The Stories of Ray Bradbury (34 page)

‘My God!’ Eckels twitched his mouth. ‘It could reach up and grab the Moon.’

‘Shh!’ Travis jerked angrily. ‘He hasn’t seen us yet.’

‘It can’t be killed.’ Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun. ‘We were fools to come. This is impossible.’

‘Shut up!’ hissed Travis.

‘Nightmare.’

‘Turn around,’ commanded Travis. ‘Walk quietly to the Machine. We’ll remit one-half your fee.’

‘I didn’t realize it would be this
big
,’ said Eckels. ‘I miscalculated, that’s all. And now I want out.’

‘It
sees
us!’

‘There’s the red paint on its chest!’

The Thunder Lizard raised itself. Its armored flesh glittered like a thousand green coins. The coins, crusted with slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny insects wriggled, so that the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even while the Monster itself did not move. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew down the wilderness.

‘Get me out of here,’ said Eckels. ‘It was never like this before. I was always sure I’d come through alive. I had good guides, good safaris, and safety. This time, I figured wrong. I’ve met my match and admit it. This is too much for me to get hold of.’

‘Don’t run,’ said Lesperance. ‘Turn around. Hide in the Machine.’

‘Yes.’ Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet as if trying to make them move. He gave a grunt of helplessness.

‘Eckels!’

He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.

‘Not
that
way!’

The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in four seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast’s mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.

Eckels, not looking back, walked blindly to the edge of the Path, his gun limp in his arms, stepped off the Path, and walked, not knowing it, in the jungle. His feet sank into green moss. His legs moved him, and he felt alone and remote from the events behind.

The rifles cracked again. Their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder. The great lever of the reptile’s tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweler’s hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulder-stone eyes leveled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris.

Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche,
Tyrannosaurus
fell. Thundering, it clutched trees, pulled them with it. It wrenched and tore the metal Path. The men flung themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons of cold flesh and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed its armored tail, twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A fount of blood spurted from its throat. Somewhere inside, a sac of fluids burst. Sickening gushes drenched the hunters. They stood, red and glistening.

The thunder faded.

The jungle was silent. After the avalanche, a green peace. After the nightmare, morning.

Billings and Kramer sat on the pathway and threw up. Travis and Lesperance stood with smoking rifles, cursing steadily.

In the Time Machine, on his face, Eckels lay shivering. He had found his way back to the Path, climbed into the Machine.

Travis came walking, glanced at Eckels, took cotton gauze from a metal box, and returned to the others, who were sitting on the Path.

‘Clean up.’

They wiped the blood from their helmets. They began to curse too. The Monster lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs as the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running a final instant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing up forever. It was like standing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at quitting time, all valves being released or levered tight. Bones cracked, the tonnage of its own flesh, off-balance, dead weight, snapped the delicate forearms, caught underneath. The meat settled, quivering.

Another cracking sound. Overhead, a gigantic tree branch broke from its heavy mooring, fell. It crashed upon the dead beast with finality.

‘There.’ Lesperance checked his watch. ‘Right on time. That’s the giant tree that was scheduled to fall and kill this animal originally.’ He glanced at the two hunters. ‘You want the trophy picture?’

‘What?’

‘We can’t take a trophy back to the Future. The body has to stay right here where it would have died originally, so the insects, birds, and bacteria can get at it, as they were intended to. Everything in balance. The body stays. But we
can
take a picture of you standing near it.’

The two men tried to think, but gave up, shaking their heads.

They let themselves be led along the metal Path. They sank wearily into the Machine cushions. They gazed back at the ruined Monster, the stagnating mound, where already strange reptilian birds and golden insects were busy at the steaming armor.

A sound on the floor of the Time Machine stiffened them. Eckels sat there, shivering.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last.

‘Get up!’ cried Travis.

Eckels got up.

‘Go out on that Path alone,’ said Travis. He had his rifle pointed. ‘You’re not coming back in the Machine. We’re leaving you here!’

