Things Will Never Be the Same Read online

Mr. Goober could not have come from an FCC licensed broadcaster in 1953. I’ll check Canada and Mexico, but I’m pretty sure everything was moved off those bands by then, even experimental stations. Since we never got sound, either there was none, or maybe it was coming in with the picture (like now) and her set couldn’t separate four pieces of information (one-half each of two signals, which is why we use FM for TV).

  It shouldn’t have happened, I don’t think. There are weird stories (the ghost signals of a Midwest station people saw the test patterns of more than a year after they quit broadcasting. The famous 2.8-second delay in radio transmissions all over the world on shortwave in 1927 and early 1928.)

  Am going to the NAB meeting in three weeks. Will talk to everybody there, especially the old guys, and find out if any of them knows about Mr. Goober’s Show. Stay sweet.

  Your sis,

  Irene

  * * *

  Eldon began the search on his own: at parties, at bars, at ball games. During the next few years, he wrote his sister with bits of fugitive matter he’d picked up. And he got quite a specialized knowledge of local TV shows, kid’s show clowns, Shock Theater hosts, and eclectic local programming of the early 1950s, throughout these United States.

  * * *

  June 25, 1979

  Dear Eldon—

  Sorry it took so long to get this letter off to you, but I’ve been busy at work, and helping with the Fund Drive, and I also think I’m on to something. I’ve just run across stuff that indicates there was some kind of medical outfit that used radio in the late ’40s and early ’50s.

  Hope you can come home for Christmas this time. Mom’s getting along in years, you know. I know you had your troubles with her (I’m the one to talk) but she really misses you. As Bill Cosby says, she’s an old person trying to get into Heaven now. She’s trying to be good the second thirty years of her life . . .

  Will write you again as soon as I find out more about these quacks.

  Your little sister,

  Irene

  * * *

  August 14, 1979

  Dear Big Brother—

  Well, it’s depressing here. The lead I had turned out to be a bust, and I could just about cry, since I thought this might be it, since they broadcast on both shortwave and FM (like Aunt Joanie’s set received), but this probably wasn’t it, either.

  It was called Drown Radio Therapy (there’s something poetic about the name, but not the operation). It was named for a Dr. Ruth Drown; she was an osteopath. Sometime before the War, she and a technocrat started working with a low-power broadcast device. By War’s end, she was claiming she could treat disease at a distance, and set up a small broadcast station behind her suburban Los Angeles office. Patients came in, were diagnosed, and given a schedule of broadcast times when they were supposed to tune in. (The broadcasts were directly to each patient, supposedly, two or three times a day.) By the late ’40s, she’d also gone into TV, which is, of course, FM (the radio stuff being shortwave.) That’s where I’d hoped I’d found someone broadcasting at the same time on both bands.

  But probably no go. She franchised the machines out to other doctors, mostly naturopaths and cancer quacks. It’s possible that one was operating near Aunt Joanie’s somewhere, but probably not, and anyway, a committee of doctors investigated her stuff. What they found was that the equipment was so low-powered it could only broadcast a dozen miles (not counting random skipping, bouncing off the Heaviside layer, which it wouldn’t have been able to reach.) Essentially, they ruled the equipment worthless.

  And, the thing that got to me, there was no picture transmission on the FM (TV) portion; just the same type of random signals that went out on shortwave, on the same schedule, every day. Even if you had a rogue cancer specialist, the FCC said the stuff couldn’t broadcast a visual signal, not with the technology of the time. (The engineer at the station here looked at the specs and said ‘even if they had access to video orthicon tubes, the signal wouldn’t have gotten across the room, unless it was on cable, which it wasn’t.’)

  I’ve gone on too long. It’s not it.

  Sorry to disappoint you (again), but I’m still going through back files of Variety and BNJ and everything put out by the networks in those years. And, maybe a motherlode, a friend’s got a friend who knows where all the Dumont records (except Gleason’s) are stored.

  We’ll find out yet, brother. I’ve heard stories of people waiting twenty, thirty, forty years to clear things like this up. There was a guy who kept insisting he’d read a serialized novel in a newspaper, about the fall of civilization, in the early 1920s. Pre-bomb, pre-almost everything. He was only a kid when he read it. Ten years ago he mentioned it to someone who had a friend who recognized it, not from a newspaper, but as a book called Darkness and the Dawn. It was in three parts, and serial rights were sold, on the first part only, to, like, three newspapers in the whole U.S. And the man, now in his sixties, had read it in one of them.

  Things like that do happen, kiddo.

  Write me when you can.

  Love,

  Irene

  * * *

  Sept. 12, 1982

  El—

  I’m ready to give up on this. It’s running me crazy—not crazy, but to distraction, if I had anything else to be distracted from.

  I can’t see any way out of this except to join the Welcome Space Brothers Club, which I refuse to do.

  That would be the easy way out: Give up, go over to the Cheesy Side of the Force. You and me saw a travelogue, a See It Now of the planets, hosted by an interstellar Walter Cronkite on a Nipkov disk TV in 1953. We’re the only people in the world who did. No one else.

