Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 Read Online Free PDF Page B

plunges, struck prey, and skimmed away,
meat and screams in their scissor mouths.
                   Terwilliger gazed, fascinated.
                   In the jungle foliage now, shiverings,
creepings, insect jitterings, antennae twitchings, slime locked in oily fatted
slime, armor skinned to armor, in sun glade and shadow moved the reptilian
inhabitors of Terwilliger's mad remembrance of vengeance given flesh and panic
taking wing.
                   Brontosaur, stegosaur, triceratops. How easily
the clumsy tonnages of name fell from one's lips.
                   The great brutes swung like ugly machineries
of war and dissolution through moss ravines, crushing a thousand flowers at one
footfall, snouting the mist, ripping the sky in half with one shriek.
                   My beauties, thought Terwilliger, my little
lovelies. All liquid latex, rubber sponge, ball-socketed steel articulature;
all nightdreamed, clay-molded, warped and welded, riveted and slapped to life
by hand. No bigger than my fist, half of them; the rest no larger than this
head they sprang from.
                   "Good Lord," said a soft admiring
voice in the dark.
                   Step by step, frame by frame of film, stop
motion by stop motion, he, Terwilliger, had run his beasts through their
postures, moved each a fraction of an inch, photographed them, moved them
another hair, photographed them, for hours and days and months. Now these rare
images, this eight hundred scant feet of film, rushed through the projector.
                   And lo! he thought. I'll never get used to it
Look! They come alive!
                   Rubber, steel, clay, reptilian latex sheath,
glass eye, porcelain fang, all ambles, trundles, strides in terrible prides
through continents as yet unmanned, by seas as yet un-salted, a billion years
lost away. They do breathe. They do smite air with thunders. Oh, uncanny!
                   I feel, thought Terwilliger, quite simply,
that there stands my Garden, and these my animal creations which I love on this
Sixth Day, and tomorrow, the Seventh, I must rest.
                   "Lord," said the soft voice again.
                   Terwilliger almost answered, "Yes?”
                   “This is beautiful footage, Mr. Clarence,” the
voice went on.
                   "Maybe,” said the man with a boy’s voice.
                   "Incredible animation.”
                   "I've seen better,” said Clarence the
Great.
                   Terwilliger stiffened. He turned from the
screen where his friends lumbered into oblivion, from butcheries wrought on
architectural scales. For the first time he examined his possible employers.
                   "Beautiful stuff.”
                   This praise came from an old man who sat to
himself far across the theater, his head lifted forward in amazement toward
that ancient life.
                   "It's jerky. Look therel** The strange
boy in the middle loge half rose, pointing with the cigarette in his mouth.
"Hey, was that a bad shot. You see?”
                   "Yes," said the old man, tired
suddenly, fading back in his chair. "I see.”
                   Terwilliger cranmied his hotness down upon a
suffocation of swiftly moving blood.
                   "Jerky,” said Joe Clarence.
                   White light, quick numerals, darkness; the
music cut, the monsters vanished.
                   "Glad that's over." Joe Clarence
exhaled. "Almost lunch-time. Throw on the next reel, Walter! That's all,
Terwilliger." Silence. “Terwilliger?" Silence. "Is that dumb
bunny still herer”
                   "Here.” Terwilliger ground his fists on
his hips.
                   “Oh," said Joe Clarence. "It's not
bad. But don't get ideas