Pohlstars (15 page)

All the good science-fiction editors I knew when I was trying to learn the trade spent a lot of their time thinking of tricks, devices, and subtle manipulations designed to get writers to write stories for them that might not otherwise have got written. You might think they didn't have to do that. After all, writers are in the business of writing; why not just let them get on with it and take what comes as it comes? Because they might be spending their time writing something unsuitable, for one reason. Because they might be writing it for Someone Else is the other. So John Campbell, Horace Gold, Bob Lowndes, Don Wollheim-and I-would pass out story ideas, mail off Xeroxes of covers that needed stories written around them, dream up "theme' issues-anything at all that would prod a lazy writer into producing a story instead of whatever else he had planned to do with his time that day. The art has not been lost. Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of
Omni,
wasn't even born when John Campbell began practicing that art, but she has thought of devices even the Master never knew. Not long ago, for instance, she called up half a dozen of her favorite writers to announce that she was going to publish a special fiction issue containing a story by each of them, all limited to a maximum of five hundred words. Five hundred words! It takes me five hundred words to answer the phone! However, these little behavior-modification tricks do work their magic, and so I sat down to try. I tried at least half a dozen story ideas without luck, because after the first page and a half each one of them convinced me that it wanted to be a full-sized story if not indeed a three volume novel sequence. Then my son, Fred the Fourth, out of the kindness of his heart, gave me an opening sentence, and the other 469 words followed easily after.

I guess, just as with the Kennedy assassination, everybody can remember exactly where he was and what he was doing on the day the space people brought Jesus back to Earth.

I was aboard Air Force One with the President-I'm Secret Service-and when Major Manley radioed the unbelievable message from the orbiting space shuttle we turned right around and headed straight for California. Beat the shuttle down, and waited, parked at the end of the landing strip, watching TV.

Of course, business had stopped all over the world. Everybody was watching the pictures from the big telescope on Mauna Kea-what a brute that spaceship was, half a mile long!-and listening to replays of Manley's message.

Well, the shuttle made its turn and came down, and they got the crew out and into Air Force One while the ground people were still purging the fuel vapors. "You sure it's Jesus? the President demanded.

"That's what they say, Mr. President. I took a picture of Him-see for yourself. And he passed over a Polaroid.

The President winced. "I didn't think He'd look like
that."

"Well, He's Jewish, you know-"

"No, I mean He's so
young.
It's been nearly two thousand years !" Major Manley explained, "They were traveling at light speed almost all this time-you know, time dilatation? After they rolled away the stone and took Him out of the cave- "

They
kidnapped
Jesus?

"They don't look at it that way, Mr. President. He was not in very good shape. They figured we were through with Him. So they took Him to their planet, where they have a place to keep specimens of life forms from all over the galaxy-

"They put
Jesus
in a zoo? Manley shrugged. "What's He doing now? the President asked.

"They say He's watching TV mostly. Doesn't much like what He sees, they say, but I didn't talk to Him myself-I don't speak Aramaic. Anyway, I was glad to get out of there, because that ship's pretty scary. You just wouldn't
believe
all the nasty kinds of weapons they've got!

The President's eyes gleamed, and the secretary of defense exulted. "New weapons! What a bargaining chip!

The President glanced around the room, and the expressions of delight were unanimous. There remained only one thing to do. He crooked a finger and his secretary turned on her recorder. "Take a decree, Mabel. I, the President, and so on, do hereby proclaim that Jesus Christ is come again, and-uh-

"And He's ours! the secretary finished. And then, raptly, "Thank God.

It looked pretty good there. Of course, the other countries were screeching their heads off.
Pravda
raged. The Chicoms canceled a trip by their soccer team, and the Israeli ambassador practically had a heart attack trying to argue that He was, after all, one of their nationals by birth. That didn't matter; we were
first,
and NASA cleared the Canaveral runways for His landing. But He requested all three networks to provide thirty minutes for a primetime telecast, and that was when it all went sour. Never mind He didn't look right. Never mind He spoke in Aramaic, which practically nobody understood. It was what He said that was the bad part-that, and the fact that before we got the translation, there was a priority call from the Mauna Kea telescope people to say the ship was breaking out of orbit and heading back out into space. "But what did He
say?
moaned the President, and the translator, sweating, shook his head.

