Bradbury Stories 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Part 139

Twenty seconds pa.s.sed.

Nothing.

At last, Shumway turned to stare and wonder at the old man by his side.

Stiles looked at him, shrugged and said: "I lied."

"You what!?" cried Shumway.

The crowds below s.h.i.+fted uneasily.

"I lied," said the old man simply.

"No!"

"Oh, but yes," said the time traveler. "I never went anywhere. I stayed but made it seem I went. There is no time machine-only something that looks like one."

"But why?" cried the young man, bewildered, holding on to the rail at the edge of the roof. "Why?"

"I see that you have a tape-recording b.u.t.ton on your lapel. Turn it on. Yes. There. I want everyone to hear this. Now."

The old man finished his champagne and then said: "Because I was born and raised in a time, in the sixties, seventies and eighties, when people had stopped believing in themselves. I saw that disbelief, the reason that no longer gave itself reasons to survive, and was moved, depressed and then angered by it.

"Everywhere, I saw and heard doubt. Everywhere, I learned destruction. Everywhere was professional despair, intellectual ennui, political cynicism. And what wasn't ennui and cynicism was rampant skepticism and incipient nihilism."

The old man stopped, having remembered something. He bent and from under a table brought forth a special bottle of red Burgundy with the label 1984 on it. This, as he talked, he began to open, gently plumbing the ancient cork.

"You name it, we had it. The economy was a snail. The world was a cesspool. Economics remained an insoluble mystery. Melancholy was the att.i.tude. The impossibility of change was the vogue. End of the world was the slogan.

"Nothing was worth doing. Go to bed at night full of bad news at eleven, wake up in the morn to worse news at seven. Trudge through the day underwater. Drown at night in a tide of plagues and pestilence. Ah!"

For the cork had softly popped. The now-harmless 1984 vintage was ready for airing. The time traveler sniffed it and nodded.

"Not only the four hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse rode the horizon to fling themselves on our cities but a fifth horseman, worse than all the rest, rode with them: Despair, wrapped in dark shrouds of defeat, crying only repet.i.tions of past disasters, present failures, future cowardices.

"Bombarded by dark chaff and no bright seed, what sort of harvest was there for man in the latter part of the incredible twentieth century?

"Forgotten was the moon, forgotten the red landscapes of Mars, the great eye of Jupiter, the stunning rings of Saturn. We refused to be comforted. We wept at the grave of our child, and the child was us."

"Was that how it was," asked Shumway quietly, "one hundred years ago?"

"Yes." The time traveler held up the wine bottle as if it contained proof. He poured some into a gla.s.s, eyed it, inhaled, and went on. "You have seen the newsreels and read the books of that time. You know it all.

"Oh, of course, there were a few bright moments. When Salk delivered the world's children to life. Or the night when Eagle landed and that one great step for mankind trod the moon. But in the minds and out of the mouths of many, the fifth horseman was darkly cheered on. With high hopes, it sometimes seemed, of his winning. So all would be gloomily satisfied that their predictions of doom were right from day one. So the self-fulfilling prophecies were declared; we dug our graves and prepared to lie down in them."

"And you couldn't allow that?" asked the young reporter.

"You know I couldn't."

"And so you built the Toynbee Convector-"

"Not all at once. It took years to brood on it."

The old man paused to swirl the dark wine, gaze at it and sip, eyes closed.

"Meanwhile, I drowned, I despaired, wept silently late nights thinking, What can I do to save us from ourselves? How to save my friends, my city, my state, my country, the entire world from this obsession with doom? Well, it was in my library late one night that my hand, searching along shelves, touched at last on an old and beloved book by H. G. Wells. His time device called, ghostlike, down the years. I heard! I understood. I truly listened. Then I blueprinted. I built. I traveled, or so it seemed. The rest, as you know, is history."

The old time traveler drank his wine, opened his eyes.

"Good G.o.d," the young reporter whispered, shaking his head. "Oh, dear G.o.d. Oh, the wonder, the wonder-"

There was an immense ferment in the lower gardens now and in the fields beyond and on the roads and in the air. Millions were still waiting. Where was the great arrival?

"Well, now," said the old man, filling another gla.s.s with wine for the young reporter. "Aren't I something? I made the machines, built miniature cities, lakes, ponds, seas. Erected vast architectures against crystal-water skies, talked to dolphins, played with whales, faked tapes, mythologized films. Oh, it took years, years of sweating work and secret preparation before I announced my departure, left and came back with good news!"

They drank the rest of the vintage wine. There was a hum of voices. All of the people below were looking up at the roof.

The time traveler waved at them and turned.

"Quickly, now. It's up to you from here on. You have the tape, my voice on it, just freshly made. Here are three more tapes, with fuller data. Here's a film-ca.s.sette history of my whole inspired fraudulence. Here's a final ma.n.u.script. Take, take it all, hand it on. I nominate you as son to explain the father. Quickly!"

Hustled into the elevator once more, Shumway felt the world fall away beneath. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry, so gave, at last, a great hoot.

The old man, surprised, hooted with him, as they stepped out below and advanced upon the Toynbee Convector.

"You see the point, don't you, son? Life has always been lying to ourselves! As boys, young men, old men. As girls, maidens, women, to gently lie and prove the lie true. To weave dreams and put brains and ideas and flesh and the truly real beneath the dreams. Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wis.h.i.+ng to be born. Here. Thus and so."

He pressed the b.u.t.ton that raised the plastic s.h.i.+eld, pressed another that started the time machine humming, then shuffled quickly in to thrust himself into the Convector's seat.

"Throw the final switch, young man!"

"But-"

"You're thinking," here the old man laughed, "if the time machine is a fraud, it won't work, what's the use of throwing a switch, yes? Throw it, anyway. This time, it will work!"

