Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

  These people await the end of life on Earth in the bright Australian sun; what they do with the time left makes up the movie.

  Halfway through, the Sawfish goes back to the West Coast of the U.S. There’s a theory some of the radioactivity may have been washed from the air by winter rains, which proves to be wrong, and there have been messages, received in Australia, on the shortwave in Morse code, mostly gibberish, from somewhere near San Diego, that may indicate survivors, possibly children.

  The only full words that have come through so far are “water” and “connect.” (Shades of E.M. Forster. The title of Shute’s novel and the movie are from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” the one that ends “not with a bang but a whimper.”)

  The messages, it turns out when a sailor in a CIMP suit leaves the sub to explore—it’s at a refinery, the generators are still going—are caused by a Coke bottle, caught in the pull-ring of a window shade blowing in the wind—the neck of the bottle occasionally touches a live telegraph key.

  It’s a swell scene. It was in 1959; it still is.

  Just a little earlier, one of the crewmen had deserted when the sub was off his hometown, San Francisco. (In one of those bits of reverse casting: as A. Perkins plays an Australian, Aussie John Meillon is the Californian—he’s Mick’s pal in the Crocodile Dundee movies made in the 1980s). There’s a scene where the sub rises to conning-tower depth and Peck talks to him through the loudspeaker next morning, while he’s fishing—all the fish are dead by this time, too—it’s too late to take him back in; he’ll be dead in a few days. They have a conversation that says much of what the movie was trying to say—it all comes down to people.

  There are things wrong with the movie—it was, after all, A Stanley Kramer film. Everybody’s stiff-upper-lip, even though these are supposed to be 1964 Aussies and Americans. There are no riots, no Ghost Dances in the streets, no bonfires of money and vanities. The closest we get is the Grand Prix of Australia, where there are crashes galore; it doesn’t matter—they’re all going to be dead in a few weeks anyway—that Julian, the Astaire character, wins. Everything’s keyed so low that Donna Anderson’s breakdown (packing for a trip to the England that no longer exists, instead of facing the inevitability of death, or suicide by Government Prescription #24768, which she’ll also have to give the baby with its milk) seems out of place, as if the character is pitched too high for the movie she’s in.

  There’s a great deal of quiet heartbreak in the film; instead of Dwight sliding it into Moira at first invitation, he holds out some hope that his family is still alive in Mystic, Connecticut. (He’s got a BB gun on the sub for his son, which would have been a belated Christmas present, if the duty tour had not been interrupted by WWIII.)

  Dwight and Moira start the big kiss and become lovers, in a mountain resort, among drunken revelers at a disastrous early-opening trout season, in a rainstorm. Drunks are singing in other rooms, at the pub downstairs, everywhere. The scene is a great one (despite what Bill Warren, a man I admire inordinately, says in his entry on the movie in Keep Watching the Skies!). The drunks are singing “Waltzing Matilda” endlessly and off-key; a window blows open, rain comes in; the couple jump up to close it, touch, and, as they kiss, and the camera (which has been still as a stump for most of the movie) swirls around them in a 360° circle, the voices downstairs turn into a single smooth baritone, which sings the final verse of the song perfectly, with its lines “you’ll never catch me alive, says he. . . .”

  The things which work in the movie really work—cheerful resignation, small grumblings about how nuclear war plays hell with the cricket and fishing seasons; people going through motions they always have (when Dwight returns from the futile Coke bottle-telegraph mission, he comes across a field Moira and her father are plowing, sowing a crop that will never be harvested). Julian, who helped invent the hydrogen bomb, only wants to live long enough to run in the Grand Prix of Australia; when it is time for everyone to die, he closes up his garage, climbs behind the wheel of the machine and guns the motor, thick clouds of exhaust (and carbon monoxide) rising around him—he’s made a very personal choice of how he wants to go.

