Business Secrets from the Stars

by David Dvorkin

  * * * * *

  In the meantime, utterly untouched by everything, two old men were wandering around Paducah, Kentucky terminating guys named Malcolm with extreme prejudice and copious hallelujahs. They were wearing out, but they pressed on because they were pros.

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  O hero-cousin, beware of the dangers that swim beneath the surface of seemingly placid waters! Those dangers are real. They are hungry. Your flesh is their food. Strike first! Get them before they get you. Kill! Eviscerate! Squash, mash, pulp, disgustify, convert into scarlet paste!

  — Lukas of Aldebaran, as quoted in a section Malcolm later decided to cut from the manuscript.

  Just what kind of piranhas swam in the seemingly placid waters into which he had plunged so joyfully began to become clear to Malcolm during his appearance on a radio talk show in Piketon late on a Friday night.

  Until Jack called, Malcolm had been wondering if being a guest on this show was not a waste of time. Now that he was already a name on a national level, how much good could this small-time stuff do him? He answered the callers mechanically, hardly hearing their questions, letting his unconscious handle them while he daydreamed about wealth and fame and power and the requisitely olive-skinned, almond-eyed, black-haired, and beautiful young woman.

  Oh, that ideal, that girl of his dreams! He had been yearning for her for years. He had never met her. He was no longer convinced that he ever would. He feared he would go to his grave, old and shrunken and trembling and drooling, without finding her. Or worse, that she would be the nurse in attendance at his deathbed, repelled by him as he gargled off this mortal coil.

  How long before you start going downhill? he sometimes asked himself.

  You never will, he answered. You’ll never be over the hill because you were never up it. You emerged from puberty already on the downslope.

  Then Jack said “Anti-Christ,” and Malcolm stopped daydreaming and started paying attention.

  “Come again?” Malcolm said.

  “The Anti-Christ,” Jack, the caller, repeated. “That’s what the Pastor said it was. Last Sunday, during his sermon.”

  Such a normal voice, Jack’s was. Not husky or grating or cold and deadly. Just an ordinary, everyday voice, the voice of the fellow sitting next to you on the bus or driving the car behind yours on the freeway or aiming the rifle through your living-room window.

  Hank Singer, the show’s host and a very friendly, easy-going fellow, was looking worried. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly at Malcolm, and Malcolm understood the gesture as asking whether he wanted Jack cut off.

  Malcolm shook his head. Instinct warned him that he ought to get some more information from Jack.

  “The Pastor?” he repeated. “Which pastor is that, Jack?”

  “The Pastor!” Jack said, clearly scandalized. “Pastor O’Hair.”

  “Oh, him.” That kook, that fellow charlatan. O’Hair was a Piketon institution who had outgrown the city. His stature had diminished a bit in recent years, but even so his radio and television programs were broadcast worldwide and his inspirational books were frequent residents on the bestseller lists. Malcolm had been aware of the latter fact, for it always caused him tooth-grinding chagrin, and he occasionally hit upon the man’s television or radio broadcasts while exploring along the dial. But he had never paid any real attention to the man himself. He had always had the impression that O’Hair was evangelistic white bread, not to be compared with, say, Jimmy Earl and his Children of God organization. “Anti-Christ” scarcely seemed a term one would expect to hear from the Wonder Bread of the pulpit.

  “Now just who is the Anti-Christ in, uh, the Pastor’s view, Jack? Not me, surely.” Malcolm laughed easily, condescendingly.

  “No, of course not!” Jack said scornfully. “You? What a laugh! No, man, the Pastor said that this voice you hear, this guy from outer space, that’s all really just a demon, an evil spirit, maybe even the Evil One Himself. You ain’t hearing no spirit channel, or whatever you call it. You’re listening to the voice of the Devil, Charlie, the sulphurous breath of the bottomless pit.”

  Not bad, Malcolm thought. I’ll have to steal that line some time. “How too terribly clever of Pastor O’Hair,” Malcolm said, feeling very witty. “And just how does he claim to know this about Lukas of Aldebaran and the star-dwelling Merskeenians?”

