Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (112 page)

‘The government’s right. I see that now,’ said George Hill.

‘I’m glad you understand the attitude of the law.’

‘Yes. After all, they can’t let murder be legal. Even if it’s done with machines and telepathy and wax. They’d be hypocrites to let me get away with my crime. For it
was
a crime. I’ve felt guilty about it ever since. I’ve felt the need of punishment. Isn’t that odd? That’s how society gets to you. It makes you feel guilty even when you see no reason to be…’

‘I have to go now. Is there anything you want?’

‘Nothing, thanks.’

‘Good-by then, Mr Hill.’

The door shut.

George Hill stood up on the chair, his hands twisting together, wet, outside the window bars. A red light burned in the wall suddenly. A voice came over the audio; ‘Mr Hill, your wife is here to see you.’

He gripped the bars.

She’s dead, he thought.

‘Mr Hill?’ asked the voice.

‘She’s dead. I killed her.’

‘Your wife is waiting in the anteroom, will you see her?’

‘I saw her fall, I shot her, I saw her fall dead!’

‘Mr Hill, do you hear me?’

‘Yes!’ he shouted, pounding at the wall with his fists. ‘I hear you. I hear you! She’s dead, she’s dead, can’t she let me be! I killed her. I won’t see her, she’s dead!’

A pause. ‘Very well, Mr Hill,’ murmured the voice.

The red light winked off.

Lightning flashed through the sky and lit his face. He pressed his hot cheeks to the cold bars and waited, while the rain fell. After a long time, a door opened somewhere onto the street and he saw two caped figures emerge from the prison office below. They paused under an arc light and glanced up.

It was Katie. And beside her, Leonard Phelps.

‘Katie!’

Her face turned away. The man took her arm. They hurried across the avenue in the black rain and got into a low car.

‘Katie!’ He wrenched at the bars. He screamed and beat and pulled at the concrete ledge. ‘She’s alive! Guard! Guard! I saw her! She’s not dead, I didn’t kill her, now you can let me out! I didn’t murder anyone, it’s all a joke, a mistake, I saw her, I saw her! Katie, come back, tell them, Katie, say you’re alive! Katie!’

The guards came running.

‘You can’t kill me! I didn’t do anything! Katie’s alive. I saw her!’

‘We saw her, too, sir.’

‘But let me free, then! Let me free!’ It was insane. He choked and almost fell.

‘We’ve been through all that, sir, at the trial.’

‘It’s not fair!’ He leaped up and clawed at the window, bellowing.

The car drove away. Katie and Leonard inside it. Drove away to Paris and Athens and Venice and London next spring and Stockholm next summer and Vienna in the fall.

‘Katie, come back, you can’t
do
this to me!’

The red taillights of the car dwindled in the cold rain. Behind him, the guards moved forward to take hold of him while he screamed.

‘Sit down, young man,’ said the Official.

‘Thanks.’ The young man sat.

‘I’ve been hearing rumors about you,’ the Official said pleasantly. ‘Oh, nothing much. Your nervousness. Your not getting on so well. Several months now I’ve heard about you, and I thought I’d call you in. Thought maybe you’d like your job changed. Like to go overseas, work in some other War Area? Desk job killing you off, like to get right in on the old fight?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said the young sergeant.

‘What
do
you want?’

The sergeant shrugged and looked at his hands. ‘To live in peace. To learn that during the night, somehow, the guns of the world had rusted, the bacteria had turned sterile in their bomb casings, the tanks had sunk like prehistoric monsters into roads suddenly made tar pits. That’s what I’d like.’

‘That’s what we’d all like, of course,’ said the Official. ‘Now stop all that idealistic chatter and tell me where you’d like to be sent. You have your choice—the Western or the Northern War Zone.’ The Official tapped a pink map on his desk.

But the sergeant was talking at his hands, turning them over, looking at the fingers: ‘What would you officers do, what would we men do, what would the
world
do if we all woke tomorrow with the guns in flaking ruin?’

