THE MAN WHO WENT TO THE MOON—TWICE
Introduction to
THE MAN WHO WENT TO THE MOON—TWICE
Originally, one of the lesser (but no less important) intents of this anthology was to commission and bring to the attention of the readers stories by writers well outside the field of speculative fiction. The names William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Alan Sillitoe, Terry Southern, Thomas Berger and Kingsley Amis were listed in my preliminary table of contents. The name Howard Rodman was also listed. Circumstances almost Machiavellian in nature prevented the appearance here of the former sextet. Howard Rodman is with us. I am honored.
You are a fan of Rodman’s work if you watch television at all. Because, if you watch TV in even the most peripheral way, you do it to catch the best programs, and if that is the case you have seen Rodman’s work. (A comment: how odd it seems to me that science fiction fans, the ones who choose to exist in dream worlds of flying skyways, cities of wonder, marvelous inventions, dilating doors, tri-vid and “feelies,” are the ones who most vocally despise modern television. The bulk of the fans I have met, when they discover I spend part of my time writing for the visual media, rather superciliously tell me they seldom watch, as though watching at all might be considered gauche. How sad it must be for them, to see television, space travel and all the other predictions of Gernsbackian “scientification” turned over to the Philistines. I suppose, in a way, it’s a small tragedy, like having been so hip for years that you knew Tolkien was great, and now suddenly finding every shmendrick in the world reading paperback editions of Lord of the Rings on the IRT. But it is a far, far better thing, I submit, to have TV as the mass media it is, even as gawdawful as it is ninety-six per cent of the time, than to relegate it to the hideously antiseptic fate intended for it by the s-f of 1928.)
Howard Rodman has been nominated for and won more awards for television drama than anyone currently working in the medium. His famous Naked City script, “Bringing Far Places Together”, won Emmys and Writers’ Guild awards not only for himself but for the series, the director and the stars. Students of exemplary teleplays will recall last season’s Bob Hope-Chrysler Theater drama, “The Game with Glass Pieces”. It was, in point of fact, Howard Rodman’s style that set the tone for the best of both Naked City and Route 66 during their auspicious tenures on the channelways.
Howard Rodman was born in the Bronx, and decided at the age of ten to be a writer. He took that decision seriously at age fifteen and from fifteen to sixteen read a minimum of one volume of short stories daily; from sixteen to seventeen read only plays, five or six a day; and from seventeen to twenty-one he wrote 3000 words a day: short stories, scenes from plays, poems, narrative sequences, etc. He graduated from Brooklyn College and later did his graduate work at Iowa University. At twenty-one he went into the army (where among his assignments he was required to inspect the brothels of Lille as a sergeant in counterintelligence). He has had over a hundred and fifty short stories published, several hundred poems, forty one-act plays, four three-act plays (and has been included in volumes of best plays of the year). For the past ten years he has been active in radio, television and motion pictures. At forty-seven, Howard Rodman—big, hearty, incredibly witty and erudite Howard Rodman—the film buff, has been married, divorced and remarried to the lovely and talented actress Norma Connolly. They have four children, several of whom can be ranked as geniuses by the most stringent criteria.
I am particularly pleased that Howard is able to appear in this anthology, not merely because his story is something very different and very special from the others in this book, but for a number of secondary reasons, herewith noted: Long before I came to Hollywood, I was an admirer of Rodman’s scripts. They seemed to me to embody the ideals a scenarist should strive for in a medium dedicated to drumming stench-deterrents for the hair, mouth, underarms and spaces between the toes. I made it a point to meet Rodman, within the first few months in Clown Town, and from him I learned an important lesson. A lesson any writer can use. Don’t be afraid. That simple; don’t let them scare you. There’s nothing they can do to you. If they kick you out of films, do TV. If they kick you out of TV, write novels. If they won’t buy your novels, sell short stories. Can’t do that, then take a job as a bricklayer. A writer always writes. That’s what he’s for. And if they won’t let you write one kind of thing, if they chop you off at the pockets in the market place, then go to another market place. And if they close off all the bazaars, then by God go and work with your hands till you can write, because the talent is always there. But the first time you say, “Oh, Christ, they’ll kill me!” then you’re done. Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore. That is what I learned from Howard Rodman.
