Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220)

by Morrow, James

  “I figure that our visit to the IRT will take all morning,” said Eliot.

  Mentally I applauded my imaginative thespian roommate. Evidently he’d bought us the time we needed for our Chock Full O’ Nuts script conference. “Ah, yes, the IRT,” I said in a bemused tone. “The New York subway system is the most impressive sculpture on the planet.” And unlike many of the pieces one finds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I thought, it’s entirely secular (with the exception of some Saint Luke’s Hospital placards the lobsters would never notice). “I’d love to come with you, but Miss Osborne and I must spend the afternoon writing a script about Norwegian fisheries.”

  “Quiet!” Lenny demanded. “I want to hear the end of the movie!”

  All eyes turned to the screen. To prevent Dr. Rukh from committing another murder, Mother Rukh employed her cane to swat a leather hypodermic case from his grasp, thus shattering his vials of the antidote for Radium X poisoning.

  “My son, you have broken the first law of science,” said Mother Rukh, a character evidently as sympathetic as our Demivirgin Mary.

  “A pox on you, Mother Rukh!” shouted Volavont.

  “Yes, you’re right,” rasped Karloff, exuding smoke and exhibiting other symptoms of internal combustion. “It’s better this way. Good-bye, Mother.”

  The radiant Dr. Rukh charged up the stairway to a balcony door and hurled himself through the glass. Transmuting into a ball of fire, he plummeted to the street below.

  “The first law of science,” said Connie. “I wonder what she meant by that.”

  “Never conduct serious research in the Carpathians?” Lenny suggested.

  “Refrain from killing sprees?” offered Eliot.

  “Refrain from unnecessary killing sprees,” Volavont corrected him.

  “First do no harm?” I proposed.

  “Unless the future of reason is at stake,” said Wulawand.

  After Lenny finished rewinding The Invisible Ray, Eliot began arguing that the Qualimosans’ trench coats and slouch hats would not make them sufficiently inconspicuous during the subway tour, and I had to agree. The solution, we soon decided, lay in the talents of our across-the-hall neighbor, an artist named Chet Sargent. Although Eliot had lost his job as a palace guard when The King and I ended its run in September, he still boasted one of the healthiest bank balances on Bleecker Street, and he was happy to fund the salvation of two million Christians.

  Grateful for the commission, his first in six weeks, Chet took two 24” x 32” slabs of plywood, adorned each with an elegant codfish, then added an advertisement for a nonexistent restaurant: EXPERIENCE FINE DINING AT CAPTAIN CABOT'S SEAFOOD TAVERN—MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS. A second pair of plywood sheets received an image of a cabin cruiser and a caption touting an alleged service for sportsmen: LONG ISLAND CHARTER BOATS, INC.—CATCH YOUR DINNER IN THE SOUND—RESULTS GUARANTEED. Leather shoulder-straps provided the coups de grâce, turning the paintings into sandwich boards.

  While Eliot supervised construction of the Qualimosans’ disguises, Connie got on the phone to NBC. First she spoke to someone in the art department, directing him to prepare two new title cards, one reading THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP, the other asking WHO CREATED GOD? Next she talked to an assistant props manager. Owing to the last-minute addition of a mêlée, she explained, the dining table and the benches on the Lazarus set must be replaced with breakaway furniture.

  “You’re right, Randy,” she said. “Brawls don’t normally figure in Not By Bread Alone, but it all makes sense in context.”

  She cradled the handset, and I straightaway called Saul Silver. Wulawand and Volavont, I explained, were indeed extraterrestrials. Their spaceship was orbiting the Earth, their shuttle lay camouflaged in Rockefeller Center, and my colleague Connie Osborne and I had less than twenty-four hours to produce a teleplay congruent with the invaders’ logical-positivist worldview, lest a mass murder occur. We’d arranged to sequester Wulawand and Volavont for the next five hours or so, but would Saul be willing to have them over as dinner guests? Indeed, might he detain them till morning, subsequently tuning in Not By Bread Alone and keeping me apprised, via telephone, of their reaction while Connie directed the broadcast?

  “You’re asking the editor of Andromeda,” said Saul, “a man who prides himself on his scientific curiosity, if he might conceivably value tête-à-têtes with two intelligent beings from outer space?”

