by Ralph Church
Mork’s heart would have skipped a beat or leaped into his mouth—if he had a heart to do such things. This was the second death he had witnessed in one morning. He rushed over to the chair and said to the squashed egg, “You nimnul! Didn’t you see him coming?” Mork turned to the other eggs and pleaded, “How can I help you if you won’t help yourselves?”
Tilwick knew that either this kid was on a very powerful drug or he was as crazy as a person could be. He pulled out his gun and said, “Okay, kid, now settle down.”
“I can’t sit down,” Mork said. “They won’t fly away. The cold machine is very powerful.”
“Well, then, just take it easy and stand there quietly.”
Mork looked down at his feet to see how they were making noise. They weren’t. He couldn’t understand these Earthlings. They froze spacemen and asked him to do ridiculous things like stand without making a sound.
Tilwick, keeping his eyes on Mork, picked up the telephone and called the sheriff’s office. “Billy? Tilwick here. Listen, I’ve a young man here—oh, I guess in his early twenties—who’s a real grapefruit. You know what I meant? Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, much. worse than that. What should I do, take him to the hospital?”
On the other end of the line, Billy, the sheriff, said, “Well, who’s the complainant? A relative?”
“Just me, Billy,” Tilwick answered. “The guy thinks eggs can fly, and he gets upset if you sit on one.”
Billy thought about that. “Why would anyone sit on one?”
“Never mind about that. It’s too long a story to tell ya. But I’m with the guy right now, and he’s obviously crazy.”
“Well, to have him committed, you gotta have a relative or a spouse. Or if he’s committed a crime, or exposed himself. What has he done?”
Tilwick looked at Mork, standing still and not making a sound.
“Well, he’s hidden a lot of eggs around an apartment.”
Billy’s voice got angry. “Tilwick, are you loaded? What kind of a crime is that? Upholstery murder?”
“Billy,” Tilwick said, his voice becoming strained, “this guy is really crazy, or he’s tripping on some incredible drug.”
“Well, if he’s got drugs you can bring him in.”
Tilwick looked at Mork. He’s probably got at least one stick of marijuana, he told himself. “Hold on for a second,” he told Billy. He walked up to Mork and said gently, “I’m gonna frisk you. Don’t get upset.”
“I cannot become upset,” Mork explained. “I don’t have any emotions.”
Jesus! Tilwick thought to himself. And Billy doesn’t think this guy is crazy! Tilwick ran his hands up and down Mork, who began to make Orkian noises that were merely reflexes having to do with their complicated physical structure.
“Klut, Bezoop. Fraz! Klut?”
Tilwick stopped and glared at Mork. “Cut that out.”
Mork looked around. “What is it you wish me to cut for you?”
Tilwick sighed. So did Mork. “I mean, stop making those noises.”
Mork was astonished once more by the impossible demands of these Earthlings. “If you persist in this hand-touching ritual, I cannot stop myself.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“I agree with you, Smokey. These cultural exchanges are very difficult.”
This was hopeless, Tilwick thought. “Do you have any identification?” he asked.
Mork nodded. “Many. My face, my clothing, my joint here,” he said, pointing to the knuckle on his bloink.
“All, right,” Tilwick said, furious. “I’ve had enough. Turn around.”
Mork immediately did as he was asked.
“Put your hands behind your back.” While Mork complied, Tilwick brought out his handcuffs and fastened them to Mork’s wrists. “Now, don’t move,” he said, returning to the phone. “Listen, Billy, he doesn’t have drugs, but he also doesn’t have anything: no identification, no money. I’m gonna bring him in on a vagrancy or a John Doe charge, and then you can judge for yourself what a nut he is.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Tilwick.”
“I do,” he said and hung up firmly. That Billy has no spirit, he thought. “Okay, fella, now you come along nice and quietly.”
