Hail and farewell

AND OTHER STORIES

RAY BRADBURY

Министерство образования и науки Российской Федерации

Государственное образовательное учреждение

высшего профессионального образования

«Уральский государственный педагогический университет»

Институт иностранных языков

Р. Брэдбери

ЗДРАВСТВУЙ И ПРОЩАЙ

И ДРУГИЕ РАССКАЗЫ

Книга для чтения на английском языке

для студентов высших учебных заведений

вступительная статья, обработка, упражнения и комментарий

А. Н. Овешковой

IFL

Екатеринбург 2009

УДК 811.111 (075.8)

ББК Ш 141.24 – 982.8

Б 89

Рецензенты:

Д. А. Старкова, кандидат педагогических наук, старший преподаватель кафедры английской филологии и СЯ

Е. М. Суменкова, старший преподаватель кафедры английской филологии и СЯ

Брэдбери, Р. Здравствуй и прощай и другие рассказы : [Текст] / учебное пособие / вступ. ст., обраб., упр-я и коммент. А. Н. Овешковой ; ГОУ ВПО «Урал. гос. пед. ун-т» ; Ин-т иностр. языков. – Екатеринбург, 2009. – 168 с.

Данное пособие предназначено для студентов институтов и факультетов иностранных языков, а также может быть рекомендовано широкому кругу лиц, изучающим английский язык самостоятельно. Выбор рассказов Р. Брэдбери обусловлен их значительными художественными достоинствами, гуманистической направленностью, остротой социальных и нравственных проблем, поднимаемых автором, а также занимательностью сюжета.

УДК 811.111 (075.8)

ББК Ш 141.24 – 982.8

Б 89

© ГОУ ВПО «Уральский государственный

педагогический университет», 2009

© Сост.: А. Н. Овешкова, 2009

Предисловие

Основной целью пособия является детальное изучение художественных произведений, анализ их идейно-образных систем, обобщение авторского замысла текста. Чтение с глубоким проникновением в текст произведения и его обсуждение способствуют развитию самостоятельной критической мысли. Сознательное чтение позволяет проникнуть дальше фабулы, развить эстетический вкус и создать высокую культуру чтения художественной литературы на иностранном языке. Работа с пособием позволяет расширить словарный запас, совершенствовать разговорные навыки, стимулировать коммуникативную компетентность студентов при построении развернутого монологического высказывания.

Все упражнения в уроках выстраиваются по единой схеме – по принципу постепенного нарастания сложности и направлены на активизацию словаря и речевых структур в процессе обсуждения прочитанного произведения. Лексика изучается в контексте, таким образом предупреждаются ошибки в сочетаемости слов. Внимание уделяется также работе с синонимами, сочетаниями глаголов с адвербиальными частицами и словообразованию. Парафраз трудных и особенно важных мест произведений дает студентам возможность проникнуть в детали, самостоятельно дополнить недосказанное автором. Так исключается поверхностное понимание прочитанного.

После рассказов приводятся пояснительные комментарии, которые обеспечивают максимальную помощь студентам при работе с текстами рассказов. Поясняются исторические, политические, географические и др. реалии и т.п.

Данное пособие предназначено для студентов институтов и факультетов иностранных языков, а также может быть рекомендовано широкому кругу лиц, изучающим английский язык самостоятельно. Выбор рассказов Р. Брэдбери обусловлен их значительными художественными достоинствами, гуманистической направленностью, остротой социальных и нравственных проблем, поднимаемых автором, а также занимательностью сюжета.

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR UNIT 1. The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind UNIT 2. The Nineteenth UNIT 3. The Cricket on the Hearth UNIT 4. The Fox and the Forest UNIT 5. Time Intervening (Interim) UNIT 6. The Rocket UNIT 7. A Sound of Thunder UNIT 8. The Smile UNIT 9. Marionettes, Inc. UNIT 10. Here There be Tygers UNIT 11. Night Meeting UNIT 12. Hail and Farewell UNIT 13. All Summer in a Day UNIT 14. The Flying Machine UNIT 15. The Blue Bottle UNIT 16. The Pedestrian REFERENCES SHORT FORMS AND LABELS

6 7 13 19 31 49 55 66 81 88 97 112 122 131 139 146 158 166 167

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Raymond Douglas Bradbury was born on the 22^nd of August in 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. Later he depicted his home town in his semi-autobiographical novels Dandelion Wine (1957) and Farewell Summer (2007). In 1934 he moved to Los Angeles, where the family eventually settled down. One of the most celebrated science fiction and fantasy writers of our time was educated in American public schools and never attended college because his family didn’t have enough money. Instead going to college Ray went to the library three days a week for a decade [18].

Bradbury’s literary career started in 1938, the year when he finished high school. He was greatly influenced by such science fiction heroes as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, who travelled through space and saved the Earth from many dangers. At that time he wrote his first stories, though it was not his job yet. To earn his living, Ray sold newspapers. R. D. Bradbury managed to sell the sci-fi story “Pendulum” in 1941, when he was 20.

Writing proved to be his true calling – starting with publishing his horror and fantasy stories in the fanzines and the pulp magazines of the 1940s, he ascended to a higher literary plane. Today he is a truly classic author of science fiction and fantasy. Ray Bradbury published over 500 short stories, novels, plays, poems, screenplays and television scripts. Among his best-known works are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer, etc. Over 35 feature films, shorts and TV movies are based on his stories and screenplays, The Illustrated Man, A Sound of Thunder, Something Wicked This Way Comes among them.

R. Bradbury has gained worldwide popularity and an international reputation for his books. He was honoured by the National Book Foundation with a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters 2000 and the National Medal of Arts in 2004. It is of interest to know that an asteroid is named “9766 Bradbury” after him and when one of the Apollo astronaut teams landed on the Moon, they named Dandelion Crater there to honour Ray Bradbury’s novel, Dandelion Wine.

Once read, Bradbury’s masterpieces are never forgotten, they linger in the memory. His trademarks have always been the eerie, the strange, the nostalgic, the speculative. The author enables his readers to focus on simple truths and view the familiar world from new angles and fresh perspectives. His works are fascinating and inspiring.

UNIT 1

THE GOLDEN KITE, THE SILVER WIND

*********

“In the shape of a pig?” cried the Mandarin.

“In the shape of a pig,” said the messenger, and de­parted.

“Oh, what an evil day in an evil year,” cried the Manda­rin. “The town of Kwan-Si, beyond the hill, was very small in my childhood. Now it has grown so large that at last they are building a wall.”

“But why should a wall two miles away make my good father sad and angry all within the hour?” asked his daugh­ter quietly.

“They build their wall,” said the Mandarin, “in the shape of a pig! Do you see? Our own city wall is built in the shape of an orange. That pig will devour us, greedily!”

They both sat thinking.

Life was full of symbols and omens. Demons lurked everywhere, Death swam in the wetness of an eye, the turn of a gull’s wing meant rain, a fan held so, the tilt of a roof, and, yes, even a city wall was of immense impor­tance. Travellers and tourists, caravans, musicians, art­ists, coming upon these two towns, equally judging the portents, would say, “The city shaped like an orange! No! I will enter the city shaped like a pig and prosper, eating all, growing fat with good luck and prosperity!”

The Mandarin wept. “All is lost! These symbols and signs terrify. Our city will come on evil days.”

“Then,” said the daughter, “call in your stone-masons and temple builders. I will whisper from behind the silken screen and you will know the words.”

The old man clapped his hands despairingly. “Ho, stone-masons! Ho, builders of towns and palaces!”

The men who knew marble and granite and onyx and quartz came quickly. The Mandarin faced them most un­easily, himself waiting for a whisper from the silken screen behind his throne. At last the whisper came.

“I have called you here,” said the whisper.

“I have called you here,” said the Mandarin aloud, be­cause our city is shaped like an orange, and the vile city of Kwan-Si has this day shaped theirs like a ravenous pig —”

Here the stone-masons groaned and wept. Death rat­tled his cane in the outer courtyard. Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

“And so,” said the whisper, said the Mandarin, “you raisers of walls must go bearing trowels and rocks and change the shape of our city!”

The architects and masons gasped. The Mandarin him­self gasped at what he had said. The whisper whispered. The Mandarin went on: “And you will change our walls into a club which may beat the pig and drive it off!”

The stone-masons rose up, shouting. Even the Man­darin, delighted at the words from his mouth, applauded, stood down from his throne. “Quick!” he cried. “To work!”

When his men had gone, smiling and bustling, the Mandarin turned with great love to the silken screen. “Daughter,” he whispered, “I will embrace you.” There was no reply. He stepped around the screen, and she was gone.

Such modesty, he thought. She has slipped away and left me with a triumph, as if it were mine.

The news spread through the city; the Mandarin was acclaimed. Everyone carried stone to the walls. Fireworks were set off and the demons of death and poverty did not linger, as all worked together. At the end of the month the wall had been changed. It was now a mighty bludgeon with which to drive pigs, boars, even lions, far away. The Mandarin slept like a happy fox every night.

“I would like to see the Mandarin of Kwan-Si when the news is learned. Such pandemonium and hysteria; he will likely throw himself from a mountain! A little more of that wine, oh Daughter-who-thinks-like-a-son.”

But the pleasure was like a winter flower; it died swift­ly. That very afternoon the messenger rushed into the courtroom. “Oh, Mandarin, disease, early sorrow, avalanch­es, grasshopper plagues, and poisoned well water!”

The Mandarin trembled.

“The town of Kwan-Si,” said the messenger, “which was built like a pig and which animal we drove away by changing our walls to a mighty stick, has now turned tri­umph to winter ashes. They have built their city’s walls like a great bonfire to burn our stick!”

The Mandarin’s heart sickened within him, like an au­tumn fruit upon an ancient tree. “Oh, gods! Travellers will spurn us. Tradesmen, reading the symbols, will turn from the stick, so easily destroyed, to the fire, which conquers all!”

“No,” said a whisper like a snowflake from behind the silken screen.

“No,” said the startled Mandarin.

“Tell my stone-masons,” said the whisper that was a falling drop of rain, “to build our walls in the shape of a shining lake.”

The Mandarin said this aloud, his heart warmed.

“And with this lake of water,” said the whisper and the old man, “we will quench the fire and put it out forever!”

The city turned out in joy to learn that once again they had been saved by the magnificent Emperor of ideas. They ran to the walls and built them nearer to this new vision, singing, not as loudly as before, of course, for they were tired, and not as quickly, for since it had taken a month to build the wall the first time, they had had to neglect busi­ness and crops and therefore were somewhat weaker and poorer.

There then followed a succession of horrible and won­derful days, one in another like a nest of frightening boxes.

“Oh, Emperor,” cried the messenger, “Kwan-Si has re­built their walls to resemble a mouth with which to drink all our lake!”

“Then,” said the Emperor, standing very close to his silken screen, “build our walls like a needle to sew up that mouth!”

“Emperor!” screamed the messenger. “They make their walls like a sword to break your needle!”

The Emperor held, trembling, to the silken screen. “Then shift the stones to form a scabbard to sheathe that sword!”

“Mercy,” wept the messenger the following morn, “they have worked all night and shaped their walls like lightning which will explode and destroy that sheath!”

Sickness spread in the city like a pack of evil dogs. Shops closed. The population, working now steadily for endless months upon the changing of the walls, resem­bled Death himself, clattering his white bones like musical instruments in the wind. Funerals began to appear in the streets, though it was the middle of summer, a time when all should be tending and harvesting. The Mandarin fell so ill that he had his bed drawn up by the silken screen and there he lay, miserably giving his architectural orders. The voice behind the screen was weak now, too, and faint, like the wind in the eaves.

“Kwan-Si is an eagle. Then our walls must be a net for that eagle. They are a sun to burn our net. Then we build a moon to eclipse their sun!”

Like a rusted machine, the city ground to a halt.

At last the whisper behind the screen cried out:

“In the name of the gods, send for Kwan-Si!”

Upon the last day of summer the Mandarin Kwan-Si, very ill and withered away, was carried into our Manda­rin’s courtroom by four starving footmen. The two manda­rins were propped up, facing each other. Their breaths fluttered like winter winds in their mouths. A voice said:

“Let us put an end to this.”

The old men nodded.

“This cannot go on,” said the faint voice. “Our people do nothing but rebuild our cities to a different shape every day, every hour. They have no time to hunt, to fish, to love, to be good to their ancestors and their ancestors’ children.”

“This I admit,” said the mandarins of the towns of the Cage, the Moon, the Spear, the Fire, the Sword and this, that, and other things.

“Carry us into the sunlight,” said the voice.

The old men were borne out under the sun and up a little hill. In the late summer breeze a few very thin children were flying dragon kites in all the colours of the sun, and frogs and grass, the colour of the sea and the colour of coins and wheat.

The first Mandarin’s daughter stood by his bed.

“See,” she said.

“Those are nothing but kites,” said the two old men.

“But what is a kite on the ground?” she said. “It is nothing. What does it need to sustain it and make it beau­tiful and truly spiritual?”

“The wind, of course!” said the others.

“And what do the sky and the wind need to make them beautiful?”

“A kite, of course — many kites, to break the monoto­ny, the sameness of the sky. Coloured kites, flying!”

“So,” said the Mandarin’s daughter. “You, Kwan-Si, will make a last rebuilding of your town to resemble noth­ing more nor less than the wind. And we shall build like a golden kite. The wind will beautify the kite and carry it to wondrous heights. And the kite will break the sameness of the wind’s existence and give it purpose and meaning. One without the other is nothing. Together, all will be beau­ty and co-operation and a long and enduring life.”

Whereupon the two mandarins were so overjoyed that they took their first nourishment in days, momentarily were given strength, embraced, and lavished praise upon each other, called the Mandarin’s daughter a boy, a man, a stone pillar, a warrior, and a true and unforgettable son. Almost immediately they parted and hurried to their towns, calling out and singing, weakly but happily.

And so, in time, the towns became the Town of the Golden Kite and the Town of the Silver Wind. And har­vestings were harvested and business tended again, and the flesh returned, and disease ran off like a frightened jackal. And on every night of the year the inhabitants in the Town of the Kite could hear the good clear wind sus­taining them. And those in the Town of the Wind could hear the kite singing, whispering, rising, and beautifying them.

“So be it,” said the Mandarin in front of his silken screen.

1953

NOTES

1. Mandarin – a very important official, a bureaucrat in imperial China

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

to lurk [v I] to prosper [v I] vile [adj] to acclaim [v T]

pandemonium [n U] to neglect [v T] to sustain [v T] co-operation [n U]

EXERCISES

1. Collocate the words in the columns and make up sentences with еach word combination:

to neglect to sustain vile

a constant temperature, a high level of service, children, friendly relations, ideas, (one’s) interest, soup, students, temper,

2. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Prosper

• Sustain

• Vile

• Acclaim (n, v)

3. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning:

Hide, big, ravenous, lie low, huge, immense, peckish, lurk, enormous, skulk, hungry.

4. Fill in the gaps using the words from the exercise above:

1. The cat has bitten me on the finger and now the brute is ________ under the bed.

2. Paris has a _________ crime problem.

3. Andrey Arshavin’s contribution to the national team’s success was _________.

4. The soup is not ready yet – take a banana, you must be _________!

5. The police have been looking for the thief for a week already, but in vain. They believe he’s _________ somewhere.

6. I raided the refrigerator late at night when I got home for I was not just _________, but _________.

7. You’re making a _________ mistake getting married to him!

8. The difference between the knowledge of English in the first year and the second year is _________.

9. Having walked around town for several hours we were really _________.

10. Lieutenant Anderson received a report of a man _________ around the neighbourhood.

11. _________ changes are taking place in the way the two countries negotiate with each other.

12. We had no idea he was _________ there watching us.

5. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. But why should a wall two miles away make my good father sad and angry all within the hour?

2. Even the Mandarin, delighted at the words from his mouth…

3. A voice said: “Let us put an end to this.”

4. Like a rusted machine, the city ground to a halt.

5. A kite, of course – many kites, to break the monotony, the sameness of the sky.

6. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the most appropriate phrase from the list below:

1. If you go camping in the forest do not forget the most important thing is to _________ ____ your fire before leaving.

2. I want you to refund my money – look, there’s a huge hole in it. And I’ve not worn it at all! – You could have _________ it ____.

3. It’s rude to stare and what is more, it can _________ people ____!

4. The Smiths kept dogs in the yard to _________ ____ intruders.

5. Hundreds of people _________ ____ to watch the filming of the final scene of Pride and Prejudice.

_____________________________________________________________

to sew up, to drive off, to put out, to turn out, to drive away

7. Paraphrase or explain:

1. She has slipped away and left me with a triumph, as if it were mine.

2. There then followed a succession of horrible and wonderful days, one in another like a nest of frightening boxes.

3. Like a rusted machine, the city ground to a halt.

4. Their breaths fluttered like winter winds in their mouths.

8. Comment on the following:

1. Life was full of symbols and omens.

2. But the pleasure was like a winter flower; it died swiftly.

3. One without the other is nothing. Together, all will be beauty and co-operation and a long and enduring life.

QUESTIONS

1. Are you prone to noticing symbols and omens? Do you try to interpret your dreams or at least believe they can be meaningful?

2. Would our life be more in harmony with the world if we went by signs and symbols? Find some proof in the text of the short story.

3. How did the continuous changes of the wall influence the life of the ordinary people in the town? Quote the text to prove your point of view.

4. Focus on the behaviour of the Mandarin in times of trouble. Why would people rather choose to depend on someone else than to make their own decisions?

5. Why do you think it was difficult for both Mandarins to put an end to their rivalry? Explain why people quite often find it difficult to co-operate with one another.

6. Have you ever experienced something like this? Is it difficult for you to admit you have not been right or have made a mistake?

7. The basis for balance in this world as the author sees it. Do you support his idea?

UNIT 2

THE NINETEENTH

*********

It was getting on toward dusk as I drove down Mo­tor Avenue one late afternoon and saw the old man walking on the far side of the road picking up lost golf¹ balls.

I braked the car so fast I almost fell against the windshield.

I let the car stand in the middle of the street for another ten seconds (there were no cars following), and then I slowly backed up (still no cars), until I could peer over into the gully² by the golf course wire screen and see the old man bend to pick up another ball and put it in a small bucket he was carrying.

No, I thought. Yes, I thought. No.

But I swerved over and parked the car and sat a moment trying to decide what to do, a mystery of tears in my eyes for no reason I could figure, and at last got out, let traffic pass, and crossed the street heading south in the gully as the old man headed north.

We finally came face to face about fifty paces from where I had entered the gully.

“Hi,” he said quietly, nodding.

“Hi,” I said.

“Nice night,” he said, glancing around at the turf and then down at his half-filled bucket of golf balls.

“Having luck?” I said.

“You can see.” He hefted the bucket.

“Darn good,” I said. “Can I help?”

“What?” he said, puzzled. “Look for more? Naw.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “It’ll be dark in an­other five minutes. We’d better find the darn things before it’s too late.”

“That’s true,” he said, regarding me curiously. “Why would you want to do that?”

“My dad used to come along here, years ago,” I said. “He always found something. His income was small and sometimes he sold the balls for extra spending money.”

“I'll be,” said the old man. “I’m out here twice a week. Last week I sold enough balls and took my wife out to dinner.”

“I know,” I said.

“What?”

“I mean,” I said. “Let’s get going. There’s one down there. And another by the fence. I’ll get the one down there.”

I walked down and found the ball and brought it back and stood holding it while the old man exam­ined my face.

“How come you’re crying?” he said.

“Am I?” I said. “Look at that. Must be the wildflowers. I’m allergic.”

“Do I know you?” he said abruptly.

“Maybe.” I told him my name.

“I’ll be darned.” He laughed quietly. “That’s my name, too, my last name. I don’t suppose we’re re­lated.”

“I don’t suppose,” I said.

“Because I’d remember if we were. Related, that is. Or if we’d met before.”

Lord, I thought, so this is how it is. Alzheimer’s³ is one thing. Going away forever is another. With both you forget. Once you’ve passed over, I guess you don’t need your memory.

The old man was watching me think. It made him uncomfortable. He took the golf ball from me and put it in his bucket. “Thanks,” he said.

“There’s another one,” I said and ran down the slope and brought it back, wiping my eyes.

“You still come here often,” I said.

“Still? Why not?” he said.

“Oh, I was just wondering,” I said. “If I ever wanted to come hunting again, for the hell of it, if you were here it would make things easier.”

“It sure as hell would,” he agreed.

He studied my face again.

“Funny thing. I had a son once. Nice boy. But he went away. Never could figure where he went.”

I know, I thought. But he didn’t go away, you did. That’s how it must be, when you’re saying goodbye, people seem to go away, when all the while it’s you who are backing off, fading out, going and gone.

Now the sun was completely gone and we walked in half-darkness lit only by a single street-lamp across the way. I saw a last golf ball a few feet to the old man’s left and nodded. He stepped over and picked it up.

“Well, I guess that’s it,” he said.

He looked me in the face. “Where to?” he said.

I churned my thoughts and said, glancing ahead, “Isn’t there always a nineteenth hole⁴ on every course⁵?”

The old man gazed ahead through the dark.

“Yeah. I mean, sure. There should be one up there.”

“Can I buy you a drink?” I said.

“Nice of you,” he said, his eyes clouded with un­certainty. “But I don’t think—”

“Just one,” I urged.

“It’s late,” he said. “I got to go.”

“Where?” I said.

That was the wrong question. His eyes clouded even more. He had to search around for a lame an­swer.

“Well,” he said. “You see,” he added. “I think ...”

“No, don’t say. I hate being nosy.”

“It’s all right. Well. Got to be going.”

He reached out to take my hand and suddenly seized it and held it tight, staring into my eyes.

“We know each other,” he cried. “Don’t we?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But where from? How far back?” he said.

“A long way,” I said.

He wouldn’t let go of my hand, he clenched it tight as if he might fall.

“What did you say your name was?”

I said my name.

“Funny,” he said, and then lowered his voice. “That’s my name, too. Think. Us meeting here like this. And with the same name.”

“That’s the way it goes,” I said.

I tried to pry my hand free but it wouldn’t come. When I finally burst free I immediately shoved it back and took his hand in a similar vise.

“Next time,” I said. “The nineteenth hole?”

“The nineteenth,” he said. “You going to come back through here again?”

“Now that I know where you are. On certain nights. It’s a good walking and finding place.”

“Not many saps like me.” He looked around at the empty grass path behind him. “Gets kind of lonely.”

“I’ll try to come more often,” I said.

“You’re just saying that.”

“No. Honest to God.”

“Honest to God is a good promise.”

“The best.”

“Well.” Now it was his turn to pry his hand free and massage it to get the circulation back. “Here goes nothing.”

And he ambled off. About ten feet along the far path he saw a final ball and picked it up. He nod­ded and gave it a toss.

I caught it easily and held it like a gift in my hand.

“The nineteenth,” he called quietly.

“Absolutely,” I called back.

And then he was gone in the darkness.

I stood there with tears running down my cheeks and felt the golf ball as I put it in my breast pocket.

I wonder, I thought, if it’ll be there in the morning?

2002

NOTES

1. Golf – a game in which the players hit a small white ball into holes in the ground with a set of golf clubs using as few hits as possible

2. Gully – a small narrow valley, usually formed by a lot of rain flowing down the side of a hill

3. Alzheimer’s – a disease especially affecting the brain of older people, often causes loss of memory, loss of ability to speak distinctly, etc.

4. Hole – a hole in the ground that you try to get the ball into when you play golf

5. Course – an area of land that is designed for playing golf on

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

to brake [v I] for no reason [adv] to head south / north [v phrase] face to face [adv] related (to sb) [adj]

to cloud [v I, T] to look sb in the face [v phrase] nosy [adj] lame [adj] to pry one’s hand free [v phrase]

EXERCISES

1. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Reason

• Lame

• Related

2. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. My dad used to come along here, years ago.

2. How come you’re crying?

3. If I ever wanted to come hunting again, for the hell of it, if you were here it would make things easier.

4. I hate being nosy.

3. Complete the sentences using the correct preposition which collocates with the verbs in bold and translate into Russian. Use the word combinations in sentences of your own:

1. The phone was ringing when he rushed into the room but when he picked it ____ (over/up/at) he was disconnected at once.

2. An hour later the group stopped and John peered ____ (into/at/through) the darkness to see if there was anybody hiding from them behind the ruins.

3. He promised to take me ____ (in/on/out) for a dinner this weekend but then all of a sudden cancelled it, providing a lame excuse.

4. When the police arrived at the place where a serious road accident was blocking the traffic first of all they asked everybody involved and the onlookers gathered at the scene of the accident to back ____ (away/off/up) and not to crowd around the crashed car.

5. The little girl reached ____ (out/for/over) a hand quite unexpectedly and picked up the flower, making me startle.

6. They were so noisy that he couldn’t make himself heard. Seeing that his efforts had failed he ambled ____ (over/off/out).

4. Note the effect of the prepositions on the meaning of the verb. Translate the sentences into Russian:

1. Last week I sold enough balls and took my wife out to dinner.

2. That’s how it must be, when you’re saying goodbye, people seem to go away, when all the while it’s you who are backing off, fading out, going and gone.

3. He reached out to take my hand and suddenly seized it and held it tight, staring into my eyes.

4. He had to search around for a lame answer.

5. “Nice night,” he said, glancing around at the turf and then down at his half-filled bucket of golf balls.

5. Paraphrase or explain:

1. But I swerved over and parked the car and sat a moment trying to decide what to do.

2. His income was small and sometimes he sold the balls for extra spending money.

3. That’s my name, too, my last name. I don’t suppose we’re related.

4. Now the sun was completely gone and we walked in half-darkness lit only by a single streetlamp across the way.

5. Once you’ve passed over, I guess you don’t need your memory.

6. Comment on the following:

1. “How come you’re crying?” he asked. “Am I?” I said. “Look at that. Must be the wildflowers. I’m allergic.”

2. Alzheimer’s is one thing. Going away forever is another. With both you forget.

3. “You still come here often,” I said. “Still? Why not?” he said.

4. I stood there with tears running down my cheeks and felt the golf ball as I put it in my breast pocket.

QUESTIONS

1. Why is the story mostly composed of a dialogue? Discuss the author’s presentation of the characters.

2. Speak about the main characters relying on the information given by the author. Whose perception is the scene viewed through?

3. Discuss the young man’s behaviour during his conversation with the old man, his attitude to the latter.

4. What prevented the young man from telling the old man they were related? What caused his indecision?

5. Make a list of words conveying the emotional state of both characters during and after their conversation. Discuss the old man’s state of mind when he was leaving the golf course.

6. Do you find the ending of the short story optimistic or pessimistic? Prove your opinion.

7. How can you interpret the last sentence of the story? Discuss the symbolic significance of the nineteenth golf ball.

UNIT 3

THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH

*********

The door slammed and John Martin was out of his hat and coat and past his wife as fluently as a magi­cian en route¹ to a better illusion. He produced the newspaper with a dry whack as he slipped his coat into the closet like an abandoned ghost and sailed through the house, scanning the news, his nose guessing at the identity of supper, talking over his shoulder, his wife following. There was still a faint scent of the train and the winter night about him. In his chair he sensed an unaccustomed silence re­sembling that of a birdhouse when a vulture’s shadow looms; all the robins, sparrows, mocking­birds quiet. His wife stood whitely in the door, not moving.

