Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220)

by Morrow, James

  “An instant later,” said Volavont, “your planet will be cleansed of all two million irrationalists.”

  “I see,” I said, hyperventilating.

  “My, my,” gasped Connie, pale as cottage cheese.

  “If for some reason Yaxquid hasn’t heard from me by twenty minutes after ten,” said Wulawand, “the death-ray will fire automatically.”

  “What a technologically advanced civilization you are,” I said, squeezing both fists: heartless aliens, promiscuous death-rays, casual slaughter—this was science fiction at its worst.

  “For the present demonstration, the X-13 is not needed,” said Wulawand, pointing to the vegetable peeler. “We shall use this compact model, the X-2. Behold!”

  Leaning toward the rabbit ears, Wulawand rotated the axis of the peeler. The device glowed violet and begin whining like a theremin. An instant later a rapier of light shot from Howdy Doody’s left eye and skewered the dummy, setting it on fire.

  “Jesus!” cried Connie.

  “Good Lord!” I yelled.

  Wulawand touched the handle of the peeler, causing the death-ray to vanish and the whine to fade, while Connie and I pulled a quilt from the steamer trunk and wrapped it around the burning dummy, smothering the flames. We looked into each other’s frightened eyes: somehow we must outfox these homicidal lobsters—though just then they seemed to hold all the aces.

  “This is all very impressive,” I said as the glimmer of an idea illuminated a normally obscure region of my brain, “but I’m afraid you misinterpreted that ‘Sitting Shivah’ rehearsal.”

  “Misinterpreted, exactly,” Connie chimed in, obviously wondering what I would say next, which was a mystery to me as well.

  “In point of fact, Not By Bread Alone is a satiric program,” I asserted. “It mocks belief in the supernatural.”

  “We didn’t see much mockery today,” said Volavont. “Against all reason, a political dissident returned from the dead.”

  “What you witnessed was the first of six or seven rehearsals,” I said, improvising madly. “The actors always work with the irrational material first, so they’ll be able to deliver it with conviction. The most valuable satire does not burn straw men. It melts mighty icons.”

  “That makes sense,” Volavont conceded.

  “Even a child can burn a straw man,” added Connie.

  Striding toward the rabbit ears, I unfastened the X-2, then handed it to the skinny lobster. “So you see, Wulawand, you won’t be needing this after all.”

  “Not so fast, O Kurt Jastrow! How do we know that what you say is true?”

  “Would Uncle Wonder tell a lie?”

  A vertical grimace claimed Wulawand’s face, and her invertebrate body assumed a skeptical pose. “Harken to our terms. On Sunday morning, in deference to your assertion concerning Not By Bread Alone, Volavont and I shall tune in the broadcast on some TV or other, while our navigator monitors the show from our spaceship. If ‘Sitting Shivah’ indeed proves satiric, we shall contact Yaxquid at ten minutes after ten as planned.” Again the crustacean flashed her ocarina. “Our message will be simple: we were mistaken about the irrationality cult—deactivate the X-13.”

  “But if the program is in fact purveying metaphysical drivel, Wulawand will order Yaxquid to call down the death-ray,” said Volavont. “Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough,” I said, raging internally.

  “Of course, we must avoid getting skewered by our own brochette.” Wulawand crept toward the steamer trunk and yanked the gold cloth from my award. “After Volavont and I suspend this impervious veil in front of the picture tube, we shall be able to watch the program without misadventure.”

  “Such precautions won’t be necessary,” I insisted. “Last year Not By Bread Alone won the Voltaire Award for Theological Impertinence.”

  “I can hardly wait to see the icons melt,” said Volavont.

  He wouldn’t have to wait long. Connie and I had only forty hours to write, cast, and rehearse the new teleplay.

  “As the ‘Sitting Shivah’ production evolves, some characters will be dropped altogether while new parts are added for other NBC actors,” I said. “Brock Barton and his crew sometimes make guest appearances on Not By Bread Alone.”

  “They do?” muttered Connie.

  “The final version will be as impious as a turd in a baptismal font,” I promised the lobsters.

  “Sacrilege on stilts,” added Connie, wincing. She wasn’t going to enjoy turning her elegant teleplay into a farce, not one little bit. “A jamboree of blasphemy. A circus of irreverence.”

