Field of Fantasies

by Rick Wilber

  “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 nights tan d and added it 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 Giant 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 deadeye, 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 in 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?”

  McCarty’s voice absolutely dripped with unassailable logic and fundamental truth. “Beasley don’t have a heart neither,” he said, “and he owns forty per cent 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 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.”

  The reporters made a beeline for the door and within a moment had filled up

  the room.

  “You may quote me, gentlemen,” Beasley repeated when the room was quiet once again. “The mighty Casey will be back in the lineup within forty-eight hours.” He threw another questioning look at Stillman. “Forty-eight hours?”

  “About,” Stillman answered quietly.

  Questions shot around the room like bolts of lightning, and for the next few moments McGarry, Beasley, and Casey were inundated by notebooks and cigarette smoke. Then the room started to empty. Mouth McGarry took a position close to the desk, stuck a cigar in his mouth, lit it, took a deep drag and held it out away from his body, gently flicking ashes on the door.

&nbs
p; “Gendemen,” he announced, “as manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, I want to tell you, and since I was the man who discovered Casey—”

  The reporters rapidly left the room, followed by the commissioner and his secretary, followed by Casey and Stillman.

  “It behooves me to tell you, gentlemen,” Mouth continued, wetting his lips over the word “behooves” and wondering to himself where he got the word. “It behooves me to make mention of the fact that the Brooklyn Dodgers are the team to beat. We’ve got the speed, the stamina,” he recollected now the Pat O’Brien speech in the Knute Rockne picture—“the vim, the vigor, the vitality—”

  He was unaware of the door slamming shut and unaware that Bertram Beasley was the only other man in the room. “And with this kind of stuff,” he continued, in the Knute Rockne voice, “the National League pennant and the World Series and—”

  “McGarry,” Beasley yelled at him.

  Mouth started as if suddenly waking from a dream.

  Beasley rose from the couch. “Why don’t you drop dead?” He walked out of the room, leaving Mouth all by himself, wondering how Pat O’Brien wound up that speech in the locker room during the halftime of that vital Army—Notre Dame game.

  How either McGarry or Bertram Beasley got through the next twenty-odd hours was a point of conjecture with both of them. Mouth emptied his bottle of nerve pills and spent a sleepless night pacing his hotel-room floor. Beasley could recall only brief moments of consciousness between swoons that occurred every time the phone rang.

  The following night the team was dressing in the locker room. They were playing the first of a five-game series against the New York Giants, and McGarry had already devised nine different batteries, then tom them all up. He now sat on a bench surveying his absolutely silent ballplayers. There was not a sound. At intervals each pair of eyes would turn toward the phone on the wall. Beasley had already phoned Dr. Stillman’s residence seven times that evening and received no answer. He was on the phone now, talking to the long-distance operator in New Jersey.

  “Yeah,” Beasley said into the phone. “Yeah, well, thank you very much, operator.”

  Mouth and the rest of the players waited expectantly. “Well?” Mouth asked. “How is he?”

  Beasley shook his head. “I don’t know. The operator still can’t get an answer.”

  Monk, the big catcher, rose from the bench. “Maybe he’s right in the middle of the operation,” he suggested.

  Mouth whirled around at him, glaring. “So he’s in the middle of the operation! Whatsa matter, he can’t use one hand to pick up a phone?” He loafed up at the clock on the wall, then jutted his jaw fiercely, his eyes scanning the bench. “We can’t wait no longer,” he announced. “I got to turn in a battery. Corrigan,” he said, pointing toward one of the players, “you’ll pitch tonight. And now the rest of you guys!” He stuck his hands in his back pockets and paced back and forth in front of them in a rather stylized imitation of Pat O’Brien.

  “All right, you guys,” he said grimly. “All right, you guys!” He stopped pacing and pointed toward the door. “That’s the enemy out there,” he said, his voice quivering a little. “That’s the New York Giants.” He spoke the words as if they were synonymous with a social disease. “And while we’re out there playing

  tonight”—again his voice quivered—“there’s a big fellah named Casey lying on a table, struggling to stay alive.”

  Tears shone in Monk’s eyes as the big catcher got a mental picture of a courageous kid lying on a hospital table. Gippy Resnick, the third baseman, sniffed and then honked into a handkerchief as a little knot of sentiment tightened up his throat. Bertram Beasley let out a sob as he thought about what the attendance record was, six weeks B.C.—before Casey—and did some more projecting on what it would be without Casey. Mouth McGarry walked back and forth before the line of players.

  “I know,” he said, his voice tight and strained. “I know that his last words before that knife went into his chest were—’Go up there, Dodgers, and win one for the big guy!”’

  The last words of this speech were choked by the tears that rolled down McGarry’s face and the sob that caught in his own chest.

  The street door to the locker room opened and Dr. Stillman came in, followed by Casey. But all the players were watching Mouth McGarry, who had now moved into his big finale scene.