“Come sit down,” said John Martin. “What’re you doing? God, don’t stare as if I were dead. What’s new? Not that there’s ever anything new, of course. What do you think of those fathead city councilmen today? More taxes, more every god­damn thing.”

“John!” cried his wife. “Don’t!”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t talk that way. It isn’t safe!”

“For God’s sake, not safe? Is this Russia or is this our own house?!”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“There’s a bug in our house,” she whispered.

“A bug?” He leaned forward, exasperated.

“You know. Detective talk. When they hide a mi­crophone somewhere you don’t know, they call it a bug, I think,” she whispered even more quietly.

“Have you gone nuts?”

“I thought I might have when Mrs. Thomas told me. They came last night while we were out and asked Mrs. Thomas to let them use her garage. They set up their equipment there and strung wires over here, the house is wired, the bug is in one or maybe all of the rooms.”

She was standing over him now and bent to whisper in his ear.

He fell back. “Oh, no!”

“Yes!”

“But we haven’t done anything —”

“Keep your voice down!” she whispered.

“Wait!” he whispered back, angrily, his face white, red, then white again. “Come on!”

Out on the terrace, he glanced around and swore. “Now say the whole damn thing again! They’re using the neighbor’s garage to hide their equipment? The FBI²?”

“Yes, yes, oh it’s been awful! I didn’t want to call, I was afraid your wire was tapped, too.”

“We’ll see, dammit! Now!”

“Where are you going?”

“To stomp on their equipment! Jesus! What’ve we done?”

“Don’t!” She seized his arm. “You’d just make trouble. After they’ve listened a few days they’ll know we’re okay and go away.”

“I’m insulted, no, outraged! Those two words I’ve never used before, but, hell, they fit the case! Who do they think they are? Is it our politics? Our studio friends, my stories, the fact I’m a producer? Is it Tom Lee, because he’s Chinese and a friend? Does that make him dangerous, or us? What, what?!”

“Maybe someone gave them a false lead and they’re searching. If they really think we’re danger­ous, you can’t blame them.”

“I know, I know, but us! It’s so damned funny I could laugh. Do we tell our friends? Rip out the mi­crophone if we can find it, go to a hotel, leave town?”

“No, no, just go on as we have done. We’ve nothing to hide, so let’s ignore them.”

“Ignore!? The first thing I said tonight was polit­ical crap and you shut me up like I’d set off a bomb.”

“Let’s go in, it’s cold out here. Be good. It’ll only be a few days and they’ll be gone, and after all, it isn’t as if we were guilty of something.”

“Yeah, okay, but damn, I wish you’d let me go over and kick the hell out of their junk!”

They hesitated, then entered the house, the strange house, and stood for a moment in the hall trying to manufacture some appropriate dialogue. They felt like two amateurs in a shoddy out-of-town play, the electrician having suddenly turned on too much light, the audience, bored, having left the theater, and, simultaneously, the actors having forgotten their lines. So they said nothing.

He sat in the parlor trying to read the paper until the food was on the table. But the house suddenly echoed. The slightest crackle of the sports section, the exhalation of smoke from his pipe, became like the sound of an immense forest fire or a wind blow­ing through an organ. When he shifted in the chair the chair groaned like a sleeping dog, his tweed pants scraped and sandpapered together. From the kitchen there was an ungodly racket of pans being bashed, tins falling, oven doors cracking open, crashing shut, the fluming full-bloomed sound of gas jumping to life, lighting up blue and hissing un­der the inert foods, and then when the foods stirred ceaselessly under the commands of boiling water, they made a sound of washing and humming and murmuring that was excessively loud. No one spoke. His wife came and stood in the door for a moment, peering at her husband and the raw walls, but said nothing. He turned a page of football to a page of wrestling and read between the lines, scan­ning the empty whiteness and the specks of undi­gested pulp.

Now there was a great pounding in the room, like surf, growing nearer in a storm, a tidal wave, crashing on rocks and breaking with a titanic ex­plosion again and again, in his ears.

My God, he thought, I hope they don’t hear my heart!

His wife beckoned from the dining room, where, as he loudly rattled the paper and plopped it into the chair and walked, padding, padding on the rug, and drew out the protesting chair on the uncarpeted dining-room floor, she tinkled and clattered last-minute silverware, fetched a soup that bubbled like lava, and set a coffeepot to percolate beside them. They looked at the percolating silver appara­tus, listened to it gargle in its glass throat, admired it for its protest against silence, for saying what it felt. And then there was the scrape and click of the knife and fork on the plate. He started to say some­thing, but it stuck, with a morsel of food, in his throat. His eyes bulged. His wife’s eyes bulged. Finally she got up, went to the kitchen, and got a piece of paper and a pencil. She came back and handed him a freshly written note: Say something!

He scribbled a reply:

What?

She wrote again: Anything! Break the silence. They’ll think something’s wrong!

They sat staring nervously at their own notes. Then, with a smile, he sat back in his chair and winked at her. She frowned. Then he said, “Well, dammit, say something!”

“What?” she said.

“Dammit,” he said. “You’ve been silent all dur­ing supper. You and your moods. Because I won’t buy you that coat, I suppose? Well, you're not go­ing to get it, and that's final!”

“But I don’t want —”

He stopped her before she could continue. “Shut up! I won’t talk to a nag. You know we can’t afford mink! If you can’t talk sense, don’t talk!”

She blinked at him for a moment, and then she smiled and winked this time.

“I haven’t got a thing to wear!” she cried.

“Oh, shut up!” he roared.

“You never buy me anything!” she cried.

“Blather, blather, blather!” he yelled.

They fell silent and listened to the house. The echoes of their yelling had put everything back to normalcy, it seemed. The percolator was not so loud, the clash of cutlery was softened. They sighed.

“Look,” he said at last, “don’t speak to me again this evening. Will you do me that favor.”

She sniffed.

“Pour me some coffee!” he said.

Along about eight-thirty the silence was getting unbearable again. They sat stiffly in the living room, she with her latest library book, he with some flies he was tying up in preparation for going fishing on Sunday. Several times they glanced up and opened their mouths but shut them again and looked about as if a mother-in-law had hove into view.

At five minutes to nine he said, “Let’s go to a show.”

“This late?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You never like to go out weeknights, because you’re tired. I’ve been home all day, cleaning, and it’s nice to get out at night.”

“Come on, then!”

“I thought you were mad at me.”

“Promise not to talk mink and it’s a go. Get your coat.”

“All right.” She was back in an instant, dressed, smiling, and they were out of the house and driving away in very little time. They looked back at their lighted house.

“Hail and farewell, house,” he said. “Let’s just drive and never come back.”

“We don’t dare.”

“Let’s sleep tonight in one of those motels that ruin your reputation,” he suggested.

“Stop it. We’ve got to go back. If we stayed away, they’d be suspicious.”

“Damn them. I feel like a fool in my own house. Them and their cricket.”

“Bug.”

“Cricket, anyway. I remember when I was a boy a cricket got in our house somehow. He’d be quiet most of the time, but in the evening he’d start scratching his legs together, an ungodly racket. We tried to find him. Never could. He was in a crack of the floor or the chimney somewhere. Kept us awake the first few nights, then we got used to him. He was around for half a year, I think. Then one night we went to bed and someone said, ‘What’s that noise?’ and we all sat up, listening. ‘I know what it is,’ said Dad. ‘It’s silence. The cricket’s gone.’ And he was gone. Dead or went away, we never knew which. And we felt sort of sad and lonely with that new sound in the house.”

They drove on the night road.

“We’ve got to decide what to do,” she said.

“Rent a new house somewhere.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Go to Ensenada³ for the weekend, we’ve been wanting to make that trip for years, do us good, they won’t follow us and wire our hotel room, anyway.”

“The problem’d still be here when we come back. No, the only solution is to live our life the way we used to an hour before we found out what was going on with the microphone.”

“I don’t remember. It was such a nice little rou­tine. I don’t remember how it was, the details, I mean. We’ve been married ten years now and one night’s just like another, very pleasant, of course. I come home, we have supper, we read or listen to the radio, no television, and go to bed.”

“Sounds rather drab when you say it like that.”

“Has it been for you?” he asked suddenly.

She took his arm. “Not really. I’d like to get out more, occasionally.”

“We’ll see what we can do about that. Right now, we’ll plan on talking straight out about every­thing, when we get back to the house, politically, socially, morally. We’ve nothing to hide. I was a Boy Scout⁴ when I was a kid, you were a Camp Fire Girl⁵; that’s not very subversive, it’s as simple as that. Speak up. Here’s the theater.”

They parked and went into the show.

About midnight they drove into the driveway of their house and sat for a moment looking at the great empty stage waiting for them. At last he stirred and said, “Well, let’s go in and say hello to the cricket.”

They garaged the car and walked around to the front door, arm in arm. They opened the front door and the feel of the atmosphere rushing out upon them was a listening atmosphere. It was like walk­ing into an auditorium of one thousand invisible people, all holding their breath.

“Here we are!” said the husband loudly.

“Yes, that was a wonderful show, wasn’t it?” said his wife.

It had been a pitiable movie.

“I liked the music especially!”

They had found the music banal and repetitive.

“Yes, isn’t that girl a terrific dancer!”

They smiled at the walls. The girl had been a rather club-footed thirteen-year-old with an im­mensely low IQ⁶.

“Darling!” he said. “Let’s go to San Diego⁷ Sun­day, for just the afternoon.”

“What? And give up your fishing with your pals? You always go fishing with your pals.” she cried.

“I won’t go fishing with them this time. I love only you!” he said, and thought, miserably, We sound like Gallagher and Shean⁸ warming up a cold house.

They bustled about the house, emptying ash­trays, getting ready for bed, opening closets, slamming doors. He sang a few bars from the tired musical they had seen in a lilting off-key baritone, she joining in.

In bed, with the lights out, she snuggled over against him, her hand on his arm, and they kissed a few times. Then they kissed a few more times. “This is more like it,” he said. He gave her a rather long kiss. They snuggled even closer and he ran his hand along her back. Suddenly her spine stiffened.

Jesus, he thought, what’s wrong now.

She pressed her mouth to his ear.

“What if,” she whispered, “what if the cricket’s in our bedroom, here?”

“They wouldn’t dare!” he cried.

“Shh!” she said.

“They wouldn’t dare,” he whispered angrily. “Of all the nerve!”

She was moving away from him. He tried to hold her, but she moved firmly away and turned her back. “It would be just like them,” he heard her whisper. And there he was, stranded on the white cold beach with the tide going out.

Cricket, he thought, I’ll never forgive you for this.

The next day being Tuesday, he rushed off to the studio, had a busy day, and returned, on time, fling­ing open the front door with a cheery “Hey there, lovely!”

When his wife appeared, he kissed her solidly, patted her rump, ran an appreciative hand up and down her body, kissed her again, and handed her a huge green parcel of pink carnations.

“For me?” she said.

“You!” he replied.

“Is it our anniversary?”

“Nonsense, no. I just got them because, that’s all, because.”

“Why, how nice.” Tears came to her eyes. “You haven’t brought me flowers for months and months.”

“Haven’t I? I guess I haven’t!”

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you,” he said, and kissed her again. They went, holding hands, into the living room.

“You’re early,” she said. “You usually stop off for a quick one with the boys.”

“To hell with the boys. You know where we’re going Saturday, darling? Instead of my sleeping in the backyard on the lounge, we’re going to that fashion show you wanted me to go see.”

“I thought you hated —”

“Anything you want, peaches,” he said. “I told the boys I won’t make it Sunday for the fishing trip. They thought I was crazy. What’s for supper?”

He stalked smiling to the kitchen, where he ap­preciatively ladled and spooned and stirred things, smelling, gasping, tasting everything. “Shepherd’s pie⁹!” he cried, opening the oven and peering in, gloriously. “My God! My favorite dish. It’s been since last June we had that!”

“I thought you’d like it!”

He ate with relish, he told jokes, they ate by can­dlelight, the pink carnations filled the immediate vicinity with a cinnamon scent, the food was splen­did, and, topping it off, there was black-bottom pie¹⁰ fresh from the refrigerator.

“Black-bottom pie! It takes hours and genius to make a really good black-bottom pie.”

“I’m glad you like it, dear.”

After dinner he helped her with the dishes. Then they sat on the living-room floor and played a num­ber of favorite symphonies together, they even waltzed a bit to the Rosenkavalier¹¹ pieces. He kissed her at the end of the dance and whispered in her ear, patting her behind, “Tonight, so help me God, cricket or no cricket.”

The music started over. They swayed together.

“Have you found it yet?” he whispered.

“I think so. It’s near the fireplace and the win­dow.”

They walked over to the fireplace. The music was very loud as he bent and shifted a drape, and there it was, a beady black little eye, not much bigger than a thumbnail. They both stared at it and backed away. He went and opened a bottle of champagne and they had a nice drink The music was loud in their heads, in their bones, in the walls of the house. He danced with his mouth up close to her ear.

“What did you find out?” she asked.

“The studio said to sit tight. Those damn fools are after everyone. They’ll be tapping the zoo tele­phone next.”

“Everything’s all right?”

“Just sit tight, the studio said. Don’t break any equipment, they said. You can be sued for breaking government property.”

They went to bed early, smiling at each other.

On Wednesday night he brought roses and kissed her a full minute at the front door. They called up some brilliant and witty friends and had them over for an evening’s discussion, having decided, in go­ing over their phone list, that these two friends would stun the cricket with their repertoire and make the very air shimmer with their brilliance. On Thursday afternoon he called her from the studio for the first time in months, and on Thursday night he brought her an orchid, some more roses, a scarf he had seen in a shop window at lunchtime, and two tickets for a fine play. She in turn had baked him a chocolate cake from his mother’s recipe, on Wednesday, and on Thursday had made Toll House cookies¹² and lemon chiffon pie¹³, as well as darning his socks and pressing his pants and sending everything to the cleaner’s that had been neglected previ­ous times. They rambled about the town Thursday night after the play, came home late, read Euripides to one another out loud, went to bed late, smiling again, and got up late, having to call the studio and claim sickness until noon, when the husband, tiredly, on the way out of the house, thought to himself, This can’t go on. He turned and came back in. He walked over to the cricket near the fireplace and bent down to it and said:

“Testing, one, two, three. Testing. Can you hear me? Testing.”

“What’re you doing?” cried his wife in the door­way.

“Calling all cars, calling all cars,” said the hus­band, lines under his eyes, face pale. “This is me speaking. We know you’re there, friends. Go away. Go away. Take your microphone and get out. You won’t hear anything from us. That is all. That is all. Give my regards to J. Edgar¹⁴. Signing off.”

His wife was standing with a white and aghast look in the door as he marched by her, nodding, and thumped out the door.

She phoned him at three o’clock.

“Darling,” she said, “it’s gone!”

“The cricket?”

“Yes, they came and took it away. A man rapped very politely at the door and I let him in and in a minute he had unscrewed the cricket and taken it with him. He just walked off and didn’t say boo.”

“Thank God,” said the husband. “Oh, thank God.”

“He tipped his hat at me and said thanks.”

“Awfully decent of him. See you later,” said the husband.

This was Friday. He came home that night about six-thirty, having stopped off to have a quick one¹⁵ with the boys. He came in the front door reading his newspaper, passed his wife, taking off his coat and automatically putting it in the closet, went on past the kitchen without twitching his nose, sat in the living room and read the sports page until sup­per, when she served him plain roast beef and string beans, with apple juice to start and sliced oranges for dessert. On his way home he had turned in the theater tickets for tonight and tomorrow, he in­formed her; she could go with the girls to the fash­ion show, he intended to bake in the backyard.

“Well,” he said, about ten o’clock. “The old house seems different tonight, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Good to have the cricket gone. Really had us going there.”

“Yes,” she said.

They sat awhile. “You know,” she said later, “I sort of miss it, though, I really sort of miss it. I think I’ll do something subversive so they’ll put it back.”

“I beg your pardon?” he said, twisting a piece of twine around a fly he was preparing from his fish­ing box.

“Never mind,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.” She went on ahead. Ten minutes later, yawning, he followed after her, putting out the lights. Her eyes were closed as he undressed in the semi-moonlit darkness. She’s already asleep, he thought.

2002

NOTES

1. En route – on the way (Fr)

2. The FBI – the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the police department that can investigate crimes in more than one state

3. Ensenada – a town not far from San Diego, on the Pacific (West) coast

4. Boy Scout – a boy who is a member of an association for boys where they are taught to acquire practical skills and develop their characters

5. Camp Fire Girl – a member of the Girl Scouts Association

6. IQ – intelligence quotient, level of intelligence

7. San Diego – a large city in California

8. Gallagher and Shean – a highly successful double act on vaudeville and Broadway in the 1910s and 1920s, consisting of Edward Gallagher and Al Shean (real name Albert Schoenberg). The comedians led separate careers in the vaudeville tradition, but it was when they teamed up that they gained popularity.

9. Shepherd’s pie – a baked dish the main ingredients of which are pieces of cooked meat covered with cooked potato

10. Black-bottom pie – a kind of pie

11. Rosenkavalier (the Knight of the Rose) – a comic opera in three acts by Richard Georg Strauss to an original German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

12. Toll House cookies – brand name cookies. Toll House is a brand named for the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, where Ruth Graves Wakefield is credited with inventing the chocolate chip cookie by mistake in the 1930s

13. Lemon chiffon pie – a very light cake made with vegetable oil, eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and flavourings. In contrast to butter, the traditional fat used in cake making, it is difficult to beat air into oil, so chiffon cakes, like angel cakes and other foam cakes, achieve a fluffy texture by beating egg whites until stiff, and folding them into the cake batter before baking

14. J. Edgar – the FBI’s first director, John Edgar Hoover, ran it with scant interference through the tenures of 8 presidents (1924 – 1972)

15. To have a quick one – a drink that you have in a hurry (informal)

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

to scan [v T] a bug [n C] to tap [v T] to be okay [v phrase] outraged [adj] to give sb a false lead [v phrase] appropriate [adj]

shoddy [adj] to bulge [v I] to talk sense [v phrase] drab [adj] subversive [adj] with relish [adv] to sit tight [v phrase]

EXERCISES

1. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Appropriate

• Subversive

2. Look out for synonyms for the words below in the text of the story, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning:

Noise, annoyed, to write, to shout, to look, annoying, to bang, to feel/be insulted, to murmur, to blink.

3. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations from the sentences below:

1. If you can’t talk sense, don’t talk!

2. It takes hours and genius to make a really good black-bottom pie.

3. You can be sued for breaking government property.

4. They fell silent and listened to the house.

4. Complete the sentences using the correct preposition which collocates with the verbs in bold and translate into Russian. Use the word combinations in sentences of your own:

1. Do you know how to set ____ (in/up/down) this programme?

2. You should go for walks more often to keep ____ (down/out/off) the fatigue you are sure to be suffering from working ten-hour days.

3. You’d better leave the room if you want to shut Amy ____ (off/down/up).

4. Maybe we’ll stop ____ (off/up/over) here just to have lunch – I’m starving!

5. Such clutch bags are all the fashion now and this pale green one tops the dress ____ (up/off/out) nicely.

6. Her handbag was turned ____ (in/at/back) to the police a couple of days later, but there was no money there.

7. He started to explain the predicament to Jane, but felt he was short on fitting words and broke off, then started ____ (off/on/over).

5. Note the effect of the prepositions on the meaning of the verb. Translate the sentences into Russian:

1. Rip out the microphone if we can find it, go to a hotel, leave town?

2. The first thing I said tonight was political crap and you shut me up like I’d set off a bomb.

3. Those damn fools are after everyone. They’ll be tapping the zoo telephone next

4. Take your microphone and get out. You won’t hear anything from us. That is all. That is all. Give my regards to J. Edgar. Signing off.

5. He walked over to the cricket near the fireplace and bent down to it and said: “Testing, one, two, three. Testing. Can you hear me? Testing.”

6. Paraphrase or explain:

1. I’m insulted, no, outraged! Those two words I’ve never used before, but, hell, they fit the case!

2. They hesitated, then entered the house, the strange house, and stood for a moment in the hall, trying to manufacture some appropriate dialogue.

3. It was like walking into an auditorium of one thousand invisible people, all holding their breath.

4. Promise not to talk mink and it’s a go.

5. He just walked off and didn’t say boo.

7. Comment on the following:

1. My God, he thought, I hope they don’t hear my heart.

2. ‘What’s that noise?’ and we all sat up, listening. ‘I know what it is,’ said Dad. ‘It’s silence. The cricket’s gone’ <…> And we felt sort of sad and lonely with that new sound in the house.

3. <…> when the husband, tiredly, on the way out of the house, thought to himself, This can’t go on.

4. “You know,” she said later, “I sort of miss it, though, I really sort of miss it.”

QUESTIONS

1. Give character sketches of John Martin and his wife; speak about the relationship between them. Compare John Martin’s and his wife’s ideas of the way married life should be. Was their marriage routine? Confirm or disprove relying on the text of the short story.

2. Discuss their behaviour under stress. Why did John and not his wife protest against their house being bugged? What would you do if you were in their place? Have you ever experienced a similar situation? How long can people stand such things?

3. Trace all the references to the seemingly new sounds echoing in the house. Mark the epithets conveying the unpleasant newness of the situation. Which of them convey John’s emotional state and the shock he underwent better?

4. Why do you think they didn’t rip the bug out at once? How and why did they try to get accustomed to the new mode of life – this human right violation?

5. Speak on the effect the new atmosphere in the house had on the main characters. How did it influence their life? Did it change for the better or for the worse? Could such a life last long?

6. Why did the Martins’ life change so drastically when the bug appeared and disappeared?

7. What’s the paradox of the story in your opinion?

UNIT 4

THE FOX AND THE FOREST

*********

There were fireworks the very first night, things that you should be afraid of perhaps, for they might remind you of other more horrible things, but these were beautiful, rockets that ascended into the ancient soft air of Mexico and shook the stars apart in blue and white fragments. Everything was good and sweet, the air was that blend of the dead and the living, of the rains and the dusts, of the incense from the church, and the brass smell of the tubas on the bandstand which pulsed out vast rhythms of “La Paloma.” The church doors were thrown wide and it seemed as if a giant yel­low constellation had fallen from the October sky and lay breathing fire upon the church walls; a million candles sent their color and fumes about. Newer and better fireworks scurried like tight-rope walking comets across the cool-tiled square, banged against adobe cafe walls, then rushed on hot wires to bash the high church tower, in which boys’ naked feet alone could be seen kicking and re-kicking, clanging and tilting and re-tilting the monster bells into monstrous music. A flaming bull blundered about the plaza chasing laughing men and screaming children.

“The year is 1938,” said William Travis, stand­ing by his wife on the edge of the yelling crowd, smiling. “A good year.”

The bull rushed upon them. Ducking, the couple ran, with fire balls pelting them, past the music and riot, the church, the band, under the stars, clutching each other, laughing. The bull passed, carried lightly on the shoulders of a charging Mexican, a frame­work of bamboo and sulphurous gunpowder.

“I’ve never enjoyed myself so much in my life.” Susan Travis had stopped for her breath.

“It’s amazing,” said William.

“It will go on, won’t it?”

“All night.”

“No, I mean our trip.”

He frowned and patted his breast pocket. “I’ve enough traveler’s checks for a lifetime. Enjoy yourself. Forget it. They’ll never find us.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

Now someone was setting off giant crackers, hurling them from the great bell-tolling tower of the church in a sputter of smoke, while the crowd below fell back under the threat and the crackers exploded in wonderful concussions among their dancing feet and flailing bodies. A wondrous smell of frying tortillas hung all about, and in the cafes men sat at tables looking out, mugs of beer in their brown hands.

The bull was dead. The fire was out of the bamboo tubes and he was expended. The laborer lifted the framework from his shoulders. Little boys clustered to touch the magnificent papier-mâché head, the real horns.

“Let’s examine the bull,” said William.

As they walked past the cafe entrance Susan saw the man looking out at them, a white man in a salt-white suit, with a blue tie and blue shirt, and a thin, sunburned face. His hair was blond and straight and his eyes were blue, and he watched them as they walked.

She would never have noticed him if it had not been for the bottles at his immaculate elbow; a fat bottle of crème de menthe¹, a clear bottle of ver­mouth, a flagon of cognac, and seven other bottles of assorted liqueurs, and, at his finger tips, ten small half-filled glasses from which, without taking his eyes off the street, he sipped, occasionally squinting, pressing his thin mouth shut upon the savor. In his free hand a thin Havana cigar smoked, and on a chair stood twenty cartons of Turkish cigarettes, six boxes of cigars, and some packaged colognes.

“Bill —” whispered Susan.

“Take it easy,” he said. “He’s nobody.”

“I saw him in the plaza² this morning.”

“Don’t look back, keep walking. Examine the papier-mâché bull here. That’s it, ask questions.”

“Do you think he’s from the Searchers?”

“They couldn’t follow us!”

“They might!”

“What a nice bull,” said William to the man who owned it.

“He couldn’t have followed us back through two hundred years, could he?”

“Watch yourself, for God’s sake,” said William.

She swayed. He crushed her elbow tightly, steering her away.

“Don’t faint.” He smiled, to make it look good. “You’ll be all right. Let’s go right in that café, drink in front of him, so if he is what we think he is, he won’t suspect.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“We’ve got to. Come on now. And so I said to David, that’s ridiculous!” This last in a loud voice as they went up the cafe steps.

We are here, thought Susan. Who are we? Where are we going? What do we fear? Start at the beginning, she told herself, holding to her san­ity, as she felt the adobe floor underfoot.

My name is Ann Kristen; my husband’s name is Roger. We were born in the year 2155 A.D. And we lived in a world that was evil. A world that was like a great black ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking two billion people with it, whether they wanted to go or not, to death, to fall over the edge of the earth and the sea into radioactive flame and madness.

They walked into the café. The man was star­ing at them.

A phone rang.

The phone startled Susan. She remembered a phone ringing two hundred years in the future, on that blue April morning in 2155, and herself an­swering it:

“Ann, this is Rene! Have you heard? I mean about Travel in Time, Incorporated³? Trips to Rome⁴ in 21 BC, trips to Napoleon’s⁵ Water­loo⁶ – any time, any place!”

“Rene, you’re joking.”

“No. Clinton Smith left this morning for Philadelphia in 1776. Travel in Time, Inc., ar­ranges everything. Costs money. But, think – to ac­tually see the burning of Rome, Kubla Khan⁷, Moses⁸ and the Red Sea⁹! You’ve probably got an ad in your tube mail now.”

She had opened the suction mail tube and there was the metal foil advertisement:

ROME AND THE BORGIAS¹⁰!

THE WRIGHT BROTHERS AT KITTY HAWK¹¹!

Travel in Time, Inc., can costume you, put you in a crowd during the assassination of Lincoln¹² or Caesar¹³! We guarantee to teach you any language you need to move freely in any civilization, in any year, with­out friction. Latin, Greek, ancient Ameri­can colloquial. Take your vacation in Time as well as Place!

Rene’s voice was buzzing on the phone. “Tom and I leave for 1492 tomorrow. They’re arranging for Tom to sail with Columbus¹⁴. Isn’t it amazing!”

“Yes,” murmured Ann, stunned. “What does the Government say about this Time Machine com­pany?”

“Oh, the police have an eye on it. Afraid peo­ple might evade the draft, run off and hide in the Past. Everyone has to leave a security bond be­hind, his house and belongings, to guarantee re­turn. After all, the war’s on.”

“Yes, the war,” murmured Ann. “The war.”

