Martin Greenberg - The Future We Wish We Had

His heart leapt to his throat.

She pointed toward the ceiling. “ Tweed is there .”

He swallowed it again.

She folded her arms over her chest. “Why is that?”

“He’s not clueless,” Roger mumbled, and stabbed at the mute button on Tweed ’s desktop. It made him uncomfortable whenever Doreen mocked his boss, even if he agreed with every brickbat she hurled at Tweed. Tweed may have been an inconsiderate ass-hole, but he was doing the most important work a man could do, bringing civilization to the great unwashed of Florida and Ohio and Montana.

“He just doesn’t always think things through,” said Roger at last.

“Are you stealing his stuff again?” She stopped to pick up one of the readettes and glanced at it. “Oh, you better leave The Cat in the Hat Comes Back if you know what’s good for you.” She tossed it carelessly onto the File-O-Matic and lowered her voice into an uncanny imitation of Tweed. “A classic bildungsroman in the tradition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn .”

“Don’t, Doreen,” he said uncomfortably. “I shouldn’t be listening to this.”

“Then come out with me tonight,” she said. “I have something I want you to see.”

“It’s tomorrow morning, actually.” He checked the clock that hung over the doorway. “Twelve fifty-eight.” He gathered the rest of the fallen readettes. “I need to get back to the studio before they sign off.”

“But after you finish helping Tweed pat himself on the back, your time is your own, right?”

“What is it that you want from me, Doreen?”

She sat down in Tweed ’s chair, kicked off her shoes, and put her feet up on his desk. “I was hoping for your immortal soul, but I’d settle for a slice of innocence.”

Roger concentrated fiercely on her stockinged toes, afraid that his gaze might slide up her calves and perhaps stray past her knees. “What would you do with it?”

“I’ll think of something,” she replied with a leer.

“Put your shoes on, Doreen. This is an office, not your living room.”

“You know what your problem is, Bookboy? You’re too serious.” She slipped one shoe on, then the other. “But maybe that’s why I bother with you.”

“And why do I bother with you?”

She scribbled something on a sheet of Tweed ’s note-paper, folded it, and tucked it into Roger’s shirt pocket. The touch of her fingertips through the thin material made his neck muscles go tight. “Meet me at the Pneum-A-Pod on forty-eight,” she said, as she walked past him. “Twenty minutes.” She paused at the door. “Bring your sense of humor. You do have one, don’t you?”

“Of course I have one,” he said heatedly.

“I was starting to wonder. Dust it off once in a while.”

“We’re in a deadly serious business, uplifting the public.”

“Deadly, right.” She waved over her shoulder on her way out.

He waited almost a minute before he opened the note.

You don’t have a choice, it read.

Roger and Doreen lay side by side in the Pneum-A-Pod as it hurtled on a cushion of air through the Eighth Avenue tunnel. Through the clear walls of the tunnel, Roger might have seen the lights of the city rushing beneath them, if he hadn’t been staring into Doreen’s eyes.

“What I believe is that ratings reflect our mission,” he was saying. “According to the May sweeps, the UN has more viewers than Fox and CBS combined. And if the World Chess Championship hadn’t gone to fourteen games, A &E wouldn’t even have come close to us.”

“The only reason so many people watch us is that there isn’t anything on TV that’s more fun,” Doreen responded. “Uncle Ralph makes sure of that.”

“Uncle Ralph? Are you talking about Ralph Nader?”

“Right-the Secretary of Television,” she confirmed. “The man who knows what’s good for you-or else.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that the Pan Am Broadway Showcase isn’t fun? Don’t we run Shakespeare and Aristophanes every week? Didn’t we just have a Moliére Festival?”

She made a lemon face. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

She had never quoted Shakespeare to him before. Roger tried not to let her see that he was impressed. “But where are we going?”

“You’ve been cooped up in the Tower for too long, Bookboy,” she said with a smile he didn’t quite understand. “Wake up and smell the gutter.”

“I’ve never been in this part of town before.” Roger glanced uneasily at the garish lights that blinked and throbbed around dim doorways and dark windows. “Where are we going?”

“What difference does it make?” asked Doreen. “You’re out on the town with a sexy girl on your arm. Stop thinking and enjoy.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Why not?” she said. “This is the real world, Bookboy. You know,” she added confidentially, “‘even Harvard professors leave the ivy-covered halls and blow off a little steam from time to time.”

“It’s the buildings that are ivy-covered, not the halls,” he corrected her.

“Roger, come down off the sixty-fourth floor. The air is too thin up there for life.”

“Why do you keep belittling our work?” he asked, “Television is the greatest invention of the century, maybe the greatest since the invention of fire.”

“You never heard of penicillin, I take it,” she said sardonically. “Or Botox.”

“Antibiotics are certainly wonderful breakthroughs, but they save sick people. Television saves everyone . Surely you’ve seen movies from the pre-television era: Abbott and Costello talking nonsense about who was on first base, private detectives walking into a hail of bullets and never getting hurt, Hoot Gibson and James Cagney being held up as examples of American manhood.”

“There were good movies too, you know,” said Doreen.

“But nobody watched them, so they stopped making them. Nobody wanted to know that Frankenstein’s monster spoke perfect English and had a soul; they just wanted to be scared into mindlessness. Or James Bond. Here’s a secret agent, a covert agent, and he can walk into any bar in the world and someone is sure to say ‘Shaken, not stirred’-and no one objects or guffaws. Movies dumb the public down; it’s up to television to pull people back up.” Roger could feel his adrenaline flowing as he warmed to his subject. “Same thing with popular literature. Before people like Tweed came along, junk like sci-fi and thrillers and romance dominated the bestseller lists. Now thoughtful essays and avant-garde poetry get the readerships they deserve.”

“Just because books are bought doesn’t mean they’re read,” said Doreen. “I think Stephen Hawking proved that years ago.” She paused in front of a double door painted a lascivious shade of red. The humming neon sign above it read All Night Long Lounge . “What if people just want to escape?”

“From what?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“From the culture Tweed and acolytes like you are forcing on them.”

“Ridiculous!” he snapped.

“Speaking of ridiculous, we’re here.” She gestured at the door. “I want you to see this show.”

“What is it?”

“Something very funny.”

“Well, the network can always use more humorists. Mort Sahl is getting a little long in the tooth, and Lord Buckley and Severn Darden both died a few years ago.”

“Well, Woody Allen did apply for a job with us. So did Nichols and May.”

He sniffed contemptuously. “Too lowbrow.”

“But people understand them,” she said. “How many people do you think understood Lord Buckley, or Ken Nordeen’s Word Jazz ?”