Ed looked in anguish at Jensen Fontaine who at first began to say something but then closed his mouth to a line so thin Ed Wonder decided you’d have your work cut out getting a knife blade between the lips. Oh great.
Ed said, “Well, Miss Fontaine was, ah, kind of heckling him. And he got sore and, well, cursed her.”
There was a silence. They’d made the same assumption Fontaine had earlier.
Ed cleared it up. “That is, he laid a hex on her.”
Wannamaker Doolittle said, “Hex?”
“Kind of a spell,” Ed said.
“What’s this got to do with her being in bed?”
Ed said, unhappily, “She says she itches.”
Jensen Fontaine banged his gavel. “Let’s cut short all this jabber. Exactly what did this crackpot say?”
In his barren actor’s years, Ed Wonder had spent considerable time in perfecting his memory. In remembering dialogue. Now he sent his mind back. He said, “It went something like this:
Ed wound it up, hopefully. “That’s not exactly it, but almost. So you see, he wasn’t exactly just putting a hex on Helen. The way he worded it, actually what it amounts to is a curse on all women…”
He broke off in mid-sentence, because an icicle had just touched the base of his spine and was slowly working its way upward.
4
By the next morning, there was little doubt left in Ed Wonder’s mind. He scanned the teleprinter’s bulletins. It wasn’t a nationwide fad, it was a worldwide fad. Common Europe, the Soviet Complex, and the aborigines of the Galapagos Islands, for that matter, were all effected.
Fads there had been before. Every type of fad. People went for fads these days. The hula hoops and the Davy Crockett craze of an earlier decade were as nothing to today’s fads. As watching TV replaced working as the daily occupation of the average citizen, the slight tendency to rebel against complete ossification seated in one’s living room was taken up by the new tri-di cinema, which at least made you walk as far as the neighborhood theatre, and by fads, fads, fads.
Fads in food, fads in dress, fads in slang, fads in everything. It was one method by which the obsolescence by style manipulators kept their goods rolling. If convertibles were in, then sedans were out, and only a twitch, a kook, would be seen dead in one. If tweeds were in, gabardines were out, and you might as well throw yesterday’s suit into the disposal chute. If Chinese food came in, Italian, Turkish, Russian, Scottish, or whatever had been the fad last month, went out. And a restaurant which had optimistically stocked its shelves and freezers with products for yesterday’s fad, might as well dump them in the garbage.
Yes, fads there had been before, but never like this.
Ultimately, almost any fad originating in the West would spread to even the Soviet Complex. Did Battle Fatigue cocktails become the thing in Greater Washington, three months later they were being used to toast the health of Number One in the Kremlin. Did Bermuda shorts in Madras cloth become the rage for formal dress in Ultra-New York, they were adorning the thin limbs of the Chinaman in the streets of Peking within a matter of weeks.
But at least it took
So far as Ed Wonder could figure out, this current Homespun Look fad had hit the world simultaneously. The data he could uncover bore that out to his satisfaction. Possibly no one else realized it, but Ed Wonder did.
It had hit Saturday night at eight thirty-five local time. From all he could piece together, from confused news reports, it had hit an hour earlier, one time zone west, and had come into effect four hours later, by the clock, in England, six hours in Common Europe. And so on. In short, it didn’t go by man-made rules of time. It had hit simultaneously.
Some of the commentators had tried to suggest otherwise, undoubtedly in good faith. No one, as yet, had actually stumbled upon the truth as Ed Wonder suspected it.
He had listened to one jovial newsman who made efforts to trace the Homespun Look back several months, claiming that it had long been aborning and had suddenly blossomed forth. The same analyst pontificated on the fad. It wouldn’t last. Couldn’t last. It was against woman’s basic human nature. It was one style that simply wouldn’t have long range appeal to the fair sex. He had chuckled and revealed that the Homespun Look had already been a boon to Madison Avenue. The Textile Association had quickly raised an initial hundred million to be devoted to nipping it in the bud with a gigantic TV, radio and Skyjector campaign. Cosmetic manufactures were also supposedly in closed session to meet the emergency.
What the commentators didn’t know, what nobody knew except Ed Wonder and Tubber himself, and the handful of Tubber’s faithful, was that there had been no time limit set on the curse. It was slated for eternity. Always assuming that Tubber’s curses, however it was that he managed them, continued their initial effectiveness.
He considered telling Mulligan about his suspicions, and decided not to. If he started sounding off about hexes laid on by itinerant religious quacks, he’d wind up convincing people he’d been on this Far Out Hour program too long.
He wandered over to Dolly’s desk. As the day before, she was in full style. By the looks of her, it must have been a dress she’d had as a teenage kid. Something in which to go out into the country, on a picnic. No lipstick, no eyebrow pencil, no powder. No earrings. No nothing.
Ed said to her, “How do you like this new Homespun Look fashion, Dolly?”
Most of the masculine elements of the staff had been working the girls over in regard to their new getup. Dolly had evidently expected Ed Wonder to head the list of tormentors, but there wasn’t that in his voice.
She said, “Well, gosh, Little Ed, it’s just like any other style. It comes in, pretty soon it’ll go out. I don’t especially either like it or dislike it.”
He said, his voice low, “Listen, have you tried putting on makeup at all these last couple of days?”
She frowned, puzzlement there. “Well… yes, a couple of times.”
“And?”
She hesitated, her pert nose wrinkled. “Well, darn it, I felt
Ed Wonder shook his head. He said, “Listen, Dolly, get me Buzz De Kemp, over on the
She bent on him the strange look he deserved and went about the chore. Ed Wonder went back to his own desk and took the call.
He said, “Hello, Buzzo. I didn’t know if you’d still be working there or not.”
The other’s voice said cheerily, “Not only here but basking in the warmth of a raise, Little Ed, old chum. It seems that some twitchy right wing outfit put in a beef to the editor about some of my articles. Wanted me fired. So Old Ulcers says the kind of pieces that’ll start enough controversy to have beefs coming in just might possibly pry a few dimwits off their TV sets long enough to read the paper. So I got a raise.”
Ed closed his eyes in sorrow at the workings of the world. “All right,” he said. “I’ve got to see you. How about the Old Coffee House in fifteen minutes? The coffee’s on me.”
“You talked me into it,” De Kemp said, his voice beaming. “It’s a date. And I think you’re beautiful, even with that queer mustache.”
Ed hung up and headed for the elevator.
He had hurried his way over, but by the time he arrived the newspaperman was already there. The Coffee Shop was practically empty. Ed suggested to Buzz that they retire to a booth.
They took places across from each other in a booth as far from the TV set and juke box as it was possible to
