Those who have been checking this space for a while will recall our study of the men on postcards who keep on rowing even when their partner makes it difficult. Looking over the postcard world recently, I realized that we had left out another role for the hardworking, helpful male.
These are the long-suffering men who are willing to provide motive power for ladies in swings. The swing pusher is a more cheerful chap than the postcard boater. You hardly ever see THESE gentry complain. No matter how hard the work gets, they are always willing to lend a hand.
Let us compare their counterpart in the art world. Here is one of the most famous swinging couples, portrayed in the eighteenth century by Fragonard. THIS gentleman is not making him useful at all. Unlike our more modern AMERICAN man, he is there only for what he can see.
You don’t catch our homegrown swing helpers thinking of such low matters.
I have read some unworthy commentators who say this is really the result of mid twentieth century morals, that what interested Frago’s hero couldn’t even be suggested on a comic postcard, and that what seems like a chivalrous and selfless dedication to the task is due to the fact that another part of the body was perfectly okay in a joke.
Of course, we can all see that this exists only the mind of those perverse critics. Look at this chap. Does he look as if HE is just interested in the feminine situpon. Consider his noble expression and join me in scoffing.
A reference to a poor, exhausted donkey does not change matters. This man is clearly working hard and doing it just so the young lady has a good time.
It’s going up in a swing which is the focus of these postcards, not some imagined obsession with the southern end of the body.
And the men are simply examples of the cheerful, helpful man of the postcard world. He is already to help out, even when the young lady does not require his assistance. He knows a kind word and a compliment will make the day advance.
And his mind is as far as possible from any thought, no matter how our twenty-first century prurience may judge him, from the considerations of anatomy or sex which Fragonard showed in the Continental male of an earlier age.
This guy doesn’t count. It’s an accident. Even the dog realizes things have gone wrong. And anyway…that is…maybe this artist produced Canadian postcards, too, and was used to French humor. (Stop snickering, you two in the back row. With minds like that, YOU’LL never be swingers.)
Remember, as we return to our attempt to find a “conspiracy theory” about each of the Presidents of the United States, that we have two basic rules: the conspiracies must have been debunked by a majority of Mainstream Historians, and they can’t be something I or some other Interwebs rumor-monger made up recently. We want bogus stories contemporary with the Presidents, or at least stories which rose within a few years of their deaths.
As we progress through our conspiracy theories, the phrase we will refer to most is “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” When considering Presidents of the United States accused of being part of vast conspiracies, it turns out we have a limited number of themes for such things.
Now, JAMES MADISON is absolutely the kind of man you’d expect conspiracy theories about (and the last person likely to be nominated if he ran for the top office nowadays.) He was a small chap, and thoroughly introverted (how he married one of the brightest extroverts in Washington is still argued over today.) When he wasn’t writing things in cipher (always a bad sign), he liked to stay in the background, writing things other people could quote, or outright ghost-writing things for more flamboyant souls. Among his works published anonymously were his parts of the Federalist Papers, in which he argued for a stronger central government than the Articles of Confederation allowed for. After he ghostwrote most of the Constitution, he then joined the Jefferson side of things, in a party suspected of plotting against the country and the Constitution. When the Adams administration passed some unpopular laws involving tariffs and immigrants, Madison wrote a landmark resolution asserting the rights of individual states, and was accused of conspiring, with Jefferson, to overthrow the very Constitution he had helped write, and, in fact, everything the United States of America stood for. Does this sound at ALL familiar? (He was not suspected of that for long, though; he was dismissed as a compulsive hypocrite. Is that better?)
JAMES MONROE was a frenemy of James Madison and the last President of the United States to run unopposed. His presidency was known as the Era of Good Feelings. This was because the Federalist Party, after a busy period churning out conspiracy theories, had evaporated during the War of 1812, and no real competition had developed for the Republican (also known as the Republican-Democrat, Democrat-Republican, and Democratic) Party. HE was suspected of planning to undermine the divinely-decreed economy of the Slave States because he had expressed misgivings, back in 1800, about the execution of the leaders of a revolt who had been saying what Monroe and his friends had been saying back in the 1770s. In the end, the leaders WERE hanged, and Monroe did not disturb the Slave States unduly during his administration.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS has already appeared once, in his father’s great conspiracy theory, but his election to the Presidency provoked plenty of conspiracy theories, because he had NOT received the majority of the popular vote. The election was close enough that Congress had to step in to make a decision, and Andrew Jackson’s supporters felt there was no coincidence when Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, was named Secretary of State. Clay and Adams denied this to their dying days (which doesn’t necessarily make it untrue), and a hearty hatred was set up between the Whigs, who favored Clay, and Jackson’s Democratic (Democratic-Republican, Repub…etc.) followers.
As a result, in the NEXT election, ANDREW JACKSON, a military man, was suspected of planning a coup if he got shortchanged this time around. Bayonets, not ballots, it was said, would put him into office. Jackson enjoyed a good fight in plain political battlefields, and there seems to have been nothing behind the coup conspiracy.
“Thousands of people!” she exclaimed. “Their thoughts and trophies! Oh no, they weren’t friends of yours, maybe; they wouldn’t agree with your every single word!”
“But….” Bott said again.
“But they had feet, too! And you can’t burn their memories and dreams into nothing just because they aren’t what you like best!”
Bott glanced left and right as he took two steps back. This had to be some kind of imperial trick to keep him busy while somebody else broke into the bridge and took command of the Drover.
