The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (26 page)

“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.

Captain Walter Allenby, wading through the deep sand, looked keenly at Corry. Again he noticed how quick to age were these banishment cases. How strangely and subtly each face had changed after only three months.

Allenby had been in the space service for eighteen years, had flown everything from jet aircraft to space vehicles and, in his millions of flying hours, he had gone through everything from engine failure to meteorite storms. This, however, was something else.

This was having to spend twelve minutes four times a year with tormented, half-crazed men who would stare at him as if he were a kind of Messiah. There were four asteroids along the route and Corry’s was the last. Allenby heaved a sigh of relief. Three weeks from now he would be back on Earth. Allenby felt a stab of pity, as he saw that Corry’s fingers were clenched tightly in front of him.

“How are you, Allenby?” Corry asked him, his voice tight and dry from the effort of self-control.

“Just fine, Corry,” Allenby answered and gestured to his two crewmen. “This is James Corry, gentlemen. And this is Adams, and this is Jensen.”

The two men nodded as they stared intently at Corry. This was their first trip and Corry was the fourth banishment case they’d seen. Both noted the similarity between all four men. The hunger in the eyes, the desperate set of the faces.

Adams, a thin, wiry, dark-haired youngster in his twenties, had signed on just a week before the ship left. He was a better-than-average navigator, but eleven lonely months in space, punctuated only by the dry, hot asteroids, had taken away his appetite, stripped the protection off his nerves, and turned him into an easily combustible, foul-mouthed little malcontent who went from rage to rage, set off by everything from navigational problems to the itchy discomfort of his space suit. He associated Corry with the heat, the discomfort, with being nine million miles from home and with the last eleven months of loneliness and dislike.

“Quite a place you got here, Corry,” he said.

Corry’s lips trembled. “I’m so glad you like it.”

“I didn’t say I liked it—I think it stinks.”

Corry’s head shot up. “You don’t have to live here,” he offered quietly.

“No. But I’ve got to come back here four times a year, and that’s eight months out of twelve, Corry, away from Earth. My wife probably won’t even recognize me when I get home.”

Corry’s face softened. He half turned away. “I’m sorry.”

Adams’s mouth twisted. “I’ll bet you are,” he said acidly. “But you’ve got it made, don’t you, Corry? It makes for simple living, doesn’t it?” He bent down, picked up a handful of sand, and held it out toward Corry.

“This is Corry’s Kingdom,” Adams said. He let the sand run through his fingers. “Right here. Six thousand miles north and south. Four thousand miles east and west. And all of it’s just like this.”

Corry felt his fingers tremble. He wet his lips, looked briefly at Allenby who had turned away, embarrassed, and forced a smile when he spoke to Adams again. “You ought to try it three hundred and sixty-five days a year, Adams. You feel like a roast that never leaves an oven.”

Adams’s laughter was not related to humor. “How about it, Captain?” he said abruptly to Allenby. “We’ve only got a few minutes.”

Allenby nodded. “Fifteen minutes this time, to be exact, Corry.”

Corry tried to keep the supplication out of his voice. “Nobody’s checking your schedule,” he said to Allenby “Why don’t we have a game of cards or something?”

Allenby kept his voice firm, with obvious effort. “I’m sorry, Corry,” he said. “This isn’t an arbitrary decision. If we delay our time of departure any more than fifteen minutes, that places us in a different orbital position. We’d never make it back to Earth. We’d have to stay here at least fourteen days before this asteroid was in position again.”

Corry’s voice went higher. “So? Fourteen days! Why not have us a ball? I’ve got some beer I’ve saved. We could play some cards, you could tell me what’s going on back there—” Words poured out of him, strung together with little gasps, and to Allenby it was like watching a full-grown man get whipped.

Allenby made a show of checking the sky. “I wish we could, Corry,” he answered, “but like I said—we’ve only got fifteen minutes.”

Corry’s voice overlapped the captain’s. “Well...well, what’s a few lousy days to you? A coupla card games.” He turned toward the other two men. “How ‘bout you guys? You think I’ll murder you or something over a bad hand?”

Jensen turned away discomfited, but Adams stared at Corry with disgust and accusation.

“I’m sorry,” Allenby said quietly. Then he took Corry’s arm “Let’s go to the shack—”

Corry flung the arm off, but with desperation, not anger. “All right,” he shrilled. “All right, two minutes are gone now. You’ve got thirteen minutes left. I wouldn’t want to foul up your schedule, Allenby. Not for a...” He looked away. “Not for a lousy game of cards. Not for a few bottles of crummy beer.” He looked down at his feet in the sand and then slowly raised his eyes to face Allenby like an animal caught in a trap, pleading for release. There was a nakedness to it as if pride had been swept away. When Corry spoke again, the voice was that of a man falling down into hell and scrabbling for the last ledge which offered him salvation.

“Allenby,” he said very softly. “Allenby...what about the pardon?”

There was a silence broken finally by Adams. His voice dripped with malice like some kind of putrefying liquid from a running sore. “A pardon, Corry,” he said harshly. “You’re out of luck, pal. Sentence reads thirty-five years and they’re not even reviewing cases of homicide. You’ve been here five now, so that makes thirty to go.”

Corry felt a strange, icy cold moving through his body. But still Adams did not stop.

“Thirty to go,” he continued, “so get comfortable, dad, huh?” He laughed briefly, his head back, his face red and itchy from the sun, the discomfort spewing out of him in the form of an attack on another human being. The laugh stopped when he saw Allenby’s face.

The tall captain shut him off with his eyes, made a brief gesture to Corry to follow him, and headed toward the shack. Corry walked beside him, the sand sending up crunchy sounds as they sank down through the crust of the top layer. At intervals Allenby glanced surreptitiously at Corry, who looked beaten and sick. They reached a small knoll close to the shack, and there Corry stopped. Both men gazed down on the metal structure and the old car that sat in a mute, ugly loneliness.

“It just crossed my mind, Captain,” Corry said, “—it just crossed my mind this is ninety percent of the view I’m gonna have for the next thirty years. Just what I’m looking at right now. That shack, that car, and all that desert...and this is my company for the next thirty years.”

Allenby touched his arm with an instinctive gentleness and compassion. His own voice was quiet. “I’m sorry, Corry,” the captain said. “Unfortunately we don’t make the rules. All we do is deliver your supplies and pass on information. I told you last time that there’d been a lot of pressure back home about this kind of punishment. There are a whole lot of people who think it’s unnecessarily cruel.” He paused for a moment. “Well, who knows what the next couple of years will bring? They may change their minds, alter the law, imprison you on Earth like in the old days.”