Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1 - Ray Bradbury

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      ‘Yes, yes, what a lovely insanity. Metal, rubber, gravitizers, foods, clothing, fuel, weapons, ladders, nuts, bolts, spoons. Ten thousand separate items I checked on your vessel. Never have I seen such a complexity. There were even shadows under the bunks and under everything! Such concentration of will! And everything, no matter how or when tested, had a smell, a solidity, a taste, a sound! Let me embrace you!’

      He stood back at last. ‘I’ll write this into my greatest monograph! I’ll speak of it at the Martian Academy next month! Look at you! Why, you’ve even changed your eye color from yellow to blue, your skin to pink from brown. And those clothes, and your hands having five fingers instead of six! Biological metamorphosis through psychological imbalance! And your three friends—’

      He took out a little gun. ‘Incurable, of course. You poor, wonderful man. You will be happier dead. Have you any last words?’

      ‘Stop, for God’s sake! Don’t shoot!’

      ‘You sad creature. I shall put you out of this misery which has driven you to imagine this rocket and these three men. It will be most engrossing to watch your friends and your rocket vanish once I have killed you. I will write a neat paper on the dissolvement of neurotic images from what I perceive here today.’

      ‘I’m from Earth! My name is Jonathan Williams, and these—’

      ‘Yes, I know,’ soothed Mr Xxx, and fired his gun.

      The captain fell with a bullet in his heart. The other three men screamed.

      Mr Xxx stared at them. ‘You continue to exist? This is superb! Hallucinations with time and spatial persistence!’ He pointed the gun at them. ‘Well. I’ll scare you into dissolving.’

      ‘No!’ cried the three men.

      ‘An auditory appeal, even with the patient dead,’ observed Mr Xxx as he shot the three men down.

      They lay on the sand, intact, not moving.

      He kicked them. Then he rapped on the ship.

      ‘It persists! They persist!’ He fired his gun again and again at the bodies. Then he stood back. The smiling mask dropped from his face.

      Slowly the little psychologist’s face changed. His jaw sagged. The gun dropped from his fingers. His eyes were dull and vacant. He put his hands up and turned in a blind circle. He fumbled at the bodies, saliva filling his mouth.

      ‘Hallucinations,’ he mumbled frantically. ‘Taste. Sight. Smell. Sound. Feeling.’ He waved his hands. His eyes bulged. His mouth began to give off a faint froth.

      ‘Go away!’ he shouted at the bodies. ‘Go away!’ he screamed at the ship. He examined his trembling hands. ‘Contaminated,’ he whispered wildly. ‘Carried over into me. Telepathy. Hypnosis. Now I’m insane. Now I’m contaminated. Hallucinations in all their sensual forms.’ He stopped and searched around with his numb hands for the gun. ‘Only one cure. Only one way to make them go away, vanish.’

      A shot rang out. Mr Xxx fell.

      The four bodies lay in the sun. Mr Xxx lay where he fell.

      The rocket reclined on the little sunny hill and didn’t vanish.

      When the town people found the rocket at sunset they wondered what it was. Nobody knew, so it was sold to a junkman and hauled off to be broken up for scrap metal.

      That night it rained all night. The next day was fair and warm.

       The Off Season

      Sam Parkhill motioned with the broom, sweeping away the blue Martian sand.

      ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Yes, sir, look at that!’ He pointed. ‘Look at that sign. SAM’S HOT DOGS! Ain’t that beautiful, Elma?’

      ‘Sure, Sam,’ said his wife.

      ‘Boy, what a change for me. If the boys from the Fourth Expedition could see me now. Am I glad to be in business myself while all the rest of them guys’re off soldiering around still. We’ll make thousands, Elma, thousands.’

      His wife looked at him for a long time, not speaking. ‘Whatever happened to Captain Wilder?’ she asked finally. ‘That captain that killed that guy who thought he was going to kill off every other Earth Man, what was his name?’

      ‘Spender, that nut. He was too damn particular. Oh, Captain Wilder? He’s off on a rocket to Jupiter, I hear. They kicked him upstairs. I think he was a little batty abouts Mars too. Touchy, you know. He’ll be back down from Jupiter and Pluto in about twenty years if he’s lucky. That’s what he gets for shooting off his mouth. And while he’s freezing to death, look at me, look at this place!’

      This was a crossroads where two dead highways came and went in darkness. Here Sam Parkhill had flung up this riveted aluminum structure, garish with white light, trembling with juke-box melody.

      He stooped to fix a border of broken glass he had placed on the footpath. He had broken the glass from some old Martian buildings in the hills. ‘Best hot dogs on two worlds! First man on Mars with a hot-dog stand! The best onions and chili and mustard! You can’t say I’m not alert. Here’s the main highways, over there is the dead city and the mineral deposits. Those trucks from Earth Settlement 101 will have to pass here twenty-four hours a day! Do I know my locations, or don’t I?’

      His wife looked at her fingernails.

      ‘You think those ten thousand new-type work rockets will come through to Mars?’ she said at last.

      ‘In a month,’ he said loudly. ‘Why you look so funny?’

      ‘I don’t trust those Earth people,’ she said. ‘I’ll believe it when I see them ten thousand rockets arrive with the one hundred thousand Mexicans and Chinese on them.’

      ‘Customers.’ He lingered on the word. ‘One hundred thousand hungry people.’

      ‘If,’ said his wife slowly, watching the sky, ‘there’s no atomic war. I don’t trust no atom bombs. There’s so many of them on Earth now, you never can tell.’

      ‘Ah,’ said Sam, and went on sweeping.

      From the corners of his eyes he caught a blue flicker. Something floated in the air gently behind him. He heard his wife say, ‘Sam. A friend of yours to see you.’

      Sam whirled to see the mask seemingly floating in the wind.

      ‘So you’re back again!’ And Sam held his broom like a weapon.

      The mask nodded. It was cut from pale blue glass and was fitted above a thin neck, under which were blowing loose robes of thin yellow silk. From the silk two mesh silver hands appeared. The mask mouth was a slot from which musical sounds issued now as the robes, the mask, the hands increased to a height, decreased.

      ‘Mr Parkhill, I’ve come back to speak to you again,’ the voice said from behind the mask.

      ‘I thought I told you I don’t want you near here!’ cried Sam. ‘Go on, I’ll give you the Disease!’

      ‘I’ve already had the Disease,’ said the voice. ‘I was one of the few survivors. I was sick a long time.’

      ‘Go on and hide in the hills, that’s where you belong, that’s where you’ve been. Why you come on down and bother me? Now, all of a sudden. Twice in one day.’

      ‘We mean you no harm.’

      ‘But I mean you harm!’ said Sam, backing up. ‘I don’t like strangers. I don’t like Martians. I never seen one before. It ain’t natural. All these years you guys hide, and all of a sudden you pick on me. Leave me alone.’

      ‘We

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