Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220) (18 page)

The relevant sponsors were actually pleased with the fallout from “The Madonna and the Starship.” As it happened, sales of Sugar Corn Pops and Ovaltine rose significantly after the broadcast. Connie and I speculated that the stodgier sort of
Bread Alone
devotee had never consumed these products in the first place, whereas the show's more open-minded viewers had found a bracing ecumenism in the replacement of the two traditional Eucharist species with a breakfast cereal and a malt beverage, and so they added these commodities to their shopping lists. Ralston Purina fared even better. Within hours of Jesus's declaration that he intended to feed their kibble to his sheepdog, the product began flying off supermarket shelves everywhere.

Thus did “The Madonna and the Starship” pass from scandal to anecdote, anecdote to legend, legend to oblivion. Defying the expectations of Connie and myself,
Not By Bread Alone
,
Brock Barton
, and
Uncle Wonder's Attic
remained on the air. When all three shows disappeared in the mid-sixties, the culprit was not sacrilege but low ratings. By this time, however, we were otherwise employed—Connie had become the chief administrator of the Saint Francis of Assisi House (Donna Dain having officially retired on her eightieth birthday), and I was working for NBC's latest experiment in SF television,
Star Trek
—and so we greeted the programs' passing with yearning rather than bitterness. Even as I pen this memoir, the Zorningorg Prize sits on my desk, inspiring me to complete another Kirk-and-Spock adventure.

You may recall that, beyond my trophy, a second object attests to the strange week that elapsed between the Qualimosans' Monday afternoon appearance on Uncle Wonder's Motorola and our heroic troupe's Sunday morning effort to hoodwink them. I speak of the golden Prometheus statue in Rockefeller Center. As you now know, it's really a shapeshifted alien shuttle, though the lobsters once remarked that this startling fact cannot be verified through any sort of conventional chemical test or x-ray analysis.

In early April of 1955, three days after Saul accepted Connie's first attempt at a short story, “Do Not Go Gentle,” for publication in
Andromeda
, she assented to my proposal of marriage. She still believed in God, and I still didn't, but we decided to give it a try anyway. (To this day she insists that, like Einstein, I believe in “the God of Spinoza,” although
everybody
believes in the universe, as far as I know, so atheism versus Spinozism strikes me as a distinction without a difference.) When Connie's analyst objected to our impending union, she fired him. We were soon trading vows on the bridge of the
Triton
. Our ringbearer was Andy Tuckerman. Saul was cast as my best man, a role played collaboratively by Lenny and Eliot, his non-agoraphobic understudies. Hollis wore his Brock Barton dress blues, Calder his Cotter Pin outfit, Joel his gorilla suit, Ezra his Jesus robes, Manny and Terry their gargoyle costumes. Hank Griswold and his kennel also showed up—minus the Irish setter, who was recovering from knee surgery—as did Wulawand and Volavont, disguised as off-Broadway actors engaged in round-the-clock rehearsals for a musical adaptation of Kafka's
The Metamorphosis
.

It turned out I'd misjudged Andy Tuckerman. After Connie got to know the boy, she speculated that his sycophantic side might trace to a dysfunctional home life, and so she investigated. Her instincts proved correct. When Andy was six years old, his parents had died in an automobile accident—why had the network never told me this?—and his upbringing had devolved to an alcoholic aunt who regularly stole her nephew's TV earnings. Six months after our wedding, the adoption process finally ran its course, and Connie and I became Andy's mother and father.

One mystery remains. Did Yaxquid the navigator witness the entire broadcast? Or did he grab the spaceship's throttle the instant he decided that the
Bread Alone
audience couldn't possibly be thought pious? Connie and I like to believe that, after ignoring Wulawand's command and then disabling the death-ray, Yaxquid had stuck around for the second half of “The Madonna and the Starship,” including the speeches by Brock and Ducky critiquing the Qualimosan worldview. Someday, after all, humankind will go to the stars. In the depths of space, Earthlings may encounter bug-eyed nihilists who murder fellow sentient life-forms in the name of some cynical ideology or other. But maybe, just maybe, thanks to Yaxquid's teachings, keyed to act two of our teleplay, all such monstrous
Weltanschauungs
will have vanished from our galaxy. Right now, of course, Connie and I have no way to determine the ontological status of meaninglessness in the Milky Way. We can only speculate, extrapolate, and submit fiction to Saul Silver.

For several years Wulawand and Volavont flourished in their calling as volunteers at the Saint Francis of Assisi House. They had no difficulty reconciling their Qualimosan rationality, now tempered by their “Brother to the Earth” encounter, with the benevolent ethos of the mission. What they couldn't abide was their own physiognomies. They hated looking so different from the other Saint Francis House personnel, and so they routinely submitted themselves to reckless procedures intended to transform their anatomies: untested drugs, Dr. Moreau-like surgeries, the shuttle's shapeshifting chamber—no intervention was too extreme.

Eventually our dear lobsters ended up in adjacent beds at Saint Vincent's Hospital, the institution where, a decade earlier, Dylan Thomas had drawn his last breath. Connie and I attended their final moments, seated on folding chairs between their ruined and recumbent forms. Wulawand and Volavont asked me to relate their favorite apocryphal episode from the life of Saint Francis. I squeezed Connie's hand and, with tears in my eyes and a catch in my voice, began telling them about the holy man negotiating with the marauding wolf.

“‘Let the citizens of Gubbio set out food for you,'” I said, quoting Saint Francis. “‘Accept their offerings, and they will have no cause to hunt you.'”

“And the bargain held,” said Wulawand.

“Year after year,” said Volavont.

“I don't want to leave!” declared Wulawand.

“L'Chaim!”
cried Volavont.

“Eventually the wolf sickened with old age,” I said. “The poor animal died in Saint Francis's arms.”

Wulawand shrieked and closed her eyes, as did Volavont an instant later, and together they went raging into an ambiguous night.

“And for a long time afterward,” I said, “the people of Gubbio were very sad.”

The Madonna and the Starship
traces to a series of conversations my wife and I enjoyed while she was researching the origins of American science fiction. At one point it occurred to me that, by steering a path between the nihilistic and the numinous—those dubious worldviews Western civilization so relentlessly recommends to its adherents—even the grottiest pulp SF performs a salutary cultural function. So, thank you, Kathryn Morrow, for igniting this project and reading the manuscript with such loving care. You are, now and forever, my best editor and favorite person.

Let me additionally offer my gratitude to those friends and colleagues who vetted early drafts of
The Madonna and the Starship
, noting anachronisms, technical gaffes, and stylistic infelicities. Whatever imperfections remain in this novella, they cannot be blamed on Joe Adamson, Peter Demski, Justin Fielding, Joseph Kaufman, Chris Morrow, Glenn Morrow, Bill Spangler, or Dave Stone, all of whom did their best to save me from myself.