Bradbury Stories (134 page)

“I can't understand it,” said Bolton. “The power failed because our relays wore out. It took us three days to manufacture and replace the particular channel relays necessary to keep the Time Element steady, and yet Wolfe hung on. There's a personal factor here, Lord knows what, we didn't take into account. Wolfe lives here, in this time, when he
is
here, and can't be snapped back, after all. Time isn't as flexible as we imagined. We used the wrong simile. It's not like a rubber band. More like osmosis; the penetration of membranes by liquids, from Past to Present, but we've got to send him back, can't keep him here, there'd be a void there, a derangement. The one thing that really keeps him here now is himself, his drive, his desire, his work. After it's over he'll go back as naturally as pouring water from a glass.”

“I don't care about reasons, all I know is Tom is finishing it. He has the old fire and description, and something else, something more, a searching of values that supersede time and space. He's done a study of a woman left behind on Earth while the damn rocket heroes leap into space that's beautiful, objective, and subtle; he calls it ‘Day of the Rocket,' and it is nothing more than an afternoon of a typical suburban housewife who lives as her ancestral mothers lived, in a house, raising her children, her life not much different from a cavewoman's, in the midst of the splendor of science and the trumpetings of space projectiles; a true and steady and subtle study of her wishes and frustrations. Here's another manuscript, called ‘The Indians,' in which he refers to the Martians as Cherokees and Iroquois and Blackfoots, the Indian nations of space, destroyed and driven back. Have a drink, Bolton, have a drink!”

Tom Wolfe returned to Earth at the end of eight weeks.

He arrived in fire as he had left in fire, and his huge steps were burned across space, and in the library of Henry William Field's house were towers of yellow paper, with lines of black scribble and type on them, and these were to be separated out into the six sections of a masterwork that, through endurance, and a knowing that the sands were dwindling from the glass, had mushroomed day after day.

Tom Wolfe came back to Earth and stood in the library of Henry William Field's house and looked at the massive outpourings of his heart and his hand and when the old man said, “Do you want to read it, Tom?” he shook his great head and replied, putting back his thick mane of dark hair with his big pale hand, “No. I don't dare start on it. If I did, I'd want to take it home with me. And I can't do that, can I?”

“No, Tom, you can't.”

“No matter
how
much I wanted to?”

“No, that's the way it is. You never wrote another novel in that year, Tom. What was written here must stay here, what was written there must stay there. There's no touching it.”

“I see.” Tom sank down into a chair with a great sigh. “I'm tired. I'm mightily tired. It's been hard, but it's been good. What day is it?”

“This is the fifty-sixth day.”

“The
last
day?”

The old man nodded and they were both silent awhile.

“Back to 1938 in the stone cemetery,” said Tom Wolfe, eyes shut. “I don't like that. I wish I didn't know about that, it's a horrible thing to know.” His voice faded and he put his big hands over his face and held them tightly there.

The door opened. Bolton let himself in and stood behind Tom Wolfe's chair, a small vial in his hand.

“What's that?” asked the old man.

“An extinct virus. Pneumonia. Very ancient and very evil,” said Bolton. “When Mr. Wolfe came through, I had to cure him of his illness, of course, which was immensely easy with the techniques we know today, in order to put him in working condition for his job, Mr. Field. I kept this pneumonia culture. Now that he's going back, he'll have to be reinoculated with the disease.”

“Otherwise?”

Tom Wolfe looked up.

“Otherwise, he'd get well, in 1938.”

Tom Wolfe arose from his chair. “You mean, get well, walk around, back there, be well, and cheat the mortician?”

“That's what I mean.”

Tom Wolfe stared at the vial and one of his hands twitched. “What if I destroyed the virus and refused to let you inoculate me?”

“You can't do that!”

“But—supposing?”

“You'd ruin things.”

“What things?”

“The pattern, life, the way things are and were, the things that can't be changed. You can disrupt it. There's only one sure thing, you're to die, and I'm to see to it.”

Wolfe looked at the door. “I could run off.”

