The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (19 page)

The brigadier general rose, his face strained from long hours of protracted concentration. He was obviously disturbed by the face and voice of the man on the screen. His voice, however, was clipped and authoritative.

“All right, clock him and get him out of there,” the general commanded.

A lieutenant colonel to the general’s right reached over, pressed a button and spoke into a panel microphone.

“Release the subject on the double!”

Inside the vast, high-ceilinged hangar, men sprang to their feet and ran toward the rectangular metal box that squatted impassively in the center of the huge room. A metal door was swung open. Two noncoms entered followed by an Air Force doctor. Very gently the wires and electrodes were removed from Sergeant Ferris’s body. The doctor’s hands wandered over his wrists and then propped open his eyes to stare into the dilated pupils. His ear listened to the hollow thumping of an overworked heart. Then Ferris was lifted carefully out and placed on a stretcher.

The medical officer went to the general, where he stood with his staff, staring across the hangar toward the prostrate figure on the stretcher.

The medical officer said, “He’s all right, sir. Delusions of some sort, but he’s responding all right now.”

The general nodded and said, “Can I see him?”

The medical officer nodded and the eight uniformed men walked across the hangar, their feet making a clickety-clack against the concrete as they approached the stretcher. On each of their left shoulders was an insignia patch, indicating that they were members of the Space Technological Research Command, US. Air Force. They reached the side of the stretcher and the general leaned over to look closely into the face of Sergeant Mike Ferris.

Ferris’s eyes were open now. He turned his face to look up at the general and smiled slightly. The face was wan, pale, bearded. Anguish, loneliness, the misery of some two hundred-odd hours in solitary confinement in a metal box showed in his eyes and the lines of his face.

It was the post-shock look of every wounded man the general had ever seen and while he didn’t know Ferris—that is, didn’t know him personally except from sixty typewritten sheets in the man’s file that he’d studied intensively before the test, he felt he knew him now. He’d been watching him for over two weeks on the small screen closely, more closely than any human being had been watched before.

The general reminded himself that there should be a medal in this for the sergeant. He had taken what no man had ever taken before. He had remained alone for two hundred and eighty-four hours on a simulated trip to the moon with almost every condition a man might have to face duplicated in the five-by-five box. The wires and electrodes had given a good indication of how the space traveler would react physically. They had charted his respiration, heart action, blood pressure. Beyond this, and most important, they had given a good idea of the point at which a man would break; of the moment a man would succumb to loneliness and try to battle his way out. It was at this moment that Sergeant Mike Ferris had pushed the release button inside his tiny confinement.

The general forced a grin as he leaned over Ferris and said, “How you doing, Sergeant? Feeling better?”

Ferris nodded, “Much better, sir, thank you.”

There was a moment’s silence before the general spoke again. “Ferris,” he asked, “What was it like? Where’d you think you were?”

Ferris stared up toward the high ceiling of the hangar and reflected a moment before he spoke. “A town, sir,” he answered. “A town without people...without anybody. A place I don’t want to go to again.”

Then he turned to look back toward the general and he said, “What was wrong with me, sir? Just off my rocker or something?”

The general turned toward the medical officer with a nod. The medical officer said softly, “Just a kind of nightmare your mind manufactured for you, Sergeant. You see, we can feed the stomach with concentrates. We can pump oxygen in and waste materials out. We can supply you with reading for recreation and try to keep your mind occupied.”

There was a silence now as the men surrounding the stretcher looked toward the medical officer.

“There’s one thing we can’t simulate,” he continued. “And that’s a very basic need. Man’s hunger for companionship. That’s a barrier we don’t know how to breach yet. The barrier of loneliness.”

Four aid men lifted Mike Ferris up on the stretcher and carried him across the vast room to the giant doors at the opposite side. He was then carried out into the night where an ambulance had been pulled up and was waiting. Ferris looked up at a giant moon and thought to himself that the next time it would be for real. Not just a box in a hangar. But he was too tired to give it much thought.

