The Illustrated Man

‘Nevertheless –’

‘Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad.’

The Hadleys turned. Wendy and Peter were coming in the front door, cheeks like peppermint candy, eyes like bright blue agate marbles, a smell of ozone on their jumpers from their trip in the helicopter.

‘You’re just in time for supper,’ said both parents.

‘We’re full of strawberry ice cream and hot dogs,’ said the children, holding hands. ‘But we’ll sit and watch.’

‘Yes, come tell us about the nursery,’ said George Hadley.

The brother and sister blinked at him and then at each other. ‘Nursery?’

‘All about Africa and everything,’ said the father with false joviality.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Peter.

‘Your mother and I were just travelling through Africa with rod and reel; Tom Swift and his Electric Lion,’ said George Hadley.

‘There’s no Africa in the nursery,’ said Peter simply.

‘Oh, come on, Peter. We know better.’

‘I don’t remember any Africa,’ said Peter to Wendy. ‘Do you?’

‘No.’

‘Run see and come tell.’

She obeyed.

‘Wendy, come back here!’ said George Hadley, but she was gone. The house lights followed her like a flock of fireflies. Too late, he realized he had forgotten to lock the nursery door after his last inspection.

‘Wendy’ll look and come tell us,’ said Peter.

‘She doesn’t have to tell me, I’ve seen it.’

‘I’m sure you’re mistaken, Father.’

‘I’m not, Peter. Come along now.’

But Wendy was back. ‘It’s not Africa,’ she said breathlessly.

‘We’ll see about this,’ said George Hadley, and they all walked down the hall together and opened the nursery door.

There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing, and Rima, lovely and mysterious, lurking in the trees with colourful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her long hair. The African veldland was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.

George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. ‘Go to bed,’ he said to the children.

They opened their mouths.

‘You heard me,’ he said.

They went off to the air closet, where a wind sucked them like brown leaves up the flue to their slumber rooms.

George Hadley walked through the singing glade and picked up something that lay in the corner near where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his wife.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

‘An old wallet of mine,’ he said.

He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it and the smell of a lion. There were drops of saliva on it, it had been chewed, and there were blood smears on both sides.

He closed the nursery door and locked it, tight.

In the middle of the night he was still awake and he knew his wife was awake. ‘Do you think Wendy changed it?’ she said at last, in the dark room.

‘Of course.’

‘Made it from a veld into a forest and put Rima there instead of lions?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s staying locked until I find out.’

‘How did your wallet get there?’

‘I don’t know anything,’ he said, ‘except that I’m beginning to be sorry we bought that room for the children. If children are neurotic at all, a room like that –’

‘It’s supposed to help them work off their neuroses in a healthful way.’

‘I’m starting to wonder.’ He stared at the ceiling.

‘We’ve given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our reward – secrecy, disobedience?’

‘Who was it said, “Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally”? We’ve never lifted a hand. They’re insufferable – let’s admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring. They’re spoiled and we’re spoiled.’

‘They’ve been acting funny ever since you forbade them to take the rocket to New York a few months ago.’

‘They’re not old enough to do that alone, I explained.’

‘Nevertheless, I’ve noticed they’ve been decidedly cool toward us since.’

‘I think I’ll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at Africa.’

‘But it’s not Africa now, it’s Green Mansions country and Rima.’

‘I have a feeling it’ll be Africa again before then.’

A moment later they heard the screams.

Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.

‘Wendy and Peter aren’t in their rooms,’ said his wife.

He lay in his bed with his beating heart. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’ve broken into the nursery.’

‘Those screams – they sound familiar.’

‘Do they?’

‘Yes, awfully.’

And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn’t be rocked to sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.

‘Father,’ said Peter.

‘Yes.’

Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his mother. ‘You aren’t going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?’

‘That all depends.’

‘On what?’ snapped Peter.

‘On you and your sister. If you intersperse this Africa with a little variety – oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China –’

‘I thought we were free to play as we wished.’

‘You are, within reasonable bounds.’

‘What’s wrong with Africa, Father?’

‘Oh, so now you admit you have been conjuring up Africa, do you?’

