Рэй Брэдбери: The Exiles

«Kill them!» screamed Poe, running.

The rocket men leaped out of their ship, guns ready. They stalked about, sniffing the air like hounds. They saw nothing. They relaxed.

The captain stepped forth last. He gave sharp commands. Wood was gathered, kindled, and a fire leapt up in an instant. The captain beckoned his men into a half circle about him.

«A new world,» he said, forcing himself to speak deliberately, though he glanced nervously, now and again, over his shoulder at the empty sea. «The old world left behind. A new start. What more symbolic than that we here dedicate ourselves all the more firmly to science and progress.» He nodded crisply to his lieutenant. «The books.»

Firelight limned the faded gilt titles: The Willows, The Outsider, Behold, The Dreamer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Land of Oz, Pellucidar, The Land That Time Forgot, A Midsummer Night's Dream and the monstrous names of Machen and Edgar Allan Poe and Cabell and Dunsany and Blackwood and Lewis Carroll; the names, the old names, the evil names.

«A new world. With a gesture, we bum the last of the old.»

The captain ripped pages from the books. Leaf by seared leaf, he fed them into the fire.

A scream!

Leaping back, the men stared beyond the firelight at the edges of the encroaching and uninhabited sea.

Another scream! A high and wailing thing, like the death of a dragon and the thrashing of a bronzed whale left gasping when the waters of a leviathan's sea drain down the shingles and evaporate.

It was the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum, where, a moment before, there had been something.

The captain neatly disposed of the last book by putting it into the fire.

The air stopped quivering.

Silence!

The rocket men leaned and listened.

«Captain, did you hear it?»

«No.»

«Like a wave, sir. On the sea bottom! I thought I saw something. Over there. A black wave. Big. Running at us.»

«You were mistaken.»

«There, sir!»

«What?»

«See it? There! The city! Way over! That green city near the lake! It's splitting in half. It's falling!»

The men squinted and shuffled forward.

Smith stood trembling among them. He put his hand to his head as if to find a thought there. «I remember. Yes, now I do. A long time back. When I was a child. A book I read. A story. Oz, I think it was. Yes, Oz. The Emerald City of Oz…»

«Oz? Never heard of it.»

«Yes, Oz, that's what it was. I saw it just now, like in the story. I saw it fall.»

«Smith!»

«Yes, sir?»

«Report for psychoanalysis tomorrow.»

«Yes, sir!» A brisk salute.

«Be careful.»

The men tiptoed, guns alert, beyond the ship's aseptic light to gaze at the long sea and the low hills.

«Why,» whispered Smith, disappointed, «there's no one here at all, is there? No one here at all.»

The wind blew sand over his shoes, whining.