The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (5 page)

The kid ambled toward the mound. It was obvious that at this moment he wished he were back in Memphis, Tennessee, sorting black-eyed peas. He took the ball from the second baseman, rubbed it up, then reached down for the rosin bag. He rubbed his hands with the bag then rubbed the ball, then rubbed the bag then put down the ball, wound up and threw the rosin bag. As it turned out, this was his best pitch of the evening. Shortly thereafter he walked six men in a row and hit one man in the head. Luckily, it was a hotdog vendor in the bleachers so that no harm was done in terms of moving any of the men on base. This was taken care of by his next pitch to the number-four batter on the Philadelphia Phillies squad, who swung with leisurely grace at what the kid from Memphis referred to as his fast ball, and sent it on a seven-hundred-foot trip over the center field fence, which took care of the men on the bases. The final score was thirteen to nothing in favor of the Phillies, but Mouth McGarry didn’t even wait until the last out. With two outs in the ninth, he and Beasley ran out of the park and grabbed a cab. Beasley handed the driver a quarter and said, “Never mind the cops. Get to the hospital.”

The hackie looked at the quarter then back toward Beasley and said, “This better be a rare mint, or I’ll see to it that you have your baby in the cab!”

They arrived at the hospital twelve minutes later and pushed their way through a lobby full of reporters to get to an elevator and up to the floor where Casey had been taken for observation. They arrived in his room during the last stages of the examination. A nurse shushed them as they barged into the room.

“Booby,” McGarry gushed, racing toward the bed.

The doctor took off his stethoscope and hung it around his neck. “You the father?” he asked Mouth.

“The father,” McGarry chortled. “I’m closer than any father.”

He noticed now for the first time that Dr. Stillman was sitting quietly in the corner of the room looking like a kindly old owl full of wisdom hidden under his feathers.

“Well, gentlemen, there’s no fracture that I can see,” the doctor announced, professionally. “No concussion. Reflexes seem normal—”

Beasley exhaled sounding like a strong north wind. “I can breathe again,” he told everyone.

“All I could think of,” Mouth said, “was there goes Casey! There goes the pennant! There goes the Series!” He shook his head forlornly, “And there goes my career.”

The doctor picked up Casey’s wrist and began to feel for the pulse.

“Yes, Mr. Casey,” he smiled benevolently down into the expressionless face and unblinking eyes, “I think you’re in good shape. I’ll tell you though, when I heard how the ball hit you in the temple I wondered to myself how—”

The doctor stopped talking. His fingers compulsively moved around the wrist. His eyes went wide. After a moment he opened up Casey’s pajamas and sent now shaking fingers running over the chest area. After a moment he stood up, took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

“What’s the matter?” Mouth asked nervously. “What’s wrong?”

The doctor sat down in a chair. “There’s nothing wrong, he said softly. “Not a thing wrong. Everything’s fine. It’s just that—”

“Just that what? Beasley asked.

The doctor pointed a finger toward the bed. “It is just that this man doesn’t have any pulse. No heart beat.” Then he looked up toward the ceiling. “This man,” he said in a strained voice, “this man isn’t alive.”

There was absolute silence in the room marred only by the slump of Beasley’s body as he slid quietly to the floor. No one paid any attention to him. It was Dr. Stillman who finally spoke.

“Mr. McGarry,” he said in a quiet, firm voice, “I do believe it’ll have to come out now.”

Beasley opened his eyes. “All right, you sonofabitch, McGarry, what are you trying to pull off?”

Mouth looked around the room as if searching for an extra bed. He looked ill. “Beasley,” he said plaintively, “you ain’t gonna like this. But it was Casey or it was nothing. God, what a pitcher! And he was the only baseball player I ever managed who didn’t eat nothing—”

Stillman cleared his throat and spoke to the doctor. “I think you should know before you go any further that Casey has no pulse or heart beat...because he hasn’t any heart. He’s a robot—”

There was the sound of another slump as Bertram Beasley fell back unconscious. This time he didn’t move.

“A what?” the doctor asked incredulously.

“That’s right,” Stillman said. “A robot.”

The doctor stared at Casey on the bed who stared right back at him. “Are you sure?” the doctor asked in a hushed voice.

“Oh, by all means. I built him.”

The doctor slowly removed his coat and then took off his tie. He marched toward the bed with his eyes strangely wide and bright. “Casey,” he announced, “get up and strip. Hear me? Get up and strip.”

Casey got up and stripped and twenty minutes later the doctor had opened the window and was leaning out breathing in the evening air. Then he turned, removed his stethoscope from around his neck and put it in his black bag. He took the blood pressure equipment from the night-stand and added this to the bag. He made a mental note to check the X rays as soon as they came out, but knew this would be gratuitous because it was all very, very evident. The man on the bed wasn’t a man at all. He was one helluva specimen, but a man he wasn’t! The doctor lit a cigarette and looked across the room.

“Under the circumstances,” he said, “I’m afraid I must notify the baseball commissioner. That’s the only ethical procedure.”

“What do you have to be ethical about it for?” McGarry challenged him. “What the hell are you—a Giants fan?”

