Shock III Part 19

I sag back on the carpeting. I appraise the ceiling and wish I am back plugging the virtues of blue underwear. I envision a stage sagging with several thousand interplanetary broads. I cannot envision the sight of female vacuum cleaners in Gloober bathing suits.

'Thousands?' gulps Mendelheimer.

'I note reluctance,' says cabbage skull. 'Your alternative is the simple act of changing the contest t.i.tle.'

'We're ruined,' says Gloober.

The yellow eye softens.

'As a matter of actual point,' he says, 'I named such a high figure in hopes of forcing you to accept the alternative. However, I see that you cannot. Know then that beyond your own system, our alliance has determined its own Miss Stardust, though hardly,' he added snottily, 'by that t.i.tle. We will consent to allow her to represent the remainder of this galaxy. She, plus the four contestants from your own system, will make five. Fairness beyond this you cannot expect to receive.'

'Foura in our system?' Sampson asks.

There is no movable life on the four outermost planets of your system.'

Now I am no devotee of Astronomy, Harry, but, even for me, this is a h.e.l.l of a way to get the word about life on other worlds. From the lips of an abusive cabbage. Lips? What lips?

Well, to make a grotesque story short, we accept the conditions. We pick up his under-the-deck deal. If the talking Hoover can make piers collapse and skies liquify, who are we to argue with him? We say, 'You win,5 and everything is cracky bad.

After that the vacuum cleaner from another world exits. Exeunt all on his heels, to view him pa.s.sing through the hall ceiling, head first. We discover later, from a gibbering roof janitor, that cabbage head gazookahs himself up through the skylight and floats up to his interstellar crockery, which is hovering fifty feet over the building. Said saucer then whips into the blue yonder and is gone. As is the composure of one formerly sane janitor.

The judges and I have a session. A couple of them get brave and cry fraud. I tell them off. I inform them that they are not pinned to the floor by blue light and I am. They reflect on this.

The upshot is we have cards painted for the contestants we expect. I do the painting, not wis.h.i.+ng to let some hand-painter blab about the new cards he did I consult Sampson for the information. There should be a card for Miss Mercury, he says, one for Miss Venus, two others for Miss Mars and Miss Jupiter. Of course, he says, they doubtless have different names for their planets. Not withstanding, bl.u.s.ters Mayor Gra.s.sblood, if they are taking part in an Earth contest, they'll take our names for them or leave them. I remind him of cabbage head making the rain, collapsing the pier and playing elevator with himself through the floors. Gra.s.s-blood pauses a moment to reflect on that.

We deduce a slight problem on the t.i.tle card for the last contestant We cannot call her Miss Stardust because, by the standards of the contest, she ain't yet. But the vacuum cleaner says she is their Miss Stardust. So what to do? We settle for an unsatisfactory Miss Outer s.p.a.ce.

'The monster will not take a s.h.i.+ne to that,' forbodes Mendelheimer.

We hush him up. We retire to the elevator, punchy but unbowed, wondering what the day will bring.

It brings headaches.

We decide to spread none of this about since we're not sure. I don't mean we're not sure the vacuum cleaner doesn't mean business, we're not sure we should let cat from bag, lest the walls of the auditorium get kicked down by the eager.

But, as per usual, some creep on the inside gives out with a strictly-between-you-and-me, and before you can say Coma Berenices the place is crawling with rumour. Add the eyewitness of one hysterical frump who sights the crockery take off over the auditorium, and you have the seeds, the ripe beginning, and the rotten harvest.

I am stopped. Is it true about the saucer, they ask, about the literate head of cabbage? Ha ha, I say, that's a good one.

Reaching the stage forty minutes and many ha ha's later, I find out how good a one it really is.

The contestants have shown with their delegate, coach and chaperone, cabbage head. All the babes who are stacked in Earthly manner are gaping like kids at a sideshow. They stand around in their Gloober suits with their eyes popping out.

This the delegate does not like. Because, when I extend my hand with a Kingfish smile, the big yellow eye flashes over me like the headlight on a locomotive. I see there is nothing to shake anyway, swallow a faux pas lump, and pretend not to notice.

'Well, you made it,' I chirp.

