Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (50 page)

 
          
 
Tomorrow would be Christmas, and even while
the three of them rode to the rocket port the mother and father were worried.
It was the boy's first flight into space, his very first time in a rocket, and
they wanted everything to be perfect. So when, at the custom's table, they were
forced to leave behind his gift which exceeded the weight limit by no more than
a few ounces and the little tree with the lovely white candles, they felt
themselves deprived of the season and their love.

 
          
 
The boy was waiting for them in the Terminal
room. Walking toward him, after their unsuccessful clash with the
Interplanetary officials, the mother and father whispered to each other.

 
          
 
"What shall we do?"

 
          
 
"Nothing, nothing. What can we do?"

 
          
 
"Silly rules!"

 
          
 
"And he so wanted the tree!"

 
          
 
The siren gave a great howl and people pressed
forward into the Mars Rocket. The mother and father walked at the very last,
their small pale son between them, silent.

 
          
 
"I'll think of something," said the
father.

 
          
 
"What . . . ?" asked the boy.

 
          
 
And the rocket took off and they were flung
headlong into dark space.

 
          
 
The rocket moved and left fire behind and left
Earth behind on which the date was
December
24, 2052
, heading out into a place where there was no time at all,
no month, no year, no hour. They slept away the rest of the first
"day." Near
midnight
, by
their Earth-time
New York
watches, the boy awoke and said, "I want to go look out the
porthole."

 
          
 
There was only one port, a "window"
of immensely thick glass of some size, up on the next deck.

 
          
 
"Not quite yet," said the father.
"I'll take you up later."

 
          
 
"I want to see where we are and where
we're going."

 
          
 
"I want you to wait for a reason," said
the father.

 
          
 
He had been lying awake, turning this way and
that, thinking of the abandoned gift, the problem of the season, the lost tree
and the white candles. And at last, sitting up, no more than five minutes ago, he
believed he had found a plan. He need only carry it out and this journey would
be fine and joyous indeed.

 
          
 
"Son," he said, "in exactly one
half hour it will be Christmas."

 
          
 
"Oh," said the mother, dismayed that
he had mentioned it. Somehow she had rather hoped that the boy would forget.

 
          
 
The boy's face grew feverish and his lips
trembled. "I know, I know. Will I get a present, will I? Will I have a
tree? You promised—"

 
          
 
"Yes, yes, all that, and more," said
the father.

 
          
 
The mother started. "But—"

 
          
 
"I mean it," said the father.
"I really mean it. All and more, much more. Excuse me, now. I'll be
back."

 
          
 
He left them for about twenty minutes. When he
came back he was smiling. "Almost time."

 
          
 
"Can I hold your watch?" asked the
boy, and the watch was handed over and he held it ticking in his fingers as the
rest of the hour drifted by in fire and silence and unfelt motion.

 
          
 
"It's Christmas now! Christmas! Where's
my present?"

 
          
 
"Here we go," said the father and
took his boy by the shoulder and led him from the room, down the hall, up a
rampway, his wife following.

 
          
 
"I don't understand," she kept
saying.

 
          
 
"You will. Here we are," said the
father.

 
          
 
They had stopped at the closed door of a large
cabin. The father tapped three times and then twice in a code. The door opened
and the light in the cabin went out and there was a whisper of voices.

 
          
 
"Go on in, son," said the father.

 
          
 
"It's dark."

 
          
 
"I'll hold your hand. Come on,
Mama."

 
          
 
They stepped into the room and the door shut,
and the room was very dark indeed. And before them loomed a great glass eye,
the porthole, a window four feet high and six feet wide, from which they could
look out into space.

 
          
 
The boy gasped.

 
          
 
Behind him, the father and the mother gasped
with him, and then in the dark room some people began to sing.

 
          
 
"Merry Christmas, son," said the
father.

 
          
 
And the voices in the room sang the old, the
familiar carols, and the boy moved forward slowly until his face was pressed
against the cool glass of the port. And he stood there for a long long time,
just looking and looking out into space and the deep night at the burning and
the burning of ten billion billion white and lovely candles. . . .

 
          
 
The man staggered through the flung-wide doors
of Heber Finn's pub as if struck by lightning. Reeling, blood on his face,
coat, and torn pants, his moan froze every customer at the bar. For a time you
heard only the soft foam popping in the lacy mugs, as the customers turned,
some faces pale, some pink, some veined and wattle-red. Every eyelid down the
line gave a blink.

 
          
 
The stranger swayed in his ruined clothes,
eyes wide, lips trembling. The drinkers clenched their fists. Yes! they cried,
silently—go on, man! what happened?

