The Veldtby Ray Bradbury

An Illustrated Summary

A family lives in a house called "The Happylife Home," filled with machines that do everything for them from cooking meals, to clothing them, to rocking them to sleep.

The two children, Peter and Wendy, become fascinated with the "nursery", a virtual reality room that is able to connect with the children’s minds to create any place they imagine.

The parents, George and Lydia, soon realize that there is something wrong with their way of life. They are also worried that the nursery is stuck on an African setting, with lions in the distance, eating the dead carcass of an animal. There they hear strangely familiar screams.

Wondering why their children are so concerned with this scene of death, they decide to call a psychologist.

The psychologist, David McClean, suggests they turn off the house, move to the country, and learn to be more self-sufficient.

The children, totally obsessed with the nursery, beg their parents to let them have one last visit. The nursery has replaced their real parents. They live for the nursery.The parents give in and agree to let them spend one more minute there. When the parents come to the nursery to get the children, the children lock them in from the outside.

Locked in the room, George and Lydia (the parents) see the lions coming toward them. They scream. At that point, they realize that what they had seen the lions eating before was not an animal, but their own virtual dead bodies.

When David (the psychologist) comes by to look for George and Lydia, he finds the children eating a picnic lunch on the veldt and sees the lions eating something in the distance.

We the readers then realize that George and Lydia died at the hands of their own children, who had obsessed so much about the lions eating their parents that it came true in the virtual room.

Wendy, the daughter, casually asks the psychologist if he would like a cup of tea.