Ray Bradbury - Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

Volume 2

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

A hardcover edition of this book was first published in the USA in 2003 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Copyright © 2003 by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Additional Copyright Informationconstitutes an extension of this copyright page.

Most of the stories in this book were previously published in the UK in the following: The Illustrated Man , first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1952, and then by Grafton 1977, Flamingo Modern Classics 1995, Voyager Classics 2002, The Martian Chronicles , first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1951 under the title Silver Locusts , Corgi 1956, Grafton 1977 publication also entitled Silver Locusts , published by Flamingo 1995; R is for Rocket , first published in Great Britain by Rupert-Hart Davis Ltd 1968; Machineries of Joy , first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1966, and by Grafton 1977; S is for Space , first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1968; Twice 22 (comprised of stories from Golden Apples of the Sun and A Medicine for Melancholy ) first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1953; Fahrenheit 451 , first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1954 and by Grafton 1976, by Flamingo 1993, and by Voyager Classics 2001; I Sing the Body Electric! first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1970, Corgi 1971, and Grafton 1991; Dandelion Wine , published by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1957, Corgi 1965 and Grafton 1977; Long After Midnight first published in Great Britain by Hart-Davis MacGibbon 1977; October Country (containing some stories published in Dark Carnival ) first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1953, New English Library 1963.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007280582

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007497690

Version 2016-08-18

WITH LOVE TO MY THREE SAMUELS:

Number One, in the past,

SAMUEL HINKSTON BRADBURY, my grandfather.

Number Two, in the present,

SAMUEL HANDLEMAN, my grandson.

Number Three, in the future,

SAM WELLER, who is writing my life.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

The Whole Town’s Sleeping

The Rocket

Season of Disbelief

And the Rock Cried Out

The Drummer Boy of Shiloh

The Beggar on O’Connell Bridge

The Flying Machine

Heavy-Set

The First Night of Lent

Lafayette, Farewell

Remember Sascha?

Junior

That Woman on the Lawn

February 1999: Ylla

Banshee

One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!

The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair

Unterderseaboat Doktor

Another Fine Mess

The Dwarf

A Wild Night in Galway

The Wind

No News, or What Killed the Dog?

A Little Journey

Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine

The Garbage Collector

The Visitor

The Man

Henry the Ninth

The Messiah

Bang! You’re Dead!

Darling Adolf

The Beautiful Shave

Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy

I See You Never

The Exiles

At Midnight, in the Month of June

The Witch Door

The Watchers

2004–05: The Naming of Names

Hopscotch

The Illustrated Man

The Dead Man

June 2001: And the Moon Be Still as Bright

The Burning Man

G.B.S. – Mark V

A Blade of Grass

The Sound of Summer Running

And the Sailor, Home from the Sea

The Lonely Ones

The Finnegan

On the Orient, North

The Smiling People

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl

Bug

Downwind from Gettysburg

Time in Thy Flight

Changeling

The Dragon

Let’s Play ‘Poison’

The Cold Wind and the Warm

The Meadow

The Kilimanjaro Device

The Man in the Rorschach Shirt

Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned

The Pedestrian

Trapdoor

The Swan

The Sea Shell

Once More, Legato

June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone

By the Numbers!

April 2005: Usher II

The Square Pegs

The Trolley

The Smile

The Miracles of Jamie

A Far-away Guitar

The Cistern

The Machineries of Joy

Bright Phoenix

The Wish

The Lifework of Juan Díaz

Time Intervening/Interim

Almost the End of the World

The Great Collision of Monday Last

The Poems

April 2026: The Long Years

Icarus Montgolfier Wright

Death and the Maiden

Zero Hour

The Toynbee Convector

Forever and the Earth

The Handler

Getting Through Sunday Somehow

The Pumpernickel

Last Rites

The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse

All on a Summer’s Night

Keep Reading

Other Works

Additional Copyright Information

About the Publisher

It is hard for me to believe that in one lifetime I have written so many stories.

But on the other hand I often wonder what other writers do with their time.

Writing, for me, is akin to breathing. It is not something I plan or schedule; it’s something I just do . All the stories collected in this book seized on me at the strangest hours, compelling me to head for my typewriter and put them down on paper before they went away.

A good example of this is ‘Banshee.’ When I was working for John Huston in Ireland on the screenplay of Moby Dick , we spent many late evenings, sitting around the fire, drinking Irish whiskey, which I did not much care for, but only drank because he loved it. And sometimes Huston would pause in the middle of drinking and talking and close his eyes to listen to the wind wailing outside the house. Then his eyes would snap open and he would point a finger at me and cry that the banshees were out in the Irish weather and maybe I should go outdoors and see if it was true and bring them in.

He did this so often to scare me that it lodged in my mind and when I got home to America I finally wrote a story in response to his antics.

‘The Toynbee Convector’ was born because of my reaction to the bombardment of despair we so frequently find in our newspaper headlines and television reportage, and the feeling of imminent doom in a society that has triumphed over circumstances again and again, but fails to look back and realize where it has come from, and what it has achieved.