Bradbury Stories (71 page)

“No sooner called than delivered,” whispered a voice.

It was impossible, but . . .

Drifting, spinning, the ancient doll with the wild red beard and blazing blue eyes fell across darkness as if impelled by God's breath, on a whim.

Instinctively, Willis opened his arms.

And the old party landed there, smiling, breathing heavily, or pretending to breathe heavily, as was his bent.

“Well, well, Willis! Quite a treat, eh?”

“Mr. Shaw! You were
dead
!”

“Poppycock! Someone bent some wires in me. The collision knocked things back together. The disconnection is here below my chin. A villain cut me there. So if I fall dead again, jiggle under my jaw and wire me up, eh?”

“Yes, sir!”

“How much food do you carry at this moment, Willis?”

“Enough to last two hundred days in Space.”

“Dear me, that's fine, fine! And self-recycling oxygen units, also, for two hundred days?”

“Yes, sir. Now, how long will
your
batteries last, Mr. Shaw?”

“Ten thousand years!” the old man sang out happily. “Yes, I vow, I swear! I am fitted with solar-cells which will collect God's universal light until I wear out my circuits.”

“Which means you will outtalk me, Mr. Shaw, long after I have stopped eating and breathing.”

“At which point you must dine on conversation, and breathe past participles instead of air. But, we must hold the thought of rescue uppermost. Are not the chances good?”

“Rockets
do
come by. And I am equipped with radio signals—”

“Which even now cry out into the deep night: I'm here with ramshackle Shaw, eh?”

I'm here with ramshackle Shaw, thought Willis, and was suddenly warm in winter.

“Well, then, while we're waiting to be rescued, Charles Willis, what next?”

“Next? Why—”

They fell away down Space alone but not alone, fearful but elated, and now grown suddenly quiet.

“
Say
it, Mr. Shaw.”

“Say what?”

“You know. Say it again.”

“Well, then.” They spun lazily, holding to each other. “Isn't life miraculous? Matter and force, yes, matter and force making itself over into intelligence and will.”

“Is
that
what we are, sir?”

“We are, bet ten thousand bright tin-whistles on it, we are. Shall I say
more
, young Willis?”

“Please, sir,” laughed Willis. “I want some more!”

And the old man spoke and the young man listened and the young man spoke and the old man hooted and they fell around a corner of Universe away out of sight, eating and talking, talking and eating, the young man biting gumball foods, the old man devouring sunlight with his solar-cell eyes, and the last that was seen of them they were gesticulating and babbling and conversing and waving their hands until their voices faded into Time and the solar system turned over in its sleep and covered them with a blanket of dark and light, and whether or not a rescue ship named
Rachel,
seeking her lost children, ever came by and found them, who can tell, who would truly ever want to know?

I
T HAD BEEN DECIDED ALREADY
that Ultar was guilty. The members of the Council sat, luxuriously relaxing as the attendants lubricated and oiled their viselike hands and their slender metal joints.

Kront was most vehement of the seventeen. His steel hand snapped and his round gray visuals flamed red.

“He's an insufferable experimentalist,” said Kront. “I recommend the Rust!”

“The Rust?” exclaimed Ome. “Isn't that too drastic?”

Kront thrust his alloyed skull-case forward.

“No. Not for ones like him. He'll undermine the entire Obot State before he's finished.”

“Come now,” suggested Lione, philosophically. “It would be better to short-circuit him for a few years, as punishment. Why be so sadistic and bitter about it, Kront?”

“In the name of the Great Obot!” said Kront. “Don't you see the danger? Experimenting with protoplasm!”

“I agree,” said one of the others. “Nothing is too severe a punishment. If Ultar insists on concluding his present experiments, he may undermine a civilization that has existed for three hundred thousand years. Take Ultar out to sea, unoiled, and fully aware. Drop him in. It will take him many years to Rust, and he will be aware, all of those years, of crumbling and rusting. Be sure that his skull-case is intact, so his awareness will not be short-circuited by water.” The others trembled a quiet, metal, hidden trembling.

