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

tied over her golden hair with a bright yellow ribbon, and
stood perspiring faintly, away from the machine. They had ridden so steadily on
the shuddering rail car that the motion was sewn into their bodies. Now, with
the stopping, they felt odd, on the verge of unraveling.
                   "Let's eat!"
                   The boy ran the wicker lunch basket down to
the shore.
                   The boy and the woman were already seated by a
spread tablecloth when the man came down to them, dressed in his business suit
and vest and tie and hat as if he expected to meet someone along the way. As he
dealt out the sandwiches and exhumed the pickles from their cool green Mason
jars, he began to loosen his tie and unbutton his vest, always looking around
as if he should be careful and ready to button up again.
                   "Are we all alone, Papa?" said the
boy, eating.
                   "Yes."
                   "No one else, anywhere?"
                   "No one else."
                   “Were there people before?"
                   "Why do you keep asking that? It wasn't
that long ago. Just a few months. You remember."
                   "Almost. If I try hard, then I don't
remember at all." The boy let a handful of sand fall through his fingers.
"Were there as many people as there is sand here on the beach? What
happened to them?"
                   "I don't know," the man said, and it
was true.
                   They had wakened one morning and the world was
empty. The neighbors’ clothesline was still strung with blowing white wash,
cars gleamed in front of other 7-a.m. cottages, but there were no farewells,
the city, did not hum with its mighty arterial traffics, phones did not alarm
themselves, children did not wail in sunflower wildernesses.
                   Only the night before, he and his wife had
been sitting on the front porch when the evening paper was delivered, and, not
even daring to open the headlines out, he had said, "I wonder when He will
get tired of us and just rub us all out?"
                   "It has gone pretty far," she said.
"On and on. We're such fools, aren't we?"
                   “Wouldn't it be nice—" he lit his pipe
and puffed it— "if we woke tomorrow and everyone in the world was gone and
everything was starting over?" He sat smoking, the paper folded in his
hand, his head resting back on the chair.
                   "If you could press a button right now
and make it happen, would you?"
                   "I think I would," he said.
**Nothing violent. Just have everyone vanish off the face of the earth. Just
leave the land and the sea and the growing things, like flowers and grass and
fruit trees. And the animals, of course, let them stay. Everything except man,
who hunts when he isn't hungry, eats when full, and is mean when no one's
bothered him."
                   "Naturally, we would be left." She
smiled quietly.
                   "I'd like that," he mused, "All
of time ahead. The longest summer vacation in history. And us out for the
longest picnic-basket lunch in memory. Just you, me and Jim. No commuting. No
keeping up with the Joneses. Not even a car. I'd like to find another way of
traveling, an older way. Then, ft hamper full of sandwiches, three bottles of
pop, pick up supplies where you need them from empty grocery stores in empty
towns, and summertime forever up ahead . . .”
                   They sat a long while on the porch in silence,
the newspaper folded between them.
                   At last she opened her mouth.
                   "Wouldn't we be lonely?" she said.
                   So that's how it was the morning of the new
world. They had awakened to the soft sounds of an earth that was now no more
than a meadow, and the cities of the