Stalking the Nightmare Part 16

"Why, nothing," she said. "Like these others... you're just browsing, aren't you?" The limpet chill that ossified his spine told him there were worse things than deals with the devil. Just browsing, as an example.

"Well...?" she asked, waiting.

He thought about it, wetting his lips--suddenly gone dry now that the decisive moment was at hand. "What if it comes only a few years from now? What if I've only got a little while to achieve whatever it was I always wanted to achieve? How do I live with the rest of my life after that, knowing I'll never be any better, any happier, any richer or more secure; knowing I'll never top what I did in that moment? What'll the rest of my life be worth?"

The tiny turtle woman shouldered aside two browsers--who moved sluggishly apart as if turning in their sleep--and drew a short, squat book from a shelf at her waist level. Cort blinked quickly. No, she hadn't drawn it out of the stacks. It had slid forward and jumped into her hand. It looked like an old Big Little Book.

She turned back and offered it to him. "Just browsing," she said, moistly.

He reached for it and stopped, curling his fingers back. She arched her finely-penciled eyebrows and gave him a bemused, quizzical look.

"You're awfully anxious to get me to read that book," he said.

"We are here to serve the public," she said, amiably. "I have a question to ask you. No, two questions. There are two questions I want you to answer. Then I'll consider browsing through your fine stock."

"If I can't give you the answer--which is, after all, our business here--then I'm sure something in my fine stock has the proper response. But... take this book that you need, just hold it, and I'll answer your question.

Questions. Two questions. Very important, I'm sure." She held out the squat little book. Cort looked at it. It was a Big Little Book, the kind he had had when he was a child; with pages of drawings alternating with pages of type, featuring comic strip heroes like Red Ryder or The Shadow or Skippy. Within reach, the answer to the question everyone wanted to ask; what will be the best moment of my life?

He didn't touch it. "I'll ask, you'll answer; then you got me... then I'll do some browsing."

She shrugged, as if to say, as you choose.

He thought: As you choose, so shall you reap.

He said: "What's the name of this bookshop?"

Her face twitched. Cort had the sudden rush of memory from childhood, when he'd first been read the story of Rumpelstiltskin. The turtle woman's face grew mean. "It doesn't have a name. It just is."

"How do we find you in the Yellow Pages?" Cort said, taunting her. It was obvious he was suddenly in a position of power. Even though he had no idea from what source that power flowed.

"No name! No name at all! We don't need a name; we have a very select clientele! It's never had a name! We don't need any names!" Her voice, which had been turtle smooth and soft and chocolate, had become rusted metal sc.r.a.ping rusted metal. No names, I don't got to tell you no names, I don't got to show you no stinkin' badges !

She paused to let the bile recede, and in the eye of the silence Cort asked his second question. "What's in this for you? Where's your fix? Where's the bottom-line profit on your p&l? What do you get out of this, frighty old lady?"

Her mouth went tight. Her blazing eyes seemed both ancient and silvery with youthful ferocity. "Clotho," she said. "Clotho: Rare Books."

He didn't recognize the name, but from the way she said it, he knew he had pried an important secret from her; had done it, apparently, because he was the first to have asked; had done it as anyone might have done it, had they thought of it. And having asked, and having been answered, he knew he was safe from her.

"So tell me, Miss Clotho, or Ms. Clotho, or Mrs., or whatever you happen to be: tell me... what do you get out of this? What coin of the realm do you get paid? You work this weird shop, you trap all these fools in here, and I'll bet when I walk out of here, poof! It all vanishes. Goes back to Never-Never Land. So what kind of a home life do you have? Do you eat three squares a day? Do you have to change your Tampax when you get your period? Do you even get the menses? Or has menopause already pa.s.sed you by? Immortal, maybe? Tell me, weird old turtle lady, if you live forever do you get change of life? Do you still want to get laid? Did you ever get laid? How's your ka-ka, firm and hard? Do weirdy old fantastic ladies who vanish with their bookstore have to take a s.h.i.t, or maybe not, huh?"

She screamed at him. "You can't talk like that to me! Do you know who I am?"

