Read Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 for Free Online

beyond that—banjos playing? No, only the
summer-night crickets in this year 2003. Ten thousand sounds breathed through
the town and the weather. Janice, head bent, listened. Long, long ago, 1849,
this very street had breathed the voices of ventriloquists, preachers,
fortunetellers, fools, scholars, gamblers, gathered at this selfsame
Independence, Missouri. Waiting for the moist earth to bake and the great tidal
grasses to come up heavy enough to hold the weight of their carts, their
wagons, their indiscriminate destinies, and their dreams.
                   “O, my the Good Time has come at last, To Mars
we are a-going, sir,
                  Five Thousand Women in the sky, That's quite a
springtime sowing, sir!"
                   "That's an old Wyoming song," said Leonora. "Change the words and it's fine for 2003,"
                   Janice lifted a matchbox of food pills,
calculating the totals of things carried in those high-axled, tall-bedded
wagons. For each man, each woman, incredible tonnages! Hams, bacon slabs,
sugar, salt, flour, dried fruits, "pilot" bread, citric acid, water,
ginger, pepper—a list as big as the land! Yet here, today, pills that fit a
wrist watch fed you not from Fort Laramie to Hangtown, but all across a wilderness of stars.
                   Janice threw wide the closet door and almost
screamed. Darkness and night and all the spaces between the stars looked out at
her.
                   Long years ago two things had happened. Her
sister had locked her, shrieking, in a closet. And, at a party, playing
hide-and-seek, she had run through the kitchen and into a long dark hall. But
it wasn't a hall. It was an unlit stair well, a swallowing blackness. She had
run out upon empty air. She had pedaled her feet, screamed, and fallen! Fallen in midnight blackness. Into the cellar. It
took a long while, a heartbeat, to fall. And she had smothered in that closet a
long, long time without daylight, without friends, no one to hear her
screamings. Away from everything, locked in darkness. Falling in darkness. Shrieking!
                   The two memories.
                   Now, with the closet door wide, with darkness
like a velvet shroud hung before her to be stroked by a trembling hand, with
the darkness like a black panther breathing there, looking at her with unfit
eyes, the two memories rushed out. Space and a falling. Space and being locked
away, screaming. She and Leonora working steadily, packing, being careful not
to glance out the window at the frightening Milky Way and the vast emptiness.
Only to have the long-familiar closet, with its private night, remind them at
last of their destiny.
                   This was how it would be, out there, sliding
toward the stars,
                   in the night, in the great hideous black closet,
screaming, but no one to hear. Falling forever among meteor clouds and godless
comets. Down the elevator shaft. Down the nightmare coal chute into
nothingness.
                   She screamed. None of it came out of her
mouth. It collided upon itself in her chest and head. She screamed. She slammed
the closet door! She lay against it! She felt the darkness breathe and yammer
at the door and she held it tight, eyes watering. She stood there a long time,
until the trembling vanished, watching Leonora work. And the hysteria, thus
ignored, drained away and away, and at last was gone. A wrist watch ticked,
with a clean sound of normality, in the room.
                   "Sixty million miles." She moved at
last to the window as if it were a deep well. "I can't believe that men on
Mars, tonight, are building towns, waiting for us."
                   "The only thing to believe is catching
our Rocket tomorrow."
                   Janice raised a white gown like a ghost in the
room.
                   "Strange, strange. To marry—on