Bradbury Stories (84 page)

His hands trembled before him.

“And what,” said Bayes, “has all this to do with your being here tonight?”

“Do? What!” cried Booth, looking at Bayes as if
he
were mad. “Haven't you been
listening
? Great God, I'm jealous! Jealous of anything that works right, anything that's perfect, anything that's beautiful all to itself, anything that lasts I don't care what it is! Jealous!”

“You can't be jealous of machines.”

“Why not, dammit?” Booth clutched the back of the seat in front of him and slowly pulled himself forward staring at the slumped figure in that highback chair in the center of the stage. “Aren't machines more perfect, ninety-nine times out of a hundred than most people you've ever known? I mean
really
? Don't they do things right? How many people can you name do things right one third, one half the time? That damned thing up there, that machine, not only looks perfection, but speaks and acts perfection. More, if you keep it oiled and wound and fixed it'll be looking, speaking, acting right and grand and beautiful a hundred, two hundred years after I'm in the earth! “Jealous? Damn right I am!”

“But a machine doesn't
know
what it is.”

“
I
know,
I
feel!” said Booth. “I'm outside it looking in. I'm always outside things like that. I've never been in. The machine has it. I don't. It was built to do one or two things exactly on the nose. No matter how much I learned or knew or tried the rest of my life, no matter what I did, I could never be as perfect, as fine, as maddening, as deserving of destruction as that thing up there, that man, that thing, that creature, that president . . .”

He was on his feet now, shouting at the stage eighty feet away.

Lincoln said nothing. Machinery oil gathered glistening on the floor under the chair.

“That president—” murmured Booth, as if he had come upon the real truth at last. “That president. Yes. Lincoln. Don't you see? He died a long time ago. He can't be alive. He just can't be. It's not right. A hundred years ago and yet here he is. He was shot once, buried once, yet here he is going on and on and on. Tomorrow and the day after that and all the days. So his name being Lincoln and mine Booth . . .I just
had
to come . . .”

His voice faded. His eyes had glazed over.

“Sit down,” said Bayes, quietly.

Booth sat, and Bayes nodded to the remaining security guard. “Wait outside, please.”

When the guard was gone and there were only Booth and himself and the quiet thing waiting up there in the chair, Bayes turned slowly at last and looked at the assassin. He weighed his words carefully and said:

“Good but not good enough.”

“What?”

“You haven't given all the reasons why you came here tonight.”

“I have!”

“You just think you have. You're kidding yourself. All Romantics do. One way or the other. Phipps when he invented this machine. You when you destroyed it. But it all comes down to this . . . very plain and very simple, you'd love to have your picture in the papers, wouldn't you?”

Booth did not answer, but his shoulder straightened, imperceptibly.

“Like to be seen coast-to-coast on magazine covers?”

“No.”

“Get free time on TV?”

“No.”

“Be interviewed on radio?”

“No!”

“Like to have trials and lawyers arguing whether a man can be tried for proxy-murder . . .”

“No!”

“. . . that is, attacking, shooting a humanoid machine . . .”

“No!”

Booth was breathing fast now, his eyes moving wildly in his face. Bayes let more out:

“Great to have two hundred million people talking about you tomorrow morning, next week, next month, next year!”

Silence.

But a smile appeared, like the faintest drip of saliva, at the corner of Booth's mouth. He must have felt it. He raised a hand to touch it away.

“Fine to sell your personal true real story to the international syndicates for a fine chunk?”

Sweat moved down Booth's face and itched in his palms.

“Shall I give you the answer to all, all the questions I have just asked? Eh? Eh? Well,” said Bayes, “the answer is—”

Someone rapped on a far theater door.

Bayes jumped. Booth turned to stare.

The knock came, louder.

“Bayes, let me in, this is Phipps,” a voice cried outside in the night.

Hammering, pounding, then silence. In the silence, Booth and Bayes looked at each other like conspirators.

“Let me in, oh Christ, let me in!”

More hammering, then a pause and again the insistent onslaught, a crazy drum and tattoo, then silence again, the man outside panting, circling perhaps to find another door.

