Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (6 page)

           
 
He turned to watch Terwilliger snap the locks
on a briefcase.

 
          
 
"What hath God wrought?”

 
          
 
Terwilliger, looking down at his hands,
turning them over to examine their texture, said, "I didn't know I was
doing it, I swear. It came out in my fingers. It was all subconscious. My
fingers do everything for me. They did this."

 
          
 
"Better the fingers had come in my office
and taken me direct by the throat," said Glass. "I was never one for
slow motion. The Keystone Kops, at triple speed, was my idea of living, or
dying. To think a rubber monster has stepped on us all. We are now so much
tomato mush, ripe for canning!"

 
          
 
"Don't make me feel any guiltier than I
feel," said Terwilliger.

 
          
 
"What do you want, I should take you
dancing?"

 
          
 
"It's just," cried Terwilliger.
"He kept at me. Do this. Do that. Do it the other way. Turn it ioside out,
upside down, he said. I swallowed my bile. I was angry all the time. Without
knowing, I must've changed the face. But right up till five minutes ago, when
Mr. Clarence yelled, I didn't see it I'll take all the blame."

 
          
 
"No," sighed Mr. Glass, “we should
all have seen. Maybe we did and couldn't admit. Maybe we did and laughed all
night in our sleep, when we couldn't hear. So where are we now? Mr. Clarence,
he's got investments he can't throw out. You got your career from this day
forward, for better or worse, you can't throw out. Mr. Clarence right now is
aching to be convinced it was all some horrible dream. Part of his ache,
ninety-nine per cent, is in his wallet. If you could put one per cent of your
time in the next hour convincing him of what I'm going to tell you next,
tomorrow morning there will be no orphan children staring out of the want ads
in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. If you would go tell him—"

 
          
 
"Tell me what?”

 
          
 
Joe Clarence, returned, stood in the door, his
cheeks still inflamed.

 
          
 
"What he just told me." Mr. Glass
turned calmly. "A touching story."

 
          
 
"I'm listening!" said Clarence.

 
          
 
"Mr. Clarence." The old lawyer
weighed his words carefully. “This film you just saw is Mr. Terwilliger's
solemn and silent tribute to you."

 
          
 
"It's what?" shouted Clarence.

 
          
 
Both men, Clarence and Terwilliger, dropped
their jaws.

 
          
 
The old lawyer gazed only at the wall and in a
shy voice said, "Shall I go on?"

 
          
 
The animator closed his jaw. "If you want
to."

 
          
 
“This film—" the lawyer arose and pointed
in a single motion toward the projection room— “was done from a feeling of
honor and friendship for you, Joe Clarence. Behind your desk, an unsung hero of
the motion picture industry, unknown, unseen, you sweat out your lonely little
life while who gets the glory? The stars. How often does a man in Atawanda
Springs, Idaho, tell his wife, 'Say, I was thinking the other night about Joe
Clarence—a great producer, that man'? How often? Should I tell? Never! So
Terwilliger brooded. How could he present the real Clarence to the world? The
dinosaur is there; boom!
it
hits him! This is it! he
thought, the very thing to strike terror to the world, here's a lonely, proud,
wonderful, awful symbol of independence, power, strength, shrewd animal
cunning, the true democrat, the individual brought to its peak, all thunder and
big lightning. Dinosaur: Joe Clarence. Joe Clarence: Dinosaur. Man embodied in
Tyrant Lizard!"

 
          
 
Mr. Glass sat down, panting quietly.

 
          
 
Terwilliger said nothing.

 
          
 
Clarence moved at last, walked across the
room, circled Glass slowly, then came to stand in front of Terwilliger, his
face pale. His eyes were uneasy, shifting up along Terwilli-ger's tall skeleton
frame.

 
          
 
"You said that?" he asked faintly.

 
          
 
Terwilliger swallowed.

 
          
 
"To me he said it. He's shy," said
Mr. Glass. ''You ever hear him say much, ever talk back, swear? anything? He
likes people, he can't say. But, immortalize them? That he can do!"

 
          
 
"Immortalize?" said Clarence.

 
          
 
"What else?" said the old man.
"Like a statue, only moving. Years from now people will say, 'Remember
that film. The Monster from the Pleistocene?' And people will say, 'Sure!
why
?' 'Because,' the others say, 'it was the one monster,
the one brute, in all
Hollywood
history had real guts,
real personality. And why is this?
Because one genius had
enough imagination to base the creature on a real-life, hardhitting,
fast-thinking businessman of A-one caliber.'
You're one with history,
Mr. Clarence. Film libraries will carry you in good supply. Cinema societies
will ask for you. How lucky can you get? Nothing like this will ever happen to
Immanuel Glass, a lawyer. Every day for the next two hundred, five hundred
years, you'll be starring somewhere in the world!"