Standing there, holding the phone, she had thought. Here is the chance my husband and I have talked and prayed over for so many years. We don’t like this world of 2155. We want to run away from his work at the bomb factory. I from my position with disease-culture units. Perhaps there is a chance for us to escape, to run for cen­turies into a wild country of years where they will never find and bring us back to burn our books, censor our thoughts, scald our minds with fear, march us, scream at us with radios...

They were in Mexico in the year 1938.

She looked at the stained café wall.

Good workers for the Future State were al­lowed vacations into the Past to escape fatigue. And so she and her husband had moved back into 1938, a room in New York City, and enjoyed the theaters and the Statue of Liberty¹⁵ which still stood green in the harbor. And on the third day they had changed their clothes, their names, and had flown off to hide in Mexico!

“It must be him,” whispered Susan, looking at the stranger seated at the table. “Those cigarettes, the cigars, the liquor. They give him away. Re­member our first night in the Past?”

A month ago, their first night in New York, before their flight, drinking all the strange drinks, savoring and buying odd foods, perfumes, ciga­rettes of ten dozen rare brands, for they were rare in the Future where war was everything. So they had made fools of themselves, rushing in and out of stores, salons, tobacconists, going up to their room to get wonderfully ill.

And now here was this stranger doing likewise, doing a thing that only a man from the Future would do who had been starved for liquors and cigarettes for many years.

Susan and William sat and ordered a drink.

The stranger was examining their clothes, their hair, their jewelry – the way they walked and sat.

“Sit easily,” said William under his breath. “Look as if you’ve worn this clothing style all your life.”

“We should never have tried to escape.”

“My God!” said William, “he’s coming over. Let me do the talking.”

The stranger bowed before them. There was the faintest tap of heels knocking together. Susan stiff­ened. That military sound! – unmistakable as that certain ugly rap on your door at midnight.

“Mr. Roger Kristen,” said the stranger, “you did not pull up your pant legs when you sat down.”

William froze. He looked at his hands lying on either leg, innocently. Susan’s heart was beating swiftly.

“You’ve got the wrong person,” said William quickly. “My name’s not Krisler.”

“Kristen,” corrected the stranger.

“I’m William Travis,” said William. “And I don’t see what my pant legs have to do with you!”

“Sorry.” The stranger pulled up a chair. “Let us say I thought I knew you because you did not pull your trousers up. Everyone does. If they don’t, the trousers bag quickly. I am a long way from home, Mr. – Travis, and in need of com­pany. My name is Simms.”

“Mr. Simms, we appreciate your loneliness, but we’re tired. We’re leaving for Acapulco¹⁶ tomor­row.”

“A charming spot. I was just there, looking for some friends of mine. They are somewhere. I shall find them yet. Oh, is the lady a bit sick?”

“Good night, Mr. Simms.”

They started out the door, William holding Susan’s arm firmly. They did not look back when Mr. Simms called, “Oh, just one other thing.” He paused and then slowly spoke the words:

“2155 A.D.”

Susan shut her eyes and felt the earth falter under her. She kept going, into the fiery plaza, seeing nothing.

***

They locked the door of their hotel room. And then she was crying and they were standing in the dark, and the room tilted under them. Far away firecrackers exploded, and there was laughter in the plaza.

“What a damned, loud nerve,” said William. “Him sitting there, looking us up and down like animals, smoking his damn cigarettes, drinking his drinks. I should have killed him then!” His voice was nearly hysterical. “He even had the nerve to use his real name to us. The Chief of the Search­ers. And the thing about my pant legs. My God, I should have pulled them up when I sat. It’s an automatic gesture of this day and age. When I didn’t do it, it set me off from the others; it made him think. Here’s a man who never wore pants, a man used to breech uniforms and future styles. I could kill myself for giving us away!”

“No, no, it was my walk – these high heels – that did it. Our haircuts – so new, so fresh. Everything about us odd and uneasy.”

He turned on the light. “He’s still testing us. He’s not positive of us – not completely. We can’t run out on him, then. We can’t make him cer­tain. We’ll go to Acapulco leisurely.”

“Maybe he is sure of us, but is just playing.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s got all the time in the world. He can dally here if he wants, and bring us back to the Future sixty seconds after we left it. He might keep us wondering for days, laughing at us.”

Susan sat on the bed, wiping the tears from her face, smelling the old smell of charcoal and incense.

“They won’t make a scene, will they?”

“They won’t dare. They’ll have to get us alone to put us in that Time Machine and send us back.”

“There’s a solution then,” she said. “We’ll never be alone; we’ll always be in crowds. We’ll make a million friends, visit markets, sleep in the Official Palaces in each town, pay the Chief of Police to guard us until we find a way to kill Simms and escape, disguise ourselves in new clothes, perhaps as Mexicans.”

Footsteps sounded outside their locked door.

They turned out the light and undressed in si­lence. The footsteps went away. A door closed.

Susan stood by the window looking down at the plaza in the darkness. “So that building there is a church?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve often wondered what a church looked like. It’s been so long since anyone saw one. Can we visit it tomorrow?”

“Of course. Come to bed.”

They lay in the dark room.

Half an hour later their phone rang. She lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

“The rabbits may hide in the forest,” said a voice, “but a fox can always find them.”

She replaced the receiver and lay back straight and cold in the bed.

Outside, in the year 1938, a man played three tunes upon a guitar, one following another.

During the night she put her hand out and al­most touched the year 2155. She felt her fingers slide over cool spaces of time, as over a corru­gated surface, and she heard the insistent thump of marching feet, a million bands playing a million military tunes, and she saw the fifty thousand rows of diseased cultures in their aseptic glass tubes, her hand reaching out to them at her work in that huge factory in the Future; the tubes of leprosy, bubonic, typhoid, tuberculosis, and then the great explosion. She saw her hand burned to a wrinkled plum, felt it recoil from a concussion so immense that the world was lifted and let fall and all the buildings broke and people hemorrhaged and lay silent. Great volcanoes, machines, winds, ava­lanches slid down to silence and she awoke, sob­bing, in the bed, in Mexico, many years away...

In the early morning, drugged with the single hour’s sleep they had finally been able to obtain, they awoke to the sound of loud automobiles in the street. Susan peered down from the iron bal­cony at a small crowd of eight people only now emerging, chattering, yelling, from trucks and cars with red lettering on them. A crowd of Mexicans had followed the trucks.

“Qué pasa¹⁷?” Susan called to a little boy.

The boy replied.

Susan turned back to her husband. “An Ameri­can motion-picture company, here on location.”

“Sounds interesting.” William was in the shower. “Let’s watch them. I don’t think we’d better leave today. We’ll try to lull Simms. Watch the films be­ing made. They say the primitive film making was something. Get our minds off ourselves.”

Ourselves, thought Susan. For a moment, in the bright sun, she had forgotten that somewhere in the hotel, waiting, was a man smoking a thou­sand cigarettes, it seemed. She saw the eight loud happy Americans below and wanted to call to them: “Save me, hide me, help me! Color my hair, my eyes; clothe me in strange clothes. I need your help. I’m from the year 2155!”

But the words stayed in her throat. The func­tionaries of Travel in Time, Inc., were not foolish. In your brain, before you left on your trip, they placed a psychological bloc. You could tell no one your true time or birthplace, nor could you reveal any of the Future to those in the Past. The Past and the Future must be protected from each other. Only with this psychological bloc were peo­ple allowed to travel unguarded through the ages. The Future must be protected from any change brought about by her people traveling in the Past. Even if she wanted to with all her heart, she could not tell any of those happy people below in the plaza who she was, or what her predicament had become.

“What about breakfast?” said William.

Breakfast was being served in the immense din­ing room. Ham and eggs for everyone. The place was full of tourists. The film people entered, all eight of them – six men and two women, giggling, shoving chairs about. And Susan sat near them, feeling the warmth and protection they offered, even when Mr. Simms came down the lobby stairs, smoking his Turkish cigarette with great in­tensity. He nodded at them from a distance, and Susan nodded back, smiling, because he couldn’t do anything to them here, in front of eight film people and twenty other tourists.

“Those actors,” said William. “Perhaps I could hire two of them, say it was a joke, dress them in our clothes, have them drive off in our car when Simms is in such a spot where he can’t see their faces. If two people pretending to be us could lure him off for a few hours, we might make it to Mex­ico City. It’d take him years to find us there!”

“Hey!”

A fat man, with liquor on his breath, leaned on their table.

“American tourists!” he cried. “I’m so sick of seeing Mexicans, I could kiss you!” He shook their hands. “Come on, eat with us. Misery loves company. I’m Misery, this is Miss Gloom, and Mr. and Mrs. Do-We-Hate-Mexico! We all hate it. But we're here for some preliminary shots for a damn film. The rest of the crew arrives tomor­row. My name’s Joe Melton. I’m a director. And if this ain’t a hell of a country! Funerals in the streets, people dying. Come on, move over. Join the party; cheer us up!”

Susan and William were both laughing.

“Am I funny?” Mr. Melton asked the immedi­ate world.

“Wonderful!” Susan moved over.

Mr. Simms was glaring across the dining room at them.

She made a face at him.

Mr. Simms advanced among the tables.

“Mr. and Mrs. Travis,” he called. “I thought we were breakfasting together, alone.”

“Sorry,” said William.

“Sit down, pal,” said Mr. Melton. “Any friend of theirs is a pal of mine.”

Mr. Simms sat. The film people talked loudly, and while they talked, Mr. Simms said quietly, “I hope you slept well.”

“Did you?”

“I’m not used to spring mattresses,” replied Mr. Simms wryly. “But there are compensations. I stayed up half the night trying new cigarettes and foods. Odd, fascinating. A whole new spec­trum of sensation, these ancient vices.”

“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Susan.

“Always the play acting.” Simms laughed. “It’s no use. Nor is this stratagem of crowds. I’ll get you alone soon enough. I’m immensely patient.”

“Say,” Mr. Melton broke in, his face flushed, “is this guy giving you any trouble?”

“It’s all right.”

“Say the word and I’ll give him the bum’s rush¹⁸.”

Melton turned back to yell at his associates. In the laughter, Mr. Simms went on: “Let us come to the point. It took me a month of tracing you through towns and cities to find you, and all of yesterday to be sure of you. If you come with me quietly, I might be able to get you off with no punishment, if you agree to go back to work on the hydrogen-plus bomb.”

“Science this guy talks at breakfast!” observed Mr. Melton, half listening.

Simms went on, imperturbably. “Think it over. You can’t escape. If you kill me, others will follow you.”

“We don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Stop it!” cried Simms irritably. “Use your in­telligence! You know we can't let you get away with this escape. Other people in the year 2155 might get the same idea and do what you’ve done. We need people.”

“To fight your wars,” said William at last.

“Bill!”

“It’s all right, Susan. We’ll talk on his terms now. We can’t escape.”

“Excellent,” said Simms. “Really, you’ve both been incredibly romantic, running away from your responsibilities.”

“Running away from horror.”

“Nonsense. Only a war.”

“What are you guys talking about?” asked Mr. Melton.

Susan wanted to tell him. But you could only speak in generalities. The psychological bloc in your mind allowed that. Generalities, such as Simms and William were now discussing.

“Only the war,” said William. “Half the world dead of leprosy bombs!”

“Nevertheless,” Simms pointed out, “the in­habitants of the Future resent you two hiding on a tropical isle, as it were, while they drop off the cliff into hell. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave. I am the guardian of their col­lective resentment against you two.”

“Look at the guardian of resentments!” said Mr. Melton to his companions.

“The longer you keep me waiting, the harder it will go for you. We need you on the bomb project, Mr. Travis. Return now – no torture. Later, we’ll force you to work, and after you’ve finished the bomb, we’ll try a number of complicated new devices on you, sir.”

“I’ve a proposition,” said William. “I’ll come back with you if my wife stays here alive, safe, away from that war.”

Mr. Simms considered it. “All right. Meet me in the plaza in ten minutes. Pick me up in your car. Drive me to a deserted country spot. I’ll have the Travel Machine pick us up there.”

“Bill!” Susan held his arm tightly.

“Don’t argue.” He looked over at her. “It’s settled.” To Simms: “One thing. Last night you could have gotten in our room and kidnaped us. Why didn’t you?”

“Shall we say that I was enjoying myself?” re­plied Mr. Simms languidly, sucking his new cigar. “I hate giving up this wonderful atmosphere, this sun, this vacation. I regret leaving behind the wine and the cigarettes. Oh, how I regret it. The plaza then, in ten minutes. Your wife will be protected and may stay here as long as she wishes. Say your good-bys.” Mr. Simms arose and walked out.

“There goes Mr. Big Talk!” yelled Mr. Melton at the departing gentleman. He turned and looked at Susan. “Hey. Someone’s crying. Breakfast’s no time for people to cry. Now is it?”

At nine-fifteen Susan stood on the balcony of their room, gazing down at the plaza. Mr. Simms was seated there, his neat legs crossed, on a deli­cate bronze bench. Biting the tip from a cigar, he lit it tenderly.

Susan heard the throb of a motor, and far up the street, out of a garage and down the cobbled hill, slowly, came William in his car.

The car picked up speed. Thirty, now forty, now fifty miles an hour. Chickens scattered before it.

Mr. Simms took off his white panama hat and mopped his pink forehead, put his hat back on, and then saw the car.

It was rushing sixty miles an hour, straight on for the plaza.

“William!” screamed Susan.

The car hit the low plaza curb, thundering; it jumped up, sped across the tiles toward the green bench where Mr. Simms now dropped his cigar, shrieked, flailed his hands, and was hit by the car. His body flew up and up in the air, and down and down, crazily, into the street.

On the far side of the plaza, one front wheel broken, the car stopped. People were running.

Susan went in and closed the balcony doors.

They came down the Official Palace steps to­gether, arm in arm, their faces pale, at twelve noon.

“Adiós, señor,” said the mayor behind them. “Señora¹⁹.”

They stood in the plaza where the crowd was pointing at the blood.

“Will they want to see you again?” asked Susan.

“No, we went over and over it. It was an ac­cident. I lost control of the car. I wept for them. God knows I had to get my relief out somewhere. Ifelt like weeping. I hated to kill him. I’ve never wanted to do anything like that in my life.”

“They won’t prosecute you?”

“They talked about it, but no. I talked faster. They believe me. It was an accident. It’s over.”

“Where will we go? Mexico City? Uruapan²⁰?”

“The car’s in the repair shop. It’ll be ready at four this afternoon. Then we’ll get the hell out.”

“Will we be followed? Was Simms working alone?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have a little head start on them, I think.”

The film people were coming out of the hotel as they approached. Mr. Melton hurried up, scowling. “Hey I heard what happened. Too bad. Everything okay now? Want to get your minds off it? We're doing some preliminary shots up the street. You want to watch, you’re welcome. Come on, do you good.”

They went.

They stood on the cobbled street while the film camera was being set up. Susan looked at the road leading down and away, and the highway going to Acapulco and the sea, past pyramids and ruins and little adobe towns with yellow walls, blue walls, purple walls and flaming bougainvillea²¹, and she thought, We shall take the roads, travel in clusters and crowds, in markets, in lobbies, bribe police to sleep near, keep double locks, but always the crowds, never alone again, always afraid the next person who passes may be another Simms. Never knowing if we’ve tricked and lost the Searchers. And always up ahead, in the Future, they’ll wait for us to be brought back, waiting with their bombs to burn us and disease to rot us, and their police to tell us to roll over, turn around, jump through the hoop! And so we’ll keep running through the forest, and we’ll never ever stop or sleep well again in our lives.

A crowd gathered to watch the film being made. And Susan watched the crowd and the streets.

“Seen anyone suspicious?”

“No. What time is it?”

“Three o’clock. The car should be almost ready.”

The test film was finished at three forty-five. They all walked down to the hotel, talking. William paused at the garage. “The car’ll be ready at six,” he said, coming out, worried.

“But no later than that?”

“It’ll be ready, don’t worry.”

In the hotel lobby they looked around for other men traveling alone, men who resembled Mr. Simms, men with new haircuts and too much ciga­rette smoke and cologne smell about them, but the lobby was empty. Going up the stairs, Mr. Melton said, “Well, it’s been a long hard day. Who’d like to put a header on it? You folks? Martini? Beer?”

“Maybe one.”

The whole crowd pushed into Mr. Melton’s room and the drinking began.

“Watch the time,” said William.

Time, thought Susan. If only they had time. All she wanted was to sit in the plaza all of a long bright day in October, with not a worry or a thought, with the sun on her face and arms, her eyes closed, smiling at the warmth, and never move. Just sleep in the Mexican sun, and sleep warmly and easily and slowly and happily for many, many days...

Mr. Melton opened the champagne.

“To a very beautiful lady, lovely enough for films,” he said, toasting Susan. “I might even give you a test.”

She laughed.

“I mean it,” said Melton. “You’re very nice. I could make you a movie star.”

“And take me to Hollywood?” cried Susan.

“Get the hell out of Mexico, sure!”

Susan glanced at William and he lifted an eye­brow and nodded. It would be a change of scene, clothing, locale, name, perhaps; and they would be traveling with eight other people, a good shield against any interference from the Future.

“It sounds wonderful,” said Susan.

She was feeling the champagne now. The after­noon was slipping by; the party was whirling about her. She felt safe and good and alive and truly happy for the first time in many years.

“What kind of film would my wife be good for?” asked William, refilling his glass.

Melton appraised Susan. The party stopped laughing and listened.

“Well, I’d like to do a story of suspense,” said Melton. “A story of a man and wife, like yourselves.”

“Go on.”

“Sort of a war story, maybe,” said the director, examining the color of his drink against the sunlight.

Susan and William waited.

“A story about a man and wife who live in a little house on a little street in the year 2155, maybe,” said Melton. “This is ad lib²², understand. But this man and wife are faced with a terrible war, super-plus hydrogen bombs, censorship, death in that year, and – here’s the gimmick – they es­cape into the Past, followed by a man who they think is evil, but who is only trying to show them what their duty is.”

William dropped his glass to the floor.

Mr. Melton continued: “And this couple take refuge with a group of film people whom they learn to trust. Safety in numbers, they say to themselves.”

Susan felt herself slip down into a chair. Eve­ryone was watching the director. He took a little sip of wine. “Ah, that’s a fine wine. Well, this man and woman, it seems, don’t realize how im­portant they are to the Future. The man, espe­cially, is the keystone to a new bomb metal. So the Searchers, let’s call them, spare no trouble or expense to find, capture, and take home the man and wife, once they get them totally alone, in a hotel room, where no one can see. Strategy. The Searchers work alone, or in groups of eight. One trick or another will do it. Don’t you think it would make a wonderful film, Susan? Don’t you, Bill?” He finished his drink.

Susan sat with her eyes straight ahead of her.

“Have a drink?” said Mr. Melton.

William’s gun was out and fired three times, and one of the men fell, and the others ran for­ward. Susan screamed. A hand was clamped to her mouth. Now the gun was on the floor and William was struggling, held.

Mr. Melton said, “Please,” standing there where he had stood, blood showing on his fingers. “Let’s not make matters worse.”

Someone pounded on the hall door.

“Let me in!”

“The manager,” said Mr. Melton dryly. He jerked his head. “Everyone, let’s move!”

“Let me in! I’ll call the police!”

Susan and William looked at each other quickly, and then at the door.

“The manager wishes to come in,” said Mr. Melton. “Quick!”

A camera was carried forward. From it shot a blue light which encompassed the room instantly. It widened out and the people of the party van­ished, one by one.

“Quickly!”

Outside the window, in the instant before she vanished, Susan saw the green land and the purple and yellow and blue and crimson walls and the cobbles flowing down like a river, a man upon a burro²³ riding into the warm hills, a boy drinking Orange Crush, she could feel the sweet liquid in her throat, a man standing under a cool plaza tree with a guitar, she could feel her hand upon the strings, and, far away, the sea, the blue and tender sea, she could feel it roll her over and take her in.

And then she was gone. Her husband was gone.

The door burst wide open. The manager and his staff rushed in.

The room was empty.

“But they were just here! I saw them come in, and now – gone!” cried the manager. “The windows are covered with iron grating. They couldn’t get out that way!”

In the late afternoon the priest was summoned and they opened the room again and aired it out, and had him sprinkle holy water through each corner and give it his blessing.

“What shall we do with these?” asked the charwoman.

She pointed to the closet, where there were 67 bottles of chartreuse, cognac, crème de cacao²⁴, ab­sinthe, vermouth, tequila²⁵, 106 cartons of Turkish cigarettes, and 198 yellow boxes of fifty-cent pure Havana-filler cigars...

1950

NOTES

1. Crème de menthe – a strong, sweet, green alcoholic drink

2. Plaza = square in Spanish

3. Inc. – incorporated, used after the name of a company in the US to show that it has become a corporation

4. Rome – the capital of Italy, founded by the twins Romulus and Remus on 21 April 753 BC

5. Napoleon, I Bonaparte – French emperor (1804 – 1814 and 100 days in March – June of 1815)

6. Waterloo – a place in Belgium, where Napoleon was defeated in June 1815. This defeat marked the end of Napoleon’s Hundred Days of return from exile (the island of Elba)

7. Kubla(i) Khan – (1216? – 1294), Mongol emperor, founder of the Yuan dynasty in China

8. Moses – Israelite leader, prophet and legislator (in the Bible, 14^th or 13^th c. BC). Moses confronted Pharaoh and his magicians and led the Israelites out of Egypt, thus helping them to escape from slavery

9. The Red Sea – Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land crossing the body of water which is traditionally identified as the Red Sea

10. The Borgias – Italian family of Spanish origin, powerful in the 2^nd half of the 15^th c. The cruelty, crimes and ambition of many of the Borgias made them hated by Italians

11. The Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk – American airplane inventors, brothers Orville (1871 – 1948) and Wilbur (1867 – 1912) Wright; Kitty Hawk is a place in North Carolina where they made their 1^st airplane flight in 1903

12. Lincoln, Abraham (1809 – 1865) – 16^th President of the US (1861 – 1865), called the Great Emancipator, was assassinated by his political opponents at the Ford Theatre in Washington

13. Caesar, Julius (101 – 44 BC) – a famous Roman statesman and general. He became a dictator in 48 and was made dictator for life in 44, was assassinated by conspirators

14. Columbus, Christopher (1451 – 1506) – the most noted discoverer of America (1492)

15. The Statue of Liberty – a monument which stands at the entrance of New York harbour on Bedloe Island. It was designed by Auguste Bartholdi; he believed his creation would serve a beacon to freedom for millenniums to come. The monument was a present from France for the 100^th anniversary of American independence

16. Acapulco – a sea port in south-western Mexico

17. Qué pasa? (Spanish) – What is going on? What’s the matter?

18. I’ll give him the bum’s rush (slang) – I’ll turn him out forcibly

19. Adiós, señor… Señora (Spanish) = goodbye

20. Uruapan – a city and municipality in the west-central part of the Mexican state of Michoacán. Uruapan is one of the oldest cities in Mexico. Its main natural attraction is the Cupatitzio River (dubbed “the river that sings”), because along its flow are tourist attractions.

21. Bougainvillea – the name comes from Louis Antoine de Bougainville, an admiral in the French Navy who discovered the plant in Brazil in 1768. It’s a plant with small flowers surrounded by large, coloured (pink, magenta, purple, red, orange, white, or yellow) bracts.

22. This is ad lib (colloq.) – it’s just a fancy

23. Burro – a donkey (Spanish)

24. Crème de cacao (Fr) – a sweet chocolateliqueurflavored primarily by thecocoabean and thevanillaorchid. It is normally made as a clear lightsyrup, however it is also available in a darkcaramel-colored syrup, often labeled as “dark crème de cacao”

25. Tequila – a strong alcoholic drink made in Mexico from the cactus plant

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

traveler’s check [n C] AmE to evade the draft [v phrase] to censor one’s thoughts [v phrase] to escape fatigue [v phrase] to bag (out) [phr v] to have the nerve to do sth [v phrase] to be positive of sb / sth [v phrase]

solution [n C] on location [adv] predicament [n C] to make a face at sb [v phrase] to take refuge [v phrase] gimmick [n C] to pick up speed [v phrase]

EXERCISES

1. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Solution

• Odd

• Amazing

II. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning and find synonyms for each group from the text:

Clean, strange, astonishing, to hiss, surprising, bizarre, tidy, to ponder, to shock, to weigh, to whisper, marvellous, queer, to muse, to astound, striking, to contemplate.

3. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. “Bill —” whispered Susan. “Take it easy,” he said. “He’s nobody.”

2. Oh, the police have an eye on it.

3. I am a long way from home, Mr. – Travis, and in need of company.

4. … they awoke to the sound of loud automobiles in the street.

5. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln…

6. The man, especially, is the keystone to a new bomb metal.

3. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the most appropriate phrase from the list below:

1. I heard the door click, then the car start up and ________ ____.

2. They are ________ ____ India in the morning. – It’s sheer madness! Two people were killed there in the latest terrorist attack! I heard it on the news last night.

3. Experienced shop-assistants say that most shoplifters ________ themselves _____ by constantly looking around for surveillance cameras.

4. He was in a serious predicament last year when his wife ________ ____ him leaving just debts and two children under school age behind.

5. It is a breach of professional etiquette to ________ ____ with a suggestion even if you are on the board of directors.

6. Though he was caught in the act he managed to ________ ____ murdering a man.

7. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours – I’ll lobby our State Representative to support your plan if you manage to ________ her ____.

_____________________________________________________________

to give away, to break in, to leave for, to get sb off, to pull away,

to run out on, to get away with

3. Note the effect of the prepositions on the meaning of the verb. Translate the sentences into Russian:

1. He crushed her elbow tightly, steering her away.

2. And on the third day they had changed their clothes, their names, and had flown off to hide in Mexico!

3. The stranger pulled up a chair. “Let us say I thought I knew you because you did not pull your trousers up.”

4. If two people pretending to be us could lure him off for a few hours, we might make it to Mexico City.

5. The manager and his staff rushed in.

3. Paraphrase or explain:

1. She would never have noticed him if it had not been for the bottles at his immaculate elbow.

2. A world that was like a great black ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking two billion people with it…

3. That military sound! – unmistakable as that certain ugly rap on your door at midnight.

4. When I didn’t do it, it set me off from the others; it made him think.

5. They say the primitive film making was something.

6. Say the word and I’ll give him the bum’s rush.

7. “Was Simms working alone?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have a little head start on them, I think”

8. Well, it’s been a long hard day. Who’d like to put a header on it?

9. Well, I’d like to do a story of suspense.

10. This is ad lib, understand.

3. Comment on the following:

1. We’ll never be alone, we’ll always be in crowds.

2. The Past and the Future must be protected from each other.

3. The rabbits may hide in the forest, but a fox can always find them.

4. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them.

5. In the late afternoon the priest was summoned and they opened the room again and aired it out, and had him sprinkle holy water through each corner and give it his blessing.

QUESTIONS

1. Speak about the main characters. What glimpses of their life in the Future does the author afford? How does he strike an unhappy note? Compare that mode of life in the Future to their life in the year 1938. Note the contrast between the years 1938 and 2155 AD.

2. Was it honest on the part of the main characters to escape from the year 2155 AD? Do you think they really believed they could get away with having escaped from the Future? Was their escape a way to oppose the regime or just the only way to save themselves? Give your reasons.

3. The Searchers worked alone or in groups of eight. Which method was better? Why?

4. The murder of Simms. Say what events had prepared it. Bill called the murder an accident and was convinced of it. Comment on this.