  But that’s why CE3K and the others have made so many millions of dollars. People want to believe, but they want to believe for other people, not themselves. They don’t want to be the ones. They want someone else to be the one. And then they want everybody to believe. But it’s not their ass out there, saying: “the Space Brothers are here; I can’t prove it, take my word for it, it’s real. Believe me as a person.”

  I’m not that person, and neither are you; OR there has to be some other answer. One, or the other, but not both; and not neither.

  I don’t know what to do anymore; whatever it is, it’s not this. It’s quit being fun. It’s quit being something I do aside from life as we know it. It is my life, and yours, and it’s all I’ve got.

  I know what Mr. Goober was trying to tell us, and there was more, but the sound was off.

  I’m tired. I’ll write you next week when I can call my life my own again.

  Your Sis

  * * *

  Cops called from Irene’s town the next week.

  After the funeral, and the stay at his mother’s, and the inevitable fights, with his stepfather trying to stay out of it, he came home and found one more letter, postmarked the same day as the police had called him.

  Dear Eldon—

  Remember this, and don’t think less of me: what we saw was real.

  Evidently, too real for me.

  Find out what we saw.

  Love always,

  Irene

  * * *

  So you’ll be sitting in the bar, there’ll be the low hum and thump of noise as the band sets up, and over in the corner, two people will be talking. You’ll hear the word “Lucy,” which could be many things—a girlfriend, a TV show, a late President’s daughter, a two-million-year-old ape-child. Then you’ll hear “M-Squad” or “Untouchables” and there’ll be more talk, and you’ll hear distinctly, during a noise-level drop, “. . . and I don’t mean Johnny-fucking-Jupiter either . . .”

  And in a few minutes he’ll leave, because the band will have started, and conversation, except at the 100-decibel level, is over for the night.

  B
ut he’ll be back tomorrow night. And the night after.

  And all the star-filled nights that follow that one.

  AFTERWORD

  I’ve told this anecdote other places, too.

  This one was written on a blazing hot January day when the temperature was in the high 30°s.

  I mean Perth, Australia, and I mean Centigrade.

  I was Guest of Honor at SwanCon on January 25, 1997. I had to read a story at 4 p.m. I got up at 6 a.m. and started writing. I wrote til I had a panel at 1 p.m., ate some food, showered and wrote til 3:58 p.m. Then I read to a bunch of Aussies and other Wild Colonial Persons.

  (At that earlier panel, half the convention was in the audience. About midway through, the other half of the convention filed in, jam-packing the place. They were led by a guy with a guitar. Then the whole convention stood up and sang “Waltzing Matilda” to me—It was Australia Day, after all, their combined Labor Day, 4th of July and National Blind Drunk Day all rolled into one—because they’d heard that I’d carried, in every wallet I’d ever owned since I’d clipped it out of a Life Magazine article about the premiere of Stanley Kramer’s On The Beach in 1959—the words of A.B. “Banjo” Paterson’s unofficial Australian national anthem—as the convention sang, I took out the faded, folded piece of paper and held it up.)

  Get me back to Seattle, then Oso. I’d written the story in a white heat (I’d wanted to write it for a long time so it was easy) but I needed the exact wording of a piece of research from a book I no longer owned, at a certain point in the story.

  I sent a letter down to Andrew Hooper in Seattle. (At Oso, I had no phone or broadcast TV for seven and 1/2 years, and no stove or refrigerator for the first three years . . .) Andy got the letter, put on his urban sombrero and poncho and hie he hither to the Fremont Public Library in a 40° rain. (I’m talking Farenheit.)

  He sent me back a note with exactly what I needed, which I got the third morning. Thanks again, Andrew. I finished the story up on March 7, 1997 and sent it off to Ellen Datlow at Omni Online, it was bought and paid for, and the story was put up on March 26, 1998.

  On March 30, 1998 Omni Online pulled the plug and went flatline DOA.

  I instantly (well, three days later) got a letter from Gordon van Gelder at F&SF asking if he could buy print rights to the story since “nobody saw it the four days it was up.” Sure, I’ll sell a story twice, I said. So it came out again in F&SF in a few months.

  When it did, Hooper said “It would have made a great episode of the original Twilight Zone.”

  I told him I was sorry I had only been 13 when the original series started but that I would have been happy to have written it for them then . . .

  All the stuff I talk about (the technology stuff) was true. It’s going to happen again in a couple of years when your TV quits working and HDTV takes over.

  I’m predicting right here right now in this book there’ll be riots dwarfing the New York Astor Place Riot of 1848 and the Draft Riots of 1863 when people realize they’ve got to get a new $3000 TV and an $800 DVD player and cable boxes before there’s anything but “the color of a tv screen tuned to a dead channel’’ in Gibson’s memorable words.

  Mark my words.

  US

  Prologue

  The ladder, though ingeniously made, was flimsy and the rungs were too far apart. He had pushed the dowels into the holes in each of the three sections. It had been made to fit inside the car, parked a mile away off the road to Hopewell. The night was cold and it had not been easy to put the sections of the ladder together with the leather gloves he wore.

