Ray Bradbury. The Rocket Man

                Ray Bradbury
                http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal

                The Rocket Man
                1951

     The  electrical  fireflies  were hovering above Mother's dark hair to light
her  path.  She  stood  in her bedroom door looking out at me as I passed in the
silent hall. "You will help me keep him here this time, won't you?" she asked.
     "I guess so," I said.
     "Please."  The fireflies cast moving bits of light on her white face. "This
time he mustn't go away again."
     "All  right,"  I  said, after standing there a moment. "But it won't do any
good; it's no use."
     She  went  away,  and  the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered
after  her  like an errant constellation, showing her how to walk in darkness. I
heard her say, faintly, "We've got to try, anyway."
     Other  fireflies  followed  me to my room. When the weight of my body cut a
circuit in the bed, the fireflies winked out. It was midnight, and my mother and
I  waited, our rooms separated by darkness, in bed. The bed began to rock me and
sing  to  me. I touched a switch; the singing and rocking stopped. I didn't want
to sleep. I didn't want to sleep at all.
     This  night  was  no different from a thousand others in our time. We would
wake  nights  and  feel the cool air turn hot, feel the fire in the wind, or see
the  walls burned a bright color for an instant, and then we knew his rocket was
over  our house-his rocket, and the oak trees swaying from the concussion. And I
would  lie  there,  eyes  wide, panting, and Mother in her room. Her voice would
come to me over the interroom radio:
     "Did you feel it?"
     And I would answer, "That was him, all right."
     That  was  my father's ship passing over our town, a small town where space
rockets  never  came,  and  we would lie awake for the next two hours, thinking,
"Now  Dad's  landed in Springfield, now he's on the tarmac, now he's signing the
papers,  now he's in the helicopter, now he's over the river, now the hills, now
he's settling the helicopter in at the little airport at Green Village here...."
And  the  night would be half over when, in our separate cool beds, Mother and I
would  be  listening,  listening.  "Now he's walking down Bell Street. He always
walks  ...  never  takes a cab ... now across the park, now turning the comer of
Oakhurst and now..."
     I  lifted  my  head  from my pillow. Far down the street, coming closer and
closer, smartly, quickly, briskly-footsteps. Now turning in at our house, up the
porch  steps.  And we were both smiling in the cool darkness. Mom and I, when we
heard  the  front  door  open in recognition, speak a quiet word of welcome, and
shut, downstairs....
     Three hours later I turned the brass knob to their room quietly, holding my
breath, balancing in a darkness as big as the space between the planets, my hand
out  to  reach  the  small  black  case at the foot of my parents' sleeping bed.
Taking  it,  I  ran  silently to my room, thinking, He won't tell me, he doesn't
want me to know.
     And  from  the  opened case spilled his black uniform, like a black nebula,
stars  glittering  here or there, distantly, in the material. I kneaded the dark
stuff in my warm hands; I smelled the planet Mars, an iron smell, and the planet
Venus,  a  green ivy smell, and the planet Mercury, a scent of sulphur and fire;
and I could smell the milky moon and the hardness of stars. I pushed the uniform
into  a  centrifuge  machine  I'd built in my ninth-grade shop that year, set it
whirling.  Soon  a  fine  powder precipitated into a retort. This I slid under a
microscope.  And while my parents slept unaware, and while our house was asleep,
all  the automatic bakers and servers and robot cleaners in an electric slumber,
I stared down upon brilliant motes of meteor dust, comet tail, and loam from far
Jupiter  glistening like worlds themselves which drew me down the tube a billion
miles into space, at terrific accelerations.
     At dawn, exhausted with my journey and fearful of discovery, I returned the
boxed uniform to their sleeping room.
     Then  I  slept,  only to waken at the sound of the horn of the dry-cleaning
car  which stopped in the yard below. They took the black uniform box with them.
It's  good  I  didn't wait, I thought. For the uniform would be back in an hour,
clean of all its destiny and travel.
     I  slept  again,  with the little vial of magical dust in my pajama pocket,
over my beating heart.
     When  I  came downstairs, there was Dad at the breakfast table, biting into
his toast. "Sleep good, Doug?" he said, as if he had been here all the time, and
hadn't been gone for three months.