They lifted him gently and were about to place him in the rear of the ambulance when Mike Ferris quite accidentally touched his breast pocket. He felt something stiff and took it out of his pocket. The doors of the ambulance shut on him and left him in the quiet darkness of the inside. He heard the engines start and felt the wheels underneath him and was much too tired to reflect on whatever was in his fingers, just a hand’s length from his face.

Just a theater ticket—that’s all it was. A theater ticket from a small movie house in an empty town. A theater ticket, he thought to himself, and it was in his breast pocket and as the ambulance engines lulled him to sleep and the gently rolling wheels made him close his eyes, he held on to the ticket very tightly. In the morning he’d have to ask himself some questions. In the morning he would have to piece together some impossible fabric of dream and reality But all that would have to come in the morning. Mike Ferris was much too tired now.

From Rod Serling’s closing narration, “Where is Everybody?”
The Twilight Zone
, October 2, 1959, CBS Television Network.

The CAMERA BEGINS A SLOW PAN

back into the hangar until it is shooting on the box, squatting empty and impassive in the empty room.

NARRATOR’S VOICE

The barrier of loneliness. The palpable, desperate need of the human animal to be with his fellow man.

LAP DISSOLVE TO:

NIGHT SKY

The moon and the stars.

NARRATOR’S VOICE

Up there...up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky...up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting...waiting with the patience of eons...forever waiting...in The Twilight Zone.

FADE TO BLACK

It was Saturday afternoon on Maple Street and the late sun retained some of the warmth of a persistent Indian summer. People along the street marveled at winter’s delay and took advantage of it. Lawns were being mowed, cars polished, kids played hopscotch on the sidewalks. Old Mr. Van Horn, the patriarch of the street, who lived alone, had moved his power saw out on his lawn and was fashioning new pickets for his fence. A Good Humor man bicycled in around the comer and was inundated by children and by shouts of “Wait a minute!” from small boys hurrying to con nickels from their parents. It was 4:40 P.M. A football game blared from a portable radio on a front porch, blending with the other sounds of a Saturday afternoon in October. Maple Street. 4:40 P.M. Maple Street in its last calm and reflective moments—before the monsters came.

Steve Brand, fortyish, a big man in an old ex-Marine set of dungarees, was washing his car when the lights flashed across the sky. Everyone on the street looked up at the sound of the whoosh and the brilliant flash that dwarfed the sun.

“What was that?” Steve called across at his neighbor, Don Martin, who was fixing a bent spoke on his son’s bicycle.

Martin, like everyone else, was cupping his hands over his eyes, to stare up at the sky. He called back to Steve, “Looked like a meteor, didn’t it? I didn’t hear any crash though, did you?”

Steve shook his head. “Nope. Nothing except that roar.”

Steve’s wife came out on the front porch. “Steve?” she called. “What was that?

Steve shut off the water hose. “Guess it was a meteor, honey. Came awful close, didn’t it?”

“Much too close for my money,” his wife answered. “Much too close.”

She went back into the house, and became suddenly conscious of something. All along Maple Street people paused and looked at one another as a gradual awareness took hold. All the sounds had stopped. All of them. There was a silence now. No portable radio. No lawn mowers. No clickety-click of sprinklers that went round and round on front lawns. There was a silence.

Mrs. Sharp, fifty-five years of age, was talking on the telephone, giving a cake recipe to her cousin at the other end of town. Her cousin was asking Mrs. Sharp to repeat the number of eggs when her voice clicked off in the middle of the sentence. Mrs. Sharp, who was not the most patient of women, banged furiously on the telephone hook, screaming for an operator.

Pete Van Horn was right in the middle of sawing a 1x4 piece of pine when the power saw went off. He checked the plug, the outlet on the side of the house and then the fuse box in his basement. There was just no power coming in.

Steve Brand’s wife, Agnes, came back out on the porch to announce that the oven had stopped working. There was no current or something. Would Steve look at it? Steve couldn’t look at it at that moment because he was preoccupied with a hose that suddenly refused to give any more water.

