Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220)

by Morrow, James

  I sold one more story to Saul that year, an androids-in-revolt allegory called “Rusted Justice,” and then the rejection letters started arriving, not only from Andromeda but also Astounding, Galaxy, Weird Tales, and even Planet Stories. It was obvious that the three-way intersection of Uncle Wyatt’s basement, my fevered cerebrum, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica would not reliably cover my share of the Bleecker Street rent. So I penned a science-fiction teleplay for children, outlined four follow-up episodes, and started pounding the midtown-Manhattan pavements, hoping that my Andromeda track record might land me an interview with some TV potentates.

  I couldn’t get past the receptionist at the Dumont Network, and CBS proved equally impervious, but somehow I wrangled a thirty-minute audience at NBC with Walter Spalding, head of programming, and George Cates, the marketing director, who listened attentively as I described a series that would give ABC’s Planet Patrol a run for its money. (The executives were especially intrigued by my idea of concluding each episode with a geezer doing science experiments in his attic.) I left the meeting with a feather in my cap—not merely a feather, a billowing plume, and a credit to go with it: Kurt Jastrow, assistant writer and associate development chief for Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers. Mr. Spalding would function as executive producer. Mr. Cates would corral a couple of sponsors. The universe was my oyster.

  I was not long on the job before realizing that NBC’s new outer-space series had neither a head writer nor a development chief. When it came to penning the scripts and defining the program’s underlying sociological and political assumptions, Brock Barton would be a one-man band, Kurt Jastrow receiving $210 a week to play all the brass, woodwinds, and percussion, though my resourceful director, Floyd Cox, and my ingenious special-effects technician, Mike Zipser, could also claim credit for the show’s success. While the contract required me to run every teleplay past my bosses, they never suggested deletions or changes, as Mr. Spalding rarely bothered to read anything I wrote—the steady stream of fan letters convinced him to leave my bailiwick alone—and Mr. Cates read only far enough to verify that the hero would appear on camera for the umpteenth time eating a bowl of Sugar Corn Pops and, later, downing a glass of Ovaltine.

  I quickly learned that the fraternity of television writers was divided into two camps. For the self-proclaimed “linguals,” live TV was the bastard child of that venerable art form called radio drama. According to this school, dialogue and narration were the sine qua non of the new medium, and it was always better to paint a scene with words, thereby engaging the viewer’s imagination, than to attempt an on-screen flying dragon, spouting volcano, or sinking ship, because whatever the technicians devised was bound to look ridiculous.

  The rival faction, the “ocularists,” located the essence of television in the camera’s lens, not the mind’s eye. True, the medium did not allow for Hollywood-style opticals or stop-motion animation, but you could still employ models, miniatures, and painted backdrops. Indeed, the low-fidelity picture tube often made such images appear vaguely authentic. And, of course, thanks to the switching device in the control room, the director could take the various cathode-ray streams arriving from the studio floor, their contents having been dictated to the cameramen via headsets, and blend them into exotic composites. Through the switcher’s magic, an ordinary lizard could become a dinosaur—a simple matter of mixing camera one’s shot of a live iguana with camera two’s shot of a prospector cowering on a desert set—just as a sun-struck vampire could be turned into a skeleton, or a couple of actors in diving gear transported to the gates of an underwater city.

  Ultimately I pledged my allegiance to the linguals. I was a published author, after all, a professional whose fiction had occasioned seven fan letters in Andromeda. And yet in writing my weekly quota of TV episodes, I always tried to give the ocularists their due—Floyd Cox and Mike Zipser favored this approach—and the adventure called “The Cobra King of Ganymede” was no exception.