“Where was I?” said Bayes. “No. Yes. The answer to all those questions? Do you get worldwide TV radio film magazine newspaper gossip broadcast publicity . . . ?”

A pause.

“No.”

Booth's mouth jerked but he stayed silent.

“N,” Bayes spelled it, “O.”

He reached in, found Booth's wallet, snapped out all the identity cards, pocketed them, and handed the empty wallet back to the assassin.

“No?” said Booth, stunned.

“No, Mr. Booth. No pictures. No coast-to-coast TV. No magazines. No columns. No papers. No advertisement. No glory. No fame. No fun. No self-pity. No resignation. No immortality. No nonsense about triumphing over the dehumanization of man by machines. No martyrdom. No respite from your own mediocrity. No splendid suffering. No maudlin tears. No renunciation of possible futures. No trial. No lawyers. No analysts speeding you up this month, this year, thirty years, sixty years, ninety years after, no stories with double spreads, no money, no.”

Booth rose up as if a rope had hauled him tall and stretched him gaunt and washed him pale.

“I don't understand. I—”

“You went to all this trouble? Yes. And I'm ruining the game. For when all is said and done, Mr. Booth, all the reasons listed and all the sums summed, you're a has-been that never was. And you're going to stay that way, spoiled and narcissistic and small and mean and rotten. You're a short man and I intend to squash and squeeze and press and batter you an inch shorter instead of force-growing you, helping you gloat nine feet tall.”

“You can't!” cried Booth.

“Oh, Mr. Booth,” said Bayes, on the instant, almost happy, “I
can
. I can do anything with this case I wish, and I wish not to press charges. More than that, Mr. Booth, it
never happened
.”

The hammering came again, this time on a locked door up on the stage.

“Bayes, for God's sake, let me in! This is Phipps! Bayes! Bayes!”

Booth stared at the trembling, the thundershaken, the rattling door, even while Bayes called very calmly and with an ease that was beautiful:

“Just a moment.”

He knew that in a few minutes this calm would pass, something would break, but for now there was this splendidly serene thing he was doing; he must play it out. With fine round tones he addressed the assassin and watched him dwindle and spoke further and watched him shrink.

“It never happened, Mr. Booth. Tell your story, but we'll deny it. You were never here, no gun, no shot, no computerized data-processed assassination, no outrage, no shock, no panic, no mob. Why now, look at your face. Why are you falling back? Why are you sitting down? Why do you shake? Is it the disappointment? Have I turned your fun the wrong way? Good.” He nodded at the aisle. “And now, Mr. Booth, get out.”

“You can't make—”

“Sorry you said that, Mr. Booth.” Bayes took a soft step in, reached down, took hold of the man's tie and slowly pulled him to his feet so he was breathing full in his face.

“If you ever tell your wife, any friend, employer, child, man, woman, stranger, uncle, aunt, cousin, if you ever tell even yourself out loud going to sleep some night about this thing you did, do you know what I am going to do to you, Mr. Booth? If I hear one whisper, one word, one breath, I shall stalk you, I shall follow you for a dozen or a hundred or two hundred days, you'll never know what day, what night, what noon, where, when or how but suddenly I'll be there when you least expect and then do you know what I am going to do to you, Mr. Booth? I won't say, Mr. Booth, I can't tell. But it will be awful and it will be terrible and you'll wish you had never been born, that's how awful and terrible it will be.”

Booth's pale face shook, his head bobbed, his eyes peeled wide, his mouth open like one who walks in a heavy rain.

“What did I just say, Mr. Booth? Tell me!”

“You'll kill me?”

“Say it again!”

He shook Booth until the words fell out of his chattered teeth:

“Kill me!”

He held tight, shaking and shaking the man firmly and steadily, holding and massaging the shirt and the flesh beneath the shirt, stirring up the panic beneath the cloth.

So long, Mr. Nobody, and no magazine stories and no fun and no TV, no celebrity, an unmarked grave and you not in the history books, no, now get out of here, get out, run, run before I kill you.

He shoved Booth. Booth ran, fell, picked himself up, and lunged toward a theater door which, on the instant, from outside, was shaken, pounded, riven.

