The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  “How can I tell you? You don’t know our system of spatial coordinates. I don’t understand what I find in your mind about ‘constellations,’ meaningless pictures which look different from any two points in space, or ‘lightyears,’ because your year doesn’t convey a time-meaning to me.”

  “It’s three hundred and sixty-five days.”

  “And what is a day?”

  “Twenty-four—no, skip it. I can see that this is going to be a lot tougher than Joe Henderson and his friends think. Let’s start over again. How did you get here?” Two minutes later Paul repeated the question.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Tarvish. “Trying to find the words in your mind. But they aren’t there. Your words make too sharp a distinction between matter and energy. If I say ‘a spaceship,’ you will think of a metal structure. If I say ‘a force field,’ you will picture me traveling in something immaterial. Both are wrong.”

  “Let’s try again. Why did you—” Paul stopped abruptly.

  The nose twitched. “No,” said Tarvish gently, “I am not the advance guard of an invasion and you are not betraying your race by being human to me. Please forget your science-fiction friends. We men of Earth have no desire to take over any of the planets of this star; ever since our terrible experience with the—” it sounded a little like Khrj “—we have made it a firm rule never to land on an inhabited planet.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Because . . .” Tarvish hesitated. A faint blue colored the root of his nose. “Because my girl is here.”

  “I’m improving,” Paul said. “It took me only five seconds to adjust to that girl. You’re in love?” Oddly, he didn’t even feel like smiling.

  “That’s why I had to land. You see, she went off by herself in the . . . I think if I invent the word ‘space dinghy’ it will give you the idea. I warned her that the . . . well, an important part was defective; but we had just had a small quarrel and she insisted on spiting me. She never came back. That’s why I had to make contact with intelligent life to learn something of the planet which I have to search.”

  “Only the intelligent life doesn’t have waves. Except me because, God help me, I expect strange things to speak. You need a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Frank Buck, and you’re stuck with a possibly not quite sane ventriloquist.”

  “You will help me? When you see her!” Tarvish was almost rapturous. “The most beautiful girl, I swear, on the whole earth. With,” he added reminiscently, “the finest pair of ears in the universe.” On the word ears his voice sank a little, and the blue tinge deepened at the root of his proboscis.

  The universe, Paul smiled to himself, must provide a fascinating variety of significant secondary sexual characteristics. “If I can help you,” he said sincerely, “I’ll try. I’ll do my best. And in the meantime we’ve the little problem of feeding you. I’ll have to take you—” he tensed a little “—home. I suppose, that is, you do eat?”

  “So far as we have observed,” Tarvish pronounced solemnly, “all races of rational beings eat and sleep and . . .” The blue was again intensified.

  “And relish a fine pair of ears,” Paul concluded for him. “Definition of rationality.” He started the car.

  By the next morning Paul Peters had learned a number of things.

  He had learned that men of Tarvish’s race are, as they choose, bipeds or quadrupeds. When they entered the Montgomery Block, that sprawling warren of odd studios where Paul lived, Tarvish had trotted behind him on all fours “because,” he said, “it would be less conspicuous,” as indeed was true. He was only by a small margin the most unusual of the animal and human companions whom Montgomery Block denizens had brought home, few of whom—including the humans—were at the moment functionally bipedal. But once inside the studio apartment, he seemed to prefer the erect posture.

  Between them they had worked out the problem of feeding. The pro-boscidiferous Tarvish was of course edentate, and accustomed to subsisting on liquids and pap. Milk, raw eggs, and tomato juice sufficed him for the time being—a surprisingly simple diet to contain most of the requisite vitamins and proteins. Later Paul planned to lay in a supply of prepared baby foods, and looked forward to the astonishment of the clerk at the nearby chain store who knew him as a resolute bachelor.

