Ray Bradbury

“ And now I am here, thought Leonard Sale. “You are here,” said that voice. “To give substance to our mentalities. To give us our needed body.”
I’m only one, thought Sale. “Nevertheless, you are of use.”
I'm an individual, thought Sale. I resent your intrusion.
“He resents our intrusion! Did you hear him, Iorr? He resents!”
“As if he had a right to resent!”
Be careful, warned Sale. I'll blink my eyes and you'll be gone, phantoms! I'll wake up and rub you out!
“But you'll have to sleep again, some time!” cried Iorr. “And when you do, we'll be here, waiting, waiting, waiting. For you.” ”

“ Far away, on the street, a beetle hissed along.
Again, again, again he shouted, pleaded. He got down by each body and asked of it his particular violent favor. No reply. He strode wildly between the even white rows, flinging his arms up, stooping again and again to make blue symbols!
Lantry was very pale. He licked his lips. "Come on, get up," he said. "They have, they always have, for a thousand years. When you make a mark—so! and speak a word—so! they always rise! Why not you now, why not you! Come on, come on, before they come back!"
The warehouse went up into shadow. ”

“ Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst, air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like this one! His brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his camera. ”

“ Thirkell morosely, and pulled a switch.
Everybody fell. The rocket went up from the planet Mars in a great fiery glide, with the noise of an entire kitchen thrown down an elevator shaft, with a sound of pots and pans and kettles and fires boiling and stews bubbling, with a smell of burned incense and rubber and sulphur, with a color of yellow fire, and a ribbon of red stretching below them, and all the old women singing and holding to each other, and Mrs. Bellowes crawling upright in the sighing, straining, trembling ship. ”

“ He had slain the world's greatest scientists!
He recalled the moment of shocked horror that followed. Something radically wrong had happened to the machine. He, Layeville, the inventor of the machine, had staggered backward, his clothes flaming and eating up about him. No time for explanations. Then he had collapsed in the blackness of pain and numbing defeat.
Swept to a hasty trial, Layeville faced jeering throngs calling out for his death. "Destroy the Time Machine!" they cried. "And destroy this MURDERER with it!"
Murderer! And he had tried to help humanity. ”

“ Science-fiction stories are not struck forth with a creative hand, they are manufactured products put together piece-meal—none of them being written in any but the calmest and most conscious mood. They are lacking in that important element of all really GREAT works of the imagination: inspiration. And what is inspiration? It is essentially the soaring of one's soul without the knowledge of the mind. In the gleaming moment the mind becomes the slave of the spirit. ”

“ Taking Lisabeth's pale hand John said, "It didn't work. Come along. Upstairs with you, scheming lady."
"What happened?" Alice and Helen waited as he brought Lisabeth up the ladder.
"They wanted to die," John said, smiling tiredly. "They weren't Killers, but the Ones To Be Killed. I see it all now." He laughed sharply. "To make an insane killer happy, you have to provide him a culture where people like and approve of being killed. This is such a culture. Those men wanted to be shot." ”

“ Ask yourself, what is imagination? Are earth-minds capable of conceiving that which is not and has never been; or is this imagination merely a deeper insight into worlds you know not of, worlds glimpsed dimly in the throes of dream? And whence come these dreams? Tell me, have you ever awakened from a dream with the sinister feeling that all was not well inside your mind?—that while you, the real you, were away in Limbo—someone—something was probing in your mind, invading it and reading it. ”

“ He thinks the Rocket is a great thing; that's number two. But they don't match, unfortunately.
"The Rocket isn't a means to happiness the way it'll be used. It's the wrong means. And with a wrong means you invariably wind up with a wrong end. A criminal seeks wealth. Does he get it? Temporarily. In the end, he suffers. All because he took the wrong means." Stanley held his hands out, uselessly. "How can I make you understand."
Tears were in her eyes. "I understand nothing, and don't need to understand! Your job, they'll take it away from you and fly the Rocket anyway!" ”

