Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 by Twice Twenty-two (v2.1) Read Free Book Online Page A

much time, A
minute."
                   She closed her eyes.
                   "I want to talk slow, but they say talk
fast and get it all in. So I want to say—I've decided. I will come up there.
I'll go on the Rocket tomorrow. I will come up there to you, after all. And I
love you. I hope you can hear me. I love you. It's been so long. . . ."
                   Her voice motioned on its way to that unseen
world. Now, with the message sent, the words said, she wanted to call them
back, to censor, to rearrange them, to make a prettier sentence, a fairer
explanation of her soul. But already the words were hung between planets and
if, by some cosmic radiation, they could have been illuminated, caught fire in
vaporous wonder there, her love would have lit a dozen worlds and startled the
night side of Earth into a premature dawn, she thought. Now the words were not
hers at all, they belonged to space, they belonged to no one until they
arrived, and they were traveling at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a
second to their destination.
                   What will he say to me? What will he say back
in his minute of time? she wondered. She fussed with and twisted the watch on
her wrist, and the light-phone receiver on her ear crackled and space talked to
her with electrical jigs and dances and audible auroras.
                   "Has he answered?" whispered
Leonora.
                   "Shhh!" said Janice, bending, as if
sick.
                   Then his voice came through space.
                   "I hear him!" cried Janice.
                   "What does he say?"
                   The voice called out from Mars and took itself
through the places where there was no sunrise or sunset, but always the night
with a sun in the middle of the blackness. And somewhere between Mars and Earth
everything of the message was lost, perhaps in a sweep of electrical gravity
rushing by on the flood tides of a meteor, or interfered with by a rain of
silver meteors. In any event, the small words and the unimportant words of the
message were washed away. And his voice came through saying only one word:
                   ". . . love . . ."
                   After that there was the huge night again and
the sound of stars turning and suns whispering to themselves and the sound of
her heart, like another world in space, filling her earphones.
                   “Did you hear him?" asked Leonora.
                   Janice could only nod.
                   "What did he say, what did he say?"
cried Leonora.
                   But Janice could not tell anyone; it was much
too good to tell. She sat listening to that one word again and again, as her
memory played it back. She sat listening, while Leonora took the phone away
from her without her knowing it and put it down upon its hook.
                   Then they were in bed and the lights out and
the night wind blowing through the rooms a smell of the long journey in
darkness and stars, and their voices talking of tomorrow, and the days after
tomorrow which would not be days at all, but day-nights of timeless time; their
voices faded away into sleep or wakeful thinking, and Janice lay alone in her
bed.
                   Is this how it was over a century ago, she
wondered, when the women, the night before, lay ready for sleep, or not ready,
in the small towns of the East, and heard the sound of horses in the night and
the creak of the Conestoga wagons ready to go, and the brooding of oxen under
the trees, and the cry of children already lonely before their time? All the sounds of arrivals and departures into the deep forests and
fields, the blacksmiths working in their own red hells through midnight ? And the smell of bacons and hams ready for the journeying,
and the heavy feel of the wagons like ships foundering with goods, with