Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

“Let’s do this carefully,” said MIK. “It’s all supposed to be in some kind of order.”

  The first thing they found was the message from four famous humans and another, whole copy of The Book of the Time Capsule. GUF picked that up.

  There was another book with a black cover with a gold cross on it; then they came to a section marked “Articles of Common Use.” The first small packet was labeled “Contributing to the Convenience, Comfort, Health, and Safety.” MIK opened the wrapper.

  Inside was an alarm clock, bifocals, a camera, pencil, nail file, a padlock and keys, toothbrush, tooth powder, a safety pin, knife, fork, and slide rule.

  The next packet was labeled “Pertaining to the Grooming and Vanity of Women.” Inside was an Elizabeth Arden Daytime Cyclamen Color Harmony Box, a rhinestone clip, and a woman’s hat, style of autumn 1938 designed by Lily Daché.

  “Golly-wow!” said DUN, and put the hat on over his.

  The next packet was marked “For the Pleasure, Use, and Education of Children.”

  First out was a small, spring-driven toy car, then a small doll and a set of alphabet blocks. Then MIK reached in and pulled out a small cup.

  He stared at it a long, long time. On the side of the cup was a decal with the name of the man who had created them, and a picture of MIK, waving his hand in greeting.

  “Gawrsh, MIK,” said GUF, “it’s YOU!”

  A tossed brick threw up a shower of dirt next to his foot.

  They all looked up.

  Around the crater edge stood ragged men, women, and children. They had sharp sticks, rocks, and ugly clubs.

  “Oh boy!” said DUN. “People!” He started toward them.

  “Hello!” he said. “We’ve been trying to find you for a long time. Do you know the way to the Park? We want to learn all about you.”

  He was speaking to them in Japanese.

  The mob hefted its weapons. DUN switched to another language.

  “I said, we come in peace. Do you know the way to the Park?” he asked in Swedish.

  They started down the crater, rocks flying before them.

  “What’s the matter with you?” yelled DUN. “WAK WAK WAK!” He raised his fists.

  “Wait!” said MIK, in English. “We’re friends!”

  Some of the crowd veered off toward him.

  “Uh-oh!” said GUF. He took off clanking up the most sparsely defended side of the depression.

  Then the ragged people yelled and charged.

  * * *

  They got the duck first.

  He stood, fists out, jumping up and down on one foot, hopping mad. Several grabbed him, one by the beak. They smashed at him with clubs, pounded him with rocks. He injured three of them seriously before they smashed him into a white, blue, and orange pile.

  “Couldn’t we, huh-huh, talk this over?” asked MIK. They stuck a sharp stick in his ear mechanism, jamming it. One of his gloved hands was mashed. He fought back with the other and kicked his feet. He hurt them, but he was small. A boulder trapped his legs; then they danced on him.

  GUF made it out of the crater. He had picked the side with the most kids, and they drew back, thinking he was attacking them. When they saw he was only running, they gave a gleeful chase, bouncing sticks and rocks off his hobbling form.

  “WHOA!” he yelled, as more people ran to intercept him and he skidded to a stop. He ran up a long slanting pile of rubble. More humans poured out of the crater to get him.

  He reached the end of the long high mound above the crater rim. His attackers paused, throwing bricks and clubs, yelling at him.

  “Halp!” GUF yelled. “Haaaaaaaalp!”

  An arrow sailed into the chest of the nearest attacker.

  * * *

  GUF turned. Other humans, dressed in cloth, stood in a line around the far side of the crater. They had bows and arrows, metal-tipped spears and metal knives in their belts.

  As he watched, the archers sent another flight of arrows into the people who had attacked the robots.

  The skin-dressed band of humans screamed and fled up out of the crater, down from the mounds, leaving their wounded and the scattered contents of the time capsule behind them.

  * * *

  It took them a while, but soon the human in command of the metal-using people and GUF found they could make themselves understood. The language was a very changed English/Spanish mixture.

  “We’re sorry we didn’t know you were here sooner,” he said to GUF. “We only heard this morning. Those others,” he said with a grimace, “won’t bother you anymore.”

  He pointed to the patch of green to the north. “Our lands and village are there. We came to it twenty years ago. It’s a good land, but those others raid it as often as they can.”

