Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (27 page)

 
          
 
"But, Willie," said Mrs. Emily long
ago, "didn't you ever get lonely? Didn't you ever want—things—that grownups
wanted?"

 
          
 
"I fought that out alone," said
Willie. "I'm a boy, I told myself, I'll have to live in a boy's world,
read boys' books, play boys' games, cut myself off from everything else. I
can't be both. I got to be only one thing—young. And so I played that way. Oh,
it wasn't easy. There were times—" He lapsed into silence.

 
          
 
"And the family you lived with, they
never knew?"

 
          
 
"No. Telling them would have spoiled
everything. I told them I was a runaway; I let them check through official
channels, police. Then, when there was no record, let them put in to adopt me.
That was best of all; as long as they never guessed. But then, after three
years, or five years, they guessed, or a traveling man came through, or a
carnival man saw me, and it was over. It always had to end."

 
          
 
"And you're very happy and it's nice
being a child for over forty years?"

 
          
 
"It's a living, as they say. And when you
make other people happy, then you're almost happy too. I got my job to do and I
do it. And anyway, in a few years now I'll be in my second childhood. All the
fevers will be out of me and all the unfulfilled things and most of the dreams.
Then I can relax, maybe, and play the role all the way."

 
          
 
He threw the baseball one last time and broke
the reverie. Then he was running to seize his luggage. Tom, Bill, Jamie, Bob,
Sam—their names moved on his lips. They were embarrassed at his shaking hands.

 
          
 
"After all, Willie, it ain't as if you're
going to China or Timbuktu."

 
          
 
"That's right, isn't it?" Willie did
not move.

 
          
 
"So long, Willie. See you next
week!"

 
          
 
"So long, so long!"

 
          
 
And he was walking off with his suitcase
again, looking at the trees, going away from the boys and the street where he
had lived, and as he turned the comer a train whistle screamed, and he began to
run.

 
          
 
The last thing he saw and heard was a white
ball tossed at a high roof, back and forth, back and forth, and two voices
crying out as the ball pitched now up, down, and back through the sky,
"Annie, annie, over! Annie, annie, over!" like the crying of birds
flying off to the far south.

 
          
 
In the early morning, with the smell of the
mist and the cold metal, with the iron smell of the train around him and a full
night of traveling shaking his bones and his body, and a smell of the sun
beyond the horizon, he awoke and looked out upon a small town just arising from
sleep. Lights were coming on, soft voices muttered, a red signal bobbed back
and forth, back and forth in the cold air. There was that sleeping hush in
which echoes are dignified by clarity, in which echoes stand nakedly alone and
sharp. A porter moved by, a shadow in shadows.

 
          
 
"Su-," said Willie.

 
          
 
The porter stopped.

 
          
 
"What town's this?" whispered the
boy in the dark.

 
          
 
"Valleyville."

 
          
 
"How many people?"

 
          
 
"Ten thousand. Why? This your stop?"

 
          
 
"It looks green." Willie gazed out
at the cold morning town for a long time. "It looks nice and quiet,"
said Willie.

 
          
 
"Son," said the porter, "you
know where you going?"

 
          
 
"Here," said Willie, and got up
quietly in the still, cool, iron-smelling morning, in the train dark, with a
rustling and stir.

 
          
 
"I hope you know what you're doing,
boy," said the porter.

 
          
 
"Yes, sir," said Willie. "I
know what I'm doing." And he was down the dark aisle, luggage lifted after
him by the porter, and out in the smoking, steaming-cold, beginning-to-lighten
morning. He stood looking up at the porter and the black metal train against
the few remaining stars. The train gave a great wailing blast of whistle, the
porters cried out all along the line, the cars jolted, and his special porter
waved and smiled down at the boy there, the small boy there with the big
luggage who shouted up to him, even as the whistle screamed again.

 
          
 
"What?" shouted the porter, hand
cupped to ear.

 
          
 
"Wish me luck!" cried Willie.

 
          
 
"Best of luck, son," called the
porter, waving, smiling. "Best of luck, boy!"

 
          
 
"Thanks!" said Willie, in the great
sound of the train, in the steam and roar.

 
          
 
He watched the black train until it was
completely gone away and out of sight. He did not move all the time it was
going. He stood quietly, a small boy twelve years old, on the worn wooden
platform, and only after three entire minutes did he turn at last to face the
empty streets below.

 
          
 
Then, as the sun was rising, he began to walk
very fast, so as to keep warm, down into the new town.

 
          
 
"South," said the captain.

 
          
 
"But," said his crew, "there
simply aren't any directions out here in space."

