The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (28 page)

Dingle shrugged. “Now watch this.”

He walked over to a large boulder, picked it up and, with minimal effort, broke it in half, then threw the two pieces away. They landed with a thud, plowing two deep holes in the earth. Several yards away a photographer was taking shots of two attractive models. Through the corner of his eye he had seen Dingle perform the rock bit. He turned and walked hurriedly over to the little man.

“Say, buddy,” he said a little tentatively. “I’m a photographer with the
Bulletin
.” He waggled a finger toward the rocks. “What’s with the rock? I mean...what’s the gag?”

Dingle said, “No gag. Oh, there isn’t any gag. Watch.” He scanned the immediate area and then his eye lit on the statue of General Belvedere Washington Hennicutt. He went over to it, leaned down to the base of the Statue and, without so much as the suggestion of a grunt, lifted the thirty-foot bronze figure high into the air. It took the photographer an instant to recover before he could attach the flash bulb and snap the picture.

Several hours later he’d had the picture developed, had an argument with the city editor over what the latter claimed were wires obviously showing on the glossy print, persuaded the same gentleman that there were no wires and it was no gag, and then had gone out and gotten drunk.

The following morning the picture was on the front page of the
Los Angeles Bulletin
. The caption underneath it read, “Hercules? No, Luther Dingle, the Twentieth-Century Samson.” And there was Luther holding the statue aloft, smiling angelically and with vast satisfaction, like some overgrown boy who had stolen his dad’s car and then gone on to win the Indianapolis Five Hundred.

Mr. Dingle himself did not see the paper until some hours later. He was sleeping soundly in his bed when the alarm rang. He reached over sleepily to push the button. He did indeed push the button and in the process flattened the alarm clock into a thin metal pancake so that the numbers, the face, and the works all fused together like a Dali painting.

Realization and remembrance flooded back into Mr. Dingle’s mind and he got out of bed hurriedly. He looked at the flattened clock, then stared at himself in the dresser mirror across the room. He walked over to it, examined his face and was satisfied that it was the same face which had been staring back at him for many, many years. Then, with a kind of self-conscious ritual, he picked up the Los Angeles telephone book and tore it apart with two fingers. He dressed, shaved, mentally thumbed his nose at the vacuum cleaner which rested on the one chair in the room, and then took a walk over to O’Toole’s bar.

By noontime that day Mr. O’Toole’s bar was as crowded as a subway car and the table at which Mr. Dingle sat by himself was circled and re-circled by a mob of con men, public relations representatives, fight managers, talent agents, television executives, carnival advance men, theatre managers, Hollywood scouts, baseball scouts, football scouts, and a Boy Scout with an autograph pad.

“Mr. Dingle...you realize how much money can be made on a tour with our carnival?”

“Mr. Dingle...your future lies in television. You’re the walking, talking embodiment of every American male’s wish fulfillment. You’re John Q. Citizen, you’re Babbitt, you’re Tom, Dick and Harry. Now here’s our idea for the series. A simple fifteen-minute, across-the-board address by you with little examples of your physical prowess! A natural for breakfast cereals, tonics, vitamin pills, anything!”

“And I keep telling you, Dingle, Patterson is nothin’! You line up with me, I’ll get you a coupla real easy setups and inside eight months I’ll have you fightin’ for the world championship!”

The voices, the offers, the suggestions, the invitations flooded the air, came from all directions, and went past Mr. Dingle’s beaming face to mingle in a welter of jabbering talk somewhere behind it. His smile was constant and beatific and he was the happiest of all men. The only untoward reaction elicited from Mr. Dingle was when a high-voiced and quite subdued Mr. Kransky announced that the sales manager of the vacuum cleaner company was on the phone and wanted to talk to him.

Dingle snapped his fingers and airily waved Kransky back to the phone, with a very specific suggestion as to where the sales manager could place all his unsold vacuum cleaners.

