The Play’s the Thing

by Timothy Zahn

Illustration by Alan M. Clark

The whole trouble started when the Fuzhtian ambassador announced that he wanted to see a Broadway play.

Though I suppose you could equally well say that the trouble started when those first silent Fuzhtian probes snuggled coyly up behind our geosynchronous TV satellites and began shipping the signals back home. You might even go back further and say that it all started when Marconi’s first radio went on-line and began spewing electromagnetic radiation out into space for everyone to hear.

Oh, well, hell, let’s be honest. All of it really started with whoever the bunch of trouble-making Sumerians were who sat around on a rainy Sunday afternoon and invented entertainment.

Because that’s really what started the trouble: our vast entertainment industry, and the Fuzhties’ maniacal love for it.

For a simple example—and this isn’t supposed to be noised about—when the Fuzhtian ship landed outside the White House, the “Greetings and Joy to Humankind” line that will be going into the history books were actually the ambassador’s second words to the President. His first words were an expression of disappointment from his government that Johnny Carson was no longer hosting the Tonight Show. For those of you who’d always wondered why Carson suddenly came out of retirement right after that to do a one-month stint as guest-host, now you know.

I suppose it could have been worse. No, strike that—it could have been a lot worse. You’ve heard all the similes: a walking barn door with gorilla arms, a four-hundred-pound bag of blubbery muscle with pinfeathers; a cross between a bull and Doberman on steroids. Even without the kind of technology we knew they had, the Fuzhties could have stomped the planet flat as Florida if they’d taken a mind to do so.

Which is why everyone had been falling all over themselves trying to satisfy the ambassador’s slightest whim. Partly it was residual fear that he might suddenly stop being congenial and start behaving the way any self-respecting B-movie creature his size ought to; but mainly it was because every national leader on the planet was visibly salivating over the prospect of getting their hands on Fuzhtian technology.

Anyway, at the time the ambassador made his Broadway request he’d been on Earth about six months, getting everything he wanted. And I mean everything. He had the top two floors of an exclusive Washington hotel, specially commissioned airplanes and cars, and three of the premier chefs in Europe. Along the way he’d also collected an astonishingly eclectic entourage, consisting of top US government officials, a smattering of foreign representatives whose countries had somehow caught his interest—we still don’t know how or why he picked the ones he did—and a few oddballs like me. I’d been up on a ladder doing some woodwork repair in the White House when the ambassador apparently expressed some sort of vague approval of me. The next thing I knew I’d been hauled down, poured into a suit and handed a briefcase, and tossed in among the smiling State Department wonks whose job it was to dog the ambassador’s size-28 footsteps.

Long afterward I learned that what had captured the ambassador’s attention was not me but rather the hammer I’d been using. But by then I’d overheard enough under-the-breath comments about my relative usefulness to the group that sheer native orneriness required me to keep quiet about the error.

Besides, the briefcase they’d handed me that first day had contained a presidential plea for my cooperation and about two bucketfuls of money, both of which I was far too patriotic to walk away from.

But for whatever reason, I was in that elite group. And I’d been with them for about five weeks when, from out of the blue, the ambassador made his request.

We still don’t know what prompted him to bring it up at that particular time. For that matter, we’re not even sure how he knew about Broadway, unless he’d picked up a reference from one of those pirate transmissions their probes had been making. But however it happened, there it was, plain as day, that morning on the RebuScope:

“Are you sure that’s what it means?” Dwight Fogerty, a senior State Department wonk and head of our little group, asked as he peered back and forth between the RebuScope and the tentative translation.

“I don’t see what else it could be, sir,” chief translator Angus MacLeod said. He’d been loaned to us by MI6 because he was both a whiz at cryptanalysis and a huge “Concentration” fan. Angus always called Fogerty “sir” because he was polite, not because Fogerty deserved it. “It’s clearly ‘eye w-ant two cee a br-rod-weigh’ something. What else but play?”

“Well, who says that scale thing is weigh’?’’ Fogerty countered. “Maybe it’s Broadscale’ something.”

“There’s no such word as Broadscale,” someone pointed out. “Or place, either.”

“There’s a Broad Sound, though,” someone else said, punching keys on a laptop. “It’s near Rockhampton in Australia, near the Great Barrier Reef. Maybe that’s a radio or stereo speaker, not a scale.”

“And what, that last picture is us and him throwing a beach ball back and forth?” Fogerty scoffed.