‘I wouldn’t want the nursery locked up,’ said Peter coldly. ‘Ever.’

‘Matter of fact, we’re thinking of turning the whole house off for about a month. Live sort of a carefree one-for-all existence.’

‘That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the shoe tier do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?’

‘It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?’

‘No, it would be horrid. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.’

‘That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.’

‘I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?’

‘All right, go play in Africa.’

‘Will you shut off the house sometime soon?’

‘We’re considering it.’

‘I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father.’

‘I won’t have any threats from my son!’

‘Very well.’ And Peter strolled off to the nursery.

‘Am I on time?’ said David McClean.

‘Breakfast?’ asked George Hadley.

‘Thanks, had some. What’s the trouble?’

‘David, you’re a psychologist.’

‘I should hope so.’

‘Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped by; did you notice anything peculiar about it then?’

‘Can’t say I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight paranoia here or there, usual in children because they feel persecuted by parents constantly, but, oh, really nothing.’

They walked down the hall. ‘I locked the nursery up,’ explained the father, ‘and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could form the patterns for you to see.’

There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.

‘There it is,’ said George Hadley. ‘See what you make of it.’

They walked in on the children without rapping.

The screams had faded. The lions were feeding.

‘Run outside a moment, children,’ said George Hadley. ‘No, don’t change the mental combination. Leave the walls as they are. Get!’

With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions clustered at a distance, eating with great relish whatever it was they had caught.

‘I wish I knew what it was,’ said George Hadley. ‘Sometimes I can almost see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and –’

David McClean laughed dryly. ‘Hardly.’ He turned to study all four walls. ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘A little over a month.’

‘It certainly doesn’t feel good.’

‘I want facts, not feelings.’

‘My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about feelings; vague things. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust my hunches and my instincts, I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment.’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘I’m afraid so. One of the original uses of these nurseries was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind, study at our leisure, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a channel toward – destructive thoughts, instead of a release away from them.’

‘Didn’t you sense this before?’

‘I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you’re letting them down in some way. What way?’

‘I wouldn’t let them go to New York.’

‘What else?’

‘I’ve taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for a few days to show I meant business.’

‘Ah, ha!’

‘Does that mean anything?’

‘Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut if off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d starve tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to tap an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.’

‘But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up abruptly, for good?’

‘I don’t want them going any deeper into this, that’s all.’

The lions were finished with their red feast.

The lions were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.

‘Now I’m feeling persecuted,’ said McClean. ‘Let’s get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous.’

‘The lions look real, don’t they?’ said George Hadley. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any way –’

‘What?’

‘– that they could become real?’

‘Not that I know.’

‘Some flaw in the machinery, a tampering or something?’

‘No.’

They went to the door.

‘I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,’ said the father.

‘Nothing ever likes to die – even a room.’

‘I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?’

‘Paranoia is thick around here today,’ said David McClean. ‘You can follow it like a spoor. Hello.’ He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. ‘This yours?’

‘No.’ George Hadley’s face was rigid. ‘It belongs to Lydia.’

They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.

The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.

‘You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!’

‘Now, children.’

The children flung themselves on to a couch, weeping.

‘George,’ said Lydia Hadley, ‘turn on the nursery, just for a few moments. You can’t be so abrupt.’

‘No.’

‘You can’t be so cruel.’

‘Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We’ve been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!’

And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lacers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and every other machine he could put his hand to.

The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

‘Don’t let them do it!’ wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. ‘Don’t let Father kill everything.’ He turned to his father. ‘Oh, I hate you!’

‘Insults won’t get you anywhere.’

‘I wish you were dead!’

‘We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live.’

Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. ‘Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery,’ they wailed.

‘Oh, George,’ said the wife, ‘it can’t hurt.’

‘All right – all right, if they’ll only just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off forever.’

‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’ sang the children, smiling with wet faces.

‘And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you.’

And the three of them went babbling off while he let himself be vacuumed upstairs through the air flue and set about dressing himself. A minute later Lydia appeared.

‘I’ll be glad when we get away,’ she sighed.

‘Did you leave them in the nursery?’

