Earth Unaware Page 8

  He leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “Simple announcements of his meetings, extending back over several years. The location of his tent, what time the sermon begins. The title of his first sermon, Is the Nation Producing Itself Poor ? No information on where he came from or where he might be going.”

  Ed Wonder said gloomily, “Jensen Fontaine thinks Tubber is a pseudonym.”

  Buzz shook his head. “Not a name like that. Nobody but fond parents from the Bible belt would ever hang a moniker like that on a kid. Nobody’d do it to himself.”

  “He said he wasn’t a Christian.”

  “Maybe not, but his folks were. Probably evangelists. When he gets all wrathed up, he inadvertently starts talking like a Holy Roller, or whatever. He must’ve picked that up as a kid. Listen, Little Ed, how badly to you want to find him, and why? What happened to your mustache?”

  Ed scratched where his tufts of mustache had been that morning. He muttered in self-deprecation, “Maybe now that I’m no longer a bright young career man, it’s not as important to look like one.”

  Buzz De Kemp cocked his head at him and lit the stogie he’d been only fiddling with thus far. “That doesn’t sound like Little Ed Wonder,” he said.

  “What does Little Ed Wonder sound like?” Ed said, snappishly.

  Buzz grinned at him. “Usually like a heel on the make.”

  “I don’t see how you manage to put up with me,” Ed snarled.

  “I’ve wondered myself,” Buzz grinned. “Maybe it’s because I’m used to you. Ever notice how you put up with people you’re used to? For some reason, you hate to give up anybody you’ve really got to know.”

  “So by the time you got to really know what a heel I was you were used to me and couldn’t bear to avoid me, eh?”

  “Something like that. Tone down. Look, how bad do you want to locate old man Tubber?”

  Ed never had been able to get really sore at Buzz De Kemp’s gibes, but even if he had, he wouldn’t have felt like it now. “I don’t know,” he grumbled. “I’m probably stupid. If he laid eyes on me, he’d probably lay down a hex that’d last like hemophilia. But I’ve been in on this since the beginning, it’s too late to try to duck out now.”

  Buzz De Kemp eyed him. “What’s in it for you?” He blew smoke around the stogie without removing it from his mouth. “Beyond the death wish, I mean.”

  “Oh, great. Funnies I get,” Ed muttered. “Nothing’s in it for me. What in the devil could there be in it?”

  The newspaperman shook his head. “Sure doesn’t sound like Little Ed Wonder. Okay, so fine. I’ll get on it. Maybe there’ll be a birth record of Nefertiti, or a marriage record of the old boy, giving some idea of where they live. Maybe AP-Reuters will have something on him. Get out of here and check back with me later. I feel something like you do. In it from the beginning.”

  Ed Wonder went down to the corner autobar with the idea of dialing himself a stiff one. His mind on Tubber and hexes, he wasn’t aware of the crowd until he was within a hundred feet of the bar’s entrance. His first impression was that there had been an accident, or, more likely still, in view of the magnitude of the mob, some act of violence. A shooting, or something.

  It wasn’t that.

  There was a policeman outside, lining up the crowd into a manageable queue. Inside, a juke box was at full blast.

  “All right, everybody, all right. Stay in line,” the cop was singing out, and over and over again. “Stay in line or nobody’ll get in.”

  Little Ed said, “What’s happened, Officer?”

  The cop said, busily, “Get in line, buddy, get in line if you want a drink. Everybody’s gotta get in line.”

  “Get in line for what ?” Ed stared at him.

  “A drink, a drink. You’re allowed in for two drinks, or for half an hour, whatever comes off first. So get in line.”

  “What the devil,” Ed blurted. “I don’t need a drink that bad.”

  Somebody in the line took umbrage at that. “Oh, yeah,” he said savagely. “What’re ya gonna do, walk up and down the streets all day? The TV’s been on the blink since…”

  Somebody else chimed in their disgust, and before he could get his complaint across, a heavier voice had drowned him out.

  Ed went off, flabbergasted. It had only happened the night before. Less than twenty-four hours.