He screamed right back at her. "Puck no, I don't know who the h.e.l.l you are, and what's more to the point, I don't give a righteous d.a.m.n who you are!"

The zombie readers were now looking up. They seemed distressed. As if a long-held trance was being broken.

They blinked furiously, moved aimlessly; they resembled... groundhogs coming out to check their shadows.

Clotho snarled at him, "Stop yelling! You're making my customers nervous! "

"You mean I'm waking them up? C'mon, everybody, rise and shine! Swing on down! How ya fixed, destiny-wise?"

"Shut up!"

"Yeah? Maybe I will and maybe I won't, old turtle. Maybe you answer my question what you were doing waiting here for me specially, and maybe I let these goofb.a.l.l.s go back to their browsing."

She leaned in as close as she could to him, without touching him, and she hissed like a snake. Then she said tightly, "You! What makes you think it was you we wait for? We wait for everyone. This was your turn. They all get a turn, you'll all get your turn in the browsing shop."

"What's this. we' business? Are you feeling imperial?"

"We. My sisters and I."

"Oh, there's more than one of you, is there? A chain bookstore. Very cute. But then I suppose you have branches these days, what with the compet.i.tion from B. Dalton and Crown and Waldenbooks."

She clenched her teeth; and for the first time Cort could see that the old turtle actually had teeth inside those straight, thin lips. "Take this book or get out of my shop," she said in a deadly whisper.

He took the Big Little Book from her quivering hands.

"I've never dealt with anyone as vile, as rude," she snarled.

"Customer is always right, sweetie," he said. And he opened the book to precisely the right page.

Where he read his finest moment. The knowledge that would make the remainder of his life an afterthought.

An also-ran. Marking time. A steady ride on the downhill side.

When would it come? A year hence? Two years? Five, ten, twenty-five, fifty, or at the blessed final moment of life, having climbed, climbed, climbed all the way to the end? He read...

That his finest moment had come when he was ten years old. When, during a sandlot baseball game, a pick-up game in which you got to bat only if you put someone out, the best hitter in the neighborhood hit a shattering line drive to deepest center field where he was always forced to play, because he was no good at baseball, and he ran back and back and stuck up his bare hand and miraculously, as he, little Alex Cort, leaped as high as he could, miraculously the pain of the frazzled hardball as it hit his hand and stayed there was sweeter than anything he had ever felt before--or would feel again. The moment replayed in the words on the page of that terrible book. Slowly, slowly he sank to earth, his feet touching and his eyes going to his hand and there, in the red, anguished palm of his hand, without a trapper's mitt, he held the hardest, surest home run line drive ever hit by anyone. He was the killer, the master of the world, the tallest thing on the face of the earth, big and bold and golden, adept beyond any telling, miraculous; a miracle, a walking miracle. It was the best moment of his life.

At the age of ten. Nothing else he would do in his life, nothing he had done between the age of ten and thirty-five as he read the Big Little Book, nothing he would do till he died at whatever number of years remained for him... nothing... nothing would match that moment.

He looked up slowly. He was having trouble seeing. He was crying. Clotho was smiling at him nastily.

"You're lucky it wasn't one of my sisters. They react much worse to being screwed with."

She started to turn away from him. The sound of his slamming the Big Little Book closed onto the counter of the showcase stopped her. He turned without saying a word and started for the door. Behind him he heard her hurrying after him.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"Back to the real world." He had trouble speaking; the tears were making him sob and his words came raggedly.

"You've got to stay! Everyone stays. "

"Not me, sweetie. The cheese stands alone. "

"It's all futile. You'll never know grandeur again. It's all dross, waste, emptiness. There's nothing as good if you live to be a thousand."

He opened the door. The fog was out there. And the night. And the final forest. He stopped and looked down at her. "Maybe if I'm lucky I won't live to be a thousand."

Then he stepped through the door of Clotho: Rare Books and closed it tightly behind him. She watched through the window as he began to walk off into the fog.

He stopped and leaned in to speak as close to the gla.s.s as he could. She strained her weird little turtle face forward and heard him say, "What's left may only be the tag-end of a s.h.i.tty life... but it's my s.h.i.tty life.