  “Because he’s a man of God, and you’re just a poor, blind dupe,” Jack said. “Anyway, the clues’re there, if you pay attention. Just look at the name: Lukas — Lucifer! Aldebaran — Devil! Don’t you get it?”

  Yes, Malcolm got it, and he was suddenly cursing himself for not having foreseen this little twist. He could have named his made-up space critter anything he wanted to — Arthur, or Btspflk — but instead he had chosen a name calculated to cause him trouble. A little voice in his head — the voice of experience, rather than that of a star-dwelling Merskeenian — told him that he had created a situation with nasty potential. He was becoming aware of the piranhas, sensing their multitudinous teeth.

  Malcolm cleared his throat. “Well, Jack, all I can tell you — and any other follower of Pastor O’Hair who’s listening in tonight — is that when I first heard the voice of Lukas of Aldebaran, speaking inside my mind up there high in the mountains, I just knew he had nothing to do with the Devil and that he’s only interested in our good. Lukas is a mortal, Jack, just like us, and he wants to be our friend.”

  “Oh, your soul is snared already!” Jack said in a voice echoing with genuine sadness. “I can see that the Old Enemy has you in his clutches and it’s too late to save you. Well, we good Christians’re just going to have to do what we can to save the world from you. Have a nice weekend.” Click. Buzz.

  Malcolm stopped for a few drinks after the show. He needed something to stop the shaking that had suddenly afflicted his hands.

  The radio studio was downtown in a shiny new high-rise. The bar was on the ground floor of the same building. From the bar, Malcolm walked the two blocks to another shiny new high-rise in which his new condominium was located. The pleasure he had felt every time he returned to this new home since moving was missing this evening.

  The panhandlers just added to his distress. Where had they all come from? And not just panhandlers. Drunks, too. And people, apparently sober, dressed in dirty clothing, with long, unwashed hair, sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against buildings, holding cardboard signs saying they were homeless. He remembered when you only saw such people in certain parts of the city, like the area around the Mexican restaurant he used to go to for lunch.

  Come to think of it, that restaurant was closed now. Everything in that block was closed.

  He pushed past the people loitering in front his building, trying not to look at them, and let himself in the front door, making sure it closed and locked properly behind him and that no one had followed him in.

  He had not been home since morning. He extracted the day’s mail from the lobby-side opening of his mailbox and then went to the elevator and pressed the button.

  As Malcolm was waiting for the elevator, the front door opened behind him. He spun around in panic. But it was a fellow condominium owner, not one of the homeless people. The newcomer also took care that the door locked behind him.

  What Malcolm was really worried about was not that a homeless vagrant would use the opportunity to get in. They were disturbing people, but he was pretty sure they were harmless. What frightened him was the thought that the person squeezing in behind one of the building’s legitimate residents might be Jack, the scary caller to the radio program. Although, for all he knew, Jack might be posing as one of the vagrants outside. Then it occurred to him that this neighbor could in fact be Jack. How would Malcolm know?

  He shivered uneasily and edged away from his neighbor, a stolid, beefy, middleaged man, as the latter joined him by the elevator door.

  I really don’t know much about this guy, Malcolm thought. He looks normal enoug
h, but he could be a cold, heartless killer. Or some other kind of kook.

  “Getting terrible, isn’t it?” the man said. He shook his head. “What are those people doing around here? We don’t want them here. The city government should do something about it. The government’s as worthless as the bums outside the door. Homeless! Yeah, sure. How can they be homeless? That’s ridiculous. There are lots of vacancies right here in this building. More all the time. Why don’t they get a job? Then they could buy a place to live, like us. Lazy losers, that’s all they are.”

  “Well,” Malcolm said, “I kind of have the feeling that there aren’t a lot of jobs to get right now.”

  “Bull. There’s lots of work if you’re aggressive and go out and get it. I’m doing all right. What are you, some kind of Democrat or something?”

