The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (33 page)

Head One finally announced, his voice dripping with boredom, “Had enough?”

Head Two nodded. “Positively. Most inferior. We give him the strength of three hundred men...and he uses it for petty exhibition. Let him have about twenty or thirty more seconds and then remove the power!”

Head One looked over toward Dingle and nodded in return. “Excellent idea. And then I think we’d best be off. Three planets on the itinerary for tomorrow. One is particularly interesting.” The orange eyes leered ever so slightly. “Contains only females!”

There was another burst of applause as Mr. Dingle held up his hands and announced with an almost pious humility, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I believe the most unique feat of all. I will lift up this entire building with my bare hands!”

There was a murmur of stunned amazement. All eyes fastened on Dingle as he looked quickly around the room, then walked to a corner of the bar and stood under one of the rafters. He looked up at the giant wooden beam as if mathematically gauging it, then very carefully removed his coat, hung it over one of the chairs, and rolled up his sleeves. He then cracked his knuckles and flexed the two small, knobby nodules that showed indistinctly under the surface of the flesh somewhere between the clavicle and elbow of each arm, and could most nearly be described as “muscles.”

This did not keep the crowd from taking a deep collective breath as the little man slowly stretched on tiptoe, felt the rafters and, with a great show of exertion, started to push. There was a loud crack that sounded all over the room and all eyes went to the ceiling where a long, irregular crevice began to appear in the plaster. It was a fact! Luther Dingle was beginning to lift up the entire building.

He was beginning to, that is, but did not continue the process for very long. Invisible to all assembled was a ray of light that emanated from an equally invisible two-headed thing. The light played on Dingle’s face for a few moments and then was shut off. Mr. Dingle, meantime, struggled, groaned, rolled his eyes, felt the sweat pouring down his face, shoved, squeezed, hefted, thrust, and after a while collapsed in a spent heap on the floor.

He rose somewhat shakily, went to one of the tables, and slammed his fist down on it. There was a gasp as the table remained intact and Mr. Dingle’s knuckles swelled up like a tired rubber balloon. He swung with his uninjured left hand into the wall. There was a loud crack as the wall remained unchanged and Mr. Dingle’s hand grew painfully red.

The audience’s reaction to all this was an amazed silence. But gradually the silence gave way to sporadic laughter and then the sporadic laughter in turn was supplanted by derisive catcalls, hooting, and generally unkind and uncomplimentary remarks about the charlatan in their midst.

Mr. Kransky, sitting at the bar, was the first to give vent to the editorial judgment of the crowd. He arose, walked over to Dingle, lifted him up by his collar, and threw him across the room.

There was a continued tumult of voices that turned the room into a bedlam, and it was with great difficulty that Jason W. Abernathy signed off the program with considerable apologies and a halting, red-faced reminder that on the following day the audience would be privileged to watch one Zelda Agranavitch, a former Bulgarian woman naval lieutenant who had actually fought in the Battle of Jutland in World War I, disguised as a boy. This was imparted to the audience over the shrieked catcalls that shook Mr. O’Toole’s bar.

Mr. Xurthya wafted slowly across the room toward the rear door at precisely that moment when two three-foot-tall purple men entered the room by walking through the wall. They were tiny, roly-poly figures with gigantic heads and extremely high foreheads. They waved at the two-headed Martian as he was going out.

Head One and Head Two said, “How are you fellahs?”

“Nice seeing you,” the Venusians answered.

“Where you from?” Head One from Mars inquired.

“Venus,” was the answer. “How about you?”

“Mars. Conducting experiments?”

“Yeah. And you?”

“Sudden introduction of strength to subnormal Earthmen. What about you?”

The two little Venusians scanned the room. “Sudden introduction of extreme intelligence. Find any interesting subjects?”

“That one over there,” Head One said. “He’s referred to as a Dingle. He certainly is subphysical. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he weren’t submental too.”

The Venusians nodded and the first one said, “Looks likely enough. We’ll give him the intelligence quota ray.”

“How strong?” his partner asked, as the two-headed Martian disappeared.

“Oh,” his partner answered, “make him about...let’s see...perhaps five hundred times more intelligent than the average human.”

Neither Mr. Luther Dingle, nor anyone else in the room, saw the beam of light come out of the small glass aperture set in the middle of the Venusian’s belt. It stayed on for just a fraction of a second and then was turned off. The Venusians sat in midair, opened a small magnesium box and began to eat their lunch.

Much later on, several hours later as a matter of fact, the people had left and the noise had totally subsided. At the bar sat Mr. Kransky and Mr. Callahan watching intently the baseball game that was in progress on the television screen over the bar. Sitting forlornly across the room alone in a booth was Luther Dingle. He had had six beers, which were quite sufficient to put Mr. Dingle in a near comatose state. He looked neither left nor right, but sat dejectedly with his chin in one hand staring at the last of his sixth beer and wondering in a vague, dreamy way exactly what had happened.

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.

A Thing About Machines

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?”