The Moth (39 page)

“Swell, but it’s early yet, so take it easy.”

“O.K., but
I’VE GOT IT
!”

“Sh!”

But before I could shut him up, she said something from upstairs, and from the sound of her voice she wasn’t even out of bed yet. In a couple of minutes, she was down, in shorts, without make-up, her hair twisted up in a knot. No servants were up, so she got breakfast herself, and served it on the table at the corner of the pool. But as soon as she had brought the eggs she told him to get going. “Laws, Hannah—you heard of them?”

“You mean like against arson, murder, mayhem—”

“I mean like gravity, forces, light—”

“Oh, physical laws!”

“That’s it. Who found them?”

“Why—didn’t Sir Isaac Newton? That apple hitting him on the—oh no, that can’t be right.”

“It is, though, you had it, first guess. And that reminds me to look up that guy’s public-relations stuff. Did it ever occur to you that’s the
only
scientific man an American has ever heard of, really to know who he was? They couldn’t tell Archimedes from Hippocrates on a bet, and yet—”

“I said get going.”

“I will, don’t worry. So we show him. We put out a regular, special picture of him, all over the billboards, on every piece of advertising we run, there on the grass, with his apple. Dreaming up his law. But our scientists—get a load of this, Hannah—they study the stars!”

“We got scientists?”

“Jack’s a B.S.”

“Why does Jack study the stars?”

“To find new elements, or whatever they’ve got up there. Because that’s our twist. The new way, they don’t work with apples, they do it with a telescope, or spectroscope, or some kind of goddam scope, don’t pin me down which, because I don’t know what it is yet but I’ll get it. The main point is, when you got some law like gravity, some element like neon, before they put it in a test tube, some slug with a glass found it in a star. Then they started looking for it here, in the middle of the Gobi Desert or some place. They—”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Then ask Jack.”

“Scientist, is he kidding me?”

“No.”

“O.K., smart guy. They—”

“They had to know it existed before they could go looking for it and put it in quantity production. You can’t find gold in them thar hills till you heard of gold.”

“So?”

“We’re putting out a new gas.”

“Are we, Jack?”

“Gas is gas. Why not?”

“Observatory gas, Hannah.”

“Yeah, but
why?”

“I’m telling you—
our scientists study the stars,
and we’ve got to put out a new gas to put that point over. For all that special
ethyl
that our gas has got, for that high-octane
pick-up,
for that good old
power,
for those extra
miles per gallon,
our scientists, the ones with smocks on their backs and slide rules in their hand and telescopes to their eyes, study the stars! And if you don’t believe it, stop at the nearest Seven-Star observatory and look at a star yourself!”

“We got observatories?”

“We will have.”

“Yeah, telescopes, but—what do you mean, observatories?”

“I mean the works.”

“But—with domes on them?”

“And telescopes pointing up in the air—ten feet.”

“Who’s paying for this?”

“You are.”

“I like that.”

He’d been half gagging up to then, but all of a sudden he got serious and began popping it off the end of his cigarette, like he did when he was trying to put something over. He said it actually wouldn’t cost a lot, as that was what he’d been looking into, these last two days since he took his powder. The telescopes, he said, you got from the Amateur Astronomers’ Association, and there were at least a dozen members of it that he had already talked to, who were just praying for the chance to get a job together for us, and so cheap you could hardly believe it. The domes would be plastic, and he’d already got a price from two or three companies that would be almost within the estimates that had been turned in for new rest rooms on several of the stations, which had to be built anyway, and could be designed to let a dome in as well as not. That was the thing to remember, he said: the observatory, the rest room, the soft-drink vendor, the water bubbler, and all the rest of it should be one unit, a feature with some individuality. He kept talking about clean, nice rest rooms, and spoke about Standard and how many people go there just because of lavatory facilities. This, he said, would be the same idea, with the observatory an extra attraction. It would be in front of the rest rooms, and revolve with a mechanism he had already got a price on, from a junk dealer, who had a dozen circular tracks, seven feet across, with cogs on them, and pinions to fit, all for some cockeyed low price. The control wheels, so each customer could turn the dome, or turret, whatever way it suited him, he said had to be shiny brass, and he’d got quotations from another junkyard. But the big surprise for me and Hannah came when he told about the big tube of brass that sticks out of the top of a dome, and works in a slot that cuts it in half. “That thing isn’t for any purpose at all but to shut out light, so you can see the moon in the daytime of you want to look, and so at night light from the Milky Way doesn’t get in. The works of a telescope, what you see with, goes in a grip you can carry in your hand. The rest is just window dressing. Those tubes we get at a sheet brass works, and I’ve got quotations on them right here. They roll up a piece of brass to our order, catch it with rivets, deliver when we’re ready to install—and there’s our observatory. It shines like a fireman’s hat, sticks away up in the air so you can see it a mile, it’s cheap, and it’s scientific! And on top of that we’ve got the astrology. But why the hell I’ve got to argue so much about it, I don’t—”