The woman raised both hands to her forehead and then lowered them. Some kind of gem seemed to be between those hands, but Bott couldn’t get a good look as she pushed both fists together in front of her. “I’d rather you knocked my head off!” she snapped. “Do I? Yes, Ido!” She cleared her throat. “They’re more important than my head!”
She was about a head taller than Bott, wearing a white bodysuit with a grey vest and grey shorts over it. Black hair was tied up in a ball on the back of her head. Glittering black eyes watched him from over what was practically no nose at all. Bott could not immediately identify her home planet from either her face or her accent. She was human enough, though. And very angry.
“Why do you people have to DO these things? Can’t you let the rest of us go on? Isn’t there room enough in this whole galaxy for all of us?”
She raised the gem to her forehead again and Bott slid left. That could be a defensive weapon. She moved right to keep her eyes on his. Damp stains showed under the arms of her suit. He’d noticed them when she raised the gem before, but they were bigger now, and darker. He had also noticed a tremor in her lips now and again, between sentences, before she caught herself. This was important to her. Whatever this was.
“Is that the only way to achieve imperial control? By destroying everything that doesn’t meet your….”
Bott leaned forward. “What are you talking about?”
She let her hands drop in front of her again and stamped one foot. “Destroying my ship!”
Bott shook his head violently. “If I wanted to destroy it, I could have fired….”
She shook all her fingers at him; the gem dropped to dangle from a chain around her neck. “You won’t trick me!” She was all but shrieking now. “Why’ve you got to play with me? I always knew you’d get me some day! Didn’t I? Yes, I did! Why can’t you…why can’t you….”
Her lips rolled in on each other; tiny nostrils flared. “And where’s your uniform?”
This had to be a trap. She could not possibly NOT know he had stolen the drover; the Free Imperial State had sent out all kinds of cleverly-worded messages to watch for him and it.
“Are your communication systems down?” Bott asked, letting one hand trail along the grenades at his belt. The BBB-44 looked much larger now that he was thinking how many troops could be waiting inside for a signal. “I didn’t receive any distress signal.”
Her face came up. “Why would I send an SOS with you people around?” She sniffed, and set the gem against her forehead again.
Bott shrugged. “You were…the ship was flying so oddly I thought there was something wrong.”
Her ears reddened. “Those were…evasive maneuvers.”
Bott gave this some thought. Was that possible? No, not really. “Are you sure you don’t have damage somewhere?”
“My ship is just fine.” She faced him full on again, her chin coming forward. “Does it matter? When you’re just going to smash it or blow it up anyhow?”
“I am not!” Now Bott stamped one foot. She stamped one of hers and took a step toward him
“You’ll keep it as a trophy, then, for your lackeys to laugh at.” She turned left and right, the stone pausing halfway down again. “Where are your lackeys? Where are they hiding?”
“Where are yours?” Bott returned. “Are you trying to make me believe you’re alone?”
Their gazes locked; her lips moved a little but no words came out. Then she cleared her throat and set the stone to her forehead again.
“Why would I want to hide anybody? We’d be outnumbered once you boarded us anyhow!”
Bott understood what was wrong. He was giving her credit for a really subtle plan. The Imperial military had a very low tolerance for subtlety.
“You are alone, aren’t you?”
She took a step backward. “I didn’t say that. Did I? I did not!”
Bott moved forward. “But you are.”
“I….”
“So am I.”
The almost invisible nose bounced up and down as she wrinkled it. “I was wondering. You’d have had your troops out here by now, wouldn’t you?”
Bott nodded. “And so would you, if you were part of a trap.”
“But what kind of trap….” She frowned, and let the gem dangle again. “Are you still playing with me?” She took two steps back toward her ship. “Why would something this size have just one person on board? I don’t believe that for a second! Do I?”
“This is the Imperial Ship Drover,” Bott informed her, before she could answer herself. “I stole it from the Imperial port on Deshler.”
“The Drover?” she demanded. “That big master ship they were building? You stole it? All alone? Now, I don’t believe that at all. Not at all. No, I don’t.”
“Before you make up your mind….” Bott reached got the proper security card and held it up. She didn’t like the looks of it, and slid closer to the ramp of the BBB-44.
Bott made no comment. “Ship?” he said, [pressing the sides of the card.
“Not dead yet?” the computer replied.
Bott glanced at the woman, whose eyes had nearly vanished in a glare of suspicion. “Ship,” he said, “Tell this person who you are.”
“I am the main computer of the Imperial Ship Drover.”
“How do you do?” said the woman.
“Now tell her who I am,” Bott continued.
“Do I have to be polite?”
“Just tell her.” He held the card up so the woman could hear it clearly; he hoped the computer wouldn’t try anything tricky.
But the computer had already denied any ability to lie. “This person,” it announced, “Is a no=good, untidy, counterproductive, irresponsible, ignorant, stupid, unsanitary, depraved, odorous, underhanded, untrustworthy, sexually perverse, mentally unbalanced pirate.”
“See?” said Bott, in triumph.
“Yes,” said the computer. “I decided to be polite after all.”
“A pirate! How wonderful!”
The woman was clasping her hands at her bosom. Having dealt with the Drover’s computer this long, Bott suspected irony. “Wonderful?”
Now she slapped her hands together flat. “Oh, yes! How…how lovely! I’m a dangerous rebel, myself. We all were, and we always had friends among the pirates!”