Shumway turned, found the control switch, grabbed hold, then looked at Craig Bennett Stiles.

"I don't understand. Where are you going?"

"Why, to be one with the ages, of course. To exist now, only in the deep past."

"How can that be?"

"Believe me, this time it will happen. Good-bye, dear, fine, nice young man."

"Good-bye."

"Now. Tell me my name."

"What?"

"Speak my name and throw the switch."

"Time traveler?"

"Yes! Now!"

The young man yanked the switch. The machine hummed, roared, blazed with power.

"Oh," said the old man, shutting his eyes. His mouth smiled gently. "Yes."

His head fell forward on his chest.

Shumway yelled, banged the switch off and leaped forward to tear at the straps binding the old man in his device.

In the midst of so doing, he stopped, felt the time traveler's wrist, put his fingers under the neck to test the pulse there and groaned. He began to weep.

The old man had, indeed, gone back in time, and its name was death. He was traveling in the past now, forever.

Shumway stepped back and turned the machine on again. If the old man were to travel, let the machine-symbolically, anyway-go with him. It made a sympathetic humming. The fire of it, the bright sun fire, burned in all of its spider grids and armatures and lighted the cheeks and the vast brow of the ancient traveler, whose head seemed to nod with the vibrations and whose smile, as he traveled into darkness, was the smile of a child much satisfied.

The reporter stood for a long moment more, wiping his cheeks with the backs of his hands. Then, leaving the machine on, he turned, crossed the room, pressed the b.u.t.ton for the gla.s.s elevator and, while he was waiting, took the time traveler's tapes and ca.s.settes from his jacket pockets and, one by one, shoved them into the incinerator trash flue set in the wall.

The elevator doors opened, he stepped in, the doors shut. The elevator hummed now, like yet another time device, taking him up into a stunned world, a waiting world, lifting him up into a bright continent, a future land, a wondrous and surviving planet . . .

That one man with one lie had created.

FOREVER AND THE EARTH.

AFTER SEVENTY YEARS OF WRITING SHORT STORIES that never sold, Mr. Henry William Field arose one night at eleven-thirty and burned ten million words. He carried the ma.n.u.scripts downstairs through his dark old mansion and threw them into the furnace.

"That's that," he said, and thinking about his lost art and his misspent life, he put himself to bed, among his rich antiques. "My mistake was in ever trying to picture this wild world of A.D. 2257. The rockets, the atom wonders, the travels to planets and double suns. n.o.body can do it. Everyone's tried. All of our modern authors have failed."

s.p.a.ce was too big for them, and rockets too swift, and atomic science too instantaneous, he thought. But at least the other writers, while failing, had been published, while he, in his idle wealth, had used the years of his life for nothing.

After an hour of feeling this way, he fumbled through the night rooms to his library and switched on a green hurricane lamp. At random, from a collection untouched in fifty years, he selected a book. It was a book three centuries yellow and three centuries brittle, but he settled into it and read hungrily until dawn. . . .

At nine the next morning, Henry William Field staggered from his library, called his servants, televised lawyers, scientists, litterateurs.

"Come at once!" he cried.

By noon, a dozen people had stepped into the study where Henry William Field sat, very disreputable and hysterical with an odd, feeding joy, unshaven and feverish. He clutched a thick book in his brittle arms and laughed if anyone even said good morning.

"Here you see a book," he said at last, holding it out, "written by a giant, a man born in Asheville, North Carolina, in the year 1900. Long gone to dust, he published four huge novels. He was a whirlwind. He lifted up mountains and collected winds. He left a trunk of penciled ma.n.u.scripts behind when he lay in bed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the year 1938, on September fifteenth, and died of pneumonia, an ancient and awful disease."

They looked at the book.

Look Homeward, Angel.

He drew forth three more. Of Time and the River. The Web and the Rock. You Can't Go Home Again.

"By Thomas Wolfe," said the old man. "Three centuries cold in the North Carolina earth."

"You mean you've called us simply to see four books by a dead man?" his friends protested.

"More than that! I've called you because I feel Tom Wolfe's the man, the necessary man, to write of s.p.a.ce, of time, huge things like nebulae and galactic war, meteors and planets, all the dark things he loved and put on paper were like this. He was born out of his time. He needed really big things to play with and never found them on Earth. He should have been born this afternoon instead of one hundred thousand mornings ago."

"I'm afraid you're a bit late," said Professor Bolton.

"I don't intend to be late!" snapped the old man. "I will not be frustrated by reality. You, professor, have experimented with time travel. I expect you to finish your time machine as soon as possible. Here's a check, a blank check, fill it in. If you need more money, ask for it. You've done some traveling already, haven't you?"

"A few years, yes, but nothing like centuries-"

"We'll make it centuries! You others"-he swept them with a fierce and s.h.i.+ning glance-"will work with Bolton. I must have Thomas Wolfe."

"What!" They fell back before him.

"Yes," he said. "That's the plan. Wolfe is to be brought to me. We will collaborate in the task of describing the flight from Earth to Mars, as only he could describe it!"

They left him in his library with his books, turning the dry pages, nodding to himself. "Yes. Oh, dear Lord yes, Tom's the boy, Tom is the very boy for this."

The months pa.s.sed slowly. Days showed a maddening reluctance to leave the calendar, and weeks lingered on until Mr. Henry William Field began to scream silently.

At the end of four months, Mr. Field awoke one midnight. The phone was ringing. He put his hand out in the darkness.

"Yes?"

"This is Professor Bolton calling."

"Yes, Bolton?"

"I'll be leaving in an hour," said the voice.

"Leaving? Leaving where? Are you quitting? You can't do that!"

"Please, Mr. Field, leaving means leaving."

"You mean, you're actually going?"

"Within the hour."