"Something about He doesn't like the way we've spoiled His planet, he croaked. "Says He told us what to do, and we haven't done it-we've messed everything up-

"Hell, shouted the President, "we can fix that up. Call Him back. We can make a deal. We'll give Him His own TV station so He can preach to the multitudes, let pilgrims come visit Him-anything He wants!

But the translator was shaking his head again. "He doesn't want that. He says He's going back with the space people. They've got a better-class zoo.

Terry Carr is one of the true gentlemen of the science-fiction field. Editors have trouble being beloved; what they do cuts too close to the writers' bones for comfort. I do not believe there is an editor in the world who some writer, somewhere, does not wish dead. On those grounds I feel sure that there must therefore be some people who hate Terry Carr, but I've never met one. Perhaps the reason is that he has never been in charge of a major magazine or boss of a large book publishing company; he has put in his editorial time as editorial consultant, anthologist, assistant to other editors, proprietor of a special line of his own within a larger group, and these are not the exposed mountaintops where the ravaging lightnings strike. However, they are good places for someone to be whose biggest interest is in finding and showcasing bright new talent. That's something Terry does extremely well. Devotees still fondly remember the Carr "Ace Special series of a decade and a half ago, when Terry took his chances on such unknowns as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, R. A. Lafferty, and a lot of others whose subsequent careers show how good an editor he really is. So when Terry Carr asks me for something, I try to deliver; and when he told me he was putting together a new anthology of original stories called
Fellowship of the Stars,
I was pleased to offer him this one—and delighted when he accepted it.

Booze, broads, big cars, the finest of food, waterbeds filled with vintage champagne. Those were some of the things that went with Tud Cowpersmith's job. The way he got the job was by going to a party in Jackson Heights. The way he happened to be at the party was that he had no choice.

It wasn't a bad party, for a loft in Jackson Heights. It wasn't a bad loft. The windows at one end looked out on the tracks of the IRT el, but they had been painted over with acrylics to look like stained glass. Every twenty minutes you got a noise like some very large person stumbling by with garbage-can lids for shoes, but except for that the el might as well not have been there. Anyway, at that end of the loft the stereo speakers stood four feet high on the floor, so the noise didn't matter all that much. You couldn't possibly talk at that end. Cowpersmith wanted, eventually, to talk, as soon as the person he wanted to talk to showed up, so he drifted to the other end.

There the noise was more or less bearable, and there the windows were still clear. They were even clean. He could see through them down on a sort of communal garden, three or four backyards for three or four different old apartment buildings thrown together: a tiny round plastic swimming pool, now iced over with leaves and boughs frozen into it; bare trees that probably had looked very nice in the summer. To get to the windows at that end you had to thread your way through a sort of indoor jungle, potted plants presumably carried in from the garden for the cold weather. And there, on a chrome-rimmed, chrome-legged kitchen table, the host and hostess were rolling joints. They greeted Cowpersmith— 

"Want a hit?"

"Thanks."—but the pot did not ease him. He was looking for somebody. That was the reason he was there.

The person he was looking for was named Murray. Murray was an old, old.., friend? Something like that. What he basically was was somebody who owed Cowpersmith fifty dollars, from a time when fifty hadn't seemed like an awful lot. Cowpersmith had heard, the day before, that Murray was in town, and tracked him down to a hotel on Central Park South.

After some deliberation he had telephoned Murray. He really hated doing it. He needed the fifty, but in his view the odds against getting it were so bad that he didn't like the risk of investing a dime in a phone call. The dime was, after all, real money. There was no way to flash a revoked American Express card at the phone booth, as he had done with the last two restaurants and the airline that had brought him back from Chicago, where the last of his bankroll had melted away. But the odds had paid off! Murray was in, and obliging- "What fifty?

