by Damon Knight
The prisoner does not answer “yes” or “no,” however. He answers “rum” or “turn” or “rum-te-tum.” This last is a maybe. He may use it twenty times. He is allowed to choose which of the other two means yes and which no. The Wizard has one hundred questions in which to find out which is which and to gain useful information. The prisoner is allowed to lie twenty times.
Play continues from noon until sundown.
Rescue. In the course of the night each team is allowed to send a total of ten players, laden with sidearm clubs, to infiltrate the enemy camp and provide prisoners with weapons, so that they may attempt an escape. These infiltrators are subject to capture.
RESUMPTION OF PLAY
This is the most crucial stage in the game, since it is the time when a point is most likely to be scored. Just before dawn, as many of each team as can be roused out of their tents and sleeping bags assemble in battle formation on the field. At dawn the hat is dropped and play is resumed.
Now suppose that Team A has roused forty or more players, while Team B has managed to awaken only fourteen. It is very possible that Team A will score in the early moments of play.
Should a team score a point while opposed by a force less than half its size, the scoring team is given five minutes to ride roughshod through the scored-upon team’s camp, knocking over tents, liberating prisoners, carrying off wenches, etc.
After a point is scored a half hour is taken to regroup and then play begins anew.
The game proceeds through Saturday from dawn until dark, in the same manner as before. Players will probably wish to resign, and may do so without much fear of retribution.
At sundown the game is once again adjourned for a night of drunken revelry.
The next morning the play is resumed yet again at dawn. Play continues until noon on Sunday. The teams then retire to their camps to await the declaration of a winner by the referee squad.
DECLARATION OF A WINNER
In the unlikely event that a point has been scored, the scoring team is automatically the winner. If more than one point has been scored, high score takes it. In a scoreless game or a tie, other methods must be used.
First, the Wizard. If, during the course of his performance, he has actually succeeded in putting the whammy on the opposition by his ritual defenestration of a watermelon or whatever, then his team loses.
The next criterion, if this has not happened, is the number of prisoners held at game’s end. The team holding the most prisoners wins.
If this produces no result, subjective judgments take over. Revelry, marching skill, enthusiasm of play, all the diverse activities observed and noted by the referees, become the determining factors. In any event, by 3 P.M. a winner is declared (“What the hell, let’s give it to Team A”), the teams congregate at midfield and everyone shouts, “Huzzah!”
Then everyone goes to the winning camp for yet another night of partying. The next morning camp is broken and everyone goes home.
Moopsball will be played soon. People are needed to organize, publicize, provide monetary support, scout locations, and play.
Keep in mind that this is organized anarchy. There are rules. A Moopsball team must incorporate a real dimension of discipline, or else the game will be a failure.
Volunteers, know your limitations. If you want to be a player, be sure you can run your tail off for twenty-four hours. If not, be a referee or a wench or a cook or a musician or a juggler.
For further information, write to Gary Cohn, Moopsball, 35 Maryland Ave., Freeport, N. Y. 11520.
Don’t expect a prompt reply.
WHO WAS THE FIRST OSCAR TO WIN A NEGRO?
No help from the audience, please!
Craig Strete
The tour guide pulled the curtain aside. The tour members waved their antennae with astonishment. Peter Renoir was removing his clothes. He looked up startled as he heard the shower curtain rustle. He saw the aliens staring at him from the bathtub.
“You will note the clothes that bind, the jaws that snap,” said Raffi the tour guide. “Also you will note,” continued Raffi, “the accouterments which denote that this culture limits tactile communication.”
“Communication with the self by masturbation is no doubt universal,” suggested a little Koapa.
“I note that he is rather pale, so unlike the black one we saw last week,” said a larger Koapa.
“Visual identification,” said the tour guide. “Who to avoid and what not to touch.”
“What keeps them from becoming universally poignant, a heart-throb for the galaxy?” asked the little Koapa. “They seem so frail, so tragic.”
