Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  “It’s time to go back,” said Cora.

  “Yes, but we’re not going,” he said quietly. “There’s nothing there any more.”

  “Your books,” she said. “Your fine clothes.”

  “Your llles and your fine ior uele rre,” she said.

  “The town’s empty. No one’s going back,” he said. “There’s no reason to, none at all.”

  The daughter wove tapestries and the sons played songs on ancient flutes and pipes, their laughter echoing in the marble villa.

  Mr. Bittering gazed at the Earth settlement far away in the low valley. “Such odd, such ridiculous houses the Earth people built.”

  “They didn’t know any better,” his wife mused. “Such ugly people. I’m glad they’ve gone.”

  They both looked at each other, startled by all they had just finished saying. They laughed.

  “Where did they go?” he wondered. He glanced at his wife. She was golden and slender as his daughter. She looked at him, and he seemed almost as young as their eldest son.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “We’ll go back to town maybe next year, or the year after, or the year after that,” he said, calmly. “Now—I’m warm. How about taking a swim?”

  They turned their backs to the valley. Arm in arm they walked silently down a path of clear-running spring water.

  Five years later a rocket fell out of the sky. It lay steaming in the valley. Men leaped out of it, shouting.

  “We won the war on Earth! We’re here to rescue you! Hey!”

  But the American-built town of cottages, peach trees, and theaters was silent. They found a flimsy rocket frame rusting in an empty shop.

  The rocket men searched the hills. The captain established headquarters in an abandoned bar. His lieutenant came back to report.

  “The town’s empty, but we found native life in the hills, sir. Dark people. Yellow eyes. Martians. Very friendly. We talked a bit, not much. They learn English fast. I’m sure our relations will be most friendly with them, sir.”

  “Dark, eh?” mused the captain. “How many?”

  “Six, eight hundred, I’d say, living in those marble ruins in the hills, sir. Tall, healthy. Beautiful women.”

  “Did they tell you what became of the men and women who built this Earth settlement, Lieutenant?”

  “They hadn’t the foggiest notion of what happened to this town or its people.”

  “Strange. You think those Martians killed them?”

  “They look surprisingly peaceful. Chances are a plague did this town in, sir.”

  “Perhaps. I suppose this is one of those mysteries we’ll never solve. One of those mysteries you read about.”

  The captain looked at the room, the dusty windows, the blue mountains rising beyond, the canals moving in the light, and he heard the soft wind in the air. He shivered. Then, recovering, he tapped a large fresh map he had thumbtacked to the top of an empty table.

  “Lots to be done, Lieutenant.” His voice droned on and quietly on as the sun sank behind the blue hills. “New settlements. Mining sites, minerals to be looked for. Bacteriological specimens taken. The work, all the work. And the old records were lost. We’ll have a job of remapping to do, renaming the mountains and rivers and such. Calls for a little imagination.

  “What do you think of naming those mountains the Lincoln Mountains, this canal the Washington Canal, those hills—we can name those hills for you, Lieutenant. Diplomacy. And you, for a favor, might name a town for me. Polishing the apple. And why not make this the Einstein Valley, and farther over … are you listening, Lieutenant?”

  The lieutenant snapped his gaze from the blue color and the quiet mist of the hills far beyond the town.

  “What? Oh, yes, sir!”

  There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury

  In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!

  In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

  "Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills."

  Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

  Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…" And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.

  Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.

  At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.

  Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.

  Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

  Ten o'clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

  Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

  The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

  Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, "Who goes there? What's the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.

  It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!

  The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

  Twelve noon.

  A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.

  The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.

  For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed
into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.

  The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here.

  It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.

  The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.

  Two o'clock, sang a voice.

  Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.

  Two-fifteen.

  The dog was gone.

  In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.

  Two thirty-five.

  Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.

  But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.

  At four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls.

  Four-thirty.

  The nursery walls glowed.

  Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden films docked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes.

  It was the children's hour.

  Five o'clock. The bath filled with clear hot water.

  Six, seven, eight o'clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.

  Nine o'clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.

  Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:

  "Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?"

  The house was silent.

  The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random." Quiet music rose to back the voice. "Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite….

  ‘There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

  The swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

  And frogs in the pools singing at night,

  And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

  Robins will wear their feathery fire,

  Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

  And not one will know of the war, not one

  Will care at last when it is done.

  Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,

  If mankind perished utterly;

  And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

  Would scarcely know that we were gone’.”

  The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.

  At ten o'clock the house began to die.

  The wind blew. A failing tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!

  "Fire!" screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"

  The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.

  The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.

  But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.

  The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

  Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!

  And then, reinforcements.

  From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green chemical.

  The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.

  But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.

  The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.

  The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.

  In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river....

  Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.

  The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.

  In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!

  The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.

  Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

  Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:

  "Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…"

  Ray Bradbury was the distinguished author of science fiction classics, including Fa
hrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes. This short story republished in July 2005 in the first issue of COSMOS Magazine.

  All Summer in a Day, by Ray Bradbury

  This story has been a staple of middle school language arts programs for years, and with good reason. Humans have colonized the planet Venus, where it rains every day; the sun only comes out for two hours every seven years. The story focuses on a classroom of children that are anticipating this moment of sunshine. Margot, a quiet child, is the only one who can remember ever having seen the sun before. She desperately misses the sun, and cannot wait for the moment when the rain stops. The other students tease and bully her for her memories, and eventually lock her in a closet, thus causing her to miss the sunshine. Heartbreaking and leaving no illusion to the cruelties of children, the tale is one of Bradbury’s best examples of mankind excluding someone because they are ‘different’.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Now?”

  “Soon.”

  “Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?”

  “Look, look; see for yourself!”

  The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.

  It rained.

  It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.

  “It’s stopping, it’s stopping!”

  “Yes, yes!”

  Margot stood apart from them, from these children who could never remember a time when there wasn’t rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands. But then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone.