Ernie Block's nyctophobia

Ernie Block’s nyctophobia is tested in the unlit troop transport carrying the witnesses under Colonel Falkirk’s guard. There, in the dark he had been expected to fear most, fragments of the erased journey toward the spacecraft begin to return; remembering does not merely recover the past but changes his relationship to the darkness.

Confinement in the Dark

The truck’s rear bay has hard metal benches, and its outside bolt is slid shut after the group is loaded. Although a fluorescent light is installed in the ceiling, Colonel Falkirk leaves it off. Ernie sits beside Faye Block, holding her hand. The others expect the pitch-black enclosure to overwhelm him, especially after the fear and anxiety he has endured, but the episode unfolds differently: he has periodic bouts of hyperventilation and quickly regains control.

Memory Returns

Before the truck begins moving, Ernie starts recalling low-flying jets—at least four, he thinks, including two that swooped very low—and then loses the thread of what happened next. He remembers getting into the motel van and driving toward I-80, toward the special place along the highway that also matters to Sandy Sarver. The recollection is incomplete, but it gives his fear a new context: the darkness is no longer only an immediate threat, because it is opening onto a past he had not been able to remember.

As the memory advances, Ernie identifies the people in the van: he and Faye Block, Dom Corvaisis, Ginger Weiss, and Zebediah Lomack, the professional gambler from Reno. He connects that ride to the moon posters in Lomack’s house, on which Lomack had written their names. The recognition suggests that a dim but urgent memory of traveling with them to the ship had nearly broken through Lomack’s own memory block.

Fear Transformed

Ernie says that the more he remembers, the less afraid he is of the dark. By the time he recalls the van and its passengers, he is no longer breathing hard. His nyctophobia has not simply been soothed by light or rescue: in this scene, the return of memory itself displaces the fear. The sealed truck remains dark, but it becomes the setting in which Ernie can recover part of the shared journey that had been hidden from him.