“Well, then, maybe it’s supposed to be ‘Broadsword,’” one of the other wonks said. “The damn RebuScope’s screwed up before. Maybe he wants to see some sword demos from one of those Medieval-nutcake groups.”

“It’s I want to see a Broadway play,’” Angus said firmly. “I’m sure of it.”

Fogerty muttered something vicious-sounding under his breath. Why the ambassador had chosen to use a gadget as ridiculously hard to understand as the RebuScope for his messages to us was a mystery, but most of us had gradually developed a sort of resigned acceptance for the procedure. Fogerty, who dealt widi the gadget more than anyone except Angus, roundly hated the thing, and seemed to be running systematically through his vast repertoire of multilingual curses in regards to it. “All right, fine,” he said. “We’ll take him to a Broadway play. Smith, get on the horn and find out who the hell we talk to about doing that.”

I cleared my throat. “You don’t need to call the White House, Mr. Fogerty,” I said. “I know some people on Broadway.”

“We’re not interested in pretzel vendors, thank you,” Fogerty said tardy, gesturing at Smith. “We need a producer or theater manager or—”

“I know all of them.”

Fogerty stopped, his gesturing hand still poised in midair, and turned his head to look at me. “You what?” he asked.

“I know all of them,” I repeated. “Up until a year ago I was working with one of the top set designers on Broadway.”

It was, and I’ll admit it, an immensely soul-satisfying moment. The whole bunch of them just stood there, professionals and wonks alike, staring at me like something that had just crawled out of the primordial ooze and asked whether the Metro Blue line stopped here. All except Angus, that is, who had a faint but very knowing smile on his face. Obviously, he was the only one of them who’d bothered to read the FBI’s rundown on me after I was booted aboard.

Fogerty recovered first, in typical Fogerty fashion. “Well, don’t just stand there, Lebowitz,” he said, waving Smith forward with his phone. “Let’s get to it.”

The first step, I decided, would be to figure out which Broadway offering would be the best one to take the ambassador to see. I put in a call to Tony Capello, theater critic, and we spent fifteen minutes discussing the current crop of plays and musicals in town.

Actually, the first twelve of those minutes were spent talking over the old times when I was a lowly carpenter and Tony was chief gopher for a succession of minor choreographers. I would have cut off the reminiscences earlier, except that the delay so obviously irritated Fogerty. When I finally got Tony down to business, his advice was instant and unequivocal: “And Whirrred When It Stood Still,” currently in previews at the St. James.

“So what’s the play about?” Fogerty asked when I relayed the recommendation. “According to Tony, it’s pleasantly harmless froth,” I assured him. “Nothing that’ll confuse the ambassador or put human beings in a bad light. At least, not in any worse light than plays typically do.”

“Assuming he understands it at all,” Fogerty growled, gesturing to his overworked secretary. “Lee, better have someone vet it anyway, just to be on the safe side. All right, what about this St. James Theater? It’s on Broadway?”

“Well, actually, it’s on West 44th Street,” I said. “But it’s—”

“West 44th Street?” Fogerty echoed. “He wants a Broadway play.”

“It is a Broadway play,” I told him stiffly. “The St. James is in the theater district, half a block off Broadway itself. It counts. Trust me.”

He glowered, but apparently decided he’d shown enough ignorance for one conversation. “Fine,” he grunted, “Let’s just hope it counts with the ambassador.”

The manager at the St. James, Jerry Zachs, was less than enthusiastic about the whole thing. “You must be joking,” he said, looking back and forth between Fogerty and me. “Bring that behemoth into my theater? Who’s going to pay for the fifty seats it’s going to cost me?”

“Oh, do try not to go off the deep end here, Mr. Zachs,” Fogerty said, his voice hovering between imperious and condescending. “We won’t have to remove more than nine seats at the most to fit him in.”

“Sure—to fit him in,” Jerry shot back. “What about these seats in front of him you want left empty?”

“That’s only another twelve seats,” Fogerty told him. “Four rows by three seats—”

“I can multiply, thank you,” Jerry growled. “I can also multiply by ticket prices and see I’m already out about a grand and a half. And what about all the seats right behind him where no one’s going to be able to see? Huh?”

Fogerty shrugged. “Fine. We’ll put his entourage there.”

“At full price?”

Fogerty lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t be silly. They won’t be able to see the show from there. How do you expect to charge full price?”

Jerry’s complexion was edging into a soft pink, which from my experience with him was a dangerous sign. “I’m sure we can work something out,” I jumped in before he could say anything. Fogerty had a virtually unlimited budget to work with, but he could go all chintzy at the oddest moments. “What’s important is that the ambassador be treated like the VIP he is.”

