Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220) (3 page)

“I see,” I said, trying not to snicker. “I have trouble believing that, of all the programs emanating from Earth, you think mine's the best.”

“Truth to tell, Qualimosa's engineers are still calibrating our planet's TV antennas!” the fat lobster explained. “Beyond
Uncle Wonder's Attic
, we have thus far tuned in only
Texaco Star Theater
, hosted by a boisterous comedian who dresses in women's clothes, and
Howdy Doody
, featuring a mentally defective child!”

“Well, if
those
are the choices,” I said, “then my show is indeed a beacon of enlightenment.”

“We humbly request that, during your Wednesday broadcast, you announce our imminent arrival!” the skinny lobster declared. “Please tell your viewers that, instead of a science experiment, Friday's program will feature an awards ceremony!”

“Harken, O Kurt Jastrow!” the fat lobster demanded. “You will be the first recipient of a trophy forged expressly for those who champion reason in its eternal war with revelation! We mean to visit your attic set and, standing before millions of viewers on Earth and Qualimosa, present you with the Zorningorg Prize!”

“This is a gag, right?” I said. “You're from ABC. Hardy har har.”

“A gag, O Kurt Jastrow?” wailed the skinny lobster. “Your hypothesis is false!”

“Hardy har har not!” added the fat lobster. “Behold!”

It really happened. I saw it with my own eyes. The dressmaker's dummy, which normally sat inertly in the corner on a small tripodal stand, began to move.
Clank
,
clank
,
clank
went the three wrought-iron feet as they stomped across the attic set. The next thing I knew, the headless automaton had marched past the steamer trunk, circled Uncle Wonder's worktable, and returned to its original position.

“Praised be the gods of logic!” exclaimed the skinny lobster.

“All hail the avatars of doubt!” declared the fat lobster.

And then the Motorola went dark.

Throughout my years as the primary creative force behind
Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers
, Tuesday morning was always the highlight of the week. Beginning at nine o'clock, NBC's four most gifted dramatists, or so we fancied ourselves, gathered at the Café Utrillo in Washington Square to eat breakfast and critique each other's teleplays. Besides myself, our group included Howard Osborne, who channeled his talents into a Friday night thriller called
Tell Me a Ghost Story
; his comely sister, Connie Osborne, who wrote and produced a Sunday morning religious program called
Not By Bread Alone
; and Sidney Blanchard, who contributed to the prestigious Thursday night anthology series
Catharsis
and also went drinking with Dylan Thomas whenever the celebrated alcoholic poet came to town. We styled ourselves the Underwood Milkers, because we all composed on Underwood typewriters and admired Mr. Thomas's radio play,
Under Milk Wood
, which Sidney had distributed in mimeographed form at the end of our inaugural meeting.

In the sixteen hours that had elapsed between my encounter with the Qualimosans and my arrival at the Utrillo, I'd decided that my first instinct was correct: my visitors were almost certainly costumed pranksters. As for the Motorola's mysterious resuscitation, they'd probably ignited it via remote control. More difficult to dismiss were the antics of the dressmaker's dummy, but I reasoned that the jokesters could have retrofitted it with springs and pulleys. (I intended to look for the hidden mechanism when I returned to the studio for Wednesday's broadcast.) And so I resolved that during the imminent meeting of the Underwood Milkers I would say nothing about blue bipedal lobsters from outer space.

The agenda for that morning's workshop included an upcoming
Brock Barton
adventure, as well as Connie's latest
Not By Bread Alone
installment. (We'd passed out carbon copies during our previous gathering.) I was not displeased with “The Phantom Asteroid,” which found Brock and his crew visiting the gas-giant sector of the solar system to investigate the sudden appearance of a minor planet in orbit between Saturn and Uranus. This strange body turned out to be a spherical machine constructed by the Nonextants, spectral beings to whom the universe belonged “before palpable matter supplanted tangible nothingness as the basic stuff of reality.” No sooner did the
Triton
's crew step onto the machine's surface than Prince Nihil, the sole surviving Nonextant, trapped them “inside a prison constructed of my ethereal ancestors' nightmares.” The last time I'd attempted something this weird—Brock and company spelunking the brain of a Manhattan-sized monster called a Spafongus—the network received enthusiastic letters from about half the children in North America, though we also got a dozen protests from adults accusing us of gratuitous surrealism.

“It doesn't make any sense,” said Connie, pushing her “Phantom Asteroid” carbon toward me as if it emitted a disagreeable odor. Among her virtues was an uncanny resemblance, in both voice and appearance, to my favorite Hollywood actress, Jean Arthur. “‘Tangible nothingness'? Really, Kurt, that's a contradiction in terms.”

“No, it's science fiction,” countered Howard, munching a strip of bacon. “It doesn't
have
to make sense.” Of my three fellow Underwood Milkers, only Howard was unstintingly sympathetic to
Brock Barton
, though he seemed incapable of exhibiting this loyalty without making condescending remarks about science fiction
per se
. “If I were a kid encountering Kurt's spectral sphere, I'd think it was swell.”

“And if I were a kid encountering Kurt's spectral sphere, I'd switch channels to
Crusader Rabbit
,” said Connie, pouring syrup on her French toast.

“Actually, science fiction has to make a
lot
of sense, or else it's just fantasy,” I said, passing Connie the July 1953 issue of
Andromeda
. The cover displayed a gleaming disc-shaped spaceship engulfed in a maelstrom of light. This was the third time I'd tried to coax her into reading one of my efforts. “I've got a story in here that extrapolates from Einstein's special theory of relativity.”

