Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220) (16 page)

“Ralston Purina will bust a gusset.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I tied a string to the AC cord.
”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I shall abandon neither the God of my Fathers nor the Supreme Being of my Mothers!” proclaimed Our Lady, shouting above the mêlée. Gradually the commotion abated. The Judeans and the Rocket Rangers accorded Mary their full attention. “And yet I am pleased that Brock Barton and his friends came into my life,” she continued. “If forced to choose between a planet I know to be real and a paradise I must take on faith, I would surely cry, ‘Give me the Earth!'”

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

Initially things went amazingly well. Manny and Terry made excellent nihilists, alternately reading cynical dialogue and improvising sardonic lines.

“Should I spare your life, O Jesus Christ?” said Terry, speaking off-the-cuff as he pointed his raygun at Ezra. “I think not. We rationalists have proved that compassion is a swindle.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cease and desist!” Ogden demanded.

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

“I'm Hank Griswold,” the dog handler told me, then gestured toward the protestors. “Who the hell are they?” He led his four-legged actors toward the back of the studio, evidently the locus of the live Ralston Purina commercial around which every
Corporal Rex
episode revolved. “In five minutes the gang and I are on the air.” Without being told, the dogs lined up before the gold curtain. “I'm fine with your
Brock Barton
rehearsal, but that pro-McCarthy demonstration has got to go.”

“I imagine your canine friends share that opinion,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

“I see what you're getting at.” Hank extended an index finger, touching each dog on its nose, then pointed to the demonstrators. “Sadie, Liam, Charlie, Spike, Duchess—repel prowlers!”

With an exuberant howl, Sadie the poodle lunged at Ogden, even as Liam the setter, Charlie the spaniel, Spike the boxer, and Duchess the collie selected one protester apiece and menaced them with snarls and snapping jaws. Cotter Pin and Sylvester Simian singled out the remaining intruders, the robot intimidating his Methodist by shifting his eyeballs into flashing-pinwheel mode, the gorilla rattling his nemesis with the most bloodcurdling roar ever to issue from a vegetarian vertebrate.

Sputtering, moaning, and tripping over cables, Ogden and his entourage ran pell-mell out of the studio. The dogs issued a final chorus of barks, then turned and pranced back to their marks.

I remained on the floor, my mind still awhirl from our apparent victory over the death-ray. The rest of “The Madonna and the Starship” rushed by in a delirious swish-pan blur. I retain no connected memories of that frenzied interval, only discrete vignettes: the live commercial, the script of which required the dogs to turn up their noses at “the other two leading brands,” then eagerly devour their Purina kibble, “the chow that makes Corporal Rex the Wonder Dog he is,” as Hank put it (though I later learned that the other two leading brands were chunks of gravel) ... Brock arguing, per the script for act two, that if God was a bad idea, then
playing
God was an even worse idea ... Zontac and Korkhan in midshot, the former saying, “O Brock Barton, we now see that our worldview partakes of a toxic nihilism,” the latter pleading, “O Ducky Malloy, help us to outgrow our puerile preoccupation with the void”... Jesus casually mentioning to Peter that he intended to start feeding Purina to his sheepdog ... Hollis rushing into the announcer's booth and declaring, “Tune in next Sunday for another iconoclastic installment of
Not By Bread Alone
! Our forthcoming presentation is an original teleplay by Robert Ingersoll, ‘If God Created the Universe, Then Who Created God?'”

At long last—could it be? was it possible?—the whole mad circus was over, and there stood Connie, leaning against the floor monitor, dazed and haggard, a tiara of sweat speckling her brow, and over there slouched our tired but magnificent cast, still in their costumes—Madonna, robot, leper, Messiah, apostle, ape, spaceship captain, sidekick, Voidovians—fidgeting amid the ruins of Lazarus's dining room, and farther still sat Walter Spalding, recently sprung from his gaffer-tape prison, wearing the trinocular goggles and staring into the iridescent depths of a Zorningorg Prize kaleidoscope. Connie switched on the floor monitor. NBC's normal

11:00
A.M. live broadcast of
Meet the Press
came streaming out of Studio One. So far, at least, the network had survived our heterodox teleplay. Phosphor dots danced across the picture tube, limning the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. God was in his heaven. Eisenhower was in his White House. Life went on.

“According to the Motorola in Studio One,” Connie told the cast and crew in a hoarse voice, “there's every reason to believe we've prevented a pancontinental atrocity.”

“We may have even purged nihilism from the Milky Way,” I added.

“Connie, you're a genius,” said Wilma.

“Kurt, we love you,” declared Joel.

“Mission accomplished,” proclaimed Gully.

“With the sweetenin' already on it,” added Hollis.

“See you in the unemployment line,” said Ezra.

“Now take your scripts home and burn 'em!” cried Connie. “As far as we're concerned, this broadcast never happened!”

Although exhausted, famished, and much in need of a nap followed by a shower, Manny and Terry nevertheless heroically ministered to Connie and myself—for we were obviously even wearier, hungrier, and grimier. After descending to the sub-basement and incinerating the cue cards in the NBC furnace, my
Andromeda
colleagues ferried us by Yellow Cab east across the river to Brooklyn, the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Fenimore Street. Wheezing and groaning, Connie and I followed the pulp-meisters up five flights of stairs to Terry's apartment.