Read The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories for Free Online Page B

beeline for the door and within a moment had filled up the room.
    “You may quote me, gentlemen,” Beasley repeated when the room was quiet once again. “The mighty Casey will be back in the lineup within forty-eight hours.” He threw another questioning look at Stillman. “Forty-eight hours?”
    “About,” Stillman answered quietly.
    Questions shot around the room like bolts of lightning and for the next few moments McGarry, Beasley and Casey were inundated by notebooks and cigarette smoke. Then the room started to empty.
    Mouth McGarry took a position close to the desk, stuck a cigar in his mouth, lit it, took a deep drag and held it out away from his body, gently flicking ashes on the floor.
    “Gentlemen,” he announced, “As manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, I want to tell you, and since I was the man who discovered Casey—”
    The reporters rapidly left the room followed by the commissioner and his secretary, followed by Casey and Stillman.
    “It behooves me to tell you gentlemen,” Mouth continued, wetting his lips over the word “behooves” and wondering to himself where he got the word. “It behooves me to make mention of the fact that the Brooklyn Dodgers are the team to beat. We got the speed, the stamina,” he recollected now the Pat O’Brien speech in a Knute Rockne picture, “the vim, the vigor, the vitality—”
    He was unaware of the door slamming shut and unaware that Bertram Beasley was the only other man in the room. “And with this kind of stuff,” he continued, in the Knute Rockne voice, “the National League pennant and the World Series and—”
    “McGarry,” Beasley yelled at him.
    Mouth started as if suddenly waking from a dream.
    Beasley rose from the couch. “Why don’t you drop dead?” He walked out of the room, leaving Mouth all by himself, wondering how Pat O’Brien wound up that speech in the locker room during the halftime of that vital Army-Notre Dame game.
    How either McGarry or Bertram Beasley got through the next twenty-odd hours was a point of conjecture with both of them.
    Mouth emptied his bottle of nerve pills and spent a sleepless night pacing his hotel room floor. Beasley could recall only brief moments of consciousness between swoons which occurred every time the phone rang.
    The following night the team was dressing in the locker room.
    They were playing the first of a five-game series against the New York Giants and McGarry had already devised nine different batteries, then torn them all up. He now sat on a bench surveying his absolutely silent ballplayers. There was not a sound. At intervals each pair of eyes would turn toward the phone on the wall. Beasley had already phoned Dr. Stillman’s residence seven times that evening and received no answer. He was on the phone now, talking to the long-distance operator in New Jersey.
    “Yeah,” Beasley said into the phone. “Yeah, well thank you very much, operator.”
    Mouth and the rest of the players waited expectantly.
    “Well?” Mouth asked. “How is he?”
    Beasley shook his head. “I don’t know. The operator still can’t get an answer.”
    Monk, the big catcher, rose from the bench. “Maybe he’s right in the middle of the operation,” he suggested.
    Mouth whirled around at him, glaring. “So he’s in the middle of the operation! Whatsa matter, he can’t use one hand to pick up a phone?”
    He looked up at the clock on the wall then jutted his jaw fiercely, his eyes scanning the bench. “We can’t wait no longer,” he announced. “I got to turn in a battery. Corrigan,” he said pointing toward one of the players, “you’ll pitch tonight. And now the rest of you guys!” He stuck his hands in his back pockets and paced back and forth in front of them in a rather stylized imitation of Pat O’Brien.
    “All right, you guys,” he said grimly. “All right, you guys!” He stopped pacing and pointed toward the door. “That’s the enemy out there,” he said, his voice quivering a