by Rod Serling
Corry opened his eyes and stared out toward the salt flats. Disjointed. That described his diary. It was a crazy quilt of unrelated facts, emotions, thoughts and attitudes, opinions that could find no rebuttal because they could not be related to anyone else.
Maybe I’ll become like the car, he thought. Inanimate. Just an item sitting in the sand. Then would I feel loneliness? Would I feel misery? He shook his head and closed off the thought process. He’d fix dinner. He had some ice left that he’d made the other day and he’d use it. He’d open up a can of beer and put the ice in it. You never did that on Earth—dilute good beer with ice. But it was something different and anything different here was desirable.
Corry went into the shack. The room was small and square. There were a cot, shelves he had built out of laminated steel, everything studded and knobbed with screws, nuts, and bolts. The bookends he had made out of a magnesium packing case; the chess board from a strip of plastic, with nuts and bolts for men.
There were many pictures drawn in charcoal and then stuck up on the wall. At first he had sketched city scenes and then, as recollection grew dimmer, he began to draw only that which his eyes could see and his mind contain. There was a whole wall covered with pictures of the desert, the distant mountains, the salt flats, and one or two of the car. There were a few attempts at self-portraiture and in some instances they resembled Corry. Always it was a bold-stroked picture of a man in front of a crowd. Always a crowd. Always a crowd suggested by little formless waves, hints of a multitude of faces and a multitude of eyes.
Corry had been a retiring man once, uneasy with people. His life had been quiet and not very social. But this sandy asteroid had changed all that. The sun had changed it. The heat had boiled away his shyness and left a bare-bone hunger for a society to belong to. Corry looked at himself in the makeshift mirror that hung close to the window. His face had taken on a mahogany hue, but otherwise he had not changed much, except for the lightness of his hair.
About a year ago he had taken to staring at himself in the mirror, trying to force a change in the face that looked back at him. For a few days he had achieved something. He had been able to alter the appearance of the reflection. And for those few days he’d carried on long conversations with a face in a piece of glass. Until one night he started to cry and ran out into the desert night to throw himself down on the sand and sob himself to sleep under a starlit sky that was nothing more than a silence upon silence.
The face that stared back at him now was the familiar face. It was his. It belonged to him. It was a lonely face, the eyes deep-set and searching but without expectation. They looked out upon an emptiness and simply reflected it.
Corry went to the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, then reached into a plastic bag and took out two small, melting ice cubes. He opened the can, poured the beer into the glass with the ice cubes. Then he sat down in his stifling metal room and looked out the window, feeling weariness mixed with the sense of desolation. The big yellow desert stared back at him like a giant sandy face. Just as it stared back at him every waking moment of his day.
Banishment.
He had thirty more years to go and deep inside the core of him was the knowledge that he could not live those thirty years—not with sanity. Already he felt pincer-like claws at his head. The nightmarish attack, as if by an invading army, had reached his brain, overflowed into the fortress that a man keeps behind his eyes—a screaming horde of barbaric thoughts, each drawing life blood from the remains of what had been James W. Corry’s rational being.
The supply ship landed three days later. It flashed across the sky, glinting briefly from the borrowed rays of the giant white sun, then landed with a roar several thousand yards away from Corry’s shack. A few moments later the crew commander followed by two other men came slowly across the sand toward the shack.
Corry stood out in front watching them, his mouth dry, his fingers unable to stop their shaking. Twice he had started an abortive, head-long leap across the desert to meet them and twice had stopped himself. He felt a sound rising in his throat, a yell, an acknowledgment of this brief respite from his torment. But he throttled himself with some hidden bands of restraint until, as they approached, he permitted himself to go slowly toward them.
Captain Walter Allenby, wading through the deep sand, looked keenly at Corry. Again he noticed how quick to age were these banishment cases. How strangely and subtly each face had changed after only three months.
Allenby had been in the space service for eighteen years, had flown everything from jet aircraft to space vehicles and, in his millions of flying hours, he had gone through everything from engine failure to meteorite storms. This, however, was something else.