 
          
 
The stranger leaned far out on the air.

 
          
 
"Collision," he whispered.
"Collision on the road."

 
          
 
Then, chopped at the knees, he fell.

 
          
 
"Collision!" A dozen men rushed at
the body.

 
          
 
"Kelly!" Heber Finn vaulted the bar.
"Get to the road! Mind the victim; easy does it! Joe, run for the
Doc!"

 
          
 
"Wait!" said a quiet voice.

 
          
 
From the private stall at the dark end of the
pub, the cubby where a philosopher might brood, a dark man blinked out at the
crowd.

 
          
 
"Doc!" cried Heber Finn. "It's
you!"

           
 
Doctor and men hustled out into the night.

 
          
 
"Collision ..." The man on the floor
twitched his lips.

 
          
 
"Softly, boys." Heber Finn and two
others gentled the victim atop the bar. He looked handsome as death on the fine
inlaid wood with the prismed mirror making him two dread calamities for the
price of one.

 
          
 
Outside on the steps, the crowd halted,
shocked as if an ocean had sunk
Ireland
in the dusk and now bulked all about them. Fog in fifty-foot rollers and
breakers put out the moon and stars. Blinking, cursing, the men leapt out to
vanish in the deeps.

 
          
 
Behind, in the bright doorframe, a young man
stood. He was neither red enough nor pale enough of face, nor dark enough or
light enough in spirit to be Irish, and so must be American. He was. That
established, it follows he dreaded interfering with what seemed village ritual.
Since arriving in
Ireland
,
he could not shake the feeling that at all times he was living stage center of
the Abbey Theatre. Now, not knowing his lines, he could only stare after the
rushing men.

 
          
 
"But," he protested weakly, "I
didn't hear any cars on the road."

 
          
 
"You did not!" said an old man
almost pridefully. Arthritis limited him to the top step where he teetered,
shouting at the white tides where his friends had submerged. "Try the
crossroad, boys! That's where it most often does!"

 
          
 
"The crossroad!" Far and near,
footsteps rang.

 
          
 
“Nor," said the American, "did I
hear a collision."

 
          
 
The old man snorted with contempt. "Ah,
we don't be great ones for commotion, nor great crashing sounds. But collision
you'll see if you step on out there. Walk, now, don't run! It's the devil's own
night. Running blind you might hit into Kelly, beyond, who's a great one for
running just to squash his lungs. Or you might head on with Feeney, too drunk
to find any road, never mind what's on it! You got a torch, a flash? Blind
you'll be, but use it. Walk now, you hear?"

 
          
 
The American groped through the fog to his
car, found his flashlight, and, immersed in the night beyond Heber Finn's, made
direction by the heavy clubbing of shoes and a rally of voices ahead. A hundred
yards off in eternity the men approached, grunting whispers: "Easy
now!" "Ah, the shameful blight!" "Hold on, don't jiggle
him!"

 
          
 
The American was flung aside by a steaming
lump of men who swept suddenly from the fog, bearing atop themselves a crumpled
object. He glimpsed a blood-stained and livid face high up there, then someone
cracked his flashlight down.

 
          
 
By instinct, sensing the far whiskey-colored
light of Heber Finn's, the catafalque surged on toward that fixed and familiar
harbor.

 
          
 
Behind came dim shapes and a chilling insect
rattle.

 
          
 
"Who's that!" cried the American.

 
          
 
"Us, with the vehicles," someone
husked. "You might say—we got the collision."

 
          
 
The flashlight fixed them. The American
gasped. A moment later, the battery failed.

 
          
 
But not before he had seen two village lads
jogging along with no trouble at all, easily, lightly, toting under their arms
two ancient black bicycles minus front and tail lights.

 
          
 
"What . . . ?" said the American.

 
          
 
But the lads trotted off, the accident with
them. The fog closed in. The American stood abandoned on an empty road, his
flashlight dead in his hand.

 
          
 
By the time he opened the door at Heber
Finn's, both "bodies" as they called them, had been stretched on the
bar.

 
          
 
"We got the bodies on the bar," said
the old man, turning as the American entered.

 
          
 
And there was the crowd lined up not for
drinks, but blocking the way so the Doc had to shove sidewise from one to
another of these relics of blind driving by night on the misty roads.

 
          
 
"One's Pat Nolan," whispered the old
man. "Not working at the moment. The other's Mr. Peevey from Meynooth, in
candy and cigarettes mostly." Raising his voice, "Are they dead now,
Doc?"

