Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“Well, what do you do?”

“You hand it to him.”

Considering Denny’s broad-minded ideas on what he owed himself in the way of leisure when we were kids, it was surprising the way he bore down on this little problem of the telescope. He was at it morning, noon, and night, going over Ed’s sheets, taking a job in the filling station, putting on coveralls, and studying every man, woman, and child that went near the damned transit. He moved it to this place and that place, to check which was transit trade and which was rest-room trade. He tried it with a sign and without a sign. He took it away and checked how many people asked about it. At the end of a week, one Sunday morning when he, she, and I had just finished breakfast in Beverly, he said: “Well, chilluns, I guess you’re getting a little impatient, but I’m on the trail of something, and I want time. For just a pretty good job, I could begin now. The main point about this, as I suppose you know, is that it prolongs your period of activity from daytime into the night. It can add — it doesn’t now, but we’re talking about the future and promotion possibilities — it could add at least ten per cent to your sales, which is terrific. On top of that, for a daytime bulge and general sales angle that has a potential I haven’t been able to calculate, there’s the astrology. That lets in a radio show, a cheap one, that we can put on with just an astrologer and some records — fifteen minutes a day, on the coast network, or better still, one of the local stations that’ll cost next to nothing but give us city coverage. So far, fine, it’s cheap and it’s good, and the telescopes don’t, as you say, eat anything. But — it lacks something. I know what I’m doing here. After all, we’re talking about stars, and I want something with some reach to it. Something good.”

She said: “What do you think, Jack?”

“Let him meditate.”

“Think, pretty creature, think.”

I found a note under my door, at the apartment, one Thursday afternoon, two or three weeks after that, that said he was going off by himself a few days, and to count him out over the week end. I didn’t pay much attention, except that by then I kind of looked forward to him, and she did. But I’d turned the utility car over to him, and if he wanted to drive off somewhere it was O.K. by me. But Sunday morning, around eight, when I was taking a few turns up and down her pool, I felt somebody around and when I looked, there he was, on the other side of the wall. When I waved he came over on a vault, in a sweat shirt, Western slacks he’d got for himself, and no shave. Then he began walking up and down. “Well, you big ape, I’ve got it, I’ve got it!”

“Swell, but it’s early yet, so take it easy.”

“O.K., but I’VE GOT IT!”

“Sh!”

But before I could shut him up, she said something from upstairs, and from the sound of her voice she wasn’t even out of bed yet. In a couple of minutes, she was down, in shorts, without make-up, her hair twisted up in a knot. No servants were up, so she got breakfast herself, and served it on the table at the corner of the pool. But as soon as she had brought the eggs she told him to get going. “Laws, Hannah — you heard of them?”

“You mean like against arson, murder, mayhem—”

“I mean like gravity, forces, light—”

“Oh, physical laws!”

“That’s it. Who found them?”

“Why — didn’t Sir Isaac Newton? That apple hitting him on the — oh no, that can’t be right.”

“It is, though, you had it, first guess. And that reminds me to look up that guy’s public-relations stuff. Did it ever occur to you that’s the only scientific man an American has ever heard of, really to know who he was? They couldn’t tell Archimedes from Hippocrates on a bet, and yet—”

“I said get going.”

“I will, don’t worry. So we show him. We put out a regular, special picture of him, all over the billboards, on every piece of advertising we run, there on the grass, with his apple. Dreaming up his law. But our scientists — get a load of this, Hannah — they study the stars!”

“We got scientists?”

“Jack’s a B.S.”

“Why does Jack study the stars?”

“To find new elements, or whatever they’ve got up there. Because that’s our twist. The new way, they don’t work with apples, they do it with a telescope, or spectroscope, or some kind of goddam scope, don’t pin me down which, because I don’t know what it is yet but I’ll get it. The main point is, when you got some law like gravity, some element like neon, before they put it in a test tube, some slug with a glass found it in a star. Then they started looking for it here, in the middle of the Gobi Desert or some place. They—”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Then ask Jack.”

“Scientist, is he kidding me?”

“No.”

“O.K., smart guy. They—”

“They had to know it existed before they could go looking for it and put it in quantity production. You can’t find gold in them thar hills till you heard of gold.”

“So?”

“We’re putting out a new gas.”

“Are we, Jack?”

“Gas is gas. Why not?”

“Observatory gas, Hannah.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“I’m telling you — our scientists study the stars, and we’ve got to put out a new gas to put that point over. For all that special ethyl that our gas has got, for that high-octane pick-up, for that good old power, for those extra miles per gallon, our scientists, the ones with smocks on their backs and slide rules in their hand and telescopes to their eyes, study the stars! And if you don’t believe it, stop at the nearest Seven-Star observatory and look at a star yourself!”

“We got observatories?”

“We will have.”

“Yeah, telescopes, but — what do you mean, observatories?”

“I mean the works.”

“But — with domes on them?”

“And telescopes pointing up in the air — ten feet.”

“Who’s paying for this?”

“You are.”

“I like that.”

He’d been half gagging up to then, but all of a sudden he got serious and began popping it off the end of his cigarette, like he did when he was trying to put something over. He said it actually wouldn’t cost a lot, as that was what he’d been looking into, these last two days since he took his powder. The telescopes, he said, you got from the Amateur Astronomers’ Association, and there were at least a dozen members of it that he had already talked to, who were just praying for the chance to get a job together for us, and so cheap you could hardly believe it. The domes would be plastic, and he’d already got a price from two or three companies that would be almost within the estimates that had been turned in for new rest rooms on several of the stations, which had to be built anyway, and could be designed to let a dome in as well as not. That was the thing to remember, he said: the observatory, the rest room, the soft-drink vendor, the water bubbler, and all the rest of it should be one unit, a feature with some individuality. He kept talking about clean, nice rest rooms, and spoke about Standard and how many people go there just because of lavatory facilities. This, he said, would be the same idea, with the observatory an extra attraction. It would be in front of the rest rooms, and revolve with a mechanism he had already got a price on, from a junk dealer, who had a dozen circular tracks, seven feet across, with cogs on them, and pinions to fit, all for some cockeyed low price. The control wheels, so each customer could turn the dome, or turret, whatever way it suited him, he said had to be shiny brass, and he’d got quotations from another junkyard. But the big surprise for me and Hannah came when he told about the big tube of brass that sticks out of the top of a dome, and works in a slot that cuts it in half. “That thing isn’t for any purpose at all but to shut out light, so you can see the moon in the daytime of you want to look, and so at night light from the Milky Way doesn’t get in. The works of a telescope, what you see with, goes in a grip you can carry in your hand. The rest is just window dressing. Those tubes we get at a sheet brass works, and I’ve got quotations on them right here. They roll up a piece of brass to our order, catch it with rivets, deliver when we’re ready to install — and there’s our observatory. It shines like a fireman’s hat, sticks away up in the air so you can see it a mile, it’s cheap, and it’s scientific! And on top of that we’ve got the astrology. But why the hell I’ve got to argue so much about it, I don’t—”