“It has no appreciation of sculpture for one thing," said the tour guide. “There are social restraints against touching art objects, for another.”
“How would it feel if we touched it?” asked the little Koapa, carving himself into a beautiful hand.
“Better not,” said the tour guide. “They are used to the illusion of separating art from life. We might confuse it.”
Peter Renoir fainted dead away.
“You see,” lectured the tour guide, “we’ve already confused it.”
“Is it dead?” asked the little Koapa, forming into a golden stream of tears.
“No,” said the tour guide, speaking from experience. “It is simply experiencing self-criticism.”
In the fall of 1939 Benito Mussolini condemned the Marx Brothers and ordered his subjects not to laugh at them.
“Somehow,” said Semina, letting the bathrobe fall at her feet, “it just doesn’t seem real this way.”
Renoir turned out the room lights, pulled the window drapes closed. He moved in beside her and said, “Perhaps it will seem more real this way.” His hand reached out and hit the switch. The projector whirred and the screen burst into color.. Renoir appeared naked on the screen. Semina moved in beside him and let her bathrobe fall at her feet. He dragged her down on the waterbed and together as the camera tilted and zoomed in, they reached for squishy delight. The film clattered along, the leader winding off the spool and beating madly against the projector housing.
Semina sighed and took Renoir’s hand off her knee. “It seemed so much more real that way, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Renoir, folding his hands in his lap. “It was realer than real. Let’s watch it again instead.”
A film critic peeping through the keyhole said, “The camera thrusts us into the depth of things.”
Realism was too easy. The movies offered themselves as substitutes. The American woman watches film to learn how to become a better female impersonator.
FROM: PETER RENOIR
SUBJECT: REWRITE OF “WHO WAS THE FIRST OSCAR TO WIN A NEGRO?”
Obviously this one can’t wait. Let’s dump the jerk who wrote it and get one of our people on it. We don’t want to blow this one. How about we give it to Sam Bernardino. You remember him. He’s the one who did that TV quickie about the attack of giant roaches or was it chickens? Let’s get a Screen Guild member on this for Christ Sakes! What we’re talking about here is our survival!
Peter Renoir, Producer
“Must you always think like a marshal? Can’t you think like a human being just once?” Semina wept openly on the set of her latest movie.
Her five-year-old son, not to be upstaged, pointed at the Marshal’s gun and said, quite distinctly, “Daddy!”
“You can take it up your movie,” said the alien, holding Lillian Gish in his extended forepaws. “I been sitting in the front row for twenty-seven silent years and I’ll be damned if my baby is going to talk!”
“Damn you, damn your naked eyes!” cursed Peter Renoir. “We can’t afford a transition like this! Not now! We were just learning how to talk with our eyes and now we are being interrupted by sound!”
“Peter!” breathed Semina. “The cheers! The shouting!”
“It’s nineteen hundred and thirty,” he said. “And I’ve had fourteen lovers and want you to bring back the Auk.”
From a letter written in the future:
The guarantee against limits is a sense of alternatives. Back in Oregon, I dreamed all my life of being the Bank of California. We lived across from the debtors’ prison. I used to sit in the darkest of theaters and watch the light and shadow. I was hypnotized by Marilyn Monroe and a known associate of the Seven Dwarfs. I was hypnotized, the dreams provided. Did I dream of being me instead?
I turned in a fire one day, after letting it burn for a while to make sure it was a good one, and got my name in the newspaper. Later, I became convinced that people were so blank, so destroyed, that no mad scientist was ever necessary to destroy their souls.
Perhaps everything terrible is something that wants to help me. Perhaps it is only that other people’s fantasies have nothing to do with reality.
Vonda McIntyre
P.S.: “Remember the night we met and I lost my glass slipper?”
“Yes,” he said, low angle, soft focus, violins beginning.
“That was when I discovered my existence was insufficiently interesting.”
The director screamed cut after the word existence and turned to his assistant and said, “Print it, it’s a wrap.”
