by Rod Serling
The Captain looked toward the closed door. "And so should I. Obviously it's some kind of hoax. And obviously it's an outrageous one. And there's no doubt in my mind that he's been carefully coached."
"Coached?" the ship's doctor asked.
The Captain nodded. "And in spite of that—he supplied us a few pieces to the puzzle."
The ship's doctor looked bewildered. "Like what?" he asked.
" 'Fouled the iceberg,' That's what he said." The Captain pointed to the closed door. " 'Iceberg, a point on the starboard bow.' Doctor, that's a sailor talking. But in whose service?"
Slowly, his shoulders hunched, the Captain started toward the stairway. The ship's doctor followed him. At the foot of the stairs the Captain stopped and looked straight ahead, deep in thought.
The ship's doctor's voice was tentative. "I don't think I understand," he began.
The Captain turned to him, his voice grim. "I'm wondering if it's possible your patient was put adrift for a very specific purpose."
"Purpose? You've lost me, Captain."
The Captain put one foot on the first rung of stairs. "To slow us down, man. To make us alter course. I know that sounds altogether incredible, doctor . . . but you know, there is a war on."
He looked down the length of the passageway toward the Infirmary door, then turned and started a slow walk up the stairs, leaving the ship's doctor staring up at him.
On the bulkhead wall a life preserver made a small sideward movement in a sudden swell. On it was stencilled, "The Lusitania."
An infirmary attendant came out of the patient's room into the passageway just as the ship's doctor came down the stairs. The ship's bell rang eleven times. The attendant balanced a tray with two plates of untouched food. The ship's doctor noted it briefly. "Not eating?" he asked.
The attendant shook his head. "Not a morsel, sir—which is odd, if you'll forgive me. Poor bloke's thin as a drainpipe. Hasn't got a pound of flesh on his bones. Looks to be proper starving is what he looks." He looked down at the tray. "Still—I couldn't get a cracker into him."
The ship's doctor moved past him to the Infirmary door, opened it, and entered. A small orange night light sent darting shadows around the room. The ship's doctor approached the bed and leaned over.
The survivor was awake, his eyes wide open.
"No appetite, I'm told," the ship's doctor said.
The survivor stared straight up at the ceiling. "What time is it?"
"Shortly after eight."
The survivor's voice sounded hollow, strangely like some kind of sepulchral confession. "Dog Watch just ended," he said.
Again the ship's doctor tried to read something in the skin-tight, unrevealing face. Despite himself, he felt an unbidden thrill. What if the man were a spy? What if he knew something that no one else knew? What if he asked the time because he knew that at a certain hour—
The ship's doctor unconsciously shook his head. Paranoia, he thought. But God, in a ship at sea during wartime, you could conjure up any kind of jeopardy. He forced an evenness to his tone. "Were you a member of the Titanic's crew?" he asked.
"Stoker."
The ship's doctor smiled, or at least tried to smile. "Well," he said in a bedside tone, "if you want to ship out again when we reach London, I'd recommend taking some nourishment."
The man on the bed turned to study him. The oversized eyes in the undersized face seemed to glow fanatically in the night light. "This ship's the Lusitania," he said softly, as if trying to authenticate that which he already knew.
"That's right," the ship's doctor answered.
The survivor lifted a thin, veined hand to his beard-
stubbled chin. "It's 1915," he said.
The ship's doctor nodded.
"I've been in that lifeboat for three years."
It was chilling just to hear him say it—chilling. To voice the impossible as if it were a matter of record.
"Well, now," the ship's doctor said, his voice nervous. "Well, now—we both know you couldn't have been in a lifeboat for three years."
The room, the ship's doctor noted, in another portion of his mind, had grown suddenly silent. It was as if the engines had stopped—that constant, rhythmic, pounding noise of dynamos that somehow fused into the subconscious and disappeared—now it was as if they were nonexistent. The room was utterly silent.
The survivor's voice seemed louder in the stillness. "A question to you, doctor," he said. "How do you know what I've told you isn't possible? Listen to me—listen to me and then tell me if you still think it's impossible.''
