The Veldt (Full Text)

The Veldt (The Saturday Evening Post, 1950) < George, I wish you9d look at the nursery.= < What9s wrong with it?= < I don9t know.= < Well, then.= < I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it. = < What would a psychologist want with a nursery?= < You know very well what he9d want.= His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four. < It9s just that the nursery is different now than it was.= < All right, let9s have a look.= They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity. < Well,= said George Hadley. *** They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. < But nothing9s too good for our children,= George had said. The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun. George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow. < Let9s get out of this sun,= he said. < This is a little too real. But I don9t see anything wrong.= < Wait a moment, you9ll see,= said his wife. Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley9s upturned, sweating face. < Filthy creatures,= he heard his wife say. < The vultures.= < You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they9re on their way to the water hole. They9ve just been eating,= said Lydia. < I don9t know what.= < Some animal.= George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. < A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.= < Are you sure?= His wife sounded peculiarly tense. < No, it9s a little late to be sure,= he said, amused. < Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what9s left.= < Did you bear that scream?= she asked. < No.= < About a minute ago?= < Sorry, no.= The lions were coming. And again George Hadley was filled with admiration for the mechanical genius who had conceived this room. A miracle of efficiency selling for an absurdly low price. Every home should have one. Oh, occasionally they frightened you with their clinical accuracy, they startled you, gave you a twinge, but most of the time what fun for everyone, not only your own son and daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a quick jaunt to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was! And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths. The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow eyes.