The Ray Bradbury Theater

Host:
When I was a boy, my dad was looking for work. He took my mom, my brother Skip and myself, and headed west. Along the way, in the middle of nowhere whatsoever at all, on a hot summer desert noon, with the wind still and heat rising from the sand dunes, we were witness to a miracle. Years later, I remembered the miracle. This is that remembrance.

Robert:
Oh, Willie, Willie, never ask Nature. There's things about radio waves and rainbows and northern lights, we're never gonna know.

William:
Are we the pure at heart?

Robert:
Nah. Not like the kids who came through today, who saw anything they wanted to see. Not like the big folks with them, born in wheat fields and by God's grace wandering the world. Nah, we're not the big children, not the little children. Willie, I'm glad to be alive. You know the morning air, early, on the road. Maybe we take it easy, don't think, relax.

Host:
Dinosaurs large and small fill my junkyard workroom. This one given to me by a friend 30 years ago. These given as toys to my daughters. And when they didn't play with them, I simply took them back. So with dinosaurs coming into my life, I often wondered, what would happen if I could go back into theirs. Dinosaurs, time machines. Put them together and you have a tale one million years old.

Eckles:
Does the safari guarantee I come back alive?

Agent:
We guarantee nothing, except the dinosaurs.

Travis:
Didn't you write a book... "Dinosaurs I Have Known"?

Eckles:
Mere fantasy.

Travis:
Right. You know nothing until today.

Eckles:
Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today. Huh. From now on, Africa will seem like Illinois.

Travis:
Have you ever visited Hell, Mr. Eckles? Until you visit Hell, don't make comparisons.

Eckles:
I'm ready.

Travis:
Yes.

Travis:
That is the jungle of sixty million, two thousand, and fifty-five years before the moment you stepped into our office, Mr. Eckles. Christ isn't born yet. Moses has not gone to the mountains to talk with God. The Pyramids lie still in the Earth. Hell.

Travis:
If we kill a mouse here, all the future family of that mouse is killed, right? And all the families of all the families. You step on a mouse, you annihilate one, a thousand, a million possible mice.

Eckles:
Well?

Travis:
If we kill a mouse here, all the future family of that mouse is killed, right? And all the families of all the families. You step on a mouse, you annihilate one, a thousand, a million possible mice.

Travis:
His breathing could vacuum clean the Empire State Building. Oh, I do go on.

Host:
This is my copy of the Johnson, Smith, Racine, Wisconsin Catalog. Every boy in America at one time had one. You sent away for jokes, surprises, funny faces, whoopee cushions, and illusions. I sent away for my first Johnson-Smith catalog when I was 10, because I heard you could buy things, strange things, that you dunked in water or planted in your window box, that grew, and grew, and grew.

Roger Willis:
What's intuition?

Huge Fortnum:
Uh, the stuff you know that you don't know you know?

Roger Willis:
That's it. Over a period of time, things gather. Surprises. Your hands get dirty but you don't remember how they got that way. Dust falls on you every day but you don't feel it. But when you get enough dust collected up, there it is. You see it. You name it. And now I feel the weather changing every minute with the skin prickling on the backs of my hands.

Huge Fortnum:
Well...

Roger Willis:
Now, don't laugh. I'm full up on dust and strange weather.

Huge Fortnum:
Well, what do we do about it?

Roger Willis:
I don't know. Watch everything. Maybe it's in the way the wind blows those weeds. Or the way the sun burns on the telephone wires. Or the crickets screeching in the grass.

Huge Fortnum:
That's not much to go on.

Roger Willis:
Then we're sunk and lost.

Host:
Here lie my first magic sets given to me when I was 10 years old, when I thought by magic I could control the world around me. My parents gave me sweaters and socks for Christmas. I rebelled, I wanted to stay young, a kid with a magic set forever. I wish somehow I could smoke the proper cigars to stunt my growth. Out of those Christmases and my secret desire to scrunch down and be 10 years old forever, the story that follows was born.

Willie:
The time of going away again. The hands of all the clocks in this town have moved around, for everyone but me. Folks are sensing they should be seeing a summer in me. But I will only ever be in spring.

