Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (4 page)

 
          
 
“Yes," I say. “Help," I say.

 
          
 
“What, sir?"

 
          
 
"I didn't say anything."

 
          
 
"You said 'Help,' sir."

 
          
 
"Did I, Matthews, did I?"

 
          
 
The body is laid out in the shadow of the
rocket and the voice screams in the deep underwater catacombs of bone and
crimson tide. My hands jerk. My mouth splits and is parched. My nostrils fasten
wide. My eyes roll. Help, help, oh help, don't, don't, let me out, don't,
don't,

 
          
 
"Don't," I say.

 
          
 
"What, sir?"

 
          
 
“Never mind," I say. "I’ve got to
get free,” I say. I clap my hand to my mouth.

 
          
 
"How's that, sir?" cries Matthews.

 
          
 
"Get inside, all of you, go back to
Earth!" I shout

 
          
 
A gun is in my hand. I lift it

 
          
 
"Don't, sir!"

 
          
 
An explosion. Shadows run. The screaming is
cut off. There is a whistling sound of falling through space.

 
          
 
After ten thousand years, how good to die. How
good to feel the sudden coolness, the relaxation. How good to be like a hand
within a glove that stretches out and grows wonderfully cold in the hot sand.
Oh, the quiet and the loveliness of gathering, darkening death. But one cannot
linger on.

 
          
 
A crack, a snap.

 
          
 
"Good God, he's killed himself!" I
cry, and open my eyes and there is the captain lying against the rocket, his
skull split by a bullet, his eyes wide, his tongue protruding between his white
teeth. Blood runs from his head. I bend to him and touch him. “The fool,"
I say. "Why did he do that?"

           
 
The men are horrified. They stand over the two
dead men and turn their heads to see the Martian sands and the distant well
where Regent lies lolling in deep waters. A croaking comes out of their dry
lips, a whimpering, a childish protest against this awful dream.

 
          
 
The men turn to me.

 
          
 
After a long while, one of them says,
"That makes you captain, Matthews."

 
          
 
"I know," I say slowly.

 
          
 
"Only six of us left."

 
          
 
"Good God, it happened so quick!"

 
          
 
"I don't want to stay here, let's get out!"

 
          
 
The men clamor. I go to them and touch them
now, with a confidence which almost sings in me. "Listen," I say, and
touch their elbows or their arms or their hands.

 
          
 
We all fall silent.

 
          
 
We are one.

 
          
 
No, no, no, no, no, no! Inner voices crying, deep
down and gone into prisons beneath exteriors.

 
          
 
We are looking at each other. We are Samuel
Matthews and Raymond Moses and William Spaulding and Charles Evans and Forrest
Cole and John Summers, and we say nothing but look upon each other and our white
faces and shaking hands.

 
          
 
We turn, as one, and look at the well.

 
          
 
"Now," we say.

 
          
 
No, no, six voices scream, hidden and layered
down and stored forever.

 
          
 
Our feet walk in the sand and it is as if a
great hand with twelve fingers were moving across the hot sea bottom.

 
          
 
We bend to the well, looking down. From the
cool depths six faces peer back up at us.

 
          
 
One by one we bend until our balance is gone,
and one by one drop into the mouth and down through cool darkness into the cold
waters.

 
          
 
The sun sets. The stars wheel upon the night
sky. Far out, there is a wink of light. Another rocket coming, leaving red
marks on space.

 
          
 
I live And well. I live like smoke in a well.
Like vapor in a stone throat. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning,
and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was
young. How can I tell you what I am when even I don't know? I cannot I am
simply waiting.

 
          
 
He opened a door on darkness. A voice cried,
"Shut it!" It was like a blow in the face. He jumped through. The
door banged. He cursed himself quietly. The voice, with dreadful patience,
intoned, "Jesus. You Terwilliger?"

 
          
 
"Yes," said Terwilliger. A faint
ghost of screen haunted the dark theater wall to his right. To his left, a
cigarette wove fiery arcs in the air as someone's lips talked swiftly around it

 
          
 
"You're five minutes late!”

 
          
 
Don't make it sound like five years, thought
Terwilliger.

 
          
 
"Shove your film in the projection room
door. Let's move."

 
          
 
Terwilliger squinted.

 
          
 
He made out five vast loge seats that exhaled,
breathed heavily as amplitudes of executive life shifted, leaning toward the
middle loge where, almost in darkness, a little boy sat smoking.

 
          
 
No, thought Terwilliger, not a boy. That's
him, Joe Clarence. Clarence the Great.

