“O Lord Most High, Creator
of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves,
Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of
Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia — what could we do for
Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times
better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly
interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our
Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last.
No longer can a fool like Malachi Constant point to a ridiculous
accident of good luck and say, ‘Somebody up there likes me.’ And no
longer can a tyrant say, ‘God wants this or that to happen, and
anybody who doesn’t help this or that to happen is against God.’ O
Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have
unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the
claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the
madhouse lies slain!”
— The Reverend C. Horner Redwine
It was a Tuesday afternoon. It was springtime
in the northern hemisphere of Earth.
Earth was green and watery. The air of earth
was good to breathe, as fattening as cream.
The purity of the rains that fell on Earth
could be tasted. The taste of purity was daintily tart.
Earth was warm.
The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in
fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death
was.
The daintily tart rain fell on a green place
where there was a great deal of death. It fell on a New World
country churchyard. The churchyard was in West Barnstable, Cape
Cod, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The churchyard was full, the spaces
between its naturally dead chinked tight by the bodies of the
honored war dead. Martians and Earthlings lay side by side.
There was not a country in the world that
did not have graveyards with Earthlings and Martians buried side by
side. There was not a country in the world that had not fought a
battle in the war of all Earth against the invaders from
Mars.
All was forgiven.
All living things were brothers, and all
dead things were even more so.
The church, which squatted among the
headstones like a wet mother dodo, had been at various times
Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Unitarian, and Universal
Apocalyptic. It was now the Church of God the Utterly
Indifferent.
A seeming wild man stood in the churchyard,
wondering at the creamery air, at the green, at the wet.He was
almost naked, and his blue-black beard and his hair were tangled
and long and shot with gray. The only garment he wore was a
clinking breechclout made of wrenches and copper wire.
The garment covered his shame.
The rain ran down his coarse cheeks. He
tipped back his head to drink it. He rested his hand on a
headstone, more for the feel than the support of it. He was used to
the feel of stones — was deathly used to the feel of rough,
dry stones. But stones that were wet, stones that were mossy,
stones that were squared and written on by men — he hadn’t
felt stones like that for a long, long time.
Pro patria said
the stone he touched.
The man was Unk.
He was home from Mars and Mercury. His space
ship had landed itself in a wood next to the churchyard. He was
filled with the heedless, tender violence of a man who has had his
lifetime cruelly wasted.
Unk was forty-three years old.
He had every reason to wither and die.
All that kept him going was a wish that was
more mechanical than emotional. He wished to
be reunited with Bee, his mate, with Chrono, his son, and with
Stony Stevenson, his best and only friend.
The Reverend C. Horner Redwine stood in the
pulpit of his church that rainy Tuesday afternoon. There was no one
else in the church. Redwine had climbed up to the pulpit in order
simply to be as happy as possible. He wasnot being as happy as
possible under adverse circumstances. He was being as happy as
possible under extraordinarily happy circumstances — for he
was a much loved minister of a religion that not only promised but
delivered miracles.
His church, the Barnstable First Church of
God the Utterly Indifferent, had a subtitle: The Church of the Weary Space Wanderer. The
subtitle was justified by this prophecy: That a lone straggler from
the Army of Mars would arrive at Redwine’s church some day.
The church was ready for the miracle. There
was a hand-forged iron spike driven into the rugged oak post behind
the pulpit. The post carried the mighty beam that was the rooftree.
And on the nail was hung a coathanger encrusted with semiprecious
stones. And on the coathanger hung a suit of clothes in a
transparent plastic bag.
The prophecy was that the weary Space
Wanderer would be naked, that the suit of clothes would fit him
like a glove. The suit was of such a design as to fit no one but
the right man well. It was one piece, lemonyellow, rubberized,
closed by a zipper, and ideally skin-tight.
The garment was not in the mode of the day.
It was a special creation to add glamour to the miracle.
Stitched into the back and front of the
garment were orange question marks a foot high. These signified
that the Space Wanderer would not know who he was.
No one would know who he was until Winston
Niles Rumfoord, the head of all churches of God the Utterly
Indifferent, gave the world the Space Wanderer’s name.
The signal, should the Space Wanderer
arrive, was for Redwine to ring the church bell madly.
When the bell was rung madly, the
parishioners were to feel ecstasy, to drop whatever they were
doing, to laugh, to weep, to come.
The West Barnstable Volunteer Fire
Department was so dominated by members of Redwine’s church that the
fire engine itself was going to arrive as the only vehicle remotely
glorious enough for the Space Wanderer.
The screams of the fire alarm on top of the
firehouse were to be added to the bedlam joy of the bell. One
scream from the alarm meant a grass or woods fire. Two screams
meant a house fire. Three screams meant a rescue. Ten screams would
mean that the Space Wanderer had arrived.
Water seeped in around an ill-fitting window
sash. Water crept under a loose shingle in the roof, dropped
through a crack and hung in glittering beads from a rafter over
Redwine’s head. The good rain wet the old Paul Revere bell in the
steeple, trickled down the bell rope, soaked the wooden doll tied
to the end of the bell rope, dripped from the feet of the doll,
made a puddle on the steeple’s flagstone floor.
The doll had a religious significance. It
represented a repellent way of life that was no more. It was called
a Malachi. No home or place of business
of a member of Redwine’s faith was without a Malachi hanging
somewhere.
There was only one proper way to hang a
Malachi. That was by the neck. There was only one proper knot to
use, and that was a hangman’s knot.
And the rain dripped from the feet of
Redwine’s Malachi at the end of the bell rope —
The cold goblin spring of the crocuses was
past.