 
          
 
"Every day?" asked Clarence softly.
"For the next—"

 
          
 
"Eight hundred, even; why not?"

 
          
 
"I never thought of that."

 
          
 
"Think of it!"

 
          
 
Clarence walked over to the window and looked
out at the Hollywood Hills, and nodded at last.

 
          
 
"My God, Terwilliger," he said.
"You really like me that much?"

 
          
 
"It's hard to put in words," said Terwilliger,
with difficulty.

 
          
 
"So do we finish the mighty
spectacle?" asked Glass. "Starring the tyrant terror striding the
earth and making all quake before him, none other than Mr. Joseph J.
Clarence?"

 
          
 
"Yeah. Sure." Clarence wandered off,
stunned, to the door, where he said, "You know? I always wanted to be an
actor!"

 
          
 
Then he went quietly out into the hall and
shut the door.

 
          
 
Terwilliger and Glass collided at the desk,
both clawing at a drawer.

 
          
 
"Age before beauty," said the
lawyer, and quickly pulled forth a bottle of whisky.

 
          
 
At midnight on the night of the first preview
of Monster from the Stone Age, Mr. Glass came back to the studio, where
everyone was gathering for a celebration, and found Terwilliger seated alone in
his office, his dinosaur on his lap.

 
          
 
"You weren't there?" asked Mr.
Glass.

 
          
 
"I couldn't face it. Was there a
riot?"

 
          
 
"A riot? The preview cards are all
superdandy extra plus! A lovelier monster nobody saw before! So now we're
talking sequels! Joe Clarence as the Tyrant Lizard in Return of the Stone Age
Monster, Joe Clarence and/or Tyrannosaurus Rex in, maybe, Beast from the Old
Country —"

 
          
 
The phone rang. Terwilliger got it

           
 
"Terwilliger, this is Clarence! Be there
in five minutes! We've done it! Your animal! Great! Is he mine now? I mean, to
hell with the contract, as a favor, can I have him for the mantel?"

 
          
 
"Mr. Clarence, the monster's yours."

 
          
 
"Better than an Oscar! So long!"

 
          
 
Terwilliger stared at the dead phone.

 
          
 
"God bless us all, said Tiny Tim. He's laughing,
almost hysterical with relief."

 
          
 
"So maybe I know why,'* said Mr. Glass.
"A little girl, after the preview, asked him for an autograph."

 
          
 
"An autograph?”

 
          
 
"Right there in the street. Made him
sign. First autograph he ever gave in his life. He laughed all the while he
wrote his name. Somebody knew him. There he was, in front of the theater, big
as life, Rex Himself, so sign the name. So he did."

 
          
 
"Wait a minute," said Terwilliger
slowly, pouring drinks. “That little girl.. . ?”

 
          
 
"My youngest daughter," said Glass.
"So who knows? And who will tell?"

 
          
 
They drank.

 
          
 
"Not me," said Terwilliger.

 
          
 
Then, carrying the rubber dinosaur between
them, and bringing the whisky, they went to stand by the studio gate, waiting
for the limousines to arrive all lights, horns and annunciations.

 
          
 
It was a day as fresh as grass growing up and
clouds going over and butterflies coming down can make it. It was a day
compounded from silences of bee and flower and ocean and land, which were not
silences at all, but motions, stirs, flutters, risings, fallings, each in its
own time and matchless rhythm. The land did not move, but moved. The sea was
not still, yet was still. Paradox flowed into paradox, stillness mixed with
stillness, sound with sound. The flowers vibrated and the bees fell in separate
and small showers of golden rain on the clover. The seas of hill and the seas
of ocean were divided, each from the other's motion, by a railroad track,
empty, compounded of rust and iron marrow, a track on which, quite obviously,
no train had run in many years. Thirty miles north it swirled on away to
further mists of distance, thirty miles south it tunneled islands of
cloud-shadow that changed their continental positions on the sides of far
mountains as you watched.

 
          
 
Now, suddenly, the railroad track began to
tremble.

 
          
 
A blackbird, standing on the rail, felt a
rhythm grow faintly, miles away, like a heart beginning to beat

 
          
 
The blackbird leaped up over the sea.