The Official saw that he would have to deal carefully with the sergeant. He smiled quietly. ‘That’s an interesting question. I like to talk about such theories, and my answer is that there’d be mass panic. Each nation would think itself the only unarmed nation in the world, and would blame its enemies for the disaster. There’d be waves of suicide, stocks collapsing, a million tragedies.’

‘But
after
that,’ the sergeant said. ‘After they realized it was true, that
every nation was disarmed and there was nothing more to fear, if we were all clean to start over fresh and new, what then?’

‘They’d rearm as swiftly as possible.’

‘What if they could be stopped?’

‘Then they’d beat each other with their fists. If it got down to that. Huge armies of men with boxing gloves of steel spikes would gather at the national borders. And if you took the gloves away they’d use their fingernails and feet. And if you cut their legs off they’d
spit
on each other. And if you cut off their tongues and stopped their mouths with corks they’d fill the atmosphere so full of hate that mosquitoes would drop to the ground and birds would fall dead from telephone wires.’

‘Then you don’t think it would do any good?’ the sergeant said.

‘Certainly not. It’d be like ripping the carapace off a turtle. Civilization would gasp and die from the shock.’

The young man shook his head. ‘Or are you lying to yourself and me because you’ve a nice comfortable job?’

‘Let’s call it ninety per cent cynicism, ten per cent rationalizing the situation. Go put your Rust away and forget about it.’

The sergeant jerked his head up. ‘How’d you know I
had
it?’ he said.

‘Had what?’

‘The Rust, of course.’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘I
can
do it, you know. I could start the Rust tonight if I wanted to.’

The Official laughed. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘I am. I’ve been meaning to come talk to you. I’m glad you called me in. I’ve worked on this invention for a long time. It’s been a dream of mine. It has to do with the structure of certain atoms. If you study them you find that the arrangement of atoms in steel armor is such-and-such an arrangement. I was looking for an imbalance factor. I majored in physics and metallurgy, you know. It came to me, there’s a Rust factor in the air all the time. Water vapor. I had to find a way to give steel a “nervous breakdown.” Then the water vapor everywhere in the world would take over. Not on all metal, of course. Our civilization is built on steel, I wouldn’t want to destroy most buildings. I’d just eliminate guns and shells, tanks, planes, battleships. I can set the machine to work on copper and brass and aluminum, too, if necessary. I’d just walk by all of those weapons and just being near them I’d make them fall away.’

The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant. ‘May I ask you a question?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you ever thought you were Christ?’

‘I can’t say that I have. But I have considered that God was good to me to let me find what I was looking for, if that’s what you mean.’

The Official reached into his breast pocket and drew out an expensive ball-point pen capped with a rifle shell. He flourished the pen and started filling in a form. ‘I want you to take this to Dr Mathews this afternoon, for a complete checkup. Not that I expect anything really bad, understand. But don’t you feel you
should
see a doctor?’

‘You think I’m lying about my machine,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’m not. It’s so small it can be hidden in this cigarette package. The effect of it extends for nine hundred miles. I could tour this country in a few days, with the machine set to a certain type of steel. The other nations couldn’t take advantage of us because I’d rust their weapons as they approach us. Then I’d fly to Europe. By this time next month the world would be free of war forever. I don’t know how I found this invention. It’s impossible. Just as impossible as the atom bomb. I’ve waited a month now, trying to think it over. I worried about what would happen if I did rip off the carapace, as you say. But now I’ve just about decided. My talk with you has helped clarify things. Nobody thought an airplane would ever fly, nobody thought an atom would ever explode, and nobody thinks that there can ever be Peace, but there
will
be.’

‘Take that paper over to Dr Mathews, will you?’ said the Official hastily.

The sergeant got up. ‘You’re not going to assign me to any new Zone then?’

‘Not right away, no. I’ve changed my mind. We’ll let Mathews decide.’

‘I’ve decided then,’ said the young man. ‘I’m leaving the post within the next few minutes. I’ve a pass. Thank you very much for giving me your valuable time, sir.’

‘Now look here, Sergeant, don’t take things so seriously. You don’t have to leave. Nobody’s going to hurt you.’

‘That’s right. Because nobody would believe me. Good-by, sir.’ The sergeant opened the office door and stepped out.

