by Rod Serling
“Bring the can, Paul,” his father said. Then he turned to Grace. For the first time there was a tremor in his voice.
“That’s why we have to survive,” he said. “That’s the reason.”
They heard Paul’s steps.
“He may inherit just rubble, but he’s twelve years old. It isn’t just our survival, Grace. Sure, we can throw our lives away. Just deposit them on the curb like garbage cans.” His voice went higher. “He’s twelve years old. It’s too Goddamn early to think about a boy dying. . . when he hasn’t even had a chance to do any living.”
Paul appeared at the door with the gasoline can. “Put it there, next to the generator,” Stockton said as he walked out of the room. “I’ll go up and get the rest of the water.”
He climbed back up the stairs to the kitchen and picked up the last of the jugs. He was about to carry it back down when he heard a knock on the kitchen door. Jerry Harlowe’s face peered through the parted curtains.
Stockton unlocked the door. Harlowe stood outside, with a smile on his face that looked as if it had been painted on. His voice was strained.
“How ya doin’, Bill? he asked.
“I’m collecting water, which is what you should be doing.”
Harlowe looked painfully ill at ease.
“We got about thirty gallons and then the water stopped,” he said. His face twisted again. “Did yours stop too, Bill?”
Stockton nodded. “—You better get on home, Jerry. Get into your shel—” He wet his lips and corrected himself. “Into your basement. I’d board up the windows if I were you, and if you’ve got any wood putty or anything, I’d seal the corners.”
Harlowe fiddled with his tie.
“We don’t have a cellar, Bill,” he said, with a lopsided grin. “Remember? The benefits of modern architecture. We’ve got the one brand-new house on the street. Everything at your beck and call. Everything at your fingertips—” His voice shook. “Every wonder of modern science taken into account...except the one they forgot.” He put his eyes down and stared at his feet. “The one that’s heading for us now”
He looked up slowly and swallowed. “Bill,” he said, in a whisper, “Can I bring Martha and the kids over here?”
Stockton froze. He felt anger. “Over here?”
Harlowe nodded eagerly. “We’re sitting ducks there. Sitting ducks. We don’t have any protection at all.”
Stockton thought for a moment, then turned away. “You can use our basement.”
Harlowe grabbed his arm. “Your basement?” he asked incredulously. “What about your shelter? Goddamnit, Bill, that’s the only place anybody can survive. We’ve got to get into a shelter!”
Stockton looked at him, and the anger that had been just a dull resentment surged up inside. He held it down with effort, wondering to himself how the familiar face, once pleasing and boyish, could be so abhorrent to him now.
“I don’t have any room, Jerry,” he said. “I don’t have nearly enough room—or supplies, or anything. It’s designed for three people.”
“We’ll bring our own water,” Harlowe said, eagerly, “and our own food. We’ll sleep on top of one another if necessary.” His voice broke. “Please, Bill...”
He stared at Stockton’s impassive face. “Bill, we’ve got to use your shelter!” he cried. “I’ve got to keep my family alive! And we won’t use any of your stuff. Don’t you understand? We’ll bring our own.”
Stockton looked down at Harlowe’s hands, then into his face.
“What about your own air? Will you bring your own air? That’s a ten-by-ten room, Jerry.”
Harlowe let his hands drop. “Just let us stay in there the first forty-eight hours or so. Then we’ll get out. Honest to God, Bill. No matter what, we’ll get out.”
Stockton felt the water jug heavy in his hand. This could not be prolonged, he knew that. His voice cut through the air like a scalpel.
“When that door gets closed, Jerry, it stays closed. Closed and locked. There’ll be radiation—and God knows what else.” He felt an anguish rising deep inside him. “I’m sorry, Jerry. As God is my witness—I’m sorry But I built that for my family.”
He turned and started for the basement.
Jerry’s voice followed him. “What about mine? What do we do? Just rock on the front porch until we get burned to cinders!’’
