The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (21 page)

He was quite unaware that the afternoon sun now looked pale and distant as it moved across the sky. It was on its way out for that day.

It was night and the young man sat on a park bench close to the statue in front of the school. He played tic-tac-toe with a stick in the din, winning game after game and then wiping out each victory with the heel of his shoe to begin all over again. He’d made himself a sandwich in a small restaurant. He’d walked through the department store and then through a Woolworth five-and-dime. He’d gone into the school, through empty classrooms and had stifled an impulse to scrawl obscenities on a blackboard. Anything to shock or jar or to defy. Anything in the way of a gesture to rip away at the facade of reality that surrounded him. He was sure it was a facade. He was sure it must be just the real quality of the unreal dream and if only he could erase it and reveal what was underneath!—but he couldn’t.

A light shone on his hand. He looked up startled. Street lights were going on and lights in the park joined them. Light after light all over the town. Street lights. Store windows. And then the flickering of the marquee lights in front of the theater.

He rose from the bench and went to the theater and stopped by the tiny box office. A ticket was sticking out of the metal slot He put it in his breast pocket and was about to go inside when he saw a poster announcing the movie inside. On the poster was a large blowup of an air force pilot, profile to the sky, staring up at a flight of jet aircraft that streaked across and over him.

The young man took a step toward the poster. Slowly and unconsciously his hands touched the coveralls he was wearing and very gradually there was a bridge between himself and the man on the poster. And then it came to him. They were dressed alike. The coveralls were almost identical. The young man grew excited, and some of the fatigue washed away, leaving behind it an enthusiasm bordering on exultation. He reached out and touched the poster. Then he whirled around to look toward the empty streets and spoke aloud.

“I’m Air Force. That’s it. I’m Air Force. I’m in the Air Force. That’s right! I remember. I’m in the Air Force.” It was a tiny, insignificant skein to a crazy quilt blanket of unknowns—but it was something he could pick up and hold and analyze. It was a clue. And it was the first one. The only one. “I’m in the Air Force,” he shouted. He headed into the theater. “I’m in the Air Force!” His voice reverberated through the empty lobby. “Hey, anybody, everybody, somebody—I’m in the Air Force!” He yelled it into the theater, the words banging through the air, over the row after row of empty seats and hitting against the huge, white, motionless screen at the far end.

The young man sat down and found he was perspiring. He felt for a handkerchief, pulled it out, wiped his face. He felt the beard stubble, knowing that there were a thousand closed doors to his subconscious he was close to opening.

“Air Force,” he said softly now. “Air Force. But what does that mean? What does ‘Air Force’ mean?” His head jerked upward. “Was there a bomb? Is that it? That must have been it. A bomb—” He stopped, shaking his head. “But if there’d been a bomb, everything would have been destroyed. And nothing’s been destroyed. How could it have been a—”

The lights began to dim and a strong beam of light from a projectionist’s booth somewhere in the rear of the theater suddenly shone on the white screen. There was the sound of music, loud, blaring, martial music, and on the screen a B-52 bomber headed down a runway and suddenly screamed into the air over his head. There were more big B-52’s and now they were in the sky, a flight of them, heading up leaving lines of vapor trails. And always the music blaring out underneath it.

The young man rose to his feet, his eyes wide, disbelieving. The beam of light disappeared into a small, blinking hole high above a balcony.

“Hey!” he screamed. “Who’s showing the picture? Somebody must be showing the picture! Hey! Do you see me? I’m down here. Hey, whoever’s showing the picture—I’m down here!”

He ran up the aisle, through the lobby, and up the stairs to the balcony. He stumbled across the dark seats, falling several times and finally, not finding an aisle, he simply crawled and jumped and scrambled over the tops of seats toward the small bright hole in the wall at the far end. He threw his face against it, staring directly into the blinding, white light. It sent him reeling back in momentary blindness.

When he could see again he found another opening in the wall, higher than the first. He jumped up, and got a quick glimpse of an empty room, a giant projector and stacks of film cans. He was dimly aware of voices on the screen, loud, giant voices that filled the theater. Once again he jumped up to look in the projectionist’s booth and in the brief moment of one-sided combat with gravity, he again saw the empty room, the machine running smoothly, the hum of it heard dimly through the glass.