  Malcolm considered saying, “At least I’m not trés bourgeois,” but he lacked the courage. Instead, he smiled noncommittally and kept his thoughts to himself. As they rode up together in the elevator, Malcolm made a point of looking through the accumulation of envelopes, avoiding further conversation.

  The other man got off the elevator at the twentieth floor, giving Malcom a hard stare through narrowed, suspicious eyes as he left.

  After the elevator door had closed again, Malcolm took a few deep breaths and tried to relax. Then he started looking through his mail again. He hadn’t been paying attention to the envelopes the first time through. He’d been watching his fellow passenger from the corner of his eye, half expecting the man to cast aside his cloak of middle-class normalcy and reveal himself as a raving maniac.

  The amount of mail Malcolm received had increased greatly with his increasing success. Many people in the publishing business now wanted to be his friends. There was a time when Malcolm would have cut off a finger or possibly even two to gain such friends. (The pinkie: not a major finger for a writer.) Now their pleading tones filled him with contempt — and, on the positive side, helped him forget about Jack and the other kooks whose existence Jack’s existence implied.

  What’s this? Malcolm thought with rising excitement as the elevator rose toward his fortieth-floor apartment. One of the envelopes bore for its return address the word “Lucasfilm” and an address in California.

  George Lucas! He must want to buy the movie rights to one of my novels!

  Malcolm tried to rip open the envelope with hands which were now trembling from excitement rather than fear.

  Sir:

  Be advised that your use of the name “Lukas” in your book Business Secrets from the Stars constitutes an illegal use of a trademark registered in the name of our company, Lucasfilm Enterprises, and you are hereby ordered to cease and desist immediately. Production and distribution of your book must halt immediately, and all copies already distributed must be immediately recalled and destroyed. Failure to comply...

  Malcolm groaned and rested his feverish brow against the cool metal of the elevator wall. Why, he wondered, doesn’t anyone love me? Where was his dream girl who would take his soul and his life and his sex organs into her capable hands and make everything right? Why wasn’t success bringing happiness? Why, what, who, when, and where? “Mommy,” he whimpered, “they’re beating on me again.”

  When he was small and other boys had indeed beaten him, Mommy had clutched him to her immense bosom, smothering him and making him forget his misery by replacing it with the desperate need to breathe. He had hated big breasts ever since. His dream girl had small, firm ones.

  So did Marlene.

  The elevator stopped, Malcolm got off, walked down the hallway to his apartment, entered, locked the door behind him, fixed himself a mightily powerful drink, guzzled down half of it, and almost dialed his ex-telephone-number and begged his ex-wife to come downtown and comfort him.

  Fortunately, he caught himself in time.

  She would set conditions. She might even want them in writing.

  He finished his drink. The drink had restored a bit of his courage and self-confidence, so he fixed and quickly drank another just like it.

  I’ll manage, he told himself. I’m the descendant and confidant of a star-dwelling Merskeenian. Nothing can stand in my way. I deserve another drink.

  * * * * *

  Meanwhile, meetings were being held, machinations were being finely machined, and malevolence was maturing. The piranhas were gathering, licking their lips, sharpening their teeth, exciting their appetites with happy imaginings of the rending of flesh. Malcolm’s flesh. Boy, were they hungry.

  One of those meetings was being held at an idyllic retreat high in the Rockies in Arapahoe, far from highways and population centers. It was, in fact, almost like the location Malcolm had invented for his book, the mountaintop where Lukas of Aldebaran had supposedly spoken to him, mind to mind. At Starland in the Rockies, however, the minds were using their mouths and English words to communicate with each other, and those words were not pretty.

  Nor were most of the people.

  Present were Carol O’Hair of the city of Piketon, known to his well and frequently fleeced flock as “The Pastor,” his wife, Elizabeth “Bess” Walters O’Hair, known to the Pastor’s staff by epithets not suitable for repetition, the Very Reverend Jimmy Earl, founder and head of the Children of God, televangelist nonpareil, and Shirley, Jimmy Earl’s virtual right hand, his most trusted employee, his confidante and coconspirator and head operative. She was young, she was beautiful, and she had been born without a heart — Jimmy Earl’s kind of woman.