Another reason for my delight at Rodman’s inclusion among these pages is the tenor of the story he has told. It is a gentle story, seemingly commonplace and not very “dangerous”. Yet when I first read it, and these thoughts occurred to me, I paused with the warning read it again signaling me from inside. Rodman is devious. So I read it again, and aside from the understatement of the handling, the pain of the concept struck me. He has attempted something very difficult, and in its own way unsettling. He has made a sage comment on the same subject which I commented upon, in the second paragraph of this introduction. (The part in parentheses.) It is the kind of story Heinlein used to write, and which Vonnegut has done several times, but which most speculative writers would not even consider. They are too far away in space. Rodman still has substantial ties with the here and now. And it is this concern (and affection) for the tragedy of the here and now that has prompted the story of the man who went to the moon—twice.
One final reason why Rodman’s appearance here is a delight. He is a fighter, not merely a parlor liberal. His admonition to me never to be afraid was capped with an order to fight for what I had written. I’ve tried to do it, sometimes successfully. It’s difficult in Hollywood, But my mentor, Howard Rodman, is the man who once threw a heavy ashtray at a man who had aborted one of his scripts, and had to be restrained from tearing the man’s head from his shoulders. On another occasion he sent a very powerful producer, who had butchered one of his cows, a large package wrapped in black crepe. Inside was a pair of scissors with a note that said Requiescat in Pace, and the name of the teleplay. There is a legend around the studios: if you aren’t getting enough of a headache from Ellison writing for you, call in Rodman and work with the original item.
It is visible testimony to the quality of his work that Howard Rodman is one of the busiest writers in Hollywood.
* * * *
THE MAN WHO WENT TO THE MOON—TWICE
by Howard Rodman
The first time Marshall Kiss went to the moon, he was nine years old, and the trip was accidental. A captive balloon broke loose at the county fair, and away it went, with Marshall in it.
It never came down till twelve hours later.
“Where’ve you been?” Marshall’s pa asked.
“Up to the moon,” Marshall answered.
“You don’t say,” Pa said, with his mouth slightly open and hanging. And off he went to tell the neighbors.
Marshall’s ma, being of a more practical turn of mind, just put a heaping bowl of good hot cereal on the table in front of Marshall. “You must be good and hungry after a trip like that. You better have some supper before you go to bed.”
“I guess I will,” said Marshall, setting to work to clear out the bowl. He was hard at work, when the reporters came—a big man with a little mustache, and a dry young man working on the newspaper for his tuition at the Undertakers’ College.
“Well,” said the mustache, “so you’ve been to the moon.”
Marshall got timid and nodded without speaking.
The undertaker smirked, but he stopped that when Marshall’s ma threw him a hot glare.
“What was it like?” the mustache asked.
“Very nice,” Marshall answered politely. “Cold and fresh and lots of singing.”
“What sort of singing?”
“Just singing. Nice tunes.”
The undertaker leered, but he stopped that when Marshall’s ma set the glass of milk down on the table with a bang and a scowl.
“Nice tunes,” Marshall repeated. “Just like church hymns.”
Three neighbors came by to take a look at Marshall. They stood back from the table a ways, gaping a little at the boy who’d been to the moon. “Who’d believe it” one of them whispered. “He looks so young.”
Marshall blushed with pride and ducked his head down towards his bowl of cereal.
Just then four schoolmates sneaked through the kitchen door and pushed their faces into the spaces between the neighbors. “Ask him!” the smallest schoolmate demanded.
“Hey, Marsh,” the bravest one called out, “you gonna play ball tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Marshall answered.
“He’s all right,” the bravest one told the others. “It ain’t changed him at all.”