 
          
 
"When you travel on down toward the
sun," replied the captain, "and everything gets yellow and warm and
lazy, then you're going in one direction only." He shut his eyes and
thought about the smoldering, warm, faraway land, his breath moving gently in
his mouth. "South." He nodded slowly to himself. "South."

 
          
 
Their rocket was the Copa de Oro, also named
the Prometheus and the Icarus, and their destination in all reality was the
blazing noonday sun. In high good spirits they had packed along two thousand sour
lemonades and a thousand white-capped beers for this journey to the wide
Sahara. And now as the sun boiled up at them they remembered a score of verses
and quotations:

 
          
 
"The golden apples of the sun'?"

 
          
 
"Yeats."

 
          
 
"Tear no more the heat of the sun'?"

 
          
 
"Shakespeare, of course!"

 
          
 
" 'Cup of Gold'? Steinbeck. The Crock of
Gold'? Stephens. And what about the pot of gold at the rainbow's end? There's a
name for our trajectory, by God. Rainbow!"

 
          
 
"Temperature?"

 
          
 
"One thousand degrees Fahrenheit!"

 
          
 
The captain stared from the huge dark-lensed
port, and there indeed was the sun, and to go to that sun and touch it and
steal part of it forever away was his quiet and single idea. In this ship were
combined the coolly delicate and the coldly practical. Through corridors of ice
and milk-frost, ammoniated winter and storming snowflakes blew. Any spark from
that vast hearth burning out there beyond the callous hull of this ship, any
small fire-breath that might seep through would find winter, slumbering here
like all the coldest hours of February.

 
          
 
The audio-thermometer murmured in the arctic
silence: "Temperature: two thousand degrees!"

 
          
 
Falling, thought the captain, like a snowflake
into the lap of June, warm July, and the sweltering dog-mad days of August.

 
          
 
"Three thousand degrees Fahrenheit!"

 
          
 
Under the snow fields engines raced,
refrigerants pumped ten thousand miles per hour in rimed boa-constrictor coils.

 
          
 
"Four thousand degrees Fahrenheit."

 
          
 
Noon. Summer. July.

 
          
 
"Five thousand Fahrenheit!"

 
          
 
And at last the captain spoke with all the
quietness of the journey in his voice:

 
          
 
"Now, we are touching the sun."

 
          
 
Their eyes, thinking it, were melted gold.

 
          
 
"Seven thousand degrees!"

 
          
 
Strange how a mechanical thermometer could
sound excited, though it possessed only an emotionless steel voice.

 
          
 
"What time is it?" asked someone.

 
          
 
Everyone had to smile.

 
          
 
For now there was only the sun and the sun and
the sun. It was every horizon, it was every direction. It burned the minutes,
the seconds, the hourglasses, the clocks; it burned all time and eternity away.
It burned the eyeUds and the serum of the dark world behind the lids, the
retina, the hidden brain; and it burned sleep and the sweet memories of sleep
and cool nightfall.

 
          
 
"Watch it!"

 
          
 
"Captain!"

 
          
 
Bretton, the first mate, fell flat to the
winter deck. His protective suit whistled where, burst open, his warmness, his
oxygen, and his life bloomed out in a frosted steam.

 
          
 
"Quick!"

 
          
 
Inside Bretton's plastic face-mask, milk crystals
had already gathered in blind patterns. They bent to see.

 
          
 
"A structural defect in his suit,
Captain. Dead."

 
          
 
"Frozen."

 
          
 
They stared at that other thermometer which
showed how winter lived in this snowing ship. One thousand degrees below zero. The
captain gazed down upon the frosted statue and the twinkling crystals that iced
over it as he watched. Irony of the coolest sort, he thought; a man afraid of
fire and killed by frost.

 
          
 
The captain turned away. "No time. No
time. Let him lie," He felt his tongue move. "Temperature?"

 
          
 
The dials jumped four thousand degrees.

 
          
 
"Look. Will you look? Look."

 
          
 
Their icicle was melting.

 
          
 
The captain jerked his head to look at the
ceiling.

 
          
 
As if a motion-picture projector had jammed a
single clear memory frame in his head, he found his mind focused ridiculously
on a scene whipped out of childhood.

 
          
 
Spring mornings as a boy he had leaned from
his bedroom window into the snow-smelling air to see the sun sparkle the last
icicle of winter. A dripping of white wine, the blood of cool but warming April
fell from that clear crystal blade. Minute by minute, December's weapon grew
less dangerous. And then at last the icicle fell with the sound of a single
chime to the graveled walk below,

 
          
 
"Auxiliary pump's broken, sir.
Refrigeration. We're losing our ice!"

 
          
 
A shower of warm rain shivered down upon them.
The captain jerked his head right and left. "Can you see the trouble?
Christ, don't stand there, we haven't time!"