"Well, don't you remember, you met that Canadian girl—

"Oh, Christ, sure. Was it only fifty? Must be some interest due by now, Tud. Tell you what—

—and the way it worked out they were to meet at this party, and Cowpersmith would collect not fifty but a hundred dollars.

That required some decision making, too, because there was the investment for a subway token to be considered. But Murray had sounded prosperous enough for a gamble. Only no Murray. Cowpersmith took another hit from a girl wearing batik bellbottoms and a halter top and glared around the room. Through the roar of Alice Cooper he realized she was talking to him.

"What?

"I said, is your name Ted?

"Tud.

"Turd?

"Tud Cowpersmith, he yelled over the androgynous rock. "It's a family name, Tudsbury.

She reached up close to his ear-she was not more than five feet tall-and shouted, "If you're a friend of Murray's he's looking for you. He allowed her to lead him around the buttress of the stairwell, for the first time noticing that her armpits were unshaven, the hair on her head stuck out in tiny, tied witch curls, and she was quite pretty.

And there was Murray, knotting his wild red eyebrows hospitably. "Hey, Tud. Looking great, man! Long time.

"You're looking fine too, said Cowpersmith, although it wasn't really true. Murray looked a little bit fine and a lot prosperous; the medallion that hung over his raw-silk shirt was clearly gold, and he wore a very expensive- looking, though ugly, thick wristwatch. The thing was he also looked about fifteen years older than he had eighteen months before. They sat in two facing armchairs, one a broken lounger, the other so overstuffed that the stuffing was curling out of it. The girl sat cross-legged between them on the floor, and Murray idly played with her tied curls.

Cooper had changed to the New York Queens and somebody had turned the volume down, or else the shelter of the stairwell did the same thing for them. Cowpersmith got several words of what Murray was saying.

"Ajob? Cowpersmith repeated. "What kind of ajob?

"The finest fucking job in all the world, said Murray, and laughed and laughed, poking the girl's shoulder. When he had calmed down, he said, "What do you work for, Tud?

Cowpersmith said angrily, "God,
you
know. I worked for the advertising agency until they took cigarette ads off TV, then I was with the oil company until-

"No, no. For what
purpose.

Cowpersmith shrugged. "Money?

"Sure, but what do you do with the money?

"Pay bills? he guessed.

"No, no, damn it!
After
you do all the lousy stuff like that. What do you do with the
extra
money? Like when you were still pulling down twenty-five K at the agency and everything was on the expense account anyway?

"Oh, sure. It had been so long ago Cowpersmith had almost forgotten. "Fun. Good food. Plays. Girls. Cars-

"Right on, cried Murray, "and that's what everyone else works for, too. Everybody but me! That's what my job
is.
I don't have to work
for
those things, because I work at them. I don't imagine you're going to believe this, Tud, but it's true, he added as an afterthought.

Cowpersmith looked down at the girl and swallowed hard. A dismal vision flashed through his mind, of the five crumpled twenties in his pocket turning out to be joke money that, turned over, might say
April Fool
or, held for ten minutes, might evaporate their ink, leaving bare paper and ruin. "I don't have any idea of what you're talking about, he said to Murray, but still looking at the girl.

"You think I'm stoned, Murray said accurately.

"Well-

"I don't blame you. Look. Well, let's see. Shirley, he said, half laughing, "how do we explain this? Try it this way, he went on, not waiting for her help, "suppose you had all the money in the world. Suppose you had more money than you even wanted, right?

"I follow you. I mean, as a theoretical thing.

"And then suppose you had like an accident. Crashbang; you're in a car accident or a piano falls on you. Quadriplegic. Can't have any fun anymore. Got that?

"Bad scene, said Cowpersinith, nodding.

"All right, but even though you can~t do much yourself anymore, there's a way you can have
some
fun vicariously. Like you're not going to Ibiza yourself, but you're seeing slides of it, or something. You can't get the kicks a normal person can, but you can get something, maybe not much but better than nothing, out of what other people do. Now, in that position, Tud, what would you do?