5. How does the author bring the enormity of war to readers? What historical parallels can you draw having read the short story?

6. What’s the fate of mankind depicted by the author? What is more frightening – the tragedy of the Kristens or the tragedy of mankind, human civilization in general?

7. The author’s message as you see it. Make a comment on/about the following quotation: “The shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual” (W. G. Golding).

UNIT 5

TIME INTERVENING (INTERIM)

*********

Very late on this night, the old man came from his house with a flashlight¹ in his hand and asked of the little boys the object of their frolic. The little boys gave no answer, but tumbled on in the leaves.

The old man went into his house and sat down and worried. It was three in the morning. He saw his own pale, small hands trembling on his knees. He was all joints and angles, and his face, reflected above the mantel, was no more than a pale cloud of breath exhaled upon the mirror.

The children laughed softly outside, in the leaf piles.

He switched out his flashlight quietly and sat in the dark. Why he should be bothered in any way by playing children he could not know. But it was late for them to be out, at three in the morning, playing. He was very cold.

There was a sound of a key in the door and the old man arose to go see who could possibly be com­ing into his house. The front door opened and a young man entered with a young woman. They were looking at each other softly and tenderly, holding hands, and the old man stared at them and cried, “What are you doing in my house?”

The young man and the young woman replied, “What are you doing in our house? Here now, old man, get on out!” And the young man took the old man by the elbow, searched him to see if he had stolen anything, and shoved him out the door and closed and locked it.

“This is my house. You can’t lock me out!” The old man beat at the door, then stood back in the dark morning air and looked up at the lights shin­ing in the warm windows and rooms upstairs and then, with a motion of shadows, going out. The old man walked down the street and came back and still the small boys rolled in the icy morning leaves, not seeing him.

He stood before the house as he watched the lights turned on and turned off more than a few thousand times as he counted softly under his breath.

A boy of about fourteen ran up to the house, a football in his hand, and opened the door without unlocking it and went in. The door closed.

Half an hour later, with the morning wind rising, the old man saw a car pull up and a plump woman get out with a little boy three years old. As they walked across the wet lawn the woman looked at the old man and said, “Is that you, Mr. Terle?”

“Yes,” said the old man automatically, for some­how he didn’t wish to frighten her. But it was a lie. He knew he was not Mr. Terle at all. Mr. Terle lived down the street.

The lights glowed on and off a thousand more times.

The children rustled softly in the leaves.

A seventeen-year-old boy bounded across the street, smelling faintly of the smudged lipstick on his cheek, almost knocked the old man down, cried, “Sorry!” and leaped up the porch steps and went in.

The old man stood there with the town lying asleep on all sides of him; the unlit windows, the breathing rooms, the stars all through the trees, liberally caught and held on winter branches, like so much snow suspended glittering on the cold air.

“That’s my house; who are all those people going in and out?” the old man cried to the wrestling children.

The wind blew, shaking the empty trees.

In the year which was 1923 the house was dark. A car drove up before it; the mother stepped from the car with her son William, who was three. William looked at the dusky morning world and saw his house and as he felt his mother lead him to­ward the house he heard her say, “Is that you, Mr. Terle?” and in the shadows by the great wind-filled oak tree an old man stood and replied, “Yes.” The door closed.

In the year which was 1934 William came run­ning in the summer night, feeling the football cra­dled in his hands, feeling the murky night street pass under his running feet, along the sidewalk. He smelled, rather than saw, an old man as he ran past. Neither of them spoke. And so, on into the house. In the year 1937 William ran with antelope boundings across the street, a smell of lipstick on his face, a smell of someone young and fresh upon his cheeks; all thoughts of love and deep night. He almost knocked the stranger down, cried, “Sorry!” and ran to open the front door.

In the year 1947 a car stopped before the house, William relaxed, his wife beside him. He wore a fine tweed suit, it was late, he was tired, they both smelled faintly of too many drinks offered and ac­cepted. For a moment they both heard the wind in the trees. They got out of the car and let themselves into the house with a key. An old man came from the living room and cried, “What are you doing in my house?”

“What are you doing in our house?” said William. “Here now, old man, get on out.” And William, feeling faintly sick in his stomach, for there was something about the old man that made him feel cold, searched the old man and pushed him out the door and closed and locked it. From outside the old man cried, “This is my house. You can’t lock me out!”

They went up to bed and turned out the lights.

In the year 1928 William and the other small boys wrestled on the lawn, waiting for the time when they would leave to watch the circus come chuffing into the pale-dawn railroad station on the blue metal tracks. In the leaves they lay and laughed and kicked and fought. An old man with a flashlight came across the lawn. “Why are you playing here on my lawn at this time of morning?” asked the old man.

“Who are you?” replied William, looking up a moment from the tangle.

The old man stood over the tumbling children a long moment. Then he dropped his flash. “Oh, my dear boy, I know now, now I know!” He bent to touch the boy. “I am you and you are me. I love you, my dear boy, with all of my heart! Let me tell you what will happen to you in the years to come! If you knew! My name is William – so is yours! And all these people going into the house, they are William, they are you, they are me!” The old man shivered. “Oh, all the long years and time passing!”

“Go away,” said the boy. ‘You’re crazy.”

“But —” said the old man.

“You’re nuts! I’ll call my dad!”

The old man backed off and walked away.

There was a flickering of the house lights, on and off. The boys wrestled quietly and secretly in the rustling leaves. The old man stood in shadow on the dark lawn.

Upstairs, in his bed, in the year 1947, William Latting did not sleep. He sat up, lit a cigarette, and looked out the window. His wife was awake. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“That old man,” said William Latting. “I think he’s still down there, under the oak tree.”

“Oh, he couldn’t be,” she said.

William drew quietly on his cigarette and nod­ded. “Who are those kids?”

“What kids?”

“On the lawn there. What a helluva² time of night to be messing around in the leaves!”

“Probably the Moran boys.”

“Hell! At this hour? No, no.”

He stood by the window, eyes shut. “You hear something?”

“What?”

“A baby crying. Somewhere...?”

‘I don’t hear anything,” she said.

She lay listening. They both thought they heard running footsteps on the street, the front doorknob turn. William Latting went to the hall and looked down the stairs but saw nothing.

In the year 1937, coming in the door, William saw a man in a dressing gown at the top of the stairs, looking down, with a cigarette in his hand.

“That you, Dad?” No answer. The man upstairs sighed and stepped back in darkness. William walked to the kitchen to raid the icebox³.

The children wrestled in the soft, dark leaves of morning.

William Latting said, “Listen.”

He and his wife listened.

“It’s that old man,” said William, “crying.”

“Why?”

“Why does anyone cry? Maybe he’s unhappy.”

“If he’s still there in the morning,” said his wife in the dark, “call the police.”

William Latting turned away from the window, put out his cigarette, and lay in bed, staring at the shadows on the ceiling that flicked off and on a thousand times, silently. “No,” he said at last. “I won’t call the police. Not for him.”

“Why not?”

His voice almost whispered. “I wouldn’t want to do that. I just couldn’t.”

They both lay there and faintly there was a sound of crying and the wind blew and William Latting knew that all he had to do if he wanted to watch the boys wrestling in the icy leaves of morning would be to reach out with his hand and lift the shade and look, and there they would be, far below, wrestling and wrestling, as the dawn came pale in the eastern sky.

With all his heart, soul, and blood he wanted to go out and lie in the leaves with them, and let the leaves bury him deep as he snuffed them in, eyes wet. He could go out there now…

Instead, he turned on his side and could not close his eyes, and could not sleep.

1947

NOTES

1. Flashlight (AmE) – a small electric light you can carry in your hand, BrE torch

2. Helluva = hell of

3. Icebox (AmE, o.-f.) – refrigerator

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

to intervene [v I] frolic [n C] to take sb by the elbow [v phrase] under one’s breath [adv] to glow [v I]

murky [adj] to be / go nuts [v phrase] to draw on a cigarette [v phrase] in shadow [adv] to raid the icebox / refrigerator [v phrase]

EXERCISES

1. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Intervene

• Breath

• Murky

II. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning:

To tremble, to leap, murky, to glitter, to run, to flicker, to spring, gloomy, to quake, to tumble, to shiver, to have fun, to bound, to glow, dark, to quiver, to frolic, to shine, to fall, to jump, dusky, to shudder, to drop, to glimmer, to amuse oneself.

III. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. Why he should be bothered in any way by playing children he could not know.

2. A seventeen-year-old boy bounded across the street, smelling faintly of the smudged lipstick on his cheek…

3. And William, feeling faintly sick in his stomach, for there was something about the old man that made him feel cold…

IV. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the most appropriate phrase from the list below:

1. Stop staring out of the window and help me to do the washing up. You are always _________ ____!

2. He was so worn out that he fell asleep behind the wheel. He woke up just in time to avoid _________ ____a passerby.

3. Oh, I cannot believe it! She’s just slammed the door in my face! I’m the owner of the house – you can’t _________ me ____!

4. There were so many journalists at the press conference that the security guards started to _________ people ____ to make some room.

5. Crossing the street she saw a car _________ ____ at the crossroads and a tall dark-haired man get out.

_____________________________________________________________

to pull up, to mess around, to lock out, to shove out, to knock down

5. Paraphrase or explain:

1. He was all joints and angles, and his face, reflected above the mantel, was no more than a pale cloud of breath exhaled upon the mirror.

2. The lights glowed on and off a thousand more times.

3. Oh, all the long years and time passing!

4. You’re nuts! I’ll call my dad!

5. Comment on the following:

1. And William, feeling faintly sick in his stomach, for there was something about the old man that made him feel cold…

2. They both thought they heard running footsteps on the street, the front doorknob turn. William Latting went to the hall and looked down the stairs but saw nothing.

3. “No,” he said at last, “I won’t call the police. Not for him.”

4. With all his heart, soul, and blood he wanted to go out and lie in the leaves with them, and let the leaves bury him deep as he snuffed them in, eyes wet. He could go there now…

QUESTIONS

1. Have you ever wanted to return to your childhood / to the past? Why?

2. Comment upon the title of the short story under discussion. What episodes justify the choice of the title?

3. Sum up all the references to time in the story. What do they symbolize?

4. Speak about the main character of the story, discuss his age, appearance.

5. Follow all the references to the lights being turned on and off in the house. How can you account for them? Discuss their symbolic significance.

6. How come all these people – the old man, the small boy, the fourteen-year-old and seventeen-year-old boys, the twenty-seven-year-old gentleman – met? Did all those meetings really happen?

7. Why couldn’t William Latting, aged twenty-seven, fall asleep? Have you ever experienced anything like this?

UNIT 6

THE ROCKET

*********

Many nights Fiorello Bodoni would awaken to hear the rockets sighing in the dark sky. He would tiptoe from bed, certain that his kind wife was dreaming, to let himself out into the night air. For a few moments he would be free of the smells of old food in the small house by the river. For a silent moment he would let his heart soar alone into space, following the rockets.

Now, this very night, he stood half naked in the darkness, watching the fire fountains murmuring in the air. The rockets on their long wild way to Mars¹ and Saturn² and Venus³!

“Well, well, Bodoni.”

Bodoni started.

On a milk crate, by the silent river, sat an old man who also watched the rockets through the midnight hush.

“Oh, it’s you, Bramante!”

“Do you come out every night, Bodoni?”

“Only for the air.”

“So? I prefer the rockets myself,” said old Bramante. “I was a boy when they started. Eighty years ago, and I’ve never been on one yet.”

“I will ride up in one someday,” said Bodoni.

“Fool!” cried Bramante. “You’ll never go. This is a rich man’s world.” He shook his gray head, remembering. “When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters: THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE! Science, Comfort, and New Things for All! Ha! Eighty years. The Future becomes Now! Do we fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ances­tors before us.”

“Perhaps my sons —” said Bodoni.

“No, nor their sons!” the old man shouted. “It’s the rich who have dreams and rockets!”

Bodoni hesitated. “Old man, I’ve saved three thousand dollars. It took me six years to save it. For my business, to invest in machinery. But every night for a month now I’ve been awake. I hear the rockets. I think. And tonight I’ve made up my mind. One of us will fly to Mars!” His eyes were shining and dark.

“Idiot,” snapped Bramante. “How will you choose? Who will go? If you go, your wife will hate you, for you will be just a bit nearer God, in space. When you tell your amazing trip to her, over the years, won’t bitterness gnaw at her?”

“No, no!”

“Yes! And your children? Will their lives be filled with the memory of Papa, who flew to Mars while they stayed here? What a senseless task you will set your boys. They will think of the rocket all their lives. They will lie awake. They will be sick with wanting it. Just as you are sick now. They will want to die if they cannot go. Don’t set that goal, I warn you. Let them be content with being poor. Turn their eyes down to their hands and to your junk yard, not up to the stars.”

“But —”

“Suppose your wife went? How would you feel, knowing she had seen and you had not? She would become holy. You would think of throwing her in the river. No, Bodoni, buy a new wrecking machine, which you need, and pull your dreams apart with it, and smash them to pieces.”

The old man subsided, gazing at the river in which, drowned, images of rockets burned down the sky.

“Good night,” said Bodoni.

“Sleep well,” said the other.

When the toast jumped from its silver box, Bo­doni almost screamed. The night had been sleepless. Among his nervous children, beside his mountainous wife, Bodoni had twisted and stared at nothing. Bramante was right. Better to invest the money. Why save it when only one of the family could ride the rocket, while the others re­mained to melt in frustration?

“Fiorello, eat your toast,” said his wife, Maria.

“My throat is shriveled,” said Bodoni.

The children rushed in, the three boys fighting over a toy rocket, the two girls carrying dolls which duplicated the inhabitants of Mars, Venus, and Neptune⁴, green mannequins with three yellow eyes and twelve fingers.

“I saw the Venus rocket!” cried Paolo.

“It took off, whoosh⁵!” hissed Antonello.

“Children!” shouted Bodoni, hands to his ears.

They stared at him. He seldom shouted.

Bodoni arose. “Listen, all of you,” he said. “I have enough money to take one of us on the Mars rocket.”

Everyone yelled.

“You understand?” he asked. “Only one of us. Who?”

“Me, me, me!” cried the children.

“You,” said Maria.

“You,” said Bodoni to her.

They all fell silent.

The children reconsidered. “Let Lorenzo go – he’s oldest.”

“Let Miriamne go – she’s a girl!”

“Think what you would see,” said Bodoni’s wife to him. But her eyes were strange. Her voice shook. “The meteors, like fish. The universe. The Moon⁶. Someone should go who could tell it well on returning. You have a way with words.”

“Nonsense. So have you,” he objected.

Everyone trembled.

“Here,” said Bodoni unhappily. From a broom he broke straws of various lengths. “The short straw wins.” He held out his tight fist. “Choose.”

Solemnly each took his turn.

“Long straw.”

“Long straw.”

Another.

“Long straw.”

The children finished. The room was quiet.

Two straws remained. Bodoni felt his heart ache in him. “Now,” he whispered. “Maria.”

She drew.

“The short straw,” she said.

“Ah,” sighed Lorenzo, half happy, half sad. “Mama goes to Mars.”

Bodoni tried to smile. “Congratulations. I will buy your ticket today.”

“Wait, Fiorello —”

“You can leave next week,” he murmured.

She saw the sad eyes of her children upon her, with the smiles beneath their straight, large noses! She returned the straw slowly to her husband. “I cannot go to Mars.”

“But why not?”

“I will be busy with another child.”

“What!”

She would not look at him. “It wouldn’t do for me to travel in my condition.”

He took her elbow. “Is this the truth?”

“Draw again. Start over.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he said in­credulously.

“I didn’t remember.”

“Maria, Maria,” he whispered, patting her face. He turned to the children. “Draw again.”

Paolo immediately drew the short straw.

“I go to Mars!” He danced wildly. “Thank you, Father!”

The other children edged away. “That’s swell, Paolo.”

Paolo stopped smiling to examine his parents and his brothers and sisters. “I can go, can’t I?” he asked uncertainly.

“Yes.”

“And you'll like me when I come back?”

“Of course.”

Paolo studied the precious broomstraw on his trembling hand and shook his head. He threw it away. “I forgot. School starts. I can’t go. Draw again.”

But none would draw. A full sadness lay on them.

“None of us will go,” said Lorenzo.

“That’s best,” said Maria.

“Bramante was right,” said Bodoni.

With his breakfast curdled within him, Fiorello Bodoni worked in his junk yard, ripping metal, melting it, pouring out usable ingots. His equip­ment flaked apart; competition had kept him on the insane edge of poverty for twenty years. It was a very bad morning.

In the afternoon a man entered the junk yard and called up to Bodoni on his wrecking machine. “Hey, Bodoni, I got some metal for you!”

“What is it, Mr. Mathews?” asked Bodoni, list­lessly.

“A rocket ship. What’s wrong? Don’t you want it?”

“Yes, yes!” He seized the man’s arm, and stopped, bewildered.

“Of course,” said Mathews, “it’s only a mockup. You know. When they plan a rocket they build a full-scale model first, of aluminum. You might make a small profit boiling her down. Let you have her for two thousand —”

Bodoni dropped his hand. “I haven’t the money.”

“Sorry. Thought I’d help you. Last time we talked you said how everyone outbid you on junk. Thought I’d slip this to you on the q.t. Well —”

“I need new equipment. I saved money for that.”

“I understand.”

“If I bought your rocket, I wouldn’t even be able to melt it down. My aluminum furnace broke down last week —”

“Sure.”

“I couldn’t possibly use the rocket if I bought it from you.”

“I know.”

Bodoni blinked and shut his eyes. He opened them and looked at Mr. Mathews. “But I am a great fool. I will take my money from the bank and give it to you.”

“But if you can’t melt the rocket down —”

“Deliver it,” said Bodoni.

“All right, if you say so. Tonight?”

“Tonight,” said Bodoni, “would be fine. Yes, I would like to have a rocket ship tonight.”

***

There was a moon. The rocket was white and big in the junk yard. It held the whiteness of the moon and the blueness of the stars. Bodoni looked at it and loved all of it. He wanted to pet it and lie against it, pressing it with his cheek, telling it all the secret wants of his heart.

He stared up at it. “You are all mine,” he said. “Even if you never move or spit fire, and just sit there and rust for fifty years, you are mine.”

The rocket smelled of time and distance. It was like walking into a clock. It was finished with Swiss delicacy. One might wear it on one’s watch fob. “I might even sleep here tonight,” Bodoni whispered excitedly.

He sat in the pilot’s seat.

He touched a lever.

He hummed in his shut mouth, his eyes closed.

The humming grew louder, louder, higher, higher, wilder, stranger, more exhilarating, trembling in him and leaning him forward and pulling him and the ship in a roaring silence and in a kind of metal screaming, while his fists flew over the controls, and his shut eyes quivered, and the sound grew and grew until it was a fire, a strength, a lifting and a pushing of power that threatened to tear him in half. He gasped. He hummed again and again, and did not stop, for it could not be stopped, it could only go on, his eyes tighter, his heart furious. “Taking off!” he screamed. The jolting concussion! The thunder! “The Moon!” he cried, eyes blind, tight. “The meteors!” The silent rush in volcanic light. “Mars. Oh, God, Mars! Mars!”

He fell back, exhausted and panting. His shak­ing hands came loose of the controls and his head tilted back wildly. He sat for a long time, breath­ing out and in, his heart slowing. Slowly, slowly, he opened his eyes. The junk yard was still there. He sat motionless. He looked at the heaped piles of metal for a minute, his eyes never leaving them. Then, leaping up, he kicked the levers. “Take off, damn you!” The ship was silent. “I’ll show you!” he cried. Out in the night air, stumbling, he started the fierce motor of his terrible wrecking machine and advanced upon the rocket. He maneuvered the massive weights into the moonlit sky. He readied his trembling hands to plunge the weights, to smash, to rip apart this insolently false dream, this silly thing for which he had paid his money, which would not move, which would not do his bidding. “I’ll teach you!” he shouted. But his hand stayed.

The silver rocket lay in the light of the moon. And beyond the rocket stood the yellow lights of his home, a block away, burning warmly. He heard the family radio playing some distant music. He sat for half an hour considering the rocket and the house lights, and his eyes narrowed and grew wide. He stepped down from the wrecking machine and began to walk, and as he walked he began to laugh, and when he reached the back door of his house he took a deep breath and called, “Maria, Maria, start packing. We’re going to Mars!”

“Oh!”

“Ah!”

“I can’t believe it!”

“You will, you will.”

The children balanced in the windy yard, under the glowing rocket, not touching it yet. They started to cry.

Maria looked at her husband. “What have you done?” she said. “Taken our money for this? It will never fly.”

“It will fly,” he said, looking at it.

“Rocket ships cost millions. Have you mil­lions?”

“It will fly,” he repeated steadily. “Now, go to the house, all of you. I have phone calls to make, work to do. Tomorrow we leave! Tell no one, un­derstand? It is a secret.”

The children edged off from the rocket, stum­bling. He saw their small, feverish faces in the house windows, far away.

Maria had not moved. “You have ruined us,” she said. “Our money used for this – this thing. When it should have been spent on equipment.”

“You will see,” he said.

Without a word she turned away.

“God help me,” he whispered, and started to work.

Through the midnight hours trucks arrived, packages were delivered, and Bodoni, smiling, ex­hausted his bank account. With blowtorch and metal stripping he assaulted the rocket, added, took away, worked fiery magics and secret insults upon it. He bolted nine ancient automobile mo­tors into the rocket’s empty engine room. Then he welded the engine room shut, so none could see his hidden labor.

At dawn he entered the kitchen. “Maria,” he said, “I’m ready for breakfast.”

She would not speak to him.

At sunset he called to the children. “We’re ready! Come on!” The house was silent.

“I’ve locked them in the closet,” said Maria.

“What do you mean?” he demanded.

“You’ll be killed in that rocket,” she said. “What kind of rocket can you buy for two thou­sand dollars? A bad one!”

“Listen to me, Maria.”

“It will blow up. Anyway, you are no pilot.”

“Nevertheless, I can fly this ship. I have fixed it.”

“You have gone mad,” she said.

“Where is the key to the closet?”

“I have it here.”

He put out his hand. “Give it to me.”

She handed it to him. “You will kill them.”

“No, no.”

“Yes, you will. I feel it.”

He stood before her. “You won’t come along?”

“I’ll stay here,” she said.

“You will understand; you will see then,” he said, and smiled. He unlocked the closet. “Come, children. Follow your father.”

“Good-bye, good-bye, Mama!”

She stayed in the kitchen window, looking out at them, very straight and silent.

At the door of the rocket the father said, “Children, we will be gone a week. You must come back to school, and I to my business.” He took each of their hands in turn. “Listen. This rocket is very old and will fly only one more jour­ney. It will not fly again. This will be the one trip of your life. Keep your eyes wide.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Listen, keep your ears clean. Smell the smells of a rocket. Feel. Remember. So when you return you will talk of it all the rest of your lives.”

“Yes, Papa.”

The ship was quiet as a stopped clock. The air­lock⁷ hissed shut behind them. He strapped them all, like tiny mummies, into rubber hammocks. “Ready?” he called.

“Ready!” all replied.

“Take-off!” He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming.

“Here comes the Moon!”

The moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports⁸. “There’s Earth!” “There’s Mars!”

The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their co­coon hammocks.

“Good,” whispered Bodoni, alone.

He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.

He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?

No. Bodoni smiled.

All about the quivering rocket lay the junk yard.

Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junk-yard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junk yard, manufacturing a magic dream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.

Maria stood in the kitchen window.

He waved to her and smiled.

He could not see if she waved or not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.

The sun was rising.

Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Si­lence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed, Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion in the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars come up under our ship, and the moons of Mars⁹, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimen­sions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mir­rors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.

He awoke.

Red Mars floated near the rocket.

“Papa!” The children thrashed to be free.

Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.

At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.

“We are home,” said Bodoni.

They walked across the junk yard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing.

“I have ham and eggs for all of you,” said Maria, at the kitchen door.

“Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!”

“Yes,” she said.

At bedtime the children gathered before Bo­doni. “We want to thank you, Papa.”

“It was nothing.”

“We will remember it for always, Papa. We will never forget.”

Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. “What’s this?” he cried.

“You’re the best father in the world,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“Now I see,” she said. “I understand.”

She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. “Is it a very lovely journey?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?”

“Just a little one, perhaps,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night,” said Fiorello Bodoni.

1950

NOTES

1. Mars – is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System, nearest to the Earth. The planet is named after Mars, the Roman god of war. It is also referred to as the “Red Planet” because of its reddish appearance, due to iron oxide prevalent on its surface

2. Saturn – is the sixth planet from the Sun, surrounded by large rings

3. Venus – is the second-closest planet to the Sun, nearest to the Earth. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love. It is the brightest natural object in the night sky, except for the Moon

4. Neptune – is the eighth planet in order in the Solar System. Named for the Roman god of the sea, it is the fourth-largest planet by diameter and the third-largest by mass

5. Whoosh – a sound imitating air or water moving quickly

6. The Moon – an object shining in the sky at night, moves around the Earth every 28 days

7. Airlock = air lock door

8. Ports = portholes

9. The moons of Mars – Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are small and irregularly shaped. These may be captured asteroids

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

to set a goal [v phrase] to be content with sth [v phrase] to smash sth to pieces [v phrase] frustration [n C, U] to reconsider [v I, T]

listlessly [adv] full-scale [adj] to make a profit [v phrase] on the q.t. [adv]

EXERCISES

1. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Frustration

• Content

2. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning and find synonyms for each group from the text:

To shriek, blessed, drawback, to yell, to tremble, to pant, to wail, divine, excited, defect, perplexed, to palpitate, to puff, anxious, baffled, to vibrate, sacred, to squeal, imperfection, confused, to screech, to shake, to shrill.

3. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. For a few moments he would be free of the smells of old food in the small house by the river.

2. It took me six years to save it. For my business, to invest in machinery.

3. Will their lives be filled with the memory of Papa, who flew to Mars while they stayed here?

4. I’d slip this to you on the q.t.

5. Children, we will be gone a week.

IV. Complete the sentences using the correct preposition which collocates with the verbs in bold and translate into Russian. Use the word combinations in sentences of your own:

1. Something is gnawing ____ (on/in/at) you – you’ve been gloomy lately. What’s eating you?

2. When we took ____ (off/up/on) I remembered I had left all the traveller’s cheques behind. The ability to keep my head in a crisis helped me to approach that emergency calmly.

3. Our aircraft usually don’t blow ____ (off/up/down) in midair, but when they do we investigate each case using the flight recorders.

4. The robber crawled to the window by stealth, peeped through a chink in the curtains, saw someone was in and edged ____ (away/forwards/through).

V. Paraphrase or explain:

1. We live in shacks like our ancestors before us.

2. The old man subsided, gazing at the river in which, drowned, images of rockets burned down the sky.

3. Someone should go who could tell it well on returning. You have a way with words.

4. Last time we talked you said how everyone outbid you on junk.

5. And in the center of the junk yard, manufacturing a magic dream, lay the quivering, purring rocket.

VI. Comment on the following:

1. You’ll never go. This is a rich man’s world.

2. … buy a new wrecking machine, which you need, and pull your dreams apart with it, and smash them to pieces.

3. Someone should go who could tell it well on returning.

4. “Ah,” sighed Lorenzo, half happy, half sad.

5. “But I am a great fool. I will take my money from the bank and give it to you.”