This was having to spend twelve minutes four times a year with tormented, half-crazed men who would stare at him as if he were a kind of Messiah. There were four asteroids along the route and Corry’s was the last. Allenby heaved a sigh of relief. Three weeks from now he would be back on Earth. Allenby felt a stab of pity, as he saw that Corry’s fingers were clenched tightly in front of him.
“How are you, Allenby?” Corry asked him, his voice tight and dry from the effort of self-control.
“Just fine, Corry,” Allenby answered and gestured to his two crewmen. “This is James Corry, gentlemen. And this is Adams, and this is Jensen.”
The two men nodded as they stared intently at Corry. This was their first trip and Corry was the fourth banishment case they’d seen. Both noted the similarity between all four men. The hunger in the eyes, the desperate set of the faces.
Adams, a thin, wiry, dark-haired youngster in his twenties, had signed on just a week before the ship left. He was a better-than-average navigator, but eleven lonely months in space, punctuated only by the dry, hot asteroids, had taken away his appetite, stripped the protection off his nerves, and turned him into an easily combustible, foul-mouthed little malcontent who went from rage to rage, set off by everything from navigational problems to the itchy discomfort of his space suit. He associated Corry with the heat, the discomfort, with being nine million miles from home and with the last eleven months of loneliness and dislike.
“Quite a place you got here, Corry,” he said.
Corry’s lips trembled. “I’m so glad you like it.”
“I didn’t say I liked it—I think it stinks.”
Corry’s head shot up. “You don’t have to live here,” he offered quietly.
“No. But I’ve got to come back here four times a year, and that’s eight months out of twelve, Corry, away from Earth. My wife probably won’t even recognize me when I get home.”
Corry’s face softened. He half turned away. “I’m sorry.”
Adams’s mouth twisted. “I’ll bet you are,” he said acidly. “But you’ve got it made, don’t you, Corry? It makes for simple living, doesn’t it?” He bent down, picked up a handful of sand, and held it out toward Corry.
“This is Corry’s Kingdom,” Adams said. He let the sand run through his fingers. “Right here. Six thousand miles north and south. Four thousand miles east and west. And all of it’s just like this.”
Corry felt his fingers tremble. He wet his lips, looked briefly at Allenby who had turned away, embarrassed, and forced a smile when he spoke to Adams again. “You ought to try it three hundred and sixty-five days a year, Adams. You feel like a roast that never leaves an oven.”
Adams’s laughter was not related to humor. “How about it, Captain?” he said abruptly to Allenby. “We’ve only got a few minutes.”
Allenby nodded. “Fifteen minutes this time, to be exact, Corry.”
Corry tried to keep the supplication out of his voice. “Nobody’s checking your schedule,” he said to Allenby “Why don’t we have a game of cards or something?”
Allenby kept his voice firm, with obvious effort. “I’m sorry, Corry,” he said. “This isn’t an arbitrary decision. If we delay our time of departure any more than fifteen minutes, that places us in a different or
bital position. We’d never make it back to Earth. We’d have to stay here at least fourteen days before this asteroid was in position again.”
Corry’s voice went higher. “So? Fourteen days! Why not have us a ball? I’ve got some beer I’ve saved. We could play some cards, you could tell me what’s going on back there—” Words poured out of him, strung together with little gasps, and to Allenby it was like watching a full-grown man get whipped.
Allenby made a show of checking the sky. “I wish we could, Corry,” he answered, “but like I said—we’ve only got fifteen minutes.”
Corry’s voice overlapped the captain’s. “Well...well, what’s a few lousy days to you? A coupla card games.” He turned toward the other two men. “How ‘bout you guys? You think I’ll murder you or something over a bad hand?”
Jensen turned away discomfited, but Adams stared at Corry with disgust and accusation.
