Read The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories for Free Online

that Casey has no pulse or heart beat...because he hasn’t any heart. He’s a robot—”
    There was the sound of another slump as Bertram Beasley fell back unconscious. This time he didn’t move.
    “A what?” the doctor asked incredulously.
    “That’s right,” Stillman said. “A robot.”
    The doctor stared at Casey on the bed who stared right back at him. “Are you sure?” the doctor asked in a hushed voice.
    “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 night-stand and added this 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 Giants 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 dead eye 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 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