Timothy Zahn: The Play's the Thing

For Fogerty and the tech boys in the entourage, though, this tour was hog heaven. Every little gadget that fell into their hands, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant by Fuzhtian standards, had them salivating for hours as they carefully took it apart to see if they could figure out how it worked. In those three months they must have filled forty notebooks and at least that many multi-gigabyte CD-ROMs. Fogerty looked simultaneously more harried and more excited than I’d ever seen him, continually speculating about what we’d learn when we were able to get a look at their really interesting stuff. Unbelievable as it would have seemed to me when I first joined the group, the man was actually becoming a pleasure to be with.

And he was like that right up until the other shoe finally dropped.

I knew something was wrong the instant Angus sat down at my breakfast table and I got a look at his face. “What is it?” I asked, my courf melon cubes suddenly forgotten. “What’s wrong?”

“Have you seen Mr. Fogerty?” he asked, his voice under rigid control.

“I don’t think he’s up yet—he and the tech boys were working late on that aroma-making gadget,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

Angus turned his head to gaze out the window at the Fuzhtian city stretching out beneath our hotel. “We were wrong, Mr. Lebowitz,” he said quietly. “Our Broadway star here wasn’t an ambassador at all. Not really. He was—” He waved a hand helplessly. “He was a penguin.”

I set down my fork. “A penguin?” I asked carefully.

“Oh, not a real penguin, of course,” he said. “That’s just the image that jumped to mind.” He sighed and looked back at me. “You’ve seen the nature specials. Seen all those penguins gathering at the edge of an ice floe in their little black and white tuxedos, flapping their flippers, all set to start hunting for breakfast. Do you remember why they don’t all just jump in and get on with it?”

I glanced down at my own breakfast. “I must have missed that episode.”

“It’s because they’re not the only ones on the hunt.” Angus picked up my fork and began absently stirring the courf cubes in my dish. “There may be killer whales or other predators lurking under the surface, you see. So you know what the penguins do?”

“Tell me.”

He stirred the cubes a little more vigorously. “They all keep jostling together on the edge until one of them gets jostled enough to fall into the water.” He flicked the fork, and one of my cubes flipped up over the edge of the dish and landed on the table. “If nothing eats him,” he said, gazing down at the cube, “the rest know it’s safe to start going about the day’s business.”

I gazed at the piece of melon, watching the juice ooze onto the table. “All right,” I said slowly. “So the ambassador was pushed into the water But I’d have thought that we’ve treated him pretty well. Certainly no one’s tried to eat him.”

Angus snorted. “Oh, we treated him well, all right. We treated him too damn well. He’s done it, he’s lived through it… and now they all want to do it, too.”

“Do what?” I asked, frowning. “Come to Earth?”

He looked up at me with a haunted expression. “No,” he said. “Star in a Broadway play.”

I felt my jaw fall open. “ All of them?”

He nodded. “ All of them.”

We’re on the last leg of the ambassador’s tour now—two more planets, fifteen more shows, and then our ship will be heading back to Earth. Our ship, and two hundred more following right behind us. Packed to the gills with eager, star-struck Fuzhties.

I don’t know what the White House and UN officials said to Fogerty when he broke the news to them. I know that when he came out of the ambassador’s communication room he had the grim look of a man who’s just watched his career crash in ruins, in glorious full-color slow motion.

Still, we may yet be able to pull this off. Assuming the officials accepted our suggestions, there should be hordes of workmen at this very moment scurrying around the Gobi, the Sahara, the Australian Outback, and a dozen other of the remotest places on Earth. Building a hundred exact movie-lot-style replicas of Broadway for the Fuzhties to perform on. With luck, they’ll all be ready by the time we get back. If not, the real Broadway will never be the same again.

They say the Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity. They had better be right.