Timothy Zahn - The Play's the Thing

Illustration by Alan M. Clark

The whole trouble started when the Fuzhtian ambassador announced that he wanted to see a Broadway play.

Though I suppose you could equally well say that the trouble started when those first silent Fuzhtian probes snuggled coyly up behind our geosynchronous TV satellites and began shipping the signals back home. You might even go back further and say that it all started when Marconi’s first radio went on-line and began spewing electromagnetic radiation out into space for everyone to hear.

Oh, well, hell, let’s be honest. All of it really started with whoever the bunch of trouble-making Sumerians were who sat around on a rainy Sunday afternoon and invented entertainment.

Because that’s really what started the trouble: our vast entertainment industry, and the Fuzhties’ maniacal love for it.

For a simple example—and this isn’t supposed to be noised about—when the Fuzhtian ship landed outside the White House, the “Greetings and Joy to Humankind” line that will be going into the history books were actually the ambassador’s second words to the President. His first words were an expression of disappointment from his government that Johnny Carson was no longer hosting the Tonight Show. For those of you who’d always wondered why Carson suddenly came out of retirement right after that to do a one-month stint as guest-host, now you know.

I suppose it could have been worse. No, strike that—it could have been a lot worse. You’ve heard all the similes: a walking barn door with gorilla arms, a four-hundred-pound bag of blubbery muscle with pinfeathers; a cross between a bull and Doberman on steroids. Even without the kind of technology we knew they had, the Fuzhties could have stomped the planet flat as Florida if they’d taken a mind to do so.

Which is why everyone had been falling all over themselves trying to satisfy the ambassador’s slightest whim. Partly it was residual fear that he might suddenly stop being congenial and start behaving the way any self-respecting B-movie creature his size ought to; but mainly it was because every national leader on the planet was visibly salivating over the prospect of getting their hands on Fuzhtian technology.

Anyway, at the time the ambassador made his Broadway request he’d been on Earth about six months, getting everything he wanted. And I mean everything. He had the top two floors of an exclusive Washington hotel, specially commissioned airplanes and cars, and three of the premier chefs in Europe. Along the way he’d also collected an astonishingly eclectic entourage, consisting of top US government officials, a smattering of foreign representatives whose countries had somehow caught his interest—we still don’t know how or why he picked the ones he did—and a few oddballs like me. I’d been up on a ladder doing some woodwork repair in the White House when the ambassador apparently expressed some sort of vague approval of me. The next thing I knew I’d been hauled down, poured into a suit and handed a briefcase, and tossed in among the smiling State Department wonks whose job it was to dog the ambassador’s size-28 footsteps.

Long afterward I learned that what had captured the ambassador’s attention was not me but rather the hammer I’d been using. But by then I’d overheard enough under-the-breath comments about my relative usefulness to the group that sheer native orneriness required me to keep quiet about the error.

Besides, the briefcase they’d handed me that first day had contained a presidential plea for my cooperation and about two bucketfuls of money, both of which I was far too patriotic to walk away from.

But for whatever reason, I was in that elite group. And I’d been with them for about five weeks when, from out of the blue, the ambassador made his request.

We still don’t know what prompted him to bring it up at that particular time. For that matter, we’re not even sure how he knew about Broadway, unless he’d picked up a reference from one of those pirate transmissions their probes had been making. But however it happened, there it was, plain as day, that morning on the RebuScope:

“Are you sure that’s what it means?” Dwight Fogerty, a senior State Department wonk and head of our little group, asked as he peered back and forth between the RebuScope and the tentative translation.

“I don’t see what else it could be, sir,” chief translator Angus MacLeod said. He’d been loaned to us by MI6 because he was both a whiz at cryptanalysis and a huge “Concentration” fan. Angus always called Fogerty “sir” because he was polite, not because Fogerty deserved it. “It’s clearly ‘eye w-ant two cee a br-rod-weigh’ something. What else but play?”

“Well, who says that scale thing is weigh’?’’ Fogerty countered. “Maybe it’s Broadscale’ something.”

“There’s no such word as Broadscale,” someone pointed out. “Or place, either.”

“There’s a Broad Sound, though,” someone else said, punching keys on a laptop. “It’s near Rockhampton in Australia, near the Great Barrier Reef. Maybe that’s a radio or stereo speaker, not a scale.”

“And what, that last picture is us and him throwing a beach ball back and forth?” Fogerty scoffed.

“Well, then, maybe it’s supposed to be ‘Broadsword,’” one of the other wonks said. “The damn RebuScope’s screwed up before. Maybe he wants to see some sword demos from one of those Medieval-nutcake groups.”

“It’s I want to see a Broadway play,’” Angus said firmly. “I’m sure of it.”

Fogerty muttered something vicious-sounding under his breath. Why the ambassador had chosen to use a gadget as ridiculously hard to understand as the RebuScope for his messages to us was a mystery, but most of us had gradually developed a sort of resigned acceptance for the procedure. Fogerty, who dealt widi the gadget more than anyone except Angus, roundly hated the thing, and seemed to be running systematically through his vast repertoire of multilingual curses in regards to it. “All right, fine,” he said. “We’ll take him to a Broadway play. Smith, get on the horn and find out who the hell we talk to about doing that.”

I cleared my throat. “You don’t need to call the White House, Mr. Fogerty,” I said. “I know some people on Broadway.”

“We’re not interested in pretzel vendors, thank you,” Fogerty said tardy, gesturing at Smith. “We need a producer or theater manager or—”

“I know all of them.”

Fogerty stopped, his gesturing hand still poised in midair, and turned his head to look at me. “You what?” he asked.

“I know all of them,” I repeated. “Up until a year ago I was working with one of the top set designers on Broadway.”

It was, and I’ll admit it, an immensely soul-satisfying moment. The whole bunch of them just stood there, professionals and wonks alike, staring at me like something that had just crawled out of the primordial ooze and asked whether the Metro Blue line stopped here. All except Angus, that is, who had a faint but very knowing smile on his face. Obviously, he was the only one of them who’d bothered to read the FBI’s rundown on me after I was booted aboard.

Fogerty recovered first, in typical Fogerty fashion. “Well, don’t just stand there, Lebowitz,” he said, waving Smith forward with his phone. “Let’s get to it.”