Not a spy, the ship's doctor thought. Spies fitted molds. Cold, callous, always planning kind of chaps. But this man . . . those haunted eyes . . . the anguish that seemed so much a part of him—deranged, of course, but not a spy.
He leaned forward. "Tell me about it," he said.
For a moment the survivor's lips moved with no words forthcoming; then he abruptly tore his gaze from the ship's doctor and stared fixedly toward the wall. His voice sounded choked. "Have you ever been frightened, doctor? I mean, so frightened you'd do anything to survive? Have you?"
Humor him, the ship's doctor thought. Always humor the deranged. Give them at least that much comfort.
"Fortunately," the ship's doctor said, "I've never found myself in that kind of situation."
The skeletal face turned to him again. "I have," the survivor said. He took a deep breath. "She was down by the bow and going fast. When I tried to get into a lifeboat, they stopped me. No crew members. Just women and children."
"That's a traditional rule of the sea," the ship's doctor said, his voice slightly aimless, like a kind of absentminded teacher.
The survivor stared at him. "Sure. Sure—unless you're standing on a tilted deck heading into icy water that'Il kill you in three minutes. Then you don't think about traditional rules of the sea."
A silence. The ship's doctor waited. "So you put on a dress," he said finally.
The survivor nodded. "And a muffler to hide my face. And I knocked a half a dozen people aside and got on. While they were lowering her, one of the cables broke. She capsized. But I hung on. Somehow I hung on. When she hit the water, I was the only one who had."
The silence, the ship's doctor thought—the incredible silence of the room and the ship. No ship's engines. No creaking bulkheads. No metallic tinkle of dishes or glassware. No squeak of a ship's lamp as it undulated slowly in the ocean's swell. There was absolutely no sound.
And then the survivor's voice continued. "The ship's band was playing. Some kind of hymn. And there was this . . . this great wailing cry. I could look up at the deck and see faces along the rail. Hundreds of faces. Then there was this explosion. She was going down by the bow, and everything inside that ship was moving. Pianos, furniture, deck chairs—everything . . . all crashing down into the bow. And then there was this . . . this cry. Then one by one the funnels disappeared . . . and then the ship. Then there was nothing but bodies floating. Stars . . . dead calm . . . and bodies."
The ship's doctor felt mesmerized.
The voice of the survivor continued in a dead monotone. The night light swayed back and forth from the ceiling.
"An illusion," the ship's doctor finally managed to say. "Understand? It had to be an illusion. You couldn't have been on the Titanic. You couldn't have survived in an open boat for three years."
He rose from the chair, bewildered and shaken by the spectral voice and the skeletal figure who spoke so calmly and so believingly about something that was beyond belief.
"There is an explanation for this," he said. "A rational, believable, altogether understandable explanation. And it'll come out eventually. In the meantime—"
The survivor interrupted him. "In the meantime, doctor—let me tell you something."
The ship's doctor felt his hand shake, and it was suddenly hard to breathe.
The man on the bed swung his legs over the side and rested them on the floor. Skin and bones. Skeleton. Just
a frame covered by a thin parchment of flesh.
"You're going to be hit by a torpedo," the man said, "off the Old Head of Kindale. You're going down in eighteen minutes flat."
The voice was so soft, so matter-of-fact, that for a moment the ship's doctor found it difficult to connect tone with words. What had the man said? Something about a torpedo? Something about going down in eighteen minutes? And what had the Captain said? The man was a spy.
"By God," the ship's doctor said finally. "By God, you are a German agent."
For the first time the survivor smiled—thin, slit mouth just slightly turned up. "A German agent? I wish . . . I wish to God I was." He shook his head. "No, doctor, I'm no agent. Not a spy. Not a saboteur. But you know something? I'm beginning to understand just what I am."
Again the blanketing silence.
"What . . . are . . . you?" the ship's doctor asked. The survivor stood up, swaying slightly, holding onto the night table for support. "I'll tell you what I am, doctor," he said. "I'm a Flying Dutchman, built of flesh, blood, and bones. Damned and doomed. An eternity of lifeboats . . . rescues . . . and then—"
"—And then forever being picked up by doomed ships," the ship's doctor said to the Captain as they sat in his cabin. An early-morning light filtered through the porthole as the night gave way to day.
