Short Fiction Ray Bradbury (always you kirsty moseley TXT) đ
- Author: Ray Bradbury
Book online «Short Fiction Ray Bradbury (always you kirsty moseley TXT) đ». Author Ray Bradbury
McClure was gabbling wildly on.
âOf course, you donât have to be examined immediately. Youâll want a rest. Iâll put you up at my place.â
âThanks. I donât feel up to being probed and pulled. Plenty of time in a week or so.â
They drew up before a house and climbed out.
âYouâll want to sleep, naturally.â
âIâve been asleep for centuries. Be glad to stay awake. Iâm not a bit tired.â
âGood.â McClure let them into the house. He headed for the drink bar. âA drink will fix us up.â
âYou have one,â said Lantry. âLater for me. I just want to sit down.â
âBy all means sit.â McClure mixed himself a drink. He looked around the room, looked at Lantry, paused for a moment with the drink in his hand, tilted his head to one side, and put his tongue in his cheek. Then he shrugged and stirred the drink. He walked slowly to a chair and sat, sipping the drink quietly. He seemed to be listening for something. âThere are cigarettes on the table,â he said.
âThanks.â Lantry took one and lit it and smoked it. He did not speak for some time.
Lantry thought, Iâm taking this all too easily. Maybe I should kill and run. Heâs the only one that has found me, yet. Perhaps this is all a trap. Perhaps weâre simply sitting here waiting for the police. Or whatever in hell they use for police these days. He looked at McClure. No. They werenât waiting for police. They were waiting for something else.
McClure didnât speak. He looked at Lantryâs face and he looked at Lantryâs hands. He looked at Lantryâs chest a long time, with easy quietness. He sipped his drink. He looked at Lantryâs feet.
Finally he said, âWhereâd you get the clothing?â
âI asked someone for clothes and they gave these things to me. Darned nice of them.â
âYouâll find thatâs how we are in this world. All you have to do is ask.â
McClure shut up again. His eyes moved. Only his eyes and nothing else. Once or twice he lifted his drink.
A little clock ticked somewhere in the distance.
âTell me about yourself, Mr. Lantry.â
âNothing much to tell.â
âYouâre modest.â
âHardly. You know about the past. I know nothing of the future, or I should say âtodayâ and day before yesterday. You donât learn much in a coffin.â
McClure did not speak. He suddenly sat forward in his chair and then leaned back and shook his head.
Theyâll never suspect me, thought Lantry. They arenât superstitious, they simply canât believe in a dead man walking. Therefore, Iâll be safe. Iâll keep putting off the physical checkup. Theyâre polite. They wonât force me. Then, Iâll work it so I can get to Mars. After that, the tombs, in my own good time, and the plan. God, how simple. How naive these people are.
McClure sat across the room for five minutes. A coldness had come over him. The color was very slowly going from his face, as one sees the color of medicine vanishing as one presses the bulb at the top of a dropper. He leaned forward, saying nothing, and offered another cigarette to Lantry.
âThanks.â Lantry took it. McClure sat deeply back into his easy chair, his knees folded one over the other. He did not look at Lantry, and yet somehow did. The feeling of weighing and balancing returned. McClure was like a tall thin master of hounds listening for something that nobody else could hear. There are little silver whistles you can blow that only dogs can hear. McClure seemed to be listening acutely, sensitively for such an invisible whistle, listening with his eyes and with his half-opened, dry mouth, and with his aching, breathing nostrils.
Lantry sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, and, as many times, blew out, blew out, blew out. McClure was like some lean red-shagged hound listening and listening with a slick slide of eyes to one side, with an apprehension in that hand that was so precisely microscopic that one only sensed it, as one sensed the invisible whistle, with some part of the brain deeper than eyes or nostril or ear. McClure was all chemistâs scale, all antennae.
The room was so quiet the cigarette smoke made some kind of invisible noise rising to the ceiling. McClure was a thermometer, a chemistâs scales, a listening hound, a litmus paper, an antennae; all these. Lantry did not move. Perhaps the feeling would pass. It had passed before. McClure did not move for a long while and then, without a word, he nodded at the sherry decanter, and Lantry refused as silently. They sat looking but not looking at each other, again and away, again and away.
McClure stiffened slowly. Lantry saw the color getting paler in those lean cheeks, and the hand tightening on the sherry glass, and a knowledge come at last to stay, never to go away, into the eyes.
Lantry did not move. He could not. All of this was of such a fascination that he wanted only to see, to hear what would happen next. It was McClureâs show from here on in.
McClure said, âAt first I thought it was the finest psychosis I have ever seen. You, I mean. I thought, heâs convinced himself, Lantryâs convinced himself, heâs quite
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