Helen’s father was saying, “During my absence I understand we had several letters concerning the subversive elements in the so-called sermons of a certain…” he looked down at the paper before him and snorted disbelief “…Ezekiel Joshua Tubber. Member Helen Fontaine, my daughter, and a staff member of WAN-TV attended a Tubber revival and as a result Helen was confined for a time to her bed. Mr. Edward Wonder will now report fully.”
Ed stood up. Already he wasn’t liking this and had an unhappy suspicion that he wasn’t going to win kudos.
Ed said, “The fact is, I’m no authority on underground subversion. I know it’s important work. Keeping the country from being overthrown by the Commies and all. But, well, I’ve got my nose to the grindstone at WAN-TV. Possibly some of you folks have tuned in to the Far Out Hour on Friday nights…”
Mulligan said ominously, “The report on Tubber, Little Ed, the report on Tubber. No commercials.”
Ed cleared his throat. “Yes, sir. Well, frankly, from what I heard, Tubber is anti-Communist, rather than a Commie. At least that’s what he says. He complained about people being too materialistic, concentrating on the things they own or consume, instead of spiritual things… I suppose.”
Somebody said, “My minister gives the same sermon every Sunday. On Monday we forget it.”
Somebody else said, “Oh, he does, does he? This is something I’ve been wanting to bring up. What’s wrong with our consumer society? What would happen to our economy if we listened to these supposed religious leaders?”
Fontaine banged his gavel. “Go on,” he said to Ed Wonder.
He didn’t sound too happy about the way the report was coming, so far. Which, in turn, didn’t make Ed any too happy either.
“Well, all I can say is that he didn’t sound like a Commie. In fact, Helen, Miss Fontaine, asked him a direct question about it and he made it clear that he wasn’t.”
The woman who had reported on the library said, mystified, “But what’s all this got to do with Helen being under a doctor’s care? What did he do to her?”
Ed looked in anguish at Jensen Fontaine who at first began to say something but then closed his mouth to a line so thin Ed Wonder decided you’d have your work cut out getting a knife blade between the lips. Oh great.
Ed said, “Well, Miss Fontaine was, ah, kind of heckling him. And he got sore and, well, cursed her.”
There was a silence. They’d made the same assumption Fontaine had earlier.
Ed cleared it up. “That is, he laid a hex on her.”
Wannamaker Doolittle said, “Hex?”
“Kind of a spell,” Ed said.
“What’s this got to do with her being in bed?”
Ed said, unhappily, “She says she itches.”
Jensen Fontaine banged his gavel. “Let’s cut short all this jabber. Exactly what did this crackpot say?”
In his barren actor’s years, Ed Wonder had spent considerable time in perfecting his memory. In remembering dialogue. Now he sent his mind back. He said, “It went something like this: Verily I curse the vainglory of women. Verily … when Tubber gets excited he slips into this fruity thee and thou language… Verily, never more wilt thou find pleasure in vanity. Truthfully, never again wilt thou find pleasure in styles or in cosmetics.”
Ed wound it up, hopefully. “That’s not exactly it, but almost. So you see, he wasn’t exactly just putting a hex on Helen. The way he worded it, actually what it amounts to is a curse on all women…”
He broke off in mid-sentence, because an icicle had just touched the base of his spine and was slowly working its way upward.
4
By the next morning, there was little doubt left in Ed Wonder’s mind. He scanned the teleprinter’s bulletins. It wasn’t a nationwide fad, it was a worldwide fad. Common Europe, the Soviet Complex, and the aborigines of the Galapagos Islands, for that matter, were all effected.
Fads there had been before. Every type of fad. People went for fads these days. The hula hoops and the Davy Crockett craze of an earlier decade were as nothing to today’s fads. As watching TV replaced working as the daily occupation of the average citizen, the slight tendency to rebel against complete ossification seated in one’s living room was taken up by the new tri-di cinema, which at least made you walk as far as the neighborhood theatre, and by fads, fads, fads.
Fads in food, fads in dress, fads in slang, fads in everything. It was one method by which the obsolescence by style manipulators kept their goods rolling. If convertibles were in, then sedans were out, and only a twitch, a kook, would be seen dead in one. If tweeds were in, gabardines were out, and you might as well throw yesterday’s suit into the disposal chute. If Chinese food came in, Italian, Turkish, Russian, Scottish, or whatever had been the fad last month, went out. And a restaurant which had optimistically stocked its shelves and freezers with products for yesterday’s fad, might as well dump them in the garbage.
Yes, fads there had been before, but never like this.
Ultimately, almost any fad originating in the West would spread to even the Soviet Complex. Did Battle Fatigue cocktails become the thing in Greater Washington, three months later they were being used to toast the health of Number One in the Kremlin. Did Bermuda shorts in Madras cloth become the rage for formal dress in Ultra-New York, they were adorning the thin limbs of the Chinaman in the streets of Peking within a matter of weeks.
But at least it took weeks.
So far as Ed Wonder could figure out, this current Homespun Look fad had hit the world simultaneously. The data he could uncover bore that out to his satisfaction. Possibly no one else realized it, but Ed Wonder did.
It had hit Saturday night at eight thirty-five local time. From all he could piece together, from confused news reports, it had hit an hour earlier, one time zone west, and had come into effect four hours later, by the clock, in England, six hours in Common Europe. And so on. In short, it didn’t go by man-made rules of time. It had hit simultaneously.
Some of the commentators had tried to suggest otherwise, undoubtedly in good faith. No one, as yet, had actually stumbled upon the truth as Ed Wonder suspected it.
He had listened to one jovial newsman who made efforts to trace the Homespun Look back several months, claiming that it had long been aborning and had suddenly blossomed forth. The same analyst pontificated on the fad. It wouldn’t last. Couldn’t last. It was against woman’s basic human nature. It was one style that simply wouldn’t have long range appeal to the fair sex. He had chuckled and revealed that the Homespun Look had already been a boon to Madison Avenue. The Textile Association had quickly raised an initial hundred million to be devoted to nipping it in the bud with a gigantic TV, radio and Skyjector campaign. Cosmetic manufactures were also supposedly in closed session to meet the emergency.
What the commentators didn’t know, what nobody knew except Ed Wonder and Tubber himself, and the handful of Tubber’s faithful, was that there had been no time limit set on the curse. It was slated for eternity. Always assuming that Tubber’s curses, however it was that he managed them, continued their initial effectiveness.
He considered telling Mulligan about his suspicions, and decided not to. If he started sounding off about hexes laid on by itinerant religious quacks, he’d wind up convincing people he’d been on this Far Out Hour program too long.
He wandered over to Dolly’s desk. As the day before, she was in full style. By the looks of her, it must have been a dress she’d had as a teenage kid. Something in which to go out into the country, on a picnic. No lipstick, no eyebrow pencil, no powder. No earrings. No nothing.