Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (28 page)

 
          
 
He shut the outer air-lock door.

 
          
 
"Now."

 
          
 
They waited. The ship's pulse ran. The heart
of the ship rushed, beat, rushed, the Cup of gold in it. The cold blood raced
around about down through, around about down through.

 
          
 
The captain exhaled slowly.

 
          
 
The ice stopped dripping from the ceiling. It
froze again.

 
          
 
"Let's get out of here."

 
          
 
The ship turned and ran.

 
          
 
"Listen!"

 
          
 
The heart of the ship was slowing, slowing.
The dials spun on down through the thousands; the needles whirred, invisible.
The thermometer voice chanted the change of seasons. They were all thinking
now, together: Pull away and away from the fire and the flame, the heat and the
melting, the yellow and the white. Go on out now to cool and dark. In twenty
hours perhaps they might even dismantle some refrigerators, let winter die.
Soon they would move in night so cold it might be necessary to use the ship's
new furnace, draw heat from the shielded fire they carried now like an unborn
child.

 
          
 
They were going home.

 
          
 
They were going home and there was some little
time, even as he tended to the body of Bretton lying in a bank of white winter
snow, for the captain to remember a poem he had written many years before:

 
          
 
Sometimes I see the sun a burning Tree, Its
golden fruit swung bright in airless air, Its apples wormed with man and
gravity, Their worship breathing from them everywhere, As man sees Sun as
burning Tree . . .

 
          
 
The captain sat for a long while by the body,
feeling many separate things. I feel sad, he thought, and I feel good, and I
feel like a boy coming home from school with a handful of dandelions.

 
          
 
"Well," said the captain, sitting,
eyes shut, sighing. "Well, where do we go now, eh, where are we
going?" He felt his men sitting or standing all about him, the terror dead
in them, their breathing quiet. "When you've gone a long, long way down to
the sun and touched it and lingered and jumped around and streaked away from
it, where are you going then? When you go away from the heat and the noonday
light and the laziness, where do you go?"

 
          
 
His men waited for him to say it out. They
waited for him to gather all of the coolness and the whiteness and the welcome
and refreshing climate of the word in his mind, and they saw him settle the
word, like a bit of ice cream, in his mouth, rolling it gently.

 
          
 
"There's only one direction in space from
here on out," he said at last

 
          
 
They waited. They waited as the ship moved swiftly
into cold darkness away from the light.

 
          
 
"North," murmured the captain,
"North."

 
          
 
And they all smiled, as if a wind had come up
suddenly in the middle of a hot afternoon.

 
For Dad, whose love,
very late in life, surprised his son.

 
          
 
And for Bernard Berenson and Nicky Mariano,
who gave me a new world.

 
          
 
George and Alice Smith detrained at Biarritz
one summer noon and in an hour had run through their hotel onto the beach into
the ocean and back out to bake upon the sand.

 
          
 
To see George Smith sprawled burning there,
you'd think him only a tourist flown fresh as iced lettuce to Europe and soon
to be transshipped home. But here was a man who loved art more than life
itself.

 
          
 
"There . . ." George Smith sighed.
Another ounce of perspiration trickled down his chest. Boil out the Ohio tap
water, he thought,
then
drink down the best Bordeaux.
Silt your blood with rich French sediment so you'll see with native eyes!

 
          
 
Why? Why eat, breathe, drink everything
French? So that, given time, he might really begin to understand the genius of
one man.

 
          
 
His mouth moved, forming a name.

 
          
 
"George?" His wife loomed over him.
"I know what you've been thinking. I can read your lips."

 
          
 
He lay perfectly still, waiting.

 
          
 
"And?"

 
          
 
Originally published in Playboy. Copyright ©
1956 by HMH Publishing Co., Inc.

 
          
 
"Picasso," she said.

 
          
 
He winced. Someday she would learn to
pronounce that name.

 
          
 
"Please," she said. "Relax. I
know you heard the rumor this morning, but you should see your eyes—your tic is
back. All right, Picasso's here, down the coast a few miles away, visiting
friends in some small fishing town. But you must forget it or our vacation's ruined."

 
          
 
"I wish I'd never heard the rumor,"
he said honestly.

 
          
 
"If only," she said, "you liked
other painters."