***
11
Mork had been thinking carefully on his trip to the police station. Since television was real, then he knew what was happening. He was being taken to see that bald-headed man in New York, or the one with flat hair in Hawaii. If he was lucky, then maybe he would get to meet the policewoman who liked to drink wine so much. He would have to get Perry Mason to defend him, unless, of course, it was Ironside whom he was being taken to. What really worried him was that Mindy might be in serious trouble. Smokey had said something about her being hurt, and he was sure that if she was in trouble it was because of him.
That would have bothered a human, no doubt, but it was an especially troubling thought for an Orkan. They were horrified at the thought of hurting people, whether indirectly or even unintentionally. Orkian respect for other life is limitless. Mork could have broken free of the handcuffs and disarmed Tilwick. Why, he could even—
The sheriff looked at Mork expectantly. “Well, son?” The sheriff was in his early sixties, with a full head of white hair, and watery brown eyes that looked long and slowly at people.
Mork was more and more unwilling to do anything. He stood there quietly.
“Where do you come from?” the sheriff asked, putting down his bifocals.
“From Ork,” he said.
“What was that?” the sheriff said, turning his head slightly, as if he needed to have his ear more in line with the speaker.
“Ork,” Tilwick said sarcastically. “Have you ever heard of such a place?”
“Is that a town in this state?” the sheriff asked.
“Nin, nin,” Mork said. “It’s well beyond the Milky Way.”
Tilwick smiled at the sheriff, as if to say, I told you so.
The sheriff frowned and sat up in his chair.
‘What’s your name, son?”
“Mork.”
“Not where you come from. Your name.”
“No, no,” Tilwick explained eagerly. “He comes from Ork, but his name is Mork.”
The sheriff looked at Tilwick as if maybe the deputy was crazy. “Thanks for clearing that up.” He turned to Mork again. “Do you have a wallet, son? You know, some papers that might tell us something about you.”
“Nin, nin,” Mork said. “We don’t use paper. Our minds recall everything perfectly, and we communicate mentally such data as that. And I can’t pay you in paper, but I have plenty of sand.”
Tilwick nodded. “See what I mean, sir? Now, I’ve searched him and he certainly doesn’t have anything. So we can hold him on a John Doe, right? Take his prints and—”
“Tilwick,” the sheriff said curtly, “I know the procedure. I’ve only been doing this for thirty-five years. You go ahead with that and we’ll get Dr. Litney in here to examine him. If he okays it, then we’ll have a sanity hearing, and they’ll decide if he goes to a fruit farm.”
Mork thought about that for a long time. He hardly paid any attention to the fuss that was made over his not having a fingerprint on his bloink. They kept talking about something called plastic surgery. But this fruit-farm business was most strange. Is that punishment on Earth? Mork wondered. Mork couldn’t decide whether prisoners washed the fruit or ate it. Eating it would really be frightening.
The cell was rather a nice place, Mork thought. Not horribly bright and dustless like other Earth places. It wasn’t nearly as pleasant as Mindy’s attic, of course. That was too much to hope for. He asked Tilwick where Mindy was just before they put him in the cell, but Tilwick said something even more puzzling. “She’s at the store, selling music. Don’t worry about her. You just relax. And stop calling me Smokey.”
So Mork was left alone in his cell to think. But he couldn’t relax. He walked around his cell wonder
ing what a store and what selling music was. Had she become someone who sells something illegal? he thought with horror. Music on Ork was always of dubious legality. Only Grenzel, the tune that Earthphones play, and Froppy, are legal songs. The others had been outlawed because they provoked emotion. Though most emotion that music creates is considered harmless by Orkans, some songs had caused awful things to occur, such as a craze that flourished during the Tet-Krell, roughly the Orkian Middle Ages. In those horrible days, when Orkans waged war and ate living things, Orkans often gathered in bright places that were very clean and danced to music.
Until this morning, Mork would never have believed Mindy was capable of such a thing. But it is true that, when he discovered that morning that she was capable of freezing spacemen, or eggs, his faith in her had been shaken.
The whole morning experience had been exhausting. It was then that Mork noticed the bunks. He was struck by admiration for Earthlings. “A king-sized Joz!” he said with delight and promptly swung up to the upper bunk and hung from it by his feet, his head resting gently on the lower bunk, his body bent in a way that would have hurt a human badly.
