Mack Reynolds - Earth Unaware

Ed called, “Hey, Buddy, could you tell me where, ah, the Reverend Tubber has his tent set up?”

“Never heard of him,” Buddy said.

“How about you, Mac?” Ed said.

Mac screwed up his face. “You know, I did see something in the paper about some revival tent meeting or something. Hey, you know what? That’s something we could do. We could take in this here new revival.”

“Geez,” Buddy said, as though in hope. “You know what? I think I’ll get on home and round up the old lady and the kids and get over there before all the seats is taken.”

Ed said patiently, “Could you tell me where they’re set up?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mac said, evidently caught up with Buddy’s idea, and ready to take off himself. “Down there about three blocks, then turn right and keep going until you wind up at the park. You can’t miss it.” He said that final ritual over his shoulder as he hurried off.

Ed drove three down and then to the left and eventually came to the park. Buddy and Mac were going to be disappointed. There was already a long line standing before the Tubber tent. It was still early afternoon, but the line was there.

“Standing room only,” Ed muttered, hitting the drop lever. He wondered if Tubber was having a matinee. He parked and strode over to the entrance.

“Get in line, Jack. Take your turn,” somebody growled at him. Faces took him in antagonistically.

Ed said, hurriedly, “I’m not here to listen to the, ah, sermon. I…”

“Sure, sure, we know, sharpy. Just get in line, is all. I been standing here two hours. You try to sneak ahead of me and you get a bust in the puss, unnerstan?”

Ed felt his usual stomach tighening at the threat of physical violence and took a double step backward. He looked disconcerted at the three or four of the Tubber followers who were doing their harried best to keep order.

“The Speaker of the Word will be heard by all,” one was saying, over and over again. “He is shortening his talks to half an hour so that everyone may have a chance to listen, in relays. Please be patient. The Speaker of the Word will be heard by all.”

One of those in line grumbled, “Half an hour. You mean I been standing here all this time just for half an hour’s show?”

Ed Wonder said, “It’s not exactly a show, pal.” He walked away from the line. Trying to get in the front entrance would have taken hours. Besides, it was no manner in which to consult Tubber. He was going to have to confront the prophet, if that was what you’d call him, face to face. He was liking the prospect less by the minute.

He walked around to the rear of the large tent and found that, as before, there was a smaller tent pitched behind it. Ed Wonder hesitated. He drifted around behind the canvas habitation. There was an old-fashioned farm wagon there and a horse quietly grazing.

He took a breath consciously, and returned to the entrance. How do you knock on the door of a tent?

He cleared his throat and called out, “Anybody home?”

He could hear a stirring inside and then the flap separated and Nefertiti Tubber was there.

She looked at him and flushed. “Good afternoon, dear one,” she said. Then, in a gush, “Oh, Ed, I’m sorry about the other night. I—I should have known better than to let father…”

“Sorry,” he said bitterly. “So’s the whole world. Listen, do you know what’s happened?” She nodded dumbly. “I’ll tell you what’s happened,” he began.

She looked quickly around them, then held back the tent flap. “Please come in, Ed.”

He followed her. The rent was surprisingly large and laid out comfortably into three rooms, two of which had flapped entries of their own. The equivalent of bedrooms, Ed decided. The larger space was a combination kitchen, living and dining room, and even went to the extent of a rug being on the ground. A rag rug, homemade, of the type that Ed Wonder hadn’t seen since early childhood.

There were folding chairs about the table and Nefertiti hesitantly gestured to one of them. Ed sat down and looked at her. The fact that Ezekiel Joshua Tubber himself wasn’t present gave him courage.

He said accusingly, “Every TV and radio station in the world is on the blink.”

She nodded. “I just found out an hour or so ago. I went into town for some supplies from a follower of the path who resides not in Elysium.”

Ed let that part of her statement that sounded like straight kookery go by and stuck to the first sentence. “Did you see all those people in the streets?”

She nodded dumbly.

“How long’s this been going on?”

She knew what he meant all right, all right.

“You mean… the power? The power to breathe the word?”

Ed Wonder closed his eyes in weary pain. “Let’s drop the twitchy language for the moment. What is it your father does ?”

She looked at him as’ though nothing could be more obvious. “He exercises the power and utters the word. But usually, of course, only when he is in wrath. You and your friend, Buzz De Kemp, brought him to wrath. Just as Helen Fontaine did, before.”

“It’s as simple as that, eh?” Ed said sarcastically.

“Don’t be angry, dear one.” She frowned, in puzzlement. “It has never been so sweeping, before.” Her face cleared. “Perhaps, he has never been so provoked in the past.”

“But look, how can he do these things?”

“But he’s the Speaker of the Word, the guru of the Path to Elysium, and the beloved of the All-Mother.”

“Oh, great,” Ed muttered, in suffering. “Ask a silly question and get a silly answer.”

Involuntarily, he put out a hand and rested it on her arm. “Now look, Nefertiti, this is important…”

Her eyes narrowed slightly and her mouth seemed to go sweetly slack. He jerked his hand back.

“Pardon me!”

Her voice was throaty, “It was all right.”

He cleared his own throat. He wondered how old Nefertiti Tubber was. It came to him that the girl had possibly never had a man touch her before. Not a man of her own age group.

“Look,” he said again. “I keep getting the impression every time I get talking with you people that I came into the conversation half a dozen sentences late. Now just what is it that your old man… that is, your father, wants to accomplish? What’s this stuff about the Communists being too mild for him. Not radical enough?”

A voice behind him said, “Ah, we have a visitor.”

Ed winced, expecting a thunderbolt between the shoulders. He turned.

The man who stood there, his face in the ultimate of understanding and sadness, looked about as dangerous as a Michelangelo depiction of the Virgin nursing the Child.

Ed Wonder, nevertheless, scrambled to his feet. “Ah, good afternoon, sir… Ooop, pardon me, not sir, ah, Ezekiel, ah, dear one.”

“Good afternoon, Edward.” The grey-bearded prophet beamed at him. “You seek further enlightment on the path to Elysium?” The older man sank with a sigh into one of the folding chairs. Evidently he bore no grudges whatsoever about the hassle of the other night.

Nefertiti had come to her feet too. Now she brought her father a glass of water which she had dipped out of a bucket. She walked, Ed Wonder noted, in spite of himself, as Malay women he’d seen on travelogue shows walked; head and shoulders proudly erect, the hips swaying gently.

“Well, ah, yes,” Ed said hurriedly. “Fascinating subject. The way I get it, you’re heading for a sort of Utopia. A…”

Ezekiel Joshua Tubber frowned. “Dear one, you have failed to understand the word. We seek not Utopia. Utopia is supposedly the perfect society and anything perfect has automatically ceased growing, hence the conception of Utopia is conservative if not reactionary. That is the mistake of many, including the so-called Communists. They think that once their promised land has been achieved, all progress will stop, that the millennium will have been reached. Nonsense! The All-Mother knows no stopping. The path to Elysium is forever!”