Kaleidoscope – setting: spaceĪ rocket explodes and the half dozen astronauts inside are scattered in all directions. Only then do they look around and see the lions advancing towards them, jaws slavering, under the hot African sun. Then they hear screams from the nursery, run down and into it only for… the children to slam and lock the door behind them.
George relents as he and his wife go upstairs to pack. Slowly George realises how spoilt and addicted to the nursery the children have become, and announces he is going to turn off the electric house and take them all on holiday to a real home where they’ll have to cook and manage for themselves.Īs he turns things off the children go mental with anger and horror and tears and beg for just a last few minutes in the nursery. Recently they’ve been recreating the same scene from the African veldt over and gain, complete with lions feasting on something in the distance. Mr and Mrs George Hadley live in a soundproofed Happylife Home, which is staffed with gadgets and machinery which does their living for them – baths which run on command, shoelace tiers, food which appears on the table when commanded, and a state-of-the-art nursery where their two children, Peter (10) and Wendy spend hours conjuring up three dimensional scenes from fairy tales and children’s stories. The British edition – which I own – omits ‘The Rocket Man’, ‘The Fire Balloons’, ‘The Exiles’ and ‘The Concrete Mixer’, and adds ‘Usher II’ from The Martian Chronicles and ‘The Playground’, to produce this running order: The America edition has the following stories: This is the rather wonderful framing device which loosely introduces this collection of eighteen science fiction short stories. Not only this, but after sundown the tattoos start moving, each one telling a wondrous story.
The illustrated man has tried every way he can to remove them – scraping them, using acid – nothing works.
Relaxing in the sun, the stranger takes off his shirt to reveal that his body is absolutely covered in wonderful tattoos, lurid El Greco designs painted in sulphurous colours, inked into him by a crazy old woman who, he claims, was a traveller from the future. The narrator invites him to share his simple dinner. Over the brow of a hill comes a stranger. The unnamed narrator is on a walking holiday in Wisconsin.
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