Stockton kept his back to him. “That’s not my concern. Right at this moment, it’s my family I have to worry about.”
He started down the steps. Harlowe ran after him and grabbed his arm.
“I’m not going to sit by and watch my wife and my kids die in agony!” Tears rolled down Harlowe’s face. “Do you understand, Bill? I’m not going to do that!”
He shook Stockton, and started to cry uncontrollably “I’m not going to—”
Stockton pulled away. The jug slipped out of his hand and bounced down the basement steps, but it did not break. Stockton went slowly down the steps and picked it up.
“I’m sorry,” he heard Harlowe say. “Please forgive me, Bill.”
Stockton turned to look up. Oh, God, he thought. That’s my friend standing there. That’s my friend. But then his anger returned. He spoke to the figure standing above him.
“I kept telling you—all of you. Build a shelter. Get ready. Forget the card parties and the barbeques for maybe a couple of hours a week and admit to yourself that the worst is possible.”
He shook his head. “But you didn’t want to listen, Jerry. None of you wanted to listen. To build a shelter was admitting the kind of age we’re living in—and none of you had the guts to make that kind of an admission.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and then took a deep breath. “So now, Jerry, now you’ve got to face the reality.”
He took one last look at the white, stricken face on the stairs. “You want help now, Jerry? Now you get it from God.” He shook his head. “Not from me.”
He walked across the cellar toward the shelter.
The front door opened and the Weisses hurried through the hall into the living room. Rebecca carried their baby in her arms and stayed close to Marty.
“Bill!” Marty called. “Bill—where are you?”
“They’re already in the shelter!” Rebecca cried hysterically. “I told you they’d be in the shelter! They’ve locked themselves in.”
Jerry Harlowe appeared from the kitchen. “It’s no use,” he said. “He won’t let anyone in.”
Marty’s dark little face twisted with fear. “He’s got to let us in!” He pointed toward Rebecca and the baby. “We don’t even have any windows in half the basement. I don’t have anything to plug them up with either.”
He started to push his way past Harlowe. “Where is he? Is he downstairs? Is he in the shelter?”
He walked through the ding room into the kitchen, saw the open basement door, and called down.
“Bill? Bill—it’s Marty. We’ve got the baby with us.”
He stumbled down the cellar steps, calling, “Bill? Bill?”
The lights dimmed in the basement and Marty groped his way across the cellar floor until he reached the metal door of the shelter, now closed.
Behind him, in the darkness, his wife’s voice called out.
“Marty! Marty where are you? The lights are out! Marty—please...come back and get us.”
The baby started to cry, and then, from outside, came the sound of the siren.
Marty pounded on the door of the shelter. “Bill! Please...Bill... let us in!”
Stockton’s voice came back, muffled, from the other side of the door.
“Marty, I would if I could. Do you understand? If it didn’t mean endangering the lives of my own family, I would. I swear to you, I would.”
The last part of his words were drowned out by the siren, and then by the shrill wailing of the baby from the steps. Panic clawed at Many and he pounded on the door with both hands.
“Bill!” he shouted. “You’ve got to let us in! Ther
e isn’t any time. Please, Bill!”
On the other side of the door, the generator had begun to hum and the lights went on in the shelter—two big one-hundred watt bulbs, glaringly white.
Bill Stockton put his head against the steel door and closed his eyes. He shook his head.
“I can’t, Marty. Don’t stay there asking me. I can’t.”
His mouth went tight and his voice shook. “I can’t and I won’t!”
Marty Weiss knew then that the door was to remain locked. He turned and peered through the darkness at the figure of his wife standing on the steps. He felt a surge of tenderness. Of love. And, at this moment—of a loss, final and irrevocable. He turned and stared at the closed door.
“I feel sorry for you, Bill,” he said, quietly but clearly. “I really do. You’ll survive. You’ll live through it.” His voice went higher. “But you’re going to have blood on your hands. Do you hear me, Bill? You’ll have blood on your hands.”