The frail and chilly fairy spring of the
daffodils was past.
The springtime for mankind had arrived, and
the blooms of the lilac bowers outside Redwine’s church hung fatly,
heavy as Concord grapes.
Redwine listened to the rain, and imagined
that it spoke Chaucerian English. He spoke aloud the words he
imagined the rain to be speaking, spoke harmoniously, at just the
noise level of the rain.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droughte of Marche hath perced to the rote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendered is the flour —
A droplet fell twinkling from the rafter
overhead, wet the left lens of Redwine’s spectacles and his apple
cheek.
Time had been kind to Redwine. Standing
there in the pulpit, he looked like a ruddy, bespectacled country
newsboy, though he was forty-nine. He raised his hand to brush away
the wetness on his cheek, and rattled the blue canvas bag of lead
shot that was strapped around his wrist.
There were similar bags of shot around his
ankles and his other wrist, and two heavy slabs of iron hung on
shoulder straps — one slab on his chest and one on his
back.
These weights were his handicaps in the race
of life.
He carried forty-eight pounds — carried
them gladly. A stronger person would have carried more, a weaker
person would have carried less. Every strong member of Redwine’s
faith accepted handicaps gladly, wore them proudly
everywhere.
The weakest and meekest were bound to admit,
at last, that the race of life was fair.
The liquid melodies of the rain made such
lovely backgrounds for any sort of recitation in the empty church
that Redwine recited some more. This time he recited something that
Winston Niles Rumfoord, the Master of Newport, had written.
The thing that Redwine was about to recite
with the rain chorus was a thing that the Master of Newport had
written to define the position of himself with respect to his
ministers, the position of his ministers with respect to their
flocks, and the position of everybody with respect to God. Redwine
read it to his flock on the first Sunday of every month.
“ ‘I am
not your father,’ ” said
Redwine. “ ‘ Rather call me
brother. But I am not your brother. Rather call me son. But I am
not your son. Rather call me a dog. But I am not your dog. Rather
call me a flea on your dog. But I am not a flea. Rather call me a
germ on a flea on your dog. As a germ on a flea on your dog, I am
eager to serve you in any way I can, just as you are willing to
serve God Almighty, Creator of the Universe.’ ”
Redwine slapped his hands together, killing
the imaginary germ-infested flea. On Sundays, the entire
congregation slapped the flea in unison.
Another droplet fell shivering from the
rafter, wet Redwine’s cheek again. Redwine nodded his sweet thanks
for the droplet, for the church, for peace, for the Master of
Newport, for Earth, for a God Who didn’t care, for
everything.
He stepped down from the pulpit, making the
lead balls in his handicap bags shift back and forth with a stately
swish.
He went down the aisle and through the arch
under the steeple. He paused by the puddle under the bell rope,
looked up to divine the course the water had taken down. It was a
lovely way, he decided, for spring rain to come in. If ever he were
in charge of remodeling the church, he would make sure that
enterprising drops of rain could still come in that way.
Just beyond the arch under the steeple was
another arch, a leafy arch of lilacs.
Redwine now stepped under that second arch,
saw the space ship like a great blister in the woods, saw the
naked, bearded Space Wanderer in his churchyard.
Redwine cried out for joy. He ran back into
his church and jerked and swung on the bell rope like a drunken
chimpanzee. In the clanging bedlam of the bells, Redwine heard the
words that the Master of Newport said all bells spoke.
“NO HELL!” whang-clanged the
bell —
“NO HELL,
“NO HELL,
“NO HELL!”
Unk was terrified by the bell. It sounded
like an angry, frightened bell to Unk, and he ran back to his
ship,gashing his shin badly as he scrambled over a stone wall. As
he was closing the airlock, he heard a siren wailing answers to the
bell.
Unk thought Earth was still at war with
Mars, and that the siren and the bell were calling sudden death
down on him. He pressed the on
button.
The automatic navigator did not respond
instantly, but engaged in a fuzzy, ineffectual argument with
itself. The argument ended with the navigator’s shutting itself
off.
Unk pressed the on button again. This time he kept it down by
jamming his heel against it.
Again the navigator argued stupidly with
itself, tried to shut itself off. When it found that it could not
shut itself off, it made dirty yellow smoke.
The smoke became so dense and poisonous that
Unk was obliged to swallow a goofball and practice Schliemann
breathing again.
Then the pilot-navigator gave out a deep,
throbbing organ note and died forever.
There was no taking off now. When the
pilot-navigator died, the whole space ship died.
Unk went through the smoke to a
porthole — looked out.
He saw a fire engine. The fire engine was
breaking through the brush to the space ship. Men, women, and
children were clinging to the engine — drenched by rain and
expressing ecstasy.
Going in advance of the fire engine was the
Reverend C. Horner Redwine. In one hand he carried a lemon-yellow
suit in a transparent plastic bag. In the other hand he held a
spray of fresh-cut lilacs.
The women threw kisses to Unk through the
portholes, held their children up to see the adorable man inside.
The men stayed with the fire engine, cheered Unk, cheered each
other, cheered everything. The driver made the mighty motor
backfire, blew the siren, rang the bell.
Everyone wore handicaps of some sort. Most
handicaps were of an obvious sort — sashweights, bags of shot,
old furnace grates — meant to hamper physical advantages. But
there were, among Redwine’s parishioners, several true believers
who had chosen handicaps of a subtler and more telling kind.
There were women who had received by dint of
dumb luck the terrific advantage of beauty. They had annihilated
that unfair advantage with frumpish clothes, bad posture, chewing
gum, and a ghoulish use of cosmetics.