  As he walked back to where he had parked the Volkshover, he noticed that it wasn’t only the autobars. Restaurants, ice cream parlors, drug stores, were all packed and overpacked, usually with lines out in front. All that had juke boxes had them tuned high. Proprietors were doing a land-office business, but Ed wondered where the money was coming from. Even under the welfare state, the average person didn’t have the wherewithal continually to patronize restaurants and bars.

  He got into his hovercar and considered it for a while. Finally he brought the vehicle to life and headed for a destination. He had the address firmly enough in mind, but had never been there. The house located, he stood before the identity screen and fanned the alert.

  A voice said, “Little Ed! Come on in, I’ll be right up.”

  Ed opened the door, stepped in and navigated a few yards down an entry way to what was obviously a living room cum library. He was astonished by the layout. The room could have been a movie set depicting a home of yesteryear. There were some prints that Ed vaguely recognized from way back, but they certainly had no faintest resemblance to the current Surrealistic-Revival School that was currently in. You’d think that the owner had hung the things for… well, possibly because he liked them. You could get a reputation as a twitch awfully quick doing that sort of thing. And the chairs, tables, furniture. Right from an antique shop, several decades out of style.

  A voice said, “Hi, friend. Come to see about Manny Levy for that swami show?”

  Ed Wonder looked at his host, bringing his mind from his surprise at the bizarre room the other affected. “Swami?” he said blankly.

  “The fire walker. You called a couple of days ago about a fire walker. What’s the matter with you, Little Ed? Remember me… Jim Westbrook? Sometimes panelist on the Far Out Hour, at a going rate of fifty dollars per appearance, cash in advance.”

  Ed Wonder shook his head. “Listen,” he said. “Where’ve you been the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Right here.”

  “In this house?”

  “Of course. I’ve been doing some concentrated work.”

  “Haven’t you turned your TV set on?”

  “I haven’t got a TV set.”

  Ed Wonder stared at him as though the offbeat engineer had gone mad. “You haven’t got a TV set? Everybody’s got a TV set. How do you tune in on…”

  Jim Westbrook said patiently, “I suppose if something came up I wanted to follow, I could wander over to some neighbor’s or friend’s. But, offhand, I can’t think of any such programs coming up for the past several years.”

  Ed Wonder closed his eyes in pain. He opened them and said, “I don’t have time to go into it now, but, well, what do you do with your free time, listen to radio, go to the movies?”

  “I don’t have any free time,” the other told him reasonably. “I get my rhabdomancy jobs once or twice a week. Then down in the cellar I’ve got my darkroom, electronics shop, woodworking shop, and I’m working up a small machine shop operation. Besides—”

  “All right,” Ed said. “That’s enough. Already you sound like triplets.”

  “Sit down and relax,” Jim said easily.

  Ed looked around the room. He grimaced before sinking into one of the prehistoric-looking overstuffed chairs. Surprisingly, it was comfortable, no matter how kooky so far as style was concerned. It must have gone back to at least the 1950s.

  “Listen, Jim, the swami who walks on coals is out—at least temporarily. You’ll find out why, later. Just now, I don’t have time to go into the detail I suspect you’d demand. What I came over to ask you is this. Are miracles possible?”


  Jim Westbrook dropped into the chair opposite his guest, his face alert. “What kind of miracles?”

  “Something effecting, well, everybody. Say, a universal curse.”

  The engineer pursed his lips. “You know, one of the difficulties with these subjects is our terminology. Use a term such as miracle, or curse, or magic, and intellectual hackles immediately go up, as conditioned. But without getting into semantics, to answer your question, yes. There would seem to have been miracles, and, if so, there probably still are, or, at least could be.”

  Ed held up a hand. “Now, wait a minute. Name just one.”

  “You can have a dozen if you want. Moses parting the waters. Jesus feeding the multitudes with a few fish and seven loaves of bread.”

  Ed said, in disappointment, “It’s debated whether or not either of them ever lived.”

  Jim Westbrook shrugged. “The Moslems are just as convinced that Mohammed performed various miracles, and nobody would deny his historicity. Or take Saint Teresa, of Avila. She could evidently levitate. I suppose that would come under the head of miracle, or magic, to most of her contemporaries and most of ours. I just object to the terms. I thing that levitation is a, well, normal attribute of some persons. The fact that it is poorly understood doesn’t make it a miracle when someone such as, say, Saint Dunstan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, performs the act. Or, offhand, among others I can think of who could levitate were Saints Philip Benitas, Bernard Ptolomei, Dominic, Francis Xavier and Albert of Sicily. Then there was Savonarola, who was seen floating a couple of feet or so off his dungeon cell floor just before they burned him to death.”

  “All of them religious fanatics,” Ed complained. “I don’t trust their witnesses. A fanatic religious crank can see anything when he’s keyed up. I’m an old hand, what with my program.”

  His host twisted his mouth. “Well, then there was D. D. Home. His witnesses were far from religious cranks when they saw him float out of a window and then return through another one, ten stories off the ground. And Mrs. Guppy and the Reverend Stainton Moses, all fairly recent and all well checked upon by figures of prominence in the scientific world.”

  Ed Wonder was unhappy. He rubbed the end of his nose with his left forefinger. He felt an urge to scratch his now nonexistent mustache.

  Jim Westbrook looked at him, eyebrows slightly raised, waiting for the next.

  Just to say something, Ed made a sweeping gesture to encompass the room. “What’re you trying to put over with this kooky room, Jim?” When the engineer didn’t seem to get the question, he added, “All this out of date furniture, no autobar, no TV, primitive art, if you can call it art, on the walls.”

  Jim Westbrook said wryly, “Velazquez and Murillo weren’t exactly Cro-Magnon cavewall painters, Little Ed.”

  “Yeah, but what do your friends think about all this twitchy layout?”

  Westbrook considered him, his mouth twisted slightly in sour humor. “I don’t have a great many friends, real friends, these days, Little Ed. Those I do have, usually agree with me. They think this room is comfortable, which is the basic thing, and utilitarian, which is next. Beyond that…” he laughed “…at least some of them prefer Velazquez to the Surrealistic-Revival agonies of Jackson Salvadore.”

  It came to Ed in a quick surprise that the heavy-set, alert engineer across from him didn’t particularly like Ed Wonder. It came as a surprise, because Ed had known the other for some years and had always got along with him. He’d had him on the Far Out Hour several times, since the man had a bent for offbeat subjects and seemed to be an authority on everything from parapsychology to space travel. Above all, he had a mischievous love of baiting scientific conventional wisdom and was a veritable Charles Fort in finding material with which to butcher the sacred cow.

  He had always thought of Jim Westbrook as a friend, and only now did he know the other didn’t reciprocate. Before thought, he blurted, “Jim, why do you dislike me?”

  The other’s eyebrows went up again and he held his silence for a long moment. Finally he said slowly, “It’s not the sort of question people usually ask, Little Ed. When they do, they seldom really want it answered.”

  “No. Tell me.” Those words came out too, without volition.

  Jim Westbrook leaned back in his chair. “All right, friend. The fact is I don’t dislike you. I’m neutral. You know what? You’re a stereotype, like practically everybody else. We’re becoming a nation of stereotypes. Everybody is a stereotype. Why in the world should all girls want to look like the current sex symbol, Brigitte Loren? But they do. The short and the fat and the tall. And all ambitious young businessmen want to look exactly the same, in their Brooks Brothers suits. They’re scared to death not to look exactly the same. They want to conform to the point where conformity becomes ludicrous. What in the hell has happened to our civilization? Remember when we had the term individuality? Rugged individualism? Now we’re frightened not to look exactly like the man next door looks, not to live in the identically same sort of house, drive the same kind of car.”

  “So you think I’m just one more stereotype.”

  “Yes.”

  He had asked for it, but as the burly engineer had gone on, Ed Wonder had felt himself coming to a slow boil. Now he bit out, “But you’re not, of course.”

  Jim Westbrook had to chuckle wryly. “I’m afraid calling a man a stereotype is something like telling him he has no sense of humor, that he isn’t a good driver, or that he’s a poor lover.”

  Ed snapped, “Not to resort to an old wheeze, but if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

  The other cut off his amusement and there seemed an air almost of compassion in what he said. “I am rich. About as rich as a person can get, because I’m doing what I want to do and have achieved or am achieving the things I find desirable. Or did you mean money? If you meant money, I have all I need. Probably if I devoted more time, especially if I devoted all of my time, to getting more, I could. But I haven’t enough time as it is to do all the things I want to do, so wouldn’t it be rather silly for me to spend any more time than necessary to chasing money?”

  “I’ve heard that bit before,” Ed said. “But I’ve always noticed that those who have it on the ball, who are really smart, get up there on top.”

  Jim Westbrook said gently, “I’m not disagreeing, friend, but it might be a question of what you consider the top. A chap named Lyle Spencer, who was president of the Science Research Associates at the time, did some research on intelligence quotients. He found that engineers and scientists of top ranking average about 135 in I.Q. Top business executives went to about 120. Spencer pointed out that most presidents of corporations weren’t as smart as their employees in their research departments. In fact, on averages they ranked under such mundane occupations as pharmacists, teachers, medical students, general bookkeepers, mechanical engineers and accountants. So evidently intelligence isn’t the prime ingredient in getting to the top, as you call it.”

  Ed sneered, “Oh, great. So if somebody came along and offered you a half million, you’d say, ‘No thanks, I’m too smart. I’d rather be happy, playing with my darkroom and electronics shop, down in the basement.’ ”

  The other laughed. “I didn’t say I’d refuse more money if it came along, Little Ed. I realize the advantages of having money. It’s just that I’m not going to spend the balance of my life pursuing the stuff at the price of giving up what I really value.” He came to his feet. “We don’t seem to be hitting it off any too well today, friend. What do you say we postpone matters until another time?”

  It wasn’t too crude a brushoff, but brushoff it was. Disgusted more with himself than the other, Ed stood and started for the door. Jim Westbrook followed him. Evidently, the engineer hadn’t been in the slightest discomfited by the radioman’s words.

  At the door, Ed turned and said, “Get a newspaper, or walk on over and talk to your nearest neighbors that have a TV set or radio. Maybe I’ll get in touch with you again
later.”

  “All right,” Westbrook said mildly.

  The bars had been packed the night before, and the time you were allowed to remain, rationed. Ed Wonder had given up his hopes of sitting in one long enough to get an edge on, and the taste of what Jim Westbrook had said to him out of his mouth. It hadn’t tasted so good.

  Not only had the bars been packed, but the streets as well. In all his memory, Ed Wonder couldn’t remember ever having seen the streets so thronged with pedestrians. They didn’t seem to have any place in particular to go. Just strolling up and down, aimlessly. The lines before the movie houses were so long as to be meaningless. Those toward the end couldn’t possibly have got inside until the following day.

  Ed had gone back to his own apartment and sank into his reading chair. He grunted his contempt of the overstuffed antiques in Jim Westbrook’s establishment. Comfortable? Sure, but how kooky could you get?

  Stereotype was he! The gall of the guy. Ed Wonder had worked his way up the hard way. He had accomplished practically straight “C”s in high school, even a few “B”s in such subjects as dramatics and gym. Sufficient grades to get him easily into college. It had been a rough row to hoe. The government subsidies had hardly covered his expenses. He’d had to drive a used car, eat at the university cafeteria, keep the same clothes until they all but showed signs of wear. Yes, Ed Wonder had obtained his education the hard way. Four years of such tough subjects as Dramatics, Debating, The Dance, Sex Techniques, and Togetherness.

  Then the long years, fighting his way up. Not for Edward Wonder to go immediately from school onto the unemployment benefits. No, sir. He took temporary compensation while actually looking for employment. For ten years he had been on list at the theatres, the studios, the stations, trying to find parts. Of course, temporary compensaion paid off better than straight unemployment insurance. It meant that you were actually trying to find a job, which was enough to show, right there, that Ed Wonder was no stereotype. The very fact that he bothered to look branded him a kook in some eyes.