“Sold, Denny. That is, if Jack—”

“Sounds O.K.”

“I just love it!”

He organized it, I’ll say that for him, right down to the last picture, copy, and release date, a regular southern California production job. We’d been making more money than I had really told her, so we could afford what he was doing easy enough, even if I did put the brakes on him here and there, just from habit, or sense of duty, or whatever it was. But it cost even less than I figured on, mainly because all that stuff, the domes, telescopes, brass wheels, and so on, looked a lot more expensive than they were. And whatever it cost, I think I would have O.K.’d it, because it was opening up something that until then I’d paid no attention to at all. I mean, it dealt with people. Up to then, my life had been things. Music, my voice, had been things, and a football was a thing, as a boxcar was, and a fruit spray, and a well. But this started with stars, the domes, and the glasses, and went on to how people felt about them. Denny tried his slogans, copy, and pictures, on everybody, from Rohrer and Lida and me and Hannah to Joe Doaks. Every reaction he’d get, he’d rethink and rewrite and redraw. After he’d tried the stuff on two hundred different people Sir Isaac was out. “It’s O.K., Jack, it’s simple and they can understand it, but in the first place it’s comedy and in the second place it’s crumby. I mean, we want everything streamlined, and then we show a fat old bastard in a Quaker Oats suit, sitting under a tree, rubbing his head with one hand and holding an apple with the other—and it’s wrong. We’ll take care of that stuff about the elements that were discovered on Mars before they were discovered on earth, or wherever they were discovered, but we’ll do it in copy. We’ll have a nice, refined column, no more than ten picas wide, running down one side of the page explaining about it, but the rest of it’s got to soar. It’s got to go sailing right off the page—out into the wide blue yonder so we lift ’em. You get it, Jack? It isn’t only that we got telescopes. It’s got to be a symbol of a whole world, of the world they live in—of infinity with a supercharger.”

I guess it sounds corny, more like Eddie Guest than Walt Whitman, but it was poetry, just the same, to him, and I’ve got to admit it, to me. It opened up things, not quite the world he was talking about, but another world I never heard of just the same, the world that you scored in by controlling people’s minds, and I don’t mind saying I bought it all, and hard. We made our first announcement with a page ad in Westways, which is a magazine put out by the Automobile Club of Southern California, and he knocked me over with it, because he caught me completely by surprise. For the picture, he ran a photo of her, Hannah, I mean. But it was a special kind of photo, and caught her at night, all smeared up with some kind of glycerin so she shone like a glowworm, with a white silk jersey swimming outfit that showed every curve she had, but somehow looked scientific at the same time. I mean, she had on big, wide glasses with white rims and white pieces running back over her ears, and she was standing under one of our telescopes, with her hand on it like she was just about to peep through it, but looking up at the sky like she was going to make sure, first, what she was going to peep at. And those thick, solid shoulders somehow meant business, more than a hundred slim cuties could have meant, and caught the spirit of this new world he was trying to put across, and gave it that thing he was talking about, lift, the spring that carried it right off the page. On the left, where you didn’t notice it till about the dozenth time you turned to the page, was the column of small type about the elements, and underneath a wide picture of one of our stations, showing the dome and glass sticking up. Up above were the stars, and Seven-Star had been changed from a circle cluster to the Big Dipper. But the main thing was that girl, with something classical about her pose that made it seem all right about the curves, and the way she was looking up, and the expression on her face. I went for it all, and I didn’t miss it that other people would too. He was hardly out with the ad, and some newspaper stuff that released a little later, and hadn’t even got started on the radio program yet, when he was invited up to L.A., to address the biweekly luncheon the Advertising Club holds on Tuesdays at the Biltmore. I didn’t go, but she did, and sat out in the lobby and listened, and when she came back she dropped in my office to give me a special report. Then she said: “He’s big time, your friend Mr. Deets. I hope we can hold him.”

