RAY BRADBURY

The Illustrated Man

Dedication

This book is forFATHER, MOTHER, and SKIPwith love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue: The Illustrated Man

The Veld

Kaleidoscope

The Other Foot

The Highway

The Man

The Long Rain

Usher II

The Last Night of the World

The Rocket

No Particular Night or Morning

The Fox and the Forest

The Visitor

Marionettes, Inc.

The City

Zero Hour

The Playground

Epilogue

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue: The Illustrated Man

It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks’ walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky.

I didn’t know he was Illustrated then, I only knew that he was tall, once well muscled, but now, for some reason, going to fat. I recall that his arms were long, and the hands thick, but that his face was like a child’s, set upon a massive body.

He seemed only to sense my presence, for he didn’t look directly at me when he spoke his first words:

‘Do you know where I can find a job?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said.

‘I haven’t had a job that’s lasted in forty years,’ he said.

Though it was a hot late afternoon, he wore his wool shirt buttoned tight about his neck. His sleeves were rolled and buttoned down over his thick wrists. Perspiration was streaming from his face, yet he made no move to open his shirt.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘this is as good a place as any to spend the night. Do you mind company?’

‘I have some extra food you’d be welcome to,’ I said.

He sat down heavily, grunting. ‘You’ll be sorry you asked me to stay,’ he said. ‘Everyone always is. That’s why I’m walking. Here it is, early September, the cream of the Labour Day carnival season. I should be making money hand over fist at any small town sideshow celebration, but here I am with no prospects.’

He took off an immense shoe and peered at it closely. ‘I usually keep a job about ten days. Then something happens and they fire me. By now every carnival in America won’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.’

‘What seems to be the trouble,’ I asked.

For an answer, he unbuttoned his tight collar, slowly. With his eyes shut, he put a slow hand to the task of unbuttoning his shirt all the way down. He slipped his fingers in to feel his chest. ‘Funny,’ he said, eyes still shut. ‘You can’t feel them but they’re there. I always hope that someday I’ll look and they’ll be gone. I walk in the sun for hours on the hottest days, baking, and hope that my sweat’ll wash them off, the sun’ll cook them off, but at sundown they’re still there.’ He turned his head slightly toward me and exposed his chest. ‘Are they still there now?’

After a long while I exhaled. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They’re still there.’

The Illustrations.

‘Another reason I keep my collar buttoned up,’ he said, opening his eyes, ‘is the children. They follow me along country roads. Everyone wants to see the pictures, and yet nobody wants to see them.’

He took his shirt off and wadded it in his hands. He was covered with Illustrations from the blue tattooed ring about his neck to his belt line.

‘It keeps right on going,’ he said, guessing my thought. ‘All of me is Illustrated. Look.’ He opened his hand. On his palm was a rose, freshly cut, with drops of crystal water among the soft pink petals. I put my hand out to touch it, but it was only an Illustration.

As for the rest of him, I cannot say how I sat and stared, for he was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and colour that you could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body. When his flesh twitched, the tiny mouths flickered, the tiny green-and-gold eyes winked, the tiny pink hands gestured. There were yellow meadows and blue rivers and mountains and stars and suns and planets spread in a Milky Way across his chest. The people themselves were in twenty or more odd groups upon his arms, shoulders, back, sides, and wrists, as well as on the flat of his stomach. You found them in forests of hair, lurking among a constellation of freckles, or peering from armpit caverns, diamond eyes aglitter. Each seemed intent upon his own activity; each was a separate gallery portrait.

‘Why, they’re beautiful!’ I said.

How can I explain about his Illustrations? If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with all his sulphurous colour, elongation, and anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s body for his art. The colours burned in three dimensions. They were windows looking in upon fiery reality. Here, gathered on one wall, were all the finest scenes in the universe; the man was a walking treasure gallery. This wasn’t the work of a cheap carnival tattoo man with three colours and whisky on his breath. This was the accomplishment of a living genius, vibrant, clear, and beautiful.

‘Oh yes,’ said the Illustrated Man. ‘I’m so proud of my Illustrations that I’d like to burn them off. I’ve tried sandpaper, acid, a knife …’

The sun was setting. The moon was already up in the East.

‘For, you see,’ said the Illustrated Man, ‘these Illustrations predict the future.’

I said nothing.

‘It’s all right in sunlight,’ he went on. ‘I could keep a carnival day job. But at night – the pictures move. The pictures change.’

I must have smiled. ‘How long have you been Illustrated?’

‘In 1900, when I was twenty years old and working a carnival, I broke my leg. It laid me up; I had to do something to keep my hand in, so I decided to get tattooed.’

‘But who tattooed you? What happened to the artist?’

‘She went back to the future,’ he said. ‘I mean it. She was an old woman in a little house in the middle of Wisconsin here somewhere not far from this place. A little old witch who looked a thousand years old one moment and twenty years old the next, but she said she could travel in time. I laughed. Now, I know better.’

‘How did you happen to meet her?’

He told me. He had seen her painted sign by the road: SKIN ILLUSTRATION! Illustration instead of tattoo! Artistic! So he had sat all night while her magic needles stung him wasp stings and delicate bee stings. By morning he looked like a man who had fallen into a twenty-colour printing press and been squeezed out, all bright and picturesque.

‘I’ve hunted every summer for fifty years,’ he said, putting his hands out on the air. ‘When I find that witch I’m going to kill her.’

The sun was gone. Now the first stars were shining and the moon had brightened the fields of grass and wheat. Still the Illustrated Man’s pictures glowed like charcoals in the half light, like scattered rubies and emeralds, with Rouault colours and Picasso colours and the long, pressed-out El Greco bodies.

‘So people fire me when my pictures move. They don’t like it when violent things happen in my Illustrations. Each Illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking you could see eighteen or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and think thoughts. It’s all here, just waiting for you to look. But most of all, there’s a special spot on my body.’ He bared his back. ‘See? There’s no special design on my right shoulder-blade, just a jumble.’

‘Yes.’

‘When I’ve been around a person long enough, that spot clouds over and fills in. If I’m with a woman, her picture comes there on my back, in an hour, and shows her whole life – how she’ll live, how she’ll die, what she’ll look like when she’s sixty. And if it’s a man, an hour later his picture’s here on my back. It shows him falling off a cliff, or dying under a train. So I’m fired again.’

All the time he had been talking his hands had wandered over the Illustrations, as if to adjust their frames, to brush away dust – the motions of a connoisseur, an art patron. Now he lay back, long and full in the moonlight. It was a warm night. There was no breeze and the air was stifling. We both had our shirts off.

‘And you’ve never found the old woman?’

‘Never.’

‘And you think she came from the future?’

‘How else could she know these stories she painted on me?’

He shut his eyes tiredly. His voice grew fainter. ‘Sometimes at night I can feel them, the pictures, like ants, crawling on my skin. Then I know they’re doing what they have to do. I never look at them any more. I just try to rest. I don’t sleep much. Don’t you look at them either, I warn you. Turn the other way when you sleep.’

I lay back a few feet from him. He didn’t seem violent, and the pictures were beautiful. Otherwise I might have been tempted to get out and away from such babbling. But the Illustrations … I let my eyes fill up on them. Any person would go a little mad with such things upon his body.

The night was serene. I could hear the Illustrated Man’s breathing in the moonlight. Crickets were stirring gently in the distant ravines. I lay with my body sideways so I could watch the Illustrations. Perhaps half an hour passed. Whether the Illustrated Man slept I could not tell, but suddenly I heard him whisper, ‘They’re moving aren’t they?’

