Short Story: That's Entertainment

Short Story: That's Entertainment

When his wife called out to him with obvious excitement, Elnax came out of the kitchen quickly, sure that Borzilon’s agitation had something to do with her experiments. He was careful to pretend to be interested in his wife’s work in order not to appear ignorant, but in actuality he knew and understood little of it.

“Yes, dear, what is it?” he asked sweetly when he reached his wife’s study. “Is your project going well?”

“It is finished. Look at it!”

Elnax was puzzled when Borzilon pointed towards an ordinary rectangular box. He had seen her working on it for several weeks but had never asked what it was supposed to be. Even now,completed, it did not seem much.

“That box? That’s what you have been working on all this time? And that’s why you called me away from making dinner?”

His annoyance was obvious.

“Look closer, Elnax,” Borzilon remained patient. “Don’t you see?”

“Do you mean the picture on the front?”

“Of course, I mean the picture. Don’t you see that it’s moving?”

“Yes, certainly. If it weren’t flat and gray and so very small, I’d be reminded of an entertainment machine, but even the one we have is much better than that thing, and ours certainly is an ancient model.”

“My dear Elnax, you still don’t understand. I know that our entertaining machines are not only three-dimensional with sound and smell but . . .”

“There is a new model with touch, too, I heard,” the man interrupted dreamily. “Do you think we could get one like that? It would make everything so much more exciting. Imagine, being right there in the middle, touching and being touched . . .”

Borzilon did not wait until her husband finished his reverie.

“Elnax,” she said sharply, “this is not a small edition of our entertaining machines. It is a receiver for transmittals from the planet Prux.”

“Prux? What are you talking about? There is no planet with that name!”

Borzilon smiled gently at her husband’s ignorance.

“Not in this solar system, my love. Prux belongs to the system of Provog. Some time ago, quite by accident, I became interested in that star and its planets. And do you know what I found out?”

Elnax knew that this was a rhetorical question, and he managed to look expectantly at his wife even though he knew he was in for a boring lecture.

“It is an amazing coincidence. Provog is the same size as our sun. Prux is the third planet in its solar system, just like our Earth. It is almost identical to Earth in every respect its distance from Provog is almost the same as the distance from the Earth to the Sun, its diameter, its weight, its density, all correspond. Its temperature and atmosphere are almost exact duplicates of our own and what is probably most important, it rotates at the same speed as our planet.”

The man was thinking how difficult it was to be married to a brilliant scientist who expected her husband to take an interest in her work.

“So what?” he asked and found it almost impossible to stifle a yawn.

“Don’t you see, Elnax?” In spite of her husband’s lack of interest, Borzilon was eager to explain everything in detail. “I thought if there were a chance for human beings to have developed on the same lines as we did, it would be there, on that planet. With the help of teaching machines, I discovered some unusual rays from Prux and built this receiver. Now I know I’m right. Look at the people on the screen. They look exactly like we do, they could be from Earth.”

“What is this box?”

“I told you it’s a receiver for transmittals from Prux. I’m not at all sure, though, what these transmittals mean. They could be a centralized entertaining or teaching network that can be picked up by all the people on Prux who own a receiver like this. But I might be wrong.”

“But if that is their entertainment, it would mean that they are much more primitive than we are.”

“As far as entertainment goes, probably. Possibly in everything else, too. But that’s something we’ll have to find out, right there on the spot.”

Only then did Elnax realize that Borzilon had a special reason for giving him this tedious explanation.

“Are you by any chance planning to go up there?” His voice shook with dread as he asked the question.

“Darling,” Borzilon said quietly, with great patience, “you’re still not using the right words. I know it looks like ‘up’ there from your window but the correct phraseology is actually ‘out there.’ Yes, dear, I’m going out there, just as soon as the preparations are finished. I’ve done as much as I can from here. The rest of the research has to be done on the spot.”

Elnax was stunned. Although he was used to his wife’s periodical absences whenever she undertook scientific expeditions, this seemed like a different proposition.

“You can’t go there, Borzilon,” he cried. “You don’t know enough about . . . that planet with the funny name. Maybe the people aren’t like us.”

“Look at the picture, Elnax,” Borzilon said.

“You can’t tell from a little flat gray picture. They could be much smaller than we are.”

“In that case I would have no trouble at all, would I?” teased the woman.

“Maybe not. But what would you do if they were much bigger?”

“I really don’t understand you.” Borzilon shook her head in exasperation, not wanting to admit that such an unpleasant possibility had occurred to her, too. “You knew when you married me that I would go on expeditions quite often. Why are you so opposed to this particular one? You’ve never before made such a fuss.”

“It’s the first time you ever wanted to go out of our solar system,” Elnax sobbed.

“That’s not true, darling. Remember that government project on which I worked two years ago?”

“That was different,” he replied stubbornly, making Borzilon smile at this piece of male logic.

“Come on, dear, you know it was not. My partner Xondi and I are going together again, just as we did many times before. Both of us are qualified scientists and astronauts. So please stop making difficulties.”

“How will you speak to the people there?”

For a moment, Borzilon hesitated. “There’s a slight problem with the language,” she said. “Our teaching machines and speech analyzers had no difficulty with any of the tongues spoken in our solar system. But they could not do much with the language of Prux.”

