—Angus
PS: Read they’re giving women over thirty in Britain the vote—can we be far behind? Ha ha.
PPS: I seem to have a touch of the flu.
1919
Sgt. Hank didn’t look up from the big thick book in his hand when Teeheezal came out of his office and walked over and poured himself a cup of steaming coffee. Say whatever else about the Peace mess in Europe, it was good to be off rationing again. Teeheezal’s nephew had actually brought home some butter and steaks from a regular grocery store and butcher’s last week.
“What’s Wilson stepping in today?”
No answer.
“Hey!”
“Huh?! Oh, gosh, Chief. Was all wrapped up in this book. What’d you say?”
“Asking about the President. Seen the paper?”
“It’s here somewhere,” said Sgt. Hank. “Sorry, Chief, but this is about the greatest book I ever read.”
“Damn thick square thing,” said Teeheezal. He looked closely at a page. “Hey, that’s a kraut book!”
“Austria. Well, yeah, it’s by a German, but not like any German you ever thought of.”
Teeheezal tried to read it, from what he remembered of when he went to school in Pennsylvania fifty years ago. It was full of two-dollar words, the sentences were a mile long, and the verb was way down at the bottom of the page.
“This don’t make a goddamn bit of sense,” he said. “This guy must be a college perfesser.”
“It’s got a cumulative effect,” said Sgt. Hank. “It’s about the rise of cultures and civilizations, and how Third Century B.C. China’s just like France under Napoleon, and how all civilizations grow and get strong, and wither and die. Just like a plant or an animal, like they’re alive themselves. And how when the civilization gets around to being an empire it’s already too late, and they all end up with Caesars and Emperors and suchlike. Gosh, Chief, you can’t imagine. I’ve read it twice already, and every time I get more and more out of it . . .”
“Where’d you get a book like that?”
“My cousin’s a reporter at the Peace Commission conference—somebody told him about it, and he got one sent to me, thought it’d be something I like. I hear it’s already out of print, and the guy’s rewriting it.”
“What else does this prof say?”
“Well, gee. A lot. Like I said, that all civilizations are more alike than not. That everything ends up in winter, like, after a spring and summer and fall.” He pointed to the Cole picture on the wall—today it was The Pastoral State. “Like, like the pictures. Only a lot deeper. He says, for instance, that Europe’s time is over—”
“It don’t take a goddamned genius to know that,” said Teeheezal.
“No—you don’t understand. He started writing this in 1911, it says. He already knew it was heading for the big blooie. He says that Europe’s turn’s over, being top dog. Now it’s the turn of America . . . and . . . and Russia.”
Teeheezal stared at the sergeant.
“We just fought a fuckin’ war to get rid of ideas like that,” he said. “How much is a book like that worth, you think?”
“Why, it’s priceless, Chief. There aren’t any more of them. And it’s full of great ideas!”
Teeheezal reached in his pocket and took out a twenty-dollar gold piece (six weeks of Sgt. Hank’s pay) and put it on the sergeant’s desk.
He picked up the big book by one corner of the cover, walked over, lifted the stove lid with the handle, and tossed the book in.
“We just settled Germany’s hash,” said Teeheezal. “It comes to it, we’ll settle Russia’s too.”
He picked up the sports section and went into his office and closed the door.
Sgt. Hank sat with his mouth open. He looked back and forth from the gold piece to the stove to the picture to Teeheezal’s door.
He was still doing that when Patrolmen Rube and Buster brought in someone on a charge of drunk and disorderly.
1920
Captain Teeheezal turned his Model T across the oncoming traffic at the corner of Conklin and Arbuckle. He ignored the horns and sound of brakes and pulled into his parking place in front of the station house.
A shadow swept across the hood of his car, then another. He looked up and out. Two condors flew against the pink southwest sky where the orange ball of the sun was ready to set.
Sgt. Fatty was just coming into view down the street, carrying his big supper basket, ready to take over the night shift.
