The line is getting closer to the door, and I can see that if I don’t get the thropo away, I’m going to lose him entirely. So I talk the thropo into skipping the spleebie for now and joining us in a bar across the street. The bar is the pits, hot and dark, with air that’s been resyked so many times it has garlic on its breath. But I figure at least the thropo will buy the cervesa, so it won’t be a total loss, even if he doesn’t buy my line.
We all cram in around a dirty little table in the corner and I start my rap. “You need time, huh?” I say. “You’re the Man, how come you don’t just make time?”
“So many planets,” says the thropo. “So much material to collect. If I thought the subject important enough, I’d stay here a while, research it more thoroughly. Someday, perhaps, I may wish I had. Difficult to judge.”
“If you stay here,” I say, “will you still be sending people to that other planet?”
“Certainly not,” says the thropo. “Need everyone here. No meaningful research can be done with the remnants of a planet’s population. But I see little justification for staying. Nothing that would convince my superiors, at any rate.”
“There’s lots of stuff,” I say, “that you haven’t seen at all. You just hit the shelves, man. There’s stuff behind the counter, too, you know. And nobody’d show it to a thropo.” I look over to Chico, who I know I can count on to get things right the first time. “Chico,” I say, “run down and get some uc zines from Paco. Rubber, S-and-M, chickens, watersports, whatever you can find.” I look back at the thropo. “You’ll see lots you never seen before.”
While we’re waiting for Chico, I want to keep the thropo busy, so I ask him what he gets off on most.
“Oh, it all fascinates me,” he says. “Just the thought, for one thing, that humans would be interested in watching the mating ritual, when survival theory indicates they should be more interested in participating. How does a watcher maintain its genetic strain in competition with those who exchange germ plasm more readily?” He looks around at us, as if he thinks we can answer this. “In addition,” he says, “there’s the use of this voyeuristic tendency, however it’s inherited, as a means of generating employment. Not only the people who produce this material, but their suppliers, distributors, those who sell them office and living space, these people all benefit. It’s a very valuable service. If there were no demand for it, there would be millions more starving.” He goes on like this for a while, and I am hatching out what I’m going to do when Chico comes back. I figure I will continue to play it by ear, because the thropo seems pretty good at selling himself on whatever he wants to buy.
Finally Chico turns up, and he’s got a good bunch of zines with him. The thropo is high as Jamaica.
“Most unusual material,” he says, and he’s muttering other stuff to himself in a sort of snuffle. “Here, for instance, the subjugation of violence to the purposes of procreation.” He flips through another stack. “A paradoxical denial of the generative religious cult to further the process of generation.” I don’t know where Paco sells all this stuff showing people dressed like nuns, but somebody must buy it. “And these magazines seem to specialize in the use of devices that — ” He goes on and on.
“So what’s the word?” I say. “You think we’re worth studying a little longer?”
The thropo looks up. “Yes,” he says. “I feel quite confident that my superiors would approve a few decades of intensive research. Perhaps more, dependent on results.”
“So you’ll be around for quite a while,” I say. Another idea is getting to me. “You could probably use some help. Me and Allie here, and Tom and Rita and Chico and LaVerne, we’ll be glad to show you where the real action is. We don’t charge much.” I figure we won’t have it too hard, getting paid to find the thropo some action. And I am keeping in mind that business has been lousy lately, like I said.
The thropo gets all choked up. “I don’t know how to show my appreciation for all this,” he says. “It could be the making of my reputation. The preservation of cultural treasures like these and the retention of their social context. And they could so easily have been destroyed with your planet.”
“Relax,” I say. “We’re your friends, right? What are friends for if they can’t help you out once in a while?” By this time the thropo is almost crying, if snakeheads can cry. He falls all over us with his snakey thanks and pays for the beers, like I thought.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
This was my first published story, aside from a few early efforts in a college literary magazine. It was bought by Ted White for Amazing Stories, way back in 1978.
As a kid, I haunted the news store in my hometown for the digest-sized science-fiction magazines that sporadically appeared. Amazing and its sisterzine Fantastic were my favorites, as they had the most extreme covers — mutants and sexy spacebabes.
My story, appropriately, was published with a striking black-and-white illustration depicting the snakehead and a randomly-assigned buxom young lady, who is not in the story. (I loved it. The artist, a newcomer named Rodak, seems to have vanished without a trace. If you’re out there, Rodak, get in touch.)
My check for $51.63 came from the publisher, Sol Cohen, a few months later — in someone else’s stamped self-addressed envelope, with their name crossed out and mine scrawled in above it. I had hit the big time.
Ideologically Labile Fruit Crisp
PART I | RECIPE
Fruit mixture:
4 to 6 cups of berries or manipulated fruit
2 tablespoons tart juice (optional)
1 to 2 pinches spice (optional)
1 to 2 teaspoons thickener (optional)
2 to 12 tablespoons sweetener (optional)
Crunchy stuff:
1 to 2 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup (or more) nuts or seeds
1 cup crushed cereal or crumbs
1/4 to 3/4 cup oil or shortening
1 to 2 pinches spice (optional)
1/4 to 1 teaspoon salt (also optional)
2 to 12 tablespoons sweetener (very optional)
Put the fruit mixture in a casserole. Mix the crunchy stuff in a bowl, making sure the oil or shortening gets distributed throughout. Put the crunchy stuff on top of the fruit. Bake in a 375-degree oven until the fruit bubbles and the top browns. Serve on plates, with something cold and white.
This recipe strives to be ideologically neutral, and can be adapted to please most castes, creeds, pocketbooks, and political persuasions. It’s too messy to sell at a bake sale.
PART II | EXPLICATION DE TEXTE
First, define your agenda. Leftwing, rightwing, or middle-American? Yuppie or blue-collar? Healthfood or junkfood? Cuisine minceur, grosseur, ou farceur? Take into consideration any special-interest groups, such as 5-year-olds.
Next, choose your fruit. Fresh, frozen, canned, or dried? You can choose something plentiful and cheap, or conspicuously expensive. You can pick it yourself, or buy fruit picked by someone else. In the latter case, you might wonder who picked it and what their lives are like. Or you might not.
Manipulate the fruit as necessary to remove seeds, stems, and stones, and to make it cook more quickly. This usually involves cutting or slicing it. You can peel it or not, whichever is most compatible with your aesthetic and digestive systems. If you’re feeling really obsessive, you can peel it, core it, and cut it into 3/8-inch-wide slices. (If you find you want to peel and slice berries, you should call your therapist for assistance.)