_A picture is worth a thousand words--especially if they're Martian
words and nobody can understand them. So Mars put on a spectacular
for Earth, using the skies as a TV screen. This proved the
superiority of their science. But their morals--Wow!_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Fantastic January 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The Atlas didn't make it--it blew up. And so did the Thor. The
Vulcan wasn't much better; it just went _pfftt_. None of them got
anywhere near outer space--the _real_ outer space. Oh, yes, they
went up hundreds of miles, even thousands. The Vulcan went nearly
five thousand. But they were still in the Electro-Magnetic Field.
Nobody really understood the EMF. Einstein had hit on it with his
final theory, before he died. He said gravity and magnetism were just
manifestations of something else, some single thing that held the very
secret of matter.
It was suspected that the Vulcan had reached the limits of the EMF, but
nobody was sure. You can't be very sure about a thing that just goes
_pfftt_, and then isn't there any more. Not there at all! That's what
radar said, and telescopes, and theodolites, and every other detection
apparatus conceivable. Not until the Jason went up where no rocket had
ever gone were they sure. Sure that man would never leave the confines
of his EMF--at least until he solved the problem of the nature of the
EMF. And that seemed the problem of the nature of matter itself. You'll
have to admit, that's a difficult problem to tackle.
Yes, they tackled it. Theories were a dime a dozen. But just _what_
the EMF really was, nobody could say even mathematically. Instead of
wasting money on rockets that went _pfftt_, they began to investigate
space with rays, frequencies, radiations, echoes, electronic things
the man in the street just didn't understand. What he did understand,
however, was the answer that came back from space, as a result of all
this electronic probing.
Mars picked us up, and answered!
We thought we had quite a bit of electronic science. But we turned
out to be babes in the woods. The Martians knew more about rays and
waves and frequencies and vibrations than the Yanks knew about buying
baseball players. They had a real cool signal. They called it the
Resonating Magnetic Field. You know what a resonating field is, don't
you? It's like a great big drum--you hit it right, and it'll vibrate
with the biggest boom you ever heard. It resonates.
* * * * *
Our scientists knew how to resonate crystals; but the Martians could
resonate the atmosphere. And when they resonated our atmosphere, every
Earthman dug them, no matter where he was. That's the way their first
signal reached us--a resonant voice sounded clearly everywhere on
Earth, speaking in the language of the area in which it was heard. It
was all a matter of resonant pitch. A thought has a basic wave, and
it can be keyed to any pitch. When you say something, you express a
thought by resonating the atmosphere. No matter if you speak English,
or German, or Brooklyn--it's all the same thought. Well, when the
Martians talked, we, each of us, were our own wave converter, and the
vibrations that hit our eardrums came out whatever language we talked.
How did they do it? Well, how do you explain electronic knowledge as
advanced as that? You're right, they didn't. They didn't even try. They
said we wouldn't get it anyway, so why waste air-time?
A few of our big-domes were incensed, but the Martians let them smoke.
They said they'd been watching our rocket efforts, and had figured we
were pretty stupid, since everybody in the Solar System (and outside it
for that matter) knew you couldn't lick the EMF with rockets. But then
we'd started our electronic probing of outer space, and they lifted
their mental eyebrows. It, they said, gave them the itch to give us a
few pointers.
You can imagine the fuss there was in the Pentagon; and in the Kremlin
for that matter. Here was a chance to load up on classified stuff of
the highest order, and something called an RMF was the biggest leak the
world had ever known.
Well, the Martians deep-froze that kind of idea right away. They
weren't going to have any truck with secrets, especially secret
weapons. They gave us quite a ribbing about weapons, and there were
a lot of red faces on Earth. They were civilized, they said, and
even their plows had been beaten into resonators. They had a highly
developed moral sense, and the word war appeared in their dictionaries
only in the archaic section.
They were going to tell us a lot of things, to be sure, but they were
going to elevate us. They were going to make real ladies and gentlemen
out of us, like they were. And as a beginning, they said they were
going to put on a pageant. They were going to depict life on Mars for
us as it was today, in all its glory and perfection, and they were
going to do it in the form of a play.
You can picture the Broadway producers perking up their ears at this,
and right away they began thinking of the whole thing in the terms of
a "production." Naturally, when the Martians said it would be done via
world-wide television, the big networks immediately sensed a big deal,
and they jumped almost as high as Vulcan.