Marshall’s pa came back with two more neighbors, and a woman brought her husband and eight children from two and a half miles down the road. A horse poked his head through the kitchen window, and a chicken hopped in and hid under the stove.
Marshall’s teacher rang the front doorbell, marched through the house into the kitchen by herself, when no one answered her ring.
Everybody looked at Marshall in a joyful and prideful sort of way, but nobody seemed to be able to think of anything to say. Even when the Mayor arrived, freshly shaven and bursting to make a speech, something happened to him, and he closed his mouth without a word.
The kitchen got warm with so many people pressing in together, but it was a pleasant sort of warmth—cheerful and happy, and nobody jostled anybody else. Marshall’s ma just grinned and glowed, and his pa puffed up on a corncob pipe, settling himself on an upturned crate beside the stove.
The reporter who was studying for the profession of undertaking started to ask Marshall, “How do you know you been to the moon?” But that was as far as he got, and somehow he found himself at the back of the crowd, looking out over everybody’s head by standing on tiptoe.
Finally the chicken cut-cutted, and everybody thought that was funny, so they all laughed out loud, and clear.
Marshall finished his cereal and his milk, and looked up to see, through the window, that the yard outside was packed with people too: for miles around, by horse and buckboard, on foot and otherwise. He could see that they were waiting for word from him, so he stood up and made a speech.
“I never intended deliberately to go to the moon,” Marshall stated. “It just happened that way. The balloon kept going up and I kept going up with it. Pretty soon I was looking down on the tops of mountains, and that was something. But I just kept on going up and up anyway. On the way I got an eagle mad. He was trying to fly as high as me, but he just couldn’t do it. He was hopping mad, that eagle. Screamed his head off.”
All the people in the kitchen, and outside in the yard too, nodded approval.
“In the end,” Marshall went on, “I got to the moon. Like I said, it was pretty nice.” He stopped speeching, because he’d said everything he had to.
“Was you scared?” somebody asked.
“Somewhat,” Marshall answered. “But the air was bracing, and I got over it.”
“Well,” said the mayor, bound to say something, “we’re glad to have you back.” And he stuck out his hand to shake with Marshall.
After that, Marshall shook hands all around and everybody went back to his own home. The horse took his head out the window and went back to cropping grass in the yard. The hen hopped out the door again, leaving an egg behind under the stove. The house was empty but still cheerful. It was as if everybody had come and brought their happiness and left it behind as a present, the way the chicken left the egg.
“Been a big day for you,” Marshall’s pa said.
“I guess you’d better go to bed now,” Marshall’s ma said.
“Might be,” Marshall’s pa went on, talking his thinking out loud, “might be you’ll turn out to be a big explorer, time to come.”
Marshall looked at his ma, saw her fear that the boy would turn out to be a gadabout. He answered for his mother’s benefit. “I’ll tell you, Pa. Seems more likely I’d just settle down now and stay put.” Of course he winked at his father to show him that maybe he was right at that.
“Good night, Pa. Good night, Ma.”
“Good night, son.”
His ma kissed him good night.
Then Marshall went into his room, closed the door, and undressed, and put on his pajamas. He knelt by the side of his bed and folded his fingers for prayer.
“Been a happy day, O Lord. Happy as I can remember. Thanks.”
He climbed into bed and went to sleep.
Well, you know the way time goes on. Marshall came to be a man, married and settled. He had children, and his children had children. His children grew up and just naturally went off their own ways, and his wife died a natural death. And there was Marshall Kiss left alone in the world, living on his farm and doing as much or as little work as he felt like.
Sometimes he went into town and sat by the stove in the general store and talked, and sometimes he stayed home and listened to the rain talking to the windowpanes. There came to be a time when Marshall was pushing ninety pretty hard. Most everybody who’d been alive when he was a boy had passed on.
The people in town were a new generation, and while they weren’t unkind, they weren’t very friendly, either. That’s the way it is with a new generation—it doesn’t look back—it keeps looking forward.