 
          
 
Others? Yes, there were others. He could
breakfast most congenially on Caravaggio still lifes of autunm pears and
midnight plums. For lunch: those fire-squirting, thick-wormed Van Gogh
sunflowers, those blooms a blind man might read with one rush of scorched
fingers down fiery canvas. But the great feast? The paintings he saved his
palate for? There, filling the horizon like Neptune risen, crowned with
limeweed, alabaster, coral, paintbrushes clenched like tridents in horn-nailed
fists, and with fishtail vast enough to fluke summer showers out over all
Gibraltar— who else but the creator of Girl Before a Mirror and Guernica?

 
          
 
"Alice," he said patiently,
"how can I explain? Coming down on the train, I thought. Good lord, it's
all Picasso country!"

 
          
 
But was it really? he wondered. The sky, the
land, the people, the flushed pink bricks here, scrolled electric-blue ironwork
balconies there, a mandolin ripe as a fruit in some man's thousand
fingerprinting hands, billboard tatters blowing like confetti in night
winds—how much was Picasso, how much George Smith staring round the world with
wild Picasso eyes? He despaired of answering. That old man had distilled
turpentines and linseed oil so thoroughly through George Smith that they shaped
his being, all Blue Period at twilight, all Rose Period at dawn.

 
          
 
"I keep thinking," he said aloud,
"if we saved our money . . ."

 
          
 
"We'll never have five thousand
dollars."

 
          
 
"I know," he said quietly. "But
it's nice thinking we might bring it off someday. Wouldn't it be great to just
step up to him, say 'Pablo, here's five thousand! Give us the sea, the sand,
that sky, or any old thing you want, we'll be happy . . .'"

 
          
 
After a moment his wife touched his arm.

 
          
 
"I think you'd better go in the water
now," she said.

 
          
 
"Yes," he said. "I'd better do
just that."

 
          
 
White fire showered up when he cut the water.

 
          
 
During the afternoon George Smith came out and
went into the ocean with the vast spilling motions of now warm, now cool people
who at last, with the sun's decline, their bodies all lobster colors and colors
of broiled squab and guinea hen, trudged for their wedding-cake hotels.

 
          
 
The beach lay deserted for endless mile on
mile save for two people. One was George Smith, towel over shoulder, out for a
last devotional.

 
          
 
Far along the shore another shorter,
square-cut man walked alone in the tranquil weather. He was deeper-tanned, his
close-shaven head dyed almost mahogany by the sun, and his eyes were clear and
bright as water in his face.

 
          
 
So the shore-line stage was set, and in a few
minutes the two men would meet. And once again Fate fixed the scales for shocks
and surprises, arrivals and departures. And all the while these two solitary
strollers did not for a moment think on coincidence, that unswum stream which
fingers at man's elbow with every crowd in every town. Nor did they ponder the
fact that if man dares dip into that stream he grabs a wonder in each hand.
Like most, they shrugged at such folly and stayed well up the bank lest Fate
should shove them in.

 
          
 
The stranger stood alone. Glancing about, he
saw his alone-ness, saw the waters of the lovely bay, saw the sun sliding down
the late colors of the day, and then, half turning, spied a small wooden object
on the sand. It was no more than the slender stick from a lime ice cream
delicacy long since melted away. Smiling, he picked the stick up. With another
glance around to reinsure his solitude, the man stooped again and, holding the
stick gently, with fight sweeps of his hand began to do the one thing in all
the world he knew best how to do.

 
          
 
He began to draw incredible figures along the
sand.

 
          
 
He sketched one figure and then moved over
and, still looking down, completely focused on his work now, drew a second and
a third figure, and after that a fourth and a fifth and a sixth.

 
          
 
George Smith, printing the shore line with his
feet, gazed here, gazed there, and then saw the man ahead. George Smith,
drawing nearer, saw that the man, deeply tanned, was bending down. Nearer yet,
and it was obvious what the man was up to. George Smith chuckled. Of course, of
course . . . Alone on the beach this man—how old? Sixty-five? Seventy?—was
scribbling and doodling away. How the sand flew! How the wild portraits flung
themselves out there on the shore! How . . .

 
          
 
George Smith took one more step and stopped,
very still.

 
          
 
The stranger was drawing and drawing and did
not seem to sense that anyone stood immediately behind him and the world of his
drawings in the sand. By now he was so deeply enchanted with his solitudinous
creation that depth bombs set off in the bay might not have stopped his flying
hand nor turned him round.