‘I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrid Africa. What can they see in it?’

‘Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare?’

‘Pride, money, foolishness.’

‘I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids get engrossed with those damned beasts again.’

Just then they heard the children calling, ‘Daddy, Mommy, come quick – quick!’

They went downstirs in the air flue and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. ‘Wendy? Peter!’

They ran into the nursery. The veldland was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. ‘Peter, Wendy?’

The door slammed.

‘Wendy, Peter!’

George Hadley and his wife whirled and ran back to the door.

‘Open the door!’ cried George Hadley, trying the knob. ‘Why, they’ve locked it from the outside! Peter!’ He beat at the door. ‘Open up!’

He heard Peter’s voice outside, against the door.

‘Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house,’ he was saying.

Mr and Mrs George Hadley beat at the door. ‘Now, don’t be ridiculous, children. It’s time to go. Mr McClean’ll be here in a minute and …’

And then they heard the sounds.

The lions on three sides of them, in the yellow veld grass, padding through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats.

The lions.

Mr Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward, crouching, tails stiff.

Mr and Mrs Hadley screamed.

And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.

‘Well, here I am,’ said David McClean in the nursery doorway. ‘Oh, hello.’ He stared at the two children seated in the centre of the open glade eating a little picnic lunch. Beyond them was the water hole and the yellow veldland; above was the hot sun. He began to perspire. ‘Where are your father and mother?’

The children looked up and smiled. ‘Oh, they’ll be here directly.’

‘Good, we must get going.’ At a distance Mr McClean saw the lions fighting and clawing and then quieting down to feed in silence under the shady trees.

He squinted at the lions with his hand up to his eyes.

Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water hole to drink.

A shadow flickered over Mr McClean’s hot face. Many shadows flickered. The vultures were dropping down the blazing sky.

‘A cup of tea?’ asked Wendy in the silence.

The Illustrated Man shifted in his sleep. He turned, and each time he turned another picture came to view, colouring his back, his arm, his wrist. He flung a hand over the dry night grass. The fingers uncurled and there upon his palm another Illustration stirred to life. He twisted, and on his chest was an empty space of stars and blackness, deep, deep, and something moving among those stars, something falling in the blackness, falling while I watched …

Kaleidoscope

The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can-opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

‘Barkley, Barkley, where are you?’

The sound of voices calling like lost children on a cold night.

‘Woode, Woode!’

‘Captain!’

‘Hollis, Hollis, this is Stone.’

‘Stone, this is Hollis. Where are you?’

‘I don’t know. How can I? Which way is up? I’m falling. Good God, I’m falling.’

They fell. They fell as pebbles fall down wells. They were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw. And now instead of men there were only voices – all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.

‘We’re going away from each other.’

This was true. Hollis, swinging head over heels, knew this was true. He knew it with a vague acceptance. They were parting to go their separate ways, and nothing could bring them back. They were wearing their sealed-tight space suits with the glass tubes over their pale faces, but they hadn’t had time to lock on their force units. With them they could be small lifeboats in space, saving themselves, saving others, collecting together, finding each other until they were an island of men with some plan. But without the force units snapped to their shoulders they were meteors, senseless, each going to a separate and irrevocable fate.

A period of perhaps ten minutes elapsed while the first terror died and a metallic calm took its place. Space began to weave its strange voices in and out, in a great dark loom, crossing, recrossing, making a final pattern.

‘Stone to Hollis. How long can we talk by phone?’

‘It depends on how fast you’re going your way and I’m going mine.’

‘An hour, I make it.’

‘That should do it,’ said Hollis, abstracted and quiet.

‘What happened?’ said Hollis a minute later.

‘The rocket blew up, that’s all. Rockets do blow up.’

‘Which way are you going?’

‘It looks like I’ll hit the moon.’

‘It’s Earth for me. Back to old Mother Earth at ten thousand miles per hour. I’ll burn like a match.’ Hollis thought of it with a queer abstraction of mind. He seemed to be removed from his body, watching it fall down and down through space, as objective as he had been in regard to the first falling snowflakes of a winter season long gone.