“We?” Bott glanced at the ramp of her ship.
“We were one of the revolution’s education fleets.” She took three little steps forward. “When Imperial ships surrounded us and took us in, I was in the library and didn’t realize. But they didn’t know about me, either. So I was able to escape, with the Dragonshelf!”
“The what?”
She pointed back toward the ramp. “The Dragonshelf! From the stories of dragons and their hoarded treasures.” She nodded at him.
Bott’s mouth dropped open. He had forgotten, in all this confusion, that the BBB-44 was not only a stout shop but a cargo ship. Now, perhaps, he could get back into a profitable business.
“What is the treasure?”
She looked puzzled again, and wary. “Didn’t I just say that? I did! The Dragonshelf is the library ship. We carry books.”
Bott’s eyes went from gleaming to nearly dropping to the floor. Books made for hideously troublesome treasure.
I know you were yearning to see the next installment of my list of presidential conspiracies, but I didn’t plan to fill this space with that until we got through thirty or forty presidents. Anyhow, I can’t quite get my head around the James Madison theory yet. We’ll come back to the list next Wednesday. In the meantime, I have been puzzling over women and tennis in the postcard world.
My inventory is not all-encompassing, of course, but I do think it should be considered a decent cross-section of the history of postcards. And I noticed in passing that I have not a single postcard which shows men playing tennis. When a man IS present, he and a woman are engaged in a match. In the postcards I have lying around, tennis is all but inseparable from the female player.
One or two other people who talk about this online lean toward a theory that at the turn of the twentieth century, women who went outdoors and did outdoor things were considered sexier than the old-fashioned Victorian female who stayed indoors, minding the house and taking care of the children. They cast back to a medieval picture of the world in which the husband was the master of the fields and barns and everything OUTSIDE the house, while the wife was in charge of everything INSIDE.
I’m not sure I can buy the whole package. For one thing, I have plenty of postcards with women outdoors: milkmaids, for example, have a whole postcard literature all their own. While charming shepherdesses can be found on postcards and n porcelain, practically already a cliché by the time the century turned. Was it just that going outside to play games meant the lady WORE less? (After all, your average milkmaid not only wrote the full outfit of dress and petticoats but an apron over them. AND a bonnet.)
Yet, although it isn’t something we discuss when we consider fashion, look at this couple. SHE could have gone dancing or shopping in that outfit, but HE is underdressed. While this was all right for tennis, a man who went out in public without a jacket, or “in his shirtsleeves” as it was called, would have been considered either shockingly shabby or simply a working class chap who couldn’t wear a jacket while wielding a pick or shovel.
I had another theory about women on tennis courts, but that had to be dropped as well. Do you know I don’t have a single postcard with the fine old joke “Love Means Nothing to a Tennis Player”? Are people just trying to keep me from using that joke? Well, THAT didn’t work, did it?
Golf is another matter. People dress MORE to play golf. The polka dot jacket and striped pants are not obligatory, nor is a bright sea green dress shirt. (Note to self: check on the possibility that golfers dress like that so they won’t be shot by deer hunters when their ball went into the woods.)
Women are no exception. Maybe the postcards were all part of a belief that a woman who was physically fit was especially alluring. The golf postcards tend to bear this out: female golfers are trim, fit, and not really in any position to, intentionally or accidentally, expose more of themselves while competing than anywhere else in public.
Oh, pshaw. I’m going back to figuring out what stories they were telling about James Madison. Maybe a Dolley Madison doughnut or two will help.
Just got hit with a new one. Some unknown conspiracy theorist just let me know that these phone calls about choosing my medical plan are NOT coming for ORDINARY robocallers. No, no:: these are people prepared to alter the fabric of our country by moving (should you be unwise enough to use the word “yes” while talking to them) to seize your personal information and use it to alter the way you vote in any upcoming election. (Um, this wouldn’t actually….) They work for neither party but for an alien institution which is neither red nor blue, but identified by striped elbow patches they will wear when the chaos begins and a takeover is possible. (Most conspiracies are sporting enough to include clues so you can catch ‘em at it?) What you NEED to do when called by these people is simply respond “elbow patches” to every question, and this will let them know you are already a member, and they will hang up. (I believe that much, anyhow.)
Being pummeled every day with new conspiracy theories about clouds, birds, snow, microchips, and ancient societies, I thought I would check around and see if I can find one solid conspiracy theory about every President of the United States. These must be pre-existing theories: it would be fun to make something up, but that spoils the game. AND they must be, at least in the eyes of “Mainstream Historians” (as the Enemy is usually denoted) completely fake. A few have been slopping over into the realm of genuine history, and that ALSO spoils the game.
Now, GEORGE WASHINGTON is an easy target. In his position, he attracts so much attention that he gathers conspiracy theories like diners to a Washington’s Birthday cherry pie. And he was a Mason (or Freemason, as your true conspiracy theorist prefers to say), which makes matters easier. My personal favorite is that when he met with Betsy Ross about the flag for the new country, he personally dictated the design, changing several features Congress had called for, particularly, for some arcane Masonic reason, insisting that she use five-pointed stars instead of stars with six points. Research indicating George never met Betsy, or, in fact, had much of anything to do with designing the Stars and Stripes, is used by the theorists to prove that Mainstream Historians are In On It.