I waited a minute.

Then I said, ‘Yes.’

The pictures were moving, each in its turn, each for a brief minute or two. There in the moonlight, with the tiny tinkling thoughts and the distant sea voices, it seemed, each little drama was enacted. Whether it took an hour or three hours for the dramas to finish, it would be hard to say. I only know that I lay fascinated and did not move while the stars wheeled in the sky.

Sixteen Illustrations, sixteen tales. I counted them one by one.

Primarily my eyes focused upon a scene, a large house with two people in it. I saw a flight of vultures on a blazing flesh sky, I saw yellow lions, and I heard voices.

The first Illustration quivered and came to life.

The Veld

‘George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, then.’

‘I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.’

‘What would a psychologist want with a nursery?’

‘You know very well what he’d want.’ His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.

‘It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.’

‘All right, let’s have a look.’

They walked down the hall of their sound-proofed, Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, light went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.

‘Well,’ said George Hadley.

They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high, it had cost half as much as the rest of the house. ‘But nothing’s too good for our children,’ George had said.

The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two-dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the centre of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veld appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in colour, reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

‘Let’s get out of this sun,’ he said. ‘This is a little too real. But I don’t see anything wrong.’

‘Wait a moment, you’ll see,’ said his wife.

Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odour at the two people in the middle of the baked veldland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley’s upturned, sweating face.

‘Filthy creatures,’ he heard his wife say.

‘The vultures.’

‘You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to the water hole. They’ve just been eating,’ said Lydia. ‘I don’t know what.’

‘Some animal.’ George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. ‘A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.’

‘Are you sure?’ His wife sounded peculiarly tense.

‘No, it’s a little late to be sure,’ he said amused. ‘Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left.’

‘Did you hear that scream?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘About a minute ago?’

‘Sorry, no.’

The lions were coming. And again George Hadley was filled with admiration for the mechanical genius who had conceived this room. A miracle of efficiency selling for an absurdly low price. Every home should have one. Oh, occasionally they frightened you with their clinical accuracy, they startled you, gave you a twinge, but most of the time what fun for everyone, not only your own son and daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a quick jaunt to a foreign land, a quick change of scene. Well, here it was!

And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.

The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow eyes.

‘Watch out!’ screamed Lydia.

The lions came running at them.

Lydia bolted and ran. Instinctively, George sprang after her. Outside, in the hall, with the door slammed, he was laughing and she was crying, and they both stood appalled at the other’s reaction.

‘George!’

‘Lydia! Oh, my dear poor sweet Lydia!’

‘They almost got us!’

‘Walls, Lydia, remember; crystal walls, that’s all they are. Oh, they look real, I must admit – Africa in your parlour – but it’s all dimensional super-reactionary, super-sensitive colour film and mental tape film behind glass screens. It’s all odorophonics and sonics, Lydia. Here’s my handkerchief.’

‘I’m afraid.’ She came to him and put her body against him and cried steadily. ‘Did you see? Did you feel? It’s too real.’

‘Now, Lydia …’

‘You’ve got to tell Wendy and Peter not to read any more on Africa.’

‘Of course – of course.’ He patted her.

‘Promise?’

‘Sure.’

‘And lock the nursery for a few days until I get my nerves settled.’

‘You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month ago by locking the nursery for even a few hours – the tantrum he threw! And Wendy too. They live for the nursery.’

‘It’s got to be locked, that’s all there is to it.’

‘All right.’ Reluctantly he locked the huge door. ‘You’ve been working too hard. You need a rest.’

‘I don’t know – I don’t know,’ she said, blowing her nose, sitting down in a chair that immediately began to rock and comfort her. ‘Maybe I don’t have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don’t we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?’

‘You mean you want to fry my eggs for me?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded.

‘And darn my socks?’

‘Yes.’ A frantic, watery-eyed nodding.

‘And sweep the house?’

‘Yes, yes – oh, yes!’

‘But I thought that’s why we bought this house, so we wouldn’t have to do anything?’

‘That’s just it. I feel I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now and nursemaid. Can I compete with an African veld? Can I give a bath and scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can? I cannot. And it isn’t just me. It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately.’

‘I suppose I have been smoking too much.’

‘You look as if you didn’t know what to do with yourself in this house, either. You smoke a little more every morning and drink a little more every afternoon and need a little more sedative every night. You’re beginning to feel unnecessary too.’

‘Am I?’ He paused and tried to feel into himself to see what was really there.

‘Oh, George!’ She looked beyond him, at the nursery door. ‘Those lions can’t get out of there, can they?’

He looked at the door and saw it tremble as if something had jumped against it from the other side.

‘Of course not,’ he said.

At dinner they ate alone, for Wendy and Peter were at a special plastic carnival across town and had televised home to say they’d be late, to go ahead eating. So George Hadley, bemused, sat watching the dining-room table produce warm dishes of food from its mechanical interior.

‘We forgot the ketchup,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ said a small voice within the table, and ketchup appeared.

As for the nursery, thought George Hadley, it won’t hurt for the children to be locked out of it awhile. Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone. And it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on Africa. That sun. He could feel it on his neck, still, like a hot paw. And the lions. And the smell of blood. Remarkable how the nursery caught the telepathic emanations of the children’s minds and created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought zebras, and there were zebras. Sun – sun. Giraffes – giraffes. Death and death.

That last. He chewed tastelessly on the meat that the table had cut for him. Death thoughts. They were awfully young, Wendy and Peter, for death thoughts. Or, no, you were never too young really. Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with cap pistols.

But this – the long, hot African veld – the awful death in the jaws of a lion. And repeated again and again.

‘Where are you going?’

He didn’t answer Lydia. Preoccupied, he let the lights glow softly on ahead of him, extinguish behind him as he padded to the nursery door. He listened against it. Far away, a lion roared.

He unlocked the door and opened it. Just before he stepped inside, he heard a far-away scream. And then another roar from the lions, which subsided quickly.

He stepped into Africa. How many times in the last year had he opened this door and found Wonderland, Alice, the Mock Turtle, or Aladdin and his Magical Lamp, or Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, or Dr Doolittle, or the cow jumping over a very real-appearing moon – all the delightful contraptions of a make-believe world. How often had he seen Pegasus flying in the sky ceiling, or seen fountains of red fireworks, or heard angel voices singing. But now, this yellow hot Africa, this bake oven with murder in the heat. Perhaps Lydia was right. Perhaps they needed a little vacation from the fantasy which was growing a bit too real for ten-year-old children. It was all right to exercise one’s mind with gymnastic fantasies, but when the lively child mind settled on one pattern …? It seemed that, at a distance, for the past month, he had heard lions roaring, and smelled their strong odour seeping as far away as his study door. But, being busy, he had paid it no attention.

George Hadley stood on the African grassland alone. The lions looked up from their feeding, watching him. The only flaw to the illusion was the open door through which he could see his wife, far down the dark hall, like a framed picture, eating her dinner abstractedly.

‘Go away,’ he said to the lions.

They did not go.

He knew the principle of the room exactly. You sent out your thoughts. Whatever you thought would appear.

‘Let’s have Aladdin and his lamp,’ he snapped.

The veldland remained, the lions remained.

‘Come on, room! I demand Aladdin!’ he said.

Nothing happened. The lions mumbled in their baked pelts.

‘Aladdin!’

