The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories Read Online Free PDF

yanked the arm away, leaving Barstow puzzled. Later on Barstow confided to Mouth McGarry that the kid’s arm felt like a piece of tube steel. McGarry gulped, smiled nervously and asked Doc how his wife had been feeling. All this happened on the night of July 1st.
    Three weeks later the Brooklyn Dodgers had moved from the cellar to fifth place in the National League. They had won twenty-three games in a row, seven of them delivered on a platter by one left-handed pitcher named Casey. Two of his ball games were no-hitters and his earned run average was by far the lowest not only in either League, but in the history of baseball. His name was on every tongue in the nation, his picture on every sports page, and contracts had already been signed so that he would be appearing on cereal boxes before the month was out. And as in life itself, winning begot winning. Even without Casey, the Dodgers were becoming a feared and formidable ball club. Weak and ineffectual bat-slappers, who had never hit more than 200 in their lives, were becoming Babe Ruths. Other pitchers who had either been too green or too decrepit were beginning to win ball games along with Casey. And there was a spirit now—an aggressiveness, a drive, that separated the boys from the pennant-winners and the Brooklyn Dodgers were potentially the latter. They looked it and they played it.
    Mouth McGarry was now described as “that master strategist” and “a top field general” and, frequently, “the winningest manager of the year” in sports columns which had previously referred to him as “that cement-headed oaf who handles a ball club like a bull would handle a shrimp cocktail.” The team was drawing more customers in single games than they’d garnered in months at a time during previous seasons. And the most delightful thing to contemplate was the fact that Casey, who had begun it all, looked absolutely invulnerable to fatigue, impervious to harm, and totally beyond the normal hazards of pitchers. He had no stiff arms, no sore elbows, no lapses of control, no nothing. He pitched like a machine and while it was mildly disconcerting, it was really no great concern that he also walked, talked and acted like a machine. There was no question about it. The Dodgers would have been in first place by mid-August at the very latest, if a shortstop on the Philadelphia Phillies had not hit a line ball directly at Casey on the mound which caught him just a few inches above his left eye.
    The dull, sickening thud was the shot heard all around the borough and if anyone had clocked Mouth McGarry’s run from the dugout to the mound where his ace left-hander was now sprawled face downward, two guys named Landy and Bannister would have been left in eclipse. Bertram Beasley, in his box seat in the grandstand, simply chewed off one quarter of his cigar and swallowed it, then fell off his seat in a dead faint.
    The players grouped around Casey and Doc Barstow motioned for a stretcher. McGarry grabbed his arm and whispered at him as if already they were in the presence of the dead.
    “Will he pull through, Doc? Will he make it?”
    The team doctor looked grim. “I think we’d better get him to a hospital. Let’s see what they say about him there.”
    Half the team provided an escort for the stretcher as it moved slowly off the field. It looked like a funeral cortege behind a recently deceased head of state with Mouth McGarry as the principal mourner. It was only then that he remembered to motion into the bullpen for a new pitcher, an eager young towhead out of the Southern Association League who had just been called up.
    The kid ambled toward the mound. It was obvious that at this moment he wished he were back in Memphis, Tennessee, sorting black-eyed peas. He took the ball from the second baseman, rubbed it up, then reached down for the rosin bag. He rubbed his hands with the bag then rubbed the ball, then rubbed the bag then put down the ball, wound up and threw the rosin