Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1. Ray Bradbury
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1 - Ray Bradbury страница 72
Название: Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1
Автор: Ray Bradbury
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Классическая проза
isbn: 9780007497683
isbn:
‘It would’ve come anyway, sooner or later,’ said the doctor. To Clemens: ‘You might talk to him.’
Clemens walked quietly over and crouched by Hitchcock and began to shake his arm gently, calling in a low voice, ‘Hey there, Hitchcock.’
No reply.
‘Hey, it’s me. Me, Clemens,’ said Clemens. ‘Look, I’m here.’ He gave the arm a little slap. He massaged the rigid neck, gently, and the back of the bent-down head. He glanced at the psychiatrist, who sighed very softly. The captain shrugged.
‘Shock treatment, Doctor?’
The psychiatrist nodded. ‘We’ll start within the hour.’
Yes, thought Clemens, shock treatment. Play a dozen jazz records for him, wave a bottle of fresh green chlorophyll and dandelions under his nose, put grass under his feet, squirt Chanel on the air, cut his hair, clip his fingernails, bring him a woman, shout, bang and crash at him, fry him with electricity, fill the gap and the gulf, but where’s your proof? You can’t keep proving to him forever. You can’t entertain a baby with rattles and sirens all night every night for the next thirty years. Sometime you’ve got to stop. When you do that, he’s lost again. That is, if he pays any attention to you at all.
‘Hitchcock!’ he cried, as loud as he could, almost frantically, as if he himself were falling over a cliff. ‘It’s me. It’s your pal! Hey!’
Clemens turned and walked away out of the silent room.
Twelve hours later another alarm bell rang.
After all of the running had died down, the captain explained: ‘Hitchcock snapped out of it for a minute or so. He was alone. He climbed into a space suit. He opened an airlock. Then he walked out into space – alone.’
Clemens blinked through the immense glass port, where there was a blur of stars and distant blackness. ‘He’s out there now?’
‘Yes. A million miles behind us. We’d never find him. First time I knew he was outside the ship was when his helmet radio came in on our control-room beam. I heard him talking to himself.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Something like “No more space ship now. Never was any. No people. No people in all the universe. Never were any. No plants. No stars.” That’s what he said. And then he said something about his hands and feet and legs. “No hands,” he said. “I haven’t any hands any more. Never had any. No feet. Never had any. Can’t prove it. No body. Never had any. No lips. No face. No head. Nothing. Only space. Only space. Only the gap.’
The men turned quietly to look from the glass port out into the remote and cold stars.
Space, thought Clemens. The space that Hitchcock loved so well. Space, with nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, a lot of empty nothings between, and Hitchcock falling in the middle of the nothing, on his way to no particular night and no particular morning …
The city waited twenty thousand years.
The planet moved through space and the flowers of the fields grew up and fell away, and still the city waited; and the rivers of the planet rose and waned and turned to dust. Still the city waited. The winds that had been young and wild grew old and serene, and the clouds of the sky that had been ripped and torn were left alone to drift in idle whitenesses. Still the city waited.
The city waited with its windows and its black obsidian walls and its sky towers and its unpennanted turrets, with its untrod streets and its untouched doorknobs, with not a scrap of paper or a fingerprint upon it. The city waited while the planet arced in space, following its orbit about a blue-white sun, and the seasons passed from ice to fire and back to ice and then to green fields and yellow summer meadows.
It was on a summer afternoon in the middle of the twenty thousandth year that the city ceased waiting.
In the sky a rocket appeared.
The rocket soared over, turned, came back, and landed in the shale meadow fifty yards from the obsidian wall.
There were booted footsteps in the thin grass and calling voices from men within the rocket to men without.
‘Ready?’
‘All right, men. Careful! Into the city. Jensen, you and Hutchinson patrol ahead. Keep a sharp eye.’
The city opened secret nostrils in its black walls and a steady suction vent deep in the body of the city drew storms of air back through channels, through thistle filters and dust collectors, to a fine and tremblingly delicate series of coils and webs which glowed with silver light. Again and again the immense suctions occurred; again and again the odors from the meadow were borne upon warm winds into the city.
‘Fire odor, the scent of a fallen meteor, hot metal. A ship has come from another world. The brass smell, the dusty fire smell of burned powder, sulphur, and rocket brimstone.’
This information, stamped on tapes which sprocketed into slots, slid down through yellow cogs into further machines.
Click-chakk-chakk-chakk.
A calculator made the sound of a metronome. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine men! An instantaneous typewriter inked this message on tape which slithered and vanished.
Clickety-click-chakk-chakk.
The city awaited the soft tread of their rubberoid boots.
The great city nostrils dilated again.
The smell of butter. In the city air, from the stalking men, faintly, the aura which wafted to the great Nose broke down into memories of milk, cheese, ice cream, butter, the effluvia of a dairy economy.
Click-click.
‘Careful, men!’
‘Jones, get your gun out. Don’t be a fool!’
‘The city’s dead; why worry?’
‘You can’t tell.’
Now, at the barking talk, the Ears awoke. After centuries of listening to winds that blew small and faint, of hearing leaves strip from trees and grass grow softly in the time of melting snows, now the Ears oiled themselves in a self-lubrication, drew taut, great drums upon which the heartbeat of the invaders might pummel and thud delicately as the tremor of a gnat’s wing. The Ears listened and the Nose siphoned up great chambers of odor.
The perspiration of frightened men arose. There were islands of sweat under their arms, and sweat in their hands as they held their guns.
The Nose sifted and worried this air, like a connoisseur busy with an ancient vintage.
Chikk-chikk-chakk-click.
Information rotated down on parallel check СКАЧАТЬ