  There are endless lines of people waiting to receive the suicide pills, like people getting swine flu shots or the polio vaccine, while the Salvation Army, under the giant banner “There Is Still Time, Brother.” plays endlessly to thinner and thinner crowds.

  The butler at the gentlemen’s club, all gentlemen gone forever, brings himself a drink and starts to play billiards. The lights go out. We assume nobody’s running them anymore, either.

  After the Perkins, Anderson, Astaire characters are gone, the only actors left are Gardner and Peck. She, Moira, already fevered and throwing up, on the beach, watching the Sawfish sail away, scarf blowing in the wind, beside her car she’s taken out for the last time; he, Towers, takes one last sighting of the noon sun and goes down the hatch; the Sawfish submerges (a reverse of the opening) on its last trip back to America so the crew can die there. There’s a cut to all the major cities of the world—deserted, a few newspapers blowing in the streets, no movement anywhere except that from the radioactive wind. The movie ends with three close-ups of the Salvation Army banner in Australia.

  * * *

  What all this has to do with is the same feeling Darin got in “Beyond the Sea.” It’s like, in the old French phrase, nostalgia for the future. In this case, a future closed off to all the possibilities. An imagined future, without anyone around to imagine it, like thoughts hanging in the air.

  On the Beach can almost make you see and feel and yearn for it; for the story to go on after everyone’s gone.

  I had my first date to go see On the Beach; this was the future waiting for me, for everyone my age, for everyone everywhere. Only five years away, maybe, said the movie. Or less . . .

  Or more. It’s forty years later now; we’re still here, lots of us.

  It was a future we didn’t have to live, because someone imagined it for us; had shown us the face of extinction (without mutants, without showing a single bomb going off, without fights with someone over a can of beans, without fuss and bother, not with a bang; but not exactly a whimper, either).

  And the music tied it all together. ’59/’60 was the year of “Theme from A Summer Place” and “Waltzing Matilda.” And as Bobby Darin married Sandra Dee, so were alpha and omega linked: a movie about the end of the world AND a song written at the very start of the Atomic Age.

  * * *

  Now, it all doesn’t seem so dumb, does it?

  ●PART TWO●

  Radio Pictures

  WHAT THE MOVIES DID, around the corner, for a quarter, television came to your house and, in any room you wanted—living room, kitchen, bedroom—did for free.

  All the science fiction stories of the ’20s and ’30s dealt with television (a word coined by Hugo Gernsback) as this great medium that would bring high-tone radio programming—opera, great plays and novels, educational shows—into your home, with pictures.

  You would be enlightened, ennobled: you could see great actors and actresses, the world’s greatest plays; far-off places, scientists, philosophers, all at the touch of a button and the click of a dial.

  They envisioned enlightenment streaming from the great broadcasting centers and (even before Arthur C. Clarke thought of geosynchronous communications satellites) events broadcast simultaneously around the world. You could go anywhere, see anything, never leave home. The wonders of the world would come to you.

  So how did we get Mr. Ed, a horse, selling you oats? My Mother the Car? The Love Boat? American Gladiators? Johnnie LaRue’s Jumping for Dollars? Who was responsible? How had the dream gone so bad in so few years?

  Along with all that great stuff it was capable of (and there has been plenty) it has probably served up more steaming heaps of caca than have been shoveled in the history of the planet, even more than the movies could ever dream

  Where had those dreams of the uplifters gone?
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br />   What follows are attempts at a stammering explanation in this hydrogenous age, as Dylan Thomas used to say before he croaked at age thirty-nine . . .

  * * *

  As soon as there was photography, there was an attempt to make the picture move. Motion pictures were one answer—all the experiments of Muybridge, Friese-Greene, the Lumières, Edison, the invention of the Maltese Cross and the loop, to cause the camera (and the projector, which at one time were the same machine) to pause at the precise point to add to the persistence of vision at 1/24th of a second.

