Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220)

by Morrow, James

  Smartly outfitted in his Brock Barton dress blues, complete with an embroidered gold comet on the breast, Hollis strode to the announcer’s booth. Clothed in a hooded robe, Wilma sat at the dining table, fidgeting under the gaze of camera three, the boom mike suspended above her head like low-hanging fruit. Squinting at the cue cards, the other players milled about the periphery of the set. Calder’s robot costume was a triumph of science-fictional design, a kind of Italian futurist saltshaker with limbs and eyes. Joel’s gorilla suit appeared extraordinarily authoritative. He was obviously the sort of primate who, when lecturing on Darwinian evolution, held his audience spellbound.

  “You’re planning something subversive, Connie!” seethed Ogden. “I can tell!

  “Put a sock in it, Ogden!” said Connie. “I’m trying to direct a goddamn TV show!”

  The console’s camera-one monitor displayed the standard not by bread alone title card, beautifully lettered in Old English script, as did the preview monitor, while the camera-two monitor offered a sign reading, THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP. Harold the audio engineer stood poised over the turntable, ready to drop the needle on the show’s familiar theme, Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Connie put on her headset and sat down before the console. Leo the technical director darkened the on-air monitor, then punched in camera one. I checked my wristwatch. 9:59 A.M. God help us all.

  “Music,” said Connie as Studio Two went on the air.

  “Ave Maria” flooded the control room and a myriad North American living rooms.

  “Up on camera one,” said Connie.

  Leo performed a quick fade-in, so that the words NOT BY BREAD ALONE filled the on-air monitor and two million corresponding television sets.

  “Cue the host,” said Connie.

  The floor manager pointed toward the announcer’s booth.

  “NBC proudly presents stories alerting viewers to the ways that people of faith,” intoned Hollis, “whether living in ancient Judea or modern America, have impoverished their intellects with supernatural explanations of reality, for a mind cannot thrive on self-delusion any more than a body can live by bread alone.”

  “What the hey?” said Ogden.

  “Dissolve to two,” said Connie.

  Leo cross-faded from the title card to camera two’s image, the sign heralding THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP.

  “Stay tuned for this morning’s special one-hour teleplay, ‘The Madonna and the Starship’!” enthused Hollis.

  “One hour?” rasped Ogden. “What about Corporal Rex?”

  “Music out,” said Connie. “Up on three.”

  Leo executed a fade-out, punched in camera three, and brightened the on-air monitor, delivering a midshot of Wilma to the airwaves.

  “Cue Mary.”

  The floor manager pointed at Wilma, who launched into her opening lament.

  “On Friday they murdered my son, the rabbi. My firstborn boy. Nailed to a tree like a jackal pelt, just because he called for the immediate and violent overthrow of the Roman Empire.”

  “Camera two, give me a longshot,” said Connie.

  “So here I am in Lazarus’s dining room, sitting shivah,” said Mary. “That’s seven days of mourning for you goyim out there. Nobody showed up on the Sabbath, but I’m optimistic about today.”

  “Cut to two,” said Connie.

  The apostle Peter strode onto the set. Placing a comforting hand on Mary’s shoulder, he revealed that, by saturating Jesus’s vinegar sponge with an opiate, he’d persuaded the Roman centurions that the convicted seditionist had died on the cross.

  “This is outrageous!” cried Ogden.

  “Shut up!” said Connie.

  “Any minute now, the drug will wear off,” said Peter to Mary. “Jesus should have no trouble tearing free of his shroud and rolling back the stone.”

  “Camera three, tight on the tomb,” said Connie.

  “Naturally I’m delighted that my boy is about to return,” said Mary. “But I fear your scheme will spark rumors of a resurrection.”

  “Stop the show!” yelled Ogden.

  “Cut to three,” said Connie.

  As Jesus emerged from Arimathea’s crypt, the control-room telephone rang. I grabbed the receiver, said “Hello,” and listened politely as Walter Spalding told me to put Ogden on the line.

  “Miss Osborne’s directing this morning,” I replied.

  “Then put her on the line!” shouted NBC’s normally phlegmatic head of programming.

  “Didn’t you hear me? She’s directing.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Kurt Jastrow.”

