Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales by Ray Bradbury
Shortly before ten o’clock, Father Vittorini came down the stairs and gasped with surprise.
Father Brian, at the unused fireplace, warming himself at the small gas heater which stood on the hearth, did not turn for a moment.
A space had been cleared and the brute television set moved forward into a circle of four chairs, among which stood two small taborettes on which stood two bottles and four glasses. Father Brian had done it all, allowing Kelly to do nothing. Now he turned, for Kelly and Pastor Sheldon were arriving.
The pastor stood in the entryway and surveyed the room. “Splendid.” He paused and added, “I think. Let me see now . . .” He read the label on one bottle. “Father Vittorini is to sit here.”
“By the Irish Moss?” asked Vittorini.
“The same,” said Father Brian.
Vittorini, much pleased, sat.
“And the rest of us will sit by the Lachryma Christi, I take it?” said the pastor.
“An Italian drink, Pastor.”
“I think I’ve heard of it,” said the pastor, and sat.
“Here.” Father Brian hurried over and, without looking at Vittorini, poured his glass a good way up with the Moss. “An Irish transfusion.”
“Allow me.” Vittorini nodded his thanks and arose, in turn, to pour the others’ drinks. “The tears of Christ and the sunlight of Italy,” he said. “And now, before we drink, I have something to say.”
The others waited, looking at him.
“The papal encyclical on space travel,” he said at last, “does not exist.”
“We discovered that,” said Kelly, “a few hours ago.”
“Forgive me, Fathers,” said Vittorini. “I am like the fisherman on the bank who, seeing fish, throws out more bait. I suspected, all along, there was no encyclical. But every time it was brought up, about town, I heard so many priests from Dublin deny it existed, I came to think it must! They would not go check the item, for they feared it existed. I would not, in my pride, do research, for I feared it did not exist. So Roman pride or Cork pride, it’s all the same. I shall go on retreat soon and be silent for a week, Pastor, and do penance.”
“Good, Father, good.” Pastor Sheldon rose. “Now I’ve a small announcement. A new priest arrives here next month. I’ve thought long on it. The man is Italian, born and raised in Montreal.”
Vittorini closed one eye and tried to picture this man to himself.
“If the Church must be all things to all people,” said the pastor, “I am intrigued with the thought of hot blood raised in a cold climate, as this new Italian was, even as I find it fascinating to consider myself, cold blood raised in California. We’ve needed another Italian here to shake things up, and this Latin looks to be the sort will shake even Father Vittorini. Now will someone offer a toast?”
“May I, Pastor?” Father Vittorini rose again, smiling gently, his eyes darkly aglow, looking at this one and now that of the three. He raised his glass. “Somewhere did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate those Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God’s Machineries of Joy?”
“If Blake said that,” said Father Brian, “I take it all back. He never lived in Dublin!”
All laughed together.
Vittorini drank the Irish Moss and was duly speechless.
The others drank the Italian wine and grew mellow, and in his mellowness Father Brian cried softly, “Vittorini, now, will you, unholy as it is, tune on the ghost?”
“Channel Nine?”
“Nine it is!”
And while Vittorini dialed the knobs Father Brian mused over his drink, “Did Blake really say that?”
“The fact is, Father,” said Vittorini, bent to the phantoms coming and going on the screen, “he might have, if he’d lived today. I wrote it down myself tonight.”
All watched the Italian with some awe. Then the TV gave a hum and came clear, showing a rocket, a long way off, getting ready.
“The machineries of joy,” said Father Brian. “Is that one of them you’re tuning in? And is that another sitting there, the rocket on its stand?”
“It could be, tonight,” murmured Vittorini. “If the thing goes up, and a man in it, all around the world, and him still alive, and us with him, though we just sit here. That would be joyful indeed.”
The rocket was getting ready, and Father Brian shut his eyes for a moment. Forgive me, Jesus, he thought, forgive an old man his prides, and forgive Vittorini his spites, and help me to understand what I see here tonight, and let me stay awake if need be, in good humor, until dawn, and let the thing go well, going up and coming down, and think of the man in that contraption, Jesus, think of and be with him. And help me, God, when the summer is young, for, sure as fate on Fourth of July evening there will be Vittorini and the kids from around the block, on the rectory lawn, lighting skyrockets. All them there watching the sky, like the morn of the Redemption, and help me, O Lord, to be as those children before the great night of time and void where you abide. And help me to walk forward, Lord, to light the next rocket Independence Night, and stand with the Latin father, my face suffused with that same look of the delighted child in the face of the burning glories you put near our hand and bid us savor.
He opened his eyes.
Voices from far Canaveral were crying in a wind of time. Strange phantom powers loomed upon the screen. He was drinking the last of the wine when someone touched his elbow gently.
“Father,” said Vittorini, near. “Fasten your seat belt.”
“I will,” said Father Brian. “I will. And many thanks.”
He sat back in his chair. He closed his eyes. He waited for the thunder. He waited for the fire. He waited for the concussion and the voice that would teach a silly, a strange, a wild and miraculous thing:
How to count back, ever backward . . . to zero.
BRIGHT PHOENIX
ONE DAY IN APRIL 2022 the great library door slammed flat shut. Thunder.
Hullo, I thought.
At the bottom step glowering up at my desk, in a United Legion uniform which no longer hung as neatly upon him as it had twenty years before, stood Jonathan Barnes.
Seeing his bravado momentarily in pause, I recalled ten thousand Veterans’ speeches sprayed from his mouth, the endless wind-whipped flag parades he had hustled, panted through, the grease-cold chicken and green-pea patriot banquets he had practically cooked himself; the civic drives stillborn in his hat.
Now Jonathan Barnes stomped up the creaking main library steps, giving each the full downthrust of his power, weight, and new authority. His echoes, rushed back from the vast ceilings, must have shocked even him into better manners, for when he reached my desk, I felt his warmly liquored breath stir mere whispers on my face.
“I’m here for the books, Tom.”
I turned casually to check some index cards. “When they’re ready, we’ll call you.”
“Hold on,” he said. “Wait—”
“You’re here to pick up the Veterans’ Salvage books for hospital distribution?”
“No, no,” he cried. “I’m here for all the books.”
I gazed at him.
“Well,” he said, “most of them.”
“Most?” I blinked once, then bent to riffle the files. “Only ten volumes to a person at a time. Let’s see. Here! Why, you let your card expire when you were twenty years old, thirty years ago. See?” I held it up.
Barnes put both hands on the desk and leaned his great bulk upon them. “I see you are interfering.” His face began to color, his breath to husk and rattle. “I don’t need a card for my work!”
So loud was his whisper that a myriad of white pages stopped butterflying under far green lamps in the big stone rooms. Faintly, a few books thudded shut.
Reading people lifted their serene faces. Thei
“Yes,” I said at last. “But it will only take a moment to re-register you. Fill in this new card. Give two reliable references—”
“I don’t need references,” said Jonathan Barnes, “to burn books!”
“Contrarily,” said I. “You’ll need even more, to do that.”
“My men are my references. They’re waiting outside for the books. They’re dangerous.”
“Men like that always are.”
“No no, I mean the books, idiot. The books are dangerous. Good God, no two agree. All the damn double-talk. All the lousy babel and slaver and spit. So, we’re out to simplify, clarify, hew to the line. We need—”
“To talk this over,” said I, taking up a copy of Demosthenes, tucking it under my arm. “It’s time for my dinner. Join me, please—”
I was halfway to the door when Barnes, wide-eyed, suddenly remembered the silver whistle hung from his blouse, jammed it to his wet lips, and gave it a piercing blast.
The library doors burst wide. A flood of black charcoal-burned uniformed men collided boisterously upstairs.
I called, softly.
They stopped, surprised.
“Quietly,” I said.
Barnes seized my arm. “Are you opposing due process?”
“No,” I said. “I won’t even ask to see your property invasion permit. I wish only silence as you work.”
The readers at the tables had leaped up at the storm of feet. I patted the air. They sat back down and did not glance up again at these men crammed into their tight dark char-smeared suits who stared at my mouth now as if they disbelieved my cautions. Barnes nodded. The men moved softly, on tiptoe, through the big library rooms. With extra care, with proper stealth, they raised the windows. Soundlessly, whispering, they collected books from the shelves to toss down toward the evening yard below. Now and again they scowled at the readers who calmly went on leafing through their books, but made no move to seize these volumes, and continued emptying the shelves.
“Good,” said I.
“Good?” asked Barnes.
“Your men can work without you. Take five.”
And I was out in the twilight so quickly he could only follow, bursting with unvoiced questions. We crossed the green lawn where a huge portable Hell was drawn up hungrily, a fat black tar-daubed oven from which shot red-orange and gaseous blue flames into which men were shoveling the wild birds, the literary doves which soared crazily down to flop broken-winged, the precious flights poured from every window to thump the earth, to be kerosene-soaked and chucked in the gulping furnace. As we passed this destructive if colorful industry, Barnes mused.
“Funny. Should be crowds, a thing like this. But . . .no crowd. How do you figure?”
I left him. He had to run to catch up.
In the small café across the street we took a table and Barnes, irritable for no reason he could say, called out, “Service! I’ve got to get back to work!”
