‘It’s five o’clock.’
At these words, hushed, they all busied themselves. Their fingers darted. Their faces were turned down to the motions they made. They made frantic patterns.
They made lilacs and grass and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth. They said nothing, but you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.
Thirty seconds passed. The second woman sighed finally and began to
relax.
‘I think I just will go shell those peas for supper,’
she said. ‘I …’
But she hadn’t time even to lift her head. Somewhere, at the side of her vision, she saw the world brighten and catch fire. She kept her head down, for she knew what it was. She didn’t look up, nor did the others, and in the last instant their fingers were flying; they didn’t glance about to see what was happening to
the country, the town, this house, or even this porch. They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.
The second woman watched an embroidered flower go. She tried to embroider it back in, but it went, and then the road vanished, and the blades of grass. She watched a fire, in slow motion almost, catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it, and pull each
threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop, and she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design. Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle while still it flashed; she watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body, untwisting the
yarn of her being so painstakingly that she could see it all in devilish beauty, yanking out the pattern from the material at hand. What it was doing to the other women or the furniture or the elm tree in the yard, she never knew. For now, yes, now! it was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh, the pink thread of her cheeks, and at last it found her heart, a soft red rose sewn with fire, and it burned the fresh, embroidered petals away,
one by delicate one
Explanation
I feel that Carl Sagan will find this story rather interesting due to the small scientific elements in the story. These elements are apparently about something that will wipe out human race. Although Ray Bradbury parallels the wiping out of the human race to the removal of the “imperfect man” from the embroidery, showing how imperfect things, important or not, are often destroyed, Carl Sagan would pay more notice to the “thing” that would wipe out the human race, probably thinking that it was a comet.
In his book, he presents information about comets in Chapter 4: Heaven and Hell. On June 30, 1908, in Central Siberia, an incident known as the “Tunguska Event”, during which a piece of comet hit the earth. As quoted from eye witnesses, “the whole northern part of the sky appeared to be covered in fire” and “sudden bangs, as if from gunfire” were heard. In this short-story, could a piece of comet have hit the earth again?
He also mentions a special comet that orbits around the sun, known as Halley’s Comet. This comet was observed to be seen every 67 years, starting from 1531. Ray Bradbury’s Embroidery describes the “thing” as being “twice as big as ever before. No, ten times, maybe a thousand.” And later says it “isn’t like the first one or the dozen later ones”. This shows that this “thing” has appeared many times, but this time it is the worst yet. Halley’s Comet, which has been observed repeatedly, was seen to get bigger and bigger each time. Carl Sagan would probably thus conclude that in this story, the humans were wiped out by the return of Halley’s Comet. This would lead him to see how others in society picture a comet.
Second Short Story
The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury
"South," said the captain.
"But," said his crew, "there simply aren't any directions out here in space."
"When you travel on down toward the sun," replied the captain, "and everything gets yellow and warm and lazy, then you're going in one direction only." He shut his eyes and thought about the smoldering, warm, faraway land, his breath moving gently in his mouth. "South." He nodded slowly to himself. "South."
Their rocket was the Copa de Oro, also named the Prometheus and the Icarus and their destination in all reality was the blazing noonday sun. In high good spirits they had packed along two thousand sour lemonades and a thousand white-capped beers for this journey to the wide Sahara. And now as the sun boiled up at them they remembered a score of verses and quotations:
'"The golden apples of the sun'?"
"Yeats."
"'Fear no more the heat of the sun'?"
"Shakespeare, of course!"
"'Cup of Gold? Steinbeck. 'The Crock of Gold'? Stephens. And what about the pot of gold at the rainbow's end? There's a name for our trajectory, by God. Rainbow!" "Temperature?" "One thousand degrees Fahrenheit!" The captain stared from the huge dark-lensed port, and there indeed was the sun, and to go to that sun and touch it and steal part of it forever away was his quiet and single idea. In this ship were combined the coolly delicate and the coldly practical. Through corridors of ice and milk-frost, ammoniated winter and storming snowflakes blew. Any spark from that vast hearth burning out there beyond the callous hull of this ship, any small firebreath that might seep through would find winter, slumbering here like all the coldest hours of February.
The audiothermometer murmured in the arctic silence: "Temperature: two thousand degrees!"
Falling, thought the captain, like a snowflake into the lap of June, warm July, and the sweltering dog-mad days of August.
"Three thousand degrees Fahrenheit!"
Under the snow fields engines raced, refrigerants pumped ten thousand miles per hour in rimed boa-constrictor coils.
"Four thousand degrees Fahrenheit."
Noon. Summer. July.