  Parallel to this, and once photoactive chemicals were found, others tried to find a way to instill motion some other way. They knew it involved holding an image a fraction of a second, then the next image, and so on. They knew it probably involved electricity. Their experiments are almost as old as photography. (Go find and read R.A. Lafferty’s brilliant take on this in “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies,” which originally appeared in the late Terry Carr’s Universe 8.) They tried them all: selenium, all the other -iums which take a charge, become luminescent, and can be made to hold an image.

  Making it move was another matter. Anything which electrically disrupted the image also obliterated it. Hence the slow development of all kinds of systems, electrical and electronic, mechanical, or a combination of the two, some of which are described in the following three forays.

  A few months after I’d meticulously researched, from hundreds of places, the backgrounds for the first two of these stories—voilà! There are big-ass books and two television series that put it all together, in one place, at one time; easy pickin’s. My method was more fun and wasted lots more time, and I got most of it right.

  So, as I said, here’s to all the old SF writers who envisioned the uplift of the (human) race through broadcasting, who wanted a future where great culture was yours at the flick of a switch. And to all the mad Russians in their mothers’ basements (Zwyorkin) and Idaho ploughboys seeing in the contours of a field the way to make an image appear on a phosphor-dot screen (Philo T. Farnsworth) and Scots who got so close, and had the thing that could have worked, a good mechanical TV, up and broadcasting, only to take one look at the all-electric orthicon tube, and see the jig was up; he saw the Future, and he wasn’t in it (John Logie Baird).

  And dozens of others, whose lives were heartbreak and who died unknown somewhere, the places where people laugh when the children say, “My father invented television.” For the bitterly ironic thing is, they’re telling the truth.

  Introduction: Hoover’s Men

  THE HISTORY OF BROADCASTING is one of accidents.

  The reason stations started was the dream—music, opera, plays, funny people telling jokes in your house. Stations broadcast: People bought radios. But people quit buying radios for a while because there was nothing to listen to twelve hours of the day. More radio stations were built that broadcast longer hours. People bought more sets. So many stations went on the air they interfered with each other. Radio sales went down again. The Commerce Department set up what later became the FCC and assigned frequencies, and thoughtfully divided up all the airwaves between Canada and the U.S., leaving Mexico out of the picture, which is what led in the 1950s to the million-watt blue-lightning-bolt-emitting Mexican-border radio stations like XERF, sending out signals you could pick up from Newfoundland to McMurdo Sound—won’t let us have any airwaves, señor? We’ll use them all. Networks were set up by the radio manufacturers to sell more radios.

  Then somebody asked if he could advertise his egg farm on WHYY in Philly. He paid something like ten dollars for an hour’s worth of time over the next month. The guy was out of eggs in two days. . . .

  Gee whiz! When they realized people would pay money to sell people stuff on your radio station, or network, the whole thing changed. Before, it had been about culture, entertainment, and selling radio sets. After, it was about the same thing it is now: dollars. The programming was there to get the audience to get the advertiser to pay dollars to sell their stuff to that audience . . .

  Meanwhile, there were the Russians in the basements, and the ploughboys, and mad Scots, and people with a little brains at the stations and networks, who were working on Radio with Pictures, and just could not see that the same damned thing that had happened to radio was going to repeat itself with Tele-Vision. . . .

  * * *

  I wrote this for one of Ellen Datlow’s what I call six-authors-for-a-buck things. Once every year or so at Omni—when it was a magazine—she’d ask six or seven writers for very short stories on common themes, and they’d all be printed in a single issue of the magazine. This went on for years—my year was 1988. Ellen said the theme was Urban Fantasy. Urban Fantasy? That means it takes place in a city, and it didn’t happen! Okay! Other writers my year: Daniel Pinkwater, Joyce Carol Oates, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Barry Malzberg, and K. W. Jeter. Pretty damn hot-shit company to keep.

  And, as I said, after I’d killed myself in the research, here come PBS and the networks doing all my work for me, after the fact, making me sort of the John Logie Baird of the history-of-early-broadcasting SF story, of which I consider myself the exemplar. . . .

