She smiled at me just the way my grandmother used to when she thought I’d said something dumb. “It’s just a body,” she said.
“Oh, sure,” I laughed. “Plenty more where that came from.”
“Exactly,” she said.
[401] “Uh, yeah,” I said, chalking it up to a belief in reincarnation.
“I suppose I’ve been talking too much,” Minnie said suddenly. “You’ll probably log me as a loon.”
I shrugged. “A certain amount of craziness is necessary for survival on this ship. There’s probably a certain number of cards missing from my deck, too.”
Minnie grinned conspiratorially. “Ah, so you agree it’s better to be nuts than earthbound mundane?”
“Well, to a certain extent,” I said hesitantly. “But you know in this life, sooner or later some killjoy insists on putting crazy people in high-security cells and switching on the force field behind them.”
“On the other hand, though, if you really are crazy, you probably won’t realize you’re being put in a high-security cell, and you certainly wouldn’t hear the field being switched on. For all intents and purposes, you wouldn’t be there at all. Me, I’d be flying off somewhere, without my body.”
I scratched my nose absently. “Logical,” I quoted the first officer. She was right. The nice thing about being crazy was not being cognizant of the fact that you were crazy. Well, one of the nice things, anyway.
“So what’ll it be, Doc?” She held out her arms as if she were waiting for me to put her into an old-fashioned strait-jacket. “Is it the padded cell for old Minnie?”
“Hell, I’d have to lock myself up if you were my criterion for judging nutsy people. Besides, you’re already locked up in a little padded cell, editing irrelevant but vital tapes.”
“That’s for sure,” she sighed.
I liked Minnie Moskowitz. Besides being the most interesting person I’d met since I’d completed my internship on [402] Tantalus, she was also the most open person I’d encountered on the ship in the two months I’d been there, aside from a few male crewpersons who’d expressed an interest in “private sessions on my couch.”
“Listen,” I said, “you’re my last appointment of the day. Want to join me down in the rec room for a drink?”
“Don’t drink,” she said. “But if you’re looking for a way to pass the time, I’ll show you where I usually end up when I’m not on duty.”
“Fair enough,” I said, turning off the tape I’d been making of the session for my records.
Minnie Moskowitz mainlined on more than her own creative fantasies. She had also tapped into someone named Gene Kelly, who, I found out, was not one of the few members of the crew I had left to do a psych workup on. For one thing, he’d been dead for well over two hundred years—although apparently not for Minnie.
She’d discovered old Gene in a secluded corner of the ship’s library, buried amongst the twentieth-century musical extravaganza tapes—the same corner she led me to that afternoon, as a matter of fact. Apparently, the tape she wanted was right where she’d left it, for she found it almost immediately. She tripped lightly over to the nearest viewer and inserted it.
The image of a large Terran undomesticated feline appeared on the screen and roared at us, then faded away as three people in yellow overcoats replaced it. They were being rained upon—in fact, they were being poured upon—but strangely, they didn’t seem to mind in the least. In fact, they were singing. At this point, appropriately enough, the [403] words “Singin’ in the Rain” were superimposed over the yellow-slickered singers.
“The one on the right,” said Minnie, “is Gene Kelly.”
“Oh,” I replied. I was unimpressed at this point. Gene Kelly was only a grinning humanoid who didn’t possess the common sense to come in out of the rain. Possible masochistic tendencies. And as for his two friends out there with him, well, lord only knew what their trip was.
Minnie tapped a button on the viewer and the tape sped ahead at fast forward. I glanced at her puzzledly and she explained, “The rest is okay, but this one particular sequence is the only important thing. The whole meaning of life in a raindrop. The reason for existence, there in a puddle.”
“All that in a twentieth-century movie?” I said in mock astonishment.
“Just watch,” she demanded. “This is what makes Minnie Moskowitz tick.”