     "All right," I said.
     "Toast?"
     He  pressed  a  button  and the breakfast table made me four pieces, golden
brown.
     I  remember  my  father  that afternoon, digging and digging in the garden,
like  an animal after something, it seemed. There he was with his long dark arms
moving  swiftly,  planting,  tamping,  fixing,  cutting,  pruning, his dark face
always  down to the soil, his eyes always down to what he was doing, never up to
the  sky, never looking at me, or Mother, even, unless we knelt with him to feel
the  earth  soak up through the overalls at our knees, to put our hands into the
black dirt and not look at the bright, crazy sky. Then he would glance to either
side,  to  Mother  or  me, and give us a gentle wink, and go on, bent down, face
down, the sky staring at his back.
     That  night  we sat on the mechanical porch swing which swung us and blew a
wind  upon us and sang to us. It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to
drink,   and  we  held  the  cold  glasses  in  our  hands,  and  Dad  read  the
stereo-newspapers  inserted  into the special hat you put on your head and which
turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three
times  in succession. Dad smoked cigarettes and told me about how it was when he
was  a  boy in the year 1997. After a while he said, as he had always said, "Why
aren't you out playing kick-the-can, Doug?"
     I  didn't  say  anything, but Mom said, "He does, on nights when you're not
here."
     Dad  looked at me and then, for the first time that day, at the sky. Mother
always watched him when he glanced at the stars. The first day and night when he
got  home  he  wouldn't  look at the sky much. I thought about him gardening and
gardening  so  furiously,  his face almost driven into the earth. But the second
night  he  looked at the stars a little more. Mother wasn't afraid of the sky in
the  day  so  much,  but it was the night stars that she wanted to turn off, and
sometimes  I  could  almost see her reaching for a switch in her mind, but never
finding  it.  And  by the third night maybe Dad'd be out here on the porch until
way  after  we were all ready for bed, and then I'd hear Mom call him in, almost
like  she  called me from the street at times. And then I would hear Dad fitting
the  electric-eye  door  lock  in  place,  with  a sigh. And the next morning at
breakfast  I'd  glance  down  and  see his little black case near his feet as he
buttered his toast and Mother slept late.
     "Well, be seeing you, Doug," he'd say, and we'd shake hands.
     "In about three months?"
     "Right."
     And  he'd  walk  away down the street, not taking a helicopter or beetle or
bus,  just walking with his uniform hidden in his small underarm case; he didn't
want anyone to think he was vain about being a Rocket Man.
     Mother  would  come  out to eat breakfast, one piece of dry toast, about an
hour later.
     But  now  it  was  tonight,  the first night, the good night, and he wasn't
looking at the stars much at all.
     "Let's go to the television carnival," I said.
     "Fine," said Dad.
     Mother smiled at me.
     And  we  rushed off to town in a helicopter and took Dad through a thousand
exhibits,  to keep his face and head down with us and not looking anywhere else.
And  as we laughed at the funny things and looked serious at the serious ones, I
thought.  My father goes to Saturn and Neptune and Pluto, but he never brings me
presents.  Other  boys  whose  fathers go into space bring back bits of ore from
Callisto  and  hunks  of  black  meteor  or  blue sand. But I have to get my own
collection, trading from other boys, the Martian rocks and Mercurian sands which
filled my room, but about which Dad would never comment.
     On occasion, I remembered, he brought something for Mother. He planted some
Martian  sunflowers  once  in  our  yard,  but after he was gone a month and the
sunflowers grew large. Mom ran out one day and cut them all down.
     Without  thinking, as we paused at one of the three-dimensional exhibits, I
asked Dad the question I always asked:
     "What's it like, out in space?"
     Mother shot me a frightened glance. It was too late.
     Dad  stood  there  for a full half minute trying to find an answer, then he
shrugged.
     "It's the best thing in a lifetime of best things." Then he caught himself.
"Oh,  it's  really  nothing at all. Routine. You wouldn't like it." He looked at
me, apprehensively.
     "But you always go back."
     "Habit."
     "Where're you going next?"
     "I haven't decided yet. I'll think it over."