"Five thousand Fahrenheit!"
And at last the captain spoke with all the quietness of the journey in his voice:
"Now, we are touching the sun."
Their eyes, thinking it, were melted gold.
"Seven thousand degrees!"
Strange how a mechanical thermometer could sound excited, though it possessed only an emotionless steel voice.
"What time is it?" asked someone.
Everyone had to smile.
For now there was only the sun and the sun and the sun. It was every horizon, it was every direction. It burned the minutes, the seconds, the hourglasses, the clocks; it burned all time and eternity away. It burned the eyelids and the serum of the dark world behind the lids, the retina, the hidden brain; and it burned sleep and the sweet memories of sleep and cool nightfall.
"Watch it!"
"Captain!"
Bretton, the first mate, fell flat to the winter deck. His protective suit whistled where, burst open, his warmness, his oxygen, and his life bloomed out in a frosted steam.
"Quick!"
Inside Bretton's plastic face-mask, milk crystals had already gathered in blind patterns. They bent to see.
"A structural defect in his suit, Captain. Dead."
"Frozen."
They stared at that other thermometer which showed how winter lived in this snowing ship. One thousand degrees below zero. The captain gazed down upon the frosted statue and the twinkling crystals that iced over it as he watched. Irony of the coolest sort, he thought; a man afraid of fire and killed by frost. The captain turned away. "No time. No time. Let him lie." He felt his tongue move. "Temperature?"
The dials jumped four thousand degrees.
"Look. Will you look? Look." Their icicle was melting. The captain jerked his head to look at the ceiling.
As if a motion-picture projector had jammed a single clear memory frame in his head, he found his mind focused ridiculously on a scene whipped out of childhood. Spring mornings as a boy he found he had leaned from his bedroom window into the snow-smelling air to see the sun sparkle the last icicle of winter. A dripping of white wine, the blood of cool but warming. April fell from that clear crystal blade. Minute by minute, December's weapon grew less dangerous. And then at last the icicle fell with the sound of a single chime to the graveled walk below.
"Auxiliary pump's broken, sir. Refrigeration. We're losing our ice!"
A shower of warm rain shivered down upon them. The captain jerked his head right and left. "Can you see the trouble? Christ, don't stand there, we haven't time!"
The men rushed; the captain bent in the warm rain, cursing, felt his hands run over the cold machine, felt them burrow and search, and while he worked he saw a future which was removed from them by the merest breath. He saw the skin peel from the rocket beehive, men, thus revealed, running, running, mouths shrieking, soundless. Space was a black mossed well where life drowned its roars and terrors. Scream a big scream, but space snuffed it out before it was half up your throat. Men scurried, ants in a flaming match-box; the ship was dripping lava, gushing steam, nothing!
"Captain?"
The nightmare flicked away.
"Here." He worked in the soft warm rain that fell from the upper decks. He fumbled at the auxiliary pump. "Damn it!" He jerked the feed line. When it came, it'd be the quickest death in the history of dying. One moment, yelling; a warm flash later only the billion billion tons of space-fire would whisper, unheard, in space. Popped like strawberries in a furnace, while their thoughts lingered on the scorched air a long breath after their bodies were charred roast and fluorescent gas.
"Damn!" He stabbed the auxiliary pump with a screw driver. "Jesus!" He shuddered. The complete annihilation of it. He clamped his eyes shut, teeth tight. God, he thought, we're used to more leisurely dyings, measured in minutes and hours. Even twenty seconds now would be a slow death compared to this hungry idiot thing waiting to eat us!
"Captain, do we pull out or stay?"
"Get the Cup ready. Take over, finish this. Now!"
He turned and put his hand to the working mechanism of the huge Cup; shoved his fingers into the robot Glove. A twitch of his hand here moved a gigantic hand, with gigantic metal fingers, from the bowels of the ship. Now, now, the great metal hand slid out holding the huge Copa de Oro, breathless, into the iron furnace, the bodiless body and the fleshless flesh of the sun.
A million years ago, thought the captain, quickly, quickly, as he moved the hand and the Cup, a million years ago a naked man on a lonely northern trail saw lightning strike a tree. And while his clan fled, with bare hands he plucked a limb of fire, broiling the flesh of his fingers, to carry it, running in triumph, shielding it from the rain with his body, to his cave, where he shrieked out a laugh and tossed it full on a mound of leaves and gave his people summer. And the tribe crept at last, trembling, near the fire, and they put out their flinching hands and felt the new season in their cave, this small yellow spot of changing weather, and they, too, at last, nervously, smiled. And the gift of fire was theirs.
"Captain!"
