Selections

by Theodore Sturgeon

  It was a play by that time, but I hadn’t changed it much. Still the same pastel, froo-froo old “Seashell” story, about two children who grew up and met each other only three times as the years went on, and a little seashell that changed hands each time they met. The plot, if any, doesn’t matter. The dialogue was—well, pastel. Naive. Unsophisticated. Very pretty, and practically sales-proof. But it just happened to ring the bell with an earnest, young reader for Associated Television, Inc., who was looking for something about that length that could be dubbed “artistic”; something that would not require too much cerebration on the part of an audience, so that said audience could relax and appreciate the new polychrome technique of television transmission. You know; pastel.

  As I leaned back in my old relic of an armchair that night, and watched the streamlined version of my slow-moving brainchild, I had to admire the way they put it over. In spots it was almost good, that “Seashell.” Well suited for the occasion, too. It was a full-hour program given free to a perfume house by Associated, to try out the new color transmission as an advertising medium. I liked the first two acts, if I do say so as shouldn’t. It was at the half-hour mark that I got my first kick on the chin. It was a two-minute skit for the advertising plug.

  A tall and elegant couple were seen standing on marble steps in an elaborate theater lobby. Says she to he:

  “And how do you like the play, Mr. Robinson?”

  Says he to she: “It stinks.”

  Just like that. Like any radio-television listener, I was used to paying little, if any, attention to a plug. That certainly snapped me up in my chair. After all, it was my play, even if it was “The Seashell.” They couldn’t do that to me.

  But the girl smiling archly out of my television set didn’t seem to mind. She said sweetly, “I think so, too.”

  He was looking slushily down into her eyes. He said: “That goes for you, too, my dear. What is that perfume you are using?”

  “Berbelot’s Doux Reves. What do you think of it?”

  He said, “You heard what I said about the play.”

  I didn’t wait for the rest of the plug, the station identification, and act three. I headed for my visiphone and dialed Associated. I was burning up. When their pert-faced switchboard girl flashed on my screen I snapped: “Get me Griff. Snap it up!”

  “Mr. Griff’s line is busy, Mr. Hamilton,” she sang to me. “Will you hold the wire, or shall I call you back?”

  “None of that, Dorothe,” I roared. Dorothe and I had gone to high school together; as a matter of fact I had got her the job with Griff, who was Associated’s head script man. “I don’t care who’s talking to Griff. Cut him off and put me through. He can’t do that to me. I’ll sue, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll break the company. I’ll—”

  “Take it easy, Ted,” she said. “What’s the matter with everyone all of a sudden, anyway? If you must know, the man gabbing with Griff now is old Berbelot himself. Seems he wants to sue Associated, too. What’s up?”

  By this time I was practically incoherent. “Berbelot, hey? I’ll sue him, too. The rat! The dirty—What are you laughing at?”

  “He wants to sue you!” she giggled. “And I’ll bet Griff will, too, to shut Berbelot up. You know, this might turn out to be really funny!” Before I could swallow that she switched me over to Griff.

  As he answered he was wiping his heavy jowls with a handkerchief. “Well?” he asked in a shaken voice.

  “What are you, a wise guy?” I bellowed. “What kind of a stunt is that you pulled on the commercial plug on my play? Whose idea was that, anyway? Berbelot’s? What the—”

  “Now, Hamilton.” Griff said easily, “don’t excite yourself this way.” I could see his hands trembling—evidently old Berbelot had laid it on thick. “Nothing untoward has occurred. You must be mistaken. I assure you—”

  “You pompous old sociophagus,” I growled, wasting a swell two-dollar word on him, “don’t call me a liar. I’ve been listening to that program and I know what I heard. I’m going to sue you. And Berbelot. And if you try to pass the buck onto the actors in that plug skit, I’ll sue them, too. And if you make any more cracks about me being mistaken, I’m going to come up there and feed you your teeth. Then I’ll sue you personally as well as Associated.”

