The Long Rain

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"The Long Rain"
Author	Ray Bradbury
Original title	"The Long Rain"
Country	United States of America
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science Fiction Short Story
Published in	The Illustrated Man
Publication type	Short Story Collection
Publication date	1951

The Long Rain is a short story by science fiction author Ray Bradbury. This story was originally published in 1950 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.

[edit] Plot summary

The first paragraph reads as follows:

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

An officer and three of his men initially survive a crash-landing on the planet Venus, here rendered as a world of perpetual rain, always at dusk and nicknamed "China" as a reference to its inhabitants' diabolical use of water as a means of torture. The men traverse the white and black jungle in search of a "Sun Dome" — a yellow house, warm, dry, round and bright as the sun, maintained by a small floating free globe that serves as an artificial star. The ill-fated explorers eventually succumb to the tortures of the unending downpour and the harsh terrain, losing both their sanity and their lives along the way. Only one of them ultimately survives to find sanctuary.

The story was made into an episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater starring Marc Singer and directed by Lee Tamahori.