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| Michael Marshall |
"I have a vision, a vision", says the bigtime TV producer as he 'does lunch' with some hapless TV writer , "I see a man in a dusty pickup truck somewhere in the South West". "Can you write a series around that?"
And of course Mr Big Time will later make the big dough and the big fame as the 'creator' of the series concept, while the writer ends up eating baloney in some low rent motel.
Well I ,too, "have a vision, a vision" for my book - in particular - the book cover.
The book cover background is a gradient of subdued blood red at the top changing slowly into a subdued green yellow at the bottom.
In big letters across the top, filling the width - in the garish colors of every 1940s Sci Fi cover - will be the words:
SKY GODS
(All in upper case.)
In fact, everything about the book cover is designed to evoke and guy-up those over-the-top 1940s Sci Fi covers : from the unsubtle flat bright primary colors to the razor-jawed heroes and ravishing women.
Immediately below and under that lettering will be three bombers, equipped with the supposedly war-winning NORDEN BOMBSIGHT, rising in an arc from left to right, filling the width, dropping bombs into the blood red sky,flames and smoke.
Inside the bombers, of course, are all those 20 year old Pierre-Simon Laplace-like bombardiers, coolly sealing the fates of tens of thousand of invisible civilian 'dots', from 25,000 feet up.
Next are these words, in a little smaller type and only occupying the center of the width:
versus
And a line below them , again in smaller type but this time filling the width:
the earthlings
(Yep, all in lower case.)
Below and under the words is an image of three patients in wheelchairs, arms linked upwards in a victory gesture, surrounded by three cheering friends.
On the left, its Charlie (Aronson) the first ever patient to receive penicillin-the-antibiotic, with Dr Tom Hunter (polio survivor) to the left of him, leaning on his ever-present crutches.
Despite his polio and those crutches, American student Hunter still coxed the Cambridge team against Oxford , at a time and place when winning the Nobel prize was almost as good as winning the rowing cup...
Charlie is a life-long sucker for any life-threatening illness the strep bacteria can throw at him but has survived them all - including his second bout of the normally invariably fatal SBE - once again responding well to Dawson's penicillin.
This cat may have used up a lot of his nine lives but he is about to need one more - a severe stroke (which he will again survive) awaits him a week or two from now - but for today, he is grinning broadly.
A shit-eating grin. And why not? There is much to celebrate and Charlie has been along for the long ride, right from the start.
Charlie has a penicillin bottle IV and the over-sized bottle is well above him, casting a big yellow circle of light against the subdued green (1930s hospital green) background.
If the glow looks like a solar monstrance in some dimly lit Orthodox church, well that is no accident.
In the center is Doctor D (Martin Henry Dawson) the doctor who brought the world the naturally grown penicillin that we still use today.
He had worked for years with the musty-moldy smelling soil bacteria and fungi that give us natural penicillin and his lab and office literally had a freshly-turned earth smell so calling his tiny team 'the earthlings' seems oddly appropriate.
He is dying, dying of MG (Myasthenia Gravis) , has been dying almost ever since he started this penicillin project back in September 1940.
One characteristic of MG is that patients with really severe cases undergo many life-threatening Myasthenic Crises , where breathing becomes almost impossible.
Even after they are stabilized, they remain on Oxygen Bottle Assist and are kept in a wheelchair until the crisis has truly passed. This is one of those times.
Dr Hunter is not just Dawson's clinical assistant in the penicillin project, he is also Dawson's personal physician - helping his boss save others' lives or saving his boss's own life, as circumstances dictate.
But today is Dr Dawson's personal day of triumph.
He has heard that his arch opponents, Dr Alfred Richard and Dr Chester Keefer, have finally thrown in the towel and will now permit penicillin to be used in thousands of American and Canadian civilian hospitals.
It is late April 1944, and penicillin has yet to undergo its first mass clinical trials ( that will only come about on June 6th, on the beaches of Normandy) but already, thanks to Dawson's example, PFIZER is producing more naturally-grown penicillin than anyone could ever have thought possible just months earlier.
Meanwhile Dr Richards's fair haired child, synthetic penicillin, still seemed as distant an illusion as ever, despite all the taxpayers' money thrown at the problem.
Behind Dawson is his wife Marjorie - born with a bad hip, which no amount of painful operations have helped and she must often use a cane to get about - today is one of those days.
Over to his right, also hooked up to a strangely glowing yellow penicillin IV bottle high above her, is HH , the young woman for whom Dawson broke the law and took on all his colleagues and the wartime American government --- all in an effort to save her.
The stolen penicillin was never enough and the course of her illnesses, as Dawson was wont to say, was 'stormy' .
Even as she beat off the SBE , the spread of its infectious fragments through her blood stream had cost her an eye and the use of her ovaries. But now thanks to new bigger supplies of penicillin there seemed to be no more pockets of infection hiding anywhere in her body and she would soon be discharged home.
She too had the same shit-eating grin as Charlie and all the others. Again, why not ?
It was the story of her dramatic recovery - and of the normally meek and mild Dr Dawson actually stealing wartime government penicillin to save her - that had spread like wildfire through the 10,000 member strong medical community in tri-state New York and had led to further dramatic incidents that finally broke the penicillin story worldwide and brought PFIZER on side.
To her right is an unremarkable looking man - an accountant of a man - also holding onto his two crutches for support.
His name is Floyd Odlum and he is one of the richest men in the world ---- and one of the best known husbands-of in the world.
An odd combination.
His wife is Jackie Cochran - glamerous, smart, tough, one of the world's fastest, best, pilots - winning all kinds of speed records and even beating the world's best test pilots at their own game.
Floyd?
He may look like a mild accountant but who said accountants can't also be smart ?
For he made all his money during the Great Depression, when everyone else was losing their shirts.
Super-Rich, a strong Republican - but also a real patriot with an eye for helping the little guy.
So the Big-Corporation-Owner-to-end-all-Big-Corporation-Owners has the unlikely job of trying to see that small businesses got a few crumbs from the war contracts going almost exclusively to the nation's top fifty corporations - because without contracts and their material allotments these small businesses would have to fold up.
The awesome stress of trying to work inside The Beltway has given him an extremely severe case of Rheumatoid Arthritis, which brought him to Dawson, because Dawson's, real, day, job is to head up a famous Arthritis Research Clinic.
Odlum began getting involved in the beginnings of a patient-centred American Arthritis organization -- which kept him connected with Dawson.
He had grown interested in, and supportive of, Dawson's small pioneering home-grown penicillin project: even helping him to recover, after a grave operation that failed to cure Dawson's MG.
So, the image I wish to leave you with is six cripples - six people who should be 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' . Losers.
Losers and worthless 'dots' , in the eyes of the SKY GODS in particular.
But far from being despondent with their fate - the six 'crips' are grinning ear to ear ---- and why not ?
For the wartime triumph of naturally-grown penicillin is a signal Triumph of the Weak , well set to rebuke the Triumph of the Strong doctrine promoted by Sky Gods all over the world during the war.
Finally, at the bottom of the book cover, in as big a font as the one used for SKY GODS is:
1939-1945
Now, let's see if that very tiny visual artist stuck inside of me is actually capable of pulling this all off...
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| Original of SKY GODS versus the earthlings:1939-1945 |
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