Lesperance seized Travis’s arm. ‘Wait—’

‘Stay out of this!’ Travis shook his hand away. ‘This son of a bitch nearly killed us. But it isn’t
that
so much. Hell, no. It’s his
shoes
! Look at them!
He ran off the Path. My God, that
ruins
us! Christ knows how much we’ll forfeit! Tens of thousands of dollars of insurance! We guarantee no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the damn fool! I’ll have to report to the government. They might revoke our license to travel. God knows
what
he’s done to Time, to History!’

‘Take it easy, all he did was kick up some dirt.’

‘How do we
know
?’ cried Travis. ‘We don’t know anything! It’s all a damn mystery! Get out there, Eckels!’

Eckles fumbled his shirt. ‘I’ll pay anything. A hundred thousand dollars!’

Travis glared at Eckels’ checkbook and spat. ‘Go out there. The Monster’s next to the Path. Stick your arms up to your elbows in his mouth. Then you can come back with us.’

‘That’s unreasonable!’

‘The Monster’s dead, you yellow bastard. The bullets! The bullets can’t be left behind. They don’t belong in the Past; they might change something. Here’s my knife. Dig them out!’

The jungle was alive again, full of the old tremorings and bird cries. Eckels turned slowly to regard that primeval garbage dump, that hill of nightmares and terror. After a long time, like a sleepwalker, he shuffled out along the Path.

He returned, shuddering, five minutes later, his arms soaked and red to the elbows. He held out his hands. Each held a number of steel bullets. Then he fell. He lay where he fell, not moving.

‘You didn’t have to make him do that,’ said Lesperance.

‘Didn’t I? It’s too early to tell.’ Travis nudged the still body. ‘He’ll live. Next time he won’t go hunting game like this. Okay.’ He jerked his thumb wearily at Lesperance. ‘Switch on. Let’s go home.’

1492. 1776. 1812.

They cleaned their hands and faces. Their changed their caking shirts and pants. Eckels was up and around again, not speaking. Travis glared at him for a full ten minutes.

‘Don’t look at me,’ cried Eckels. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘Who can tell?’

‘Just ran off the Path, that’s all, a little mud on my shoes—what do you want me to do—get down and pray?’

‘We might need it. I’m warning you, Eckels, I might kill you yet. I’ve got my gun ready.’

‘I’m innocent. I’ve done nothing!’

1999. 2000. 2055.

The Machine stopped.

‘Get out,’ said Travis.

The room was there as they had left it. But not the same as they had
left it. The same man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not quite sit behind the same desk.

Travis looked around swiftly. ‘Everything okay here?’ he snapped.

‘Fine. Welcome home!’

Travis did not relax. He seemed to be looking at the very atoms of the air itself, at the way the sun poured through the one high window.

‘Okay, Eckels, get out. Don’t ever come back.’

Eckels could not move.

‘You heard me,’ said Travis. ‘What’re you
staring
at?’

Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were…were…And there was a
feel
. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk…lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind…

But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering.

Somehow, the sign had changed:

TYME SEFARI INC
.
SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST
.
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL
.
WEE TAEK YU THAIR
.
YU SHOOT ITT
.

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling. ‘No, it
can’t
be. Not a
little
thing like that. No!’

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful, and very dead.

‘Not a little thing like
that
! Not a butterfly!’ cried Eckels.

It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels’ mind whirled. It
couldn’t
change things. Killing one butterfly couldn’t be
that
important! Could it?

His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: ‘Who—who won the presidential election yesterday?’

The man behind the desk laughed. ‘You joking? You know damn well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that damn weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts, by God!’ The official stopped. ‘What’s wrong?’

Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. ‘Can’t we,’ he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, ‘can’t we take it
back
, can’t we
make
it alive again? Can’t we start over? Can’t we—’

He did not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon.

There was a sound of thunder.

Music moved with him in the white halls. He passed an office door: ‘The Merry Widow Waltz.’ Another door:
Afternoon of a Faun
. A third: ‘Kiss Me Again.’ He turned into a cross-corridor: ‘The Sword Dance’ buried him in cymbals, drums, pots, pans, knives, forks, thunder, and tin lightning. All washed away as he hurried through an anteroom where a secretary sat nicely stunned by Beethoven’s Fifth. He moved himself before her eyes like a hand; she didn’t see him.

