Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220)

by Morrow, James

  Costumes in hand, we scurried down the corridor to the employees’ subterranean entrance. As it happened, the guard on duty was Claude Moffet, erstwhile performer on the defunct Dick Tracy radio serial. I told him that around 8:00 A.M. two eminent American writers bearing toy rayguns would appear, and he should admit them posthaste.

  Returning to street level, Connie and I deposited the gargoyle outfits in dressing room A, along with a note to the Bread Alone wardrobe mistress explaining that she should suit up Mr. Glass and Mr. Murgeon the instant they arrived. We sprinted to the storage closets, where we procured a hundred blank cue cards, plus a box of grease pencils. As we staggered away, hugging bundles of pasteboard, Connie and I agreed that we needn’t write any new lines for the minor characters of Peter and the leper. As for Cotter Pin and Sylvester Simian, we should keep their brawny human alter egos in reserve, for they might prove vital in deterring unwanted visitors during the broadcast.

  Arriving in conference room C, Connie and I got to work. For ninety minutes, we batted potential speeches and possible stage directions back and forth like shuttlecocks. (Per Hollis’s contract, we remembered to include additional Sugar Corn Pops and Ovaltine commercials.) Taking turns in the role of stenographer, fighting sleep with every clause and comma, we methodically transcribed our best ideas, so that each cue card became a piece in a jigsaw puzzle that, assembled, might conceivably influence the course of galactic history.

  The plot was simple. After the Demivirgin Mary delivers the final line of act one—“If forced to choose between a planet I know to be real and a paradise I must take on faith, I would surely cry, ‘Give me the Earth!’”—two malign creatures rocket in from Voidovia. Zontac and Korkhan explain that they’ve embarked on a grand tour of the Milky Way, following an itinerary that includes vaporizing everyone who doesn’t share their one hundred percent deity-free worldview. Drawing forth their rayguns, they threaten Jesus, his mother, his apostle, and the leper. But then Brock Barton comes to the Judeans’ rescue, arguing that the Voidovians’ professed atheism is nothing of the kind.

  “You’ve not rejected God at all,” says the captain of the Triton. “You’ve turned him into yourselves. How theistic of you.”

  “You’ve not dismantled the Almighty’s throne,” adds Ducky Malloy. “You’ve made it your favorite easy chair. How pious of you.”

  “If God is a bad idea, then playing God is an even worse idea,” says Brock. “You invertebrates have embraced the very mythology you claim to despise.”

  “God is not a bad idea,” Mary insists.

  “It’s a very good idea,” Jesus avers.

  “I think not,” says Brock, having the last word.

  Fade-out. Cut to title card, WHO CREATED GOD? Dissolve to NBC logo.

  Under normal circumstances, Connie and I would now have borne the ninety-three new speeches to Studio Two and distributed them around the Bread Alone set. But our muscles and ligaments would hear none of it. Since Friday afternoon we’d been burning our candles at both ends; nothing remained of us but nubs of wax and smidgeons of wick. And so, after numbering the cue cards, we leaned them against the walls in a half-dozen upright stacks, crawled under the circular table, stretched out on the carpet, and promptly fell asleep, knowing that, sooner rather than later, a Judean theist, a Triton humanist, or a nihilistic gargoyle would rouse us from our slumbers.

  5.

  THAT BUCK ROGERS STUFF

  epressed by their poker losses, and to invertebrates no less, Manny Glass and Terry Murgeon had little desire to hang around Saul’s apartment, and so they arrived in conference room C, rayguns at the ready, a half-hour ahead of schedule. As Connie and I crawled out from under the table, the two insomniac Andromeda writers presented us with catastrophic news. The picture tube of Saul’s television set had burned out. Kaput. Defunct. Irredeemably on the fritz.

  I grabbed the wall phone and, after quickly introducing Connie to “the pulp-meisters of Prospect Park,” placed a frantic call to 59 West 82nd Street.

  “You gotta borrow Gladys Everhart’s TV!” I told Saul.

  “She’s at her sister’s place in Yonkers, and I don’t have a key to her apartment.”

  “Then go buy a new TV!”

  “Agoraphobics don’t go out and buy new TV’s, Kurt, especially on Sunday morning. The stores aren’t open.”

  “Call a repairman!”

  “It’s Sunday, Kurt! It’s the fershlugginer Christian Sabbath!”

