer. She had not.

 
          
 
He put the dish of mushrooms on the
newel-upright at the bottom of the stairs and stood looking at them. He
imagined himself in bed later, looking at the walls, the open windows, watching
the moonlight sift patterns on the ceiling. He heard himself saying, Cynthia?
And her answering. Yes? And him saying, There is a way for mushrooms to grow
arms and legs. What? she would say, silly, silly man, what? And he would gather
courage against her hilarious reaction and go on, What if a man wandered
through the swamp, picked the mushrooms and ate them. . . ?

 
          
 
No response from Cynthia.

 
          
 
Once inside the man, would the mushrooms
spread through his blood, take over every cell and change the man from a man to
a—Martian? Given this theory, would the mushroom need its own arms and legs?
No, not when it could borrow people, live inside and become them. Roger ate
mushrooms given him by his son. Roger became 'something else. He kidnapped
himself. And in one last flash of sanity, of being himself, he telegraphed us,
warning us not to accept the special-delivery mushrooms. The 'Roger' that
telephoned later was no longer Roger but a captive of what he had eaten!
Doesn't that figure, Cynthia, doesn't it, doesn't it?

 
          
 
No, said the imagined Cynthia, no, it doesn't
figure, no, no, no....

 
          
 
There was the faintest whisper, rustle, stir
from the cellar. Taking his eyes from the bowl, Fortnum walked to the cellar
door and put his ear to it.

 
          
 
"Tom?"

 
          
 
No answer.

 
          
 
"Tom, are you down there?"

 
          
 
No answer.

 
          
 
"Tom?"

 
          
 
After a long while, Tom's voice came up from
below.

 
          
 
"Yes, Dad?"

 
          
 
"It's after midnight," said Fortnum,
fighting to keep his voice from going high. "What are you doing down
there?"

 
          
 
No answer.

 
          
 
"I said—"

 
          
 
“Tending to my crop," said the boy at
last, his voice cold and faint.

 
          
 
"Well, get the hell out of there! You
hear me?'*

 
          
 
Silence.

 
          
 
"Tom? Listen! Did you put some mushrooms
in the refrigerator tonight? If so, why?"

 
          
 
Ten seconds must have ticked by before the boy
replied from below, "For you and Mom to eat, of course."

 
          
 
Fortnum heard his heart moving swiftly and had
to take three deep breaths before he could go on.

           
 
"Tom? You didn't . . . that is, you
haven't by any chance eaten some of the mushrooms yourself, have you?"

 
          
 
"Funny you ask that," said Tom.
"Yes. Tonight. On a sandwich. After supper. Why?"

 
          
 
Fortnum held to the doorknob. Now it was his
turn not to answer. He felt his knees beginning to melt and he fought the whole
silly senseless fool thing. No reason, he tried to say, but his lips wouldn't
move.

 
          
 
"Dad?" called Tom, softly from the
cellar. "Come on down." Another pause. "I want you to see the
harvest."

 
          
 
Fortnum felt the knob slip in his sweaty hand.
The knob rattled. He gasped.

 
          
 
"Dad?" called Tom softly.

 
          
 
Fortnum opened the door.

 
          
 
The cellar was completely black below.

 
          
 
He stretched his hand in toward the light
switch.

 
          
 
As if sensing this from somewhere, Tom said,
"Don't. Light's bad for the mushrooms."

 
          
 
He took his hand off the switch.

 
          
 
He swallowed. He looked back at the stair
leading up to his wife. I suppose, he thought, I should go say goodbye to
Cynthia. But why should I think that! Why, in God's name, should I think that
at all? No reason, is there?

 
          
 
None.

 
          
 
"Tom?" he said, affecting a jaunty
air. "Ready or not, here I come!"

 
          
 
And stepping down in darkness, he shut the
door.

 
          
 
Sighting Rock Junction, Arizona, at noon on
August 22, 1967, Willy Bersinger let his miner's boot rest easy on the jalopy's
accelerator and talked quietly to his partner, Samuel Fitts.

 
          
 
"Yes, sir, Samuel,
it's
great hitting town. After a couple of months out at the Penny Dreadful Mine, a
jukebox looks like a stained-glass window to me. We need the town; without it,
we might wake some morning and find ourselves all jerked beef and petrified
rock. And then, of course, the town needs us, too."

 
          
 
"How's that?" asked Samuel Fitts.

 
          
 
"Well, we bring things into town that it
hasn't got— mountains, creeks, desert night, stars, things like that . .
."

 
          
 
And it was true, thought Willy, driving along.
Set a man 'way out in the strange lands and he fills with wellsprings of
silence.
Silence of sagebrush, or a mountain lion purring
like a warm beehive at
noon
.
Silence of the river shallows deep in the canyons. All
this a man takes in. Opening his mouth, in town, he breathes it out.

