The spaceliner office protested. “Last minute reservations are just impossible. Two cabins— We might be able to arrange one double . . .”
The captain protested. “Never heard of performing a ceremony on the first day out! I don’t care if you can’t go to your cabin without it . . . !” But he capitulated too, after a jocular suggestion that Faustina could stay respectable by occupying her old air lock.
They themselves protested, both of the Arthurs, against the inactive three months forced upon them by Space. But they too capitulated; a honeymoon is a honeymoon.
Steele Morrison protested, shooting himself around Headquarters like a schizophrenic yo-yo. “You’ll never even get in to see him! And you’ll do no good if you do. The idea’s crazy; drop it and try to make the best of what we have!”
A series of domestic technicians and secretarial technicians protested. But once the message reached him, President Weddergren eagerly insisted on an immediate interview with Faustina Parva Arthur.
Excellent journalist though he was, Jon Arthur would never have attempted a description of the reactions of Weddergren as he listened to his pupil—for of course his first desire, before any such trifles as felicitations on marriage, was to hear her after her sojourn with Storm.
Surprise, resentment, perplexity—those were certainly, in order, the first reactions to this blend of Weddergren perfection with Storm humanity. After that the emotions were more complex . . .
At the end of the brief recital there was a pause. Then the President observed, “My dear, I sent you to Venus as the greatest voice in the system. You have returned as the greatest singer.”
And that was all.
It was the next day that the letter came—addressed not to Faustina but to Jon Arthur.
Their tenth reading of it was to Steele Morrison, who actually hung immobile for its duration:
Dear Mr. Arthur:
You are indeed a clever man, to realize the one thing that means so much to me that I can even, in its terms, understand an allegory that goes against my beliefs.
Yes, your nonallegoric suggestion is agreeable to me. The pressures of my office leave me little time to participate in the work myself; but my technicians will instruct you fully in my theories of physiology, in the demonstrative uses of Marchesi, and in the methods of hypnopedagogy. With these you may return to Venusberg and aid in establishing the Venusberg school of singing, the Weddergren-Storm [“She’ll never accept that billing,” Arthur interpolated] method, in which each contributor has something uniquely valuable to impart.
As to your unstated but implicit allegorical suggestions:
I had known, of course, through our Academy agents, that you were working for some nebulous Third Force, and that you hoped to save the world with some message from Kleinbach. I knew even that you were present at Kleinbach’s deathbed. (Did it never occur to you that that baritone was too typically Populist to be anything but an Academy agent among Populists?)
I had not expected the message to come in this form, or with this, to me, peculiarly forceful impact.
Science and humanity have made of Parva something which she could never have become without science—and yet something which the more absolutely perfect Marchesi could never become at all.
The analogy may be worth pursuing.
Respectfully yours,
James Weddergren
As Arthur finished, Steele Morrison zoomed across to the unsorted welter of papers which he termed his filing cabinet.
“I got me a letter today too, babies,” he stated, brandishing a leaf of the same official note paper. “At first—hell, I don’t know—I thought it was a rib maybe. It’s about would I consider a cabinet post—me yet! And would I call at my earliest convenience with any suggestions as to psychological methods of preparation for a possible reintroduction of elections . . .”
Faustina opened her mouth and her throat. A three-octave run was as good a comment as any.
“Damn it,” Arthur exclaimed, “I feel like singing myself. Something great and stirring and human and free—Battle Hymn of the Republic or Thaelmanns-Kolonne or La Marseillaise!”
Faustina began it. Her voice was Man’s freedom, technically freed by science, spiritually free in its own ardor. “Allons, enfants de la patriel. . .”
“Hell!” shouted Steele Morrison, zooming toward the bar. “I know how to translate that: Come on, kids, let’s have a party!”
So they did.
Mr. Lupescu
The teacups rattled, and flames flickered over the logs.
“Alan, I do wish you could do something about Bobby.”
“Isn’t that rather Robert’s place?”