He went back to dinner. ‘The fool room’s out of order,’ he said. ‘It won’t respond.’

‘Or –’

‘Or what?’

‘Or it can’t respond,’ said Lydia, ‘because the children have thought about Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room’s in a rut.’

‘Could be.’

‘Or Peter’s set it to remain that way.’

‘Set it?’

‘He may have got into the machinery and fixed something.’

‘Peter doesn’t know machinery.’

‘He’s a wise one for ten. That IQ of his –’

‘Nevertheless –’

‘Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad.’

The Hadleys turned. Wendy and Peter were coming in the front door, cheeks like peppermint candy, eyes like bright blue agate marbles, a smell of ozone on their jumpers from their trip in the helicopter.

‘You’re just in time for supper,’ said both parents.

‘We’re full of strawberry ice cream and hot dogs,’ said the children, holding hands. ‘But we’ll sit and watch.’

‘Yes, come tell us about the nursery,’ said George Hadley.

The brother and sister blinked at him and then at each other. ‘Nursery?’

‘All about Africa and everything,’ said the father with false joviality.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Peter.

‘Your mother and I were just travelling through Africa with rod and reel; Tom Swift and his Electric Lion,’ said George Hadley.

‘There’s no Africa in the nursery,’ said Peter simply.

‘Oh, come on, Peter. We know better.’

‘I don’t remember any Africa,’ said Peter to Wendy. ‘Do you?’

‘No.’

‘Run see and come tell.’

She obeyed.

‘Wendy, come back here!’ said George Hadley, but she was gone. The house lights followed her like a flock of fireflies. Too late, he realized he had forgotten to lock the nursery door after his last inspection.

‘Wendy’ll look and come tell us,’ said Peter.

‘She doesn’t have to tell me, I’ve seen it.’

‘I’m sure you’re mistaken, Father.’

‘I’m not, Peter. Come along now.’

But Wendy was back. ‘It’s not Africa,’ she said breathlessly.

‘We’ll see about this,’ said George Hadley, and they all walked down the hall together and opened the nursery door.

There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing, and Rima, lovely and mysterious, lurking in the trees with colourful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her long hair. The African veldland was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.

George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. ‘Go to bed,’ he said to the children.

They opened their mouths.

‘You heard me,’ he said.

They went off to the air closet, where a wind sucked them like brown leaves up the flue to their slumber rooms.

George Hadley walked through the singing glade and picked up something that lay in the corner near where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his wife.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

‘An old wallet of mine,’ he said.

He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it and the smell of a lion. There were drops of saliva on it, it had been chewed, and there were blood smears on both sides.

He closed the nursery door and locked it, tight.

In the middle of the night he was still awake and he knew his wife was awake. ‘Do you think Wendy changed it?’ she said at last, in the dark room.

‘Of course.’

‘Made it from a veld into a forest and put Rima there instead of lions?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s staying locked until I find out.’

‘How did your wallet get there?’

‘I don’t know anything,’ he said, ‘except that I’m beginning to be sorry we bought that room for the children. If children are neurotic at all, a room like that –’

‘It’s supposed to help them work off their neuroses in a healthful way.’

‘I’m starting to wonder.’ He stared at the ceiling.

‘We’ve given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our reward – secrecy, disobedience?’

‘Who was it said, “Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally”? We’ve never lifted a hand. They’re insufferable – let’s admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring. They’re spoiled and we’re spoiled.’

‘They’ve been acting funny ever since you forbade them to take the rocket to New York a few months ago.’

‘They’re not old enough to do that alone, I explained.’

‘Nevertheless, I’ve noticed they’ve been decidedly cool toward us since.’

‘I think I’ll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at Africa.’

‘But it’s not Africa now, it’s Green Mansions country and Rima.’

‘I have a feeling it’ll be Africa again before then.’

A moment later they heard the screams.

Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.

‘Wendy and Peter aren’t in their rooms,’ said his wife.

He lay in his bed with his beating heart. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’ve broken into the nursery.’

‘Those screams – they sound familiar.’

‘Do they?’

‘Yes, awfully.’

And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn’t be rocked to sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.

‘Father,’ said Peter.

‘Yes.’

Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his mother. ‘You aren’t going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?’

‘That all depends.’

‘On what?’ snapped Peter.

‘On you and your sister. If you intersperse this Africa with a little variety – oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China –’

‘I thought we were free to play as we wished.’

‘You are, within reasonable bounds.’

‘What’s wrong with Africa, Father?’

‘Oh, so now you admit you have been conjuring up Africa, do you?’

‘I wouldn’t want the nursery locked up,’ said Peter coldly. ‘Ever.’

‘Matter of fact, we’re thinking of turning the whole house off for about a month. Live sort of a carefree one-for-all existence.’

‘That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the shoe tier do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?’

‘It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?’

‘No, it would be horrid. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.’

‘That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.’

‘I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?’

‘All right, go play in Africa.’

‘Will you shut off the house sometime soon?’

‘We’re considering it.’

‘I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father.’

‘I won’t have any threats from my son!’

‘Very well.’ And Peter strolled off to the nursery.

‘Am I on time?’ said David McClean.

‘Breakfast?’ asked George Hadley.

‘Thanks, had some. What’s the trouble?’

‘David, you’re a psychologist.’

‘I should hope so.’

‘Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped by; did you notice anything peculiar about it then?’

‘Can’t say I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight paranoia here or there, usual in children because they feel persecuted by parents constantly, but, oh, really nothing.’

They walked down the hall. ‘I locked the nursery up,’ explained the father, ‘and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could form the patterns for you to see.’

There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.

‘There it is,’ said George Hadley. ‘See what you make of it.’

They walked in on the children without rapping.

The screams had faded. The lions were feeding.

‘Run outside a moment, children,’ said George Hadley. ‘No, don’t change the mental combination. Leave the walls as they are. Get!’

With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions clustered at a distance, eating with great relish whatever it was they had caught.

‘I wish I knew what it was,’ said George Hadley. ‘Sometimes I can almost see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and –’

David McClean laughed dryly. ‘Hardly.’ He turned to study all four walls. ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘A little over a month.’

‘It certainly doesn’t feel good.’

‘I want facts, not feelings.’

‘My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about feelings; vague things. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust my hunches and my instincts, I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment.’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘I’m afraid so. One of the original uses of these nurseries was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind, study at our leisure, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a channel toward – destructive thoughts, instead of a release away from them.’

‘Didn’t you sense this before?’

‘I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you’re letting them down in some way. What way?’

‘I wouldn’t let them go to New York.’

‘What else?’

‘I’ve taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for a few days to show I meant business.’

‘Ah, ha!’

‘Does that mean anything?’

‘Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut if off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d starve tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to tap an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.’

‘But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up abruptly, for good?’

‘I don’t want them going any deeper into this, that’s all.’

The lions were finished with their red feast.

The lions were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.

‘Now I’m feeling persecuted,’ said McClean. ‘Let’s get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous.’

‘The lions look real, don’t they?’ said George Hadley. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any way –’

‘What?’

‘– that they could become real?’

‘Not that I know.’

‘Some flaw in the machinery, a tampering or something?’

‘No.’

They went to the door.

‘I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,’ said the father.

‘Nothing ever likes to die – even a room.’

‘I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?’

‘Paranoia is thick around here today,’ said David McClean. ‘You can follow it like a spoor. Hello.’ He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. ‘This yours?’