 
          
 
The rail continued to vibrate softly until, at
long last, around a curve and along the shore came a small workman's handcar,
its two-cylinder engine popping and spluttering in the great silence.

 
          
 
On top of this small four-wheeled car, on a
double-sided bench facing in two directions and with a little surrey roof above
for shade, sat a man, his wife and their small seven-year-old son. As the
handcar traveled through lonely stretch after lonely stretch, the wind whipped
their eyes and blew their hair, but they did not look back but only ahead.
Sometimes they looked eagerly as a curve unwound itself, sometimes with great
sadness, but always watchful, ready for the next scene.

 
          
 
As they hit a level straightaway, the machine
engine gasped and stopped abruptly. In the now crushing silence, it seemed that
the quiet of earth, sky and sea itself, by its friction, brought the car to a
wheeling halt.

 
          
 
"Out of gas."

 
          
 
The man, sighing, reached for the extra can in
the small storage bin and began to pour it into the tank.

 
          
 
His wife and son sat quietly looking at the
sea, listening to the muted thunder, the whisper, the drawing back of huge
tapestries of sand, gravel, green weed, and foam.

 
          
 
"Isn't the sea nice?" said the
woman.

 
          
 
"I like it," said the boy.

 
          
 
"Shall we picnic here, while we're at
it?"

 
          
 
The man focused some binoculars on the green
peninsula ahead.

 
          
 
"Might as well. The rails have rusted
badly. There's a break ahead. We may have to wait while I set a few back in place."

 
          
 
"As many as there are," said the
boy, "well have picnics!"

 
          
 
The woman tried to smile at this, then turned
her grave attention to the man. "How far have we come today?"

 
          
 
"Not ninety miles." The man still
peered through the glasses, squinting. "I don't like to go farther than
that any one day, anyway. If you rush, there's no time to see. We'll reach
Monterey day after tomorrow, Palo Alto the next day, if you want."

 
          
 
The woman removed her great shadowing straw
hat, which had been tied over her golden hair with a bright yellow ribbon, and
stood perspiring faintly, away from the machine. They had ridden so steadily on
the shuddering rail car that the motion was sewn into their bodies. Now, with
the stopping, they felt odd, on the verge of unraveling.

 
          
 
"Let's eat!"

 
          
 
The boy ran the wicker lunch basket down to
the shore.

 
          
 
The boy and the woman were already seated by a
spread tablecloth when the man came down to them, dressed in his business suit
and vest and tie and hat as if he expected to meet someone along the way. As he
dealt out the sandwiches and exhumed the pickles from their cool green Mason
jars, he began to loosen his tie and unbutton his vest, always looking around
as if he should be careful and ready to button up again.

 
          
 
"Are we all alone, Papa?" said the
boy, eating.

 
          
 
"Yes."

 
          
 
"No one else, anywhere?"

 
          
 
"No one else."

 
          
 
“Were there people before?"

 
          
 
"Why do you keep asking that? It wasn't
that long ago. Just a few months. You remember."

 
          
 
"Almost. If I try hard, then I don't
remember at all." The boy let a handful of sand fall through his fingers.
"Were there as many people as there is sand here on the beach? What
happened to them?"

 
          
 
"I don't know," the man said, and it
was true.

 
          
 
They had wakened one morning and the world was
empty. The neighbors’ clothesline was still strung with blowing white wash,
cars gleamed in front of other 7-a.m. cottages, but there were no farewells,
the city, did not hum with its mighty arterial traffics, phones did not alarm
themselves, children did not wail in sunflower wildernesses.

 
          
 
Only the night before, he and his wife had
been sitting on the front porch when the evening paper was delivered, and, not
even daring to open the headlines out, he had said, "I wonder when He will
get tired of us and just rub us all out?"

 
          
 
"It has gone pretty far," she said.
"On and on. We're such fools, aren't we?"

 
          
 
“Wouldn't it be nice—" he lit his pipe
and puffed it— "if we woke tomorrow and everyone in the world was gone and
everything was starting over?" He sat smoking, the paper folded in his
hand, his head resting back on the chair.

 
          
 
"If you could press a button right now
and make it happen, would you?"

 
          
 
"I think I would," he said.
**Nothing violent. Just have everyone vanish off the face of the earth. Just
leave the land and the sea and the growing things, like flowers and grass and
fruit trees. And the animals, of course, let them stay. Everything except man,
who hunts when he isn't hungry, eats when full, and is mean when no one's
bothered him."