 
          
 
"Ah, be still, won't you?" The Doc
resembled a sculptor troubled at finding some way to finish up two full-length
marble statues at once. "Here, let's put one victim on the floor!"

 
          
 
"The floor's a tomb," said Heber
Finn. "He'll catch his death down there. Best leave him up where the warm
air gathers from our talk."

 
          
 
"But," said the American quietly,
confused, "I've never heard of an accident like this in all my life. Are
you sure there were absolutely no cars? Only these two men on their
bikes?"

 
          
 
"Only?" the old man shouted.
"Great God, man, a fellow working up a drizzling sweat can pump along at
sixty kilometers. With a long downhill glide his bike hits ninety or
ninety-five! So here they come, these two, no front or tail lights—"

 
          
 
"Isn't there a law against that?"

 
          
 
"To hell with government interference! So
here the two come, no lights, flying home from one town to the next. Thrashing
like Sin Himself's at their behinds! Both going opposite ways but both on the
same side of the road. Always ride the wrong side of the road, it's safer, they
say. But look on these lads, fair destroyed by all that official palaver. Why?
Don't you see? One remembered it, but the other didn't! Better if the officials
kept their mouths shut! For here the two be, dying."

 
          
 
"Dying?" The American stared.

 
          
 
"Well, think on it, man! What stands
between two able-bodied hell-bent fellas jumping along the path from Kilcock to
Meynooth? Fog! Fog is all! Only fog to keep their skulls from bashing together.
Why, look when two chaps hit at a cross like that, it's like a strike in
bowling alleys, tenpins flying! Bang! There go your friends, nine feet up,
heads together like dear chums met, flailing the air, their bikes clenched like
two tomcats. Then they all fall down and just lay there, feeling around for the
Dark Angel."

 
          
 
"Surely these men won't—"

 
          
 
"Oh, won't they?
Why,
last year alone in all the
Free
State
no night passed some
soul did not meet in fatal collision with another!"

 
          
 
"You mean to say over three hundred Irish
bicyclists die every year, hitting each other?"

 
          
 
"God's truth and a pity."

 
          
 
"I never ride my bike nights." Heber
Finn eyed the bodies. "I walk."

 
          
 
"But still then the damn bikes run you
down!" said the old man. "Awheel or afoot, some idiot's always
panting up Doom the other way. They'd sooner split you down the seam than wave
hello. Oh, the brave men I've seen ruined or half-ruined or worse, and
headaches their lifetimes after." The old man trembled his eyelids shut.
"You might almost think, mightn't you, that human beings was not made to
handle such dehcate instruments of power."

 
          
 
"Three hundred dead each year." The
American seemed dazed.

 
          
 
"And that don't count the 'walking
wounded' by the thousands every fortnight who, cursing, throw their bikes in
the bog forever and take government pensions to salve their all-but-murdered
bodies."

 
          
 
"Should we stand here talking?" The
American gestured helplessly toward the victims. "Is there a
hospital?"

 
          
 
"On a night with no moon," Heber
Finn continued, "best walk out through the middle of fields and be damned
to the evil roads! That's how I have survived into this my fifth decade."

 
          
 
"Ah . . ." The men stirred
restlessly.

 
          
 
The Doc, sensing he had withheld information
too long, feeling his audience drift away, now snatched their attention back by
straightening up briskly and exhaling.

 
          
 
"Well!"

 
          
 
The pub quickened into silence.

 
          
 
"This chap here—" The Doc pointed.
"Bruises, lacerations, and agonizing backaches for two weeks running. As for
the other lad, however—" And here the Doc let himself scowl for a long
moment at the paler one there looking rouged, waxed, and ready for final rites.
"Concussion."

 
          
 
"Concussion!"

 
          
 
The quiet wind rose and fell in the silence.

 
          
 
"He'll survive if we run him quick now to
Meynooth Clinic. So whose car will volunteer?"

 
          
 
The crowd turned as a staring body toward the
American. He felt the gentle shift as he was drawn from outside the ritual to
its deep and innermost core. He flushed, remembering the front of Heber Finn's
pub, where seventeen bicycles and one automobile were parked at this moment.
Quickly, he nodded,

 
          
 
"There! A volunteer, lads! Quick now,
hustle this boy—gently!—to our good friend's vehicle!"

 
          
 
The men reached out to lift the body, but
froze when the American coughed. They saw him circle his hand to all, and tip
his cupped fingers to his lips. They gasped in soft surprise. The gesture was
not done when drinks foamed down the bar.

 
          
 
"For the road!"

 
          
 
And now even the luckier victim, suddenly
revived, face like cheese, found a mug gentled to his hand with whispers.