‘No.’ George Hadley’s face was rigid. ‘It belongs to Lydia.’

They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.

The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.

‘You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!’

‘Now, children.’

The children flung themselves on to a couch, weeping.

‘George,’ said Lydia Hadley, ‘turn on the nursery, just for a few moments. You can’t be so abrupt.’

‘No.’

‘You can’t be so cruel.’

‘Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We’ve been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!’

And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lacers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and every other machine he could put his hand to.

The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

‘Don’t let them do it!’ wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. ‘Don’t let Father kill everything.’ He turned to his father. ‘Oh, I hate you!’

‘Insults won’t get you anywhere.’

‘I wish you were dead!’

‘We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live.’

Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. ‘Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery,’ they wailed.

‘Oh, George,’ said the wife, ‘it can’t hurt.’

‘All right – all right, if they’ll only just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off forever.’

‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’ sang the children, smiling with wet faces.

‘And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you.’

And the three of them went babbling off while he let himself be vacuumed upstairs through the air flue and set about dressing himself. A minute later Lydia appeared.

‘I’ll be glad when we get away,’ she sighed.

‘Did you leave them in the nursery?’

‘I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrid Africa. What can they see in it?’

‘Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare?’

‘Pride, money, foolishness.’

‘I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids get engrossed with those damned beasts again.’

Just then they heard the children calling, ‘Daddy, Mommy, come quick – quick!’

They went downstirs in the air flue and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. ‘Wendy? Peter!’

They ran into the nursery. The veldland was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. ‘Peter, Wendy?’

The door slammed.

‘Wendy, Peter!’

George Hadley and his wife whirled and ran back to the door.

‘Open the door!’ cried George Hadley, trying the knob. ‘Why, they’ve locked it from the outside! Peter!’ He beat at the door. ‘Open up!’

He heard Peter’s voice outside, against the door.

‘Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house,’ he was saying.

Mr and Mrs George Hadley beat at the door. ‘Now, don’t be ridiculous, children. It’s time to go. Mr McClean’ll be here in a minute and …’

And then they heard the sounds.

The lions on three sides of them, in the yellow veld grass, padding through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats.

The lions.

Mr Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward, crouching, tails stiff.

Mr and Mrs Hadley screamed.

And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.

‘Well, here I am,’ said David McClean in the nursery doorway. ‘Oh, hello.’ He stared at the two children seated in the centre of the open glade eating a little picnic lunch. Beyond them was the water hole and the yellow veldland; above was the hot sun. He began to perspire. ‘Where are your father and mother?’

The children looked up and smiled. ‘Oh, they’ll be here directly.’

‘Good, we must get going.’ At a distance Mr McClean saw the lions fighting and clawing and then quieting down to feed in silence under the shady trees.

He squinted at the lions with his hand up to his eyes.

Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water hole to drink.

A shadow flickered over Mr McClean’s hot face. Many shadows flickered. The vultures were dropping down the blazing sky.

‘A cup of tea?’ asked Wendy in the silence.

The Illustrated Man shifted in his sleep. He turned, and each time he turned another picture came to view, colouring his back, his arm, his wrist. He flung a hand over the dry night grass. The fingers uncurled and there upon his palm another Illustration stirred to life. He twisted, and on his chest was an empty space of stars and blackness, deep, deep, and something moving among those stars, something falling in the blackness, falling while I watched …

Kaleidoscope

The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can-opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

‘Barkley, Barkley, where are you?’

The sound of voices calling like lost children on a cold night.

‘Woode, Woode!’

‘Captain!’

‘Hollis, Hollis, this is Stone.’

‘Stone, this is Hollis. Where are you?’

‘I don’t know. How can I? Which way is up? I’m falling. Good God, I’m falling.’

They fell. They fell as pebbles fall down wells. They were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw. And now instead of men there were only voices – all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.

‘We’re going away from each other.’

This was true. Hollis, swinging head over heels, knew this was true. He knew it with a vague acceptance. They were parting to go their separate ways, and nothing could bring them back. They were wearing their sealed-tight space suits with the glass tubes over their pale faces, but they hadn’t had time to lock on their force units. With them they could be small lifeboats in space, saving themselves, saving others, collecting together, finding each other until they were an island of men with some plan. But without the force units snapped to their shoulders they were meteors, senseless, each going to a separate and irrevocable fate.

A period of perhaps ten minutes elapsed while the first terror died and a metallic calm took its place. Space began to weave its strange voices in and out, in a great dark loom, crossing, recrossing, making a final pattern.

‘Stone to Hollis. How long can we talk by phone?’

‘It depends on how fast you’re going your way and I’m going mine.’

‘An hour, I make it.’

‘That should do it,’ said Hollis, abstracted and quiet.

‘What happened?’ said Hollis a minute later.

‘The rocket blew up, that’s all. Rockets do blow up.’

‘Which way are you going?’

‘It looks like I’ll hit the moon.’

‘It’s Earth for me. Back to old Mother Earth at ten thousand miles per hour. I’ll burn like a match.’ Hollis thought of it with a queer abstraction of mind. He seemed to be removed from his body, watching it fall down and down through space, as objective as he had been in regard to the first falling snowflakes of a winter season long gone.

The others were silent, thinking of the destiny that had brought them to this, falling, falling, and nothing they could do to change it. Even the captain was quiet, for there was no command or plan he knew that could put things back together again.

‘Oh, it’s a long way down. Oh, it’s a long way down, a long, long, long way down,’ said a voice. ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, it’s a long way down.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Stimson, I think. Stimson, is that you?’

‘It’s a long, long way and I don’t like it. Oh, God, I don’t like it.’

‘Stimson, this is Hollis. Stimson, you hear me?’

A pause while they fell separate from one another.

‘Stimson?’

‘Yes.’ He replied at last.

‘Stimson, take it easy; we’re all in the same fix.’

‘I don’t want to be here. I want to be somewhere else.’

‘There’s a chance we’ll be found.’

‘I must be, I must be,’ said Stimson. ‘I don’t believe this; I don’t believe any of this is happening.’

‘It’s a bad dream,’ said someone.

‘Shut up!’ said Hollis.

‘Come and make me,’ said the voice. It was Applegate. He laughed easily, with a similar objectivity. ‘Come and shut me up.’

Hollis for the first time felt the impossibility of his position. A great anger filled him, for he wanted more than anything at this moment to be able to do something to Applegate. He had wanted for many years to do something and now it was too late. Applegate was only a telephonic voice.

Falling, falling, falling …

Now, as if they had discovered the horror, two of the men began to scream. In a nightmare Hollis saw one of them float by, very near, screaming and screaming.

‘Stop it!’ The man was almost at his fingertips, screaming insanely. He would never stop. He would go on screaming for a million miles, as long as he was in radio range, disturbing all of them, making it impossible for them to talk to one another.

Hollis reached out. It was best this way. He made the extra effort and touched the man. He grasped the man’s ankle and pulled himself up along the body until he reached the head. The man screamed and clawed frantically, like a drowning swimmer. The screaming filled the universe.

One way or the other, thought Hollis. The moon or Earth or meteors will kill him, so why not now?

He smashed the man’s glass mask with his iron fist. The screaming stopped. He pushed off from the body and let it spin away on its own course, falling.

Falling, falling down space Hollis and the rest of them went in the long, endless dropping and whirling of silence.

‘Hollis you still there?’

Hollis did not speak, but felt the rush of heat in his face.

‘This is Applegate again.’