The doctor didn’t answer. He took the twenty or thirty sheets of paper that he’d been making notes on and rammed them in his pocket. He mentally ran down the list of medical societies and organizations that would have to be informed of this. He also devised the opening three or four paragraphs to a monumental paper he’d write for a medical journal on the first mechanical man. He was in for a busy time. He carried his black bag to the door, smiled and went out, wondering just how the American Medical Association would react to this one. The only sound left in the room was Beasley’s groaning, until McGarry walked over to Casey on the bed.

“Casey,” he said forlornly, “would you move over?”

The Daily Mirror
had it first because one of the interns in the maternity ward was really a leg man for them. But the two wire services picked it up twenty minutes later and by six the following morning the whole world knew about Casey—the mechanical man. Several scientists were en route from Europe, and Dr. Stillman and Casey were beleaguered in a New York hotel room by an army of photographers and reporters. Three missile men at Cape Canaveral sent up a fabulous rocket that hit the moon dead eye only to discover that the feat made page twelve of the afternoon editions because the first eleven pages were devoted exclusively to a meeting to be held by the commissioner of baseball, who had announced he would make a decision on the Casey case by suppertime.

At four-thirty that afternoon the commissioner sat behind his desk, drumming on it with the end of a pencil. A secretary brought him a folder filled with papers and in the brief moment of the office door opening, he could see the mob of reporters out in the corridor.

“What about the reporters?” the secretary asked him.

Mouth McGarry, sitting in a chair close to the desk, made a suggestion at this point as to what might be done to the reporters or, more specifically, what they could do to themselves. The secretary looked shocked and left the room. The commissioner leaned back in his chair.

“You understand, McGarry,” he said, “that I’m going to have to put this out for publication. Casey must definitely be suspended.”

Bertram Beasley, sitting on a couch across the room, made a little sound deep in his throat, but stayed conscious.

“Why?” Mouth demanded noisily.

The commissioner pounded a fist on the desk top. “Because he’s a robot, Goddamn it,” he said for the twelfth time that hour.

Mouth spread out his palms. “So he’s a robot,” he said simply.

Once again the commissioner picked up a large manual. “Article six, section two, the Baseball Code,” he said pontifically. “I quote: ‘A team should consist of nine men’ end of quote. Men, understand, McGarry? Nine
men
. Not robots.”

Beasley’s voice was a thin little noise from the couch. “Commissioner,” he said weakly. “To all intents and purposes—he is human.” Then he looked across the room at the tall pitcher who stood in the shadows practically unnoticed. “Casey, talk to him. Tell him about yourself.”

Casey swallowed. “What—what should I say?” he asked hesitantly.

“See,” Mouth shouted. “He talks as good as me. And he’s a whole helluva lot smarter than most of the muttonheads I got on my ball team!”

The commissioner’s fist pounded on the desk.
“He is not human!”

Again the weak voice of desperation from the couch. “How human do you want him?” the general manager asked. “He’s got arms, legs, a face. He talks—”

“And no heart,” the commissioner shouted. “He doesn’t even own a heart. How could he be human without a heart?”

McGarry’s voice absolutely dripped with unassailable logic and fundamental truth. “Beasley don’t have a heart neither,” he said, “And he owns forty percent of the club.”

The commissioner pushed the papers away from him and put the flat of his hands down on the desk. This was a gesture of finality and it fitted perfectly the judicial tone of his voice. “That’s it, gentlemen,” he announced. “He doesn’t have a heart. That means he isn’t human, and that’s a clear violation of the baseball code. Therefore he doesn’t play.”

The door opened and Dr. Stillman walked quietly into the room in time to hear the last words of this proclamation. He waved at Casey who waved back. Then he turned to the commissioner.

“Mr. Commissioner,” he said.

The commissioner stopped halfway to his feet and looked at the old man. “Now what?” he asked tiredly.

Stillman walked over to the desk. “Supposing,” he asked, “we gave him a heart? If that essentially is the only thing that makes him different from the norm, I believe I could operate and supply him with a mechanical heart.”

“That’s thinking!” McGarry shrieked into the room.

Beasley inched forward on the couch and took out a cigar. The commissioner sat back and looked very, very thoughtful. “This is irregular. This is highly irregular.” Then he picked up the telephone and asked to speak to the examining physician who had sent in the report in the first place. “Doctor,” he asked, “relative to the Casey matter, if he were to be given a mechanical heart—would you classify him as—what I mean is—would you call him a—” Then he held the phone close to his face, nodding into it. “Thank you very much, Doctor.”

The commissioner looked across the room at Casey. He drummed on the desk top with the pencil, puckered up his lips and made smacking sounds inside of his mouth. McGarry took out his bottle of pills and plopped three of them into his mouth.

“All right,” the commissioner announced. “
With
a heart, I’ll give him a temporary okay until the League meeting in November. Then we’ll have to take it up again. The other clubs are gonna scream bloody murder!”

Beasley struggled to his feet. The look of massive relief on his face shone like a beacon. “It’s all settled then,” he said. “Casey here needs an accreditation as being human and this requires a simple—” He stopped, looking over toward Stillman. “Simple?” he asked.

“Relatively,” Stillman answered.

Beasley nodded. “A simple operation having to do with a mechanical heart.” He walked across the room to the door and opened it. The reporters, milling around, stopped talking instantly. “Gentlemen,” Beasley called out to them, “you may quote me.”