“That’s right,” Fogerty said, apparently believing I was on his side here. “The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity, Mr. Zachs, and the more favors he owes us, the sooner he’ll start coming across with some of this magic technology of theirs. This is just one of those favors.”

“ The play’s the thing,’” I said in my best soliloquy voice, “ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. ’”

Fogerty frowned at me. “What?”

“Hamlet,” I said.

“Shakespeare,” Jerry added acidly. “He’s done some plays and poems and stuff.”

“Thank you,” Fogerty said, matching Jerry’s acid pH for pH. “I have heard of the man. The point is that I can requisition your theater, no questions asked, like it or lump it. So you might as well like it. Anyway, you should be honored to have their first ambassador in your theater.”

“Besides, think of the great publicity,” I reminded him. “You’ll be able to use photos of the ambassador in all your future ads and—”

“Wait a minute,” Fogerty cut me off, his face suddenly stricken. “He can’t use the ambassador as a cheap come-on. This is a serious diplomatic mission.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jerry mused, picking up the cue and running with it. “When the King of Sweden came here, he let us use his name in some of our promotionals. I don’t see how this is any different.”

“Of course it’s different,” Fogerty snapped. “And if you even think about trying to take advantage of him that way—”

“Taking advantage?” Jerry asked mildly. “You mean like a six-hundred-pound government gorilla trying to gouge a poor innocent theater manager on ticket prices?”

Fogerty glared daggers at both of us. But he didn’t have time for a fight, and we all knew it. “Fine,” he bit out. “Full ticket prices for the whole entourage.”

“And full payment for the crew handling the alterations?” Jerry asked.

“We’ll be doing it all ourselves,” Fogerty gritted. “My people are already downstairs, waiting for the green light.”

“Well, then, I guess I’d better give it to them,” Jerry said, reaching for his phone. “A pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Fogerty.”

The alterations took only a few hours, about the same time it took to get the ambassador and the rest of the entourage up from Washington and settled into a hotel a couple of blocks from the St. James. We headed out that evening for the theater in the ambassador’s special car, which would have been a major challenge to drive in midtown Manhattan if the police hadn’t cordoned off the area for us. I’m sure that stunt made us lots of friends among the local drivers. Probably just as well we couldn’t hear what the cabbies were saying.

The theatergoers at the St. James, to my mild surprise, seemed to take the whole thing pretty much in stride. There’d been some hassles at Jerry’s end, I knew, sorting out the people who’d already bought the seats Fogerty had appropriated, but they’d all been moved or paid off or otherwise placated, and by the time we walked in with the ambassador everyone was feeling cordial enough to give him a round of polite applause. I presume he understood—there’d certainly been enough applause on the TV programs the Fuzhties had pilfered—but if he was either pleased or annoyed he didn’t show it. Fogerty showed him to his chair—which had indeed required the removal of a square block of nine seats—and the rest of us filled in behind him. The house lights dimmed, the curtain went up, and the play started. In the reflected light from the stage I saw Fogerty lean back in his seat and cross his legs, the tired but smug image of a man who has faced yet another political brush fire and successfully stomped it out.

He got to be smug for exactly three minutes.

I had given up trying to see anything around the ambassador’s bulk when, without warning, he heaved himself to his feet. Someone behind me gasped—the Trinidadian representative, I think—and I remember having the fleeting, irrational thought that the ambassador had realized I couldn’t see and was courteously getting out of my way. An instant after that I realized how absurd that was, and my second thought was that he must have to go to the bathroom or stretch his legs or something.

He didn’t. With a roar that shook the spotlight battens, he climbed up on the empty seat backs in front of him and made a ponderous beeline for the stage.

The actors froze into statues, staring wide-eyed at this pinfeathered Goliath bearing down on them in slow motion. Making his way across the seats and the covered orchestra pit, he made a huge bound up onto the stage, landing with a thud that must have shaken the whole block. He turned around, filled his lungs, and bellowed.

You’ve never seen a theater clear out so fast. The orchestra and mezzanine both—it just emptied out like someone was giving away free beer outside. It was a miracle that no one was killed or seriously injured; even more of a miracle, in my book, that no one filed any lawsuits afterward for bruised shins or tom clothing. I guess the thought of feeing a huge unpredictable alien in court made quiet discretion the smart move on everyone’s part.