His wrist radio buzzed.

‘Yes?’

‘This is Lee, Dad. Don’t forget about my allowance.’

‘Yes, Son, yes. I’m busy.’

‘Just didn’t want you to forget, Dad,’ said the wrist radio. Tchaikovsky’s
Romeo and Juliet
swarmed about the voice and flushed into the long halls.

The psychiatrist moved in the beehive of offices, in the cross-pollination of themes, Stravinsky mating with Bach, Haydn unsuccessfully repulsing Rachmaninoff, Schubert slain by Duke Ellington. He nodded to the humming secretaries and the whistling doctors fresh to their morning work. At his office he checked a few papers with his stenographer, who sang under her breath, then phoned the police captain upstairs. A few minutes later a red light blinked, a voice said from the ceiling:

‘Prisoner delivered to Interview Chamber Nine.’

He unlocked the chamber door, stepped in, heard the door lock behind him.

‘Go away,’ said the prisoner, smiling.

The psychiatrist was shocked by that smile. A very sunny, pleasant warm thing, a thing that shed bright light upon the room. Dawn among the dark hills. High noon at midnight, that smile. The blue eyes sparkled serenely above that display of self-assured dentistry.

‘I’m here to help you,’ said the psychiatrist, frowning. Something was wrong with the room. He had hesitated the moment he entered. He glanced
around. The prisoner laughed. ‘If you’re wondering why it’s so quiet in here, I just kicked the radio to death.’

Violent, thought the doctor.

The prisoner read this thought, smiled, put out a gentle hand. ‘No, only to machines that yak-yak-yak.’

Bits of the wall radio’s tubes and wires lay on the gray carpeting. Ignoring these, feeling that smile upon him like a heat lamp, the psychiatrist sat across from his patient in the unusual silence which was like the gathering of a storm.

‘You’re Mr Albert Brock, who calls himself The Murderer?’

Brock nodded pleasantly. ‘Before we start…’ He moved quietly and quickly to detach the wrist radio from the doctor’s arm. He tucked it in his teeth like a walnut, gritted, heard it crack, handed it back to the appalled psychiatrist as if he had done them both a favor. ‘That’s better.’

The psychiatrist stared at the ruined machine. ‘You’re running up quite a damage bill.’

‘I don’t care,’ smiled the patient. ‘As the old song goes: “Don’t Care What Happens to Me!”’ He hummed it.

The psychiatrist said: ‘Shall we start?’

‘Fine. The first victim, or one of the first, was my telephone. Murder most foul. I shoved it in the kitchen Insinkerator! Stopped the disposal unit in mid-swallow. Poor thing strangled to death. After that I shot the television set!’

The psychiatrist said, ‘Mmm.’

‘Fired six shots right through the cathode. Made a beautiful tinkling crash, like a dropped chandelier.’

‘Nice imagery.’

‘Thanks, I always dreamt of being a writer.’

‘Suppose you tell me when you first began to hate the telephone.’

‘It frightened me as a child. Uncle of mine called it the Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies, Scared the living hell out of me. Later in life I was never comfortable. Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it
felt
like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn’t
want
to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone’s such a
convenient
thing; it just sits there and
demands
you call someone who doesn’t want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. When it wasn’t the telephone it was the television, the radio, the phonograph. When it wasn’t the television or radio or the phonograph it was motion pictures at the corner theater, motion pictures projected, with
commercials on low-lying cumulus clouds. It doesn’t rain rain any more, it rains soapsuds. When it wasn’t High-Fly Cloud advertisements, it was music by Mozzek in every restaurant; music and commercials on the busses I rode to work. When it wasn’t music, it was interoffice communications, and my horror chamber of a radio wristwatch on which my friends and my wife phoned every five minutes. What is there about such “conveniences” that makes them so
temptingly
convenient? The average man thinks, Here I am, time on my hands, and there on my wrist is a wrist telephone, so why not just buzz old Joe up, eh? “Hello,
hello
!” I love my friends, my wife, humanity, very much, but when one minute my wife calls to say, “Where are you
now
, dear?” and a friend calls and says. “Got the best offcolor joke to tell you. Seems there was a guy—” And a stranger calls and cries out, “This is the Find-Fax Poll. What gum are you chewing at this very
instant
?” Well!’

