Ray Bradbury - The Illustrated Man Omnibus

Grandpa, get your teeth from the water glass.

Grandma and great grandma, fry hotcakes.

Sun...up!

Ready...?

Wake up!

My first decision as a child, at the age of 11, was to become a magician.

My second decision, at the age of 12,

was to become a short story writer,

as a result of meeting another magician, Mr Electrico,

who pointed at me on a night when he sat in his electric chair

and touched me with his sword of fire.

All this blue electricity coming down through his arm and hand,

out the sword, touching me on the nose and he said, "Live for ever,"

and it was that week I decided to live for ever by becoming a writer.

I remember the moment and the hour of my birth.

I don't know why I should be privileged, if that's the word,

to remember that, but I do.

I remember lying in my crib during the first week after my birth,

I remember being circumcised,

I remember suckling at my mother's breast -

I checked all of this out with her later.

And the nightmares I had in my crib, about being born,

are still very vivid for me.

CLOCK TICKING

BABY CRYING

SHE SCREAMS

Years later, I wrote a short story called The Small Assassin

about a baby with just such a capacity to remember,

to see, to know and to want to revenge its parents

for thrusting it out into the world.

EERIE MUSIC

I was very fortunate in having a maniac mother

who couldn't stay away from motion pictures when I was a child.

So, every chance she had, especially when I was two, three and four years old,

she'd creep off to the local movies

and introduce me to those fabulous monsters.

People like Lon Chaney in the Hunchback of Notre Dame,

Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera.

So, by the time I was seven or eight years old

I was dressing myself up in my grandma's opera cape,

putting fangs in my mouth and hanging upside down in trees, and dropping on people.

Well, this is my nest. And what is a nest to a writer?

It's bits and pieces of things that changed his life for ever,

starting when I was three years old.

Falling in love with motion pictures -

grabbing a piece of the film, collecting that,

falling in love with the Oz books, collecting the Oz books -

you'll find them here,

falling in love with science-fiction books -

I'm surrounded by science-fiction books, comic strips -

Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon.

All these things, which are my security blanket.

JOLLY ORGAN MUSIC

People told me not to collect them, not to read Buck Rogers,

there was never going to be a space age, of course.

It was a long time ago and I listened to them for a while

and I made the mistake of tearing up all my comic strips.

And a month or two later I burst into tears and said to myself,

"Something's terribly wrong. What could it be?

"Could it be that those people are all wrong,

"telling me what to do with my life? And am I right?"

And I decided I was right

and I went back and collected the Buck Rogers comic strips

and became a happy boy again.

And, from that time on, I never listened to anybody else about taste,

I just went ahead and did what I had to do.

Now we have a magic set out of my past,

with all kinds of fantastic goodies in.

And, er...

..I think part of the fun comes from the colours of these things

and the miraculousness of the kind of devices

you could find in a box like this.

And if you're very lucky and things are working for you...

you make cards appear like that, hm?

Er, these things are in the cellar

because that's where you keep the naughty boy, hm?

In other words, if I were upstairs I would clutter the house.

JOLLY PIANO MUSIC

I'm a child of my time.

I grew up in the tail end of the Industrial Revolution

and at the beginning of the electronic revolution.

Everything's been turned inside out.

Therefore, there is no other fiction to write.

When people ask, "Why do you write science fiction?",

when you grow up with all this pouring into your blood,

in your eyeballs and ears - tasting it, feeling it.

In cities all over the world there is nothing else to write about.

Well, this is my office, my basement in the sky,

my annexe to my junkyard at home.

This is where I come to hide away from telephones and people.

People are afraid to come here

because we had an earthquake several years ago.

I couldn't get into the office.

Everything had collapsed, everything had fallen over.

Cleaning people refuse to come in

because there's so much on the floor - my filing system -

that it's impossible to do anything about cleaning.

They flee the place!

HE WHISPERS TO HIMSELF

When I was a boy I loved to go out and look at the stars

and when I wasn't looking at the stars

I was busy running through the town

wearing my special Para Litefoot tennis shoes

on my way to somewhere.

As I grew older, I looked at the stars more and more,

wrote about rocket ships, but I never forgot the shoes.

And when I had characters with problems I would say to them,

in effect, "put on your tennis shoes

"and run toward the thing that you want with all your heart.

"I will follow you. I will write your story."

"Somehow the people who made tennis shoes

"knew what the boys needed and wanted.

