by Rod Serling
From Rod Serling’s closing narration, “The Mighty Casey,”
The Twilight Zone, scheduled for telecast March 25, 1960,
CBS Television Network.
A BASEBALL FIELD-LONG ANGLE SHOT
It is empty and in absolute quiet.
NARRATOR’S VOICE
Once upon a time there was a major league team called the Brooklyn Dodgers who during the last year of their existence as a ball team wound up in last place and shortly thereafter wound up in oblivion. They are rarely if ever mentioned in these parts again. Rumor has it that a ball club on the West Coast is the residue of what was left of the original ball club.
(a pause)
And on occasion in a dark bar off Flatbush Avenue, someone might whisper the name of a certain pitcher with an exceptional left hand. Somebody else will softly murmur the question—whatever happened to the mighty Casey?
(a pause)
No, you won’t find any of the answers in the records. Though they are available should anyone be interested by checking under “B” for baseball in The Twilight Zone.
FADE TO BLACK
Escape Clause
Walter Bedeker lay on his bed waiting for the doctor. He wore a heavy, wool bathrobe over heavy wool pajamas, and had a heavy wool scarf wrapped tightly around his head and knotted under the chin in a giant bow. On the nightstand next to him was a tray full of bottles. There were pills, lotions, antibiotics, nasal sprays, throat sprays, ear drops, nose drops, three boxes of Kleenex and a book titled, How To Be Happy Though Bedridden. He stared dourly up at the ceiling then cocked an irritated eye toward the bedroom door, beyond which he could hear his wife’s footsteps walking from kitchen to living room.
Ethel his wife was healthy. Oh God, she was healthy! Like a horse was Ethel. Never even had a cold. But he, Walter Bedeker, went from crisis to crisis, ailment to ailment, agonizing pain to agonizing pain.
Walter Bedeker was forty-four years old. He was afraid of the following: death, disease, other people, germs, drafts and everything else. He had one interest in life, and that was Walter Bedeker; one preoccupation, the life and well-being of Walter Bedeker; one abiding concern about society; if Walter Bedeker should die, how would it survive without him. In short, he was a gnome-faced little man who clutched at disease the way most people hunger for security.
Ethel entered his room for the fifth time that hour to even out his blankets, fluff up his pillow. He looked at her jaundice-eyed and didn’t say anything except to groan slightly when she helped him put his head back down on the pillow.
“Head still ache, darling?” Ethel asked him.
“Ache, Ethel, is not the word for it,” he told her through a taut mouth. “Ache is a mild inconvenience. What I have is an agony. What I have is a living torture!”
Ethel made a brave attempt at a sympathetic smile. Walter never talked of his ailments in anything less than superlatives and this was his fifth stay-in-bed that month. The door chimes rang and she was unable to keep the look of relief from crossing her features. Walter recognized it instantly.
“Can’t stand being in the room with me, can you,” he said to her. “Sick people bore you, don’t they?” He turned away to look at the wall to his right. “That is the tragedy of illness,” he said to the wall. “The fleeting compassion of your so-called loved ones!”
“Oh, Walter—” Ethel began, and then stopped. She shrugged resignedly and went to answer the front door.
The doctor was waiting there with his black bag and he followed Ethel into the bedroom.
“Well, how are you feeling today, Mr. Bedeker?” he asked. The doctor was tired and his feet hurt. He hated house calls unless they were emergencies and Walter Bedeker’s beckonings were never emergencies. He had difficulty keeping the tiredness out of his voice.
“How do I look?” Bedeker barked at him.
The doctor smiled at him and said, “Rather well, as a matter of fact.”
Bedeker’s face screwed up like a persimmon and mimicked him fiercely. “Rather well, as a matter of fact, huh? Well I can assure you, doctor, I’m not rather well. I’m not in the least bit well. I’m a very sick man. Which you’ll soon discover once you examine me. But I want you to tell me the worst. I don’t want any cushioning. I’m not a coward, doctor.”
“I’m sure you aren’t. Hold your arm out, Mr. Bedeker. I’d like to take your pressure first.”