Willie:
Newspaper every day, full of lost people and empty houses.

Old Woman:
I look at a lot of faces passing by and I think, "What a shame all those flowers have to be cut, all those bright fires put out. What a shame they have to grow tall and wrinkle up and gray out in blizzards like me." They're so eager for everything.

Willie:
I've been a child for over 40 years now. It's a living, as they say. You make other people happy. You almost feel happy, too. I've got my job to do. I do it.

Mr. Smith:
How can you have such faith? How can I learn to sing along with you?

Mr. Terle:
You've got to write your own hymns, or they aren't worth singing.

Mr. Terle:
Go on with your life, Miss Hillgood.

Blanche Hillgood:
Where was I? Oh, yes. All my life I've spent so much time running from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms, I never noticed I was twenty-nine. Next thing I knew, I was forty. Yesterday, sixty-five. Oh, there were men; but they'd given up singing when they were ten, flying when they were twelve. I always figured we were meant to fly, one way or other, so most of the time I couldn't stand most men who just shuffled by with the iron of the earth in their feet and blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. In their black business suits, you could just hear them roll by like funeral hearses.

Mr. Terle:
So you flew away?

Blanche Hillgood:
First just in my mind, Mr. Terle. It's taken me forty years to make the final break. It's been the long way around that's brought me here. No one in all Elm City really cares if you fly or how high you go. But talk of leaving, they swat you down and laugh. And say, "Why be a little frog in a big pond when you can be the biggest frog in all Elm City!" Which may be true. Except Elm City's the wrong pond. So at last I shook myself good and stared in the mirror, and asked myself, "Look here, Blanche Hillgood. Since when do frogs have wings, anyway? And will they ever?"

Himself - Host:
The long hot summers of childhood surround me in photos taken along the shores of Lake Michigan. Looking at them many years ago, I remembered when I built impossible cities out of sand and discovered that the lake could be a sorrow as well as a joy. When I finished writing this story at the age 22 I was in tears, and knew that at last I had become a writer.

Douglas:
Crossing the ocean, and a gulf of time. Return to the haunts of childhood, and feelings both bitter and sweet. Though many years have passed, memories remain. Strange sorrow mingled with happiness when I came back with my new wife to the country where I was raised.

Albert Brock:
You're wondering why it's so quiet in here.

Dr. Arnold Fellows:
Yes.

Albert Brock:
I just kicked the radio to death.

Albert Brock:
Excuse me. [bites Dr. Fellows' radio and destroys it] Welcome to tranquility.

Dr. Arnold Fellows:
This will cost you $300.

Albert Brock:
I don't care. [turns around singing] I don't care, I don't care.

Dr. Arnold Fellows:
Suppose you tell me when you first started to hate the telephone.

Albert Brock:
Oh at first I loved them, I mean when I was growing up we had them all over: in the kitchen, the bathroom, in our cars. Then when I was 16 my folks gave me my first video phone. Only it was so new no one else in town had one, so I had nobody I could call. But then, Emily Foster, prettiest girl in town got one, started to get real close. But the phone changes you, even it has a picture, it drains your personality so what comes through the other end is some cold fish of a voice. Saying the wrong things, changing the meaning on you, next thing you know, you've made an enemy.

Dr. Arnold Fellows:
But the phone is useful, essential to all our lives, couldn't you adjust?

Albert Brock:
Why are we always adjusting to machines? They're like spoiled kids always making demands. We're adults, we should have control over them. And the telephone just sits there and demands to be used.

Albert Brock:
Remember what happened when cellulars first came in? At first they were just supposed to be used for emergencies: if you got stuck in traffic or had a breakdown. But then people couldn't resist using them, they always were calling, calling, and if it wasn't the telephone, it was the television and the radio, AM/FM, or the VCR, or the computer or the fax machine. Or the Walkman or the watchman, or the discman, or the motion pictures at the corner multiplex, and THEN larger than life in your own living room commercials coming at you from all directions and phone polls and junk fax!

David McLean:
So the problem's sick kids?

Lydia Hadley:
Sick nursery, David.

Lydia Hadley:
It won't respond, will it?

George Hadley:
No.