"They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles

"and they wove the rest out of grasses,

"bleached and fired in the wilderness."

JAUNTY PIANO MUSIC

"The people who made those shoes

"must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees,

"a lot of rivers going down to the lake.

"Whatever it was, it was in the shoes and it was summer."

When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh.

We're all so busy looking out to find ways and means

we forget to look in.

"Soft trolleys, and runabouts, and friends can go away for a while,

"or go away for ever.

"And if someone like great grandma,

"who was going to live for ever, can die, if all of this is true,

"then someday I, Douglas Spaulding, must..."

Douglas Spaulding is most definitely me.

Er, a boy who grew up in a small, Midwestern town - Northern Illinois,

very much loved his grandparents,

loved the summer days and running through them,

loved making dandelion wine with his grandfather.

So, all of that I've gathered up over the years

and put in books like Dandelion Wine.

"Dandelion wine...

"..the words were summer on the tongue.

"The wine was summer caught and stoppered.

"Row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers open at morning.

"With the light of this young sun glowing through a faint skin of dust

"would stand the dandelion wine.

"Peer through it at the wintry day, the snow melted to grass,

"the trees were re-inhabited with bird, leaf and blossoms,

"like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind."

BIRDS SINGING

I'm a Sunday painter who paints about once a year

and when I do paint I go back into my childhood

and I paint pictures of dandelions in the middle of summer fields.

Or, in autumn, I paint something like a Halloween tree.

EERIE MUSIC

Death, violence, fantasy - not good for children - nonsense!

I've always believed that we should act out our fantasies -

put them in stories, put them in films -

so we can make do with them.

So we don't have to go act them in real life.

After all, isn't it true that most of us, at one time or another,

has wanted to kill one of our parents or one of our teachers?

A film like Dracula, for me, gives me a chance, and others a chance,

to act out our fears about death.

And when we've scared ourselves for an hour,

Van Helsing hands us a cedar stake,

we put it to Dracula's chest and, "VAM! VAM! VAM!"

We kill death, don't we?

"He walked down to the next table, 'Good afternoon, Mr Wren.',

" 'Good afternoon.'

" 'And how was the master of the racial hatreds today, Mr Wren?'

"Pure, white, laundered Mr Wren, clean as snow,

"white as linen Mr Wren.

"The man who hated Jews and Negroes. " 'Minorities, Mr Wren, minorities.'

"He pulled back the sheet.

"Mr Wren stared up with glassy, cold eyes.

" 'Mr Wren, look upon a member of the minorities.

" 'Myself, the minority of inferiors,

" 'those who speak not above a whisper,

" 'those afraid of talking aloud,

" 'those frightened little nonentities - mice.

" 'Do you know what I'm going to do with you, Mr Wren?

" 'First, let us draw your blood from you, intolerant friend.'

"The blood was drawn off.

"' Now, the injection of, you might say, embalming fluid.'

" Mr Wren, snow white, linen pure, lay with the fluid going into him.

"Mr Benedict laughed.

"Mr Wren turned black. Black as dirt.

"Black as night.

"The embalming fluid was ink."

DOORBELL RINGING

-Trick or treat?

-Well, we're all out of treats.

-Looks like it's going to have to be a trick.

-OK.

We've forgotten where these rituals came from.

What the witch mask really means, what the skeleton really means.

Halloween is an example of the need for fantasy

that exists in all of us.

This kind of fantasy

and the kind that comes out in horror stories and horror films,

is our way of dealing with death.

When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark.

I lived in a house near a ravine, on the edge of town.

I used to go and stare down into the ravine in the daytime,

when it was all right, but at night, when you went down there,

the darkness came out from behind the trees, and the rocks,

and made it very black indeed. Very frightening.

We knew that someone was waiting for us.

That someone was a murderer called The Lonely One.

'Three minutes from now I'll be putting my key in my house door.

'Nothing's happened, has it? No-one around, is there?'

FOOTSTEPS ECHOING

'Wait...someone's following me.'

'Someone's behind me. I don't dare turn around.'

'Every time I take a step, they take one.'

'Run.

'Faster, faster, run!

'He's following - don't turn, don't look, just run, run!'

'God, it's dark and everything's so far away.

'God, please let me be safe.

'If I get home safe I'll never go out alone.'

SHE PANTS

'Home.

'Oh, God, safe at home.

'Look out the window.'

