Рэй Брэдбери - Yestermorrow - Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

Let’s face it, there is no use building a center or a mall where people only come on occasion to argue fresh fruit and give up coffee. A town is conversation, gossiping, chatting, watching, looking, noting, and staring. We must give people back their eyes. And their mouths. And their derrieres.

What to do with your eyes is what our People Machine will teach.

What to do with your mouth is what our townsfolk will learn.

What to do with your rump roast posterior is Ballet Position Number One in the plaza of the future.

We must build a social machine of such curious and mixed and delightful parts that the city beyond the horizon will fall over dead with envy and sink into the tar where its dinosaur unsociability belongs.

“Okay, Prophet, put the pieces together,” you cry. “What do we build and fit?”

For starters, a fresh new idea, thought of just seventeen million mornings ago: The Town Plaza.

If you have one lying about, summon it back to life.

“How?” Here’s the blueprint:

The Longest Bar in the World is in Tijuana. Why not, facing our plaza, build the Longest Soda Fountain in the World! With one hundred stools facing an old-fashioned soda fountain. Beyond the stools, put another 50 to 80 tables, and beyond the tables another 40 or 50 booths.

On the opposite side of the plaza, let us add a wonderfully colored, imaginatively built bookstore, whose paperback department, in particular, would carry a cross section of just about every and any kind of book that people out in the Plaza might want to hold in their hands or sit on. The bookstore would open late in the afternoon and stay open until at least midnight every night.

The bookstore, needless to say, should be fabulous, metaphorical, mythological, and as exciting as the books that line the shelves. Libraries may well demand silence, but, why not as you enter our bookstore, have a Robot Computer King or a Queen-of-Egypt mummy standing near the door, to whom you can whisper your needs, and who will tell you all the latest wonders in the grand stacks and corridors! The mummy’s breastplate might have, in gold beetle symbols, the names of the various sections, which, if pressed, would whisper the new stuff just arrived from across the world! A golden amber beetle, plucked up on its wire, would tickle the quiet message in your peach-fuzz ear.

Wandering the stacks, you could stick your hands in various myth-holes to view tiny dioramas of the areas you are traveling through by book. Stick your head in here: OZ, with music. Stick your head in there: Caveman Territory. Next hole: Dinosaurs. Next after that: Alpha Centauri! Andromeda! With sound! With symphonies!

How do you get to the Children’s Section?

By sliding down a Rabbit Hole into the basement!

Who could resist that? Not me!

Where are all the Star Books, the Future Books? Where is the Grand Universe itself? Up a twisting circular staircase into a miniature, domed planetarium where John Carter, Luke Skywalker, and Chewbacca wait!

Over in the adult mystery section, as you prowl the stacks, why not, on occasion, the sound of a faintly squeaking door, a dim rattle of gunfire among the dark, leaning books if you pick up some stethoscopes hanging there and give a listen. Now—back out to the Town Plaza!

On the third side of the plaza build a fairly large bike rink, with humps and hills and semi-detours, fast and slow lanes, where you can rent a bike and take off for a few miles of nice work with a view of the plaza, the ice-cream eaters, and the book people. Under a canopy, of course, for fair and foul weather.

On two opposing corners of the plaza, the finest restaurants you can put together under sane or insane but imaginative chefs. On two other opposing corners, cinemas running the latest appalling imports from the prison side of Hollywood, or the great stuff from Alpha Centauri and Beyond.

If your plaza is near a college or university, great. Lacking that, toss in a university extension building as close to the Ice Cream Parlor as possible. We want all those nice young bodies, every three years a new mob, parading around being lovable idiots.

Now, next door to the bookstore, what?

That old-fashioned Kaleidoscope, the vast store you could hold up to the sun and see just about anything you wanted to see and touch and buy—The Dime Store!

And I mean a bright, well-lit, clean, uncrowded, though full of incredible junk, Dime Store, the way they used to be before you took one look and never went in again—the year they began to look like garbage dumps.

Next to that, a Drug Store, and I mean a Drug Store, the way they used to look and smell. Remember the smell? All the mysterious medicines and cosmetics and perfumes. Somebody should bottle that. The smell alone makes the feet drift, the body turn and move in its direction.

Next to that—a Penny Arcade, but not just your old-fashioned Penny Arcade with robot-tarot-witches, penny-moviola machines, and Electrocute-Yourself-For-A-Penny devices. I mean an Arcade where Darth Vader will cream your tiny guts with his laser. Where Outer Space beckons in three dimensions, where you can blast off in an electro-sensor Pod, to knock hell out of the Empire’s rockets, zap the Orion Nebula, disintegrate the Moon, and rebirth ten billion Suns, all in an afternoon. Talk about your Old-fashioned Shooting Gallery taking on new intergalactic aspects! And, with bigger, better, more incredible Computer Games coming up, in monster as well as mini-sizes, you can add to your Penny Arcade, your Outer Space Arcade, as the money pours in.

The Laser Light Arcade, incidentally, might be the first stopping place for any People Mover or electric bus that enters the downtown area of your Future Small Town. Mothers who want to gab and shop can drop Annihilating Junior or Bust-’em-Up Betsy at the Arcade for a few hours of socking Martians or traveling to far countries.

Part of the Electro-Computer Environment would be, of course, my Asking Room. You walk in and ask the room to take you anywhere and it does. “Africa! You Shout.” And Africa’s all around you, on four walls—or one great shell wall that encloses you, if you’re seated. The varieties of adventures a child—or an adult—could ask for might be endless. Each adventure lasting from ten to twenty minutes.

If the town ever got around to building an overhead people mover, or miniature monorail, the pods from this practical ride could, if one wished, detach themselves and Detour to Paris or Turn Here For Bombay. By pressing a switch while enroute across Peoria, the tired housewife could derail on a sidetrack that slid into an experience tunnel near the Arcade, there to see the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal or the Houses of Parliament before returning to the wonders of Kraft dinners and Coors beer.

All the above, of course, is expensive. Spend your money first on the Town Plaza and its environs, plus the Arcade. The People Mover Pod Experience can come as a dividend, later.

Where were we? Oh, yes…

Back to the four corners again. On the second and third floors of the four buildings on the four corners are the Gray Battalion Headquarters, the Old Folks homes, with the best damn views in town of the bike-riding, ice cream-eating, park-strolling, people-watching, book-reading public. Out of the two-fisted TV grip at last and back out on the street where the greatest danger is an elbow, and soap opera, the real stuff, boils in every passing bod.

Was it Aristotle who woke one morn in his sixties and discovered that for the first time in Lord knows how many years, he had no a.m. erection, and raced down the streets, shouting to the skies, “Free! Free at last! Free!”

Our People Machine, with all its components, promises just that. No more crowding in the TV room with all those strange people and their maniac grins and lousy lines and ill-mannered laughter. No more being forced to stay in school (Channel 2, that is, or Channel 4) when the great world of the town invites and truly beckons.