The Illustrated Man

“The Veldt” opens with a worried conversation between George and Lydia Hadley over their children’s virtual reality nursery. They had bought their fully automated Happy-life Home which “clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and play and sang and was good to them” (7). The nursery generates 3D reproductions from their children’s imaginations but now only shows an African veldt. George and Lydia watch lions feeding far away as vultures circle above them. Suddenly the lions charge and the Hadleys escape, reminding themselves it is only a simulation. 

The Hadleys muse over how addicted their children are to the nursery and how the Home performing their duties for them has stripped them of their utility as parents. As they watch, something collides with the door from inside the nursery.

At dinner, George frets over how obsessively the children seem to be thinking about death. He cannot remember the transition from storybook scenes to the veldt; “being busy, he had paid it no attention” (13). He tries to change the simulation himself but cannot. He and Lydia wonder if it is stuck because the children think about killing so repetitively or because Peter, unusually smart for his age, has somehow reprogrammed it.

Ten-year-old Peter and Wendy return from their trip. George confronts them about the veldt; Peter coolly denies knowledge of it. Wendy quickly changes the room to a pleasant scene, but George finds his wallet on the ground, mauled by lions. He locks up the nursery. That night, they hear strangely familiar screams coming from inside. The nursery is supposed to help neurotic children, but it seems to have only compounded the problems created by George and Lydia spoiling the children. George says, “They’re spoiled and we’re spoiled” (14).

The next day George threatens to lock up the nursery and the house permanently. Peter panics at needing to do things himself. He does not want to do anything but “look and listen and smell,” and subtly threatens George (17-18).

A child psychologist, David McClean, visits. In his previous examinations of Peter and Wendy, he had noticed “the usual violences […] usual in children because they feel persecuted by their parents constantly” (18), but the veldt room causes him great alarm. He believes the room has amplified the children’s destructive thoughts rather than releasing them and urges George to turn everything off. George, he argues, has gone from a “Santa” to a “Scrooge” (20) in buying the Home, allowing the children to become dependent on it as their new parent and then threatening to take it away. They find a bloodied scarf of Lydia’s and turn off the nursery.

George tells the family they will be taking a long vacation. The children throw a tantrum. George is convinced to let them use the nursery one more time, but the children lock him and Lydia inside—the lions attack, and the Hadleys realize why the screams had sounded familiar. The screams were their own.

The story ends with David McClean, unaware of what happened, having lunch with the children on the veldt. As a vulture circles over him, he watches the lions eating far away.