Ray Bradbury - Long After Midnight

"Tom, good-bye," he whispered.

Moving down the dim stairwell toward the steadily beating rain, he found Tom's friend waiting at the foot of the stairs.

"Frank! You haven't been down here all night?"

"No, no, Mr. Kelly," said Frank, quickly. "I stayed at a friend's."

The old man turned to look up the dark stairwell as if he could see the room and Tom in it warm asleep.

"Gah . . . !" Something almost a growl stirred in his throat and subsided. He shifted uneasily and looked back down at the dawn kindled on this young man's face, this one who had painted a picture that hung above the fireplace in the room above.

"The damn night is over," said the old man. "So if you'll just stand aside—"

"Sir."

The old man took one step down and burst out:

"Listen! If you hurt Tom, in any way ever, why, Jesus, I'll break you across my knee! You hear?"

Frank held out his hand. "Don't worry."

The old man looked at the hand as if he had never seen one before. He sighed. •

"Ah, damn it to hell, Frank, Tom's friend, so young you're destruction to the eyes. Get away!"

They shook hands.

"Jesus, that's a hard grip," said the old man, surprised.

Then he was gone, as if the rain had hustled him off in its own multitudinous running.

The young man shut the upstairs door and stood for a moment looking at the figure on the bed and at last went over and as if by instinct put his hand down to the exact same spot where the old man had printed his hand in farewell not five minutes before. He touched the summer cheek.

In his sleep, Tom smiled the smile of his father's father, and called the old man, deep in a dream, by name.

He called him twice.

And then he slept quietly.

Darling Adolf

They were waiting for him to come out. He was sitting inside the little Bavarian caf6 with a view of the mountains, drinking beer, and he had been in there since noon and it was now two-thirty, a long lunch, and much beer, and they could see by the way he held his head and laughed and lifted one more stein with the suds fluffing in the spring breeze that he was in a grand humor now, and at the table with him the two other men were doing their best to keep up, but had fallen long behind.

On occasion their voices drifted on the wind, and then the small crowd waiting out in the parking lot leaned to hear. What was he saying? and now what?

"He just said the shooting was going well."

"What, where?!"

"Fool. The film, the film is shooting well."

"Is that the director sitting with him?"

"Yes. And the other unhappy one is the producer."

"He doesn't look like a producer."

"No wonder! He's had his nose changed."

"And him, doesn't he look real?"

"To the hair and the teeth."

And again everyone leaned to look in at the three men, at the man who didn't look like a producer, at the sheepish director who kept glancing out at the crowd and slouching down with his head between his shoulders, shutting his eyes, and the man between them, the man in the uniform with the swastika on his arm, and the fine military cap put on the table beside the almost-untouched food, for he was talking, no, making a speech.

"That's the Fuhrer, all right!"

"God in heaven, it's as if no time had passed. I don't believe this is 1973. Suddenly it's 1934 again, when first I saw him."

"Where?"

"The Nuremberg Rally, the stadium, that was the autumn, yes, and I was thirteen and part of the Youth and one hundred thousand soldiers and young men in that big place that late afternoon before the torches were lit. So many bands, so many flags, so much heartbeat, yes, I tell you, I could hear one hundred thousand hearts banging away, we were all so in love, he had come down out of the clouds. The gods had sent him, we knew, and the time of waiting was over, from here on we could act, there was nothing he couldn't help us to do."

"I wonder how that actor in there feels, playing him?"

"Sh, he hears you. Look, he waves. Wave back."

"Shut up," said someone else. "They're talking again. I want to hear—"

The crowd shut up. The men and women leaned into the soft spring wind. The voices drifted from the caf6 table.

Beer was being poured by a maiden waitress with flushed cheeks and eyes as bright as fire.

"More beer!" said the man with the toothbrush mustache and the hair combed forward on the left side of his brow.

"No, thanks," said the director.

"No, no," said the producer.

"More beer! It's a splendid day," said Adolf. "A toast to the film, to us, to me. Drink!"

The other two men put their hands on their glasses of beer.

"To the film," said the producer.

"To darling Adolf." The director's voice was flat.

The man in the uniform stiffened.

"I do not look upon myself—" he hesitated, "upon him as darling."

"He was darling, all right, and you're a doll." The director gulped his drink. "Does anyone mind if I get drunk?"

"To be drunk is not permitted," said Der Fiihrer.

"Where does it say that in the script?"

The producer kicked the director under the table.

"How many more weeks' work do you figure we have?" asked the producer, with great politeness.

"I figure we should finish the film," said the director, taking huge swigs, "around about the death of Hinden-burg, or the Hindenburg gasbag going down in flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey, which ever comes first."

Adolf Hitler bent to his plate and began to eat rapidly, snapping at his meat and potatoes in silence.

The producer sighed heavily. The director, nudged by this, calmed the waters. "Another three weeks should see the masterwork in the can, and us sailing home on the Titanic, there to collide with the Jewish critics and go down bravely singing 'Deutschland Uber Mies' "

Suddenly all three were voracious and snapping and biting and chewing their food, and the spring breeze blew softly, and the crowd waited outside.

At last, Der Fuhrer stopped, had another sip of beer, and lay back in his chair, touching his mustache with his little finger.

"Nothing can provoke me on a day like this. The rushes last night were so beautiful. The casting for this film, ah! I find Goring to be incredible. Goebbels? Perfection!" Sunlight dazzled out of Der Fuhrer's face. "So. So, I was thinking just last night, here I am in Bavaria, me, a pure Aryan—"

Both men flinched slightly, and waited.

"—making a film," Hitler went on, laughing softly, "with a Jew from New York and a Jew from Hollywood. So amusing."

"I am not amused," said the director, lightly.

The producer shot him a glance which said: the film is not finished yet. Careful.

"And I was thinking, wouldn't it be fun . . ." Here Der Fuhrer stopped to take a big drink, ". . . to have another ... ah ... Nuremberg Rally?"

"You mean for the film, of course?"

The director stared at Hitler. Hitler examined the texture of the suds in his beer.

"My God," said the producer, "do you know how much it would cost to reproduce the Nuremberg Rally? How much did it cost Hitler for the original, Marc?"

He blinked at his director, who said, "A bundle. But he had a lot of free extras, of course."

"Of course! The Army, the Hitler Youth."

"Yes, yes," said Hitler. "But think of the publicity, all over the world? Let us go to Nuremberg, eh, and film my plane, eh, and me coming down out of the clouds? I heard those people out there, just now: Nuremberg and plane and torches. They remember. I remember. I held a torch in that stadium. My God, it was beautiful. And now, now I am exactly the age Hitler was when he was at his prime."

"He was never at his prime," said the director. "Unless you mean hung-meat."