Bradbury, Ray - SSC 21

by Long After Midnight (v1. 1)

  "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 messenger. 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. I 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 along."

  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, thaf s the Venus rocket. And the others, you see the yellow and the blue? Rockets, all of theml"

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

  "What years is this?"

  "The year of the rocket. Look here." And the old man touched some flowers that bloomed at his touch. The blossoms were like blue and white fire. They burned and sparkled their cold, long petals. The blooms were two feet wide, and they were the color of an autumn moon. "Moon-flowers," said the old man. "From the other side of the moon." He brushed them and they dripped away into a silver rain, a shower of white sparks on the air. "The year of the rocket. That's a title for you, Tom. That's why we brought you here, we've need of you. You're the only man could handle the sun without being burnt to a ridiculous cinder. We want you to juggle the sun, Tom, and the stars, and whatever else you see on your trip to Mars."

  "Mars?" Thomas Wolfe turned to seize the old man's arm, bending down at him, searching his face in unbelief.

  "Tonight. You leave at six o'clock."

  The old man held a fluttering pink ticket on the air, waiting for Tom to think to take it.

  It was five in the afternoon. "Of course, of course I appreciate what you've done," cried Thomas Wolfe.

  "Sit down, Tom. Stop walking around."

  "Let me finish, Mr. Field, let me get through with this, I've got to say it."

  "We've been arguing for hours," pleaded Mr. Field, exhaustedly.

  They had talked from breakfast until lunch until tea, they had wandered through a dozen rooms and ten dozen arguments, they had perspired and grown cold and perspired again.

  "It all comes down to this," said Thomas Wolfe, at last. "I can't "stay here, Mr. Field. I've got to go back. This isn't my time. You've no right to interfere—"

  "But, I-"

  "I was deep in my work, my best yet to come, and now you run me off three centuries. Mr. Field, I want you to call Mr. Bolton back. I want you to have him put me in his machine, whatever it is, and return me to 1938, my rightful place and year. That's all I ask of you."

  "But, don't you want to see Mars?"

  "With all my heart. But T know it isn't for me. It would throw my writing off. I'd have a huge handful of experience that I couldn't fit into my other writing when I went home."

  "You don't understand, Tom, you don't understand at all."

  "I understand that you're selfish."

  "Selfish? Yes," said the old man. "For myself, and for others, very selfish."

  "I want to go home."

  "Listen to me, Tom."

  "Call Mr. Bolton."

  "Tom, I don't want to have to tell you this. I thought I wouldn't have to, that it wouldn't be necessary. Now, you leave me only this alternative." The old man's right hand fetched hold of a curtained wall, swept back the drapes, revealing a large white screen, and dialem a number, a series of numbers. The screen flickered into vivid color, the lights of the room darkened, darkened, and a graveyard took line before their eyes.

  "What are you doing?" demanded Wolfe, striding forward, staring at the screen.

  "I don't like this at all," said the old man. "Look there."

  The graveyard lay in midafternoon light, the light of summer. From the screen drifted the smell of summer earth, granite, and the odor of a nearby creek. From the trees, a bird called. Red and yellow flowers nodded among the stones, and the screen moved, the sky rotated, the old man twisted a dial for emphasis, and in the center of the screen, growing large, coming closer, yet larger, and now filling their senses, was a dark granite mass; and Thomas Wolfe, looking up in the dim room, ran his eyes over the chiseled words, once, twice, three times, gasped, and read again, for there was his name:

  THOMAS WOLFE.

  And the date of his birth and the date of his death, and the flowers and green ferns smelling sweetly on the air of the cold room.

  "Turn it off," he said.

  "I'm sorry, Tom."

  "Turn it off, turn it off! I don't believe it."

  "It's there."

  The screen went black and now the entire room was a midnight vault, a tomb, with the last faint odor of flowers.

  "I didn't wake up again," said Thomas Wolfe.

  "No. You died that September of 1938. So, you see. O God, the ironies, it's like the title of your book. Tom, you can't go home again."

  "I never finished my book."

  "It was edited for you, by others who went over it, carefully."

  "I didn't finish my work, I didn't finish my work."

  "Don't take it so badly, Tom."

  "How else can I take it?"

  The old man didn't turn on the lights. He didn't want to see Tom there. "Sit down, boy." No reply. "Tom?" No answer. "Sit down, son; will you have something to drink?" For answer there was only a sigh and a kind of brutal moaning.

  "Good Lord," said Tom, "it's not fair. I had so much left to do, it's not fair." He began to weep quietly.

  "Don't do that," said the old man. "Listen. Listen to me. You're still alive, aren't you? Here? Now? You still feel, don't you?"

  Thomas Wolfe waited for a minute and then he said, "Yes."

