S IS FOR SPACE
Ray Bradbury
For Charles Beaumont
who lived in that little house halfway up in the next block most of my life.
And for Bill Nolan
and Bill Idelson, friend of Rush Gook, and for Paul Condylis …
Because …
Table of Contents
Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed
Jules Verne was my father.
H. G. Wells was my wise uncle.
Edgar Allan Poe was the batwinged cousin we kept high in the back attic room.
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were my brothers and friends.
There you have my ancestry.
Adding, of course, the fact that in all probability Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was my mother.
With a family like that, how else could I have turned out than as I did: a writer of fantasy and most curious tales of science fiction.
I lived up in the trees with Tarzan a good part of my life with my hero Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I swung down out of the foliage I asked for a toy typewriter during my twelfth year, at Christmas. On this rattletrap machine I wrote my first John Carter, Warlord of Mars imitation sequels, and from memory tapped out whole episodes of Chandu the Magician.
I sent away boxtops and think I joined every secret radio society that existed. I saved comic strips, most of which I still have in great boxes down in my California basement. I went to movie matinees. I devoured the works of H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the midst of my young summers I leapt high and dove deep down into the vast ocean of Space, long long before the Space Age itself was more than a fly speck on the two-hundred-inch Mount Palomar telescope.
In other words, I was in love with everything I did. My heart did not beat, it exploded. I did not warm toward a subject, I boiled over. I have always run fast and yelled loud about a list of great and magical things I knew I simply could not live without.
I was a beardless boy-magician who pulled irritable rabbits out of papier-mâché hats. I became a bearded man-magician who pulled rockets out of his typewriter and out of a Star Wilderness that stretched as far as eye and mind could see and imagine.
My enthusiasm stood me well over the years. I have never tired of the rockets and the stars. I never cease enjoying the good fun of scaring heck out of myself with some of my weirder, darker tales.
So here in this new collection of stories you will find not only S is for Space, but a series of subtitles that might well read: D is for Dark, or T is for Terrifying, or D is for Delight. Here you will find just about every side of my nature and my life that you might wish to discover. My ability to laugh out loud with the sheer discovery that I am alive in a strange, wild, and exhilarating world. My equally great ability to jump and raise up a crop of goosepimples when I smell strange mushrooms growing in my cellar at midnight, or hear a spider fiddling away at his tapestry-web in my closet just before sunrise.
You who read, and I who write, are very much the same. The young person locked away in me has dared to write these stories for your pleasure. We meet on the common ground of an uncommon Age, and share out our gifts of dark and light, good dream and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow.
The boy-magician speaks from another year. I stand aside and let him say what he most needs to say. I listen and enjoy.
I hope you will, too.
RAY BRADBURY
Los Angeles, California
December 1, 1965
Rockwell didn’t like the room’s smell. Not so much McGuire’s odor of beer, or Hartley’s unwashed, tired smell—but the sharp insect tang rising from Smith’s cold green-skinned body lying stiffly naked on the table. There was also a smell of oil and grease from the nameless machinery gleaming in one corner of the small room.
The man Smith was a corpse. Irritated,