Across the street Charlie Farnsworth, fat and dumpy, in a loud Hawaiian sport shirt that featured hula girls with pineapple baskets on their heads, barged angrily out toward the road, damning any radio outfit that manufactured a portable with the discourtesy to shut off in the middle of a third-quarter forward pass.

Voices built on top of voices until suddenly there was no more silence. There was a conglomeration of questions and protests; of plaintive references to half-cooked dinners, half-watered lawns, half-washed cars, half-finished phone conversations. Did it have anything to do with the meteor? That was the main question—the one most asked. Pete Van Horn disgustedly threw aside the electric cord of his power mower and announced to the group of people who were collected around Steve Brand’s station wagon that he was going on over to Bennett Avenue to check and see if the power had gone off there, too. He disappeared into his back yard and was last seen heading into the back yard of the house behind his.

Steve Brand, his face wrinkled with perplexity, leaned against his car door and looked around at the neighbors who had collected. “It just doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Why should the power go off all of a sudden and the phone line?”

Don Martin wiped bicycle grease off his fingers. “Maybe some kind of an electrical storm or something.”

Dumpy Charlie’s voice was always unpleasantly high. “That just don’t seem likely,” he squealed. “Sky’s just as blue as anything. Not a cloud. No lightning. No thunder. No nothin’. How could it be a storm?”

Mrs. Sharp’s face was lined with years, but more deeply by the frustrations of early widowhood. “Well, it’s a terrible thing when a phone company can’t keep its line open,” she complained. “Just a terrible thing.”

“What about my portable radio,” Charlie demanded. “Ohio State’s got the ball on Southern Methodist’s eighteen-yard line. They throw a pass and the damn thing goes off just then.”

There was a murmur in the group as people looked at one another and heads were shaken.

Charlie picked his teeth with a dirty thumbnail. “Steve,” he said in his high, little voice, “why don’t you go downtown and check with the police?”

“They’ll probably think we’re crazy or something,” Don Martin said. “A little power failure and right away we get all flustered and everything.”

“It isn’t just the power failure,” Steve answered. “If it was, we’d still be able to get a broadcast on the portable.”

There was a murmur of reaction to this and heads nodded. Steve opened the door to his station wagon. “I’ll run downtown. We’ll get this all straightened out.”

He inched his big frame onto the front seat behind the wheel, turned on the ignition and pushed the starter button. There was no sound. The engine didn’t even turn over. He tried it a couple of times more, and still there was no response. The others stared silently at him. He scratched his jaw.

“Doesn’t that beat all? It was working fine before.”

“Out of gas?” Don offered.

Steve shook his head. “I just had it filled up.”

“What’s it mean?” Mrs. Sharp asked.

Charlie Farnsworth’s piggish little eyes flapped open and shut. “It’s just as if—just as if everything had stopped. You better
walk
downtown, Steve.”

“I’ll go with you,” Don said.

Steve got out of the car, shut the door and turned to Don. “Couldn’t be a meteor,” he said. “A meteor couldn’t do
this
.” He looked off in thought for a moment, then nodded. “Come on, let’s go.”

They started to walk away from the group, when they heard the boy’s voice. Tommy Bishop, aged twelve, had stepped out in front of the others and was calling out to them.

“Mr. Brand! Mr. Martin. You better not leave!”

Steve took a step back toward him.

“Why not?” he asked.

“They don’t want you to,” Tommy said.

Steve and Don exchanged a look.

“
Who
doesn’t want us to?” Steve asked him.

Tommy looked up toward the sky. “Them,” he said.

“Them?” Steve asked.

“Who are ‘them’?” Charlie squealed.

“Whoever was in that thing that came by overhead,” Tommy said intently.

Steve walked slowly back toward the boy and stopped close to him. “What, Tommy?” he asked.

‘Whoever was in that thing that came over,” Tommy repeated. “I don’t think they want us to leave here.”

Steve knelt down in front of the boy. “What do you mean, Tommy? What are you talking about?”

“They don’t want us to leave, that’s why they shut everything off.”

“What makes you say that?” Irritation crept into Steve’s voice.