  Construction stuff lay all around. The house wasn’t landscaped yet, borders and walks were laid out but not yet rocked in. The house was big, two stories and a gable-windowed third narrow one set in the steeply pitched roof. The outside was stucco.

  He put the ladder against the upstairs window, the one with the shutter that, though new, was already warped and wouldn’t close completely.

  He picked up the gunnysack, checked in his pocket for the envelope, and started up. There were two lights on downstairs, the sitting room and the kitchen.

  The ladder swayed and groaned. He had to lift one leg at a time, more crawl up than climb, then pull the other one after it up to the same rung. When both feet were on one, he could feel the vibration of the strain.

  He reached the next from the top, pulled the shutter the rest of the way open without a sound. He raised the window, the sack flopping over his face as he used one hand to steady himself and the other to lift.

  His eyes adjusted to the dim light inside. There was a stack of trunks and suitcases under the window, the sill of which was concrete rather than wood. A crib across the way. Beside the window a fireplace and mantel, some bird toys along the top. A scooter on the floor. Just past the fireplace a big parabolic electric heater and a chair. The room was almost hot.

  He smelled Mentholatum or Vicks salve. He eased himself over the sill, swung the sack and his feet to the floor. He went to the crib, where the medicine smell was strongest.

  The kid was safety-pinned under the blankets, its breathing a little rough and croupy. He undid one of the pins, eased the toddler out of the crib. It began to move.

  “Sh-sh-sh,” he said, holding it close and swinging it slightly back and forth. He noticed the kid was in some kind of cut-down larger garment rather than Dr. Denton’s or a nightshirt. The child subsided.

  He pulled a blanket out of the sack, wrapped the kid in it, put both back in the bag, lifted it gently by the center top. He went to the windowsill, laid the bag down, eased himself over. He had to search around for the first rung, turned, put one leg down, then the other. He reached back inside. Lifted the child by the sack onto the concrete sill. He felt inside his pocket, took out the envelope, put it on the inside of the sill.

  Then with both hands, he lifted the sack.

  One: “The Little Eaglet”

  He had been born just after Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto. He was the most famous child in the world for a year or two, until Shirley Temple came along. He was the son of a famous man and a celebrated mother. Somebody’d tried to kidnap him when he was twenty months old, but they’d caught the guy on the way to his car. and Charles Jr. was back in his crib by 10:00 p.m. and didn’t remember a thing about it.

  But it convinced his father (a very private man) and his mother (from a distinguished family) that they would be hounded all their lives by newspapermen, gossip columnists, and radio reporters if they stayed where they were.

  They moved out of the house in New Jersey and moved out to Roswell, New Mexico, so his father could be near his friend Dr. Robert H. Goddard, who fooled around with rockets.

  “The Little Eaglet,” as the press had dubbed him, grew up watching six-foot-long pieces of metal rise, wobble, and explode themselves all over the remote scrub country of the Eden Valley that Uncle Robert used as a range.

  It was a great place to be a kid. His mother and father were often away on flights, surveying airline routes, or his father was off consulting with Boeing or Curtiss, or there’d be pictures of him in a zeppelin somewhere. His mother, when she was around, wrote books and was always off in her study, or having another of his brothers and sisters.

  He had the run of the place. The first time he’d walked over on his own to the worksheds, Uncle Robert had stooped down to his level and said, “Do anything you want here, kid, but don’t ever play with matches.”

  They let him have pieces of metal, old tubing, burnt-out frozen-up fuel pumps, and that neat stuff that looks like tortoiseshell. They had to run him out of the place when they closed up at night.

  He went unwillingly to school in 1936, each day an agony of letters and numbers. Of course he had to poke a few three-foot jerks in the snoot because they made fun of his curly golden hair.
r />   He learned a phrase early and used it often: “So’s your old man.”

  His own old man, after some vacillation, jumped on the Preparedness bandwagon and was out with Hap Arnold, beefing up the army air corps.

  You wouldn’t have known there’d just been a Depression.

  Uncle Robert finally got something right. When he was eight, Charles Jr. watched a rocket go up and actually get out of sight before it exploded. He, Uncle Robert, and everybody else ran back inside the small blockhouse while it rained metal for a couple of minutes.

  Of course his father taught him how to fly, but since he’d been driving the converted mail van and rocket trailer from the shed three miles out to the range since he was six (he’d put blocks on the brakes and accelerator and stood on a box to see out the windshield), he thought flying was a lot like driving a car, only the road was bigger.

  One time he and his father talked about it. “I like flying too, I guess,” said Charles Jr. “But the air’s so thick. That’s for sissies.”

  “You’ll think sissy when you pull three g’s on an inside turn sometime,” said the Lone Eagle.

  He spent most of his time with his aunt and uncle, and by the time he was ten he was working for Uncle Robert after school and full time in the summers, at whatever needed to be done.

  Uncle Robert was getting older—he’d always looked old with his bald head and mustache, but now his head was wrinkled and the mustache was gray and white like a dollop of cream cheese across his lip.