Combined Story 7 - The Bet By Anton Chekov (8 Hours Sleep)

Embroidery,

A short story by Ray Bradbury.

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute and shell those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house to the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower,

A man,

A road,

A sun,

A house.

The scene grew underhand,

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands,

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady,

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers.

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that.

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces,

And fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

That this won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb,

And it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house.

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene with a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread,

And her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but return to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far and this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times.

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away,

A mosquito sound.

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on.

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others.

In the last moment their fingers were flying,

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished and the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop.

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being so painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew.

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Record,

A short story written by Ray Bradbury.

For twenty years,

For twenty long,

Horror-filled,

War-laden years,

The earth had not known peace.

Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long,

Lean battle projectiles,

Glinting silver in the sunlight,

Or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky,

To blast man's civilization from its cultural foundations.

Man against man,

Ship against ship,

A ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter,

Men at their battle stations in the ships,

Pressed buttons,

Releasing radio bombs at blistered space,

And lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces,

And flung them down,

Grim ruins,

Reminders of man's ignorant hatreds and suspicions,

And gas,

Thick black clouds of it,

Billowing over the cities,

Seeking every possible egress,

Pushed forward by colossal wind machines.

But even when victory came for the one side,

Often nature,

In one of her vengeful moments,

Would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.

Rays cut the air,

Power bombs exploded incessantly,

Evaporates robbed the earth of its water,

Shot it up into the atmosphere,

And made it a fog that condensed only after many months,

And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain,

Rays that hypnotized,

Caused even the strong-minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets.

Rays that affected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind,

Unable to find food.

It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity,

And why were they fighting?

For pleasure and amusement.

In the middle of the 22nd century,

Every nation had a standard defense.

The weapons of war of each were equal,

Not in proportion to size,

But actually,

Since manpower no longer counted high.

Pacifism had done its best,

But the world was armed to the hilt,

And now,

Though illogically,

It felt safe,

For every nation meant the same as if all had nothing.

Another thing,

There was no work to be done.

Robots did it,

And there seemed nothing left to discover,

Invent,

Or enjoy.

Art was at its perfection.

Poetry was mathematically correct and unutterably beautiful,

Worked out by the aesthetic machines.

Sculpturing had been given the effect complete,

Artists' hands guided by wonderful pieces of machinery.

Huge museums were crammed with art put out synthetically,

And thus it was with the many arts and their creators,

Who grew stagnant in their perfection,

And it was that way with the many sciences also.

Paleontologists had found and articulated and cataloged every fossil.

The ancestor of the Ohippus,

The little four-toed dawn horse,

Was discovered.

The direct line between man and ape established in skeletal remains,

The seat of life itself,

Definitely proved holoradica.

And great biochemists,

Skilled in the science of vital processes,

Had created synthetic tissues and muscles and flesh,

Built upon the frames that had been recovered bodies with skillful modeling,

Even supplied them with blood and given them the spark of life,

So that the paleobotanists recreated the flora of a prehistoric era.

Again,

The ponderous amphibious brontosaur pushed through the marshes.

Fish emerged upon the land,

And the first bird,

Archaeopteryx,

Tried his imperfect wings for flight.

In the regulated climates of long dead ages,

Fish,

Amphibians,

Reptiles,

Birds,

And mammals lived again for the edification of those interested in the very ancient or who were amused with queer animals.

But that was only paleontologically speaking.

There were the heavens to be considered.

They had been.

The stars and planets weighed and measured.

Their composition noted.

Courses plotted with super accuracy.

Every feature had been mapped.

Every climactic condition recorded.

Life had been named and numbered,

Then photographed.

And these were but the first considerations.

Actually,

What wasn't known about the solar system had not yet occurred.

But that would be probably remedied by a machine to view the future.

There was physics,

Biology,

Anthropology,

Zoology,

Geology,

Bacteriology,

Botany,

And ologies and onodes and anomies,

Such as ran into figures which only machines could calculate.

A book could indeed have been written of the accomplishments of super race.

But this is of the war itself and how it came about and how it all ended.

Stated simply,

In 2050,

The point of diminishing utility had been reached.

To the hungry man,

The first course of dinner is wonderfully delicious.

The second good.

The third satisfying.

Through the ages,

People have hungered after luxury and leisure.

But when he finds his food,

A lot of it,

Man finds suddenly that it no longer appeals to him.

In fact,

Too much is bound to make him sick and often disagreeable.

He looks around for something else.

So did the people of the 22nd century.

They had all of the pleasurable amusements they wanted,

But it was all so intellectual.

Everything was culture.

They had surfeited with it,

And suddenly they wanted to forget it.

All play and no work made man a discontented citizen.

A reaction set in.

Man was not completely civilized as yet.

The war.

21 years the war raged,

And scarcely a million survived.

Bit by bit,

This million was whittled down by the weapons of destruction to a ragged handful of things that had once been cultured.

Finally,

Only 100 humans remained alive,

And they kept fighting blindly,

None of them realizing how close to oblivion they were crowding themselves and the future of humanity.

And they went on.

Killing.

Killing.

Killing.

It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished,

Leaving the world to the more competent,

Though half-ignorant,

Hands of the beasts,

Who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food,

Not because of madness,

And who did not have books and talk and have culture.

The human race would have gone,

Had it not been for the record.

The fighters of war's end,

Leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat,

Were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the 20th century,

But now lay crumbling,

Its proud buildings falling to the ground,

Sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky,

And the city was Los Angeles.

Hedrick Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists,

Hand-enclosed in chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist,

Insulated on the interior for the wearer.

When suddenly the two of them were caught by a spreader.

The other man died instantly,

But Hedrick got in the side and was whirled about sickeningly and survived.

He was lying painfully on something when he came to,

But felt too dizzy and sick to move.

At last,

When his head had cleared a bit,

He rolled over into a sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp a phonograph.

Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171,

And a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort,

Which was exactly what Hedrick thought,

And you can hardly blame him because no one in that generation had ever seen one of these things.

There was a curious story connected with the music concerning the days of 2050,

When there was a movement to stamp out all symphonies,

Songs,

And things even slightly sentimental,

But back to Hedrick.

Hedrick found the crank that would wound the portable,

Turned it,

Reasoning that perhaps it gave power,

And then,

Holding it away from him,

He waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

Nothing happened.

Hedrick was disappointed.

After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement,

He finally accidentally placed the needle arm onto the disc.

The disc,

He noticed,

Was black and filled with little undulations.

The disc was like a wheel,

So Hedrick thought.

It should revolve like one,

Shouldn't it?

He pushed the starter thoughtfully,

And was more than surprised when the disc started spinning.

From the phonograph came music,

Music and singing.

The lost art had returned.

The art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

Some man was singing on the record,

In a queerly interesting and familiar tone,

The ancient English.

The singer seemed sad,

Almost crying,

And Hedrick was thrilled as he played it over and over again,

Drinking in the new experience,

Like wine on the lips of a connoisseur.

The voice rose,

Fell,

Lingered,

And Hedrick suddenly didn't feel like fighting anymore.

The music floated out over the tumbled ruins,

Descended to the ears of the other people,

And the fighting ceased.

They transformed.

They came running to crowd about the machine.

And there in the aged music shop,

They stood enthralled.

Music filled their souls.

It was exactly what they had needed,

And had wanted for many years.

It had been denied them.

Music was the balancing force,

The force that would help them struggle ahead,

Rebuilding the world.

And next time they would be saner,

They knew.

The lesson of luxury had been learned,

And learned well.

Never again would they leave all of the work to the machines.

Now they would work,

And sing,

And play.

It would be work,

Hard work,

For some time to come.

But they had found music again,

And that would anchor them to sanity.

And thus was mankind saved through a record.

Sunny Boy.

The Bet.

A short story written by Anton Chekhov.

It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study,

And remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out of date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host the banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane?

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man.

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five,

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions,

And I stake my freedom,

Said the young man,

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle,

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this,

And asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be freed across the threshold of the lodge to see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters in newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted,

Books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on,

In any quantity he desired,

By writing an order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoiled the air of his room.

In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character,

Novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written.

More than once he could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year,

The prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years,

Some 600 volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake,

I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year,

The prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered 600 learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement,

The prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His readings suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought,

Tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement,

I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him,

It's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before,

His millions had been yawned reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater,

His debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange,

Wild speculation,

And the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years,

Had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune.

And the proud,

Fearless,

Self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank,

Trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet!

Muttered the old man,

Clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only forty now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry,

He will enjoy life,

Will gamble on the exchange,

While I shall look on him with envy like a beggar,

And hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No,

It is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock.

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house,

And nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees.

Trying to make no noise,

He took from a fireproof safe the key of the door,

Which had not been opened for fifteen years,

Put on his overcoat,

And went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden.

Rain was falling.

A damp,

Cutting wind was racing about the garden,

Howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes,

But could see neither the earth nor the white statues,

Nor the lodge nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood,

He twice called the watchman.

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather,

And was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention of the old man,

Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door,

And went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it,

And in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out,

The old man,

Trembling with emotion,

Peeped through the little window.

A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table.

Nothing could be seen but his back,

The hair on his head,

And his hands.

Open books were lying on the table,

And on the two easy chairs,

And on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed,

And the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years in prison had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger,

And the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound,

And the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment,

But three minutes passed,

And it was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table,

A man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones,

With long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow,

And the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver,

And seeing his emaciated,

Aged-looking face,

No one would have believed that he was only forty.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written on handwriting.

Poor creature,

Thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions,

And I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the pillow,

And the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow,

At twelve o'clock,

I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men.

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine,

I think it necessary to say a few words to you.

With a clear conscience I tell you,

As before God,

Who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and health,

And all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountaintops with gold and crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherd's pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom.

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor,

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth and hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the strange events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you to exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great a contempt for himself.

When he got home,

He lay on his bed.

But his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.

Next morning,

The watchman ran in with pale faces and told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden go to the gate and disappear.

The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner.

To avoid arousing unnecessary talk,

He took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced,

And when he got home,

Locked it up in the fireproof safe.

EMBROIDERY A SHORT STORY BY RAY BRADBURY The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute and shew those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery and needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house,

To the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower.

A man.

A road.

A sun.

A house.

The scene grew underhand,

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands.

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady.

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers,

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that,

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces and fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

That this won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb,

And it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady,

Exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house,

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene with a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread and her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked,

Almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but return to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far and this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times.

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away,

A mosquito sound.

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on.

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others.

In the last moment their fingers were flying,

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished,

And the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop.

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being,

So painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew.

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Bet A short story written by Anton Chekhov It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study,

And remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out of date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host the banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane?

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man,

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five,

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions,

And I stake my freedom,

Said the young man.

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle,

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this,

And asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life,

And my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be freed across the threshold of the lodge to see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters and newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted,

Books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on,

In any quantity he desired,

By writing an order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoiled the air of his room.

In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character,

Novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he'd spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written.

More than once he could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years some six hundred volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year the prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him it's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before his millions had been beyond reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater his debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange wild speculation and the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune and the proud fearless self-confident millionaire had become a banker of mintling rank trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet muttered the old man clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only forty now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry.

He will enjoy life.

He will gamble on the exchange while I shall look on him with envy like a beggar and hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No it is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock.

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house and nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees.

Trying to make no noise he took from a fireproof safe the key of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years put on his overcoat and went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden.

Rain was falling.

A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes but could see neither the earth nor the white statues nor the lodge nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood he twice called the watchman.

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather and was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention of the old man suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door and went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it and in the corner there was a dark cast iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out the old man trembling with emotion peeked through the little window.

A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table.

Nothing could be seen but his back,

The hair on his head and his hands.

Open books were lying on the table and on the two easy chairs and on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed and the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years imprisonment had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger and the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound and the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment,

But three minutes passed.