“I saw only the moving pictures,” Elnax was interested again. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“I switched off the sound because we can’t understand it and because it is very unusual. Listen.” Borzilon threw a switch, and suddenly the room was filled with noises that Elnax had never heard before.

“Shut it off, it’s horrible,” he yelled, covering his ears. “Are you trying to tell me that you want to learn that?”

“I have already started, but right now it is not that easy. As I told you before, the teaching machines at the university have not been much help. They finally isolated a number of phrases that are being repeated over and over. We don’t know what they mean but both Xondi and I are memorizing as many of these sentences as we can in order to greet the first person we meet with a few words in her own language. I’m sure we’ll be able to find someone who can teach us their language in exchange for learning ours. Listen and tell me if I’m not coming pretty close to their pronunciation.”

When Elnax heard his wife imitate the strange, garbled language of the box, he became almost hysterical, but Borzilon was determined to go on the expedition despite her husband’s opposition. However, as a considerate wife, she made it easier for him to accept defeat by promising to take him on a two week moon vacation after her return from Prux.

•••

At this point in the story the editor looked up. “I’m sorry, son. I’m afraid we can’t use this.”

The nervous young man who sat across from his desk stammered.

“But your cousin . . . he said it was real good. Just the stuff you would be wanting for your magazine.”

“My cousin,” the editor replied and wondered why he had ever listened to that bum, “obviously doesn’t know what we want. I’m terribly sorry, this is not what we’re looking for.”

“Listen, could you at least tell me what’s wrong with it? Maybe I could change a few things,” the boy begged.

Deep down, the editor had a soft heart for young aspiring writers. He should have told the kid to beat it and not to waste his valuable time. He should have said that no matter how much more work he put into this story, it would still be unsuitable for his magazine. But because his cousin had sent the boy and because he was a kind man, he just sighed.

“First of all, Jack, our magazine publishes only straight science fiction stories. Yes, I know,” he held up his hand when the writer wanted to interrupt him, “there is some mention of a machine that is obviously much more advanced than anything we have now. There is also the fact, not too subtly expressed, that in some future age women will be the brains on this planet and men will be househusbands,” he allowed himself a small chuckle there, “but apart from that there is really nothing sci-fi about the story. No scientific jargon, nothing that would interest our fans. And one of my rules for selecting stories is that no matter how fantastic the tale is, people must be able to believe that in some more or less distant future this could happen. But in your case, nobody could make me believe that all this might one day come to pass. You see my point?”

“But, Mr. Ericsson,” the boy sounded confused, “I don’t understand, and I don’t think you do, either. I thought your cousin told you. All that has already happened. It is a true story.”

The editor almost swallowed his pipe. For a moment, he was tempted to throw the impertinent young man out, but then he decided to delve a little deeper.

“This is science fiction, or isn’t it?” he asked with a gleam in his eyes.

The boy squirmed. “Not really!”

“What do you mean, not really? This is not about the earth at some future date?”

“Oh no, Mr. Ericsson. Is that what you thought? I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. Maybe I should not have used ‘Earth’ and ‘Sun’ when I spoke of their solar system. That’s a translation of their words, Hovor and Horeb. I only did it to make the story easier to understand.”

The editor’s puzzlement grew.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“If you read on, it tells about my meeting with Borzilon and Xondi.”

“That’s another thing. Where did you get these terrible names, anyway? The title and the right kind of names could make or break a work, Jack, remember that.”

“They asked me not to change their names if I ever wrote a story about them.”

“Who asked you?”

“Borzilon and Xondi.”

The editor’s pipe was in danger of being swallowed for the second time.

“Are you out of your mind?” he finally asked. “Do you really believe there are such people?”

“Of course there are, Mr. Ericsson. As I said, if you’d continue reading, you would know what I’m talking about.”

‘Oh my God,’ thought the editor, ‘never again will I do anybody any favors, especially not anybody who is recommended by my cousin, the bum. This one is a real nut. What do they say? Humor them. Agree with them. Don’t antagonize them.’

Out loud he said, “Just a second, Jack, I need to give my secretary this note, so she will not disturb us, and then I suggest you tell me how you met those two. Maybe it’s faster than reading.”

The editor scribbled something on a piece of paper, got up, opened the door to the anteroom and handed the paper to his secretary. Then he closed the door and returned to his desk.The boy had not moved.

“All right, Jack, let’s have the whole truth.”

“Yes, Mr. Ericsson, if you say so, I’ll be happy to tell you what happened.”

And the young man launched into a detailed narration.

•••

A few hours later, Mr. Ericsson was having lunch with his girl friend.

“You won’t believe what I went through today, Liza, you just won’t believe it. I had a nut in my office, a real honest-to-goodness nut. Recommended by my cousin, too, that bum. I managed to give a note to my secretary, on the sly, asking her to call the nearest nut house in case he was one of their escapees. And in the meantime I sat there, listening to him and being afraid. I mean, you never know when someone like that really cracks. Boy, was I glad when the attendants came and picked him up.”

“Was he one of theirs?”

“No, but they took him along anyway after I told them what he had told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

Mr. Ericsson could not help himself and started to giggle.

“You’ll think I’m nuts, too, but believe me, he really said it. He saw a spaceship land in a meadow near his home. Two beautiful women stepped out and walked towards him. And do you know what happened then? The first one bowed and said, ‘I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener!’ And the second one smiled and said, ‘Ring around the collar.’”