Mack Reynolds - Earth Unaware

Helen was garbed in a simple cotton print. Her shoes were low of heel. Her hair, in braids. Her face looked as though it had been thoroughly scrubbed not five minutes earlier.

Buzz De Kemp moved his stogie from the left side of his mouth to the right, thoughtfully. He said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of in that old boy. He’s a kindly old coot, as innocent as—”

“A stick of dynamite,” Helen put in bitterly. “Give me another beer, Little Ed.”

Ed said, “I’ve never seen you drink beer before.”

She grunted. “Neither have I, but I’m beginning to suspect that anti-vanity curse of Tubber’s covers ostentatious drinks. Nothing tastes good to me anymore except beer and dago red wine.”

Buzz said, “Now look, you don’t really believe Tubber put a hex on you?”

“Yes. And I have no intention of getting near enough to him for him to dream up another one, sharpy.”

Buzz said, “Okay. Grant for argument that he did, really, truly put a spell on you. If he can put it on, he can take it off, can’t he?”

She frowned at him, over the rim of her beer glass. “I… I don’t know. I suppose so.”

“Why, sure,” Ed put in helpfully.

Buzz said, “So fine. You’ll admit he’s a sweet old duffer until you get him roused up. I’ve never seen him roused up but I’ll take the word of you two that you heckled him into a temper the other night. But basically he’s a sweet old man. So fine. Come on the air with us and apologize to him and ask him to reverse the spell.”

She thought about that, pulling on her beer.

“You know,” she said finally. “This’ll pop like corn, but I don’t particularly object to this built-in allergy I’ve got to cosmetics and fancy dress. I think I feel more, well, comfortable than I have since I was a child.”

Buzz bore in. “Sure, fine. But how about all the other women in the world? Billions of them. Billions. You’re young and pretty. Any style looks good on you. Even the Homespun Look. But how about all the women who don’t start off with your advantages? All the rest of them are under this hex you brought on too.”

Ed looked at him. “I thought you didn’t believe in it?”

Buzz said, “Shut up. This is just for the sake of argument.” He said to Helen, “Besides, it’s Little Ed’s big chance. A real blockbuster of a show. It’ll get as much publicity as Orson Welles’ expeditionary force from Mars back in the 1930s. But you’re necessary. You’re the big witness. You’re the one he cursed, but in miswording it, he took in all other women as well. Little Ed needs you on the program.”

Helen said decisively, “All right, I’ll do it. I should have my skull candled, but I’ll do it. However, I’ll tell you right now, sharpy, my women’s intuition tells me a wheel is going to come off this go-cart.”

Buzz took his stogie from his mouth and looked at the unlit tip. “Women’s intuition,” he said flatly. “First we get hexes and spells and now we get women’s intuition. Next week I’ll meet somebody who believes in fairies.”

From the first, the program didn’t come off exactly the way Ed Wonder and Buzz De Kemp pictured it. In fact, it didn’t come off remotely in the manner they had pictured it.

Up until Jerry, in the control booth, signaled that the mike was hot, everything was routine. Ed Wonder had set up Studio Three for five persons, himself and four guests. There was a mike for each of them. A pad and a pencil for each, so that anyone could make notes, or doodle, or whatever. Tubber and his daughter Nefertiti had arrived a full hour before broadcast time. Helen and Buzz De Kemp came together, a half an hour later, Buzz having picked up Helen at her house, afraid that she might renege at the last moment.

Ten minutes before going on, Jerry, the engineer, had taken a level on their voices. Then they had waited. When the red light had lit, signifying that the studio was hot, Ed launched into his routine. Since his program was live and off the cuff, rather than being taped, it could be variable. Sometimes one of his guests, and the panelists he had to help question them, would take up the full horn, effortlessly. Sometimes, however, he’d get a kook who just didn’t come off and Ed would have to wind up the interview and play music and chatter for the rest of the time.

Tonight, he had a satisfied belief he wasn’t going to have to play music.

He said into the mike, after the routine of station identification and the naming of the program, “Folks, tonight we’ve got something different. Of course, every Friday night I try to bring you something, somebody, different. We’ve had everything from a man who talked to horses to a woman that flew. Now, of course, to some this might not seem very far out, but on this program things are special. Not only did our guest talk to horses like any jockey or cowboy might do, but he got replies since he was speaking horse language. Our woman who flew didn’t bother to have an airplane around her. She flew all by her lonesome. Levitation, she called it.”

From the side of his eyes, Ed Wonder could see that his guest of the evening Ezekiel Joshua Tubber, wasn’t taking this any too well. His daughter, sitting next to him, was showing signs of acute apprehension.

Ed hurried on. “But tonight, folks, we’ve got somebody here who’ll really set you back. A religious prophet, crisscross my heart and point to heaven, who can cast hexes wholesale. And what’s more, we’re going to prove it. Because folks, we have here in the studio the man responsible for the Homespun Look, that supposed fad which has swept the globe in the past week. It’s not a fad, folks, not a fad at all. It’s a real, true hex which our guest of the evening, Ezekiel Joshua Tubber, has cast on all womankind. Also with us tonight is Nefertiti Tubber, daughter of our guest-in-chief; Helen Fontaine, well known Kingsburg socialite; and Buzz De Kemp, whose byline in the Times-Tribune you’ve all come to know. Mr. Kemp, who simply doesn’t believe in spells, folks, will help question evangelist Ezekiel Joshua Tubber.

“Now then, first of all, Mr. Tubber, with a name like yours I assume in your revival meetings you carry on a long tradition of good Christian family.”

The Lincolnesque face had been losing some of its gentle sadness as Ed progressed. Now Tubber said tightly, “Then you make an incorrect assumption, Edward. First, the meetings I have been addressing are not revivals. It is my teaching that Christianity, along with Judaism, Mohammedism, and indeed all other present day organized religions, is a dead, profitless religion and I have no intention of reviving the corpse.”

“Oh,” Ed said blankly. “Ah, evidently I gained a wrong impression, folks. Then, just what were you, ah, preaching at your tent meetings over on Houston Street, Mr. Tubber?”

“A new religion, Edward. One fitted to our times.” His voice had taken on inspiration.

Buzz De Kemp said wryly, “The human race needs another religion like it needs an extra collective aperture in the head. We’ve got so many religions now, we can’t sort them out.”

Tubber turned on him quickly. “To the contrary. But very little knowledge of religion shows that a major one has not come upon the scene for nearly fifteen hundred years. And what was that? Mohammedism, a religion, like Judaism and Christianity, born in the desert to express the religious needs of semibarbaric nomads. The great religions of the East, such as the Hindu and the Buddhist, are even older. I tell you, dear ones, that in their day perhaps these beliefs of our ancestors were positive in their effects. But the world has changed. Man has changed. There is need today for a new religion, one that fits out modern condition. One that will point out the way to a more full life, not simply parrot the words of men of past centuries who knew not the problems that would confront our generation. The proof that these hoary religions of the past are no longer valid is to be seen in the direction of our people. We play lip service to our churches, temples, synagogues and mosques but the lives we lead are without ethic.”