It was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table a man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones with long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow,

And the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver and seeing his emaciated,

Aged-looking face,

No one would have believed that he was only forty.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written in fine handwriting.

Poor creature,

Thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions,

And I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the pillow,

And the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow,

At twelve o'clock,

I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men.

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine,

I think it necessary to say a clear conscience I tell you,

As before God,

Who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and health,

And all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountaintops with gold and crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherd's pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom.

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor.

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth and hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the strange events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you to exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great a contempt for himself.

When he got home,

He lay on his bed,

But his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.

Next morning the watchman ran in with pale faces and told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden,

Go to the gate,

And disappear.

The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner.

To avoid arousing unnecessary talk,

He took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced.

And when he got home,

Locked it up in the fireproof safe.

Embroidery.

A short story by Ray Bradbury.

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute and shell those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery and needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house,

To the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower,

A man,

A road,

A sun,

A house.

The scene grew underhand,

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands,

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady.

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers,

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that,

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces,

And fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

That this won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb,

And it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady,

Exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house,

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern,

Practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene,

With a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread,

And her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked,

Almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but return to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far,

And this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times.

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one,

Or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch,

In the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away a mosquito sound,

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on.

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others,

In the last moment their fingers were flying.

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished and the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop,

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being,

So painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew,

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Bet A short story written by Anton Chekhov It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study,

And remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out of date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host,

The banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane,

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man,

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five,

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions,

And I stake my freedom,

Said the young man.

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle,

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

The thought that you have the right to stay and step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this,

And asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life,

And my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be freed across the threshold of the lodge to see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters in newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted,

Books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on,

In any quantity he desired,

By writing in order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoiled the air of his room.

In the first year,

The books he sent for were principally of a light character,

Novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year,

The piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year,

Music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he'd spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written.

More than once,

He could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year,

The prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years,

Some six hundred volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake,

I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year,

The prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement,

The prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought,

Tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him,

It's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before,

His millions had been yon reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater,

His debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange,

Wild speculation,

And the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years,

Had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune.

And the proud,

Fearless,

Self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank,

Trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet!

Muttered the old man,

Clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only forty now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry,

He will enjoy life,

Will gamble on the exchange,

While I shall look on him with envy like a beggar and hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No,

It is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock,

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house,

And nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees.

Trying to make no noise,

He took from a fireproof safe the key of the door,

Which had not been opened for fifteen years,

Put on his overcoat,

And went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden.

Rain was falling.

A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden,

Howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes,

But could see neither the earth nor the white statues,

Nor the lodge nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood,

He twice called the watchman.

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather,

And was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention of the old man,

Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door,

And went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it,

And in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out,

The old man,

Trembling with emotion,

Peeked through the little window.

A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table.

Nothing could be seen but his back,

The hair on his head,

And his hands.

Open books were lying on the table,

And on the two easy chairs,

And on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed,

And the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years imprisonment had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger,

And the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound,

And the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment,

But three minutes passed.

It was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table,

A man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones,

With long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow,

And the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver,

And seeing his emaciated,

Aged-looking face,

No one would have believed that he was only forty.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written on handwriting.

Poor creature,

Thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions,

And I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the pillow,

And the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow,

At twelve o'clock,

I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men.

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine,

I think it necessary to say a few words to you.

With a clear conscience I tell you,

As before God,

Who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and hell,

And all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountain tops with gold and crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherd's pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom.

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth,

As though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor.

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth,

And hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the strange events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you to exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great a contempt for himself.

When he got home he lay on his bed,

But his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.

Next morning the watchman ran in with pale faces and told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden,

Go to the gate,

And disappear.

The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner.

To avoid arousing unnecessary talk,

He took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced,

And when he got home locked it up in the fireproof safe.

The Record.

A short story written by Ray Bradbury.

For twenty years,

For twenty long,

Horror-filled,

War-laden years,

The earth had not known peace.

Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long,

Lean battle projectiles,

Glinting silver in the sunlight,

Or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky to blast man's civilization from its cultural foundations.

Man against man,

Ship against ship,

A ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter,

Men at their battle stations in the ships,

Pressed buttons,

Releasing radio bombs at blistered space,

And lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces,

And flung them down,

Grim ruins,

Reminders of man's ignorant hatreds and suspicions,

And gas,

Thick black clouds of it,

Billowing over the cities,

Seeking every possible egress,

Pushed forward by colossal wind machines.

But even when victory came for the one side,

Often nature,

In one of her vengeful moments,

Would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.

Rays cut the air,

Power bombs exploded incessantly,

Evaporates robbed the earth of its water,

Shot it up into the atmosphere,

And made it a fog that condensed only after many months,

And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain.

Rays that hypnotized caused even the strong-minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets.

Rays that affected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind,

Unable to find food.

It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity.

And why were they fighting?

For pleasure and amusement.

In the middle of the 22nd century,

Every nation had a standard defense.

The weapons of war of each were equal,

Not in proportion to size,

But actually,

Since manpower no longer counted high.

Pacifism had done its best,

But the world was armed to hilt,

And now,

Though illogically,

It felt safe,

For every nation meant the same as if all had nothing.

Another thing,

There was no work to be done.

Robots did it,

And there seemed nothing left to discover,

Invent,

Or enjoy.

Art was at its perfection.

Poetry was mathematically correct and unutterably beautiful,

Worked out by the aesthetic machines.

Sculpturing had been given the effect complete.

Artists' hands guided by wonderful pieces of machinery.

Huge museums were crammed with art,

Put out synthetically.

And thus it was with the many arts and their creators,

Who grew stagnant in their perfection.

And it was that way with the many sciences also.

Paleontologists had found and articulated and cataloged every fossil.

The ancestor of the Ohippus,

The little four-toed dawn horse,

Was discovered.

The direct line between man and ape established in skeletal remains,

The seat of life itself,

Definitely proved holoradica.

And great biochemists,

Skilled in the science of vital processes,

Had created synthetic tissues and muscles and flesh,

Built upon the frames that had been recovered bodies with skillful modeling,

Even supplied them with blood,

And given them the spark of life,

So that the paleobotanists recreated the flora of a prehistoric era.

Again,

The ponderous amphibious brontosaur pushed through the marshes.

Fish emerged upon the land,

And the first bird,

Archaeopteryx,

Tried his imperfect wings for flight.

In the regulated climates of long dead ages,

Fish,

Amphibians,

Reptiles,

Birds,

And mammals lived again for the edification of those interested in the very ancient,

Or who were amused with queer animals.

But that was only paleontologically speaking.

There were the heavens to be considered.

They had been.

The stars and planets weighed and measured.

Their composition noted.

Courses plotted with super accuracy.

Every feature had been mapped.

Every climactic condition recorded.

Life had been named and numbered,

Then photographed.

And these were but the first considerations.

Actually,

What wasn't known about the solar system had not yet occurred.

But that would be probably remedied by a machine to view the future.

There was physics,

Biology,

Anthropology,

Zoology,

Geology,

Bacteriology,

Botany,

And ologies and onides and onomies,

Such as ran into figures which only machines could calculate.

A book could indeed have been written of the accomplishments of super race.

But this is of the war itself,

And how it came about,

And how it all ended.

Stated simply,

In 2050,

The point of diminishing utility had been reached.

To the hungry man,

The first course of dinner is wonderfully delicious.

The second good.

The third satisfying.

Through the ages,

People have hungered after luxury and leisure.

But when he finds his food,

A lot of it,

Man finds suddenly that it no longer appeals to him.

In fact,

Too much is bound to make him sick and often disagreeable.

He looks around for something else.

So did the people of the 22nd century.

They had all of the pleasurable amusements they wanted,

But it was all so intellectual.

Everything was culture.

They had surfeited with it,

And suddenly they wanted to forget it.

All play and no work made man a discontented citizen.

A reaction set in.

Man was not completely civilized as yet.

The war.

21 years the war raged,

And scarcely a million survived.

Bit by bit,

This million was whittled down by the weapons of destruction to a ragged handful of things that had once been cultured.

Finally,

Only 100 humans remained alive,

And they kept fighting blindly,

None of them realizing how close to oblivion they were crowding themselves and the future of humanity.

And they went on,

Killing,

Killing,

Killing.

It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished,

Leaving the world to the more competent,

Though half-ignorant,

Hands of the beasts,

Who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food,

Not because of madness,

And who did not have books and talk and have culture.

The human race would have gone had it not been for the record.

The fighters of war's end,

Leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat,

Were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the 20th century,

But now lay crumbling,

Its proud buildings falling to the ground,

Sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky,

And the city was Los Angeles.

Hedrick Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists,

Hand-enclosed in chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist,

Insulated on the interior for the wearer.

Suddenly,

The two of them were caught by a spreader.

The other man died instantly,

But Hedrick got in the side and was whirled about sickeningly and survived.

He was lying painfully on something when he came to,

But felt too dizzy and sick to move.

At last,

When his head had cleared a bit,

He rolled over into a sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp a phonograph.

Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171,

And a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort,

Which was exactly what Hedrick thought,

And you can hardly blame him because no one in that generation had ever seen one of these things.

There was a curious story connected with the dying music concerning the days of 2050,

When there was a movement to stamp out all symphonies,

Songs,

And things even slightly sentimental,

But back to Hedrick.

Hedrick found the crank that would wound the portable,

Turned it,

Reasoning that perhaps it gave power,

And then,

Holding it away from him,

He waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

Nothing happened.

Hedrick was disappointed.

After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement,

He finally accidentally placed the needle arm onto the disc.

The disc,

He noticed,

Was black and filled with little undulations.

The disc was like a wheel,

So Hedrick thought.

It should revolve like one,

Shouldn't it?

He pushed the starter thoughtfully and was more than surprised when the disc started spinning.

From the phonograph came music,

Music and singing.

The lost art had returned.

The art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

Some man was singing on the record,

In a queerly interesting and familiar tone,

The ancient English.

The singer seemed sad,

Almost crying,

And Hedrick was thrilled as he played it over and over again,

Drinking in the new experience,

Like wine on the lips of a connoisseur.

The voice rose,

Fell,

Lingered,

And Hedrick suddenly didn't feel like fighting anymore.

The music floated out over the tumbled ruins,

Descended to the ears of the other people,

And the fighting ceased.

They transformed.

They came running to crowd about the machine.

And there in the aged music shop,

They stood enthralled.

Music filled their souls.

It was exactly what they had needed and had wanted for many years.

It had been denied them.

Music was the balancing force,

The force that would help them struggle ahead,

Rebuilding the world.

And next time they would be saner,

They knew.

The lesson of luxury had been learned,

And learned well.

Never again would they leave all of the work to the machines.

Now they would work,

And sing,

And play.

It would be work,

Hard work,

For some time to come.

But they had found music again,

And that would anchor them to sanity.

And thus was mankind saved through a record.

Sunny Boy.

Embroidery.

A short story by Ray Bradbury.

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute and shell those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery and needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house,

To the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower,

A man,

A road,

A sun,

A house.

The scene grew underhand,

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands,

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady,

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers,

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that,

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces and fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

That this won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb and it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house.

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene with a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread and her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked,

Almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but return to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far and this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times,

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away a mosquito sound,

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on.

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others.

In the last moment their fingers were flying,

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished and the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop.

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being,

So painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew.

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Bet A short story written by Anton Chekhov It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study,

And remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out of date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host the banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane?

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man.

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five,

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions,

And I stake my freedom,

Said the young man.

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle,

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this,

And asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be freed across the threshold of the to see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters in newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted,

Books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on,

In any quantity he desired by writing an order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoiled the air of his room.

In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character,

Novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he'd spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written.

More than once he could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years some six hundred volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake,

I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year the prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him it's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before his millions had been yawned reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater his debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange wild speculation and the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune and the proud fearless self-confident millionaire had become a banker of mintling rank trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet muttered the old man.

Clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only 40 now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry.

He will enjoy life.

Will gamble on the exchange while I shall look on him with envy like a beggar and hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No it is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock.

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house and nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees.

Trying to make no noise he took from a fireproof safe the key of the door which had not been opened for 15 years put on his overcoat and went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden.

Rain was falling.

A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes but could see neither the earth nor the white statues nor the lodge nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood he twice called the watchman.

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather and was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention of the old man suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door and went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it and in the corner there was a dark cast iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out the old man trembling with emotion peeked through the little window.

A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table.

Nothing could be seen but his back,

The hair on his head and his hands.

Open books were lying on the table and on the two easy chairs and on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed and the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years imprisonment had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger and the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound and the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment,

But three minutes passed.

It was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table a man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones with long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow,

And the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver and seeing his emaciated,

Aged-looking face,

No one would have believed that he was only forty.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written in fine handwriting.

Poor creature,

Thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions,

And I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the pillow,

And the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow,

At twelve o'clock,

I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men,

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine,

I think it necessary to say a clear conscience I tell you,

As before God,

Who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and health,

And all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountain tops with gold and crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherd's pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom,

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor.

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth and hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the strange events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you to exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise,

And which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great a contempt for himself.

When he got home,

He lay on his bed,

But his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.

Next morning,

The watchman ran in with pale faces and told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the gate and disappear.

The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner.

To avoid arousing unnecessary talk,

He took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced,

And when he got home,

Locked it up in the fire-proof safe.

The Record.

A short story written by Ray Bradbury.

For twenty years,

For twenty long,

Horror-filled,

War-laden years,

The earth had not known peace.

Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long,

Lean battle projectiles,

Glinting silver in the sunlight,

Or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky to blast man's civilization from its cultural foundations.

Man against man,

Ship against ship,

A ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter,

Men at their battle stations in the ships,

Pressed buttons,

Releasing radio bombs at blistered space,

And lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces,

And flung them down,

Grim ruins,

Reminders of man's ignorant hatreds and suspicions,

And gas,

Thick black clouds of it,

Billowing over the cities,

Seeking every possible egress,

Pushed forward by colossal wind-machines.

But even when victory came for the one side,

Often nature,

In one of her vengeful moments,

Would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.

Rays cut the air,

Power bombs exploded incessantly,

Evaporates robbed the earth of its water,

Shot it up into the atmosphere,

And made it a fog that condensed only after many months,

And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain,

Rays that hypnotized,

Caused even the strong-minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets.

Rays that affected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind,

Unable to find food.

It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity,

And why were they fighting?

For pleasure and amusement.

In the middle of the 22nd century,

Every nation had a standard defense.

The weapons of war of each were equal,

Not in proportion to size,

But actually,

Since manpower no longer counted high.

Pacifism had done its best,

But the world was armed to the hilt,

And now,

Though illogically,

It felt safe,

For every nation meant the same as if all had nothing.

Another thing,

There was no work to be done.

Robots did it,

And there seemed nothing left to discover,

Invent,

Or enjoy.

Art was at its perfection.

Poetry was mathematically correct and unutterably beautiful,

Worked out by the machines.

Sculpturing had been given the effect complete,

Artists' hands guided by wonderful pieces of machinery.

Huge museums were crammed with art put out synthetically,

And thus it was with the many arts and their creators,

Who grew stagnant in their perfection,

And it was that way with the many sciences also.

Paleontologists had found and articulated and cataloged every fossil.

The ancestor of the Ohippus,

The little four-toed dawn horse,

Was discovered.

The direct line between man and ape established in skeletal remains.

The seed of life itself definitely proved holoradica,

And great biochemists skilled in the science of vital processes had created synthetic tissues and muscles and flesh,

Built upon the frames that had been recovered bodies with skillful modeling,

Even supplied them with blood,

And given them the spark of life,

So that the paleobotanists recreated the flora of a prehistoric era.

Again,

The ponderous amphibious brontosaur pushed through the marshes.

Fish emerged upon the land,

And the first bird,

Archaeopteryx,

Tried his imperfect wings for flight.

In the regulated climates of long dead ages,

Fish,

Amphibians,

Reptiles,

Birds,

And mammals lived again for the edification of those interested in the very ancient,

Or who were amused with queer animals.

But that was only paleontologically speaking.

There were the heavens to be considered.

They had been.

The stars and planets weighed and measured.

Their composition noted.

Courses plotted with super-accuracy.

Every feature had been mapped.

Every climactic condition recorded.

Life had been named and numbered,

Then photographed.

And these were but the first considerations.

Actually,

What wasn't known about the solar system had not yet occurred.

But that would be probably remedied by a machine to view the future.

There was physics,

Biology,

Anthropology,

Zoology,

Geology,

Bacteriology,

Botany,

And ologies and onides and onomies,

Such as ran into figures which only machines could calculate.

A book could indeed have been written of the accomplishments of super-race.

But this is of the war itself,

And how it came about,

And how it all ended.

Stated simply,

In 2050,

The point of diminishing utility had been reached.

To the hungry man,

The first course of dinner is wonderfully delicious,

The second good,

The third satisfying.

Through the ages,

People have hungered after luxury and leisure.

But when he finds his food,

A lot of it,

Man finds suddenly that it no longer appeals to him.

In fact,

Too much is bound to make him sick and often disagreeable.

He looks around for something else.

So did the people of the 22nd century.

They had all of the pleasurable amusements they wanted,

But it was all so intellectual.

Everything was culture.

They had surfeited with it,

And suddenly they wanted to forget it.

All play and no work made man a discontented citizen.

A reaction set in.

Man was not completely civilized as yet.

The war.

Twenty-one years,

The war raged,

And scarcely a million survived.

Bit by bit,

This million was whittled down by the weapons of destruction to a ragged handful of things that had once been cultured.

Finally,

Only 100 humans remained alive,

And they kept fighting blindly,

None of them realizing how close to oblivion they were crowding themselves and the future of humanity.

And they went on,

Killing,

Killing,

Killing.

It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished,

Leaving the world to the more competent,

Though half-ignorant,

Hands of the beasts,

Who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food,

Not because of madness,

And who did not have books and talk and have culture.

The human race would have gone,

Had it not been for the record.

The fighters of war's end,

Leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat,

Were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the 20th century,

But now lay crumbling,

Its proud buildings falling to the ground,

Sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky,

And the city was Los Angeles.

Hedrick Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists,

Hand-enclosed in chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist,

Insulated on the interior for the wearer,

When suddenly the two of them were caught by a spreader.

The other man died instantly,

But Hedrick got in the side and was whirled about sickeningly and survived.

He was lying painfully on something when he came to,

But felt too dizzy and sick to move.

At last,

When his head had cleared a bit,

He rolled over into a sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp a phonograph.

Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171,

And a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort,

Which was exactly what Hedrick thought,

And you can hardly blame him because no one in that generation had ever seen one of these things.

There was a curious story connected with the dying music concerning the days of 2050,

When there was a movement to stamp out all symphonies,

Songs,

And things even slightly sentimental.

But back to Hedrick.

Hedrick found the crank that would wound the portable,

Turned it,

Reasoning that perhaps it gave power,

And then,

Holding it away from him,

He waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

Nothing happened.

Hedrick was disappointed.

After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement,

He finally accidentally placed the needle arm onto the disc.

The disc,

He noticed,

Was black and filled with little undulations.

The disc was like a wheel,

So Hedrick thought.

It should revolve like one,

Shouldn't it?

He pushed the starter thoughtfully,

And was more than surprised when the disc started spinning.

From the phonograph came music,

Music and singing.

The lost art had returned.

The art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

Some man was singing on the record,

In a queerly interesting and familiar tone,

The ancient English.

The singer seemed sad,

Almost crying,

And Hedrick was thrilled as he played it over and over again,

Drinking in the new experience,

Like wine on the lips of a connoisseur.

The voice rose,

Fell,

Lingered,

And Hedrick suddenly didn't feel like fighting anymore.

The music floated out over the tumbled ruins,

Descended to the ears of the other people,

And the fighting ceased.

They transformed.

They came running to crowd about the machine.

And there in the aged music shop,

They stood enthralled.

Music filled their souls.

It was exactly what they had needed,

And had wanted for many years.

It had been denied them.

Music was the balancing force,

The force that would help them struggle ahead,

Rebuilding the world.

And next time they would be saner,

They knew.

The lesson of luxury had been learned,

And learned well.

Never again would they leave all of the work to the machines.

Now they would work,

And sing,

And play.

It would be work,

Hard work,

For some time to come.

But they had found music again,

And that would anchor them to sanity.

And thus was mankind saved through a record.

Sunny Boy.

Embroidery.

A short story by Ray Bradbury.

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back,

And then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute,

And shell those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery and needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house,

To the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower,

A man,

A road,

A sun,

A house.

The scene grew underhand,

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands,

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady,

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers,

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that,

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces,

And fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

That this won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb,

And it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady,

Exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house.

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern,

Practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene,

With a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread,

And her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked,

Almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but return to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far,

And this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times.

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one,

Or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away a mosquito sound,

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on.

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others.

In the last moment their fingers were flying,

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished,

And the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop.

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being,

So painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew.

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Bet,

A short story written by Anton Chekhov.

It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study,

And remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out-of-date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host the banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane?

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man,

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five,

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions,

And I stake my freedom,

Said the young man.

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle,

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a deal harder to bear than compulsory.

The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this,

And asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be freed across the threshold of the lodge to see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters in newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted—books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on—in any quantity he desired by writing an order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoiled the air of his room.

In the first year,

The books he sent for were principally of a light character—novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year,

The piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year,

Music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he'd spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning,

And angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written.

More than once he could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year,

The prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years,

Some six hundred volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake,

I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year,

The prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement,

The prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought,

Tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him,

It's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before,

His millions had been beyond reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater,

His debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange,

Wild speculation,

And the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years,

Had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune.

And the proud,

Fearless,

Self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank,

Trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet!

Muttered the old man,

Clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only forty now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry,

He will enjoy life,

Will gamble on the exchange,

While I shall look on him with envy like a beggar,

And hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No,

It is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock,

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house,

And nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees.

Trying to make no noise,

He took from a fireproof safe the key of the door,

Which had not been opened for fifteen years,

Put on his overcoat,

And went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden.

Rain was falling.

A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden,

Howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes,

But could see neither the earth nor the white statues,

Nor the lodge nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood,

He twice called the watchman.

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather,

And was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention,

Thought the old man,

Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door,

And went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it,

And in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out,

The old man,

Trembling with emotion,

Peeked through the little window.

A handle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table,

Nothing to be seen but his back,

The hair on his head and his hands.

Open books were lying on the table,

And on the two easy chairs,

And on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed,

And the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years imprisonment had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger,

And the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound,

And the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment,

But three minutes passed.

It was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table,

A man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones,

With long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow,

And the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver,

And seeing his emaciated,

Aged-looking face,

No one would have believed that he was only forty.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written in fine handwriting.

Poor creature,

Thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions,

And I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the pillow,

And the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow,

At twelve o'clock,

I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men.

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine,

I think it necessary to say a conscience I tell you,

As before God,

Who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and health,

And all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountaintops with gold and crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherd's pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom.

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth,

As though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor.

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth,

And hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the strange events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you to exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise,

And which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great a contempt for himself.

When he got home he lay on his bed,

But his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.

The next morning the watchman ran in with pale faces,

And told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden,

Go to the gate,

And disappear.

The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge,

And made sure of the flight of his prisoner.

To avoid arousing unnecessary talk,

He took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced,

And when he got home,

Locked it up in the fireproof safe.

The Record.

A short story written by Ray Bradbury.

For twenty years,

For twenty long,

Horror-filled,

War-laden years,

The earth had not known peace.

Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long,

Lean battle projectiles,

Glinting silver in the sunlight,

Or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky,

To blast man's civilization from its cultural foundations.

