The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (24 page)

Allenby turned very slowly toward Corry. “It’s...it’s something I brought you, Corry.”

Corry laughed shortly.  “If it’s a twenty-year supply of puzzles—lots of luck—I’ll have to decline with thanks. I don’t need any puzzles, Allenby. If I want to try to probe any mysteries—I can look in the mirror and try to figure out my own.”

Allenby went to the door and put his hand on the knob. “We’ve got to go now. We’ll be back in three months.” There was a silence. “You listening to me, Corry?” he continued. “This is important.’’

Corry looked up at him.

“When you open the crate,” Allenby said, “there’s nothing you need do. The...the item has been vacuum packed. It needs no activator of any kind. The air will do that. There’ll be a booklet inside too that can answer any of your questions.”

“You’re mysterious as hell,” Corry said.

“I don’t mean to be,” Allenby answered. “It’s just like I told you, though—I’m risking a lot to have brought this here.” He pointed toward the window. “They don’t know what it is I brought. I’d appreciate your waiting till we get out of sight before you open it.”

Corry was barely listening. “All right,” he said flatly “Have a good trip back. Give my regards to...” he wet his lips and looked down at the floor “...to Broadway and every place else while you’re at it.”

Allenby nodded and studied the other man. “Sure, Corry,” he said quietly. “I’ll see you.”

He opened the door and went out. Through the window Corry could see him motion to the others as they followed him across the desert back toward the ship. Corry, watching the retreating back of the captain, suddenly called out:

“Allenby!”

The three men stopped and turned toward him.  “Allenby,” Corry yelled “I don’t much care what it is. But for the thought, Allenby. For the...decency of it...I thank you.”

Allenby nodded, his mouth taut, feeling a sickness in his stomach. “You’re quite welcome, Corry,” he said softly “You’re quite welcome.”

Corry watched them for a long, long time until they disappeared over the line of dunes. Then aimlessly, without direction, without much thought, he went outside.

The crates were piled end on end beside the long rectangular box with the red tag. Corry studied it, throwing questions at himself in his mind as to what it might be. It was a mystery, but an insignificant mystery What the hell difference did it make what it was. Games, cards, puzzles, books, microfilm—whatever! The newness of it would be corroded under the sun and it would change into what everything else changed into on the asteroid. A blob of weary familiarity without excitement and without challenge. He kicked at the box with his foot, then slowly turned and studied the horizon in the direction where Allenby had disappeared.

Alongside the ship, Jensen was clambering up the metal ladder to the open hatch. He disappeared inside and Allenby motioned Adams to follow. Adams went halfway up the ladder, then looked down toward Allenby, who was staring off into the distance.

“Captain,” Adams said. “Just man to man, huh?”

Allenby, as if shaken from a trance, stared up at him. “What?” he asked.

“What did you bring him?” Adams asked. “What was in the box?”

Allenby smiled and then said softly, more to himself than to Adams, “I’m not sure, really. Maybe it’s just an illusion. Or maybe it’s salvation!”

He waved Adams up the ladder and followed him toward the open hatch. Ten and a half minutes had gone by and they’d blast off in exactly fifty-three seconds.

Moments later, as the ship raced through the sky on the long trip home, Allenby felt a pang of guilt They were going back to Earth. The green earth. An earth full of sounds and smells. An earth that was home. He could not bring himself to look back through the rear scanner at the tiny yellow blob that floated through space carrying a man in anguish who sat in a metal shack contemplating nothing but more anguish.

Corry had opened the crate, removed what was inside and was reading a booklet.

“You are now the proud possessor,” the first paragraph began, “of a robot built in the form of woman. To all intents and purposes this creature is a woman. Physiologically and psychologically she is a human being with a set of emotions, a memory track, the ability to reason, to think, and to speak. She is beyond illness and under normal circumstances should have a life span similar to that of a comparable human being. Her name is Alicia.”

Very slowly Corry let the booklet slip out of his fingers. He looked across the yards of sand over to the crate and to the creature who stood alongside it.

She looked human. She had long brown hair, deep-set brown eyes, a straight, tiny nose, a firm jaw. She was dressed in a simple, loose-flowing garment that neither added to nor detracted from her femininity.