The time came when Marshall could walk through the town from one end to the other and not see a face he knew or that knew him. He’d nod and get nodded back at, but it wasn’t a real, close, human thing—it was just a polite thing to do. And you know what the end is, when a man has to live like that—he gets lonely.
That’s just what Marshall did—he got lonely.
First he thought he could forget his loneliness by staying off by himself. And there was a whole month when Marshall never showed his face around at all, expecting that somebody might show some curiosity and maybe come by to see how he was. But nobody ever did. So Marshall went back into town.
The clerk at the store seemed to have some vague recollection about not having seen Marshall, but he wasn’t too sure. “You haven’t been around for a couple of days or so, have you?” he asked Marshall.
“More like a month,” Marshall said.
“You don’t say,” the clerk remarked, as he toted up the figures on Marshall’s bill.
“Been away,” said Marshall.
“Seeing relatives?” the clerk asked.
“Been to the moon,” Marshall said.
The clerk looked a little bored, and not at all interested, and not at all impressed. In fact, he didn’t look as if he believed Marshall to begin with. But he was a polite man, so he commented. “Must be a nice trip,” he commented, never thinking any more about it than that.
Marshall went stomping out of the store and down to have his hair trimmed.
“Pretty heavy growth, Mr. Kiss,” the barber said.
“Should be,” Marshall answered. “There ain’t no barbershops on the moon, you know.”
“Expect not,” the barber said, and went ahead, busily clicking his shears and making believe he was clipping a hair here and a hair there, but never saying another word about the moon, never even having the common decency to ask what it was like on the moon.
So Marshall fell asleep till the barber should be finished.
The mayor came in for his daily shave. He was a young man with a heavy beard, and he glanced casually at Marshall. “Old-timer,” he said to the barber.
The barber nodded as he worked.
“Looks tuckered out,” the mayor said.
“Should be,” the barber told him. “He just got back from the moon.” He snickered loud.
“You don’t say,” the mayor said.
“That’s what he claims.” The barber snickered again. “Just got back from the moon.”
“Well, no wonder he’s tired, then.” But the way the mayor laughed and the way the barber laughed, Marshall could tell that they were just making fun of him. For Marshall wasn’t really sleeping, of course.
It got Marshall mad, and he sprang up and threw the sheet off of him and stomped on down to the newspaper office.
“My name is Marshall Kiss.” Marshall said to the fresh cub at the desk, “and I’ve just come back from a trip to the moon!”
“Thanks for the tip, Pop,” the reporter said, smiling a little crookedly. “I’ll look into it when I get the time.” And, saying that, he planted his big feet plump on the desk and clasped his hands behind his head.
Tears sprang up in Marshall’s eyes. “I been to the moon twice,” he shouted. “Once when I was nine years old, and it’s been printed in your paper, too, at the time. Why, people came from twelve miles around just to look at me. I went up there in an old balloon and busted an eagle’s heart when he tried to get up as high as I was.” He looked at the reporter hard, and he could see that the reporter didn’t believe him and wasn’t going to try. “There’s no pity left in the world any more,” said Marshall, “and no joy.” And with that, he walked out.
The road home was mostly rocky and uphill, and it seemed to take Marshall a long time to walk a short distance. “Can’t figure out how people changed so much,” Marshall thought. “Grass is still green, and horses have tails, and hens lay eggs—” He was interrupted by a little boy who came running up from behind, pretending to gallop and hitting himself on the rump as if he were a horse.
“Hello,” the little boy said, “where are you going?”
“Just up the hill a way, back to my farm,” Marshall answered.
“Where’ve you been?” the little boy asked.
“Just to town,” Marshall said.
“Is that all?” the little boy asked, disappointed. “Ain’t you never been nowhere else?”
“I been to the moon,” Marshall said, a little timidly.
The boy’s eyes opened and shone brightly.
“Twice,” Marshall added.
The boy’s eyes opened even wider. “How do you like that!” the little boy shouted, excited. “H-h-how do you like that?” He was so excited, he stammered.
