Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07
Read Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 Online
Authors: Twice Twenty-two (v2.1)
Twice Twenty-two
Ray Bradbury
Contents
5
THE FRUIT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL
9
THE GOLDEN KITE, THE SILVER WIND
12
THE BIG BLACK AND WHITE GAME
14
THE GREAT WIDE WORLD OVER THERE
22
THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN
8
THE TOWN WHERE NO ONE GOT OFF
12
DARK THEY WERE, AND GOLDEN-EYED
18
THE GREAT COLLISION OF MONDAY LAST
And this one, with love, is for
Neva
,
daughter
of Glinda
the Good Witch of the South
. . .And pluck till time and times are done The
silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
W. B. YEATS
Out there in the cold water, far from land, we
waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the
brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feellng like two
birds in the gray sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then
white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our
light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn
shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of
scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.
"It's a lonely life, but you're used to
it now, aren't you?" asked McDunn.
"Yes," I said. "You're a good
talker, thank the Lord."
"Well, it's your turn on land
tomorrow," he said, smiling, "to dance the ladies and drink
gin."
"What do you think, McDunn, when I leave
you out here alone?"
"On the mysteries of the sea."
McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening,
the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred directions, the Fog
Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn't a town for a
hundred miles down the coast, just a road which came lonely through dead
country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of cold water
out to our rock, and rare few ships.
"The mysteries of the sea," said
McDunn thoughtfully. "You know, the ocean's the biggest damned snowflake
ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colors, no two alike. Strange.
One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea
surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and He in the bay, sort of
trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across
them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big
peacock's tail, moving out there until
midnight
.
Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped
away,
the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they
came all those miles to worship.
Strange.
But think
how the tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the
God-light flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster
voice. They never came back, those fish, but don't you think for a while they
thought they were in the Presence?"
I shivered. I looked out at the long gray lawn
of the sea stretching away into nothing and nowhere.
"Oh, the sea's full." McDunn puffed
his pipe nervously, blinking. He had been nervous all day and hadn't said why.
"For all our engines and so-called submarines, it'll be ten thousand
centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the
fairy kingdoms there, and know real terror. Think of it, it's still the year
300,000 Before Christ down under there. While we've paraded around with
trumpets, lopping off each other's countries and heads, they have been living
beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a
comet."
"Yes, it's an old world."
"Come on. I got something special I been
saving up to tell you."
We ascended the eighty steps, talking and
taking our time. At the top, McDunn switched off the room fights so there'd be no
reflection in the plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning
easily in its oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every
fifteen seconds.
"Sounds like an animal, don't it?"
McDunn nodded to himself. "A big lonely animal crying in the night.
Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years calling out to the Deeps, I'm
here, I'm here, I'm here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do. You been here
now for three months, Johnny, so I better prepare you. About this time of year,"
he said, studying the murk and fog, "something comes to visit the
lighthouse."
"The swarms of fish like you said?"
"No, this is something else. I've put off
telling you because you might think I'm daft. But tonight's the latest I can
put it off, for if my calendar's marked right from last year, tonight's the
night it comes. I won't go into detail, you'll have to see it yourself. Just
sit down there. If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the
motorboat in to land and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the
cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your lights burning
nights, I won't question or blame you. It's happened three years now, and this
is the only time anyone's been here with me to verify it. You wait and
watch."
Half an hour passed with only a few whispers
between us. When we grew tired waiting, McDunn began describing some of his
ideas to me. He had some theories about the Fog Horn itself.
"One day many years ago a man walked
along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We
need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'U make one. I'll make a
voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that
is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when
you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the
birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the
hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it,
that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer,
and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll
make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever
hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.'"
The Fog Horn blew.
"I made up that story," said McDunn
quietly, "to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the
lighthouse every year. The Fog Horn calls it, I think, and it comes. . .
."
"But—" I said.
"Sssst!" said McDunn.
"There!" He nodded out to the Deeps.
Something was swimming toward the lighthouse
tower.
It was a cold night, as I have said; the high
tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and
calling through the raveling mist. You couldn't see far and you couldn't see
plain, but there was the deep sea moving on its way about the night earth, flat
and quiet, the color of gray mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high
tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising,
a bubble, a bit of froth. And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a
head, a large head, dark-colored, with immense eyes, and then a neck. And
then—not a body—but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above
the water on a slender and beautiful dark neck. Only then did the body, like a
little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the
subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I
estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.
I don't know what I said. I said something.
"Steady, boy, steady," whispered
McDunn.
"It's impossible!" I said.
"No, Johnny, we're impossible. It's like
it always was ten million years ago. It hasn't changed. It's us and the land
that've changed, become impossible. Us!"
It swam slowly and with a great dark majesty
out in the icy waters, far away. The fog came and went about it, momentarily
erasing its shape. One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our
immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disk
held high and sending a message in primeval
code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.
"It's a dinosaur of some sort!" I
crouched down, holding to the stair rail.
“Yes, one of the tribe."
"But they died out!"
"No, only hid away in the Deeps. Deep,
deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn't that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it
says so much: the Deeps. There's all the coldness and darkness and deepness in
the world in a word like that."
'What'll we do?"
“Do? We got our job, we can't leave. Besides,
we're safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing's as big as
a destroyer and almost as swift."
"But here, why does it come here?"
The next moment I had my answer.
The Fog Horn blew.
And the monster answered.
A cry came across a million years of water and
mist. A cry so anguished and alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The
monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again.
The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound
that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far
away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was
the sound.
"Now," whispered McDunn, "do
you know why it comes here?"
I nodded.
"All year long, Johnny, that poor monster
there lying far out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe,
biding its time, perhaps it's a million years old, this one creature. Think of
it, waiting a million years; could you wait that long? Maybe it's the last of
its kind. I sort of think that's true. Anyway, here come men on land and build
this lighthouse, five years ago. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and
sound it out toward the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories
of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you're alone, all
alone in a world not made for you, a world where you have to hide.
"But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and
goes, comes and goes, and you stay from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your
eyes open like the lenses of two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you
have the ocean sea on your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a
thousand miles of water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly
stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on great slakes
of cod and minnow, on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn
months, through September when the fogs started, through October with more fog
and the horn still calUng you on, and then, late in November, after
pressurizing yourself day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are near
the surface and still alive. You've got to go slow; if you surfaced all at once
you'd explode. So it takes you all of three months to surface, and then a
number of days to swim through the cold waters to the lighthouse. And there you
are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest damn monster in creation. And
here's the lighthouse calling to you, with a long neck like your neck sticking
way up out of the water, and a body hke your body, and, most important of all,
a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny, do you
understand?"
The Fog Horn blew.
The monster answered.
I saw it all, I knew it all—the million years
of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million
years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while
the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps dried on the continental lands,
the sloths and saber-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran
like white ants upon the hills.