One old man, whose only advantage was
excellent eyesight, had spoiled that eyesight by wearing his wife’s
spectacles.
A dark young man, whose lithe, predaceous
sex appeal could not be spoiled by bad clothes and bad manners, had
handicapped himself with a wife who was nauseated by sex.
The dark young man’s wife, who had reason to
be vain about her Phi Beta Kappa key, had handicapped herself with
a husband who read nothing but comic books.
Redwine’s congregation was not unique. It
wasn’t especially fanatical. There were literally billions of
happily self-handicapped people on Earth.
And what made them all so happy was that
nobody took advantage of anybody any more.
Now the firemen thought of another way to
express joy. There was a nozzle mounted amidships on the fire
engine. It could be swiveled around like a machine gun. They aimed
it straight up and turned it on. A shivering, unsure fountain
climbed into the sky, was torn to shreds by the winds when it could
climb no more. The shreds fell all around, now falling on the space
ship with splattering thumps; now soaking the firemen themselves;
now soaking women and children, startling them, then making them
more full of joy than ever.
That water should have played such an
important part in the welcoming of Unk was an enchanting accident.
No one had planned it. But it was perfect that everyone should
forget himself in a festival of universal wetness.
The Reverend C. Horner Redwine, feeling as
naked as a pagan wood sprite in the clinging wetness of his
clothes, swished a spray of lilacs over the glass of a porthole,
then pressed his adoring face against the glass.
The expression of the face that looked back
at Redwine was strikingly like the expression on the face of an
intelligent ape in a zoo. Unk’s forehead was deeply wrinkled, and
his eyes were liquid with a hopeless wish to understand.
Unk had decided not to be afraid.
Neither was he in any hurry to let Redwine
in.
At last he went to the airlock, unlatched
both the inner and outer doors. He stepped back, waiting for
someone else to push the doors open.
“First let me go in and have him put on the
suit!” said Redwine to his congregation. “Then you can have
him!”
There in the space ship, the lemon-yellow
suit fit Unk like a coat of paint. The orange question marks on his
chest and back clung without a wrinkle.
Unk did not yet know that no one else in the
world was dressed like him. He assumed that many people had suits
like his — question marks and all.
“This — this is Earth?” said Unk to
Redwine.
“Yes,” said Redwine. “Cape Cod,
Massachusetts, United States of America, Brotherhood of Man.”
“Thank God!” said Unk.
Redwine raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“Why?” he said.
“Pardon me?” said Unk.
“Why thank God?” said Redwine. “He doesn’t
care what happens to you. He didn’t go to any trouble to get you
here safe and sound, any more than He would go to the trouble to
kill you.” He raised his arms, demonstrating the muscularity of his
faith. The balls of shot in the handicap bags on his wrists shifted
swishingly, drawing Unk’s attention. Form the handicap bags, Unk’s
attention made an easy jump to the heavy slab of iron on Redwine’s
chest. Redwine followed the trend of Unk’s gaze, hefted the iron
slab on his chest. “Heavy,” he said.
“Um,” said Unk.
“You should carry about fifty pounds, I
would guess — after we build you up,” said Redwine.
“Fifty pounds?” said Unk.
“You should be glad, not sorry, to carry
such a handicap,” said Redwine. “No one could then reproach you for
taking advantage of the random ways of luck.” There crept into his
voice a beatifically threatening tone that he had not used much
since the earliest days of the Church of God the Utterly
Indifferent, since the thrilling mass conversions that had followed
the war with Mars. In those days, Redwine and all the other young
proselytizers had threatened unbelievers with the righteous
displeasure of crowds — righteously displeased crowds that did
not then exist.
The righteously displeased crowds existed
now in every part of the world. The total membership of Churches of
God the Utterly Indifferent was a good, round three billion. The
young lions who had first taught the creed could now afford to be
lambs, to contemplate such oriental mysteries as water trickling
down a bell rope. The disciplinary arm of the Church was in crowds
everywhere.
“I must warn you,” Redwine said to Unk,
“that when you go out among all those people you mustn’t say
anything that would indicate that God took a special interest in
you, or that you could somehow be of help to God. The worst thing
you could say, for instance, would be something like, ‘Thank God
for delivering me from all my troubles. For some reason He singled
me out, and now my only wish is to serve Him.’
“The friendly crowd out there,” continued
Redwine, “could turn quite ugly quite fast, despite the high
auspices under which you come.”
Unk had been planning to say almost exactly
what Redwine had warned him against saying. It had seemed the only
proper speech to make. “What — what should I say?” said
Unk.
“It has been prophesied what you will say,”
said Redfield, “word for word. I have thought long and hard about
the words you are going to say, and I am convinced they cannot be
improved upon.”
“But I can’t think of any words —
except hello — thank you —” said Unk. “What do you
want me to say?”
“What you do say,” said Redwine. “Those good
people out there have been rehearsing this moment for a long time.
They will ask you two questions, and you will answer them to the
best of your ability.”
He led Unk through the airlock to the
outside. The fire engine’s fountain had been turned off. The
shouting and dancing had stopped.
Redwine’s congregation now formed a
semicircle around Unk and Redwine. The members of the congregation
had their lips pressed tightly together and their lungs
filled.
Redwine gave a saintly signal.
The congregation spoke as one. “Who are
you?” they said.
“I — I don’t know my real name,” said
Unk. “They called me Unk.”
“What happened to you?” said the
congregation.
Unk shook his head vaguely. He could think
of no apt condensation of his adventures for the obviously ritual
mood. Something great was plainly expected of him.He was not up to
greatness. He exhaled noisily, letting the congregation know that
he was sorry to fail them with his colorlessness. “I was a victim
of a series of accidents,” he said. He shrugged. “As are we all,”
he said.