“Matter of fact,” Marshall said, “I just come back from the moon.”
The little boy was silent for a second. “Say, mister,” he asked finally, “do you mind if I bring my friend to see you?” “Not at all. I live right back there, in that house you see.” Marshall turned off to get to his house.
“I’ll be right back,” the little boy promised and ran away as fast as he could to get his friend.
It must have been about half an hour later that the little boy and the little girl got to Marshall’s house. They knocked on the door, but there wasn’t any answer, so they just walked in. “It’s all right,” the little boy said, “he’s very friendly.”
The kitchen was empty, so they looked in the parlor, and that was empty too.
“Maybe he’s gone back to the moon,” the little girl whispered, awed.
“Maybe he has,” the little boy admitted, but just the same they looked in the bedroom.
There was Marshall, lying on the bed, and at first they thought he was sleeping. But after a while, when he didn’t move or breathe, the little boy and the little girl knew he was further away than that.
“Guess you were right,” the little boy said.
He and the little girl just looked and looked with their eyes as wide as wide can be, at the man who had been to the moon twice.
“I guess this makes three times now,” the little girl said.
And suddenly, without knowing why, they became frightened and ran off, leaving the door opened behind them. They ran silently, hand in hand, frightened, but happy too, as if something very wonderful had happened that they couldn’t understand.
After a while, though it was the first time it had ever happened on that farm, the horse wandered into the house and stuck his head through the bedroom door and looked.
And then a chicken hopped in and hid under the bed.
And a long time later, a lot of people came to look at the contented smile on Marshall’s face.
“That’s him,” the little boy said, pointing. “That’s the man who’s been to the moon twice.”
And somehow, with Marshall’s smile, and the horse standing there swishing his tail, and the sudden cut-cutt of the chicken under the bed—somehow, nobody corrected the little boy.
That was the day the Mars rocket went on a regular three-a-day schedule. Hardly anybody went to the moon at all, any more. There wasn’t enough to see.
* * * *
Afterword:
This particular story came out of a sudden, strongly personal understanding of certain aspects of my father’s life—the enormous changes which took place in the history of his time: technological developments beyond dreaming when he was a boy.
He had told me of sitting and listening to a phonograph which was carried on the back of a man who went from village to village in Poland, where my father was born. For a kopek the man wound the handle, the disc turned, the needle scratched, and if you put your ear close to the horn there was the miracle of a voice, a music, a recitation.
Now, in 1928 or ‘29, my father stepped into an airplane which landed in a cornfield in the Catskill Mountains. For five dollars my father flew for five minutes.
If this was my father’s story, it was the story of his generation. Within what seems to me an incredibly short time, the mystery and the miracle were lost. There is small marvel to television, despite the fact that the extraordinary complexity of the sending and reception of a television signal is beyond the understanding and capability of the tens and hundreds of millions of television watchers. The television set is successful because the marvel has been eliminated. Because the set is truly an idiot box; not so much in its content as in the manner in which the controls have been simplified, so that the viewing may be had by anyone with the sense to push a button and twist a dial. The dial itself, so devised that one has merely to twist it: not even to a specific number. But, ipso facto, if one wants to see the show on channel 8, all one has to do is keep twisting the dial until that show appears on the screen. Ergo, one has dialed to channel 8.
And the marvel is gone.
Because the sweep of modern history seems to me to have a feeling of wonder; because it has a sense of fairy tale and unbelievability to me; because the miracle of the changes wrought from the time of my father’s boyhood to my own seemed to me to have been lost, I wrote this story.
It is simply a reminder that fantasy lies in the day-to-day of our lives as much as it lies in the wonder of the future. And it is a reminder that the best of our civilization goes far beyond the comprehension of the ordinary of our citizens. The wonder is that there is so much civilization when so few are civilized.
In another mood I might have written a sharper story. But this time I thought simply that form should follow content. Hence, a fairy tale; old-fashioned and sentimental, written on an electric typewriter.
* * * *