 
          
 
George Smith looked down at the sand. And
after a long while, looking, he began to tremble.

 
          
 
For there on the flat shore were pictures of
Grecian lions and Mediterranean goats and maidens with flesh of sand like
powdered gold and satyrs piping on hand-carved horns and children dancing,
strewing flowers along and along the beach with lambs gamboling after, and
musicians skipping to their harps and lyres and unicorns racing youths toward
distant meadows, woodlands, ruined temples, and volcanoes. Along the shore in a
never-broken line, the hand, the wooden stylus of this man, bent down in fever
and raining perspiration, scribbled, ribboned, looped around over and up,
across, in, out, stitched, whispered, stayed, then hurried on as if this
traveling bacchanal must flourish to its end before the sun was put out by the
sea. Twenty, thirty yards or more the nymphs and dryads and summer founts
sprang up in unraveled hieroglyphs. And the sand in the dying light was the
color of molten copper on which was now slashed a message that any man in any
time might read and savor down the years. Everything whirled and poised in its
own wind and gravity. Now wine was being crushed from under the grape-blooded
feet of dancing vintners' daughters, now steaming seas gave birth to coin-sheathed
monsters while flowered kites strewed scent on blowing clouds . . . now . . .
now . . , now . . .

 
          
 
The artist stopped.

 
          
 
George Smith drew back and stood away.

 
          
 
The artist glanced up, surprised to find
someone so near. Then he simply stood there, looking from George Smith to his
own creations flung like idle footprints down the way. He smiled at last and
shrugged as if to say, Look what I've done; see what a child? You will forgive
me, won't you? One day or another we are all fools . . . You too, perhaps? So
allow an old fool this, eh? Good! Good!

 
          
 
But George Smith could only look at the little
man with the sun-dark skin and the clear sharp eyes and say the man's name
once, in a whisper, to himself.

 
          
 
They stood thus for perhaps another five seconds.
George Smith staring at the sand-frieze, and the artist watching George Smith
with amused curiosity. George Smith opened his mouth, closed it, put out his
hand, took it back. He stepped toward the pictures, stepped away. Then he moved
along the line of figures, like a man viewing a precious series of marbles cast
up from some ancient ruin on the shore. His eyes did not blink, his hand wanted
to touch but did not dare to touch. He wanted to run but did not run.

 
          
 
He looked suddenly at the hotel. Run, yes!
Run! What? Grab a shovel, dig, excavate, save a chunk of this all-too-crumbling
sand? Find a repairman, race him back here with plaster of Paris to cast a mold
of some small fragile part of these? No, no. Silly, silly. Or ... ? His eyes
flicked to his hotel window. The camera! Run, get it, get back, and hurry along
the shore, clicking, changing film, clicking, until ...

 
          
 
George Smith whirled to face the sun. It
burned faintly on his face; his eyes were two small fires from it. The sun was
half underwater, and as he watched it sank the rest of the way in a matter of
seconds.

 
          
 
The artist had drawn nearer and now was gazing
into George Smith's face with great friendliness, as if he were guessing every
thought. Now he was nodding his head in a little bow. Now the ice cream stick
had fallen casually from his fingers. Now he was saying good night, good night.
Now he was gone, walking back down the beach toward the south.

 
          
 
George Smith stood looking after him. After a
full minute he did the only thing he could possibly do. He started at the
beginning of the fantastic frieze of satyrs and fauns and wine-dipped maidens
and prancing unicorns and piping youths and he walked slowly along the shore.
He walked a long way, looking down at the free-running bacchanal. And when he
came to the end of the animals and men he turned around and started back in the
other direction, just staring down as if he had lost something and did not
quite know where to find it. He kept on doing this until there was no more
light in the sky or on the sand to see by.

 
          
 
He sat down at the supper table.

 
          
 
"You're late," said his wife.
"I just had to come down alone. "I'm ravenous."

 
          
 
"That's all right," he said.

 
          
 
"Anything interesting happen on your
walk?" she asked.

 
          
 
"No," he said.

 
          
 
"You look funny; George, you didn't swim
out too far, did you, and almost drown? I can tell by your face. You did swim
out too far, didn't you?"