The cheering and dancing began again.
Unk was hustled aboard the fire engine, and
driven on it to the door of the church.
Redwine pointed amiably to an unfurled
wooden scroll over the door. Incised in the scroll and gilded were
these words:
I WAS A VICTIM OF A SERIES
OF ACCIDENTS, AS ARE WE ALL.
Unk was driven on the fire engine straight
from the church to Newport, Rhode Island, where a materialization
was due to take place.
According to a plan that had been set up
years before, other fire apparatus on Cape Cod was shifted so as to
protect West Barnstable, which would be without its pumper for a
little while.
Word of the Space Wanderer’s coming spread
over the Earth like wildfire. In every village, town, and city
through which the fire engine passed, Unk was pelted with
flowers.
Unk sat high on the fire engine, on a
two-by-six fir timber laid across the cockpit amidships. In the
cockpit itself was the Reverend C. Horner Redwine.
Redwine had control of the fire engine’s
bell, which he rang assiduously. Attached to the clapper of the
bell was a Malachi made of high-impact plastic. The doll was of a
special sort that could be bought only in Newport. To display such
a Malachi was to proclaim that one had made a pilgrimage to
Newport.
The entire Volunteer Fire Department of West
Barnstable, with the exception of two non-conformists, had made
such a pilgrimage to Newport. The fire engine’s Malachi had been
bought with Fire Department funds.
In the parlance of the souvenir hawkers in
Newport, the Fire Department’s high-impact plastic Malachi was a
“genuwine, authorized, official Malachi.”
Unk was happy, because it was so good to be
among people again, and to be breathing air again. And everybody
seemed to adore him so.
There was so much good noise. There was so
much good everything. Unk hoped the good everything would go on
forever.
“What happened to you?” the people all
yelled to him, and they laughed.
For the purposes of mass communications, Unk
shortened the answer that had pleased the little crowd so much at
the Church of the Space Wanderer. “Accidents!” he yelled.
He laughed.
Oh boy.
What the hell. He laughed.
In Newport, the Rumfoord estate had been
packed to the walls for eight hours. Guards turned thousands away
from the little door in the wall. The guards were hardly necessary,
since the crowd inside was monolithic.
A greased eel couldn’t have squeezed
in.
The thousands of pilgrims outside the walls
now jostled one another piously for positions close to the
loudspeakers mounted at the corners of the walls.
From the speakers would come Rumfoord’s
voice.
The crowd was the largest yet and the most
excited yet, for the day was the long-promised Great Day of the
Space Wanderer.
Handicaps of the most imaginative and
effective sort were displayed everywhere. The crowd was wonderfully
drab and hampered.
Bee, who had been Unk’s mate on Mars, was in
Newport, too. So was Bee’s and Unk’s son, Chrono.
“Hey! — getcher genuwine, authorized,
official Malachis here,” said Bee hoarsely. “Hey! — getcher
Malachis here. Gotta have a Malachi to wave at the Space Wanderer,”
said Bee. “Get a Malachi, so the Space Wanderer can bless it when
he comes by.”
She was in a booth facing the little iron
door in the wall of the Rumfoord estate in Newport. Bee’s booth was
the first in the line of twenty booths that faced the door. The
twenty booths were under one continuous shed roof, and were
separated from one another by waist-high partitions.
The Malachis she was hawking were plastic
dolls with movable joints and rhinestone eyes. Bee bought them from
a religious supply house for twenty-seven cents apiece and sold
them for three dollars. She was an excellent businesswoman.
And while Bee showed the world an efficient
and flashy exterior, it was the grandeur within her that sold more
merchandise than anything. The carnival flash of Bee caught the
pilgrims’ eyes. But what brought the pilgrims to her booth and made
them buy was her aura. The aura said unmistakably that Bee was
meant for a far nobler station in life, that she was being an
awfully good sport about being stuck where she was.
“Hey! — getcher Malachi while there’s
still time,” said Bee. “Can’t get a Malachi while a
materialization’s going on!”
That was true. The rule was that the
concessionaires had to close their shutters five minutes before
Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog materialized. And they had to
keep their shutters closed until ten minutes after the last trace
of Rumfoord and Kazak had disappeared.
Bee turned to her son, Chrono, who was
opening a fresh case of Malachis. “How long before the whistle?”
she said. The whistle was a great steam whistle inside the estate.
It was blown five minutes in advance of materializations.
Materializations themselves were announced
by the firing of a three-inch cannon.
Dematerializations were announced by the
release of a thousand toy balloons.
“Eight minutes,” said Chrono, looking at his
watch. He was eleven Earthling years old now. He was dark and
smoldering. He was an expert short-changer, and was clever with
cards. He was foul-mouthed, and carried a switch-knife with a
six-inch blade. Chrono would not socialize well with other
children, and his reputation for dealing with life courageously and
directly was so bad that only a few very foolish and very pretty
little girls were attracted to him.
Chrono was classified by the Newport Police
Department and by the Rhode Island State Police as a juvenile
delinquent. He knew at least fifty law-enforcement officers by
their first names, and was a veteran of fourteen lie-detector
tests.
All that prevented Chrono’s being placed in
an institution was the finest legal staff on Earth, the legal staff
of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Under the direction
of Rumfoord, the staff defended Chrono against all charges.
The commonest charges brought against Chrono
were larceny by sleight of hand, carrying concealed weapons,
possessing unregistered pistols, discharging firearms within the
city limits, selling obscene prints and articles, and being a
wayward child.