  Jimmy Earl was talking and everyone else was listening. “Now, Carol, you’re just not listening to me. Or else you’re just not understanding me.”

  “We understand perfectly well, Jimmy,” Bess Walters said. “We just —”

  “Shut up,” Jimmy Earl said. Bess looked outraged and amazed. Shirley snickered. Jimmy Earl continued. “I’m telling you, Carol, I keep telling you, we can’t just let this guy keep on with this crap. It’s dangerous. He’s got to be stopped, and Piketon is supposed to be your area of operations.”

  “And Carol keeps telling you, Jimmy,” Bess said, “that you’re exaggerating the danger. This Erskine is just one of many. There’s lots of New Age con men around. Always have been. They come and they go. We should ignore them. In the end, they’re just a passing fad.”

  Jimmy Earl pretended to ignore her. Instead, he spoke directly to the Pastor.

  “First of all, Carol, none of us can afford to ignore these New Age con games because we’ve made the New Age stuff one of our main bogeymen. Secondly, we especially can’t afford to ignore any con man who’s got a pitch that rivals ours. The number of sheep is finite, and if these New Age fellas fleece them too well, what’s left for us?”

  Carol, wispy and uncertain at the best of times, looked even more wispy and uncertain. “But, Jimmy, we all know they’re false prophets, and that the voices they hear are of Satan, not God. All we really have to do is occasionally remind our flocks of that, and — Is something wrong?”

  Jimmy Earl’s pudgy body was shaking, his pudgy cheeks were quivering, his oily hair was standing up on his pudgy scalp, and his pudgy brows had drawn together in a fat frown. His chipmunk face turned dangerously red, and then he burst out, “Jesus God Almighty, man! Don’t start believing your own spiel, or you’re dead in this game!”

  “Sorry,” Carol muttered, while the others stared at him with varying degrees of contempt.

  Oh, how Carol missed the good old days — not so very long ago — when he had been a power himself in the electronic land of televangelism, when the services held in the Lifeway Temple and the weekly Hour of Power program had been carried on radio and television stations across this broad and fertile land of ours and verily even into other lands, even those of the heathens.

  Now the dominant forces in the business had narrowed down to a few, among whom Jimmy Earl was the most powerful and widely heard and seen, and Carol O’Hair now found himself in a position much like that of Malcolm Erskine before the public
ation of Business Secrets from the Stars. That is, he was a mid-list televangelist. From a man of political as well as religious importance whose influence had reached far beyond the borders of the state of Arapahoe, he had become little more than another cog in the Reverend Jimmy Earl’s money-making machine.

  Now that he thought about it, Carol realized that he missed even more the earliest days, before he had become a big name. He missed his youth, when he had believed what he preached. He couldn’t deny the suspicion that never in his life had Jimmy Earl believed a single word of his own sermons.

  What am I doing here with these people, Carol wondered. Plotting to destroy a man, for God’s sake!

  He reminded himself that Malcolm Erskine was a man who deserved destruction. He had to keep remembering that.

  “Now, then,” Jimmy Earl said, his blubbery face relaxing into the smooth, genial blandness so familiar to his electronic flock (fifty million strong, so Jimmy Earl’s public relations man claimed). “Here’s how I’m going to take care of this guy. First, the softening up. That comes from you, Carol. I want you to keep up the sermons where you say that Erskine is really listening to a demonic spirit, or maybe even to the Devil himself. Keep on with the pitch that Erskine is at best a dupe, some sort of herald of the Antichrist, at worst the Antichrist himself. Stir up the hicks in your town. We want a certain number of frightening phone calls and letters to Erskine and newspapers and radio stations and so on. But keep it under control. We don’t want any real violence, because that would reflect back on you.

  “When I think he’s softened up enough, I’ll give him a call myself and suggest that maybe he ought to make some kind of public retraction of all his shit and apologize to all the Godly people of America he’s insulted,” quivering cheeks becoming a mottled red again, “with his anti-Christian,” breathing speeding up, “anti-family —”