Big Book of Science Fiction (25 page)

I staggered out and down the
stairs. And that’s just the trouble about my story. There wasn’t any later.

For after I fumbled through a day’s
work at the bank, I got to thinking about things, and I wasn’t quite sure
whether I wanted to go back there again alone; that is, until I had talked to
someone else about it. When I did summon up nerve enough to go back, a couple
of evenings later, I found there wasn’t any name beside the top button in the
row in the hall, and nobody answered the bell when I rang. So I pushed the
button marked “Super” and a fat women with scraggly hair came out;

As I remarked before, I didn’t
even know the old man’s name. “Who lives on the top floor?” I asked.

“Nobody,” she said. “Not now,
anyway.” She gave me a suspicious look. “If you’re another one of them G-men, I
want to see your badge.”

So there it is. I went away. I’m
not a G-man, I don’t want them looking for me when I have to work in a bank. It
could be that the old man gave me some kind of dope, and that he was mixed up
in the racket somehow. I don’t know. But if he was, why did he have all those
old rolls of sheepskin up there? They were genuine, all right. And any
scientific people I’ve talked to since say that my description of Venus is just
about what it would look like. Me, I just don’t know.

<>

~ * ~

FOREVER AND THE EARTH

by Ray Bradbury

AFTER
seventy years of writing short stories that never sold, Mr. Henry William Field
arose one night at 11:30 and burned ten million words. He carried the
manuscripts 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
2257
a.d
. The rockets, the atom
wonders, the travels to planets and double suns. Nobody can do it. Everyone’s
tried. All of our modern authors have failed.”

Space 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 o’clock, Henry William
Field rushed from his library, called his servants, televised lawyers, friends,
scientists, litterateurs.

“Come at once!” he cried.

Within the hour, a dozen people
hurried 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 pencilled manuscripts behind when he lay in bed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore in the year 1938, on September 15th, 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 space, 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 this month. 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 shining 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
month passed 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 the month, 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 an hour.”

“To 1938? To September 15th?”

“Yes!”

“You’re sure you’ve the date
written down? You’ll arrive before he dies? Be sure of it! Good Lord, you’d
better get there a good hour before his death, don’t you think?”

“A good hour.”

“I’m so excited I can’t hold the
phone. Good luck, Bolton. Bring him through safely!”

“Thank you, sir. Goodbye.”

The phone clicked.

Mr. Henry William Field lay
through the ticking night. He thought of Tom Wolfe as a lost brother to be
lifted infect from under a cold, chiseled stone, to be restored to- blood and
fire and speaking. He trembled each time he thought of Bolton whirling on the
time wind back to other calendars and other faces.

Tom, he thought, faintly, in the
half-awake warmth of an old man calling after his favorite and long-gone child,
Tom, where are you tonight, Tom? Come along now, we’ll help you through, you’ve
got to come, there’s need of you. I couldn’t do it, Tom, none of us here can.
So the next best thing to doing it myself, Tom, is helping you to do it. You
can play with rockets like jackstraws, Tom, and you can have the stars, like a
handful of crystals. Anything your heart asks, it’s here. You’d like the fire
and the travel, Tom, it was made for you. Oh, we’ve a pale lot of writers
today, I’ve read them all, Tom, and they’re not like you. I’ve waded in
libraries of their stuff and they’ve never touched space, Tom; we need
you
for that! Give an old man his wish then, for God knows I’ve waited all my life
for myself or some other to write the really great book about the stars, and I’ve
waited in vain. So, whatever you are tonight, Tom Wolfe, make yourself tall. It’s
that book you were going to write. It’s that good book the critics said was in
you when you stopped breathing. Here’s your chance, will you do it, Tom? Will
you listen and come through to us, will you do that tonight, and be here in the
morning when I wake? Will you, Tom?

His eyelids closed down over the
fever and the demand. His tongue stopped quivering in his sleeping mouth.

The clock struck four.

Awakening to the white coolness
of morning, he felt the excitement rising and welling in himself. He did not
wish to blink, for fear that the thing which awaited him somewhere in the house
might run off and slam a door, gone forever. His hands reached up to clutch his
thin chest.

Far away . . . footsteps . . .

A series of doors opened and
shut. Two men entered the bedroom.

Field could hear them breathe.
Their footsteps took on identities. The first steps were those of a spider,
small and precise: Bolton. The second steps were those of a big man, a large
man, a heavy man.

“Tom?” cried the old man. He did
not open his eyes.

“Yes,” said the voice, at last.

Tom Wolfe burst the seams of
Field’s imagination, as a huge child bursts the lining of a too-small coat.

“Tom Wolfe, let me look at you!”
If Field said it once he said it a dozen times as he fumbled from bed, shaking
violently. “Put up the blinds, for God’s sake, I want to see this! Tom Wolfe,
is that
you?”

Tom Wolfe looked down from his
tall thick body, with big hands out to balance himself in a world that was
strange. He looked at the old man and the room and his mouth was trembling.

“You’re just as they said you
were, Tom!”

Thomas Wolfe began to laugh and
the laughing was huge, for he must have thought himself insane or in a
nightmare, and he came to the old man and touched him and he looked at
Professor Bolton and felt of himself, his arms and legs, he coughed
experimentally and touched his own brow. “My fever’s gone,” he said. “I’m not
sick any more.”

“Of course not, Tom.”

“What a night,” said Tom Wolfe. “It
hasn’t been easy. I thought I was sicker than any man ever was. I felt myself
floating and I thought, this is fever. I felt myself traveling, and thought, I’m
dying fast. A man came to me. I thought, this is the Lord’s message. He took my
hands. I smelled electricity. I flew up and over, and I saw a brass city. I
thought, I’ve arrived. This is the city of heaven, there is the Gate! I’m numb
from head to toe, like someone left in the snow to freeze. I’ve got to laugh
and do things or I might think myself insane. You’re not God, are you? You don’t
look like him.”

The old man laughed. “No, no,
Tom, not God, but playing at it. I’m Field.” He laughed again. “Lord, listen to
me. said it as if you should know who Field is. Field, the financier, Tom, bow
low, kiss my ring-finger. I’m Henry Field, I like your work. I brought you
here. Come here.”

The old man drew him to an
immense crystal window.

“Do you see those lights in the
sky, Tom?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Those fireworks?”

“Yes.”

“They’re not what you think, son.
It’s not July Fourth, Tom. Not in the usual way. Every day’s Independence Day
now. Man has declared his Freedom from Earth. Gravitation without
representation has been overthrown. The Revolt has long since been successful.
That green Roman Candle’s going to Mars. That red fire, that’s the Venus
rocket. And the others, you see the yellow and the blue? Rockets, all of them!”

Thomas Wolfe gazed up like an
immense child caught amid the colorized glories of a July evening when the
set-pieces are awhirl with phosphorous and glitter and barking explosion.