The authorities complained bitterly that the
boy’s big trouble was his mother. His mother loved him just the way
he was.
“Only eight more minutes to get your
Malachi, folk,” said Bee. “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”
Bee’s upper front teeth were gold, and her
skin, like the skin of her son, was the color of golden oak.
Bee had lost her upper front teeth when the
space ship in which she and Chrono had ridden from Mars
crash-landed in the Gumbo region of the Amazon Rain Forest. She and
Chrono had been the only survivors of the crash, and had wandered
through the jungles for a year.
The color of Bee’s and Chrono’s skins was
permanent, since it stemmed from a modification of their livers.
Their livers had been modified by a three-month diet consisting of
water and the roots of the salpa-salpa or Amazonian blue poplar.
The diet had been a part of Bee’s and Chrono’s initiation into the
Gumbo tribe.
During the initiation, mother and son had
been staked at the ends of tethers in the middle of the village,
with Chrono representing the Sun and Bee representing the Moon, as
the Sun and the Moon were understood by the Gumbo people.
As a result of their experiences, Bee and
Chrono were closer than most mothers and sons.
They had been rescused at last by a
helicopter. Winston Niles Rumfoord had sent the helicopter to just
the right place at just the right time.
Winston Niles Rumfoord had given Bee and
Chrono the lucrative Malachi concession outside the
Alice-in-Wonderland door. He had also paid Bee’s dental bill, and
had suggested that her false front teeth be gold.
The man who had the booth next to Bee’s was
Harry Brackman. He had been Unk’s platoon sergeant back on Mars.
Brackman was portly and balding now. He had a cork leg and a
stainless steel right hand. He had lost the leg and hand in the
Battle of Boca Raton. He was the only survivor of the battle —
and, if he hadn’t been so horribly wounded, he would certainly have
been lynched along with the other survivors of his platoon.
Brackman sold plastic models of the fountain
inside the wall. The models were a foot high. The models had
spring-driven pumps in their bases. The pumps pumpedwater from the
big bowl at the bottom to the tiny bowls at the top. Then the tiny
bowls spilled into the slightly larger bowls below and …
Brackman had three of them going at once on
the counter before him. “Just like the one inside, folks,” he said.
“And you can take one of these home with you. Put it in the picture
window, so all your neighbors’ll know you’ve been to Newport. Put
it in the middle of the kitchen table for the kids’ parties, and
fill it with pink lemonade.”
“How much?” said a rube.
“Seventeen dollars,” said Brackman.
“Wow!” said the rube.
“It’s a sacred shrine, cousin,” said
Brackman, looking at the rube levelly. “Isn’t a toy.” He reached
under the counter, brought out a model of a Martian space ship.
“You want a toy? Here’s a toy. Forty-nine cents. I only make two
cents on it.”
The rube made a show of being a judicious
shopper. He compared the toy with the real article it was supposed
to represent. The real article was a Martian space ship on top of a
column ninety-eight feet tall. The column and space ship were
inside the walls of the Rumfoord estate — in the corner of the
estate where the tennis courts had once been.
Rumfoord had yet to explain the purpose of
the space ship, whose supporting column had been built with the
pennies of school children from all over the world. The ship was
kept in constant readiness. What was reputedly the longest
free-standing ladder in history leaned against the column, led
giddily to the door of the ship.
In the fuel cartridge of the space ship was
the very last trace of the Martian war effort’s supply of the
Universal Will to Become.
“Uh huh,” said the rube. He put the model
back on the counter. “If you don’t mind, I’ll shop around a little
more.” So far, the only thing he had bought was a Robin Hood hat
with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and a picture of a sailboat
on the other, and with his own name stitched on the feather. His
name, according to the feather, was Delbert. “Thanks just the same,” said Delbert.
“I’ll probably be back.”
“Sure you will, Delbert,” said
Brackman.
“How did you know my name was Delbert?” said
Delbert, pleased and suspicious.
“You think Winston Niles Rumfoord is the
only man around here with supernatural powers?” said
Brackman.
A jet of steam went up inside the walls. An
instant later, the voice of the great steam whistle rolled over the
booths — mighty, mournful, and triumphant. It was the signal
that Rumfoord and his dog would materialize in five minutes.
It was the signal for the concessionaires to
stop their irreverent bawling of brummagem wares, to close their
shutters.
The shutters were banged shut at once.
The effect of the closing inside the booths
was to turn the line of concessions into a twilit tunnel.
The isolation of the concessionaires in the
tunnel had an extra dimension of spookiness, since the tunnel
contained only survivors from Mars. Rumfoord had insisted on
that — that Martians were to have first choice of the
concessions at Newport. It was his way of saying, “Thanks.”
There weren’t many survivors — only
fifty-eight in the United States, only three hundred and sixteen in
the entire World.
Of the fifty-eight in the United States,
twenty-one were concessionaires in Newport.
“Here we go again, kiddies,” somebody said,
far, far, far down the line. It was the voice of the blind man who
sold the Robin Hood hats with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and
a picture of a sailboat on the other.
Sergeant Brackman laid his folded arms on
the half-partition between his booth and Bee’s. He winked at young
Chrono, who was lying on an unopened case of Malachis.
“Go to hell, eh, kid?” said Brackman to
Chrono.
“Go to hell,” Chrono agreed. He was cleaning
his nails with the strangely bent, drilled and nicked piece of
metal that had been his good-luck piece on Mars. It was still his
good-luck piece on Earth.
This good-luck piece had probably saved
Chrono’s and Bee’s lives in the jungle. The Gumbo tribesmen had
recognized the piece of metal as an object of tremendous power.