'Well, there's no-one there at all!

'NOBODY!'

SHE GASPS

I don't much trust realists,

because what they want to do is wet your thumb and stick it in a socket.

That way you get electrocuted.

'I would much rather take that energy

'and cause it to illuminate the world.'

CROWD APPLAUDS

..and Nietzsche has a wonderful quote where he says,

"We have our arts that we do not die of truth."

That's interesting, isn't it? That we don't die of reality.

By the time we get to be 16 or 17

we know everything there is to know about reality, huh?

That we are born, that we grow up, that we grow old,

that we get sick, that we die - those are the basic facts.

And along the way some terrible things happen to us and some beautiful things happen,

but by the time we're 18, 19, 20, we know what they are.

And if you just stick with the realists,

who tell you again and again what you already know,

you're never going to learn anything.

What we need is interpreters of that same basic truth

and that's my function.

To come along and take the familiar cliches and hand them back to you,

refreshed, in some new form, so that you look at them again.

So that reality won't kill you.

'I was having lunch one day with some Life magazine editors'

and they said, "Where'd you get your ideas?"

We'd been talking about space.

We were sitting there eating hamburger steak,

on which there was a covering of mushrooms.

I pointed at the mushrooms, I said,

"Now, what would be a great way to invade Earth?

"Not the old-fashioned way of spaceships coming down,

"flying saucers, but what if,

"since we know that spores do drift down from outer space,

"some of those spores drifted into a swamp, grew up as mushrooms,

"the mushrooms come into the city on a farm truck,

"we put them on our hamburger steak, we eat them

"and we turn into something very strange."

As soon as I said it, I said, "That's a wonderful idea.

"Pardon me, I'm going to go write it."

EERIE MUSIC

DIGGING AND SCRAPING

There was the faintest whisper, rustle, stir from the cellar.

Taking his eyes from the bowl,

Fortnum walked to the cellar door and put his ear to it.

Tom?

Tom, are you down there?

Tom?

-Yes, Dad?

-What are you doing down there?

-I said...

-Tending my crop.

Well, now, you get up out of there. You hear me?

Tom, listen...

did you put some mushrooms in the refrigerator tonight?

-Yes.

-Why?

For you and Mom to eat, of course.

Now, Tom, you haven't, by any chance...

eaten some of the mushrooms yourself, have you?

Funny you should ask that.

Dad?

Come on down, I want you to see the harvest.

Dad?

Don't! Light's bad for mushrooms.

'I suppose I should say goodbye to my wife, but why should I think that?'

'Why should I think that at all?

'No reason, is there?

'None.'

A few years ago I wrote a short story

called A Scent of Sarsaparilla.

It was the story of an old man for whom everything was going wrong.

Nothing was right in his life at all.

His wife was yelling at him all the time

so he took to climbing up into the attic

to, sort of, hide out and guard himself against reality.

He began to look around that attic.

He realised, in a way, it was a kind of Time Machine

and late on in the story, he went and looked out the back window of the attic

and saw down below the year 1905 or 1908,

when things were younger and better, at least for him.

I had to attack the senses of the reader

in order to make the reader believe in my fantasy.

And, when you think about it, an attic truly is a time machine.

HE INHALES

I'd allowed the reader to run their hand over the plush, open, old attic trunks,

look at dress forms, giant chandeliers put by,

toys from another time.

And when I described each of these things in great detail

through the sense of smell, and seeing, hearing, tasting,

I finished the story and it worked.

People believed in the fantasy of the Time Machine attic,

going back in time,

and at the end of the story the old man climbed through the back window,

out of the attic, and disappeared for ever.

When you think of American writers 100 years ago,

all of a sudden you think of magicians, don't you?

At least I do.

Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe,

Washington Irving and Nathanial Hawthorne,

they were all illusionists who could do incredible things.

SHOUTS: The birds!

He rises!

MEN!

Get out after him!

Spike!

THE MEN ALL SHOUT

It was while writing the screenplay of Moby Dick for John Huston

that I surprised myself by discovering that, at one time,

Melville has never read Shakespeare and suddenly fell upon him,

took his novel that he was working on, about whales and ships,

threw it out the window and started over, and birthed Moby Dick.

So, suddenly I find myself in familiar territory with Shakespeare,

whom I'd loved since I was 14 years old.

Oh, ye whale! Ye dammed whale!