“ Others yelled, screamed in delight, played tag, threw away bottles!
And on twenty thousand other Tri-Union hills twenty thousand other small family ships landed. Twenty thousand more picnic riots began. Sixty thousand napkins, well wadded, were dropped from wiped lips! One hundred thousand shattered egg shells were spilled! Sixty thousand shiny soup cans were left gleaming in the sun. Three hundred million ants rushed out to welcome them. And the 30 million people of Greater Bruegher glared at the invasion, knowing not what to do. What was the world coming to? ”

“ To the Incinerator, of course. Cigarette smoke moved slowly up on the air, curling and tying into itself in grey loops and spirals. One was dead and must accept it.
Lantry did not move. He was a marionette, the strings cut. There was only a tiny hatred in his heart, in his eyes, like twin coals, feeble, glowing, fading.
I am Poe, he thought. I am all that is left of Edgar Allan Poe, and I am all that is left of Ambrose Bierce and all that is left of a man named Lovecraft. I am a grey night bat with sharp teeth, and I am a square black monolith monster. I am Osiris and Baal and Set. ”

“ And Hedrik suddenly didn't feel like fighting anymore!
The music floated out over the tumbled ruins, descended to the ears of the other people. AND THE FIGHTING CEASED! They were transformed. They came running to crowd about the machine.
And there in that aged music shop they stood enthralled—music filled their souls. It was exactly what they had needed and wanted for many years. And it had been denied them. Music was the balancing force ... the force that would help them struggle ahead rebuilding the world. ”

“ All the world's a stage? No. You, Leonard Sale, are the small stage. And they the players. And what if you put a bullet through the wings, tearing down scenes, destroying curtains, ruining lines! Destroy the stage, the players, all, if they aren't careful!
First of all, he must radio through to Marsport, again. If there was any way they could rush the rescue ship sooner, then maybe he could hang on. Anyway, he must warn them what sort of planet this was, this so innocent-seeming spot of nightmare and fever vision——
He tapped on the radio key for a minute. ”

“ Up and down, Layeville went on his journey to nowhere, in his prison, a strange smile etched on his lips. In a week or more, he knew, he would be the only man alive on earth.
Elation flamed within him. This was his victory! Where the other men had planned the pendulum as a prison it had been an asylum against annihilation now!
Day after day the robots still came, worked, unabated by the visitation of the black horde. They came every week, brot food, tinkered, checked, oiled, cleaned. Up and down, back and forth—THE PENDULUM! ”

“ Thought leaves the ancient
Earth behind to mold.
And when the galaxies have
heeded DEATH,
And welcomed lastly SPACE'S
poisoned breath,
Still shall thought travel
as an arrow flown.
SPACE--thy boundaries are
TIME---AND TIME ALONE!
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was legally published within the United States (or the United Nations Headquarters in New York subject to Section 7 of the United States Headquarters Agreement) between 1928 and 1977 (inclusive) without a copyright notice. ”

“ The fighters of WAR'S END, leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat, were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the Twentieth Century, but now lay crumbling, its proud buildings falling to the ground, sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky—and the city was LOS ANGELES!
HEDRIK HUNSON was fighting with phosphorized fists—hand inclosed in chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist, insulated on the interior for the wearer—when suddenly the two of them were caught by a spreader. ”

“ Thirkell entered. His large liquid dark eyes were so improbable that one of the old ladies had facetiously claimed she saw a mosquito cloud hovering over them as they did around summer rain-barrels. And Mrs. Bellowes sometimes caught the scent of the theatrical mothball and the smell of calliope steam on his sharply pressed suit.
But with the same savage rationalization that had greeted all other disappointments in her rickety life, she bit at the suspicion and whispered, "This time it's real. This time it'll work. Haven't we got a rocket?" ”

“ Helen was by the port, staring out. "Insane. Insane, all of them."
"To us, yes," said John. "To themselves, no. Their culture is sane to itself and all inhabitants within it. That's all that counts."
"I don't understand."
"Take a man who wants eighty-nine wives. On Earth he goes insane because he can't have them. He's frustrated. Bring him out here to the asteroids, put him on a planet full of women where marriage in triplicate is okay, and he becomes the norm, becomes happy." ”