Lydia Hadley:
Or it can't. Because Peter and Wendy have been thinking about Africa and lions and KILLING for so long.

George Hadley:
Come on, Lydia, you don't really believe that.

Lydia Hadley:
Or Peter SET it that way.

George Hadley:
Set it?

Lydia Hadley:
Well he's awfully clever for a 12 year old, you remember when David McLean tested his IQ.

David McLean:
My God. How your kids must hate you.

George Hadley:
Hate us? But we've done nothing.

David McLean:
Right. When was the last time you did something yourself, for your kids?

George Hadley:
But we do things all the time.

David McLean:
No! I don't mean switching on the video or the digital disc player. Ever play tennis? Badminton? Kick the can? Hide and seek, OUT THERE? I mean there IS a world, outside this house.

George Hadley:
I know, but what about the nursery?

David McLean:
Turn it off. Lock it up! As matter of fact, turn off the whole house. Go jump in the lake, go climb a mountain, go!

Lydia Hadley:
Just as I've been saying, it's rotten, isn't it?

David McLean:
Just turn it off.

George Hadley:
I wonder... will the room hate me for doing it in?

David McLean:
[laughs] George.

George Hadley:
How could I be such a damned fool?

David McLean:
With so many servants, easy.

Lydia Hadley:
Shut off the room, George, then I'll calm down.

George Hadley:
Shut off the room? What're the kids gonna say?

Lydia Hadley:
I say shut it off! Shut the whole house off! I've had it with all this electronic junk! Let's light candles, do things with our hands! George, let's switch the whole house off and take a vacation!

George Hadley:
I can't believe that a room is doing this to you!

Lydia Hadley:
Can't you feel it? My God, George, it's sick, Wendy and Peter have made it that way.

George Hadley:
Lydia, walls, crystal walls: it's all 3-dimensional, super-actionary, super-sensitive, color film. Odor-foam, sonics...

Lydia Hadley:
I'm afraid. George, it's too real.

Host:
Clocks, hourglasses, barometers. Who has not lain on his back and wondered where the weather was born, and how it traveled, and why along the way it sometimes ate people alive. And then again late nights doesn't the wind outside your house scratch at your screen like a cat needing to be fed. And what then? Do you let the wind in, and what happens if you do?

John Colt:
This tape's for you, Herb. If you find it. Herb, you know I've studied the wind, recorded its violence, all of my working life. The great storm here in New Zealand in '68. Hurricane Gina in the Fijis. Right up to the most recent Gilbert in the Caribbean. Massive devastation. I've followed the weather everywhere. And now... the weather's following me.

John Colt:
In Tibet, I climbed up into the mountains, to the Valley of the Winds. The place where the winds gathered to plan their destruction. It was a vast evil mountain, hard, bony rock. Blasphemy to touch. I touched it. I climbed 7,000 feet to see what I should never have seen. It was terrifying. Not one wind, but hundreds. I hid in a cave, hearing the sound. But I sensed too much.

Bigelow:
Is it everything you wanted, Mr. Stendahl?

Stendahl:
Yes.

Bigelow:
Is it desolate and terrible?

Stendahl:
Very terrible.

Bigelow:
The walls are bleak?

Stendahl:
Amazingly so.

Bigelow:
The sedge, we dyed it, you know. Is it properly hideous?

Stendahl:
It's beautiful.

Stendahl:
There's always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the past, afraid of the future, afraid of themselves.

Garrett:
Now suppose you tell me about this place, Mr. Stendahl.

Stendahl:
It's a haunted castle, if you like.

Garrett:
I don't like, Mr. Stendahl. I don't like.

Stendahl:
In this house, copper bats fly in make-believe attics. Brass rats scuttle in plastic cellars. Robot skeletons rattle in dreary closets.

Garrett:
Robot skeletons?

Stendahl:
Vampires, wolves, phantoms. Done with chemicals and ingenuity.

Garrett:
Mr. Stendahl, what exactly is going on here?

Stendahl:
Murder.

Garrett:
Murder?

Stendahl:
Murder most foul!

Garrett:
What are you doing?

Stendahl:
I'm being ironic. Never interrupt a man when he's being ironic. It's not polite.