THE
REPLOIDS
Stephen King
Appeared in
Night Visions #5, 1988
No one knew exactly how long it had been going on. Not long.
Two days, two weeks; it couldn't have been much longer than that,
Cheyney reasoned. Not that it mattered. It was just that people got
to watch a little more of the show with the added thrill of knowing
the show was real. When the United States - the whole world -
found out about the Reploids, it was pretty spectacular. just as
well, maybe. These days, unless it's spectacular, a thing can go on
damned near forever. It is neither believed nor disbelieved. It is
simply part of the weird Godhead mantra that made up the
accelerating flow of events and experience as the century neared its
end. It's harder to get peoples' attention. It takes machine-guns in a
crowded airport or a live grenade rolled up the aisle of a bus load
of nuns stopped at a roadblock in some Central American country
overgrown with guns and greenery. The Reploids became national
- and international - news on the morning of November 30, 1989,
after what happened during the first two chaotic minutes of the
Tonight Show taping in Beautiful Downtown Burbank, California,
the night before.
The floor manager watched intently as the red sweep secondhand
moved upward toward the twelve. The studio audience
clockwatched as intently as the floor manager. When the red sweep
second-hand crossed the twelve, it would be five o'clock and
taping of the umpty-umptieth Tonight Show would commence.
As the red second-hand passed the eight, the audience stirred and
muttered with its own peculiar sort of stage fright. After all, they
represented America, didn't they? Yes!
'Let's have it quiet, people, please,' the floor manager said
pleasantly, and the audience quieted like obedient children. Doc
Severinsen's drummer ran off a fast little riff on his snare and then
held his sticks easily between thumbs and fingers, wrists loose,
watching the floor manager instead of the clock, as the show -
people always did. For crew and performers, the floor manager
was the clock. When the second-hand passed the ten, the floor
manager counted down aloud to four, and then held up three
fingers, two fingers, one finger ... and then a clenched fist from
which one finger pointed dramatically at the audience. An
APPLAUSE sign lit up, but the studio audience was primed to
whoop it up; it would have made no difference if it had been
written in Sanskrit.
So things started off just as they were supposed to start off: dead
on time. This was not so surprising; there were crewmembers on
the Tonight Show who, had they been LAPD officers, could have
retired with full benefits. The Doc Severinsen band, one of the best
showbands in the world, launched into the familiar theme: Ta-da-
