From Here to Infinity

A MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY (240 pp.) --Ray Bradbury--Doubleday ($3.75).

Ray Bradbury, 38, is science fiction's suavest purple-people greeter. In this collection of short stories, his literary reception line includes Martians, Venusniks, mermaids and sundry oddball Earthlings. What the tales have in common is the spectral dread of a Charles Addams cartoon, a twist of O. Henry, and an occasionally vivid poetic image that some readers regard as Bradburied treasure.

A good half of the tales in A Medicine for Melancholy are inner-directed rather than outer-space bound. The Headpiece is a typical Bradbury skin-prickler. Andrew Lemon is a middle-aged apartment dweller, thoroughly undistinguished except for the hole in his head, the result of a hammer blow from his exwife. Lemon is hopelessly in love with a pert young thing down the hall, but she is cool to him, and he blames his strange deformity. One day he knocks at her door proudly decked in a toupee. Tonelessly, the girl says, "I can still see the hole, Mr. Lemon."

In other tales, Author Bradbury cultivates what he calls the sense of "infinite interfusion." A boy is "taken over" by disease germs and himself becomes a bad seed whose touch can kill a pet canary. Exploring his musty attic, a man dons an Edwardian striped blazer and boater, is promptly whisked backwards through time to the lazy summer afternoons of his youth. A 12th century armored knight tilts tragically with a 20th century locomotive that he takes for a dragon. The Shore Line at Sunset is a simple parable on the vagrant power of beauty, but its mermaid heroine is evoked in mythic watercolors: "Her upper body was all moon pearl . . . and her lower body all slithering ancient green-black coins."

Evading the technological mumbo jumbo of most spacemen of letters, Author Bradbury concentrates instead on the post-atomic-war homesickness of displaced Earthlings, or the pioneering wonder of planet hopping. An unexpected religiosity mars several of these tales and suggests that science fiction may be catering to a new brand of heresy ("If there's any way to get hold of that immortality men are always talking about, this is the way--spread out--seed the universe").

When he is not blasting off from this rocket tower of Babel, Author Bradbury is an eerily engaging host at the Interstellar Hilton.

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