“The designer made an error,” said Connie, pointing to the cover typography,
DREAMS OF CHRONOS
: A MIND-BENDING NOVELETTE BY KURT JASTROW. “He's implying that this lurid spaceship illustrates your story.”

“That lurid spaceship
does
illustrate my story,” I said, trying not to sound miffed.

“I wish I could fathom why a man of your intelligence likes that Buck Rogers stuff,” said Connie. “I can't begrudge a writer making a living from children's television, but why does he squander the rest of his workday trying to please the editor of
Andromeda
? No thinking person reads it.”

“Cousin Greg reads it,” Howard informed his sister.

“Case in point,” said Connie.

“In pre-Socratic philosophy, Chronos was the personification of time,” I noted.

“I know,” said Connie, eating her French toast.

Of course she knew. Before going to work for NBC, Connie had majored in philosophy at Barnard. I suspected she was some sort of believing Christian—otherwise why was she writing
Not By Bread Alone
?—though she'd once remarked that “in lieu of attending church” she volunteered each week at the Saint Francis of Assisi House in the Bowery, “ladling out soup for hungry bums,” even though she was “raised Presbyterian and used to think Catholics were scary.” Connie idolized the mission's founder and chief administrator, Donna Dain, and she often found herself helping to get out the next issue of Miss Dain's nickel newspaper, the
Catholic Anarchist
.

This is as good a time as any to report that I was madly in love with Connie, although I'd never made any such protestation in her vicinity. As long as she regarded
Andromeda
as a kind of correspondence course for graduates of
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
, I would garner neither her affection nor her respect.

“Does Cotter Pin
always
have to talk in mechanical-man imagery?” Sidney ate a forkful of eggs benedict, then pressed his “Phantom Asteroid” carbon into my grasp. “I struck out ‘Well, I'll be an oscilloscope's uncle' and every other ‘Leapin' lug nuts!' I also dumped ‘palpable' on the cutting-room floor, likewise ‘ethereal.' This is a children's show, for heaven's sake.”

We devoted the rest of the meeting to Connie's
Bread Alone
script, “Sitting Shivah for Jesus.” First came the usual passage from Schubert's “Ave Maria,” played under the off-screen host's standard introduction.
NBC proudly presents stories that dramatize how people of faith, whether residing in ancient Judea or modern America, variously confronting timeless trials and today's tribulations, meet the challenges of daily existence, for men and women live NOT BY BREAD ALONE
. There followed an ingenious and unorthodox drama. Time: the Sunday morning after the crucifixion. Place: the Jerusalem abode of Jesus's best friend, Lazarus. Fade-in on the master of the house and his guests—Joseph, Mary, and their two surviving sons—arrayed around the dining table. They are sitting shivah, meaning “seven,” the number of days their formal grieving will last. Through the rear window we glimpse Joseph of Arimathea's sealed crypt, resting place of the Galilean rabbi. Before long the mourners receive a cleansed leper, a cured blind man, and a rehabilitated cripple, who bless the despondent family in the name of the Jesus who healed them. Next, two apostles show up, offering accounts of the Last Supper, and the conversation turns to the dawning doctrine of transubstantiation. In the climax, the stone rolls away from the tomb. Jesus exits, glides toward the house, and appears before his family and beneficiaries, much to their collective and tearful delight. Although the apostles were already committed to spreading the Savior's message of hope and love, this final miracle reinforces their resolve.

“Are you saying Christianity might have flourished even without the resurrection?” Howard asked his sister.

“I'm saying that charity is its own reward,” said Connie. “It's not a down payment on eternal life.”

“A subversive thesis,” said Sidney, delivering his carbon copy to the play's author. “I mean that as a compliment, my dear. Kindly omit ‘My son, my son, are you truly back from the dead?' It's sappy.”

“Indeed,” said Connie with a merry laugh. Were she and Sidney cultivating a mutual crush? The thought sent my stomach into free fall.

“The whole shivah premise seems self-defeating to me,” said Howard. “Jews will think you're appropriating one of their most sacred rituals, and Christians will think you're celebrating Jews.”

“That's why God invented television,” Connie replied cryptically.

“That's why God invented
unsponsored
television,” said Howard. “I can't put anything in
Tell Me a Ghost Story
that violates Procter and Gamble's notions of propriety.”

“Can you really get away with Joseph and Mary having their own biological children?” I asked Connie. “The Antidicomarianites will love it, but Cardinal Spellman will throw up.”

Once again the
Britannica
had come through for me. Antidicomarianites, literally “opponents of Mary,” was a term the Church applied disparagingly to Christians who believed that the siblings of Jesus mentioned in the Gospels were the younger children of Joseph and Mary—an interpretation that made hash of Our Lady's perpetual virginity—as opposed to Joseph's children by a previous marriage, the orthodox view.

Alas, my use of “Antidicomarianites” failed to beguile Connie. She merely told me, testily, “I don't give a fig what Cardinal Spellman thinks. At last report he was in Korea, sprinkling holy water on the U.N. guns.”

It occurred to me that neither my
Andromeda
fiction nor my TV efforts would ever afford me an entrée into Connie Osborne's complicated heart—but there might be a third way. What if I wrote a speculative
Bread Alone
script? What if Connie read the first draft and decided we should develop it together? What if we kicked off our new professional relationship with a dinner date in the Village?

“Connie, there's something I must ask you,” I said. “
Not By Bread Alone
is broadcast Sunday mornings at ten o'clock, but isn't your East Coast audience supposed to be in
church
then?”

“True enough,” said Connie, taking a final sip of coffee. “Kind of a paradox, I guess.”

“Have you considered that most of your viewers might not be very religious?” I said. “Maybe you're preaching to a bunch of doubters.”