The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (29 page)

On the screen the television announcer’s voice bleated excitedly about it being the bottom of the ninth inning, two Dodgers on base, and Frank Howard coming to bat.

“Go, go, go, go, go, boy,” Mr. Kransky screeched, drowning out the noise of the paid customers at the Coliseum, who numbered forty-three thousand, but even in unison had their voices muffled by Mr. Kransky’s booming lungs.

Mr. Callahan, the bookie, leered sardonically up to the set then turned toward Kransky and said, “Three to one he don’t get onto base. Five to one he don’t drive a run in. Ten to one the Dodgers lose.”

Kransky’s face turned white. He looked first at O’Toole behind the bar, past Callahan and then across the room toward the forlorn Dingle.

“Hey, Dingle,” he shouted suddenly. “What about that? This clod’s givin’ odds Howard don’t even get on base let alone drive in the winning run. Now, how about that?”

Mr. Dingle looked up across the room, frowning as he suddenly felt a strange heaviness descend on his shoulder blades. He looked up toward the screen of the television set, then down to Kransky.

“Well,” he announced, in a voice that did not sound altogether like his own, “in this case the laws of probability are interspersed with the finaglion laws of chance. So through a process of calculus and a subdivision of Greppel based on physical motivating ante divisional annotating...in this case, of course, using the two X factors as represented by the teams...the gentleman at bat must of necessity hit a home run, driving in the winning run and leading the Dodgers to a five to three victory!”

“There,” Kransky announced triumphantly, turning toward Callahan. On the screen there was the sound and picture of a tall, lanky center fielder suddenly connecting with a curve ball that hung too high. He hit it hard, straight and directly, and the ball sailed out to the vicinity of the center field fence some four hundred and fifty feet from the point where it had been hit. There was a roar from the crowd and then the camera picked up a shot of three men crossing the base paths.

“It’s a home run,” the announcer screamed. “A game winning home run as Frank Howard comes through for the Dodgers and they win in the bottom of the ninth, five to three.”

Kransky roared his delight, pounded one fist on the bar and the other on Callahan’s back as the latter glumly reached for his wallet. But suddenly both activities stopped as the two men did a double take and stared across at Dingle. Dingle had called it! The scrawny little scapegoat with the prominent jaw had announced quite clearly and precisely exactly what would happen! And it had happened! Howard had hit the home run and the Dodgers had carried it away five to three.

Kransky walked to the center of the room staring at Dingle with just a shade of his former, short-lived respect. “Dingle,” he said somewhat breathlessly, “how’d you know?”

Mr. Dingle smiled a little vaguely and then rose from the booth. “It was apparent,” he said, as he moved toward the door, “on an advanced mathematical plane that what was operating here was the entire quantum theory of space and time relativity.” He tilted his head a bit and looked up at the ceiling. “It occurs to me,” he said matter-of-factly, “that there is a definite necessity of an equation between the parallellion law of definitive numerical dialectic algebraic with a further notation...” He went out the door still talking and his voice could be heard still as he walked down the street.

Exactly what Mr. Dingle was talking about as he walked was an academic point since there were no knowledgeable onlookers or bystanders to overhear his remarks. (Most of those seeing the thin little man spew out gusts of quite unintelligible jargon thought he was either drunk or batty.)

Actually, in the first three blocks, Mr. Dingle had solved twelve of the most complex mathematical problems known to science, invented a perpetual motion machine, supplied the equation for a principle to govern gasoline engines that could run a year and a half on a cup full of gas, along with several minor chemical analyses that would in the long run destroy smog, take nicotine safely out of tobacco, and provide an electric light that could burn for a hundred and five years at the cost of thirteen cents. Twenty minutes later Mr. Dingle was swallowed up by the evening traffic and no one in those environs saw him again.

Mr. O’Toole’s drinking establishment is quiet these days. It is only on the rarest of occasions that he is forced to brandish either the World War I revolver or the broken bottle. Mr. Callahan still occupies his favorite stool, but his bookmaking is a desultory sideline and his principal customer, Mr. Hubert Kransky, is a blunted and subdued imitation of his former glorious, raucous, quick-to-come-out-swinging self. What few bets he makes with Mr. Callahan are colorless and without excitement, with the winning or losing of little consequence to either—a sort of dull ritual performed by rote.

