Ray Bradbury by Short Stories

Author:Short Stories [Stories, Short]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-12T02:17:33+00:00

Rej Bredberi. Vel’d (original in english)Ocenite etot tekstNe chital10987654321Rej Bredberi. Vel’d (original in english) Ray Bradbury. The Veldt

“George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, then.”

“I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to

look at it.”

“What would a psychologist want with a nursery?”

“You know very well what he’d want.” His wife paused in the middle of

the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for

four.

“It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.”

“All right, let’s have a look.”

They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which

had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed

and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.

Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked

on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the

halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft

automaticity.

“Well,” said George Hadley.

They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet

across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as

much as the rest of the house. “But nothing’s too good for our children,”

George had said.

The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high

noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia

Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede

into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt

appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the

final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with

a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

“Let’s get out of this sun,” he said. “This is a little too real.

But I

don’t see anything wrong.”

“Wait a moment, you’ll see,” said his wife.

Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at

the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of

lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty

smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air.

And

now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery

rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered

on George Hadley’s upturned, sweating face.

“Filthy creatures,” he heard his wife say.

“The vultures.”

“You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their

way to the water hole. They’ve just been eating,” said Lydia. “I don’t know

what.”

“Some animal.” George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning

light from his squinted eyes. “A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.”

“Are you sure?” His wife sounded peculiarly tense.

“No, it’s a little late to be sure,” be said, amused. “Nothing over

there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s

left.”

“Did you bear that scream?” she asked.

‘No.”

“About a minute ago?”

“Sorry, no.”

The lions were coming.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.