Their respect for it had led them to initiate rather than eat its
owners.
Brackman laughed affectionately.
“Yessir — there’s a Martian for you,” he said. “Won’t even get
off his case of Malachis for a look at the Space Wanderer.”
Chrono was not alone in his apathy about the
Space Wanderer. It was the proud and impudent custom of all the
concessionaires to stay away from ceremonies — to stay in the
twilit tunnel of their booths until Rumfoord and his dog had come
and gone.
It wasn’t that the concessionaires had real
contempt for Rumfoord’s religion. Actually, most of them thought
the new religion was probably a pretty good thing. What they were
dramatizing when they stayed in their shuttered booths was that
they, as Martian veterans, had already done more than enough to put
the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent on its feet.
They were dramatizing the fact of their
having been all used up.
Rumfoord encouraged them in this pose —
spoke of them fondly as his “… soldier saints outside the little
door. Their apathy,” Rumfoord once said, “is a great wound they
suffered that we might be more lively, more sensitive, and more
free.”
The temptation of the Martian
concessionaires to take a peek at the Space Wanderer was great.
There were loudspeakers on the walls of the Rumfoord estate, and
every word spoken by Rumfoord inside blatted in the ears of anyone
within a quarter of a mile. The words had spoken again and again of
the glorious moment of truth that would come when the Space
Wanderer came.
It was a big moment true believers
titillated themselves about — the big moment wherein true
believers were going to find their beliefs amplified, clarified,
and vivified by a factor of ten.
Now the moment had arrived.
The fire engine that had carried the Space
Wanderer down from the Church of the Space Wanderer on Cape Cod was
clanging and shrieking outside the booths.
The trolls in the twilight of the booths
refused to peek.
The cannon roared within the walls.
Rumfoord and his dog, then, had
materialized — and the Space Wanderer was passing in through
the Alice-in-Wonderland door.
“Probably some broken-down actor he hired
from New York,” said Brackman.
This got no response from anyone, not even
from Chrono, who fancied himself the chief cynic of the booths.
Brackman didn’t take his own suggestion seriously — that the
Space Wanderer was a fraud. The concessionaires knew all too well
about Rumfoord’s penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a
passion play, he used nothing but real people in real hells.
Let it be emphasized here that, passionately
fond as Rumfoord was of great spectacles, he never gave in to the
temptation to declare himself God or something a whole lot like
God.
His worst enemies admit that. Dr. Maurice
Rosenau, in his Pan-Galactic Humbug or Three
Billion Dupes says:
Winston Niles Rumfoord, the interstellar Pharisee, Tartufe, and Cagliostro, has taken pains to declare that he is not God Almighty, that he is not a close relative of God Almighty, and that he has received no plain instructions from God Almighty. To these words of the Master of Newport we can say Amen! And may we add that Rumfoord is so far from being a relative or agent of God Almighty as to make all communication with God almighty Himself impossible so long as Rumfoord is around!
Ordinarily, talk by the Martian veterans in
the shuttered booths was sprightly — bristling with
entertaining irreverence and tips on selling trashy religious
articles to boobs.
Now, with Rumfoord and the Space Wanderer
about to meet, the concessionaires found it very hard not to be
interested.
Sergeant Brackman’s good hand went up to the
crown of his head. It was the characteristic gesture of a Martian
veteran. He was touching the area over his antenna, over the
antenna that had once done all his important thinking for him. He
missed the signals.
“Bring the Space
Wanderer here!“ blatted Rumfoord’s voice from the Gabriel
horns on the walls.
“Maybe — maybe we should go,” said
Brackman to Bee.
“What?” murmured Bee. She was standing with
her back to the closed shutters. Her eyes were shut. Her head was
down. She looked cold.
She always shivered when a materialization
was taking place.
Chrono was rubbing his good-luck piece
slowly with the ball of his thumb, watching a halo of mist on the
cold metal, a halo around the thumb.
“The hell with ‘em — eh, Chrono?” said
Brackman.
The man who sold twittering mechanical birds
swung his wares overhead listlessly. A farm wife had stabbed him
with a pitchfork in the Battle of Toddington, England, had left him
for dead.
The International Committee for the
Identification and Rehabilitation of Martians had, with the help of
fingerprints, identified the bird man as Bernard K. Winslow, an
itinerant chicken sexer, who had disappeared from the alcoholic
ward of a London hospital.
“Thanks very much for the information.”
Winslow had told the committee. “Now I don’t have that lost feeling
any more.”
Sergeant Brackman had been identified by the
Committee as Private Francis J. Thompson, who had disappeared in
the dead of night while walking a lonely guard post around a motor
pool in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, U.S.A.
The committee had been baffled by Bee. She
had no fingerprints on record. The Committee believed her to be
either Florence White, a plain and friendless girl who had
disappeared from a steam laundry in Cohoes, New York, or Darlene
Simpkins, a plain and friendless girl who had last been seen
accepting a ride with a swarthy stranger in Brownsville,
Texas.
And down the line of booths from Brackman
and Chrono and Bee were Martian husks who had been identified as
Myron S. Watson, an alcoholic, who had disappeared from his post as
a wash room attendant at Newark Airport … as Charlene Heller,
assistant dietitian of the cafeteria of Stivers High School in
Dayton, Ohio … as Krishna Garu, a typesetter still wanted,
technically, on charges of bigamy, pandering, and nonsupport in
Calcutta, India … as Kurt Schneider, also an alcoholic,
manager of a failing travel agency in Bremen, Germany.
“The mighty Rumfoord —” said Bee.
“Pardon me?” said Brackman.
