Free The Toynbee Convector by Ray Bradbury

hollow, the eyes sank in wrinkles.
    John drew back. “Grandmother, it’s you !”
    “Cecy!” Grandpa was trembling violently. “Stash John in a bird, a stone, a well! Anywhere, but not in my damn fool head! Now!”
    “Out you go, John!” said Cecy.
    And John vanished.
    Into a robin singing on a pole that flashed by the train window.
    Grandmother stood withered in darkness. Grandpa’s gentle inward gaze touched her again, to reclothe her younger flesh. New color poured into her eyes, cheeks, and hair. He hid her safely away in a nameless and far-off orchard.
    Grandpa opened his eyes.
    Sunlight sprang in on the last three cousins.
    The young woman still sat across the aisle.
    Grandfather shut his eyes again but it was too late. The cousins rose up behind his gaze. “We’re fools!” said Tom. “Why bother with old times! New is right there ! That girl! Yes?”
    “Yes!” whispered Cecy. “Listen! I’ll put Grandpa’s mind over in her body. Then bring her mind over to hide in Grandpa’s head! Grandpa’s body will sit here straight as a ramrod, and inside it well all be acrobats, gymnasts! fiends! The conductor will pass, never guessing! Grandpa will sit here. His head full of wild laughter, unclothed mobs while his real mind will be trapped over there in that fine girl’s head! What fun in the middle of a train coach on a hot afternoon, with nobody knowing.”
    “Yes!” said everyone at once.
    “No,” said Grandpa, and pulled forth two white tab lets from his pocket and swallowed them.
    “Stop him!” shouted William.
    “Drat!” said Cecy. “It was such a fine, lovely, wicked plan.”
    “Good night, everybody,” said Grandpa. The medicine was working. “And you—” he said, looking with gentle sleepiness at the young lady across the aisle. “You have just been rescued from a fete, young lady, worse than ten thousand deaths.”
    “Beg pardon?” The young lady blinked.
    “Innocence, continue in thy innocence,” said Grand pa, and fell asleep.
    The train pulled into Cranamockett at six o’clock. Only then was John allowed back from his exile in the head of that robin on a fence miles behind.
    There were absolutely no relatives in Cranamockett willing to take in the cousins. At the end of three days, Grandfather rode the train back to Illinois, the cousins still in him, like peach stones. And there they stayed, each in a different territory of Grandpa’s sun-or-moonlit attic keep.
    Tom took residence in a remembrance of 1840 in Vienna with a crazed actress, William lived in Lake County with a flaxen-haired Swede of some indefinite years, while John shuttled from fleshpot to fleshpot, ‘Frisco, Berlin, Paris, appearing, on occasion, as a wicked glitter in Grandpa’s eyes. Philip, on the other hand, locked himself deep in a potato-bin cellar, where he read all the books Grandpa ever read.
    But on some nights Grandpa edges over under the covers toward Grandma.
    “You!” she cries. “At your age! Git!” she screams.
    And she beats and beats and beats him until, laughing in five voices, Grandpa gives up, fells back, and pretends to sleep, alert with five kinds of alertness, for another try.

The Last Circus

    Red Tongue Jurgis (we called him that because he ate candy red-hots all the time) stood under my window one cold October morning and yelled at the metal weathercock on top of our house. I put my head out the window and blew steam. “Hi, Red Tongue!”
    “Jiggers!” he said. “Come on! The circus!”
    Three minutes later I ran out of the house polishing two apples on my knee. Red tongue was dancing to keep warm. We agreed that the last one to reach the train yard was a damnfool old man.
    Eating apples, we ran through the silent town.
    We stood by the rails in the dark train yard and listened to them humming. Far away in the cold dark morning country, we knew, the circus was coming. The sound of it was in the rails, trembling. I put my ear down to hear it traveling. “Gosh,” I