Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  “I still think we should be watching President Kennedy,” Schmidt insisted.

  “We can view it afterward, if you like,” said Jazzbow, diplomatically. As I said, he had turned into quite a baseball fan and we both wanted to see the Splendid Splinter’s final home run.

  Jazzbow was a typical Martian. Some of the scientists still can’t tell one from another, they look so much alike, but I guess that’s because they’re all cloned rather than conceived sexually. Mars is pretty damned dull that way, you know. Of course, most of the scientists aren’t all that smart outside of their own fields of specialization. Take Einstein, for example. Terrific thinker. He believes if we all scrapped our atomic bombs the world would be at peace. Yah. Sure.

  Anyway, Jazzbow is about four foot nine with dark leathery skin, kind of like a football that’s been left out in the sun too long. The water from the tank made him look even darker, of course. Powerful barrel chest, but otherwise a real spidery build, arms and legs like pipestems. Webbed feet, evolved for walking on loose sand. Their hands have five fingers with opposable thumbs, just like ours, but the fingers have so many little bones in them that they’re as flexible as an octopus’ tentacles.

  Martians would look really scary, I guess, if it weren’t for their goofy faces. They’ve got big sorrowful limpid eyes with long feminine eyelashes, like a camel; their noses are splayed from one cheek to the other; and they’ve got these wide lipless mouths stretched into a permanent silly-looking grin, like a dolphin. No teeth at all. They eat nothing but liquids. Got long tongues, like some insects, which might be great for sex if they had any, but they don’t and anyway they usually keep their tongues rolled up inside a special pouch in their cheeks so they don’t startle any of us earthlings. How they talk with their tongues rolled up is beyond me.

  Anyway, Jazzbow was half in the tank, as I said. He needed the water’s buoyancy to make himself comfortable in earthly gravity. Otherwise he’d have to wear his exoskeleton suit and I couldn’t see putting him through that just so we could have a face-to-face with Prof. Schmidt.

  The professor was fidgeting unhappily in his chair. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about baseball, but at least he could tell Jazzbow from the other Martians. I guess it’s because he was one of the special few who’d known the Martians ever since they had first crash-landed in New Mexico back in Forty-six.

  Well, Williams socked his home run and the Fenway Park fans stood up and cheered for what seemed like an hour and he never did come out of the dugout to tip his cap for them. Good for him! I thought. His own man to the very end. That was his last time on a ball field as a player. I found I had tears in my eyes.

  ”Now can we see the President?” Schmidt asked, exasperated. Normally he looked like a young Santa Claus, round and red-cheeked, with a pale blond beard. He usually was a pretty jolly guy, but just now his responsibilities were starting to get the better of him.

  Jazzbow snaked one long, limber arm out of the water and fiddled with the controls beneath the inverted triangle of the interociter’s screen. JFK came on the screen in full color, in the middle of his speech to the joint session of Congress:

  “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. I believe we should go to the moon.”

  Jazzbow sank down in his water tank until only his big eyes showed and he started noisily blowing bubbles, his way of showing that he was upset.

  Schmidt turned to me. “You’re going to have to talk him out of it,” he said flatly.

  I had not voted for John Kennedy. I had instructed all of my employees to vote against him, although I imagine some of them disobeyed me out some twisted sense of independence.

  Now that he was President, though, I felt sorry for the kid. Eisenhower had let things slide pretty badly. The Commies were infiltrating the Middle East and of course they had put up the first artificial satellite and just a couple weeks ago had put the first man into space: Yuri something-or-other. Meanwhile young Jack Kennedy had let that wacky plan for the reconquest of Cuba go through. I had told the CIA guys that they’d need strong air cover, but they went right ahead and hit the Bay of Pigs without even a Piper Cub over them. Fiasco.

  So the new President was trying to get everybody’s mind off all this crap by shooting for the moon. Which would absolutely destroy everything we’d worked so hard to achieve since that first desperate Martian flight here some fifteen years earlier.