'Did you doubt it?' says he in a surly gasp which has all the amiability of a Bendix washer conversing.

'No! No!' I say, jollity flecking off my ashen jowls. 'Not at all. We've been waiting for you.'

He ignores that. He gives the people on stage the single eye. He hisses.

'My wards are losing patience with your goggling Earthians. I demand you have the contest started immediately and see to it that this offensive staring ceases.'

I nod, I smile, I make the rounds dispersing, my stomach doing pushups. That completed, I return to the vacuum cleaner. He says something which makes my heart bounce like a handball.

'If,' he says, 'I note the slightest prejudice toward my wards, the remotest suggestion of alien regard a" there will be severe repercussions.'

And so drags on stage the contest nee Miss Stardust.

Ever have a dream where everything goes wrong? Where no matter what you try, it backfires? Where you're the eternal blunderer? That's what I feel like in that contest. The thing is a shambles.

There is a long rumble of curiosity when, after a few Earth babes have minced on and off stage, we hold up the card that reads Miss Mercury. Then a few hoots and cat-calls. These suddenly ending when the kid herself makes her entrance.

Now if a technicolour rock comes bobbing out on a stage, Harry, what would you do? The same as the audience did, I speck. Eyeb.a.l.l.s protrude, faces blank, jaws gape; in a thousand brains comes the sole query: Wot in 'ell is this?

Then some visiting fireman gives out with a guffaw and that starts it off. They all decide this is a wonderful gag. I glance a queasy shot over my trembling shoulder and see murder in that yellow eye. My Adam's apple does a swan dive into my lungs, and I turn back.

Applause now. Great little gag that, ha ha. Bring on some more. Some more comes.

Miss Venus.

A hothouse plant with eyes. It slips across the stage on its bottom fronds. The eyes, three, look around the audience. They look ever so slightly disgusted.

Another roar from the audience, this one a little forced. Like the roar of a man who, by gosh, is going to have a good time even if his hair is starting to stand on end. This gag is almost too good. A guy could swear that green plant was walking around by itself, the wires are so well concealed.

I smell a breath over my shoulder. Rather foul.

'This reception is highly unsatisfactory,' bubbles cabbage head. 'You will alleviate the situation or there will be increasing trouble for you.'

I look at him. I think of flying saucers and ray guns and California going up in toto.

That in mind, I bounce out on stage as Miss Venus exits. I raise the mike from the floor. I raise my palsied arms.

'May I have your attention,' my voice booms through the place. Only electrically.

Brief pause in pandemonium.

'Listen, people,' I say, 'I know this is hard to swallow but those two contestants you just saw are really from Mercury anda'

I am laughed to scorn. I am inundated by Bronx cheers. A cus.h.i.+on flies in the air. Mocking airplanes fas.h.i.+oned from programmes fill the auditorium sky. Confetti drizzles from the balconies.

'Wait a minute!' I shout. 'Your attention please.'

More noise. I wait for the subsiding. I see flash-bulb lightning everywhere. Story and pix will be in the newspapers post-haste. For the first time, unworked-for publicity gives me a pain. Let's face it, I'm scared, Harry. When heroes were made, I was sleeping one off in the next room.

'Let's be fair to these contestants,' I say, my voice a l.u.s.trous croak, 'Let's show them some real Earthlike sportsmans.h.i.+p.'

I then let loose a flimsy wave of hand, sheathe the mike in the floor, beckon to the m.c. to take over, and traipse off stage. Right into the vacuum cleaner. I raise a shaky smile to the edifice of his dubious good nature. He glares at me.

'Miss Mercury is grossly offended,' he tells me. 'She states that if she is not chosen winner of the contest, there will be severe retaliation by her elders.'

'What!'

I recoil against the curtain.

'Now wait a second,' I gasp. 'Have a heart. We can't rig the contest just becausea'

I'm talking to deaf ears. To no ears, to be correct.

'You created your own problem,' he says, 'when you named your contest as you did.'

'Buddy, I didn't name it!'

'Beside the actual point,' he says, and wheels off. I turn back to the stage with haunted blinkers. Just in time to get a fast load of Miss Mars making her debut on old Earth.

