Free Bradbury, Ray - SSC 13 by S is for Space (v2.1)

like marbles in their hands the little toads leapt about
and frisked and blinked. Then it was only logical that the gravediggers think
of William Lantry in like fashion.
                 But
what if the various parts were fitted together in the next day or so? If the
vanished body and the shattered, exploded Incinerator were connected? What if
this fellow named Burke, who had returned pale from Mars, went to the library
again and said to the young woman he wanted some books and she said, “Oh, your
friend Lantry was in the other day.” And he’d say, ‘Lantry who? Don’t know
anyone by that name.’ And she’d say, “Oh, he lied .” And people in this time didn’t lie. So it would all form and
coalesce, item by item, bit by bit. A pale man who was pale and shouldn’t be
pale had lied and people don’t lie, and a walking man on a lonely country road
had walked and people don’t walk any more, and a body was missing from a cemetery,
and the Incinerator had blown up and and and—
                 They
would come after him. They would find him. He would be easy to find. He walked.
He lied. He was pale. They would find him and take him and stick him through
the open fire lock of the nearest Burner and that would be your Mr. William
Lantry, like a Fourth of July set-piece!
                 There
was only one thing to be done efficiently and completely. He arose in violent
moves. His lips were wide and his dark eyes were flared and there was a
trembling and burning all through him. He must kill and kill and kill and kill
and kill. He must make his enemies into friends, into people like himself who
walked but shouldn’t walk, who were pale in a land of pinks. He must kill and
then kill and then kill again. He must make bodies and dead people and corpses.
He must destroy Incinerator after Flue after Burner after Incinerator.
Explosion on explosion. Death on death. Then, when the Incinerators were all in
thrown ruin, and the hastily established morgues were jammed with the bodies of
people shattered by the explosion, then he would begin his making of friends,
his enrollment of the dead in his own cause.
                 Before
they traced and found and killed him, they must be killed themselves. So far he
was safe. He could kill and they would not kill back. People simply do not go
around killing. That was his safety margin. He climbed out of the abandoned
drain, stood in the road.
                 He
took the knife from his pocket and hailed the next beetle.
                  
     
                 It
was like the Fourth of July! The biggest firecracker of them all. The Science
Port Incinerator split down the middle and flew apart. It made a thousand small
explosions that ended with a greater one. It fell upon the town and crushed
houses and burned trees. It woke people from sleep and then put them to sleep
again, forever, an instant later.
                 William
Lantry, sitting in a beetle that was not his own, tuned idly to a station on
the audio dial. The collapse of the Incinerator had killed some four hundred
people. Many had been caught in flattened houses, others struck by flying
metal. A temporary morgue was being set up at—
                 An
address was given.
                 Lantry
noted it with a pad and pencil.
                 He
could go on this way, he thought, from town to town, from country to country,
destroying the Burners, the Pillars of Fire, until the whole clean magnificent
framework of flame and cauterization was tumbled. He made a fair estimate—each
explosion averaged five hundred dead. You could work that up to a hundred
thousand in no time.
                 He
pressed the floor stud on the beetle. Smiling, he drove off through the dark
streets of the city.
                  
     
                 The
city coroner had requisitioned an old warehouse. From midnight until four