  “Get the lobsters to steal one!”

  “That would be a recipe for disaster,” said Saul.

  “Doing nothing about the Qualimosan death-ray is a recipe for disaster!”

  “I’m on the case, Kurt,” said Saul. “Shalom.”

  “So which is the better part?” asked Manny, rifling through a stack of cue cards. With his rapid-fire speech cadences and fondness for wisecracks, he was generally regarded as the Groucho Marx of pulp science fiction. “Zontac or Korkhan?”

  “It depends on how you feel about facing two million Bread Alone viewers and declaring, ‘Logical positivism today, logical positivism tomorrow, logical positivism forever!’” said Connie. “That’s Zontac’s best line.”

  “I think I’ll play Korkhan,” said Manny.

  “Which gives you the speech that begins, ‘Die, Judean scum!’” said Connie. “‘Go to your illusory maker, you deluded fools!’”

  “Actually, I’m leaning toward Zontac,” said Manny.

  “Let’s flip a coin.” Terry pulled a nickel from his pocket and passed it to me. A pale man with a mellifluous voice, he was as suave and ethereal as Manny was ribald and earthy. “Heads, I’m stuck with Zontac. Tails, I’m forced to play Korkhan.”

  I flipped the coin. Terry would play Zontac.

  “Listen, fellas,” said Connie, “Kurt and I really appreciate how you stepped up to the plate at the last minute.”

  “I ask myself, if Kurt Jastrow and Connie Osborne ever got the opportunity to save a couple million Jews,” said Manny, “like maybe the audience for The Goldbergs, would they rise to the occasion? I’m sure they would.”

  “Take the cue cards to Studio Two and distribute them around the set in chronological order,” said Connie, gesturing toward the stacks of grease-pencil speeches. “Then find the switchboard cubby and tell Lulu she’ll be receiving some irate calls this morning. In every case, she should say, ‘Didn’t you know? This is our once-a-year Saturnalia hoax.’”

  “No, she should say, ‘It’s an April Fool’s Day gag,’” Manny insisted. “When the caller says, ‘But it’s not April Fool’s Day,’ Lulu answers, ‘That’s part of the gag.’”

  “I like that,” said Terry.

  Connie glowered and said, “Finally, go to dressing room A, where Hannah will zip you into your Voidovian suits. They’re actually gargoyle costumes left over from an old Tell Me a Ghost Story.”

  “I saw that one,” said Manny, opening the door for Terry. “‘Gargoyle Bar Mitzvah.’ Very avant-garde.”

  No sooner did the Andromeda writers leave on their errands than conference room C began filling up with actors. True to his word, Ezra had brought along an ice chest jammed with a box of Sugar Corn Pops, a jar of Ovaltine, and a bottle of milk. Assuming a persona of authority, somewhere between a crossing guard and a softball coach, Connie removed her loafers and climbed atop the table.

  “God willing, we are about to write a glorious chapter in the annals of anonymous benevolence,” she told the assembled company.

  “Last night I read the Book of Job and cobbled together a nifty little rant,” said Gully.

  “I’ll try to shoehorn it in,” Connie assured him.

  “I’m all set to endorse Jesus’s preferred Eucharist substances,” said Hollis.

  “You’re also our announcer,” said Connie. “The final image is a midshot of two chastened aliens, so you’ll have no problem getting to the booth in time for the closing signature.”

  “Chastened aliens?” said Clement. �
��That isn’t in my script.”

  “Mine neither,” said Wilma.

  “Same here,” said Jimmy.

  Connie proceeded to explain that, during the night, “The Madonna and the Starship” had transmuted into a fifty-five minute epic. The pivot from act one to act two would occur on Mary’s line about preferring a real planet to a hypothetical paradise. When writing the second half of the show, Connie continued, she and Mr. Jastrow had focused on convincing the Qualimosans that their worldview was unworthy of the term “logical positivism,” for it was as barbaric in its attack on conventional wisdom as Friedrich Nietzsche’s had been erudite. The troupe would find the additional material—including speeches by invading aliens Zontac and Korkhan, plus new dialogue for Brock, Ducky, Jesus, and Mary—displayed on a convenient panorama of cue cards. Peter and the leper could, if they wished, contribute an occasional extemporaneous line. As for Cotter Pin and Sylvester, it would be best if the corresponding actors slipped away shortly after ten-thirty and started guarding the periphery of the set, for by then the broadcast would have surely drawn a mob of protestors.