     He  always  thought  it  over. In those days rocket pilots were rare and he
could  pick  and choose work when he liked. On the third night of his homecoming
you could see him picking and choosing among the stars.
     "Come on," said Mother, "let's go home."
     It  was still early when we got home. I wanted Dad to put on his uniform. I
shouldn't  have asked-it always made Mother unhappy-but I could not help myself.
I kept at him, though he
     had  always  refused. I had never seen him in it, and at last he said, "Oh,
all right."
     We  waited  in  the  parlor  while he went upstairs in the air flue. Mother
looked at me dully, as if she couldn't believe that her own son could do this to
her. I glanced away. "I'm sorry," I said.
     "You're not helping at all," she said. "At all."
     There was a whisper in the air flue a moment later.
     "Here I am," said Dad quietly.
     We looked at him in his uniform.
     It was glossy black with silver buttons and silver rims to the heels of the
black boots, and it looked as if someone had cut the arms and legs and body from
a  dark nebula, with little faint stars glowing through it. It fit as close as a
glove  fits  to  a slender long hand, and it smelled like cool air and metal and
space. It smelled of fire and time.
     Father stood, smiling awkwardly, in the center of the room.
     "Turn around," said Mother.
     Her eyes were remote, looking at him.
     When  he  was  gone, she never talked of him. She never said anything about
anything but the weather or the condition of my neck and the need of a washcloth
for  it,  or  the fact that she didn't sleep nights. Once she said the light was
too strong at night.
     "But there's no moon this week," I said.
     "There's starlight," she said.
     I went to the store and bought her some
     darker,  greener  shades.  As  I lay in bed at night, I could hear her pull
them down tight to the bottom of the windows. It made a long rustling noise.
     Once I tried to mow the lawn.
     "No." Mom stood in the door. "Put the mower away."
     So  the  grass went three months at a time without cutting. Dad cut it when
he came home.
     She  wouldn't let me do anything else either, like repairing the electrical
breakfast  maker  or  the mechanical book reader. She saved everything up, as if
for  Christmas.  And  then  I  would  see Dad hammering or tinkering, and always
smiling at his work, and Mother smiling over him, happy.
     No,  she never talked of him when he was gone. And as for Dad, he never did
anything  to  make  a  contact across the millions of miles. He said once, "If I
called you, I'd want to be with you. I wouldn't be happy."
     Once  Dad  said  to  me, "Your mother treats me, sometimes, as if I weren't
here-as if I were invisible."
     I had seen her do it. She would look just beyond him, over his shoulder, at
his  chin  or  hands,  but never into his eyes. If she did look at his eyes, her
eyes  were  covered  with a film, like an animal going to sleep. She said yes at
the right times, and smiled, but always a half second later than expected.
     "I'm not there for her," said Dad.
     But  other  days she would be there and he would be there for her, and they
would  hold  hands  and  walk  around  the block, or take rides, with Mom's hair
flying  like  a  girl's  behind  her,  and  she would cut off all the mechanical
devices  in  the  kitchen  and  bake  him incredible cakes and pies and cookies,
looking  deep into his face, her smile a real smile. But at the end of such days
when  he  was  there to her, she would always cry. And Dad would stand helpless,
gazing about the room as if to find the answer, but never finding it.
     Dad turned slowly, in his uniform, for us to see.
     "Turn around again," said Mom.
     The  next morning Dad came rushing into the house with handfuls of tickets.
Pink rocket tickets for California, blue tickets for Mexico.
     "Come on!" he said. "We'll buy disposable clothes and bum them when they're
soiled.  Look,  we  take the noon rocket to L. A., the two-o'clock helicopter to
Santa Barbara, the nine-o'clock plane to Ensenada, sleep overnight!"
     And we went to California and up and down the Pacific Coast for a day and a
half,  settling at last on the sands of Malibu to cook wieners at night. Dad was
always listening or singing or watching things on all sides of him, holding onto
things as if the world were a centrifuge going so swiftly that he might be flung
off away from us at any instant.
     The  last  afternoon at Malibu Mom was up in the hotel room. Dad lay on the
sand beside me
     for  a  long  time  in the hot sun. "Ah," he sighed, "this is it." His eyes
were  gently  closed;  he lay on his back, drinking the sun. "You miss this," he
said.
