R is for Rocket. Ray Bradbury

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      “Blast-off!” He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming. “We’re moving! We’re off! Look!”

      “Here comes the Moon!”

      The moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports. “There’s Earth!” “There’s Mars!”

      The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their cocoon hammocks.

      “Good,” whispered Bodoni, alone.

      He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.

      He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?

      No. Bodoni smiled.

      All about the quivering rocket lay the junkyard.

      Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junkyard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junkyard, manufacturing a magic dream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.

      Maria stood in the kitchen window.

      He waved to her and smiled.

      He could not see if she waved or not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.

      The sun was rising.

      Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Silence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed, Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion in the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars come up under our ship, and the moons of Mars, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimensions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mirrors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.

      He awoke.

      Red Mars floated near the rocket.

      “Papa!” The children thrashed to be free.

      Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.

      At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.

      “We are home,” said Bodoni.

      They walked across the junkyard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing. Perhaps they knew what he had done. Perhaps they guessed his wonderful magic trick. But if they knew, if they guessed, they never said. Now they only laughed and ran.

      “I have ham and eggs for all of you,” said Maria, at the kitchen door.

      “Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!”

      “Yes,” she said.

      At bedtime the children gathered before Bodoni. “We want to thank you, Papa.”

      “It was nothing.”

      “We will remember it for always, Papa. We will never forget.”

      Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. “What’s this?” he cried.

      “You’re the best father in the world,” she whispered.

      “Why?”

      “Now I see,” she said. “I understand.”

      She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. “Is it a very lovely journey?” she asked.

      “Yes,” he said.

      “Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?”

      “Just a little one, perhaps,” he said.

      “Thank you,” she said. “Good night.”

      “Good night,” said Fiorello Bodoni.

The Rocket Man

      The electrical fireflies were hovering above Mother’s dark hair to light her path. She stood in her bedroom door looking out at me as I passed in the silent hall. “You will help me keep him here this time, won’t you?” she asked.

      “I guess so,” I said.

      “Please.” The fireflies cast moving bits of light on her white face. “This time he mustn’t go away again.”

      “All right,” I said, after standing there a moment. “But it won’t do any good; it’s no use.”

      She went away, and the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered after her like an errant constellation, showing her how to walk in darkness. I heard her say, faintly, “We’ve got to try, anyway.”

      Other fireflies followed me to my room. When the weight of my body cut a circuit in the bed, the fireflies winked out. It was midnight, and my mother and I waited, our rooms separated by darkness, in bed. The bed began to rock me and sing to me. I touched a switch; the singing and rocking stopped. I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to sleep at all.

      This night was no different from a thousand others in our time. We would wake nights and feel the cool air turn hot, feel the fire in the wind, or see the walls burned a bright color for an instant, and then we knew his rocket was over our house—his rocket, and the oak trees swaying from the concussion. And I would lie there, eyes wide, panting, and Mother in her room. Her voice would come to me over the interroom radio:

      “Did you feel it?”

      And I would answer, “That was him, all right.”

      That was my father’s ship passing over our town, a small town where space rockets never came, and we would lie awake for the next two hours, thinking. “Now Dad’s landed in Springfield, now he’s on the tarmac, now he is signing the papers, now he’s in the helicopter, now he’s over the river, now the hills, now he’s settling the helicopter in at the little airport at Green Village here.…” And the night would be half over when, in our separate cool beds, Mother and I would be listening, listening. “Now he’s walking down Bell Street. He always walks … never takes a cab … now across the park, now turning the corner of Oakhurst and now …”

      I lifted my head from my pillow. Far down the street, coming closer and closer, smartly, quickly, briskly—footsteps. Now turning in at our house, up the porch steps. And we were both smiling in the cool darkness, Mom and I, when we heard the front door СКАЧАТЬ