JOHN ADAMS was a participant in the Adams vs. Jefferson Presidential Campaign, which is one of the top ten nastiest in history. The leading tale the Jefferson folks spread about John, and which I have seen printed as fact in British textbooks, is that he was plotting, while Vice President, to marry his son, John Quincy, to Princess Charlotte of England. As the princess was the heir to the throne, this would have made his son Prince Consort and his grandson King of England. George Washington got wind of this, and paid a friendly call on John, telling him that, as a fellow member of the Federalists, he wanted John to know this betrayed not only the new independent nation but the ideals of the party. When George found out John was pursuing negotiations, he had a rather more official meeting, telling John that as President of the United States, he was ordering John to give up this treasonous idea. On hearing the proposal was still moving along, he donned his military uniform and marched over to John’s place to say that as Commander In Chief of the Armed Forces, he was going to lop John’s head off with his sword if John didn’t notify King George that the whole thing was off. The cowardly John, the story concludes, immediately caved in.
For his part, John’s people pointed out, among other things, that Thomas Jefferson was not a good, reliable Federalist, but a Democrat who was left-leaning and a freethinker in matters of religion. As a man who read Voltaire, the leading evil author of the day, Jefferson was planning, if he became President, to close all the churches and burn all the Bibles. (Jefferson read the Bible too, by the way; he in fact edited the Gospels into a single account which he felt made more sense, which at least argues a deep reading of the text.) The story is told of a Jefferson man visited by the elderly woman next door, who told him she was afraid Jefferson would win, and begged him to hide her Bible from the impending destruction. The man explained that Jefferson had no such plans, which worked about as well as any time you try to convince someone that a conspiracy theory is not true. She still pled, with tears in her eyes, that he hide her book until he said, “Anyhow, you know I support Mr. Jefferson. Why trust me with your treasure?”
She told him, “Because nobody would look for a Bible in the house of a Democrat.” (The more conspiracy theories change, the more they stay the same.)
The slime devil towered over the slim diminutive woman; its roar shivered the metal plates in the walls of the room. She looked up into huge red eyes, showing no fear. Then she dippedher spoon not the shimmering gelatin dessert. The Denebian did not fill her with terror, and she had been brought up to show no fear even when she did feel it.
The fact that she herself had ordered this prisoner chained to the wall helped.
Unfed and unwatered for days, the prisoner was dehydrating at an terrible rate. He was too far gone now to try to mask his interest in the cool food being consumed beyond his reach. Out of the atmosphere of his home planet and deprived of any protective clothing save for a slippery green pair of trunks, he had too little life left to allow for dignity.
She did not speak until every morsel of wriggling blue gelatin was gone. Then, dabbing her lips, she rolled her eyes up at the trembling slime devil.
“Are you ready to let us know who received that box of recipe cards, so it can be found and destroyed?”
The long mouth crackled shut. The woman shrugged and motioned to a subordinate to clear away the food. But the slime devil was not so exhausted as to miss one motion of her thin elegant hand.
She rose from her seat as the table was wheeled out. “It is an insignificant thing for which to suffer,” she said. “Not even recipes of your own planet. We already know who has them. Are you certain you can’t save yourself more pain by confirming our knowledge?”
Eyes on long stalks were all turned toward that one hand. She felt no necessity to conceal the salt shaker. The creature’s skin, when she held up the slender black enamel cylinder, rippled where it still could, making the burns from previous patches stand out in rigid islands.
Back laminated fingernails came down into the waistband of the trunks. “This will seriously disfigure your dainties.”
Long lips tore a bit as they jerked open. “I’ll tell. I’ll tell.”
She pretended to consider this. “But you will tell me more loudly in a little while.” She emptied the shaker within the trunks and let the waistband snap against the wriggling skin.
“No! Come back!” wailed the prisoner, as she stepped to the door, and switched the overhead lights to full glare. “Come ba-a-ack.”
She did not go back. Even had she felt an inclination to do so, to do anything a prisoner suggested meant a diminishing of her authority. She stepped over the threshold of the circular door and let it slide shut behind her with a slap.
A traveling square waited. She moved onto it and set it in motion toward the nearest chute. In seconds she had been deposited before a second circular door, much larger than the prison door, its size unnecessary for any purpose beyond impressing the viewer and allowing a large space for the display of official symbols.
The eyes and globe at the top of the door had been for centuries the hereditary symbol of the Sheriffs of Parimat, imperial peace officers for this section of the galaxy. Beneath this was the spiked planet insignia of the Free Imperial State, symbolizing the fact that n planet, once securely nailed into the imperial structure, had ever pulled loose.
The Rhododendron was one of the tools for driving those nails, a square-nosed polished hammer of a shi[, friendly as a mallet, like its captain, Sherrif Marah Parimat. She snapped a gold security card from its holster on her sleeve, and thrust this into the slot.
The immense metal panel slid back to reveal the dark, gloomy bridge of the Rhododendron. Sheriff Parimat liked gloom. Gloom was good for people. This was why she wore the long grey uniform, more like the clothing worn by prisoners than the multicolored indulgences sported by her counterparts in other districts. The round cheeky face that was the norm for her planet was unavoidable, but she had dyed her naturally pink hair black to add an air of severity.
It worked. Certainly everyone on the bridge hunched over their consoles as she entered, studying with new intensity the routinely winking keys of many colors that flashed at them from the shadows.
“Your grace,” said a tall man with fine narrow features and two log incisors, stepping forward. His heels came together and he bowed slightly. Chief Deputy Taw Brust had developed something of a stoop from dealing with his younger, shorter superior.