Inside the shelter, Stockton stared at his wife. She tried to say something to him, but nothing came out.
Stockton could hear Marty Weiss’s footsteps retreating through the cellar and up the steps. His hands shook, and he had to clasp them together to keep them still.
“I can’t help it,” he whispered. “It’s us or it’s them. All my life...all my life I’ve only had one function. That was to end suffering. Relieve pain. To cure. But the rules are different now. The rules, the time, the place. Now there’s only one purpose, Grace—that’s to survive. Nothing else means anything. And we can’t afford to let it mean anything.” Suddenly he whirled to the door. “Marty! Jerry!” he screamed. “All of you—any of you! Get out of here! Stay out of here!”
Behind him he could hear his son beginning to cry.
“Goddamn it! Goddamn it! If there’s blood on my hands...all of you—all of you put it there!”
And then he began to tremble. Fatigue struck him like a blow; he felt as if he could no longer stand up, and he sat down on one of the cots.
Far off there was the sound of the siren.
Bill Stockton closed his eyes tightly and tried to make his mind go blank. But the sound persisted, and he felt a massive pain.
A group of neighbors collected outside Bill Stockton’s house. One of them carried a portable radio, and the voice of the Conelrad announcer supplied an urgent background to the whispered questions and the occasional cry of a child or a woman.
Harlowe came out from the house and stood on the front porch. Marty Weiss and his wife followed him.
Martha Harlowe pushed her way through the group, holding tight to the hands of her children. “Jerry,” she called toward the porch,” what happened?”
Harlowe shook his head. “Nothing happened. I think we all better go back and try to fix up the cellars.”
“That’s crazy!” a man’s voice said. “There’s no time for that. Bill’s got the only place on the street that would do any good.”
A woman cried out, “It’ll land any minute!” Her voice was frantic. “I know it—it’s going to land any minute!”
“This is Conelrad,” the radio announced. “This is Conelrad. We are still in a state of Yellow Alert. If you are a public official or a government employee with an emergency assignment, or a Civil Defense worker, you should report to your post immediately. If you are a public official or government employee...” The voice continued underneath the flood of voices.
A big, burly man who lived on the corner started up the steps to Stockton’s porch. Jerry Harlowe stood in his way.
“Don’t waste your time,” Harlowe said. “He won’t let anyone in.”
The man turned helplessly toward his wife, who stood at the foot of the steps.
“What’ll we do?” the woman asked, panic building in her voice. “What are we going to do?”
“Maybe we ought to pick out just one basement,” Many Weiss said, “and go to work on it. Pool all our stuff. Food, water—everything.”
“It isn’t fair,” Martha Harlowe said. She pointed toward the Stockton porch. “He’s down there in a bomb shelter—completely safe. And our kids have to just wait around for a bomb to drop!”
Her nine-year-old daughter began to cry, and Martha knelt down to hold her tightly to her.
The big man, on the porch steps, turned to survey the group. “I think we’d better just go down into his basement—break down the door!”
In the sudden silence the siren wailed shrilly across the night, and the ten or twelve people seemed to draw closer to one another.
Another man took a step out from the group. “Henderson’s right,” he said. “There isn’t any time to argue or anything else. We’ve just got to go down there and get in!”
A chorus of voices agreed with him.
The big man walked down the steps and started around the yard toward the garage.
Harlowe shouted at him. “Wait a minute!” He raced down the steps. “Goddamnit—wait a minute! We all wouldn’t fit in there. It’d be crazy to even try!”
Marty Weiss’s voice called out plaintively, “Why don’t we draw lots? Pick out one family.”
“What difference would it make?” Harlowe said. “He won’t let us in.”
Henderson, the big man, looked unsure for a moment. “We could all march down there,” he said, “and tell him he’s got the whole street against him. We could do that.”
Again, voices agreed with him.
Harlowe pushed his way through the group to stand near Henderson. “What the hell good would that do?” he asked. “I keep telling you. Even if we were to break down the door, it couldn’t accommodate all of us. We’d just be killing everybody, and for no reason!”