“He snatched us out of our lives,” said Bee.
“He put us to sleep. He cleaned out our minds the way you clean the
seeds out of a jack-o’-lantern. He wired us like robots, trained
us, aimed us — burned us out in a good cause.” She
shrugged.
“Could we have done any better if he’d left
us in charge of our own lives?” said Bee. “Would we have become any
more — or any less? I guess I’m glad he used me. I guess he
had a lot better ideas about what to do with me than Florence White
or Darlene Simpkins or whoever I was.
“But I hate him all the same,” said
Bee.
“That’s your privilege,” said Brackman. “He
said that was the privilege of every Martian.”
“There’s one consolation,” said Bee. “We’re
all used up. We’ll never be of any use to him again.”
“Welcome, Space Wanderer,” blatted Rumfoord’s
oleomargarine tenor from the Gabriel horns on the wall. “How meet
it is that you should come to us on the bright red pumper of a
volunteer fire department. I can think of no more stirring symbol
of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine. Tell me, Space
Wanderer, do you see anything here — anything that makes you
think you may have been here before?”
The Space Wanderer murmured something
unintelligible.
“Louder, please,” said Rumfoord.
“The fountain — I remember that
fountain,” said the Space Wanderer gropingly. “Only —
only —”
“Only?” said Rumfoord.
“It was dry then — whenever that was.
It’s so wet now,” said the Space Wanderer.
A microphone near the fountain was now tuned
into the public address system, so that the actual babble, spatter
and potch of the fountain could underline the Space Wanderer’s
words.
“Anything else familiar, oh, Space
Wanderer?” said Rumfoord.
“Yes,” said the Space Wanderer shyly.
“You.”
“I am familiar?” said Rumfoord archly. “You
mean there’s a possibility that I played some small part in your
life before?”
“I remember you on Mars,” said the Space
Wanderer. “You were the man with the dog — just before we took
off.”
“What happened after you took off?” said
Rumfoord.
“Something went wrong,” said the Space
Wanderer. He sounded apologetic, as though the series of
misfortunes were somehow his own fault. “A lot of things went
wrong.”
“Have you ever considered the possibility,”
said Rumfoord, “that everything went absolutely right?”
“No,” said the Space Wanderer simply. The
idea did not startle him, could not startle him — since the
idea proposed was so far beyond the range of his jerry-built
philosophy.
“Would you recognize your mate and child?”
said Rumfoord.
“I — I don’t know,” said the Space
Wanderer.
“Bring me the woman and the boy who sell
Malachis outside the little iron door,” said Rumfoord. “Bring Bee
and Chrono.”
The Space Wanderer and Winston Niles Rumfoord
and Kazak were on a scaffold before the mansion. The scaffold was
at eye-level for the standing crowd. The scaffold before the
mansion was a portion of a continuous system of catwalks, ramps,
ladders, pulpits, steps, and stages that reached into every corner
of the estate.
The system made possible the free and showy
circulation of Rumfoord around the grounds, unimpeded by crowds. It
meant, too, that Rumfoord could offer a glimpse of himself to every
person on the grounds.
The system was not suspended magnetically,
though it looked like a miracle of levitation. The seeming miracle
was achieved by means of a cunning use of paint. The underpinnings
were painted a flat black, while the superstructures were painted
flashing gold.
Television cameras and microphones on booms
could follow the system anywhere.
For night materializations, the
superstructures of the system were outlined in flesh-colored
electric lamps.
The Space Wanderer was only the thirty-first
person to be invited to join Rumfoord on the elevated system.
An assistant had now been dispatched to the
Malachi booth outside to bring in the thirty-second and
thirty-third persons to share the eminence.
Rumfoord did not look well. His color was
bad. And, although he smiled as always, his teeth seemed to be
gnashing behind the smile. His complacent glee had become a
caricature, betraying the fact that all was not well by any
means.
But on and on the famous smile went. The
magnificently snobbish crowd-pleaser held his big dog Kazak by a
choke chain. The chain was twisted so as to nip warningly into the
dog’s throat. The warning was necessary, since the dog plainly did
not like the Space Wanderer.
The smile faltered for an instant, reminding
the crowd of what a load Rumfoord carried for them — warning
the crowd that he might not be able to carry it forever.
Rumfoord carried in his palm a microphone
and transmitter the size of a penny. When he did not want his voice
carried to the crowd, he simply smothered the penny in his
fist.
The penny was smothered in his fist
now — and he was addressing bits of irony to the Space
Wanderer that would have bewildered the crowd, had the crowd been
able to hear them.
“This is certainly your day, isn’t it?” said
Rumfoord. “A perfect love feast from the instant you arrived. The
crowd simply adores you. Do you adore crowds?”
The joyful shocks of the day had reduced the
Space Wanderer to a childish condition — a condition wherein
irony and even sarcasm were lost on him. He had been the captive of
many things in his troubled times. He was now a captive of a crowd
that thought he was a marvel. “They’ve certainly been wonderful,”
he said, in reply to Rumfoord’s last question. “They’ve been
grand.”
“Oh — they’re a grand bunch,” said
Rumfoord. “No mistake about that. I’ve been racking my brains for
the right word to describe them, and you’ve brought it to me from
outer space. Grand is what they are.”
Rumfoord’s mind was plainly elsewhere. He wasn’t much interested in
the Space Wanderer as a person — hardly looked at him. Neither
did he seem very excited about the approach of the Space Wanderer’s
wife and child.
“Where are they, where are they?” said
Rumfoord to an assistant below. “Let’s get on with it. Let’s get it
over with.”