The door shut and the Official was alone. He stood for a moment looking at the door. He sighed. He rubbed his hands over his face. The phone rang. He answered it abstractedly.

‘Oh,
hello
, Doctor. I was just going to call you.’ A pause. ‘Yes, I was going to send him over to you. Look, is it all right for that young man to be wandering about? It
is
all right? If you say so, Doctor. Probably needs a rest, a good long one. Poor boy has a delusion of rather an interesting sort. Yes, yes. It’s a shame. But that’s what a Sixteen-Year War can do to you, I suppose.’

The phone voice buzzed in reply.

The Official listened and nodded. ‘I’ll make a note on that. Just a second.’ He reached for his ball-point pen. ‘Hold on a moment. Always mislaying things.’ He patted his pocket. ‘Had my pen here a moment ago. Wait.’ He put down the phone and searched his desk, pulling out drawers. He checked
his blouse pocket again. He stopped moving. Then his hands twitched slowly into his pocket and probed down. He poked his thumb and forefinger deep and brought out a pinch of something.

He sprinkled it on his desk blotter: a small filtering powder of yellowred rust.

He sat staring at it for a moment. Then he picked up the phone. ‘Mathews,’ he said, ‘get off the line, quick.’ There was a click of someone hanging up and then he dialed another call. ‘Hello. Guard Station, listen, there’s a man coming past you any minute now, you know him, name of Sergeant Hollis, stop him, shoot him down, kill him if necessary, don’t ask any questions, kill the son of a bitch, you heard me, this is the Official talking! Yes, kill him, you hear!’

‘But sir,’ said a bewildered voice on the other end of the line. ‘I can’t, I just
can’t…
’

‘What do you mean you can’t, God damn it!’

‘Because…’ The voice faded away. You could hear the guard breathing into the phone a mile away.

The Official shook the phone. ‘Listen to me, listen, get your gun ready!’

‘I can’t shoot anyone,’ said the guard.

The Official sank back in his chair. He sat blinking for half a minute, gasping.

Out there even now—he didn’t have to look, no one had to tell him—the hangars were dusting down in soft red rust, and the airplanes were blowing away on a brown-rust wind into nothingness, and the tanks were sinking, sinking slowly into the hot asphalt roads, like dinosaurs (isn’t that what the man had said?) sinking into primordial tar pits. Trucks were blowing away into ocher puffs of smoke, their drivers dumped by the road, with only the tires left running on the highways.

‘Sir…’ said the guard, who was seeing all this, far away. ‘Oh, God…’

‘Listen, listen!’ screamed the Official. ‘Go after him, get him, with your hands, choke him, with your fists, beat him, use your feet, kick his ribs in, kick him to death, do anything, but get that man. I’ll be right out!’ He hung up the phone.

By instinct he jerked open the bottom desk drawer to get his service pistol. A pile of brown rust filled the new leather holster. He swore and leaped up.

On the way out of the office he grabbed a chair. It’s wood, he thought. Good old-fashioned wood, good old-fashioned maple. He hurled it against the wall twice, and it broke. Then he seized one of the legs, clenched it hard in his fist, his face bursting red, the breath snorting in his nostrils, his mouth wide. He struck the palm of his hand with the leg of the chair, testing it. ‘All right, God damn it, come on!’ he cried.

He rushed out, yelling, and slammed the door.

The sundials were tumbled into white pebbles. The birds of the air now flew in ancient skies of rock and sand, buried, their songs stopped. The dead sea bottoms were currented with dust which flooded the land when the wind bade it reenact an old tale of engulfment. The cities were deeplaid with granaries of silence, time stored and kept, pools and fountains of quietude and memory.

Mars was dead.

Then, out of the large stillness, from a great distance, there was an insect sound which grew large among the cinnamon hills and moved in the sun-blazed air until the highway trembled and dust was shaken whispering down in the old cities.

The sound ceased.

In the shimmering silence of midday, Albert Beck and Leonard Craig sat in an ancient landcar, eying a dead city which did not move under their gaze but waited for their shout:

‘Hello!’

A crystal tower dropped into soft dusting rain.