So I watched. In this scene, Gene still didn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain—and now he didn’t even have his slicker on. He did have one of those antiquated rain-deflecting devices—umbrella, I believe the nomenclature was—but of course he wasn’t using it. Instead, he was singing in the rain. Ah, logical, I thought, recalling the title of this epic. Gene was also dancing up a storm, if you’ll forgive the pun. And getting frightfully wet. He didn’t seem to mind. He said he didn’t, anyway, and he was smiling very broadly as the rainwater streamed down his face and fell into his mouth.
I found that I had begun smiling myself. It was very incongruous, this silly man singing and dancing in horrible meteorological conditions, not even using his little umbrella [404] for its man-made intention. He was cavorting with Nature instead of fighting it. And he was having a hell of a good time in those puddles. And then I realized what Minnie meant. Gene Kelly was soaring. There he was, smack dab in the midst of reality, soaked to the skin, feet firmly planted on the ground—and yet he was as far removed from reality and mundanity as you can get.
The stuff dreams are made of, I mused. That’s what old Gene is. Pure kitsch. No wonder she’s hooked on him.
“Not a bad ambition at all,” Minnie muttered. “Think of it—distilling what he’s got in his feet. What a rush. I’d like to control Gene Kelly’s feet myself.”
“Well, I suppose you can as long as no one else wants to use the tape.”
“You don’t really understand, do you?” she said. “That’s still being tied to reality, to a body, having to play a tape over and over again.”
“But that’s all you can do,” I said gently. “At least that’s something. At least you can get the feeling for a few minutes at a time, watching this, or feeling the wind in your face. Some people never feel it. Most people never feel it.”
“It’s not enough, Doc,” she said solemnly.
“Well,” I began with an appeasing smile, “maybe we’ll make it to the amusement park planet for shore leave. I bet it’d be just what the doctor ordered for you.”
“The what?”
“The amusement park planet. I hear it’s a terrific place, probably just what I need at this point, too. We’re in the Omicron Delta region now anyway. If some emergency doesn’t tear us away, that’s where we’ll probably end up. You ever been there for a leave?”
[405] She shrugged nonchalantly, but there was something strangely coy about her expression. “Can’t remember,” she said. Then she rewound Singin’ in the Rain and carefully put it back on the shelf.
There aren’t any clues as to the passage of time on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Sometimes you have breakfast at midnight and sometimes you have dinner at dawn. It makes no difference on a starship. No antique grandfather clock ever sounds the witching hour, nor does the sun ever burst through a veranda window at cock’s crow. The words “day” and “night” are irrelevant, and so are terms like “weeks” and “months” and “years.” Birthdays often pass unnoticed and holidays are all but forgotten, with the exception of one or two. Time marches on, but we stay the same up here, floating around in our glorious relativity condenser. So it goes.
And so it went. I finished the interview portion of my workup and moved on to the more tedious task of entering the numerous tapes into their individual files. A is for Agbadudu, B is for Bartholomew, C is for Castanuela. And so on. G is for Garvey, H is for Harrison, I is for Ix. And so on into tedium. It was a well-known drag, and I found myself nodding off at my desk more than once. But onward—so on and so on and so forth all the way up through the M’s, where I gave myself pau
se. Moskowitz, Minnie. I hadn’t thought about her in any number of irrelevant weeks. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her in that period of time, either, not that I had made any special effort to find her. It did seem somewhat unusual that with all the overlapping shifts I tended to work, Minnie never seemed to take her meals in [406] the rec area when I did. Perhaps she ate in her quarters, or down in the film library with Gene Kelly.
Whatever, here in the midst of the clutter on my desk was Minnie Moskowitz. Here in the midst of an advanced case of boredom, a mild case of loneliness, and just a touch of down in the mouth, was Minnie Moskowitz. Here in the midst of an empty, quiet office was a desk monitor and plop, into the tape slot went the Moskowitz tape, instead of into the Moskowitz file.