  “I love circuses,” said Volavont. “By the way, I’m famished.”

  “Myself as well,” said Wulawand, tucking the ray-proof cloth into her carapace. “Let us now patronize three or four of those swank restaurants for which Manhattan is famous.”

  The thought of spending the evening explaining trench-coated crustaceans to maître d’s and Diners Club members filled me with apprehension. “You know what you two really need?” I said. “A home-cooked meal, that’s what.” Although the cuisine at 378 Bleecker Street, apartment 4R, was spartan, I always kept my favorite prepackaged food on hand. “Once you get a taste of Kraft macaroni and cheese, you’ll want to take tons of it back with you.”

  “It appears that we are all friends again,” said Wulawand.

  “O Kurt Jastrow, I wish we could give you a Zorningorg Prize every day of the year,” said Volavont.

  I marched up to the Motorola and flipped off the tube, sending Howdy Doody into oblivion.

  3.

  COFFEE WITH CHRIST

  AT CHOCK FULL O' NUTS

  onnie and I agreed that, as a first step in foiling the Qualimosans, I should secretly contact my roommates and prepare them for two guests whose resemblance to immense blue bipedal lobsters was best accorded an extraterrestrial interpretation. A Rexall drugstore on 54th Street supplied the necessary pay telephone. Connie contributed the nickel. Lenny answered on the first ring. Probably owing to his bohemian sensibility, he greeted my narrative of alien invasion with minimal skepticism, and he seemed to accept the logic of my argument: only a last-minute Not By Bread Alone rewrite could save two million innocent television viewers from an X-13 death-ray.

  “I always knew the flying-saucer people were out there, and sooner or later they’d land on Earth,” said Lenny. “But I never imagined they’d be so antagonistic to God.”

  “They’re logical positivists, or so Connie tells me.”

  “Eliot’s going to have a lot of trouble with this,” said Lenny, “especially their plan to throw all those Christians to the lions.”

  “The rule for tonight’s visit is simple,” I said. “No metaphysics. Take down Eliot’s poster of the Buddha. Hide your copy of the Upanishads. Make no mention of Cardinal Spellman, the Pope, or any other Christian celebrity. If you can’t say something nice about logical positivism, say nothing at all.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Now here’s a tougher assignment. I suspect that Qualimosans never sleep, so we’ll need some way to amuse them while Connie and I sneak off and give her script a makeover. Maybe you could show our guests a couple of movies on that projector you got when the New Yorker commissioned ‘The Celluloid Rebels.’”

  “The piece was called ‘The Celluloid Insurgents,’ and I sold it to the Brooklynite,” Lenny corrected me. “I’ll telephone my cousin Marvin in Queens. Last year he bought up a lot of Army-surplus horror movies—you know, the sort of 16mm prints the G.I.s got to see when they weren’t killing Nazis. I’ll bet your flying-saucer people would think Bela Lugosi is the bug’s nuts.”

  “Lugosi? Are you kidding? The Qualimosans are allergic to supernaturalist narratives.”

  “We’ll skip Lugosi’s vampires and confine the festival to his mad doctors. A romantic but basically level-headed lot, all fiercely committed to the scientific worldview.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You got a better idea?”


  “No.”

  “Bye, Kurt. See you soon.”

  At first the Yellow Cab driver I flagged down was reluctant to accept, along with two seemingly normal fares, a pair of trench-coated exhibitionists who thought it was still Halloween, but then I waved a twenty-dollar bill in his face, saying he could keep the change. “For twenty bucks, I don’t care if your fabulous fairyland costume party is in frigging Connecticut,” said the cabbie, a mustachioed man whose hackney license identified him as Rocco Spinelli. “Lemme guess—I’m takin’ you to Greenwich Village.”

  “Bull’s-eye,” I said.

  “Chocolate cologne!” said the cabbie. “What will you drag queens think of next?”

  “Drive on, O Rocco Spinelli!” ordered Wulawand.

  “And remember, our death-ray is not just for irrationalists,” Volavont added. “Sometimes we set our sights on sarcastic vertebrates.”