***
12
Mindy had spent most of the morning trying to get her father alone. But Fred had several lessons to teach. There were two rooms at the back of the store where Fred gave piano and violin lessons, and he waited in there between students, not responding to Mindy’s knocks. After his second lesson, he came out. He looked terrible. His eyes were bloodshot and he walked as if the room were a boat in a stormy sea. He kept steadying himself on objects as he passed them. When Mindy tried to speak with him, be shut his eyes and winced.
“Daddy, do you have a hangover?” Mindy asked, surprised. Her father had never gotten drunk as far as she could remember.
Fred opened his eyes slightly. They looked hurt, not only because of the red lines, but because they were sad and wounded. “What do you think?”
“I think you have a hangover.”
Fred closed his eyes again. “I’m not talking to you.”
“Daddy, please, listen to me. I want you to come home with me at lunchtime.”
Fred rubbed his forehead. “Why? Have you thrown him out?”
“Uh.” Mindy looked guilty under Fred’s questioning stare.
“Well?” he said, impatient.
“I want you to be there so that we—”
“Forget it!” Fred immediately regretted having yelled at her. It made his head hurt. His tongue felt like it was three sizes too large for his mouth. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Isn’t it enough that you’ve broken my heart?”
Cora had been selling on the other side of the store. “Now, this is the perfect axe for your band. No distortion and lots of volume. In fact, you can’t turn it all the way up or you’ll bust every zit in the place.” But her customers, two long-haired teenagers, had only listened for as long as they did because they were amazed that this woman in her sixties knew so much about rock music. She now joined Fred and Mindy by saying, “Why don’t you stop avoiding her? Mindy’s a young girl and she has to experience life.”
“Do you approve of her living with a man?” Fred demanded.
“Approve? No,” Cora said, and Fred began to smile. “Envy? Yes.” And Fred closed his eyes both from frustration and illness. “Come off it, Fred,” Cora said cheerfully. “She’s not any different, is she? This is a new world for women. It’s not like the old days when if they behaved for a minute for their pleasure everybody stoned them to death.”
“What difference does it make how the world feels?” Fred pleaded. “It’s how I feel that matters.”
“Cora,” Mindy said, “thanks, but no thanks. Dad, if you would only come home with me, I could explain the whole thing so that you would still be happy and feel your little girl still lives.”
“How can you do that?” Fred said, suspicion “You’re only trying to trick me into meeting that—that punk. You’re crazy enough to think that I’ll like him and forget my objections.”
Mindy was shaking her head and trying to interrupt. “Dad, that’s not it—”
“Oh, yes, it is!” Fred yelled. “I won’t be fooled! Even if he were President of the United States, I wouldn’t approve of your living with him!”
“He’s crazy,’ Cora decided and walked away.
Mindy was about to argue again when the door opened and Fred called out happily, “Tilwick! My good friend! How are you?”
Tilwick glanced at Mindy nervously. He knew that Mindy couldn’t be in love with that lunatic, and he had decided she was merely being kind by giving him somewhere to stay. After all, he had a daughter. He knew how much girls liked to take in every stray. He had lived with a house full of animals his daughter rescued from the cold, cruel outdoors. Tilwick knew that Mindy would be furious with him for trying to get Mork committed to a mental clinic. So Tilwick walked past her and whispered in Fred’s ear, “I have to talk to you.”
Mindy was made suspicious by Tilwick’s glances in her direction as he walked off with Fred, so she edged her way after them, listening hard.
“Did you scare him off?” Fred asked.
“You, uh, well, you won’t have to worry about him.” Looking at Mindy made Tilwick feel guilty about what he had done, just like when he forced his daughter to give up the wounded bird she found one weekend.
“So you scared him off?”
“Uh.” Now Tilwick was so ashamed he couldn’t even bear to tell Fred.
“He was yellow, was he? A couple of words from authority and he runs.” Fred shook his head with disgust. “What a heel!”
“That’s not the way it happened,” Tilwick confessed.