  I knew that somebody had to talk the President out of this moon business. And of all the handful of people who were in on the Martian secret, I guess that the only one who could really deal with the White House on an eye-to-eye level was me.

  “Okay,” I said to Schmidt. “But he’s going to have to come out here. I’m not going to Washington.”

  It wasn’t that easy. The President of the United States doesn’t come traipsing across the country to see an industrial magnate, no matter how many services the magnate has performed for his country. And my biggest service, of course, he didn’t know anything about.

  To make matters worse, while my people were talking to his people, I found out that the girl I was grooming for stardom turned out to be a snoop from the goddamned Internal Revenue Service. I had had my share of run-ins with the Feds, but using a beautiful starlet like Jean was a low blow even for them. A real crotch shot.

  It was Jazzbow who found her out, of course.

  Jean and I had been getting along very nicely indeed. She was tall and dark-haired and really lovely, with a sweet disposition and the kind of wide-eyed innocence that makes life worthwhile for a nasty old S.O.B. like me. And she loved it, couldn’t get enough of whatever I wanted to give her. One of my hobbies was making movies; it was a great way to meet girls. Believe it or not, I’m really very shy. I’m more at home alone in a plane at twenty thousand feet than at some Hollywood cocktail party. But if you own a studio, the girls come flocking.

  Okay, so Jean and I are getting along swell. Except that during the period when my staff was dickering with the White House staff, one morning I wake up and she’s sitting at the writing desk in my bedroom, going through my drawers. The desk drawers, that is.

  I cracked one eye open. There she is, naked as a Greek goddess and just as gorgeous, rummaging through the papers in my drawers. There’s nothing in there, of course. I keep all my business papers in a germtight fireproof safe back at the office.

  But she had found something that fascinated her. She was holding it in front of her, where I couldn’t see what was in her hand, her head bent over it for what seemed like ten minutes, her dark hair cascading to her bare shoulders like a river of polished onyx.

  Then she glanced up at the mirror and spotted me watching her.

  “Do you always search your boyfriends’ desks?” I asked. I was pretty pissed off, you know.

  “What is this?” She turned and I saw she was holding one of my safari photos between her forefinger and thumb, like she didn’t want to get fingerprints on it.

  Damn! I thought. I should’ve stashed those away with my stag movies.

  Jean got up and walked over to the bed. Nice as pie she sat on the edge and stuck the photo in front of my bleary eyes.

  “What is this?” she asked again.

  It was a photo of a Martian named Crunchy, the physicist George Gamow, James Dean and me in the dripping dark jungle in front of a brontosaurus I had shot. The Venusian version of a brontosaurus, that is. It looked like a small mountain of mottled leather. I was holding the stun rifle Crunchy had lent me for the safari.

  I thought fast. “Oh, this. It’s a still from a sci-fi film we started a few years ago. Never finished it, though. The special effects cost too much.”

  “That’s James Dean, isn’t it?”

  I peered at the photo as if I was trying to remember something that wasn’t terribly important. “Yeah, I think so. The kid wanted more money than I wanted to spend on t
he project. That’s what killed it.”

  “He’s been dead for five or six years.”

  “Has it been that long?” James Dean was alive and having the time of life working with the Martians on Venus. He had left his acting career and his life on earth far behind him to do better work than the President’s Peace Corps could even dream about.

  “I didn’t know he did a picture for you,” she said, her voice dreamy, ethereal. Like every other woman her age she had a crush on James Dean. That’s what drove the poor kid to Venus.

  “He didn’t,” I snapped. “We couldn’t agree on terms. Come on back to bed.”

  She did, but in the middle of it my damned private phone rang. Only five people on earth knew that number and one of them wasn’t human.

  I groped for the phone. “This better be important,” I said.

  “The female you are with,” said Jazzbow’s hissing voice, “is a government agent.”

  Oh yeah, the Martians are long-distance telepaths, too.