‘All right. Applegate.’

‘Let’s talk. We haven’t anything else to do.’

The captain cut in. ‘That’s enough of that. We’ve got to figure a way out of this.’

‘Captain, why don’t you shut up?’ said Applegate.

‘What!’

‘You heard me, Captain. Don’t pull your rank on me, you’re ten thousand miles away by now, and let’s not kid ourselves. As Stimson puts it, it’s a long way down.’

‘See here, Applegate!’

‘Can it. This is a mutiny of one. I haven’t a damn thing to lose. Your ship was a bad ship and you were a bad captain and I hope you break when you hit the Moon.’

‘I’m ordering you to stop!’

‘Go on, order me again.’ Applegate smiled across ten thousand miles. The captain was silent. Applegate continued, ‘Where were we, Hollis? Oh yes, I remember. I hate you too. But you know that. You’ve known it for a long time.’

Hollis clenched his fists, helplessly.

‘I want to tell you something,’ said Applegate. ‘Make you happy. I was the one who blackballed you with the Rocket Company five years ago.’

A meteor flashed by. Hollis looked down and his left hand was gone. Blood spurted. Suddenly there was no air in his suit. He had enough air in his lungs to move his right hand over and twist a knob at his left elbow, tightening the joint and sealing the leak. It had happened so quickly that he was not surprised. Nothing surprised him any more. The air in the suit came back to normal in an instant now that the leak was sealed. And the blood that had flowed so swiftly was pressured as he fastened the knob yet tighter, until it made a tourniquet.

All of this took place in a terrible silence on his part. And the other men chatted. That one man, Lespere, went on and on with his talk about his wife on Mars, his wife on Venus, his wife on Jupiter, his money, his wondrous times, his drunkenness, his gambling, his happiness. On and on; while they all fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.

It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the centre of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.

‘Are you angry, Hollis?’

‘No.’ And he was not. The abstraction had returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere.

‘You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. You always wondered what happened. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.’

‘That isn’t important,’ said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, ‘There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,’ the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.

From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?

One of the other men, Lespere, was talking. ‘Well, I had me a good time: I had a wife on Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Each of them had money and treated me swell. I got drunk and once I gambled away twenty thousand dollars.’

But you’re here now, thought Hollis. I didn’t have any of those things. When I was living, I was jealous of you, Lespere; when I had another day ahead of me I envied you your women and your good times. Women frightened me and I went into space, always wanting them and jealous of you for having them, and money, and as much happiness as you could have in your own wild way. But now, falling here, with everything over, I’m not jealous of you any more, because it’s over for you as it is for me, and right now it’s like it never was. Hollis craned his face forward and shouted into the telephone.

‘It’s all over, Lespere!’

Silence.

‘It’s just as if it never was, Lespere!’

‘Who’s that?’ Lespere’s faltering voice.

‘This is Hollis.’

He was being mean. He felt the meanness, the senseless meanness of dying. Applegate had hurt him; now he wanted to hurt another. Applegate and space had both wounded him.

‘You’re out here, Lespere. It’s all over. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?’

‘Yes, it’s better!’

‘How?’

‘Because I got my thoughts, I remember!’ cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.

And he was right. With a feeling of cold water rushing through his head and body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.

‘What good does it do you?’ he cried to Lespere. ‘Now? When a thing’s over it’s not good any more. You’re no better off than me.’

‘I’m resting easy,’ said Lespere. ‘I’ve had my turn. I’m not getting mean at the end, like you.’

‘Mean?’ Hollis turned the word on his tongue. He had never been mean, as long as he could remember, in his life. He had never dared to be mean. He must have saved it all of these years for such a time as this. ‘Mean.’ He rolled the word into the back of his mind. He felt tears start into his eyes and roll down his face. Someone must have heard his gasping voice.

‘Take it easy, Hollis.’

It was, of course, ridiculous. Only a minute before he had been giving advice to others, to Stimson; he had felt a braveness which he had thought to be the genuine thing, and now he knew that it had been nothing but shock and the objectivity possible in shock. Now he was trying to pack a lifetime of suppressed emotion into an interval of minutes.

‘I know how you feel, Hollis,’ said Lespere, now twenty thousand miles away, his voice fading. ‘I don’t take it personally.’

But aren’t we equal? he wondered. Lespere and I? Here, now? If a thing’s over, it’s done, and what good is it? You die anyway. But he knew he was rationalizing, for it was like trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse. There was a spark in one, and not in the other – an aura, a mysterious element.

So it was with Lespere and himself; Lespere had lived a good full life, and it made him a different man now, and he, Hollis, had been as good as dead for many years. They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were kinds of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?

It was a second later that he discovered his right foot was cut sheer away. It almost made him laugh. The air was gone from his suit again. He bent quickly, and there was blood, and the meteor had taken flesh and suit away to the ankle. Oh, death in space was most humorous. It cut you away, piece by piece, like a black and invisible butcher. He tightened the valve at the knee, his head whirling into pain, fighting to remain aware, and with the valve tightened, the blood retained, the air kept, he straightened up and went on falling, falling, for that was all there was left to do.

‘Hollis?’

Hollis nodded sleepily, tired of waiting for death.

‘This is Applegate again,’ said the voice.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve had time to think. I listened to you. This isn’t good. It makes us bad. This is a bad way to die. It brings all the bile out. You listening, Hollis?’

‘Yes.’

‘I lied. A minute ago. I lied. I didn’t blackball you. I don’t know why I said that. Guess I wanted to hurt you. You seemed the one to hurt. We’ve always fought. Guess I’m getting old fast and repenting fast. I guess listening to you be mean made me ashamed. Whatever the reason, I want you to know I was an idiot too. There’s not an ounce of truth in what I said. To hell with you.’

Hollis felt his heart begin to work again. It seemed as if it hadn’t worked for five minutes, but now all of his limbs began to take colour and warmth. The shock was over, and the successive shocks of anger and terror and loneliness were passing. He felt like a man emerging from a cold shower in the morning, ready for breakfast and a new day.

‘Thanks, Applegate.’

‘Don’t mention it. Up your nose, you bastard.’

‘Hey,’ said Stone.

‘What?’ Hollis called across space; for Stone, of all of them, was a good friend.

‘I’ve got myself into a meteor swarm, some little asteroids.’

‘Meteors?’

‘I think it’s the Myrmidone cluster that goes out past Mars and in toward Earth once every five years. I’m right in the middle. It’s like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colours and shapes and sizes. God, it’s beautiful, all that metal.’

Silence.

‘I’m going with them,’ said Stone. ‘They’re taking me off with them. I’ll be damned.’ He laughed.

Hollis looked to see, but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires. There was a kind of wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the meteor swarm, out past Mars for years and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet’s ken for the next million centuries, Stone and the Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colours when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and gave it a twirl.

‘So long, Hollis,’ Stone’s voice, very faint now. ‘So long.’

‘Good luck,’ shouted Hollis across thirty thousand miles.

‘Don’t be funny,’ said Stone, and was gone.

The stars closed in.

Now all the voices were fading, each on his own trajectory, some to Mars, others into farthest space. And Hollis himself … He looked down. He, of all the others, was going back to Earth alone.

‘So long.’

‘Take it easy.’

‘So long, Hollis.’ That was Applegate.

The many good-byes. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying. Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body, no longer to be despised and worked against. The brain was exploded, and the senseless, useless fragments of it were far scattered. The voices faded and now all of space was silent. Hollis was alone, falling.