“Brust,” replied the Sherrif. She glanced at her seat, checking for dents to show he had used it while she was away instead of staying in his own chair.
His name was usually his cue to bow and step back, relinquishing his temporary command. When he did not do so, she looked up into his face. “You have something to report.”
His upper lip drew back farther across his teeth. He always did this when he was excited. “The Drover’s position has been pinpointed again, Your Grace.”
The Drover had been spotted, fleetingly, seven times so far today. The Rhododendron had barely been able to stay within reach, and though there was still the slightest chance of overtaking the stolen vessel before it moved into another sheriff’s sector, this sighting failed to inspire Sheriff Parimat with any sense of jubilation.
For some reason, however, it had impressed her usually impassive deputy. She blinked at him. “You are about to add something pleasant,” she said, the coolness of her tone a rebuke to his enthusiasm. “Has the pirate indicated a desire to surrender to you personally?”
The deputy’s head dipped I submission, but when he went on, it was clear he had not succeeded in curbing his excitement. “Your Grace, the Drover has rendezvoused with the Dragonshelf.”
This was news indeed. The Sheriff’s head came forward and she peered into his face. All this darkness did have drawbacks: for all she could tell he might be making some kind of joke. “You are ertain?”
“There are no other ships of that configuration in this partition,” he assured her. “It can only be the Dragonshelf.”
“As you say.” She inclined her head to the right. “And you are sure there has been a meeting?”
“The Dragonshelf disappeared from the screen, Your Grace. It must have been taken aboard.”
Sheriff Parimat moved to one of her viewscreens to verify the location of the Drover. “The way that pirate flies, it might well have been a collision. But let us assume you have analyzed the images correctly. We are in pursuit?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Well done.” She moved to her chair. “How fortunate that you did not notify me of this earlier. The Dragonshelf without a doubt received those recipes cards, and I should have had no entertainment with my lunch.”
She reached to a key on the arm of her chair and called, “Pirgy, douse the Denebian and put him away for future reference. What? Certainly. Your own research is your own business; do to him what will preserve him, however.”
Taw Brust had followed, to stand next to his commander’s chair. She looked up and nodded, whereupon he moved to his own seat.
“The pirate’s course has changed slightly since the rendezvoused, Your Grace,” he said. “Now he seems to be on a line for the Lodeon System.”
The Sheriff set both hands flat on her lap. “Is he? Basca, lay in a course for Lodeon VII.”
Her chief deputy looked around the bridge as if to learn where that idea had come from. He cleared his throat. “Your Grace, his current position is still quite a distance from the Lodeon System. We have no idea whether he will continue on his present course, nor that if he does so, he intends to proceed to Lodeon VII.”
“You may have no idea, Brust,” said Sheriff Parimat. “Losch, notify His Worship at once that, thanks to Chief Deputy Taw Brust, we are on our way to retrieve the Drover, and the Dragonshelf as well.”
Brust’s eyes went wide. “W…would it not be wise to wait until we have taken them, Your Grace?”
She rolled her eyes up at him. “Brust, when did we last have a triumph to report to His Worship?”
He spread out six-fingered hands. “Why, when we captured the Denebian….”
She tossed her head. “The report will not have gone beyond the Imperial Undersecretaries.”
Brust leaned toward the Sheriff’s chair. “When we destroyed the Library of Karsch….”
“Two notebooks, four bookmarks,” replied his captain. “That may well have reached an Imperial Secretary. We received a command to produce more good reports, and we shall now give them two. First we shall report that you spotted the fugitives, and later today we will report that we have taken the two ships into custody and are recording every step in the punishment of the traitors involved. For their capture is inevitable, of course.” Her voice raised a little at the end, commanding immediate agreement.
“It is.” The Chief Deputy’s response was sincere enough to surprise even his superior. “But if….” He swallowed and hurried on, “If His Worship decides to attend the punishments in person?”
She had not thought of this, but her crew would not see her wince. “Then we shall entertain His Worship imperially, as we did the last time.”
“What happened?” asked Barbara, looking around the off-white chamber.
The tall person in the white robe smiled. “We get a lot of that. You turned left on the corner of State and Delaware just as a driver lost control of his SUV. You were caught between the grille and the window washer’s scaffold.” He bowed his head. “You died instantly.”
“Oh!” Barbara clutched her purse to her chest. “I remember wondering whether I should stop for coffee before or after I bought the groceries…if I’d decided to do it after and went on for the groceries….”
The tall figure nodded. “Things would have been different, yes.”
Barbara scowled. “I might have lived another thirty years!”
“Eleven, actually.” The person floated around behind a tall beige desk. “If we can….”
“Eleven? You know that?”
“Well, yes,” said her host. “I have your life record right here, and if I look back to the moment you turned for coffee, change the decision, and roll forward, I can see…but that’s immaterial now.” A keyboard clicked out of Barbara’s sight. He smiled again. “You are saved the trouble of moving to the new house.”
Barbara took two steps forward. The desk and the figure behind it seemed much larger now. “What new house?”
The figure’s lips pursed. “That’s not important, but you would have…here, look.”
Barbara came around to his side of the desk. At the height of her shoulders was a shelf on which sat a viewer with an eyeshield, and a keyboard next to it. “It’s like watching a video on a website,” said her host. “You click the action back to the right moment, pause it, type in “Do not turn left, and then watch how events would have followed.”