‘How did you feel during the week?’

‘The fuse lit. On the edge of the cliff. That same afternoon I did what I did at the office.’

‘Which was?’

‘I poured a paper cup of water into the intercommunications system.’

The psychiatrist wrote on his pad.

‘And the system shorted?’

‘Beautifully! The Fourth of July on wheels! My God, stenographers ran around looking
lost
! What an uproar!’

‘Felt better temporarily, eh?’

‘Fine! Then I got the idea at noon of stomping my wrist radio on the sidewalk. A shrill voice was just yelling out of it at me. “This is People’s Poll Number Nine. What did you eat for lunch?” when I kicked the Jesus out of the wrist radio!’

‘Felt even
better
, eh?’

‘It
grew
on me!’ Brock rubbed his hands together. ‘Why didn’t I start a solitary revolution, deliver man from certain “conveniences”? “Convenient for who?” I cried. Convenient for friends: “Hey, Al, thought I’d call you from the locker room out here at Green Hills. Just made a sockdolager hole in one! A hole in one, Al! A
beautiful
day. Having a shot of whiskey now. Thought you’d want to know. Al!” Convenient for my office, so when I’m in the field with my radio car there’s no moment when I’m not in touch.
In touch! There’s
a slimy phrase. Touch, hell.
Gripped!
Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices. You can’t leave your car without checking in: “Have stopped to visit gas-station men’s room.” “Okay, Brock, step on it!” “Brock, what
took
you so long?” “Sorry, sir.” “Watch it next time, Brock.” “
Yes
, sir!” So, do you know what I did, Doctor? I bought a quart of French chocolate ice cream and spooned it into the car radio transmitter.’

‘Was there any
special
reason for selecting French chocolate ice cream to spoon into the broadcasting unit?’

Brock thought about it and smiled. ‘It’s my favorite flavor.’

‘Oh,’ said the doctor.

‘I figured, hell, what’s good enough for me is good enough for the radio transmitter.’

‘What made you think of spooning
ice cream
into the radio?’

‘It was a hot day.’

The doctor paused.

‘And what happened next?’

‘Silence happened next. God, it was
beautiful
. That car radio cackling all day, “Brock go here, Brock go there, Brock check in, Brock check out, okay Brock, hour lunch, Brock, lunch over, Brock, Brock, Brock.” Well, that silence was like putting ice cream in my ears.’

‘You seem to like ice cream a lot.’

‘I just rode around feeling of the silence. It’s a big bolt of the nicest, softest flannel ever made. Silence. A whole hour of it. I just sat in my car, smiling, feeling of that flannel with my ears. I felt
drunk
with Freedom!’

‘Go on.’

‘Then I got the idea of the portable diathermy machine. I rented one, took it on the bus going home that night. There sat all the tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, “Now I’m at Fortythird, now I’m at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first.” One husband cursing, “Well, get
out
of that bar, damn it, and get home and get dinner started, I’m at Seventieth!” And the transit-system radio playing “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” a canary singing words about a first-rate wheat cereal. Then—I switched on my diathermy! Static! Interference! All wives cut off from husbands grousing about a hard day at the office. All husbands cut off from wives who had just seen their children break a window! The “Vienna Woods” chopped down, the canary mangled.
Silence!
A terrible, unexpected silence. The bus inhabitants faced with having to converse with each other. Panic! Sheer, animal panic!’

‘The police seized you?’

‘The bus
had
to stop. After all, the music
was
being scrambled, husbands and wives
were
out of touch with reality. Pandemonium, riot, and chaos. Squirrels chattering in cages! A trouble unit arrived, triangulated on me instantly, had me reprimanded, fined, and home, minus my diathermy machine, in jig time.’

‘Mr Brock, may I suggest that so far your whole pattern here is not very—practical? If you didn’t like transit radios or office radios or car business radios, why didn’t you join a fraternity of radio haters, start petitions, get legal and constitutional rulings? After all, this
is
a democracy.’