Should have programmed up a bowl of popcorn while I was at it, I decided, for even on tape Minnie was as entertaining as one of her twentieth-century extravaganza films. She brightened up my evening more than an extended coffee break. And just think—now I could play her whenever I needed a lift. I could play her over and over again for myself, just like she played old Gene Kelly. An ironic and slightly disturbing parallel. As much as I personally delighted in Minnie’s method of coping with “mundanity,” I did not particularly relish the prospect of finding myself falling victim to the same habits. It was not ... well ... professional.
But then again, after studying under people like Leonard McCoy, one might get the impression that professionalism is not one of the chief prerequisites to becoming a good doctor in Starfleet.
And speaking of extended coffee breaks, there was also that holy old adage about all work and no play making for a worn-out lady shrink. Bless them words of wisdom. I suddenly found myself inspired to close up shop, put on my boots, and go for a walk down to the library.
* * *
[407] “You’re a very bad man!”
This, in the voice of a young girl.
“No, my dear. I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.”
That, in the unwizardly voice of an old man.
I approached the voices, weaving my way around numerous shelves and tape stacks. The sounds, I discovered, were being emitted by an activated viewer. Portrayed on its screen was a man of straw, a man of tin, and a man of lion-hide, in addition, of course, to the young girl and the unwizardly wizard.
“Aha—Wizard of Oz,” I guessed with keen insight. “I’ve seen that one.”
Minnie glanced up at me and smiled. “You’re a true patron of the arts, Doc.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but we did have a copy of this at home when I was a kid.” I sat down next to her and added in a confessional tone, “I always had a thing for the Scarecrow.”
“ ’S nice,” she said, turning back toward the screen.
“I take it that this is another of your favorites?”
Minnie scratched her head. “Not really. I had this compulsion to watch it, but it’s not what I was looking for. It’s too earthbound.”
“Earthbound?” I echoed in disbelief. “But it’s pure fantasy.”
She shook her head. “Not pure. It’s hopelessly tied down by emotional bonds. That cluck has the chance of a lifetime handed to her on a silver platter ... or tornado, if you will, the opportunity to fulfill every daydream she’s ever had. And she chucks it!” Her voice rose in disgust. “And for what? For Kansas, for crying out loud. Mundane old Kansas!”
[408] “Well, yes, but ...” But what? She was right. Why did I feel such a need to defend Dorothy’s actions? Why did I feel so personally wounded? Why had I always identified so much with that dumb little cluck? “But she soared for a while. She didn’t really want to soar forever. She just needed to get away for a little while, to avoid the bad things about reality.”
“Yeah, I know somebody just like that,” Minnie muttered to herself. “Me, though, I’d take a good pair of flying feet over that any day. You wouldn’t catch me anywhere near Kansas if I didn’t have to be there.”
“You mean you don’t need that sense of security that home will always be waiting for you? Or that you belong? Or that Auntie Em loves you no matter what?”
“Not me. That isn’t in my backyard.”
I hesitated before I commented, “But there’s no place like home.”
Minnie shrugged. “If you say so, Doc. Dorothy can go home, and you can go home, and I’ll dance all night and still beg for more. That’s my function.”
And she pulled out the tape just as Dorothy was saying, “I think I’ll miss you most of all,” to the Scarecrow, who could say nothing at all, only look at her with fond tears in his painted eyes.
I stared at Minnie for a moment, thinking. It wasn’t that she was unemotional. No one who wanted to soar that badly could be unemotional. Yet there was definitely something lacking in that girl’s soul that I couldn’t quite pin down.
Her clear gray eyes met mine and she said, “I must admit that I’m getting awfully tired of this game. I’m fed up with this girl’s army.” She chuckled. “I think my battery’s [409] wearing down. Maybe it’s time for this one to go home after all.”
She leaned forward until her head rested on her forearms and she sighed. I found my hand instinctively reaching out toward her shoulder in a gesture of comfort that I suddenly realized would not give her anything that she needed. The hand fell back to my side. I cleared my throat and said, “Don’t suppose it’s made the complete circuit through the grapevine yet, but the word came through this morning. About R and R.”
