The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury
The doctor showed his teeth and patted the boy’s hand. ‘It looks fine to me, son. You just had a little fever dream.’
‘But it changed, Doctor, oh, Doctor,’ cried Charles, pitifully holding up his pale wild hand. ‘It did!’
The doctor winked. ‘I’ll give you a pink pill for that.’ He popped a tablet onto Charles’s tongue. ‘Swallow!’
‘Will it make my hand change back and become me, again?’
‘Yes, yes.’
The house was silent when the doctor drove off down the road in his car under the quiet, blue September sky. A clock ticked far below in the kitchen world. Charles lay looking at his hand.
It did not change back. It was still something else.
The wind blew outside. Leaves fell against the cool window.
At four o’clock his other hand changed. It seemed almost to become a fever. It pulsed and shifted, cell by cell. It beat like a warm heart. The fingernails turned blue and then red. It took about an hour for it to change and when it was finished, it looked just like any ordinary hand. But it was not ordinary. It no longer was him any more. He lay in a fascinated horror and then fell into an exhausted sleep.
Mother brought the soup up at six. He wouldn’t touch it. ‘I haven’t any hands,’ he said, eyes shut.
‘Your hands are perfectly good,’ said Mother.
‘No,’ he wailed. ‘My hands are gone. I feel like I have stumps. Oh, Mama, Mama, hold me, hold me, I’m scared!’
She had to feed him herself.
‘Mama,’ he said, ‘get the doctor, please, again. I’m so sick.’
‘The doctor’ll be here tonight at eight,’ she said, and went out.
At seven, with night dark and close around the house, Charles was sitting up in bed when he felt the thing happening to first one leg and then the other. ’Mama! Come quick!’ he screamed.
But when Mama came the thing was no longer happening.
When she went downstairs, he simply lay without fighting as his legs beat and beat, grew warm, red-hot, and the room filled with the warmth of his feverish change. The glow crept up from his toes to his ankles and then to his knees.
‘May I come in?’ The doctor smiled in the doorway.
‘Doctor!’ cried Charles. ‘Hurry, take off my blankets!’
The doctor lifted the blankets tolerantly. ‘There you are. Whole and healthy. Sweating, though. A little fever. I told you not to move around, bad boy.’ He pinched the moist pink cheek. ‘Did the pills help? Did your hand change back?’
‘No, no, now it’s my other hand and my legs!’
‘Well, well, I’ll have to give you three more pills, one for each limb, eh, my little peach?’ laughed the doctor.
‘Will they help me? Please, please. What’ve I got?’
‘A mild case of scarlet fever, complicated by a slight cold.’
‘Is it a germ that lives and has more little germs in me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure it’s scarlet fever? You haven’t taken any tests!’
‘I guess I know a certain fever when I see one,’ said the doctor, checking the boy’s pulse with cool authority.
Charles lay there, not speaking until the doctor was crisply packing his black kit. Then in the silent room, the boy’s voice made a small, weak pattern, his eyes alight with remembrance. ‘I read a book once. About petrified trees, wood turning to stone. About how trees fell and rotted and minerals got in and built up and they look just like trees, but they’re not, they’re stone.’ He stopped. In the quiet warm room his breathing sounded.
‘Well?’ asked the doctor.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Charles after a time. ‘Do germs ever get big? I mean, in biology class they told us about one-celled animals, amoebas and things, and how millions of years ago they got together until there was a bunch and they made the first body. And more and more cells got together and got bigger and then finally maybe there was a fish and finally here we are, and all we are is a bunch of cells that decided to get together, to help each other out. Isn’t that right?’ Charles wet his feverish lips.
‘What’s all this about?’ The doctor bent over him.
‘I’ve got to tell you this. Doctor, oh, I’ve got to!’ he cried. ‘What would happen, oh just pretend, please pretend, that just like in the old days, a lot of microbes got together and wanted to make a bunch, and reproduced and made more—’
His white hands were on his chest now, crawling toward his throat.
‘And they decided to take over a person!’ cried Charles.
‘Take over a person?’
‘Yes, become a person. Me, my hands, my feet! What if a disease somehow knew how to kill a person and yet live after him?’
He screamed.
The hands were on his neck.
The doctor moved forward, shouting.
At nine o’clock the doctor was escorted out to his car by the mother and father, who handed him his bag. They conversed in the cool night wind for a few minutes. ‘Just be sure his hands are kept strapped to his legs,’ said the doctor. ‘I don’t want him hurting himself.’
‘Will he be all right, Doctor?’ The mother held to his arm a moment.
He patted her shoulder. ‘Haven’t I been your family physician for thirty years? It’s the fever. He imagines things.’
‘But those bruises on his throat, he almost choked himself.’
‘Just you keep him strapped; he’ll be all right in the morning.’
The car moved off down the dark September road.
At three in the morning, Charles was still awake in his small black room. The bed was damp under his head and his back. He was very warm. Now he no longer had any arms or legs, and his body was beginning to change. He did not move on the bed, but looked at the vast blank ceiling space with insane concentration. For a while he had screamed and thrashed, but now he was weak and hoarse from it, and his mother had gotten up a number of times to soothe his brow with a wet towel. Now he was silent, his hands strapped to his legs.