“We’ll do our best.”

“I think he rates a bonus.”

“Just that—a bonus?”

“Well?”

“He does—but say it bigger.”

“You mean real money?”

“We’d better.”

“Jack, I’d say the main thing is: To keep building Seven-Star, so as it grows, his prospects grow and he has an incentive!”

“Yeah, but money talks.”

I guess it was two or three months after that, when Denny had been with us nearly a year, that she came up to me at the refinery, where I’d gone to talk with Rohrer about putting a new unit in. I was standing at one of the stills when she came down the concrete stairs, said she wanted to see me, and went off in the direction of the office. I went over there. I was no sooner in the room than she piled in: “Jack, why didn’t you tell me Mrs. Deets was here.”

“Denny’s wife?”

“She’s been here a week.”

“I didn’t know it.”

“He didn’t mention it to you?”

“Not a word.”

“You didn’t notice he’d moved from the Castile?”

“He hasn’t. When I stopped by the desk this morning the girl was still taking his messages. She’d never be doing that if he’d left there. She’d say he’d checked out. I was in the hotel business once. I know.”

“He’s paid up till the end of the month.”

“Then he hasn’t moved.”

“Doesn’t this all strike you as very peculiar?”

“It’s his business. And his wife.”

“Couldn’t you have made it your business? A little?”

“I like to be friendly, I like to do things for people, I like to help a guy get settled, I like to welcome a girl to a strange place, and maybe have some flowers waiting for her when she sees her new living room for the first time. But I’m no goddam mind reader.”

“You can hardly blame him, though.”

“For what?”

“For keeping it quiet. After the queer way you’ve acted.”

“I?
About what?”

“His wife, Jack. Stop cracking dumb!”

“I’ve never said one word to him about his wife.”

“Well, good God! Isn’t that acting just about as queer as they come—or am I crazy? After all, you knew he was married, he’s mentioned a hundred times he was married, he talks about writing his wife, and you’ve never said a word to him about her. Is that how things are done? Is that so nice and friendly?”

“His wife is from Baltimore. Or so I suppose.”

“So what?”

“I don’t want to hear about Baltimore.”

“Jack, I’m not crazy.”

“O.K., so I am.”

She lit a cigarette, snapped the ashes at the ash tray four or five times, and began charging up and down like some kind of a leopard. I tried to talk. “Yeah, he mentioned about his wife, or tried to. He’s tried to mention about a good many things, including my family. I’ve cut him off. I’ve tried to make it plain to him I don’t want any news from home, and I’ve got my reasons. I never hid anything from you, particularly, and if you want to know what my reasons are, I guess I can tell you, but I’d prefer not to. I had a row. With my father. So I blew. I beat it out of there, but what I want to hear about him, or Baltimore, or any of it, is nothing. I’ve encouraged him strictly to keep his mouth shut about anything personal, and he’s done it.”

“But Jack—I was never so embarrassed in my life as when I blew into his office just now, over there at the Jergins Trust Building, just to say hello and ask how things were going, and he was standing there talking with this girl, and come to find out it was his wife, and she’d been here a week, and they’ve gone and taken a place on Willow Avenue, and I hadn’t even been around to see if there was something I could do. Good God, Jack—is that making him like us? Is that saying bonus in a big loud tone of voice?”

“I tell you I couldn’t guess it.”

“Yes, but that’s the whole point. When I actually did get him off by himself for a minute, and put it up to him what was the big idea, I couldn’t even get him to talk then. He said you’ve acted so queer about the whole thing he supposed you’d prefer he said nothing about it, and so they did it this way. Jack, what are you hiding?”