The Captain sat behind his desk and folded his hands behind his head. "Justice, of the poetic sort," he said, smiling.
"He believes it," the ship's doctor said.
The Captain's smile was fixed. "Does he, now? He believes it." He leaned farther back in his chair. "Very fanciful," he said. "Altogether bizarre." Then he put his hands down on top of the desk. "Except for a very notable flaw. If this is his damnation, his punishment for an act of cowardice "
"He believes that it is," the ship's doctor interrupted.
The Captain shook his head. "So we take a torpedo and share his punishment?" He smiled. "Not exactly fair, you'll admit, since none of us have done anything to make us damned and doomed, eh?"
"It doesn't work that way," the ship's doctor said, as if pleading a case. "He tells me that when the torpedo hits only he'll be aware of it. We're only here to . . . to people the scene, so to speak."
The Captain rose from behind the desk, the smile gradually fading. "So. And following that logic, it means that you and I are—"
"Phantoms," the ship's doctor said. "Phantoms, Captain. Ghosts of what we were."
The Captain walked over to the porthole and stared out at the brightening sky. "Now, that's interesting," he said. "Especially interesting in light of the fact that I don't feel at all like a phantom. To the contrary, doctor, I feel—"
He turned as he spoke, and whatever words were to follow were choked off and left deep inside his throat.
He was alone in the room. There was no ship's doctor. Inside his mind the machinery of logic roared and pulsated; the mental process that manufactured rationale, that explained away the impossible, that offered up the clues, the excuses, the reasons to explain the totally unexplainable.
The room was empty.
The ship's doctor had disappeared.
And the machinery in the Captain's head stripped gears and went off in screaming tangents, thoughts colliding with thoughts and terror laying claim to the debris. Like some kind of partially destroyed robot, he forced his legs over to the ship's phone on the wall and tried to reach the bridge.
"Bridge, this is the Captain. Come in, bridge. This is the Captain, bridge. Come in—"
Three decks above him the bridge was empty of men. The dials of the instruments moved; the ship's phone undulated gently on its hook; the needle of the giant compass above the Helmsman's wheel moved left and right in sporadic little stops and gos.
And then the Captain's cabin was empty.
The survivor forced himself through empty passageways, down silent decks, into cavernous salons and mausoleumlike dining rooms. When he reached the deck, he went directly to the rail and looked out at the quiet sea. And then he saw it. A tiny black broom handle sticking up above the water.
"Periscope," he screamed. "Periscope off the starboard bow!"
He looked wildly up and down the empty deck.
"Periscope," he screamed again, "off the starboard bow!"
He raced up a ladderway to the deck above him. And then he saw the torpedo. It slivered through the water at a breathless speed, leaving a wake of frosty bubbles. Then another torpedo, and still a third. His world exploded into a flash of blinding whiteness. He felt an incredible pain, and then for a time he felt nothing at all.
The ocean liner, gleaming white and graceful as a porpoise, sped swiftly across the quiet sea.
On the bridge came the voice of a Lookout through the ship's speaker. "Object dead ahead," the metallic voice rasped.
The men on the bridge lifted up binoculars and peered through the glass.
"Incredible," said the Officer of the Watch.
"What is it?" asked the Quartermaster.
"A ship's boat," the Officer of the Watch answered. "Appears to be . . . one survivor."
A tall, gray-bearded Captain entered the bridge. "Any sign of life?" he asked.
"One survivor, sir," the Officer of the Watch responded, "but—"
"But what?"
The Officer of the Watch took off his binoculars and handed them to the Captain. "You'd best look for yourself, sir."
The Captain lifted the binoculars and peered through the glass. "That can't be," he said in a quiet little voice. He lowered the binoculars, then turned toward the Officer of the Watch. "Get a small boatman and lower him immediately. We'll stop for a recovery." Again he raised the binoculars. "I think someone must be playing a joke. You read the name of the bow, Carlos?"