  “I want to tell you something, guys! From now on”—he sniffed loudly— “from now on there’s gonna be a ghost in that dugout. Every time you pick up a bat, look over to where Casey used to sit—because he’s gonna be there in spirit rooting for us, cheering for us, yellin’, ‘Go Dodgers, go!’”—McGarry turned and looked at Casey, who was smiling at him. Mouth nodded perfunctorily. “Hello there, Casey,” he said and turned back to the team. “Now I’m gonna tell you something else about that big guy. This fellah has a heart. Not a real heart, maybe, but this fellah that’s lyin’ there with a hole in his chest—”

  Mouth s lower jaw dropped seven inches, as he turned very slowly to look at Casey. He had no chance to say anything, however, because the team had pushed him aside as they rushed toward the hero, shaking his hand, pounding him on the back, pulling, grabbing, shouting at him. Mouth spent a moment recovering and then screamed, “All right, knock it off! Let’s have quiet! Quiet! QUIET!” He pulled players away from Casey and finally stood in front of the big pitcher. “Well?” he asked.

  Stillman smiled. “Go ahead, Casey. Tell him.”

  It was then that everyone in the room noticed Casey’s face. He was smiling. It was a big smile. A broad smile. An enveloping smile. It went across his face and up and down. It shone in his eyes. “Listen, Mr. McGarry,” he said proudly. He pointed a thumb at his chest and Mouth put his ear there. He could hear the steady tick, tick, tick.

  Mouth stepped back and shouted excitedly. “You got a heart!”

  There was a chorus of delighted exclamation and comment from all the players and Beasley, poised for a faint, decided against it.

  “And look at that smile,” Stillman said over the shouting. “That’s the one thing I couldn’t get him to do before—smile!”

  Casey threw his arm around the old man. “It’s wonderful. It’s just wonderful. Now I feel—I feel—like—togetherness!”

  The team roared their approval and Bertram Beasley mounted a rubbing-table, cupping his hands like a megaphone, and shouted, “All right, Dodgers, out on the field. Let’s go, team. Casey starts tonight. The new Casey!”

  The team thundered out onto the field, pushing Mouth McGarry out of the way and blotting out the first part of the speech which had begun, “All right, you guys, with vim, vigor and vital—” He never got to finish the speech because Monk, Resnick, and a utility infielder had carried him with their momentum out the door and up to the dugout.

  When Casey’s name was announced as the starter for the Dodgers that night the crowd let out a roar that dwarfed any thunder ever heard in or around the environs of New York City. And when Casey stepped out on the field and headed toward the mound, fifty-seven thousand eight hundred and thirty-three people stood up and applauded as one, and it was only the second baseman who, as he carried the ball over to the pitcher, noticed that there were tears in Casey’s eyes and an expression on his face that made him pause. True, he’d never seen any expression on Casey’s face before, but this one made him stop and look over his shoulder as he went back to his base.

  The umpire shouted, “Play ball,” and the Dodgers began the running stream of chatter that always prefaced the first pitch. Monk, behind the plate, made a signal and then held up his glove as a target. Start with a fast ball, he thought. Let them know what they’re up against, jar them a little bit. Confuse them. Unnerve them. That was the way Monk planned his strategy behind the plate. Not that much strategy was needed when Casey was on the mound, but it was always good to show the big guns first. Casey nodded, went into his windup and threw. Twelve seconds later a woman in a third-floor apartment three blo
cks away had her bedroom window smashed by a baseball that had traveled in the neighborhood of seven hundred feet out of Tebbet’s Field.

  Meanwhile, back at the field, the crowd just sat there silently as the lead-off batter of the New York Giants ambled around the base path heading home to the outstretched hands of several fellow Giants greeting him after his lead-off home run.

  Mouth McGarry at this moment felt that he would never again suffer a stab of depression such as the one that now intruded into his head. He would recall later that his premonition was quite erroneous. He would feel stabs of depressions in innings number two, three and four that would make that first stab of depression seem like the after-effect of a Miltown tablet. That’s how bad it got forty-five minutes later, when Casey had allowed nine hits, had walked six men, had thrown two wild pitches, and had muffed a pop fly to the mound, which, McGarry roared to the bench around him, “could have been caught by a palsied Civil War veteran who lost an arm at Gettysburg.”

  In the seventh inning Mouth McGarry took his fifth walk over to the mound and this time didn’t return to the bench till he’d motioned to the bullpen for Casey’s relief—a very eager kid, albeit a nervous one, who chewed tobacco going to the mound and got violently sick as he crossed the third-base line because he’d swallowed a piece. Coughing hard, he arrived at the mound and took the ball from Mouth McGarry. Casey solemnly shoved his mitt into his hip pocket and took the long walk back toward the showers.

  At ten minutes to midnight the locker room had been emptied. All the players save Casey had gone back to the hotel. Bertram Beasley had left earlier—on a stretcher in the sixth inning. In the locker room were a baseball manager who produced odd grunts from deep within his throat and kept shaking his head back and forth—and a kindly white-haired old man who built robots. Casey came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel. He smiled gently at Mouth and then went over to his locker, where he proceeded to dress.

  “Well?” Mouth shouted at him. “Well? One minute he’s three Lefty Groves, the next minute he’s the cousin to every New York Giant who ever lived. He’s a tanker. He’s a nothing. All right—you wanna tell me, Casey? You wanna explain? You might start by telling me how one man can throw nine pitched balls and give up four singles, two doubles, a triple and two home runs!”