Tone refers to the way
the author feels about the subject of the text, and mood refers to the emotionalcreated by the
text itself and is more akin to how the reader is meant to feel. The mood of this story is
foreboding and menacing. Early on, the reader learns that the city is alive, that it has
"waited" for a long time, twenty thousand years to be exact, until, one day, a rocket
appears in the sky.
When men emerge from the ship, the city listens to their
speech, watches them from windows, smells their feet and clothes and even eyeballs, weighs them,
and eventually snatches their captain, emptying him of his human life and filling him up with
organs made by the city of metal. Ultimately, once all the men have been killed by the city, and
given new life as the city, they plan to return to Earth with "golden bombs of disease
culture" in the rocket they came in. This does not bode well for Earth or the people still
living on it.
The tone of the story is more understated, though. Bradbury
does not seem to condone the city's actions, nor does he explicitly condemn them. He is rather
matter-of-fact in allowing the men to be callously disemboweled by the city. The city claims,
via the captain's body, that it "was to be a balancing machine, a litmus, an antenna to
test all future space travelers," to learn if they were the descendants of the
"Earthmen" who left the city's inhabitants "to die of a terrible disease, a form
of leprosy with no cure."
If this is true, then it seems that turnabout
is fair play. If people abuse other people, abandon them in their time of need, or exploit them
somehow, then they ought to expect consequences. Those consequences are meted out, here, and
Bradbury seems to look on with a sense that those consequences were predictable and perhaps even
just.
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