The Long Rain

"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.

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. 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 first "Sun Dome" they come across was attacked by the indigenious creatures. Later, one of the men went insane, lying in the rain, causing Simmons, another trooper to kill him. Eventually, Simmons succumbs to the tortuous rain, and takes his own life. Only one of the officers ultimately survives to find sanctuary in one of the Sun Domes, although similarities between the description of this event and those of the other crew member's hallucinations suggest that the story is being deliberately ambiguous as to whether this really occurs.