But it was her face Corry stared at. There was no expression in the eyes. There was a deadness, a lack of vitality, an almost comatose immobility of the features, the mouth, the eyes, the face muscles. It was a mask—a beautiful mask. The face of a woman...but nonetheless just a mask, a covering.

Corry felt a revulsion, a horror at this thing that looked at him with glassy orbs that so resembled human eyes, but were so emotionlessly unhuman in their empty stare.

“Get out of here,” Corry said in a low voice as he advanced toward her. “Get out of here.” His voice was louder as he glared at her, the horror he felt crawling across his skin. “Get out of here! I don’t want any machine in here! Go on, get out of here!”

The robot looked back at him, then she opened her mouth and spoke. “My name is Alicia,” the mouth said. The voice was that of a woman, but there was a coldness to it. “My name is Alicia. What’s yours?”

It was ludicrous. It was beyond belief. This...this thing that spoke to him from the desert floor. This machine that mouthed proprieties as if from a book on etiquette. It spoke to him in a language of tea parties and civilization.

Corry took another step to stand near her, staring at her. He no longer shouted. He just stood there shaking his head and finally he said in a flat, even tone, “I’m going inside now. And when I come back out...when I come back out, I don’t want to find you here. Understand?”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked back toward the shack, leaving this thing that looked so much like a woman standing in the sand watching him as he disappeared inside.

She had come on what Corry was certain was Thursday and now it was Saturday afternoon. He had seen little of her. During the day she would stand on the knoll close to the shack watching him and at night she was either gone or on occasion he could hear her on the metal porch, but he never spoke to her.

He was digging a hole for garbage now and, as always, had waited till the late afternoon. Not that it was much cooler or that there was any more shade, but the habit pattern of a life spent on Earth still persisted in the functions of Corry’s existence. Late afternoon he’d always associated with cooling and even when it stayed breathlessly hot he did most of his physical labor then.

He leaned on his shovel, wiping a sweatless face, looking at a sun just reaching the top of the mountains. Now bright orange instead of glaring white, it nonetheless sent out its cascades of heat.

Alicia came walking down the dune toward him. She carried a bucket of water which she put down on the sand a few feet from him, her mechanical face staring at his as if sightless.

“Well? Corry asked her.

“I brought you some water. Where shall I put it?”

“Just leave it there and get out of here.”

“It’ll get warm,” Alicia said, “just sitting there.”

Corry took the dipper from the bucket, tasted the water, spit some of it out, and then put the dipper back. He stared at her and saw how intently she seemed to stare back.

“You’d know, huh? he asked.

“Know what?

“You’d know that water’d get warm.”

The corners of Alicia’s mouth wrinkled and it was as close to a smile as he’d ever noticed from her.

“I can feel thirst,” she said.

Corry wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared at her again. He found himself staring at her a lot lately, but it was not the inventory of interest that a man uses to look at a woman. It was a clinical examination of a foreign object. It was the reluctant stare of a man who finds himself in a freak house and yet feels the painful fascination of all that which is strange and odd and unearthly.

“What else can you feel? Corry asked. The question was rhetorical.

“I don’t understand—” Alicia began.

“I suppose you can feel heat and cold, can’t you?” Corry interrupted her. “How about pain? Can you feel pain?

Alicia nodded and the flat voice suddenly sounded strangely soft. “That, too.”

Corry took a step over to her and looked at her. “How?” he asked. “How can you? You’re a machine, aren’t you?

“Yes,” Alicia whispered. “I am a machine.”

“Of course you are,” Corry said. His mouth twisted. His eyes glared at her with distaste. “Why didn’t they build you to look like a machine? Why aren’t you made out of metal with nuts and bolts sticking out of you? With wires and electrodes and things like that? His voice rose. “Why do they turn you into a lie? Why do they cover you with what looks like flesh? Why do they give you a face?” His nails dug deep into the palms of his hands and something else went into his voice at this moment. “A face,” he said, his voice very low. “A face that, if I look at it long enough, makes me think...makes me believe that...” His hands grabbed her shoulders and went up past her neck to cup her face in a hard and painful grasp.

