The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (22 page)

From a quarter of a mile away, on a hilltop, Maple Street looked like this, a long tree-lined avenue full of lights going on and off and screaming people racing back and forth. Maple Street was a bedlam. It was an outdoor asylum for the insane. Windows were broken, street lights sent clusters of broken glass down on the heads of women and children. Power mowers started up and car engines and radios. Blaring music mixed with the screams and shouts and the anger.

Up on top of the hill two men, screened by the darkness, stood near the entrance to a spaceship and looked down on Maple Street. “Understand the procedure now? the first figure said. “Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers. Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then watch the pattern unfold.”

“And this pattern is always the same?” the second figure asked.

“With few variations,” came the answer. “They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it’s themselves. All we need do is sit back—and watch.”

“Then I take it,” figure two said, “this place, this Maple Street, is not unique?”

Figure one shook his head and laughed. “—By no means. Their world is full of Maple Streets and we’ll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves.” He started up the incline toward the entrance of the spaceship. “One to the other,” he said as the other figure followed him. “One to the other.” There was just the echo of his voice as the two figures disappeared and a panel slid softly across the entrance. “One to the other,” the echo said.

When the sun came up on the following morning Maple Street was silent. Most of the houses had been burned. There were a few bodies lying on sidewalks and draped over porch railings. But the silence was total. There simply was no more life. At four o’clock that afternoon there was no more world, or at least not the kind of world that had greeted the morning. And by Wednesday afternoon of the following week, a new set of residents had moved into Maple Street.

They were a handsome race of people. Their faces showed great character. Great character indeed. Great character and excellently shaped heads. Excellently shaped heads—two to each new resident.

From Rod Serling’s closing narration, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” The Twilight Zone, January 1, 1960, CBS Television Network.

Now the CAMERA PANS UP for a shot of the starry sky and over this we hear the Narrator’s Voice.

NARRATOR’S VOICE

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices—to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children...and the children yet unborn.

(a pause)

And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.

FADE TO BLACK

It was like the surface of a giant stove—this desert that stretched in a broiling yellow mat to the scrubby line of mountains on one side and the shimmering salt flats on the other. Occasional dunes and gullies punctuated the yellow sameness with thin, dark purple streaks. But for the most part it looked endless and unchanging; a barren mass of sand that beckoned the heat rays and then soaked them into itself.

The shack was an alien element on the scene. It stood some eighty miles from the nearest mountains. It was built of corrugated metal and had a flat, sloping roof. Alongside it was a 1943 sedan, the metal pitted, windshield without glass, looking as if a wind could blow it apart. And sitting on the metal porch, shaded by the overhang of the roof, was James Corry. He was forty, with a lean, long-jawed face and deep-set, light blue eyes. His hair, once brown, was now a bleached-out thatch that hung dry over his forehead, with streaks of gray at the temples.

Corry was writing slowly and painstakingly in a large diary. Sometimes he paused and squinted out at the desert around him. In the beginning Corry had been able to lose himself in activities—and forget the desert. When he’d put the old car together, for example, he’d been able to work three or four hours at a stretch unmindful of the white orb overhead or even the furnace-like air that sometimes hung heavy and sometimes was thrown at him by the wind in hot gusts.

But that was five years ago when he first was put down here. The old beat-up car had occupied his time. And writing in his diary had done more for him than pass the time. It had been like a survival exercise, in the practice of which a man could train himself to compartmentalize his thoughts, shut out the heat, disregard the loneliness, and somehow make a day go by and then a night and then another day...and then another day...and then another day...

He’d been thirty-five when it happened, on Earth. At odd times it would come back to him, graphic and clear, in actual chronology and vivid, almost unbearable, recall. He could see the dead body of his wife, struck down by a wildly speeding driver. This incredibly beautiful woman, in one violent, shrieking moment, was turned into a thing of horror, to lie, an unrecognizable pulp, on a city street while the drunken maniac responsible careened along to wind up against a lamp post.

Corry saw it happen from his apartment window and dashed out into the street. He took one look at his wife and then ran toward the smashed car. The driver was getting out, his face ashen with a sudden sobriety laced with horror. It had taken only a moment for Corry to do his job. Goaded by a fury, an anger, a hatred, a torment which knew no bounds he strangled the man with his bare hands while onlookers screamed and two large men had been unable to tear him away.

His trial had been brief. The extenuating circumstances surrounding the homicide kept him from the “release pills” that had long ago taken over for gas chambers, gallows, and electric chairs. But often, sitting on the front porch of his desert home, fingers shaking, skin feeling taut, poreless, his whole body somehow mummified and foreign to him, he would reflect that a sentence of thirty-five years on a sandy asteroid could be less compassionate than a swift, painless exit into a black void.

Corry fingered quickly through the pages of his diary from August 1993 back to June of 1990, remembering in another portion of his brain how long that passage of time had taken in actuality.

He looked out toward the distant salt flats. He had started walking toward them three years ago and collapsed three hours away from the shack. He knew then that the heat and the desert were bars and that the area around his home was a dungeon.

He didn’t remember exactly at what point he had become unable to lose himself in writing or doing chores, and the loneliness of the place began to take on an almost physical discomfort. It was an emotional reaction, but it carried with it an ache of body and mind that was deep, real, and constant.

“Banishment” is what they called his punishment. Banishment. Half a lifetime on an asteroid, visited four times a year by a supply ship which stayed, on the average, twelve minutes between landing and taking off. The arrival of the spaceship was like a breath of sanity, a recharging of the mind so that it could function during the next three months.