“We control the machine. You wouldn't get out of the house. I'd have you back here, by force, and inoculated. I anticipated some such trouble when the time came; there are five men waiting down below. One shout from me—you see, it's useless. There, that's better. Here now.”

Wolfe had moved back and now had turned to look at the old man and the window and this huge house. “I'm afraid I must apologize. I don't want to die. So very much I don't want to die.”

The old man came to him and took his hand. “Think of it this way: you've had two more months than anyone could expect from life, and you've turned out another book, a last book, a fine book, think of that.”

“I want to thank you for this,” said Thomas Wolfe, gravely. “I want to thank both of you. I'm ready.” He rolled up his sleeve. “The inoculation.”

And while Bolton bent to his task, with his free hand Thomas Wolfe penciled two black lines across the top of the first manuscript and went on talking:

“There's a passage from one of my old books,” he said, scowling to remember it.
“. . . of wandering forever and the Earth... Who owns the Earth? Did we want the Earth? That we should wander on it? Did we need the Earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the Earth shall have the Earth; he shall be upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever...”

Wolfe was finished with the remembering.

“Here's my last book,” he said, and on the empty yellow paper facing the manuscript he blocked out vigorous huge black letters with pressures of the pencil:

FOREVER AND THE EARTH
, by Thomas Wolfe.

He picked up a ream of it and held it tightly in his hands, against his chest, for a moment. “I wish I could take it back with me. It's like parting with my son.” He gave it a slap and put it aside and immediately thereafter gave his quick hand into that of his employer, and strode across the room, Bolton after him, until he reached the door where he stood framed in the late-afternoon light, huge and magnificent. “Good-bye, good-bye!” he cried.

The door slammed. Tom Wolfe was gone.

They found him wandering in the hospital corridor.

“Mr. Wolfe!”

“What?”

“Mr. Wolfe, you gave us a scare, we thought you were gone!”

“Gone?”

“Where did you go?”

“Where? Where?” He let himself be led through the midnight corridors. “Where? Oh, if I
told
you where, you'd never believe.”

“Here's your bed, you shouldn't have left it.”

Deep into the white death bed, which smelled of pale, clean mortality awaiting him, a mortality which had the hospital odor in it; the bed which, as he touched it, folded him into fumes and white starched coldness.

“Mars, Mars,” whispered the huge man, late at night. “My best, my very best, my really fine book, yet to be written, yet to be printed, in another year, three centuries away . . .”

“You're tired.”

“Do you really think so?” murmured Thomas Wolfe. “Was it a dream? Perhaps. A good dream.”

His breathing faltered. Thomas Wolfe was dead.

In the passing years, flowers are found on Tom Wolfe's grave. And this is not unusual, for many people travel to linger there. But these flowers appear each night. They seem to drop from the sky. They are the color of an autumn moon, their blossoms are immense, and they burn and sparkle their cold, long petals in a blue and white fire. And when the dawn wind blows they drip away into a silver rain, a shower of white sparks on the air. Tom Wolfe has been dead many, many years, but these flowers never cease. . . .

M
R
. B
ENEDICT CAME OUT OF HIS LITTLE HOUSE
. He stood on the porch, painfully shy of the sun and inferior to people. A little dog trotted by with clever eyes; so clever that Mr. Benedict could not meet its gaze. A small child peered through the wrought-iron gate around the graveyard, near the church, and Mr. Benedict winced at the pale, penetrant curiosity of the child.

“You're the funeral man,” said the child.

Cringing within himself, Mr. Benedict did not speak.

“You own the church?” asked the child, finally.

“Yes,” said Mr. Benedict.

“And the funeral place?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Benedict bewilderedly.

“And the yards and the stones and the graves?” wondered the child.

