Okay, test-armed to arm, test-armed to arm, right-engine prep complete, vane tanks pressurizing, vane tanks pressurizing, you have the missile prep complete.
Here at the Rocketdyne Propulsion Laboratory, in a blast-scarred valley of the Santa Susana Mountains, parts of the engine which will power Americans on their first voyage to the moon are about to be test-fired.
This is Ray Bradbury. His tales of science fiction and fantasy are known throughout the world. For over 20 years, he has predicted and examined the joys and nightmares of the coming age of the rocket.
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This is a marketplace.
A marketplace of entertainments and ideas where thousands of authors compete for the eye, the mind, the dollar, the reading public. I'm John Willis.
Among the best known and most popular contemporary writers in America is Ray Bradbury.
At 43, he has achieved international recognition with such books as The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, books and stories which have stimulated the imaginations of millions.
Much of his writing explores the future, the way man may live and think tomorrow.
But as his visions of tomorrow are overtaken by the events and scientific developments of today, his man steps beyond the threshold of space.
Ray Bradbury, writer of The Strange and the Fantastic, finds himself a prophet in his own time.
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Fantasy and illusion have always filled my life. I can still perform the magic tricks I learned when I was 11 and I sometimes do for my wife Maggie and our four daughters.
Magic was my first great love. If I hadn't discovered writing, I think I really would have become a magician.
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Ray Bradbury does most of his writing here in a basement room of his West Los Angeles home.
A highly disciplined man, he often works seven days a week, turning out as many as 30 short stories a year.
His files contain not only his completed stories, but the dozens of ideas, fragments and first drafts which he keeps in work at one time.
A purposeful clutter of curios, mementos and old souvenirs surrounding him as he writes.
A writer's past is the most important thing he has. Sometimes an object, a mask, a ticket stop, anything at all helps me remember a whole experience.
And all of that may come an idea for a story.
So I'm a pack rat. I've kept everything I've ever cared about since childhood.
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I was born in Waukegan, Illinois and one of my earliest memories is being in awe of the stars on a summer night.
We moved to Los Angeles when I was 11. By then I was collecting Buck Rogers and my favorite authors were Mark Twain, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
I read everything from Tom Swift to Tarzan and by star respect to the light they gave me.
I don't turn my back on any of it. My art has grown out of many things, the good, the bad and the indifferent.
Now your problem is a feeling of inferiority, but you're full of self-doubt in your careers today more than ever before.
A writer must periodically break out of his isolation and come into contact with people. At least twice a month Bradbury lectures to clubs, scientific groups and students.
Because really essentially no one can help you in this world. There is no help but yourself.
Mr. Bradbury, how much did you make in your early years of writing?
It varies. The first year I made nothing. The second year I made nothing. The third year I made ten dollars.
The fourth year I made forty dollars. I remember these. I got these indelibly stamped in there. The fifth year I made eighty.
The sixth year I made two hundred. The seventh year I made eight hundred. The eighth year twelve hundred. The ninth year two thousand.
The tenth year four thousand. The eleventh year eight thousand.
How does an artist keep going during those early years of low income?
Just get a part-time job. Anything. That's halfway decent.
Unless you're in a theater, unless you're a madman, you can't make do in the art field.
You've got to be inspired and mad and excited and love it more than anything else in the world.
And if any girl doesn't like what you're doing, out of your life.
And if any of your male friends make fun of you, the hell with them. Out. Out.
And then you get rid of all the relatives at once immediately.
No more Thanksgiving dinners.
But it has to be this kind of, I've got to do it. I've simply got to do it.
You're not this excited. You can't win.
At the age of seventeen, Ray Bradbury set out to be a professional writer.
Since then, he has published nearly three hundred short stories and novels which have been translated into eighteen languages.
And earned him many important awards.
In addition, his provocative magazine articles have made him internationally known as a perceptive and candid observer of our times.
Any world of three billion people waited on hand, foot, ear and eyeball by fifty billion robot devices is a science fiction world.
And that's fine. I've always been in favor of a science that can prolong and beautify our lives.
I believe in television, atomic power and certainly computers.
But when does an invention stop being a reasonable and worthwhile mechanism and start being a paranoically dangerous device?
The problem of good and evil fascinates me as a writer.
Are atomic knowledge destroys cancer or men?