 
          
 
The men rushed; the captain bent in the warm
rain, cursing, felt his hands run over the cold machine, felt them burrow and
search, and while he worked he saw a future which was removed from them by the
merest breath. He saw the skin peel from the rocket beehive, men, thus
revealed, running, running, mouths shrieking, soundless. Space was a black
mossed well where life drowned its roars and terrors. Scream a big scream, but
space snuffed it out before it was half up your throat. Men scurried, ants in a
flaming matchbox; the ship was dripping lava, gushing steam, nothing!

 
          
 
"Captain?"

 
          
 
The nightmare flicked away.

 
          
 
"Here." He worked in the soft warm
rain that fell from the upper decks. He fumbled at the auxihary pump.
"Damn it!" He jerked the feed line. When it came, it'd be the
quickest death in the history of dying. One moment, yelling; a warm flash later
only the billion billion tons of space-fire would whisper, unheard, in space.
Popped like strawberries in a furnace, while their thoughts lingered on the
scorched air a long breath after their bodies were charred roast and
fluorescent gas.

 
          
 
"Damn!" He stabbed the auxiliary
pump with a screw driver. "Jesus!" He shuddered. The complete
annihilation of it. He clamped his eyes tight, teeth tight. God, he thought,
we're used to more leisurely dyings, measured in minutes and hours. Even twenty
seconds now would be a slow death compared to this hungry idiot thing waiting
to eat us!

 
          
 
"Captain, do we pull out or stay?"

 
          
 
"Get the Cup ready. Take over, finish
this. Now!"

 
          
 
He turned and put his hand to the working
mechanism of the huge Cup; shoved his fingers into the robot Glove. A twitch of
his hand here moved a gigantic hand, with gigantic metal fingers, from the
bowels of the ship. Now, now, the great metal hand slid out holding the huge Copa
de Oro, breathless, into the iron furnace, the bodiless body and the fleshless
flesh of the sun.

 
          
 
A million years ago, thought the captain,
quickly, quickly, as he moved the hand and the Cup, a million years ago a naked
man on a lonely northern trail saw lightning strike a tree. And while his clan
fled, with bare hands he plucked a limb of fire, broiling the flesh of his
fingers, to carry it, running in triumph, shielding it from the rain with his
body, to his cave, where he shrieked out a laugh and tossed it full on a mound
of leaves and gave his people summer. And the tribe crept at last, trembling,
near the fire, and they put out their flinching hands and felt the new season
in their cave, this small yellow spot of changing weather, and they, too, at last,
nervously, smiled. And the gift of fire was theirs.

 
          
 
"Captain!"

 
          
 
It took all of four seconds for the huge hand
to push the empty Cup to the fire. So here we are again, today, on another
trail, he thought, reaching for a cup of precious gas and vacuum, a handful of
different fire with which to run back up cold space, fighting our way, and take
to Earth a gift of fire that might bum forever. Why?

 
          
 
He knew the answer before the question.

 
          
 
Because the atoms we work with our hands, on
Earth, are pitiful; the atomic bomb is pitiful and small and our knowledge is
pitiful and small, and only the sun really knows what we want to know, and only
the sun has the secret. And besides, it's fun, it's a chance, it's a great
thing coming here, playing tag, hitting and running. There is no reason,
really, except the pride and vanity of little insect men hoping to sting the
Hon and escape the maw. My God, we'll say, we did it! And here is our cup of
energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities
and sail our ships and light our hbraries and tan our children and bake our
daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand
years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and
religion: drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows
of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of
darkness in each man. So: we stretch out our hand with the beggar's cup ...

 
          
 
"Ah."

 
          
 
The Cup dipped into the sun. It scooped up a
bit of the flesh of God, the blood of the universe, the blazing thought, the
blinding philosophy that set out and mothered a galaxy, that idled and swept
planets in their fields and summoned or laid to rest lives and livelihoods.

 
          
 
"Now, slow," whispered the captain.

 
          
 
"What'll happen when we pull it inside?
That extra heat now, at this time. Captain?"

 
          
 
"God knows."

 
          
 
"Auxiliary pump all repaired, sir."

 
          
 
"Start it!"

 
          
 
The pump leaped on.

 
          
 
"Close the lid of the Cup and inside now,
slow, slow."

 
          
 
The beautiful hand outside the ship trembled,
a tremendous image of his own gesture, sank with oiled silence into the ship
body. The Cup, lid shut, dripped yellow flowers and white stars, slid deep. The
audio-thermometer screamed. The refrigerator system kicked; ammoniated fluids
banged the walls like blood in the head of a shrieking idiot.