  “Silly question.”

  “What do they eat?”

  “Apparently they’re omnivores. You got any macaroni and cheese? It needn’t be kosher.”

  “Ha, ha, ha. Yes, I’ve got macaroni and cheese. How’s your edge-of-the-universe novelette coming along?”

  “Slowly. I’ve been preoccupied.”

  At 11:30 A.M. Connie, Eliot, the lobsters, and I entered West 4th Street Station, my valise bulging with the cloaked Zorningorg Prize, the trinocular goggles, and all twelve copies of the teleplay. Still fetchingly attired in Lenny’s motorcycle jacket, Connie approached the newsstand and purchased that morning’s Herald Tribune.

  She immediately wished she hadn’t. DYLAN THOMAS DEAD AT THIRTY-EIGHT proclaimed the headline in the lower left corner. PNEUMONIA CLAIMS WELSH BARD IN SAINT VINCENT'S HOSPITAL ran the subhead.

  “I hope he raged,” said Connie, scanning the article.

  “I’m sure he did,” I said.

  “God rest his soul.”

  Wulawand and Volavont followed us as we descended to the platform for the uptown A, B, and C trains, both aliens eager to begin the first phase of their cultural adventure, a protracted northward journey to the 207th Street Station near the Harlem River. Doubtless owing to the sandwich boards affixed to their chests and spines like a conquistador’s armor, the invertebrates attracted little notice. I told Eliot to meet us on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History at four o’clock, a plan that would presumably allow Connie and me to hand the crustaceans off to Saul and still keep our evening appointment at the White Horse Tavern.

  The A train whooshed out of the tunnel and screeched to a halt. Connie and I bid the three IRT tourists farewell, then climbed back to daylight, walked to Prince Street Station, and took the N train to Herald Square.

  Our Galilean rabbi, Ezra Heifetz, a swarthy man who uncannily resembled Warner Sallman’s iconic Jesus painting, had already secured a booth at Chock Full O’ Nuts. Shortly after sidling into the compartment, Connie and I were joined by the muscular Calder Bolling and the massive Joel Seddok, of Cotter Pin and Sylvester Simian fame respectively. A Negro employee appeared—racial pluralism had been a Chock Full O’ Nuts hiring norm even before Jackie Robinson became the company’s vice president—and took our orders. We all selected the house specialties: coffee, egg sandwiches, a plateful of brownies. I glanced at my watch. Noon on the dot. Twenty-two hours till show time.

  Waiting for our lunch to arrive, the five of us traded autobiographical anecdotes. Until this moment I hadn’t realized that Calder had gotten his start as a Venusian gangster in a Republic serial called Ghouls of the Stratosphere, nor had I known that, after a knee injury terminated his wrestling career (and exempted him from the Army), Joel had reinvented himself portraying gorillas in horror comedies of the Bowery-Boys-East-Side-Kids-Three-Stooges variety, a résumé that put him in the running for the semicoveted role of Sylvester. As for Ezra, it turned out that incarnating Jesus was something of a family tradition, his grandfather having played the part in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, his great uncle in Ben-Hur, and he himself in the recent MGM remake of Quo Vadis.

  “Here’s the funny thing,” said Ezra. “We’re Jews.”

  “So was Jesus,” noted Connie, distributing three scripts from the stack.

  “I can compound the irony,” said Ezra. “We’re secular Jews.”

  “Jesus was, too, according to Donna Dain,” said Connie. “She believes his intention was to end religion and replace it with morality.”

  The waiter reappeared, orders in hand. As we sa
vored our meals, I offered a full account of the awards ceremony, the crustaceans’ scandalized reaction to the “Sitting Shivah” rehearsal, the incinerated dressmaker’s dummy, and our efforts to convince Wulawand and Volavont that Not By Bread Alone was sacrilegious. By way of countering our three actors’ evident skepticism, I removed the Zorningorg Prize from my valise, set the trophy on the table, pulled away the cardigan, and, passing the goggles to Ezra, invited him to peer into the incandescent heart of Qualimosan culture.

  The artifact proved persuasive, not only for Ezra but also for Calder and Joel. Something uncanny had fallen into my hands, a hallucination-machine whose provenance was either extraterrestrial or something equally fantastic. The instant I cloaked the prize once again our actors entered into a state of suspended disbelief and set about perusing “The Madonna and the Starship.”