Bedeker thrust out a remarkably well muscled arm for a man his age and the doctor wrapped the pressure cloth around it.
Ten minutes later he was putting most of his impedimenta back in the bag while Bedeker stared at him glumly.
“Well, doctor?”
The doctor closed the bag and turned to Bedeker without speaking.
“I asked you a question, doctor. How bad is it?”
“It isn’t bad at all.” the doctor said. “As a matter of fact, it’s quite good. You have no temperature. Pressure normal. Respiration normal. Heart action normal. No infection. Throat clear. Nasal passages clear. Ears clear.”
“What about the pains in my back and side? what about four sleepless nights in a row? What about that?” Bedeker shouted triumphantly.
The doctor shook his head. “What about that? ‘That,’ Mr. Bedeker, is psychosomatic!”
Bedeker’s eyes grew large. “Psychosomatic? You’re trying to tell me that I’m sick only in the mind?”
“Something like that, Mr. Bedeker,” the doctor answered quietly. “There’s nothing wrong with you, really, except the ailments you manufacture for yourself. Your pains, Mr. Bedeker, are imaginary. Your inability to sleep is a case of nerves—but nothing more. In short, Mr. Bedeker, you’re a very healthy man!”
Walter Bedeker smiled sadly at his favorite confidant, the wall on the right, and talked to it, occasionally jerking his head toward the doctor.
“See? This is a doctor. Four years premed. Four years medical school. Two years internship. Two years residency. And what is he? I ask you, what is he?” Then he shouted, “A quack!”
The doctor had to smile in spite of himself. Ethel came in on tiptoe, and whispered to the doctor, “What’s the prognosis?”
Bedeker shouted, “Don’t ask him. The man’s an idiot!”
“Walter, darling,” Ethel said patiently, “Don’t excite yourself.”
“Don’t whisper,” Bedeker shouted. “You’re looking at half of my troubles right there,” he said to the doctor. “This woman. This awful woman who runs around whispering all day long to make me think I’m sick even if I’m not. And I am,” he added quickly. “I’m lying here at death’s door and who’s ushering me out? A quack and this whispering woman without a mind!”
“I’ll call tomorrow, Mrs. Bedeker!” the doctor said jovially.
“There’ll be no need to call,” Bedeker answered. “just come on over with the death certificate and fill it out.”
“Oh, Walter—” Ethel said piteously.
“Don’t drench me with those crocodile tears of yours, idiot,” Bedeker screamed at her. “She’d be so happy to get rid of me, doctor, I just can’t tell you.”
The doctor was no longer smiling as he went out, followed by Ethel. At the front door he looked at her very closely. She must have been a very attractive woman in her day. God, to be married to that man for as long as she’d been married to him!
“How is he, doctor?” Ethel asked.
“Mrs. Bedeker,” the doctor said, “your husband is one of the healthiest patients I have. If he were up in front of me for an exam to get into the combat Marines, I’d pass him with flying colors.”
Ethel shook her head dubiously. “He’s sick most of the time. He won’t let me open a window in the house. He says for every cubic foot of air, there are eight million, nine hundred thousand germs.”
The doctor threw back his head and laughed. “He’s probably right.”
Ethel said worriedly, “And he’s just quit his job. The fifth job he’s quit since the first of the year. He says
they make him work in a draft.”
The doctor stopped laughing and looked at this small, comely woman in front of him. “Mrs. Bedeker,” he said softly, “there isn’t a thing in the world I can do for your husband. Or any other doctor for that matter—except, perhaps, a psychiatrist.”
Ethel’s hand went to her mouth in a shocked gesture. “A psychiatrist,” she said.
The doctor nodded. “His trouble is in his mind This awful fear of disease. This phobia about death. I suppose I’m oversimplifying it when I say there’s nothing wrong with him because in a sense there really is. This constant worrying about himself is an illness of a sort. Has he always been this frightened?”
“Ever since I can remember,” said Ethel. “When he was courting me he told me he was in the last stages of T.B. and only had a week to live.” She looked away reminiscently and sadly. “I only married him because I felt so sorry for him—!” She bit her lip. “What I meant, doctor—”
The doctor patted her on the arm and said, “I understand. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.” He looked closely at her again, reached in his pocket for a pad and scribbled down a prescription. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “You look a little rundown yourself. This is for vitamins.”