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep. There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.

And I? thought Hollis. What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If only I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me! But there’s no one here but myself, and how can you do good all alone? You can’t. Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth’s atmosphere.

I’ll burn, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.

He fell swiftly, like a bullet, like a pebble, like an iron weight, objective, objective all of the time now, not sad or happy or anything, but only wishing he could do a good thing now that everything was gone, a good thing for just himself to know about.

When I hit the atmosphere, I’ll burn like a meteor.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if anyone’ll see me?’

The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. ‘Look, Mom, look! A falling star!’

The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois.

‘Make a wish,’ said his mother. ‘Make a wish.’

The Illustrated Man turned in the moonlight. He turned again … and again … and again …

The Other Foot

When they heard the news they came out of the restaurants and cafés and hotels and looked at the sky. They lifted their dark hands over their upturned white eyes. Their mouths hung wide. In the hot noon for thousands of miles there were little towns where the dark people stood with their shadows under them, looking up.

In her kitchen Hattie Johnson covered the boiling soup, wiped her thin fingers on a cloth, and walked carefully to the back porch.

‘Come on, Ma! Ma, come on – you’ll miss it!’

‘Hey, Mom!’

Three little Negro boys danced around in the dusty yard, yelling. Now and then they looked at the house frantically.

‘I’m coming,’ said Hattie, and opened the screen door. ‘Where you hear this rumour?’

‘Up at Jones’s, Ma. They say a rocket’s coming, first one in twenty years, with a white man in it!’

‘What’s a white man? I never seen one.’

‘You’ll find out,’ said Hattie. ‘Yes indeed, you’ll find out.’

‘Tell us about one, Ma. Tell like you did.’

Hattie frowned. ‘Well, it’s been a long time. I was a little girl, you see. That was back in 1965.’

‘Tell us about a white man, Mom!’

She came and stood in the yard, looking up at the blue clear Martian sky with the thin white Martian clouds, and in the distance the Martian hills broiling in the heat. She said at last, ‘Well, first of all, they got white hands.’

‘White hands!’ The boys joked, slapping each other.

‘And they got white arms.’

‘White arms!’ hooted the boys.

‘And white faces.’

‘White faces! Really?’

‘White like this, Mom?’ The smallest threw dust on his face, sneezing. ‘This way?’

‘Whiter than that,’ she said gravely, and turned to the sky again. There was a troubled thing in her eyes, as if she was looking for a thundershower up high, and not seeing it made her worry. ‘Maybe you better go inside.’

‘Oh, Mom!’ they stared at her in disbelief. ‘We got to watch, we just got to. Nothing’s going to happen, is it?’

‘I don’t know. I got a feeling, is all.’

‘We just want to see the ship and maybe run down to the port and see that white man. What’s he like, huh, Mom?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know,’ she mused, shaking her head.

‘Tell us some more!’

‘Well, the white people live on Earth, which is where we all come from, twenty years ago. We just up and walked away and came to Mars and set down and built towns and here we are. Now, we’re Martians instead of Earth people. And no white men’ve come up here in all that time. That’s the story.’

‘Why didn’t they come up, Mom?’

‘Well, ’cause. Right after we got up here, Earth got in an atom war. They blew each other up terribly. They forgot us. When they finished fighting, after years, they didn’t have any rockets. Took them until recently to build more. So here they come now, twenty years later, to visit.’ She gazed at her children numbly and then began to walk. ‘You wait here. I’m going down the line to Elizabeth Brown’s house. You promise to stay?’

‘We don’t want to but we will.’

‘All right, then.’ And she ran off down the road.

At the Browns’ she arrived in time to see everybody packed into the family car. ‘Hey there, Hattie! Come on along!’

‘Where you going?’ she said, breathlessly running up.

‘To see the white man!’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Brown seriously. He waved at his load. ‘These children never saw one, and I almost forgot.’

‘What you going to do with that white man?’ asked Hattie.

‘Do?’ said everyone. ‘Why – just look at him, is all.’

‘You sure?’

‘What else can we do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Hattie. ‘I just thought there might be trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘You know,’ said Hattie vaguely, embarrassed. ‘You ain’t going to lynch him?’

‘Lynch him?’ Everyone laughed. Mr Brown slapped his knee. ‘Why, bless you, child, no! We’re going to shake his hand. Ain’t we, everyone?’

‘Sure, sure!’

Another car drove up from another direction and Hattie gave a cry. ‘Willie!’

‘What you doing ’way down here? Where’re the kids?’ shouted her husband angrily. He glared at the others. ‘You going down like a bunch of fools to see that man come in?’

‘That appears to be just right,’ agreed Mr Brown, nodding and smiling.

‘Well, take your guns along,’ said Willie. ‘I’m on my way home for mine right now!’

‘Willie!’

‘You get in this car, Hattie.’ He held the door open firmly, looking at her until she obeyed. Without another word to the others he roared the car down the dusty road.

‘Willie, not so fast!’

‘Not so fast, huh! We’ll see about that.’ He watched the road tear under the car. ‘What right they got coming up here this late? Why don’t they leave us in peace? Why didn’t they blow themselves up on that old world and let us be?’

‘Willie, that ain’t no Christian way to talk.’

‘I’m not feeling Christian,’ he said savagely, gripping the wheel. ‘I’m just feeling mean. After all them years of doing what they did to our folks – my mom and dad, and your mom and dad – You remember? You remember how they hung my father on Knockwood Hill and shot my mother? You remember? Or you got a memory that’s short like the others?’

‘I remember,’ she said.

‘You remember Dr Phillips and Mr Burton and their big houses, and my mother’s washing shack, and Dad working when he was old, and the thanks he got was being hung by Dr Phillips and Mr Burton. Well,’ said Willie, ‘the shoe’s on the other foot now. We’ll see who gets laws passed against him, who gets lynched, who rides the back of streetcars, who gets segregated in shows. We’ll just wait and see.’

‘Oh, Willie, you’re talking trouble.’

‘Everybody’s talking. Everybody’s thought on this day, thinking it’d never be. Thinking. What kind of day would it be if the white man ever came up here to Mars? But here’s the day, and we can’t run away.’

‘Ain’t you going to let the white people live up here?’

‘Sure.’ He smiled, but it was a wide, mean smile, and his eyes were mad. ‘They can come up and live and work here, why, certainly. All they got to do to deserve it is live in their own small part of town, the slums, and shine our shoes for us, and mop up our trash, and sit in the last row in the balcony. That’s all we ask. And once a week we hang one or two of them. Simple.’

‘You don’t sound human, and I don’t like it.’

‘You’ll have to get used to it,’ he said. He braked the car to a stop before the house and jumped out. ‘Find my guns and some rope. We’ll do this right.’

‘Oh, Willie,’ she wailed, and just sat there in the car while he ran up the steps and slammed the front door.

She went along. She didn’t want to go along, but he rattled around in the attic, cursing like a crazy man until he found four guns. She saw the brutal metal of them glittering in the black attic, and she couldn’t see him at all, he was so dark; she heard only his swearing, and at last his long legs came climbing down from the attic in a shower of dust, and he stacked up bunches of brass shells and blew out the gun chambers and clicked shells into them, his face stern and heavy and folded in upon the gnawing bitterness there. ‘Leave us alone,’ he kept muttering, his hands flying away from him suddenly, uncontrolled. ‘Leave us blame along, why don’t they?’

‘Willie, Willie.’