More like an hors d'oeuvre than a female. The trunk and head are two Spanish olives, and the legs and arms are toothpicks stuck in them. I hang onto the curtain ropes with a sorry groan. The audience isn't catcalling so much now. It is sinking in. Even though it's a hard thing to admit and still claim sanity. You see a couple of olives stroll on stage, preceded by an ambulating tropical plant and a rainbow rock that crawls and first you laugh it off, then the creeps get to you.

The creeps are getting to them.

Miss Jupiter doesn't help any when she slides across stage in a transparent globe. She looks like a dirty iceberg. No face, arms, legs a" no nothing. I hear someone in the audience gag. Someone says ugh. All we need now, I am thinking, isa 'Miss Mars has informed me,' the vacuum cleaner says, 'that unless she wins first prize, her injured emotions will result in venomous impulses toward revenge against this planet.'

'Now, wait a minute, buddy,' I implore.

'Finish the contest quickly,' he says.

'My wards are becoming violently ill at the sight of Earth people en ma.s.se.'

'What do you mean, ill?'

'They find your appearance surpa.s.singly repugnant,' he says.

'Now, look,' I say.

He is gone.

I watch him roll off. They find us repugnant. If I were not ready to cry I would laugh. But I am ready to cry.

Highlight of the show, Miss Stardust, their own Miss Stardust, comes out of the wings.

I can't say she walked. She didn't roll. It wasn't a crawl. You might say she s...o...b..red her way across the stage.

She was an orange jellyfish with a skirt and eyes. She was some jello quivering from the bowl in search of whipped cream. I better shut up, I'm making myself sick.

No, I keep tel ling myself, she wouldn't do that. She couldn't possibly think thata 'Our Miss Stardust has informed mea' starts the delegate.

That's all, brother.

'Oh she has!' I yell. 'What's the matter with Venus and Jupiter, are they sick?'

'They also demand first prize,' says the vacuum cleaner with the head like a cabbage.

I melt, I drip into the floorboards and disappear between the cracks. In wishful imagination anyway. I really just stand there, my mouth offering a large home for needy flies.

'How can they all win?' I ask in a gurgling mutter.

'Beside the actual point,' he says and I think in unison.

Briefly, my dander goes up again.

'I think you came here just to start trouble,' I tell him.

His eye is on me like an exterminator's lining sights on a particularly odious specimen.

'We do not like you Earthmen,' he says. 'My wards and I find you both obnoxious to the mind and unwholesome to the eye. My wards and I will be glad when they have all won first prize and can leave your loathsome presence.'

I stare at his receding dustbag back. I ponder slipping out the back way and hopping a raft for South America. In the pit the band is playing 'I'm in Love with the Man in the Moon,' the only interplanetary song they know. The judges are stumbling off stage for a break, looking for a good ten fingers of anything potent. They had become judges in the hope of rousing senile corpuscles by viewing luscious femalia. Insteada this.

I shepherd them all into a dressing room the size of an occupied closet. They all stand there with untended sweat drops dripping from their portly faces. They direct smitten eyes in my direction.

'We have a first-cla.s.s h.e.l.lish problem,' I tell them. I enlarge.

'Buta that's impossible!' cries Local Dignitary Number Two, unable to smite his n.o.ble brow because the room is too small.

'I've told him that,' I say, 'He's not buying.'

Gloober of etcetera and etcetera sinks down into a chair which just manages to support ample him.

'I'm sick,' he announces.

Gra.s.sblood pounds his well-pounded palm.

'This is un-American!' he says and purses lips.

'And I have a niece who wanted to win the contest,' says Mendelheimer sadly.

'What!' cries Local Dig 2. 'Fraud! Calumny!'

'Awright awready a" stow it? That is an angry me, fed up to here.

I ease immediate tension. I tell Mendelheimer that even if his niece, Miss Alimentary Ca.n.a.l, is impartially judged best-looking head, she can't win now because we are hung up. One of the outer s.p.a.cers has to get the prize.

'Ora what!' asks Gloober of.

'Or else we get pulverized,' I say.

'You think they can really do this thing?' asks Mendelheimer.