 
          
 
For now the tiny mouth snapped like a
puppet's, blowing smoke. "Well?"

 
          
 
Terwilliger stumbled back to hand the film to
the projectionist, who made a lewd gesture toward the loges, winked at
Terwilliger and slammed the booth door.

 
          
 
"Jesus," sighed the tiny voice. A
buzzer buzzed. "Roll it, projection!"

 
          
 
Terwilliger probed the nearest loge, struck
flesh, pulled back and stood biting his lips.

 
          
 
Music leaped from the screen. His film
appeared in a storm of drums:

 
          
 
TYRANNOSAURUS Rex: The Thunder Lizard.

 
          
 
Photographed in stop-motion animation with
miniatures created by John Terwilliger. A study in life-forms on Earth one
billion years before Christ.

           
 
Faint ironic applause came softly patting from
the baby hands in the middle loge.

 
          
 
Terwilliger shut his eyes. New music jerked
him alert. The last titles faded into a world of primeval sun, mist, poisonous
rain and lush wilderness. Morning fogs were strewn along eternal seacoasts
where immense flying dreams and dreams of nightmare scythed the wind. Huge
triangles of bone and rancid skin, of diamond eye and crusted tooth,
pterodactyls, the kites of destruction, plunges, struck prey, and skimmed away,
meat and screams in their scissor mouths.

 
          
 
Terwilliger gazed, fascinated.

 
          
 
In the jungle foliage now, shiverings,
creepings, insect jitterings, antennae twitchings, slime locked in oily fatted
slime, armor skinned to armor, in sun glade and shadow moved the reptilian
inhabitors of Terwilliger's mad remembrance of vengeance given flesh and panic
taking wing.

 
          
 
Brontosaur, stegosaur, triceratops. How easily
the clumsy tonnages of name fell from one's lips.

 
          
 
The great brutes swung like ugly machineries
of war and dissolution through moss ravines, crushing a thousand flowers at one
footfall, snouting the mist, ripping the sky in half with one shriek.

 
          
 
My beauties, thought Terwilliger, my little
lovelies. All liquid latex, rubber sponge, ball-socketed steel articulature;
all nightdreamed, clay-molded, warped and welded, riveted and slapped to life
by hand. No bigger than my fist, half of them; the rest no larger than this
head they sprang from.

 
          
 
"Good Lord," said a soft admiring
voice in the dark.

 
          
 
Step by step, frame by frame of film, stop
motion by stop motion, he, Terwilliger, had run his beasts through their
postures, moved each a fraction of an inch, photographed them, moved them
another hair, photographed them, for hours and days and months. Now these rare
images, this eight hundred scant feet of film, rushed through the projector.

 
          
 
And lo! he thought. I'll never get used to it
Look! They come alive!

 
          
 
Rubber, steel, clay, reptilian latex sheath,
glass eye, porcelain fang, all ambles, trundles, strides in terrible prides
through continents as yet unmanned, by seas as yet un-salted, a billion years
lost away. They do breathe. They do smite air with thunders. Oh, uncanny!

 
          
 
I feel, thought Terwilliger, quite simply,
that there stands my Garden, and these my animal creations which I love on this
Sixth Day, and tomorrow, the Seventh, I must rest.

 
          
 
"Lord," said the soft voice again.

 
          
 
Terwilliger almost answered, "Yes?”

 
          
 
“This is beautiful footage, Mr. Clarence,” the
voice went on.

 
          
 
"Maybe,” said the man with a boy’s voice.

 
          
 
"Incredible animation.”

 
          
 
"I've seen better,” said Clarence the
Great.

 
          
 
Terwilliger stiffened. He turned from the
screen where his friends lumbered into oblivion, from butcheries wrought on
architectural scales. For the first time he examined his possible employers.

 
          
 
"Beautiful stuff.”

 
          
 
This praise came from an old man who sat to
himself far across the theater, his head lifted forward in amazement toward
that ancient life.

 
          
 
"It's jerky. Look therel** The strange
boy in the middle loge half rose, pointing with the cigarette in his mouth.
"Hey, was that a bad shot. You see?”

 
          
 
"Yes," said the old man, tired
suddenly, fading back in his chair. "I see.”

 
          
 
Terwilliger cranmied his hotness down upon a
suffocation of swiftly moving blood.

 
          
 
"Jerky,” said Joe Clarence.

 
          
 
White light, quick numerals, darkness; the
music cut, the monsters vanished.

