I guess, just as with the Kennedy assassination, everybody can remember exactly where he was and what he was doing on the day the space people brought Jesus back to Earth.
I was aboard Air Force One with the President-I'm Secret Service-and when Major Manley radioed the unbelievable message from the orbiting space shuttle we turned right around and headed straight for California. Beat the shuttle down, and waited, parked at the end of the landing strip, watching TV.
Of course, business had stopped all over the world. Everybody was watching the pictures from the big telescope on Mauna Kea-what a brute that spaceship was, half a mile long!-and listening to replays of Manley's message.
Well, the shuttle made its turn and came down, and they got the crew out and into Air Force One while the ground people were still purging the fuel vapors. "You sure it's Jesus? the President demanded.
"That's what they say, Mr. President. I took a picture of Him-see for yourself. And he passed over a Polaroid.
The President winced. "I didn't think He'd look like that.
"Well, He's Jewish, you know-
"No, I mean He's so young. It's been nearly two thousand years !"
Major Manley explained, "They were traveling at light speed almost all this time-you know, time dilatation? After they rolled away the stone and took Him out of the cave- "They kidnapped Jesus?
"They don't look at it that way, Mr. President. He was not in very good shape. They figured we were through with Him. So they took Him to their planet, where they have a place to keep specimens of life forms from all over the galaxy-
"They put Jesus in a zoo? Manley shrugged. "What's He doing now? the President asked.
"They say He's watching TV mostly. Doesn't much like what He sees, they say, but I didn't talk to Him myself-I don't speak Aramaic. Anyway, I was glad to get out of there, because that ship's pretty scary. You just wouldn't believe all the nasty kinds of weapons they've got!
The President's eyes gleamed, and the secretary of defense exulted. "New weapons! What a bargaining chip!
The President glanced around the room, and the expressions of delight were unanimous. There remained only one thing to do. He crooked a finger and his secretary turned on her recorder. "Take a decree, Mabel. I, the President, and so on, do hereby proclaim that Jesus Christ is come again, and-uh-
"And He's ours! the secretary finished. And then, raptly, "Thank God.
It looked pretty good there. Of course, the other countries were screeching their heads off. Pravda raged. The Chicoms canceled a trip by their soccer team, and the Israeli ambassador practically had a heart attack trying to argue that He was, after all, one of their nationals by birth. That didn't matter; we were first, and NASA cleared the Canaveral runways for His landing. But He requested all three networks to provide thirty minutes for a prime-time telecast, and that was when it all went sour. Never mind He didn't look right. Never mind He spoke in Aramaic, which practically nobody understood. It was what He said that was the bad part-that, and the fact that before we got the translation, there was a priority call from the Mauna Kea telescope people to say the ship was breaking out of orbit and heading back out into space. "But what did He say? moaned the President, and the translator, sweating, shook his head.
"Something about He doesn't like the way we've spoiled His planet, he croaked. "Says He told us what to do, and we haven't done it-we've messed everything up-
"Hell, shouted the President, "we can fix that up. Call Him back. We can make a deal. We'll give Him His own TV station so He can preach to the multitudes, let pilgrims come visit Him-anything He wants!
But the translator was shaking his head again. "He doesn't want that. He says He's going back with the space people. They've got a better-class zoo.
ENJOY, ENJOY
Terry Carr is one of the true gentlemen of the science- fiction field. Editors have trouble being beloved; what they do cuts too close to the writers' bones for comfort. I do not believe there is an editor in the world who some writer, somewhere, does not wish dead. On those grounds I feel sure that there must therefore be some people who hate Terry Carr, but I've never met one. Perhaps the reason is that he has never been in charge of a major magazine or boss of a large book publishing company; he has put in his editorial time as editorial consultant, anthologist, assistant to other editors, proprietor of a special line of his own within a larger group, and these are not the exposed mountaintops where the ravaging lightnings strike. However, they are good places for someone to be whose biggest interest is in finding and showcasing bright new talent. That's something Terry does extremely well. Devotees still fondly remember the Carr "Ace Special series of a decade and a half ago, when Terry took his chances on such unknowns as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, R. A. Lafferty, and a lot of others whose subsequent careers show how good an editor he really is. So when Terry Carr asks me for something, I try to deliver; and when he told me he was putting together a new anthology of original stories called Fellowship of the Stars, I was pleased to offer him this one-and delighted when he accepted it.
Booze, broads, big cars, the finest of food, waterbeds filled with vintage champagne. Those were some of the things that went with Tud Cowpersmith's job. The way he got the job was by going to a party in Jackson Heights. The way he happened to be at the party was that he had no choice.
It wasn't a bad party, for a loft in Jackson Heights. It wasn't a bad loft. The windows at one end looked out on the tracks of the IRT el, but they had been painted over with acrylics to look like stained glass. Every twenty minutes you got a noise like some very large person stumbling by with garbage-can lids for shoes, but except for that the el might as well not have been there. Anyway, at that end of the loft the stereo speakers stood four feet high on the floor, so the noise didn't matter all that much. You couldn't possibly talk at that end. Cowpersmith wanted, eventually, to talk, as soon as the person he wanted to talk to showed up, so he drifted to the other end.
There the noise was more or less bearable, and there the windows were still clear. They were even clean. He could see through them down on a sort of communal garden, three or four backyards for three or four different old apartment buildings thrown together: a tiny round plastic swimming pool, now iced over with leaves and boughs frozen into it; bare trees that probably had looked very nice in the summer. To get to the windows at that end you had to thread your way through a sort of indoor jungle, potted plants presumably carried in from the garden for the cold weather. And there, on a chrome-rimmed, chrome-legged kitchen table, the host and hostess were rolling joints. They greeted Cowpersmith- "Want a hit?