“Oh, you know Robert. He’s so busy doing good in nice abstract ways with committees in them.”
“And headlines.”
“He can’t be bothered with things like Mr. Lupescu. After all, Bobby’s only his son.”
“And yours, Marjorie.”
“And mine. But things like this take a man, Alan.”
The room was warm and peaceful; Alan stretched his long legs by the fire and felt domestic. Marjorie was soothing even when she fretted. The firelight did things to her hair and the curve of her blouse.
A small whirlwind entered at high velocity and stopped only when Marjorie said, “Bob-by! Say hello nicely to Uncle Alan.”
Bobby said hello and stood tentatively on one foot.
“Alan . . .” Marjorie prompted.
Alan sat up straight and tried to look paternal. “Well, Bobby,” he said. “And where are you off to in such a hurry?”
“See Mr. Lupescu ’f course. He usually comes afternoons.”
“Your mother’s been telling me about Mr. Lupescu. He must be quite a person.”
“Oh gee I’ll say he is, Uncle Alan. He’s got a great big red nose and red gloves and red eyes—not like when you’ve been crying but really red like yours’re brown—and little red wings that twitch only he can’t fly with them cause they’re rudder-mentary he says. And he talks like—oh gee I can’t do it, but he’s swell, he is.”
“Lupescu’s a funny name for a fairy godfather, isn’t it, Bobby?”
“Why? Mr. Lupescu always says why do all the fairies have to be Irish because it takes all kinds, doesn’t it?”
“Alan!” Marjorie said. “I don’t see that you’re doing a bit of good. You talk to him seriously like that and you simply make him think it is serious. And you do know better, don’t you, Bobby? You’re just joking with us.”
“Joking? About Mr. Lupescu?”
“Marjorie, you don’t— Listen, Bobby. Your mother didn’t mean to insult you or Mr. Lupescu. She just doesn’t believe in what she’s never seen, and you can’t blame her. Now, suppose you took her and me out in the garden and we could all see Mr. Lupescu. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Uh-uh.” Bobby shook his head gravely. “Not for Mr. Lupescu. He doesn’t like people. Only little boys. And he says if I ever bring people to see him, then he’ll let Gorgo get me. G’bye now.” And the whirlwind departed.
Marjorie sighed. “At least thank heavens for Gorgo. I never can get a very clear picture out of Bobby, but he says Mr. Lupescu tells the most terrible things about him. And if there’s any trouble about vegetables or brushing teeth, all I have to say is Gorgo and hey presto!”
Alan rose. “I don’t think you need worry, Marjorie. Mr. Lupescu seems to do more good than harm, and an active imagination is no curse to a child.”
“You haven’t lived with Mr. Lupescu.”
“To live in a house like this, I’d chance it,” Alan laughed. “But please forgive me now—back to the cottage and the typewriter . . . Seriously, why don’t you ask Robert to talk with him?’
Marjorie spread her hands helplessly.
“I know. I’m always the one to assume responsibilities. And yet you married Robert.”
Marjorie laughed. “I don’t know. Somehow there’s something about Robert . . .” Her vague gestu
re happened to include the original Degas over the fireplace, the sterling tea service, and even the liveried footman who came in at that moment to clear away.
Mr. Lupescu was pretty wonderful that afternoon, all right. He had a little kind of an itch like in his wings and they kept twitching all the time. Stardust, he said. It tickles. Got it up in the Milky Way. Friend of mine has a wagon route up there.
Mr. Lupescu had lots of friends, and they all did something you wouldn’t ever think of, not in a squillion years. That’s why he didn’t like people, because people don’t do things you can tell stories about. They just work or keep house or are mothers or something.
But one of Mr. Lupescu’s friends, now, was captain of a ship, only it went in time, and Mr. Lupescu took trips with him and came back and told you all about what was happening this very minute Five hundred years ago. And another of the friends was a radio engineer, only he could tune in on all the kingdoms of faery and Mr. Lupescu would squidgle up his red nose and twist it like a dial and make noises like all the kingdoms of faery coming in on the set. And then there was Gorgo, only he wasn’t a friend—not exactly; not even to Mr. Lupescu.
