“I Shot an Arrow into the Air” (The Twilight Zone, January 15, 1960) puts the survivors of a crash down in a desert ninety-seven miles from Reno, lets them decide it is another world, and watches what one of them becomes once he is sure that no one is looking.
A Nursery Rhyme of the Age of Space
Two men stand in a tracking station whose screens have just gone empty, and one of them recites a poem. He gets it wrong. Longfellow’s schoolroom couplet, the one that generations of American children were made to memorize, runs “I shot an arrow into the air, / It fell to earth, I knew not where.” The man in the control room says “I shot an arrow into the air. It landed I know not where,” and then, with the rueful pride of someone who has managed a small joke on a bad night, calls it “a nursery rhyme of the age of space.” The tense has slipped and a phrase has dropped out. What is missing from the line is “to earth.” Whether Serling changed the couplet on purpose or wrote it the way a tired man remembers it, the version that went out over CBS is short by exactly the two words that would answer every question the next twenty minutes are going to ask. The arrow landed. Nobody in the room can say where, and the sentence built to tell them has a hole in it precisely where the answer should be.
Everything that follows lives in that hole. The launch has gone by in seconds: a voice confirming that liquid oxygen tanking is secured, a countdown that reaches zero and then, strangely, keeps going, one, two, three, four, five, as though the numbers had lost their sense of direction the moment the ship left the ground. Serling’s opening narration has already told us what is at stake, and told us in the language of a public ceremony: four and a half years of planning, a thousand years of science and mathematics, “the projected dreams and hopes of not only a nation but a world.” The ship is called an aircraft three times in the episode: by the narration, by the men who lose her (Harry Bartell and Leslie Barrett), and by the log of the man who commanded her. “An aircraft with an eight-man crew just disappears like a puff of smoke,” one of them says, and the other supplies the only explanation the instruments allow, a short period of heavy interference, “probably solar,” after which the contact was broken. The course was preset. The pilot would not have changed it. “Bob Donlin’s commanding.” Then the poem, the wrong poem, and a blessing thrown after it into the dark: “Gentlemen, wherever you are, God help you.”
The next voice we hear belongs to Donlin himself, and it is the voice of a man writing. “First entry, log, Arrow One. Colonel R.G. Donlin commanding. We have crash-landed on what appears to be an uncharted asteroid.” The hedge is right there in the first sentence anyone speaks on the ground. It appears to be. Cause of the malfunction unknown. An explosion, the electrical system gone, “and that’s all any of us remember.” Four men dead, four alive, one of the living, the navigator Hudak, seriously hurt. Very little left of the ship, the radio gone, most of the supplies destroyed, and “as of this moment there is little certainty that we have been tracked and our whereabouts known.” It is a scrupulous entry, and scrupulousness is what makes it dangerous. By the time Donlin has finished dictating it, the conjecture in its opening clause has become the ground the men stand on. Nobody will say “appears to be” again. The crew woke up from an explosion into a premise, and the premise was entered in the log before anyone had walked a hundred yards.
The episode is, before it is anything else, a story about what a man will do inside a sentence with a phrase missing. The men of the Arrow One have been given every fact they need and have lost the one word that would organize the facts. They can see the sun. They can breathe the air. They will feel the night come down and watch clouds cover the stars. They carry their own weight across the ground and never remark on it. None of this tells them anything, because they already know where they are, and knowing is the problem. What the desert does to Corey, the flight officer who will end the episode alone on a ridge, is not what a desert does to a body. The heat and the thirst are real, but the episode is careful to show that they never quite reach the pitch that would excuse him. What the desert does to Corey is give him a story, and the story tells him that the ordinary claims other people have on him have expired along with the mission. He does not become a different man on the asteroid. He becomes the man the asteroid permits, and the asteroid is a word in a log.
The title had been in Serling’s drawer before the story existed. According to Marc Scott Zicree’s history of the series, Serling had written, before the pilot, an hour-long script called “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air” ...