But at the time, I wasn’t convinced any of us would be getting out of the St. James alive. With the ambassador’s second bellow even the actors lost it, scurrying for the wings like they’d spotted a critic with an Uzi. I was cowering in my seat, trying desperately hard to be invisible, unwilling to move until I had a straight shot at an exit that wasn’t already jammed with people. The ambassador, still bellowing, had begun pacing back and forth across the now empty stage when Angus grabbed my arm. “Look!” he shouted over the hysterical bedlam.

“I see him!” I shouted back, momentarily hating Angus for drawing unnecessary attention our direction. “Shut up before he—”

“No!” Angus snapped, jabbing a finger at the RebuScope monitor he was carrying. “He’s not just roaring at nothing—he’s talking to us!”

I looked at the RebuScope… and damned if he wasn’t right.

“Fine,” I shouted. “So what does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” Angus said. More pictures were starting to scroll along the screen; punching for a hard copy, he tore off the first part of the message and thrust it into my hands. “Here—see what you can figure out.”

I shrank back into my seat, half of my attention on the paper, the other half on the ambassador still pacing and roaring. Tb-hiss book hiss awl th-hat eye knee-d—

None of this made any sense. It really didn’t. In the five weeks I’d been with the ambassador he’d never so much as raised his voice.

Howl two howl two drink—

And anyway, what in the world could be important enough for him to interrupt a play for? A play he himself had asked to attend?

Drink? No, not drink. Straw? Howl two straw? No. Ah—suck. Howl two suck-see-d…

And then, with a sudden horrible jolt, I had it. I took another look at my sheet—glanced at the new pictures Angus was getting—

“I’ve got it!” I yelled, grabbing Angus’s arm and waving my paper in front of him. “ ‘This book is all that I need / How to, How to Succeed.’ ”

He blinked at me. “What?”

“It’s part of a song,” I told him. “The opening song from the classic musical ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.’”

Angus looked up at the ambassador, his mouth falling slightly open. “You mean—?”

“You got it,” I said. “The ambassador’s not talking to us. He’s singing.”

It took till after midnight for Fogerty to get the preliminary damage control finished with the St. James management. An hour after that, he held a council of war in the hotel.

A very small council of war, consisting of Fogerty, Angus, and me. I’m still not exactly sure why I’d been included, unless that as our resident Broadway expert I was the one Fogerty was planning to pin the fiasco on.

Not that he wasn’t willing to apportion everyone a share of the blame if he could manage it. Fogerty was generous that way. “All right, MacLeod, let’s hear it,” he said icily as he closed the door behind us. “What the bloody-red hell happened?”

“The same thing that’s happened before, sir,” Angus said calmly, letting Fogerty’s glare bounce right off him. “The RebuScope made a mistake.”

“Really,” Fogerty said, turning the glare up another couple of notches. “The RebuScope. Convenient enough excuse.”

“I don’t think ‘convenient’ is exactly the word I would have chosen,” Angus said. “But it is what happened.”

He pressed keys on the RebuScope monitor, pulling up a copy of the ambassador’s original Broadway request. “A very simple error, actually, compared with some we’ve seen. You see this letter C? It should have been a B.”

A frown momentarily softened Fogerty’s glare by a couple of horsepower. “What?”

“The message wasn’t ‘I want to see a Broadway play,’ ” Angus amplified. “It was ‘I want to be a Broadway play.’ ”

For a long minute Fogerty just stood there, staring down at the RebuScope, a look of disbelief on his face. “But that’s absurd,” he said when he finally found his voice again. “ ‘I want to be in a—?’ No. It’s ridiculous.”

“Nevertheless, sir, that’s what he wants,” Angus said. “The question now is how you’re going to get it for him.”

Fogerty tried the glare again, but his heart was clearly no longer in it. “Me?”

“You’re the head of this operation,” Angus reminded him. “You’re the one who talks to the White House, authorizes the expenditures, and accepts the official plaudits. We await your instructions. Sir.”

For another minute Fogerty was silent, gazing at and through Angus. Then, with obvious reluctance, he turned to look at me. “I suppose you have the contacts for this one, too?”

With anyone else who treated people the way Fogerty did, I’d have been tempted to demand a little groveling before I gave in. But, down deep, I suspected that being polite to underlings was as close as Fogerty ever got to a grovel. “I know a few people,” I said. “ There may be a way to pull it off.”

“Seems to me there are at least two stage versions of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ out there, aren’t there?” Angus suggested. “He’d be a natural.”

“Wouldn’t work,” I said, shaking my head. “Too many lines, too much real acting.”