Man against man,

Ship against ship,

A ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter,

Men at their battle stations in the ships,

Pressed buttons,

Releasing radio bombs at blistered space,

And lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces,

And flung them down,

Grim ruins,

Reminders of man's ignorant hatreds and suspicions,

And gas,

Thick black clouds of it,

Billowing over the cities,

Seeking every possible egress,

Pushed forward by colossal wind-machines.

But even when victory came for the one side,

Often nature,

In one of her vengeful moments,

Would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.

Rays cut the air,

Power bombs exploded incessantly,

Evaporates robbed the earth of its water,

Shot it up into the atmosphere,

And made it a fog that condensed only after many months,

And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain,

Rays that hypnotized,

Caused even the strong-minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets.

Rays that affected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind,

Unable to find food.

It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity.

And why were they fighting?

For pleasure and amusement.

In the middle of the 22nd century,

Every nation had a standard defense.

The weapons of war of each were equal,

Not in proportion to size,

But actually,

Since manpower no longer counted high.

Pacifism had done its best,

But the world was armed to the hilt,

And now,

Though illogically,

It felt safe,

For every nation meant the same as if all had nothing.

Another thing,

There was no work to be done.

Robots did it,

And there seemed nothing left to discover,

Invent,

Or enjoy.

Art was at its perfection.

Poetry was mathematically correct and unutterably beautiful,

Worked out by the aesthetic machines.

Sculpturing had been given the effect complete.

Artists' hands guided by wonderful pieces of machinery.

Huge museums were crammed with art,

Put out synthetically.

And thus it was with the many arts and their creators,

Who grew stagnant in their perfection.

And it was that way with the many sciences also.

Paleontologists had found and articulated and cataloged every fossil.

The ancestor of the Ohippus,

The little four-toed dawn horse,

Was discovered.

The direct line between man and ape established in skeletal remains.

The seat of life itself definitely proved holoradica.

And great biochemists,

Skilled in the science of vital processes,

Had created synthetic tissues and muscles and flesh,

Built upon the frames that had been recovered bodies with skillful modeling,

Even supplied them with blood,

And given them the of life.

So that the paleobotanists recreated the flora of a prehistoric era.

Again,

The ponderous amphibious brontosaur pushed through the marshes.

Fish emerged upon the land,

And the first bird,

Archaeopteryx,

Tried his imperfect wings for flight.

In the regulated climates of long dead ages,

Fish,

Amphibians,

Reptiles,

Birds and mammals lived again,

For the edification of those interested in the very ancient,

Or who were amused with queer animals.

But that was only paleontologically speaking.

There were the heavens to be considered.

They had been.

The stars and planets weighed and measured.

Their composition noted.

Courses plotted with super accuracy.

Every feature had been mapped.

Every climactic condition recorded.

Life had been named and numbered,

Then photographed.

And these were but first considerations.

Actually,

What wasn't known about the solar system had not yet occurred.

But that would be probably remedied by a machine to view the future.

There was physics,

Biology,

Anthropology,

Zoology,

Geology,

Bacteriology,

Botany,

And ologies and onodes and anomies,

Such as ran into figures which only machines could calculate.

A book could indeed have been written of the accomplishments of super race.

But this is of the war itself,

And how it came about,

And how it all ended.

Stated simply,

In 2050,

The point of diminishing utility had been reached.

To the hungry man,

The first course of dinner is wonderfully delicious,

The second good,

The third satisfying.

Through the ages,

People have hungered after luxury and leisure.

But when he finds his food,

A lot of it,

Man finds suddenly that it no longer appeals to him.

In fact,

Too much is bound to make him sick,

And often disagreeable.

He looks around for something else.

So did the people of the 22nd century.

They had all of the pleasurable amusements they wanted,

But it was all so intellectual.

Everything was culture.

They had surfeited with it,

And suddenly they wanted to forget it.

All play and no work made man a discontented citizen.

A reaction set in.

Man was not completely civilized as yet.

The war.

21 years the war raged,

And scarcely a million survived.

Bit by bit,

This million was whittled down by the weapons of destruction,

To a ragged handful of things that had once been cultured.

Finally,

Only 100 humans remained alive,

And they kept fighting blindly,

None of them realizing how close to oblivion they were crowding themselves and the future of humanity.

And they went on,

Killing,

Killing,

Killing.

It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished,

Leaving the world to the more competent,

Though half-ignorant,

Hands of the beasts,

Who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food,

Not because of madness,

And who did not have books and talk and have culture.

The human race would have gone had it not been for the record.

The fighters of war's end,

Leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat,

Were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the 20th century,

But now lay crumbling,

Its proud buildings falling to the ground,

Sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky,

And the city was Los Angeles.

Hedrick Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists,

Hand-enclosed and chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist,

Insulated on the interior for the wearer,

When suddenly the two of them were caught by a spreader.

The other man died instantly,

But Hedrick got in the side and was whirled about sickeningly and survived.

He was lying painfully on something when he came to,

But felt too dizzy and sick to move.

At last,

When his head had cleared a bit,

He rolled over into a sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp a phonograph.

Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171,

And a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort,

Which was exactly what Hedrick thought,

And you can hardly blame him because no one in that generation had ever seen one of these things.

There was a curious story connected with the dying music concerning the days of 2050 when there was a movement to stamp out all symphonies,

Songs,

And things even slightly sentimental,

But back to Hedrick.

Hedrick found the crank that would wound the portable,

Turned it,

Reasoning that perhaps it gave power,

And then,

Holding it away from him,

He waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

Nothing happened.

Hedrick was disappointed.

After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement,

He finally accidentally placed the needle arm onto the disc.

The disc he had been holding noticed was black and filled with little undulations.

The disc was like a wheel,

So Hedrick thought.

It should revolve like one,

Shouldn't it?

He pushed the starter thoughtfully and was more than surprised when the disc started spinning.

From the phonograph came music,

Music and singing.

The lost art had returned.

The art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

Some man was singing on the record in a queerly interesting and familiar tone,

The ancient English.

The singer seemed sad,

Almost crying,

And Hedrick was thrilled as he played it over and over again,

Drinking in the new experience like wine on the lips of a connoisseur.

The voice rose,

Fell,

Lingered,

And Hedrick suddenly didn't feel like fighting anymore.

The music floated out over the tumbled ruins,

Descended to the ears of the other people,

And the fighting ceased.

They transformed.

They came running to crowd about the machine.

And there in the aged music shop,

They stood enthralled.

Music filled their souls.

It was exactly what they had needed and had wanted for many years.

It had been denied them.

Music was the balancing force,

The force that would help them struggle ahead,

Rebuilding the world.

And next time they would be saner,

They knew.

The lesson of luxury had been learned,

And learned well.

Never again would they leave all of the work to the machines.

Now they would work and sing and play.

It would be work,

Hard work,

For some time to come.

But they had found music again,

And that would anchor them to sanity.

And thus was mankind saved through a record.

Sunny Boy.

Embroidery.

A short story by Ray Bradbury.

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute and shell those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house,

To the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower,

A man,

A road,

A sun,

A house.

The scene grew underhand,

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands,

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady,

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers,

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that,

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces,

And fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

That this won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb,

And it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house.

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene with a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread,

And her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked,

Almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but return to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far,

And this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times,

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one,

Or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch,

In the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away a mosquito sound,

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on,

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others,

In the last moment their fingers were flying.

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished and the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop,

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being,

So painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew,

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Bet A short story written by Anton Chekhov It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study,

And remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out of date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host,

The banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane,

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man.

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five,

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions and I stake my freedom,

Said the young man.

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle,

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this and asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be free to cross the threshold of the lodge,

To see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters in newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted,

Books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on,

In any quantity he desired by writing an order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoiled the air of his room.

In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character,

Novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he'd spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written.

More than once he could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years some six hundred volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake,

I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year the prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him it's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before his millions had been reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater his debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange wild speculation and the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune.

And the proud fearless self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet muttered the old man clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only forty now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry.

He will enjoy life.

He will gamble on the exchange while I shall look on him with envy like a beggar and hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No it is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock.

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house and nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees.

Trying to make no noise he took from a fireproof safe the key of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years,

Put on his overcoat and went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden.

Rain was falling.

A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes but could see neither the earth nor the white statues nor the lodge nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood he twice called the watchman.

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather and was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention of the old man suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door and went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it and in the corner there was a dark cast iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out the old man trembling with emotion peeked through the little window.

A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table.

Nothing could be seen but his back,

The hair on his head and his hands.

Open books were lying on the table and on the two easy chairs and on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed and the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years imprisonment had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger and the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound and the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment but three minutes passed.

It was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table a man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones with long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow and the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver and seeing his emaciated aged looking face no one would have believed that he was only 40.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written on handwriting.

Poor creature thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions and I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the pillow and the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow at 12 o'clock I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men.

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine I think it necessary to say a few words to you.

With a clear conscience I tell you,

As before God who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and health and all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For 15 years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountaintops with gold and crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherd's pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom.

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor.

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth and hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the strange events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you,

Who exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great a contempt for himself.

When he got home he lay on his bed,

But his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.

Next morning the watchman ran in with pale faces and told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden,

Go to the gate,

And disappear.

The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner.

To avoid arousing unnecessary talk,

He took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced,

And when he got home,

Locked it up in the fireproof safe.

The Record,

A short story written by Ray Bradbury For twenty years,

For twenty long,

Horror-filled,

War-laden years,

The earth had not known peace.

Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long,

Lean battle projectiles,

Glinting silver in the sunlight,

Or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky to blast man's civilization from its cultural foundations.

Man against man,

Ship against ship,

A ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter,

Men at their battle stations in the ships,

Pressed buttons,

Releasing radio bombs at blistered space,

And lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces,

And flung them down,

Grim ruins,

Reminders of man's ignorant hatreds and suspicions,

And gas,

Thick black clouds of it,

Billowing over the cities,

Seeking every possible egress,

Pushed forward by colossal wind machines.

But even when victory came for the one side,

Often nature,

In one of her vengeful moments,

Would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.

Rays cut the air,

Power bombs exploded incessantly,

Evaporates robbed the earth of its water,

Shot it up into the atmosphere,

And made it a fog that condensed only after many months,

And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain,

Rays that hypnotized,

Caused even the strong-minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets.

Rays that affected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind,

Unable to find food.

It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity,

And why were they fighting?

For pleasure and amusement.

In the middle of the 22nd century,

Every nation had a standard defense.

The weapons of war of each were equal,

Not in proportion to size,

But actually,

Since manpower no longer counted high.

Pacifism had done its best,

But the world was armed to the hilt,

And now,

Though illogically,

It felt safe,

For every nation meant the same as if all had nothing.

Another thing,

There was no work to be done.

Robots did it,

And there seemed nothing left to discover,

Invent,

Or enjoy.

Art was at its perfection.

Poetry was mathematically correct and unutterably beautiful,

Worked out by the aesthetic machines.

Sculpturing had been given the effect complete.

Artists' hands guided by wonderful pieces of machinery.

Huge museums were crammed with art put out synthetically,

And thus it was with the many arts and their creators who grew stagnant in their perfection,

And it was that way with the many sciences also.

Paleontologists had found and articulated and cataloged every fossil.

The ancestor of the Ohippus,

The little four-toed dawn horse,

Was discovered.

The direct line between man and ape established in skeletal remains.

The seed of life itself definitely proved holoradica,

And great biochemists skilled in the science of vital processes had created synthetic tissues and muscles and flesh built upon the frames that had been recovered bodies with skillful modeling,

Even supplied them with blood and given them the spark of life so that the paleobotanists recreated the flora of a prehistoric era.

Again,

The ponderous amphibious brontosaur pushed through the marshes.

Fish emerged upon the land,

And the first bird,

Archaeopteryx,

Tried his imperfect wings for flight.

