“The sensation was unrelated to anything he’d ever felt before. He awoke, but had no recollection of ever gone to sleep. And, to mystify him further, he was not in bed. He was walking down a road, a two-lane black macadam with a vivid white stripe running down the center. He stopped, stared up at a blue sky, a hot, mid-morning sun. Then he looked around at a rural landscape, high, full-leafed trees flanking the road. Beyond the trees were fields of wheat, golden and rippling”
(opening lines).
Rod Serling’s short story for “Where Is Everybody?” sticks pretty close to the famous pilot episode of The Twilight Zone, while at the same time adding some wonderful color to the ending in particular. In the story, an amnesiac is walking down a dirt road with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He smokes a cigarette and notices commercial slogans on his cigarette box –he must be in America. Slowly as he walks along the road, he pieces together a few facts. He is in his twenties, it is the 1950s, and the season is summer. As in The Twilight Zone episode of the same name, he wanders into an empty diner and then through a vacant town filled with dummies and recently active machinery –but shockingly there don’t seem to be any people.
“Hey! Anybody here? Anybody hear me?”
He sits outside on a curb for an unknown number of hours, wandering in and out of nearby stores and a bank for the fourth time. Suddenly, he hears the jarring sound of church bells down the street. He walks into a store and spots a bit of pulp fiction, such as The Last Man On Earth (Richard Matheson’s book “I Am Legend” which can also be seen displayed prominently in the episode). Night falls and all the lights in the town illuminate. Our unnamed protagonist begins to grow desperate for companionship. He glimpses his own reflection in a window and realizes he is wearing Air Force coveralls! He enters a movie theater and looks at all the posters. He thinks he sees another person in the movie theater so he rushes forward, crashing full speed into mirror. Sobbing and feeling hopeless, he stumbles outside and clutches a street lamp pushing the crosswalk button over and over, begging for help.
Suddenly, we are transported out of this nightmare and into a dark control room where Sergeant Mike Ferris is pushing a button from inside a tiny enclosed space. “Alright, clock him and get him out of there,” says a gruff brigadier general. We learn that Sgt. Ferris has just survived 284 hours alone in an enclosed 5×5 metal box, a simulated trip to the moon. This has all been a hallucination brought on by deprivation. Of all the things the Air Force can successfully simulate, it cannot offer a substitute for human companionship. Sgt. Ferris’s mind fabricated this whole nightmare as a means of coping with his sheer isolation.
As Sgt. Ferris is lifted off his stretcher into an ambulance, he gazes up at the moon in the night sky. He knows the next time will be the real thing, not a simulation, but for now he is far too exhausted to care. And in a momentary departure from the ending portrayed in The Twilight Zone episode, Sgt. Ferris reaches down into his breast pocket where he finds a movie theater ticket stub… just like the the theater he visited in his hallucination. Somewhere along the way, the fabric between dream and reality must have been torn. A troubled Sgt. Ferris is carted off to the hospital and the short story ends.
Serling, Rod. Stories From The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling Books: 1960 (republished in 1990 by the Serling family), Paperback Edition.
Click here to return to my survey of The Twilight Zone series.
Click here to read my review of the The Twilight Zone episode “Where Is Everybody?”
Science fiction can be most uniquely methodical in portraying the issues of isolation. Rod Serling took that to heart with quite a few Twilight Zone episodes.