by Ray Bradbury
Sometimes 1 see the sun a burning Tree,
Its golden fruit swung bright in airless air,
Its apples wormed with man and gravity,
Their worship breathing from them everywhere,
As man sees Sun as burning Tree...
The captain sat for a long while by the body, feeling many separate things. I feel sad, he thought, and I feel good, and I feel like a boy coming home from school with a handful of dandelions.
"Well," said the captain, sitting, eyes shut, sighing. "Well, where do we go now, eh, where are we going?" He felt his men sitting or standing all about him, the terror dead in them, their breathing quiet. "When you've gone a long, long way down to the sun and touched it and lingered and jumped around and streaked away from it, where are you going then? When you go away from the heat and the noonday light and the laziness, where do you go?"
His men waited for him to say it out. They waited for him to gather all of the coolness and the whiteness and the welcome and refreshing climate of the word in his mind, and they saw him settle the word, like a bit of ice cream, in his mouth, rolling it gently.
"There's only one direction in space from here on out," he said at last.
They waited. They waited as the ship moved swiftly into cold darkness away from the light.
"North," murmured the captain. "North."
And they all smiled, as if a wind had come up suddenly in the middle of a hot afternoon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. He has published over 300 stories during the past twenty-five years, and fourteen books including stories and novels. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston's Moby Dick, and his own novel, Fahrenheit 451, has been made into a motion picture by Francois Truffaut. His more recent books include S Is for Space, The Vintage Bradbury and Twice 22. Mr. Bradbury lives in Los Angeles, California.