  “I have trouble believing Ogden’s on board with this,” said Ezra upon turning the last page. “He’s more reverent than God.”

  “Ogden’s taking a vacation,” said Connie. “I’ll be in the control room on Sunday, calling the shots. I’m counting on you all to show up in character and off the book. Come to conference room C at eight o’clock sharp.”

  “In other words, we’re directing ourselves,” said Calder, frowning.

  “What other choice is there?” Connie replied.

  “We could assassinate the Qualimosans,” Calder suggested.

  “The X-13 has already been placed on standby alert,” I explained. “If the navigator of the aliens’ spaceship, a creature called Yaxquid, doesn’t hear from Wulawand by twenty minutes after ten tomorrow, the death-ray will fire automatically.”

  “What if we just lock ’em up somewhere?” asked Joel. “The price of their freedom will be deactivating the X-13.”

  “Assault Wulawand and Volavont?” said Connie. “They probably have sidearm blasters. Don’t you ever watch Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers?”

  “Believe me, our best hope is this script,” I said, “not some reckless Errol Flynn derring-do.”

  “Since the death-ray will be riding the NBC carrier wave, maybe we could simply disconnect the transmitter before the broadcast,” Joel persisted. “Okay, sure, hundreds of thousands of Bread Alone viewers would probably change channels to some other religious program, for which the network will never forgive us, but that’s better than letting everybody die.”

  “I don’t mind boosting the ratings for Lamp Unto My Feet,” said Connie, “but the Qualimosans themselves might switch to that show, and then the jig would really be up.”

  Calder tapped his script with a silver-plated cigarette lighter. “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? After this thing hits the airwaves, we’ll all be out of work.”

  “Worse than that,” said Joel. “Everybody connected with Bread Alone and Brock Barton will be out of work.”

  “Speaking for myself, I’m looking on the bright side.” Ezra dunked a brownie in his coffee. He bit off a soggy morsel, chewed pensively, and laid a palm on his script. “A Messiah driven mad by his premature burial,” he said in measured tones. “Hey, Connie, hey, Kurt—this is meaty stuff. Jesus as Quixote, as Lear, Ahab, Raskolnikov. I’m salivating like Pavlov’s dog. Sure, I’ll probably get some bad press in Daily Variety, ‘Yid Thespian Ridicules Redeemer in Blasphemous Broadcast,’ but, hey, I can live with it.”

  “Actually, I’m pretty darned excited, too,” said Joel. “How often does an actor get to play a gorilla who introduces Jesus Christ to Charles Darwin?”

  “Thanks for the line, ‘Miracles are like the gods—capricious, cruel, and wholly unreliable,’” said Calder. “Delicious.”

  “I see just one hitch,” said Ezra. “So the Qualimosans go home without committing mass murder—great—but how do we know they won’t monitor a regular Bread Alone broadcast next month and realize they’ve been hornswoggled?”

  “Kurt worries about that, too,” said Connie. “In theory we could write and produce a very different script, calculated to make the crustaceans see the limitations of their Weltanschauung, but the clock is against us.”

  “Let’s not allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good,” Calder told the group.

  “Saving two million lives sounds like a fine morning’s work to me,” added Joel. “I think we should settle for that.”

  Ezra snorted and said nothing.

  I unveiled my trophy, slipped on the visor, and surveyed the nearest facet. No doubt my sleep-deprived brain was playing tricks on me, but I thought I saw an impish creature cavorting across a meadow strewn with glittering diamonds. Calder is right, the Demon of Regret told me, you must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good—but neither should you let the good become the friend of the atrocious.

  “By the way, this lunch is on NBC,” said Connie, signaling our waiter. “I have a subsistence expense account.”

  “Then let’s have another cup of coffee,” said Joel.

  “More brownies,” said Calder.

  “The best bottle of champagne in the Chock Full O’ Nuts cellar,” said Ezra.

  I continued to contemplate the iridescent triangle. The Demon of Regret vanished. Like an immense colony of fireflies, the diamonds rose from the meadow to ornament a seamless black sky, forming constellations that presumably illustrated some Qualimosan equivalent of pagan mythology. But the substance of these stories was opaque to me, narratives from another world, so I closed my eyes, removed the goggles, and, like a magician covering a bird cage prior to making a canary disappear, dropped the cardigan back over my prize.

