The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope. Ray Bradbury

      THE HAUNTED COMPUTER

      AND THE ANDROID POPE

      Ray Bradbury

Copyright

      HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB

       www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

      Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1981

       Cover design by Mike Topping. Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

      Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539918

      Version: 2014–07–18

Dedication

      With love for my granddaughter, Julia, whose face promises me immortality

      Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope

Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind

Poem from a Train Window

Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone

Joy Is the Grace We Say to God

They Have Not Seen the Stars

This Attic Where the Meadow Greens

Abandon in Place

The Great Man Speaks

       Shakespeare the Father, Freud the Son

       A Miracle of Popes, All with One Face!

       The Bike Repairmen

       The East Is Up!

       If Peaches Could Be Painters

       Once the Years Were Numerous and the Funerals Few

       Satchmo Saved!

       God Blows the Whistle

       The Infirmities of Genius

       Farewell Summer

       The Dogs of Mesopotamia—Dyed by Spring

       Two Impressionists

       And Yet the Burning Bush Has Voice

       To an Early Morning Darning-Needle Dragonfly

       Poem Written on a Train Just Leaving a Small Southern Town

       Too Much

       There Are No Ghosts in Catholic Spain

       I Am God’s Greatest Basking Hound

       Doing Is Being

       Ode to an Utterance by Norman Corwin, Who Punned the First Line, and Must Suffer the Rest

       Nectar and Ambrosia

       We Are the Reliquaries of Lost Time

       Anybody Who Can Make Great Strawberry Shortcake Can’t Be All Bad

       And Have You Seen God’s Birds Collide?

       You Can’t Go Home Again, Not Even if You Stay There!

       Schliemann