Corry penciled in the last line of the day’s entry, closed the book and thought with relief that it wouldn’t be long before the supply ship came again. He went over to the car and leaned against it, feeling the heat press against his back, wishing in some strange, illogical way, that he could perspire. At least this would be a manifestation of his body. It would be a remonstrance against the elements. But as it was, his flesh was like the sand he walked on. It took in the heat uninvited and was incapable of reacting.

He reached through the windowless opening of the door and pressed the horn. It gave off a deep, sludgy, raspy kind of noise and then quickly died away. He pressed it again several times, then turned very slowly, leaning against the door, and let his eyes travel the width of the desert beyond. There was a ritual even to loneliness, he thought. Twice a day he went to his car, to look at it, touch the horn, and sometimes sit in the front seat, staring through a glassless windshield, succumbing to a wishful daydream that the car was on a highway and there was some place to go.

Banished.

The word held little meaning for him before his sentence.

Banished.

It meant something now. It meant a heat that was unbearable. It meant a loneliness beyond rationale. A sobbing hunger for someone of his own kind. A shaky, pulsating yearning to hear a voice other than his own.

He went back to the porch, touching the metal railing. It had cooled slightly and this meant that night was coming. He looked down at his diary lying on the metal folding chair. He knew exactly what he had written. His mind could pick up anything now and give it back to him because it was uncluttered, almost a desert itself.

“The fifteenth day, sixth month...the year five,” the entry began. “And all the days and the months and the years the same. There’ll be a supply ship coming in soon, I think. They’re either due or overdue, and I hope it’s Allenby’s ship because he’s a decent man and he brings things for me.”

The words came back to Corry almost as if spoken aloud by his own voice. “Like the parts for that antique automobile. I was a year putting that thing together—such as it is. A whole year putting an old car together.”

Corry closed his eyes, touched his hot cheek and the beard stubble.

“But thank God and Allenby for that car and the hours it used up. The days and the weeks. I can look at it out there and I know it’s real, and reality is what I need. Because what is there left that I can believe in? The desert and the wind? The silence? Or myself—can I believe in myself anymore?”

Corry opened his eyes and stared out toward the salt flats. Disjointed. That described his diary. It was a crazy quilt of unrelated facts, emotions, thoughts and attitudes, opinions that could find no rebuttal because they could not be related to anyone else.

Maybe I’ll become like the car, he thought. Inanimate. Just an item sitting in the sand. Then would I feel loneliness? Would I feel misery? He shook his head and closed off the thought process. He’d fix dinner. He had some ice left that he’d made the other day and he’d use it. He’d open up a can of beer and put the ice in it. You never did that on Earth—dilute good beer with ice. But it was something different and anything different here was desirable.

Corry went into the shack. The room was small and square. There were a cot, shelves he had built out of laminated steel, everything studded and knobbed with screws, nuts, and bolts. The bookends he had made out of a magnesium packing case; the chess board from a strip of plastic, with nuts and bolts for men.

There were many pictures drawn in charcoal and then stuck up on the wall. At first he had sketched city scenes and then, as recollection grew dimmer, he began to draw only that which his eyes could see and his mind contain. There was a whole wall covered with pictures of the desert, the distant mountains, the salt flats, and one or two of the car. There were a few attempts at self-portraiture and in some instances they resembled Corry. Always it was a bold-stroked picture of a man in front of a crowd. Always a crowd. Always a crowd suggested by little formless waves, hints of a multitude of faces and a multitude of eyes.

Corry had been a retiring man once, uneasy with people. His life had been quiet and not very social. But this sandy asteroid had changed all that. The sun had changed it. The heat had boiled away his shyness and left a bare-bone hunger for a society to belong to. Corry looked at himself in the makeshift mirror that hung close to the window. His face had taken on a mahogany hue, but otherwise he had not changed much, except for the lightness of his hair.

About a year ago he had taken to staring at himself in the mirror, trying to force a change in the face that looked back at him. For a few days he had achieved something. He had been able to alter the appearance of the reflection. And for those few days he’d carried on long conversations with a face in a piece of glass. Until one night he started to cry and ran out into the desert night to throw himself down on the sand and sob himself to sleep under a starlit sky that was nothing more than a silence upon silence.

The face that stared back at him now was the familiar face. It was his. It belonged to him. It was a lonely face, the eyes deep-set and searching but without expectation. They looked out upon an emptiness and simply reflected it.

Corry went to the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, then reached into a plastic bag and took out two small, melting ice cubes. He opened the can, poured the beer into the glass with the ice cubes. Then he sat down in his stifling metal room and looked out the window, feeling weariness mixed with the sense of desolation. The big yellow desert stared back at him like a giant sandy face. Just as it stared back at him every waking moment of his day.

Banishment.

He had thirty more years to go and deep inside the core of him was the knowledge that he could not live those thirty years—not with sanity. Already he felt pincer-like claws at his head. The nightmarish attack, as if by an invading army, had reached his brain, overflowed into the fortress that a man keeps behind his eyes—a screaming horde of barbaric thoughts, each drawing life blood from the remains of what had been James W. Corry’s rational being.

The supply ship landed three days later. It flashed across the sky, glinting briefly from the borrowed rays of the giant white sun, then landed with a roar several thousand yards away from Corry’s shack. A few moments later the crew commander followed by two other men came slowly across the sand toward the shack.

Corry stood out in front watching them, his mouth dry, his fingers unable to stop their shaking. Twice he had started an abortive, head-long leap across the desert to meet them and twice had stopped himself. He felt a sound rising in his throat, a yell, an acknowledgment of this brief respite from his torment. But he throttled himself with some hidden bands of restraint until, as they approached, he permitted himself to go slowly toward them.