He felt the walls of his body change, the organs shift, the lungs catch fire like burning bellows of pink alcohol. The room was lighted up as with the flickerings of a hearth.
Now he had no body. It was all gone. It was under him, but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head, and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the body, below, still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate. There were the little hand hairs and the fingernails and the scars and the toenails and the tiny mole on his right hip, all done again in perfect fashion.
I am dead, he thought, I’ve been killed, and yet I live. My body is dead, it is all disease and nobody will know. I will walk around and it will not be me, it will be something else. It will be something all bad, all evil, so big and so evil it’s hard to understand or think about. Something that will buy shoes and drink water and get married some day maybe and do more evil in the world than has ever been done.
Now the warmth was stealing up his neck, into his cheeks, like a hot wine. His lips burned, his eyelids, like leaves, caught fire. His nostrils breathed out blue flame, faintly, faintly.
This will be all, he thought. It’ll take my head and my brain and fix each eye and every tooth and all the marks in my brain, and every hair and every wrinkle in my ears, and there’ll be nothing left of me.
He felt his brain fill with a boiling mercury. He felt his left eye clench in upon itself and, like a snail, withdraw, shift. He was blind in his left eye. It no longer belonged to him. It was enemy territory. His tongue was gone, cut out. His left cheek was numbed, lost. His left ear stopped hearing. It belonged to someone else now. This thing that was being born, this mineral thing replacing the wooden log, this disease replacing healthy animal cell.
He tried to scream and he was able to scream loud and high and sharply in the room, just
His scream stopped before his mother ran through the door to his side.
It was a good, clear morning, with a brisk wind that helped carry the doctor up the path before the house. In the window above, the boy stood, fully dressed. He did not wave when the doctor waved and called, ‘What’s this? Up? My God!’
The doctor almost ran upstairs. He came gasping into the bedroom.
‘What are you doing out of bed?’ he demanded of the boy. He tapped his thin chest, took his pulse and temperature. ‘Absolutely amazing! Normal, Normal, by God!’
‘I shall never be sick again in my life,’ declared the boy, quietly, standing there, looking out the wide window. ‘Never.’
‘I hope not. Why, you’re looking fine, Charles.’
‘Doctor?’
‘Yes, Charles?’
‘Can I go to school now?’ asked Charles.
‘Tomorrow will be time enough. You sound positively eager.’
‘I am. I like school. All the kids. I want to play with them and wrestle with them, and spit on them and play with the girls’ pigtails and shake the teacher’s hand, and rub my hands on all the cloaks in the cloakroom, and I want to grow up and travel and shake hands with people all over the world, and be married and have lots of children, and go to libraries and handle books and—all of that I want to!’ said the boy, looking off into the September morning. ‘What’s the name you called me?’
‘What?’ The doctor puzzled. ‘I called you nothing but Charles.’
‘It’s better than no name at all, I guess.’ The boy shrugged.
‘I’m glad you want to go back to school,’ said the doctor.
‘I really anticipate it,’ smiled the boy. ‘Thank you for your help, Doctor. Shake hands.’
‘Glad to.’
They shook hands gravely, and the clear wind blew through the open window. They shook hands for almost a minute, the boy smiling up at the old man and thanking him.
Then, laughing, the boy raced the doctor downstairs and out to his car. His mother and father followed for the happy farewell.
‘Fit as a fiddle!’ said the doctor. ‘Incredible!’
‘And strong,’ said the father. ‘He got out of his straps himself during the night. Didn’t you. Charles?’
‘Did I?’ said the boy.
‘You did! How?’
‘Oh,’ the boy said, ‘that was a long time ago.’
‘A long time ago!’
They all laughed, and while they were laughing, the quiet boy moved his bare foot on the sidewalk and merely touched, brushed against a number of red ants that were scurrying about on the sidewalk. Secretly, his eyes shining, while his parents chatted with the old man, he saw the ants hesitate, quiver, and lie still on the cement. He sensed they were cold now.
‘Good-by!’
The doctor drove away, waving.
The boy walked ahead of his parents. As he walked he looked away toward the town and began to hum ‘School Days’ under his breath.
‘It’s good to have him well again,’ said the father.
‘Listen to him. He’s so looking forward to school!’
The boy turned quietly. He gave each of his parents a crushing hug. He kissed them both several times.
Then without a word he bounded up the steps into the house.
In the parlor, before the others entered, he quickly opened the bird cage, thrust his hand in, and petted the yellow canary, once.
Then he shut the cage door, stood back, and waited.
The Town Where No One Got Off
Crossing the continental United States by night, by day, on the train, you flash past town after wilderness town where nobody ever gets off. Or rather, no person who doesn’t belong, no person who hasn’t roots in these country graveyards ever bothers to visit their lonely stations or attend their lonely views.
I spoke of this to a fellow passenger, another salesman like myself, on the Chicago-Los Angeles train as we crossed Iowa.
