Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

by Ray Bradbury

  “I won’t have strangers here, understand!”

  “Yes, your Majesty!”

  The carriage moved down the street, the horses dancing, the crowd hallooing, the band playing, leaving the silver rocket ship behind.

  She did not look back again, not even when the man in the silver ship cried, “Good-bye, good-bye!” for his voice was drowned when the crowd on all sides rushed warmly in, engulfing her in happiness, shouting, “Catherine, Catherine, Mother of all the Russias!”

  THE TROLLEY

  THE FIRST LIGHT ON THE ROOF OUTSIDE; very early morning. The leaves on all the trees tremble with a soft awakening to any breeze the dawn may offer. And then, far off, around a curve of silver track, comes the trolley, balanced on four small steel-blue wheels, and it is painted the color of tangerines. Epaulets of shimmery brass cover it, and pipings of gold; and its chrome bell bings if the ancient motorman taps it with a wrinkled shoe. The numerals on the trolley’s front and sides are bright as lemons. Within, its seats prickle with cool green moss. Something like a buggy whip flings up from its roof to brush the spider thread high in the passing trees from which it takes its juice. From every window blows an incense, the all-pervasive blue and secret smell of summer storms and lightning.

  Down the long, elm-shadowed streets the trolley moves, alone, the motorman’s gray gloves touched gently, timelessly, to the controls.

  At noon the motorman stopped his car in the middle of the block and leaned out. “Hey!”

  And Douglas and Charlie and Tom and all the boys and girls on the block saw the gray glove waving, and dropped from trees and left skip ropes in white snakes on lawns, to run and sit in the green plush seats, and there was no charge. Mr. Tridden, the conductor, kept his glove over the mouth of the money box as he moved the trolley on down the shady block. “Hey,” said Charlie. “Where are we going?”

  “Last ride,” said Mr. Tridden, eyes on the high electric wire ahead. “No more trolley. Bus starts tomorrow. Going to retire me with a pension, they are. So—a free ride for everyone! Watch out!”

  He moved the brass handle, the trolley groaned and swung round an endless green curve, and all the time in the world held still, as if only the children and Mr. Tridden and his miraculous machine were riding an endless river, away.

  “Last day?” asked Douglas, stunned. “They can’t do that! They can’t take off the trolley! Why,” said Douglas, “no matter how you look at it, a bus ain’t a trolley. Don’t make the same kind of noise. Don’t have tracks or wires, don’t throw sparks, don’t pour sand on the tracks, don’t have the same colors, don’t have a bell, don’t let down a step like a trolley does!”

  “Hey, that’s right,” said Charlie. “I always get a kick watching a trolley let down the step, like an accordion.”

  “Sure,” said Douglas.

  And then they were at the end of the line; the tracks, abandoned for thirty years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman’s Park with vast picnic hampers. The track still lay rusting among the hills.

  “Here’s where we turn around,” said Charlie.

  “Here’s where you’re wrong!” Mr. Tridden snapped the emergency generator switch. “Now!”

  The trolley, with a bump and a sailing glide, swept past the city limits, turned off the street, and swooped downhill through intervals of odorous sunlight and vast acreages of shadow that smelled of toadstools. Here and there creek waters flushed the tracks and sun filtered through trees like green glass. They slid whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers, past abandoned way stations empty of all save transfer-punched confetti, to follow a forest stream into a summer country, while Douglas talked. “Why, just the smell of a trolley, that’s different. I been on Chicago buses; they smell funny.”

  “Trolleys are too slow,” said Mr. Tridden. “Going to put buses on. Buses for people and buses for school.”

  The trolley whined to a stop. From overhead Mr. Tridden reached down huge picnic hampers. Yelling, the children helped him carry the baskets out by a creek that emptied into a silent lake, where an ancient bandstand stood crumbling into termite dust.

  They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges, and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been forty years ago: the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush through the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing, and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden’s voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching, designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell upon it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.

  A loon flew over the sky, crying.

  Somebody shivered.

  Mr. Tridden worked on his gloves. “Well, time to go. Parents’ll think I stole you all for good.”

  The trolley was silent and cool-dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore. With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand, and the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on them into other lands.

  Bing! went the soft bell under Mr. Tridden’s foot, and they soared back over sun-abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when Mr. Tridden stopped to let the children out.

  Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Tridden’s gloves on the brass controls.

  Douglas ran his fingers over the green creek moss, looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling.

  “Well . . . So long again, Mr. Tridden.”

  “Good-bye, boys.”

  “See you around, Mr. Tridden.”

  “See you around.”

  There was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed gently shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. The trolley sailed slowly down the late afternoon, brighter than the sun, all tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far corner, wheeling, and vanished, gone away.

  “School buses.” Charlie walked to the curb. “Won’t even give us a chance to be late for school. Come get you at your front door. Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare, Doug, just think it all over.”