They’d been playing for a couple of weeks—only it must’ve been really hours, cause Mamselle hadn’t yelled about supper yet, but Mr. Lupescu says Time is funny—when Mr. Lupescu screwed up his red eyes and said, “Bobby, let’s go in the house.”
“But there’s people in the house, and you don’t—”
“I know I don’t like people. That’s why we’re going in the house. Come on, Bobby, or I’ll—”
So what could you do when you didn’t even want to hear him say Gorgo’s name?
He went into Father’s study through the French window, and it was a strict rule that nobody ever went into Father’s study, but rules weren’t for Mr. Lupescu.
Father was on the telephone telling somebody he’d try to be at a luncheon but there was a committee meeting that same morning but he’d see. While he was talking, Mr. Lupescu went over to a table and opened a drawer and took something out.
When Father hung up, he saw Bobby first and started to be very mad. He said, “Young man, you’ve been trouble enough to your Mother and me with all your stories about your red-winged Mr. Lupescu, and now if you’re to start bursting in—”
You have to be polite and introduce people. “Father, this is Mr. Lupescu. And see, he does too have red wings.”
Mr. Lupescu held out the gun he’d taken from the drawer and shot Father once right through the forehead. It made a little clean hole in front and a big messy hole in back. Father fell down and was dead.
“Now, Bobby,” Mr. Lupescu said, “a lot of people are going to come here and ask you a lot of questions. And if you don’t tell the truth about exactly what happened, I’ll send Gorgo to fetch you.”
Then Mr. Lupescu was gone through the French window.
“It’s a curious case, Lieutenant,” the medical examiner said. “It’s fortunate I’ve dabbled a bit in psychiatry; I can at least give you a lead until you get the experts in. The child’s statement that his fairy godfather shot his father is obviously a simple flight mechanism, susceptible of two interpretations. A, the father shot himself; the child was so horrified by the sight that he refused to accept it and invented this explanation. B, the child shot the father, let us say by accident, and shifted the blame to his imaginary scapegoat. B has, of course, its more sinister implications: if the child had resented his father and created an ideal substitute, he might make the substitute destroy the reality . . . But there’s the solution to your eyewitness testimony; which alternative is true, Lieutenant, I leave up to your researchers into motive and the evidence of ballistics and fingerprints. The angle of the wound jibes with either.”
The man with the red nose and eyes and gloves and wings walked down the back lane to the cottage. As soon as he got inside, he took off his coat and removed the wings and the mechanism of strings and rubber that made them twitch. He laid them on top of the ready pile of kindling and lit the fire. When it was well started, he added the gloves. Then he took off the nose, kneaded the putty until the red of its outside vanished into the neutral brown of the mass, jammed it into a crack in the wall, and smoothed it over. Then he took the red-irised contact lenses out of his brown eyes and went into the kitchen, found a hammer, pounded them to powder, and washed the powder down the sink.
Alan started to pour himself a drink and found, to his pleased surprise, that he didn’t especially need one. But he did feel tired. He could lie down and recapitulate it all, from the invention of Mr. Lupescu (and Gorgo and the man with the Milky Way route) to today’s success and on into the future when Marjorie—pliant, trusting Marjorie—would be more desirable than ever as Robert’s widow and heir. And Bobby would need a man to look after him.
Alan went into the bedroom. Several years passed by in the few seconds it took him to recognize what was waiting on the bed, but then, Time is funny.
Alan said nothing.
“Mr. Lupescu, I presume?” said Gorgo.
Balaam
“What is a “man?” Rabbi Chaim Acosta demanded, turning his back on the window and its view of pink sand and infinite pink boredom. “You and I, Mule, in our respective ways, work for the salvation of man—as you put it, for the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God. Very well, let us define our terms: Whom, or more precisely what, are we interested in saving?”
Father Aloysius Malloy shifted uncomfortably and reluctandy closed the American Football Yearbook which had been smuggled in on the last rocket, against all weight regulations, by one of his communicants. I honestly like Chaim, he thought, not merely (or is that the right word?) with brotherly love, nor even out of the deep gratitude I owe him, but with special individual liking; and I respect him. He’s a brilliant man—too brilliant to take a dull post like this in his stride. But he will get off into discussions which are much too much like what one of my Jesuit professors called “disputations.”
“What did you say, Chaim?” he asked.
The rabbi’s black Sephardic eyes sparkled. “You know very well what I said, Mule; and you’re stalling for time. Please indulge me. Our religious duties here are not so arduous as we might wish; and since you won’t play chess . . .”
“. . . and you,” said Father Malloy unexpectedly, “refuse to take any interest in diagraming football plays . . .”
“Touche. Or am I? Is it my fault that as an Israeli I fail to share the peculiar American delusion that football means something other than rugby and soccer? Whereas chess—” He looked at the priest reproachfully. “Mule,” he said, “you have led me into a digression.”
“It was a try. Like the time the whole Southern California line thought I had the ball for once and Leliwa walked over for the winning TD.”
“What,” Acosta repeated, “is man? Is it by definition a member of the genus H. sapiens inhabiting the planet Sol III and its colonies?”
“The next time we tried the play,” said Malloy resignedly, “Leliwa was smeared for a ten-yard loss.”
The two men met on the sands of Mars. It was an unexpected meeting, a meeting in itself uneventful, and yet one of the turning points in the history of men and their universe.
The man from the colony base was on a routine patrol—a patrol imposed by the captain for reasons of discipline and activity-for-activity’s-sake rather than from any need for protection in this uninhabited waste. He had seen, over beyond the next rise, what he would have sworn was the braking blaze of a landing rocket—if he hadn’t known that the next rocket wasn’t due for another week. Six and a half days, to be exact, or even more exactly, six days, eleven hours, and twenty-three minutes, Greenwich Interplanetary. He knew the time so exactly because he, along with half the garrison, Father Malloy, and those screwball Israelis, was due for rotation then. So no matter how much it looked like a rocket, it couldn’t be one; but it was something happening on his patrol, for the first time since he’d come to thi
s God-forsaken hole, and he might as well look into it and get his name on a report.
The man from the spaceship also knew the boredom of the empty planet. Alone of his crew, he had been there before, on the first voyage when they took the samples and set up the observation autoposts. But did that make the captain even listen to him? Hell, no; the captain knew all about the planet from the sample analyses and had no time to listen to a guy who’d really been there. So all he got out of it was the privilege of making the first reconnaissance. Big deal! One fast look around reconnoitering a few googols of sand grains and then back to the ship. But there was some kind of glow over that rise there. It couldn’t be lights; theirs was the scout ship, none of the others had landed yet. Some kind of phosphorescent life they’d missed the first time round . . . ? Maybe now the captain would believe that the sample analyses didn’t tell him everything.
The two men met at the top of the rise.
One man saw the horror of seemingly numberless limbs, of a headless torso, of a creature so alien that it walked in its glittering bare flesh in this freezing cold and needed no apparatus to supplement the all but nonexistent air.
One man saw the horror of an unbelievably meager four limbs, of a torso topped with an ugly lump like some unnatural growth, of a creature so alien that it smothered itself with heavy clothing in this warm climate and cut itself off from this invigorating air.
And both men screamed and ran.
“There is an interesting doctrine,” said Rabbi Acosta, “advanced by one of your writers, C. S. Lewis . . .”
“He was an Episcopalian,” said Father Malloy sharply.
“I apologize.” Acosta refrained from pointing out that Anglo-Catholic would have been a more accurate term. “But I believe that many in your church have found his writings, from your point of view, doctrinally sound? He advances the doctrine of what he calls hnaus—intelligent beings with souls who are the children of God, whatever their physical shape or planet of origin.”
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