I crammed myself with Moby Dick

to the extent of reading some parts of the novel 50 or 60 times over.

Some scenes 80 times over.

Until a day finally came in London

when I got out of bed, walked over to the mirror and said to myself,

"I am Herman Melville,"

and on that day I rewrote the last fourth of the screenplay -

40 pages in a single afternoon.

From Hell's heart I stab at thee!

For hate's sake!

I spit my last breath at thee, oh, damned whale!

I was walking with a friend, about 30 years back,

along Wilshire and Western Avenue,

and a police car pulled up

and the policeman got out and came over to us and said,

"What are you doing?"

And I said, "Putting one foot in front of the other,"

which was the wrong answer.

CROWD LAUGHS

And the more the policeman talked to me the more upset I got

because I felt I wasn't a criminal, I'd done nothing,

that I could remember anyway, to be questioned on the street.

And I looked around suddenly

and I realised how great a distance it was

toward the West, with no pedestrians,

and toward the east, with no-one walking,

and all the side streets,

nobody doing anything, and we were isolated.

This other chap and myself, walking at night.

And the more I talked, the more I realised I was making trouble for myself.

I became so frustrated that, at a certain point,

I reached into my pocket and took out a packet of soda crackers

and put them in my mouth and chewed on them.

And as I talked to the policeman, I sprayed him with flakes.

CROWD LAUGHS

Now, I've never been able to figure out whether I did this on purpose

or whether there was some subconscious thing going on there.

And the policeman looked down at the flakes on his uniform

and he looked like the night sky,

with the Andromeda nebula here and Orion over here,

and he couldn't decide whether I was being hostile or not.

All right, stand still.

Stay where you are, don't move.

Put up your hands.

Your hands up or we'll shoot.

-Your name?

-Ray Bradbury.

-Speak up!

-Ray Bradbury.

-What are you doing out?

Walking.

Walking? Walking? Just walking?

-Walking?!

-Yes, sir.

Walking where? For what?

To breathe the air.

-To see things.

-You've done this often?

Every night for years.

Well, Mr Bradbury...

-Is that all?

-Yes.

Here, get in.

But you don't understand, I haven't done anything.

Get in.

I wrote The Pedestrian, a story of a time, 50 years from now,

when a man is arrested by a robot car.

He is taken off for a clinical study

because he insists on looking at untelevised reality

and breathing un-air-conditioned air.

And, about a year later, two years later,

I took that story out and I was looking at some other notes about fireman

and I suddenly decided to take that pedestrian out for a walk again.

And I went to my typewriter, started walking the pedestrian,

changed the sex to a girl - Clarisse McClellan -

had her turn a corner and smell kerosene

and nine days later Fahrenheit 451 was finished as a novel.

So, thank God for that policeman, huh?

Tell me, that number you all wear, what does it mean?

Oh, Fahrenheit 451.

Why 451 rather than 813 or 121...?

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper catches fire

and starts to burn.

(Look, isn't that lovely?)

The pages, like flower petals or butterflies.

Luminous and black.

Who can explain the fascination of fire? What draws us to it?

Whether we're young or old.

HARROWING VIOLIN MUSIC

The McCarthy period, the Joseph McCarthy period,

I consider to be one of the strangest semi-frightening

and ridiculous periods of American history.

I myself wasn't so much afraid of him as I was angered by him.

As a result of this, believing in the power of the individual,

I wrote a whole series of short stories, which turned into novels.

The final novel being Fahrenheit 451.

Is it true...that a long time ago firemen used to put out fires

and not burn books?

Oh, really, your uncle is right, you are light in the head!

-Put fires out? Who told you that?

-Oh, I don't know, someone.

-But is it true? Did they?

-Oh, what a strange idea!

In the midst of writing about the future

I sat down and exploded, politically, about the future

by putting together an advertisement,

which I paid for myself, with 200 I didn't truly have.

"Get to your work now, remembering that you have good men in your party

"if you put them to work

"but in the name of all that is right, and good, and fair,

"let us send Joseph McCarthy and his friends back to Salem

"and the 17th century."

My friend said, "It's no use, he's going to stay in power for ever,

"he's going to hurt a lot of people."

I said, "I refuse to be frightened. Let's attack."

So, I said, "The individual has great power.

"I believe that McCarthy will be destroyed by one or two people."

That's how it turned out.