Peter Renoir was an alien and didn’t know any better. He came here for a good education. A good sex education. He was an alien and didn’t know any better. He turned to television for advice, for the facts, for the inside info. He found what he sought. He never had a minute of regret.
“It could have happened to anyone,” he said. And indeed he might just have been right. He was an alien and he came here from another galaxy, came here with a problem of sorts. It was the kind of thing that can happen to anybody. The people on Peter Renoir’s planet, they had this culture, see, really a ball-breaker, see, with everything wired for sound, juiced right up to the limits. See, they had perfected perfection. They had it made, only they were so busy being perfect, they forgot how to do it.
“What do you mean, DO IT?”
“I mean do it, DO IT,” said Peter Renoir. “It’s a natural.”
Semina scratched inelegantly. “It’ll never sell product,” she said.
“Oh, man!” shouts Peter Renoir. “You cannot see the frigging unbelievable scope of this thing! I mean, see, he comes eight million miles or whatever in this big frigging flying space something or other! See what I’m getting at?”
“Jesus!” said Semina. “That’s a hell of a long drive for just one person. Don’t he let somebody else take a turn driving?”
“That’s what I’m getting at!” shouts Peter Renoir. “See him and his girl, course she looks just like a real girl like on TV or something. You know, what was the name of that broad with the gaps in her teeth, you know the one on the acne commercial, the before one?”
“Norma Jean, you mean,” said Semina, finally catching some of his enthusiasm.
“See, they got the hots, they got ’em so bad and they don’t know which end is which.”
“Right!” screams Semina. “And that’s where we hit them with the commercial, our plug for toilet paper!”
“Aw, shit,” said Peter Renoir, “you should of let me say it first! You’re always taking all the fun out of it!”
I know he’s out there. I know he’s reading my story, wondering about the size of my breasts, missing every single word of what I had to say. How many times have I told him. Explore other people’s metaphors. It isn’t only a metaphor. It’s an angle of vision.
I’ve based my life on the theory of the persistence of vision. You can’t throw up 3,000 years of art in three minutes and not see something.
Joanna Russ
“Jesus!” said Peter Renoir. “That name, Joanna Russ. Sounds very Hollywood. I think we can go with it. I really think this one is our baby. How does she look in a bikini?”
I am an alchemist, the father of science, the death of us all. I am the real root of science. I am an erotic science. I am deeply involved with buried aspects of reality, from novel to film and back again.
Rain is copulation. The sexual activity of man is an energy-to-matter conversion. Mineral formations are sexual crystal trysts. The creation of the world was a sexual activity. I am an alchemist. I can remember love affairs of chemicals and stars, romances of stones, fertility in fire. I am an alchemist.
On the other hand, maybe I am only showing you the soft underbelly of a stealing tide of nostalgia. Maybe I need a new analogy.
I am a science-fiction writer, the mother impregnator of dreams. I reflect culture. Culture reflects me. Why are both these statements true?
“Joanna Russ, and we throw in some other kind of broad, I don’t know who just yet, but we tear her clothes halfway off and so she’s got to look like she’s asking for it, but what I mean we can maybe do,” said Peter Renoir, “is have these two broads, see, and this alien menace from somewhere, how the hell I know, one of the damn planets or something. Are you with me on this?”
“Gotcha,” said Semina, licking the end of her pencil and scribbling it down on her napkin.
“Well see, my idea for the series is first these two aliens come down and these two broads have one hell of a time trying to escape from them. In the last ten minutes of the show, we burn this Russ’s clothes off, see, get some good leg shots going for us and maybe a couple good back shots, then the alien catches her and rapes the hell out of her. We make that nine minutes and then cut away for the commercial. We cut back for the final minute, in which it is revealed that the alien is really working for the government. So the show ends on an upbeat note and we sell one hell of a lot of product.”
“But won’t it get stale? Don’t you have to have a sad show once in a while, you know a downbeat one for a change of pace?” asked Semina.