Bedeker’s voice came shrieking from the bedroom. “Ethel! There’s a draft in here and I feel a coma coming on!”
“Yes, darling,” Ethel hurriedly called. “I’ll be right in.”
“Don’t forget about the vitamins,” said the doctor, wincing a little at the sound of Bedeker’s voice. “Good-by, Mrs. Bedeker.”
Ethel shut the door behind him and rushed back into the bedroom. Bedeker lay on the bed, his head off the pillow, and waved weakly toward the window to his left. “Ethel,” he whined at her, “there’s freezing air blasting into the room!”
The window was open about a fifth of an inch. As she put it down, Bedeker half rose in bed.
“Do you know how many germs come in one cubic foot of air, Ethel?”
Under her breath she repeated the figure as he called it out. “Eight million, nine hundred thousand!” He lowered his head back to the pillow. “I know you want me gone and that’s why you leave windows open all over the place, but as a point of decency, Ethel, couldn’t you do it more subtly?”
Ethel smoothed out his blankets. “The doctor said you needed some air. He said it was stuffy in here.” She patted his hand which he drew away sharply.
He suddenly saw the prescription in her other hand. “What’s this?” Bedeker said, yanking it out of her fingers. “Where’d you get this? I’m not sick, but he gives you a prescription for medicine for me. Nothing wrong with me and while I lie here helpless, he’s out there telling you that I’ve got a life expectancy of twenty minutes.” He puckered up his mouth like a prune. “Don’t deny it, Ethel. Kindly don’t deny it. I smelled the collusion the moment he left the room!”
Ethel’s eyes closed as a wave of weakness hit her. Then she took a deep breath. “It is for vitamins, Walter, for me.”
Bedeker bolted upright in bed. “Vitamins? For you.” Then he turned to the wall and spoke to it, nodding familiarly at it. “I lie here while the life seeps out of me, and that quack prescribes medicines for my wife. See? I’m dying and she gets vitamins!” He broke into a spasm of coughing. When Ethel tried to pat his back he pushed her away, then very limply and weakly he lay back down on the bed, shook his head and closed his eyes.
“Never mind, Ethel. Go on, get out of here. Let me die in peace.”
“All right, Walter,” Ethel said softly.
“What?” Bedeker shouted.
This time it was Ethel’s eyes that closed. “I meant,” she whispered, “I’ll let you alone, Walter, so you can take a little nap.”
He lay there quietly for a moment and then suddenly jumped up and sat on the edge of the bed. “I can’t nap,” he squealed. “Why does a man have to die anyway? I asked you a question, Ethel. Why does a man have to die?” He got out of bed and went to the window, feeling the sash at the bottom for any errant air that might intrude. “The world goes on for millions and millions of years and how long is a man’s life?” He held up two fingers. “This much! A drop. A microscopic fragment. Why can’t a man live five hundred years? Or a thousand years? Why does he have to die almost the minute he’s born?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, dear.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Go on, get out of here, Ethel.”
“Yes, dear,” she said, and escaped into the living room with the tremendous sense of relief she always felt after getting out of Walter Bedeker’s presence. Today had been one of the worst days. He had called the doctor four times that morning, then had Ethel phone the hospital to check on the availability of an oxygen tent. He had insisted right after lunch that she phone the janitor to come and check the heating pipes. The janitor had arrived and Walter had immediately engaged him with a running broadside from the bed as the janitor pounded on the hot water pipes and steam and damp heat floated into the room.
“You want heat, Mr. Bedeker?” the janitor had said to him gleefully. “In about twenty minutes, it’ll be about a hundred and five in here. So heat you’ll get!”
Livid with rage at the noise of the janitor’s pounding, Bedeker had shouted at him, “Ape! Get out of here. If I’m to die, at least I’ll die in comfort and peace. Go on, get out of here!”