  “So we’re gunning for their Weltanschauung after all!” exclaimed Ezra. “Marvelous!”

  “And how are the producers of Corporal Rex taking all this?” asked Calder.

  “Except for the commercial, the whole show’s on 35mm celluloid,” said Connie. “Film chains break down at the worst times—don’t they, Joel?”

  “I’m on the job,” said the gorilla.

  “And now, troupers, it’s up and at ’em!” cried Connie. “Off with your clothes and into your costumes! I want to see everyone in Studio Two by nine-thirty on the dot!”

  While our players transformed themselves into Judeans and Rocket Rangers, Connie and I hied ourselves to the NBC commissary, where we consumed a couple of jelly doughnuts washed down with black coffee.

  “About last night,” she said, a line I’d vowed never to write if I ever became a real dramatist. “We both went a little crazy, huh? The tech rehearsal, the exhaustion, the kaleidoscopes. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not in the market for a steady boyfriend.”

  “I understand,” I muttered, attempting to project simple disappointment but probably sounding despondent. “That prism takes a person to the strangest places.”

  “My analyst says that now’s the time for me to concentrate on my career. Believe me, Kurt, if I wanted a relationship, you’d be at the top of the list—”

  “Ahead of Sidney Blanchard?”

  “Way ahead of Sidney, but for the next several years I want to throw myself into scriptwriting. Okay, sure, Bread Alone is doomed. Religious broadcasting? It’s here to stay, and I want to help it grow. Thanks to ‘The Madonna and the Starship,’ I’ve started seeing unexpected possibilities in the form.”

  “Unexpected,” I said, finishing my coffee. “Makes sense. Now let’s go run those pesky Martians out of town.”

  “Will Mr. Silver figure out how to get them in front of a functional TV?” asked Connie.

  “He’s pulled bigger rabbits out of smaller hats.”

  Resuscitated, though hardly revitalized, I followed Connie as she dashed to the kinescope booth, the facility through which NBC preserved its most important broadcasts for posterity. The television monitor and the loaded 35mm camera faced each other like gunfighters in Dodge City, while the auxiliary shutter stood ready to resolve the disparity—thirty frames per second versus twenty-four—between the respective optical illusions on which television and motion pictures depended. The technician hadn’t arrived yet, so Connie left him a note saying that this morning’s Bread Alone must not be committed to celluloid. It’s certain to be our worst show ever, she wrote, and I want it to leave no trace.

  We exited the kinescope booth, sprinted to Studio Two, and waded into the hubbub: the lighting director fiddling with his kliegs and fresnels, the boom operator adjusting his omnidirectional mike, the cameramen rehearsing their dolly moves, the floor manager pacing nervously around, the assistant director pursuing an equally anxious path—and everyone casting puzzled glances at the costumed gargoyles, wondering why Ogden Lynx had imported two medieval statues into a drama set in ancient Palestine. All ninety-three cue cards fringed the dining-room set. The on-air floor monitor displayed the current NBC offering: a live puppet show out of Studio Three called Locky the Loch Ness Monster. Although the image was almost certainly a closed-circuit feed, uncoupled from the carrier wave, I resolved to kill this particular cathode-ray tube when “The Madonna and the Starship” began, just to make sure we eluded the death-ray.

  Connie whistled sharply, commanding the crew’s attention, then revealed that this morning’s broadcast would be “a trifle unorthodox.” No matter what the actors said—no matter what they did or what costumes they wore—“each of you professionals must stay at his post.” Sooner rather than later, she insisted, the program’s ostensible irreverence would be “explained to everyone’s satisfaction.”

  The instant Connie finished her speech, an unwelcome visitor appeared, the eternally crusty Ogden, dressed in his usual loud checked jacket and polka-dot bowtie, cricketing his way across the studio floor like some immense insect out of a Brock Barton episode.

  “Morning, Connie,” he said. “I decided to drop by and help out.”

  “Know how you can help?” said Connie. “Go home.”

  “I promise not to kibitz unless you ask.”

  “What I’m asking is for you to leave.”

  “See here, Connie Osborne!” shouted Ogden. “I’ve directed forty-one consecutive Bread Alone installments! This is my show, too!”