The others were silent, thinking of the destiny that had brought them to this, falling, falling, and nothing they could do to change it. Even the captain was quiet, for there was no command or plan he knew that could put things back together again.

‘Oh, it’s a long way down. Oh, it’s a long way down, a long, long, long way down,’ said a voice. ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, it’s a long way down.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Stimson, I think. Stimson, is that you?’

‘It’s a long, long way and I don’t like it. Oh, God, I don’t like it.’

‘Stimson, this is Hollis. Stimson, you hear me?’

A pause while they fell separate from one another.

‘Stimson?’

‘Yes.’ He replied at last.

‘Stimson, take it easy; we’re all in the same fix.’

‘I don’t want to be here. I want to be somewhere else.’

‘There’s a chance we’ll be found.’

‘I must be, I must be,’ said Stimson. ‘I don’t believe this; I don’t believe any of this is happening.’

‘It’s a bad dream,’ said someone.

‘Shut up!’ said Hollis.

‘Come and make me,’ said the voice. It was Applegate. He laughed easily, with a similar objectivity. ‘Come and shut me up.’

Hollis for the first time felt the impossibility of his position. A great anger filled him, for he wanted more than anything at this moment to be able to do something to Applegate. He had wanted for many years to do something and now it was too late. Applegate was only a telephonic voice.

Falling, falling, falling …

Now, as if they had discovered the horror, two of the men began to scream. In a nightmare Hollis saw one of them float by, very near, screaming and screaming.

‘Stop it!’ The man was almost at his fingertips, screaming insanely. He would never stop. He would go on screaming for a million miles, as long as he was in radio range, disturbing all of them, making it impossible for them to talk to one another.

Hollis reached out. It was best this way. He made the extra effort and touched the man. He grasped the man’s ankle and pulled himself up along the body until he reached the head. The man screamed and clawed frantically, like a drowning swimmer. The screaming filled the universe.

One way or the other, thought Hollis. The moon or Earth or meteors will kill him, so why not now?

He smashed the man’s glass mask with his iron fist. The screaming stopped. He pushed off from the body and let it spin away on its own course, falling.

Falling, falling down space Hollis and the rest of them went in the long, endless dropping and whirling of silence.

‘Hollis you still there?’

Hollis did not speak, but felt the rush of heat in his face.

‘This is Applegate again.’

‘All right. Applegate.’

‘Let’s talk. We haven’t anything else to do.’

The captain cut in. ‘That’s enough of that. We’ve got to figure a way out of this.’

‘Captain, why don’t you shut up?’ said Applegate.

‘What!’

‘You heard me, Captain. Don’t pull your rank on me, you’re ten thousand miles away by now, and let’s not kid ourselves. As Stimson puts it, it’s a long way down.’

‘See here, Applegate!’

‘Can it. This is a mutiny of one. I haven’t a damn thing to lose. Your ship was a bad ship and you were a bad captain and I hope you break when you hit the Moon.’

‘I’m ordering you to stop!’

‘Go on, order me again.’ Applegate smiled across ten thousand miles. The captain was silent. Applegate continued, ‘Where were we, Hollis? Oh yes, I remember. I hate you too. But you know that. You’ve known it for a long time.’

Hollis clenched his fists, helplessly.

‘I want to tell you something,’ said Applegate. ‘Make you happy. I was the one who blackballed you with the Rocket Company five years ago.’

A meteor flashed by. Hollis looked down and his left hand was gone. Blood spurted. Suddenly there was no air in his suit. He had enough air in his lungs to move his right hand over and twist a knob at his left elbow, tightening the joint and sealing the leak. It had happened so quickly that he was not surprised. Nothing surprised him any more. The air in the suit came back to normal in an instant now that the leak was sealed. And the blood that had flowed so swiftly was pressured as he fastened the knob yet tighter, until it made a tourniquet.

All of this took place in a terrible silence on his part. And the other men chatted. That one man, Lespere, went on and on with his talk about his wife on Mars, his wife on Venus, his wife on Jupiter, his money, his wondrous times, his drunkenness, his gambling, his happiness. On and on; while they all fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.

It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the centre of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.