In the regulated climates of long dead ages,

Fish,

Amphibians,

Reptiles,

Birds,

And mammals lived again for the edification of those interested in the very ancient or who were amused with queer animals.

But that was only paleontologically speaking.

There were the heavens to be considered.

They had been.

The stars and planets weighed and measured,

Their composition noted,

Courses plotted with super accuracy.

Every feature had been mapped.

Every climactic condition recorded.

Life had been named and numbered,

Then photographed.

And these were but first considerations.

Actually,

What wasn't known about the solar system had not yet occurred.

But that would be probably remedied by a machine to view the future.

There was physics,

Biology,

Anthropology,

Zoology,

Geology,

Bacteriology,

Botany,

And ologies and onodes and anomies,

Such as ran into figures which only machines could calculate.

A book could indeed have been written of the accomplishments of super race.

But this is of the war itself,

And how it came about,

And how it all ended.

Stated simply,

In 2050,

The point of diminishing utility had been reached.

To the hungry man,

The first course of dinner is wonderfully delicious.

The second good,

The third satisfying.

Through the ages,

People have hungered after luxury and leisure.

But when he finds his food,

A lot of it,

Man finds suddenly that it no longer appeals to him.

In fact,

Too much is bound to make him sick,

And often disagreeable.

He looks around for something else.

So did the people of the 22nd century.

They had all of the pleasurable amusements they wanted,

But it was all so intellectual.

Everything was culture.

They had surfeited with it,

And suddenly they wanted to forget it.

All play and no work made man a discontented citizen.

A reaction set in.

Man was not completely civilized as yet.

The war.

21 years the war raged,

And scarcely a million survived.

Bit by bit,

This million was whittled down by the weapons of destruction,

To a ragged handful of things that had once been cultured.

Finally,

Only 100 humans remained alive,

And they kept fighting blindly,

None of them realizing how close to oblivion they were crowding themselves and the future of humanity.

And they went on,

Killing,

Killing,

Killing.

It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished,

Leaving the world to the more competent,

Though half-ignorant,

Hands of the beasts,

Who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food,

Not because of madness,

And who did not have books and talk and have culture.

The human race would have gone had it not been for the record.

The fighters of war's end,

Leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat,

Were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the 20th century,

But now lay crumbling,

Its proud buildings falling to the ground,

Sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky,

And the city was Los Angeles.

Hedrick Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists,

Hand-enclosed and chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist,

Insulated on the interior for the wearer.

Suddenly,

The two of them were caught by a spreader.

The other man died instantly,

But Hedrick got in the side and was whirled about sickeningly and survived.

He was lying painfully on something when he came to,

But felt too dizzy and sick to move.

At last,

When his head had cleared a bit,

He rolled over into a sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp a phonograph.

Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171,

And a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort,

Which was exactly what Hedrick thought,

And you can hardly blame him because no one in that generation had ever seen one of these things.

There was a curious story connected with the dying music concerning the days of 2050,

When there was a movement to stamp out all symphonies,

Songs,

And things even slightly sentimental,

But back to Hedrick.

Hedrick found the crank that would wound the portable,

Turned it,

Reasoning that perhaps it gave power,

And then,

Holding it away from him,

He waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

Nothing happened.

Hedrick was disappointed.

After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement,

He finally accidentally placed the needle arm onto the disc.

The disc,

He noticed,

Was black and filled with little undulations.

The disc was like a wheel,

So Hedrick thought.

It should revolve like one,

Shouldn't it?

He pushed the starter thoughtfully and was more than surprised when the disc started spinning.

From the phonograph came music,

Music and singing.

The lost art had returned.

The art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

Some man was singing on the record,

In a queerly interesting and familiar tone,

The ancient English.

The singer seemed sad,

Almost crying,

And Hedrick was thrilled as he played it over and over again,

Drinking in the new experience,

Like wine on the lips of a connoisseur.

The voice rose,

Fell,

Lingered,

And Hedrick suddenly didn't feel like fighting anymore.

The music floated out over the tumbled ruins,

Descended to the ears of the other people,

And the fighting ceased.

They transformed.

They came running to crowd about the machine.

And there in the aged music shop,

They stood enthralled.

Music filled their souls.

It was exactly what they had needed and had wanted for many years.

It had been denied them.

Music was the balancing force,

The force that would help them struggle ahead,

Rebuilding the world.

And next time they would be saner,

They knew.

The lesson of luxury had been learned,

And learned well.

Never again would they leave all of the work to the machines.

Now they would work,

And sing,

And play.

It would be work,

Hard work,

For some time to come.

But they had found music again,

And that would anchor them to sanity.

And thus was mankind saved through a record.

Sunny Boy.

Embroidery.

A short story by Ray Bradbury.

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute and shell those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery and needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house,

To the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower.

A man.

A road.

A sun.

A house.

The scene grew underhand,

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands.

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady,

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers,

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that,

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces and fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

That this won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb and it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house.

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene with a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread and her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked,

Almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but returned to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far and this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times,

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away a mosquito sound,

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on.

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others.

In the last moment their fingers were flying,

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished and the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop.

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being so painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew.

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Bet.

A short story written by Anton Chekhov.

It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study,

And remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out of date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host the banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane?

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man,

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five,

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions,

And I stake my freedom,

Said the young man.

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle,

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this,

And asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life,

And my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be freed across the threshold of the lodge to see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters in newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted,

Books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on,

In any quantity he desired,

By writing an order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoiled the air of his room.

In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character,

Novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he'd spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written.

More than once he could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years some 600 volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year the prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered 600 learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought,

Tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him it's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before his millions had been beyond reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater his debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange,

Wild speculation and the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune and the proud,

Fearless,

Self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank,

Trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet,

Muttered the old man,

Clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only forty now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry,

He will enjoy life,

Will gamble on the exchange while I shall look on him with envy like a beggar and hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No,

It is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock,

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house and nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees.

Trying to make no noise,

He took from a fireproof safe the key of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years,

Put on his overcoat and went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden,

Rain was falling,

A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden,

Howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes but could see neither the earth nor the white statues,

Nor the lodge nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood,

He twice called the watchman,

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather and was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention of the old man,

Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door,

And went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it and in the corner there was a dark cast iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out,

The old man,

Trembling with emotion,

Peeked through the little window.

A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table.

Nothing could be seen but his back,

The hair on his head,

And his hands.

Open books were lying on the table,

And on the two easy chairs,

And on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed and the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years imprisonment had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger,

And the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound and the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment,

But three minutes passed.

It was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table,

A man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones,

With long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow,

And the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver,

And seeing his emaciated,

Aged-looking face,

No one would have believed that he was only forty.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written in fine handwriting.

Poor creature,

Thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions,

And I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the knife,

Would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow,

At twelve o'clock,

I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men,

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine,

I think it necessary to say a few words to you.

With a clear conscience I tell you,

As before God,

Who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and health,

And all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountaintops with gold and crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherd's pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom.

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth,

As though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor.

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth,

And hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the strange events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you to exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise,

And which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great at contempt for himself.

When he got home,

He lay on his bed,

But his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.

Next morning,

The watchman ran in with pale faces and told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden,

Go to the gate,

And disappear.

The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner.

To avoid arousing unnecessary talk,

He took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced,

And when he got home,

Locked it up in the fireproof safe.

The Record,

A short story written by Ray Bradbury For twenty years,

For twenty long,

Horror-filled,

War-laden years,

The earth had not known peace.

Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long,

Lean battle projectiles,

Glinting silver in the sunlight,

Or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky to blast man's civilization from its cultural foundations.

Man against man,

Ship against ship,

A ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter,

Men at their battle stations in the ships,

Pressed buttons,

Releasing radio bombs at blistered space,

And lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces,

And flung them down,

Grim ruins,

Reminders of man's ignorant hatreds and suspicions,

And gas,

Thick black clouds of it,

Billowing over the cities,

Seeking every possible egress,

Pushed forward by colossal wind machines.

But even when victory came for the one side,

Often nature,

In one of her vengeful moments,

Would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.

Rays cut the air,

Power bombs exploded incessantly,

Evaporates robbed the earth of its water,

Shot it up into the atmosphere,

And made it a fog that condensed only after many months,

And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain,

Rays that hypnotized,

Caused even the strong-minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets.

Rays that affected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind,

Unable to find food.

It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity,

And why were they fighting?

For pleasure and amusement.

In the middle of the 22nd century,

Every nation had a standard defense.

The weapons of war of each were equal,

Not in proportion to size,

But actually,

Since manpower no longer counted high.

Pacifism had done its best,

But the world was armed to the hilt,

And now,

Though illogically,

It felt safe,

For every nation meant the same as if all had nothing.

Another thing,

There was no work to be done.

Robots did it,

And there seemed nothing left to discover,

Invent,

Or enjoy.

Art was at its perfection.

Poetry was mathematically correct and unutterably beautiful,

Worked out by the aesthetic machines.

Sculpturing had been given the effect complete.

Artists' hands guided by wonderful pieces of machinery.

Huge museums were crammed with art put out synthetically,

And thus it was with the many arts and their creators who grew stagnant in their perfection,

And it was that way with the many sciences also.

Paleontologists had found and articulated and cataloged every fossil.

The ancestor of the Ohippus,

The little four-toed dawn horse,

Was discovered.

The direct line between man and ape established in skeletal remains.

The seed of life itself definitely proved holoradica,

And great biochemists,

Skilled in the science of vital processes,

Had created synthetic tissues and muscles and flesh,

Built upon the frames that had been recovered bodies with skillful modeling,

Even supplied them with blood,

And given them the of life,

So that the paleobotanists recreated the flora of a prehistoric era.

Again,

The ponderous amphibious brontosaur pushed through the marshes.

Fish emerged upon the land,

And the first bird,

Archaeopteryx,

Tried his imperfect wings for flight.

In the regulated climates of long dead ages,

Fish,

Amphibians,

Reptiles,

Birds,

And mammals lived again for the edification of those interested in the very ancient,

Or who were amused with queer animals.

But that was only paleontologically speaking.

There were the heavens to be considered.

They had been.

The stars and planets weighed and measured.

Their composition noted.

Courses plotted with super-accuracy.

Every feature had been mapped.

Every climactic condition recorded.

Life had been named and numbered,

Then photographed.

And these were but first considerations.

Actually,

What wasn't known about the solar system had not yet occurred.

But that would be probably remedied by a machine to view the future.

There was physics,

Biology,

Anthropology,

Zoology,

Geology,

Bacteriology,

Botany,

And ologies,

And onides,

And anomies,

Such as ran into figures which only machines could calculate.

A book could indeed have been written of the accomplishments of super-race.

But this is of the war itself,

And how it came about,

And how it all ended.

Stated simply,

In 2050,

The point of diminishing utility had been reached.

To the hungry man,

The first course of dinner is wonderfully delicious,

The second good,

The third satisfying.

Through the ages,

People have hungered after luxury and leisure.

But when he finds his food,

A lot of it,

Man finds suddenly that it no longer appeals to him.

In fact,

Too much is bound to make him sick,

And often disagreeable.

He looks around for something else.

So did the people of the 22nd century.

They had all of the pleasurable amusements they wanted,

But it was all so intellectual.

Everything was culture.

They had surfeited with it,

And suddenly they wanted to forget it.

All play and no work made man a discontented citizen.

A reaction set in.

Man was not completely civilized as yet.

The war.

Twenty-one years,

The war raged,

And scarcely a million survived.

Bit by bit,

This million was whittled down by the weapons of destruction to a ragged handful of things that had once been cultured.

Finally,

Only 100 humans remained alive,

And they kept fighting blindly,

None of them realizing how close to oblivion they were crowding themselves and the future of humanity.

And they went on,

Killing,

Killing,

Killing.

It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished,

Leaving the world to the more competent,

Though half-ignorant,

Hands of the beasts,

Who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food,

Not because of madness,

And who did not have books and talk and have culture.

The human race would have gone,

Had it not been for the record.

