The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (26 page)

Allenby felt a shock of pain in his stomach as Corry lunged against him, flailing with an elbow and pushing him aside. Adams toppled sideways as Corry backhanded him away. They could hear him shouting as he raced across the desert away from the shack.

“Alicia! Alicia!”

Allenby was on his feet and out the door in a moment, Adams and Jensen following. It was as if the whole purpose of Allenby’s life was funneled into this pursuit. He had to take this man back. He had to save him.

A hundred yards ahead he saw Corry stop and then disappear in a gully. When he reached the spot he was almost afraid to look. Adams and Jensen caught up with him and he heard them gasp.

Corry was kneeling beside the figure of a woman. She looked up at them with eyes like a frightened child’s. Corry saw the three space-suited figures. Desperation clawed at his voice.

“Alicia, talk to them,” he begged. “Tell them you’re a woman. Explain to them.”

Allenby walked slowly down the dune toward the gully. He had a rocket pistol in a holster on his belt. He unbuckled it as he walked. “Corry,” he pleaded, “you’ve got to understand this.” He stopped a few feet from them. His voice was an agonized whisper. “I don’t have any choice. God help me, I just don’t have any choice.”

He took the gun out of the holster and held it up. Corry turned to him, still on his knees.

“Allenby, she’s a human being. Don’t you understand, Allenby? Alicia’s a human being.” He started to crawl toward Allenby, sobbing.

“Allenby, Allenby, she’s a human being. She’s a human being, Allenby. She’s a human being—”

His voice was drowned out by the shrieking whine of the rocket pistol as it blasted the hot stillness of the morning. Corry felt his blood congeal and something, he didn’t know what, forced him to turn and look at the woman behind him.

She had been hit in the face and the force of the blast had lifted her off the ground and flung her aside. She lay against the side of the dune, propped up like a puppet. The big hole where had been the face ringed by brown curls was a horror of twisted wires, smashed tubes, and a thin spiral of smoke. The remnant of an eye hung down in front and incredibly a voice yet came from this.

“Corry,” it said. “Corry...Corry...” It made other sounds like a record running down on a turntable and then it was quiet.

“Captain,” Adams said, “it’s got to be now.”

Allenby, staring down at the gun in his hand, nodded. “It will be now,” he said softly. Then he looked at Corry. “Let’s go, Corry. It’s time to go home.”

The four men walked across the desert toward the spaceship that awaited them. Corry moved like an automaton.

“It’s all behind you now, Corry,” Allenby said to him as they approached the ship. “It’s all behind you. Like a bad dream. A nightmare. And when you wake up, you’ll be on Earth. You’ll be home.”

“Home?” Corry’s voice sounded hollow and strange.

“That’s right,” Allenby said. He touched the other man’s arm. “All you’re leaving behind you, Corry, is loneliness.”

Corry stopped, then slowly turned to stare back toward the glinting metal thing that was the shack and beyond it, to the right, a tiny blob of color that was a woman’s dress, lying in the sand. He could not cry now except those silent tears that come from deep within.

“I must remember,” he said. “I must remember to keep that in mind.”

He let Allenby take his elbow, turn him around and lead him to the giant metal cylindrical thing that stood poised pointing impatiently toward the sky. Moments later there was a roar, and the ship headed upward.

Down below on a microscopic piece of sand that floated through space was a fragment of a man’s life. Left to rust were the place he’d lived in and the machines he’d used. Without use they would disintegrate from the wind and the sand and the years that acted upon them. All of Mr. Corry’s machines...including the one made in his image and kept alive by love. It lay mutilated in the sand. It had become obsolete.

It was that uniquely American institution known as the neighborhood bar, small, softly lit and at this moment catering to that unsophisticated pre-cocktail group whose drinking was a serious business undisturbed and uncomplicated by the social frivolities of the five-thirty crowd. The latter group were the cocktail folks whose alcohol was part of a master plan of either business contacts or logistically planned seduction.

Reading left to right in the small, dark room were first, Mr. Anthony O’Toole the proprietor, who watered his drinks like geraniums, but who stood foursquare for peace and quiet and booths for ladies.

A scrawny, tired-faced, hollow-cheeked customer sat across from him and this man’s name was Joseph J. Callahan. He was an unregistered bookie whose entire life was any sporting event with two sides and a set of odds. His concept of a “meeting at the summit” was the dialogue between a catcher and a pitcher with more than one man on base.