Alicia closed her eyes against the pain. “Corry,” she said, her voice pleading.

“You mock me,” he said to her, ‘you know that? When you look at me. When you talk to me—I’m being mocked.”

“I’m sorry,” Alicia answered. She slowly reached up and felt her neck and shoulders. “You hurt me, Corry.”

Corry stared at her, repugnance in his eyes. “Hurt you? he asked her, his hands grabbing her shoulders again. “How in the Goddamn hell could I hurt you? His fingers dug into her flesh. “I’d like you to explain that to me. How could I possibly hurt you? This isn’t flesh. There aren’t any nerves under there. There aren’t any tendons or muscles.”

Corry felt the soft yielding stuff under his fingertips and for just an illogical moment he thought he smelled a perfume, a gentle sweetness that filled the air around her. And again the feeling rose in him that he must crush this thing in front of him. He must twist and pull it apart. He must end its standing there and mocking him from morning till night.

His fingers pressed tighter into her until, forced down by weight and pain, she was on her knees. He reluctantly pulled his hands away from her, looked at her kneeling there, her head down, her tousled brown hair hanging long in front of her.

The fury that he felt was beyond any understanding. He knew only that he must destroy. Kneeling in front of him was his loneliness. Prostrate at his feet was the heat and the discomfort. Vulnerable and weak was the massive desert. It was all in front of him now in the form of this mocking machine. This was the wildness in his mind as he picked up the shovel, lifted it high in the air. He had already begun the downward arc of the swing as he screamed at her.

“You know what you are?” The metal face of the shovel glinted in the departing sun. “Do you know what you are? You’re like that broken-down heap I’ve got sitting in the yard. You’re a hunk of metal with arms and legs instead of wheels.” The shovel stopped its descent and shook in his hand. His voice took on a different tone, quieter and somehow plaintive.

“But that heap...that Goddamn heap doesn’t mock me like you do. It doesn’t look at me with make-believe eyes and talk to me with a make-believe voice. Well listen, you...listen, machine. I’m sick of being mocked by a ghost, by a memory of woman. And that’s all you are. You’re a reminder to me that I’m so lonely I’m about to lose my mind.”

The woman raised her face to him and it was only then that he realized that her eyes were wet and that tears rolled down her cheeks. Very slowly his hand went loose and he was unaware of it when the shovel slipped from his fingers and dropped down to the sand. He stared at her. The face was no longer inanimate, no longer immobile. It had depth and emotion. It was filled with the nuances and the mysteries of that which is woman and there was beauty in the face, too. Corry trembled and slowly went down to his knees to kneel close to her. He extended a shaking hand that met her cheek and he felt the wetness.

“You can cry, too, Can’t you?”

Alicia nodded. “With reason,” she looked up at him again. “And I can feel loneliness, too.”

He took her arm and helped her to her feet, then stood very close to her. There was a moment’s silence before he could bring himself to speak. Finally he said, “We’ll go back home now We’ll eat our dinner.”

She nodded again. “All right.” She started to walk ahead of him.

Corry called out to her. “Alicia?”

She stopped and turned.

“Alicia,” he began. There was something in his tone. Something rich. Something deep. It was man talking to woman. There was gentleness and compassion and something that went beyond both.

“Yes, Corry?”

“I don’t care...I don’t care how you were born...or made. You’re flesh and blood to me. You’re a woman.” He took a step toward her and reached out for her. Her hand met his. “You’re my companion. Do you understand, Alicia? You’re my companion. I need you desperately.”

She smiled at him. A smile of infinite warmth. A smile that lit up the face and that shone in the eyes. A smile that was yet another part of the beauty that was this woman. “And I need you, Corry.”

They held hands as they walked back toward the shack. Corry would reflect later that at this moment he had felt a peace and composure almost unbearably sweet. And, walking toward the shack he was conscious of the feel of her hand. When he stole a look at her profile he felt that this was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen.

They went into the shack and she started to set the table. Corry’s eyes never left her. This woman must never leave his sight again. He must never be without her. And though he could not articulate this because his whole being was so scarred and battered by conflicting emotions, James W. Corry had indeed found salvation. It had come in the form of a woman. James W. Corry was in love.