Phipps was there, calling in the darkness.

“The other door,” said Bayes.

He pointed and Booth wheeled to stumble in a new direction to stand swaying by yet another door, putting one hand out—

“Wait,” said Bayes.

He walked across the theater and when he reached Booth raised his flat hand up and hit Booth once, hard, a slapping strike across the face. Sweat flew in a rain upon the air.

“I,” said Bayes, “I just had to do that. Just once.”

He looked at his hand, then turned to open the door.

They both looked out into a world of night and cool stars and no mob.

Booth pulled back, his great dark liquid eyes the eyes of an eternally wounded and surprised child, with the look of the self-shot deer that would go on wounding, being shot by itself forever.

“Get,” said Bayes.

Booth darted. The door slammed shut. Bayes fell against it, breathing hard.

Far across the arena at another locked door, the hammering, pounding, the crying out began again. Bayes stared at that shuddering but remote door. Phipps. But Phipps would have to wait. Now . . .

The theater was as vast and empty as Gettysburg in the late day with the crowd gone home and the sun set. Where the crowd had been and was no more, where the Father had lifted the Boy high on his shoulders and where the Boy had spoken and said the words, but the words now, also, gone . . .

On the stage, after a long moment, he reached out. His fingers brushed Lincoln's shoulder.

Fool, he thought standing there in the dusk. Don't. Now, don't. Stop it. Why are you doing this? Silly. Stop. Stop.

And what he had come to find he found. What he needed to do he did.

For tears were running down his face.

He wept. Sobs choked his mouth. He could not stop them. They would not cease.

Mr. Lincoln was dead. Mr. Lincoln was
dead
!

And
he
had let his murderer go.

A
WIND BLEW THE LONG YEARS AWAY
past their hot faces.

The Time Machine stopped.

“Nineteen hundred and twenty-eight,” said Janet. The two boys looked past her.

Mr. Fields stirred. “Remember, you're here to observe the behavior of those ancient people. Be inquisitive, be intelligent, observe.”

“Yes,” said the girl and the two boys in crisp khaki uniforms. They wore identical haircuts, had identical wristwatches, sandals, and coloring of hair, eyes, teeth, and skin, though they were not related.

“Shh!” said Mr. Fields.

They looked out at a little Illinois town in the spring of the year. A cool mist lay on the early morning streets.

Far down the street a small boy came running in the last light of the marble-cream moon. Somewhere a great clock struck 5
A.M.
far away. Leaving tennis-shoe prints softly in the quiet lawns, the boy stepped near the invisible Time Machine and cried up to a high dark house window.

The house window opened. Another boy crept down the roof to the ground. The two boys ran off with banana-filled mouths into the dark cold morning.

“Follow them,” whispered Mr. Fields. “Study their life patterns. Quick!”

Janet and William and Robert ran on the cold pavements of spring, visible now, through the slumbering town, through a park. All about, lights flickered, doors clicked, and other children rushed alone or in gasping pairs down a hill to some gleaming blue tracks.

“Here it comes!” The children milled about before dawn. Far down the shining tracks a small light grew seconds later into steaming thunder.

“What is it?” screamed Janet.

“A train, silly, you've seen pictures of them!” shouted Robert.

And as the Time Children watched, from the train stepped gigantic gray elephants, steaming the pavements with their mighty waters, lifting question-mark nozzles to the cold morning sky. Cumbrous wagons rolled from the long freight flats, red and gold. Lions roared and paced in boxed darkness.

“Why—
this
must be a—circus!” Janet trembled.

“You think so? Whatever happened to them?”

“Like Christmas, I guess. Just vanished, long ago.”

Janet looked around. “Oh, it's awful, isn't it.”

The boys stood numbed. “It sure is.”

Men shouted in the first faint gleam of dawn. Sleeping cars drew up, dazed faces blinked out at the children. Horses clattered like a great fall of stones on the pavement.

Mr. Fields was suddenly behind the children. “Disgusting, barbaric, keeping animals in cages. If I'd known this was here, I'd never let you come see. This is a terrible ritual.”