  Paul had also learned an astonishing amount, considering the relative brevity of the conversation, concerning the planet which was to Tarvish the Earth—from its socio-economic systems to the fascinating fact that at present fine full, ripe ears were, as any man would prefer, in style, whereas only a generation ago they had been unaccountably minimized and even strapped down. Paul’s amused explanation of the analogy on this Earth served perhaps as much as anything to establish an easy man-to-man intimacy. Tarvish went so far as to elaborate a plan for introducing gradually inflatable false earlobes on his Earth. It was never quite clear to Paul how an edentate being could speak so easily, but he imagined that the power resembled his own professional skill.

  All of these strange thoughts coursed through Paul’s head as he lay slowly waking up the next morning; and it was only after several minutes of savoring them that he perceived the wonderful background note that served as their ground-bass. Not since the first difficult instant of entering the apartment had he so much as thought of the corner of the main room in which Chuck Woodchuck lay.

  “You know, Tarvish,” Paul said as they finished breakfast, “I like you. You’re easy to be with.”

  “Thank you, Paul.” The root of the proboscis blushed faintly blue. “I like you too. We could spend happy days simply talking, exchanging, learning to know. . . But there is Vishta.”

  “Vishta?”

  “My girl. I dreamed about her last night, Paul . . .” Tarvish gave a little sigh, rose, and began bipedally to pace the room. “Your Earth is enormous, even though the figures you tell me convey no meaning to me. Whatever a square mile means, one hundred and ninety-seven million of them must represent quite an area. There must be some way. . .”

  “Look,” Paul said. “Before we tackle the problem again, let’s try restating it. (A), we must find Vishta. But that doesn’t necessarily mean literally, physically, Dr. Livingstone-I-presume find, does it? She’ll be over the lovers’ quarrel by now; she’ll want to get back to the—you’ll pardon the expression—spaceship. If we can let her know where you are, that’s enough, isn’t it?”

  Tarvish rubbed the tip of his large nose. “I should think so.”

  “All right. Restate the restatement. (A), get word to Vishta. (B), without revealing your interplanetary presence to the world at large. Both because it’s against your mores and because I think it’ll cause just too damned much trouble. Agreed?”

  “Agreed. ”

  The two sat in silence for perhaps five minutes. Paul alternately cudgeled his brains, and addressed brief prayers to the Holy Ghost for assistance in helping this other creature of God. Meanwhile, his eyes drifted around the apartment, and for a moment rested on the noble two-volume Knopf edition of Poe.

  “My God in Heaven!” he exclaimed. The most devout could not have considered this a violation of the decalog. “Look, Tarvish. We have in our literature a story called ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Its point is that the most over-obvious display can be the subtlest concealment.”

  “The point occurs in our folklore as well,” said Tarvish. “But I don’t—” Suddenly he stopped.

  Paul grinned. “Did you get a wave? But let me go on out loud—this race is happier that way. Yes, we had it all solved yesterday and let it slip. The lie we bribed Tim to tell—”

  “—that I am your new dummy,” Tarvish picked up eagerly.

  “The act’ll be sensational. Because you can really talk, I can do anything. Eat soda crackers while you’re talking—it won’t make any difference. And you—I hate like hell to say this to any man, but from an audience viewpoint it’s true—you’re cute. You’re damned near cuddly. They’ll love you. And we bill you with
the precise truth: you’re a visitant from outer space. It ties a ventriloquism act into the sciencefiction trend in TV. You’re THE STAR DUMMY. We’ll make a fortune—not that I’m thinking of that—”

  “Aren’t you?” Tarvish asked dryly.

  Paul smiled. “Can anyone be a hypocrite in a telepathic civilization?”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “Well, anyway, I’m not thinking primarily of the fortune. We’ll get publicity we couldn’t buy. And wherever she is, unless it’s in Darkest Africa or behind the Iron Curtain, Vishta’ll learn where you are.”

  “Paul,” said Tarvish solemnly, “you’re inspired. On that I could use a drink.”

  “Another custom of all rational races?”

  “Nearly all. But just a moment: I find in your mind the concept alcohol. I’m afraid that doesn’t convey much.”

  Paul tried to think back to his high-school chemistry. Finally he ventured, “C2H6OH. That help any?”