 
          
 
"Glad that's over." Joe Clarence
exhaled. "Almost lunch-time. Throw on the next reel, Walter! That's all,
Terwilliger." Silence. “Terwilliger?" Silence. "Is that dumb
bunny still herer”

 
          
 
"Here.” Terwilliger ground his fists on
his hips.

 
          
 
“Oh," said Joe Clarence. "It's not
bad. But don't get ideas about money. A dozen guys came here yesterday to show
stuff as good or better than yours, tests for our new film. Prehistoric Monster.
Leave your bid in an envelope with my secretary. Same door out as you came in.
Walter, what the hell are you waiting for? Roll the next one!"

 
          
 
In darkness, Terwilliger barked his shins on a
chair, groped for and found the door handle, gripped it tight, tight.

 
          
 
Behind him the screen exploded: an avalanche
fell in great flourings of stone, whole cities of granite, immense edifices of
marble piled, broke and flooded down. In this thunder, he heard voices from the
week ahead:

 
          
 
"We'll pay you one thousand dollars,
Terwilliger.”

            
"But
I need a thousand for my equipment alone!"

            
"Look, we're giving you a break. Take it or leave it!” With the
thunder dying, he knew he would take, and he knew he would hate it.

 
          
 
Only when the avalanche had drained off to
silence behind him and his own blood had raced to the inevitable decision and
stalled in his heart, did Terwilliger pull the immensely weighted door wide to
step forth into the terrible raw light of day.

 
          
 
Fuse flexible spine to sinuous neck, pivot
neck to death's-head skull, hinge jaw from hollow cheek, glue plastic sponge
over lubricated skeleton, slip snake-pebbled skin over sponge, meld seams with
fire, then rear upright triumphant in a world where insanity wakes but to look
on madness—Tyrannosaurus Rex!

 
          
 
The Creator's hands glided down out of
arc-light sun. They placed the granuled monster in false green summer wilds,
they waded it in broths of teeming bacterial life. Planted in serene terror,
the lizard machine basked. From the blind heavens the Creator's voice hummed,
vibrating the Garden with the old and monotonous tune about the foot-bone
connected to the . . . anklebone, anklebone connected to the . . . legbone,
legbone connected to the . . . kneebone, kneebone connected to the ...

 
          
 
A door burst wide.

 
          
 
Joe Clarence ran in very much like an entire
Cub Scout pack. He looked wildly around as if no one were there.

 
          
 
"My God!" he cried. "Aren't you
set up yet? This costs me money!"

 
          
 
"No," said Terwilliger dryly.
"No matter how much time I take, I get paid the same."

 
          
 
Joe Clarence approached in a series of quick
starts and stops. "Well, shake a leg. And make it real horrible."

 
          
 
Terwilliger was on his knees beside the
miniature jungle set. His eyes were on a straight level with his producer's as
he said, "How many feet of blood and gore would you like?"

 
          
 
"Two thousand feet of each!"
Clarence laughed in a kind of gasping stutter. "Let's look." He
grabbed the lizard.

 
          
 
"Careful!"

           
 
"Careful?" Clarence turned the ugly
beast in careless and nonloving hands. "It's my monster, ain't it? The
contract—" "The contract says you use this model for exploitation
advertising, but the animal reverts to me after the film's in release."

 
          
 
"Holy cow." Clarence waved the
monster. “That's wrong. We just signed the contracts four days ago—"

 
          
 
"It feels like four years."
Terwilliger rubbed his eyes. "I've been up two nights without sleep
finishing this beast so we can start shooting."

 
          
 
Clarence brushed this aside. "To hell
with the contract What a slimy trick. It's my monster. You and your agent give
me heart attacks. Heart attacks about money, heart attacks about equipment,
heart attacks about—"

 
          
 
"This camera you gave me is
ancient."

 
          
 
"So if it breaks, fix it; you got hands?
The challenge of the shoestring operation is using the old brain instead of
cash. Getting back to the point, this monster, it should've been specified in
the deal, is my baby."

 
          
 
"I never let anyone own the things I
make," said Terwilliger honestly. "I put too much time and affection
in them."

 
          
 
"Hell, okay, so we give you fifty bucks
extra for the beast, and throw in all this camera equipment free when the
film's done, right? Then you start your own company. Compete with me, get even
with me, right, using my own machines!" Clarence laughed.

 
          
 
"If they don't fall apart first,"
observed Terwilliger.

 
          
 
"Another thing." Clarence put the
creature on the floor and walked around it. "I don't like the way this
monster shapes up."