"And it's the only game in town, sweetie. The cheese stands alone."

Then he walked off into the fog, crying; but trying to whistle.

Somehow, I Don't Think We're In Kansas, Toto

Six months of my life were spent in creating a dream the shape and sound and color of which had never been seen on television. The dream was called The Starlost, and between February and September of 1973 I watched it being steadily turned into a nightmare.

The late Charles Beaumont, a scenarist of unusual talents who wrote many of the most memorable Twilight Zones, said to me when I arrived in Hollywood in 1962, "Attaining success in Hollywood is like climbing a gigantic mountain of cow flop, in order to pluck one perfect rose from the summit. And you find when you've made that hideous climb... you've lost the sense of smell."

In the hands of the inept, the untalented, the venal and the corrupt, The Starlost became a veritable Mt.

Everest of cow flop and, though I climbed that mountain, somehow I never lost sight of the dream, never lost the sense of smell, and when it got so rank I could stand it no longer, I descended hand-over-hand from the northern ma.s.sif, leaving behind $93,000, the corrupters, and the eviscerated remains of my dream. I'll tell you about it.

February. Marty the agent called and said, "Go over to 20th and see Robert Kline."

"Who's Robert Kline?"

"West Coast head of taped syndicated shows. He's putting together a package of mini-series, eight or ten segments per show. He wants to do a science fiction thing. He asked for you. It'll be a co-op deal between 20th Century-Fox and the BBC. They'll shoot it in London."

London! "I'm on my way," I said, the jet-wash of my departure deafening him across the phone connection.

I met Kline in the New Administration Building of 20th, and his first words were so filled with sugar I had the feeling if I listened to him for very long I'd wind up with diabetes: "I wanted the top sf writer in the world," he said.

Then he ran through an informed list of my honors in the field of science fiction. It was an impressive performance of the corporate art-form known as ego-ma.s.sage.

Then Kline advised me that what he was after was, " A sort of The Fugitive in s.p.a.ce." Visions of doing a novel-for-television in the mode of The Prisoner splatted like overripe casaba melons; I got up and started to walk.

"Hold it, hold it!" Kline said. "What did you have in mind?" I sat down again.

Then I ran through half a dozen ideas for series that would be considered primitive concepts in the literary world of sf. Kline found each of them too complex. As a final toss at the a.s.signment, I said, "Well, I've been toying with an idea for tape, rather than film; it could be done with enormous production values that would be financially impossible for a standard filmed series."

"What is it?" he said.

And here's what I told him: Five hundred years from now, the Earth is about to suffer a cataclysm that will destroy all possibility for life on the planet. Time is short. The greatest minds and the greatest philanthropists get together and cause to have constructed in orbit between the Moon and the Earth, a giant ark, one thousand miles long, comprised of hundreds of self-contained biospheres. Into each of these little worlds is placed a segment of Earth's population, its culture intact.

Then the ark is sent off toward the stars, even as the Earth is destroyed, to seed the new worlds surrounding those stars with the remnants of humanity.

But one hundred years after the flight has begun, a mysterious "accident" (which would remain a mystery till the final segment of the show, four years later, it was hoped) kills the entire crew, seals the biosphere-worlds so they have no contact with one another... and the long voyage goes on with the people trapped, developing their societies without any outside influence. Five hundred years go by, and the travelers--the Starlost--forget the Earth. To them it is a myth, a vague legend, even as Atlantis is to us. They even forget they are adrift in s.p.a.ce, forget they are in an interstellar vessel. Each community thinks it is "the world" and that the world is only fifty square miles, with a metal ceiling.

Until Devon, an outcast in a society rigidly patterned after the Amish communities of times past, discovers the secret, that they are onboard a s.p.a.ce-going vessel. He learns the history of the Earth, learns of its destruction, and learns that when "the accident" happened, the astrogation gear of the ark was damaged and now the last seed of humankind is on a collision course with a star. Unless he can convince a sufficient number of biosphere-worlds to band together in a communal attempt to learn how the ark works, repair it and re-program their flight, they will soon be incinerated in the furnace of that giant sun toward which they're heading.

