Free Now and Forever by Ray Bradbury Page B

wooden wheels beyond the city, and the platform timbers on which we imagined our houses, barns, and orchards transported so far off that no one would suspect this place had once known a life and now would know no more.
    Â Â Â Â â€œ You have seen, have you not, those solitary parades, single houses hoisted up on wooden plates and pulled like toys along the streets to empty lots to be replanted while the old sites turned to dust? Multiply that by three hundred homes and witness a parade of pachyderms, an entire town gliding toward the foothills, followed by the orchard trees.
    Â Â Â Â â€œ It is all quite impossible. Yet, in times of war, think of the preparations, the blueprints, the final accomplishments, thousands of ships, tens of thousands of tanks and guns, more tens of thousands of rifles, bullets, millions of iron helmets, tens of millions of shirts and jackets. How complicated but how necessary when war shouted and we ran. How much simpler our task to uproot a town, to run and rebirth it with wheels.
    Â Â Â Â â€œ In time, our fevers turned into a festival of triumph instead of a funeral march. We were forced on by the imagined thunder, the threatening hiss, of that new road beyond the eastern range. At night we could hear the road coming toward us full steam, rushing to catch us before we vanished.
    Â Â Â Â â€œ Well, the purveyors of concrete and movers of earth did not catch us. On the final day of our escape there remained, where you stand, the ruined station surrounded by a jungle of orange and lemon trees. These were the last to go, a beautiful excursion of softly scented orchards that drifted, four abreast, across the desert to nourish our newly hidden town.
    Â Â Â Â â€œ There you have it, dear James. We moved and left no pebble, no stone, no basement larder, no graveyard tombstone. All, all, all of it was transported.
    Â Â Â Â â€œ And when the highway arrives, what will they find? Was there ever a Summerton, Arizona, a courthouse, a town hall, a picnic ground, an empty school? No, never. Look to the dust.
    Â Â Â Â â€œ I will post this letter on the station platform mail-loop in the hope that it will reach you, if you should return. Somehow I know you will come back. I can feel your touch on this envelope even as I sign and seal it.
    Â Â Â Â â€œ When you finish reading this, dear friend and lover, consign it to the weather.”
    Â 
    And below this was her signature: Nef.
    He tore the letter in quarters and then quarters of quarters, and quarters again, and loosed the confetti into the air.
    Now, he thought, which way?
    He squinted at the northern rim of desert where lay a length of low half-green hills. He imagined the orchards.
    There, he thought.
    He had taken but one step when he looked back.
    Like an old brown dog, his suitcase lay on the dust-blown station platform.
    No, he thought, you’re another time.
    The luggage lay, waiting.
    â€œStay,” he said.
    The luggage stayed.
    He walked on.

CHAPTER 33
    It was twilight when he reached the first row of orange trees.
    It was deepening twilight when he saw the familiar crowds of sunflowers in each yard and the sign, EGYPTIAN VIEW ARMS, swaying above the verandah.
    The sun was almost gone as he walked up the last sidewalk, mounted the porch steps, stood before the screen door, and pressed the doorbell. It chimed quietly. A slender shadow appeared on the hall stair.
    â€œNef,” he said at last, quietly.
    â€œNef,” he said, “I’m home.”

“RADIO DREAM”
    In 1939, when I was nineteen, I fell in love with the radio dramas of Norman Corwin.
    I met him later, when I was twenty-seven, and he encouraged me to write my Martian stories, thus causing The Martian Chronicles to be born.
    Along through the years my dream was to one day have Norman Corwin direct one of my radio dramas.
    When I returned from my year in Ireland, after writing the