Walter, the proprietor, strolled over, with some dog-eared menus. Walter looked at me. I winked.
Walter looked at Jonathan Barnes.
Walter said, “‘Come live with me and be my love; and we will all the pleasures prove.’”
“What?” Jonathan Barnes blinked.
“‘Call me Ishmael,’” said Walter.
“Ishmael,” I said. “We’ll have coffee to start.”
Walter came back with the coffee.
“‘Tiger! Tiger! burning bright,’” he said. “‘In the forests of the night.’”
Barnes stared after the man who walked away casually. “What’s eating him? Is he nuts?”
“No,” I said. “But go on with what you were saying back at the library. Explain.”
“Explain?” said Barnes. “My God, you’re all sweet reason. All right, I will explain. This is a tremendous experiment. A test town. If the burning works here, it’ll work anywhere. We don’t burn everything, no no. You noticed, my men cleaned only certain shelves and categories? We’ll eviscerate about forty-nine point two percent. Then we’ll report our success to the overall government committee—”
“Excellent,” I said.
Barnes eyed me. “How can you be so cheerful?”
“Any library’s problem,” I said, “is where to put the books. You’ve helped me solve it.”
“I thought you’d be . . . afraid.”
“I’ve been around Trash Men all my life.”
“I beg pardon?”
“Burning is burning. Whoever does it is a Trash Man.”
“Chief Censor, Green Town, Illinois, damn it!”
A new man, a waiter, came with the coffee pot steaming.
“Hullo, Keats,” I said.
“‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’” said the waiter.
“Keats?” said the Chief Censor. “His name isn’t Keats.”
“Silly of me,” I said. “This is a Greek restaurant. Right, Plato?”
The waiter refilled my cup. “‘The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness . . .This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.’”
Barnes leaned forward to squint at the waiter, who did not move. Then Barnes busied himself blowing on his coffee: “As I see it, our plan is simple as one and one make two . . .”
The waiter said, “‘I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.’”
“Damn it!” Barnes slammed his cup down. “Peace! Get away while we eat, you, Keats, Plato, Holdridge, that’s your name. I remember now, Holdridge! What’s all this other junk?”
“Just fancy,” said I. “Conceit.”
“Damn fancy, and to hell with conceit, you can eat alone, I’m getting out of this madhouse.” And Barnes gulped his coffee as the waiter and proprietor watched and I watched him gulping and across the street the bright bonfire in the gut of the monster device burned fiercely. Our silent watching caused Barnes to freeze at last with the cup in his hand and the coffee dripping off his chin. “Why? Why aren’t you yelling? Why aren’t you fighting me?”
“But I am fighting,” I said, taking the book from under my arm. I tore a page from Demosthenes, let Barnes see the name, rolled it into a fine Havana cigar shape, lit it, puffed it, and said, “‘Though a man escape every other danger, he can never wholly escape those who do not want such a person as he is to exist.’”
Barnes was on his feet, yelling, the “cigar” was torn from my mouth, stomped on, and the Chief Censor was out of the door, almost in one motion.
I could only follow.
On the sidewalk, Barnes collided with an old man who was entering the café. The old man almost fell. I grabbed his arm.
“Professor Einstein,” I said.
“Mr. Shakespeare,” he said.
Barnes fled.
I found him on the lawn by the old and beautiful library where the dark men, who wafted kerosene perfume from the
“You,” I called up easily at the men who paused. “City Ordinance. Closing time is nine sharp. Please be done by then. Wouldn’t want to break the law—Good evening, Mr. Lincoln.”
“‘Four score,’” said a man, passing, “‘and seven years—’”
“Lincoln?” The Chief Censor turned slowly. “That’s Bowman. Charlie Bowman. I know you, Charlie, come back here, Charlie, Chuck!”
But the man was gone, and cars drove by, and now and again as the burning progressed men called to me and I called back, and whether it was, “Mr. Poe!” or hullo to some small bleak stranger with a name like Freud, each time I called in good humor and they replied, Mr. Barnes twitched as if another arrow had pierced, sunk deep in his quivering bulk and he were dying slowly of a hidden seepage of fire and raging life. And still no crowd gathered to watch the commotion.
Suddenly, for no discernible reason, Mr. Barnes shut his eyes, opened his mouth wide, gathered air, and shouted, “Stop!”
The men ceased shoveling the books out of the window above.
“But,” I said, “it’s not closing time . . .”
“Closing time! Everybody out!” Deep holes had eaten away the center of Jonathan Barnes’ eyes. Within, there was no bottom. He seized the air. He pushed down. Obediently, all the windows crashed like guillotines, chiming their panes.
The dark men, bewildered, came out and down the steps.