But when he landed back on his feet he knew there was no one up there. It was a machine running by itself. It was a picture showing itself. It was like the town and everything in it. Machines, items, things—all unattended. He backed away, banged against the back of the top row of seats and, losing his balance, sprawled head first.

The beam of light kept changing intensity as scenes altered on the screen. There was dialogue and music and it reverberated around the theater. Voices of giants. Music of a million-piece band. And something inside the young man cracked. The small compartment in the back of his mind, where man closets his fears, ties them up, controls and commands them, broke open and they surged across brain and nerves and muscles—a nightmare flood in open rebellion.

The young man scrambled to his feet, sobbing, choking, screaming. He raced down the stairs, through the door, down the steps toward the lobby.

It was when he reached the foot of the steps that he saw the other person. He was directly across the lobby and approaching from a flight of stairs the young man hadn’t noticed before. The young man didn’t see him clearly nor did he try. He just ran toward him, dimly aware that the other person was running toward him at the same time. In the fraction of a moment that it took him to cross the lobby he had only one thought and that was to reach the other person, to touch him, to hold him. To follow him out to wherever he was going. Out of the building, off the streets, out of the city, because now he knew that he must get away.

It was this thought that filled his mind just before he hit the mirror—a full length mirror that hung on the opposite wall. And he hit it with the force of a hundred and seventy pounds, smashing into it at a dead run. The mirror seemed to explode into a thousand pieces. He found himself on the floor looking at little fragments of his reflection in the small and minute sections of mirror that remained on the wall. It was the picture of a hundred young men lying cut and dazed on the floor of a theater lobby, staring up at what was left of a mirror. And then he lurched to his feet and, like a drunken man in a tilting ship in a heavy sea, he stumbled out of the lobby and out into the street.

Outside it was dark and misty; the streets were wet. The street lights were enveloped in fog and each shone like a dim moon hanging in vapor. He began to run along sidewalks and across streets. He tripped over a bicycle stand and landed on his face, but was on his feet in a moment continuing the mad, headlong, thoughtless, desperate race to no place in particular. He tripped over a curb near the drugstore and again fell on his face, conscious for a moment that he could still feel pain—a jarring, wrenching pain. But only for a moment. He pushed his palms against the sidewalk, forcing himself up and then fell over on his back.

For a moment he lay there, eyes closed. And then he opened them. A nightmare knocked at his head and asked to come in and ice flowed over his body. He started to scream. An eye was looking at him. A giant eye, bigger than the upper trunk of a man. An unblinking, cold-looking eye was staring at him and his scream never let up, even after he had floundered again to his feet and started to run back toward the park. He was like a human siren disappearing into the dark. Behind him the big painted eye on the optometrist’s window stared after him—cold, inhuman and unblinking.

He fell, clutching against a street light. There was a panel with a button which his fingers touched, scrabbled at and finally kept pushing over and over again. A sign over it read, “Push to turn green.” He didn’t know the sign was there. He only knew he had to push the button and this he kept doing, while the light over the intersection turned red, then yellow, then green, over and over again, responding to the bleeding knuckles of the young man who kept pushing a button and moaning to himself in a soft, barely intelligible chant.

“Please—please, somebody—help me. Help me, somebody. Please. Please. Oh dear God—somebody help me! Won’t somebody help me. Won’t somebody come—can anyone hear me—?”

The control room was dark and the figures of the uniformed men were silhouetted against the light that came from a small viewing screen on which could be seen the face and upper body of Sergeant Mike Ferris, a youngish looking man in coveralls who kept pushing a button to the right of the screen. Ferris’s voice babbled out into the darkness of the control room pleading for help, or someone to listen, for someone to show themselves. It was the sobbing, pleading, supplicating voice of a man whose mind and body were laid bare on a block and the up-and-down intonation seemed naked and embarrassing, as if listened to through a keyhole, with an ear pressed against the door.

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.”