Jazzbow snaked one long, limber arm out of the water and fiddled with the control knobs beneath the inverted triangle of the interociter’s screen. JFK came on the screen in full color, in the middle of his speech to the joint session of Congress:
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. I believe we should go to the moon.”
Jazzbow sank down in his water tank until only his big eyes showed, and he started noisily blowing bubbles, his way of showing that he was upset.
Schmidt turned to me. “You’re going to have to talk him out of it,” he said flatly.
I had not voted for John Kennedy. I had instructed all of my employees to vote against him, although I imagine some of them disobeyed me out of some twisted sense of independence. Now that he was president, though, I felt sorry for the kid. Eisenhower had let things slide pretty badly. The Commies were infiltrating the Middle East and, of course, they had put up the first artificial satellite and just a couple weeks ago had put the first man into space.
Yuri something-or-other. Meanwhile, young Jack Kennedy had let that wacky plan for the reconquest of Cuba go through. I had told the CIA guys that they’d need strong air cover, but they went right ahead and hit the Bay of Pigs without even a Piper Cub over them. Fiasco.
So the new president was trying to get everybody’s mind off all this crap by shooting for the moon. Which would absolutely destroy everything we’d worked so hard to achieve since that first desperate Martian flight here some fifteen years earlier.
I knew that somebody had to talk the president out of this moon business. And of all the handful of people who were in on the Martian secret, I guess that the only one who could really deal with the White House on an eye-to-eye level was me.
“Okay,” I said to Schmidt. “But he’s going to have to come out here. I’m not going to Washington.”
It wasn’t that easy. The president of the United States doesn’t come traipsing across the country to see an industrial magnate, no matter how many services the magnate has performed for his country. And my biggest service, of course, he didn’t know anything about.
To make matters worse, while my people were talking to his people, I found out that the girl I was grooming for stardom turned out to be a snoop from the goddamned Internal Revenue Service. I had had my share of run-ins with the feds, but using a beautiful starlet like Jean was a low blow, even for them. A real crotch shot.
It was Jazzbow who found her out, of course. Jean and I had been getting along very nicely indeed. She was tall and dark-haired and really lovely, with a sweet disposition and the kind of wide-eyed innocence that makes life worthwhile for a nasty old SOB like me. And she loved it, couldn’t get enough of whatever I wanted to give her. One of my hobbies was making movies; it was a great way to meet girls. Believe it or not, I’m really very shy. I’m more at home alone in a plane at twenty thousand feet than at some Hollywood cocktail party. But if you own a studio, the girls come flocking.
Okay, so Jean and I are getting along swell. Except that during the period when my staff was dickering with the White House staff, one morning I wake up and she’s sitting at the writing desk in my bedroom, going through my drawers. The desk drawers, that is.
I cracked one eye open. There she is, naked as a Greek goddess and even more gorgeous, rummaging through the papers in my drawers. There’s nothing in there, of course. I keep all my business papers in a germ tight, fireproof safe back at the office.
But she had found something that fascinated her. She was holding it in front of her, where I couldn’t see what was in her hand, her head bent over it for what seemed like ten minutes, her dark hair cascading to her bare shoulders like a river of polished onyx.
Then she glanced up at the mirror and spotted me watching her.
“Do you always search your boyfriends’ desks?” I asked. I was pretty pissed off, you know.
“What is this?” She turned, and I saw she was holding one of my safari photos between her forefinger and thumb, like she didn’t want to get fingerprints on it.
Damn! I thought. I should’ve stashed those away with my stag movies.
Jean got up and walked over to the bed. Nice as pie, she sat on the edge and stuck the photo in front of my bleary eyes.
“What is this?” she asked again.
It was a photo of a Martian named Crunchy, the physicist George Gamow, the kid actor James Dean, and me in the dripping dark jungle in front of a brontosaurus I had shot. The Venusian version of a brontosaurus, that is. It looked like a small mountain of mottled leather. I was holding the stun rifle Crunchy had lent me for the safari.
I thought fast. “Oh, this. It’s a still from a sci-fi film we started a few years ago. Never finished it, though. The special effects cost too much.”
“That’s James Dean, isn’t it?”
I peered at the photo as if I was trying to remember something that wasn’t terribly important. “Yeah, I think so. The kid wanted more money than I wanted to spend on the project. That’s what killed it.”
“He’s been dead for five or six years.”
“Has it been that long?” James Dean was alive and having the time of life working with the Martians