Twenty minutes later someone had moved in a television camera and special lights had been strung up across the room. One Jason Abernathy, a thin, flannel-suited little man with squirrel-bright eyes, pushed his way importantly through the crowd of people, carrying a hand mike. He stood over Dingle, then looked at the camera.

“Fine here?” he inquired professionally, pointing first to Dingle, then to the lights overhead. “Getting a picture, are we?”

He acknowledged the nods of the cameraman, the floor director, and the director, who had been pulled aside by Mr. Kransky and was being given a rundown on what cost the Dodgers the pennant in 1960. A red light shone on the camera and Mr. Abernathy’s face was suddenly suffused in a hundred-watt smile.

“Hello there, everyone,” Mr. Abernathy gushed. “This is Jason Abernathy here with your show—’TV Probes The Unusual.’ And our unusual subject today...”

He moved aside and pointed to where Luther Dingle sat proudly like an underfed Cheshire cat who really didn’t care that he suffered from malnutrition.

“Mr. Luther Dingle,” Abernathy continued, “who, if what actual on-lookers say is true, is the world’s strongest man.” He carried the hand mike over to the table and thrust it in front of Dingle’s contented face.

“Mr. Dingle,” he asked, ‘Would you give us an example of this fantastic—” he cleared his throat—“
alleged
...strength of yours?”

“I’d be happy to,” Dingle answered. He stood up, and wiggled a couple of fingers in the direction of Anthony O’Toole who was behind the bar, furiously pouring drinks and depositing fistfuls of money in the cash register.

“Mr. O’Toole,” Dingle called across the room. “Is it all right? You know, the thing we discussed?”

O’Toole grinned happily. “Are you kiddin’? I ain’t done business like this since the night they repealed the Eighteenth Amendment! Be my guest, Dingle.”

The ex-vacuum cleaner salesman smiled, winked at the camera, and announced in a quietly prideful voice, “Well, I’ll start off with the simple things!”

He turned to the wall, chuckled a secret chuckle, and then plowed his right hand directly through it, creating a three-foot hole in the plaster. Then, still smiling, he winked broadly, walked around the table, patted the top of it as if testing it and then splintered it by simply slamming the palm of his hand on it. The table parted in the middle and collapsed on the floor. The crowd cheered and applauded. Jason W. Abernathy smiled happily and threw an “I-told-you-so” look at the camera. He then watched as Mr. Dingle went to the bar, took hold of the bottom section of one of the stool supports, and ripped it out of the floor. Dingle dusted his hands meticulously and walked past the gaping, ogling watchers toward the now white and stricken face of one Hubert Kransky.

Mr. Kransky rose, his hands held out defensively in front of him. “Now, wait a minute, Dingle,” he gurgled in a voice that sounded quite unlike his own. “Please, Dingle, wait a minute. Ain’t you ever heard of bygones being bygones?”

Mr. Luther Dingle, who obviously had forgotten all about bygones being bygones, if indeed, he had ever embraced the concept, lifted Mr. Kransky by the shirt, held him out at arm’s length and twirled him around in one hand like a baton. This went on for roughly a minute and a half. Finally Mr. Kransky was gently re-deposited on the bar stool. There he wavered back and forth as the room spun around in front of him, a mélange of faces, walls, television camera and—shooting by at intervals like telegraph poles outside a speeding train window—the smiling and satisfied face of Luther Dingle, who had at this moment reinstated himself in the company of men by paying back a debt of long, long standing.

Mr. Kransky, it was quite obvious, would never again extrapolate his innermost thoughts against Mr. Luther Dingle’s face, nose, and cheekbone. From this moment on he would be a good boy—not to say a deferential, fawning, desperately frightened drinking companion.

Once again the assemblage cheered and roared its delight as Mr. Dingle, with just the trace of a smirk, retraced his steps to what was left of his table. The cheering, however, was confined to that species of being known as “homo sapiens.” The other specimen in the room—one double-headed Martian whose family name was “Xurthya”—was somewhat less impressed. The two slightly green-tinged faces looked glumly at one another, disgust showing in all four orangish eyes.

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.