  The plot had the villainous ruler in question, the notorious Argon Drakka, threatening our solar system by breeding space-dwelling pythons of ever-increasing size, eventually creating a serpent who could gird a planet, Midgard-like, so that the inhabitants faced an unhappy choice between doing Drakka’s bidding and having their world crushed like a tennis ball in a vise. Monday’s chapter, “Coils of Terror,” found Galaxy Central ordering the space schooner to the moon of Jupiter called Ganymede, so Brock could investigate the rumor that Drakka was experimenting with extraterrestrial reptiles. Before embarking on the assignment, Brock collected his crew on the bridge of the Triton (an elaborate set that filled an entire quadrant of Studio One), including his fearless first lieutenant, Lance Rawlings; his prepossessing second lieutenant, Wendy Evans, a.k.a. the love interest; a slap-happy ensign, Ducky Malloy; a humanoid robot, Cotter Pin; and a talking gorilla, Sylvester Simian, whose intellect had been augmented through accelerated evolution. Shortly after the Triton landed on Ganymede, Drakka unleashed one of his creatures-in-progress, a serpent of intermediate immensity that dutifully sinuated across the sands toward the space schooner and wrapped itself around the hull. (I felt confident Mike Zipser could coax a live garter snake into embracing our Triton model.) Cut to a commercial: a non sequitur shot of Brock, now mysteriously relocated to Galaxy Central, enjoying a bowl of Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops. “And remember, kids, it’s got the sweetenin’ already on it!” Cut back to Ganymede. With a reverberant prerecorded hiss the snake constricted. The schooner buckled. Girders snapped. Rivets popped loose—and then, suddenly, the monster’s head breached the viewport, threatening to sink a huge pointy tooth into Wendy: a composite shot fusing camera one’s close-up of a snake-head puppet with camera two’s image of the Triton bridge. Fade-out. Cut to Brock doing an Ovaltine commercial. Dissolve to title card, FANGS OF DEATH.

  “Be sure to tune in Wednesday for ‘Fangs of Death,’” exhorted Jerry Korngold, “chapter two of ‘The Cobra King of Ganymede’!”

  Up in the control room, Floyd ordered the usual dissolve to camera three: the familiar attic set, including a Motorola TV displaying, via a closed-circuit feed, the title card, FANGS OF DEATH. (The rabbit ears were just for show.) After Uncle Wonder—yours truly, Kurt Jastrow—deactivated the picture tube, a fresh title card, UNCLE WONDER'S ATTIC, appeared over a close-up of the tinkerer’s acolyte, Andy Tuckerman.

  Smiling benevolently, itching beneath my ersatz beard and eyebrows, I paced around amid the canonical collection of attic bric-a-brac—dressmaker’s dummy, steamer trunk, hurricane lantern, grandfather clock—and addressed Andy in reassuring tones. “Wendy sure has gotten herself in a peck of trouble, hasn’t she? But I’m not worried, Andy, are you?”

  An exciting chapter, to be sure, though not free of the disasters to which live television was heir. Ducky Malloy had bobbled his first line, “Not Ganymede again, their bars serve the worst orange juice in the Milky Way,” which came out, “Not Ganymede again, their oranges serve the worst Milky Way bars in the galaxy.” (We’d be hearing from the Mars Candy Company about that one.) While coiling itself around the Triton, the snake had snapped off a stabilizer, betraying the space schooner as a mere balsa-wood prop. And when the reptile’s head penetrated the bridge, Lance Rawlings had glanced at the floor monitor, seen the composite, and started laughing uncontrollably, forcing Sylvester to provide his lines from memory.

  “Brock will save the day!” declared Andy. I was not alone in my lack of affection for this unctuous child. Everyone at the network thought he was a pill. “He always comes through in the nick of time!”

  “Right you are! Say, Andy, have you ever wondered what makes the Triton’s shuttle go zooming across the sky?”

  “I’m guessin’ it uses a jet engine!”

  “Yep!” Sidling toward my worktable, I pulled on a pair of canvas gloves. “And it happens we can build a jet engine right here”—I stared into camera three, its tally-light ablaze—“and so can all you kids at home.”

  �
��Gee willikers!” exclaimed Andy.

  “We start with an empty cylindrical ice-cream tub.” By now the camera-two operator had wheeled his rig into Uncle Wonder’s sector of the studio, so that, as I identified the engine’s components, Floyd could reveal each in close-up. “We also need an aluminum pie-plate, a basin of room-temperature water, two short drinking-straw segments, a lump of putty, a pair of kitchen tongs, and some chunks of dry ice.” Cut to camera three: a midshot of Uncle Wonder. I winked at the lens. “Kids, you can get your dry ice from the man who drives your Popsicle truck. Popsicle brings you Wild West Roundup every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at four o’clock here on your local NBC station.”

  “I see you’re wearin’ gloves,” said Andy.