  Hoover’s Men

  ON MARCH 30, 1929, THREE WEEKS AFTER Al Smith’s Presidential inauguration, four gunmetal-gray Fords were parked on a New Jersey road. On the tonneau top of each was a large silver loop antenna.

  There were fifteen men in all—some inside the cars in their shirtsleeves, earphones on their heads, the others sitting on the running boards or standing in stylish poses. All those outside wore dark blue or gray suits, hats, and dark ties with small checks on them. Each had a bulge under one of his armpits.

  It was dusk. On the horizon, two giant aerials stood two hundred feet high, with a long wire connecting them. They were in silhouette and here and there they blotted out one of the early stars. Back to the east lay the airglow of Greater Manhattan.

  Men in the cars switched on their worklights. Outside the first car Carmody uncrossed his arms, opened his pocket watch, noted the time on his clipboard. “Six fifty-two. Start your logs,” he said. Word passed down the line.

  He reached in through the window, picked up the extra set of headphones next to Dalmas and listened in:

  “This is station MAPA coming to you from Greater New Jersey with fifty thousand mighty watts of power. Now, to continue with The Darkies’ Hour for all our listeners over in Harlem, is Oran ‘Hot Lips’ Page with his rendition of ‘Blooey!’ featuring Floyd ‘Horsecollar’ Williams on the alto saxophone. . . .”

  “Jesus,” said Dalmas, looking at his dials. “The station’s all over the band, blocking out everything from 750 to 1245. Nothin’ else is getting through nowhere this side of Virginia!”

  Carmody made a note on his clipboard pages.

  * * *

  “The engineer—that’s Ma—said sorry we were off the air this afternoon for a few minutes but we blew out one of our heptodes, and you know how danged particular they can be. She says we’ll get the kinks out of our new transmitter real soon.

  “Don’t forget—at 7:05 tonight, Madame Sosostris will be in to give the horoscopes and read the cards for all you listeners who’ve written her, enclosing your twenty-five-cents handling fee, in the past week. . . .”

  * * *

  “Start the wire recorders,” said Carmody.

  * * *

  “Remember to turn off your radio sets for five minutes just before 7:00 P.M. That’s four minutes from now. First, we’re going up to what, Ma?—two hundred and ninety thousand watts—in our continuin’ effort to contact the planet Mars, then we’ll be down to about three quarters of a watt with our antenna as a receiver in our brand-new effort to make friends with the souls of the departed.

  “Here, to end our Negro music broadcast for this evening are Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong and Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower with their instrumental ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?’ Hang on, this one will really heat up your ballast tubes
. . . .”

  Some of the sweetest horn and clarinet music Dalmas had ever heard came out of the earphones. He swayed in time to the music. Carmody looked at him. “Geez. You don’t have to enjoy this stuff so much. We have a job to do.” He checked his pocket watch again.

  He turned to Mallory. “I want precise readings on everything. I want recordings from all four machines. Mr. Hoover doesn’t want a judge throwing anything out on a technicality like with the KXR2Y thing. Understood?”

  “Yeah, boss,” said Mallory from the third car.

  “Let’s go, then,” said Carmody.

  * * *

  Just then the sky lit up blue and green in a crackling halo that flickered back and forth between the aerials on the horizon.

  “Yikes!” yelled Dalmas, throwing the earphones off. The sound coming out of them could be heard fifty feet away.

  “EARTH CALLING MARS! EARTH CALLING MARS! THIS IS STATION MAPA, MA AND PA, CALLING MARS. HOWDY TO ALL OUR MARTIAN LISTENERS. COME SEE US!

  “EARTH CALLING MARS . . .”

  * * *

  They burst through the locked station door. Small reception room, desk piled high with torn envelopes and stacks of quarters, a glass wall for viewing into the studio, locked power room to one side. A clock on the wall that said 7:07. There was a small speaker box and intercom on the viewer window.