Kront swayed to his feet, his oblong face gleaming ice-blue and hard. “I want a show of opinion, a vote. The Rust for Ultar. Vote!”

There was an indecisive moment. Kront's fifteen feet of towering, alloyed metal shifted uneasily in the lubrication cell.

Vises came up, arms came up. Six at first. Then four more. Ome and five others declined to vote. Kront counted the vises with an instantaneous flare of his visuals.

“Good. There's an express rocket for Ultar's laboratory in one hundred seconds from Level CV. If we hurry we'll make it!”

Huge, magnetic plates clung to the floor as metal bodies heaved upward with oiled quiet.

They hurried to a wide portal. Ome and the five dissenters followed. He stopped Kront at the portal. “There's a thing I want to ask you, Kront.”

“Hurry. We haven't time.”

“You've—
seen
it.”

“Protoplasm?”

“Yes. You've looked at it?”

Kront nodded. “Yes. I have seen.”

Ome said, “What is it
like?
”

Kront did not answer for a long moment and then he said, very slowly. “It is enough to freeze the motion of all Obot Things. It is horror. It is unbelievable. I think you had better come and see this for yourself.”

Ome deliberated. “I'll come.”

“Hurry then. We have fifty seconds.”

They followed the others.

The sea lay quietly as a huge, pallidly relaxed hand. In the vein and artery of that vast hand nothing moved but the gray blood tides. Moved silently and with the motion of one lunar tide against another. The deeps were not stirred by any other thing. The sea was lifeless and clear of any gill or eye or fin or any moving thing save the soft sea dust which arose, filtering, when the tides changed. The sea was dead.

The forests were silent. The brush was naked, the trees high and forlorn in a wilderness of quiet. There were no bird songs, or cracklings of sly animal paws in autumnal leaves, there were no loon cries or far off calls of moose or chipmunk. Only the wind sang little songs of memory it had learned three hundred thousand years before from things called birds. The forest and the land under the forest was dead. The trees were dead, turned to stone, upright, shading the hard stony soil forever. There was no grass and no flowers. The land was dead, as dead as the sea.

Now, over the dead land, in the birdless sky, came a metal sound. The sound of a rocket singing in the dead air.

Then it was gone, leaving a vein of pale gold powder in its wake. Kront and his fellows, on their way to the fortress of Ultar. . . .

A door opened as the ship landed. Kront and the others came forth from the ship.

“I've been waiting for you,” said Ultar, standing in the open portal of the laboratory. “I knew you'd bring the Council with you, Kront. Step in, all of you. I can tell by the immediate temperature of your bodies, that I am already condemned to Rust. We shall see. Step in, anyway.”

The door rang shut behind the Council. Ultar led the way down a tubular hall which issued forth into a dark room.

“Be seated, Obot Rulers. It is an unusual thing, this reception for the Great. I am flattered.”

Kront clicked angrily. “Before you die, you must show us this protoplasm, so it can be judged and destroyed.”

“Must I? Must you? Must it?”

“Where is it?”

“Here.”

“Where!”

“Patience, Kront.”

“I've no patience with blasphemers!”

“That is apparent.”

In one corner of the room was a large square box, from which a glow illumined the nearby walls. Over the box hung a yellow cloth which hid the contents from view.

Ultar, with a certain sure sense of the dramatic, moved to this box and made several adjustments of heat-dials. His visuals were glowing. Grasping the yellow cloth, he lifted it up and away from the box.

A hard, rattling tremor passed through the group. Visuals blinked and changed color. Bodies made an uneasy whining of metal. What lay before them was not pleasant. They drifted forward until they circled the box and peered into it. What they saw was blasphemous and sacrilegious and more than horrible.

Something that
grew
.

Something that expanded and built upon itself, changed and reproduced. Something that actually lived and died.

Died.

How silly! No one need die, ever, ever!

Something that could rot away into nothingness and run blood and be tortured. Something that felt and could be burned or hurt or made to feel hot or cold. Silly, silly something, horrid, horrid something, all incomprehensible and nightmarish and unpredictable!