‘You there!’

And another tumbled down.

And another and another fell as Beck called, summoning them to death. In shattering flights, stone animals with vast granite wings dived to strike the courtyards and fountains. His cry summoned them like living beasts and the beasts gave answer, groaned, cracked, leaned up, tilted over, trembling, hesitant, then split the air and swept down with grimaced mouths and empty eyes, with sharp, eternally hungry teeth suddenly seized out and strewn like shrapnel on the tiles.

Beck waited. No more towers fell.

‘It’s safe to go in now.’

Craig didn’t move. ‘For the same reason?’

Beck nodded.

‘For a damned
bottle
! I don’t understand. Why does everyone want it?’

Beck got out of the car. ‘Those that found it, they never told, they never explained. But—it’s old. Old as the desert, as the dead seas—and it might contain anything. That’s what the legend says. And because it
could
hold anything—well, that stirs a man’s hunger.’

‘Yours, not mine,’ said Craig. His mouth barely moved; his eyes were half-shut, faintly amused. He stretched lazily. ‘I’m just along for the ride. Better watching you than sitting in the heat.’

Beck had stumbled upon the old landcar a month back, before Craig had joined him. It was part of the flotsam of the First Industrial Invasion of Mars that had ended when the race moved on toward the stars. He had worked on the motor and run it from city to dead city, through the lands of the idlers and roustabouts, the dreamers and lazers, men caught in the backwash of space, men like himself and Craig who had never wanted to do much of anything and had found Mars a fine place to do it in.

‘Five thousand, ten thousand years back the Martians made the Blue Bottle,’ said Beck. ‘Blown from Martian glass—and lost and found and lost and found again and again.’

He stared into the wavering heat shimmer of the dead city. All my life, thought Beck, I’ve done nothing and nothing inside the nothing. Others, better men, have done big things, gone off to Mercury, or Venus, or out beyond the System. Except me. Not me. But the Blue Bottle can
change
all that.

He turned and walked away from the silent car.

Craig was out and after him, moving easily along. ‘What is it now, ten years you’ve hunted? You twitch when you sleep, wake up in fits, sweat through the days. You want the damn bottle
that
bad, and don’t know what’s in it. You’re a fool. Beck.’

‘Shut up, shut up,’ said Beck, kicking a slide of pebbles out of his way.

They walked together into the ruined city, over a mosaic of cracked tiles shaped into a stone tapestry of fragile Martian creatures, long-dead beasts which appeared and disappeared as a slight breath of wind stirred the silent dust.

‘Wait,’ said Beck. He cupped his hands to his mouth and gave a great shout. ‘You there!’

‘…there,’ said an echo, and towers fell. Fountains and stone pillars folded into themselves. That was the way of these cities. Sometimes towers as beautiful as a symphony would fall at a spoken word. It was like watching a Bach cantata disintegrate before your eyes.

A moment later: bones buried in bones. The dust settled. Two structures remained intact.

Beck stepped forward, nodding to his friend.

They moved in search.

And, searching, Craig paused, a faint smile on his lips. ‘In that bottle,’ he said, ‘is there a little accordion woman, all folded up like one of those tin cups, or like one of those Japanese flowers you put in water and it opens out?’

‘I don’t need a woman.’

‘Maybe you do. Maybe you never had a
real
woman, a woman who loved you, so, secretly, that’s what you hope is in it.’ Craig pursed his mouth. ‘Or maybe, in that bottle, something from your childhood. All in a tiny bundle—a lake, a tree you climbed, green grass, some crayfish. How’s
that
sound?’

Beck’s eyes focused on a distant point. ‘Sometimes—that’s almost it. The past—Earth. I don’t know.’

Craig nodded. ‘What’s in the bottle would depend, maybe, on who’s looking. Now, if there was a shot of
whiskey
in it…’

‘Keep looking,’ said Beck.

There were seven rooms filled with glitter and shine; from floor to tiered ceiling there were casks, crocks, magnums, urns, vases—fashioned of red, pink, yellow, violet, and black glass. Beck shattered them, one by one, to eliminate them, to get them out of the way so he would never have to go through them again.