It took all of four seconds for the huge hand to push the empty Cup to the fire. So here we are again, today, on another trail, he thought, reaching for a cup of precious gas and vacuum, a handful of different fire with which to run back up cold space, lighting out way, and take to Earth a gift of fire that might bum forever. Why? He knew the answer before the question. Because the atoms we work with our hands, on Earth, are pitiful; the atomic bomb is pitiful and small and our knowledge is pitiful and small, and only the sun really knows what we want to know, and only the sun has the secret. And besides, it's fun, it's a chance, it's a great thing coming here, playing tag, hitting and running. There is no reason, really, except the pride and vanity of little insect men hoping to sting the lion and escape the maw. My God, we'll say, we did it! And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion: Drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness in each man. So: We stretch out our hand with the beggar's cup.... "Ah."
The Cup dipped into the sun. It scooped up a bit of the flesh of God, the blood of the universe, the blazing thought, the blinding philosophy that set out and mothered a galaxy, that idled and swept planets in their fields and summoned or laid to rest lives and livelihoods.
"No, slow," whispered the captain. "What'll happen when we pull it inside? That extra heat now, at this time, Captain?"
"God knows." "Auxiliary pump all repaired, sir."
"Start it!"
The pump leaped on.
"Close the lid of the Cup and inside now, slow, slow."
The beautiful hand outside the ship trembled, a tremendous image of his own gesture, sank with oiled silence into the ship body. The Cup, lid shut, dripped yellow flowers and white stars, slid deep. The audiothermometer screamed. The refrigerator system kicked; ammoniated fluids banged the walls like blood in the head of a shrieking idiot.
He shut the outer air-lock door.
"Now."
They waited. The ship's pulse ran. The heart of the ship rushed, beat, rushed, the Cup of gold in it. The cold blood raced around about down through, around about down through.
The captain exhaled slowly.
The ice stopped dripping from the ceiling. It froze again.
"Let's get out of here."
The ship turned and ran.
"Listen!"
The heart of the ship was slowing, slowing. The dials spun on down through the thousands; the needles whirred, invisible. The thermometer voice chanted the change of seasons. They were all thinking now, together: Pull away and away from the fire and the flame, the heat and the melting, the yellow and the white. Go on out now to cool and dark. In twenty hours perhaps they might even dismantle some refrigerators, let winter die. Soon they would move in night so cold it might be necessary to use the ship's new furnace, draw heat from the shielded fire they carried now like an unborn child. They were going home. They were going home and there was some little time, even as he tended to the body of Bretton lying in a bank of white winter snow, for the captain to remember a poem he had written many years before:
Sometimes I see the sun a burning Tree,
Its golden fruit swung bright in airless air,
Its apples wormed with man and gravity,
Their worship breathing from them everywhere,
As man sees Sun as burning Tree...
The captain sat for a long while by the body, feeling many separate things. I feel sad, he thought, and I feel good, and I feel like a boy coming home from school with a handful of dandelions.
"Well," said the captain, sitting, eyes shut, sighing. "Well, where do we go now, eh, where are we going?" He felt his men sitting or standing all about him, the terror dead in them, their breathing quiet. "When you've gone a long, long way down to the sun and touched it and lingered and jumped around and streaked away from it, where are you going then? When you go away from the heat and the noonday light and the laziness, where do you go?"
His men waited for him to say it out. They waited for him to gather all of the coolness and the whiteness and the welcome and refreshing climate of the word in his mind, and they saw him settle the word, like a bit of ice cream, in his mouth, rolling it gently.
"There's only one direction in space from here on out," he said at last.
They waited. They waited as the ship moved swiftly into cold darkness away from the light.
"North," murmured the captain. "North." And they all smiled, as if a wind had come up suddenly in the middle of a hot afternoon.
Explanation
I feel that Carl Sagan, once again, would be amused by the scientific elements in this second short-story by Ray Bradbury, in particular the claims about the sun.
The story first shows the immense heat of the sun, with temperatures jumping by four thousand degrees Fahrenheit every few seconds as the space ship approaches. It also shows how without the winter machine, they would all die in a split second. Based on Carl Sagan’s information, this seems to be accurate.
Ray Bradbury also has a strange hypothesis on the fragment obtained from the sun, be it gas or just fire. As the book says:
So here we are again, today, on another trail, he thought, reaching for a cup of precious gas and vacuum, a handful of different fire with which to run back up cold space, lighting out way, and take to Earth a gift of fire that might bum forever. Why? He knew the answer before the question. Because the atoms we work with our hands, on Earth, are pitiful; the atomic bomb is pitiful and small and our knowledge is pitiful and small, and only the sun really knows what we want to know, and only the sun has the secret. And besides, it's fun, it's a chance, it's a great thing coming here, playing tag, hitting and running. There is no reason, really, except the pride and vanity of little insect men hoping to sting the lion and escape the maw. My God, we'll say, we did it! And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done.