“How about a non-speaking role, then?” Fogerty suggested. “Maybe a walk-on part?”

I snorted. “Wouldyou travel three hundred light-years for a walk-on part?”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. “No, I suppose not,” he conceded. “I suppose that also lets out any chance of using him as part of the set decoration.”

“It does,” I agreed. “Which leaves only one approach, at least only one I can think of. We’re going to have to have a play written especially for him.”

Fogerty waved a hand. “Of course,” he said, as if it had been obvious all along. “Well. Phone’s over there—better get busy.”

“What, you mean now?” I asked, looking at my watch. “It’s after one in the morning.”

“New York is the city that never sleeps, isn’t it?” he countered, jabbing a finger at the phone. “Besides, we need to get this on track. Go on, start punching.”

There were six New York playwrights with whom I had at least a passing acquaintance. The first five numbers I tried shunted me to answering machines or services. My sixth try, to Mark Skinner, actually went through.

“Mr. Skinner, this is Adam Lebowitz,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I was assistant set designer when your play Catch the Rainbow was at the Marquis. I’m the one—”

“Oh, sure,” he interrupted. “You’re the one who came up with that rotating chandelier/staircase gizmo, weren’t you? That was a snazzy trick—tell you the truth, I was damned if I could see how that was going to work when I wrote it into the play. So what’s up?”

“I’m currently attached to the State Department group in charge of escorting the Fuzhtian ambassador around,” I said. “We’re—”

“Oh, yeah, sure—Lebowitz. Yeah, I remember seeing you in the background in one of those TV shots. Couldn’t place you at the time—that was you in the brown suit and Fedora sort of thing, right? Sure. So what’s up?”

“The ambassador wants to be in a Broadway play,” I told him. “We need you to write it for him.”

There was a long silence. “You what?”

“We need you to write a play for him,” I repeated.

“Ah,” he said. “Uh… yeah. Well… can he act?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Oh, and the only translator he brought with him prints everything he says in rebus pictures.”

“Uh-huh. And you’re sure he really wants to do this?”

“We think so. He climbed up on the stage at the St. James tonight and started singing from ‘How to Succeed.”

Mark digested that. “So you’re wanting a musical?”

“I don’t think it really matters,” I said. “Fuzhtian singing voices seem to be the same as their speaking ones, except a lot louder. Might help with stage projection, but otherwise it’s not going to make much difference.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “And how loud can you make a rebus, anyway? OK, sure, I’ll take a crack at it. How soon do you need this?”

I looked at Fogerty. “He says sure, and how soon.”

“Tell him two days.”

I goggled. “What?”

“Two days.” Fogerty gestured impatiently at the phone. “Go on, tell him.”

I swallowed. “Mr. Fogerty, the head of the delegation, says he needs it in two days.”

I don’t remember Mark’s response to that exactly. I do know it lasted nearly five minutes, covered the complete emotional range from incredulity to outrage and back again, tore apart in minute detail Fogerty’s heritage, breeding, intelligence, integrity, and habits, and never once used a single swear word. Playwrights can be truly awesome sometimes.

Finally, he ran down. “Two days, huh?” he said, sounding winded but much calmer. “OK, fine, he’s on. You want to tell him what it’s going to cost?”

He quoted me a number that would have felt right at home in a discussion of the national debt. I relayed it to Fogerty and had the minor satisfaction of seeing him actually pale a little. For a second I thought he was going to abandon the whole idea, but he obviously realized he wouldn’t do any better anywhere else. So with a pained look on his face he gave a single stiff nod. “He says OK,” I told Mark.

“Fine,” Mark said, all brisk business now. “I’ll have it ready in forty-eight hours. Incidentally, I trust you realize how utterly insane this whole thing is.”

Privately, I agreed with him. Publicly, though, I was a company man now. “The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity,” I told him.

“I hope you’re right,” he grunted. “So where do you want the play delivered?”

The next two days were an incredible haze of whirlwind chaos. While Fogerty and a skeleton crew escorted the ambassador on a tour of New York, the rest of us worked like maniacs to organize his theatrical debut. There was a theater to hire on a couple of days’ notice—no small feat on Broadway—a complete stage crew to assemble, a casting agent to retain for whatever other parts Mark wrote into this forty-eight-hour wonder, and a hundred other details that needed to get worked out.

To my quite honest astonishment, they all did. We got the Richard Rodgers theater hired for an off-hours matinee, the backstage personnel fell into line like I’d never seen happen, and Mark got his play delivered within two hours of his promised deadline.