Sitting next to him, with his nose a quarter of an inch away from Mr. Callahan’s, was Mr. Hubert Kransky, whose two hundred and fifty-eight pounds were packed into a five-foot-eight frame the way onions are crowded into pickled herring jars. Mr. Kransky had a voice like a French horn and perpetually florid cheeks that burned crimson whenever his dander went up, an occasion which was both frequent and regular.

In a sense Mr. Kransky was the spokesman for every anonymous bettor who had ever dropped rent money on a horse race, a prize fight, or a floating crap game. It was his custom during these Indian summer afternoons to take out his frustrations, not to mention his insolvency, on any vulnerable fellow bar-stool companion within arm’s and fist’s reach.

And sitting across the room was a spindle-framed, gentle-faced little man in glasses, drinking a beer and listening to the conversation. On the table beside him was a vacuum cleaner, resplendent with attachments and odd impedimenta that made it look like a cross between a sickly octopus and a surplus bagpipe.

This man was Mr. Luther Dingle who sold the aforementioned vacuum cleaner, or at least went through the motions. His volume of business was roughly that of a valet at a hobos’ convention. And while he was a consummate failure in almost everything else, he was an exceptionally good listener and, whenever Mr. Kransky had a mad on, Mr. Dingle proved a most accessible. vulnerable prominent-jawed scapegoat.

Kransky’s voice blasted through the room like a bugle call at Hialeah. “Don’t gimme that, Callahan,” he roared, pushing the bookie’s forefinger out of the way. “I told yuh before—I don’t pay off on a bum call!”

Callahan opened a toothless mouth and slammed his beer glass on the bar. “T’ree umpires called him out,” the bookie said positively. “I called him out. Eleven thousand fans called him out. Final score, Pittsburgh three, Dodgers nothin’. You and me got an even bet. I got the Pirates—hence you owe me five bucks.”

Hubert Kransky left his stool like Discoverer II off a launching pad at Canaveral. He stuck a gnarled fist in front of Callahan’s face. “I know a bum call when I see one,” he announced. “That ball was foul when it hit him. So instead of an out, it was a foul ball. So who’s to say he wouldn’t’ve got on base so that when Pignatano hit the single, a run would have scored, and like that! And furthermore, Callahan”—Kransky’s voice shook with rage—“you’re a cheatin’ insult to the American bookie.”

Callahan too rose from his stool and put two hands on his breast like Sarah Bernhardt, his toothless mouth working furiously as injured innocence rose up from deep within. This was shortly replaced by a pugnacity that made O’Toole the bartender reach down to a shelf under the bar where he kept odd and assorted items like blackjacks, a World War I revolver, and one half of a broken bottle. He pointed the bottle menacingly at Callahan.

“I told you once before awready, Callahan! You start a brawl in here again and I’ll fix that mouth of yours so that you’ll be doin’ your drinkin’ through a tube stuck in a vein.”

The bookie’s hands stroked his breast and he looked positively outraged. “Me?” he asked. “Me? I give you trouble?” He pointed to Mr. Kransky. “Tell that to the number one welsher of all the western states over there! This guy still owes me money on the second Dempsey-Tunney fight.”

Kransky’s answering shout had the volume and carry of the brass section of the Boston Pops. “Yeah, yeah, yeah! Mainly on account of that was a bum call! And I don’t pay off on bum calls.”

His bullet head slowly revolved atop the bull-like shoulders uninterrupted by anything remotely resembling a neck. His eyes fixed finally on Mr. Luther Dingle who sat smiling happily over his beer.

“You remember that fight, Dingle?” Kransky shouted as if the vacuum cleaner sales man were five blocks away. “Tunney’s out of the ring and the ref gives him a long count Like everybody in the room coulda gone out for a beer, engaged in some small talk, and then come back and still sit down before the ref is finished counting. Now how about that? I’m askin’ you—you—how about that?”

Dingle pointed to himself. “Me?” he asked.

Kransky walked over to him. “You. Yeah, you. You talk about bum calls. You see the game on television last night? Ninth inning? Snider’s up with two down and we got Howard and Moon on first and second and this umpire with no pupils in his eyes calls a foul ball an out! You see that?”