The fighters of war's end,

Leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat,

Were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the 20th century,

But now lay crumbling,

Its proud buildings falling to the ground,

Sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky,

And the city was Los Angeles.

Hedrick Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists,

Hand-enclosed in chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist,

Insulated on the interior for the wearer,

When suddenly the two of them were caught by a spreader.

The other man died instantly,

But Hedrick got in the side and was whirled about sickeningly and survived.

He was lying painfully on something when he came to,

But felt too dizzy and sick to move.

At last,

When his head had cleared a bit,

He rolled over into a sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp a phonograph.

Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171,

And a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort,

Which was exactly what Hedrick thought,

And you can hardly blame him because no one in that generation had ever seen one of these things.

There was a curious story connected with the dying music concerning the days of 2050,

When there was a movement to stamp out all symphonies,

Songs,

And things even slightly sentimental,

But back to Hedrick.

Hedrick found the crank that would wound the portable,

Turned it,

Reasoning that perhaps it gave power,

And then,

Holding it away from him,

He waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

Nothing happened.

Hedrick was disappointed.

After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement,

He finally accidentally placed the needle arm onto the disc.

The disc,

He noticed,

Was black and filled with little undulations.

The disc was like a wheel,

So Hedrick thought.

It should revolve like one,

Shouldn't it?

He pushed the starter thoughtfully and was more than surprised when the disc started spinning.

From the phonograph came music,

Music and singing.

The lost art had returned.

The art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

Some man was singing on the record in a queerly interesting and familiar tone,

The ancient English.

The singer seemed sad,

Almost crying,

And Hedrick was thrilled as he played it over and over again,

Drinking in the new experience like wine on the lips of a connoisseur.

The voice rose,

Fell,

Lingered,

And Hedrick suddenly didn't feel like fighting anymore.

The music floated out over the tumbled ruins,

Descended to the ears of the other people,

And the fighting ceased.

They transformed.

They came running to crowd about the machine.

And there in the aged music shop,

They stood enthralled.

Music filled their souls.

It was exactly what they had needed and had wanted for many years.

It had been denied them.

Music was the balancing force,

The force that would help them struggle ahead,

Rebuilding the world.

And next time they would be saner,

They knew.

The lesson of luxury had been learned,

And learned well.

Never again would they leave all of the work to the machines.

Now they would work and sing and play.

It would be work,

Hard work,

For some time to come.

But they had found music again,

And that would anchor them to sanity.

And thus was mankind saved through a record.

Sunny Boy.

Embroidery.

A short story by Ray Bradbury.

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute and shell those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery and needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house,

To the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower.

A man.

A road.

A sun.

A house.

The scene grew underhand.

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands.

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady.

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers,

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that,

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces and fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

This won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb and it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house,

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene with a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread and her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked,

Almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but return to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far and this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times,

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away a mosquito sound,

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on.

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others.

In the last moment their fingers were flying,

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished,

And the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop,

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being,

So painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew,

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Bet,

A short story written by Anton Chekhov.

It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out of date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host the banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane?

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man,

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five.

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions,

And I stake my freedom,

Said the young man.

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle.

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this and asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part,

It was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part,

Simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be freed across the threshold of the lodge to see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters in newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted,

Books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on,

In any quantity he desired,

By writing an order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoilt the air of his room.

In the first year,

The books he sent for were principally of a light character,

Novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year,

The piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year,

Music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he'd spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written,

More than once he could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year,

The prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years,

Some six hundred volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake,

I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year,

The prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement,

The prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought,

Tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him,

It's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before,

His millions had been beyond reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater,

His debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange,

Wild speculation,

And the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years,

Had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune.

And the proud,

Fearless,

Self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank,

Trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet,

Muttered the old man,

Clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only forty now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry,

He will enjoy life,

Will gamble on the exchange,

While I shall look on him with envy like a beggar,

And hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No,

It is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock,

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house,

And nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees.

Trying to make no noise,

He took from a fireproof safe the key of the door,

Which had not been opened for fifteen years,

Put on his overcoat,

And went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden.

Rain was falling.

A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden,

Howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes,

But could see neither the earth nor the white statues,

Nor the lodge nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood,

He twice called the watchman.

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather,

And was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention of the old man,

Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door,

And went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it,

And in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out,

The old man,

Trembling with emotion,

Peeked through the little window.

A handle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table,

Nothing to be seen but his back,

The hair on his head and his hands.

Open books were lying on the table,

And on the two easy chairs and on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed,

And the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years imprisonment had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger,

And the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door,

And put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound,

And the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment,

But three minutes passed.

It was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table,

A man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones,

With long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow,

And the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver,

And seeing his emaciated,

Aged-looking face,

No one would have believed that he was only forty.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written in fine handwriting.

Poor creature!

Thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions,

And I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the pillow,

And the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow,

At twelve o'clock,

I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men.

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine,

I think it necessary to say a few words to you.

With a clear conscience I tell you,

As before God who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and health,

And all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountaintops with golden crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherd's pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom.

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor.

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth and hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the strange events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you to exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great a contempt for himself.

When he got home,

He lay on his bed.

But his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.

Next morning,

The watchman ran in with pale faces,

And told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden,

Go to the gate,

And disappear.

The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge,

And made sure of the flight of his prisoner.

To avoid arousing unnecessary talk,

He took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced,

And when he got home,

Locked it up in the fireproof safe.

The Record.

A short story written by Ray Bradbury.

For twenty years,

For twenty long,

Horror-filled,

War-laden years,

The earth had not known peace.

Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long,

Lean battle projectiles,

Glinting silver in the sunlight,

Or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky,

To blast man's civilization from its cultural foundations.

Man against man,

Ship against ship,

A ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter,

Men at their battle stations in the ships,

Pressed buttons,

Releasing radio bombs at blistered space,

And lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces,

And flung them down,

Grim ruins,

Reminders of man's ignorant hatreds and suspicions,

And gas,

Thick black clouds of it,

Billowing over the cities,

Seeking every possible egress,

Pushed forward by colossal wind-machines.

But even when victory came for the one side,

Often nature,

In one of her vengeful moments,

Would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.

Rays cut the air,

Power bombs exploded incessantly,

Evaporates robbed the earth of its water,

Shot it up into the atmosphere,

And made it a fog that condensed only after many months,

And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain,

Rays that hypnotized,

Caused even the strong-minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets.

Rays that affected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind,

Unable to find food.

It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity.

And why were they fighting?

For pleasure and amusement.

In the middle of the 22nd century,

Every nation had a standard defense.

The weapons of war of each were equal,

Not in proportion to size,

But actually,

Since manpower no longer counted high.

Pacifism had done its best,

But the world was armed to the hilt,

And now,

Though illogically,

It felt safe,

For every nation meant the same as if all had nothing.

Another thing,

There was no work to be done.

Robots did it,

And there seemed nothing left to discover,

Invent,

Or enjoy.

Art was at its perfection.

Poetry was mathematically correct and unutterably beautiful,

Worked out by the aesthetic machines.

Sculpturing had been given the effect complete,

Artists' hands guided by wonderful pieces of machinery.

Huge museums were crammed with art,

Put out synthetically.

And thus it was with the many arts and their creators,

Who grew stagnant in their perfection.

And it was that way with the many sciences also.

Paleontologists had found and articulated and cataloged every fossil.

The ancestor of the Ohippus,

The little four-toed dawn horse,

Was discovered.

The direct line between man and ape established in skeletal remains.

The seat of life itself definitely proved holoradica.

And great biochemists,

Skilled in the science of vital processes,

Had created synthetic tissues and muscles and flesh,

Built upon the frames that had been recovered bodies with skillful modeling,

Even supplied them with blood,

And given them the of life.

So that the paleobotanists recreated the flora of a prehistoric era.

Again,

The ponderous amphibious brontosaur pushed through the marshes.

Fish emerged upon the land,

And the first bird,

Archaeopteryx,

Tried his imperfect wings for flight.

In the regulated climates of long dead ages,

Fish,

Amphibians,

Reptiles,

Birds and mammals lived again,

For the edification of those interested in the very ancient,

Or who were amused with queer animals.

But that was only paleontologically speaking.

There were the heavens to be considered.

They had been.

The stars and planets weighed and measured.

Their composition noted.

Courses plotted with super accuracy.

Every feature had been mapped.

Every climactic condition recorded.

Life had been named and numbered,

Then photographed.

And these were but first considerations.

Actually,

What wasn't known about the solar system had not yet occurred.

But that would be probably remedied by a machine to view the future.

There was physics,

Biology,

Anthropology,

Zoology,

Geology,

Bacteriology,

Botany,

And ologies and onodes and anomies,

Such as ran into figures which only machines could calculate.

A book could indeed have been written of the accomplishments of super race.

But this is of the war itself,

And how it came about,

And how it all ended.

Stated simply,

In 2050,

The point of diminishing utility had been reached.

To the hungry man,

The first course of dinner is wonderfully delicious,

The second good,

The third satisfying.

Through the ages,

People have hungered after luxury and leisure.

But when he finds his food,

A lot of it,

Man finds suddenly that it no longer appeals to him.

In fact,

Too much is bound to make him sick,

And often disagreeable.

He looks around for something else.

So did the people of the 22nd century.

They had all of the pleasurable amusements they wanted,

But it was all so intellectual.

Everything was culture.

They had surfeited with it,

And suddenly they wanted to forget it.

All play and no work made man a discontented citizen.

A reaction set in.

Man was not completely civilized as yet.

The war.

21 years the war raged,

And scarcely a million survived.

Bit by bit,

This million was whittled down by the weapons of destruction,

To a ragged handful of things that had once been cultured.

Finally,

Only 100 humans remained alive,

And they kept fighting blindly,

None of them realizing how close to oblivion they were crowding themselves and the future of humanity.

And they went on,

Killing,

Killing,

Killing.

It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished,

Leaving the world to the more competent,

Though half-ignorant,

Hands of the beasts,

Who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food,

Not because of madness,

And who did not have books and talk and have culture.

The human race would have gone had it not been for the record.

The fighters of war's end,

Leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat,

Were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the 20th century,

But now lay crumbling,

Its proud buildings falling to the ground,

Sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky,

And the city was Los Angeles.

Hedrick Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists,

Hand-enclosed and chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist,

Insulated on the interior for the wearer,

When suddenly the two of them were caught by a spreader.

The other man died instantly,

But Hedrick got in the side and was whirled about sickeningly and survived.

He was lying painfully on something when he came to,

But felt too dizzy and sick to move.

At last,

When his head had cleared a bit,

He rolled over into sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp a phonograph.

Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171,

And a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort,

Which was exactly what Hedrick thought,

And you can hardly blame him,

Because no one in that generation had ever seen one of these things.

There was a curious story connected with the dying music,

Concerning the days of 2050,

When there was a movement to stamp out all symphonies,

Songs,

And things even slightly sentimental.

But back to Hedrick.

Hedrick found the crank that would wound the portable,

Turned it,

Reasoning that perhaps it gave power,

And then,

Holding it away from him,

He waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

Nothing happened.

Hedrick was disappointed.

After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement,

He finally accidentally placed the needle arm onto the disc.

The disc,

He noticed,

Was black and filled with little undulations.

The disc was like a wheel,

So Hedrick thought.

It should revolve like one,

Shouldn't it?

He pushed the starter thoughtfully,

And was more than surprised when the disc started spinning.

From the phonograph came music,

Music and singing.

The lost art had returned.

The art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

Some man was singing on the record,

In a queerly interesting and familiar tone,

The ancient English.

The singer seemed sad,

Almost crying,

And Hedrick was thrilled as he played it over and over again,

Drinking in the new experience,

Like wine on the lips of a connoisseur.

The voice rose,

Fell,

Lingered,

And Hedrick suddenly didn't feel like fighting anymore.

The music floated out over the tumbled ruins,

Descended to the ears of the other people,

And the fighting ceased.