Fred stared at him and became worried. “Well, what in heaven did you do?”
By now Mindy was very close to them, and Tilwick whispered the news that he had put Mork in jail as a preparation to having him committed. “What!?” Fred was appalled. For all his tough talk about having Mork’s head cut off, he wished the young man no harm. “I just wanted you to get rid of him—not do that!”
“I didn’t want to,” Tilwick said, almost whining. “I had to do my duty. No matter how harmless those nuts may seem, they turn violent in a minute. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
“Is this about Mork?” Mindy asked, fear rising inside her.
Both men stood and looked stupidly at her.
“What have you done!” she yelled, almost hysterical.
“Mindy,” Tilwick said, no longer convinced that he was right, “I just went to your apartment to scare him away. I know, I know, that’s not my job, but keeping lunatics off the street is. When I saw him there, talking to the eggs and claiming he was from Outer Space, I just had to do my duty!”
Mindy was almost too scared to ask. “What,” she said, her voice full of threat, “was your duty, Deputy Tilwick?”
“I know he’s your friend. I know you weren’t doing what your dad thought. It’s a nice idea, Mindy, but professionals—”
“Answer my question!” Mindy said, her eyes burning at Tilwick.
“I had to take him in,” Tilwick admitted. Mindy groaned and Tilwick swallowed before he went on. “He’s bonkers,” Tilwick pleaded, looking at Fred. “The shrink is coming to examine him, and if he thinks it’s necessary, there’ll be a sanity hearing soon.”
Mindy began to cry. Fred went over to her, but she pushed him away, groaning as she said, “Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted?”
“How did I know he was going to do that?” Fred protested. “I was drunk. He came here last night when I was drunk and I told him about you and Mork—”
“Will you listen to me!” Mindy yelled, still crying. “‘I’ve tried to tell you over and over. There’s nothing between us. I was just giving him a place to stay, because he’s—”
Tilwick broke in: “You know how it is, Fred. This guy is like a kid. He’s got no money and he thinks he’s from another planet. She felt sorry for him.”
&nbs
p; “But he’s not crazy!” Mindy shouted.
Tilwick felt sorry for Mindy. She was just like his daughter, unable to believe that some cases really are hopeless. Fred looked at Tilwick questioningly. “How about it? I met the kid. He seemed like a wiseguy, but not crazy.”
“Fred,” Tilwick pleaded, “he thinks he’s from another planet.”
“But—” Mindy began. The two men looked at her. She waved her hands in frustration and said, “We have to get him out, Dad. We have to bail him out.”
Fred thought of his meager bank account. He looked doubtful.
“You have to, Dad!” Mindy said, her face reddening. “You got Mork into this mess, so is your responsibility to get him out.”
“How about it, Tilwick?” Fred said. He had made up his mind that only through helping Mindy could he regain her respect and love.
“Well,” Tilwick said, “for today, there’s nothing you can do. He’s got to be examined by the psychiatrist.”
“I’ve got to see him,” Mindy said, “before the psychiatrist does!”
“Now, surely you can arrange that,” Fred said threateningly to his friend Tilwick. But his friend backed away, looking uncertain. “Tilwick, if you arrested him, I’m pretty sure you can get a visitor in to see him.”
This sure had been a confusing day for Tilwick. He still hadn’t gotten to bed, for one thing. But he obliged. Mindy had succeeded in making him feel like a villain, and during the drive to the jail, he found himself planning ways to convince the sanity hearing that Mork wasn’t crazy. Mindy had told Tilwick that Mork liked to kid people and that his placement of eggs all around her apartment was an old fraternity prank. Tilwick tried to believe her and Fred did, thinking to himself that that was just the sort of thing an unemployed hippie would do.
But when Tilwick asked Mindy where Mork came from, if not from another planet, Mindy was stumped. “Uh, from New York City,” she said in desperation.
And it must have been a good choice, because Fred nodded and said, “Of course.”
Even Tilwick looked impressed. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
At the jail, the same deputy who was on duty earlier looked at Tilwick with amazement. “What are you trying for, cop of the century?”