  Now the program’s regular announcer, the lumpish and genial Fred Thigpen, ambled into view.

  “Hi, Mr. Lynx, morning, Miss Osborne—sorry I’m late. Where’s the script?”

  “Guess what, Mr. Thigpen?” said Connie. “We won’t be employing your services today. It’s our once-a-year Saturnalia celebration.”

  “Saturnalia?” said Ogden.

  “But this is Sunday,” said Fred.

  “Bingo,” said Connie. “Go to church, Mr. Thigpen. Read the funnies. Mow your lawn. Report for work this time next week.”

  The bewildered announcer shrugged and sauntered away.

  While Connie and Ogden resumed their argument, I climbed the stairs to the control room, where Leo the technical director and Harold the audio engineer practiced their cross-fades and twiddled their potentiometers. I grabbed the telephone and called Saul.

  “Okay, problem solved,” he said: a felicitous message—so why did he sound distressed? “I just finished escorting the lobsters—”

  “Escorting them? You mean you left your apartment?”

  “I took ’em all the way to Marty’s Electronics Shop on Eighty-Fourth. We broke in, found a working Zenith, turned the dial to channel two, tuned in a puppet show called—”

  “Locky the Loch Ness Monster!” I cried. “Brilliant, Saul! I’m damned impressed! You triumphed over your condition!”

  “I didn’t triumph over anything! I got to hear Wulawand contact her orbiting navigator and make sure the death-ray was still on standby alert, but then I bailed out, leaving the lobsters with their Zenith.” A mournful sigh escaped Saul’s throat. “Want to know something, Kurt? I crawled—that’s right, I fucking crawled back home! Me, the editor of a respected literary magazine, inching his way down Amsterdam Avenue on hands and knees!” He released a groan compounded of equal parts humiliation and pique. “Lucky for me, a cop happened by and helped me up the stairs to my apartment. Right now I’m under my desk with Zelda and Zoey.”

  “What a heroic effort,” I said, even as nausea gripped my innards. With Saul and the lobsters in different zones, we’d have no way of knowing whether, when Wulawand talked to Yaxquid for a second time that morning, she’d ordered the slaughter or canceled it.

  “I even remembered to tell the Qualimosans to stick around for the second half-hour,” said Saul. “Gotta go, Kurt. I’m about
to plotz.”

  Bit by bit, a scheme took shape in my brain. I bolted from the control room, told Connie the good news about Marty’s Electronics Shop—she was still squabbling with Ogden—and fled the Bread Alone hurly-burly. Galvanized by my memories of the death-ray murdering the dressmaker’s dummy, I proceeded to the wardrobe department, where I appropriated the male mannequin. I trundled the thing to Studio One. The Motorola in Uncle Wonder’s attic was exactly as we’d left it on Friday afternoon, rabbit ears connected, studio-feed spade lug lying disconnected on the floor.

  I set the mannequin directly in front of the picture tube, then rigged the AC cord with a piece of twine so I could cut the power if and when the death-ray emerged from the scanning-gun. Gingerly I switched on the Motorola, turned the dial to NBC, and tuned in Locky the Loch Ness Monster. By my lights, at least, I had just devised the perfect mechanism for determining whether, come 10:10 A.M. or thereabouts, two million TV viewers had been spared or roasted. Uncle Wonder a.k.a. Kurt Jastrow was a clever fellow indeed.

  Returning to Studio Two, I glanced at the dormant red on the air light hanging above the portal, with its implicit addendum, abandon hope all ye who interrupt. In five minutes the floor manager would ignite the sign. Under normal circumstances this directive reliably deterred unwanted intruders, but it would surely prove impotent against God’s partisans—and yet I felt vaguely confident that our robot and our gorilla could keep them at bay through the end of act one and possibly beyond.

  Connie and Ogden had relocated their altercation to the control room. I approached the on-air floor monitor, which currently displayed the final shot of Locky the Loch Ness Monster (a plesiosaur puppet sitting in a bathtub, playing volleyball with a rubber duck), and reached for the on-off knob. The Locky end title dissolved into a commercial for a doll called Mop Top. I extinguished the picture tube (thereby perhaps preventing the X-13 from wreaking havoc in the studio), then climbed the stairs to the director’s domain. Peering through the glass, I surveyed the scene below.