6. It was finished with Swiss delicacy.

7. “You’re the best father in the world,” she whispered.

QUESTIONS

1. Sum up the Bodoni family. Give a character sketch of Bodoni, sum up his manner.

2. Why was a trip to Mars just a pipe dream for every member of the Bodoni family? Comment upon Bramante’s words about letting Bodoni’s children be content with poverty.

3. What did that flight (though only one of them could fly) mean to the whole family? Why didn’t they draw lots again?

4. What motive prompted Bodoni to buy the mockup of a space rocket? Why was his wife opposed to the idea of flying it? Comment on the proverb: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” in relation to the plot of the story.

5. Mark all the references to the rocket. What does the rocket symbolize?

6. Do you think the children will ever learn the truth? What will it mean to them?

7. What is the emotional key of the end of the story? Speak about the author’s message.

UNIT 7

A SOUND OF THUNDER

*********

The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness:

TIME SAFARI¹, INC.

SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.

YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.

WE TAKE YOU THERE.

YOU SHOOT IT.

A warm phlegm gathered in Eckels’ throat; he swallowed and pushed it down. The muscles around his mouth formed a smile as he put his hand slowly out upon the air, and in that hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars to the man behind the desk.

“Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?”

“We guarantee nothing,” said the official, “ex­cept the dinosaurs.” He turned. “This is Mr. Travis, your Safari Guide in the Past. He’ll tell you what and where to shoot. If he says no shooting, no shooting. If you disobey instructions, there’s a stiff penalty of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your return.”

Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue. There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame.

A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remem­bered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes², rabbits in hats³, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.

“Hell and damn,” Eckels breathed, the light of the Machine on his thin face. “A real Time Machine.” He shook his head. “Makes you think. If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith won. He’ll make a fine President of the United States.”

“Yes,” said the man behind the desk. “We’re lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492⁴. Of course it’s not our business to conduct Escapes, but to form Safaris. Anyway, Keith’s Presi­dent now. All you got to worry about is —”

“Shooting my dinosaur,” Eckels finished it for him.

“A Tyrannosaurus rex⁵. The Thunder Lizard, the damnedest monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you, we’re not respon­sible. Those dinosaurs are hungry.”

Eckels flushed angrily. “Trying to scare me!”

“Frankly, yes. We don’t want anyone going who’ll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed last year, and a dozen hunters. We’re here to give you the damnedest thrill a real hunter ever asked for. Traveling you back sixty million years to bag the biggest damned game in all Time. Your personal check’s still there. Tear it up.”

Mr. Eckels looked at the check for a long time. His fingers twitched.

“Good luck,” said the man behind the desk. “Mr. Travis, he’s all yours.”

They moved silently across the room, taking their guns with them, toward the Machine, toward the silver metal and the roaring light.

First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night-day. A week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055, A.D. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone! The Machine roared.

They put on their oxygen helmets and tested the intercoms.

Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face pale, his jaw stiff. He felt the trembling in his arms and he looked down and found his hands tight on the new rifle. There were four other men in the Machine. Travis, the Safari leader, his as­sistant, Lesperance, and two other hunters, Billings and Kramer. They sat looking at each other, and the years blazed around them.

“Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?” Eckels felt his mouth saying.

“If you hit them right,” said Travis on the hel­met radio. “Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay away from those. That’s stretching luck. Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can, blind them, and go back into the brain.”

The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them. “Good God,” said Eckels. “Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois⁶.”

The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a mur­mur. The Machine stopped.

The sun stopped in the sky.

The fog that had enveloped the Machine blew away and they were in an old time, a very old time indeed, three hunters and two Safari Heads with their blue metal guns across their knees.

“Christ isn’t born yet,” said Travis. “Moses⁷ has not gone to the mountain to talk with God. The Pyramids⁸ are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up. Remember that, Alexander⁹, Caesar¹⁰, Napoleon¹¹, Hitler¹² – none of them exists.”

The men nodded.

“That” – Mr. Travis pointed – “is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years be­fore President Keith.”

He indicated a metal path that struck off into green wilderness, over steaming swamp, among gi­ant ferns and palms.

“And that,” he said, “is the Path, laid by Time Safari for your use. It floats six inches above the earth. Doesn’t touch so much as one grass blade, flower, or tree. It’s an antigravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching this world of the past in any way. Stay on the Path. Don’t go off it. I repeat. Don’t go off. For any reason! If you fall off, there’s a penalty. And don’t shoot any animal we don’t okay.”

“Why?” asked Eckels.

They sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds’ cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the color of blood.

“We don’t want to change the Future. We don’t belong here in the Past. The government doesn’t like us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise. A Time Machine is damn finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a grow­ing species.”

“That’s not clear,” said Eckels.

“All right,” Travis continued, “say we acciden­tally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?”

“Right.”

“And all the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stomp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!”

“So they’re dead,” said Eckels. “So what?”

“So what?” Travis snorted quietly. “Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all man­ner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine mil­lion years later, a cave man, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-tooth tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the cave man starves. And the cave man, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civiliza­tion. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is com­parable to slaying some of Adam’s grandchildren. The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. With the death of that one cave man, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crash the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon¹³, across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth¹⁴ might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware¹⁵, there might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!”

“I see,” said Eckels. “Then it wouldn’t pay for us even to touch the grass?”

“Correct. Crashing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion. Of course maybe our theory is wrong. Maybe Time can’t be changed, by us. Or maybe it can be changed only in little subtle ways. A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a popula­tion disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and, finally, a change in social temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Per­haps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don’t know. We’re guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history, we’re being damned careful. This Machine, this Path, our clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can’t introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere.”

“How do we know which animals to shoot?”

“They’re marked with red paint,” said Travis. “Today, before our journey, we sent Lesperance here back with the Machine. He came to this par­ticular era and followed certain animals.”

“Studying them?”

“Right,” said Lesperance. “I track them through their entire existence, noting which of them lives longest. Very few. How many times they mate. Not often. Life’s short. When I find one that’s going to die when a tree falls on him, or one that drowns in a tar pit¹⁶, I note the exact hour, minute, and second. I shoot a paint bomb. It leaves a red patch on his hide. We can’t miss it. Then I correlate our arrival in the Past so that we meet the Monster not more than two minutes before he would have died anyway. This way, we kill only animals with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see howcareful we are?”

“But if you came back this morning in Time,” said Eckels eagerly, “you must’ve bumped into us, our Safari! How did it turn out? Was it successful? Did all of us get through – alive?”

Travis and Lesperance gave each other a look. “That’d be a paradox,” said the latter. “Time doesn’t permit that sort of mess – a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped? That was us passing ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw nothing. There’s no way of telling if this expedition was a success, if we got our monster, or whether all of us – meaning you, Mr. Eckels – got out alive.” Eckels smiled palely.

“Cut that,” said Travis sharply. “Everyone on his feet!”

They were ready to leave the Machine. The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats out of a delirium and a night fever. Eckels, bal­anced on the narrow Path, aimed his rifle play­fully.

“Stop that!” said Travis. “Don’t even aim for fun, damn it! If your gun should go off —”

Eckels flushed. “Where’s our Tyrannosaurus?”

Lesperance checked his wrist watch. “Up ahead. We’ll bisect his trail in sixty seconds. Look for the red paint, for Christ’s sake. Don’t shoot till we give the word. Stay on the Path. Stay on the Path!”

They moved forward in the wind of morning.

“Strange,” murmured Eckels. “Up ahead, sixty million years, Election Day over. Keith made President. Everyone celebrating. And here we are, a million years lost, and they don’t exist. The things we worried about for months, a lifetime, not even born or thought about yet.”

“Safety catches off, everyone!” ordered Travis. “You, first shot, Eckels. Second, Billings. Third, Kramer.”

“I’ve hunted tiger, wild boar, buffalo, elephant, but Jesus, this is it,” said Eckels. “I’m shaking like a kid.”

“Ah,” said Travis.

Everyone stopped.

Travis raised his hand. “Ahead,” he whispered. “In the mist. There he is. There’s His Royal Ma­jesty now.”

The jungle was wide and full of twitterings, rustlings, murmurs, and sighs.

Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut a door.

Silence.

A sound of thunder.

Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus rex.

“Jesus God,” whispered Eckels.

“Sh!”

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a ter­rible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crashing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and bal­anced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily, its beautifully reptile hands feeling the air.

“My God!” Eckels twitched his mouth. “It could reach up and grab the moon.”

“Sh!” Travis jerked angrily. “He hasn’t seen us yet.”

“It can’t be killed.” Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun¹⁷. “We were fools to come. This is im­possible.”

“Shut up!” hissed Travis.

“Nightmare.”

“Turn around,” commanded Travis. “Walk quietly to the Machine. We’ll remit one-half your fee.”

“I didn’t realize it would be this big,” said Eckels. “I miscalculated, that’s all. And now I want out.”

“It sees us!”

“There’s the red paint on its chest!”

The Thunder Lizard raised itself. Its armored flesh glittered like a thousand green coins. The coins, crusted with slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny insects wriggled, so that the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even while the monster itself did not move. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew down the wilderness.

“Get me out of here,” said Eckels. “It was never like this before. I was always sure I’d come through alive. I had good guides, good safaris, and safety. This time, I figured wrong. I’ve met my match and admit it. This is too much for me to get hold of.”

“Don’t run,” said Lesperance. “Turn around. Hide in the Machine.”

“Yes,” Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet as if trying to make them move. He gave a grunt of helplessness.

“Eckels!”

He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.

“Not that way!”

The Monster, at the first motion, lunged for­ward with a terrible scream. It covered one hun­dred yards in four seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast’s mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.

Eckels, not looking back, walked blindly to the edge of the Path, his gun limp in his arms, stepped off the Path, and walked, not knowing it, in the jungle. His feet sank into green moss. His legs moved him, and he felt alone and remote from the events behind.

The rifles cracked again. Their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder. The great lever of the reptile’s tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees ex­ploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweler’s hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulder-stone eyes leveled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris.

Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell. Thundering, it clutched trees, pulled them with it. It wrenched and tore the metal Path. The men flung themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons of cold flesh and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed its ar­mored tail, twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A fount of blood spurted from its throat. Somewhere inside, a sac of fluids burst. Sickening gushes drenched the hunters. They stood, red and glisten­ing.

The thunder faded.

The jungle was silent. After the avalanche, a green peace. After the nightmare, morning.

Billings and Kramer sat on the pathway and threw up. Travis and Lesperance stood with smoking rifles, cursing steadily.

In the Time Machine, on his face, Eckels lay shivering. He had found his way back to the Path, climbed into the Machine.

Travis came walking, glanced at Eckels, took cotton gauze from a metal box, and returned to the others, who were sitting on the Path.

“Clean up.”

They wiped the blood from their helmets. They began to curse too. The Monster lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs as the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running a final in­stant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing up forever. It was like stand­ing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at quitting time, all valves being released or levered tight. Bones cracked; the tonnage of its own flesh, off balance, dead weight, snapped the delicate forearms, caught underneath. The meat settled, quivering.

Another cracking sound. Overhead, a gigantic tree branch broke from its heavy mooring, fell. It crashed upon the dead beast with finality.

“There.” Lesperance checked his watch. “Right on time. That’s the giant tree that was scheduled to fall and kill this animal originally.” He glanced at the two hunters. “You want the trophy pic­ture?”

“What?”

“We can’t take a trophy back to the Future. The body has to stay right here where it would have died originally, so the insects, birds, and bac­teria can get at it, as they were intended to. Everything in balance. The body stays. But we can take a picture of you standing near it.”

The two men tried to think, but gave up, shak­ing their heads.

They let themselves be led along the metal Path. They sank wearily into the Machine cush­ions. They gazed back at the ruined Monster, the stagnating mound, where already strange reptilian birds and golden insects were busy at the steaming armor.

A sound on the floor of the Time Machine stiffened them. Eckels sat there, shivering.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last.

“Get up!” cried Travis.

Eckels got up.

“Go out on that Path alone,” said Travis. He had his rifle pointed. “You’re not coming back in the Machine. We're leaving you here!”

Lesperance seized Travis’ arm. “Wait —”

“Stay out of this!” Travis shook his hand away. “This son of a bitch nearly killed us. But it isn’t that so much. Hell, no. It’s his shoes! Look at them! He ran off the Path. My God, that ruins us! Christ knows how much we’ll forfeit. Tens of thousands of dollars of insurance! We guarantee no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the damn fool! I’ll have to report to the government. They might revoke our license to travel. God knows what he’s done to Time, to History!”

“Take it easy, all he did was kick up some dirt.”

“How do we know?” cried Travis. “We don’t know anything! It’s all a damn mystery! Get out there, Eckels!”

Eckels fumbled his shirt. “I’ll pay anything. A hundred thousand dollars!”

Travis glared at Eckels’ checkbook and spat. “Go out there. The Monster’s next to the Path. Stick your arms up to your elbows in his mouth. Then you can come back with us.”

“That’s unreasonable!”

“The Monster’s dead, you yellow bastard. The bullets! The bullets can’t be left behind. They don’t belong in the Past; they might change something. Here’s my knife. Dig them out!”

The jungle was alive again, full of the old tremorings and bird cries. Eckels turned slowly to regard the primeval garbage dump, that hill of nightmares and terror. After a long time, like a sleepwalker, he shuffled out along the Path.

He returned, shuddering, five minutes later, his arms soaked and red to the elbows. He held out his hands. Each held a number of steel bullets. Then he fell. He lay where he fell, not moving.

“You didn’t have to make him do that,” said Lesperance.

“Didn’t I? It’s too early to tell.” Travis nudged the still body. “He’ll live. Next time he won’t go hunting game like this. Okay.” He jerked his thumb wearily at Lesperance. “Switch on. Let’s go home.”

1492. 1776. 1812.

They cleaned their hands and faces. They changed their caking shirts and pants. Eckels was up and about again, not speaking. Travis glared at him for a full ten minutes.

“Don’t look at me,” cried Eckels. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Who can tell?”

“Just ran off the Path, that’s all, a little mud on my shoes – what do you want me to do – get down and pray?”

“We might need it. I’m warning you, Eckels, I might kill you yet. I’ve got my gun ready.”

“I’m innocent. I’ve done nothing!”

1999. 2000. 2055.

The Machine stopped.

“Get out,” said Travis.

The room was there as they had left it. But not the same as they had left it. The same man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not quite sit behind the same desk.

Travis looked around swiftly. “Everything okay here?” he snapped.

“Fine. Welcome home!”

Travis did not relax. He seemed to be looking at the very atoms of the air itself, at the way the sun poured through the one high window.

“Okay, Eckels, get out. Don’t ever come back.”

Eckels could not move.

“You heard me,” said Travis. “What’re you staring at?”

Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were... were... And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk ... lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind...

But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering.

Somehow, the sign had changed:

TYME SEFARI INC.

SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.

YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.

WEE TAEK YU THAIR.

YU SHOOT ITT.

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling. “No, it can’t be. Not a little thing like that. No!”

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful, and very dead.

“Not a little thing like that. Not a butterfly!” cried Eckels.

It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes, and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels’ mind whirled. It couldn’t change things. Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?

His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: “Who – who won the presidential election yester­day?”

The man behind the desk laughed. “You jok­ing? You know damn well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that damn weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts, by God!” The official stopped. “What’s wrong?”

Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fin­gers. “Can’t we,” he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, “can’t we take it back, can’t we make it alive again? Can’t we start over? Can’t we —”

He did not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shiv­ering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon.

There was a sound of thunder.

1952

NOTES

1. Safari – an overland journey. It usually refers to a trip by tourists to Africa, traditionally for a big-game hunt

2. Chinese boxes – are a set of boxes of graduated size, each fitting inside the next larger box (compare to the Russian matryoshka doll)

3. Rabbits in hats – a trick of an illusionist

4. 1492 – the year when Columbus reached the New World

5. Tyrannosaurus rex – meaning ‘tyrant lizard’) is a large, flesh-eating dinosaur. The famous species Tyrannosaurus rex (‘rex’ meaning ‘king’ in Latin), commonly abbreviated to T. rex, lived throughout what is now western North America

6. Illinois – is a state of the United States of America, the 21^st to be admitted to the Union. Illinois is the most populous and demographically diverse Midwestern state and the fifth most populous state in the nation

7. Moses – Israelite leader, prophet and legislator (in the Bible, 14^th or 13^th c. BC). Moses confronted Pharaoh and his magicians and led the Israelites out of Egypt, thus helping them to escape from slavery

8. Pyramids – large stone buildings with four triangular walls which slope in to a point at the top, especially in Egypt and Central America

9. Alexander – ruled Macedon from 498 BC to 454 BC

10. Caesar – Gaius Julius Caesar, was a Roman military and political leader. He played a critical role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire

11. Napoleon, I Bonaparte – French emperor (1804 – 1814 and 100 days in March – June of 1815)

12. Hitler – an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP), also called the Nazi Party. He was appointed chancellor in 1933, and quickly established a totalitarian and fascist dictatorship. Hitler pursued a foreign policy with the declared goal of seizing Lebensraum (‘living space’) for Germany

13. Grand Canyon – is a steep-sided gorge carved by the Colorado River in the United States in the state of Arizona. It is largely contained within the Grand Canyon National Park — one of the first national parks in the United States.

14. Queen Elizabeth (1533 – 1603) – the daughter of Ann Boleyn and Henry VIII, her reign (1558 – 1603) is considered to be the high point of the English Renaissance. The arts flourished in England with the work of W. Shakespeare, C. Marlowe, W. Byrd, etc.

15. Washington’s crossing of the Delaware – occurred on December 25, 1776 during the American Revolutionary War, was the first move in a surprise attack against the Hessian forces in Trenton, New Jersey at the Battle of Trenton

16. A tar pit – an asphalt pit, is a geological occurrence where subterranean bitumen leaks to the surface, creating a large puddle, pit, or lake of asphalt

17. A cap gun – is a toy gun that creates a loud sound akin to a gunshot and a puff of smoke when the trigger is pulled.

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

on return [adv] wilderness [n C usually Sg] graft [n U], especially AmE to okay [v T] finicky [adj] out of proportion [adv]

to weigh the evidence [v phrase] to miscalculate [v I, T] to be numb [v phrase] to forfeit [v T] to nudge [v T] guts [n Pl]

EXERCISES

1. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Numb

• Evidence

• Return

2. Differentiate between the word combinations and use them in proper contexts:

• On / upon return

• In return (for)

• By return (of post)

3. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning:

Glorious, to crush, subtle, to roar, delicate, splendid, to break, faint, impressive, to bawl, slight, to smash, admirable, bellow, to crumble.

4. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter.

2. If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results.

3. Its purpose is to keep you from touching this world of the past in any way.

4. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a cave man, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-tooth tiger for food.

5. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam’s grandchildren.

6. Eckels was up and about again, not speaking.

5. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the most appropriate phrase from the list below:

1. It seemed unlikely that after World War II the National Socialist German Workers Party would be able to _________ ____. It seemed unlikely that it would be able to revive.

2. Potatoes were _________ ____ Russia by Peter the Great.

3. You’ll never guess who I _________ ____ yesterday – my old friend I haven’t seen for 10 years!

4. It _________ ____ that she was charming on the phone, but couldn’t type even with two fingers. So, she had to give up her position with the company a week later.

5. You should be aware that the place is surrounded. It’ll be hard to _________ ____ the next week. Of course you can always go out with your hands up.

_____________________________________________________________

to get through, to get in, to turn out, to introduce sth into,

to bump into sb

6. Paraphrase or explain:

1. If Deutscher had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship.

2. “Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?” Eckels felt his mouth saying.

3. Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay away from those. That’s stretching luck.

4. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise.

5. And the cave man, please note, is not just any expendable man, no!

6. “Cut that,” said Travis sharply. “Everyone on his feet!”

7. We’ll remit one-half your fee.

8. This is too much for me to get hold of.

9. I’ll have to report to the government. They might revoke our license to travel.

10. After a long time, like a sleepwalker, he shuffled out along the Path.

7. Comment on the following:

1. Don’t go off. For any reason!

2. Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally.

3. Time doesn’t permit that sort of mess – a man meeting himself.

4. It can’t be killed.

5. Everything in balance. The body stays.

6. Stick your arms up to your elbows in his mouth. Then you can come back with us.

QUESTIONS

1. What made Eckels go on safari in the Past? The adventure as seen by him. What proves he didn’t take it seriously? Note the contrast between Eckels’ expectations and the reality he had to face on safari.

2. Mr. Travis says that a Time Machine is finicky business. What does he mean? Comment on the measures taken by Time Safari, Inc. to ensure the balance of the primordial world in the Past. Were the precautions they took sufficient enough to keep it untouched? What does the Path symbolize?

3. Comment upon the behaviour of each hunter at the sight of the Thunder Lizard, in the process of and after the dinosaur hunt. Why does the author give a detailed description of the reptile? What change was there in the behaviour of Eckels? Does his reaction prove he was cowardly by nature?

4. What was dangerous about the way Eckels behaved after Travis had ordered him to hide in the Machine? Do you believe that a little error in the Past can really multiply all out of proportion in the Future, that it is next to impossible to predict the outcome, the effects of such little errors? Can a minor change in the Past influence the course of history?

5. Whom do you think responsible for the disrupted balance? Could the delicate balance between man and nature be restored by going back to the Past again?

6. Why did Travis humiliate Eckels making him go to the dead body of Rex and dig out the bullets? What does this intimidation symbolize?

7. Comment upon the title of the short story, specify its implications.

UNIT 8

THE SMILE

*********

In the town square the queue had formed at five in the morning while cocks were crowing far out in the rimed country and there were no fires. All about, among the ruined buildings, bits of mist had clung at first, but now with the new light of seven o’clock it was beginning to disperse. Down the road, in twos and threes, more people were gathering in for the day of marketing, the day of festival.

The small boy stood immediately behind two men who had been talking loudly in the clear air, and all of the sounds they made seemed twice as loud because of the cold. The small boy stomped his feet and blew on his red, chapped hands, and looked up at the soiled gunnysack clothing of the men and down the long line of men and women ahead.

“Here, boy, what’re you doing out so early?” said the man behind him.

“Got my place in line, I have,” said the boy.

“Why don’t you run off, give your place to some­one who appreciates?”

“Leave the boy alone,” said the man ahead, suddenly turning.

“I was joking.” The man behind put his hand on the boy’s head. The boy shook it away coldly. “I just thought it strange, a boy out of bed so early.”

“This boy’s an appreciator of arts, I’ll have you know,” said the boy’s defender, a man named Grigsby. “What’s your name, lad?”

“Tom.”

“Tom here is going to spit clean and true, right, Tom?”

“I sure am!”

Laughter passed down the line.

A man was selling cracked cups of hot coffee up ahead. Tom looked and saw the little hot fire and the brew bubbling in a rusty pan. It wasn’t really coffee. It was made from some berry that grew on the meadowlands beyond town, and it sold a penny a cup to warm their stomachs; but not many were buying, not many had the wealth.

Tom stared ahead to the place where the line ended, beyond a bombed-out stone wall.

“They say she smiles” said the boy.

“Aye, she does,” said Grigsby.

“They say she’s made of oil and canvas.”

“True. And that’s what makes me think she’s not the original one. The original, now, I’ve heard, was painted on wood a long time ago.”

“They say she’s four centuries old.”

“Maybe more. No one knows what year this is, to be sure.”

“It’s 2061!”

“That’s what they say, boy, yes. Liars. Could be 3000 or 5000, for all we know. Things were in a fearful mess there for a while. All we got now is bits and pieces.”

They shuffled along the cold stones of the street.

“How much longer before we see her?” asked Tom uneasily.

“Just a few more minutes. They got her set up with four brass poles and velvet rope, all fancy, to keep folks back. Now mind, no rocks, Tom; they don’t allow rocks thrown at her.”

“Yes, sir.”

The sun rose higher in the heavens, bringing heat which made the men shed their grimy coats and greasy hats.

“Why’re we all here in line?” asked Tom at last. “Why’re we all here to spit?”

Grigsby did not glance down at him, but judged the sun. “Well, Tom, there’s lots of rea­sons.” He reached absently for a pocket that was long gone, for a cigarette that wasn’t there. Tom had seen the gesture a million times. “Tom, it has to do with hate. Hate for everything in the Past. I ask you, Tom, how did we get in such a state, cities all junk, roads like jigsaws from bombs, and half the cornfields glowing with radio-activity at night? Ain’t that a lousy stew, I ask you?”

“Yes, sir, I guess so.”

“It’s this way, Tom. You hate whatever it was that got you all knocked down and ruined. That’s human nature. Unthinking, maybe, but human nature anyway.”

“There’s hardly nobody or nothing we don’t hate,” said Tom.

“Right! The whole blooming kaboodle¹ of them people in the Past who run the world. So here we are on a Thursday morning with our guts plas­tered to our spines, cold, live in caves and such, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t nothing except have our festivals, Tom, our festivals.”

And Tom thought of the festivals in the past few years. The year they tore up all the books in the square and burned them and everyone was drunk and laughing. And the festival of science a month ago when they dragged in the last motorcar and picked lots and each lucky man who won was allowed one smash of a sledge hammer at the car.

“Do I remember that, Tom? Do I remember? Why, I got to smash the front window, the window, you hear? My God, it made a lovely sound! Crash!”

Tom could hear the glass fall in glittering heaps.

“And Bill Henderson, he got to bash the en­gine. Oh, he did a smart job of it, with great efficiency. Wham!”

“But best of all,” recalled Grigsby, “there was the time they smashed a factory that was still trying to turn out airplanes.”

“Lord, did we feel good blowing it up!” said Grigsby.

“And then we found that newspaper plant and the munitions depot and exploded them together. Do you understand, Tom?”

Tom puzzled over it. “I guess.”

It was high noon. Now the odors of the ruined city stank on the hot air and things crawled among the tumbled buildings.

“Won’t it ever come back, mister?”

“What, civilization? Nobody wants it. Not me!”

“I could stand a bit of it,” said the man be­hind another man. “There were a few spots of beauty in it.”

“Don’t worry your heads,” shouted Grigsby. “There’s no room for that, either.”

“Ah,” said the man behind the man. “Some­one’ll come along someday with imagination and patch it up. Mark my words. Someone with a heart.”

“No,” said Grigsby.

“I say yes. Someone with a soul for pretty things. Might give us back a kind of limited sort of civilization, the kind we could live in in peace.”

“First thing you know there’s war!”

“But maybe next time it’d be different.”

At last they stood in the main square. A man on horseback was riding from the distance into the town. He had a piece of paper in his hand. In the center of the square was the roped-off area. Tom, Grigsby, and the others were collecting their spit­tle and moving forward – moving forward prepared and ready, eyes wide. Tom felt his heart beating very strongly and excitedly, and the earth was hot under his bare feet.

“Here we go, Tom, let fly!”

Four policemen stood at the corners of the roped area, four men with bits of yellow twine on their wrists to show their authority over other men. They were there to prevent rocks being hurled.

“This way,” said Grigsby at the last moment, “everyone feels he’s had his chance at her, you see, Tom? Go on, now!”

Tom stood before the painting and looked at it for a long time.

“Tom, spit!”

His mouth was dry.

“Get on, Tom! Move!”

“But,” said Tom, slowly, “she’s beautiful”

“Here, I’ll spit for you!” Grigsby spat and the missile flew in the sunlight. The woman in the portrait smiled serenely, secretly, at Tom, and he looked back at her, his heart beating, a kind of music in his ears.

