Ten Early Stories by Ray Bradbury

Book Details

These ten early stories by Ray Bradbury were written between 1942 and 1944, during the height of World War II. Mostly from Weird Tales, they show Bradbury’s early interests in questions of coming of age, the power of childhood innocence, and death. Bradbury was excused from military service in the war because of his poor eyesight. King of the Gray Spaces is an early version of the classic story R is For Rocket.

The Wind (1943) – He was tracked across the world by the damnedest, biggest prehistoric killer that ever hunted prey.

The Crowd (1943) – They’re always there . . . these people who use up the valuable air a dying man’s lungs need

The Candle (1942) – The proprietor pronounced the candle an implement of destruction.

The Sea Shell (1944) – Yesterday is nothing and tomorrow’s so far away, said the little boy; now is the only time we can ever have

King of the Gray Spaces (1943) – Chosen. . . one out of a million. . . for only the best could be trusted with the lives of travelers in the space lanes between the planets. . . . This is the story of how one boy received the summons—and how he answered it.

The Scythe (1943) – Somewhere there is a field, and a farmer there who unendingly cuts the wheat, his blade moving on day and night—forever!

Promotion To Satellite (1943) – Obscure Pietro Becomes a Space Ship Hero

The Monster Maker (1944) – A camera is one devil of a poor weapon with which to capture a pirate’s fortress.

The Ducker (1943) – If you shoot those guys over there, he wondered, then they got to play right and fall down, don’t they?

Bang! You’re Dead (1944) – The kid thought that war was a game and that death and bullets were only make believe

Ray Douglas Bradbury (1920–2012) was was one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers. He worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction. Upon his death in 2012, The New York Times called Bradbury “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream”.

Ten Early Stories contains 18 illustrations.

Files:

1. 10EarlyStories.epub

Excerpt: The Crowd

They’re always there . . . these people who use up the valuable air a dying man’s lungs need

AFTER the accident, the crowd gathered swiftly. A ring of faces looking down at Spallner, stirring, shifting, gaping. Where they all came from, he did not know. He had heard their hard heels clattering over the asphalt of the street, heard their shouts and tiny squeals and curses as they saw the new motor car crumpled against the brick wall.

Blood was trickling from a gash on his brow. It swam across his face and he had trouble breathing. And yet he was strangely calm. He couldn’t understand why.

Gasoline crawled on the asphalt, mixed with blood. Feet moved.

“All right; break it up in there, break it up!” A thick Irish voice shouted its way through the crowd. Blue-serge legs appeared. A red Irish face peered down. “You okay, son?”

Spallner nodded his head weakly. “I’ll —I’ll be all right.” A swallowing pause. “Ambulance?”

“Be here any minute now. You just take it easy.”

Spallner did take it easy. He rested back against a coat somebody had thoughtfully slipped under his head. He had time to listen and look and smell.

He looked at the faces. A cordon of questioning, shifting faces. What sort of people were they, where were they from, what did they do?

HE EXAMINED each one. First, a man’s face; thin, bright, alert and pale, staring at him; continually swallowing and wetting his lips as if he were hypnotized.

Beside him stood a small-boned woman with red hair and too much powder on her face. She was a calcimined wren with a high, hysterical voice. She wrung a handkerchief with her thin fingers.

Behind the officer, a little boy with freckles wavered. Tears streamed down his ruddy cheeks. He was barefooted, his eyes were scrouged up tight and he kept opening them and blinking them and closing them again.

A siren split the night wide open at the seams. The crowd craned its neck, as if it were all on a marionette string, activated by one silent will.

A sort of fear raced through Spallner then. The crowd twisted back, to gaze at him. Faces. There was something suggestive about them. Something he could not quite catch with his mind.

What was it. . . ?

Other faces. An old man with a face like a bleached apricot, bald and whimpering in his throat. A young woman whose hands were twitching all by themselves at her sides, as if they did not belong to her. A high school student, pimple-faced, who kept drawing back from the blood, but who always returned, curious, to look again. He couldn’t help himself.

Where had they all come from?

So strange, thought Spallner, how a crowd gathers after an accident. Instantly, with the speed of Mercury, they materialized; young, old, glib and sour and frightened and calm. They came running for blocks, out of side-streets and out of alleys and out of houses and hotels and out of cabs and street cars and busses. They came quickly. It was impossible that so many people could gather in one place at once.

They came as to the call of Gabriel.

The ambulance shrieked up, and the siren bubbled to a moan, then into silence. White uniforms took the plunge into the throng, wedged a trail through with a carrier.

“What is it?”

The officer told them. The crowd watched and listened. Effectively, the internes shifted Spallner onto the carrier, hoisted him and slid him into the ambulance.

One of the internes hopped in, slammed the doors shut. Through the square glass windows a few faces of the crowd still stared.

There was something wrong with the crowd. Something far worse than what had happened to Spallner. He felt uneasiness in his stomach.

Engines roared to life. The ambulance started. It pulled away from the curb, from the crumpled wreck, the blood and gas, away from the crowd.

The crowd that always came so fast. So strangely fast. To form a circle. A circle; like a ring of——

Vultures . . . ?

Blackness enveloped Spallner. It clipped off everything.

Excerpt From: Ray Bradbury. “Ten Early Stories.”