  I dialed out and went back to my television set, fuming. The program was going on as if nothing had happened. As I cooled—and I cool slowly—I began to see that the last half of “The Seashell” was even better than the first. You know, it’s poison for a writer to fall in love with his own stuff; but, by golly, sometimes you turn out a piece that really has something. You try to be critical, and you can’t be. The Ponta Delgada sequence in “The Seashell” was like that.

  The girl was on a cruise and the boy was on a training ship. They met in the Azores Islands. Very touching. The last time they saw each other was before they were in their teens, but in the meantime they had had their dreams. Get the idea of the thing? Very pastel. And they did do it nicely. The shots of Ponta Delgada and the scenery of the Azores were swell. Came the moment, after four minutes of ickey dialogue. when he gazed at her, the light of true, mature love dawning on his young face.

  She said shyly, “Well—”

  Now, his lines, as written—and I should know!—went:

  “Rosalind … it is you, then, isn’t it? Oh, I’m afraid”—he grasps her shoulders—”afraid that it can’t be real. So many times I’ve seen someone who might be you, and it has never been … Rosalind. Rosalind, guardian angel, reason for living. beloved … beloved—” Clinch.

  Now, as I say, it went off as written, up to and including the clinch. But then came the payoff. He took his lips from hers, buried his face in her hair and said `clearly: “I hate your guts.” And that ” ” was the most perfectly enunciated present participle of a four-letter verb I have ever heard.

  Just what happened after that I couldn’t tell you. I went haywire. I guess. I scattered two hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of television set over all three rooms of my apartment. Next thing I knew I was in a ‘press tube, hurtling toward the three-hundred-story skyscraper that housed Associated Television. Never have I seen one of those ‘press cars, forced by compressed air through tubes under the city, move so slowly, but it might have been my imagination. If I had anything to do with it, there was going to be one dead script boss up there.

  And who should I run into on the 229th floor but old Berbelot himself. The perfume king had blood in his eye. Through the haze of anger that surrounded me, I began to realize that things were about to be very tough on Griff. And I was quite ready to help out all I could.

  Berbelot saw me at the same instant, and seemed to read my thought. “Come on,” he said briefly, and together we ran the gantlet of secretaries and assistants and burst into Griff’s office.

  Griff rose to his feet and tried to look dignified, with little success. I leaped over his glass desk and pulled the wings of his stylish open-necked collar together until he began squeaking.

  Berbelot seemed to be enjoying it. “Don’t kill him, Hamilton,” he said after a bit. “I want to.”

  I let the script man go. He sank down to the floor, gasping. He was like a scared kid, in more ways than one. It was funny.

  We let him get his breath. He climbed to his feet, sat down at his desk, and reached out toward a battery of push buttons. Berbelot snatched up a Dow-metal paper knife and hacked viciously at the chubby hand. It retreated.

  “Might I ask,” said Griff heavily, “the reason for this unprovoked rowdiness?”

  Berbelot cocked an eye at me. “Might he?”

  “He might tell us what this monkey business is all about,” I said.

  Griff cleared his throat painfully. “I told both you … er … gentlemen over the phone that, as far as I know, there was nothing amiss in our interpretation of your play, Mr. Hamilton, nor in the commercial section of the broadcast, Mr. Berbelot. After your protests over the wire, I made it a point to
see the second half of the broadcast myself. Nothing was wrong. And as this is the first commercial color broadcast, it has been recorded. If you are not satisfied with my statements, you are welcome to see the recording yourselves, immediately.”

  What else could we want? It occurred to both of us that Griff was really up a tree; that he was telling the truth as far as he knew it, and that he thought we were both screwy. I began to think so myself.

  Berbelot said, “Griff, didn’t you hear that dialogue near the end, when those two kids were by that sea wall?”

  Griff nodded.

  “Think back now,” Berbelot went on. “What did the boy say to the girl when he put his muzzle into her hair?”

  ” `I love you,’ ” said Griff self-consciously, and blushed. “He said it twice.”

  Berbelot and I looked at each other. “Let’s see that recording,” I said.