     He  meant  "on  the  rocket,"  of course. But he never said "the rocket" or
mentioned  the  rocket  and  all the things you couldn't have on the rocket. You
couldn't  have  a salt wind on the rocket or a blue sky or a yellow sun or Mom's
cooking. You couldn't talk to your fourteen-year-old boy on a rocket.
     "Let's hear it,' he said at last.
     And I knew that now we would talk, as we had always talked, for three hours
straight.  All afternoon we would murmur back and forth in the lazy sun about my
school grades, how high I could jump, how fast I could swim.
     Dad  nodded  each  time  I spoke and smiled and slapped my chest lightly in
approval.  We  talked.  We  did  not  talk of rockets or space, but we talked of
Mexico,  where  we  had driven once in an ancient car, and of the butterflies we
had  caught in the rain forests of green warm Mexico at noon, seeing the hundred
butterflies  sucked to our radiator, dying there, beating their blue and crimson
wings,  twitching,  beautiful,  and sad. We talked of such things instead of the
things I wanted to talk about. And he listened to me. That was the thing he did,
as  if  he  was  trying to fill himself up with all the sounds he could hear. He
listened  to  the  wind  and  the falling ocean and my voice, always with a rapt
attention,  a  concentration that almost excluded physical bodies themselves and
kept  only  the sounds. He shut his eyes to listen. I would see him listening to
the  lawn  mower as he cut the grass by hand instead of using the remote-control
device,  and  I  would  see  him  smelling the cut grass as it sprayed up at him
behind the mower in a green fount.
     "Doug,"  he  said,  about  five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our
towels and heading back along the beach near the surf, "I want you to promise me
something."
     "What?"
     "Don't ever be a Rocket Man."
     I stopped.
     "I  mean  it," he said. "Because when you're out there you want to be here,
and  when  you're  here you want to be out there. Don't start that. Don't let it
get hold of you."
     "But-"
     "You don't know what it is. Every time I'm out there I think, If I ever get
back  to  Earth  I'll  stay  there; I'll never go out again. But I go out, and I
guess I'll always go out."
     "I've thought about being a Rocket Man for a long time," I said.
     He  didn't  hear  me.  "I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I
started trying so damned hard to stay here."
     I  remembered  him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing
and  listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and
the  towns  and  the  land and his family were the only real things and the good
things.  But  I  knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion
from our front porch.
     "Promise me you won't be like me," he said.
     I hesitated awhile. "Okay," I said.
     He shook my hand. "Good boy," he said.
     The dinner was fine that night. Mom had run about the kitchen with handfuls
of  cinnamon  and dough and pots and pans tinkling, and now a great turkey fumed
on the table, with dressing, cranberry sauce, peas, and pumpkin pie.
     "In the middle of August?" said Dad, amazed.
     "You won't be here for Thanksgiving."
     "So I won't."
     He sniffed it. He lifted each lid from each tureen and let the flavor steam
over  his  sunburned  face.  He said "Ah" to each. He looked at the room and his
hands. He gazed at the pictures on the wall, the chairs, the table, me, and Mom.
He cleared his throat. I saw him make up his mind. "Lilly?"
     "Yes?"  Mom  looked  across  her  table  which she had set like a wonderful
silver  trap,  a miraculous gravy pit into which, like a struggling beast of the
past  caught in a tar pool, her husband might at last be caught and held, gazing
out through a jail of wishbones, safe forever. Her eyes sparkled.
     "Lilly," said Dad.
     Go  on,  I  thought crazily. Say it, quick; say you'll stay home this time,
for good, and never go away; say it!
     Just  then  a  passing helicopter jarred the room and the window pane shook
with a crystal sound. Dad glanced at the window.
     The blue stars of evening were there, and the red planet Mars was rising in
the East.
     Dad  looked  at Mars a full minute. Then he put his hand out blindly toward
me. "May I have some peas," he said.
     "Excuse me," said Mother. "I'm going to get some bread."
     She rushed out into the kitchen.
     "But there's bread on the table," I said.
     Dad didn't look at me as he began his meal.