  GUF looked down into the crater with its toppled column and debris. Cigarettes and tobacco drifted from the glass cylinder. The microfilm with all its books and knowledge was tangled all over the rocks. Samples of aluminum, hypernik, ferrovanadium, and hypersil gleamed in the dust. Razor blades, an airplane gear, and glass wool were strewn up the side of the slope.

  The message from Grover Whalen opening the World’s Fair, and knowledge of how to build the microfilm reader were gone. The newsreel, with its pictures of Howard Hughes, Jesse Owens, and Babe Ruth, bombings in China and a Miami Beach fashion show, was ripped and torn. The golf ball was in the hands of one of the fleeing children. Poker chips lay side by side with tungsten wire, combs, lipstick. GUF tried to guess what some of the items were.

  “They destroyed one of your party,” said the commander. “I think the other one is still alive.”

  “I’ll tend to ’em,” said GUF.

  “We’ll take you back to our village,” said the man. “There are lots of things we’d like to know about you.”

  “That goes double fer us,” said GUF. “Those other folks pretty much tore up what we came to find.”

  GUF picked up the small cup from the ground. He walked to where they had MIK propped up against a rock.

  “Hello, GUF,” he said. “Huh-huh, I’m not in such good shape.” His glove hung uselessly on his left arm. His ears were bent and his nose was dented. He gave off a noisy whir when he moved.

  “Oh, hyuk hyuk,” said GUF. “We’ll go back with these nice people, and you’ll rest up and be as right as rain, I guarantee.”

  “DUN didn’t make it, did he, GUF?”

  GUF was quiet a moment. “Nope, MIK, he didn’t. I’m shore sorry it turned out this way. I’m gonna miss the ol’ hothead.”

  “Me, too,” said MIK. “Are we gonna take him with us?”

  “Shore thing,” said GUF. He waved to the nearby men.

  * * *

  The town was in a green valley watered by two streams full of fish. There were small fields of beans, tomatoes, and corn in town, and cattle and sheep grazed on the hillside, watched over by guards. There was a coppersmith’s shop, a council hut, and many houses of wood and stone.

  GUF was walking up the hill to where MIK lay.

  They had been there a little over two weeks, talking with the people of the village, telling them what they knew. GUF had been playing with the children when he and MIK weren’t talking with the grown folks. But from the day after they had buried DUN up on the hill, MIK had been getting worse. His legs had quit moving altogether, and he could now see only in the infrared.

  “Hello, GUF,” said MIK.

  “How ya doin’ pardner?”

  “I-I think I’m going to terminate soon,” said MIK. “Are they making any progress on the flume?”

  Two days before, MIK had told the men how to bring water more efficiently from one of the streams up to the middle of the village.

  “We’ve almost got it now,” said GUF. “I’m sure they’ll come up and thank you when they’re finished.”

  “They don’t need to do that,” said MIK.

  “I know, but these are real nice folks, MIK. And they’ve had it pretty rough, what with one thing and another, and th
ey like talkin’ to yah.”

  GUF noticed that some of the human women and children waited outside the hut, waiting to talk to MIK.

  “I won’t stay very long,” said GUF. “I gotta get back and organize the cadres into work teams and instruction teams and so forth, like they asked me to help with.”

  “Sure thing, GUF,” said MIK. “I—”

  “I wisht there was somethin’ I could do . . .”

  There was a great whirring noise from MIK and the smell of burning silicone.

  GUF looked away. “They just don’t have any stuff here,” he said, “that I could use to fix you. Maybe I could find something at thuh crater, or . . .”

  “Oh, don’t bother,” said MIK. “I doubt . . .”

  GUF was looking at the village. “Oh,” he said, reaching in the bag someone had made him. “I been meanin’ to give you this for a week and keep fergettin’.” He handed MIK the cup with the picture of him on the side.

  “I’ve been thinking about this since we found it,” said MIK. He turned it in his good hand, barely able to see its outline. “I wonder what else we lost at the crater.”

  “Lots of stuff,” said GUF. “But we did get to keep this.”

  “This was supposed to last for a long time,” said MIK, “and tell what people were like for future ages? Then the people who put this there must really have liked the man who thought us up?”

  “That’s for sure,” said GUF.

  “And me too, I wonder?”

  “You probably most of all,” said GUF.