“Yes,” said Benedict, with some show of pride. And it was true. An amazing thing it was. A stroke of business luck really, that had kept him busy and humming nights over long years. First he had landed the church and the churchyard, with a few green-mossed tombs, when the Baptist people moved uptown. Then he had built himself a fine little mortuary, in Gothic style, of course, and covered it with ivy, and then added a small house for himself, way in back. It was very convenient to die for Mr. Benedict. He handled you in and out of buildings with a minimum of confusion and a maximum of synthetic benediction. No need of a funeral procession! declared his large ads in the morning paper. Out of the church and into the earth, slick as a whistle. Nothing but the finest preservatives used!

The child continued to stare at him and he felt like a candle blown out in the wind. He was so inferior. Anything that lived or moved made him feel apologetic and melancholy. He was continually agreeing with people, never daring to argue or shout or say no. Whoever you might be, if Mr. Benedict met you on the street he would look up your nostrils or perceive your ears or examine your hairline with his little shy, wild eyes and never look you straight in your eye, and he would hold your hand between his cold ones as if your hand was a precious gift, as he said to you:

“You are definitely, irrevocably, believably correct.”

But, always, when you talked to him, you felt he never heard a word you said.

Now, he stood on his porch and said, “You are a sweet little child,” to the little staring child, in fear that the child might not like him.

Mr. Benedict walked down the steps and out the gate, without once looking at his little mortuary building. He saved that pleasure for later. It was very important that things took the right precedence. It wouldn't pay to think with joy of the bodies awaiting his talents in the mortuary building. No, it was better to follow his usual day-after-day routine. He would let the conflict began.

He knew just where to go to get himself enraged. Half of the day he spent traveling from place to place in the little town, letting the superiority of the living neighbors overwhelm him, letting his own inferiority dissolve him, bathe him in perspiration, tie his heart and brain into trembling knots.

He spoke with Mr. Rodgers, the druggist, idle, senseless morning talk. And he saved and put away all the little slurs and intonations and insults that Mr. Rodgers sent his way. Mr. Rodgers always had some terrible thing to say about a man in the funeral profession. “Ha, ha,” laughed Mr. Benedict at the latest joke upon himself, and he wanted to cry with miserable violence. “There you are, you cold one,” said Mr. Rodgers on this particular morning. “Cold one,” said Mr. Benedict, “ha, ha!”

Outside the drugstore, Mr. Benedict met up with Mr. Stuyvesant, the contractor. Mr. Stuyvesant looked at his watch to estimate just how much time he dared waste on Benedict before trumping up some appointment. “Oh, hello, Benedict,” shouted Stuyvesant. “How's business? I bet you're going at it tooth and nail. Did you get it? I said, I bet you're going at it tooth and—”

“Yes, yes,” chuckled Mr. Benedict vaguely. “And how is your business, Mr. Stuyvesant?” “Say, how do your hands get so cold, Benny, old man? That's a cold shake you got there. You just get done embalming a frigid woman! Hey, that's not bad. You heard what I said?” roared Mr. Stuyvesant, pounding him on the back. “Good, good!” cried Mr. Benedict, with a fleshless smile. “Good day.”

On it went, person after person. Mr. Benedict, pummeled on from one to the next, was the lake into which all refuse was thrown. People began with little pebbles and then when Mr. Benedict did not ripple or protest, they heaved a stone, a brick, a boulder. There was no bottom to Mr. Benedict, no splash and no settling. The lake did not answer.

As the day passed he became more helpless and enraged with them, and he walked from building to building and had more little meetings and conversations and hated himself with a very real, masochistic pleasure. But the thing that kept him going most of all was the thought of the night pleasures to come. So he inflicted himself again and again with these stupid, pompous bullies and bowed to them and held his hands like little biscuits before his stomach, and asked no more than to be sneered at.

“There you are, meat-chopper,” said Mr. Flinger, the delicatessen man. “How are all your corned beeves and pickled brains?”

Things worked to a crescendo of inferiority. With a final kettle-drumming of insult and terrible self-effacement, Mr. Benedict, seeking wildly the correct time from his wrist-watch, turned and ran back through the town. He was at his peak, he was all ready now, ready to work, ready to do what must be done, and enjoy himself. The awful part of the day was over, the good part was now to begin!