‘You too – you too.’ And he gave her the same look, and a pressure of his hatred touched her mind.

Outside the window the boys gabbled to each other. ‘White as milk, she said. White as milk.’

‘White as a stone, like chalk you write with.’

Willie plunged out of the house. ‘You children come inside. I’m locking you up. You ain’t seeing no white man, you ain’t talking about them, you ain’t doing nothing. Come on now.’

‘But, Daddy –’

He shoved them through the door and went and fetched a bucket of paint and a stencil and from the garage a long thick hairy rope coil into which he fashioned a hangman’s knot, very carefully, watching the sky while his hands felt their way at their task.

And then they were in the car, leaving bolls of dust behind them down the road. ‘Slow up, Willie.’

‘This is no slowing-up time,’ he said. ‘This is a hurrying time, and I’m hurrying.’

All along the road people were looking up in the sky, or climbing in their cars, or riding in cars, and guns were sticking up out of some cars like telescopes sighting all the evils of a world coming to an end.

She looked at the guns. ‘You been talking,’ she accused her husband.

‘That’s what I been doing,’ he grunted, nodding. He watched the road, fiercely. ‘I stopped at every house and I told them what to do, to get their guns, to get paint, to bring rope and be ready. And here we all are, the welcoming committee, to give them the key to the city. Yes, sir!’

She pressed her thin dark hands together to push away the terror growing in her now, and she felt the car bucket and lurch around other cars. She heard the voices yelling, Hey Willie, look! and hands holding up ropes and guns as they rushed by! and mouths smiling at them in the swift rushing.

‘Here we are,’ said Willie, and braked the car into dusty halting and silence. He kicked the door open with a big foot and, laden with weapons, stepped out, lugging them across the airport meadow.

‘Have you thought, Willie?’

‘That’s all I done for twenty years. I was sixteen when I left Earth, and I was glad to leave,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t anything there for me or you or anybody like us. I’ve never been sorry I left. We’ve had peace here, the first time we ever drew a solid breath. Now, come on.’

He pushed through the dark crowd which came to meet him.

‘Willie, Willie, what we gonna do?’ they said.

‘Here’s a gun,’ he said. ‘Here’s a gun. Here’s another.’ He passed them out with savage jabs of his arms. ‘Here’s a pistol. Here’s a shotgun.’

The people were so close together it looked like one dark body with a thousand arms reaching out to take the weapons. ‘Willie, Willie.’

His wife stood tall and silent by him, her fluted lips pressed shut, and her large eyes wet and tragic. ‘Bring the paint,’ he said to her. And she lugged a gallon can of yellow paint across the field to where, at that moment, a trolley car was pulling up, with a fresh-painted sign on its front, TO THE WHITE MAN’S LANDING, full of talking people who got off and ran across the meadow, stumbling, looking up. Women with picnic boxes, men with straw hats, in shirt sleeves. The streetcar stood humming and empty. Willie climbed up, set the paint cans down, opened them, stirred the paint, rested a brush, drew forth a stencil and climbed up on a seat.

‘Hey, there!’ the conductor came around behind him, his coin changer jangling. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Get down off there!’

‘You see what I’m doing. Keep your shirt on.’

And Willie began the stencilling in yellow paint. He dabbed on an F and an O and an R with terrible pride in his work. And when he finished it the conductor squinted up and read the fresh glinting yellow words, FOR WHITES: REAR SECTION. He read it again. FOR WHITES. He blinked. REAR SECTION. The conductor looked at Willie and began to smile.

‘Does that suit you?’ asked Willie, stepping down.

Said the conductor, ‘That suits me just fine, sir.’

Hattie was looking at the sign from outside, and holding her hands over her breasts.

Willie returned to the crowd, which was growing now, taking size from every auto that groaned to a halt, and every new trolley car which squealed around the bend from the nearby town.

Willie climbed up on a packing box. ‘Let’s have a delegation to paint every streetcar in the next hour. Volunteers?’

Hands leapt up.

‘Get going!’

They went.

‘Let’s have a delegation to fix theatre seats, roped off, the last two rows for whites.’

More hands.

‘Go on!’

They ran off.

Willie peered around, bubbled with perspiration, panting with exertion, proud of his energy, his hand on his wife’s shoulder who stood under him looking at the ground with her downcast eyes. ‘Let’s see now,’ he declared. ‘Oh yes. We got to pass a law this afternoon; no intermarriages!’

‘That’s right,’ said a lot of people.

‘All shoeshine boys quit their jobs today.’

‘Quittin’ right now!’ Some men threw down the rags they carried, in their excitement, all across town.

‘Got to pass a minimum wage law, don’t we?’

‘Sure!’

‘Pay them white folks at least ten cents an hour.’

‘That’s right!’

The mayor of the town hurried up. ‘Now look here, Willie Johnson. Get down off that box!’

‘Mayor, I can’t be made to do nothing like that.’

‘You’re making a mob, Willie Johnson.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘The same thing you always hated when you were a kid. You’re no better than some of those white men you yell about!’

‘This is the other shoe, Mayor, and the other foot,’ said Willie, not even looking at the mayor, looking at the faces beneath him, some of them smiling, some of them doubtful, others bewildered, some of them reluctant and drawing away, fearful.

‘You’ll be sorry,’ said the mayor.

‘We’ll have an election and get a new mayor,’ said Willie. And he glanced off at the town where up and down the streets signs were being hung, fresh-painted: LIMITED CLIENTELE: Right to serve customer revocable at any time. He grinned and slapped his hands. Lord! And streetcars were being halted and sections being painted white in back, to suggest their future inhabitants. And theatres were being invaded and roped off by chuckling men, while their wives stood wondering on the curbs and children were spanked into houses to be hid away from this awful time.

‘Are we all ready?’ called Willie Johnson, the rope in his hands with the noose tied and neat.

‘Ready!’ shouted half the crowd. The other half murmured and moved like figures in a nightmare in which they wished no participation.

‘Here it comes!’ called a small boy.

Like marionette heads on a single string, the heads of the crowd turned upward.

Across the sky, very high and beautiful, a rocket burned on a sweep of orange fire. It circled and came down, causing all to gasp. It landed, setting the meadow afire here and there; the fire burned out, the rocket lay a moment in quiet, and then, as the silent crowd watched, a great door in the side of the vessel whispered out a breath of oxygen, the door slid back and an old man stepped out.

‘A white man, a white man, a white man …’ The word travelled back in the expectant crowd, the children speaking in each other’s ears, whispering, butting each other, the words moving in ripples to where the crowd stopped and the streetcars stood in the windy sunlight, the smell of paint coming out of their opened windows. The whispering wore itself away and it was gone.

No one moved.

The white man was tall and straight, but a deep weariness was in his face. He had not shaved this day, and his eyes were as old as the eyes of a man can be and still be alive. His eyes were colourless; almost white and sightless with things he had seen in the passing years. He was as thin as a winter bush. His hands trembled and he had to lean against the portway of the ship as he looked out over the crowd.

He put out a hand and half smiled, but drew his hand back.

No one moved.

He looked down into their faces, and perhaps he saw but did not see the guns and the ropes, and perhaps he smelled the paint. No one ever asked him. He began to talk. He started very quietly and slowly, expecting no interruptions, and receiving none, and his voice was very tired and old and pale.