  MIK smiled. The smile froze. The eyes went dark, and a thin line of condensation steam rose up from the eartracks. The hand gripped tightly on the cup.

  Outside, the people began to sing a real sad song.

  * * *

  It was a bright sunny morning. GUF put flowers on MIK’s and DUN’s graves at the top of the hill. He patted the earth, stood up uncertainly.

  He had replaced his frozen foot with a little wood-wheeled cart which he could skate along almost as good as walking.

  He stood up and thought of MIK. He set his carpenter’s cap forward on his head and whistled a little tune.

  He picked up his wooden toolbox and started off down the hill to build the kids a swing set.

  ●INTERLUDE●

  Introduction:

  A Summer Place, On the Beach, Beyond the Sea . . .

  THIS ONE PRETTY MUCH SPEAKS FOR ITSELF, and is the interregnum between the movie and television sections. It’s about all the stuff movies (and TV and the whole rest of popular culture) do to people. Especially moi.

  The article tells of my introduction to dating in those heady 1959/1960 days. I later got my first open-mouthed kiss during Pepé (1960) with Cantinflas. (I didn’t kiss him, but you know what I mean.) There’s no telling what I got a little later in the decade at drive-in screenings of Door-to-Door Maniac (1961, with Johnny Cash) or those Dusk-to-Dawn Bugaramas (Earth vs. the Spider 1958; Beginning of the End 1957; Tarantula 1955; The Deadly Mantis 1957) so beloved at showings in the mid-sixties.

  Event Horizon was a Web magazine by a bunch of ex-pat Omni Online (I killed it—see the introduction to “Mr. Goober’s Show” in the Radio Pictures section following) alumni—the ones I know were Ellen Datlow and Rob Killheffer, but there were more. It was a virtual magazine that (which) printed my story “US” and an article called “Chani. And Me. And You.” about the effects of ’50s SF movies on me and friends of mine. (You won’t find it here, as you can find it there, archived and available [ed. note: http://www.eventhorizon.com/sfzine/commentary/waldrop/0599.html].) I then wrote the following article. Ellen, Rob, everyone else loved it, contracted for it, paid for it, then, like nearly all markets that have taken something from me, died. It’s never been published before. Here it is.

  Two days before writing this intro (long after Dream Factories and Radio Pictures was contracted and paid for) I received a package; in it was a contract for “A Summer Place, On the Beach, Beyond the Sea . . .” from another e-publisher along with Lincoln and Jackson shaking hands (in other words, the ultimate compliment, money up front). I had to write a letter saying “Tough beans, kid,” and put the check back in the envelope. And sending it back, for only the second time in my thirty-one-year career . . .

  I cried all the way to the Post Office.

  A Summer Place, On the Beach, Beyond the Sea . . .

  IN MY THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD MIND, it was all tied together: a movie I didn’t see for forty years, and its theme song; a movie everyone saw; and a song by an Italo-American lounge lizard. By the time you finish this article, it’ll all be inseparable in your mind, too. Or, maybe, my confusion will have been made more real and logical-like to you, and I will get to live out my rapidly approaching “golden years” without benefit of tastefully barred windows and supervised outings to the therapeutic trout pond . . .

  The short version: The movie I didn’t see (till last night) was A Summer Place. It was 1959 and you could not go anywhere without “Theme from A Summer Place” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra playing; on the radio, at the municipal swimming pool, every prom and party, every jukebox (the record sold nine jillion—give or take a bazillion—copies).

  The movie me and everyone saw was On the Beach: I had my first date to see it (Linda Rodden, where are you now?). Among other things, it showed the world would end in 1964. . . . (“Welcome to the future, kid” as Gahan Wilson would later say in the comic strip Nuts.)

  The other song that played everywhere that year when “Theme from A Summer Place” wasn’t playing and poking melodic holes in the air was Bobby Darin’s version of “Beyond the Sea.”

  Stick with me: I lived it; you only have to read about it.

  * * *

  A Summer Place. A movie with Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire, Arthur Kennedy, Troy Donahue, and Sandra Dee. Everybody was talking about it (over the theme music played everywhere), I mean everybody. It was adapted and directed by Delmer Daves from a Sloan Wilson (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) middlebrow novel. The movie is jam-packed with adultery, alcoholism, passion, premarital sex and teen pregnancy, divorce scandal, repression, and a Frank Lloyd Wright house—in other words, 1959 in a nutshell. Plus, it had a swell Max Steiner score, with the aforementioned theme. (Steiner went from King Kong—which figures heavily in a dialogue section of A Summer Place—to Casablanca to this in only twenty-six years. . . .)

