The Pendulum quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which genre best describes "The Pendulum"?

   • Pastoral romance
   • Correct answer: Science fiction
   • Detective fiction
   • Historical fiction

   Correct. The time machine, robots, rocket ships and alien visitors make this science fiction, with a strong streak of horror in the imprisonment and the grinning skeleton.

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2. 2

   Question 2. What happens when Layeville pulls the main switch at the public display of his time machine?

   • The laboratory roof collapses onto the watching crowd below
   • The machine falls silent and the crowd jeers at its failure
   • The machine sends the thirty scientists a week into the future
   • Correct answer: Wild electrical flames burn the thirty scientists into ashes

   The text says "The scientists, all of them, blasted into ashes from wild electrical flames!" Two million witnesses saw it happen, in person or on television.

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3. 3

   Question 3. Who comes up with the idea of turning the time machine into Layeville's prison?

   • A robot that guards the laboratory
   • The families of the dead scientists
   • Correct answer: A man who leaps onto the platform
   • The judge who leads the tribunal

   "One man had leaped onto the tribunal platform at the trial" and shouted that he had a better plan than destroying the machine: rebuild it and put Layeville "on exhibition for life within his executioning device!"

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4. 4

   Question 4. In the line "Now, fettered to the very machine he had planned and constructed," what does fettered mean?

   • Correct answer: Chained or held fast
   • Praised as its creator
   • Blamed in public for it
   • Kept away from it by law

   Fettered means chained or bound so that a person cannot move freely. Layeville is welded inside the pendulum of his own machine and cannot get out.

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5. 5

   Question 5. At the trial, what do the jeering throngs first cry out for?

   • Layeville exiled from the city forever
   • A full inquiry into what went wrong
   • Layeville forced to repair his machine
   • Correct answer: The machine and its inventor both destroyed

   The crowd shouts, "Destroy the Time Machine!" and "And destroy this MURDERER with it!" Nobody asks for an explanation; the story shows mob justice, a crowd hungry for revenge rather than understanding.

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6. 6

   Question 6. How many scientists die in the accident?

   • Ten
   • Fifteen
   • Correct answer: Thirty
   • Two hundred

   The sign by the pendulum reads that Layeville "KILLED THIRTY OF THE WORLDS FINEST SCIENTISTS!"

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7. 7

   Question 7. Who looks after Layeville once the humans decide he is not worth the bother?

   • The schoolchildren who ride the moving sidewalk
   • Correct answer: Robots that bring food, clean the cell and oil the machine
   • Prison guards whom the tribunal sends every morning
   • Tourists who pay to drop food parcels down the tube

   "The robots took care of him now. Evidently the humans thot it a waste of time to bother over their prisoner." The robots bring food, clean the cell and oil the machinery, and they keep at it for a thousand years.

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8. 8

   Question 8. In the line "Continuous, monotonous movements over and above the ground," what does monotonous mean?

   • Correct answer: Dull, repeating without change
   • Graceful and lovely to watch
   • Sudden and hard to predict
   • Wildly fast and out of control

   Monotonous means dull because it never varies. The swing goes up and down, back and forth, the same way every time, and the sameness is part of Layeville's torment.

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9. 9

   Question 9. What destroys the people of the city while Layeville swings?

   • A blast of fire from the rebuilt time machine
   • Correct answer: Black gelatinous masses that suck out life
   • A fleet of rocket ships from a rival city
   • Robots that rise up and turn on their makers

   "Alien creatures fluttered down, great gelatinous masses of black that sucked out the life of all." An hour later they were gone, and the city was dead.

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10. 10

    Question 10. Why does Layeville feel elation after the alien attack?

    • He thinks the attack proves his theory
    • He thinks the robots will now let him go
    • Correct answer: His prison has shielded him from death
    • He hopes the creatures will free him

    "Where the other men had planned the pendulum as a prison it had been an asylum against annihilation now!" The punishment meant to torment him is what kept him alive.

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11. 11

    Question 11. How long does the pendulum swing before the visitors stop it?