“She’s beautiful,” he said.

“Now get on, before the police —”

“Attention!”

The line fell silent. One moment they were be­rating Tom for not moving forward, now they were turning to the man on horseback.

“What do they call it, sir?” asked Tom, qui­etly.

“The picture? Mona Lisa², Tom, I think. Yes, the Mona Lisa.”

“I have an announcement,” said the man on horseback. “The authorities have decreed that as of high noon³ today the portrait in the square is to be given over into the hands of the populace there, so they may participate in the destruction of —”

Tom hadn’t even time to scream before the crowd bore him, shouting and pummeling about, stampeding toward the portrait. There was a sharp ripping sound. The police ran to escape. The crowd was in full cry, their hands like so many hungry birds pecking away at the portrait. Tom felt himself thrust almost through the broken thing. Reaching out in blind imitation of the oth­ers, he snatched a scrap of oily canvas, yanked, felt the canvas give, then fell, was kicked, sent rolling to the outer rim of the mob. Bloody, his clothing torn, he watched old women chew pieces of canvas, men break the frame, kick the ragged cloth, and rip it into confetti.

Only Tom stood apart, silent in the moving square. He looked down at his hand. It clutched the piece of canvas close to his chest, hidden.

“Hey there, Tom!” cried Grigsby.

Without a word, sobbing, Tom ran. He ran out and down the bomb-pitted road, into a field, across a shallow stream, not looking back, his hand clenched tightly, tucked under his coat.

At sunset he reached the small village and passed on through. By nine o’clock he came to the ruined farm dwelling. Around back, in the half silo, in the part that still remained upright, tented over, he heard the sounds of sleeping, the family – his mother, father, and brother. He slipped quickly, silently, through the small door and lay down, panting.

“Tom?” called his mother in the dark.

“Yes.”

“Where’ve you been?” snapped his father. “I’ll beat you in the morning.”

Someone kicked him. His brother, who had been left behind to work their little patch of ground.

“Go to sleep,” cried his mother, faintly.

Another kick.

Tom lay getting his breath. All was quiet. His hand was pushed to his chest, tight, tight. He lay for half an hour this way, eyes closed.

Then he felt something, and it was a cold white light. The moon rose very high and the little square of light moved in the silo and crept slowly over Tom’s body. Then, and only then, did his hand relax. Slowly, carefully, listening to those who slept about him, Tom drew his hand forth. He hesitated, sucked in his breath, and then, wait­ing, opened his hand and uncrumpled the tiny fragment of painted canvas.

All the world was asleep in the moonlight.

And there on his hand was the Smile.

He looked at it in the white illumination from the midnight sky. And he thought, over and over to himself, quietly, the Smile, the lovely Smile.

An hour later he could still see it, even after he had folded it carefully and hidden it. He shut his eyes and the Smile was there in the darkness. And it was still there, warm and gentle, when he went to sleep and the world was silent and the moon sailed up and then down the cold sky to­ward morning.

1952

NOTES

1. Kaboodle = caboodle

2. Mona Lisa = Gioconda /dʒɜυ’kɒndə/, an unknown woman in the famous portrait by Leonardo da Vinci

3. As of high noon = starting from

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

to bomb out [phr v] soiled [adj] to shed sth [v T] grimy [adj] to bash [v I, T]

efficiency [n U] to berate (formal) [v T + for] to pummel [v T] in full cry [adv] to uncrumple [v I, T]

EXERCISES

1. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• To uncrumple

• Efficiency

• Grimy

2. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning:

To shuffle, stink, mob, smell, to trudge, to pant, crowd, stench, to breathe, to wade, to smash, to bash, assembly, odour, mass, fragrance, to crush, to totter, to break, whiff.

3. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. Down the road, in twos and threes, more people were gathering in for the day of marketing, the day of festival.

2. Tom, it has to do with hate.

3. And Bill Henderson, he got to bash the engine. Oh, he did a smart job of it, with great efficiency.

4. Reaching out in blind imitation of the others, he snatched a scrap of oily canvas…

5. Tom lay getting his breath (back).

4. Complete the sentences using the correct preposition which collocates with the verbs in bold and translate into Russian. Use the word combinations in sentences of your own:

1. This university turns ____ (up/out/away) over two thousand Bachelors of Arts annually.

2. Terrorists attempted to blow ____ (out/down/up) a five-star hotel in Egypt last Monday, only tight security helped to avoid it.

3. She stood in the foyer and stared at the crudely lettered note. “Lydia Mason, I’m going to kill you.” She had been puzzling _____ (about/on/out) what to do until her hand began to shake and the ugly words became a blur.

4. The tap’s dripping! – No! You must know the roof always leaks when it rains. You’d better patch it ____ (up/together/in).

5. Johnny’s favourite trick as he grew older was to run away from home. Once he managed to slip ____ (out/through/into) the airport’s security net and flew off to Cairo!

5. Note the effect of prepositions on the meaning of the verb. Translate the sentences into Russian:

1. The man behind put his hand on the boy’s head. The boy shook it away coldly.

2. Laughter passed down the line.

3. They shuffled along the cold stones of the street.

4. He reached absently for a pocket that was long gone, for a cigarette that wasn’t there.

5. Only Tom stood apart, silent in the moving square.

6. Paraphrase or explain:

1. The small boy stomped his feet and blew on his red, chapped hands, and looked up at the soiled gunnysack clothing of the men and down the long line of men and women ahead.

2. I ask you, Tom, how did we get in such a state, cities all junk, roads like jigsaws from bombs, and half the cornfields glowing with radio-activity at night? Ain’t that a lousy stew, I ask you?

3. And the festival of science a month ago when they dragged in the last motorcar and picked lots and each lucky man who won was allowed one smash of a sledge hammer at the car.

4. The crowd was in full cry, their hands like so many hungry birds pecking away at the portrait.

7. Comment on the following:

1. “Why’re we all here in line?” asked Tom at last. “Why’re we all here to spit?”

2. You hate whatever it was that got you all knocked down and ruined. That’s human nature. Unthinking, maybe, but human nature, anyway.

3. “Won’t it ever come back, mister?”

“What, civilization? Nobody wants it. Not me!”

4. Might give us back a kind of limited sort of civilization, the kind we could live in in peace.

5. Someone’ll come along someday with imagination and patch it up. Mark my words. Someone with a heart.

QUESTIONS

1. Why were there so many people in line early in the morning eager to spit at the picture? What events prepared the degradation of civilization?

2. What contextual meaning does the word ‘festival’ receive in the text of the story? How can you explain the behaviour of the crowd blinded by a deep hatred for the Past? Is it possible to change the Present destroying the Past? What are the chances of creating a new civilization with new values starting from scratch?

3. Why did Tom come to queue up? What was his aim? Why couldn’t he spit at Mona Lisa?

4. The measures taken by the authorities. What do they aim at letting the crowd destroy masterpieces of the Past? What proves the authorities didn’t feel completely safe? How long could that policy blind ordinary people to the authorities’ inefficiency and corruption?

5. Do you believe that “someone’ll come along someday with imagination and patch it up”? Is the role of personality really important in history? Prove your point of view.

6. What is the symbolic meaning of the smile in Tom’s hands? Why is the noun ‘smile’ spelt in the capital letter?

7. According to F. M. Dostoevsky, beauty will save the world. Comment on it discussing the text of the story.

UNIT 9

MARIONETTES, INC.

*********

They walked slowly down the street at about ten in the evening, talking calmly. They were both about thirty-five, both eminently sober.

“But why so early?” said Smith.

“Because,” said Braling.

“Your first night out in years and you go home at ten o’clock.”

“Nerves, I suppose.”

“What I wonder is how you ever managed it. I’ve been trying to get you out for ten years for a quiet drink. And now, on the one night, you insist on turning in early.”

“Mustn’t crowd my luck,” said Braling.

“What did you do, put sleeping powder in your wife’s coffee?”

“No, that would be unethical. You’ll see soon enough.”

They turned a corner. “Honestly, Braling, I hate to say this, but you have been patient with her. You may not admit it to me, but marriage has been awful for you, hasn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“It’s got around, anyway, here and there, how she got you to marry her. That time back in 1979 when you were going to Rio¹ —”

“Dear Rio. I never did see it after all my plans.”

“And how she tore her clothes and rumpled her hair and threatened to call the police unless you married her.”

“She always was nervous, Smith, understand.”

“It was more than unfair. You didn’t love her. You told her as much, didn’t you?”

“I recall that I was quite firm on the subject.”

“But you married her anyhow.”

“I had my business to think of, as well as my mother and father. A thing like that would have killed them.”

“And it’s been ten years.”

“Yes,’” said Braling, his gray eyes steady. “But I think perhaps it might change now. I think what I’ve waited for has come about. Look here.”

He drew forth a long blue ticket.

“Why, it’s a ticket for Rio on the Thursday rocket!”

“Yes, I’m finally going to make it.”

“But how wonderful! You do deserve it! But won’t she object? Cause trouble?”

Braling smiled nervously. “She won’t know I’m gone. I’ll be back in a month and no one the wiser, except you.”

Smith sighed. “I wish I were going with you.”

“Poor Smith, your marriage hasn’t exactly been roses, has it?”

“Not exactly, married to a woman who overdoes it. I mean, after all, when you’ve been married ten years, you don’t expect a woman to sit on your lap for two hours every evening, call you at work twelve times a day and talk baby talk. And it seems to me that in the last month she’s gotten worse. I wonder if perhaps she isn’t a little simple-minded?

“Ah, Smith, always the conservative. Well, here’s my house. Now, would you like to know my secret? How I made it out this evening?”

“Will you really tell?”

“Look up, there!” said Braling.

They both stared up through the dark air.

In the window above them, on the second floor, a shade was raised. A man about thirty-five years old, with a touch of gray at either temple, sad gray eyes, and a small thin mustache looked down at them.

“Why, that’s you!” cried Smith,

“Sh-h-h, not so loud!” Braling waved upward. The man in the window gestured significantly and vanished.

“I must be insane,” said Smith.

“Hold on a moment.”

They waited.

The street door of the apartment opened and the tall spare gentleman with the mustache and the grieved eyes came out to meet them.

“Hello, Braling,” he said.

“Hello, Braling,” said Braling.

They were identical.

Smith stared. “Is this your twin brother? I never knew —”

“No, no,” said Braling quietly. “Bend close. Put your ear to Braling Two’s chest.”

Smith hesitated and then leaned forward to place his head against the uncomplaining ribs.

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

“Oh no! It can’t be!”

“It is.”

“Let me listen again.”

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Smith staggered back and fluttered his eyelids, appalled. He reached out and touched the warm hands and the cheeks of the thing.

“Where’d you get him?”

“Isn’t he excellently fashioned?”

“Incredible. Where?”

“Give the man your card, Braling Two.”

Braling Two did a magic trick and produced a white card:

MARIONETTES, INC.²

Duplicate self or friends; new humanoid plastic 1990 models, guaranteed against all physical wear. From $ 7,600 to our $ 15,000 de luxe³ model.

“No,” said Smith.

“Yes,” said Braling.

“Naturally,” said Braling Two.

“How long has this gone on?”

“I’ve had him for a month. I keep him in the cellar in a toolbox. My wife never goes downstairs, and I have the only lock and key to that box. Tonight I said I wished to take a walk to buy a cigar. I went down the cellar and took Braling Two out of his box and sent him back up to sit with my wife while I came on out to see you, Smith.”

“Wonderful! He even smells like you!”

“It may be splitting hairs, but I think it highly ethical. After all, what my wife wants most of all is me. This mario­nette is me to the hairest detail. I’ve been home all evening. I shall be home with her for the next month. In the mean­time another gentleman will be in Rio after ten years of waiting. When I return from Rio, Braling Two here will go back in his box.”

Smith thought that over a minute or two. “Will he walk around without sustenance for a month?” he finally asked.

“For six months if necessary. And he’s built to do everything – eat, sleep, perspire – everything, natural as natural is. You’ll take good care of my wife, won’t you, Brailing Two?”

“Your wife is rather nice,” said Braling Two. “I’ve grown rather fond of her.”

Smith was beginning to tremble. “How long has Marionettes, Inc., been in business?”

“Secretly, for two years.”

“Could I – I mean, is there a possibility —” Smith took his friend’s elbow earnestly. “Can you tell me where can get one, a robot, a marionette, for myself? You will give me the address, won’t you?”

“Here you are.”

Smith took the card and turned it round and round. “Thank you,” he said. “You don’t know what this means. Just a little respite. A night or so, once a month even. My wife loves me so much she can’t bear to have me gone an hour. I love her dearly, you know, but remember the old poem: “Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly.” I just want her to relax her grip a little bit.

“You’re lucky, at least, that your wife loves you. Hate’s my problem. Not so easy.”

“Oh, Nettie loves me madly. It will be my task to make her love me comfortably.”

“Good luck to you, Smith. Do drop around while I’m in Rio. It will seem strange, if you suddenly stop calling by, to my wife. You’re to treat Braling Two, here, just like me.”

“Right! Goodbye. And thank you.”

Smith went smiling down the street. Braling and Braling Two turned and walked into the apartment hall.

On the crosstown bus Smith whistled softly, turning the^: white card in his fingers:

Clients must be pledged to secrecy, for while an act is pending in Congress⁴ to legalize Marionettes, Inc., it is still a felony, if caught, to use one.

“Well,” said Smith.

Clients must have a mold made of their body and a color index check of their eyes, lips, hair, skin, etc. Clients must expect to wait for two months until their model is finished.

Not so long, thought Smith. Two months from now my ribs will have a chance to mend from the crushing they’ve taken. Two months from now my hand will heal from being so constantly held. Two months from now my bruised under-lip will begin to reshape itself. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful... He flipped the card over.

Marionettes, Inc. is two years old and has a fine record of satisfied customers behind it. Our motto is “No Strings Attached.” Address: 43 South Wesley Drive.

The bus pulled to his stop; he alighted, and while hum­ming up the stairs he thought, Nettie and I have fifteen thou­sand on our joint bank account. I’ll just slip eight thousand out as a business venture, you might say. The marionette will probably pay back my money, with interest, in many ways. Nettie needn’t know. He unlocked the door and in a minute was in the bedroom. There lay Nettie, pale, huge, and piously asleep.

“Dear Nettie.” He was almost overwhelmed with remorse at her innocent face there in the semidarkness. ‘If you were awake you would smother me with kisses and coo in my ear. Really, you make me feel like a criminal. You have been such a good, loving wife. Sometimes it is impossible for me to believe you married me instead of that Bud Chapman you once liked. It seems that in the last month you have loved me more wildly than ever before.”

Tears came to his eyes. Suddenly he wished to kiss her, confess his love, tear up the card, forget the whole business. But as he moved to do this, his hand ached and his ribs cracked and groaned. He stopped, with a pained look in his eyes, and turned away. He moved out into the hall and through the dark rooms. Humming, he opened the kidney desk in the library and filched the bankbook. “Just take eight thousand dollars is all,” he said. “No more than that.” He stopped. “Wait a minute.”

He rechecked the bankbook frantically. “Hold on here!” he cried. “Ten thousand dollars is missing!” He leaped up. “There’s only five thousand left! What’s she done? What’s Nettie done with it? More hats, more clothes, more per­fume! Or, wait – I know! She bought that little house on the Hudson⁵ she’s been talking about for months, without so much as a by your leave!”

He stormed into the bedroom, righteous and indignant. What did she mean, taking their money like this! He bent over her. “Nettie, wake up!”

She did not stir. “What’ve you done with my money!” he bellowed.

She stirred fitfully. The light from the street flushed over her beautiful cheeks.

There was something about her. His heart throbbed violently. His tongue dried. He shivered. His knees suddenly turned to water. He collapsed. “Nettie, Nettie!” he cried. “What’ve you done with my money!”

And then, the horrid thought. And then the terror and the loneliness engulfed him. And then the fever and disillusionment. For, without desiring to do so, he bent forward and yet forward again until his fevered ear was resting firmly and irrevocably upon her pink bosom. “Nettie!” he cried. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

As Smith walked away down the avenue in the night, Braling and Braling Two turned in at the door to the apart­ment. “I’m glad he’ll be happy too,” said Braling.

“Yes,” said Braling Two abstractedly.

“Well, it’s the cellar box for you, B-Two.” Braling guided the other creature’s elbow down the stairs to the cellar.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” said Braling Two, as they reached the concrete floor and walked across it. “The cellar. I don’t like it. I don’t like that toolbox.” “I’ll try and fix up something more comfortable.”

“Marionettes are made to move, not to lie still. How would you like to lie in a box most of the time?”

“Well —”

“You wouldn’t like it at all. I keep running. There’s no way to shut me off. I’m perfectly alive and I have feelings.”

“It’ll only be a few days now. I’ll be off to Rio and you won’t have to stay in the box. You can live upstairs.”

Braling Two gestured irritably.

“And when you come back from having a good time, back in the box I go.

Braling said, “They didn’t tell me at the marionette shop that I’d get a difficult specimen.”

“There’s a lot they don’t know about us,” said Braling Two. “We’re pretty new. And we’re sensitive. I hate the idea of you going off and laughing and lying in the sun in Rio while we’re stuck here in the cold.”

“But I’ve wanted that trip all my life,” said Braling quietly.

He squinted his eyes and could see the sea and the moun­tains and the yellow sand. The sound of the waves was good to his inward mind. The sun was fine on his bared shoulders. The wine was most excellent. “I’ll never get to go to Rio,” said the other man. “Have you thought of that?”

“No, I —”

“And another thing. Your wife.”

“What about her?” asked Braling, beginning to edge toward the door.

“I’ve grown quite fond of her.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying your employment.” Braling licked his lips nervously.

“I’m afraid you don’t understand. I think – I’m in love with her.”

Braling took another step arid froze. “You’re in what?”

“And I’ve been thinking,” said Braling Two, “how nice it is in Rio and how I’ll never get there, and I’ve thought about your wife and – I think we could be very happy.”

“Th-that’s nice.” Braling strolled as casually as he could to the cellar door. “You won’t mind waiting a moment, will you? I have to make a phone call.”

“To whom?” Braling Two frowned.

“No one important.”

“To Marionettes, Incorporated? To tell them to come get me?”

“No, no – nothing like that!” He tried to rush out the door.

A metal-firm grip seized his wrists. “Don’t run!”

“Take your hands off!”

“No.”

“Did my wife put you up to this?”

“No.”

“Did she guess? Did she talk to you? Does she know? Is that it?” He screamed. A hand clapped over his mouth.

“You’ll never know, will you?” Braling Two smiled deli­cately. “You’ll never know.”

Braling struggled. “She must have guessed; she must have affected you!”

Braling Two said, “I’m going to put you in the box, lock it, and lose the key. Then I’ll buy another Rio ticket for your wife.”

“Now, now, wait a minute. Hold on. Don’t be rash. Let’s talk this over!”

“Goodbye, Braling.”

Ten minutes later Mrs. Braling awoke. She put her hand to her cheek. Someone had just kissed it. She shivered and looked up. “Why – you haven’t done that in years,” she murmured.

“We’ll see what we can do about that,” someone said.

1949

NOTES

1. Rio = Rio de Janeiro, a city in the south-east of Brazil, its former capital

2. Inc. = incorporated

3. De luxe = deluxe – sth that is of better quality than other things of the same type

4. Congress – the group of people elected to make laws in the US, consists of the Senate and the House of Representatives

5. The Hudson – a river in the north-east of the USA

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

unethical [adj] to admit sth (to sb) [v phrase] to object [v I] simple-minded [adj] to split hairs [v phrase] to relax your grip on [v phrase]

pained [adj] righteous [adj] to be engulfed with [v phrase] abstractedly [adv] to be stuck somewhere [v phrase] to be rash [v phrase]

EXERCISES

1. Match the columns to build typical collocations and make up sentences using them:

ethical righteous be engulfed with pained be / get stuck rash simple-minded

agreement, anger, behaviour, between the railings, decision, deed, desire, expression, fear, fright, hatred, in a traffic jam, indignation, in the snow, loneliness, look, marriage, outrage, panic, person, principle, question, smile, suggestion

2. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• To object

• Abstractedly

• Righteous

3. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning:

Ethical, rash, oppose, accept, object, moral, protest, acknowledge, disagree, virtuous, hasty, admit, impulsive, recognise.

4. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. And now, on the one night, you insist on turning in early.

2. I recall that I was quite firm on the subject.

3. I’ve grown rather fond of her.

4. Just a little respite. A night or so, once a month even.

5. He was almost overwhelmed with remorse at her innocent face there in the semidarkness.

5. Complete the sentences using the correct preposition which collocates with the verbs in bold and translate into Russian. Use the word combinations in sentences of your own:

1. It quickly got ____ (around/about/out) that he only asked Kate for a date to get back at his ex-girlfriend.

2. They invited him to drop _____ (around/about/by) whenever he wanted.

3. We’d better fix _____ (on/up/over) the damaged car – Dad is sure to hit the roof when he sees it in such awful condition!

4. Jane is not in the habit of jeering at other people, someone must have put her _____ (up to/on to/up with) it.

5. I want to talk it _____ (about/through/over) with you first; your opinion is of great importance to me!

6. Paraphrase or explain:

1. “Mustn’t crowd my luck,” said Braling.

2. I’ll be back in a month and no one the wiser, except you.

3. “Poor Smith, your marriage hasn’t exactly been roses, has it?”

“Not exactly, married to a woman who overdoes it.”

4. How I made it out this evening?

5. This marionette is me to the hairest detail.

6. Our motto is “No Strings Attached.”

7. She bought that little house on the Hudson she’s been talking about for months, without so much as a by your leave.

8. His knees suddenly turned to water.

7. Comment on the following:

1. It may be splitting hairs, but I think it highly ethical.

2. Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly.

3. There’s a lot they don’t know about us.

4. Did my wife put you up to this?

QUESTIONS

1. Speak about the main characters of the story. Specify what each of them found attractive in having a marionette.

2. What motives made Braling buy a marionette? What motives made Smith want to follow his example? Do you find them serious?

3. Does the use of marionettes in the story raise difficult ethical problems? Is it somehow related to cloning? What is your attitude to the possibility of cloning animals nowadays? What can it result in in future? Regard its possible outcome.

4. What advantages could a marionette give to its owner? Can you imagine yourself taking advantage of possessing a marionette?

5. Do you believe that marionettes / clones can help to solve family problems, cope with difficulties, stop marital breakup, etc.? Rely on the text of the story to prove your view.

6. Do you believe a marionette can substitute for a real person?

7. What is the symbolic meaning of the motto of Marionettes, Inc. “No Strings Attached”?

UNIT 10

HERE THERE BE TYGERS¹

*********

“You have to beat a planet at its own game,” said Chatterton. “Get in, rip it up, poison its animals, dam its rivers, sow its fields, mine it, nail it down, hack away at it, and get the hell out from under when you have what you want. Otherwise, a planet will fix you good. You can’t trust plan­ets. They’re bound to be different, bound to be bad, bound to be out to get you, especially this far off, a billion miles from nowhere, so you get them first. Tear their skin off, I say. Drag out the minerals and run away before the damn world explodes in your face. That’s the way to treat them.”

The rocket ship sank down towards planet 7 of star system 84. They had travelled millions upon millions of miles. Earth was far away, her system and her sun forgotten, her system settled and investigated and profited on, and other systems rummaged through and milked and tidied up, and now the rockets of these tiny men from an impossibly remote planet were probing out to far universes. In a few months, a few years, they could travel anywhere, for the speed of their rocket was the speed of a god, and now for the ten thou­sandth time one of the rockets of the far-circling hunt was feathering down towards an alien world.

“No,” said Captain Forester. “I have too much respect for other worlds to treat them the way you want to, Chatterton. It’s not my business to rape or ruin, anyway, thank God. I’m glad I’m just a rocket man. You’re the anthropologist-mineralogist. Go ahead, do your mining and ripping and scraping. I’ll just watch. I’ll just go around looking at this new world, whatever it is, however it seems. I like to look. All rocket men are lookers or they wouldn’t be rocket men. You like to smell new airs, if you’re a rocket man, and see new colours and new people if there are new people to see, and new oceans and islands.”

“Take your gun along,” said Chatterton.

“In my holster,” said Forester.

They turned to the port together and saw the green-world rising to meet their ship. “I wonder what it thinks of us?” said Forester.

“It won’t like me,” said Chatterton. “By God, I’ll see to it it won’t like me. And I don’t care, you know. I don’t give a damn. I’m out for the money. Land us over there, will you, Captain; that looks like iron country if I ever saw it.”

It was the freshest green-colour they had seen since child­hood.

Lakes lay like clear blue water droplets through the soft hills; there were no loud highways, signboards, or cities. It’s a sea of green golf-links, thought Forester, which goes on forever. Putting greens, driving greens, you could walk ten thousand miles in any direction and never finish your game A Sunday planet, a croquet-lawn world, where you could lie on your back, clover in your lips, eyes half-shut, smiling at the sky, smelling the grass, drowse through an eternal Sabbath², rousing only on occasion to turn the Sunday paper or crack the red-striped wooden ball through the hoop³.

“If ever a planet was a woman, this one is.”

“Woman on the outside, man on the inside,” said Chat­terton. “All hard underneath, all male iron, copper, uranium, black sod. Don’t let the cosmetics fool you.”

He walked to the bin where the Earth Drill waited. Its great screw-snout glittered bluely, ready to stab seventy feet deep and suck out corks of earth, deeper still with extensions into the heart of the planet. Chatterton winked at it. “We’ll fix your woman, Forester, but good.”

“Yes, I know you will,” said Forester, quietly.

The rocket landed.

“It’s too green, too peaceful,” said Chatterton. “I don’t like it.” He turned to the captain. “We’ll go out with our rifles.”

“I give orders, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes, and my company pays our way with millions of dollars of machinery we must protect; quite an investment.”

The air on the new planet 7 in star system 84 was good. The port swung wide. The men filed out into the greenhouse world.

The last man to emerge was Chatterton, gun in hand.

As Chatterton set foot to the green lawn, the earth trem­bled. The grass shook. The distant forest rumbled. The sky seemed to blink and darken imperceptibly. The men were watching Chatterton when it happened.

“An earthquake, by God!”

Chatterton’s face paled. Everyone laughed.

“It doesn’t like you, Chatterton!”

“Nonsense!”

The trembling died away at last.

“Well,” said Captain Forester, “it didn’t quake for if so it must be that it doesn’t approve of your philosophy.”

“Coincidence,” Chatterton smiled. “Come on now on the double. I want the Drill out here in a half-hour for samplings.”

“Just a moment.” Forester stopped laughing. “We’ve got to clear the area first, be certain there’re no hostile people or animals. Besides, it isn’t every year you hit a planet like this, very nice; can you blame us if we want to have a look at it?”

“All right.” Chatterton joined them. “Let’s get it over with.”

They left a guard at the ship and they walked away over fields and meadows, over small hills and into little valleys. Like a bunch of boys out hiking on the finest day of the best summer in the most beautiful year in history, walking in the croquet weather where if you listened you could hear the whisper of the wooden ball across grass, the click through the hoop, the gentle undulations of voices, a sudden high drift of women’s laughter from some ivy-shaded porch, the tinkle of ice in the summer tea-pitcher.

“Hey,” said Driscoll, one of the younger crewmen, sniff­ing the air. “I brought a baseball and bat; we’ll have a game later. What a diamond!”