  We passed the next half-hour jammed together in the taxi, Connie and the lobsters riding in the back seat, myself ensconced beside the driver, the Zorningorg Prize, now cloaked in Uncle Wonder’s cardigan sweater, balanced on my lap. Connie took the opportunity to chat with Wulawand and Volavont. Both crustaceans were delighted to learn that, in the lexicon of Western academic philosophy, they were logical positivists. Elaborating, Connie breezily declared that this world-view overlapped considerably with “the reigning ethos of Planet Earth, secular humanism.”

  “At my alma mater, Barnard College, anyone who questions the principle of empirical verification is called a twaddle coddler,” she insisted. “Your Weltanschauung also partakes of the atomism favored by the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus.”

  “Marvelous,” said Wulawand.

  “I love this planet,” said Volavont.

  “Logical positivism has its critics, of course,” said Connie. “This system must consign ethics to the sphere of arbitrary emotivism. It’s difficult to get from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ using only linguistic analysis.”

  “Ethics?” said Wulawand. “What is ethics?”

  “Nothing you need worry about,” I piped up from the front seat, fearful that Connie’s answer would antagonize the lobsters. “Miss Osborne’s point is that almost everyone on our world thinks logical positivism is just as swell as secular humanism.”

  “As I told your audience this afternoon, Qualimosa is in the throes of a civil war,” said Wulawand. “The first shots were fired two hundred years ago, after a clever young scientist, Professor Squatront, advanced a persuasive theory concerning the origin of our planet’s premier species—and all its other life-forms as well.”

  “Squatront argued that we could account for ourselves entirely through materialist evolutionary processes,” said Volavont. “Narratives of special creation by a Supreme Being were tales for children.”

  “I’m thankful that no such controversy ever emerged here on Earth,” said Connie.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” said Wulawand.

  Darkness had fallen by the time we reached 378 Bleecker Street. Squeezing the award against my chest, I led Connie and the lobsters up the stairs to the fourth floor landing, trying to tamp down my fear that, outraged by the Qualimosans’ murderous intentions, my roommates would treat them with the same caliber of hostility Joe McCarthy accorded Communists.

  I needn’t have worried. Lenny welcomed Wulawand and Volavont magnanimously, adding even a dash of the cavalier, as if extraterrestrial dinner guests were just another interesting feature of life in the big city. Eliot, too, had apparently decided to fête our visitors for now and reckon with their sociopathy later. After ascertaining from Wulawand that feeler-stroking constituted the standard Qualimosan salutation, he greeted both aliens in this manner, then offered them vino from a wicker-wrapped Chianti bottle he’d been “saving for a special occasion,” though obviously not this special occasion.

  “Fermented juice from a fruit we call grapes,” Eliot explained to the lobsters.

  “It sounds exquisite,” said Wulawand.

  “Please decant the beverage in question,” said Volavont.

  “None for me, thanks,” said Connie.

  “I’m supposed to pound out a script tonight,” I said, shaking my head.

  As Eliot uncorked the Chianti, Lenny curled an arm around my neck and whispered, “An emergency Bela Lugosi delivery is on the way.”

  “You’ll get a medal for this,” I said.

  Eliot filled four glasses with Chianti, and the invertebrates immediately started guzzling. Connie and I repaired to the kitchen, where I secured my cardigan-covered trophy atop the refrigerator, snugging it between the cathedral radio and the Hasbro Toy Company’s windup tinplate version of Cotter Pin. Speaking sotto voce, we simultaneously prepared dinner and plotted our strategy.

  “With any luck, we’ll be able to meet with half your ‘Sitting Shivah’ actors tomorrow,” I told Connie, filling a saucepan with tap water, “plus four or five Brock Barton regulars.”

  “My top priority is relieving Ogden of his directorial duties,” she said. “As the show’s producer, I can bounce him from any episode. I won’t enjoy firing him, but if he ends up in the control room Sunday morning, he’s bound to cause trouble.”

  “He can’t abide sacrilege?” I asked

  Connie nodded and said, “I’m not wild about it either, but I’ll do anything to thwart your horrid Martians.”

  “Maybe Ogden will be equally flexible,” I suggested.

  “Show him the charred dummy, show him your trophy—he’ll still think it’s all a joke at the expense of the Lutheran Church.”

  I lit the stove and set the saucepan on the open flame. “So who’s going to direct this clambake?”

  “Me, unless you’ve got a better idea.”

