Read Online Bradbury, Ray - SSC 13 by S is for Space (v2.1) - Free Book Online Page A

Funny. A noise you never heard when you were alive, the breath that
fed your body, and yet, once dead, oh how you missed it!
                 The
only other time you ever heard it was on deep dreamless awake nights when you
wakened and listened and heard first your nose taking and gently poking out the
air, and then the dull deep dim red thunder of the blood in your temples, in
your eardrums, in your throat, in your aching wrists, in your warm loins, in
your chest. All of those little rhythms, gone. The wrist beat gone, the throat
pulse gone, the chest vibration gone. The sound of the blood coming up down
around and through, up down around and through. Now it was like listening to a
statue.
                 And
yet he lived . Or, rather, moved
about. And how was this done, over and above scientific explanations, theories,
doubts?
                 By
one thing, and one thing alone.
                 Hatred.
                 Hatred
was a blood in him, it went up down around and through, up down around and
through. It was a heart in him, not beating, true, but warm. He was—what?
Resentment. Envy. They said he could not lie any longer in his coffin in the
cemetery. He had wanted to. He had
never had any particular desire to get up and walk around. It had been enough,
all these centuries, to lie in the deep box and feel but not feel the ticking of the million insect watches in the earth
around, the moves of worms like so many deep thoughts in the soil.
                 But
then they had come and said, “Out you go and into the furnace!” And that is the
worst thing you can say to any man. You cannot tell him what to do. If you say
you are dead, he will want not to be dead. If you say there are no such things
as vampires, by God, that man will try to be one just for spite. If you say a dead man cannot walk, he will test his limbs.
If you say murder is no longer occurring, he will make it occur. He was, in toto , all the impossible things. They
had given birth to him with their practices and ignorances. Oh, how wrong they
were. They needed to be shown. He would show them! Sun is good , so is night , there is nothing wrong with dark, they said.
                 Dark
is horror, he shouted, silently, facing the little houses. It is meant for contrast. You must fear, you
hear! That has always been the way of this world. You destroyers of Edgar Allan
Poe and fine big-worded Lovecraft, you burner of Halloween masks and destroyer
of pumpkin jack-o-lanterns! I will make night what it once was, the thing against which man built all his lanterned
cities and his many children!
                 As
if in answer to this, a rocket, flying low, trailing a long rakish feather of
flame. It made Lantry flinch and draw back.
                 IV
     
     
                 It
was but ten miles to the little town of Science Port. He made it by dawn,
walking. But even this was not good. At four in the morning a silver beetle
pulled up on the road beside him.
                 “Hello,”
called the man inside.
                 “Hello,”
said Lantry, wearily.
                 “Why
are you walking?” asked the man.
                 “I’m
going to Science Port.”
                 “Why
don’t you ride?”
                 “I like to walk.”
                 “ Nobody likes to walk. Are you sick? May
I give you a ride?”
                 “Thanks,
but I like to walk.”
                 The
man hesitated, then closed the beetle door. “Good night.”
                 When
the beetle was gone over the hill, Lantry retreated into a nearby forest. A
world full of bungling, helping people. By God, you couldn’t even walk without being accused of sickness.
That meant only one thing. He must not walk any longer, he had to ride. He
should have accepted that fellow’s offer.