The play was a masterpiece in its own unique way: an actual, coherent story completely cobbled together from famous scenes and lines from other plays and movies. Fogerty nearly had an apoplectic lit when he saw it, wondering at the top of his lungs why he should be expected to pay a small fortune for what was essentially a literary retread. I calmed him down by pointing out that (A) this would allow an obvious entertainment buff like the ambassador to learn his lines with a minimum of rehearsal time, which would get this whole tiling over with more quickly and enable us to get out of our overpriced Manhattan hotel and back to the overpriced Washington hotel which the government already had a lease on; and (B) that Mark had even managed to choose scenes and lines that should translate reasonably well on the RebuScope, which would help make the show at least halfway intelligible for the audience. Eventually, Fogerty cooled down.

We met at nine sharp the next morning for the first rehearsal… and, as I should have expected, ran full-bore into our first roadblock.

“What’s the problem now?” Fogerty demanded, hovering over Angus like a neurotic mother bird.

“I don’t know,” Angus replied. “It’s the same message that started this whole thing: “I want to be in a Broadway play.”

“So he’s in one,” Fogerty bit out, throwing a glare up at the brightly lit stage. The ambassador was standing motionless in the center, repeating the same message over and over, while the other actors and crew stood nervously watching him, most of them from what they obviously hoped was a safe distance. News of the St. James incident had clearly gotten around.

“I know that, sir,” Angus said calmly. “Perhaps he doesn’t understand the concept of rehearsals.”

Fogerty trotted out the next in line of his exotic curses, sharing this one between the RebuScope and the ambassador himself. “Then you’d better try to explain it to him, hadn’t you?”

Angus stood up. “I’ll try, sir.”

“Wait a minute,” I said suddenly, looking over Angus’s shoulder. “That doesn’t say ‘I want to be in a Broadway play.’ It says ‘I want to be a Broadway play.’ ”

“What?” Fogerty looked over Angus’s other shoulder.

“There’s no ‘in’ in the message,” I explained, pointing. “See? ‘Eye w-ant to—’ ”

“I see what it says,” Fogerty snapped. “So what the hell does it mean?”

Angus craned his head to look at me. “Are you suggesting…?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said, nodding soberly. “He wants to be a Broadway play. The whole Broadway play.”

There was a moment of shocked silence in which the only sound was the ambassador’s rumbling. “He must be joking,” Fogerty choked out at last. “He can’t do a one-man show.”

“Would it be any more incomprehensible to an audience than what we’ve already got planned?” Angus pointed out heavily. “None of this really makes any sense in the first place.”

Fogerty turned a glare on me. “I am not,” he said, chewing out each word, “mortgaging the White House to pay for another play.”

“The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity,” I reminded him. “If we don’t keep him happy—”

“I am not,” he repeated, gazing unblinkingly at me, “paying for another play.” I looked up at the stage, trying to think. A one-man play… “Well, then, we’ll just have to use this one,” I said slowly. “The ambassador’s already got the lion’s share of the lines. If we just take the other actors off the stage…”

“Rear-project them, maybe?” Angus offered. “Like—like what?”

“Like they’re all part of a dream,” I said. “The whole thing can be done as a monologue: his reminiscences of life on the stage.”

“You’re both crazy,” Fogerty said. But there was a thoughtful tone in his voice, the tone of someone who has exactly one straw to grasp at and is trying to figure out where to get the best grip on it. “You think you could do the rewrite, Lebowitz?”

I shrugged. “You’d do better to see if Mark would—but if you’d rather, I could probably handle it,” I corrected hastily at the sudden glint in his eye. “But it would take some time.”

“You’ve got three hours,” he said, snapping his fingers and gesturing his secretary over to us. “Lee can handle the typing and other paperwork. You concentrate on being creative.”

It turned out to be easier than I’d expected to convert the play down to a one-man format, and I still sometimes wonder if Marie deliberately designed it with that possibility lurking in the back of his coffee-soaked mind. Still, the whole job took nearly four hours, and Fogerty was about ready to climb the scrims by the time Lee and I emerged from the basement dressing room where we’d been working.

“Took your sweet time about it,” he growled, snatching the sheaf of paper.

“You want it good or you want it last?” I quoted the old line.

“I want it fast,” he retorted, rifling through the pages. “Who’s going to know from good’ on this thing anyway? Come on.”