He pulled aside and Barbara found that by standing on tiptoe, she could look down the eyeshield into the viewer. “Okay, I buy groceries, I go for coffee, I go home, and…it skipped a scene.”
“Yes, it shows you just the significant parts of the….”
She waved at him to be quiet. “I’m looking at the television and the lottery ticket I got at the store and…I win? I would have won the lottery?”
“If you had bought groceries, you would have had the change to buy a lottery ticket on impulse, and….”
“I would have.” Barbara sighed and drew back from the viewer. “Oh well. Too late now.”
“Thank you for understanding that,” said her host. “Now….”
She put a hand on the viewer. “Could I do that to anywhere in my life?”
“You can look at any decision you made in your life, though you really don’t have any need now to do so.”
“It’s just that I’ve always wondered what would’ve happened if I hadn’t chickened out and skipped the cheerleader tryouts. Would I have made the squad?”
Her host sighed. “I can let you look at one more. Scroll back to the year….”
“I know the year.” She found the cursor and slid her finger on the pad to the right of the keyboard. Nodding at her younger self, she typed “Don’t go home.”
“Oh, there’s Sharon! And Sue! And all the other….” She shook her head and watched unhistory play out. “And there’s Mrs. Kinnick posting the names of the…. And I didn’t make it. I knew….”
She watched as her young self turned away from the list, shoulders slumped. Her eyes widened as a taller woman came up next to her, and put an arm around her waist. Her mouth dropped open as scenes skipped ahead.
“We were…but she hardly ever spoke to me in…we’re friends. Oh! Well, that’s friendlier than I…which meant I was with her when she went on to professional women’s basketball. And because I was there, she didn’t lose the big game and she didn’t get into meth, and…that’s…..”
“Yes.” It sounded as if a foot was tapping under her host’s robe. “You see that….”
She held up a hand to hold him off. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What if I hadn’t gone to that party in college and wound up marrying that….”
Barbara slid the cursor a little ahead, and typed in “Skip New Year party.” She watched in silence as that evening unfolded, but ats the fifth scene passed her line of vision, she emitted a little shriek, slapped her purse on the shelf, and climbed onto the high stool.
Her host’s voice was grave. “There’s no point in….”
“Just hang on,” she told him. “What if I….” She sent the cursor back along her lifeline.
The white-robed character waited a few more moments and then stepped quietly out of the room, locking it behind him. Down the hall, he stepped into a much larger cubicle, where a much larger individual sat behind a desk.
“She’s throwing things now.” A long hand indicated the other room, out in the endless corridor. “And she broke two fingernails down to the quick.”
“Excellent, How long will it take her to go through all the decisions of her life?”
“Roughly three thousand years, though once she starts second-guessing the decisions in the alternate time streams….it could take an eternity,”
“Very good. And every alternative will turn out better than what she actually lived.”
“Yes. She does, er, still think she’s in Heaven.”
“But she’s miserable and in pain? And things will get worse?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Then let’s not lose sight of our goals in the details. Carry on with the next arrival.” The tall figure leaned back and blew a smoke ring which did not involve any tobacco product.
It is time for my annual column where I go through my inventory and discover I have no Halloween postcards for sale. There ARE Halloween postcards, and postcard mongers who can offer you a fine array, but these folks exist at a higher financial level than I can compete with, and therefore I have to seek my Halloween terrors elsewhere. The postcard featured at the top here, for example, strikes a lot of people as a grotesque horror. But it was intended, back in the day, to be funny.
This, also, could do as a Halloween card only in a pinch. Yes, the man saying “ootsy boo boo” to the baby IS a tad frightening. But this artist was great at grotesque faces, and if you look more closely, with a saturnine attitude, everyone in the picture seems to be wearing a weird mask.
And you can’t call it a Halloween card simply because the joke is frightful. (People would start asking why I write Halloween columns all the year long.)
If we look for genuine nightmares in our Halloween greetings, we might take this picture of a health spa where large men drinking from the mineral springs to renew their youth discover all the restrooms are already occupied. Can’t immediately recall any really four-star horror movies that used this idea, but perhaps we’d be ahead of the curve. (Or at least at the front of the line.)
Here we do finally get into genuine horror movie material. Pity it was sent as a happy congratulations card.
And this cabinet card, from a line which did the same thing as souvenir postcards but in an era when picture postcards were barely a blip on the radar, was intended as a celebration of heroic engineering: not nightmare fuel for prospective passengers.
This was simply a convenient way of showing a person was in the city without having to do any shooting on location. It was NOT intended as the first in a series of science fiction horrors in which giants stomped all over defenseless cities.
Anyway, that’s what people tell me. I do wonder.
This was meant to simply be funny, not horror fodder at all. “Lobster” has been used for various people over the decades, sometimes for a rich man, sometimes for one who was merely surly. This card laughs at the idea that any woman would voluntarily get into bed with an unpleasant person just because he’s rich. It’s the incongruity that matters, the unlikelihood: not the scary picture.
You can tell by the victim’s face here that he is perfectly comfortable having the seat of his britches mended. You were supposed to laugh at the joke about “closing up the rear”, not quiver on the edge of your seat with suspense at whether the short-sighted attacker can be trusted with that needle.
