Long After Midnight
A classic collection of Ray Bradbury’s short fiction, available in ebook for the first time.In twenty-two stories of amazing range and variety, Ray Bradbury once again works his special magic, sounding out life's mysteries in the past, present, and the future.
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LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT
Ray Bradbury
This book, with love, is dedicated to William F. Nolan, amazing collector, fantastic researcher, dear friend.
Table of Contents
Getting Through Sunday Somehow
Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds
The sundials were tumbled into white pebbles. The birds of the air now flew in ancient skies of rock and sand, buried, their songs stopped. The dead sea bottoms were currented with dust which flooded the land when the wind bade it reenact an old tale of engulfment. The cities were deep laid with granaries of silence, time stored and kept, pools and fountains of quietude and memory.
Mars was dead.
Then, out of the large stillness, from a great distance, there was an insect sound which grew large among the cinnamon hills and moved in the sun-blazed air until the highway trembled and dust was shook whispering down in the old cities.
The sound ceased.
In the shimmering silence of midday, Albert Beck and Leonard Craig sat in an ancient landcar, eyeing a dead city which did not move under their gaze but waited for their shout:
“Hello!”
A crystal tower dropped into soft dusting rain.
“You there!”
And another tumbled down.
And another and another fell as Beck called, summoning them to death. In shattering flights, stone animals with vast granite wings dived to strike the courtyards and fountains. His cry summoned them like living beasts and the beasts gave answer, groaned, cracked, leaned up, tilted over, trembling, hesitant, then split the air and swept down with grimaced mouths and empty eyes, with sharp, eternally hungry teeth suddenly seized out and strewn like shrapnel on the tiles.
Beck waited. No more towers fell.
“It’s safe to go in now.”
Craig didn’t move. “For the same reason?”
Beck nodded.
“For a damned bottle! I don’t understand. Why does everyone want it?”
Beck got out of the car. “Those that found it, they never told, they never explained. But—it’s old. Old as the desert, as the dead seas—and it might contain anything. That’s what the legend says. And because it could hold anything—well, that stirs a man’s hunger.”
“Yours, not mine,” said Craig. His mouth barely moved; his eyes were half-shut, faintly amused. He stretched lazily. “I’m just along for the ride. Better watching you than sitting in the heat.”
Beck had stumbled upon the old landcar a month back, before Craig had joined him. It was part of the flotsam of the First Industrial Invasion of Mars that had ended when the race moved on toward the stars. He had worked on the motor and run it from city to dead city, through the lands of the idlers and roustabouts, the dreamers and lazers, men caught in the backwash of space, men like himself and Craig who had never wanted to do much of anything and had found Mars a fine place to do it in.
“Five thousand, ten thousand years back the Martians made the Blue Bottle,” said Beck. “Blown from Martian glass—and lost and found and lost and found again and again.”
He stared into the wavering heat shimmer of the dead city. All my life, thought Beck, I’ve done nothing and nothing inside the nothing. Others, better men, have done big things, gone off to Mercury, or Venus, or out beyond the System. Except me. Not me. But the Blue Bottle can change all that.
He turned and walked away from the silent car.
Craig was out and after him, moving easily along. “What is it now, ten years you’ve hunted? You twitch when you sleep, wake up in fits, sweat through the days. You want the damn bottle that bad, and don’t know what’s in it. You’re a fool, Beck.”
“Shut up, shut up,” said Beck, kicking a slide of pebbles out of his way.
They walked together into the ruined city, over a mosaic of cracked tiles shaped into a stone tapestry of fragile Martian creatures, long-dead beasts which appeared and disappeared as a slight breath of wind stirred the silent dust.
“Wait,” said Beck. He cupped his hands to his mouth and gave a great shout. “You there!”
“… there,” said an echo, and towers fell. Fountains and stone pillars folded into themselves. That was the way of these cities. Sometimes towers as beautiful as a symphony would fall at a spoken word. It was like watching a Bach cantata disintegrate before your eyes.
A moment later: bones buried in bones. The dust settled. Two structures remained intact.
Beck stepped forward, nodding to his friend.
They moved in search.
And, searching, Craig paused, a faint smile on his lips. “In that bottle,” he said, “is there a little accordion woman, all folded up like one of those tin cups, or like one of those Japanese flowers you put in water and it opens out?”