Dingle nodded happily “As a matter of fact, I did watch the game on television,” he said, sipping the head off his beer. “Exceptional defensive play, exceptional. Abner Doubleday would have been proud.”

“Never mind Abner Doubleday,” Kransky said, poking a finger against Dingle’s chest. “I leave it up to you. Was that a foul ball or was that an out?”

Dingle thoughtfully wiped the foam from his mouth. “Well, it appeared to me,” he said, “that the ball was hit in fair territory. Consequently, upon its striking the ground and then hitting the batter, the rules would very plainly indicate that the batter was out.”

He sat back contentedly and smiled up at the chunk of concrete that glared back at him.

“You realize, of course, pal,” Kransky said softly, “that you’re calling me a liar! Now I ain’t an unreasonable man, so I’ll give you one more chance.” He put his face an inch away from Dingle’s. “Was that a foul ball or was it an out?”

Luther Dingle stared intently into the red-hazed retinas, smiled again, and began, “Well, it’s my considered opinion—”

The sentence was fractured by a looping right hand that Mr. Kransky threw with great precision and considerable verve. It landed with impact somewhere between the bridge of Mr. Dingle’s nose and his right cheekbone. It catapulted his one-hundred-and-eighteen-pound frame over the back of the chair and propelled him through the air to land within spitting distance of the brass bowl close to the bar.

Mr. Anthony O’Toole lifted Dingle easily to his feet, dusted him off and patted him back into consciousness. With equal finesse, he placed Mr. Dingle on the bar stool where the salesman wafted gently to and fro like a willow stalk in a north wind. (Mr. O’Toole felt very strongly that a reputable place of business simply could not have unconscious customers on the floor.) He waited a moment for the color to come back into Dingle’s face, then turned accusingly toward Kransky.

“How come you always gotta hit Dingle, Kransky? You hit him last week, you hit him the week before.”

“A man can only stand so much,” Kransky said, as he marched back to his stool at the bar. “I’m tired of this guy contradictin’ me! And when somebody calls me a liar—there’s my honor to consider.” He drained the beer from his glass and looked threateningly into the glazed eyes of Luther Dingle.

“Your honor?” Callahan, the bookie, snorted deprecatingly “Why you’ve got nothin’ but larceny in you all the way from your crotch to where you part your hair. When you die, Kransky, they’re gonna have to screw you into the ground.”

Once again Kransky leaped to his feet. A thick left arm shot out to grab the gently oscillating Dingle by his coat front.

“How about that?” he roared. “Is that true? I’m crooked? I leave it to you, Dingle. Am I crooked?”

Dingle was having a dream. He was standing in the wings of Minsky’s burlesque on 46th Street. A tall, statuesque blonde had just beckoned to him from the other side of the stage. Dingle nodded happily, his absolute, unequivocal acceptance of whatever the young lady had in mind. The affair was ended by Mr. Kransky’s right hand, which landed on the side of Dingle’s face and sent him sprawling head first off the stool.

Once again O’Toole ministered to him with at least a perfunctory professionalism if not tender loving care.

Mr. Kransky began another battle with Mr. Callahan on the kind of odds any decent and legitimate bookie would give on Saturday’s St. Louis-Cincinnati double-header and Mr. Dingle lapsed into another dream.

And, though none of the aforementioned gentlemen knew it, they were being observed very closely and with great attention by a large, two-headed figure, complete with antennae and a radar-like, protuberant wand that undulated, revolved, and let out small metallic bleeps at regular intervals.

To the human eye this figure was quite invisible and the voices of the two heads were inaudible to the human ear. This figure was in fact a visitor from the planet Mars and of sufficiently advanced intelligence to know beyond any doubt that no leaders were to be found in this nondescript Earth bar.

One waxen, slightly greenish face nodded toward the other, as Kransky’s voice traveled through their hearing apparatus and was automatically translated into a Martian tongue “...and I say that anybody who tells me that the Philadelphia Phillies had any right winning the pennant that year is out of their green grass mind! And furthermore if you’re going to sit there and tell me—”

Kransky’s voice continued its strident blare as Head One of the Martian creature said to Head Two, “Are you sure we’re invisible?”

The second head nodded and answered, “Beyond any doubt.” Its slightly orangish eyes stared toward the group of men. “I wish
they
were!” Then with a shudder, “Did you ever see such jerky-looking creatures?”