On the one occasion when Mr. Kransky took issue with a customer’s opinion of the Los Angeles Rams and stalked across the room with at least a semblance of his former grandeur, he had his jaw summarily fractured. His deceitful opponent turned out to be a former middleweight champion of the United States Navy.

The whole ugly affair accomplished only a further entrenchment of the conservatism of Mr. Kransky and he would spend long hours wistfully staring at the booth where Luther Dingle used to sit, while he himself heaved deep sighs and thought longingly of bygone days and bygone little men with prominent jaws. Little did he or his two companions realize that Mr. Luther Dingle had a great appeal to extra-terrestrial note takers and that from then on it was altogether possible that the ex-vacuum cleaner salesman would scale Mt. Everest, take off in a spaceship, prove himself the world’s greatest, most effective lover, or take a position on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It all could very well happen.

And it probably did.

Mr. Bartlett Finchley, tall, tart, and fortyish, looked across his ornate living room to where the television repairman was working behind his set and felt an inner twist of displeasure that the mood of the tastefully decorated room should be so damaged by the T-shirted, dungareed serviceman whose presence was such a foreign element in the room. He looked, gimlet-eyed, at the man’s tool box lying on the soft pile of the expensive carpet like a blot on Mr. Finchley’s escutcheon, which emphasized symmetry above all! Mr. Finchley, among other things, was both a snob and fastidious. And snobbery and fastidiousness were not simply character traits with him; they were banners that he flaunted with pride. He rose from the chair and walked over to within a few feet of the television set. The repairman looked up at him, smiling, and wiped his forehead.

“How are you today, Mr. Finchley?”

Mr. Finchley’s left eyebrow shot up. “I’ll answer
that
burning question after you tell me what’s wrong with that electronic boo-boo, and also acquaint me with how much this current larceny is going to cost me.”

The repairman rose and wiped his hands with a rag. He looked down at the set, then up to Mr. Finchley. “Two hours’ labor,” he said, “a broken set of tubes, new oscillator, new filter.”

Mr. Finchley’s face froze, his thin lips forming a taut line.

“How very technical,” he announced. “How very nice! And I presume I’m to be dunned once again for three times the worth of the bloody thing?”

The repairman smiled gently and studied Mr. Finchley. “Last time I was here, Mr. Finchley,” he said, “you’d kicked your foot through the screen. Remember?”

Mr. Finchley turned away and put a cigarette in a holder. “I have a vivid recollection,” he announced. “It was not working properly.” He shrugged. “I tried to get it to do so in a normal fashion!”

“By kicking your foot through the screen?” the repairman shook his head. “Why didn’t you just horsewhip it, Mr. Finchley? That’d show it who’s boss.”

He started to collect his tools and put them into the box. Mr. Finchley lit the cigarette in the holder, took a deep drag, and examined his nails.

“What do you say we cease this small talk and get down to some serious larceny? You can read me off the damages...though I sometimes wonder exactly what is the purpose of the Better Business Bureau when they allow you itinerant extortionists to come back week after week, move wires around, busily probe with ham-like hands, and accomplish nothing but the financial ruin of every customer on your route!”

The repairman looked up from the tool box, his smile fading. “We’re not a gyp outfit, Mr. Finchley We’re legitimate repairmen. But I’ll tell you something about
yourself
—”

“Spare me, please,” Mr. Finchley interrupted him. “I’m sure there must be some undernourished analyst with an aging mother to care for whom I can contact for that purpose.”

The repairman closed the box and stood up. “Why don’t you hear me out, Mr. Finchley? That set doesn’t work because obviously you got back there and yanked out wires and God knows what else! You had me over here last month to fix your portable radio—because you’d thrown it down the steps.”

“It did not work properly,” Finchley said icily.

“That’s the point, Mr. Finchley. Why don’t they work properly? Off-hand I’d say it’s because you don’t treat them properly.”

