Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury Page B

called than delivered," whispered a voice.
                 It
was impossible, but. . .
                 Drifting,
spinning, the ancient doll with the wild red beard and blazing blue eyes fell
across darkness as if impelled by God's breath, on a whim.
                 Instinctively,
Willis opened his arms.
                 And
the old party landed there, smiling, breathing heavily, or pretending to
breathe heavily, as was his bent.
                 "Well,
well, Willis! Quite a treat, eh?"
                 "Mr.
Shaw! You were dead?'
                 "Poppycock!
Someone bent some wires in me. The collision knocked things back together. The
disconnection is here below my chin. A villain cut me there. So if I fall dead
again, jiggle under my jaw and wire me up, eh?"
                 "Yes,
sir!"
                 "How
much food do you carry at this moment, Willis?"
                 "Enough
to last two hundred days in Space."
                 "Dear
me, thaf s fine, fine! And self-recycling oxygen
units, also, for two hundred days?"
                 “Yes,
sir. Now, how long will your batteries
last, Mr. Shaw?"
                 "Ten
thousand years!" the old man sang out happily. "Yes, I vow, I swear!
I am fitted with solar-cells which will collect God's universal light until I
wear out my circuits."
                 "Which
means you will outtalk me, Mr. Shaw, long after I have stopped eating and
breathing."
                 "At
which point you must dine on conversation, and breathe past participles instead
of air. But, we must hold the thought of rescue uppermost. Are not the chances
good?"
                 "Rockets do come by. And I am equipped with
radio signals—"
                 "Which
even now cry out into the deep night: I'm here with ramshackle Shaw, eh?"
                 I'm
here with ramshackle Shaw, thought Willis, and was suddenly warm in winter.
                 "Well,
then, while we're waiting to be rescued, Charles Willis, what next?"
                 "Next?
Why-"
                 They
fell away down Space alone but not alone, fearful but elated, and now grown
suddenly quiet.
                 "Say it, Mr. Shaw."
                 "Say
what?"
                 "You
know. Say it again."
                 "Well,
then." They spun lazily, holding to each other. "Isn't life
miraculous? Matter and force, yes, matter and force making itself over into
intelligence and will."
                 "Is that what we are, sir?" .
                 "We
are, bet ten thousand bright tin-whistles on it, we are. Shall I say more, young Willis?"
                 "Please,
sir," laughed Willis. "I want some more!"
                 And
the old man spoke and the young man listened and the young man spoke and the
old man hooted and they fell around a corner of Universe away out of sight,
eating and talking, talking and eating, the young man biting gumball foods, the
old man devouring sunlight with his solar-cell eyes, and the last that was seen
of them they were gesticulating and babbling and conversing and waving their
hands until their voices faded into Time and the solar system turned over in
its sleep and covered them with a blanket of dark and light, and whether or not
a rescue ship named Rachel, seeking her lost children, ever came by and found
them, who can tell, who would truly ever want to know?

 
The Utterly
Perfect Murder
 
 
                  
                 It
was such an utterly perfect, such an incredibly delightful idea for murder,
that I was half out of mind all across America .
                 The
idea had come to me for some reason on my forty-eighth birthday. Why it hadn't
come to me when I was thirty or forty, I cannot say. Perhaps those were good
years and I sailed