  All my friends went with their older brothers and sisters and their girlfriends and boyfriends to see it at the drive-in. Me, my parents worked two jobs each all the time; the Arlington Theater wouldn’t let kids in UNLESS they paid the full adult price (and sixty-five cents was more money than I saw in three weeks, unless it was summer—it wasn’t—and I was mowing 100' x 200' yards for a buck-fifty a pop . . .). So, as was my wont, I grilled all my friends (and some pretty much total strangers at school) for details. They made it sound a lot hotter than it seemed to be as I watched it on tape last night. (Although, for 1959, it’s cranked pretty high, you do not, as my friends implied, Get To See The Whole Thing. . . .)

  So, it was the year of “Theme from A Summer Place,” also On the Beach (more later).

  And “Beyond the Sea.”

  * * *

  The Bobby Darin song had, to me, the same haunting melancholy as Nevil Shute’s novel, and Stanley Kramer’s movie made from it. (Give me a break, I was a kid. Or guy. Mannish boy. Teenager in love. With death, and the atomic bomb, at least. Joe Dante’s film Matinee, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, has some of that same fatalistic melancholy feel, and is at the same time hilarious, and has some deep insight into the times . . . his time, my time.)

  In “Beyond the Sea,” there’s this guy, looking out toward the ocean, singing about the love he knows is there, but has left. Over the horizon, but close, and on the way. I saw Darin staring out into that same irradiated air of the West Coast of the U.S. from On the Beach. Darin sings of his love, across the ocean, knowing, just knowing, they’ll m
eet again . . .

  I mean, this is the Bobby Darin of the Ed Sullivan Show/Vegas days, before his “If I Was a Carpenter”-relevant days . . .

  It’s all tied together, the movies and the songs.

  I’ve had the words to “Waltzing Matilda” (the theme song adapted for On the Beach) in every wallet I’ve owned from the time I was thirteen, clipped out of a magazine article (Life) about the Kramer film.

  The words are by A. B. (Banjo) Paterson, the unofficial poet laureate of the Land Down Under (most of his work reads like a mix of Rudyard Kipling and Robert W. Service . . .). I was in Perth, Australia, in January of 1997, as guest-of-honor at Swancon, a science fiction convention, on Australia Day. I was on a panel at 2:00 P.M. when suddenly, everybody at the convention came into the room and they all sang “Waltzing Matilda” to me. I was moved beyond tears.

  The words and music to “Beyond the Sea” are by a Frenchman, Charles Trenet (its original title is La Mer); the English words are by Jack Lawrence. Though it became a big hit in 1959, the year of A Summer Place and On the Beach, it was written in 1945, the year of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . .

  And it wasn’t just me, evidently, caught up in this swirling maelstrom of aural and visual emotion, connections and resonance. A year later, Bobby Darin of “Beyond the Sea” married Sandra Dee of A Summer Place.

  I started early, being the avatar of the Zeitgeist. . . .

  * * *

  On the Beach was released late in 1959.

  There’s been either WWIII or some accident that led to the mutual exchange of atomic and hydrogen bombs, and the Northern Hemisphere is devoid of life. The radioactive cloud is drifting south, across the equatorial calms, and Australia and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere await their turn.

  The movie opens with the USS Sawfish nuclear submarine entering an Australian harbor—it’s been heading southward since whatever happened, and it’s commanded by Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck). We meet the rest of the cast of characters—there’s Anthony Perkins playing an Aussie naval lieutenant; Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner) as a good-time woman who knows and feels a lot more than she lets on; Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire), an embittered nuclear physicist whose hobby is racing dangerous cars (there’s a lot more about this character in the novel than the movie); there’s Donna Anderson as Perkins’ young wife—and they’ve just had a baby. There are lots of finely realized character bits—two old guys at a stuffy club trying to drink up all the fine wines before they’re wasted on the dead; an Australian admiral and his aide; a really good bit by an actor, playing a doctor, late in the movie as the first symptoms of radiation sickness show up.