The Space Wanderer was finding his
adventures so satisfying and stimulating, so splendidly staged,
that he was shy about asking questions — was afraid that
asking questions might make him seem ungrateful.
He realized that he had a terrific
ceremonial responsibility and that the best thing to do was to keep
his mouth shut, to speak only when spoken to, and to make his
answers to all questions short and artless.
The Space Wanderer’s mind did not teem with
questions. The fundamental structure of his ceremonial situation
was obvious — was as clean and functional as a three-legged
milking stool. He had suffered mightily, and now he was being
rewarded mightily.
The sudden change in fortunes made a bang-up
show. He smiled, understanding the crowd’s delight —
pretending to be in the crowd himself, sharing the crowd’s
delight.
Rumfoord read the Space Wanderer’s mind.
“They’d like it just as much the other way around, you know,” he
said.
“The other way around?” said the Space
Wanderer.
“If the big reward came first, and then the
great suffering,” said Rumford. “It’s the contrast they like. The order of events doesn’t
make any difference to them. It’s the thrill of the fast reverse —”
Rumfoord opened his fist, exposed the
microphone. With his other hand he beckoned pontifically. He was
beckoning to Bee and Chrono, who had been hoisted onto a tributary
of the gilded system of catwalks, ramps, ladders, pulpits, steps
and stages. “This way, please. We haven’t got all day, you know,”
said Rumfoord schoolmarmishly.
During the lull, the Space Wanderer felt the
first real tickle of plans for a good future on Earth. With
everyone so kind and enthusiastic and peaceful, not only a good
life but a perfect life could be lived on Earth.
The Space Wanderer had already been given a
fine new suit and a glamorous station in life, and his mate and son
were to be restored to him in a matter of minutes.
All that was lacking was a good friend, and
the Space Wanderer began to tremble. He trembled, for he knew in
his heart that his best friend, Stony Stevenson, was hidden
somewhere on the grounds, awaiting a cue to appear.
The Space Wanderer smiled, for he was
imagining Stony’s entrance. Stony would come running down a ramp,
laughing and a little drunk. “Unk, you bloody bastard —” Stony
would roar right into the public address system, “by God, I’ve
looked in every flaming pub on bloody Earth for you — and here
you’ve been hung up on Mercury the whole bloody time!”
As Bee and Chrono reached Rumfoord and the
Space Wanderer, Rumfoord walked away. Had he separated himself from
Bee, Chrono, and the Space Wanderer by a mere arm’s length, his
separateness might have been understood. But the gilded system
enabled him to put a really respectable distance between himself
and the three, and not only a distance, but a distance made
tortuous by rococo and variously symbolic hazards.
It was undeniably great theater,
notwithstanding Dr. Maurice Rosenau’s carping comment (op. cit.): “The people who watch reverently as
Winston Niles Rumfoord goes dancing over his golden jungle gym in
Newport are the same idiots one finds in toy stores, gaping
reverently at toy trains as the trains go chuffa-chuffa-chuffa in and out of papier-mâché
tunnels, over toothpick trestles, through cardboard cities, and
into papier-mâché tunnels again. Will the little trains or will
Winston Niles Rumfoord chuffa-chuffa-chuffa into view again? Oh,
mirabile dictu! … they
will!”
From the scaffold in front of the mansion
Rumfoord went to a stile that arched over the crest of a boxwood
hedge. On the other side of the stile was a catwalk that ran for
ten feet to the trunk of a copper beech. The trunk was four feet
through. Gilded rungs were fixed to the trunk by lag screws.
Rumfoord tied Kazak to the bottom rung, then
climbed out of sight like Jack on the beanstalk.
From somewhere up in the tree he
spoke.
His voice can not from the tree but from the
Gabriel horns on the walls.
The crowd weaned its eyes from the leafy
treetop, turned its eyes to the nearest loudspeakers.
Only Bee, Chrono, and the Space Wanderer
continued to look up, to look up at where Rumfoord really was. This
wasn’t so much a result of realism as it was a result of
embarrassment. By looking up, the members of the little family
avoided looking at each other.
None of the three had any reason to be
pleased with the reunion.
Bee was not drawn to the scrawny, bearded,
happy boob in lemon-yellow long underwear. She had dreamed of a
big, angry, arrogant free-thinker.
Young Chrono hated the bearded intruder on
his sublime relationship with his mother. Chrono kissed his
good-luck piece and wished that his father, if this really was his
father, would drop dead.
And the Space Wanderer himself, sincerely as
he tried, could see nothing he would have chosen of his own free
will in the dark, malevolent mother and son.
By accident, the Space Wanderer’s eyes met
the one good eye of Bee. Something had to be said.
“How do you do?” said the Space
Wanderer.
“How do you do?”
said Bee.
They both looked up into the tree
again.
“Oh, my happy, handicapped brethren,” said
Rumfoord’s voice, “let us thank God — God, who appreciates our
thanks as much as the mighty Mississippi appreciates a
raindrop — that we are not like Malachi Constant.”
The back of the Space Wanderer’s neck ached
some. He lowered his gaze. His eyes were caught by a long, straight
golden runway in the middle distance. His eyes followed it.
The runway ended at Earth’s longest
free-standing ladder. The ladder was painted gold, too.
The Space Wanderer’s gaze climbed the ladder
to the tiny door of the space ship on top of the column. He
wondered who would have nerve enough or reason enough to climb such
a frightening ladder to such a tiny door.
The Space Wanderer looked at the crowd
again. Maybe Stony Stevenson was in the crowd somewhere. Maybe he
would wait for the whole show to end before he presented himself to
his best and only friend from Mars.
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