“Pardon me!”
Her voice was throaty, “It was all right.”
He cleared his own throat. He wondered how old Nefertiti Tubber was. It came to him that the girl had possibly never had a man touch her before. Not a man of her own age group.
“Look,” he said again. “I keep getting the impression every time I get talking with you people that I came into the conversation half a dozen sentences late. Now just what is it that your old man… that is, your father, wants to accomplish? What’s this stuff about the Communists being too mild for him. Not radical enough?”
A voice behind him said, “Ah, we have a visitor.”
Ed winced, expecting a thunderbolt between the shoulders. He turned.
The man who stood there, his face in the ultimate of understanding and sadness, looked about as dangerous as a Michelangelo depiction of the Virgin nursing the Child.
Ed Wonder, nevertheless, scrambled to his feet. “Ah, good afternoon, sir… Ooop, pardon me, not sir, ah, Ezekiel, ah, dear one.”
“Good afternoon, Edward.” The grey-bearded prophet beamed at him. “You seek further enlightment on the path to Elysium?” The older man sank with a sigh into one of the folding chairs. Evidently he bore no grudges whatsoever about the hassle of the other night.
Nefertiti had come to her feet too. Now she brought her father a glass of water which she had dipped out of a bucket. She walked, Ed Wonder noted, in spite of himself, as Malay women he’d seen on travelogue shows walked; head and shoulders proudly erect, the hips swaying gently.
“Well, ah, yes,” Ed said hurriedly. “Fascinating subject. The way I get it, you’re heading for a sort of Utopia. A…”
Ezekiel Joshua Tubber frowned. “Dear one, you have failed to understand the word. We seek not Utopia. Utopia is supposedly the perfect society and anything perfect has automatically ceased growing, hence the conception of Utopia is conservative if not reactionary. That is the mistake of many, including the so-called Communists. They think that once their promised land has been achieved, all progress will stop, that the millennium will have been reached. Nonsense! The All-Mother knows no stopping. The path to Elysium is forever!”
For a while there, Ed Wonder had thought he was following the old boy, but toward the end it had degenerated into gibberish.
However, Ed Wonder had dealt with twitches before. The fact that this one had the most far out abilities that the radio man had ever run into was beside the point. Twitch he was. Ed said placatingly, “Yeah, well, the way you put it makes a lot of sense. Utopia is reactionary.”
Tubber looked at him questioningly.
“I see, dear one, that possibly your motive for visiting us might be other than interest in the path.” He smiled benignly and looked at Nefertiti, who hadn’t taken her eyes from Ed Wonder during all this. She flushed. The girl, Ed decided, seemed to be in almost perpetual blush. She couldn’t be as shy as all that.
Tubber said gently, “Could it be that you have come to spark my daughter?”
Gently it might have been said, but Ed Wonder barely managed to keep his seat. All instincts told him to be up. Up and away!
“Oh, no…” he protested. “Oh…”
“Father!” Nefertiti said.
Ed didn’t look at her. He suspected that Nefertiti Tubber was the color of new bricks, if she could go pink just looking at a man. He stuttered, “Oh, no. No. I just came about the television, the radio.”
Ezekiel Joshua Tubber was frowning, though such was his face that it came over more kindly than might have another man’s smile. He said sadly, “How unfortunate. Truly, the All-Mother’s path to Elysium is brightened by the romancing of our young. And I fear that such is the life I lead my Nefertiti that she loses the opportunity to meet pilgrims of her own age.” He sighed and said, “But what is this about television and radio? As you know, Edward, I have little sympathy with the direction our mass media have taken of recent years.”
Ed was finding courage in the other’s quiet manner. Tubber seemed to carry no grudge at all due to the fiasco at the station the other night. Ed said, “Well, you didn’t have to take it to such extreme. This lack of sympathy.”
Tubber was puzzled. “I don’t believe I understand, dear one.”
Ed said impatiently, “The curse. The curse you put on television and radio. Holy smokes, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten you did it!”
Tubber’s eyes, bewildered, went from Ed to Nefertiti. She sat there, her wrapt concentration on Ed waning slightly as apprehension began to grow.
She said, “Father, you have probably forgotten, but you became distraught the other night on Ed’s radio program. You… called upon the power to curse it.”
Ed blurted, “And now there’s not a TV or radio station in the world still operating.”
Tubber looked at the two of them, blankly. “You mean that I called down wrath upon these admittedly perverted institutions and… it worked ?”
“It worked, all right,” Ed said glumly. “And now I’m out of a job. Several million people in the industry, in one part of the world or another are out of jobs.”
“All the world?” Tubber said, amazed.
“Oh, father,” Nefertiti protested. “You know you have the power. Remember the young man who continually practiced his hillbilly music on his guitar?”
Tubber was staring fascinatedly at Ed Wonder. He said to his daughter, “Yes, but breaking five guitar strings at a distance of a few hundred feet is certainly nothing…”
Nefertiti said, “Or the neon sign that you complained made your eyes feel as though they were about to pop out.”
Ed said, “You mean you didn’t know it worked? That you cursed radio and now there’s not a station, radio or TV, that isn’t on the blink?”
Tubber said, in awe, “The powers the All-Mother can delegate are indeed wondrous.”
“They’re wondrous all right,” Ed said bitterly. “But the thing is, can you reverse them? People are getting desperate. Why, in a little town like this, thousands are roaming the streets with nothing to do. Why even a little tent meeting like yours is packed to the limit and…”
He let the sentence dribble away. The face of Ezekiel Joshua Tubber had suddenly gone empty, tragically empty.
Tubber said, “You mean… dear one… that the large crowds I have suddenly been attracting—the capacity audiences so that I must hold a dozen talks a day. They appear…”
Ed said bitterly, “They appear because they haven’t any place else to go and be entertained.”
Nefertiti said in soft compassion, “Father, I was going to tell you. Multitudes of people are roaming up and down the streets. They are desperate for amusement.”
Tubber’s homely face, broken for a moment, was now slowly regaining strength. “Amusement!”
Ed said, “Ezekiel, don’t you see? People have to do something with their time. They want to be entertained. They want to have a little fun. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? They like radio, they like TV. You can’t stop them. So, okay, they don’t know what to do with themselves. They’ve got to have some way to kill time.”
“Kill time! Kill time!” Tubber rumbled. “Killing time is not murder, dear one. It is suicide! We are committing racial suicide with our meaningless, empty lives. Man must resume the path to Elysium, not seek methods of wasting life away!”
Ed said, “Yeah, but don’t you see, ah, dear one? People don’t want to listen to your message. They’re well, conditioned. They want to be entertained. And you can’t stop them. Okay, take away their TV and radio and…”
Even as he spoke, caught up in the argument, Ed Wonder knew he had already said too much. Ezekiel Joshua Tubber was swelling in anger.