Pink flesh formed six feet tall with long, long fleshy arms and flesh hands and two long flesh legs. And—they remembered from myth-dreams—those two unnecessary things—a mouth and nose!

Ome felt the silent coggery within himself grind slow. It was unbelievable! Like the half-heard myths of an Age of Flesh and Darkness. All those little half-truths, rumors, those dim little mutterings and whispers of creatures that grew instead of being built!

Who ever heard of such blasphemy? To grow instead of being built? How could a thing be perfect unless it was built and tendered every aid to perfection by an Obot scientist? This fleshy pulp was imperfect. The least jar and it broke, the least heat and it melted, the least cold and it froze. And as for the amazing fact that it grew, well, what of that? It was only luck that it grew to
be
anything. Sheer luck.

Not so the inhabitants of the Obot State! They were perfect to begin with and grew, paradoxically, more perfect as time progressed. It was nothing, nothing at all for them to exist one hundred thousand years, two hundred thousand years. Ome himself was past thirty-thousand, a youth, still a youth!

But—flesh? Depending upon the whims of some cosmic Nature to give it intellect, health, longevity? How silly a joke, how pointless, when it could be installed in parcels and packages, in wheels and cogs and red and blue wires and sparkling currents!

“Here it is,” said Ultar, simply, and with pride. He said it with a firmness that was unafraid. “A body of bone and flesh and blood and fantasy.”

There was a long silence in which the metal whining did not cease among the stricken Council. There was hardly a flicker of movement among them. They stared.

Ome said, “It is frightening. Where did you get it?”

“I made it.”

“How could you bring yourself to
think
of it?”

“It is hard to say. It was long ago. Ten thousand years ago, when I was walking over the stony forests, alone, one day, as I have often done, I found a blade of grass. Yes, one last small blade of green grass, the last one in all of this world. You can't imagine how unbearably excited I was. I held it up and I examined it and it was a small green miracle. I felt as if I might explode into a million bits. I took the grass blade home with me, carefully, and telling no one. Oh, what a beautiful treasure it was.”

“That was a direct violation of the law,” said Kront.

“Yes, the law,” said Ultar remembering. “Three hundred thousand years ago when we burned the birds in the air, like cinders, and killed the foxes and the snakes in their burrows, and killed fish in the sea, and all animals, including man—”

“Forbidden names!”

“Remembered names, nevertheless. Remembered. And then we saw the forests still grew and reminded us of growing things, so we turned the forests to stone, and killed the grass and flowers, and we've lived on a barren stony world ever since. Why, we even destroyed the microbes that we couldn't
see
, that's how afraid we were of
growing things
!”

Kront rasped out, “We weren't afraid!”

“Weren't we? Never mind. Let me complete my story. We shot the birds from the sky, sprayed insects from the air, killed the flowers and grass, but yet one small blade survived and I found it and brought it here, and nurtured it, and it grew for hundreds of years until it was ten million blades of grass which I studied because it had cells that grew. I cannot tell you with what excitement I greeted the blossoming of the first
flower
.”

“Flower!”

“A little thing. A blue flower, after a thousand years of experiment. And from that flower more flowers, and from those flowers, five centuries later, a bush, and from that bush, four hundred years later, a tree. Oh, it's been a strange long time of working and watching, I'll tell you.”

“But
this
,” cried Kront. “How did it evolve to this?”

“I went looking. I scoured the world. If I found one precious blade of grass, I reasoned, then perhaps I can find another thing, a lizard that had escaped, or a snake, or some such thing. I was more than lucky. I found a small monkey. From there to this is another thousand years and more. Artificial breeding, insemination, a study of genes and cells, well, it is here now, and it is good.”

“It is forbidden!”

“Yes. Damnably forbidden. Look, Ome, do you know why flesh was eradicated from the Earth?”

Ome deliberated. “Because it threatened Obot Rule.”

“How did it threaten it?”

“With the Rust.”

“With more than the Rust,” replied Ultar, quietly. “Flesh threatened us with another way of life and thought. It threatened us with delightful imperfection, unpredictability, art, and literature, and we slaughtered flesh and made it blasphemy and forbidden to see flesh or speak of it.”