Beck finished his room, stood ready to invade the next. He was almost afraid to go on. Afraid that
this
time he would find it: that the search would be over and the meaning would go out of his life. Only after he had heard of the Blue Bottle from fire-travelers all the way from Venus to Jupiter, ten years ago, had life begun to take on a purpose. The fever had lit him and he had burned steadily ever since. If he worked it properly, the prospect of finding the bottle might fill his entire life to the brim. Another thirty years, if he was careful and not
too
diligent, of search, never admitting aloud that it wasn’t the bottle that counted at all, but the search, the running and the hunting, the dust and the cities and the going-on.

Beck heard a muffled sound. He turned and walked to a window looking out into the courtyard. A small gray sand cycle had purred up almost noiselessly at the end of the street. A plump man with blonde hair eased himself off the spring seat and stood looking into the city. Another searcher. Beck sighed. Thousands of them, searching and searching. But there were thousands of brittle cities and towns and villages and it would take a millennium to sift them all.

‘How you doing?’ Craig appeared in a doorway.

‘No luck,’ Beck sniffed the air. ‘Do you smell anything?’

‘What?’ Craig looked about.

‘Smells like—bourbon.’

‘Ho!’ Craig laughed. ‘That’s
me
!’

‘You?’

‘I just took a drink. Found it in the other room. Shoved some stuff around, a mess of bottles, like always, and one of them had some bourbon in it, so I had myself a drink.’

Beck was staring at him, beginning to tremble. ‘What—what would bourbon be doing
here
, in a Martian bottle?’ His hands were cold. He took a slow step forward. ‘Show me!’

‘I’m sure that…’

‘
Show
me, damn you!’

It was there, in one corner of the room, a container of Martian glass as blue as the sky, the size of a small fruit, light and airy in Beck’s hand as he set it down upon a table.

‘It’s half-f of bourbon,’ said Craig.

‘I don’t see anything inside,’ said Beck.

‘Then shake it.’

Beck picked it up, gingerly shook it.

‘Hear it gurgle?’

‘No.’

‘I can hear it plain.’

Beck replaced it on the table. Sunlight spearing through a side window struck blue flashes off the slender container. It was the blue of a star held in the hand. It was the blue of a shallow ocean bay at noon. It was the blue of a diamond at morning.

‘This
is
it,’ said Beck quietly. ‘I know it is. We don’t have to look any more. We’ve found the Blue Bottle.’

Craig looked skeptical. ‘Sure you don’t
see
anything in it?’

‘Nothing…But—’ Beck bent close and peered deeply into the blue universe of glass. ‘Maybe if I open it up and let it out, whatever it is, I’ll know.’

‘I put the stopper in tight. Here.’ Craig reached out.

‘If you gentlemen will excuse me,’ said a voice in the door behind them.

The plump man with blonde hair walked into their line of vision with a gun. He did not look at their faces, he looked only at the blue glass bottle. He began to smile. ‘I hate very much to handle guns,’ he said, ‘but it is a matter of necessity, as I simply
must
have that work of art. I suggest that you allow me to take it without trouble.’

Beck was almost pleased. It had a certain beauty of timing, this incident; it was the sort of thing he might have wished for, to have the treasure stolen before it was opened. Now there was the good prospect of a chase, a fight, a series of gains and losses, and, before they were done, perhaps another four or five years spent upon a new search.

‘Come along now,’ said the stranger. ‘Give it up.’ He raised the gun warningly.

Beck handed him the bottle.

‘Amazing. Really amazing,’ said the plump man. ‘I can’t believe it was as simple as this, to walk in, hear two men talking, and to have the Blue Bottle simply
handed
to me. Amazing!’ And he wandered off down the hall, out into the daylight, chuckling to himself.

Under the cool double moons of Mars the midnight cities were bone and dust. Along the scattered highway the landcar bumped and rattled, past cities where the fountains, the gyrostats, the furniture, the metal-singing books, the paintings lay powdered over with mortar and insect wings. Past cities that were cities no longer, but only things rubbed to a fine silt that flowered senselessly back and forth on the wine winds between one land and another, like the sand in a gigantic hourglass, endlessly pyramiding and repyramiding. Silence opened to let the car pass, and closed swiftly in behind.