It was, in short, a fable of our world today.

"Fresh! Original! New!" Kline chirruped. "There's never been an idea like it before!" I didn't have the heart to tell him the idea was first propounded in astronautical literature in the early 1920s by the great Russian pioneer Tsiolkovsky, nor that the British physicist Bernal had done a book on the subject in 1929, nor that the idea had become very common coin in the genre of science fiction through stories by Heinlein, Harrison, Panshin, Simak and many others. (Arthur C. Clarke's then-current bestseller, RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, was the latest example of the basic idea.) Kline suggested I dash home and write up the idea, which he would then merchandise. I pointed out to him that the Writers Guild frowns on speculative writing and that if he wanted the riches of my invention, he should lay on me what we call "holding money" to enable me to write a prospectus and to enable him to blue-sky it with the BBC.

The blood drained from his face at my suggestion of advance money, and he said he had to clear it with the BBC, but that if I wrote the prospectus he would guarantee me a free trip to London. I got up and started to walk.

"Hold it, hold it!" he said, and opened a desk drawer. He pulled out a ca.s.sette recorder and extended it. "Tellyou what: why don't you just tell it on a ca.s.sette, the same way you told it to me." I stopped and looked. This was a new one on me. In over twenty years as a film and television writer, I've seen some of the most circuitous, sleazy, Machiavellian dodges ever conceived by the mind of Western Man to get writers to write on the cuff. But never before, and never since, has anyone been that slippery. It should have been all the tip-off I needed.

I thought on it for a moment, rationalized that this wasn't speculative writing, that at worst it was "speculative talking," and since a writer is expected to pitch an idea anyhow, it was just barely legitimate.

So I took the ca.s.sette home, backed my spiel with the music from 2001: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey, outlined the barest bones of the series concept, and brought it back to Kline.

"Okay. Here it is," I said, "but you can't transcribe it. If you do, then it becomes spec writing and you have to pay me." I was a.s.sured he wouldn't put it on paper, and that he'd be back to me shortly. He was sure the BBC would go bananas for the idea.

No sooner was lout of his office than he had his secretary transcribe the seven-minute tape.

March. No word.

April. No word.

May. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity. Marty the agent called. "Kline sold the series. Go see him."

"Series?" I said, appalled. "But that idea was only planned to accommodate eight segments... a series, you say?"

"Go see him."

So I went. Kline greeted me as if I were the only human capable of deciphering the Mayan Codex, and caroled that he had sold the series not only to 48 of the NBC independent stations (what are called the O&O's, Owned & Operated stations), but that the Westinghouse outlets had bitten, and the entire Canadian Television Network, the CTV.

"Uh, excuse me," I said, in an act of temerity not usually attributed to writers in Hollywood, "how did you manage to sell this, er, series without having a contract with me, or a prospectus, or a pilot script, or a pilot film... or anything?"

"They read your outline, and they bought it on the strength of your name."

"They read it? How?"

He circ.u.mnavigated that little transgression of his promise not to set my words on paper, and began talking in grandiose terms about how I'd be the story editor, how I'd have creative control, how I'd write many scripts for the show, and what a good time I'd have in Toronto.

"Toronto?!" I said, gawking. "What the h.e.l.l happened to London? The Sir Lew Grade Studios. Soho.

Buckingham Palace. Swinging London. What happened to all that?"

Mr. Kline, without bothering to inform the creator of this hot property he had been successfully hawking, had been turned down by the BBC and had managed to layoff the project with CTV, as an all-Canadian production of Glen Warren, a Toronto-based operation that was already undertaking to tape The Starlost at the CFTO Studios in Toronto.

It was a.s.sumed by Mr. Kline that I would move to Toronto to story edit the series; he never bothered to ask if I wanted to move to Canada, he just a.s.sumed I would.

Mr. Kline was a real bear for a.s.suming things.

Such as: I would write his series (which was the way he now referred to it) even though a writers' strike was imminent. I advised him that if the strike hit, I would be incommunicado, but he waved away my warnings with the words, "Everything will work out." With such words, Napoleon went to Elba.