‘It doesn’t matter who I am,’ he said. ‘I’d be just a name to you, anyhow. I don’t know your names, either. That’ll come later.’ He paused, closed his eyes for a moment, and then continued:

‘Twenty years ago you left Earth. That’s a long, long time. It’s more like twenty centuries, so much has happened. After you left, the War came.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, the big one. The Third One. It went on for a long time. Until last year. We bombed all of the cities of the world. We destroyed New York and London and Moscow and Paris and Shanghai and Bombay and Alexandria. We ruined it all. And when we finished with the big cities we went to the little cities and atom-bombed and burned them.’

Now he began to name cities and places, and streets. And as he named them, a murmur rose up in his audience.

‘We destroyed Natchez …’

A murmur.

‘And Columbus, Georgia …’

Another murmur.

‘We burned New Orleans …’

A sigh.

‘And Atlanta …’

Still another.

‘And there was nothing left of Greenwater, Alabama.’

Willie Johnson jerked his head and his mouth opened. Hattie saw this gesture, and the recognition coming into his dark eyes.

‘Nothing was left,’ said the old man in the port, speaking slowly. ‘Cotton fields, burned.’

‘Oh,’ said everyone.

‘Cotton mills bombed out –’

‘Oh.’

‘And the factories, radioactive; everything radioactive. All the roads and the farms and the foods, radioactive. Everything.’ He named more names of towns and villages.

‘Tampa.’

‘That’s my town,’ someone whispered.

‘Fulton.’

‘That’s mine,’ someone else said.

‘Memphis.’

‘Memphis. Did they burn Memphis?’ A shocked query.

‘Memphis, blown up.’

‘Fourth Street in Memphis?’

‘All of it,’ said the old man.

It was stirring them now. After twenty years it was rushing back. The towns and the places, the trees and the brick buildings, the signs and the churches and the familiar stores, all of it was coming to the surface among the gathered people. Each name touched memory, and there was no one present without a thought of another day. They were all old enough for that, save the children.

‘Laredo.’

‘I remember Laredo.’

‘New York City.’

‘I had a store in Harlem.’

‘Harlem, bombed out.’

The ominous words. The familiar, remembered places. The struggle to imagine all of those places in ruins.

Willie Johnson murmured the words, ‘Greenwater, Alabama. That’s where I was born, I remember.’

Gone. All of it gone. The man said so.

The man continued, ‘So we destroyed everything and ruined everything, like the fools that we were and the fools that we are. We killed millions. I don’t think there are more than five hundred thousand people left in the world, all kinds and types. And out of all the wreckage we salvaged enough metal to build this rocket, and we came to Mars in it this month to seek your help.’

He hesitated and looked down among the faces to see what could be found there, but he was uncertain.

Hattie Johnson felt her husband’s arm tense, saw his fingers grip the rope.

‘We’ve been fools,’ said the old man quietly. ‘We’ve brought the Earth and civilization down about our heads. None of the cities are worth saving – they’ll be radioactive for a century. Earth is over and done with. Its age is through. You have rockets here which you haven’t tried to use to return to Earth in twenty years. Now I’ve come to ask you to use them. To come to Earth, to pick up the survivors and bring them back to Mars. To help us go on at this time. We’ve been stupid. Before God we admit our stupidity and our evilness. All the Chinese and the Indians and the Russians and the British and the Americans. We’re asking to be taken in. Your Martian soil has lain fallow for numberless centuries; there’s room for everyone; it’s good soil – I’ve seen your fields from above. We’ll come and work it for you. Yes, we’ll even do that. We deserve anything you want to do to us, but don’t shut us out. We can’t force you to act now. If you want I’ll get into my ship and go back and that will be all there is to it. We won’t bother you again. But we’ll come here and we’ll work for you and do the things you did for us – clean your houses, cook your meals, shine your shoes, and humble ourselves in the sight of God for the things we have done over the centuries to ourselves, to others, to you.’

He was finished.

There was a silence of silences. A silence you could hold in your hand and a silence that came down like a pressure of a distant storm over the crowd. Their long arms hung like dark pendulums in the sunlight, and their eyes were upon the old man and he did not move now, but waited.

Willie Johnson held the rope in his hands. Those around him watched to see what he might do. His wife Hattie waited, clutching his arm.

She wanted to get at the hate of them all, to pry at it and work at it until she found a little chink, and then pull out a pebble or a stone or a brick and then a part of the wall, and, once started, the whole edifice might roar down and be done away with. It was teetering now. But which was the keystone, and how to get at it? How to touch them and get a thing started in all of them to make a ruin of their hate?

She looked at Willie there in the strong silence and the only thing she knew about the situation was him and his life and what had happened to him, and suddenly he was the keystone; suddenly she knew that if he could be pried loose, then the thing in all of them might be loosened and torn away.

‘Mister –’ She stepped forward. She didn’t even know the first words to say. The crowd stared at her back; she felt them staring. ‘Mister –’

The man turned to her with a tired smile.

‘Mister,’ she said, ‘do you know Knockwood Hill in Greenwater, Alabama?’

The old man spoke over his shoulder to someone within the ship. A moment later a photographic map was handed out and the man held it, waiting.

‘You know the big oak on top of that hill, mister?’

The big oak. The place where Willie’s father was shot and hung and found swinging in the morning wind.

‘Yes.’

‘Is it still there?’ asked Hattie.

‘It’s gone,’ said the old man. ‘Blown up. The hill’s all gone, and the oak tree too. You see?’ He touched the photograph.

‘Let me see that,’ said Willie, jerking forward and looking at the map.

Hattie blinked at the white man, heart pounding.

‘Tell me about Greenwater,’ she said quickly.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘About Dr Phillips. Is he still alive?’

A moment in which the information was found in a clicking machine within the rocket …

‘Killed in the war.’

‘And his son?’

‘Dead.’

‘What about their house?’

‘Burned. Like all the other houses.’

‘What about the other big tree on Knockwood Hill?’

‘All the trees went – burned.’

‘That tree went, you’re sure?’ said Willie.

‘Yes.’

Willie’s body loosened somewhat.

‘And what about that Mr Burton’s house and Mr Burton?’

‘No houses at all left, no people.’

‘You know Mrs Johnson’s washing shack, my mother’s place?’

The place where she was shot.

‘That’s gone. Everything’s gone. Here are the pictures, you can see for yourself.’

The pictures were there to be held and looked at and thought about. The rocket was full of pictures and answers to questions. Any town, any building, any place.

Willie stood with the rope in his hands.

He was remembering Earth, the green Earth and the green town where he was born and raised, and he was thinking now of that town, gone to pieces, to ruin, blown up and scattered, all of the landmarks with it, all of the supposed or certain evil scattered with it, all of the hard men gone, the stables, the ironsmiths, the curio shops, the soda founts, the gin mills, the river bridges, the lynching trees, the buckshot-covered hills, the roads, the cows, the mimosas, and his own house as well as those big-pillared houses down near the long river, those white mortuaries where the women as delicate as moths fluttered in the autumn light, distant, far away. Those houses where the old men rocked, with glasses of drink in their hands, guns leaned against the porch newels, sniffing the autumn airs and considering death. Gone, all gone; gone and never coming back. Now, for certain, all of that civilization ripped into confetti and strewn at their feet. Nothing, nothing of it left to hate – not an empty brass gun shell, or a twisted hemp, or a tree, or even a hill of it to hate. Nothing but some alien people in a rocket, people who might shine his shoes and ride in the back of trolleys or sit far up in midnight theatres …

‘You won’t have to do that,’ said Willie Johnson.

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