  Well, we did, in Grills luxurious private projection room. I hope I never have to live through an hour like that again. If it weren’t for the fact that Berbelot was seeing the same thing I saw, and feeling the same way about it, I’d have reported to an alienist. Because that program came off Griffis projector positively shimmering with innocuousness. My script was A-1; Berbelot’s plugs were right. On that plug that had started everything, where the man and the girl were gabbing in the theater lobby, the dialogue went like this:

  “And how do you like the play, Mr. Robinson?”

  “Utterly charming … and that goes for you, too, my dear. What is that perfume you are using?”

  “Berbelot’s Doux Reves. What do you think of it?”

  “You heard what I said about the play.”

  Well, there you are. And by the recording, Griff had been right about the repetitious three little words in the Azores sequence. I was floored.

  After it was over, Berbelot said to Griff: “I think I can speak for Mr. Hamilton when I say that if this is an actual recording, we owe you an apology; also when I say that we do not accept your evidence until we have compiled our own. I recorded that program as it came over my set, as I have recorded all my advertising. We will see you tomorrow, and we will bring that sound film. Coming, Hamilton?”

  I nodded and we left, leaving Griff to chew his lip.

  I’d like to skip briefly over the last chapter of that evening’s nightmare. Berbelot picked up a camera expert on the way, and we had the films developed within an hour after we arrived at the fantastic “house that perfume built.” And if I was crazy, so was Berbelot: and if he was, then so was the camera. So help me, that blasted program came out on Berbelot’s screen exactly as it had on my set and his. If anyone ever took a long-distance cussing out, it was Griff that night. We figured, of course, that he had planted a phony recording on us, so that we wouldn’t sue. He’d do the same thing in court, too. I told Berbelot so. He shook his head.

  “No, Hamilton, we can’t take it to court. Associated gave me that broadcast, the first color commercial, on condition that I sign away their responsibility for `incomplete, or inadequate, or otherwise unsatisfactory performance.’ They didn’t quite trust that new apparatus, you know.”

  “Well, I’ll sue for both of us, then,” I said.

  “Did they buy all rights?” he asked.

  “Yes … damn! They got me, too! They have a legal right to do anything they want.” I threw my cigarette into the electric fire, and snapped on Berbelot’s big television set, tuning it to Associated’s XZB.

  Nothing happened.

  “Hey! Your set’s on the bum!” I said. Berbelot got up and began fiddling with the dial. I was wrong. There was nothing the matter with the set. It was Associated. All of their stations were off the air—all four of them. We looked at each other.

  “Get XZW,” said Berbelot. “It’s an Associated affiliate, under cover. Maybe we can-“

  XZW blared out at us as I spun the dial. A dance program, the new five-beat stuff. Suddenly the announcer stuck his face into the transmitter.

  “A bulletin from Iconoscope News Service,” he said conversationally. “FCC has clamped down on Associated Television. And its stations. They are off the air. The reasons were not given, but it is surmised that it has to do with a little strong language used on the world premiere of Associated’s new color transmission. That is all.”

  “I expected that,” smiled Berbelot. “Wonder how Griff’ll alibi himself out of that? If he tries to use that recording of his, I’ll most cheerfully turn mine over to the government, and we’ll have him for perjury.”

  “Sorta tough on Associated, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Not particularly. You know these .big corporations. Associated gets millions out of their four networks, but those millions are just a drop in the bucket compared with the other pies they’ve got their fingers in. That color technique, for instance. Now that they can’t use it for a while, how many other outfits will miss the chance of bidding for the method and equipment? They lose some advertising contracts, and they save by not operating. They won’t even feel it. I’ll bet you’ll see color transmission within forty-eight hours over a rival network.”

  He was right. Two days later Cineradio had a color broad-cast scheduled, and all hell broke loose. What they’d done to the Berbelot hour and my “Seashell” was really tame.