Mrs. Henderson’s voice broke in. “If it saves even one of these kids out here—I’d call that a reason.”
Again, a murmur of assent came.
“Jerry,” Marty Weiss said, you know him better than any of us. You’re his best friend. Why don’t you go down again? Try to talk to him. Plead with him. Tell him to pick out one family—draw lots or something—’’
Henderson took a long stride over to Marty. “One family—meaning yours, Weiss, huh?”
Marty whirled around toward him. “Well, why not? Why the hell not? I’ve got a four-month-old baby—”
“What difference does that make?” the big man’s wife said. Is your baby’s life any more precious than our kids’?”
Marty Weiss turned to her. “I never said that. If you’re going to start trying to argue about who deserves to live more than the next one—”
“Why don’t you shut your mouth, Weiss!” Henderson shouted at him. In wild, illogical anger he turned to the others. “That’s the way it is when the foreigners come over here. Pushy, grabby, semi-Americans!”
Marty’s face went white. “Why, you garbage-brained idiot, you— There’s always one person—one rotten, unthinking crumb, who suddenly has to become the number-one big straw boss and decide what ancestry is acceptable that season—”
A man at the back shouted out: “It still goes, Weiss. If we’ve got to start hunting around for some people to disqualify—you and yours can go to the top of the list!”
“Oh, Marty!” Rebecca sobbed, feeling a surge of a different fear.
Weiss threw off her restraining arm, and started to push his way through the crowd to the man who had spoken. Jerry Harlowe had to step between them.
“Keep it up—both of you,” he said, tautly. Just keep it up we won’t need a bomb. We can slaughter each other.”
“Marty!” Rebecca Weiss’s voice came from the darkness near the porch. “Please. Go down to Bill’s shelter again. Ask him—”
Marty turned to her. “I’ve already asked him. It won’t do any good!”
There was the sound of the siren again—this time closer. And far off in the distance, a stabbing searchlight probed the night sky.
The Conelrad announcer’s voice came up again, and they heard him repeating the same Yellow Alert announce
ment as before.
“Mommy, Mommy!” a little girl’s voice quavered. “I don’t want to die, Mommy! I don’t want to die!”
Henderson looked at the child, then started to walk toward the garage. Gradually, in little groups, the neighbors followed him.
“I’m going down there,” he announced as he walked, “and get him to open that door. I don’t care what the rest of you think—that’s the only thing left to do.”
Another man called out: “He’s right. Come on, let’s do it!”
They were no longer walking. Now they were a running, jostling group, linked by positive action. And Jerry Harlowe, watching them run past him, suddenly noticed that in the moonlight all their faces looked the same—wild eyes; taut, grim, set mouths—an aura of pushing, driving ferocity.
They slammed their way through the garage, and Henderson kicked open the door leading to the basement. Like a mob of fanatics, they shouted their way into the basement.
Henderson pounded his fist on the shelter door. “Bill? Bill Stockton! You’ve got a bunch of your neighbors out here who want to stay alive. Now you can open that door and talk to us and figure out with us how many can come in there—or else you can just keep doing what you’re doing—and we’ll bust our way in!”
They all shouted in agreement.
On the other side of the door, Grace Stockton grabbed her son and held him tight. Stockton stood close to the door, for the first time unsure and frightened. Again he heard the pounding this time by many fists.
“Come on, Stockton!” a voice called from the other side. “Open up!”
Then there was the familiar voice of Jerry Harlowe.
“Bill, this is Jerry. They mean business out here.”
Stockton wet his lips. “And I mean business in here,” he said. “I’ve already told you, Jerry—you’re wasting your time. You’re wasting precious time that could be used for something else...like figuring out how you’re going to survive.”
Again Henderson smashed at the door with a heavy fist, and felt the unyielding metal. He turned to look at his neighbors. “Why don’t we get some kind of a battering ram?” he suggested.
