The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (47 page)

Paula Temple came through the flight-deck door, her face white. “Look, I know you’ve got your hands full...but somebody get on that pipe and in a hurry! I’ve got at least three people back there who are close to hysteria and—” She stopped abruptly, staring toward the front of the cockpit through the glass. Before she could say anything, Craig was half out of his seat, pointing.

“Look,” he shouted. “Skipper, look. We made it! We’re back! Look!”

Through a break in the heavy overcast they all saw it then. It was the skyline of New York, its tall spires shooting up toward the sky. Hatch closed his eyes and mumbled a prayer. Farver felt the sweat clammy on his forehead and for the first time noticed that his hands were shaking. He reached for the loudspeaker microphone, grinned around the cockpit, then pushed the button.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Farver. We had some momentary difficulty back there, but as you can see we’re now over New York and we should be landing in just a few minutes. Thank you.”

Paula leaned against the bulkhead, tears in her eyes, her lips trembling. Jane held her tightly for a moment, kissed her on the cheek.

Jane said, “Come on, partner, let’s go back and make believe nothing happened.”

The two girls left and the captain of Flight 33 breathed deeply. He was conscious of a tightness in the chest suddenly unraveling itself. He checked the instruments, made a few adjustments, then spoke to Wyatt.

“How about Idlewild?”

Wyatt was already fiddling with the radio. “Nothing doing.” He shook his head. “Our VHF is still out.”

“Maybe Idlewild’s it too,” Farver suggested. “Try using high frequency.”

“I did already, Skipper. Nothing from Idlewild.”

“How about LaGuardia? Keep using high frequency. Somebody should hear us.”

Wyatt spoke into the mike. “LaGuardia, this is Trans-Ocean 33. LaGuardia, Trans-Ocean 33.”

There was some static and then a metallic voice that came from the other end. “This is LaGuardia,” the voice said. “Who’s calling please?”

There was a whoop of unbridled delight from Purcell. Craig pounded the captain on the back, and Hatch kept applauding as if some unseen dance band had just finished a concert on the wing.

Wyatt held up his hand for silence and went back on the mike. “This is Trans-Ocean 33, LaGuardia,” he said. “We’re on the northeast leg of the LaGuardia range. Both our ILS and VOR appear inoperative. Request radar vector to Idlewild ILS.”

There was a pause at the other end and then the voice came back, impatient and belligerent “What are you, a wise guy? You’d like
what?
”

Wyatt’s face sobered. “A radar vector to Idlewild ILS,” he repeated.

“What flight did you say this was?” the LaGuardia tower asked.

Wyatt’s voice took on a tenseness. “Trans-Ocean 33. Come on, LaGuardia, quit fooling around. We’re low on fuel.”

The other four men in the cockpit leaned forward toward Wyatt, a tiny, errant fear building in each mind as to what new devilment...what new incredible and wild deviation from the norm they were moving against now.

Then the LaGuardia tower voice came back on. “Trans-Ocean Airlines? It asked. “What kind of aircraft is this?

“This is Trans-Ocean 33.” What said into the mike. “A Boeing 707 and we—”

The voice interrupted him. “Did you say a Boeing 247?”

Farver bit his lip, feeling anger and impatience surge through him. He plugged in his own mike. “Let me handle it,” he said tersely to Wyatt. Then he held the mike close to his mouth. “LaGuardia, this is a Boeing 707, and every five-second period you keep this aircraft up in the air, you’re shortening the odds on its ever getting back on the ground. Now don’t give us this two-four-seven jazz. You’re only about twenty years behind the times. This is a 707, LaGuardia. A jet. Four big, lovely Pratt & Whitney turbines, only they’re getting hungry. We’re low on fuel and all we want is a radar vector to Idlewild. Now Goddamn it, do you have us in radar contact or don’t you?”

There was a pause and then the LaGuardia voice came back on, still sullen, but with just a shade of concern. “I don’t know who you guys are,” the tower said, “and we don’t know anything at all about radar, jets, or anything else. We’ve never heard of a 707 aircraft. But if you’re really low on fuel, we’ll clear you to land.”

Craig, who’d been consulting an approach chart during this exchange, leaned over to Farver and pointed to it. “Captain,” he said, “Their longest runway is less than five thousand feet. Can we take a chance?”

The LaGuardia voice came back on. “Trans-Ocean 33, you’re cleared to land on runway 22. Altimeter two nine eight eight, wind south 10 miles per hour. The Captain is to report to the CAA office immediately after landing.”

“Roger,” Farver said tersely into the mike. “We’ll stay in touch.” He removed the microphone plug, then suddenly frowned. “CAA?” he asked aloud. “Why, they haven’t called the Federal Aviation CAA—”

It was part of a pattern, he thought to himself. Part of a routine they had been going through for the past hour. A jigsaw puzzle perfect in every detail except every now and then a round peg appeared and didn’t fit the square hole. Then he shook his head and pushed it out of his mind as he turned to Craig.

“We’ll bring her down, Craig,” he said. “It’ll be like landing in a phone booth, but—”

Hatch, who was standing up between his seat and the two pilots’ chairs, suddenly pointed out of the window, his eyes wide.

“Captain,” he said, pointing a shaking finger toward the left window “Circle again, will you?” He wet his lips. “And then look!”

