There Will Come Soft Rain-Zero Hour

Adventures in time and space told in future tense. Demacra! Can you predict the future? Can you tell what will come in 100 years?

Or in 10? Or in the next minute? The night we present two ventures into the unknown. Two fantasies of a future chosen from the works of one of our most brilliant young science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury, first his story entitled, There Will Come Soft Raines.

Was a good house, planned and built to be lived in in the year 1980. The real estate agent had told them all about it. Now this is the bedroom. Of course it contains all the latest devices, self-warming blankets, and there is a brand new feature, beds which make themselves.

Now, if you just step this way through the library, we can see the latest in talking book recorders, self-building fireplace, self-cleaning robot dust disposal. Oh, these little mouths like things come out of the walls, take away all of them.

Now over this way, as a complete robot kitchen, of course, just set the menu for the week, and the stove does the rest. Then there's the automatic hydroponic garden, self-sprinkling fire protection. See, the house is fully automatic.

Well, you could go away for a year and it would run itself. And so the family took the house. The man and the woman and the two children. Oh, a boy and a girl. And they lived contentedly, enjoying music and poetry and the rich, warm things in life.

And the house fed them and slept them and entertained them. It made a good life for them. Until one day... There were 10,000 explosions and the world shook. And red fire and ashes and radioactivity fell from the sky.