 
          
 
"Oh, how I love to climb into that old
barbershop chair," Willy admitted, "and see all those city men lined
up under the naked-lady calendars, staring back at me, waiting while I chew
over my philosophy of rocks and mirages and the kind of Time that just sits out
there in the hills waiting for man to go away. I exhale—and that wilderness
settles in a fine dust on the customers. Oh, it's nice, me talking, soft and
easy, up and down, on and on ..."

 
          
 
In his mind he saw the customers' eyes strike
fire. Someday they would yell and rabbit for the hills, leaving families and
time-clock civilization behind.

 
          
 
"It's good to feel wanted," said
Willy. "You and me, Samuel, are basic necessities for those city-dwelling
folks. Gangway, Rock Junction!"

           
 
And with a tremulous tin whistling they
steamed across city limits into awe and wonder.

 
          
 
They had driven perhaps a hundred feet through
town when Willy kicked the brakes. A great shower of rust flakes sifted from
the jalopy fenders. The car stood cowering in the road.

 
          
 
"Something's wrong," said Willy. He
squinted his lynx eyes this way and that. He snuffed his huge nose. "You
feel it? You smell it?"

 
          
 
"Sure," said Samuel, uneasily,
"but what?"

 
          
 
Willy scowled. "You ever see a sky-blue
cigar-store Indian?"

 
          
 
"Never did."

 
          
 
“There's one over there. Ever see a pink dog
kennel, an orange outhouse, a lilac-colored birdbath? There, there, and over
there!"

 
          
 
Both men had risen slowly now to stand on the
creaking floorboards.

 
          
 
"Samuel," whispered Willy, "the
whole damn shooting match, every kindling pile, porch rail, gewgaw gingerbread,
fence, fireplug, garbage truck, the whole blasted town, look at it! It was
painted just an hour ago!"

 
          
 
"No!" said Samuel Fitts.

 
          
 
But there stood the band pavilion, the Baptist
church, the firehouse, the Oddfellows' orphanage, the railroad depot, the
county jail, the cat hospital and all the bungalows, cottages, greenhouses,
gazebos, shop signs, mailboxes, telephone poles and trashbins, around and in
between, and they all blazed with corn yellow, crab-apple greens, circus reds.
From water tank to tabernacle, each building looked as if God had jig-sawed it,
colored it and set it out to dry a moment ago.

 
          
 
Not only that, but where weeds had always
been, now cabbages, green onions, and lettuce crammed every yard, crowds of
curious sunflowers clocked the noon sky, and pan-sies lay under unnumbered
trees cool as summer puppies, their great damp eyes peering over rolled lawns
mint-green as Irish travel posters. To top it all, ten boys, faces scrubbed,
hair brilliantined, shirts, pants and tennis shoes clean as chunks of snow,
raced by.

 
          
 
"The town," said Willy, watching
them run, "has gone mad. Mystery. Mystery everywhere. Samuel, what kind of
tyrant's come to power? What law has passed that keeps boys clean, drives
people to paint every toothpick, every geranium pot? Smell that smell? There's
fresh wallpaper in all those houses! Doom in some horrible shape has tried and
tested these people. Human nature doesn't just get this picky perfect
overnight. I'll bet all the gold I planned last month those attics, those
cellars are cleaned out, all shipshape. I'll bet you a real Thing fell on this
town."

 
          
 
"Why, I can almost hear the cherubim
singing in the Garden," Samuel protested. "How you figure Doom? Shake
my hand, put 'er there. I'll bet and take your money!"

 
          
 
The jalopy swerved around a comer through a
wind that smelled of turpentine and whitewash. Samuel threw out a gun wrapper,
snorting. He was somewhat surprised at what happened next. An old man in new
overalls, with mirror-bright shoes, ran out into the street, grabbed the
crumpled gum wrapper and shook his fist after the departing jalopy.

 
          
 
"Doom . . ." Samuel Fitts looked
back, his voice fading. "Well, ... the bet still stands."

 
          
 
They opened the door upon a barbershop teeming
with customers whose hair had already been cut and oiled, whose faces were shaved
close and pink, yet who sat waiting to vault back into the chairs where three
barbers flourished their shears and combs. A stock-market uproar filled the
room as customers and barbers all talked at once.

 
          
 
When Willy and Samuel entered, the uproar ceased
instantly. It was if they had fired a shotgun blast through the door.

 
          
 
"Sam ... Willy . .."

 
          
 
In the silence some of the sitting men stood
up and some of the standing men sat down, slowly, staring.