They transformed.

They came running to crowd about the machine.

And there in the aged music shop,

They stood enthralled.

Music filled their souls.

It was exactly what they had needed,

And had wanted for many years.

It had been denied them.

Music was the balancing force,

The force that would help them struggle ahead,

Rebuilding the world.

And next time they would be saner,

They knew.

The lesson of luxury had been learned,

And learned well.

Never again would they leave all of the work to the machines.

Now they would work and sing and play.

It would be work,

Hard work,

For some time to come.

But they had found music again,

And that would anchor them to sanity.

And thus was mankind saved through a record.

Sunny Boy.

Embroidery.

A short story by Ray Bradbury.

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute and shell those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery and needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house,

To the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower,

A man,

A road,

A sun,

A house.

The scene grew underhand,

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands,

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady,

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers,

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that,

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces,

And fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

That this won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb,

And it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady,

Exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house.

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern,

Practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene,

With a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread,

And her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked,

Almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but return to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far,

And this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times.

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one,

Or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away a mosquito sound,

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on.

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others.

In the last moment their fingers were flying,

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished and the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop,

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being,

So painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew,

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Bet A short story written by Anton Chekhov.

It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study,

And remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out of date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host,

The banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane?

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man,

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five,

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions,

And I stake my freedom,

Said the young man.

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle,

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this,

And asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life,

And my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be freed across the threshold of the lodge to see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters in newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted,

Books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on,

In any quantity he desired,

By writing in order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoiled the air of his room.

In the first year,

The books he sent for were principally of a light character,

Novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year,

The piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year,

Music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he'd spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written.

More than once,

He could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year,

The prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years,

Some six hundred volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake,

I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year,

The prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book,

Easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement,

The prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought,

Tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him,

It's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before,

His millions had been yawned reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater,

His debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange,

Wild speculation,

And the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years,

Had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune.

And the proud,

Fearless,

Self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank,

Trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet,

Muttered the old man,

Clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only forty now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry,

He will enjoy life,

Will gamble on the exchange,

While I shall look on him with envy like a beggar and hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No,

It is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock,

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house,

And nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees,

Trying to make no noise.

He took from a fireproof safe the key of the door,

Which had not been opened for fifteen years,

Put on his overcoat,

And went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden.

Rain was falling.

A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden,

Howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes,

But could see neither the earth,

Nor the white statues,

Nor the lodge,

Nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood,

He twice called the watchman.

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather,

And was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention of the old man,

Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door,

And went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it,

And in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out,

The old man,

Trembling with emotion,

Peeked through the little window.

A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table.

Nothing could be seen but his back,

The hair on his head,

And his hands.

Open books were lying on the table,

And on the two easy chairs,

And on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed,

And the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years in prison had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger,

And the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound,

And the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment,

But three minutes passed.

It was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table,

A man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones,

With long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow,

And the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver,

And seeing his emaciated,

Aged-looking face,

No one would have believed that he was only forty.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written in fine handwriting.

Poor creature,

Thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions,

And I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the pillow,

And the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow,

At twelve o'clock,

I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men.

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine,

I think it necessary to say a few words to you.

With a clear conscience I tell you,

As before God,

Who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and health,

And all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountaintops with gold and crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherds' pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom.

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor.

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth and hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the strange events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you to exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great a contempt for himself.

When he got home,

He lay on his bed.

But his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.

Next morning,

The watchman ran in with pale faces and told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden,

Go to the gate,

And disappear.

The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner.

To avoid arousing unnecessary talk,

He took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced,

And when he got home,

Locked it up in the fireproof safe.

The Record A short story written by Ray Bradbury For twenty years,

For twenty long,

Horror-filled,

War-laden years,

The earth had not known peace.

Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long,

Lean battle projectiles,

Glinting silver in the sunlight,

Or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky,

To blast man's civilization from its cultural foundations.

Man against man,

Ship against ship,

A ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter,

Men at their battle stations in the ships,

Pressed buttons,

Releasing radio bombs at blistered space,

And lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces,

And flung them down,

Grim ruins,

Reminders of man's ignorant hatreds and suspicions,

And gas,

Thick black clouds of it,

Billowing over the cities,

Seeking every possible egress,

Pushed forward by colossal wind-machines.

But even when victory came for the one side,

Often nature,

In one of her vengeful moments,

Would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.

Rays cut the air,

Power bombs exploded incessantly,

Evaporates robbed the earth of its water,

Shot it up into the atmosphere,

And made it a fog that condensed only after many months,

And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain,

Rays that hypnotized,

Caused even the strong-minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets.

Rays that affected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind,

Unable to find food.

It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity,

And why were they fighting?

For pleasure and amusement.

In the middle of the 22nd century,

Every nation had a standard defense.

The weapons of war of each were equal,

Not in proportion to size,

But actually,

Since manpower no longer counted high.

Pacifism had done its best,

But the world was armed to the hilt,

And now,

Though illogically,

It felt safe,

For every nation meant the same as if all had nothing.

Another thing,

There was no work to be done.

Robots did it,

And there seemed nothing left to discover,

Invent,

Or enjoy.

Art was at its perfection.

Poetry was mathematically correct and unutterably beautiful,

Worked out by the aesthetic machines.

Sculpturing had been given the effect complete.

Artists' hands guided by wonderful pieces of machinery.

Huge museums were crammed with art put out synthetically,

And thus it was with the many arts and their creators who grew stagnant in their perfection,

And it was that way with the many sciences also.

Paleontologists had found and articulated and cataloged every fossil.

The ancestor of the Ohippus,

The little four-toed dawn horse,

Was discovered.

The direct line between man and ape established in skeletal remains.

The seed of life itself definitely proved holoradica,

And great biochemists skilled in the science of vital processes had created synthetic tissues and muscles and flesh built upon the frames that had been recovered bodies with skillful modeling,

Even supplied them with blood and given them the spark of life so that the paleobotanists recreated the flora of a prehistoric era.

Again,

The ponderous amphibious brontosaur pushed through the marshes.

Fish emerged upon the land,

And the first bird,

Archaeopteryx,

Tried his imperfect wings for flight.

In the regulated climates of long dead ages,

Fish,

Amphibians,

Reptiles,

Birds,

And mammals lived again for the edification of those interested in the very ancient or who were amused with queer animals.

But that was only paleontologically speaking.

There were the heavens to be considered.

They had been.

The stars and planets weighed and measured,

Their composition noted,

Courses plotted with super accuracy,

Every feature had been mapped,

Every climactic condition recorded,

Life had been named and numbered,

Then photographed.

And these were but the first considerations.

Actually,

What wasn't known about the solar system had not yet occurred.

But that would be probably remedied by a machine to view the future.

There was physics,

Biology,

Anthropology,

Zoology,

Geology,

Bacteriology,

Botany,

And ologies and onodes and anomies,

Such as ran into figures which only machines could calculate.

A book could indeed have been written of the accomplishments of super race.

But this is of the war itself,

And how it came about,

And how it all ended.

Stated simply,

In 2050,

The point of diminishing utility had been reached.

To the hungry man,

The first course of dinner is wonderfully delicious,

The second good,

The third satisfying.

Through the ages,

People have hungered after luxury and leisure.

But when he finds his food,

A lot of it,

Man finds suddenly that it no longer appeals to him.

In fact,

Too much is bound to make him sick,

And often disagreeable.

He looks around for something else.

So did the people of the 22nd century.

They had all of the pleasurable amusements they wanted,

But it was all so intellectual.

Everything was culture.

They had surfeited with it,

And suddenly they wanted to forget it.

All play and no work made man a discontented citizen.

A reaction set in.

Man was not completely civilized as yet.

The war.

21 years the war raged,

And scarcely a million survived.

Bit by bit,

This million was whittled down by the weapons of destruction,

To a ragged handful of things that had once been cultured.

Finally,

Only 100 humans remained alive,

And they kept fighting blindly,

None of them realizing how close to oblivion they were crowding themselves and the future of humanity.

And they went on,

Killing,

Killing,

Killing.

It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished,

Leaving the world to the more competent,

Though half-ignorant,

Hands of the beasts,

Who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food,

Not because of madness,

And who did not have books and talk and have culture.

The human race would have gone had it not been for the record.

The fighters of war's end,

Leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat,

Were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the 20th century,

But now lay crumbling,

Its proud buildings falling to the ground,

Sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky,

And the city was Los Angeles.

Hedrick Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists,

Hand-enclosed in chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist,

Insulated on the interior for the wearer.

When suddenly the two of them were caught by a spreader.

The other man died instantly,

But Hedrick got in the side and was whirled about sickeningly and survived.

He was lying painfully on something when he came to,

But felt too dizzy and sick to move.

At last,

When his head had cleared a bit,

He rolled over into a sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp a phonograph.

Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171,

And a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort,

Which was exactly what Hedrick thought,

And you can hardly blame him because no one in that generation had ever seen one of these things.

There was a curious story connected with the music concerning the days of 2050,

When there was a movement to stamp out all symphonies,

Songs,

And things even slightly sentimental,

But back to Hedrick.

Hedrick found the crank that would wound the portable,

Turned it,

Reasoning that perhaps it gave power,

And then,

Holding it away from him,

He waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

Nothing happened.

Hedrick was disappointed.

After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement,

He finally accidentally placed the needle arm onto the disc.

The disc,

He noticed,

Was black and filled with little undulations.

The disc was like a wheel,

So Hedrick thought.

It should revolve like one,

Shouldn't it?

He pushed the starter thoughtfully,

And was more than surprised when the disc started spinning.

From the phonograph came music,

Music and singing.

The lost art had returned.

The art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

Some man was singing on the record,

In a queerly interesting and familiar tone,

The ancient English.

The singer seemed sad,

Almost crying,

And Hedrick was thrilled as he played it over and over again,

Drinking in the new experience,

Like wine on the lips of a connoisseur.

The voice rose,

Fell,

Lingered,

And Hedrick suddenly didn't feel like fighting anymore.

The music floated out over the tumbled ruins,

Descended to the ears of the other people,

And the fighting ceased.

They transformed.

They came running to crowd about the machine.

And there in the aged music shop,

They stood enthralled.

Music filled their souls.

It was exactly what they had needed and had wanted for many years.

It had been denied them.

Music was the balancing force,

The force that would help them struggle ahead,

Rebuilding the world.

And next time they would be saner,

They knew.

The lesson of luxury had been learned,

And learned well.

Never again would they leave all of the work to the machines.

Now they would work,

And sing,

And play.

It would be work,

Hard work,

For some time to come.

But they had found music again,

And that would anchor them to sanity.

And thus was mankind saved through a record.

Sunny Boy.

Embroidery.

A short story by Ray Bradbury.

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes,

Like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light.

The three women's mouths twitched over their work.

Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward,

So that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured.

Each woman looked to her own hands,

As if quite suddenly she found her heart beating there.

What time is it?

Ten minutes to five.

Got to get up in a minute,

And shell those peas for dinner.

But,

Said one of them,

Oh yes,

I forgot.

How foolish of me.

The first woman paused,

Put down her embroidery and needle,

And looked through the open porch door,

Through the warm interior of the quiet house,

To the silent kitchen.

There upon the table,

Seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life,

Lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat,

Resilient jackets,

Waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

Go haul them if it'll make you feel good,

Said the second woman.

No,

Said the first.

I won't.

I just won't.

The third woman sighed.

She embroidered a rose,

A leaf,

A daisy on a green field.

The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest,

Most delicate piece of embroidery of them all,

Deftly poking,

Finding,

And returning the quick needle upon the innumerable journeys.

Her quick,

Black glance was on each motion.

A flower,

A man,

A road,

A sun,

A house.

The scene grew underhand,

A miniature beauty,

Perfect in every thread of detail.

It seems at times like this that it'll always be your hands you turn to,

She said.

The others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

I believe,

Said the first lady,

That our souls are in our hands,

For we do everything to the world with our hands.

