Then I read the seventeenth episode of Dead Air, “Is Anybody Out There?”
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, the flying-saucer detector that I’d built to alert me in the event that unearthly creatures invaded my neighborhood had sat on a shelf in my room, detecting nothing, which meant that we were, for the time being, safe. Then, one night, my mother borrowed the detector, hoping that she would sleep more securely with it beside her, detecting nothing.
It worked. She slept. I was the one who couldn’t sleep that night, and, in a way, it was the flying-saucer detector that kept me awake, because a succession of schemes for selling saucer detectors dragged through my mind. For distraction from these ideas, I turned “Baldy’s Nightcap” on.
“Well, here we are back again,” said Baldy. “At least I’m back. I hope you’re back, listener. I know I’m back. I am definitely back, right, Bob?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course it could be that I never left. How would you know?”
His question was directed to me; I could tell from the sound of his voice. Baldy had a way of turning aside from the microphone and raising his voice when he directed a question to Bob and of leaning into it and lowering his voice when he was speaking to me. Often I answered him, “Yeah,” but tonight I was too occupied with my own thoughts. I felt certain that I could sell my mother a saucer detector, and that sale would get the business started. Maybe she would buy my detector, and that would allow me to order the parts for the next one — the next two — but if she wasn’t willing to buy a used detector, maybe she would advance me the cost of the parts for a new one — for two new ones.
“Maybe you never left,” said Baldy. “Maybe you’ve been sitting there in the dark all this time, waiting for me to return. I don’t know. How would I know?”
I figured that my grandfather, Guppa, would probably buy a detector for his fallout shelter. That would make the shelter twice as useful, since it would become both a fallout shelter and a flying-saucer shelter. Of course! I could sell a detector to everyone with a shelter. If people were going to be hiding in their shelters, they’d want to know whether anything was outside — bombs, fallout, desperate refugees, flying saucers.
“Or maybe you went away,” said Baldy, wearily. A match was struck, a cigarette lit, a long drag taken, the smoke exhaled. “That’s all right. I don’t hold it against you. You were gone for a while, that’s all right. You’re there now, and I’m here, and that’s what counts. At least, I hope you’re there, because if you’re not there, then what is the point of my being here?”
Porky would buy one — Porky White, who ran the Kap’n Klam clam bar, the center of saucer speculation in Babbington. The center of saucer speculation had to have a saucer detector on the counter. Porky would definitely buy one.
“I’m here because I assume that you are there,” said Baldy. “You see the implications of that, don’t you? I know you do. Of course you do. Don’t be offended by the question — it was just a rhetorical device. I wasn’t suggesting that you wouldn’t see the implications. Not at all, not at all. I always say I’ve got the most intelligent audience in radio. Don’t I always say that, Bob?”
“Yeah.”
Leaning very close to the mike, and speaking in a desperate voice that made me take notice, Baldy said, “Without you I’m nothing, you know. I’m just a voice calling into the dark, trying to make myself heard over the static, just a pathetic guy — a dummy, when you get right down to it — sitting in a cave — talking into the dark.” After another drag and a long exhalation, he said, “So, don’t touch that dial, okay? I beg of you. If you touch that dial, I’m here alone. Don’t do it, okay? Don’t leave me here alone. We’re in this together, you and I. I’m sitting here in my cave, talking, and you’re sitting out there in your dark little rooms — your caves, you know, your caves — listening to a dummy in the dark.”
It was right about there that I thought of sending a detector to Baldy so that he could use it in the cave to tell him a little something about what was going on outside, so that he would know that I was out here, listening, and so that he would talk about the detector and me and make both of us — me and my detector, a boy and his invention — famous, and it must have been right about there that I fell asleep.
[to be continued]
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