The Starcrossed

16: THE REACTION

On the second Friday in January, twenty-odd members of the New England Science Fiction Association returned to their clubroom after their usual ritual Chinese dinner in downtown Boston. The clubroom was inside the lead walls of what once had housed MIT’s nuclear reactor until the local Cambridge chapter of Ecology Nowl had torn the reactor apart with their bare hands, a decade earlier, killing seventeen of their members within a week from the radiation poisoning and producing a fascinating string of reports for the obstetrics journals ever since.

The clubroom was perfectly safe now, of course. It had been carefully decontaminated and there was a trusty scintillation counter sitting on every bookshelf, right alongside musty crumbling copies of Astounding Stories of Super Science.

The NESFA members were mostly young men and women, in their twenties or teens, although on this evening they were joined by the President Emeritus, a retired lawyer who was regaling them with his Groucho Marx imitations.

“Okay, knock it off!” said the current president, a slim, long-haired brunette who ran the City of Cambridge’s combined police, fire and garbage control computer system. “It’s time for the new show.”

They turned on the three-dee in the corner and arranged themselves in a semicircle on the floor to see the first episode of “The Starcrossed.”

But first, of course, they saw three dozen commercials: for bathroom bowl cleaners, bras, headache remedies, perfumes, rectal thermometers, hair dyes, and a foolproof electronic way to cheat on your school exams. Plus new cars, used cars, foreign cars, an airline commercial that explained the new antihijacking system (every passenger gets his very own Smith Wesson .38 revolver!), and an ail company ad dripping with sincerity about the absolute need to move the revered site of Disneyland so that “we can get more oil to serve you better.”

The science fiction fans laughed and jeered at all the commercials, especially the last one. They bicycled, whenever and wherever the air was safe enough to breathe.

Then the comer of the room where the three-dee projector cast its images went absolutely black. The fans went silent with anticipation. Then a thread of music began, too faint to really pick out the tune. A speck of light appeared in the middle of the pool of blackness. Then another. Two stars, moving toward each other. The music swelled.

“Hey, that tune is ‘When You Wish Upon a Star!’”

“Sssshhh.” Nineteen hisses.

The two stars turned out to be starships and bold letters spelled out “The Starcrossed” over them. The fans cheered and applauded.

Two minutes later, after another dozen commercials, they were gaping.

“Look at how solid they are!”

“It’s like they’re really here in the room. No scintillations at all.”

“It’s a damned-near perfect projection.”

“I wish we had a life-sized set.”

“You can reach out and touch them!”

“I wouldn’t mind touching her!”

“Or him. He’s got muscles. Not like the guys around here.”

“And she’s got.…”

Twelve hisses, all from female throats, drowned him out.

Fifteen minutes later, they were still gaping, but now their comments were:

“This is pretty slow for an opening show.”

“It’s pretty slow, period.”

“That hockey player acts better in the Garden when they call a foul on him.”

“Shuddup. I want to watch Juliet breathe.”

Halfway into the second act they were saying:

“Who wrote this crud?”

“It’s awful”

“They must be dubbing Romeo’s speeches. His mouth doesn’t sync with the words.”

“Who cares? The words are dumb.”

They laughed. They groaned. They threw marshmallows at the solid looking images and watched the little white missiles sail right through the performers. When the show finally ended:

“What a wagonload of crap!”

“Well, at least the girl was good-looking.”

“Good-looking? She’s sensational!”

“But the story. Ugh!”

“What story?”

“There was a story?”

“Maybe its supposed to be a children’s show.”

“Or a spoof.”

“It wasn’t funny enough to be a spoof.”

“Or intelligent enough to be a children’s show. Giant amoebas in space!”

“It’ll set science fiction back ten years, at least.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the President Emeritus said, clutching his walking stick. “I thought it was pretty funny in places.”

“In the wrong places.”

“One thing, though. That new projection system is terrific. I’m going to scrounge up enough money to buy a lifesized three-dee. They’ve finally worked all the bugs out of it.”