 
          
 
"Samuel," said Willy out of the
comer of his mouth, "I feel like the Red Death standing here." Aloud
he said, "Howdy! Here I am to finish my lecture on the Interesting Flora
and Fauna of the Great American Desert, and—'*

 
          
 
"No!"

 
          
 
Antonelli, the head barber, rushed frantically
at Willy, seized his arm, clapped his hand over Willy's mouth like a snuffer on
a candle. "Willy," he whispered, looking apprehensively over his
shoulder at his customers. "Promise me one thing: buy a needle and thread,
sew up your lips. Silence, man, if you value your life!"

 
          
 
Willy and Samuel felt themselves hurried
forward. Two already neat customers leaped out of the barber chairs without
being asked. As they stepped into the chairs, the two miners glimpsed their own
images in the flyspecked mirror.

 
          
 
"Samuel, there we are! Look!
Compare!"

 
          
 
"Why," said Samuel, blinking,
"we're the only men in all Rock Junction who really need a shave and a
haircut."

 
          
 
"Strangers!" Antonelli laid them out
in the chairs as if to anesthetize them quickly. "You don't know what
strangers you are!”

 
          
 
"Why, we've only been gone a couple of
months!—" A steaming towel inundated Willy's face; he subsided with
muffled cries. In steaming darkness he heard Antonelli's low and urgent voice.

 
          
 
"We'll fix you to look like everyone
else. Not that the way you look is dangerous, no, but the kind of talk you
miners talk might upset folks at a time like this."

 
          
 
"Time like this, hell!" Willy lifted
the seething towel. One bleary eye fixed Antonelli. "What's wrong with
Rock Junction?"

 
          
 
"Not just Rock Junction." Antonelli
gazed off at some incredible dream beyond the horizon. "Phoenix, Tucson,
Denver. All the cities in America! My wife and I are going as tourists to
Chicago next week. Imagine Chicago all painted and clean and new. The Pearl of
the Orient, they call it! Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Buffalo, the same! All
because—well, get up now, walk over and switch on that television set against
the wall."

 
          
 
Willy handed Antonelli the steaming towel,
walked over, switched on the television set, listened to it hum, fiddled with
the dials and waited. White snow drifted down the screen.

 
          
 
"Try the radio now," said Antonelli.

 
          
 
Willy felt everyone watch as he twisted the
radio dial from station to station.

 
          
 
"Hell," he said at last, "both
your television and radio are broken."

 
          
 
"No," said Antonelli simply.

 
          
 
Willy lay back down in the chair and closed
his eyes.

 
          
 
Antonelli leaned forward, breathing hard.

 
          
 
"Listen," he said.

 
          
 
"Imagine four weeks ago, a late Saturday
morning, women and children staring at clowns and magicians on TV. In beauty
shops, women staring at TV fashions. In the barbershop and hardware stores, men
staring at baseball or trout fishing. Everybody everywhere in the civilized
world staring. No sound, no motion, except on the little black-and-white
screens.

 
          
 
"And then, in the middle of all that
staring . . ."

 
          
 
Antonelli paused to lift up one comer of the
broiling cloth.

 
          
 
"Sunspots on the sun," he said.

 
          
 
Willy stiffened.

 
          
 
"Biggest damn sunspots in the history of
mortal man,” said Antonelli. "Whole damn world flooded with electricity.
Wiped every TV screen clean as a whistle, leaving nothing, and, after that,
more nothing."

 
          
 
His voice was remote as the voice of a man
describing an arctic landscape. He lathered Willy's face, not looking at what
he was doing. Willy peered across the barbershop at the soft snow falling down
and down that humming screen in an eternal winter. He could almost hear the
rabbit thumping of all the hearts in the shop.

 
          
 
Antonelli continued his funeral oration.

 
          
 
"It took us all that first day to realize
what had happened. Two hours after that first sunspot storm hit, every TV
repairman in the United States was on the road. Everyone figured it was just
their own set. With the radios conked out, too, it was only that night, when
newsboys, like in the old days, ran headlines through the streets, that we got
the shock about the sunspots maybe going on—for the rest of our lives!"

 
          
 
The customers murmured.

 
          
 
Antonelli's hand, holding the razor, shook. He
had to wait.

 
          
 
"All that blankness, that empty stuff
falling down, falling down inside our television sets, oh, I tell you, it gave
everyone the willies. It was like a good friend who talks to you in your front
room and suddenly shuts up and lies there, pale, and you know he's dead and you
begin to turn cold yourself.

 
          
 
"That first night, there was a run on the
town's movie houses. Films weren't much, but it was like the Oddfellows' Ball
downtown till midnight. Drugstores fizzed up two hundred
vanilla
,
three hundred chocolate sodas that first night of the Calamity. But you can't
buy movies and sodas every night. What then? Phone your in-laws for canasta or
parchesi?"