  “Ah, yes. More correctly, of course, CH3CH2OH. You find that mild fluid stimulating? We use it somewhat in preparing food, but . . . Now, if I might have a little C8H10N4O2?”

  Paul rubbed his head. “Doesn’t mean a thing to me. Sounds like some kind of alkaloid. It’s the touch of nitrogen that does it with you people?”

  “But indeed you do know it. You were drinking it at breakfast. And I must say I admired the ease with which you put away so much strong liquor so early in the day.”

  Hastily Paul checked in a dictionary. “Caffeine, ”he groaned. “And what do you use to sober up? A few cups of good straight alcohol, no cream?”

  And in copious shots of C2H6OH and C8H10N4O2, the two men pledged the future of THE STAR DUMMY.

  So now you see at last to what this story has been leading. What began in a confessional and passed through an analyst’s office to a zoo—all symbolism is read into the sequence at your own peril—is in actuality the backstage story of the genesis of your own favorite television program.

  Most of the rest of that genesis you know from a thousand enthusiastic recountings, from John Crosby’s in the Herald Tribune to Philip Hamburger’s in the New Yorker: how network producers at first greeted Paul Peters skeptically when he returned to show business, after a mysterious absence, with a brand-new type of act; how THE STAR DUMMY was at first somewhat hesitantly showcased on San Francisco Presents; how the deluge of fan mail caused that first showing to be kinnied all over the country, while the next week a live performance shot over the nation on a microwave relay; how the outrageous concept of a cuddlesome dummy from Outer Space managed unbelievably to combine the audiences of Charlie McCarthy and Space Cadet; how Star Dummies outgrossed the combined total sales of Sparkle Plenty Dolls and Hopalong Cassidy suits.

  But there are a few untold backstage scenes which you should still hear.

  Scene: Station KMNX-TV. Time: the morning after the first Star Dummy broadcast. Speaker: a vice-president.

  “But my God, M.N., there’s all hell popping. That was Hollywood on the phone. They’ve got the same damned show lined up for show-casing next week. Same format—identical dummy—only maybe theirs has bigger ears. The property owner’s flying up here and our lawyers had better be good!”

  Scene: Same. Time: that afternoon.

  “I think,” Paul had said, “that we might be able to reach a settlement out of court.” The vice-presidents had filed out eagerly, the lawyers somewhat reluctantly.

  Once he had been introduced to Vishta (and so close had he come, in weeks of preparing the show, to Tarvish’s ways of thinking that he found her enchantingly lovely), it would have been inconceivably rude and prying to do anything but turn his back on the reunion of the lovers. Which meant that he had to keep his eyes on Marcia Judd, property owner of the Hollywood show.

  “I’m not a professional ventriloquist like you, Mr. Peters,” she was saying. “I couldn’t do a thing without Vishta. But when we talked about it, it seemed the most logical way to let Tarvish know where she was. You know, like ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ”

  “And you have waves?” Paul marveled. It was about the only thing which she did not obviously have on first glance.

  “I guess maybe it’s because I write fantasy and s.f. Oh, I don’t sell much, but a little. And I’m not too sure that there’s anything that can’t happen. So when I was walking through the San Diego zoo and I saw something in with the koalas that was making diagrams . . . Well, I couldn’t help remembering Joe’s story about intercultural communication—”

  “Joe Henderson? You know old Joe?”

  “He’s helped me a lot. I guess you’d sort of say I’m his protege.”

  “So long,” Paul smiled, “as he isn’t your protector. But tell me, does Joe still. . .”

  And one half of room was as happy in the perfect chatter of a first meeting as was the other half in the perfect silence of a long-delayed reunion.

  Truth had shifted again, and THE STAR DUMMY was in fact a dummy—a brilliantly constructed piece of mechanism which had eaten up the profits of the three shows on which Tarvish himself had appeared. But the show was set now, and Paul’s own professional skill could carry it from this point on. And the highly telegenic presence of Marcia Judd did no harm.

  Paul’s car stopped by a lonely stretch of beach south of the city.