The men laughed quietly in the baseball season, in the good quiet wind for tennis, in the weather for bicycling and picking wild grapes.

“How’d you like the job of mowing all this?” asked Driscoll.

The men stopped.

“I knew there was something wrong!” cried Chatterton. “This grass; it’s freshly cut!”

“Probably an unknown species of grass!”

Chatterton spat on the green grass and rubbed it in with his boot. “I don’t like it, I don’t like it. If anything happened to us, no one on Earth would ever know. Silly policy: if a rocket fails to return, we never send a second rocket to check the reason why.”

“Natural enough,” explained Forester, “We can’t waste time on a thousand hostile worlds, fighting futile wars. Each rocket represents years, money, lives. We can’t afford to waste two rockets if one rocket proves a planet hostile. We go on to peaceful planets. Like this one.”

“I often wonder,” said Driscoll, “what happened to all those lost expeditions on worlds we’ll never try again.”

Chatterton eyed the distant forest. “They were shot, stabbed, broiled for dinner. Even as we may be, any minute. It’s time we got back to work, Captain!”

They stood at the top of a little rise.

“Feel,’ said Driscoll, his hands and arms out loosely. “Remember how you used to run when you were a kid, am how the wind felt? Like feathers on your arms. You ran and thought any minute you’d fly, but you never quite did.”

The men stood remembering. There was a smell of pollen and new rain drying upon a million grass blades.

Driscoll gave a little run. “Feel it, by God, the wind! You know, we never have really flown by ourselves. We have to sit inside tons of metal, away from flying, really. We’ve never flown like birds fly, to themselves. Wouldn’t it be nice to put your arms out like, this —” He extended his arms. “And run.” He ran ahead of them, laughing at his idiocy. “And fly!” he cried.

He flew.

Time passed on the silent gold wrist-watches of the men standing below. They stared up. And from the sky came a high sound of almost unbelievable laughter.

“Tell him to come down,’” whispered Chatterton. “He’ll be killed.”

Nobody heard. Their faces were raised away from Chat­terton; they were stunned and smiling.

At last Driscoll landed at their feet. “Did you see me? My God, I flew!”

They had seen.

“Let me sit down, oh Lord, Lord.” Driscoll slapped his knees, chuckling. “I’m a sparrow, I’m a hawk, God bless me. Go on, all of you, try it!”

“It’s the wind. It picked me up and flew me!” he said, a moment later, gasping, shivering with delight.

“Let’s get out of here.” Chatterton started turning slowly in circles, watching the blue sky. “It’s a trap, it wants us all to fly in the air. Then it’ll drop us all at once and kill us. I’m going back to the ship.”

“You’ll wait for my order on that,” said Forester.

The men were frowning, standing in the warm-cool air, while the wind sighed about them. There was a kite sound in the air, a sound of eternal March.

“I asked the wind to fly me,” said Driscoll. “And it did!”

Forester waved the others aside. “I’ll chance it next. If I’m killed, back to the ship, all of you.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t allow this; you’re the captain,” said Chatterton. “We can’t risk you.” He took out his gun. “I should have some sort of authority of force here. This game’s gone on too long; I’m ordering us back to the ship!”

“Holster your gun,” said Forester quietly.

“Stand still, you idiot!” Chatterton blinked now at this man, now at that. “Haven’t you felt it? This world’s alive, it has a look to it, it’s playing with us, biding its time.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Forester. “You’re going back to the ship, in a moment, under arrest, if you don’t put up that gun.”

“If you fools won’t come with me, you can die out here. I’m going back, get my samples, and get out.”

“Chatterton!”

“Don’t try to stop me!”

Chatterton started to run. Then, suddenly, he gave a cry. Everyone shouted and looked up.

“There he goes,” said Driscoll.

Chatterton was up in the sky.

Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye. Chatterton sat stunned on the side of the hill. The other men sat around him, exhausted and laughing. He would not look at them, he would not look at the sky, he would only feel of the earth, and his arms and his legs and his body, tightening in on himself.

“God, wasn’t it perfect!” said a man named Koestler.

They had all flown, like orioles and eagles and sparrows, and they were all happy.

“Come out of it, Chatterton, it was fun, wasn’t it?” said Koestler.

“It is impossible.” Chatterton shut his eyes, tight, tight. “It can’t do it. There’s only one way for it to do it; it’s alive. The air’s alive. Like a fist, it picked me up. Any minute now, it can kill us all. It’s alive!”

“All right,” said Koestler, “say it’s alive. And a living thing must have purposes. Suppose the purpose of this world is to make us happy.”

As if to add to this, Driscoll came flying up, canteens, in each hand. “I found a creek, tested and pure water, wait’ll you try it!”

Forester took a canteen, nudged Chatterton with it, offering a drink. Chatterton shook his head and drew hastily away. He put his hands over his face. “It’s the blood of this planet, living blood. Drink that, put that inside and you put this world inside you to peer out your eyes and listen through your ears. No thanks!”

Forester shrugged and drank.

“Wine!” he said.

“It can’t be!”

“It is. Smell it, taste it! A rare white wine!”

“French domestic.” Driscoll sipped his.

“Poison,” said Chatterton.

They passed the canteens round.

They idled on through the gentle afternoon, not wanting to do anything to disturb the peace that lay all about them. They were like very young men in the presence of great beauty, of a fine and famous woman, afraid that by some word, some gesture, they might turn her face away, avert her loveliness and her kindly attentions. They had felt the earthquake that had greeted Chatterton, thought Forester, and they did not want earthquake. Let them enjoy this Day After School Lets Out⁴, this fishing weather. Let them sit under the shade trees or walk on the tender hills, but let them drill no drillings, test no testings, contaminate no contaminations.

They found a small stream which poured into a boiling water pool. Fish, swimming in the cold creek above, fell glittering into the hot spring and floated, minutes later, cooked, to the surface.

Chatterton reluctantly joined the others, eating.

“It’ll poison us all. There’s always a trick to things like this. I’m sleeping in the rocket tonight. You can sleep out if you want. To quote a map I saw in medieval history: “Here there be tygers.” Some time tonight when you’re sleeping, he tigers and cannibals will show up.”

Forester shook his head. “I’ll go along with you, this planet is alive. It’s a race in itself. But it needs us to show off to, to appreciate its beauty. What’s the use of a stage full of miracles if there’s no audience?”

But Chatterton was busy. He was bent over, being sick.

“I’m poisoned! Poisoned!”

They held his shoulders until the sickness passed. They gave him water. The others were feeling fine.

“Better eat nothing but ship’s food from now on,” advised Forester. “It’d be safer.”

“We’re starting work right now.” Chatterton swayed, wiping his mouth. “We’ve wasted a whole day. I’ll work alone if I have to. I’ll show this damned thing.”

He staggered away towards the rocket.

“He doesn’t know when he’s well off,” murmured Driscoll. Can’t we stop him, Captain?”

“He practically owns the expedition. We don’t have to help him; there’s a clause in our contract that guarantees refusal to work under dangerous conditions. So... do unto this Picnic Ground as you would have it do unto you⁵. No initial-cutting on the trees. Replace the turf on the greens. Clean up your banana-peels after you.”

Now, below, in the ship there was an immense humming. From the storage port rolled the great shining Drill. Chatter­ton followed it, called directions to its robot radio. “This way, here!”

“The fool.”

“Now!” cried Chatterton.

The Drill plunged its long screw-bore into the green grass.

Chatterton waved up at the other men. “I’ll show it!”

The sky trembled.

The Drill stood in the centre of a little sea of grass. For moment it plunged away, bringing up moist corks of sod, which it spat unceremoniously into a shaking analysis bin.

Now the Drill gave a wrenched, metallic squeal like a monster interrupted at its feed. From the soil beneath it, low, bluish liquids bubbled up.

Chatterton shouted, “Get back, you fool!”

The Drill lumbered in a prehistoric dance. It shrieked like a mighty train turning on a sharp curve, throwing out red sparks. It was sinking. The black slime gave under it in a dark pool.

With a coughing sigh, a series of pants and churnings the Drill sank into a black scum like an elephant shot a dying, trumpeting, like a mammoth at the end of an Age, vanishing limb by ponderous limb into the pit.

“My God,” said Forester under his breath, fascinated with the scene. “You know what that is, Driscoll? It’s tar. The damn fool machine hit a tar-pit!”

“Listen, listen!” cried Chatterton at the Drill, running about on the edge of the oily lake. “This way, over here!”

But like the old tyrants of the earth, the dinosaurs with their tubed and screaming necks, the Drill was plunging and thrashing in the one lake from where there was no returning to bask on the firm and understandable shore. Chatterton turned to the other men far away. “Do something, someone!”

The Drill was gone.

The tar-pit bubbled and gloated, sucking the hidden monster bones. The surface of the pool was silent. A huge bubble, the last, rose, expelled a scent of ancient petroleum and fell apart.

The men came down and stood on the edge of the little black sea.

Chatterton stopped yelling.

After a long minute of staring into the silent tar-pool, Chatterton turned and looked at the hills, blindly, at the green rolling lawns. The distant trees were growing fruit now and dropping it, softly, to the ground.

“I’ll show it,” he said quietly.

“Take it easy, Chatterton.”

“I’ll fix it,” he said.

“Sit down, have a drink.”

“I’ll fix it good, I’ll show it it can’t do this to me.” Chatterton started off back to the ship. “Wait a minute, now,” said Forester.

Chatterton ran. “I know what to do, I know how to fix it!”

“Stop him!” said Forester. He ran, then remembered he could fly. “The A-Bomb’s on the ship, if he should get to that...”

The other men had thought of that and were in the air. A small grove of trees stood between the rocket and Chatterton as he ran on the ground, forgetting that he could fly, or afraid to fly, or not allowed to fly, yelling. The crew headed for the rocket to wait for him, the Captain with them. They arrived, formed a line, and shut the rocket port. The last they saw of Chatterton he was plunging through the edge of the tiny forest.

The crew stood waiting.

“That fool, that crazy guy.”

Chatterton did not come out on the other side of the small woodland.

“He’s turned back, waiting for us to relax our guard,”

“Go bring him in,” said Forester.

Two men flew off.

Now, softly, a great and gentle rain fell upon the green world.

“The final touch,” said Driscoll. “We’d never have to build houses here. Notice it’s not raining on us. It’s raining all around, ahead, behind us. What a world!”

They stood dry in the middle of the blue, cool rain. The sun was setting. The moon, a large one the colour of ice, rose over the freshened hills.

“There’s only one more thing this world needs.”

“Yes,” said everyone, thoughtfully, slowly.

“We’ll have to go looking,” said Driscoll. “It’s logical. The wind flies us, the trees and streams feed us, everything is alive. Perhaps if we asked for companionship...”

“I’ve thought a long time, today and other days,” said Koestler. “We’re all bachelors, been travelling for years, and tired of it. Wouldn’t it be nice to settle down somewhere. Here, maybe. On Earth you work like hell just to save enough to buy a house, pay taxes; the cities stink. Here, you won’t even need a house, with this weather. If it gets monotonous you can ask for rain, clouds, snow, changes. You don’t have to work here for anything.”

“It’d be boring. We’d go crazy.”

“No,” Koestler said, smiling. “If life got too soft, all we’d have to do is repeat a few times what Chatterton said: “Here there be tigers.” Listen!”

Far away, wasn’t there the faintest roar of a giant cat, hidden in the twilight forest?

The men shivered.

“A versatile world,” said Koestler dryly. “A woman who’ll do anything to please her guests, as long as we’re kind to her. Chatterton wasn’t kind.”

“Chatterton. What about him?”

As if to answer this, someone cried from a distance. The two men who had flown off to find Chatterton were waving at the edge of the woods.

Forester, Driscoll, and Koestler flew down alone.

“What’s up?”

The men pointed into the forest. “Thought you’d want to see this, Captain. It’s damned eerie.” One of the men indi­cated a pathway. “Look here, sir.”

The marks of great claws stood on the path, fresh and clear.

“And over here.”

A few drops of blood.

A heavy smell of some feline animal hung in the air. “Chatterton?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever find him, Captain.”

Faintly, faintly, moving away, now gone in the breathing silence of twilight, came the roar of a tiger.

The men lay on the resilient grass by the rocket and the night was warm. “Reminds me of nights when I was a kid,” said Driscoll. “My brother and I waited for the hottest night in July and then we slept on the lawn, counting the stars, talking; it was a great night, the best night of the year, and now, when I think back on it, the best night of my life.” Then he added, “Not counting tonight, of course.”

“I keep thinking about Chatterton,” said Koestler.

“Don’t,” said Forester. “We’ll sleep a few hours and take off. We can’t chance staying here another day. I don’t mean the danger that got Chatterton. No. I mean, if we stayed on we’d get to liking this world too much. We’d never want to leave.”

A soft wind blew over them.

“I don’t want to leave now.” Driscoll put his hands be­hind his head, lying quietly. “And it doesn’t want us to leave.”

“If we go back to Earth and tell everyone what a lovely planet it is, what then, Captain? They’ll come smashing in here and ruin it.”

“No,” said Forester, idly. “First, this planet wouldn’t put up with a full-scale invasion. I don’t know what I’d do, but it could probably think of some interesting things. Secondly, I like this planet too much; I respect it. We’ll go back to Earth and lie about it. Say it’s hostile. Which it would be to the average man, like Chatterton, jumping in here to hurt it. I guess we won’t be lying after all.”

“Funny thing,” said Koestler. “I’m not afraid. Chatterton vanishes, is killed most horribly, perhaps, yet we lie here, no one runs, no one trembles. It’s idiotic. Yet it’s right. We trust it, and it trusts us.”

“Did you notice, after you drank just so much of the wine-water, you didn’t want more? A world of moderation.”

They lay listening to something like the great heart of this earth beating slowly and warmly under their bodies.

Forester thought, I’m thirsty.

A drop of rain splashed on his lips.

He laughed quietly.

I’m lonely, he thought.

Distantly, he heard soft high voices.

He turned his eyes in upon a vision. There was a group of hills from which flowed a clear river, and in the shallows of that river, sending up spray, their faces shimmering, were the beautiful women. They played like children on the shore. And it came to Forester to know about them and their life. They were nomads, roaming the face of this world as was their desire. There were no highways or cities, there were only hills and plains and winds to carry them like white feathers where they wished. As Forester shaped the question, some invisible answerer whispered the answers. There were no men. These women, alone, produced their race. The men had vanished fifty thousand years ago. And where were these women now? A mile down from the green forest, a mile over on the wine-stream by the six white stones, and a third mile to the large river. There, in the shallows, were the women who would make fine wives, and raise beautiful children.

Forester opened his eyes. The other men were sitting up.

“I had a dream.”

They had all dreamed.

“A mile down from the green forest...”

“...a mile over the wine-stream...”

“...by the six white stones...” said Koestler.

“...and a third mile to the large river,” said Driscoll, sitting there.

Nobody spoke again for a moment. They looked at silver rocket standing there in the starlight.

“Do we walk or fly, Captain?”

Forester said nothing.

Driscoll said, “Captain, let’s stay. Let’s never go back to Earth. They’ll never come and investigate to see what happened to us, they’ll think we were destroyed here. What do you say?”

Forester’s face was perspiring. His tongue moved again and again on his lips. His hands twitched over his knees. The crew sat waiting.

“It’d be nice,” said the captain.

“Sure.”

“But...” Forester sighed. “We’ve got our job to do. People invested in our ship. We owe it to them to go back.”

Forester got up. The men still sat on the ground, not listening to him.

“It’s such a goddamn nice night,” said Koestler. They stared at the soft hills and the trees and the river running off to other horizons.

“Let’s get aboard ship,” said Forester, with difficulty.

“Captain...”

“Get aboard,” he said.

The rocket rose into the sky. Looking back, Forester saw every valley and every tiny lake.

“We should’ve stayed,” said Koestler.

“Yes, I know.”

“It’s not too late to turn back.”

“I’m afraid it is.” Forester made an adjustment on the port telescope. “Look now.”

Koestler looked.

The face of the world was changed. Tigers, dinosaurs, mammoths appeared. Volcanoes erupted, cyclones and hurricanes tore over the hills in a welter and fury of weather

“Yes, she was a woman all right,” said Forester. “Waiting for visitors for millions of years, preparing herself, making herself beautiful. She put on her best face for us. When Chatterton treated her badly, she warned him a few times, and then, when he tried to ruin her beauty, she eliminated him. She wanted to be loved, like every woman, for herself, not for her wealth. So now, after she had offered us everything, we turn our backs. She’s the woman scorned. She let us go, yes, but we can never come back. She’ll be waiting for us with those…” He nodded to the tigers and the cyclones and boiling seas.

“Captain,” said Koestler.

“Yes.”

“It’s a little late to tell you this. But just before we took off, I was in charge of the air-lock. I let Driscoll slip away from the ship. He wanted to go. I couldn’t refuse him. I’m sensible. He’s back there now on that planet.”

They both turned to the viewing port.

After a long while, Forester said, “I’m glad. I’m glad one of us had enough sense to stay.”

“But he’s dead by now!”

“No, that display down there is for us, perhaps a visual hallucination. Underneath all the tigers and lions and hurricanes, Driscoll is quite safe and alive, because he’s her only audience now. Oh, she’ll spoil him rotten. He’ll lead a wonderful life, he will, while we’re slugging it out up and down the system looking for but never finding a planet quite like this again. No, we won’t try to go back and rescue Driscoll. I don’t think “she” would let us anyway. Full speed ahead, Koestler, make it full speed.”

The rocket leaped forward into greater acceleration.

And just before the planet dwindled away in brightness and mist, Forester imagined he could see Driscoll very clearly, walking away down from the green forest, whistling quietly, all of the fresh planet around him, a wine-creek flowing for him, baked fish lolling in the hot springs, fruit ripening in the midnight trees, and distant forests and lakes waiting for him to happen by. Driscoll walked away across the endless green lawns, near the six white stones, beyond the forest to the edge of the large bright river.

1951

NOTES

1. Here there be tygers – watch out, tigers are sure to attack

2. Sabbath – the Sabbath, Sunday, considered as a day of rest and prayer by most Christian churches

3. Crack the red-striped wooden ball through the hoop – it refers to croquet playing; croquet is an outdoor game played on grass in which players hit balls with wooden mallets (= long-handled hammers) so that they roll under curved wires or through a series of hoops placed in the ground

4. Day After School Lets Out – the day when schools break off for holidays

5. Do unto this Picnic Ground as you would have it do unto you – a modified quotation from the Bible: And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; unto = to

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

alien [adj] to rummage (through) [v I] futile [adj] to bide one’s time [v phrase] versatile [adj]

eerie [adj] to make an adjustment [v phrase] a welter of [n phrase] to turn your back on [v phrase] to dwindle (away) [v I]

EXERCISES

1. Collocate the words in the columns and make up sentences with each:

futile versatile eerie

action, actress, attempt, exercise, feeling, food, howl, lavender oil, material, musician, performer, sound, try, work table.

2. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Futile

• Alien

• Versatile

3. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning:

Futile, average, fascinated, ordinary, pointless, interested, normal, intrigued, standard, useless.

4. Fill in the gaps using the words from the exercise above:

1. March 8^th is a holiday in Russia, but in Norway it is a _________ working day.

2. The _________ building in our town has got 5 storeys.

3. The more I hear about her latest book, the more __________ I become.

4. Well, the book is entitled “Who are you?” – Oh, I’m __________.

5. I made several __________ attempts to talk him out of buying that car. He was firm on the subject.

6. She was really __________ when I showed her my new article.

7. When I babysat I was paid the __________ rate for the job.

8. Mr Bosh was an __________ man living in an __________ house in an _________ street.

9. Worrying is a __________ activity.

10. I know a person you can borrow some money from! It’s Denis – he’s making a lot of money from his computer websites. – It’s __________ information, he left for Japan yesterday.

11. She was ___________ by his voice on the phone, that’s why she agreed to a blind date.

12. Searching luggage at airports is now __________ practice.

5. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. “Woman on the outside, a man on the inside,” said Chatterton.

2. They are bound to get you, especially this far off...

3. By God, I’ll see to it it won’t like me.

4. Let’s get it over with.

5. It’s time we got back to work, Captain!

6. “I’ll be the judge of that,” said Forester.

7. Better eat nothing but ship’s food from now on.

8. Oh, she’ll spoil him rotten.

6. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the most appropriate phrase from the list below:

1. The lion _________ ____ the antelope trying to it eat it up as quickly as possible.

2. My Mum was almost asleep when my brother finally _________ ____. It turned out the car had broken down.

3. She _________ ____ all the suggestions, thinking that only her point of view was right.

4. I’d like to see you _________ ____ and get a good all-round education.

5. She hated him so much that she _________ ____ the note from him into tiny pieces.

6. She finally managed to _________ him ____, and he told her the truth.

7. You’ll have to _________ ____ his behaviour if you are determined to save your marriage.

8. Don’t pay attention to her – she is just _________ ____.

_____________________________________________________________

to hack away at, to rip sth up, to nail sb/sth down, to wave sth aside,

to show up, to settle down, to put up with, to show off

7. Paraphrase or explain:

1. You have to beat a planet at its own game.

2. Otherwise, a planet will fix you good.

3. Come on now on the double.

4. They idled on through the gentle afternoon, not wanting to disturb the peace that lay all about them.

5. He’s turned back, waiting for us to relax our guard.

6. A world of moderation.

8. Comment on the following:

1. They’re bound to be different, bound to be bad, bound to be out to get you.

2. I have too much respect for other worlds, to treat them the way you want to.

3. If ever a planet was a woman, this one is.

4. This world is alive, it has a look to it, it’s playing with us, biding its time.

5. Suppose the purpose of this world is to make us happy.

6. I’ll show it.

7. I mean, if we stayed on we’d get to liking this world too much. We’d never want to leave.

QUESTIONS

1. Comment on the title of the story, specify its implications.

2. Do you think the planet was really alive? Prove your point.

3. Two different attitudes to Nature voiced in the story. Discuss advantages / disadvantages of each. Analyze Chatterton’s behaviour. Why was he so hostile from the very beginning?

4. Why were the rocket men so eager to go back to Nature, so eager to settle down there? What made them feel happy on that planet? Why did they yearn to stay there and why did they give up the idea in the long run?

5. People only exploit natural resources giving nothing in return. Do you believe Nature can punish mankind for what it has done to it? How and when?

6. Do you think Driscoll will be happy on the planet? Would you like to live on such a planet?

7. Do you find the story optimistic or pessimistic? The author’s message as you see it.

UNIT 11

NIGHT MEETING

*********

Before going on up into the blue hills, Tomás Gomez topped for gasoline at the lonely station.

“Kind of alone out here, aren’t you, Pop¹?” said Tomas.

The old man wiped off the windshield of the small truck.

“Not bad.”

“How do you like Mars, Pop?”

“Fine, Always something new. I made up my mind when I came here last year I wouldn’t expect nothing, nor ask nothing, nor be surprised at nothing.² We’ve got to forget Earth and how things were. We’ve got to look at what we’re in here, and how different it is. I get a hell of a lot of fun out of just the weather here. It’s Martian weather. Hot as hell daytimes, cold as hell nights. I get a big kick out of the different flowers and different rain. I came to Mars to retire and I wanted to retire in a place where everything is different. An old man needs to have things different. Young people don’t want to talk to him, other old people bore hell out of him. So I thought the best thing for me is a place so different that all you got to do is open your eyes and you’re entertained. I got this gas station. If business picks up too much, I’ll move on back to some other old highway that’s not so busy, where I can earn just enough to live on and still have time to feel the different things here.”

“You got the right idea, Pop,” said Tomas, his brown hands idly on the wheel. He was feeling good. He had been working in one of the new colonies for ten days straight and now he had two days off and was on his way to a party.

“I’m not surprised at anything any more,” said the old man. “I’m just looking. I’m just experiencing. If you can’t take Mars for what it is, you might as well go back to Earth. Everything’s crazy up here, the soil, the air, the canals, the natives (I never saw any yet, but I hear they’re around), the clocks. Even my clock acts funny. Even time is crazy up here. Sometimes I feel I’m here all by myself, no one else on the whole damn planet. I’d take bets on it. Sometimes I feel about eight years old, my body squeezed up and every­thing else tall. Jesus, it’s just the place for an old man. Keeps me alert and keeps me happy. You know what Mars is? It’s like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago — don’t know if you ever had one — they called them kaleido­scopes, bits of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that’s Mars. Enjoy it. Don’t ask it to be nothing else but what it is. Jesus, you know that highway right there, built by the Martians, is over sixteen centuries old and still in good con­dition? That’s one dollar and fifty cents, thanks and good night.”

Tomás drove off down the ancient highway, laughing quietly.

It was a long road going into darkness and hills and he held to the wheel, now and again reaching into his lunch bucket and taking out a piece of candy. He had been driving steadily for an hour, with no other car on the road, no light, just the road going under, the hum, the roar, and Mars out there, so quiet. Mars was always quiet, but quieter tonight than any other. The deserts and empty seas swung by him, and the mountains against the stars.

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight — Tomás shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck — tonight you could almost touch Time.

He drove the truck between hills of Time. His neck prick­led and he sat up, watching ahead.

He pulled into a little dead Martian town, stopped the engine, and let the silence come in around him. He sat, not breathing, looking out at the white buildings in the moonlight. Uninhabited for centuries. Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect, nevertheless.

He started the engine and drove on another mile or more before stopping again, climbing out, carrying his lunch bucket, and walking to a little promontory where he could look back at that dusty city. He opened his thermos and poured himself a cup of coffee. A night bird flew by. He felt very good, very much at peace.

Perhaps five minutes later there was a sound. Off in the hills, where the ancient highway curved, there was a motion, a dim light, and then a murmur.

Tomás turned slowly with the coffee cup in his hand. And out of the hills came a strange thing. It was a machine like a jade-green insect, a praying man­tis, delicately rushing through the cold air, indistinct, countless green diamonds winking over its body, and red jewels that glittered with multifaceted eyes. Its six legs fell upon the ancient highway with the sounds of a sparse rain which dwindled away, and from the back of the machine a Martian with melted gold for eyes looked down at Tomás as if he were looking into a well.

Tomás raised his hand and thought Hello! Automatically but did not move his lips, for this was a Martian. But Tomás had swum in blue rivers on Earth, with strangers passing on the road, and eaten in strange houses with strange people, and his weapon had always been his smile. He did not carry a gun. And he did not feel the need of one now, even with the little fear that gathered about his heart at this moment. The Martian’s hands were empty too. For a moment they looked across the cool air at each other.

It was Tomas who moved first.

“Hello!” he called.

“Hello!” called the Martian in his own language. They did not understand each other.

“Did you say hello?” they both asked.

“What did you say?” they said, each in a different tongue.

They scowled.

“Who are you?” said Tomás in English.

“What are you doing here?” in Martian; the stranger’s lips moved.

“Where are you going?” they said, and looked bewildered.

“’I’m Tomás Gomez.”

“I’m Muhe Ca.”

Neither understood, but they tapped their chests with the words and then it became clear.

And then the Martian laughed. “Wait!” Tomás felt his head touched, but no hand had touched him. “There!” said the Martian in English. “That’s better!”

“You learned my language, so quick!”

“Nothing at all!”

They looked, embarrassed with a new silence, at the steaming coffee he had in one hand.

“Something different?’” said the Martian, eyeing him and the coffee, referring to them both, perhaps.

“May I offer you a drink?” said Tomas.

“Please.”