“Yeah.”

“Right. Let’s get a life-sized set for the clubroom.”

“Do we have enough money in the treasury?”

“We do,” said the treasurer, “if we cancel the rocket launch in March.”

“Cancel it,” the president said. “Let’s see if the show gets any better. We can always scratch up more money for a rocket launch.”

In Pete’s Tavern in downtown Manhattan, the three-dee set was life-sized. The regulars sat on their stools with their elbows on the bar and watched “The Starcrossed” actors galumph across the corner where the jukebox used to be.

After the first few minutes, most of them turned back to the bar and resumed their drinking.

“That’s Francois Dulaq, the hockey star?”

“Indeed it is, my boy.”

“Terrible. Terrible. “

“Hey, Kenno, turn on the hockey game. At least we can see some action. This thing stinks.”

But one of the women, chain smoking while sipping daiquiris and petting the toy poodle in her lap, stared with fascination at the life-sized three-dimensional images in the corner. “What a build on him,” she murmured to the poodle.

In the Midwest the show went on an hour later.

Eleven ministers of various denominations stared incredulously at Rita Yearling and immediately began planning sermons for Sunday on the topic of the shamelessness of modern women. They watched the show to the very end.

The cast and crew of As You Like It caught the show during a rehearsal at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. They decided they didn’t like it at all and asked their director to pen an open letter to Titanic Productions, demanding a public apology to William Shakespeare.

The science fiction classes at the University of Kansas—eleven hundred strong—watched the show in the University’s Gunn Amphitheater. After the first six minutes, no one could hear the dialogue because of the laughing, catcalls and boos from the sophisticated undergraduates and grad students. The professor who held the Harrison Chair and therefore directed the science fiction curriculum decided that not hearing the dialogue was a mercy. The six-man police force of Cisco, Texas, voted Rita Yearling “The Most Arresting Three-Dee Personality.”

The Hookers Convention in Reno voted Francois Dulaq “Neatest Trick of the Year.”

The entire state of Utah somehow got the impression that the end of the world had come a step closer.

In Los Angeles, the cadaverous young man who wrote television criticism for the Free Press-News-Times smiled as he turned on his voice recorder. Ron Gabriel had stolen three starlets from him in the past year. Now was the moment of his revenge.

He even felt justified.

The editor-in-chief of the venerable TV Guide, in his Las Vegas office, shook his head in despair. “How in the world am I going to put a good face on this piece of junk?” he asked a deaf heaven.

In Oakland, the staff of the most influential science fiction newsletter watched the show to its inane end—where Dulaq (playing Rom, or Romeo) improvises a giant syringe from one of his starship’s rocket tubes and kills the spaceroving Giant Amoeba with a thousand liter shot of penicillin.

Charles Brown III heaved a mighty sigh. The junior editors, copyreaders and collators sitting at his feet held their breath, waiting for his pronouncement.

“Stinks,” he said simply.

High on a mountainside in the Cascade Range, not far from Glacier Park, a bearded writer clicked off his threedee set and sat in the darkness of his mist-enshrouded chalet. For many minutes he simply sat and thought.

Then he snapped his fingers and his voice recorder came rolling out of its slot on smoothly oiled little trunions. “Take a letter,” he said to the simple-minded robot and its red ON light winked with electrical pleasure. “No, make it a telegram. To Ran Gabriel. The ’puter has his address in its memory. Dear Ron: Have plenty of room up here in the hills if you need to get away from the flak. Come on up. The air’s clean and the women are dirty. What more can I say? Signed, Herb. Make it collect.”

And in Bernard Finger’s home in the exclusive Watts section of Greater Los Angeles, doctors shuttled in and out, like substitute players for the Honolulu Pineapples, manfully struggling to save the mogul of Titanic Productions from what appeared to be-from the symptoms—the world’s first case of manic convulsive paranoid cardiac insufficiency, with lockjaw on the side.