The Officer of the Watch gulped. "Yes, sir, I do. It reads . . . 'The Lusitania,' sir."
The Captain took a deep breath. "The Lusitania," he said. "Sunk—forty-odd years ago. And this is one of her lifeboats?" He shook his head, rejecting the entire thing. "Stop engines," he ordered.
"Stop engines," the Quartermaster repeated.
"Starboard, two degrees," the Captain said to the Helmsman.
The Helmsman, following his compass, turned the wheel slightly to the right and felt a combination chill and sweat. He had to wipe the perspiration from his brow where little rivulets of water were dripping down from his seaman's cap a cap which read "S.S. Andrea Doria."
There was a ship's whistle, and then the grinding halt of the engines; and in the little lifeboat the survivor looked toward the approaching rescuers. He wondered how long it would be this time. And how would the death come. Then he felt the jar and scrape of the other boat hitting the gunwales of his own. He fainted as eager arms reached out to pull him to what they thought was safety.
Make Me Laugh
His mother was a cooch dancer, his father a carnival donicker, and he arrived on earth a squalling, protesting lard-ass—fat and ugly, screaming around the clock, as if someone had already told his fortune and whispered it into his mother's womb for him to hear.
His last name was Slatsky—and they named him Jacob. But no one ever called him by name, even as an infant. They called him "Fats"—always as a description and never as an endearment.
By the time he was five, his infant ugliness had taken root in his piggish little face and obese little body. When he was ten, his father abandoned his mother. When he was fifteen, his mother deserted him. And by the time he was twenty, he had forsaken his name and become Jackie Slater.
Jackie Slater. A balding, baggy-pants fat man who did stand-up monologues in third-rate "nightclubs"—smelly little places with broken neon signs—and he would stand in front of a cheap and distorting microphone, wheezing out broad burlesque in between arthritic acrobats and over-the-hill, big-thighed dancing girls, playing to bored boozers who had either heard his jokes or didn't want to hear them.
Jackie Slater. An overweight thief of other people's material, trying to be Jackie Gleason
, Sam Levenson, or Joe Miller; trying to be anybody and everybody just to squeeze out laughter from the grim dark silhouettes sitting at tables beyond the spotlight. He was bad. A coaxer and a cajoler. A classless clown, freakish but not funny. Gross. Wheedling. Desperately cute. A hippopotamus in ruffled panties, waddling around the stage, sweating his life away in one-nighters.
Myron's Mecca was a roadhouse outside of Corning, New York. On the walls were faded murals from the Arabian Nights, looking like bad cartoons. The two waitresses, dressed as harem girls, looked like two crone rejects from a long-dead Sultan; the bartender wore a Shriner's fez with a bare spot underneath a beaded scimitar with the faded lettering "Scranton, Pa." The place smelled of stale beer mixed occasionally with the wafting salty scent of a fresher liquid when the door leading to the rest rooms was opened and closed. Beaded curtains had been hung behind a six-foot-square platform which served as a stage, and there was a dissonant four-piece combo, now mercifully silent as Jackie Slater stood on the stage, clutching a microphone and dying.
"You like this suit? It's a chopped-liver gray. Nice fit? My girl friend says it looks more like a convulsion.''
Silence in the audience. A half-dozen bored drunks. One short, staccato burst of laughter, and then a highpitched female giggle. On Jackie's pale, perspiring, uncooked dough face, a hopeful half-smile, quickly erased. The man had poured a drink down the dress of a peroxide bimbo and laughed. The bimbo had giggled.
"Yessir—more like a convulsion," Jackie perspired and repeated and milked.
"It is—you ain't," said a man at the bar, and the bartender chuckled.
Jackie gripped the microphone fighter. "Just the other day," he said, "I met some very good friends of mine out in front of the Plaza in New York. That's where I was living at the time. Out in front of the Plaza."
Silence from the audience, then somebody coughed. Somebody else overturned a glass.
"Yessir," Jackie repeated, "that's where I was living at the time—out in front of the Plaza."