by Rod Serling
He reached down and picked up the gun, then looked around the room. He saw the refrigerator and went over to it. One bottle of water was left in it and he smiled with relief as he took it out. He threw his head back and drank, the water running out the corners of his mouth and dripping down the front of him. When he had finished the bottle he threw it to one side, where it broke on the floor with incredible loudness.
He walked slowly across the room, still holding the gun, and looked at the pictures, studying them carefully. He looked at Norma and pointed to one of the paintings. “You do this?” he asked.
Norma nodded, not daring to speak.
“You’re good,” the man said. “You paint real good. My wife used to paint.”
The terror overflowed from Mrs. Bronson. “Please,” she moaned, “please leave us alone. We didn’t do you any harm. Please—”
The man just stared at her as if her voice came from far away. He turned, looked at the painting again and then down at the gun, as if he had suddenly become aware of it. Very slowly he lowered it until it hung loosely from his hand and then he dropped to the floor. His mouth twitched and his eyes kept blinking. He went over to the couch and sat down.
“My wife,” he said, “my wife was having her baby. She was in the hospital. Then this”—he motioned toward the window “this thing happened. She was... she was so fragile—just a little thing.” He held out his hands again as if groping for the right words. “She couldn’t take the heat. They tried to keep her cool but... but she couldn’t take the heat. The baby didn’t live more than an hour and then... then she followed him.” His head went down, and when he looked up again his eyes were wet “I’m not a—I’m not a housebreaker. I’m a decent man. I swear to you, I’m a decent man. It’s just that...well, this heat. This terrible heat. And all morning long I’ve been walking around the streets trying to find some water.”
His eyes pleaded for understanding; and underneath the dirty sweat, his face suddenly looked young and frightened. “I didn’t mean to do you any harm, honest. I wouldn’t hurt you. Would you believe it?” He laughed. “I was scared of you. That’s right—I was just as scared of you as you were of me.”
He rose from the couch and started across the room, his foot hitting a fragment of the broken glass from the bottle. He looked down at it. “I’m...I’m sorry about that,” he said.”I’m just off my rocker. I was just so thirsty.” He moved toward the door past Mrs. Bronson. He held out a hand to her. It was a gesture that was almost—supplication. “Please...please forgive me, will you? Will you please forgive me?”
He went to the door and leaned against the frame for a moment, the sweat pouring down his face. “Why doesn’t it end?” he said in a low voice, almost unintelligible. “Why don’t we just...why don’t we just burn up?” He turned to them. “I wish it would end. That’s all that’s left now—just to have it end.” He went out.
When Norma heard the front door close, she went over to Mrs. Bronson, helped her to her feet, and cradled her head in her arms, petting her like a mother.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said. “Mrs. Bronson, listen to me, I’ve got a surprise for you.”
She went across the room and pulled out a canvas from a group of others. She turned it around and held it in front of her. It was a hurriedly done waterfall scene, obviously rough work and painted with desperation.
Mrs. Bronson looked at it for a long moment and slowly smiled. “It’s beautiful, Norma. I’ve seen waterfalls like that. There’s one near Ithaca, New York. It’s the highest waterfall in this part of the country, and I love the sound of it.” She went over to the canvas and touched it. “That clear water tumbling over the rocks—that wonderful clear water.”
Suddenly she stopped and looked up, her eyes wide. “Did you hear it?” she asked.
Norma stared at her.
“Don’t you hear it, Norma? Oh, it’s a wonderful sound. It’s so... it’s so cool. It’s so clear.” She kept listening as she walked across the room to the window. “Oh, Norma,” she said, her smile now a vapid, dreamy thing, “it’s lovely. It’s just lovely. Why, we could take a swim right now.”
“Mrs. Bronson...” Norma said in a choked voice.
“Let’s take a swim, Norma, at the bottom of the waterfall. I used to do that when I was a girl. Just sit there and let the water come down on you. Oh, the lovely water,” she murmured, as she leaned her face against the burning-hot glass. “Oh, the beautiful water... the cool nice water...the lovely water.”