But the Martians said the broadcast didn't need receivers, but that
the sky itself would be the TV screen. This was going to be exactly
the opposite of closed-circuit TV. This was wide open--as wide open as
Minsky's in the Twenties.
* * * * *
Nobody knows how they did it, but NBC and CBS got a dual contract with
the Martians for the commercials! Yes, it's true. The Martians agreed
to monitor their commercials, and then rebroadcast them as part of the
Big Show that was to introduce Earthmen to Martians.
The sponsors weren't difficult to sell! They fell all over themselves
to get spots on the program.
Actually, the whole thing was the most serious development in world
history. Picture it for yourself. Out of a clear sky, one day (and
night, because it involved the whole Earth in the same instant) a voice
came from outer space, from Mars, and introduced us to a form of life
our scientists had always claimed was a member of the lichen family,
but which actually was a lot more human than you are. What we had
thought was the lowest form of mossback, was actually the highest human
civilization in the solar system. Wedgewood china, suspension bridges,
and hot dogs were old stuff thirty thousand years ago with the
Martians. They were really advanced. And when we understood it (most of
us, that is) we felt mighty flattered to think that they were going to
try to rub some of it off on us.
* * * * *
Actually the Big Show idea was a good one. Their psychologists had
studied us, and had decided that the best way to educate us was the
painless way--by entertaining us. They knew how TV fascinated us. They
noted our bowed shoulders, our kinked necks, our TV squint. What more
natural thing than to put on the biggest TV show of all, and at the
same time take the bow out of our shoulders, the kink out of our necks,
and restore the focus of our eyes to the natural one of infinity?
The whole sky was going to become one gigantic television screen, in
perfect focus, in full (how full we never imagined until we saw it!)
color, and in Three-D.
This Big Show, they said, was going to come in like cosmic rays, from
every direction, but seeming to focus directly overhead. Every seat
in the house would be the best seat in the house. You were the entire
audience, sitting in the one seat, surrounded from horizon to zenith
by the entire stage. The Earth's EMF, they said, was a perfect lens
shape--and it formed a perfect focus on the center of the Earth. The
atmosphere was a perfect lens also, because it was governed by, and in
fact owed its existence, as did the entire Earth, to the EMF.
Ever stop to think that it's the EMF that makes the direction exactly
opposite to your feet the direction we call up, no matter where we
stand on Earth? To a Chinese, up is the other way. It's the EMF does
that. The EMF, expressing itself as gravity. There really isn't
anything called gravity, as an entity. The EMF is the entity, and
gravity is one of its legs. Magnetism is the other. Maybe the only way
you could describe the EMF would be to call it the body. And nobody
knows what the head is!
The egotist who thinks he is the center of the universe may be right
after all. Except that he's not alone. Everybody else is at the center
too!
Not that Edith Miller was ego-centric. She was beautiful, yes, but not
ego-centric. She was not only beautiful, but she was private secretary
to Herman Fendler, head of the new NBC-CBS Big Show Merger. It was
quite true that she would not have been secretary had she not been
beautiful. After all, it's what you see on TV that counts, and the
bosses never let that fact get very far out of their minds. Anything
that couldn't go before a camera, didn't go in TV, _anywhere_. Edith
went _everywhere_. She was the kind of a girl who, when you saw her,
you wanted to see more--and you cursed the "things as they are" that
made it impossible. It just wasn't fair, was the thought that instantly
suggested itself as you saw enough to realize there was much more.
* * * * *
That was the thought that Roy Mallory usually carried in his mind as he
went about his business of Production and Coordination. And sometimes
it effected his coordination, but never his production. As a TV
producer, he was tops. And now, the youngest man in the sharpest of all
businesses, he was assigned to handle the biggest "spectacular" of them
all. To give you an idea of how highly regarded he was, having given
him the assignment, Herman Fendler also gave him his secretary--but
strictly on loan.
Roy's face was flushed as he walked back to his office, Edith beside
him, Fendler's words still ringing in his ears.
"The Big Show!" he breathed. "Wow!"
"Not too big for you," said Edith.
"Not with you to handle the details," he returned, gallantly.
"That will be wise," she said.
"Huh?" he said.
"To let me do all the handling."