No, there weren’t as many show business folk as there had been even a decade ago, not to speak of a quarter century or more.
Ed proved a disappointment when his turn for interview came up. They took down in detail all that he had ever done, and evidently decided it was precious little that would benefit them.
Did he think that he could act as an M.C. for vaudeville shows?
Ed Wonder sighed. Yes, he thought he could.
They’d keep in touch with him.
He left and climbed back into his hovercar.
He had to do something. Over and over it came back to him that he, Buzzo and Helen were the only three outside the Tubber circle who actually knew what was going on.
A boy with a heavy stack of papers under his arm was yelling an extra. It came to Ed that it had been a very long time since he had heard a newsboy shouting extra. Radio and TV news commentators had put an end to that newspaper institution of old.
He made out what the boy was shouting. Race riots, somewhere or other. He didn’t have to read the paper to get the picture. Bored people wandering up and down the streets with nothing to do.
Race riots. He wondered how long it would be before people got around to religious riots. Riots between races, riots between different religious creeds, riots over politics. It gave you something to take up time, didn’t it?
He simply had to do something. There must be some starting point. He changed his direction. He drove out along the road to the south and eventually pulled onto the university grounds.
He was in luck and had no difficulty in finding Professor Varley Dee in his office at the Department of Anthropology. Ed Wonder had had the crisp anthropologist on the Far Out Hour several times as a panelist, but had never met him before on his home grounds.
He chuckled at Ed Wonder even as he offered him a chair. “Well, sir, even the ambitious Little Ed Wonder finds himself amid the unemployed with the disruption of the radio waves, eh? Fascinating development. Have the technicians arrived at any conclusions? What’s this about sun spots?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ed told him. “Every time something comes along to foul up reception, or the weather, or whatever, it’s blamed on sun spots. That’s all I know about the subject.” Actually, he didn’t want to get into the subject of TV reception with the professor. If he had, they would never gee around to the real reason for his visit.
He changed the subject, abruptly, “Look, Professor, what can you tell me about Jesus?”
Dee gimlet-eyed him. “Just who do you mean when you say Jesus?”
Ed was exasperated. “For crissake, Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth. Born on Christmas. Died on the cross. The founder of Christianity. Who else could I mean?”
“There are Jesuses and Jesuses, Little Ed. According to what religious sect you follow, or if you follow none at all and are interested in the historic Jesus. Do you want myth, or history?”
“I’m talking about reality. The real Jesus. What I…”
“All right. Then to begin with, his name wasn’t Jesus. His name was Joshua. Jesus is a Greek name, and he was a Jew. And he wasn’t from Nazareth. There was no such town as Nazareth in Palestine at that time; later on the boys worked that one in to fill in some holes in the prophesies that supposedly foretold the coming of the Messiah. And he wasn’t born on Christmas. The early Christians took over that day from the pagans in one of the attempts to popularize the new religion. Christmas was originally the winter solstice, it got shoved around to December 25th through faulty calendars. It’s even debatable whether Joshua died on the cross. If he did, then he died in a remarkably short time. The horror of crucifiction as a means of execution is in the time it takes the victim to die. Robert Graves made a good case for the hypothesis that Jesus survived the cross, after a cataleptic fit, and was spirited away.”
Ed was bug-eyeing him.
Varley Dee said, his voice cranky, “You wanted to know about the historic Jesus. Very well. That’s just the beginning. For instance, many of the more serious scholars doubt very much that Joshua had any intentions of starting a new religion. He was a good Jew and practiced that religion faithfully his whole life.”
“Listen,” Ed demanded. “Is there anything left at all of what I learned in Sunday school as a kid?”
The professor chuckled acidly. “Actually, quite a bit. Just what was it you wanted to know?”
Ed said, “Look, for instance the story about feeding the multitudes with two or three fish and a few loaves of bread, and then winding up with several bushels of leftover scraps.”
Dee shrugged. “Probably a parable. Many of Joshua’s teachings were given in parables.”
“Well, some of the other miracles. Raising the dead. Curing the lepers. That sort of thing.”
Dee was impatient. “Modern medicine performs miracles of that order with ease. In Joshua’s day their medical procedure before pronouncing a person dead was primitive, to say the least. As a matter of fact, you don’t have to go back that far. Did you know that the mother of Robert E. Lee was pronounced dead and was actually buried? She revived later and was rescued. So far as leprosy is concerned, it was and is a meaningless term, medically speaking, and in those days covered everything from skin diseases to venereal infections. Miracle healers were a dime a dozen, and a religious figure didn’t get very far unless he could put on a good performance in that department. Actually, Joshua is on record as being contemptuous of his followers continually wanting him to prove himself by such devices.”
Ed Wonder squirmed in his chair. “Well, if not Jesus, how about some of the other miracle workers? Mohammed, for instance?”
Dee eyed him critically. “I would think that with your program, Little Ed, you would have had your fill of miracle workers, by this time. Certainly, down through history, we run into them. Jesus, Mohammed, Hassan Ben Sabbah…”
“That one misses me,” Ed said.
“Founder of the Ismailian Shiite sect of the Moslems. His followers, the assassins, were fantatical beyond belief. At any rate, supposedly he performed various miracles, including teleporting himself several hundred miles at a crack.”
“But…” Ed said. Professor Dee’s attitude suggested a very big but.
“But,” Dee said, “close inspection by reliable scholars into the lives of these miracle workers seldom turns up evidence of unexplainable happenings.”
It was directly the opposite of what Jim Westbrook’s opinion had been the other day. Ed stirred in his chair. His interview with Professor Varley Dee was netting him a zero.
He came to his feet. “Well, thanks, Professor. I won’t take up any more of your time.”
Dee beamed at him. “Not at all, Little Ed. Pleasure. And I look forward to appearing on your remarkable program, once again, when the present difficulties with the air waves are over.”