  “Hey, Kurt, what the hell is going on over there?” asked Walter. “My Aunt Edna tuned in Bread Alone this morning. She was horrified, so she phoned me at the studio, and now I’m horrified.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “Heed my warning, Walter. You and Aunt Edna should switch to Lamp Unto My Feet, or you might get hit with an alien death-ray. Bye now.”

  “Jastrow!”

  I slammed down the handset, then grabbed a pair of scissors and severed the phone line as neatly as a mayor cutting the ribbon at a construction site. There would be no more annoyance calls this morning.

  I faced the console and contemplated the on-air monitor. Jesus shuffled into Lazarus’s dining room, his shroud hanging limply from his shoulders, his wrists displaying nail wounds, then described his ordeal of waking up alive in a tomb. “The unendurable oppression of the lungs”—Connie and I had appropriated a passage from Poe’s story about a premature burial—“the stifling fumes of the damp earth, the clinging to the death garments, the rigid embrace of the narrow house, the unseen but palpable presence of the conqueror worm.”

  After Jesus explained how he’d extricated himself from his shroud and dispensed with the stone, Mary casually remarked, per the White Horse Tavern rewrite of the rewrite, “As a little boy, you were quite a handful, especially compared to your two brothers.”

  “Well naturally I was a handful,” noted Jesus. “I’m God, you know. Or is that my madness talking?”

  Ogden dropped to his knees and began to pray.

  “I wonder who worked harder, you raising me from a baby, or my Heavenly Father raising me from the dead?” said Jesus to his mother—an astute ad lib by Ezra.

  Suddenly Brock Barton and three other Rocket Rangers burst onto the set. Availing himself of the fruit bowl, Ducky Malloy jammed a half-dozen plastic grapes in his mouth, then spat them on the floor like watermelon seeds. Cotter Pin grabbed three figs and started juggling them. Sylvester Simian sniffed Peter’s neck and midriff.

  “Greetings, pathetic Judeans!” Brock declared. “The star sailors and I have traveled an entire light year to prevent yet another religion from contaminating the Milky Way!”

  “I’ve been from one end of this galaxy to the other,” added Cotter Pin in his static-laden basso profundo voice, “and I can tell you that, once a new church gets up to speed, the news is normally bad. On Alpha Centauri-3 they’re burning female herbalists even as we speak. On Gliese Omicron-4 it’s now open season on heretics.”

  “I wish all the races in the Milky Way would become logical positivists,” said the gorilla.

  “Or at least illogical positivists,” said Ducky.

  “But surely reason and science have a dark side, too,” said Mary, a line on which Connie had insisted.

  “Not dark enough to keep me up at night,” said Brock, a riposte that I’d demanded.

  “Harold, kill the boom mike!” ordered Ogden, regaining his feet. “Leo, stand by to bring up the film chain! We’re switching to Hopalong Cassidy!”

  “Kurt, dear, it’s time you escorted Mr. Lynx out of here,” said Connie.

  I didn’t have to drag Ogden away, because he left of his own accord, headed for NBC’s trove of westerns. As I followed him down the control-room stairs, Joel deftly assessed the situation and sidled out of camera range. Together the gorilla and I chased Ogden as he ran through the studio door, then al
ong the corridor toward the film-chain closet.

  Arriving in the claustrophobic space, Ogden scanned the racks of 35mm prints, looking for a Hopalong Cassidy vehicle. Joel crashed into the closet, removed his ape mask, and wrenched the camera free of the floor, tucking it under his arm like a Frenchman transporting a baguette. Under no circumstances would Corporal Rex preempt our planned preemption of it.

  “How dare you!” cried Ogden.

  “Go home, Mr. Lynx, or I’ll put your head in a wrestling lock of my own invention,” said Joel. “I call it Madame Guillotine.”

  “NBC will be sending you a repair bill!” wailed Ogden.

  “Not before Beth Israel sends you an emergency room bill!” screamed Joel.

  Having lost the skirmish, Ogden threw up his hands and stalked off. An instant later the film-chain operator, a pot-bellied technician whose name I could never remember, appeared bearing two large hexagonal canisters labeled Wonder Dog Episode 23.

  “No Corporal Rex today, Lou,” said Joel, pointing to the uprooted camera. Louis, that was his name. “The vidicon just went haywire.”

  “Haywire?” said Louis. “What do you mean?”