“I’m sorry,” Allenby said quietly. Then he took Corry’s arm “Let’s go to the shack—”
Corry flung the arm off, but with desperation, not anger. “All right,” he shrilled. “All right, two minutes are gone now. You’ve got thirteen minutes left. I wouldn’t want to foul up your schedule, Allenby. Not for a...” He looked away. “Not for a lousy game of cards. Not for a few bottles of crummy beer.” He looked down at his feet in the sand and then slowly raised his eyes to face Allenby like an animal caught in a trap, pleading for release. There was a nakedness to it as if pride had been swept away. When Corry spoke again, the voice was that of a man falling down into hell and scrabbling for the last ledge which offered him salvation.
“Allenby,” he said very softly. “Allenby...what about the pardon?”
There was a silence broken finally by Adams. His voice dripped with malice like some kind of putrefying liquid from a running sore. “A pardon, Corry,” he said harshly. “You’re out of luck, pal. Sentence reads thirty-five years and they’re not even reviewing cases of homicide. You’ve been here five now, so that makes thirty to go.”
Corry felt a strange, icy cold moving through his body. But still Adams did not stop.
“Thirty to go,” he continued, “so get comfortable, dad, huh?” He laughed briefly, his head back, his face red and itchy from the sun, the discomfort spewing out of him in the form of an attack on another human being. The laugh stopped when he saw Allenby’s face.
The tall captain shut him off with his eyes, made a brief gesture to Corry to follow him, and headed toward the shack. Corry walked beside him, the sand sending up crunchy sounds as they sank down through the crust of the top layer. At intervals Allenby glanced surreptitiously at Corry, who looked beaten and sick. They reached a small knoll close to the shack, and there Corry stopped. Both men gazed down on the metal structure and the old car that sat in a mute, ugly loneliness.
“It just crossed my mind, Captain,” Corry said, “—it just crossed my mind this is ninety percent of the view I’m gonna have for the next thirty years. Just what I’m looking at right now. That shack, that car, and all that desert...and this is my company for the next thirty years.”
Allenby touched his arm with an instinctive gentleness and compassion. His own voice was quiet. “I’m sorry, Corry,” the captain said. “Unfortunately we don’t make the rules. All we do is deliver your supplies and pass on information. I told you last time that there’d been a lot of pressure back home about this kind of punishment. There are a whole lot of people who think it’s unnecessarily cruel.” He paused for a moment. “Well, who knows what the next couple of years will bring? They may change their minds, alter the law, imprison you on Earth like in the old days.”
Corry turned to stare at the captain’s face. There was no emotion in his voice now. It was flat. Flat like the desert around him. Dry like the sand. Unrevealing like the vast expanse of nothingness that surrounded them.
“Allenby,” Corry said. “I’ll tell you something. Every morning...every morning when I get up, I tell myself that this is my last day of sanity.” His voice broke for a moment and then he recovered. “I won’t be able to live another day of loneliness. Not another day! And by noon I can’t keep my fingers still and the inside of my mouth feels like gunpowder and burnt copper and deep inside my gut I got an ache that won’t go away and seems to be crawling all over the inside of my body, pricking at me, tearing little chunks out of me—and then I think I’ve got to hold out for another day, just another day.” He turned away from Allenby and stared down at the shack again. “But I can’t keep doing that day after day,” he continued, “for the next thirty years. I’ll lose my mind, Allenby. I swear to Christ...I’ll lose my mind.”
Adams, coming up the knoll and only a few yards away, heard part of what Corry said. He shook his head. The heat was burning the back of his neck and he felt stifled. “Jesus,” he exploded. “Honest to God, Corry, you’re breaking my heart!”
Corry whirled around, his face contorted. He growled like an animal and then screamed from deep inside his chest. He lunged at Adams, catching him off balance and sending him sprawling backwards down the knoll. He was on him in an instant, hitting him in the face, crunching, desperate blows that smashed against flesh and bone, until Allenby and Jensen pulled Corry off and threw him backwards.
Allenby, standing between the prostrate man and his attacker, shouted at Corry. “Easy...easy, Corry. For God’s sake!”