  “We can find what you like to call the spaceship from here,” said Tarvish. “I’d sooner you didn’t see it. I think it would only confuse you.”

  “We love you both,” said Vishta gently. “God bless you.”

  “God!” Marcia exclaimed. “Don’t tell me people with a science like yours believe in God!”

  Paul sighed. “I hope you don’t mind too much that I’m such a barbarian.”

  “It’s your conditioning,” said Marcia. “But with them . . .!”

  “And your conditioning, Marcia,” Tarvish observed, “has driven you the other way? Yes, I do believe in God in a way—if less devoutly than Paul, or at least than Paul being devout. Many do on our Earth; not all, but many. There was once a man, or possibly more than a man. We argue about that. His name was Hraz, and some call him the Oiled One.” Marcia smiled and Tarvish added, “It refers to a ceremony of honor. I am not quite a follower of Hraz, and yet when I pray—as I did, Paul, shortly before you found me—it is in words that Hraz taught us.”

  “Which are?”

  “We’ll say them together,” said Vishta. “It makes a good good-bye.”

  And the lovers recited:

  Lifegiver over us, there is blessing in the word that means you. We pray that in time we will live here under your rule as others now live with you there; but in the meantime feed our bodies, for we need that here and now. We are in debt to you for everything, but your love will not hold us accountable for this debt; and so we too should deal with others, holding no man to strict balances of account.

  Do not let us meet temptations stronger than we can bear; but let us prevail and be free of evil.

  Then they were gone, off down the beach.

  Marcia sniffled away a tear. “It is not the prayer,” she protested indignantly. “But they were so nice . . .”

  “Yes,” said the Paulist at Old St. Mary’s, “you may tell your fiancee to come in next Thursday at three to start her pre-marital instruction.”

  “You’ll find her a tartar, Father,” Paul grinned.

  “Atheism can be the most fanatical of religions. Thank Heaven my duty is only to inform, not to convert her. I’m glad you’re getting married, Paul. I don’t think anything inside or outside of you will denounce the flesh so violently again. Did the analysis help you?”

  “Somehow I never got around to it. Things started happening.”

  “Now this . . . ah . . . document,” the Paulist went on. “Really extraordinary. Lifegiver over us . . . Terribly free, of course, but still an unusually stimulating, fresh translation of the Pater Noster. I’ve shown it to Father Massini—he was on the Bishops’ Committee for the
revised translation of the New Testament—and he was delighted. Where on earth did you get it?”

  “Father, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “No?” asked the priest.

  Review Copy

  The only light in the room was the flame burning inside the pentacle.

  The man who kept his face in the shadows said, “But why do you want to kill him?”

  The customer said, “What’s that to you?”

  “Let us put it this way,” the man said persuasively. “In order to establish the psychic rapport necessary for the success of our . . . experiment, I need a full knowledge of all the emotional factors involved. Only complete knowing can compel the Ab.” He hoped it sounded plausible.

  The customer said, “Once he gave me a mortal wound. I need to kill him too.”

  “And why this method? Why not something more direct?”

  “I can’t cross the continent. I can’t leave New York. As soon I cross the river—I don’t know, it’s like breath going out of me . . .”

  Compulsion neurosis, the man thought; form of agoraphobia. “But men have been murdered by mail?” he suggested.

  “Not this one. He’s too smart. He writes mystery novels; you don’t think he’ll open unexpected parcels, eat chocolates from strangers—why is it always chocolates?—he’s too smart, the devil.”

  “But surely it should be possible to—”

  The customer sprang to his feet and his shadow wove wildly in the light from the pentacle. “I’m paying you; isn’t that enough? A body’d think you’re trying to talk me out of it.”

  “Nonsense,” said the man in the shadows. Though it was true. He knew that he had powers and that he could make good money from their use. But he knew too how unpredictable they were, and he always experienced this momentary desire to talk the customer out of it. “But if you’d tell me your reason . . . ?” There was method to that insistence too. When sometimes things failed and the customer turned nasty, a bit of private knowledge could often keep him from demanding his money back.