Farver winged the plane over gently, circled in as short an arc as he could and then came back, following the trembling finger of Hatch. And then they all saw it. The scene whisked past their eyes in less than a second, but it registered. It was an indelible shock that made itself known optically, but then entered the mind of every one of the crew members to infiltrate their brains and corrode the lines to sanity.

Yes, they had all seen it. And when Farver turned the aircraft to retrace the flight path, they saw it again. A trylon and perisphere were set in the middle of what appeared from the air to be a giant fair or carnival. And they all knew what it was.

Craig’s hands dropped from the controls and he had to press them into his sides to keep them from shaking. “Skipper,” he said, “do you know what that is down there? Do you know what—”

Farver, hunched forward in his seat, kept shaking his head from side to side.

Wyatt said in a small, strained voice, “It’s the New York World’s Fair. That’s what it is. The New York World’s Fair. But that means we’re in—”

“1939,”Hatch interrupted him. “We came back...we came back...but dear God...
we didn’t come back far enough!
”

They all turned toward Farver. What was happening was more than they could handle. Far more than even their better-than-average minds could assimilate. And they did what any human being would do. They looked up and away, abdicated all decisions, and threw the massive dead weight of responsibility on the number one man in the cabin.

Farver felt it press down on him. The prerogative of command...but worse, the responsibility. They all wanted to know what to do and he was the one man who would have to tell them.

And what do you tell them? What is the procedure? What is the command that is right and proper to cover a situation that has no precedent, no logic, and no reason. For one panicky moment Farver’s mind went blank and he felt like turning on them and screaming, “Goddamn it, don’t look at me. Don’t wait to hear what I say. Don’t hang on the next command that’s supposed to come from
this
airplane pilot!”

Holy Mother—it was too much to expect that any human being could rise up in the middle of this nightmare and point the way to an awakening or anything even resembling it. But after a moment, whatever was the invisible challenge that was thrown at him by the frightened faces, he responded. He was the captain of this aircraft. And though reality and logic were cracking up and falling to pieces all around him—
by God he would command!

“We can’t land,” Farver said finally, his voice soft. He shook his head. “We can’t land in LaGuardia...and we can’t land back in 1939. We’ve got to try again. That’s all that’s left. Try again.”

Craig nodded toward the flight-deck door. “What about the passengers?”

“I think we had better let them in on it now.” Farver flicked on the PA. system and reached for the mike. “Ladies and gentlemen,’’ he said, his voice firm, full of resolve, no condescension, no fake optimism. “What I’m going to tell you is something I can’t explain. The crew is as much in the dark as you are. Because if you look out on the left-hand side of the aircraft...you’ll see directly below us an area called Lake Success. And those buildings down there aren’t the United Nations. They happen to be...” his voice faltered for a moment then came back on. “They happen to be the World’s Fair.”

Down the length of the plane the loudspeaker carried Captain William Farver’s voice and the passengers listened as a nightmare began to close in on them.

“What I’m trying to tell you,” Farver’s voice told them, “is that somehow, someway...this aircraft has gone back into time and it’s 1939. What we’re going to do now is increase our speed, get into the same jet-stream and attempt to go through the sound barrier we’ve already broken twice before. I don’t know if we can do it. All I ask of you is that you remain calm...
and pray
.”

In the cockpit, Farver pulled the yoke forward and the 707 once again pointed toward the sky.

The giant aircraft disappeared through the heavy overcast. Its roaring engines grew indistinct and faded out, leaving a silence in its wake and a long jet trail that was picked up by the wind and carried away.

Thirty thousand feet below, it was 1939 and people gaped at the wondrous exhibits. There was the waterfall in front of the Italian building; the beautiful marble statuary that fronted the Polish pavilion; the exquisite detail of the tapestry and wood carvings shown by the smiling Japanese. And the people walked happily through a warm June afternoon, seeing only the sunlight and not knowing that darkness was falling over the world.

***

She was a Trans-Ocean jet airliner on her way from London to New York, on an uneventful June afternoon in the year 1961.She was last heard from six hundred miles south of Newfoundland, then somehow she was swallowed up into the vast design of things, to be searched for on land, on sea, and in the air by anguished human beings, fearful of what they’d find.

You and I, however, know where she is. You and I know what happened. So if some moment...any moment...you hear the sound of jet engines flying atop the overcast...engines that sound searching and lost...engines that sound desperate...shoot up a flare. Or do something. That would be Trans-Ocean 33 trying to get home...from The Twilight Zone.

Dust

There was a village built of crumbling clay and rotting wood. It squatted, ugly, under a broiling sun, like a sick, mangy animal waiting to die. It had a name, but the name was of little consequence. It had an age, but few people cared how old it was. It lay somewhere in the Southwest on the fringe of a desert—a two-block-long main street, limed with squalid frame stores and a few adobe huts. They shook and wheezed and groaned like fired old men whenever a wagon went by (which was seldom), raising the dust and leaving it to hang like a fog.

On this day, even the few stores that were not boarded up had closed their doors. Scrawled signs announced that each was “Closed For The Funeral” or “Will Be Open After Funeral.” And also, on this day, the street was empty, save for a swaybacked horse pushing an aged snout into a water trough and flicking off the glossy green flies that descended on its flanks by the hundreds. Its switching tail was the only movement on the main street. Sounds came loudly and intermittently from around the corner; hammering, the creak of boards, then the sound as of some heavy object being dropped through the air only to be caught up short.