Damon Knight - Orbit 14

The regular season began.

“Now we’ll see what this early-blooming crocus can really do,” a few of the unsold critics muttered.

Young Cy Slocum, pitching every third day, won his first thirteen games without a loss. There would be no limits at all to such a career as was opening up before him.

“How old are you anyhow, Cy?” a reporter asked him one day.

“Eighty-one,” Cy said promptly. Then he corrected himself. “No, no, I mean eighteen. I have a speech affliction: I sometimes get my numbers transposed.”

Flambeau La Flesche the zoom-zoom girl had zoomed to the top of everything with electronic swiftness. She was on live; she was on 2D, 3D, and 4D (you have to be smarter than hell even to know how to watch 4D; only Mensa members are allowed to apply for tickets) ; she was on Voxo; she was in five simultaneous musical comedies; she was on Vodvil and Sound in the Round; she was in the Old Time Electric Theatre; and she was big in Metranome. Already she looked like a shoo-in to take the Nobel Prize in the Centerfold Division. Few were the media in which she had not quickly become outstanding.

But had there not been a Flambeau La Flesche a long time ago? Had that other young girl not been identical to this both in name and appearance? Yes, even in voice.

“I suspect that I’m the same kid, only refleshed,” Flambeau told an interviewer. “I’m reincarnated, that’s what I am, and you have to have the right kind of flesh to do that. That’s what it means. I’m very carnal. That’s why I reincarnate so easy.”

Really, what else can you say of Flambeau? She did have the flesh, she did have a spirit as torchy as her name. She did have all the forms and resonances. She was everything, just as her preincarnation had been everything so many years before.

And she found, as had the previous she, that there were only twenty-four or twenty-six hours in the day; she could never remember which, but there weren’t enough. Then she had a hot idea to save everyone money and to save herself drudgery and time.

“You, moguls, why don’t you just dig out the old movies that I made in my previous life,” she said. “I haven’t changed any since then. When you have class you don’t have to change. Just get them out and fill in the scratches and cracks and run them again. Nobody can know that it isn’t me, because it will be me.”

They did it. It worked. They ran all those old ones and they were explosive hits.

Oh, the names of those two-timing great movies are like music: Louisiana Haystack, Popsie, The Cremation of Betty Lou, Zephyr Jones, The Day the Lilac Bush Burned Down, Nine Dollar Dog, Three Fish Out, Little Audrey, Crabgrass Street, Slippery Elm, Spider Spider Down Inside Her, Lady Bug Bongo, Accolade, and Accolade Revisited. (This last had been titled Son of Accolade the first time around.)

What drama, what comedy, what music, what memories!

But Flambeau wasn’t quite so happy with it that second time around. “I knew that the competition nowadays was nothing,” she said once, “but, after all, what is there to compete for? The Accolades aren’t what they used to be. And Accolade Revisited has an emptiness and irony that wasn’t, at first, intended. The thing about us excelling types is that when we ascend to great heights it is the same as if we stood still and the world went downhill. We must have excelled too much; the world sure has gone down.”

“Miss Flambeau,” another interviewer asked her, “we know that you are an old-car fancier, but many of the big-time restorers are puzzled and jealous about the restoration job you’ve had done on that old Dusenberg. It’s almost as if it were new. What’s the secret?”

“It is new,” Flambeau said. “The secret is to buy a dollar jug. A fifty-cent jug is all right for people, but it just isn’t enough for a snazzy speedster like that.”

But the interviewer didn’t seem to understand.

“Why don’t we produce The World Under Louisiana Haystack again?” she asked her producer. “That was a movie a girl could really put herself into.”

“But, Flambeau, The World Under Louisiana Haystack was never finished,” the producer said. “There were difficulties with it.”

“Let’s finish it then,” she said. “The difficulties are the best part.” They set about the task of finishing it. There were real difficulties. The resolution of these difficulties might take all things to the end of this account, or to the end of the world, whichever came first.

“This is a job that calls for another jug,” Flambeau said. “It may even call for a dollar jug this time.”

Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson (great-nephew of Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson) had won the first of the Presidential primaries, that of Massachusetts and Connecticut Plantations. So he was off and running ahead.

He took Florida State Conglomerate. That was expected. He took Los Angeles State, and that had not been expected. It was a big one.

Johnson was speaking well, often nine times a day. It was the Golden Guff itself, and no one could do it like young Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson. In this, he reminded old-timers and historians of his own great-uncle Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson. That Ex-President, by the bye, was unavailable for comment or for appearance.

But the young Johnson campaigned energetically and wantonly, if not always well. He wore a serape and grass sandals when he campaigned in Chicano districts, though the Chicanos did not wear these things and many had never seen them before. He was decked out in Navajo beadwork and a Sioux war bonnet when he spoke at a supermarket in Indianapolis. Indianapolis really meant Indian City, didn’t it? Johnson went equipped with skullcap and nine phrases of Yiddish into the affluent Jewish suburbs. He wore a miter and alb and carried a crosier when he went into Irish Catholic neighborhoods, and he offered what he said was holy water from Exendine Creek. “Nine doctors out of ten state that it is more efficacious than Lourdes water,” he declared, “and it contains eleven more additives.” He wore a zebra-hide cape and crocodile-tooth necklace when he entered the black suburbs. “For our common African heritage,” he would say. “One of my ancestors was Postmaster General for the Pharaoh Ro-ta-ta.”

He opened a wild but calculated bloodletting against the other candidates of his own party. “They have turned the House of our Fathers into the Outhouse of our Fathers,” he would roar in his golden roar. There was nothing gingerly about his attacks: he left no stone unthrown in his assaults. What matter? He could always unlet the blood, he could always unthrow the stones again when there might come the proper time for it. Often he hummed to himself that old healing melody, “Will you love me in September as you hated me in May?” Of course they’d all love him in September, if he won the nomination. Their heads would roll else.

He won the primary in Chicago Metropolitan, a high-number delegate state. He won it narrowly by means of a little over a million votes that came in or were discovered very late, the morning after the voting. They had been unaccountably overlooked in the tabulations of the evening before.

He most handily won the primary in Missouri Valley, that grand old state with its capital at Omaha. He had lost a few along the way, but we will not mention those. He was leading, it was believed, and he would increase his lead in what was still a close race.

Then it came, a threatening and chilling storm out of a cloud no bigger than a man’s thorax. While yodeling at Swiss Colony Wisconsin, Johnson’s golden voice broke; it broke in a cavernous old-man cough. Several rude persons laughed. This could go badly. There is nothing so contagious or epidemic as laughter. Johnson got his broken voice temporarily fixed at nearby Koffkoff, Wisconsin, the cough-drop capital of the world. But he knew that the fixing was only temporary.