Very gradually Corry let his body relax, moving the route from a trembling, shaking ague to the tired, heavy motionlessness that served better in this heat.
Adams slowly got to his feet, feeling the tear on his cheek, the throbbing bruise on his jaw. “I wouldn’t worry about going off my rocker if I were you, Corry,” he said. “It’s already happened. Stir-crazy they used to call it. Well that’s what you are now, stir-crazy.”
Allenby took a step toward him to make certain he’d stay in one place. “Back off, Adams,” he ordered. “You and Jensen go back and get the supplies. Bring them over to the shack.”
Adams bridled. “Mr. Corry has a broken leg or something?” He pointed to Corry.
Allenby said, “Adams, do as I tell you.” He paused, looking briefly at Corry, then back toward Adams. “And the big crate,” he continued, “with the red tag—handle that one gently.”
Jensen looked over toward the car and grinned. “How about the use of his buggy there? Some of the stuff’s heavy.”
Corry answered as if shaken out of his dream. “It isn’t running today,” he said.
Once again Adams laughed. “It isn’t running today! What’s the matter, Corry—use it too much, do you?” He turned to Jensen. “You know there’s so many places a guy can go out here. There’s the country club over the mountains there, and the seashore over that way, and a drive-in theatre—that’s some place around here, isn’t it, Corry?”
Corry stood motionless, his head down.
Allenby faced the young navigator. The gentleness of his tone did not disguise the sense of absolute command that permeated the voice. “I’m going to tell you one more time, Adams. Go get the stuff or you’ll wind up the rest of the trip with your hands tied behind your back, and I’ll have every right to handle it that way!”
Adams opened his mouth to retort, then shut it tight. He cast a vindictive look at Corry, then turned and started back across the desert, Jensen following him. Allenby took Corry’s arm and the two men walked down the knoll toward the shack, up the steps of the burning hot metal porch, and inside.
Corry sat down on his cot, staring at his folded hands. Allenby went to the refrigerator and took out a jug of water.
“Glasses?” he asked.
Corry motioned toward the shelf. “Paper cups up there.”
Allenby unscrewed the jar, sniffed it, made a face. He poured some water into a cup, took it in a quick gulp.
“We’ve got some fresh on board,” he said to Corry. “They’ll be bringing it over.”
Corry nodded numbly, not looking at him. Allenby took a deep breath, then p
ulled up a chair directly opposite Corry. He studied the man on the cot as if formulating an approach.
“I brought you some magazines, too,” he said, “strictly on my own.”
Corry nodded. “Thanks.”
“And some microfilm. Old vintage movies. Science fiction stuff You’ll get a kick out of it.”
Again Corry nodded. “I’m sure I will.”
Allenby ran his tongue over his lips, stared at Corry for a long, silent moment, then rose and crossed over to the window.
“I brought you something else, Corry,” Allenby said, over his shoulder. “It would be my job if they suspected.” He paused. “It would be my neck if they found out for sure.”
“Look, Allenby,” Corry said grimly, “I don’t want gifts now. I don’t want tidbits. It makes me feel like an animal in a cage and there’s a nice old lady out there who wants to throw peanuts at me.” He was suddenly on his feet, his voice high again and shrill. “A pardon, Allenby,” he shouted. “That’s the only gift I want.” The words tumbled out, propelled by his grief, by his urgency, by a sudden hopelessness that descended on him. ‘‘I killed an animal, Allenby. As God is my witness, I killed an animal and he had no business living anyway. All right, punish me...stick me in jail...but, Allenby...” his voice quivered and his eyes glistened, “Allenby...not this. Jesus God, Allenby...not this!”
Allenby nodded and said, “I know, Corry. I know all about it.” He retraced his steps to the chair and sat down. “I doubt if it’ll be any consolation to you, Corry, but it’s not easy handling this kind of an assignment. Stopping here four times a year and having to look at a man’s agony!”
Allenby spoke truth and only truth, and Corry realized it. There was compassion in Allenby and honesty, but Corry was unable to keep back the harshness.