Edward R Murrow with his television show on McCarthy,

Mr Welsh, the lawyer at the Army trial, turning on McCarthy

and saying, finally, at long last, "Sir, have you no decency?",

and down the drain went McCarthy.

Is this your special book?

It's got to be burned with the others and you're under arrest.

(Die.)

HE SCREAMS

People are saying, "Well, what do you predict for the future?

"You're writing these depressing books."

I don't mean to depress, I mean to use my books as weapons

to prevent futures rather than to predict them.

And I'm optimistic about the future

or I wouldn't be writing the way I write.

If I really believed the future was going to be as dark as Orwell said

or Aldous Huxley said, I would, tomorrow, go out

and eat a ton of pickles and 16 Clark bars and 13 Cadburys

and get the hell out of the world.

MUSIC BOX PLAYING "Fly Me To The Moon" by Bart Howard

I've never learned to drive ever in my life.

Number one because I was very poor growing up as a writer,

number two, I'm afraid of automobiles.

It's ours to choose - you can create good machines or bad machines.

A machine that has humanity embodied in it is a good machine.

We can create machines in the future that can lock humanity into them

and therefore change the entire aspect of technology.

'And now, the skills of the sculptor

'and the talents of the artist will let us relive great moments

'with Mr Lincoln.'

The world, it...never had a good definition...

..of the word liberty.

'Hello and welcome to the magic kingdom of Disneyland.

'There are several ways to visit Disneyland.

'If this is your first visit, you may enjoy the guided tour,

'complete with your admission and seven of Disneyland's major attractions...'

I think we all have our lives at Disneyland.

The future of America, for me,

is in the kind of planning that is going on here.

CAROUSEL MUSIC

I happen to believe that machines of this sort

are very helpful in the world.

I'm tired of the cliches about computers and machines being terrible monsters.

It would be like walking by a library and saying,

"Aren't you terrified of libraries?",

And that is what a computer is, it's a library

but it doesn't look like one.

It's an incredible place where the first monorails have been built,

the first real studies of what people are in relationship to one another.

The elimination of elbows,

how to get rid of mobs and turn them into crowds, it's very important.

I think the future of America is in studying a place like this.

'..icy caverns and crystal caves.'

I encouraged the web people, the Disney people, over the years

to bring their robots and their computers, and their plans,

and apply them to the problems of the small town.

And when uncle Walt was alive I said to him once,

"Walt, I wish you would run for mayor of Los Angeles.",

And he said, "Ray, why should I be mayor when I'm already king?"

There we go. Hi, there. How you doing? God bless.

JOLLY MUSIC

'Happy's one of his favouritest friends.

'Ha, except I'm your favourite. Yeah, I'm your bestest friend!'

I'm fascinated with the idea that machines are as paradoxical

as mankind is itself.

Over the years you consider the fact that atom power can be used

to blow up the world or to illuminate the world.

So, I've written just as many short stories, over a long period of time,

attacking technology as I have defending it.

'Tick-tock seven o'clock, time to get up.

'Time to get up. Seven o'clock.'

'7.09 breakfast time. 7.09.'

'Today is August 4th, 2026.

'Today is Mr Featherstone's birthday.'

'8.01, tick-tock, 8.01 o'clock.

'Off to school, off to work.

'Run, run, 8.01.'

ROBOTIC SQUEAKING

"The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places.

"Here, the silhouette, in paint, of a man mowing the lawn,

"here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers.

"Still further over,

"their images burned on wood in one titanic incident,

"a small boy, hands flung into the air,

"higher up, the image of a thrown ball and opposite him a girl,

"hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

"The five spots of paint, the man, the woman, the children,

"the ball remained.

"The rest was a thin, charcoaled layer.

"The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light."

KETTLE WHISTLING

'Fire, help, help! Fire, run, run!

'Fire, help.

'Fire, burning, run! Run!

'Fire! Help! HELP! BURNING!

'FIRE! RUN! RUN...

'7am, breakfast...

'FIRE! HELP! HELP!

'Help, help.'

DISTORTED ROBOTIC SQUEAKING

When I was a young man I looked at the shelves at the library,

saw the empty places and said to myself,

"How do I get there? How do I put myself on that shelf?"

The answer was to write a book that would scare the hell out of myself.

We all love that.

To write books about boys sneaking around at midnight,

doing secret things, out in the back yard, climbing trees,

going into haunted houses, that sort of wonderful adventure.

If I could write that, maybe I'd wind up on the shelves.