Captain Teeheezal had been at a meeting with the new mayor about all the changes that were coming when Wilcox was incorporated as a city.
Sgt. Hank came running out, waving a telegram. “This just came for you.”
Teeheezal tore open the Western Union envelope.
TO: ALL POLICE DEPARTMENTS, ALL CITIES, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FROM: OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
1. VOLSTEAD ACT (PROHIBITION) IS NOW LAW STOP ALL POLICE DEPARTMENTS EXPECTED TO ENFORCE COMPLIANCE STOP
2. ROUND UP ALL THE REDS STOP
PALMER
Teeheezal and the sergeant raced to punch the big red button on the sergeant’s desk near the three phones. Bells went off in the squad room in the tower atop the station. Sgt. Fatty’s lunch basket was on the sidewalk out front when they got back outside. He reappeared from around back, driving the black box of a truck marked Police Patrol, driving with one hand. And cranking the hand siren with the other, until Sgt. Hank jumped in beside him and began working the siren on the passenger side.
Patrolmen came from everywhere, the squad room, the garage, running down the streets, their nightsticks in their hands—Al, Mack, Buster, Chester, Billy, and Rube—and jumped onto the back of the truck, some missing, grabbing the back fender and being dragged until they righted themselves and climbed up with their fellows.
Teeheezal stood on the running board, nearly falling off as they hit the curb at the park across the street, where the benches had a No Petting sign above them.
“Head for the dago part of town,” said Teeheezal, taking his belt and holster through the window from Sgt. Hank. “Here,” he said to the sergeant, knocking his hand away from the siren crank. “Lemme do that!”
The world was a high screaming whine, and a blur of speed and nightsticks in motion when there was a job to be done.
AFTERWORD
When I looked, at my story log for this, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
I’d always remembered this out-of-chronology, as being written after lots of other stories, I worked on part of it in the summer of 1994, because I read part of it while teaching at the Clarion SF Writers’ Workshop (then in East Lansing, MI). I finished the whole thing and read the long-hand copy at Armadillocon on October 9, 1994. I typed it up on October l0 and 11 and sent it off to Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s, like some Columbus of the Imagination, on October 12.
Gardner sent back a Wandering Angus post card, taking it, on October 20, I got the contracts a few days later, then the money, and it was published in Asimov’s in Feb. 1996.
It was included in my first e-book of all my movie- and radio- and tv-based stories Dream-Factories and Radio-Pictures by Electricstory.com (2001) and reprinted by Wheatland Press in 2005, both of which are still available.
This story came from two places.
I was reading about the Palmer (US Attorney-General) raids on suspected Bolsheviks, anarchists and foreigners of 1920. People got rounded up and deported on general principles. (One part of this became the celebrated Sacco and Vanzetti case which dragged on till 1927.) At some point I realized that if the raids had taken place in the Hollywood of our imaginations, it would have been the Keystone Kops of Mack Sennett who carried them out. The story began (after a mountain of research) to write itself.
The other impetus was that I’d just heard Connie Willis read her story “In The Late Cretaceous”—other people who heard her read it just liked it. When she’d finished, my jaw was hanging open a foot.
What she’d written was the first story I know of where the subtext is right on the surface (which means of course that the real subtext is somewhere else). What I mean is that there was a 1 to 1 correspondence between a small paleontology department at a cow college, and the last days of the dinosaurs.
Well, I’d show her! Connie Willis isn’t the only one who can do that!
Like “Heart of Whitenesse” in vol. 1, this is one of the most jam-packed stories I ever wrote. I’d first read about Osvald Spengler in a piece called “Fafhrd and Me” by Fritz Leiber in an early Amra @ 1960. I tried, god knows I tried, to get through The Decline of the West (1922) all through my high school and college years. One page and zzzzzzzzzzzzzz—Morpheus comes stealing in. Everything is just as I described it in the story.