‘And I,’ said Brock, ‘am that thing best called a minority. I
did
join
fraternities, picket, pass petitions, take it to court. Year after year I protested. Everyone laughed. Everyone else
loved
bus radios and commercials.
I
was out of step.’

‘Then you should have taken it like a good soldier, don’t you think? The majority rules.’

‘But they went too far. If a little music and “keeping in touch” was charming, they figured a lot would be ten times as charming. I went
wild
! I got home to find my wife hysterical.
Why?
Because she had been completely out of touch with me for half a day. Remember, I did a dance on my wrist radio? Well, that night I laid plans to murder my house.’

‘Are you
sure
that’s how you want me to write it down?’

‘That’s semantically accurate. Kill it dead. It’s one of those talking, singing, humming, weather-reporting, poetry-reading, novel-reciting, jingle-jangling, rockaby-crooning-when-you-go-to-bed houses. A house that screams opera to you in the shower and teaches you Spanish in your sleep. One of those blathering caves where all kinds of electronic Oracles make you feel a trifle larger than a thimble, with stoves that say, “I’m apricot pie, and I’m
done
,” or “I’m prime roast beef, so
baste
me!” and other nursery gibberish like that. With beds that rock you to sleep and
shake
you awake. A house that
barely
tolerates humans, I tell you. A front door that barks: “You’ve mud on your feet, sir!” And an electronic vacuum hound that snuffles around after you from room to room, inhaling every fingernail or ash you drop. Jesus God,
I
say, Jesus God!’

‘Quietly,’ suggested the psychiatrist.

‘Remember that Gilbert and Sullivan song—“I’ve Got It on My List, It Never Will Be Missed”? All night I listed grievances. Next morning early I bought a pistol. I
purposely
muddied my feet. I stood at our front door. The front door shrilled. “Dirty feet, muddy feet! Wipe your feet! Please be
neat
!” I shot the damn thing in its keyhole! I ran to the kitchen, where the stove was just whining. “Turn me
over
!” In the middle of a mechanical omelet I did the stove to death. Oh, how it sizzled and screamed, “I’m
shorted
!” Then the telephone rang like a spoiled brat. I shoved it down the Insinkerator. I must state here and now I have
nothing
whatever against the Insinkerator; it was an innocent bystander. I feel sorry for it now, a practical device indeed, which never said a word, purred like a sleepy lion most of the time, and digested our leftovers, I’ll have it restored. Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back, hoping and waiting until—bang! Like a headless turkey, gobbling, my wife whooped out the front door. The police came. Here I
am
!’

He sat back happily and lit a cigarette.

‘And did you realize, in committing these crimes, that the wrist radio, the broadcasting transmitter, the phone, the bus radio, the office intercoms, all were rented or were someone else’s property?’

‘I would do it all over again, so help me God.’

The psychiatrist sat there in the sunshine of that beatific smile.

‘You don’t want any further help from the Office of Mental Health? You’re ready to take the consequences?’

‘This is only the beginning,’ said Mr Brock. ‘I’m the vanguard of the small public which is tired of noise and being taken advantage of and pushed around and yelled at, every moment music, every moment in touch with some voice somewhere, do this, do that, quick, quick, now here, now there. You’ll
see
. The revolt begins. My name will go down in history!’

‘Mmm.’ The psychiatrist seemed to be thinking.

‘It’ll take time, of course. It was all so enchanting at first. The very
idea
of these things, the practical uses, was wonderful. They were almost toys, to be played with, but the people got too involved, went too far, and got wrapped up in a pattern of social behavior and couldn’t get out, couldn’t admit they were
in
, even. So they rationalized their nerves as something else. “Our modern age,” they said. “Conditions,” they said. “High-strung,” they said. But mark my words, the seed has been sown. I got world-wide coverage on TV, radio, films;
there’s
an irony for you. That was five days ago. A billion people know about me. Check your financial columns. Any day now. Maybe today. Watch for a sudden spurt, a rise in sales for French chocolate ice cream!’