Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 Read Online Free PDF

             No, no, no, no, no, no! Inner voices crying, deep
down and gone into prisons beneath exteriors.
                   We are looking at each other. We are Samuel
Matthews and Raymond Moses and William Spaulding and Charles Evans and Forrest
Cole and John Summers, and we say nothing but look upon each other and our white
faces and shaking hands.
                   We turn, as one, and look at the well.
                   "Now," we say.
                   No, no, six voices scream, hidden and layered
down and stored forever.
                   Our feet walk in the sand and it is as if a
great hand with twelve fingers were moving across the hot sea bottom.
                   We bend to the well, looking down. From the
cool depths six faces peer back up at us.
                   One by one we bend until our balance is gone,
and one by one drop into the mouth and down through cool darkness into the cold
waters.
                   The sun sets. The stars wheel upon the night
sky. Far out, there is a wink of light. Another rocket coming, leaving red
marks on space.
                   I live And well. I live like smoke in a well.
Like vapor in a stone throat. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning,
and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was
young. How can I tell you what I am when even I don't know? I cannot I am
simply waiting.
                  
     
     
     
     

TYRANNOSAURUS
REX
     
     
                   He opened a door on darkness. A voice cried,
"Shut it!" It was like a blow in the face. He jumped through. The
door banged. He cursed himself quietly. The voice, with dreadful patience,
intoned, "Jesus. You Terwilliger?"
                   "Yes," said Terwilliger. A faint
ghost of screen haunted the dark theater wall to his right. To his left, a
cigarette wove fiery arcs in the air as someone's lips talked swiftly around it
                   "You're five minutes late!”
                   Don't make it sound like five years, thought
Terwilliger.
                   "Shove your film in the projection room
door. Let's move."
                   Terwilliger squinted.
                   He made out five vast loge seats that exhaled,
breathed heavily as amplitudes of executive life shifted, leaning toward the
middle loge where, almost in darkness, a little boy sat smoking.
                   No, thought Terwilliger, not a boy. That's
him, Joe Clarence. Clarence the Great.
                   For now the tiny mouth snapped like a
puppet's, blowing smoke. "Well?"
                   Terwilliger stumbled back to hand the film to
the projectionist, who made a lewd gesture toward the loges, winked at
Terwilliger and slammed the booth door.
                   "Jesus," sighed the tiny voice. A
buzzer buzzed. "Roll it, projection!"
                   Terwilliger probed the nearest loge, struck
flesh, pulled back and stood biting his lips.
                   Music leaped from the screen. His film
appeared in a storm of drums:
                   TYRANNOSAURUS Rex: The Thunder Lizard.
                   Photographed in stop-motion animation with
miniatures created by John Terwilliger. A study in life-forms on Earth one
billion years before Christ.
                  Faint ironic applause came softly patting from
the baby hands in the middle loge.
                   Terwilliger shut his eyes. New music jerked
him alert. The last titles faded into a world of primeval sun, mist, poisonous
rain and lush wilderness. Morning fogs were strewn along eternal seacoasts
where immense flying dreams and dreams of nightmare scythed the wind. Huge
triangles of bone and rancid skin, of diamond eye and crusted tooth,
pterodactyls, the kites of destruction,