  “Not to worry,” I said. “My Bread Alone teleplay runs till eleven o’clock in Studio Two.”

  “Don’t you usually write that Buck Rogers stuff?” Louis asked me.

  “I’m branching out.”

  “Ralston Purina will bust a gusset.”

  “Everything’s under control,” I said. “At ten forty-five we’ll dissolve to the usual live commercial.”

  “’Fraid I gotta run,” said Joel, restoring his gorilla mask. “Big speech coming up. Tell me, Lou, what’s your opinion of Charles Darwin?”

  “He the guy plays second banana on Tales of the Pony Express? Not much of an actor.”

  Joel turned to me and said, “Hey, Kurt, how do you think it’s going?”

  “Better than I expected.” I glanced at my watch. 10:08 A.M. “Uncle Wonder’s Motorola is receiving the broadcast. Two or three minutes from now, we’ll know if the Martians bought our act.”

  “Don’t get yourself incinerated,” said Joel.

  “I tied a string to the AC cord.”

  “What the hell are you two talking about?” asked Louis.

  “Be careful, Kurt,” said Joel. “Good TV writers are hard to find.”

  The sagacious ape pirouetted and hurried away, bearing the stolen camera.

  Consider this thought experiment. A letter arrives in your mailbox—a message from your doctor that will reveal whether the lump in your armpit is malignant or benign. Imagine the trepidation with which you tear open the envelope. Now double that dread, and you’ll appreciate my state of mind as I entered Studio One.

  Heart pounding, palms sweating, I marched onto the attic set. The Motorola remained illuminated, calling down “The Madonna and the Starship” from the heavens. The male mannequin was still standing, seemingly absorbed in the broadcast. I took hold of the twine—one yank, and the scanning-gun would die—then gritted my teeth and consulted my watch. 10:10 A.M. Zero hour.

  On the tube, Jesus solemnly shared bowls of cereal with the star sailors and the other Judeans. “Eat these measures of Sugar Corn Pops,” he said, “for they are my body.”

  “You know, Jesus, the great thing about Sugar Corn Pops is that it’s got the sweetenin’ already on it,” said Brock.

  “Even tin men like the taste,” said Cotter Pin.

  “Most impressive,” Jesus replied, methodically distributing eight mugs of warm, chocolate-flavored beverage. “Drink this Ovaltine, for it is my blood.”

  “My next-door neighbor’s kid, little Sally Warren, was having a hard time in fifth grade,” said Brock. “But then her mom started her on Ovaltine each morning, and Sally’s grades rocketed through the roof. She also became a dodge-ball champion.”

  “I’ve heard that four out of five elementary school teachers recommend Ovaltine,” said Jesus.

  I checked my watch. 10:12 A.M. Success! Triumph! Deliverance! Hooray for Our Lady of Pompeii! Monitoring the show in Marty’s Electronics Shop, Wulawand had contacted her spaceship and canceled the slaughter!

  Well, maybe.

  I couldn’t help imagining scenarios that might prompt the automatic 10:20 A.M. triggering. Perhaps the aliens’ Zenith had gone on the fritz, just like Saul’s Admiral, and they’d been unable to see the broadcast. Maybe Wulawand’s transceiver had conked out before she could deliver the cancelation order to Yaxquid. Conceivably Yaxquid, observing the show from the orbiting vessel, was finding it insufficiently satiric and, in defiance of Wulawand’s command, had decided to let the death-ray fire of its own accord.

  Each subsequent minute of “The Madonna and the Starship” seemed to consume an hour. Reeling with anxiety, I watched the blind and crippled leper enter Lazarus’s house and beg Jesus for a miracle cure. At 10:14 A.M. the Galilean rabbi attempted to heal the unfortunate man’s scabrous skin, dysfunctional eyes, and paralyzed leg. By 10:16 A.M. it was clear that the rehabilitation attempt had failed, and so the leper climbed gingerly onto the breakaway dining table and cursed the Almighty with quotations from the Book of Job, including “When a sudden deadly scourge descends, God laughs at the plight of the innocent!” and “From the towns come the groans of wounded men crying for help, yet God remains deaf to their appeal!” At 10:19 A.M. the leper descended from the table, whereupon Sylvester Simian began lecturing the Judeans, asserting that the geological, paleontological, anatomical, and embryological evidence for materialist evolution was overwhelming. An irritated Jesus and an equally unhappy Peter responded by smashing Lazarus’s table and chairs to pieces and converting the debris into cudgels.