  4.

  ANYTHING FOR OVALTINE

  he instant I beheld Eliot and the Qualimosans milling around on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History, the aliens still bedecked in their sandwich boards, I concluded that my roommate’s scheme had succeeded. Waving their subway maps around like pennants, the lobsters comported themselves with the glee of children who’d just seen an especially splendid performance by the Rockettes. Of course, it would be foolish to take Wulawand and Volavont themselves to see the famous Radio City Music Hall show—they were certain to become bored and flee into the metropolis at large, soon spotting evidence that Earthlings were more enamored of the metaphysical than they’d assumed—but luckily I had an ace named Saul Silver up my sleeve.

  “Nowhere on Qualimosa can an aficionado of the arts visit anything as magnificent as your Interborough Rapid Transit,” Wulawand declared.

  “Sorry we couldn’t join you,” I said, setting down my valise, its interior crammed with my award and the nine remaining teleplays. “At least Miss Osborne and I finished our script about Norwegian fisheries.”

  “O Eliot Thornhill, you are a virtuoso tour guide,” said Volavont to my roommate.

  “Not the first time an unemployed actor has worked as a docent,” said Eliot.

  “We especially enjoyed the subterranean gallery called Times Square,” said Volavont.

  “‘Come and meet those dancing feet,’” sang Connie, “‘on the avenue I’m takin’ you to, Forty-Second Street.’”

  “Mr. Thornhill performed that same song for us,” said Volavont. “‘Little nifties from the Fifties, innocent and sweet,’” he sang. “‘Sexy ladies from the Eighties, who are indiscreet.’” A carillon of squonk, squonk, squonk laughter pealed from his throat. “‘They’re side by side, they’re glorified, where the underworld can meet the elite, naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty Forty-Second Street’!”

  “Speaking of the Eighties, our next destination is just around the corner,” I said. “Saul Silver, editor of America’s premier science-fiction magazine, has invited you to dine with him on macaroni and cheese. Reading Andromeda as a teenager made me the atheist rationalist logical positivist I am today.”

  “We shall happily accede to Mr. Silver’s request,” said Wulawand. “On Qualimosa we, too, have science-fiction periodicals, although Rocket Sagas and Comet Angst are surely inferior to your Andromeda.”

  “
Will you and Miss Osborne be joining the party?” asked Volavont.

  “I’m afraid we’ve got an emergency conference at the studio,” I replied, shaking my head. “You’ll find Mr. Silver a little peculiar—he suffers from agoraphobia—but he’s got the finest mind in the business.”

  Eliot announced that he must now “revisit the aesthetic pleasures of the IRT,” as he had a ticket to see Arthur Kennedy and E. G. Marshall in The Crucible that night at the Martin Beck and wanted “to grab some dinner first at a midtown automat.” Before Eliot strode away, the lobsters offered him their gratitude for “a visually munificent and acoustically nutritive afternoon.”

  I decided to accompany my roommate on his one-block walk to the 81st Street Station, taking the opportunity to thank him for confining Wulawand and Volavont to a secular zone during the Chock Full O’ Nuts meeting.

  “So how’s the big broadcast shaping up?” he asked.

  “I’m guardedly optimistic. That said, if you know anybody who watches Not By Bread Alone, tell him to skip tomorrow’s installment.”

  Ten minutes later, Connie, the crustaceans, and I stood shoulder-to-carapace in the atrium of Saul Silver’s building. I pressed the buzzer. Gladys trundled up from the basement, admitted us to the foyer, and promptly lost her composure, chortling like a schoolgirl being mischievous in church.

  “You Flash Gordon guys will do anything to get into Mr. Silver’s magazine, won’t you?” she said, looking Wulawand in her compound eye. “He’ll love your getups, but if you really want to impress him, bring him a blow-up floozy next time.” She offered me a conspiratorial wink. “He thinks I don’t know about Zelda and Zoey.”

  “We are not Flash Gordon guys,” Wulawand insisted, “and we have no desire to write for Andromeda.”

  “Mr. Silver is expecting us,” added Volavont. “We are here to eat macaroni and talk about the cosmos.”