Mr. Finchley let the cigarette holder dangle from his mouth as he surveyed the repairman much as a scientist would look at a bug through a microscope. “I assume there’s no charge for that analysis?” he inquired.

The repairman shook his head. “What does go wrong with these things, Mr. Finchley? Have you any idea?”

Mr. Finchley let out a short, frozen chortle. “Have I any idea? Now that’s worth a scholarly ten lines in your Repairman’s Journal! Bilk the customer, but let him do the repairing!”

“The reason I asked that,” the repairman persisted, “is because whatever it is that really bothers you about that television set and the radio...you’re not telling me.”

He waited for a response. Mr. Finchley turned his back.

“Well?” the repairman asked.

Finchley drew a deep breath as if the last resisting pocket of his patience had been overrun and was being forced to capitulate. “Aside from being rather an incompetent clod,” Finchley announced, turning back toward the repairman, ‘you’re a most insensitive man. I’ve explained to you already. The television set simply did not work properly. And that rinky-dink original Marconi operating under the guise of a legitimate radio gave me nothing but static.”

The TV repairman flicked the set on, watched the picture, raised and lowered the volume, then shut it off. He turned toward Finchley. “You’re sure that’s all that was wrong with it?”

Finchley made a gesture and started out of the room. The repairman, with a smile, followed him.

“I’ll send you a bill, Mr. Finchley,” he said as they walked toward the front hall.

“Of this I have no doubt,” Finchley responded.

At the front door, the repairman turned to look once again at Finchley, who stood on the first step of the long sweeping stairway which led to the second floor.

“Mr. Finchley...what is it with you and machines?”

Finchley’s eyes sought the ceiling as if this latest idiocy was more than he could bear. “I will file
that
idiotic question in my memorabilia to be referred to at some future date when I write my memoirs. You will fill one entire chapter on The Most Forgettable Person I Have Ever Met!”

The repairman shook his head and left. Mr. Finchley stood stock-still, his features working. For just one, single, fleeting moment, his hauteur, his pre-emptive mastery of all situations, his snobbery seemed to desert his face, leaving behind a mask of absolute, undiluted terror.

“It just so happens, you boob,” Finchley called out into the empty hall, his voice shaking, “it just so happens that every machine in my house is—”

He cut himself off abruptly, closed his eyes, shook his head, looked down at his hands, which were shaking, grabbed them together, then turned and walked unsteadily into the living room. A clock on the mantelpiece chimed deep, resonant notes that filled the room.

“All right,” Finchley said, holding his voice down, “that’ll be about enough of that! Hear me?”

The clock continued to chime. Finchley walked over toward the mantel and shouted.

“I said that’ll be just about enough of that!”

He reached up, grabbed the clock in both hands, ripped the plug out of the wall, and slammed the clock down on the floor, stamping on it with his foot while the chimes continued to blare at him like the death rattle of some dying beast. It took several moments for the chimes to die out. Finchley stood over the wreckage of broken glass and dismembered fly wheels and springs, sweat pouring down his face, his whole body shaking as if with an ague. Then very slowly he recovered composure. The shaking stopped, and he went upstairs to his bedroom.

He closed the door and lay down on the bed, feeling limp, washed out and desperately vulnerable. Soon he fell into an uneasy, twisting and turning, dream-filled sleep, full of all the nightmares that he lived with during the day and that were kept hidden underneath the icy facade of superiority which insulated him from the world.

Mr. Bartlett Finchley at age forty-two was a practicing sophisticate who wrote very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like. He was a bachelor and a recluse. He had few friends—only devotees and adherents to the cause of tart sophistry. He had no interests—save whatever current annoyance he could put his mind to. He had no purpose to his life—except the formulation of day-to-day opportunities to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances of an age he abhorred.

In short, Mr. Bartlett Finchley was a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century—he was unsure which. The only thing he was certain of as he awoke, drenched with perspiration, from his nap, was that the secret could not be held much longer. The sleepless nights and fear-filled days were telling on him, and this man with no friends and no confidants realized in a hidden portion of his mind that he urgently required both.