Night Gallery 1 Read Free Page A

doctor said.
    The survivor stared straight up at the ceiling. "What time is it?"
    "Shortly after eight."
    The survivor's voice sounded hollow, strangely like some kind of sepulchral confession. "Dog Watch just ended," he said.
    Again the ship's doctor tried to read something in the skin-tight, unrevealing face. Despite himself, he felt an unbidden thrill. What if the man were a spy? What if he knew something that no one else knew? What if he asked the time because he knew that at a certain hour—
    The ship's doctor unconsciously shook his head. Paranoia, he thought. But God, in a ship at sea during wartime, you could conjure up any kind of jeopardy. He forced an evenness to his tone. "Were you a member of the Titanic 's crew?" he asked.
    "Stoker."
    The ship's doctor smiled, or at least tried to smile. "Well," he said in a bedside tone, "if you want to ship out again when we reach London, I'd recommend taking some nourishment."
    The man on the bed turned to study him. The oversized eyes in the undersized face seemed to glow fanatically in the night light. "This ship's the Lusitania ," he said softly, as if trying to authenticate that which he already knew.
    "That's right," the ship's doctor answered.
    The survivor lifted a thin, veined hand to his beard-
    stubbled chin. "It's 1915," he said.
    The ship's doctor nodded.
    "I've been in that lifeboat for three years."
    It was chilling just to hear him say it—chilling. To voice the impossible as if it were a matter of record.
    "Well, now," the ship's doctor said, his voice nervous. "Well, now—we both know you couldn't have been in a lifeboat for three years."
    The room, the ship's doctor noted, in another portion of his mind, had grown suddenly silent. It was as if the engines had stopped—that constant, rhythmic, pounding noise of dynamos that somehow fused into the subconscious and disappeared—now it was as if they were nonexistent. The room was utterly silent.
    The survivor's voice seemed louder in the stillness. "A question to you, doctor," he said. "How do you know what I've told you isn't possible? Listen to me—listen to me and then tell me if you still think it's impossible.''
    Not a spy, the ship's doctor thought. Spies fitted molds. Cold, callous, always planning kind of chaps. But this man . . . those haunted eyes . . . the anguish that seemed so much a part of him—deranged, of course, but not a spy.
    He leaned forward. "Tell me about it," he said.
    For a moment the survivor's lips moved with no words forthcoming; then he abruptly tore his gaze from the ship's doctor and stared fixedly toward the wall. His voice sounded choked. "Have you ever been frightened, doctor? I mean, so frightened you'd do anything to survive? Have you?"
    Humor him, the ship's doctor thought. Always humor the deranged. Give them at least that much comfort.
    "Fortunately," the ship's doctor said, "I've never found myself in that kind of situation."
    The skeletal face turned to him again. "I have," the survivor said. He took a deep breath. "She was down by the bow and going fast. When I tried to get into a lifeboat, they stopped me. No crew members. Just women and children."
    "That's a traditional rule of the sea," the ship's doctor said, his voice slightly aimless, like a kind of absentminded teacher.
    The survivor stared at him. "Sure. Sure—unless you're standing on a tilted deck heading into icy water that'Il kill you in three minutes. Then you don't think about traditional rules of the sea."
    A silence. The ship's doctor waited. "So you put on a dress," he said finally.
    The survivor nodded. "And a muffler to hide my face. And I knocked a half a dozen people aside and got on. While they were lowering her, one of the cables broke. She capsized. But I hung on. Somehow I hung on. When she hit the water, I was the only one who had."
    The silence, the ship's doctor thought—the incredible silence of the room and the ship. No ship's engines. No creaking bulkheads. No metallic tinkle of