The Veldt by Ray Bradbury (The Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1950)1 opens with a concerned Lydia Hadley telling her husband George about what is happening in their house’s nursery, a holographic/sensory play area for their two children, Peter and Wendy. Lydia takes George to the nursery to show him and, once there, it switches on and they find themselves in the African veldt. At first they experience the sounds and smells of the simulation, and then:
“You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to the water hole. They’ve just been eating,” said Lydia. “I don’t 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, it’s a little late to be sure,” he said, amused. “Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left.”
“Did you hear that scream?” she asked.
The lions move towards the couple and eventually charge, causing the pair to flee to the hall and slam the door behind them. They realise that they are running from a simulation but are badly frightened by the experience anyway. Subsequently, they tell their children to stop reading about Africa (the nursery works by reading “the telepathic emanations of the children’s minds and [creating] life to fill their every desire”), and the couple also decide to lock the nursery for a few days, even though it will cause tantrums.
The rest of the story unrolls from this episode, with George first finding he can’t change the scene in the nursery (but his daughter later does temporarily). Then, when a psychologist friend visits the room at George’s request, the lions and their unidentified prey are seen again. The friend’s blunt advice on seeing this is to shut the room down immediately and send the children to him for treatment.
George later shuts down the nursery and the rest of the automatic house devices, which causes the children to act out. However, when they plead for one final minute in the room, George relents, but (spoiler) when the couple go to retrieve the children George and Lydia are locked in the room and the lions kill them.
The story’s plot doesn’t work in a logical sense (how could a glorified video projector conjure up lions that could kill someone?),2 but I guess it works as a sort of surreal/TwilightZone-ish horror after the repeated telegraphing of the various cues (the lions and their unidentified kill, the screaming, the brattish and chilling behaviour of the children, etc.).
This is another of Bradbury’s anti-technology stories—the room is essentially a glorified TV, a device he railed against in other stories.
*** (Good). 4,650 words. Radio Drama link.
1. First published under the title The World the Children Made.
2. I didn’t like this as much the first time around but the ending is less jarring when you know what is coming.