He led the way onto the stage, where the ambassador was bellowing at the top of his lungs. Singing, Fuzhtie style. Vaguely, I wondered which musical he was doing this time. “While you two were twiddling your thumbs down there, we got a sort of rear projection system put together,” Fogerty told us. “That’ll take care of the other actors—excuse me; the extras. The bad news is that we’ve only got a couple of hours now before we have to clear out for today.”

“That should be enough time for a run-through,” I said. “And the ambassador seems to be a quick study. Let’s try it.”

We did, and he was. But even more than that: if Angus was interpreting the RebuScope messages correctly, he absolutely loved the play. We got all the way through it and were five pages into a second reading when the stage manager arrived to kick us out.

The ambassador didn’t want to leave, of course, and seemed quite prepared to make a major diplomatic incident out of it. Fortunately, Fogerty had anticipated this one and had already arranged to rent one of our hotel’s ballrooms so that we could continue the rehearsal over there. The ambassador acceded with what I thought was uncharacteristic good grace, and we all trooped back. For a long time after that, through the wee hours of the morning, you could hear his dulcet singing tones from everywhere near the ballroom, as well as from certain portions of two other floors. Rumors that he could also be heard in Brooklyn were apparently unfounded.

We had one more day of rehearsals, and then it was opening night. Opening afternoon. Whatever.

I’d been too busy the past few days to get around to wondering exactly what Fogerty was going to do about an audience. I suppose I was assuming he would simply round up the members of the local Federal employees’ unions—and any other warm bodies he could find—and plop them down in theater seats, at direct gunpoint if necessary.

Nothing could have been farther from the truth. New York Mayor Grenoble and half the city council had turned out to see the play, along with several high-ranking members of the governor’s office, and even the Vice President and a Secret Service contingent. The rest of the theater was packed with playwrights, actors, and your basic upper-crust New York intelligentsia. Somehow, Fogerty had managed to get this billed as The Event of the Season, and no one who considered himself a theater aficionado was about to miss it. Under the circumstances, I wasn’t surprised to learn Fogerty was also charging them $150 apiece.

They finished filing in, settled into their seats, and stopped rattling their programs. The house lights dimmed, the curtain went up, and the play started.

And to my utter surprise and endless relief, it was great.

I don’t mean the ambassador was great as an actor. His Fuzhtian expressions and body language—if he had any—were completely opaque to the human audience. His singing voice as already noted was merely a much louder version of his speaking voice, and his speaking voice itself was no great shakes to begin with. Mark’s play wasn’t particularly impressive, either, though I have no doubt that it was the best Broadway play ever conceived and written in under fifty hours.

Yet in some weird and inexplicable way, it all worked. What the ambassador lacked in acting ability he more than made up in sheer raw stage presence; his inability to sing his way out of a laundry sack created a strangely effective Yin/Yang with the rear-projected background singers; and over and through it all was woven the unceasing and surrealistic flow of pictures from the RebuScope.

And when it was over, they gave him a standing ovation.

“Well,” Fogerty said, watching from the wings as the ambassador lumbered out for his fourth curtain call. “Thank God that’s over.”

“Yes,” I agreed, watching the ambassador do the Fuzhtian version of a bow, which to me looked more like a seriously deformed curtsy. “It was fun while it lasted.”

Fogerty gave me a look which would probably have been one of his famous glares if he’d had any emotional energy left to glare with. “You must be joking.”

“No, really,” I insisted. “It felt good to be on Broadway again. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it.”

“Missed the fawning and applause, you mean,” he countered. Glares were out, but he could still handle snide. “Well, better tuck the greasepaint back in your suitcase. Time for you to go back to being anonymous again.”

“I’m not so sure about that, Mr. Fogerty,” Angus said, coming up to Fogerty’s side and showing us his RebuScope monitor. “Here’s what the ambassador said right after his second curtain call.”

“At least it doesn’t have the word ‘Broadway’ in it,” Fogerty grunted. “You have a translation yet?”

“I’m not sure,” Angus said. “It seems to be ’eye w-ant to go on street.’ ”

I sucked in my breath. “That’s not street,” I said carefully. “It’s road.”

Fogerty frowned at me. “ ‘Go on road’? What in hell does that—?”

And then, suddenly, he got it. But to my amazement, his face actually brightened. “On the road,” he said. “He wants to take the play on the road.”

I threw Angus a look, saw my same surprise mirrored there. Fogerty, actually happy about this?

“No, I’m not having a breakdown,” Fogerty assured us. “We’ll take it on the road, all right. But this play is too good to waste on humans. We’re going to take it to the Fuzhtian worlds.”

