Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 by The Machineries of Joy (v2.1)

             "Not me," said Terwilliger.
                   Then, carrying the rubber dinosaur between
them, and bringing the whisky, they went to stand by the studio gate, waiting
for the limousines to arrive all lights, horns and annunciations.
                  
     
     
     
     

THE VACATION
     
     
                   It was a day as fresh as grass growing up and
clouds going over and butterflies coming down can make it. It was a day
compounded from silences of bee and flower and ocean and land, which were not
silences at all, but motions, stirs, flutters, risings, fallings, each in its
own time and matchless rhythm. The land did not move, but moved. The sea was
not still, yet was still. Paradox flowed into paradox, stillness mixed with
stillness, sound with sound. The flowers vibrated and the bees fell in separate
and small showers of golden rain on the clover. The seas of hill and the seas
of ocean were divided, each from the other's motion, by a railroad track,
empty, compounded of rust and iron marrow, a track on which, quite obviously,
no train had run in many years. Thirty miles north it swirled on away to
further mists of distance, thirty miles south it tunneled islands of
cloud-shadow that changed their continental positions on the sides of far
mountains as you watched.
                   Now, suddenly, the railroad track began to
tremble.
                   A blackbird, standing on the rail, felt a
rhythm grow faintly, miles away, like a heart beginning to beat
                   The blackbird leaped up over the sea.
                   The rail continued to vibrate softly until, at
long last, around a curve and along the shore came a small workman's handcar,
its two-cylinder engine popping and spluttering in the great silence.
                   On top of this small four-wheeled car, on a
double-sided bench facing in two directions and with a little surrey roof above
for shade, sat a man, his wife and their small seven-year-old son. As the
handcar traveled through lonely stretch after lonely stretch, the wind whipped
their eyes and blew their hair, but they did not look back but only ahead.
Sometimes they looked eagerly as a curve unwound itself, sometimes with great
sadness, but always watchful, ready for the next scene.
                   As they hit a level straightaway, the machine
engine gasped and stopped abruptly. In the now crushing silence, it seemed that
the quiet of earth, sky and sea itself, by its friction, brought the car to a
wheeling halt.
                   "Out of gas."
                   The man, sighing, reached for the extra can in
the small storage bin and began to pour it into the tank.
                   His wife and son sat quietly looking at the
sea, listening to the muted thunder, the whisper, the drawing back of huge
tapestries of sand, gravel, green weed, and foam.
                   "Isn't the sea nice?" said the
woman.
                   "I like it," said the boy.
                   "Shall we picnic here, while we're at
it?"
                   The man focused some binoculars on the green
peninsula ahead.
                   "Might as well. The rails have rusted
badly. There's a break ahead. We may have to wait while I set a few back in place."
                   "As many as there are," said the
boy, "well have picnics!"
                   The woman tried to smile at this, then turned
her grave attention to the man. "How far have we come today?"
                   "Not ninety miles." The man still
peered through the glasses, squinting. "I don't like to go farther than
that any one day, anyway. If you rush, there's no time to see. We'll reach
Monterey day after tomorrow, Palo Alto the next day, if you want."
                   The woman removed her great shadowing straw
hat, which had been