“You mean like could we add something like a pet goat or something that gets killed off or a baby dog or something?” asked Peter Renoir, mulling it over in his head.
His face lit up. “Oh, man! It just hit me! It’s a frigging natural! We come back next week and throw in this time machine device, see, and she and this other broad gets thrown back into the past. Back to fifteen hundred and forty-eight or whenever the hell the Civil War was. Do you see it! See, we have the whole Confederate Army and the Union Army and Russ and this other broad lands in a Union town. We kill off the other broad when the Rebels overrun the town. Then, see, we got the audience’s sympathy. We got their attention and then the Confederate Army catches Joanna Russ and rapes the hell out of her. We do it in three versions, soft focus for television with lots of shots of horses taken extra so we can cut them in, crotch closeups for the drive-in and for the big downtown theater market, we got to shoot something symbolic or something. I don’t know what, maybe a picture of Orson Welles in the buff.”
“It’s going to be beautiful,” said Semina.
“Then see, the way we end it is, the Union Army comes in and saves her.”
“Then what happens?” said Semina.
“Then the Union Army rapes the hell out of her and the picture ends and we are left with a sense of loss.”
“You’re a frigging genius!” said Semina. “You really are, Peter.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” said Peter Renoir. “But it damn well will sell.”
NOTE TO THE READER: l’LL BET THE EDITOR THINKS I DON’T CARE TOO MUCH FOR YOU. HE’S WRONG. PLEASE REMEMBER THE EDITOR BEHIND HIS SMILE IS MY PIMP. I DO LOVE YOU VERY DEARLY AT
EXACTLY FIVE CENTS A WORD. AND BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, l’M GOING TO CLARIFY THINGS FOR YOU. I WANT EVERYTHING IN THIS STORY TO BE RIGHT BETWEEN US.
ON PLOTTING THE STORY:
The plot is simply about an alien who has come into your bedroom, your life, your church. He has come seeking knowledge, information. He is looking to the reader for that information. He is an alien and doesn’t care how he gets it. He wants information about doing it. Yes, he does. He is an alien and he learned about your planet from watching television and going to the drive-in movies on Saturday and Sunday nights
. While the alien is very much in sympathy with the reader, while the alien is very much on the reader’s side, the alien cannot deny his personal feelings and values as an alien, which is why his meaning may not be too clear. This is the story of his struggle in your world to figure out how to do it.
In 1934 Clark Gable took off his shirt and underneath he wasn’t wearing an undershirt. The undershirt industry fell off that year by 50 percent.
“Christ!” said Peter Renoir. “When is this damn story going to finish up? I say we cut the hell out of the son of a bitching thing. I say we muzzle the son of a bitch and get it over with. He isn’t Screen Guild anyway. Just because he wrote some stuff under the name of Rudyard Kipling do I have to listen to the whole thing? I got things to do.”
“But how the hell we going to do it up without you got the whole picture?”
“I got the picture,” said Peter Renoir. “We take out Gunga Din and substitute Nanette Fabray. Don’t tell me I ain’t got the picture!”
“Who we gonna get to direct it?”
“How about we get Gower Champion? I want someone who isn’t going to mess it up by knowing anything.”
“You’re a genius, Peter Renoir,” said Semina.
“Yes, I know,” said Peter Renoir.
Semina tells a lie and then tells the truth. There is no change in her face. She murders a stripper named Shirley who wants to get married and have a baby. She murders a stripper who is not named Shirley and who doesn’t want to get married and would sell a baby if she could get anything out of it. There is no change in her face.
She goes away for the weekend with a bowling team sponsored by a local carwash. The inbuilt demand for a higher standard of living creates a feeling of menace. The captain of the bowling team dies from heart failure that may or may not have been caused by the bullet in his brain. Panic-stricken by this turn of events, she decides to escape from this world. She buys a ticket and enters a movie house to watch a double feature. The him ends and we are left with a sense of familiarity.