“Why? We know what he’s going to say. He’s going to tell Congress that he wants to send a man to the Moon before Nineteen-Seventy.”
The Martian shuddered. His name was a collection of hisses and sputters that came out to something pretty close to Jazzbow. Anyhow, that’s what I called him. He didn’t seem to mind. Like me, he was a baseball fan.
We were sitting in my Culver City office, watching Ted Williams’ last ballgame from last year. Now there was a baseball player. Best damned hitter since Ruth. And as independent as Harry Truman. Told the rest of the world to go to hell whenever he felt like it. I admired him for that. I had missed almost the whole season last year; the Martians had taken me on safari with them. They were always doing little favors like that for me; this interociter device was just the latest one.
“I still think we should be watching President Kennedy,” Schmidt insisted.
“We can view it afterward, if you like,” said Jazzbow, diplomatically. As I said, he had turned into quite a baseball fan and we both wanted to see the Splendid Splinter’s final home run.
Jazzbow was a typical Martian. Some of the scientists still can’t tell one from another, they look so much alike, but I guess that’s because they’re all cloned rather than conceived sexually. Mars is pretty damned dull that way, you know. Of course, most of the scientists aren’t all that smart outside of their own fields of specialization. Take Einstein, for example. Terrific thinker. He believes if we all scrapped our atomic bombs the world would be at peace. Yah. Sure.
Anyway, Jazzbow is about four foot nine with dark leathery skin, kind of like a football that’s been left out in the sun too long. The water from the tank made him look even darker, of course. Powerful barrel chest, but otherwise a real spidery build, arms and legs like pipestems. Webbed feet, evolved for walking on loose sand. Their hands have five fingers with opposable thumbs, just like ours, but the fingers have so many little bones in them that they’re as flexible as an octopus’ tentacles.
Martians would look really scary, I guess, if it weren’t for their goofy faces. They’ve got big sorrowful limpid eyes with long feminine eyelashes, like a camel; their noses are splayed from one cheek to the other; and they’ve got these wide lipless mouths stretched into a permanent silly-looking grin, like a dolphin. No teeth at all. They eat nothing but liquids. Got long tongues, like some insects, which might be great for sex if they had any, but they don’t and anyway they usually keep their tongues rolled up inside a special pouch in their cheeks so they don’t startle any of us earthlings. How they talk with their tongues rolled up is beyond me.
Anyway, Jazzbow was half in the tank, as I said. He needed the water’s buoyancy to make himself comfortable in earthly gravity. Otherwise he’d have to wear his exoskeleton suit and I couldn’t see putting him through that just so we could have a face-to-face with Prof. Schmidt.
The professor was fidgeting unhappily in his chair. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about baseball, but at least he could tell Jazzbow from the other Martians. I guess it’s because he was one of the special few who’d known the Martians ever since they had first crash-landed in New Mexico back in Forty-six.
Well, Williams socked his home run and the Fenway Park fans stood up and cheered for what seemed like an hour and he never did come out of the dugout to tip his cap for them. Good for him! I thought. His own man to the very end. That was his last time on a ball field as a player. I found I had tears in my eyes.
“Now can we see the President?” Schmidt asked, exasperated. Normally he looked like a young Santa Claus, round and red-cheeked, with a pale blond beard. He usually was a pretty jolly guy, but just now his responsibilities were starting to get the better of him.
Jazzbow snaked one long, limber arm out of the water and fiddled with the controls beneath the inverted triangle of the interociter’s screen. JFK came on the screen in full color, in the middle of his speech to the joint session of Congress:
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. I believe we should go to the moon.”
Jazzbow sank down in his water tank until only his big eyes showed and he started noisily blowing bubbles, his way of showing that he was upset.
Schmidt turned to me. “You’re going to have to talk him out of it,” he said flatly.
I had not voted for John Kennedy. I had instructed all of my employees to vote against him, although I imagine some of them disobeyed me out some twisted sense of independence.
Now that he was President, though, I felt sorry for the kid. Eisenhower had let things slide pretty badly. The Commies were infiltrating the Middle East and of course they had put up the first artificial satellite and just a couple weeks ago had put the first man into space: Yuri something-or-other. Meanwhile young Jack Kennedy had let that wacky plan for the reconquest of Cuba go through. I had told the CIA guys that they’d need strong air cover, but they went right ahead and hit the Bay of Pigs without even a Piper Cub over them. Fiasco.
So the new President was trying to get everybody’s mind off all this crap by shooting for the moon. Which would absolutely destroy everything we’d worked so hard to achieve since that first desperate Martian flight here some fifteen years earlier.
I knew that somebody had to talk the President out of this moon business. And of all the handful of people who were in on the Martian secret, I guess that the only one who could really deal with the White House on an eye-to-eye level was me.
“Okay,” I said to Schmidt. “But he’s going to have to come out here. I’m not going to Washington.”
It wasn’t that easy. The President of the United States doesn’t come traipsing across the country to see an industrial magnate, no matter how many services the magnate has performed for his country. And my biggest service, of course, he didn’t know anything about.
To make matters worse, while my people were talking to his people, I found out that the girl I was grooming for stardom turned out to be a snoop from the goddamned Internal Revenue Service. I had had my share of run-ins with the Feds, but using a beautiful starlet like Jean was a low blow even for them. A real crotch shot.
It was Jazzbow who found her out, of course.
Jean and I had been getting along very nicely indeed. She was tall and dark-haired and really lovely, with a sweet disposition and the kind of wide-eyed innocence that makes life worthwhile for a nasty old S.O.B. like me. And she loved it, couldn’t get enough of whatever I wanted to give her. One of my hobbies was making movies; it was a great way to meet girls. Believe it or not, I’m really very shy. I’m more at home alone in a plane at twenty thousand feet than at some Hollywood cocktail party. But if you own a studio, the girls come flocking.
Okay, so Jean and I are getting along swell. Except that during the period when my staff was dickering with the White House staff, one morning I wake up and she’s sitting at the writing desk in my bedroom, going through my drawers. The desk drawers, that is.
I cracked one eye open. There she is, naked as a Greek goddess and just as gorgeous, rummaging through the papers in my drawers. There’s nothing in there, of course. I keep all my business papers in a germtight fireproof safe back at the office.
But she had found something that fascinated her. She was holding it in front of her, where I couldn’t see what was in her hand, her head bent over it for what seemed like ten minutes, her dark hair cascading to her bare shoulders like a river of polished onyx.
Then she glanced up at the mirror and spotted me watching her.
“Do you always search your boyfriends’ desks?” I asked. I was pretty pissed off, you know.
“What is this?” She turned and I saw she was holding one of my safari photos between her forefinger and thumb, like she didn’t want to get fingerprints on it.
Damn! I thought. I should’ve stashed those away with my stag movies.
Jean got up and walked over to the bed. Nice as pie she sat on the edge and stuck the photo in front of my bleary eyes.
“What is this?” she asked again.
It was a photo of a Martian named Crunchy, the physicist George Gamow, James Dean and me in the dripping dark jungle in front of a brontosaurus I had shot. The Venusian version of a brontosaurus, that is. It looked like a small mountain of mottled leather. I was holding the stun rifle Crunchy had lent me for the safari.
I thought fast. “Oh, this. It’s a still from a sci-fi film we started a few years ago. Never finished it, though. The special effects cost too much.”
“That’s James Dean, isn’t it?”
I peered at the photo as if I was trying to remember something that wasn’t terribly important. “Yeah, I think so. The kid wanted more money than I wanted to spend on the project. That’s what killed it.”
“He’s been dead for five or six years.”