Craig said, ‘We’ll never find him. These damned road. So old. Potholes, lumps, everything wrong. He’s got the advantage with the cycle; he can dodge and weave. Damn!’

They swerved abruptly, avoiding a bad stretch. The car moved over the old highway like an eraser, coming upon blind soil, passing over it, dusting it away to reveal the emerald and gold colors of ancient Martian mosaics worked into the road surface.

‘Wait,’ cried Beck, He throttled the car down. ‘I saw something back there.’

‘Where?’

They drove back a hundred yards.

‘There. You see. It’s
him
.’

In a ditch by the side of the road the plump man lay folded over his cycle. He did not move. His eyes were wide, and when Beck flashed a torch down, the eyes burned dully.

‘Where’s the bottle?’ asked Craig.

Beck jumped into the ditch and picked up the man’s gun. ‘I don’t know. Gone.’

‘What killed him?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘The cycle looks okay. Not an accident.’

Beck rolled the body over. ‘No wounds. Looks like he just—stopped, of his own accord.’

‘Heart attack, maybe,’ said Craig. ‘Excited over the bottle. He gets down here to hide. Thought he’d be all right, but the attack finished him.’

‘That doesn’t account for the Blue Bottle.’

‘Someone came along. Lord, you know how many searchers there are…’

They scanned the darkness around them, Far off, in the starred blackness, on the blue hills, they saw a dim movement.

‘Up there.’ Beck pointed. ‘Three men on foot.’

‘They must have…’

‘My God, look!’

Below them, in the ditch, the figure of the plump man glowed, began to melt. The eyes took on the aspect of moonstones under a sudden rush of water. The face began to dissolve away into fire. The hair resembled small firecracker strings, lit and sputtering. The body fumed as they watched. The fingers jerked with flame. Then, as if a gigantic hammer had struck a glass statue, the body cracked upward and was gone in a blaze of pink shards, becoming mist as the night breeze carried it across the highway.

‘They must have—
done
something to him,’ said Craig. ‘Those three, with a new kind of weapon.’

‘But it’s happened before,’ said Beck. ‘Men I knew about who had the Blue Bottle. They vanished. And the bottle passed on to others who vanished.’ He shook his head. ‘Looked like a million fireflies when he broke apart…’

‘You going after them?’

Beck returned to the car. He judged the desert mounds, the hills of bone-silt and silence. ‘It’ll be a tough job, but I think I can poke the car through after them. I
have
to, now.’ He paused, not speaking to Craig. ‘I think I know what’s in the Blue Bottle…Finally, I realize that what I want most of all is in there. Waiting for me.’

‘I’m not going,’ said Craig, coming up to the car where Beck sat in the dark, his hands on his knees. ‘I’m not going out there with you, chasing three armed men. I just want to live, Beck. That bottle means nothing to me. I won’t risk my skin for it. But I’ll wish you luck.’

‘Thanks,’ said Beck. And he drove away, into the dunes.

The night was as cool as water coming over the glass hood of the landcar.

Beck throttled hard over dead river washes and spills of chalked pebble, driving between great cliffs. Ribbons of double moonlight painted the basreliefs of gods and animals on the cliff sides all yellow-gold: mile-high faces upon which Martian histories were etched and stamped in symbols, incredible faces with open cave eyes and gaping cave mouths.

The motor’s roar dislodged rocks, boulders. In a whole rushing downpour of stone, golden segments of ancient cliff sculpture slid out of the moons’ rays at the top of the cliff and vanished into blue cool-well darkness.

In the roar, as he drove, Beck cast his mind back—to all the nights in the last ten years, nights when he had built red fires on the sea bottoms, and cooked slow, thoughtful meals. And dreamed. Always those dreams of
wanting
. And not knowing what. Ever since he was a young man, the hard life on Earth, the great panic of 2130, the starvation, chaos, riot, want. Then bucking through the planets, the womanless, loveless years,
the alone years. You come out of the dark into the light, out of the womb into the world, and what do you find that you really want?