R is for Rocket. Ray Bradbury

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      Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Prologue

R Is for Rocket

The End of the Beginning

The Fog Horn

The Rocket

The Rocket Man

       The Golden Apples of the Sun

       A Sound of Thunder

       The Long Rain

       The Exiles

       Here There Be Tygers

       The Strawberry Window

       The Dragon

       The Gift

       Frost and Fire

       Uncle Einar

       The Time Machine

       The Sound of Summer Running

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

Prologue

      When I was a boy in the Midwest I used to go out and look at the stars at night and wonder about them.

      I guess every boy has done that.

      When I wasn’t looking at the stars, I was running in my old or my brand-new tennis shoes, on my way to swing in a tree, swim in a lake, or delve in the town library to read about dinosaurs or Time Machines.

      I guess every boy has done that, too.

      This is a book about those stars and those tennis shoes. Mainly about the stars, because that is the way I grew up, getting more and more involved with rockets and space as I moved toward my twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years.

      Not that I have forgotten the tennis shoes and their powerful magic, as you will see in the last story here, which I have included not because it concerns the Future, but because it gives you some sort of idea of the kind of boy I was when I was looking at the stars and thinking of the Years Ahead.

      Nor have I forgotten the dinosaurs that all boys love; they are here, too, along with a Machine that travels back in Time to step on a butterfly.

      This is a book then by a boy who grew up in a small Illinois town and lived to see the Space Age arrive, as he hoped and dreamt it would.

      I dedicate these stories to all boys who wonder about the Past, run swiftly in the Present, and have high hopes for our Future.

      The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.

      RAY BRADBURY

      Los Angeles March 28, 1962

R is for Rocket

      There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go.…

      Yet we were boys and liked being boys and lived in a Florida town and liked the town and went to school and fairly liked the school and climbed trees and played football and liked our mothers and fathers.…

      But some time every hour of every day of every week for a minute or a second when we thought on fire and stars and the fence beyond which they waited … we liked the rockets more.

      The fence. The rockets.

      Every Saturday morning …

      The guys met at my house.

      With the sun hardly up, they yelled until the neighbors were moved to brandish paralysis guns out their ventilators commanding the guys to shut up or they’d be frozen statues for the next hour and then where would they be?

      Aw, climb a rocket, stick your head in the main-jet! the kids always yelled back, but yelled this safe behind our garden fence. Old Man Wickard, next door, is a great shot with the para-gun.

      This one dim cool Saturday morning I was lying in bed thinking about how I had flunked my semantics exam the day before at formula-school, when I heard the gang yelling below. It was hardly 7 A.M. and there was still a lot of fog roaming in off the Atlantic, and only now were the weather-control vibrators at each comer starting to hum and shoot out rays to get rid of the stuff; I heard them moaning soft and nice.

      I padded to the window and stuck my head out.

      “Okay, space-pirates! СКАЧАТЬ