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THE HAUNTED COMPUTER
AND THE ANDROID POPE
Ray Bradbury
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
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.
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Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539918
Version: 2014–07–18
With love for my granddaughter, Julia, whose face promises me immortality
Table of Contents
The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope
Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind
Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone
Joy Is the Grace We Say to God
This Attic Where the Meadow Greens
Shakespeare the Father, Freud the Son
A Miracle of Popes, All with One Face!
Once the Years Were Numerous and the Funerals Few
The Dogs of Mesopotamia—Dyed by Spring
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
There Are No Ghosts in Catholic Spain
I Am God’s Greatest Basking Hound
Ode to an Utterance by Norman Corwin, Who Punned the First Line, and Must Suffer the Rest
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!