Plus I’d been looking at Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire series of five paintings for years; the essence of Spengler in visual form, though it predated him by 60 years.
It all came together—even the order of the monsters encountered has a historical, chronological background (you could read up on it, but right now, trust me). This one is soaked through and through with historical parallels, right on the surface.
Take that, Willis.
After I read this at that Armadillocon, many people came up to me and congratulated me on writing a story that didn’t confuse them, for a change.
“Thanks, I think,” I said.
MAJOR SPACER IN THE 21st CENTURY!
June 1950
“Look,” said Bill, “I’ll see if I can go down and do a deposition this Thursday or Friday. Get ahold of Zachary Glass, see if he can fill in as . . . what’s his name . . . ?”
“Lt. Marrs,” said Sam Shorts.
“. . . Lt. Marrs. We’ll move that part of the story up. I’ll record my lines. We can put it up over the spacephone, and Marrs and Neptuna can have the dialogue during the pursuit near the Moon we were gonna do week after next . . .”
“Yeah, sure!” said Sam. “We can have you over the phone, and them talking back and forth while his ship’s closing in on hers, and your voice—yeah, that’ll work fine.”
“But you’ll have to rewrite the science part I was gonna do, and give it yourself, as Cadet Sam. Man, it’s just too bad there’s no way to record this stuff ahead of time.”
“Phil said they’re working on it at the Bing Crosby Labs, trying to get some kind of tape to take a visual image; they can do it but they gotta shoot eight feet of tape a second by the recording head. It takes a mile of tape to do a ten-minute show,” said Sam.
“And we can’t do it on film, kids hate that.”
“Funny,” said Sam Shorts. “They pay fifteen cents for Gene Autry on film every Saturday afternoon, but they won’t sit still for it on television . . .”
Philip walked in. “Morgan wants to see you about the Congress thing.”
“Of course,” said Bill.
“Run-through in . . .” Phil looked at his watch, and the studio clock “. . . eleven minutes. Seen Elizabeth?”
“Of course not,” said Bill, on the way down the hall in his spacesuit, with his helmet under his arm.
That night, in his apartment, Bill typed on a script.
MAJOR SPACER: LOOKS LIKE SOMEONE LEFT IN A HURRY.
Bill looked up. Super Circus was on. Two of the clowns, Nicky and Scampy, squirted seltzer in ringmaster Claude Kirchner’s face.
He never got to watch Big Top, the other circus show. It was on opposite his show.
Next morning, a young guy with glasses slouched out of a drugstore.
“Well, hey Bill!” he said.
“Jimmy!” said Bill, stopping, shifting his cheap cardboard portfolio to his other arm. He shook hands.
“Hey, I talked to Zooey,” said Jimmy. “You in trouble with the Feds?”
“Not that I know of. I think they’re bringing in everybody in the city with a kid’s TV show.”
He and Jimmy had been in a flop play together early in the year, before Bill started the show.
“How’s it going otherwise?” asked Jimmy.
“It’s about to kill all of us. We’ll see if we make twenty weeks, much less a year. We’re only four to five days ahead on the script. You available?”
“I’ll have to look,” said Jimmy. “I got two Lamps Unto My Feet next month, three-day rehearsals each, I think. I’m reading a couple plays, but that’ll take a month before anybody gets off their butt. Let me know’f you need someone quick some afternoon. If I can, I’ll jump in.”
“Sure thing. And on top of everything else, looks like we’ll have to move for next week; network’s coming in and taking our space; trade-out with CBS. I’ll be real damn glad when this Station Freeze is over, and there’s more than ten damn places in this city that can do a network feed.”
“I hear that could take a couple more years,” said Jimmy, in his quiet Indiana voice.
“Yeah, well . . . hey, don’t be such a stranger. Come on with me, I gotta get these over to the mimeograph room; we can talk on the way.”