  But Douglas, standing on the lawn, was seeing how it would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so you would never know a trolley had ever run this way. He knew it would take as many years as he could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter, he knew he’d wake, and if he didn’t go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm in his bed, he would hear it, faint and faraway.

  And around the bend of the morning street, up the avenue, between the even rows of sycamore, elm, and maple, in the quietness before the start of living, past his house, he would hear the familiar sounds. Like the ticking of a clock, the rumble of a dozen metal barrels rolling, the hum of a single immense dragonfly at dawn. Like a merry-go-round, like a small electrical storm, the color of blue lightning, coming, here, and gone. The trolley’s chime. The hiss like a soda-fountain spigot as it let down and took up its ste
p, and the starting of the dream again, as on it sailed along its way, traveling a hidden and buried track to some hidden and buried destination. . . .

  “Kick-the-can after supper?” asked Charlie.

  “Sure,” said Douglas. “Kick-the-can.”

  THE SMILE

  IN THE TOWN SQUARE THE QUEUE HAD FORMED at five in the morning while cocks were crowing far out in the rimed country and there were no fires. All about, among the ruined buildings, bits of mist had clung at first, but now with the new light of seven o’clock it was beginning to disperse. Down the road, in twos and threes, more people were gathering in for the day of marketing, the day of festival.

  The small boy stood immediately behind two men who had been talking loudly in the clear air, and all of the sounds they made seemed twice as loud because of the cold. The small boy stomped his feet and blew on his red, chapped hands, and looked up at the soiled gunny sack clothing of the men and down the long line of men and women ahead.

  “Here, boy, what’re you doing out so early?” said the man behind him.

  “Got my place in line, I have,” said the boy.

  “Whyn’t you run off, give your place to someone who appreciates?”

  “Leave the boy alone,” said the man ahead, suddenly turning.

  “I was joking.” The man behind put his hand on the boy’s head. The boy shook it away coldly. “I just thought it strange, a boy out of bed so early.”

  “This boy’s an appreciator of arts, I’ll have you know,” said the boy’s defender, a man named Grigsby. “What’s your name, lad?”

  “Tom.”

  “Tom here is going to spit clean and true, right, Tom?”

  “I sure am!”

  Laughter passed down the line.

  A man was selling cracked cups of hot coffee up ahead. Tom looked and saw the little hot fire and the brew bubbling in a rusty pan. It wasn’t really coffee. It was made from some berry that grew on the meadowlands beyond town, and it sold a penny a cup to warm their stomachs; but not many were buying, not many had the wealth.

  Tom stared ahead to the place where the line ended, beyond a bombed-out stone wall.

  “They say she smiles,” said the boy.

  “Aye, she does,” said Grigsby.

  “They say she’s made of oil and canvas.”

  “True. And that’s what makes me think she’s not the original one. The original, now, I’ve heard, was painted on wood a long time ago.”

  “They say she’s four centuries old.”

  “Maybe more. No one knows what year this is, to be sure.”

  “It’s 2061!”

  “That’s what they say, boy, yes. Liars. Could be 3000 or 5000, for all we know. Things were in a fearful mess there for a while. All we got now is bits and pieces.”

  They shuffled along the cold stones of the street.

  “How much longer before we see her?” asked Tom uneasily.

  “Just a few more minutes. They got her set up with four brass poles and velvet rope, all fancy, to keep folks back. Now mind, no rocks, Tom; they don’t allow rocks thrown at her.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The sun rose higher in the heavens, bringing heat which made the men shed their grimy coats and greasy hats.

  “Why’re we all here in line?” asked Tom at last. “Why’re we all here to spit?”

  Grigsby did not glance down at him, but judged the sun. “Well, Tom, there’s lots of reasons.” He reached absently for a pocket that was long gone, for a cigarette that wasn’t there. Tom had seen the gesture a million times. “Tom, it has to do with hate. Hate for everything in the past. I ask you, Tom, how did we get in such a state, cities all junk, roads like jigsaws from bombs, and half the cornfields glowing with radioactivity at night? Ain’t that a lousy stew, I ask you?”

  “Yes, sir, I guess so.”

  “It’s this way, Tom. You hate whatever it was that got you all knocked down and ruined. That’s human nature. Unthinking, maybe, but human nature anyway.”

  “There’s hardly nobody or nothing we don’t hate,” said Tom.

  “Right! The whole blooming kaboodle of them people in the past who run the world. So here we are on a Thursday morning with our guts plastered to our spines, cold, live in caves and such, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t nothing except have our festivals, Tom, our festivals.”

  And Tom thought of the festivals in the past few years. The year they tore up all the books in the square and burned them and everyone was drunk and laughing. And the festival of science a month ago when they dragged in the last motorcar and picked lots and each lucky man who won was allowed one smash of a sledgehammer at the car.

  “Do I remember that, Tom? Do I remember? Why, I got to smash the front window, the window, you hear? My Lord, it made a lovely sound! Crash!”