The janitor surveyed his principal irritation in an apartment house of eighty-three families. “Well, if you do die, Bedeker,” he’d said, “and you go where you’re going—as far as the temperature goes, YOU ain’t gonna be able to tell the difference!”
Now Ethel felt the result of the janitor’s promise. The apartment was stuffy beyond belief. She opened up one of the living room windows and let the cool, fall air ripple over her hot, tired flesh. But she could still hear Walter Bedeker’s running monologue from the bedroom.
“It’s a crime for a man to live such a short span of years. An absolute crime,” Bedeker’s muffled voice said.
Ethel went into the tiny kitchen, shut the door and poured herself a cup of coffee.
Walter Bedeker sat propped up in bed looking at his reflection in the dresser mirror across the room. “A crime,” he repeated. “What I wouldn’t give! What I wouldn’t give to live a decent number of years. Two hundred. Three hundred.” He heaved a deep sigh and shook his head.
A voice, deep, resonant, with a chuckle in it, said, “Why not five or six hundred?”
Bedeker nodded agreeably. “Why not? Or a thousand. What a miserable thing to contemplate. A handful of years, then an eternity in a casket down under the ground. The dark, cold ground!”
“With worms yet,” the voice answered him.
“Of course, with worms,” Bedeker said. Then his eyes grew wide as suddenly across the room, materializing rather rapidly in the bedroom chair, he saw a large, fat man in a dark suit. Bedeker gulped, gaped, blinked his eyes and then just stared.
The gentleman smiled and nodded. “I subscribe to your views wholly, Mr. Bedeker,” he said. “I mean wholly.”
Bedeker continued to stare at him and said, “I’m delighted. And who might you be?”
“Cadwallader’s my name,” the gentleman answered. “At least I’m using it this month. It has a nice feeling on the tongue.”
Bedeker surreptitiously looked around the room, checking the door, the window, then took a quick look under the bed. Then he looked at the man accusingly. “How did you get in?”
“Oh, I’ve never been gone,” Cadwallader said. “I’ve been here for some time.” Then he leaned forward in the manner of a man about to start his business. “I’ll be brief, Mr. Bedeker,” he said. “You look like a man with a nose for a bargain. I’d like to make a proposition to you. We each have something the other wants, and that seems a relatively solid basis for a bargain.”
Bedeker’s voice was coolly appraising. “Do we? What in the world do you have that I could possibly want?”
The fat man
smiled and lit a cigarette, then he sat back comfortably. “Oh, many things, Mr. Bedeker,” he said. “You’d be surprised. Many things. Varied and delightful.”
Bedeker studied the man’s face. An odd face, he reflected. Fat, but not unpleasant. Nice white teeth, even though the eyes were a little shiny and wild. Bedeker scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “What do I have that could remotely interest you?”
Cadwallader’s smile was deprecating. “Actually a minor item,” he said. “Smaller than minor. Insignificant. Microscopic.” He held up two fat, little fingers. “Teensy weensy!”
The two men’s eyes locked.
“What did you say your name was?” Bedeker asked.
“What’s in a name, Mr. Bedeker? Cadwallader replied ingratiatingly. “Just a question of semantics—language. A stretch of words, really. For example, what is it you want? You want an extended life span. You want a few hundred years to play around with. Now some people would call it immortality of a sort. But why give it that kind of description? Why make it sound so imposing. Let’s call it—the two of us—let’s call it some additional free time! After all what are a few hundred years or a few thousand years?”
Bedeker swallowed. “A few...thousand?”
“Or five thousand or ten thousand—” Cadwallader threw the numbers into the breach like a used car salesman bringing up his heavy artillery. “The world will go on ad infinitum, so what’s a few thousand years more or less, give or take, add or subtract.”
Bedeker rose warily from the bed and studied the fat man. “This little item, Mr. Cadwallader, that I am to give you in exchange—what do you call that?”
Cadwallader gave him a little Santa Claus wink. “What do we call that?” he asked. “Let’s see! We can call it a little piece of your make-up. A little crumb off the crust of your structure. A fragment of an atom from your being.” His smile persisted, but it never quite reached his eyes. “Or, we might call it a—”