  The program was sponsored by one of the antigravity industries— I forget which. They’d hired Raouls Stavisk, the composer, to play one of the ancient Gallic operas he’d exhumed. It was a piece called “Carmen” and had been practically forgotten for two centuries. News of it had created quite a stir among music lovers, although, personally, I don’t go for it. It’s too barbaric for me. Too hard to listen to, when you’ve been hearing five-beat air your life. And those old-timers had never heard of a quarter tone.

  Anyway, it was a big affair, televised right from the huge Citizens’ Auditorium. It was more than half full—there were about 130,000 people there. Practically all of the select high-brow music fans from that section of the city. Yes, 130,000 pairs of eyes saw that show in the flesh, and countless millions saw it on their own sets; remember that.

  Those that saw it at the Auditorium got their money’s worth, from what I hear. They saw the complete opera; saw it go off as scheduled. The coloratura, Maria Jeff, was in perfect voice, and Stavisk’s orchestra rendered the ancient tones perfectly. So what?

  So, those that saw it at home saw the first half of the program the same as broadcast—of course. But—and get this—they saw Maria Jeff, on a close-up, in the middle of an aria, throw back her head, stop singing, and shout raucously: “The hell with this! Whip it up, boys!”

  They heard the orchestra break out of that old two-four music—”Habaiiera,” I think they called it—and slide into a wicked old-time five-beat song about “alco-pill Alice,” the girl who didn’t believe in eugenics. They saw her step lightly about the stage, shedding her costume—not that I blame her for that; it was supposed to be authentic, and must have been warm. But there was a certain something about the way she did it.

  I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it. First, I thought that it was part of the opera, because from what I learned in school I gather that the ancient people used to go in for things like that. I wouldn’t know. But I knew it wasn’t opera when old Stavisk himself jumped up on the stage and started dancing with the prima donna. The televisors flashed around to the audience, and there they were, every one of them, dancing in the aisles. And I mean dancing. Wow!

  Well, you can imagine the trouble that that caused. Cineradio, Inc., was flabbergasted when they were shut down by FCC like Associated. So were 130,000 people who had seen the opera and thought it was good. Every last one of them denied dancing in the aisles. No one had seen Stavisk jump on the stage. It just didn’t make sense.

  Cineradio, of course, had a recording. So, it turned out, did FCC. Each recording proved the point of its respective group. That of Cineradio, taken by a sound camera right there in the auditorium, showed a musical program. FC
C’s, photographed right off a government standard receiver, showed the riot that I and millions of others had seen over the air. It was too much for me. I went out to see Berbelot. The old boy had a lot of sense, and he’d seen the beginning of this crazy business.

  He looked pleased when I saw his face on his house televisor. “Hamilton!” he exclaimed. “Come on in! I’ve been phoning all over the five downtown boroughs for you!” He pressed a button and the foyer door behind me closed. I was whisked up into his rooms. That combination foyer and elevator of his is a nice gadget.

  “I guess I don’t have to ask you why you came,” he said as we shook hands. “Cineradio certainly pulled a boner, hey?”

  “Yes and no,” I said. “I’m beginning to think that Griff was right when he said that, as far as he knew, the program was on the up and up. But if he was right, what’s it all about? How can a program reach the transmitters in perfect shape, and come out of every receiver in the nation like a practical joker’s idea of paradise?”

  “It can’t,” said Berbelot. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “But it did. Three times.”

  “Three? When—”

  “Just now, before you got in. The secretary of state was making a speech over XZM, Consolidated Atomic, you know. XZM grabbed the color equipment from Cineradio as soon as they were blacked out by FCC. Well, the honorable secretary droned on as usual for just twelve and a half minutes. Suddenly he stopped, grinned into the transmitter, and said, `Say, have you heard the one about the traveling farmer and the salesman’s daughter?’ “

  “I have,” I said. “My gosh, don’t tell me he spieled it?”

  “Right,” said Berbelot. “In detail, over the unsullied air-waves. I called up right away, but couldn’t get through. XZM’s trunk lines were jammed. A very worried-looking switchboard girl hooked up I don’t know how many lines together and announced into them: ‘If you people are calling up about the secretary’s speech, there is nothing wrong with it. Now please get off the lines!’ “