Are airplanes carry passengers or jellied gasoline bombs?
The hairline, the human choice is always there.
A writer moves about observing, seeing as much as he can, trying to guess how man will play the game.
Constantly measuring the way life is against the way he feels it ought to be.
He's a magnet pricing through a factual world, taking from it what he needs.
Radbury lived for many years here in Venice, an area of Los Angeles which he frequently revisits.
The time we have alone, the time we have in walking, the time we have in riding a bicycle is the most important time for a writer.
Escaping from the typewriter is part of the creative process.
You have to give a subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs on the subconscious level.
I never consciously set out to write a certain story. The idea must originate somewhere deep within me and push itself out in its own time.
Usually it begins with associations, electricity, the sea. Life started in the sea.
Could the miracle occur again? Could life take hold in another environment? An electromechanical environment?
An electromechanical environment?
An electromechanical environment?
An electromechanical environment?
Hello?
Hello?
Who is this?
Who is this?
Who is you, Charlie? Come off it, will you?
Who is this?
Look, what number are you calling from?
What number?
Hello?
What do you want?
What do you want?
Look, will you tell me who you are?
We are you.
Operator.
Hello, operator. I've had somebody calling me and bothering me on the phone. It must be some crazy person. Who should I call to?
You'll have to call your service representative, sir.
My service representative.
That's 118.
Okay, thank you.
Hello?
Hello?
Dial 00, a story by Ray Bramper. Out of a ride along a dusty road, out of observations, impressions, a lifetime of experience.
A story has begun.
In the world of Ray Bradbury, anything is possible, including within the vast complex of the telephone system, the spontaneous formation of intelligent life.
A professional writer lives on what he produces.
To help him sell, he often relies on a literary agent. Bradbury has two, one in New York and one in Hollywood.
A story sells itself always, but not when it's sitting in the files.
A writer needs an agent to go out into the marketplace and sell his wares.
I never learned to drive. As a kid, I saw too many fatal accidents, and I grew up hating the idea.
Our automobiles slaughter 40,000 people a year, name 100,000 more, and bring out the worst in man.
Any society where a natural man, the pedestrian, becomes the intruder, an unnatural man encased in a steel shell becomes his molester, is a science fiction nightmare.
Research is a necessary part of writing, even for fantasy.
Together background for Dial 00, Bradbury visits a long-distance telephone switching center.
As a writer, I've been called a mechanical moron, someone who knows no practical physics, and that's almost true.
Yet I don't think anyone admires scientific technology more than I do.
Here are thousands of people calling thousands of other people every minute, with banks of relays across the country singing to each other in musical codes and handling it all in microseconds.
Mechanisms like this represent scientific man at his best.
A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping.
Your reader's passengers on a boat whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scenery.
My readers must become the main character.
In Dial 00, they must be Tom, confronted by a miracle, trying to understand.
The mysterious voice, the voice on the telephone, calls Tom again and again, each time less odd, more natural, changing, developing, each time untraceable, unexplainable, as if existing for his ears alone.
Finally, armed only with suspicion, Tom confides in a friend.
Hello?
Ralph, listen Ralph, I called you to find out if you could possibly have dinner with me tonight.
There's something very important I want to discuss with you.
I don't think these phone calls are coming from anyone.
I don't think they're coming from any person, any human being.
These phone calls are coming from the telephone system itself.
Suddenly, Tom faltered.
He realized that if in fact there were an intelligence in the telephone system, it would be listening.
It would have overheard.
He would know he suspected it.
Look Ralph, I'm going to have to hang up.
Suddenly, Tom's friends began receiving calls, insulting, disgusting calls from someone, something, imitating Tom's voice.
Desperately, Tom turned again to the telephone company, which was still unable to trace a single call.
In fact, as it was patiently explained to him, such calls could not be taking place, or if they were, they would be originating from an impossible source.
From high up on pole number 74862, a few blocks from his apartment.
Bradbury sometimes works away from his home at his Beverly Hills office, or he can avoid most interruptions.
There, he occasionally finds time to meet with young writers who seek him out.
There's no real way of thanking my own teachers, except through teaching others.
We all need one person to look us in the face and say, you can do what you want to do.
I tell young writers, you can never be James Joyce, you can never be Mickey Spelane, you can only be yourself.