The Martian slid down from his machine.

A second cup was produced and filled, steaming. Tomás held it out.

Their hands met and — like mist — fell through each other.

“Christ!” cried Tomas, and dropped the cup.

“Name of the Gods!” said the Martian in his own tongue.

“Did you see what happened?” they both whispered.

They were very cold and terrified.

The Martian bent to touch the cup but could not touch it.

“Jesus!” said Tomás.

“Indeed.” The Martian tried again and again to get hold of the cup, but could not. He stood up and thought for a moment, then took a knife from his belt. “Hey!” cried Tomás. “You misunderstand. Catch!” said the Martian, and tossed it. Tomás cupped his hands. The knife fell through his flesh. It hit the ground. Tomás bent to pick it up but could not touch it, and he recoiled shivering.

Now he looked at the Martian against the sky.

“The stars!” he said.

“The stars!” said the Martian, looking, in turn, at Tomás.

The stars were white and sharp beyond the flesh of the Martian, and they were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphorescent membrane of a gelatinous sea fish. You could see stars flickering like violet eyes in the Martian’s stomach and chest, and through his wrists, like jewelry.

“I can see through you!” said Tomás.

“And I through you!” said the Martian, stepping back.

Tomas felt of his own body and, feeling the warmth was reassured. I am real, he thought.

The Martian touched his own nose and lips. “I have flesh,” he said, half aloud. “I am alive.”

Tomás stared at the stranger. “And if I am real, then you. Must be dead.”

“No, you!”

“A ghost!”

“A phantom!”

They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself in­tact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds.

I’m drunk, thought Tomás. I won’t tell anyone of this tomorrow, no, no.

They stood there on the ancient highway, neither of them moving.

“Where are you from?” asked the Martian at last.

“Earth.”

“What is that?”

“There.” Tomás nodded to the sky.

“When?”

“We landed over a year ago, remember?”

“No.”

“And all of you were dead, all but a few. You’re rare, don’t you know that?”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, dead. I saw the bodies. Black, in the rooms, in the houses, dead. Thousands of them.”

“That’s ridiculous. We’re alive!”

“Mister, you’re invaded, only you don’t know it. You must have escaped.”

“I haven’t escaped; there was nothing to escape. What do you mean? I’m on my way to a festival now at the canal, near the Eniall Mountains. I was there last night. Don’t you see the city there?” The Martian pointed.

Tomás looked and saw the ruins. “Why, that city’s been dead thousands of years.”

The Martian laughed. “Dead? I slept there yesterday!”

“And I was in it a week ago and the week before that, and I just drove through it now, and it’s a heap. See the broken pillars?”

“Broken? Why, I see them perfectly. The moonlight helps. And the pillars are upright.”

“There’s dust in the streets,” said Tomas.

“The streets are clean!”

“The canals are empty right there.”

“The canals are full of lavender wine!”

“It’s dead.”

“It’s alive!” protested the Martian, laughing more now. “Oh, you’re quite wrong. See all the carnival lights? There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets there. That’s where I’m going now, to the festi­val; we’ll float on the waters all night long; we’ll sing, we’ll drink, we’ll make love. Can’t you see it?”

“Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. Ask any of our party. Me, I’m on my way to Green City tonight; that’s the new colony we just raised over near Illinois High­way. You’re mixed up. We brought in a million board feet of Oregon lumber and a couple dozen tons of good steel nails and hammered together two of the nicest little villages you ever saw. Tonight we’re warming one of them. A couple rockets are coming in from Earth, bringing our wives and girl-friends. There’ll be barn dances and whiskey —”

The Martian was now disquieted. “You say it is over that way?”

“There are the rockets.” Tomás walked him to the edge of the hill and pointed down. “See?”

“No.”

“Damn it, there they are! Those long silver things.”

“No.”

Now Tomás laughed. “You’re blind!”

“I see very well. You are the one who does not see.”

“But you see the new town, don’t you?”

“I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low tide.”

“Mister, that water’s been evaporated for forty centuries.”

“Ah, now, that’s enough.”

“It’s true, I tell you.”

The Martian grew very serious. “Tell me again. You do not see the city the way 1 describe it? The pillars very white, the boats very slender, the festival lights — oh, I see then clearly! And listen! I can hear them singing. It’s no space away at all.”

Tomás listened and shook his head. “No.”

“And I, on the other hand,” said the Martian, “cannot see what you describe. Well.”

Again they were cold. An ice was in their flesh.

“Can it be...?”

“What?”

“You say ‘from the sky’?”

“Earth.”

“Earth, a name, nothing,” said the Martian. “But... as I came up the pass an hour ago...” He touched the back his neck. “I felt...”

“Cold?”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“Cold again. Oddly. There was a thing to the light, to the hills, the road,” said the Martian. “I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if were the last man alive on this world...”

“So did I!” said Tomás, and it was like talking to аn old and dear friend, confiding, growing warm with the topic.

The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. “This can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are a figment of the Past!”

“No, you are from the Past,” said the Earth Man, having had time to think of it now.

“You are so certain. How can you prove who is from the Past, who from the Future? What year is it?”

“Two thousand and one!”

“What does that mean to me?”

Tomás considered and shrugged. “Nothing.”

“It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S. E. С. It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show us how the stars stand?”

“But the ruins prove it! They prove that I am the Fu­ture, I am alive, you are dead!”

“Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stom­ach hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it. Two strangers passing. Ruins, you say?”

“Yes. You’re afraid?”

“Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think — the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?’ The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. “But there they are. I see them. Isn’t that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.”

And for Tomás the rockets, far away, waiting for him, and the town and the women from Earth. “We can never agree,” he said.

“Let us agree to disagree,” said the Martian. “What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don’t ask. But the night is very short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds.” Tomás put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in imitation. Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other.

“Will we meet again?”

“Who knows? Perhaps some other night?”

“I’d like to go with you to that festival.”

“And I wish I might come to your new town, to see this ship you speak of, to see these men, to hear all that has happened.”

“Goodbye,” said Tomás.

“Good night.”

The Martian rode his green metal vehicle quietly away into the hills. The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently in the opposite direction.

“Good lord, what a dream that was,” sighed Tomas, his hands on the wheel, thinking of the rockets, the women, the raw whiskey, the party. How strange a vision was that, thought the Martian, rushing on, thinking of the festival, the canals, the boats, the women with golden eyes, and the songs.

The night was dark. The moons³ had gone down. Starlight twinkled on the empty highway where now there was not a sound, no car, no person, nothing. And it remained that way all the rest of the cool dark night.

1950

NOTES

1. Pop (slang) – father; often used in addressing an elderly man

2. I wouldn’t expect nothing, nor ask nothing, nor be surprised at nothing (colloquial) – double negation, characteristic of uncultured illiterate speech

3. The moons – Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are small and irregularly shaped. These may be captured asteroids

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

to get a big kick out of sth [v phrase] alert [adj] to take your breath away [v phrase] faultless [adj]

sparse [adj] ridiculous [adj] to confide (to sb that / in sb) [v T] figment [n C]

EXERCISES

1. Collocate the words in the columns and make up sentences with each:

alert faultless ridiculous sparse

argument, to be on full, data, foreign language, to look, mind, patently, performance, person, to remain, set of teeth, suggestion, traffic, vegetation.

2. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Confide

• Faultless

• Ridiculous

• Sparse

3. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning:

Meagre, absurd, alert, sparse, ludicrous, vigilant, ridiculous, scanty, foolish, watchful.

4. Fill in the gaps using the words from the exercise above:

1. You look absolutely _________ in this hat! They are out of fashion now! Such hats went out of fashion years ago.

2. She couldn’t afford going abroad because of her _________ wages.

3. What must I do? – Your task is to stay _________ at all times and report any suspicious events to the headquarters immediately.

4. Again you are wearing this _________ flowery shirt! You know I hate it! We are not in Hawaii!

5. Wheat farmers have had a poor crop this year. The reason is _________ rains.

6. It was _________ of the government to expect the economy to recover within a year or so.

7. To combat this kind of vandalism the staff must be _________ at all times.

8. In the daytime his fear almost disappeared but in the evening she became more _________ and felt jittery.

9. It was a cold day for swimming and she attracted everybody’s attention wearing just a _________ bikini.

5. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. He had been working in one of the new colonies for ten days straight <…>.

2. Jesus, you know that highway right there, built by the Martians, is over 16 centuries old and still in good condition?

3. He felt very good, very much at peace (with himself).

4. I’m on my way to a festival now at the canal, near the Eniall Mountains.

5. I can hear them singing, it’s no space at all.

6. The Martian did likewise in imitation.

7. The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently in the opposite direction.

6. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the most appropriate phrase from the list below:

1. They say that the economy of the country is _________ ____, but we see quite the opposite changes!

2. “I can lend you some money,” he _________ ____ some bank notes but the wind snatched them and they whirled around in the air.

3. Don’t _________ me ____! You are always trying to do it to distract me!

4. It was Mark who _________ his foot ____ and tripped me up!

5. Be quick, _________ ____ – let the limousine pass!

__________________________­­­___________________________________

to pull in(to), to hold out, to pick up, to put out, to mix up

7. Paraphrase or explain:

1. If business picks up too much, I’ll move on back to some other old highway that’s not busy…

2. … and walking to a little promontory where he could look back at that dusty city.

3. And he didn’t feel the need of one (gun) now, even with the little fear that gathered about his heart at this moment.

4. You’re mixed up.

5. The Martian was now disquieted.

6. Let us agree to disagree.

8. Comment on the following:

1. Even time is crazy up here.

2. But Tomás had swum in blue rivers on Earth, with strangers passing on the road, and eaten in strange houses with strange people and his weapon had always been his smile.

3. Caught between is more like this.

4. Who wants to see the Future, who ever does?

5. What does it matter who is Past or Future, if they are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years.

QUESTIONS

1. Specify what people like Tomás found attractive in the life on Mars.

2. Comment upon the description of Time provided by the author. Have you ever felt what Tomás experienced – that you can almost touch Time? If yes, try to answer the questions he was preoccupied with: What did Time smell/look/sound like? Compare your associations with Tomás’ ones.

3. Do you agree that it is easier to face the Past? Why are we usually not willing to see the Future? Would you like to know what’s going to happen to you?

4. How come Tomás and Muhe Ca met? As Muhe Ca said they had been caught between. What does it mean? Comment upon Tomás’ and Muhe Ca’s behaviour during their conversation. How did each of them take the shock of having met a man from a different world?

5. Do you agree with the statement that everything is meaningful in this world? What’s the meaning of the night meeting? Will Tomás and Muhe Ca ever see each other again? Do you believe this meeting really happened? Maybe it was just a dream?

6. Pay attention to the descriptions of Martian towns lying in ruins. What symbolic significance is attached to them?

7. What’s the author’s message?

UNIT 12

HAIL AND FAREWELL

*********

But of course he was going away, there was nothing else to do, the time was up, the clock had run out, and he was going very far away indeed. His suitcase was packed, his shoes were shined, his hair was brushed, he had expressly washed behind his ears, and it remained only for him to go down the stairs, out the front door, and up the street to the small-town station where the train would make a stop for him alone. Then Fox Hill, Illinois, would be left far off in his past. And he would go on, perhaps to Iowa, perhaps to Kansas, perhaps even to California; a small boy twelve years old with a birth certificate in his valise to show he had been born forty-three years ago.

“Willie!” called a voice downstairs.

“Yes!” He hoisted his suitcase. In his bureau mirror he saw a face made of June dandelions and July apples and warm summer-morning milk. There, as always, was his look of the angel and the innocent, which might never, in the years of his life, change.

“Almost time,” called the woman’s voice.

“All right!” And he went down the stairs, grunting and smiling. In the living-room sat Anna and Steve, their clothes painfully neat.

“Here I am!” cried Willie in the parlor door.

Anna looked like she was going to cry. “Oh, good Lord, you can’t really be leaving us, can you, Willie?”

“People are beginning to talk,” said Willie quietly. “I’ve been here three years now. But when people begin to talk, I know it’s time to put on my shoes and buy a railway ticket.”

“It’s all so strange. I don’t understand. It’s so sudden,” Anna said. “Willie, we’ll miss you.”

“I’ll write you every Christmas, so help me. Don’t you write me.”

“It’s been a great pleasure and satisfaction,” said Steve, sitting there, his words the wrong size in his mouth. “It’s a shame it had to stop. It’s a shame you had to tell us about yourself. It’s an awful shame you can’t stay on.”

“You’re the nicest folks I ever had,” said Willie, four feet high, in no need of a shave, the sunlight on face.

And then Anna did cry. “Willie, Willie.” And she down and looked as if she wanted to hold him but was afraid to hold him now; she looked at him with shock and amazement and her hands empty, not knowing what to do with him now.

“It’s not easy to go,” said Willie. “You get used to things.” You want to stay. But it doesn’t work. I tried to stay on once after people began to suspect. “How horrible!” people said. “All these years, playing with our innocent children,” they said, “and us not guessing! Awful!” they said. And finally I had to just leave town one night. It’s not easy! You know darned well how much I love both of you. Thanks for three swell years.”

They all went to the front door. “Willie, where’re you going?”

“I don’t know. I just start traveling. When I see a town that looks green and nice, I settle in.”

“Will you ever come back?”

“Yes,” he said earnestly with his high voice. “In about twenty years it should begin to show in my face. When it does, I’m going to make a grand tour of all the mothers and fathers I’ve ever had.”

They stood on the cool summer porch, reluctant to say the last words.

Steve was looking steadily at an elm tree. “How many other folks’ve you stayed with, Willie? How many adoptions?”

Willie figured it, pleasantly enough. “I guess it’s about five towns and five couples and over twenty years gone by since I started my tour.”

“Well, we can’t holler,” said Steve. “Better to’ve had a son thirty-six months than none whatever.”

“Well,” said Willie, and kissed Anna quickly, seized his luggage, and was gone up the street in the green noon light, under the trees, a very young boy indeed, not looking back, running steadily.

The boys were playing on the green park diamond when he came by. He stood a little while among the oak-tree shad­ows, watching them hurl the white, snowy baseball into the warm summer air, saw the baseball shadow fly like a dark bird over the grass, saw their hands open in mouths¹ to catch this swift piece of summer that now seemed most especially important to hold on to. The boys’ voices yelled. The ball lit on the grass near Willie.

Carrying the ball toward from under the shade trees, he thought of the last three years now spent to the penny, and the five years before that, and so on down the line to the year when he was really eleven and twelve and fourteen and the voices saying: “What’s wrong with Willie, missus?” “Mrs. В., is Willie late a-growing²?” “Willie, you smokin’ cigars lately?” The echoes died in summer light and color. His mother’s voice: “Willie’s twenty-one today!” And a thousand voices saying: “Come back, son, when you’re fif­teen; then maybe we’ll give you a job.”

He stared at the baseball in his trembling hand, as if it were his life, an interminable ball of years strung around and around and around, but always leading back to his twelfth birthday. He heard the kids walking toward him; he felt them blot out the sun, and they were older, standing around him.

“Willie! Where you goin’?” They kicked his suitcase.

How tall they stood in the sun. In the last few months it seemed the sun had passed a hand above their heads, and they were golden toffee pulled by an immense gravity to the sky, thirteen, fourteen years old, looking down upon Willie, smiling, but already beginning to neglect him. It had started four months ago:

“Choose up sides! Who wants Willie?”

“Aw, Willie’s too little; we don’t play with “kids.”

And they raced ahead of him, drawn by the moon and the sun and the turning seasons of leaf and wind, and he was twelve years old and not one of them any more. And the other voices beginning again on the old, the dreadfully familiar, the cool refrain: “Better feed that boy vitamins, Steve.” “Anna, does shortness run in your family?” And the cold fist knocking at your heart again and knowing that the roots would have to be pulled up again after so many good years with the “folks”.

“Willie, where you goin’?”

He jerked his head. He was back among the towering, shadowing boys who milled around him like giants at a drinking fountain bending down.

“Goin’ a few days visitin’ a cousin of mine.”

“Oh.” There was a day, a year ago, when they would have cared very much indeed. But now there was only curiosity for his luggage, their enchantment with trains and trips and far places.

“How about a game?” said Willie.

They looked doubtful, but, considering the circumstances, nodded. He dropped his bag and ran out; the white baseball was up in the sun, away to their burning white figures in the far meadow, up in the sun again, rushing, life coming and going in a pattern. Here, there! Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hanlon, Creek Bend, Wisconsin, 1932, the first couple, the first year! Here, there! Henry and Alice Boltz, Limeville, Iowa, 1935! The baseball flying. The Smiths, the Eatons, the Robinsons! 1939! 1945! Husband and wife, husband and wife, husband and wife, no children, no children! A knock on this door, a knock on that.

“Pardon me. My name is William. I wonder if —”

“A sandwich? Come in, sit down. Where you from, son?”

The sandwich, a tall glass of cold milk, the smiling, the nodding, the comfortable, leisurely talking.

“Son, you look like you been traveling. You run off from somewhere?”

“No.”

“Boy, are you an orphan?”

Another glass of milk.

“We always wanted kids. It never worked out. Never knew why. One of those things. Well, well. It’s getting late, son. Don’t you think you better hit for home?”

“Got no home.”

“A boy like you? Not dry behind the ears? Your mother’ll be worried.”

“Got no home and no folks anywhere in the world. I won­der if – I wonder – could I sleep here tonight?”

“Well, now, son, I don’t just know. We never considered taking in —” said the husband.

“We got chicken for supper tonight,” said the wife, “enough for extras, enough for company...”

And the years turning and flying away, the voices, and the faces, and the people, and always the same first conversations. The voice of Emily Robinson, in her rocking chair, in summernight darkness, the last night he stayed with her, the night she discovered his secret, her voice saying:

“I look at all the little children’s faces going by. And I sometimes think. What a shame, what a shame, that all these flowers have to be cut, all these bright fires have to be put out. What a shame these, all of these you see in schools or running by, have to get tall and unsightly and wrinkle and turn gray or get bald, and finally, all bone and wheeze, be dead and buried off away. When I hear them laugh I can’t believe they’ll ever go the road I’m going. Yet here they come! I still remember Wordsworth’s poem³: “When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” That’s how I think of children, cruel as they sometimes are, mean as I know they can be, but not yet showing the meanness around their eyes or in their eyes, not yet full of tiredness. They’re so eager for everything! I guess that’s what I miss most in older folks, the eagerness gone nine times out of ten, the freshness gone, so much of the drive and life down the drain. I like to watch school let out each day. It’s like someone threw a bunch of flowers out of the school front doors. How does it feel, Willie? How does it feel to be young forever? To look like a silver dime new from the mint? Are you happy? Are you as fine as you seem?”

The baseball whizzed from the blue sky, stung his hand like a great pale insect. Nursing it, he hears his memory say:

“I worked with what I had. After my folks died, after I found I couldn’t get man’s work anywhere, I tried carni­vals, but they only laughed. “Son,” they said, “you’re not a midget, and even if you are, you look like a boy! We want midgets with midgets’ faces! Sorry, son, sorry.” So I left home, started out, thinking: What was I? A boy. I looked like a boy, sounded like a boy, so I might as well go on being a boy. No use fighting it. No use screaming. So what could I do? What job was handy? And then one day I saw this man in a res­taurant looking at another man’s pictures of his children. “Sure wish I had kids,” he said. “Sure wish I had kids.” He kept shaking his head. And me sitting a few seats away from him, a hamburger in my hands. I sat there, frozen! At that very instant I knew what my job would be for all the rest of my life. There was work for me, after all. Making lonely people happy. Keeping myself busy. Playing forever. I knew I had to play forever. Deliver a few papers, run a few errands, mow a few lawns, maybe. But hard work? No. All I had to do was be a mother’s son and a father’s pride. I turned to the man down the counter from me. “I beg your pardon,” I said. I smiled at him…”

“But, Willie,” said Mrs Emily long ago, “didn’t you ever feel lonely? Didn’t you ever want – things – that grown-ups wanted?”

“I fought that out alone,” said Willie. “I’m a boy, I told myself, I’ll have to live in a boys’ world, read boys’ books, play boys’ games, cut myself off from everything else. I can’t be both. I got to be only one thing – young. And so I played that way. Oh, it wasn’t easy. There were times —” He lapsed into silence.

“And the family you lived with, they never knew?”

“No. Telling them would have spoiled everything. I told them I was a runaway; I let them check through official channels, police. Then, when there was no record, let them put in to adopt me. That was best of all; as long as they nev­er guessed. But then, after three years, or five years, they guessed, or a traveling man came through, or a carnival man saw me, and it was over. It always had to end.”

“And you’re very happy and it’s nice being a child for over forty years?”

“It’s a living, as they say; and when you make other people happy, then you’re almost happy too. I got my job to do and I do it.”

He threw the baseball one last time and broke the reverie. Then he was running to seize his luggage. Tom, Bill, Jamie, Bob, Sam – their names moved on his lips. They were em­barrassed at his shaking hands.

“After all, Willie, it ain’t as if you’re going to China or Timbuktu⁴.”

“That’s right, isn’t it?” Willie did not move.

“So long, Willie. See you next week!”

“So long, so long!”

And he was walking off with his suitcase again, looking at the trees, going away from the boys and the street where he had lived, and as he turned the corner a train whistle screamed, and he began to run.

In the early morning, with the smell of the mist and the cold metal, with the iron smell of the train around him and a full night of traveling shaking his bones and his body, and a smell of the sun beyond the horizon, he awoke and looked upon a small town just arising from sleep. Lights were coming on, soft voices muttered, a red signal bobbed back and forth, back and forth in the cold air. A porter moved by, a shadow in shadows.

“Sir,” said Willie.

The porter stopped.

“What town’s this?” whispered the boy in the dark.

“Valleyville.”

“How many people?”

“Ten thousand. Why? This your stop?”

“It looks green.” Willie gazed out at the cold morning town for a long time. “It looks nice and quiet,” said Willie.

“Son,” said the porter, “you know where you going?”

“Here,” said Willie, and got up quietly in the still, cool, iron-smelling morning, in the train dark, with a rustling and stir.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, boy,” said the porter.

“Yes, sir,” said Willie. “I know what I’m doing.” And he was down the dark aisle, luggage lifted after him by the porter, and out in the smoking, steaming-cold, beginning-to-lighten morning. He stood looking up at the porter and the black metal train against the few remaining stars. The train gave a great wailing blast of whistle, the porters cried out all along the line, the cars jolted, and his special porter waved and smiled down at the boy there, the small boy there with the big luggage who shouted up to him, even as the whistle screamed again.

“What?” shouted the porter, hand cupped to ear.

“Wish me luck!” cried Willie.

“Best of luck, son,” called the porter, waving, smiling. “Best of luck, boy!”

“Thanks,” said Willie, in the great sound of the train, in the steam and roar.

He watched the black train until it was completely gone away and out of sight. He did not move all the time it was going. He stood quietly, a small boy twelve years old, on the worn wooden platform, and only after three entire min­utes did he turn at last to face the empty streets below.

Then, as the sun was rising, he began to walk very fast, so as to keep warm, down into the new town.

1953

NOTES

1. Their hands open in mouths – their hands cupped ready to catch a flying ball

2. A-growing – {a-} is the dialectal marker for Participle I

3. Wordsworth, William – a famous English poet, one of the Romantic poets, who was born in the Lake District and spent most of his life there. He wrote one of the earliest guide-books to the Lake District. The quotation is from his poem “The Daffodils”

4. Timbuktu – a town in Mali on the Niger River

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

Explain the contextual meaning of the lexical units:

reluctant [adj] to settle in / into [phr v] adoption [n C, U] to run in the family [v phrase] interminable [adj]

to neglect [v T] enchantment (with) [n C, U] midget [n C] handy [adj] reverie [n C, U]

EXERCISES

1. Give the derivatives of the lexical units below and make sentences with each:

• Reluctant

• Interminable

• Neglect

• Adoption

2. Arrange the lexical units into groups of synonyms, discriminate between the shades of difference in their meaning:

Interminable, dream, immense, never-ending, fantasy, enormous, unlimited, delusion, tremendous, endless, reverie, perpetual, huge.

3. Make up sentences using the underlined word combinations:

1. I’m going to make a grand tour of all the mothers and fathers I’ve ever had.

2. I let them check through official channels, police.

3. I looked like a boy, sounded like a boy, so I might as well go on being a boy. No use fighting it. No use screaming.

4. “Oh, it wasn’t easy. There were times —” He lapsed into silence.

5. He watched the black train until it was completely gone and out of sight.

4. Complete the sentences with the correct form of the most appropriate phrase from the list below:

1. If you ________ ____ you are sure to let down lots of people dependent on you!

2. Mark is in the habit of ________ ____ anybody who hasn’t got a higher education, though he is quite ignorant and uneducated.

3. It took firemen several hours to put out the forest fire – it was so large that the sun was ________ ____.

4. After her new album turned out to be a total failure and didn’t sell at all, she ________ herself ____ and got down to work.

5. She is a nervous wreck after she has finally passed all the exams! She doesn’t seem to understand me and I don’t know who to ________ ____.

6. I hear that Jean and Tom have broken up? – You are wrong! They are going through a difficult patch in their marital life but I am sure things will soon ________ ____.

_____________________________________________________________

to blot out, to run off, to turn to, to work out, to look down on, cut off

5. Paraphrase or explain:

1. The boys were playing on the green park diamond when he came by.

2. Carrying the ball toward from under the shade trees, he thought of the last three years now spent to the penny…

3. Don’t you think you better hit for home?

4. A big boy like you? Not dry behind the ears.

5. What a shame these, all of these you see in schools or running by, have to get tall and unsightly and wrinkle and turn gray or get bald, and finally, all bone and wheeze, be dead and buried.

6. “I fought that out alone,” said Willie.

6. Comment on the following:

1. But when people begin to talk, I know it’s time to put on my shoes and buy a railway ticket.

2. He started at the baseball in his trembling hand, as if it were his life, an interminable ball of years strung around and around and around, but always leading back to his twelfth birthday.

3. And the cold fist knocking at your heart again and knowing that the roots would have to be pulled up again after so many good years with the “folks”.

4. What a shame, what a shame, that all these flowers have to be cut, all these bright fires have to be put out.

5. There was work for me, after all. Making lonely people happy. Keeping myself busy.

QUESTIONS

1. Comment on the title of the story.

2. What do you think how it felt/feels to be forever young? Is it true happiness? Do you believe Willie was as fine as he seemed?

3. Why was it impossible for Willie to stay in one and the same family? Were the reasons really serious? Is it worth paying attention to gossip, public opinion?

4. Do you believe that when you make other people happy, then you are almost happy too? Give examples from your experience.

5. Can it be a job – to make other people happy? Is it easy? Was it easy for Willie if he had to pull up the roots over and over again? Do you think he really took to new “folks”, felt a great affection for them? Describe Willie’s emotional state every time he had to part with his “folks”.

6. Was Willie’s life a dream come true? What future awaited him?

7. Do you find the story optimistic or pessimistic? The author’s message as you see it.

UNIT 13

ALL SUMMER IN A DAY

*********

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Now?”

“Soon.”

“Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?”

“Look, look; see for yourself!”

The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.

It rained.

It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus¹, and this was the school room of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.

“It’s stopping, it’s stopping!”

“Yes, yes!”

Margot stood apart from them, from these children who could ever remember a time when there wasn’t rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands. But then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone.

All day yesterday they had read in class about the sun. About how like a lemon it was, and how hot. And they had written small stories or essays or poems about it: