She said, “Why, Edward. Loved one. You’ve come to me.”
It wasn’t exactly the way the followers of Tubber usually pronounced loved one.
Ed closed the door behind him and cleared his throat.
She came closer, her arms at her sides, and stood before him.
It was as simple as that. He didn’t have to think about it at all. If he had, maybe he wouldn’t have. Wouldn’t have done what came so naturally.
He took her very firmly and kissed her very truly, as old Hemingway used to put it, smack on the kisser. She had a kisser built to order for kissing. But evidently hadn’t put it to much practice.
Nefertiti Tubber seemed highly in favor of rectifying that shortcoming. She didn’t stir. Her face continued to be held up to his, her eyes, open, not closed, were dreaming.
He kissed her again.
After a time he remembered to say, nervously, “Ah… where’s your father, ah… honey?”
She stirred, as though impatient of talk. “He’s gone into Woodstock to meditate over a few glasses of beer.”
Ed closed his eyes in quick appeal to his guardian angels, if any. “Ezekiel Joshua Tubber on the town having a few brews?”
“Why not?” She took him by the hand and led him to the couch. It was, he noted, absently, obviously of hand construction, even the padding, the bolsters and pillows. Somebody had put a great deal of work into this piece of furniture. She seated herself comfortably beside him, not relinquishing his hand.
Ed said, “I don’t know. I just kind of thought your father would be against drinking. In fact, any day I expected my autobar to start making with buttermilk, or something, when I dialed a highball.”
It came to him that this was an opportunity he should be taking advantage of, instead of spending it necking. No matter how desperately Nefertiti Tubber might be in need of practice.
He said, “Look Nefertiti… by the way, did you know the original bearer of your name was the most beautiful woman in antiquity?”
“No,” she sighed. She snuggled his arm more tightly around her waist. “Tell me more.”
He said, “I suppose your father gave you the name because Nefertiti’s husband, Amenhotep, was the first pharaoh to teach that there was only one god.” Ed Wonder had picked up that bit of knowledge from Professor Varley Dee on the Far Out Hour one night. A religious twitch guest had been of the belief that the Hebrews had been the first to teach monotheism.
“Well, no,” she said. “Actually, it was a press agent. My real name is Sue.”
“Press agent!”
“Ummm,” she said distantly, as though impatient of talk. “Back when I was a stripper.”
“Back when you were WHAT?”
“Doing a strip tease act, on the Borsch Circuit.”
Ed Wonder sat belt upright. His eyes goggled her. “Listen,” he said desperately. “I’m hearing things wrong. I could have sworn you said you were a strip teaser on the Borsch Circuit.”
“Ummm, put your arm around me again, Edward. That was before my father rescued me and brought me to Elysium.”
Ed knew that the best possible thing he could do was change the subject. Change it to anything. But he couldn’t. Any more than he could have kept from wrigging a loose tooth with his tongue, no matter what the pain.
“You mean to tell me that your father allowed you to do a strip tease act, on the Borsch Circuit or anywhere else?”
“Oh, that was before he was my father.”
Ed Wonder closed his eyes, resigned to anything.
Nefertiti summed it up quickly. “I was an orphan and, well, sort of kid-crazy to get into show business. So I ran away from the orphanage and lied about my age. I was fifteen. And, well, finally I got a job with a troupe doing real live shows. I was booked as Nefertiti the Modest, the girl who blushes all over. But we didn’t do so well, because who wants to see real live shows any more when all the truly good acts are on TV? Anyway, to make it short…”
“The shorter the better,” Ed muttered.
“…father rescued me.” Her tone went apologetic. “It was the first time I heard him speak in wrath. Then he brought me here, and sort of adopted me.”
Ed didn’t ask what sort of adopted meant. He said, “The first time you heard him speak in wrath? What did he do?”
Nefertiti said uncomfortably, “Uhh, he kind of burned the nightclub building down. Sort of, uhh, like a bolt of lightning, kind of.”
He brought his twirling mind back to approximate place and present, with a great effort. He simply had to use this opportunity to advantage. He couldn’t sit here and blabber as these curves were thrown at him.
“Look,” he said firmly, disengaging his hand from hers and half-turning to stare at her levelly, seriously, “I didn’t come here just to see you.”
“You didn’t?” There was hurt in her face.
“Well, not entirely,” he said hurriedly. “I’ve been given a very responsible job by the government, Nefertiti. Very responsible. Part of my duty is to find out… well, to find out more about your father and this movement of his.”
“Oh, wonderful. Then you’ll have to spend a great deal of time here in Elysium.”
He kept himself from answering with an emphatic negative to that and said, “Now, to start at beginnings. I’m a little confused about this new religion your father is trying to spread.”
“But about what, Edward? It’s perfectly simple. Father says all great religions are quite simple, at least before they are corrupted.”
“Well, for instance, who is this All-Mother you’re always talking about?”
“Why, you are, Edward.”
11
After a long moment, Ed Wonder opened his eyes again. He said, slowly, “I keep getting the impression that every other sentence is being left out of this conversation. What in the name of Mountain Moving Mohammed are you talking about?”
“The All-Mother. You’re the All-Mother, I’m the All-Mother, that little bird singing out there, it’s the All-Mother. The All-Mother is everything. The All-Mother is life. That’s the way father explains it.”
“You mean, something like Mother Nature?” Ed said with a certain relief.
“Exactly like Mother Nature. The All-Mother is transcendent. We pilgrims on the path to Elysium aren’t so primitive as to believe in a, well, god. Not a personal, individual god. If we must use such terms, and evidently we do, in order to spread our message, then we must use All-Mother as a symbol of all life. Father says that woman was man’s earliest symbol when searching for spiritual values. The Triple Goddess, the White Goddess was all but universal in the first civilizations. Even down into modern times, Mary has almost been deified by Christians. Note that even atheists refer to Mother Nature, rather than Father Nature. Father says that those religions that have degraded women, such as the Moslems, are contemptible and invariably reactionary.”
“Oh,” Ed Wonder said. He knuckled his chin ruefully. “I suppose you people aren’t quite as kooky as I first had figured out.”
Nefertiti Tubber hadn’t heard that. Her face was twisted thoughtfully. “We could probably have that cottage, up next to the laboratory,” she said.
The import of that didn’t get through to him at first. “Laboratory?” he said.
“Ummm, where Doctor Wetzler is working on his cure.”
“Wetzler! You don’t mean…”
“Ummm, Felix Wetzler.”
“You mean Felix Wetzler is up here in this backwoods… that is, in this little community?”
“Of course. They had him working on some sort of pills to give women curly hair, or something. So he gave up in disgust and came here.”
“Felix Wetzler, working up here. Balls of fire, he’s the most famous… What kind of a cure is he working on?”
“For death. We could have the cottage right next to him. It will be finished in a day or two. And…”
Ed Wonder shot quickly to his feet. It had got through to him now. “Look,”
he said hurriedly. “Like I told you, I’ve got this important government assignment. I have to see your father.”
She was unhappy, but she stood too. “When will you be back, Ed?”
“Well, I don’t know. You know how it is. The government. I’m working directly under Dwight Hopkins himself. Duty first. All that sort of kookery.” He began edging toward the door.
She followed him. At the door she held up her face again, for his kiss. “Edward, do you know when I fell in love with you?”
“Well, no,” he said hurriedly. “I wouldn’t know when that happened.”
“When I heard them calling you little Ed. You don’t like to be called Little Ed. But they all call you that. They don’t care that you hate it, they don’t even know you do.”
He looked into her. Suddenly everything was different He said, “You never called me that.”
“No.”
He bent down and kissed her again. She didn’t seem to need practice as much as he had thought earlier. He tried again, just to be sure. She hardly needed practice at all.
Ed said, “I’ll be back.”
“Of course.”
He found Ezekiel Joshua Tubber seated at a table in a corner of Dixon’s Bar.
The drive down from Elysium, through Shady and Bearsville, had been accomplished in a state of mental confusion.
But now that he considered it, he had never been in a state other than one of confusion every time he came up against Tubber and his movement. The man had started out seemingly a Bible belt itinerant revivalist, and wound up with an academecian’s degree in political economy from Harvard. His daughter had started off as a simple, slightly plumpish girl in gingham print dress who blushed, and had wound up an ex-strip teaser and only a sort-of-adopted member of the Tubber family. The new religion had started off just one more sect of cranks, and now was revealed to have among its followers Nobel Prize winner Martha Kent, and ultra-top research biochemist Felix Wetzler.
However, he was, beginning to lose his fear of Ezekiel Joshua Tubber. The Lincolnesque prophet—if that were the term—was beginning to take on aspects of reality.
Ed Wonder had brought himself up sharp at that point. Reality, his neck. There was no reality in a situation that embraced the laying on of worldwide hexes, just because an elderly twitch got himself into a tizzy against this or that aspect of modern society, from time to time.
He spotted the Tubber horse and wagon pulled up before a smallish autobar which read simply Dixon’s. Ed Wonder began fumbling in his pockets for a coin for the parking meter; there being an empty place right next to the wagon. However, at this point he saw a cop coming along the street toward him and scowling unbelievingly at each meter in its turn.
When he came abreast of Ed’s Volkshover, Ed said, “What seems to be the matter, Officer?”
The other looked at him unbelievingly. “These here parking meters. Something crazy’s happened.”
Ed Wonder could see it coming, but he couldn’t help saying, “What?”
“There’s no slot for the coin to go in. There’s gotta be a slot. There was a slot yesterday. There’s always been a slot for the coins to go in. This is crazy. You’d think they were hexed, or something.”
“Yeah,” Ed said, wearily. He climbed out of the hovercar and made his way toward Dixon’s.
There was a blast of juke box music emanating from the autobar. Ed Wonder set his shoulder against it, and pushed his way in. For some reason, since the elimination of radio and TV, everybody seemed to have tuned up their juke boxes to the cyclonic point.
Tubber was seated in a corner, a half-full glass of beer before him. In spite of the fact that the place was packed, his table was empty except for himself. He looked up at Ed’s approach and smiled gentle welcome.
“Ah, dear one. Will you share a glass of beer with me?” Ed steeled himself and took a chair. He said bravely, “Sure, I’ll have a glass of beer. What surprises me is that you’re having one. I thought all you reformers were on the blue-nosed side. How come the pilgrims on the path to Elysium aren’t morally opposed to the demon alcohol?”
Tubber chuckled again. At least the old boy seemed to be in a good humor. He raised his voice over the blast of the juke box. “I see you are beginning to pick up some of our symbolic terminology. But why should we be opposed to the blessing of alcohol? It is one of the All-Mother’s earliest gifts to mankind. So far back as we can trace, in history and prehistory, man was aware of alcoholic beverages and enjoyed them.” He held up his glass of beer. “We have written records of the brewing of beer going back some 5000 years B.C in Mesopotamia. By the way, were you aware of the fact that when the Bible mentions wine, in its earlier books, it is referring to barley wine, which is, of course, actually beer. Beer is a much older beverage than wine.”
“No, I didn’t know it,” Ed said. He dialed himself a Manhattan, feeling a need for some more substantial backing than beer would promote. “But most religions point out that alcohol can be a disaster. The Mohammedans don’t allow it at all.”
Tubber shrugged pleasantly, after darting a disapproving glance over at the juke box which was now rendering a Rock’n’Swing version of Silent Night. He all but yelled to get his voice above the alleged music. “Anything can be a disaster if overdone. You can drink enough water to kill yourself. What in the name of the All-Mother is that piece they’re playing? It seems, very vaguely, to be familiar.”
Ed told him.
Tubber looked disbelief. “That’s Stille Nacht ? Dear one, you are jesting.”
Ed figured they’d gone through enough preliminary pleasantries. He said, “Look here, Mr. Tubber…”
Tubber bent an eye on him.
“…Uh, that is, Ezekiel. I’ve been assigned to contact you and try to come to some understanding on these developments of the past couple of weeks. I don’t suppose there’s any need of telling you that the world is going to pot by the minute. There are riots going on in half of the larger cities of the world. People are going batty for lack of something to do. No TV, no radio, no movies. Not even comics or fiction, to read.”
“Surely you are mistaken. Why, the world’s classics haven’t been effected through my righteous actions.”
“The world’s classics! Who the devil reads classics? The people want something they can read without thinking! After a hard day, people can’t concentrate.”
“A hard day?” Tubber said mildly.
“Well, you know what I mean.”
The bearded religious leader said gently, “That is the difficulty, dear one. The All-Mother designed man to put in a hard day, as you call it. A full day. A productive day. Not necessarily a physically hard day, of course. Mental endeavor is just as important as physical.”
“Just as important,” Ed said. “More important. Anybody knows that.”
“No,” Tubber said mildly. “The hand is as important as the brain.”
“Yeah? Without the brain where would man be?”
“And where without the hand?”
“Some of the monkeys have hands and haven’t got very far.”
“Such animals as dolphins and whales have brains and haven’t gotten very far either. Both are needed, dear one. The one as badly as the other.”
Ed said, “We’re getting away from the point. The point is that the world’s on the point of collapse because of this, these… well, whatever it is you do.”
Tubber nodded and dialed himself another beer. He scowled at the juke box which was now roaring out a hill billy lament, complete with vocal twang. The hill billy twang, it came to Ed Wonder, intensified as each decade went by. He wondered if a hundred years ago there had actually been a twang in Ozark speech.
“Fine,” Tubber said.
“What?” Ed asked. The juke box had distracted him.
“You said the world is on the point of collapse.” The Speaker of the Word nodded satisfaction. “After the collapse, perhaps all will take up the path to Elysium.”
Ed fi
nished his Manhattan and dialed another. “Now look,” he said aggressively, “I’ve been checking on some of your background. You’re a well-educated man. You’ve been around. In short, you’re not stupid.”
“Thank you, Edward,” Tubber said. He scowled again over at the juke box. They had to shout to make themselves heard.
“All right. Now suppose everything you say about the Welfare State is correct. Let’s concede that. All right. I’ve just been over to Elysium. I’ve seen how you live there. Okay. It’s fine for some people. Some people must love it. Nice and quiet. Good place to write poetry, or do handicrafts or scientific experiments, maybe. But, holy smokes, do you expect everybody to want to live like that? You’ve got this tiny community of a few dozen households. The whole world can’t join up. It’s a small basis thing. You keep talking about taking the road to Elysium. Suppose everybody did, how would you pack four or five billion people into that little Elysium of yours?”
Ezekiel Joshua Tubber had heard him out. Now he chuckled. Broke off his humor to scowl still once again at the source of music. The juke box never went silent. There was always someone to drop in another coin.
“You fail to understand the word, dear one. Our term Elysium has a double meaning. Obviously, we do not expect the whole world to join our little community. It is but an example for others to heed. We are but indicating that it is possible to lead full, meaningful lives without resort to the endless products of present mechanical society. Perhaps we go to the extreme, for the sake of emphasis. I utilize horse and wagon to illustrate that five hundred horsepower hovercars, gulping up petroleum products at a disastrous rate for the sake of obtaining a speed of two hundred miles an hour, are redundant. There are many examples to illustrate that too often we utilize complicated machinery simply for machinery’s sake.”
Ed shouted, “I don’t get that.”
Tubber said, “Take the abacus. For years we have been sneering at the Japanese, Chinese and Russians because they are so backward as to use the abacus in their businesses, their banks and so forth, instead of our electrical adding machines. However, the fact is that the abacus is more efficient and actually faster than the usual electric adding machine, and most certainly less apt to break down.” The old boy glowered in the direction of the juke box. “Verily, that device is an abomination.”
Earth Unaware Page 17