     I  couldn't  sleep  that night. I came downstairs at one in the morning and
the  moonlight  was  like  ice on all the housetops, and dew glittered in a snow
field on our grass. I stood in the doorway in my pajamas, feeling the warm night
wind,  and  then  I  knew  that  Dad  was sitting in the mechanical porch swing,
gliding  gently.  I  could  see his profile tilted back, and he was watching the
stars  wheel  over  the  sky. His eyes were like gray crystal there, the moon in
each one.
     I went out and sat beside him.
     We glided awhile in the swing.
     At last I said, "How many ways are there to die in space?"
     "A million."
     "Name some."
     "The  meteors  hit you. The air goes out of your rocket. Or comets take you
along  with  them.  Concussion. Strangulation. Explosion. Centrifugal force. Too
much acceleration. Too little. The heat, the cold, the sun, the moon, the stars,
the planets, the asteroids, the planetoids, radiation...."
     "And do they bury you?"
     "They never find you."
     "Where do you go?"
     "A  billion  miles  away.  Traveling  graves,  they call them. You become a
meteor or a planetoid traveling forever through space."
     I said nothing.
     "One  thing,"  he  said  later, "it's quick in space. Death. It's over like
that. You don't linger. Most of the time you don't even know it. You're dead and
that's it."
     We went up to bed.
     It was morning.
     Standing  in  the doorway, Dad listened to the yellow canary singing in its
golden cage.
     "Well, I've decided," he said. "Next time I come home, I'm home to stay."
     "Dad!" I said.
     "Tell your mother that when she gets up," he said.
     "You mean it!"
     He nodded gravely. "See you in about three months."
     And  there  he went off down the street, carrying his uniform in its secret
box,  whistling and looking at the tall green trees and picking chinaberries off
the  chinaberry  bush  as  he brushed by, tossing them ahead of him as he walked
away into the bright shade of early morning....
     I asked Mother about a few things that mom-ing after Father had been gone a
number  of  hours.  "Dad said that sometimes you don't act as if you hear or see
him," I said.
     And then she explained everything to me quietly.
     "When  he went off into space ten years ago, I said to myself, 'He's dead.'
Or  as good as dead. So think of him dead. And when he comes back, three or four
times  a  year,  it's  not  him  at all, it's only a pleasant little memory or a
dream.  And  if  a memory stops or a dream stops, it can't hurt half as much. So
most of the time I think of him dead-"
     "But other times-"
     "Other  times  I can't help myself. I bake pies and treat him as if he were
alive,  and  then it hurts. No, it's better to think he hasn't been here for ten
years and I'll never see him again. It doesn't hurt as much."
     "Didn't he say next time he'd settle down."
     She shook her head slowly. "No, he's dead. I'm very sure of that."
     "He'll  come  alive  again, then," 1 said. "Ten years ago," said Mother, "I
thought,  What if he dies on Venus? Then we'll never be able to see Venus again.
What  if  he dies on Mars? We'll never be able to look at Mars again, all red in
the  sky,  without  wanting  to  go  in and lock the door. Or what if he died on
Jupiter  or  Saturn  or Neptune? On those nights when those planets were high in
the sky, we wouldn't want to have anything to do with the stars." "I guess not,"
I said.
     The message came the next day.
     The  messenger  gave  it to me and I read it standing on the porch. The sun
was  setting.  Mom  stood  in  the  screen  door behind me, watching me fold the
message and put it in my pocket.
     "Mom," I said.
     "Don't tell me anything I don't already know," she said.
     She didn't cry.
     Well,  it wasn't Mars, and it wasn't Venus, and it wasn't Jupiter or Saturn
that  killed  him. We wouldn't have to think of him every time Jupiter or Saturn
or Mars lit up the evening sky.
     This was different.
     His ship had fallen into the sun.
     And  the  sun was big and fiery and merciless, and it was always in the sky
and you couldn't get away from it.
     So  for  a  long time after my father died my mother slept through the days
and  wouldn't  go  out.  We  had breakfast at midnight and lunch at three in the
morning,  and  dinner at the cold dim hour of 6 A. M. We went to all-night shows
and went to bed at sunrise.
     And, for a long while, the only days we ever went out to walk were the days
when it was raining and there was no sun.