I tell them, it doesn't have to be the greatest, but it does have to be you.
If there were three of me, I could keep us all busy.
Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual.
There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.
After a good day of writing, I feel like I've been for a long hike in another world, and painting helps me relax.
This is the story about my being microscopic and being hidden on the back of the moth, and it flew up to my mother's shoulder and landed on her shoulder.
She looked and said, oh, what a beautiful moth, and I kept yelling at her, mother, mother, I'm here on the back of the moth.
The wicked witch has changed me into a tiny little creature, and in order to get back to you...
I was afraid of the dark until I was almost 20.
My only children's book, Switch on the Night, was written the week before my first daughter was born, so she wouldn't be afraid, too.
And she's not. None of my daughters are.
In fact, I can never make my bedtime stories scary enough.
It's the desire of the moth, and maybe she'll see me standing up on the back of the moth and waving to her and shouting to her.
So she started looking very close, and I was very hopeful that at which moment my father came into the house, slammed the door, scared the moth.
The moth flew up and out the window, and I screamed and screamed, and we flew off into the night, and that's the end of the story for tonight.
Can you tell the rest?
Can you tell the rest?
Yes.
What happened next?
A witch ran in to eat you, and that's the end.
Every other Friday for the past 14 years, Bradbury and a group of friends have met to read and criticize each other's work.
Having completed his telephone story, Bradbury exposes it to their reaction.
Bradbury's father said he had lost fool. He looked around at the apartment, guessing it might be the last time he would see it for many hours, days, or forever.
Poor lost, poor sick, dumb, mad Tom.
And Tom went out into the night, into the dark of the night, sure only that if he were saying that in the small gray box in the pole was his enemy.
The phone, the telephone, and Tom understood what was happening. The box was afraid, was calling, calling out through its arteries, calling for help.
All right, get down, get down from there. Come on, get down.
You up on that pole. You up there. Come on down.
Get down over there. Get down over that pole.
In the instant of exploding light, Tom saw within the box, saw it, saw something he knew must be it, and he knew it had won.
By the next afternoon, every trace of poor Tom and his seeming madness had been removed, and in the vicinity of pole 74826, all was normal once again.
The damage to the wires had been repaired, the box had been shut, without the repairman touching or having seen whatever it was that Tom had seen.
Inside the humming box, there was a tick, a tick-tick, a tick, a tick-tick-tick, and a silence.
And then a click, and very far away, after another silence, the voice said, the White House, good evening.
The end.
Now, can we have some reactions from any one of you?
I think the thing that intrigues me about the story is the process of life starting again.
But I found it disturbing that this voice was malevolent.
I don't think that the purpose or the overtone of the entire story should be malevolent.
Everyone will have something to say. Comments will range from the questioning of a single word to suggestions for major story revisions.
To Bradbury, the group's reaction is a necessary and sometimes painful prelude to sending a story out.
I always have Maggie go over everything I write, word by word.
She taught English in college, and I rely on her to correct my grammar and catch any other errors I might have missed.
It's always hard for me to decide when a manuscript's really ready to go out.
Usually, if we can't change another word, that's when it's ready, not before.
For Bradbury, mailing dial 00 to his New York agent who will offer it up for sale to leading magazines is the last step of literary production.
I worry about rejection, but not too much.
The real fear isn't rejection, but that there won't be enough time in your life to write all the stories you have in you.
So every time I put a new one in the mail, I know I've beaten death again.
Though Ray Bradbury's formal education ended with high school, his stories appear today in 15 college textbooks,
along with those of Sorolla, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Pohl.
I'm a storyteller. That's all I've ever tried to be.
I guess in ancient times, I would have been somewhere in the marketplace, alongside the magician, delighting the people.
I'd rather delight and entertain than anything else.
We live in a time of paradox. Man is confronted with a terrifying, magnificent choice.
Destroy himself utterly with the atom, or survive utterly with the same means.
Man has always been half monster, half dreamer.
The very real fear is that now he'll destroy himself just as he's about to attain his dreams.
Today we stand on the rim of space. Man is about to flow outward to spread his seed to far new worlds,
if he can conquer the seed of his own self-destruction.
But man at his best is immortal, and from his beginnings, he has dreamed of reaching the stars.
I'm convinced he will.
The End
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