The Toynbee Convector
One of Ray Bradbury’s classic short story collections, available in ebook for the first time.THE TOYNBEE CONVECTOR is a brilliant short story collection from one of the genre’s master storytellers. Several of the stories are original to this collection. Others originally appeared in the magazines Playboy, Omni, Gallery, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Woman's Day, and Weird Tales.Bradbury displays the unclassifiable versatility of his imagination in this collection of twenty stories.
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THE TOYNBEE CONVECTOR
Ray Bradbury
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
First published by Alfred A. Knopf June 1988
Some of these stories originally appeared in Gallery, Omni, Playboy, Twilight Zone, and Weird Tales. “A Touch of Petulance” originally appeared in Dark Forces, published by Viking Penguin Inc. The Last Circus and The Love Affair were originally published by Lord John Press.
Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1988
Cover design by Mike Topping.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Ebook Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780007539802
Version: 2014–07–17
Table of Contents
The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair
I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here?
One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!
At Midnight, in the Month of June
Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned
The Thing at the Top of the Stairs
“Good! Great! Bravo for me!”
Roger Shumway flung himself into the seat, buckled himself in, revved the rotor and drifted his Dragonfly Super-6 helicopter up to blow away on the summer sky, heading south toward La Jolla.
“How lucky can you get?”
For he was on his way to an incredible meeting.
The time traveler, after 100 years of silence, had agreed to be interviewed. He was, on this day, 130 years old. And this afternoon, at four o’clock sharp, Pacific time, was the anniversary of his one and only journey in time.
Lord, yes! One hundred years ago, Craig Bennett Stiles had waved, stepped into his Immense Clock, as he called it, and vanished from the present. He was and remained the only man in history to travel in time. And Shumway was the one and only reporter, after all these years, to be invited in for afternoon tea. And? The possible announcement of a second and final trip through time. The traveler had hinted at such a trip.
“Old man,” said Shumway, “Mr. Craig Bennett Stiles—here I come!”
The Dragonfly, obedient to fevers, seized a wind and rode it down the coast.
The old man was there waiting for him on the roof of the Time Lamasery at the rim of the hang glider’s cliff in La Jolla. The air swarmed with crimson, blue, and lemon kites from which young men shouted, while young women called to them from the land’s edge.
Stiles, for all his 130 years, was not old. His face, blinking up at the helicopter, was the bright face of one of those hang-gliding Apollo fools who veered off as the helicopter sank down.
Shumway hovered his craft for a long moment, savoring the delay.
Below him was a face that had dreamed architectures, known incredible loves, blueprinted mysteries of seconds, hours, days, then dived in to swim upstream through the centuries. A sunburst face, celebrating its own birthday.
For on a single night, one hundred years ago, Craig Bennett Stiles, freshly returned from time, had reported by Telstar around the world to billions of viewers and told them their future.
“We made it!” he said. “We did it! The future is ours. We rebuilt the cities, freshened the small towns, cleaned the lakes and rivers, washed the air, saved the dolphins, increased the whales, stopped the wars, tossed the solar stations across space to light the world, colonized the moon, moved on to Mars, then Alpha Centauri. We cured cancer and stopped death. We did it—Oh Lord, much thanks—we did it. Oh, future’s bright and beauteous spires, arise!”