He smiled with brittle slyness. “And along the way, I expect we’ll finally get a look at some of this wonderful Fuzhtian technology we’ve been dying to see.”

He gestured across the backstage to Lee. “Start getting everything organized,” he called over the applause from out front. “We’re taking this show on the road.”

And we did. For three months we slogged across space in the ambassador’s starship, stopping at star after star, planet after planet, theater after theater. Setting up, watching the ambassador play to packed houses, tearing down, and moving on again.

For the rest of the crew and me it was a lot of work, though fundamentally not a lot different than doing a tour back in the States. Fuzhtian worlds—and there were a lot of them—each had their own peculiar odors and sounds and colors and climates; but when you get right down to it, roast leg of glimprik and steamed colfia vegetables taste the same everywhere you go.

For Fogerty and the tech boys in the entourage, though, this tour was hog heaven. Every little gadget that fell into their hands, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant by Fuzhtian standards, had them salivating for hours as they carefully took it apart to see if they could figure out how it worked. In those three months they must have filled forty notebooks and at least that many multi-gigabyte CD-ROMs. Fogerty looked simultaneously more harried and more excited than I’d ever seen him, continually speculating about what we’d learn when we were able to get a look at their really interesting stuff. Unbelievable as it would have seemed to me when I first joined the group, the man was actually becoming a pleasure to be with.

And he was like that right up until the other shoe finally dropped.

I knew something was wrong the instant Angus sat down at my breakfast table and I got a look at his face. “What is it?” I asked, my courf melon cubes suddenly forgotten. “What’s wrong?”

“Have you seen Mr. Fogerty?” he asked, his voice under rigid control.

“I don’t think he’s up yet—he and the tech boys were working late on that aroma-making gadget,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

Angus turned his head to gaze out the window at the Fuzhtian city stretching out beneath our hotel. “We were wrong, Mr. Lebowitz,” he said quietly. “Our Broadway star here wasn’t an ambassador at all. Not really. He was—” He waved a hand helplessly. “He was a penguin.”

I set down my fork. “A penguin?” I asked carefully.

“Oh, not a real penguin, of course,” he said. “That’s just the image that jumped to mind.” He sighed and looked back at me. “You’ve seen the nature specials. Seen all those penguins gathering at the edge of an ice floe in their little black and white tuxedos, flapping their flippers, all set to start hunting for breakfast. Do you remember why they don’t all just jump in and get on with it?”

I glanced down at my own breakfast. “I must have missed that episode.”

“It’s because they’re not the only ones on the hunt.” Angus picked up my fork and began absently stirring the courf cubes in my dish. “There may be killer whales or other predators lurking under the surface, you see. So you know what the penguins do?”

“Tell me.”

He stirred the cubes a little more vigorously. “They all keep jostling together on the edge until one of them gets jostled enough to fall into the water.” He flicked the fork, and one of my cubes flipped up over the edge of the dish and landed on the table. “If nothing eats him,” he said, gazing down at the cube, “the rest know it’s safe to start going about the day’s business.”

I gazed at the piece of melon, watching the juice ooze onto the table. “All right,” I said slowly. “So the ambassador was pushed into the water But I’d have thought that we’ve treated him pretty well. Certainly no one’s tried to eat him.”

Angus snorted. “Oh, we treated him well, all right. We treated him too damn well. He’s done it, he’s lived through it… and now they all want to do it, too.”

“Do what?” I asked, frowning. “Come to Earth?”

He looked up at me with a haunted expression. “No,” he said. “Star in a Broadway play.”

I felt my jaw fall open. “All of them?”

He nodded. “All of them.”

We’re on the last leg of the ambassador’s tour now—two more planets, fifteen more shows, and then our ship will be heading back to Earth. Our ship, and two hundred more following right behind us. Packed to the gills with eager, star-struck Fuzhties.

I don’t know what the White House and UN officials said to Fogerty when he broke the news to them. I know that when he came out of the ambassador’s communication room he had the grim look of a man who’s just watched his career crash in ruins, in glorious full-color slow motion.

Still, we may yet be able to pull this off. Assuming the officials accepted our suggestions, there should be hordes of workmen at this very moment scurrying around the Gobi, the Sahara, the Australian Outback, and a dozen other of the remotest places on Earth. Building a hundred exact movie-lot-style replicas of Broadway for the Fuzhties to perform on. With luck, they’ll all be ready by the time we get back. If not, the real Broadway will never be the same again.

They say the Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity. They had better be right.

Content

The Play’s the Thing
by Timothy Zahn