  “You bet I am. Never touch dry ice with your bare hands.”

  I equipped the kid with his own gloves, and then we got to work. Under my supervision Andy punched two holes on opposite sides of the ice-cream tub, then inserted the straw segments, securing them with putty and curling them in opposite directions. I filled our cardboard jet engine a quarter of the way with warm water, rested it on the pie-plate, and set the plate afloat in the basin.

  “Go ahead, Andy, fuel the engine.”

  The kid seized the tongs and—plop, plop, plop—dropped three chunks of dry ice into the tub.

  “Here’s how our machine works,” I said, fitting the lid back over the tub. “The heat of the engine-water causes the dry ice to dissolve quickly. The vapor escapes through the straw segments in two complementary streams of thrust. Our turbine reacts by—”

  Right on cue, the floating tub-and-plate arrangement began rotating in the basin.

  “Spinning!”

  “Gollywhompers, that’s swell!” said Andy. “I think I’ll go home and make a jet engine of my own!” Whistling, he headed for the door. “Mind if I borrow these gloves? Safety first, right, Uncle Wonder?”

  “Of course you can borrow ’em! Safety first!”

  Dissolve to end title. Fade-out. Cut to NBC logo.

  The operators of cameras two and three lost no time switching off their rigs and leaving the floor—they were scheduled to cover Sing-Along Circus in Studio Three—even as the audio engineer killed the boom mike and the lighting director doused the kliegs. Though free to go home, I elected to hang around the deserted attic set and practice Wednesday’s science experiment.

  Because the next chapter of “Cobra King” involved Brock detonating a bomb inside a dormant volcano, I’d decided to demonstrate why bakeries and flour mills sometimes exploded. The setup included a small funnel resting inside an empty paint can with a perforated bottom. A rubber tube snaked beneath the can, one end bare, the other suckling the funnel’s spout. Before Andy’s popping eyes, I would fill the funnel with flour, place a burning candle in the paint can, seal it with a metal lid, and exhale into the tube, forcing the white powder into a fateful rendezvous with the candle flame.

  The rehearsal went rather too well. No sooner did I perform the requisite puff than a detonation rocked the attic set, wrenching off the paint-can lid and hurling it into the hurricane lantern—smash, crash, tinkle, tinkle—even as a fireball blossomed atop the worktable. My first thought: if my trial explosion had intruded on the live broadcast spilling from Studio Three, the Sing-Along Circus people would never speak to me again. My second thought: thank God I’d decided to rehearse, since blowing up a child, even Andy Tuckerman, on live TV was the sort of disaster from which my career would never recover.

  Cautiously I prepared my miniature mill for a second trial, adding fuel to the funnel—a mere teaspoon this time—then inserting the lighted candle. But before I could restore the lid to the paint can, Uncle Wonder’s Motorola flared to life, displaying an unstable but intelligible picture: perhaps a feed from an NBC camera, I thought, though more likely, considering the fuzziness of the image, a broadcast struggling to cope with the disconnected rabbit ears. The scanning-gun limned an outlandish life-form suggesting a svelte blue lobster with serrated claws and a grasshopper’s rear legs. Its visual system was tripartite—three large eyeballs protruded from its brow on pliant stalks—and its toothless mouth opened and closed along the vertical axis.

  “Greetings, Earthling!” shouted the crustacean, a line I’d promised myself I would never use in a Brock Barton episode. “Salutations, O Kurt Jastrow! We have converted your television into a pangalactic transceiver! Even as you watch this broadcast, we are hurtling toward you from our home planet, Qualimosa in the Procyon system!”

  “I see,” I said, suppressing a smirk. Evidently my counterparts at ABC’s Planet Patrol were playing a practical joke.

  A second bipedal lobster entered the shot, as obese as its colleague was skinny. (Stay tuned for Laurel and Hardy in Two Chumps from Outer Space.) “We apologize for the murky image! When we talk again on Wednesday, our ship will be closer to Earth and the transmission much clearer!”

  “Know this, O Kurt Jastrow!” cried the skinny lobster. “All the brightest people on Qualimosa adore Uncle Wonder’s Attic ! In a galaxy riddled with self-delusion, your program stands as a beacon of scientific enlightenment!”

  “I see,” I said, trying not to snicker. “I have trouble believing that, of all the programs emanating from Earth, you think mine’s the best.”