 
          
 
"Naturally, we would be left." She
smiled quietly.

 
          
 
"I'd like that," he mused, "All
of time ahead. The longest summer vacation in history. And us out for the
longest picnic-basket lunch in memory. Just you, me and Jim. No commuting. No
keeping up with the Joneses. Not even a car. I'd like to find another way of
traveling, an older way. Then, ft hamper full of sandwiches, three bottles of
pop, pick up supplies where you need them from empty grocery stores in empty
towns, and summertime forever up ahead . . .”

 
          
 
They sat a long while on the porch in silence,
the newspaper folded between them.

 
          
 
At last she opened her mouth.

 
          
 
"Wouldn't we be lonely?" she said.

 
          
 
So that's how it was the morning of the new
world. They had awakened to the soft sounds of an earth that was now no more
than a meadow, and the cities of the earth sinking back into seas of
saber-grass, marigold, marguerite and morning-glory. They had taken it with
remarkable calm at first, perhaps because they had not liked the city for so
many years, and had had so many friends who were not truly friends, and had
lived a boxed and separate life of their own within a mechanical hive.

 
          
 
The husband arose and looked out the window
and observed very calmly, as if it were a weather condition, "Everyone's
gone," knowing this just by the sounds the city had ceased to make.

 
          
 
They took their time over breakfast, for the
boy was still asleep, and then the husband sat back and said, "Now I must
plan what to do."

 
          
 
"Do? Why . . . why, you'll go to work, of
course."

 
          
 
"You still don't believe it, do
you?" He laughed. "That I won't be rushing off each day at eight-ten,
that Jim won't go to school again ever. School's out for all of us! No more
pencils, no more books, no more boss's sassy looks! We're let out, darling, and
we'll never come back to the silly damn dull routines. Come on!"

 
          
 
And he had walked her through the still and
empty city streets.

 
          
 
"They didn't die," he said.
"They just . . . went away."

 
          
 
"What about the other cities?"

 
          
 
He went to an outdoor phone booth and dialed
Chicago, then New York, then San Francisco.

 
          
 
Silence. Silence. Silence.

 
          
 
"That's it," he said, replacing the
receiver.

 
          
 
"I feel guilty," she said. "Them
gone and us here. And . . . I feel happy. Why? I should be unhappy."

 
          
 
"Should you? It's no tragedy. They
weren't tortured or blasted or burned. They went easily and they didn't know.
And now we owe nothing to no one. Our only responsibility is being happy.
Thirty more years of happiness, wouldn't that be good?"

 
          
 
"But . . . then we must have more
children!"

            
“To
repopulate the world?" He shook his head slowly, calmly. "No. Let Jim
be the last. After he's grown and gone let the horses and cows and ground
squirrels and garden spiders have the world. They'll get on. And someday some
other species that can combine a natural happiness with a natural curiosity
will build cities that won't even look; like cities to us, and survive. Right
now, let's go pack a basket, wake Jim, and get going on that long thirty-year
summer vacation. I'll beat you to the house!"

 
          
 
He took a sledge hammer from the small rail
car, and while he worked alone for half an hour fixing the rusted rails into
place the woman and the boy ran along the shore. They came back with dripping
shells, a dozen or more, and some beautiful pink pebbles, and sat and the boy
took school from the mother, doing homework on a pad with a pencil for a time,
and then at high noon the man came down, his coat off, his tie thrown aside,
and they drank orange pop, watching the bubbles surge up, glutting, inside the
bottles. It was quiet. They listened to the sun tune the old iron rails. The
smell of hot tar on the ties moved about them in the salt wind, as the husband
tapped his atlas map lightly and gently.

 
          
 
"Well go to Sacramento next month. May,
then work up toward Seattle. Should make that by July first, July's a good
month in Washington, then back down as the weather cools, to Yellowstone, a few
miles a day, hunt here, fish there . . ."

 
          
 
The boy, bored, moved away to throw sticks
into the sea and wade out like a dog to retrieve them.

 
          
 
The man went on: "Winter in Tucson, then,
part of the winter, moving toward Florida, up the coast in the spring, and
maybe New York by June. Two years from now, Chicago in the summer. Winter,
three years from now, what about Mexico City? Anywhere the rails lead us,
anywhere at all, and if we come to an old offshoot rail line we don't know
anything about, what the hell, we'll just take it, go down it, to see where it
goes. And some year, by God, we'll boat down the Mississippi, always wanted to
do that.
Enough to last us a lifetime.
And that's just
how long I want to take to do it all..."