I have TRIED to sell this as a Halloween card on the basis of completely untrue rumors (always useful for selling things) that it represents an unaired Twilight Zone episode in which the hero (is that Mickey Rooney again?) wishes to be pursued by women. This would be the closing shot, where you can wonder whether they will toss him on the grill…or just be left in suspense about where the incoming beach bunny is going to take hold.
This seems at first glance to be a large man giving small pig a humanback ride, but if you look closely, you will see he is a butcher. The image is grotesque, but it just won’t DO as a scary Halloween postcard. Everyone is smiling.
Bott’s head swung left and right as he fingered the grenades on his belt. There was no way to predict where danger waited: overhead, underfoot, forward, behind. He studied what seemed to be holes I the corridor walls. Were they ornaments, part of the structural design, or the aiming mechanisms of traps?
Lights sat high, within translucent ridges which could resist attack in case of a slave riot. A slight hum could be heard coming from somewhere I the ceiling. Ort from the lights. Or from a waiting tank of gas which would snuff or suppress an enemy. He heard also three footsteps for each one of his, presumably echoes. His head continued to swivel, eyes open.
Bott had never bought all those late-watch tales about haunted ships. “Drover’s too new to be haunted anyhow,” he told himself, stopping again to make sure those echo footsteps stopped as well. “They designed it like this to scare the prisoners, to keep the crew quiet.”
The crew. Were there security devices in the walls, things a duly-trained crew member would know about, but unknown to an interloper? He slid his feet along the floor in case these were sound-activated. Such devices would more likely damage him than finish him off: a slow slave would be an object lesson to the others.
He turned a corner and passed a communications booth. A white light was flashing on a small monitor inside. He wondered if that was all right.
This new corridor seemed colder and darker. After a few steps, Bott realized this was because the walls were another color. On large ships, corridors were color-coordinated, so crew members could tell where they belonged. They had only to match the color of their uniforms to the wall.
In most of the ships Bott had raided, none of them anywhere near the level of the Drover, cargo bays had been orange. He couldn’t recall anything blue.
A door confronted him after only a few more sliding steps. The security slot next to it was blue. He reached for his deck of security cards and pulled out a dark blue one. With any luck, it was a cargo pass. He wondered what the LIGHT blue card was for.
The door slid back. He waved the card in the doorway first, to see if this triggered anything. When his hand was not shot away, he moved forward.
And looked down. He stood on a narrow bridge stretched over a vast cavern that could have swallowed his ship and the BBB-44 together. Bott shuddered. This was no cargo bay: not for what he called cargo, at least. This was an entrance to the slave quarters. The bridge was meant as a final obstacle for unrestrained sales to pass if they joined in revolt. Before they could escape their pen, they would need to move in single file across this bridge, under the guns of Imperial guards above.
Bott stared into the cold blue depths. He knew nothing about the slave pens aboard the Drover. He knew the ones on Coderah. In escaping those, he had nearly left his right arm and shoulder behind, and it would have been a cheap enough price to pay, at that.
He heard the tiniest sushing sigh. Whirling, Bott threw himself against the door as it started to slide shut. One foot and one shoulder held it in place and, throwing his weight against it, he was able to push through.
“That was stupid,” he told himself, panting on the other side, “You’ve got the bilstim card.”
He did not, however, have all day. When he could breathe again, he moved back up the corridor to the communications station.
A blue-rimmed viewscreen was now showing something, but Bott couldn’t tell what it was. He took the blue card he’d used on the door, turned it up the long way, and set it into the slot provided.
“I….”
A voice he had not heard before declared, “If this is a further complaint about the food, I must inform you that the drover still does not have a full complement of supplies. Mashed lumpucks will continue to be served without maynage until we can take up the remaining portion of our allotted supplies.”
“I wan’t going to complain,” Bott protested. “Um, the food’s okay, really.”
“What did you want then?” snapped the voice.
Bott reminded himself that he was the captain. “Link me to the main computer. Er, if you can.”
“One moment, please. I shall put you through.” There followed a burst of static in which Bott thought he could catch the wotds “Why can’t they take time to do it the right way?”
After that came a short whistle. A much more familiar voice demanded, “What are you doing down there?”
“I….”
“He’s going to complain about the food, I just know it,” growled the other voice. “Going over my head will do no good, you know. I still won’t have any maynage.”
“Oh, get off the line,” said the Drover.
After another grumble of static, the bridge computer asked Bott, “Why did you have to go through him? Touchy as a cook, he is.”
“Well, I didn’t know how else to reach you.”
“Oh, that’s right. You wouldn’t. You’re the pirate. Well, that gold card you were so flashy with a little while ago has a contact system built into it. Just hold it up the long way and press the sides. Do it that way from now on and cut out the middle grouch.”
Bott was glad to know about this, but felt it vital to assert his command position. “I’ll call you any way I like.”
“You are, of course, the captain, by all rights of theft and plunder,” the Drover told him. “But that’s no reason you need to put up with the moods of every subordinate computer.”
“Who was that?”
“Oh, he issues food and monitors conditions in the slave quarters. I don’t need to tell you you took a wrong turn, do I, Captain?”
Bott was willing to put off that discussion for a bit. “How many different computers do you have here?”
“I,” said the Drover, “Have one hundred and seventy-eight first level computers on my staff, each communicating with some three hundred lesser brains. Not counting yours, of course.”
“Why so many?”
“The ship can be run from a number of different stations,” the Drover explained, “And makes it impossible, in case of a slave revolt, for the ship to be taken over by unauthorized persons all at once.”
