Bucky and I stood at their safe distance, crushed to silence by the anti-climax. Morrison had had his moment of glory or lack thereof and now was off to two years of numbing obscurity. He had made his point and as a result only petty criminals would be further exposed to his anti-social views. I couldn’t help thinking that such a brave stand deserved better than that. I thought of how my own mother would have coped had I made a similar stand. Her sense of shame would have been unbearable. No one, she knew clearly, ever went to jail unless they had committed unforgivable sins. She would have never dared speak to anyone again. She would have withered and died. I shuddered at the impossibility of it. I had never really imagined that I had options—now I definitely knew I didn’t.

It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met The Illustrated Man….
… He took his shirt off and wadded it in his hands. He was covered in Illustrations from the blue tattooed ring about his neck to his belt line.
    “It keeps right on going,” he said, guessing my thought,” All of me is illustrated. Look.” He opened his hand. On his palm was a rose, fresh-cut, with drops of crystal water among the soft pink petals. I put out my hand to touch it, but it was only an Illustration.
    As for the rest of him, I cannot say how I sat and stared, for he was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and colour that you could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body. When his flesh twitched, the tiny green-and-gold eyes wrinkled, the tiny pink hands gestured. There were yellow meadows and blue rivers and mountains and stars and suns and planets spread in a Milky Way across his chest. The people themselves were in twenty or more odd groups upon his arms, shoulders, back, sides, and wrists, as well as on the flat of his stomach. You found them in forests of hair, lurking among a constellation of freckles, or peering from armpit caverns, diamond eyes aglitter. Each seemed intent upon its own activity; each was a separate gallery portrait….
    It’s not really a novel but an excuse to tell another collection of Ray Bradbury’s excellent science fiction stories, all linked by the fact that the tattooed images on the man’s body are able to come alive and tell the stories they depict. The stories are fine but it is the idea of The Illustrated Man, linking them all together, is an unforgettable one.