“ The robots took care of him now. Evidently the humans thot it a waste of time to bother over their prisoner. The robots brot the food, cleaned the pendulum cell, oiled the machinery, worked tirelessly from dawn until the sun crimsoned westward. At this rate it could keep on for centuries.
But one day as Layeville stared at the city and its people in the blur of ascent and descent, he perceived a swarming darkness that extended in the heavens. ”

“ McClure shut his eyes a moment. He put down his sherry glass. He waited a moment. He took up his cigarette and puffed it and then put it down in a black tray.
"I am alone in this room," he said.
Lantry did not move.
"You are dead," said McClure. "My mind does not know this. It is not a thinking thing. It is a thing of the senses and the subconscious. At first I thought, this man thinks he is dead, risen from the dead, a vampire. Is that not logical? Would not any man, buried as many centuries, raised in a superstitious, ignorant culture, think likewise of himself once risen from the tomb? ”

“ In this moment, with the spiraling 'copters suspended over his lawn, over his wife and children and house, over himself and his beliefs, Stanley swallowed, stepped back, put his hands down and let the idea grow within him. Yes, he would give them their rocket. He would give it to them. You cannot fight the children, he thought. They must have their green apples. If you refuse them, they will find a way around you. Go along with their illogical tide and make logic of it. Let the children eat their full of green apples, many, many green apples to swell their vast stomach into sickness. ”

“ My fingers clutched at the edges of the bench so tightly that I have been unable to write with them until now. He concluded thus:
"So you see that I am everywhere a worldless alien. Sometimes this secret is too great for one mind to contain, and I must talk. I must feel the presence of someone human near me, else I shall attempt to commit suicide and again fail. It is without end—my horror. ”

“ What is this place? asked Leonard Sale, struggling against horror.
“Once a mighty planet!” said Tylle of Rathalar.
“Once a place of battles!” said Iorr of Wendillo.
“Now dead,” said Tylle.
“Now silent,” said Iorr.
“Until you came,” said Tylle.
“To give us life again,” said Iorr.
You're dead, insisted Leonard Sale, flesh writhing. You're nothing but empty wind.
“We live, through you.”
“And fight, through you!”
So that's it, thought Leonard Sale. I'm to be a battleground, am I? Are you friends?
“Enemies!” cried Iorr.
“Foul enemies!” cried Tylle. ”

“ Speaking of Christian progress he says, "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best—to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history—but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. ”

“ Lantry took out the knife. "Do you know what this is?"
"A knife."
"Do you ever use knives on people any more?"
"How do you mean?"
"I mean—killing them, with knives or guns or poison?"
"You are an odd joker!" The man giggled awkwardly.
"I'm going to kill you," said Lantry.
"Nobody kills anybody," said the man.
"Not any more they don't. But they used to, in the old days."
"I know they did."
"This will be the first murder in three hundred years. I just killed your friend. I just shoved him into the fire lock." ”

“ A lot of criticism can be directed against everything, and usually is, by certain people who take an unholy delight in it. I myself have sometimes snorted in wrath at the gross egotism and, yes, stupidity and childishness, of certain fans. I would have taken great delight in kicking their blooming teeth down their bloody well bally throats. But did I do this? Did I succumb to this desire? No, I did not. I never got close enough. A more important reason is that I had the patience to realize this type of fan is a minority (not a majority, Mr. Onya, by any means!) ”

“ The people ran like water splashed on tiles, screaming soundlessly. Alien creatures fluttered down, great gelatinous masses of black that sucked out the life of all. They clustered thickly over everything, glistened momentarily upon the pendulum and its body above, over the whirling wheels and roaring bowels of the metal creature once a Time Machine. ”

“ I haven't any money to go back home to Earth and I've too much pride to go to the Government and tell them a common man like this has fooled us out of our life's savings. I don't know how you feel about it, all of you, but the reason all of us came is because I'm eighty-five, and you're eighty-nine, and you're seventy-eight, and all of us are nudging on toward a hundred, and there's nothing on Earth for us, and it doesn't appear there's anything on Mars either. ”