Read Some Rain Must Fall for Free Online Page A

in the centre of his room, attached by a few threads of cotton to the lightbulb just above. He’d removed the lampshade from the bulb, to give his planet maximum light, and to eliminate distractions: there ought to be only one focus of attention up there. God’s planet looked beguiling and perfect, revolving almost imperceptibly but constantly in the breeze from the window, elevated to a level where no other toys were visible. For, though God still played with his other toys, he knew they were objects of a different order: sturdier, more useful; less complex, less special. There were toys which could, on the right day, amuse him so intensely that he forgot his planet existed, but as soon as he remembered, he was well aware that his planet was, unlike his other toys, unique.
    Apart from playing at home, God continued to go out to the abandoned universe and rummage around the garbage. As usual, his eyes would goggle at the strange new things he found there. Incandescent rods, impossibly dense metals, bottled gases which plumed out in the shape of a star when smashed free, huge fluffs of silver fibre spilling out of the bins like foam, bright yellow protective clothing with holes in it, enigmatically specific crystal implements still snug in their black rubber cases, handwritten code-books whose densely inscribed pages were washed to a pastel blur, whole binfuls of computer disks smashed to shrapnel, and – too big for the bins to contain – broken engines of paradox. All the materials of universe-making were being thrown out here.
    None of this mattered to God. He was concerned not with the universe’s past or future but only with its present. He would play while there were things to play with, even if they came from the garbage. What else was there to do?
    Inevitably, because God’s planet was suspended from the ceiling, he paid most attention to it when he was lying in bed, looking up from his pillow. Tired out from playing all day, he would notice the little blue-green world through eyes already half closed. Usually he fell asleep then, and dreamed of travelling there, shrunk down to the appropriate size. These were funny dreams, highly romantic, with the almost holy air of myth and nonsense. Typically he would be, at one and the same time, his normal self, looking up at the planet from his bed, and a tiny, grown-up version of himself, wandering around on the planet, looking up through the impenetrable heavens as if for a glimpse of his own face. In these dreams, his tiny, grown-up self was constantly surrounded by other people, beset by responsibilities, driven by a mission; and yet, perversely, he craved aloneness and the freedom to play in silence.
    Always by the end of the dream there would be some sort of crisis in which the citizens of his blue-green planet imprisoned him, determined to keep him there for ever; in nightmares, they even tried to bury him alive, so that he might, in time, enter the anonymity of the earth’s crust as a sprinkling of irreclaimable atoms. Gasping for breath, he would wake in a shroud-like tangle of bedsheets.
    Despite these occasional nightmares, he never lost his sense of the little planet’s beauty and charm. A miraculous egg of confluences, it was innocent and clever, making mountains out of molten sludge, rainforests out of water and dirt, fresh water out of salt. It was alchemy achieved by instinct, the instinct of a world which was not aware of itself, but which had none the less found a use even for the spent breaths of plants.
    Often, having intended to go to sleep, he would be captivated by the planet’s gentle glow of ingenuity, and leap out of bed to discover it all over again. Standing on a chair, hewould peer at the globe with a magnifying glass, almost touching the spongy skin of its atmosphere.
    The magnifying glass was a pretty good one, also found in the bins at the back of the universe, but there were limits to what he could see through it. Extremes of weather, so