Ray Bradbury by The Day it Rained Forever

Author:The Day it Rained Forever [Forever, The Day it Rained]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-12T02:17:55+00:00

The Day It Rained Forever

HERE THERE BE TYGERS

‘YOU have to beat a planet at its own game,’ said Chatterton. ‘Get in, rip it up, poison its animals, dam its rivers, sow its fields, depollinate its air, mine it, nail it down, hack away at it, and get the hell out from under when you have what you want. Otherwise, a planet will fix you good. You can’t trust planets. They’re bound to be different, bound to be bad, bound to be out to get you, especially this far off, a billion miles from nowhere, so you get them first. Tear their skin off, I say. Drag out the minerals and run away before the damn world explodes in your face. That’s the way to treat them.’

The rocket ship sank down towards planet 7 of star System 84. They had travelled millions upon millions of miles. Earth was far away, her system and her sun forgotten, her system settled and investigated and profited on, and other systems rummaged through and milked and tidied up, and now the rockets of these tiny men from an impossibly remote planet were probing out to far universes. In a few months, a few years, they could travel anywhere, for the speed of their rocket was the speed of a god, and now for the ten thousandth time one of the rockets of the far-circling hunt was feathering down towards an alien world.

‘No,’ said Captain Forester. ‘I have too much respect for other worlds to treat them the way you want to, Chatterton. It’s not my business to rape or ruin, anyway, thank God. I’m glad I’m just a rocket man. You’re the anthropologist-mineralogist. Go ahead, do your mining and ripping and scraping. I’ll just watch. I’ll just go around looking at this new world, whatever it is, however it seems. I like to look. All rocket men are lookers or they wouldn’t be rocket men. You like to smell new airs, if you’re a rocket man, and see new colours and new people if there are new people to see, and new oceans and islands.’

‘Take your gun along,’ said Chatterton.

‘In my holster,’ said Forester.

They turned to the port together and saw the green world rising to meet their ship. ‘I wonder what it thinks of us?’ said Forester.

‘It won’t like me,’ said Chatterton. ‘By God, I’ll see to it it won’t like me. And I don’t care, you know. I don’t give a damn. I’m out for the money. Land us over there, will you, Captain; that looks like iron country if I ever saw it.’

It was the freshest green colour they had seen since childhood.

Lakes lay like clear blue water droplets through the soft hills; there were no loud highways, signboards, or cities. It’s a sea of green golf-links, thought Forester, which goes on for ever. Putting greens, driving greens, you could walk ten thousand miles in any direction and never finish your game. A Sunday planet, a croquet-lawn world, where you could lie

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