  I glanced at my watch. Twenty-two minutes after ten! We were out of the woods! We’d saved two million lives!

  As the brawl progressed, I switched off the Motorola, kissed the mannequin’s cheek, and gleefully exited the attic set. I dashed down the corridor to Studio Two, then scrambled up the stairs to Connie’s realm. At some point Walter Spalding had arrived in the control room, and now he stood propped against an oscilloscope, gagged with a bandana, bound hand-and-foot with gaffer tape. (Presumably Joel had tied him up, then vaulted onto the set just in time to deliver his speech.) Absorbed in directing the brawl, Connie took no note of my arrival. Instead she cut from a longshot of Lazarus’s wrecked dining room—broken furniture, shattered fruit bowl, fractured amphorae, toppled potted palm, shards of communion crockery—to a midshot of Jesus banging on Cotter Pin’s aluminum chest with a table leg.

  “Uncle Wonder’s Motorola has been receiving NBC all morning!” I cried. “Nothing happened! The scanning-gun never fired!”

  Although my message must have been meaningless to them, Leo the technical director and Harold the audio engineer burst into applause. Connie rose from the console, tore off her headset, and kissed me on the lips.

  “Evidently the lobsters loved it all!” I gushed. “The fake resurrection, the Sugar Pops Eucharist, the leper’s rant, the atheist gorilla—everything!”

  “Walter just told me I’m out of a job, and right now I don’t care.” Connie restored her headset and sat down again. “Camera three, let’s see Mary in close-up. Ready? Cut to three.”

  “I shall abandon neither the God of my Fathers nor the Supreme Being of my Mothers!” proclaimed Our Lady, shouting above the mêlée. Gradually the commotion abated. The Judeans and the Rocket Rangers accorded Mary their full attention. “And yet I am pleased that Brock Barton and his friends came into my life,” she continued. “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!’”

  Connie cut back to a longshot. Waving their rayguns around, two creatures from Planet Voidovia dashed into Lazarus’s dining room. The second act had begun.

  Initially things went amazingly well. Manny and Terry made excellent nihilists, alternately reading cynical dialogue and improvising sardonic lines.<
br />
  “Should I spare your life, O Jesus Christ?” said Terry, speaking off-the-cuff as he pointed his raygun at Ezra. “I think not. We rationalists have proved that compassion is a swindle.”

  “Of all the human sentiments, none is more pathetic than pity, O Mary Mother of the Alleged God,” adlibbed Manny, threatening the Madonna with his weapon. “Ask Friedrich Nietzsche.”

  “I wish he’d leave Nietzsche out of it,” said Connie.

  Suddenly Ogden Lynx came charging through the door and headed toward Lazarus’s dining room. Behind him surged three men and three women, dressed in their Sunday best and wielding placards bearing hostile sentiments. BROCK BARTON IS JUDAS ISCARIOT ... NBC EQUALS NATIONAL BLASPHEMY CORPORATION ... METHODISTS AGAINST MOCKERY ... BANISH ATHEISTS FROM THE AIRWAVES ... GIVE US THE REAL "BREAD" ... NO REDS IN OUR LIVING ROOMS. After our film-chain dustup, Ogden had apparently run to the nearest church, crashed the ten o’clock service, and recruited a band of congregants to his cause.

  “Get those goddamn Methodists out of here!” Connie instructed me.

  Already Calder and Joel were on the move. As I left the control room and charged down the stairs, our robot and our gorilla armed themselves with orphaned legs from Lazarus’s table and formed a fleshy redoubt against the invasion.

  “Shame on all of you!” shouted a male protestor, an imprecation surely heard by the viewers at home, assuming they’d not been barbecued.

  “End this travesty now!” yelled a female Methodist.

  “Cease and desist!” Ogden demanded.

  Now another contingent entered the studio: a poodle, an Irish setter, a cocker spaniel, a boxer, and a collie—followed by a lantern-jawed dog handler wearing TV makeup and an NYPD uniform. He pushed a motorcycle sidecar holding a sack of Purina kibble, two unlabeled bags, and a stack of aluminum bowls.