Sometimes I think we don't use our hands half enough.

It's certain we don't use our heads.

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing.

Yes,

Said the third lady,

When you look back on a whole lifetime,

It seems you don't remember faces so much as hands and what they did.

They recounted to themselves the lids that they had lifted,

The doors that they had opened and shut,

The flowers they had picked,

The dinners they had made,

All with slow and quick fingers,

As was their manner or custom.

Looking back,

You saw a flurry of hands,

Like a magician's dream,

Doors popping wide,

Taps turned,

Brooms wielded,

Children spanked.

The flutter of pink hands was the only sound,

The rest of a dream without voices.

No supper to fix tonight,

Or tomorrow night,

Or the next night after that,

Said the third lady.

No windows to open or shut.

No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.

No papers to clip cooking articles out of.

And suddenly they were crying.

The tears rolled softly down their faces and fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

That this won't help things,

Said the first lady at last.

Putting the back of her thumb to each under eyelid,

She looked at her thumb and it was wet.

Now look what I've done,

Cried the second lady exasperated.

The others stopped and peered over.

The second lady held out her embroidery.

There was the scene.

Perfect,

Except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field,

The embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house.

The man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

I'll just have to rip out the whole pattern practically to fix it right,

Said the second lady.

What a shame.

They all stared intently at the beautiful scene with a flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick up away at the thread and her little deaf scissors flashing.

The pattern came out thread by thread.

She pulled and yanked,

Almost viciously.

The man's face was gone.

He continued to seize at the threads.

What are you doing?

Asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road.

She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but return to their own tasks.

What time is it?

Asked someone.

Five minutes to five.

Is it supposed to happen at five o'clock?

Yes.

And they're not sure what it'll do to anything,

Really,

When it happens?

No,

Not sure.

Why didn't we stop them before it got this far and this big?

It's twice as big as ever before.

No,

Ten times,

Maybe a thousand.

This isn't like the first one or the dozen later ones.

This is different.

Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.

They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass.

What time is it now?

One minute to five.

The needles flashed silver fire.

They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away a mosquito sound,

Then something like a tremor of drums.

The three women cocked their heads,

Listening.

We won't hear anything,

Will we?

They say not.

Perhaps we're foolish.

Perhaps we'll go right on.

After five o'clock,

Shelling peas,

Opening doors,

Stirring soups,

Washing dishes,

Making lunches,

Peeling oranges.

My,

How we'll all laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment.

They smiled at each other.

It's five o'clock.

At these words,

Hushed,

They all busied themselves.

Their fingers darted.

Their faces were turned down to the motions they made.

They made frantic patterns.

They made lilacs and green and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth.

They said nothing,

But you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,

She said.

I.

.

.

But she hadn't time enough to lift her head.

Somewhere on the side of her vision,

She saw the world brighten and catch fire.

She kept her head down,

For she knew what it was.

She didn't look up,

Nor did the others.

In the last moment their fingers were flying,

They didn't glance about to see what was happening to the country,

The town,

This house,

Or even this porch.

They were only staring down,

At the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go.

She tried to embroider it back in,

But it went,

And then the road vanished,

And the blades of grass.

She watched a fire,

In slow motion almost,

Catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it,

And pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop.

And she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design.

Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle,

While still it flashed.

She watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body,

Untwisting the yarn of her being,

So painstakingly that she could see it,

In all of its devilish beauty,

Yanking out the pattern from the material at hand.

What it was doing to the other women,

Or the furniture,

Or the elm tree in the yard,

She never knew.

For now,

Yes,

Now,

It was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh,

The pink thread of her cheeks,

And at last it found her heart,

A soft red rose sewn in with the fire,

And it burned the fresh,

Embroidered petals away,

One by delicate one.

The Bet.

A short story written by Anton Chekhov.

It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how,

Fifteen years before,

He had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there,

And there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things,

They had talked of capital punishment.

The majority of the guests,

Among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

Disapproved of the death penalty.

They considered that form of punishment out of date,

Immoral,

And unsuitable for Christian states.

In the opinion of some of them,

The death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

I don't agree with you,

Said their host the banker.

I have not tried either death penalty or imprisonment for life,

But if one may judge a priory,

The death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man once,

But lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane?

He who kills you in a few minutes,

Or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?

Both are equally immoral,

Observed one of the guests,

For they both have the same object,

To take life away.

The state is not God.

It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

Among the guests was a young lawyer,

A young man of five and twenty,

And when he was asked his opinion,

He said,

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral,

But if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

A lively discussion arose.

The banker,

Who was younger and more nervous in those days,

Was suddenly carried away by excitement.

He struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man,

It's not true.

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.

If you mean that in earnest,

Said the young man,

I'll take the bet,

But I would stay not five,

But fifteen years.

Fifteen!

Done!

Cried the banker.

Gentlemen,

I stake two million.

Agreed.

You stake your millions,

And I stake my freedom,

Said the young man.

And this wild,

Senseless bet was carried out.

The banker,

Spoilt and frivolous,

With millions beyond his reckoning,

Was delighted at the bet.

At supper he made fun of the young man and said,

Think better of it,

Young man,

While there is still time.

To me,

Two million is a trifle,

But you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.

I say three or four because you won't stay longer.

Don't forget,

Either,

You unhappy man,

That voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.

I am sorry for you.

And now the banker,

Walking to and fro,

Remembered all this,

And asked himself,

What was the object of that bet?

What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life,

And my throwing away two million?

Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life?

No,

No.

It was all nonsensical and meaningless.

On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man,

And on his part simple greed for money.

Then he remembered what followed that evening.

It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.

It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be freed across the threshold of the lodge to see human beings,

To hear the human voice,

Or to receive letters in newspapers.

He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books,

And was allowed to write letters,

Drink wine,

And to smoke.

By the terms of the agreement,

The only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.

He might have anything he wanted,

Books,

Music,

Wine,

And so on,

In any quantity he desired,

By writing in order,

But could only receive them through the window.

The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary,

And bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years,

Beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14,

1870,

And ending at twelve o'clock of November 14,

1885.

The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions,

If only two minutes before the end,

Released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

For the first year of his confinement,

As far as one could judge from his brief notes,

The prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.

The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.

He refused wine and tobacco.

Wine,

He wrote,

Excites the desires,

And desires are the worst foes of the prisoner.

And besides,

Nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.

And tobacco spoiled the air of his room.

In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character,

Novels with a complicated love plot,

Sensational and fantastic stories,

And so on.

In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge,

And the prisoner asked only for the classics.

In the fifth year music was audible again,

And the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he'd spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed,

Frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.

He did not read books.

Sometimes at night he would sit down to write.

He would spend hours writing,

And in the morning tear up all that he had written.

More than once he could be heard crying.

In the second half of the sixth year,

The prisoner began zealously studying languages,

Philosophy,

And history.

He threw himself eagerly into the studies,

So much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered.

In the course of four years,

Some six hundred volumes were procured at his request.

It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner.

My dear jailer,

I write you these lines in six languages.

Show them to people who know the languages.

Let them read them.

If they find not one mistake,

I implore you to fire a shot in the garden.

That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages,

But the same flame burns in all of them.

Oh,

If you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled.

The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

Then after the tenth year,

The prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the gospel.

It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book,

Easy of comprehension.

Theology and histories of religion followed the gospels.

In the last two years of his confinement,

The prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately.

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences.

Then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare.

There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry and a manual on medicine and a novel and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

His reading suggested a man swimming in a sea among the wreckage of his ship and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

The old banker remembered all of this and thought,

Tomorrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom.

By our agreement I ought to pay him two million.

If I do pay him,

It's all over with me.

I shall be utterly ruined.

Fifteen years before,

His millions had been beyond reckoning.

Now he was afraid to ask himself which was greater,

His debts or his assets.

Desperate gambling on the stock exchange,

Wild speculation,

And the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years,

Had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune.

And the proud,

Fearless,

Self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.

Cursed bet,

Muttered the old man,

Clutching his head in despair.

Why didn't that man die?

He is only forty now.

He will take my last penny from me.

He will marry,

He will enjoy life,

Will gamble on the exchange,

While I shall look on him with envy like a beggar and hear from him every day the same sentence.

I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life.

Let me help you out.

No,

It is too much.

The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man.

It struck three o'clock,

The banker listened.

Everyone was asleep in the house,

And nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees.

Trying to make no noise,

He took from a fireproof safe the key of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years,

Put on his overcoat,

And went out of the house.

It was dark and cold in the garden.

Rain was falling.

A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden,

Howling and giving the trees no rest.

The banker strained his eyes,

But could see neither the earth,

Nor the white statues,

Nor the lodge,

Nor the trees.

Going to the spot where the lodge stood,

He twice called the watchman.

No answer followed.

Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather,

And was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.

If I had the pluck to carry out my intention of the old man,

Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman.

He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door,

And went into the entry of the lodge.

Then he groped his way into the little passage and lighted a match.

There was not a soul there.

There was a bedstead with no bedding on it,

And in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove.

The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's room were intact.

When the match went out,

The old man,

Trembling with emotion,

Peeked through the little window.

A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room.

He was sitting at the table.

Nothing could be seen but his back,

The hair on his head,

And his hands.

Open books were lying on the table,

And on the two easy chairs,

And on the carpet near the table.

Five minutes passed,

And the prisoner did not once stir.

Fifteen years imprisonment had taught him to sit still.

The banker tapped at the window with his finger,

And the prisoner made no movement whatever in response.

Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put a key in the keyhole.

The rusty lock gave a grating sound,

And the door creaked.

The banker expected to hear at once the footsteps and a cry of astonishment,

But three minutes passed.

It was as quiet as ever in the room.

He made up his mind to go in.

At the table,

A man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless.

He was a skeleton with skin drawn tight over his bones,

With long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard.

His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it.

His cheeks were hollow,

His back long and narrow,

And the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at.

His hair was already streaked with silver,

And seeing his emaciated,

Aged-looking face,

No one would have believed that he was only forty.

He was asleep.

In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written on handwriting.

Poor creature,

Thought the banker.

He is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions,

And I have only to take this half-dead man,

Throw him on the bed,

Stifle him a little with the pillow,

And the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death.

But let us first read what he has written here.

The banker took the page from the table and read as follows.

Tomorrow at twelve o'clock I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men,

But before I leave this room and see the sunshine I think it necessary to say a few words to you.

With a clear conscience I tell you,

As before God who beholds me,

That I despise freedom and life and health,

And all that in your books is called the good things of the world.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life.

It is true that I have not seen the earth nor men,

But in your books I have drunk fragrant wine,

I have sung songs,

I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forest,

Have loved women,

Beauties as ethereal as clouds,

Created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,

Have visited me at night,

And have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl.

In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elbers and Mount Blanc,

And from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky,

The ocean,

And the mountaintops with gold and crimson.

I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm clouds.

I have seen green forests,

Fields,

Rivers,

Lakes,

Towns.

I have heard the singing of the sirens and the strains of the shepherd's pipes.

I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.

In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,

Performed miracles,

Slain,

Burned towns,

Preached new religions,

Conquered whole kingdoms.

Your books have given me wisdom.

All that unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain.

I know that I am wiser than all of you,

And I despise your books.

I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world.

It is all worthless,

Fleeting,

Illusory,

And deceptive like a mirage.

You may be proud,

Wise,

And fine,

But death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor.

And your posterity,

Your history,

Your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.

You have taken lies for truth and hideousness for beauty.

You would marvel if,

Owing to the events of some sorts,

Frogs and lizards suddenly grew on an apple and orange trees instead of fruit,

Or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse.

So I marvel at you to exchange heaven for earth.

I don't want to understand you.

To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by,

I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise.

To deprive myself of the right to the money,

I shall go out of here five hours before the time fixed,

And so break the compact.

When the banker had read this,

He laid the page on the table,

Kissed the strange man on the head,

And went out of the lodge weeping.

At no other time,

Even when he had lost heavily on the stock exchange,

Had he felt so great a contempt for himself.