  So I took Jean for a drive out to the desert in my Bentley convertible. She loved the scenery, thought it was romantic. Or so she said. Me, I looked at that miserable dry Mohave scrubland and thought of what it could become: blossoming farms, spacious tracts of housing where people cooped up in the cities could raise their kids, glamorous shopping malls. But about all it was good for now was an Air Force base where guys like Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield flew the X-planes and the Martians landed their saucers every now and then. After dark, of course.

  “Just look at that sunset,” Jean said, almost breathless with excitement, maybe real, maybe pretended. She was an actress, after all.

  I had to admit the sunset was pretty. Red and purple glowing brighter than Technicolor.

  “Where are we going?” she kept on asking, a little more nervous each time.

  “It’s a surprise.” I had to keep on going until it was good and dark. We had enough UFO sightings as it was, no sense taking a chance on somebody getting a really good look. Or even worse, a photograph.

  The stars came out, big and bright and looking close enough to touch. I kept looking for one in particular to detach itself from the sky and land on the road beside us. All that stuff about saucers shining green rays on cars or planes and sucking them up inside themselves is sheer hooey. The Martians don’t have anything like that. Wish they did.

  Pretty soon I see it.

  “Look!” says Jean. “A falling star!”

  I didn’t say anything, but a couple of minutes later the headlights pick up the saucer sitting there by the side of the road, still glowing a little from the heat of its re-entry from orbit.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve driven me all the way out here to see another movie set,” Jean said, sounding disappointed. “This isn’t your big surprise, is it?”

  “Not quite,” I said, pulling up beside the saucer’s spindly little ladder.

  She was pretty pissed off. Even when two of the Martians came slithering down the ladder she still thought it was some kind of a movie stunt. They had to move pretty slow and awkwardly because of the gravity; made me think of the monster movies we made. Jean was definitely not impressed.

  “Honestly, Howard, I don’t see why—”

  Then one of the Martians put its snake-fingered hands on her and she gave a yelp and did what any well-trained movie starlet would do. She fainted.

  Jazzbow wasn’t in the ship, of course. The Martians wouldn’t risk a landing in Culver City to pick him up, not even at night. Nobody but Prof. Schmidt and me knew he was in my office suit there. And the other Martians, of course.

  So I got Jazzbow on the ship’s interociter while his fellow Martians draped the unconscious Jean on one of their couches. Her skirt rucked up nicely, showing off her legs to good advantage.

  “They’re not going to hurt her any, are they?” I asked Jazzbow.

  “Of course not,” his image answered from the inverted triangular screen. “I thought you knew us better than that.”

  “Yeah, I know. You can’t hurt a fly. But still, she’s just a kid . . . “

  “They’re merely probing her mind to see how much she actually knows. It will only take a few minutes.”

  I won’t go into all the details. The Martians are extremely sensitive about their dealings with other living creatures. Not hurt a fly? Hell, they’d make the Dalai Lama look like a bloodthirsty maniac.

  Very gently, like a mother caressing her sleeping baby, three of them touched her face and forehead with those tentacle-like fingers. Probing her mind. Some writer got wind of the technique second- or third-hand and used it on television a few years later. Called it a Velcro mind-melt or something like that.

  “We have for you,” the ship’s science officer told me, “good news and bad news.”

  His name sounded kind of like Snitch. Properly speaking, every Martian is an “it,” not a “him” or a “her.” But I always thought of them as males.

  “The good news,” Snitch said to me, “is that this female knew nothing of our existence. She hadn’t the faintest suspicion that Martians exist or that you are dealing with them.”

  “Well, she does now,” I grumbled.

  “The bad news,” he went on, with that silly grin spread across his puss, “is that she is acting as an undercover agent for your Internal Revenue Service—while she’s between acting jobs.”

  Aw hell.