“Nah, nah,” said Jimmy. “I, you know, gotta meet some people. I’m late already. See ya ’round, Bill.”
“Well, okay.”
Jimmy turned around thirty feet away. “Don’t let the Feds get your jock strap in a knot!” he said, waved, and walked away.
People stared at both of them.
Damn, thought Bill. I don’t get to see anyone anymore; I don’t have a life except for the show. This is killing me. I’m still young.
“And what the hell are we supposed to do in this grange hall?” asked Bill.
“It’s only a week,” said Morgan. “Sure, it’s seen better days, the Zieg-feld Roof, but they got a camera ramp so Harry and Fred can actually move in and out on a shot; you can play up and back, not just sideways like a crab, like usual.”
Bill looked at the long wooden platform built out into what used to be the center aisle when it was a theater.
“Phil says he can shoot here . . .”
“Phil can do a show in a bathtub, he’s so good, and Harry and Fred can work in a teacup, they’re so good. That doesn’t mean they have to,” said Bill.
A stagehand walked in and raised the curtain while they stood there.
“Who’s that?” asked Bill.
“Well, this is a rehearsal hall,” said Morgan. “We’re lucky to get it on such short notice.”
When the curtain was full up there were the usual chalk marks on the stage boards, and scene flats lined up and stacked in twenty cradles at the rear of the stage.
“We’ll be using that corner there,” said Morgan, pointing. “Bring our sets in, wheel ’em, roll ’em in and out—ship, command center, planet surface.”
Some of the flats for the other show looked familiar.
“The other group rehearses 10:00–2:00. They all gotta be out by 2:15. We rehearse, do the run-through at 5:30, do the show at 6:30.”
Another stagehand came in with the outline of the tail end of a gigantic cow and put it into the scene cradle.
“What the hell are they rehearsing?” asked Bill.
“Oh. It’s a musical based on the paintings of Grant Wood, you know, the Iowa artist?”
“You mean the Washington and the Cherry Tree, the DAR guy?”
“Yeah, him.”
“That’ll be a hit,” said Bill. “What’s it called?”
“I think they’re calling it In Tall Corn. Well, what do you think?”
“I think it’s a terrible idea. I can see the closing notices now.”
> “No, no. I mean the place. For the show,” said Morgan.
Bill looked around. “Do I have any choice in the matter?”
“Of course not,” said Morgan. “Everything else in town that’s wired up is taken. I just wanted you to see it before you were dumped in it.”
“Dumped is right,” said Bill. He was looking at the camera ramp. It was the only saving grace. Maybe something could be done with it. . . .
“Harry and Fred seen it?”
“No, Phil’s word is good enough for them. And, like you said, they can shoot in a coffee cup . . .”
Bill sighed. “Okay. Let’s call a Sunday rehearsal day, this Sunday, do two blockings and rehearsals, do the run-through of Monday’s show, let everybody get used to the place. Then they can come back just for the show Monday. Me and Sam’ll see if we can do something in the scripts. Phil got the specs?”
“You know he has,” said Morgan.
“Well, I guess one barn’s as good as another,” said Bill.
And as he said it, three stagehands brought on a barn and a silo and a windmill.
Even with both window fans on, it was hot as hell in the apartment. Bill slammed the carriage over on the Remington Noiseless Portable and hit the margin set and typed:
MAJOR SPACER: CAREFUL. SOMETIMES THE SURFACE OF MARS CAN LOOK AS ORDINARY AS A DESERT IN ARIZONA.
He got up and went to the kitchen table, picked up the bottle of Old Harper, poured some in a coffee cup and knocked it back.
There. That was better.
On TV, Haystacks Calhoun and Duke Kehanamuka were both working over Gorgeous George, while Gorilla Monsoon argued with the referee, whose back was to the action. Every time one of them twisted George’s arm or leg, the announcer, Dennis James, snapped a chicken bone next to the mike.
Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 Page 23