  “Truth to tell, Qualimosa’s engineers are still calibrating our planet’s TV antennas!” the fat lobster explained. “Beyond Uncle Wonder’s Attic, we have thus far tuned in only Texaco Star Theater, hosted by a boisterous comedian who dresses in women’s clothes, and Howdy Doody, featuring a mentally defective child!”

  “Well, if those are the choices,” I said, “then my show is indeed a beacon of enlightenment.”

  “We humbly request that, during your Wednesday broadcast, you announce our imminent arrival!” the skinny lobster declared. “Please tell your viewers that, instead of a science experiment, Friday’s program will feature an awards ceremony!”

  “Harken, O Kurt Jastrow!” the fat lobster demanded. “You will be the first recipient of a trophy forged expressly for those who champion reason in its eternal war with revelation! We mean to visit your attic set and, standing before millions of viewers on Earth and Qualimosa, present you with the Zorningorg Prize!”

  “This is a gag, right?” I said. “You’re from ABC. Hardy har har.”

  “A gag, O Kurt Jastrow?” wailed the skinny lobster. “Your hypothesis is false!”

  “Hardy har har not!” added the fat lobster. “Behold!”

  It really happened. I saw it with my own eyes. The dressmaker’s dummy, which normally sat inertly in the corner on a small tripodal stand, began to move. Clank, clank, clank went the three wrought-iron feet as they stomped across the attic set. The next thing I knew, the headless automaton had marched past the steamer trunk, circled Uncle Wonder’s worktable, and returned to its original position.

  “Praised be the gods of logic!” exclaimed the skinny lobster.

  “All hail the avatars of doubt!” declared the fat lobster.

  And then the Motorola went dark.

  Throughout my years as the primary creative force behind Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers, Tuesday morning was always the highlight of the week. Beginning at nine o’clock, NBC’s four most gifted dramatists, or so we fancied ourselves, gathered at the Café Utrillo in Washington Square to eat breakfast and critique each other’s teleplays. Besides myself, our group included Howard Osborne, who channeled his talents into a Friday night thriller called Tell Me a Ghost Story; his comely sister, Connie Osborne, who wrote and produced a Sunday morning religious program called Not By Bread Alone; and Sidney Blanchard, who contributed to the prestigious Thursday night anthology series Catharsis and also went drinking with Dylan Thomas whenever the celebrated alcoholic poet came to town. We styled ourselves the Underwood Milkers, because we all composed on Underwood typewriters and admired Mr. Thomas’s radio play, Under Milk Wood, which Sidney had distributed in mimeographed form at the end of o
ur inaugural meeting.

  In the sixteen hours that had elapsed between my encounter with the Qualimosans and my arrival at the Utrillo, I’d decided that my first instinct was correct: my visitors were almost certainly costumed pranksters. As for the Motorola’s mysterious resuscitation, they’d probably ignited it via remote control. More difficult to dismiss were the antics of the dressmaker’s dummy, but I reasoned that the jokesters could have retrofitted it with springs and pulleys. (I intended to look for the hidden mechanism when I returned to the studio for Wednesday’s broadcast.) And so I resolved that during the imminent meeting of the Underwood Milkers I would say nothing about blue bipedal lobsters from outer space.

  The agenda for that morning’s workshop included an upcoming Brock Barton adventure, as well as Connie’s latest Not By Bread Alone installment. (We’d passed out carbon copies during our previous gathering.) I was not displeased with “The Phantom Asteroid,” which found Brock and his crew visiting the gas-giant sector of the solar system to investigate the sudden appearance of a minor planet in orbit between Saturn and Uranus. This strange body turned out to be a spherical machine constructed by the Nonextants, spectral beings to whom the universe belonged “before palpable matter supplanted tangible nothingness as the basic stuff of reality.” No sooner did the Triton’s crew step onto the machine’s surface than Prince Nihil, the sole surviving Nonextant, trapped them “inside a prison constructed of my ethereal ancestors’ nightmares.” The last time I’d attempted something this weird—Brock and company spelunking the brain of a Manhattan-sized monster called a Spafongus—the network received enthusiastic letters from about half the children in North America, though we also got a dozen protests from adults accusing us of gratuitous surrealism.