  I talked it over with Jazzbow. Then he talked in Martian with Snitch. Then all three of us talked together. We had evolved a Standard Operating Procedure for situations like this, when somebody stumbled onto our secret. I didn’t much like the idea of using it on Jean, but there wasn’t much else we could do.

  So, reluctantly, I agreed. “Just be damned careful with her,” I insisted. “She’s not some hick cop who’s been startled out of his snooze by one of your cockamamie malfunctioning saucers.”

  Their saucers were actually pretty reliable, but every once in a while the atmospheric turbulence at low altitude would get them into trouble. Most of the sightings happened when the damned things wobbled too close to the ground.

  Jazzbow and Snitch promised they’d be extra-special careful.

  Very gently, the Martians selectively erased Jean’s memory so that all she remembered the next morning, when she woke up a half a mile from a Mohave gas station, was that she had been abducted by aliens from another world and taken aboard a flying saucer.

  The authorities wanted to put her in a nut house, of course. But I sent a squad of lawyers to spring her, since she was under contract to my movie studio. The studio assumed responsibility for her, and my lawyers assured the authorities that she was about to star in a major motion picture. The yokels figured it had all been a publicity stunt and turned her loose. I actually did put her into a couple of starring roles, which ended her career with the IRS, although I figured that not even the Feds would have had anything to do with Jean after the tabloids headlined her story about being abducted by flying saucer aliens. I took good care of her, though. I even married her, eventually. That’s what comes from hanging around with Martians.

  See, the Martians have a very high ethical standard of conduct. They cannot willingly hurt anybody or anything. Wouldn’t step on an ant. It’s led to some pretty near scrapes for us, though. Every now and then somebody stumbles onto them and the whole secret’s in jeopardy. They could wipe the person’s brain clean, but that would turn the poor sucker into a zombie. So they selectively erase only the smallest possible part of the sucker’s memory.

  And they always leave the memory of being taken into a flying saucer. They tell me they have to. That’s part of their moral code, too. They’re constantly testing us—the whole human race, that is—to see if we’re ready to receive alien visitors from another world. And to date, the human race as a whole has consistently flunked every test.

  Sure, a handful of very special people know about them. I’m pretty damned proud to be among that handful, let me tell you. But the
rest of the human race, the man in the street, the news reporters and preachers and even the average university professor—they either ridicule the very idea that there could be any kind of life at all on another world or they get scared to death of the possibility. Take a look at the movies we make!

  “Your people are sadly xenophobic,” Jazzbow told me more than once, his big liquid eyes looking melancholy despite that dumbbell clown’s grin splitting his face.

  I remembered Orson Welles’ broadcast of The War of the Worlds back in Thirty-eight. People got hysterical when they thought Martians had landed in New Jersey, although why anybody would want to invade New Jersey is beyond me. Here I had real Martians zipping all over the place and they were gentle as butterflies. But no one would believe that; the average guy would blast away with his twelve-gauge first and ask where they came from afterward.

  So I had to convince the President that if he sent astronauts to the moon, it would have catastrophic results.

  Well, my people and Kennedy’s people finally got the details ironed out and we agreed to meet at Edwards Air Force Base, out in the Mohave. Totally secret meeting. JFK was giving a speech in LA that evening at the Beverly Wiltshire. I sent a company helicopter to pick him up there and fly him over to Edwards. Just him and two of his aides. Not even his Secret Service bodyguards; he didn’t care much for having those guys lurking around him, anyway. Cut down on his love life too much.

  We met in Hangar Nine, the place where the first Martian crew was stashed back in Forty-six, pretty battered from their crash landing. That’s when I first found out about them. I was asked by Prof. Schmidt, who looked like a very agitated young Santa Claus back then, to truck in as many refrigeration units as my company could lay its hands on. Schmidt wanted to keep the Martians comfortable, and since their planet is so cold he figured they needed mucho refrigeration. That was before he found out that the Martians spend about half their energy budget at home just trying to stay reasonably warm. They loved southern California! Especially the swimming pools.