  "All right, then." The old man pressed forward on the dark air. "I've brought you here, I've given you another chance, Tom. An extra month or so. Do you think I haven't grieved for you? When I read your books and saw your gravestone there, three centuries worn by rains and wind, boy, don't you imagine how it killed me to think of your talent gone away? Well, it did! It killed me, Tom. And I spent my money to find a way to you. You've a respite, not long, not long at all. Professor Bolton says that, with luck, he can hold the channels open through time for eight weeks. He can keep you here that long, and only that long. In that interval, Tom, you must write the book you've wanted to write—no, not the book you were working on for them, son, no, for they're dead and gone and it can't be changed. No, this time if s a book for us, Tom, for us the living, that's the book we want A book you can leave with us, for you, a book bigger and better in every way than anything you ever wrote; say you'll do it, Tom, say you'll forget about that stone and that hospital for eight weeks and start to work for us, will you, Tom, will you?"

  The lights came slowly on. Tom Wolfe stood tall at the window, looking out, his face huge and tired and pale. He watched the rockets on the sky of early evening. "I imagine I don't realize what you've done for me," he said. "You've given me a little more time, and time is the thing I love most and need, the thing I always hated and fought against, and the only way I can show my appreciation is by doing as you
say." He hesitated. "And when I'm finished, then what?"

  "Back to your hospital in 1938, Tom."

  "Must I?"

  "We can't change time. We borrowed you for five minutes. We'll return you to your hospital cot five minutes after you left it. That way, we upset nothing. It's all been written. You can't hurt us in the future by living here now with us, but, if you refused to go back, you could hurt the past, and resultantly, the future, make it into some sort of chaos."

  "Eight weeks," said Thomas Wolfe.

  "Eight weeks."

  "And the Mars rocket leaves in an hour?"

  "Yes."

  "I'll need pencils and paper."

  "Here they are."

  "I'd better go get ready. Good-bye, Mr. Field."

  "Good luck, Tom."

  Six o'clock. The sun setting. The sky turning to wine. The big house quiet. The old man shivering in the heat until Professor Bolton entered. "Bolton, how is he getting on, how was he at the port; tell me?"

  Bolton smiled. "What a monster he is, so big they had to make a special uniform for him! You should've seen him, walking around, lifting up everything, sniffing like a great hound, talking, his eyes looking at everyone, excited as a ten-year-old!"

  "God bless him, oh, God bless him! Bolton, can you keep him here as long as you say?"

  Bolton frowned. "He doesn't belong here, you know. If our power should falter, he'd be snapped back to his own time, like a puppet on a rubber band. We'll try and keep him, I assure you."

  "You've got to, you understand, you can't let him go back until he's finished with his book. You've—"

  "Look," said Bolton. He pointed to the sky. On it was a silver rocket.

  "Is that him?" asked the old man.

  "That's Tom Wolfe," replied Bolton. "Going to Mars."

  "Give 'em hell, Tom, give 'em hell!" shouted the old man, lifting both fists.

  They watched the rocket fire into space.

  By midnight, the story was coming through.

  Henry William Field sat in his library. On his desk was a machine that hummed. It repeated words that were being written out beyond the moon. It scrawled them in black pencil, in facsimile of Tom Wolfe's fevered hand a million miles away. The old man waited for a pile of them to collect and then he seized them and read them aloud to the room where Bolton and the servants stood listening. He read the words about space and time and travel, about a large man and a large journey and how it was in the long midnight and coldness of space, and how a man could be hungry enough to take all of it and ask for more. He read the words that were full of fire and thunder and mystery. " Space was like October, wrote Thomas Wolfe. He said things about its darkness and its loneliness and a man so small in it The eternal and timeless October, was one of the things he said. And then he told of the rocket itself, the smell and the feel of the metal of the rocket, and the sense of destiny and wild exultancy to at last leave Earth behind, all problems and all sadnesses, and go seeking a bigger problem and a bigger sadness. Oh, it was fine writing, and it said what had to be said about space and man and his small rockets out there alone.

  The old man read until he was hoarse, and then Bolton read, and then the others, far into the night, when the machine stopped transcribing words and they knew that Tom Wolfe was in bed, then, on the rocket, flying to Mars, probably not asleep, no, he wouldn't sleep for hours yet, no, lying awake, like a boy the night before a circus, not believing the big jeweled black tent is up and the circus is on, with ten billion blazing performers on the high wires and the invisible trapezes of space.

  "There," breathed the old man, gentling aside the last pages of the first chapter. "What do you think of that, Bolton?"

  "It's good."

  "Good hell!" shouted Field. "It's wonderful! Read it again, sit down, read it again, damn you!"

  It kept coming through, one day following another, for ten hours at a time. The stack of yellow papers on the floor, scribbled on, grew immense in a week, unbelievable in two weeks, absolutely impossible in a month.

  "Listen to this!" cried the old man, and read.

  "And this!" he said.

  "And this chapter here, and this little novel here, it just came through, Bolton, titled 'The Space War,' a complete novel on how it feels to fight a space war. Tom's been talking to people, soldiers, officers, men, veterans of space. He's got it all here. And here's a chapter called 'The Long Midnight,' and here's one on the Negro colonization of Mars, and here's a character sketch of a Martian, absolutely priceless!"