    • About one week
    • About one century
    • About ten years
    • Correct answer: About a thousand years

    "A thousand years this pendulum had swung." The robots kept it going long after every human was dead.

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12. 12

    Question 12. In the line "it had been an asylum against annihilation now," what does asylum mean?

    • Correct answer: A safe shelter from danger
    • A trap that holds a captive
    • A sentence for a grave crime
    • A hospital for the mentally ill

    Here asylum means a place of safety or protection. The pendulum, built as a prison, became the shelter that saved Layeville from the creatures that killed everyone else.

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13. 13

    Question 13. Why does Layeville think his title, THE PRISONER OF TIME, is ironic?

    • He meant to free people from time and now he must serve it
    • Correct answer: His invention became a clock, and he marks out its years
    • The judges once praised him as the master of all time
    • He was sentenced for a crime that took no time at all

    He finds it ironic "that he should invent a time machine and have it converted into a clock, and that he, in its pendulum, should mete out the years." The man who wanted to travel through time now measures it with his own body.

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14. 14

    Question 14. The words 'up and down, back and forth' recur all through the story. What does this repetition do?

    • It marks each place the story jumps in time
    • It repeats the chant of the crowd at the trial
    • Correct answer: It imitates the pendulum's ceaseless swinging
    • It shows the robots counting the hours

    The repeated phrase swings back and forth like the pendulum itself, so the reader feels the same dizzy, endless motion that Layeville does. The story opens and nearly closes with it.

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15. 15

    Question 15. The story's title and its central image of a prisoner and a swinging pendulum echo which earlier work?

    • Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle
    • Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil
    • Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener
    • Correct answer: Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum

    The title and the pendulum point to Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), where a prisoner lies beneath a swinging blade. Bradbury, a lifelong admirer of Poe, puts his prisoner inside the pendulum instead.

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16. 16

    Question 16. When the visitors open the cell, what does the skull's grin suggest?

    • Correct answer: That Layeville, in the end, had beaten time by outlasting it
    • That Layeville had gone insane, just as he had feared
    • That Layeville died laughing as the visitors landed
    • That the robots had kept Layeville content all along

    The skull grins "as if it knew that it had conquered something. Had conquered time." Layeville had indeed "travelled along the centuries," just as he once dreamed, though not in the way he meant.

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17. 17

    Question 17. Which of these happen in the story?

    • Layeville's own clothes catch fire during the accident.

      Happened

      He staggered backward, "his clothes flaming and eating up about him," then collapsed.

    • Layeville breaks the glass with his fists and escapes.

      Didn't happen

      He hammered the glass until his fists bled, but the cell was welded shut and he never got out.

    • Two million people see the accident, some on television.

      Happened

      It happened "Before the eyes of two million witnesses who had come to the laboratory or were tuned in by television at home!"

    • The tribunal orders the time machine melted down for scrap.

      Didn't happen

      The crowd cried to destroy the machine, but the plan that won was to rebuild it into a towering timepiece with a pendulum.

    • Layeville ties himself down with leather thongs to sleep.

      Happened

      He was given glass loops on the floor and leather thongs "with which he tied himself down at nite" so he would not slide.

    • Layeville's beard grows until it fills the glass cell.

      Didn't happen

      His cheeks "had developed a short beard and then ceased growing."

    • A sign by the pendulum names him as the killer of thirty.

      Happened

      The sign reads THIS IS THE PRISONER OF TIME, JOHN LAYEVILLE, who killed thirty of the world's finest scientists.

    • The black creatures break the glass and kill Layeville.

      Didn't happen

      The creatures only glistened on the pendulum and left; the sealed cell kept him alive while the city died.

    • The robots keep lowering food long after Layeville dies.

      Happened

      When the robots lowered food through the tube "it lay untouched," and the vacuum tube took it away again.

    • The visitors in the silver ship find Layeville still alive.

      Didn't happen

      They found a skeleton, "the face of a whitened skull," pressed against the glass.

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