Рэй Брэдбери: The Crowd

Mr. Spallner put his hands over his face.

There was the feeling of movement in space, the beautifully tortured scream, the impact and tumbling of the car with wall, through wall, over and down like a toy, and him hurled out of it. Then-silence.

The crowd came running. Faintly, where he lay, he heard them running. He could tell their ages and their sizes by the sound of their numerous feet over the summer grass and on the lined pavement, and over the asphalt street, and picking through the cluttered bricks to where his car hung half into the night sky, still spinning its wheels with a senseless centrifuge.

Where the crowd came from he didn't know. He struggled to remain aware and then the crowd faces hemmed in upon him, hung over like the large glowing leaves of down-bent trees. They were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into a moon-dial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out upon his cheek to tell the time of breathing or not breathing any more ever.

How swiftly a crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere.

A siren. A police voice. Movement. Blood trickled from his lips and he was being moved into an ambulance. Someone said, «Is he dead?» And someone else said, «No, he's not dead.» And a third person said, «He won't die, he's not going to die.» And he saw the faces of the crowd beyond him in the night, and he knew by their expressions that he wouldn't die. And that was strange. He saw a man's face, thin, bright, pale; the man swallowed and bit his lips. very sick. There was a small woman, too, with red hair and too much red on her cheeks and lips. And a little boy with a freckled face. Others' faces. An old man with a wrinkled upper lip, an old woman, with a mole upon her chin. They had all come from- where? Houses, cars, alleys, from the immediate and the accidentshocked world. Out of alleys and out of hotels and out of streetcars and seemingly out of nothing they came.

The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.

The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man's agony by their frank curiosity.

The ambulance drove off. He sank back and their faces still stared into his face, even with his eyes shut.

The car wheels spun in his mind for days. One wheel, four wheels, spinning, spinning, and whirring, around and around.

He knew it was wrong. Something wrong with the wheels and the whole accident and the running of feet and the curiosity. The crowd faces mixed and spun into the wild rotation of the wheels.

He awoke.

Sunlight, a hospital room, a hand taking his pulse.

«How do you feel?» asked the doctor.

The wheels faded away. Mr. Spallner looked around.

«Fine―I guess.»

He tried to find words. About the accident. «Doctor?»

«Yes?»

«That crowd-was it last night?»

«Two days ago. You've been here since Thursday. You're all right, though. You're doing fine. Don't try and get up.»

«That crowd. Something about wheels, too. Do accidents make people, well, a-little off?»

«Temporarily, sometimes.»

He lay staring up at the doctor. «Does it hurt your time sense?»

«Panic sometimes does.»

«Makes a minute seem like an hour, or maybe an hour seem like a minute?»

«Yes.»

«Let me tell you then.» He felt the bed under him, the sunlight on his face. «You'll think I'm crazy. I was driving too fast, I know. I'm sorry now. I jumped the curb and hit that wall. I was hurt and numb, I know, but I still remember things. Mostly―the crowd.» He waited a moment and then decided to go on, for he suddenly knew what it was that bothered him. «The crowd got there too quickly. Thirty seconds after the smash they were all standing over me and staring at me… it's not right they should run that fast, so late at night…»

«You only think it was thirty seconds,» said the doctor. «It was probably three or four minutes. Your senses―»

«Yeah, I know―my senses, the accident. But I was conscious! I remember one thing that puts it all together and makes it funny, God, so damned funny. The wheels of my car, upside down. The wheels were still spinning when the crowd got there!»

The doctor smiled.

The man in bed went on. «I'm positive! The wheels were spinfling and spinning fast-the front wheels! Wheels don't spin very long, friction cuts them down. And these were really spinning!»

«You're confused,» said the doctor.

«I'm not confused. That street was empty. Not a soul in sight. And then the accident and the wheels still spinning and all those faces over me, quick, in no time. And the way they looked down at me, I _knew_ I wouldn't die…»

«Simple shock,» said the doctor, walking away into the sunlight.

They released him from the hospital two weeks later. He rode home in a taxi. People had come to visit him during his two weeks on his back, and to all of them he had told his story, the accident, the spinning wheels, the crowd. They had all laughed with him concerning it, and passed it off.

He leaned forward and tapped on the taxi window.

«What's wrong?»

The cabbie looked back. «Sorry, boss. This is one helluva town to drive in. Got an accident up ahead. Want me to detour?»

«Yes. No. No! Wait. Go ahead. Let's-let's take a look.»

The cab moved forward, honking.

«Funny damn thing,» said the cabbie. «Hey, _you!_ Get that fleatrap out the way!» Quieter, «Funny thing-more damn people. Nosy people.»

Mr. Spallner looked down and watched his fingers tremble on his knee. «You noticed that, too?»

«Sure,» said the cabbie. «All the time. There's always a crowd. You'd think it was their own mother got killed.»

«They come running awfully fast,» said the man in the back of the cab.

«Same way with a fire or an explosion. Nobody around. Boom. Lotsa people around. I dunno.»

«Ever seen an accident-at night?»

The cabbie nodded. «Sure. Don't make no difference. There's always a crowd.»

The wreck came in view. A body lay on the pavement. You knew there was a body even if you couldn't see it. Because of the crowd. The crowd with its back toward him as he sat in the rear of the cab. With its back toward him. He opened the window and almost started to yell. But he didn't have the nerve. If he yelled they might turn around.

And he was afraid to see their faces.

«I seem to have a penchant for accidents,» he said, in his office. It was late afternoon. His friend sat across the desk from him, listening. «I got out of the hospital this morning and first thing on the way home, we detoured around a wreck.»

«Things run in cycles,» said Morgan.

«Let me tell you about my accident.»

«I've heard it. Heard it all.»

«But it was funny, you must admit.»

«I must admit. Now how about a drink?»

They talked on for half an hour or more. All the while they talked, at the back of Spallner's brain a small watch ticked, a watch that never needed winding. It was the memory of a few little things. Wheels and faces.

At about five-thirty there was a hard metal noise in the street. Morgan nodded and looked out and down. «What'd I tell you? Cycles. A truck and a cream-colored Cadillac. Yes, yes.»

Spailner walked to the window. He was very cold and as he stood there, he looked at his watch, at the small minute hand. One two three four five seconds_people running-eight nine ten eleven twelve-from all over, people came running-fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen seconds-more people, more cars, more horns blowing. Curiously distant, Spallner looked upon the scene as an explosion in reverse, the fragments of the detonation sucked back to the point of impulsion. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one seconds and the crowd was there. Spallner made a gesture down at them, wordless.