  “You’ll be terrific,” I said. “I see a Zorningorg Prize in your future.”

  For the next five minutes we stared at the water, waiting for it to boil.

  “Then there’s the problem of the script itself,” said Connie.

  “What script?”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “The evening is young,” I said. “Lenny has a scheme for keeping the Qualimosans distracted while you and I slip away to some garret or other. It involves a cache of old horror movies.”

  “I’m not following you,” said Connie as a constellation of bubbles rose to the water’s surface.

  “Lenny feels pretty confident.”

  “I suggest we write our script at the Saint Francis House." Connie opened a box of Kraft macaroni, removed the cheese envelope, and dumped the remaining contents in the boiling water. "Donna never turns off the heat, and we can probably use the Catholic Anarchist mimeo machine.”

  “Don’t worry about the sacrilege, Connie.” I stirred the macaroni with a wooden spoon, the pasta bits swirling like motes in a nebula. “God will understand. I hear he’s a pragmatist at heart, very keen on William James.”

  Forty minutes later the six of us sat down to a meal of bread, butter, and cheese-flavored macaroni, three boxes’ worth. Wulawand and Volavont derived as much pleasure from playing with their food as eating it. (They especially enjoyed blowing into the hollow pasta segments to create high-pitched whistles.) When the crustaceans declared that they found the main course scrumptious, I took this assessment at face value, though their satisfaction was doubtless enhanced by the second bottle of Chianti, which Lenny had found in our pantry behind a pyramid of Campbell’s tomato-soup cans.

  “Don’t think me rude if I go to bed soon,” said Eliot, yawning. “Today I had four absolutely grueling auditions.”

  I turned to Wulawand and said, “You’re welcome to toss some blankets and mattress pads on the floor—or will you be sleeping in your shuttle tonight?”

  “What is sleeping?” she asked.

  “A lapse in rational consciousness,” I replied.

  “Ah, you mean religion,” said Volavont, emitting the squonk, squonk, squonk noise by which Qualimosans expressed amuse
ment.

  “Very clever,” I said with a forced guffaw as Connie rolled her eyes.

  When Eliot realized we had no dessert on hand, he volunteered to fetch some ice cream from the corner bodega. Before he left, I quietly instructed him to return with vanilla and strawberry only. (Because our guests smelled like chocolate, I explained, that flavor might smack of cannibalism.) No sooner had Eliot departed than Lenny marched to the hall closet and pulled out his Bell & Howell Filmosound projector. His present Brooklynite assignment, he explained, concerned Bela Lugosi, “the king of anti-metaphysics melodramas.” Because the Hollywood legend’s latest low-budget vehicle, The Phantom of Flatbush, was set largely in Brooklyn, Lenny’s editors had decided the magazine should do a 10,000-word Lugosi feature, complete with a sympathetic review of the new movie, a biographical sketch, and an impressionistic survey of the Hungarian actor’s greatest performances.

  “The only way I can meet the deadline is to stay up all night watching my cousin Marvin’s collection of Lugosi classics,” Lenny told the lobsters. “Please join me. These entertainments celebrate logical positivism at its finest. Murders in the Rue Morgue finds Lugosi playing Dr. Mirakle, whose scientific curiosity can be satisfied only by infusing a virgin with an orangutan’s blood, his goal being to create a mate for his talking sideshow ape, Erik.”

  If I correctly recalled the Daily Variety coverage, The Phantom of Flatbush had indeed opened recently—on Halloween, appropriately, and to sluggish business, predictably. But Lenny had certainly received no Lugosi assignment from the Brooklynite. My journalist roommate, God bless him, was prevaricating for the greater good.

  Within fifteen minutes of Eliot’s return from the bodega, the ice cream had disappeared, most of it into alien alimentary canals, Wulawand expressing a preference for the vanilla, Volavont favoring the strawberry. But they were utterly ecstatic about the candy Eliot had impulsively purchased. Consuming their 3 Musketeers bars, the crustaceans declared that nougat was as delectable as logic.

  Not long after our guests had savored their final morsels of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—the chocolate component evidently gave them no offense—I announced that Connie and I were facing a deadline as severe as Lenny’s. We’d be spending the rest of the evening back at NBC, collaborating on a teleplay.