Earth Unaware

Fontaine evidently assumed that the other hadn’t understood him. He bellowed again, “Giving that atheistic subversive the opportunity to speak his piece on my radio station, you idiot! I tell you, Wonder, you’re fired!”

“I know it,” Ed grunted. “So is everybody else on radio and TV. Goodnight, everybody.”

Ed Wonder was awakened by the alarm’s voice saying, “You are wanted on the phone.”

He grumbled himself awake. He’d been dreaming of Ezekiel Joshua Tubber who was about to lay a curse on eating food. Ed Wonder and Nefertiti, who for some unknown reason had been attired in a bikini, had been frantically trying to dissuade the old man. Ed scratched his wisp of a mustache.

His elaborate TV-stereo-radio-phono-tape recorder-alarm said again, more loudly this time. “You are wanted on the telephone.”

He yawned. “Oh, yeah,” and switched it on. Mulligan’s face faded in.

Mulligan’s voice blatted, “Little Ed! Where’ve you been?”

He yawned again. “I haven’t been anywhere. Remember? I’m fired.”

“Well, now look, maybe we can do something about that. See here, Little Ed…”

Even as the other was talking, Ed Wonder switched on the TV screen. He winced when it lit up. He turned to another channel, and then another. The one-eighth of a second echo was still plaguing the radio waves. He killed it.

Mulligan was saying, “Mr. Fontaine was possibly a little hasty.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Ed told him.

“Well, at any rate, it looks like he’s been talking to his daughter and Miss Fontaine seems to have taken your part. They want to see you over at their place. See here, you know what’s been going on?”

“Yes,” Ed said.

Mulligan ignored him. “It’s sun spots, or something. There’s not a station on the air that’s giving any sort of reception at all.”

“Yeah,” Ed said. It occurred to him that neither Mulligan nor Fontaine had heard Tubber making with his curse. They’d been too busy yelling at Jerry in the control room to switch off the program.

“Well, look, Little Ed. Are you going over to see Mr. Fontaine?”

“No,” Ed said. He switched off the phone, then stared down at it. He just realized that he had performed a long-time ambition that he hadn’t realized he’d had. He’d hung up on Fatso.

He grunted. What neither Mulligan or Fontaine realized was that there was no point in worrying about regaining his job—not so long as there was no TV or radio.

When he’d finished shaving, showering and dressing, he decided that breakfast in his own auto-kitchen didn’t appeal’ to him and that he’d go down to the corner drugstore and dial himself some sausage and egg. He had some thinking to do, but he was in no hurry to start. He gave a last look at himself in the bathroom mirror. Thirty-three years. Ten years spent trying to break into the thinning ranks of show business. Nearly five working himself patiently up in TV and radio. Now at thirty-three, jobless. Oh, great. But somehow he didn’t feel as badly as he thought he ought to be feeling.

He turned to go and then looked back again and eyed his tiny mustache. A little wisp of mustache was to be seen on the faces of practically every aggressive young executive in the thirty to forty year age bracket. It was currently the thing.

Ed Wonder took up his jar of NoSbav and rubbed a smear of it across the sprig of hair. He took up a towel, and wiped the hair away. He looked back into the mirror and nodded satisfaction.

There was quite a crowd in the drug store, but Ed Wonder managed to find a seat at the fountain. Most of them were gathered around the magazine rack.

He knew the manager of the place and saw him standing nearby. “What’s going on?” Ed said.

The other said, “Never had such a turnover of comic books since I’ve been in the business. Practically sold out already, and it’s not even noon. Having more rushed in.”

“Comic books?”

“Uh huh. Something’s wrong with TV and even radio. One of the papers says it’s Soviet Complex sabotage. Some kind of scientific thing they got over in Siberia. Anyway, until they get it fixed nobody can watch TV. It’ll probably drive my wife and kids kooky, but while it still lasts I’m sure selling comic books.”

Ed said emptily, “They’re not going to get fixed. It’s going to stay this way.”

The manager looked at him. “Don’t be a twitch, Little Ed. You got to have TV.”

Ed didn’t want to argue. He gave one more look at the empty-faced adults packed around the comic book stands, then turned and dialed his meal and coffee. He kept his mind as clear as he could of the subject that was wriggling to get through. When he started thinking about it, he was afraid it was going to hurt.

However, when he had finished, he went back to the garages beneath his apartment building and got the Volkshover. He was probably looking for trouble, sheer trouble. But he drove over to Houston Street and the lot where Tubber and his daughter had had their tents pitched. The girl had said that the old man didn’t remember what he said in wrath, and evidently it was when he was in wrath that his curses came off. The thing to do was to deal with him in such manner as not to let him get stirred up. Maybe there was some way to reverse this whole thing. If he could pull it off, then would be the time to see about getting his job back.

The lot where the tents had been was empty.

Ed looked at it blankly. He might have remembered. They had been packing up to leave when he and Buzzo had braced Tubber about appearing on the program.

He thought about it for a minute. Finally he brought the Volkshover back into the air and headed for the Times-Tribune building. It was a bit past noon, but Buzzo’s hours were on the erratic side to say the least. There was as much chance to find him in during the lunch hour as any other time.

There seemed to be an unusual number of persons in the streets, most of them aimlessly milling around. There were long lines before the movie theatres.

By luck, Buzz De Kemp was at his desk in the city room. He looked up at Ed’s approach. Ed found a chair, reversed it, so that the back pressed against his jacket front when he straddled it. They looked at each other.

Ed said finally, “Did you run the story?”

Buzz shrugged and fished a stogie from a box out of a desk drawer. “I wrote it up. It’s on the eighth page of the morning edition. Somebody on rewrite thought it’d make a cute little gag piece, so he did a revision.” His voice turned wry. “Improved it considerably. More jollies.”

“So nobody believed you, eh?”

“Of course not. I gave up. Look at it the city editor’s way. Would you believe it?”

“No,” Ed said. “No, I wouldn’t believe it.”

They looked at each other for a time again.

Finally Ed cleared his throat and said, “I was just over at the lot where Tubber was holding his talks.”

“And…?”

“He’s gone. No sign of them left. I thought I might talk it over with him and his daughter. She seems to be lucid enough.”

Buzz thought about that. “Let’s go into the morgue,” he said finally, getting to his feet.

Ed Wonder followed him from the city room, down a corridor into another room presided over by an ancient who was unhurriedly clipping what was evidently a pile of yesterday’s edition of the Times- Tribune with an enormous pair of shears. He grunted something at Buzz who grunted something in return and hence they ignored each other.

Buzz De Kemp muttered, “Tubber,” and drew forth a deep file of folders. He fingered through them. “Tubber, Tubber, Ezekiel Joshua. Here it is.”

He brought forth a manila folder and led the way to a heavy table, sat down and opened it. There were three very short clippings, their dates penciled in on the top of each. Buzz scanned them quickly, handed each in turn to Ed Wonder.

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