  Tom could hear the glass fall in glittering heaps.

  “And Bill Henderson, he got to bash the engine. Oh, he did a smart job of it, with great efficiency. Wham!

  “But best of all,” recalled Grigsby, “there was the time they smashed a factory that was still trying to turn out airplanes.

  “Lord, did we feel good blowing it up!” said Grigsby. “And then we found that newspaper plant and the munitions depot and exploded them together. Do you understand, Tom?”

  Tom puzzled over it. “I guess.”

  It was high noon. Now the odors of the ruined city stank on the hot air and things crawled among the tumbled buildings.

  “Won’t it ever come back, mister?”

  “What, civilization? Nobody wants it. Not me!”

  “I could stand a bit of it,” said the man behind another man. “There were a few spots of beauty in it.”

  “Don’t worry your heads,” shouted Grigsby. “There’s no room for that, either.”

  “Ah,” said the man behind the man. “Someone’ll come along someday with imagination and patch it up. Mark my words. Someone with a heart.”

  “No,” said Grigsby.

  “I say yes. Someone with a soul for pretty things. Might give us back a kind of limited sort of civilization, the kind we could live in in peace.”

  “First thing you know there’s war!”

  “But maybe next time it’d be different.”

  At last they stood in the main square. A man on horseback was riding from the distance into the town. He had a piece of paper in his hand. In the center of the square was the roped-off area. Tom, Grigsby, and the others were collecting their spittle and moving forward—moving forward prepared and ready, eyes wide. Tom felt his heart beating very strongly and excitedly, and the earth was hot under his bare feet.

  “Here we go, Tom, let fly!”

  Four policemen stood at the corners of the roped area, four men with bits of yellow twine on their wrists to show their authority over other men. They were there to prevent rocks being hurled.

  “This way,” said Grigsby at the last moment, “everyone feels he’s had his chance at her, you see, Tom? Go on, now!”

  Tom stood before the painting and looked at it for a long time.

  “Tom, spit!”

  His mouth was dry.

  “Get on, Tom! Move!”

  “But,” said Tom, slowly, “she’s beautiful!”

  “Here, I’ll spit for you!” Grigsby spat and the missile flew in the sunlight. The woman in the portrait smiled serenely, secretly, at Tom, and he looked back at her, his heart beating, a kind of music in his ears.

  “She’s beautiful,” he said.

  “Now get on, before the police—”

  “Attention!”

  The line fell silent. One moment they were berating Tom for not moving forward, now they were turning to the man on horseback.

  “What do they call it, sir?” asked Tom, quietly.

  “The picture? Mona Lisa, Tom, I think. Yes, the Mona Lisa.”

  “I have an announcement,” said the man on horseback. “The authorities have decreed that as of high noon today the portrait in the square is
to be given over into the hands of the populace there, so they may participate in the destruction of—”

  Tom hadn’t even time to scream before the crowd bore him, shouting and pummeling about, stampeding toward the portrait. There was a sharp ripping sound. The police ran to escape. The crowd was in full cry, their hands like so many hungry birds pecking away at the portrait. Tom felt himself thrust almost through the broken thing. Reaching out in blind imitation of the others, he snatched a scrap of oily canvas, yanked, felt the canvas give, then fell, was kicked, sent rolling to the outer rim of the mob. Bloody, his clothing torn, he watched old women chew pieces of canvas, men break the frame, kick the ragged cloth, and rip it into confetti.

  Only Tom stood apart, silent in the moving square. He looked down at his hand. It clutched the piece of canvas close to his chest, hidden.

  “Hey there, Tom!” cried Grigsby.

  Without a word, sobbing, Tom ran. He ran out and down the bomb-pitted road, into a field, across a shallow stream, not looking back, his hand clenched tightly, tucked under his coat.

  At sunset he reached the small village and passed on through. By nine o’clock he came to the ruined farm dwelling. Around back, in the half silo, in the part that still remained upright, tented over, he heard the sounds of sleeping, the family—his mother, father, and brother. He slipped quickly, silently, through the small door and lay down, panting.

  “Tom?” called his mother in the dark.

  “Yes.”

  “Where’ve you been?” snapped his father. “I’ll beat you in the morning.”

  Someone kicked him. His brother, who had been left behind to work their little patch of ground.

  “Go to sleep,” cried his mother, faintly.

  Another kick.

  Tom lay getting his breath. All was quiet. His hand was pushed to his chest, tight, tight. He lay for half an hour this way, eyes closed.

  Then he felt something, and it was a cold white light. The moon rose very high and the little square of light moved in the silo and crept slowly over Tom’s body. Then, and only then, did his hand relax. Slowly, carefully, listening to those who slept about him, Tom drew his hand forth. He hesitated, sucked in his breath, and then, waiting, opened his hand and uncrumpled the tiny fragment of painted canvas.