The white-hot rays of the sun clawed at her face, and slowly she began to slump to the floor, leaving a patch of burnt flesh on the window, and then she crumpled in a heap silently. Norma bent down over her. “Mrs. Bronson?” she said. “Mrs. Bronson?” Norma began to cry. “Oh, Mrs. Bronson...”
It happened rather quickly after that. The windows of the buildings began to crack and shatter. The sun was now the whole sky—a vast flaming ceiling that pressed down inexorably.
Norma had tried to pick up the gun but the handle was too hot to touch. Now she knelt in the middle of the room and watched as the paint began to run down the canvases, slow rivulets of thick sluggish color like diminutive lava streams; after a moment, they burst into flames that licked up the canvases, in jagged, hungry assaults.
Norma didn’t feel the pain when it finally came. She was not aware that her slip had caught fire or that liquid was running out from her eyes. She was a lifeless thing in the middle of an inferno, and there was nothing left inside her throat or mind to allow the scream to come out—
Then the building exploded and the massive sun devoured the entire city.
It was black and cold, and an icy frost lay thick on the corners of the window. A doctor with thin lips, his overcoat collar turned high, sat alongside the bed and reached over to touch Norma’s forehead. He turned to look across the room at Mrs. Bronson, who stood by the door.
“She’s coming out of it now,” he said quietly. Then he turned back toward the bed. “Miss Smith?” There was a pause. “Miss Smith?” Norma opened her eyes and looked up at him. “Yes,” she whispered.
“You’ve been running a very high fever, but I think it’s broken now.”
“Fever?”
Mrs. Bronson moved to the bed. “You gave us a start, child—you’ve been so ill. But you’re going to be all right now.” She smiled hopefully at the doctor. “Isn’t she, doctor? Isn’t she going to be all right?”
The doctor didn’t smile back. “Of course,” he said quietly. Then he rose and motioned to Mrs. Bronson. He tucked the blankets tighter around the girl, picked up his bag, and moved out into the hall where Mrs. Bronson was waiting for him.
A cold air whistled up through the landing and through the window over the stairway snow came down in heavy ice-laden gusts.
“I hope she’ll be all right,” the doctor said to Mrs. Bronson. ‘‘Just let her sleep as much as she can.” He looked down at his bag. “I wish I had something left to give her,” he said disconsolately, “but the medicine’s pretty much all gone now.” He looked toward the window over the landing. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to come back. I’m going to try to move my family south tomorrow. A friend of mine has a private plane.”
Mrs. Bronson’s voice was quiet and sad. “They say... they say on the radio that Miami is a little warmer.”
The doctor just looked at her. “So they say.” Then he stared at the ice-encrusted window. “But we’re just prolonging it. That’s all we’re doing. Everybody running like scared rabbits to the south, and they say that within a week that’ll be covered with snow, too.”
Through the partially opened door to Mrs. Bronson’s apartment a radio announcer’s voice could be heard. “This is a traffic advisory,” the voice said, “from the Office of Civil Defense. Motorists are advised to stay off the highways on all those routes leading south and west out of New York City. We repeat this advisory: Stay off the highways.”
The doctor picked up his bag and
started toward the steps. “There was a scientist on this morning,” Mrs. Bronson said as she walked beside him. “He was trying to explain what happened. How the earth had changed its orbit and started to move away from the sun. He said that...” Her voice became strained. “He said that within a week or two—three at the most—there wouldn’t be any more sun—that we’d all...” She gripped her hands together. ‘We’d all freeze.”
The doctor tried to smile at her, but nothing showed on his face. He looked haggard and old and his lips were blue as he tightened the scarf around his neck, put on a pair of heavy gloves, and started down the steps.
Mrs. Bronson watched him for a moment until he disappeared around the corner of the landing, then she returned to Norma’s room. “I had such a terrible dream,” Norma said, her eyes half closed. “Such an awful dream, Mrs. Bronson.”
The older woman pulled a chair up closer to the bed.
“There was daylight all the time. There was a...a midnight sun and there wasn’t any night at all. No night at all.” Her eyes were fully open now and she smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful, Mrs. Bronson, to have darkness and coolness?”