“What about it?” she said softly.
“We’re going to the amusement park planet. We’ll be there the day after tomorrow.”
Just what the doctor ordered, I told myself again. I was sure that it would be just what she needed. She looked more cheerful already. “Well,” she smiled, “how nice. I guess now we’ll see one way or the other.”
“See what?” I asked.
“Whether there really is no place like it.”
Like the amusement park planet, I assumed. Nothing else would have made much sense.
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call your life boring,” I said, chewing absently on a dandelion stem. “What was your childhood like?”
“Childhood?” the Scarecrow replied. “What childhood?”
I stared at him for a moment, embarrassingly slow on the uptake, then chuckled. “Oh, yeah, right! Silly of me. Should learn to leave the couch up at the office.” I tossed the weed off to one side. “Pass me the potato salad.”
He glanced into the picnic basket and noted, “There’s an ant in the potato salad.”
[410] “Without the ant, if you don’t mind.”
He carefully picked up the (most likely) computer-created insect between two gloved fingers and placed it onto a blade of grass. “There you go, fella,” he addressed it kindly. “And don’t bring back your pals.” He handed me the container of potato salad and a fork.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Oh, you’re very welcome,” he replied graciously.
“Listen,” I said between mouthfuls of food, “are you sure you don’t want something to eat? There’s plenty here.”
“Oh, no. I never eat. But I’ll take some spare straw if you have it. That’s how I fill up.”
I checked the wicker basket briefly, and sure enough, there, neatly wrapped in a square of red and white gingham, was a small bundle of straw.
“Boy, they think of everything,” I said, handing him the parcel.
“A most competent planet,” agreed the Scarecrow, stuffing a handful of straw up either sleeve. “There now. That’s much better, don’t you think?”
He really didn’t look any different to me, but his freshly harvested appearance seemed so important to him that I commented, “Oh, undoubtedly. Indubitably, even.” I finished off a leg of fried chicken and wiped my fingers on the discarded gingham. “What would you say to a little promenade?” I asked him.
A glimmer of mischief appeared in his dark shiny eyes. “Why, I’d say, �
��Hello, little promenade!’ ”
I gave him a disapproving glance as he smiled at his own wit, which, unfortunately, had not come with the same money-back guarantee as his degree in thinkology.
[411] The Scarecrow sprang lightly to his feet, then extended his arm to me. I grasped the gloved hand and pulled myself up. In spite of his cornfield sense of humor, I had to admit that he was excellent company to explore the amusement park planet with. Polite, cheerful, brave, devoted—who could ask for anything more? Not me, certainly. Not even subconsciously. I’d barely begun to look around this wonderland when I’d discovered him, pole stuck up his back and everything, smack dab in the middle of a previously unoccupied field. Helping him down was obviously the only proper thing to do, an action which immediately made us fast friends. I’d always needed a friend like him. I’d always known that he’d care for me as much as he cared for Dorothy, if we just had the chance to get acquainted.
We promenaded for a while, arm in arm, with me helping him to his feet whenever he stumbled, which was often. It was a fine, fine day, bright and sunny and filled with the scent of blossoms from untold galaxies. Here and there we’d run into a crew member, blissfully engrossed in some personally entertaining fantasy, from wine, women, and song to lightsabers at twenty paces. Everywhere I looked, a lifetime of carefully constructed and even more carefully guarded castles in the air had become, at least temporarily, tangible reality.
“I don’t want to sound bossy or anything,” said the Scarecrow suddenly, “but I would suggest that we avoid that area up ahead. Now, we could go to the right—some people say that it’s very nice over there. Or we could ...”
“What’s wrong with straight ahead?” I was compelled to ask.
“Well,” he said apologetically, “nothing really. If you like [412] getting wet, I mean. I just noticed that it’s raining up ahead.”
“Raining?”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with rain. It makes the corn grow and all that. But whenever I get caught in the rain I come down with the worst case of mildew ...”
STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds I Page 34