  Bolton cleared his throat. "Mr. Field?"

  "Yes, yes, don't bother me."

  "I've some bad news, sir."

  Field jerked his gray head up. "What? The time element?"

  "You'd better tell Wolfe to hurry his work. The connection may break sometime this week," said Bolton, softly.

  "I'll give you anything, anything if you keep it going!"

  "It's not money, Mr. Field. It's just plain physics right now. I'll do everything I can. But you'd better warn him."

  The old man shriveled in his chair and was small. "But you can't take him away from me now, not when he's doing so well. You should see the outline he sent through an hour ago, the stories, the sketches. Here, here's one on spatial tides, another on meteors. Here's a short novel begun, called 'Thistledown and Fire'—"

  "I'm sorry."

  "If we lose him now, can we get him again?"

  "I'd be afraid to tamper too much."

  The old man was frozen. "Only one thing to do then. Arrange to have Wolfe type his work, if possible, or dictate it, to save time; rather than have him use pencil and paper, he's got to use a machine of some sort. See to it!"

  The machine ticked away by the hour into the night and into the dawn and through the day. The old man slept only in faint dozes, blinking awake when the machine stuttered to life, and all of space and travel and existence came to him through the mind of another:

  ".. . the great starred meadows of space . .."

  The machine jumped.

  "Keep at it, Tom show them!" The old man waited.

  The phone rang.

  It was Bolton.

  "We can't keep it up, Mr. Field. The continuum device will absolute out within the hour."

  "Do something!"

  "I can't."

  The teletype chattered. In a cold fascination, in a horror, the old man watched the black lines form.

  ". . . the Martian cities, immense and unbelievable, as numerous as stones thrown from some great mountain in a rushing and incredible avalanche, resting at last in shining mounds . . ."

  "Tom!" cried the old man.

  "Now," said Bolton, on the phone.

  The teletype hesitated, typed a word, and fell silent.

  "Tom!" screamed the old man.

  He shook the teletype.

  "It's no use," said the telephone voice. "He's gone. I'm shutting off the time machine."

  "No! Leave it on!"

  "But-"

  "You heard me—leave it! We're not sure he's gone."

  "He is. It's no use, we're wasting energy."

  "Waste it, then!"

  He slammed the phone down.

  He turned to the teletype, to the unfinished sentence.

  "Come on, Tom, they can't get rid of you that way, you won't let them, will you, boy, come on. Tom, show them, you're big, you're bigger than time or space or their damned machines, you're strong and you've a will like iron, Tom, show them, don't let them send you back!"

  The teletype snapped one key.

  The old man bleated. "Tom! You are there, aren't you? Can you still write? Write, Tom, keep it coming, as long as you keep it rolling, Tom, they can't send you back!"

  "The," typed the machine.

  "More, Tom, more!"

  Odors of, clacked the machine.

  "Yes?"

  Mars, typed the machine, and paused. A minute's silence. The machine spaced, skipped a paragraph, and began:

  The odors of Mars, the cinnam
ons and cold spice winds, the winds of cloudy dust and winds of powerful bone and ancient pollen—

  "Tom, your're still alive!"

  For answer the machine, in the next ten hours, slammed out six chapters of "Flight Before Fury" in a series of fevered explosions.

  "Today makes six weeks, Bolton, six whole weeks, Tom gone, on Mars, through the Asteroids. Look here, the manuscripts. Ten thousand words a day, he's driving himself, I don't know when he sleeps, or if he eats, I don't care, he doesn't either, he only wants to get it done, because he knows the time is short."

  "I can't understand it," said Bolton. "The power failed because our relays wore out. It took us three days to manufacture and replace the particular channel relays necessary to keep the Time Element steady, and yet Wolfe hung on. There's a personal factor here, Lord knows what, we didn't take into account. Wolfe lives here, in this time, when he is here, and can't be snapped back, after all. Time isn't as flexible as we imagined. We used the wrong simile. It's not like a rubber band. More like osmosis; the penetration of membranes by liquids, from Past to Present, but we've got to send him back, can't keep him here, there'd be a void there, a derangement. The one thing that really keeps him here now is himself, his drive, his desire, his work. After it's over he'll go back as naturally as pouring water from a glass."

  "I don't care about reasons, all I know is Tom is finishing it. He has the old fire and description, and something else, something more, a searching of values that supersede time and space. He's done a study of a woman left behind on Earth while the damn rocket heroes leap into space that's beautiful, objective, and subtle; he calls it 'Day of the Rocket,' and it is nothing more than an afternoon of a typical suburban housewife who lives as her ancestral mothers lived, in a house, raising her children, her life not much different from a cavewoman's, in the midst of the splendor of science and the trumpetings of space projectiles; a true and steady and subtle study of her wishes and frustrations. Here's another manuscript, called 'The Indians,' in which he refers to the Martians as Cherokees and Iroquois and Blackfoots, the Indian nations of space, destroyed and driven back. Have a drink, Bolton, have a drink!"