EERIE PIANO MUSIC

"Out in the world not much happened but here, in this special night,

"a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen.

"Always did.

"Listen, and you heard 10,000 people screaming

"so high, only dogs feathered their ears."

CROWD SCREAMING

MEN SHOUTING IN UNISON

WHINING PLANE ENGINE

"Mankind perished utterly..."

EXPLOSIONS

MARCHING FEET AND SINGING

CHURCH BELLS RINGING

FOG HORNS BLARING

I got the title for my novel from Shakespeare's play Macbeth.

"By the pricking of my thumbs Something wicked this way comes."

CARNIVAL MUSIC

"These illustrations are all right through the day,

"but at night, they move.

" 'For you see,' said the illustrated man,

" 'these pictures predict the future.' "

FRANTIC ORGAN MUSIC

This is one of my favourite books.

Mainly because I found my father, by surprise, in it a few years ago.

My father died some 23 years back.

I wrote the book 20 years ago, published it 18 years ago,

didn't read it for many years after.

One night, about eight or nine years ago,

prowling around my house, late, picked up the book,

read a whole chapter about this man, this father in the book,

and burst into tears.

It was my father, hidden away at the heart of the book,

very special, very loving, very good.

And that's why it's my favourite book.

" 'Me,' said his father, 'I'm the original sad man.

" 'I read a book and it makes me sad, see a film - sad,

" 'plays - they really work me over.'

" 'Is there anything,' said Will, 'doesn't make you sad?'

" 'One thing - death.'

" 'Boy!', Will started, 'I should think that would.'

" 'No,' said the man with the voice to match his hair,

" 'death makes everything else sad, but death itself only scares.

" 'If there wasn't death,

" 'well, all the other things wouldn't get tainted.'

" 'And,' Will thought, 'here comes the Carnival.

" 'Death, like a rattle in one hand, life, like candy in the other,

" 'shake one to scare you, offer one to make your mouth water.

" 'Here comes the sideshow and both hands full.' "

MUSIC: "Funeral March" by Frederic Chopin

CHATTERING CROWD

DISTORTED ORGAN MUSIC

"The carousel wheeled, the horses thrusting,

"the music gasped after, while Mr Cougar, as simple as shadows,

"as simple as time, got younger, and younger, and younger.

"The days being short now, simply, I had come to gaze, and look,

"and stare upon the thought of that once endless maze of afternoons.

"But, most of all, I wish to find the places where I ran,

"as dogs do run before or after boys."

I think one of the basic secrets of life

is doing things because you want to do them

and not because someone pays you.

That's been true for me.

I've been writing poetry for 40 years or so

that nobody wanted to read -

even myself, at times.

And now, very late in time, the poetry is getting pretty good

and I'm beginning to publish it.

"I came upon an oak where once, when I was 12,

"I had climbed up and screamed for Skip to get me down.

"It was 1,000 miles to Earth, I shut my eyes and yelled."

Help!

"My brother, richly compelled to mirth,

"gave shouts of laughter and scaled up to rescue me.

" 'What we doing there?', he said.

"I did not tell, but I was there to place a note within a squirrel nest

"on which I had written some old secret thing now long forgot.

"Now, in the green ravine of middle years, I stood beneath that tree.

" 'Why, why?', I thought,

" 'my God, it's not so high. Why did I shriek?' "

"What awe, the squirrel's hole and long lost nest were there.

"I lay upon the limb a long while thinking.

"I drank in all the leaves, and clouds, and weathers going by

"as mindless as the days. 'What, what, what if?', I thought

"but no, some 40 years beyond,

"the note I had put had surely stolen off by now.

"I put my hand into the nest...

"..I dug my fingers deep - nothing and still more nothing.

"Yet, digging further, I brought forth the note.

"Like moth wings neatly powdered on themselves and folded close

"it had survived!

"I opened it, for now I had to know. I opened it and wept.

"I clung, then, to the tree and let the tears flow out

"and down my chin.

"Dear boy, strange child

"who must have known the years and reckoned time

"and smelled sweet death from flowers in the far churchyard.

"What did it say that made me weep?"

"I remember you."

" 'I remember you.'

" 'I remember you.' "

People are always saying, "What are you?

"Are you a science fiction writer, are you a fantasy writer?"

I say, "No, I am what I started out to be - a magician."

Everyone, clothes off!

Brush teeth.

Now, out with the lights.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd