Earth Unaware

he said. He looked down at Helen. “What in the devil’s wrong?”

“I itch. Not right now. Like an allergy, or something.”

He looked at her for a long moment, as though he had put a dime in a slot machine and nothing had come out.

Finally he said, “When do you itch?”

“If I put on makeup. Even the slightest touch of lipstick. Or if I do up my hair any way except combed straight down to my shoulders or done in braids. Or if I put on anything except the simplest clothes I’ve got. No silk. Not even in my underthings. I simply start itching. It started really last night, but I didn’t realize it. Little Ed, I’m scared. It works. That old goat’s curse is working on me.”

Ed Wonder stared down at her. “Don’t be a twitch.”

She stared back at him, defiantly.

He had never seen Helen Fontaine before, save last night, in other than the height of heights, fashionwise. Every pore in place. It came to him now that she possibly looked better this way. Possibly when she got to be the age of Mary Malone, the screen and TV star, she’d need civilization’s contributions to aid nature’s gifts. But in her mid-twenties…

Helen said, “You were there.”

“Sure I was there. So old Tubber waved his arms around a little, got red in the face and slapped a hex on you. And you believed him.”

“I believed him because it worked.” she flared back.

“Don’t be a kook, Helen! Curses don’t work unless the person who has one laid on him believes it will work. Anybody knows that.”

“Fine! But in this case it worked without my believing in it. Do you think I believe in curses?”

“Yes.”

“Well, maybe I do now. But I didn’t then. And let me tell you something else, Little Ed Wonder. That chubby daughter of his, and those followers in the audience. They believe in the power, as they call it, too. They’ve seen him do it before. Remember how scared his daughter was when she heard him speaking in wrath?”

“They’re a bunch of twitches.”

“All right, all right. Go on. Get out. I’m getting up and getting dressed. But I’m going to dress in the simplest things I’ve got, understand?”

“I’ll see you later,” Ed told her, not doing very well at keeping disgust from his voice.

“The later the better,” she snapped back.

He had to get hopping on this program for the Friday after next. On his way past Dolly’s desk to his own he said to her, “Get me Jim Westbrook. And put a little snap into it, eh?”

“Who?” Dolly said. He still couldn’t get used to her well scrubbed face and her cotton print, not to speak of the Little Dutch girl hairdo.

“Jim Westbrook. We’ve had him on the program several times. He’s in the book as James C. Westbrook.”

He sat down at his desk and fumbled his key into the top drawer. Something was nagging him about Dolly’s down-on-the-farm getup, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Something that should be very obvious, but didn’t come through. He shook his head to switch subjects and brought forth the letter from the swami. He scanned it again. Confound it, this was the sort of character he could really project over TV. His program demanded TV. Half the kooks he had on as guests needed to be seen to be appreciated.

The phone buzzed and he picked it up.

It said, “Little Ed? Jim Westbrook here.”

“Yeah, hi Jim. Listen, I’ve got this Hindu twitch who calls himself Swami Respa Rammal. Claims he can walk on burning coals. Is there any chance he can?”

Over the phone Jim Westbrook said slowly, “With a name like that, friend, he sounds like a phony. A respa is a sort of Tibetian neophyte lama who indures fantastic cold as part of his training for full lamahood. And Rammal is a Moslem name, rather than Hindu. And he wouldn’t call himself a swami, either. That’s the wrong word. A swami is simply a Hindu religious teacher. Comes from the Sanskrit word svamin, meaning master.”

“All right, all right,” Ed Wonder said. “Phony name or not, is it possible that he can walk on burning coals?”

“It’s been done, friend.”

Ed was incredulous. “At 800 degrees Fahrenheit?”

“That’s a little better than the melting point of steel,” Jim told him, “but it’s been done.”

“When, and by whom?”

“Well, right offhand I can’t reel off names and dates but there’re two types of this fire-walking. The first takes place over coals and embers and the second over hot stones. The Hindus do it and so do various cults in the South Seas. For that matter, every year in Northern Greece and Southern Bulgaria they have a day on which they traditionally walk on hot coals. The British Society for Psychical Research and the London Council for Psychical Investigation both looked into it, witnessed it, and even had some of their members try it. Some succeeded…”

“And…” Ed prompted.

“Some burned the hell out of their feet.”

Ed thought about it. He said finally, “Look Jim, do you know anybody with some nice scientific sounding handle who disagrees with you? Suppose we made this a four way panel. Me, the swami, you, who agrees it can be done, and this scientist who claims it can’t. Possibly we can stretch it over two programs. The first one we’ll interview the swami and argue it around. Then during the next week we’ll have him perform, and we’ll report on the experiment the following program.”

Jim Westbrook said, “Come to think of it, I had an argument with Manny Levy a year or two back on the very subject.”

“Who?”

“Doctor Manfred Levy, down in Ultra-New York. He’s a big wig in popularization of science, several books to his credit. On top of that, he’s got a German accent you could chin yourself on. Makes him sound very scientific.”

Ed said, “Do you think you could get him to act as a panelist on my show?”

“Sure we could get him—at your top rates.”

“Not for free, eh? Not just for the fun of it? My budget’s running low for this quarter.”

Jim Westbrook laughed. “You don’t know Manny, friend.”

Ed sighed. “Okay, Jim. Get in touch with him, will you? Let me know soonest what he says.”

He switched off the phone, switched on the dicto and did a letter to Swami Respa Rammal. Whether or not they could get this Doctor Levy on the panel, he decided to use the fire-walker. A fire-walker, yet. Sometimes he wondered how he’d ever gotten into this line. Once he’d wanted to be an actor. It took him some ten years to find out he wasn’t. Deep within, Ed Wonder divided the world into two groups, those who gawked and listened, the twitches, and those who performed. He couldn’t stand not being one of the performers.

He got up and wandered over to the coke dispenser, not actually thirsty. On the way he stopped at the news teleprinter and let his eyes scan the last few dispatches. El Hassan was uniting North Africa, largely in spite of itself. The Soviet Complex was having interior rumblings again. The Hungarians were slowly replacing the Russians in the higher echelons of the party.

The teleprinter chattered and he took in the latest item.

A new fashion seems to be sweeping the nation… No makeup, no frills… Simplicity is the keynote… Robert Hope the third, TV comedian, has already tagged it the Homespun Look …

Ed Wonder grunted. So that’s why Dolly and the rest of the office staff had come to work looking like the hired girl all set to do the milking. The way these fads could spread. It was bad enough in the old days. Hems up, hems down; hair up, hair dbwn, pony tails, wigs, short, long, and what not; bosoms are in this season, bosoms are out. It had been bad enough but now with universal television, the welfare state and the