‘True,’ he said. ‘People get off in Chicago; everyone gets off there. People get off in New York, get off in Boston, get off in L.A. People who don’t live there go there to see and come back to tell. But what tourist ever just got off at Fox Hill, Nebraska, to look at it? You? Me? No! I don’t know anyone, got no business there, it’s no health resort, so why bother?’
‘Wouldn’t it be a fascinating change,’ I said, ‘some year to plan a really different vacation? Pick some village lost on the plains where you don’t know a soul and go there for the hell of it?’
‘You’d be bored stiff.’
‘I’m not bored thinking of it!’ I peered out the window. ‘What’s the next town coming up on this line?’
‘Rampart Junction.’
I smiled. ‘Sounds good. I might get off there.’
‘You’re a liar and a fool. What you want? Adventure? Romance? Go ahead, jump off the train. Ten seconds later you’ll call yourself an idiot, grab a taxi, and race us to the next town.’
‘Maybe.’
I watched telephone poles flick by, flick by, flick by. Far ahead I could see the first faint outlines of a town.
‘But I don’t think so,’ I heard myself say.
The salesman across from me looked faintly surprised.
For slowly, very slowly, I was rising to stand. I reached for my hat. I saw my hand fumble for my one suitcase. I was surprised myself.
‘Hold on!’ said the salesman. ‘What’re you doing?’
The train rounded a curve suddenly. I swayed. Far ahead I saw one church spire, a deep forest, a field of summer wheat.
‘It looks like I’m getting off the train,’ I said.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s something about that town up ahead. I’ve got to go see. I’ve got the time. I don’t have to be in L.A., really, until next Monday. If I don’t get off the train now, I’ll always wonder what I missed, what I let slip by when I had the chance to see it.’
‘We were just talking. There’s nothing there.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘There is.’
I put my hat on my head and lifted the suitcase in my hand.
‘By God,’ said the salesman, ‘I think you’re really going to do it.’
My heart beat quickly. My face was flushed.
The train whistled. The train rushed down the track. The town was near!
‘Wish me luck,’ I said.
‘Luck!’ he cried.
I ran for the porter, yelling.
There was an ancient flake-painted chair tilted back against the stationplatform wall. In this chair, completely relaxed so he sank into his clothes, was a man of some seventy years whose timbers looked as if he’d been nailed there since the station was built. The sun had burned his face dark and tracked his cheek with lizard folds and stitches that held his eyes in a perpetual squint. His hair smoked ash-white in the summer wind. His blue shirt, open at the neck to show white clock springs, was bleached like the staring late afternoon sky. His shoes were blistered as if he had held them, uncaring, in the mouth of a stove, motionless, forever. His shadow under him was stenciled a permanent black.
As I stepped down, the old man’s eyes flicked every door on the train and stopped, surprised, at me.
I thought he might wave.
But there was only a sudden coloring of his secret eyes; a chemical change that was recognition. Yet he had not twitched so much as his mouth, an eyelid, a finger. An invisible bulk had shifted inside him.
The moving train gave me an excuse to follow it with my eyes. There was no one else on the platform. No autos waited by the cobwebbed, nailed-shut office. I alone had departed the iron thunder to set foot on the choppy waves of platform lumber.
The train whistled over the hill.
Fool! I thought. My fellow passenger had been right. I would panic at the boredom I
I walked my suitcase down the platform, not looking at the old man. As I passed, I felt his thin bulk shift again, this time so I could hear it. His feet were coming down to touch and tap the mushy boards.
I kept walking.
‘Afternoon,’ a voice said faintly.
I knew he did not look at me but only at that great cloudless spread of shimmering sky.
‘Afternoon,’ I said.
I started up the dirt road toward the town. One hundred yards away, I glanced back.
The old man, still seated there, stared at the sun, as if posing a question.
I hurried on.
I moved through the dreaming late afternoon town, utterly anonymous and alone, a trout going upstream, not touching the banks of a clearrunning river of life that drifted all about me.
My suspicions were confirmed: it was a town where nothing happened, where occurred only the following events:
At four o’clock sharp, the Honneger Hardware door slammed as a dog came out to dust himself in the road. Four-thirty, a straw sucked emptily at the bottom of a soda glass, making a sound like a great cataract in the drugstore silence. Five o’clock, boys and pebbles plunged in the town river. Five-fifteen, ants paraded in the slanting light under some elm trees.
And yet—I turned in a slow circle—somewhere in this town there must be something worth seeing. I knew it was there. I knew I had to keep walking and looking. I knew I would find it.
I walked. I looked.
All through the afternoon there was only one constant and unchanging factor: the old man in the bleached blue pants and shirt was never far away. When I sat in the drugstore he was out front spitting tobacco that rolled itself into tumblebugs in the dust. When I stood by the river he was crouched downstream making a great thing of washing his hands.
Along about seven-thirty in the evening, I was walking for the seventh or eighth time through the quiet streets when I heard footsteps beside me.
I looked over, and the old man was pacing me, looking straight ahead, a piece of dried grass in his stained teeth.