Mrs. Bronson stared into the feverish face and nodded slowly. “Yes, my dear,” she said softly, “it’s wonderful.”
Outside the snow fell heavier and heavier and the glass on the thermometer cracked. The mercury had gone down to the very bottom, and there was no place left for it to go. And very slowly night and cold reached out with frozen fingers to feel the pulse of the city, and then to stop it.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper
The tracks of the Union Pacific were reptile twins snaking their way south of the Nevada line into the vast torrid valleys of the Mojave desert. And once a day when the crack streamliner, City of St. Louis, thundered along these tracks past the needle-like volcanic crags, the distant saw-toothed desolate mountains, the dead sea of ash and brittle creosote brush, it was the intrusion of a strange anachronism. The screaming power of the diesel pushed aside the desert winds. It shot past the white and arid wastes of the ancient land as if afraid of being caught by the jagged, crumbling spurs of rock that surrounded the great quadrangular desert.
And once ...just once...the impossible happened. The steel cord that tied the train to the earth was parted. Too late, the giant wheels sent up protesting sparks and agonized metal shrieks, trying to stop that which could not be stopped—fifty tons of engine and train moving at ninety miles an hour. It thundered off the broken tracks and smashed against a sloping sand dune with an explosive roar that shattered that still desert with earth-shaking reverberation. Cars followed the engine off the tracks like nightmares piling atop nightmares until the carnage had spent itself. The City of St. Louis was a dying metal beast with fifteen broken vertebrae stretched across the desert floor.
The moving van lumbered up the side of the desert slope toward the lonely ledge above. It groaned and wheezed in the heat, while behind it a small sedan followed closely. When it reached the ledge the van pulled to the left and let the sedan go by, stopping a few hundred feet away. Then the van reversed until it had backed against the opening of a cave—a yawning mouth in the face of the rock. Two men got out of the van and two out of the sedan. They wore unmarked white coveralls, and all four met near the tailgate of the van. They were like a committee of quiet generals meeting for a critique after a giant battle-sweaty, dead-tired, but victorious.
What they had just accomplished had been a victory. It was an operation that needed the precision of a stopwatch combined with the timing, logistics, and power of a full-scale invasion. And everything lad worked beyond their wildest, most sanguine dreams. For inside he moving van, neatly piled in heavy motionless lumps, was two million dollars in gold bullion.
The tall man with the thin face and the steady, intelligent eyes looked like a college professor. His name was Farwell and he had a doctorate in chemistry and physics. His specialty was noxious gasses. He turned toward the others and held up his thumb in a gesture of victory.
“Clockwork, gentlemen,” he said with a thin smile. His eyes moved slowly left and right, staring into the faces of the other three.
Next to him was Erbe, almost as tall as Farwell, with thin sloping shoulders, a pale nondescript face—perhaps a little younger-looking than his years. He was the expert in mechanical engineering. He could make anything, fix anything, manipulate anything. With probing eyes and surgeon’s fingers, he would gently caress a maze of sears, cogs, wheels, cylinders and coax them into a hum.
Alongside him was Brooks. Broad and stocky, partially bald, with an infectious grin and a Texas accent, he knew more about ballistics than almost anyone alive. Someone had said that his brains were made out of gunpowder, because in the area of firearms and other weaponry he was a dedicated genius.
And to his right was DeCruz—small, mercurial, handsome—a shock of unruly black hair hanging over deep-set, probing dark eyes. DeCruz was the expert in demolition. He was a master at destruction. He could improvise anything and blow up everything.
Two hours earlier these four men, in an incredible blending of talent, timing, and technique, had executed a heist unlike anything ever performed in the annals of crime. DeCruz had planted the five one-pound blocks of TNT that had blown up the tracks and sent the train to its destruction. Erbe had almost single-handedly put the two vehicles together from the parts of a dozen others—with parentage untraceable. Brooks had developed the grenades. And Farwell had come up with the sleeping gas. And in precisely thirteen minutes every occupant of the train had been asleep—the two engineers forever. Then the four men had moved quickly and quietly into one of the cars to remove the rotary-locked pouches carrying the bullion. Again DeCruz had utilized his talents to blow the locks apart, and the bullion had been transferred to the van.
It was part of their natures that none of them was concerned with the two dead engineers or the twenty-odd badly wounded human beings they’d left behind. Expediency was the one gospel that they all recognized and paid homage to.
It was DeCruz who hopped over the tailgate and started to push the treasure toward the rear of the van.
“Apples in the barrel,” Erbe said, and he grinned as he started to carry one of the bars of bullion toward the cave.
Brooks took another bar of bullion and let his fingers run over it. “So far,” he said, “but we ain’t spent nothin’ yet.”
DeCruz paused and nodded thoughtfully. “Brooks is right. Two million dollars’ worth of gold, but I’m still wearing dungarees and I got a dollar and twenty cents in my pocket.”
Farwell chuckled and winked at them. “That’s this year, Señor DeCruz. Today this...” He pointed to the tailgate and then nodded toward the cave opening. “But tomorrow! Tomorrow, gentlemen, like Croesus! Midas! Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan all rolled into one.” He patted the gold piling up on the tailgate. “Perfection, gentlemen. That’s how you performed. With perfection.”
Brooks laughed. “Man, did you see that train engineer when he hit those brakes! Looked like he thought the world was comin’ to an end.”
“Why not!” DeCruz said, his voice shrill, his eyes flashing. He pointed to himself proudly. “When I blow up tracks, I blowup tracks!”
Brooks stared at him. There was a rooted dislike, an undisguised contempt in his look. “Find a foundry for me, DeCruz—I’ll cast a medal for you.”
DeCruz’s black eyes returned the dislike. “What’s your trouble, Brooks? That wasn’t any easy thing tying up those tracks like that. You coulda done better, huh?”
Farwell, the catalyst, looked from one to the other. He motioned DeCruz back into the van. “May we get to business now?” he said. “We’re on schedule and I’d like to keep it that way.”
They continued to move the gold off the van and into the cave. It was torturously hot and the ten-inch cubes were deadweight in their arms as they slowly emptied the van.
“Man!” said Brooks as he moved into the cave with the last of the bars. He put it on
top of the pile next to the deep pit that had been dug days before. “You’re a heavy little bastard. Anymore at home like you?”
Erbe came up beside him. “Yeh, one million nine hundred and eighty thousand bucks’ worth...just like him.” He turned to Farwell. “It worked just like you said it would—car full of gold, train derailed, sleeping gas puts everybody out...” He looked down at the gas mask hanging from his belt. “...except us,” he said pointedly.
Farwell nodded. “Except us, Mr. Erbe. It was not our time to sleep. It was our time to enrich ourselves.” He looked briefly at his watch. “All right, gentlemen, the gold is in the cave. Next on the agenda—we destroy the van and Mr. Erbe wraps up the car with cosmoline.”
He walked across the cave to the far end. There were four glass-covered boxes, the size of coffins, lined up evenly. Farwell touched the glass top of one of them and nodded his head approvingly.
“And now,” he said in a whisper, “the pièce de rèsistance—the real culmination—the ultimate ingenuity.”
The three men stood behind him in the shadows.
“It’s one thing,” Farwell’s quiet voice continued, “to stop a train on its way from Los Angeles to Fort Knox and steal its cargo. It’s quite another thing to remain free to spend it.”
DeCruz squatted down in the dirt. “When?” he asked. “When do we spend it?”
“Don’t you know, Señor DeCruz?” Farwell’s voice was faintly disapproving. “I would have thought that this aspect of the plan would be particularly clear in your mind.”
DeCruz rose and walked over to the glass boxes. He stared at them with obvious trepidation. “Rip Van Winkles,” he said, “that’s what we are...”He turned toward the others. “We’re four RipVanWinkles. I’m not sure—”
Farwell interrupted him. “What aren’t you sure of, Mr. DeCruz?”
“Getting put to sleep, Mr. Farwell. Just lying down in these glass coffins and getting put to sleep. I like to know what I’m doing.”