Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220) (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 along 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.”