Ray Bradbury is in the opinion that this fire is very likely to burn forever. However, if you take Carl Sagan’s Scientific findings into consideration, you would know that this is definitely not possible. The sun is created by collisions of gas that heat up hydrogen to the extent that every two molecules of hydrogen will be violently converted into a helium molecule, producing fire, which produces the light that we see from the sun. Large amounts of hydrogen colliding would result in a star being created. In the centre of the sun is the hydrogen core. The outermost layers consist of only combusting helium. Scientific findings have proven that nothing can combust without the presence of Oxygen, which is used up in combustion. If scooped into a cup and contained, the oxygen would eventually be used up and the flame would die out. Contrary to the captain’s belief, the cup would not contain perpetual energy. Thus Carl Sagan would see the misinterpretations of the society on the sun.
Poem Chosen
The Centre of the Universe by Paul Durcan
-
Pushing my trolley about the supermarket,
I am the centre of the universe;
Up and down the aisle of juices,
I am the centre of the universe;
It does not matter that I live alone;
It does not matter that I am a jilted lover;
It does not matter that I am a misfit in my job;
I am the centre of the Universe
But I’m always here , if you want me –
For I am the centre of the universe.
-
I enjoy being the centre of the universe.
It is not easy being the centre of the universe
But I enjoy it.
I take pleasure in,
I delight in,
Being the centre of the universe.
At six o’clock a.m. this morning I had a phone call;
It was from a friend, a man in Los Angeles:
‘Paul, I don’t know what time it is in Dublin
But I simply had to call you:
I cannot stand LA so I thought I’d call you.’
I calmed him down as best I could.
But I’m always here , if you want me –
For I am the centre of the universe.
-
I had barely put the phone down when it rang again,
This time a friend in São Paulo in Brazil:
‘Paul – do you know what is the population of São Paulo?
I will tell you, it is twelve million skulls.
Twelve million pairs of feet in the one footbath.
Twelve million pairs of eyes in one fishbowl.
It is unspeakable, I tell you, unspeakable.’
I calmed him down.
But I’m always here , if you want me –
For I am the centre of the universe.
-
But then when the phone rang a second time and it was not yet 6.30 a.m.,
The petals of my own hysteria began to wake up and unfurl.”
This time it was a woman I know in New York City:
‘Paul – New York City is a Cage’,
And she began to cry a little bit over the phone,
To sob over the phone,
And from five thousand miles away I mopped up her tears.
I dabbed each tear from her cheek
With just a word or two or three from my calm voice.
But I’m always here , if you want me –
For I am the centre of the universe.
-
But now tonight it is myself;
Sitting at my aluminium double-glazed window in Dublin City;
Crying just a little bit into my black tee shirt.
If only there was just one human being out there
With whom I could make a home? Share a home?
Just one creature out there in the night?
In Helsinki, perhaps? Or in Reykjavik?
Or in Chapelizod? Or in Malahide?
So you see, I have to calm myself down also
If I am to remain the centre of the universe;
It’s by no means an exclusively self-centred automatic thing
Being the centre of the universe.
But I’m always here , if you want me –
For I am the centre of the universe.
Explanation
I believe that even scientists like Carl Sagan should know how to appreciate things that are out of their jobs, like poetry. In his book, he has studied the literal Universe. In this poem, however, he will be able to see the poet’s message and understand what he means by “The Centre of the Universe” being a person.
The persona is the centre of the universe, and in the first stanza he describes himself, and how these shortcomings do not matter, he is still the centre of the universe. In the next few stanzas, he gets calls consecutively from 3 people in less than half an hour, with people in need asking him for help. He then calms them down and helps them.
And in the final stanza, the persona cries to himself, as he is all alone and although he always helps others, he is often taken for granted and often no one remembers him when their problems are solved.
At the end of each stanza, the persona affirms that he will always be there for anyone as he is the centre of the universe.
The persona gives of himself selflessly without expecting repayment and always around to lend a listening ear. This seems to hint perhaps that the persona is God, to whom people ask for help in times of need, but after that tend to take him for granted, also indicated by “jilted lover”. Carl Sagan, after reading this poem, might see that although scientists are constantly searching throughout the universe, discovering new things, there is the figurative centre of the universe – God, who will always be there for anyone. Perhaps Carl Sagan will learn to see what religion is about despite the lack of scientific evidence.