“Impossible? It’s a good thing I didn’t know about that before I did it.”
A growl of static was followed by “The master system works only if a full crew s available to conduct a proper resistance. Special codes are entered if part of the crew is captured or pressed into service by the slaves, and cards will be bypassed. It was planned that my staff was to be generational: entire families growing up here to regard the Drover as their home. Hiding places are provided where they could lead an armed resistance for years, if necessary, as the slaves learned their cause was hopeless. If you had simply called ahead, I could have told you I wasn’t quite ready yet for pirates.”
“I’ll remember that next time,” Bott promised. Thinking it over, he went on, “Are there any crew here now, hoed up to plan a resistance?”
“No,” the Drover told him. “More’s the pity. I’d make lovely, ingenious suggestions about what they could do with you.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”
The voice went a bit chilly. “Has any computer ever lied to you?”
Bott thought this over. “No. Omitted data, let me mislead myself, yes. But lie outright? No.”
“All right, then. Go back the way you came, past two turnoffs, until you see the orange corridor you should have taken? If you are color-blind I can arrange to play tinkly music when you get there? No? Then go up the corridor past the first five cargo bay doors and enter the sixth. You can count to six, can’t you?”
“I’ve done it before. That’s the number of guards I took out at your front entrance.” He yanked his card from the slot.
He marched back up the corridor, thinking over possible loopholes in the computer’s declaration that no crew members were waiting in ambush. The orange corridor was warmer and less shadowed than the blue one, but he did not feel notably enheartened. The sixth cargo bay did not cheer him, either. Naturally, the Drover had had no time to take on much cargo, so the captured ship sat alone at one end of the immense room. The BBB-44 rested on a white oval on the orange floor.
And that was all. It sat silent, entrances closed, unguarded. Bott would have preferred a ring of armed guards, weapons pointed at him. He had dealt with that sort of thing before. But this ship was still: not dead, but waiting.
He moved forward, feeling alone and absurdly young, remembering the big abandoned hangar where he had found, cleaned, and repaired the very first ship he’d had on his own. The TDA-3 had been nowhere as big, but in this cargo cavern the captured ship looked smaller.
What kind of creatures might be waiting inside. Nothing too bizarre would be flying a BBB-44, surely. He unhooked a grenade from his belt, wishing he’d asked the Drover to do a scan, or even release that gas it had suggested.
“I can take on anything when I’m sober,” he muttered. “And I haven’t had a drink for three days.” This was true. He had taken on a lot of things that he wasn’t able to beat, of course. But here he was.
He bounced the grenade in his hand. “If only I could find out something without having to….”
As you will recall from our last thrilling episode, we were looking through a portfolio of beach postcards produced in 1948 by Curteich. These accordion-pleated collections were essentially cartoon collections, the postcards printed on both sides of the page (as opposed to other similar portfolios where you could tear out and mail individual cards.) It satisfied the desires of postcard buyers who liked some jokes well enough to want to keep them AND cheered up the publisher, who could use up a number of older designs which had had their day but were still available to fill up a booklet.) “Fun On the Run” was a collection which emphasized romantic and other mishaps which occurred when scantily-clad people gathered in a warm place far from their homes. WHICH could include (for the vacationer and the postcard company) near or complete nudity.
This was in an era when nudity was carefully monitored by the Powers of Morality in government, so you can observe how our postcard artists (Ray Walters again in both the first two examples) have to play it safe. The skinny-dipping postcard gets the point across without displaying anything actionable, while the second lets you know how much skin she is showing by emphasizing the danger presented by solar rays.
When a man ventured on sunburn comedy, he had to stay rather more covered. (The voluminous shorts are really just there to make him look inelegant and sloppy, like most Walters heroes. By the way, look closely and you WILL observe that his sign will burn “ME N’ U” into his back. I have been scolded for making a joke of my own and suggesting it says MENU. In case you thought the Powers of Morality have gone to sleep since 1948.)
A matter which has concerned our official and unofficial porn-sniffers has always been nipples. Note that our victim here does not have any, and that the swimsuits worn by the lifeguards, which strike me as impractical for the job, are just barely big enough to cover the really objectionable feature of the human chest.
One way around this, pursued here by another Teich artist, is the silhouette. Is the lady strolling in the nude by moonlight, or is she simply wearing a very tight bathing suit? Guess which answer was ready for anybody who complained.
How form-fitting a swimsuit can be, or could be in the late Forties, is limited by the demands of fabric, so this twilight bather is not fooling anybody. But as long as it’s POSSIBLE that she is wearing a suit…and, in any case, nothing really naughty is SHOWING, which is the point (or points.)
The artist did give this lady a skirt…which is transparent…but not where it can bother the viewer.
This panel, though, did worry me. Perhaps, I thought, the Curteich folks were allowed to show genuine nipples since this was, after all, merely a panel in a folding accordion, and NOT on open display in a postcard rack at the beachfront gift shop. But quick research showed that this very image WAS available on an individual card as well as in Fun On the Run. The only thing I can think of is that they could always say they are NOT showing exposed nipples. This lady’s bosom is demurely hidden behind a beach ball…which is transparent but which IS still covering her chest.
This argument has its legal limits. Men had to make use of cloudier beachballs. We can imagine the scene at that gift shop in 1948. “I’d like to buy a beach ball, please.” “Of course. Men’s or women’s?”
Blogsy Babbles 