Bernard Finger came to Toronto.

Gabriel was standing on the balcony of his hotel room, looking out disconsolately at the park-like front grounds of the hotel and beyond to the towers of the city that blocked what had once been a decent view of Lake Ontario. There wasn’t much smog in Toronto, since the Canadians used nuclear energy to a large extent. But the lake was still a fetid cesspool of industrial wastes.

Rita had smilingly accepted Gabriel’s dinner invitation the night before; he had treated her to a quick jet flight to New York for authentic delicatessen fare. All through the evening she was warm, friendly, outgoing, obviously happy to be with Gabriel. And that’s as far as it went. She eluded his grasp. Even in the plush passenger compartment of the rented jet (five thousand bucks, Canadian, for the night) she somehow managed to stay at arm’s length.

Gabriel couldn’t figure it out. Women didn’t act that way. Or at least, he’d never had any patience with those who did. “You either do or you don’t,” he had told hundreds of girls. But Rita’s different. Shy yet friendly. Innocent yet knowing. Desirable but distant. She’s driving me nuts, Gabriel told himself for the thousandth time.

He burped pastrami. The morning air wasn’t helping to settle his stomach. Just as he decided to go back inside and take some antacid, a long stream of cars came purring off the superhighway and onto the hotel’s approach road.

Finger! Gabriel knew instantly. No one else would demand such commotion. The carefully landscaped grounds of the old hotel had never seen such a flurry of sychophants. Bellmen and doormen seemed to spring out of the front entrance. Yes men by the dozens poured out of the cars and yes women, too. Finger was no sexist.

As Gabriel leaned over his balcony railing to watch, it seemed as if the hotel was disgorging whole phalanxes of flunkies. It was easy to tell the Californians from the Canadians.

The L.A. contingent wore the latest mode: fur-trimmed robes and boots and hats that made them look like extras from an old Ivan the Terrible flick. Or the minions of Ming the Merciless. The locals wore conservatively zippered business suits, while the hotel staff was decked out in bluish uniforms faintly reminiscent of the old RAF.

The whole conglomeration swirled and eddied around the car for nearly fifteen minutes. Then everyone seemed to fall into a prearranged pattern, and the rear door of the longest, blackest, shiniest limousine was opened by one of the RAF uniforms. Despite himself, Gabriel grinned. He ought to have a line of trumpeters announcing his arrival.

Bernard Finger’s expensively booted foot appeared in the limousine’s doorway, followed by the rest of his Cary Grant body. He looked gorgeous, resplendent in royal purple and ermine. And he bumped his head on the car’s low doorway.

Gabriel hooted. “You’re still a klutz, you klutz!” he hollered. But his balcony was too far above street level for anyone to hear him. Briefly he wondered if he’d have time enough to make a water bomb and drop it on Finger’s ermine-trimmed hat. But he couldn’t tear himself away from the barbaric splendor of the scene below, even for an instant.

Finger straightened his hat and sneaked a small rub on the bump he’d just received, then stood tall and beaming at the sea of servility surrounding him.

Rita’s not there to greet him, Gabriel noticed, and felt good about it.

Then with an expansive gesture. Finger said something to the people nearest him. Several of them were holding reorders and minicameras, Gabriel noticed. Media flaks.

Finger turned back toward his limousine and ducked slightly, beckoning to someone inside. New girlfriend? Gabriel wondered.

It was a man who got out. A guy who wasn’t terribly tall, but looked wide across the shoulders and narrow at the hips. Muscleman. He wasn’t wearing Hollywood finery, either. He wore a simple turtleneck sweater and a very tight pair of pants. Athlete’s striped sneakers. Dirty blond hair, cropped short and curly. Rugged looking face; nose must’ve been broken more than once. Good smile, dazzling teeth. Must be caps.

The newcomer grinned almost boyishly at the cameras, then turned and, grabbing Finger by the shoulders so strongly that he lifted the mogul off his feet, he kissed B.F. soundly on both cheeks.  As he let Finger’s boots smack down on the pavement again, Gabriel howled to himself. He’s got a new girlfriend, all right! Wait’ll Rita sees this!

But Gabriel was completely wrong.

Les Montpelier phoned almost as soon as Gabriel stepped back inside his room, inviting him to a “command performance” dinner.

“The whole team’s going to be here tonight,” Les said gravely, “to meet the show’s male lead.”

Gabriel blinked at Montpelier’s image on the tiny phone screen. “You mean that guy is going to be our big star?”

“That’s right.” Montpelier cut the connection before Gabriel could ask who the man was.

Briefly, Gabriel considered throwing himself off the balcony. But he decided to attend B.F.’s dinner instead.

Finger bought out the hotel’s main restaurant for the evening and filled it with media people and the top-level crew of “The Starcrossed.” No working types allowed, Gabriel grumbled to himself. No painters or electricians or carpenters. Just us white-collar folks. Not even Bill Oxnard had been invited, although Gabriel knew he was in Toronto for the weekend.

Finger sat at the head table, flanked by Rita Yearling on one side and the rugged-looking, erstwhile star of the show on the other. Gabriel had been placed halfway across the big dining room, as far removed from Gregory Earnest as possible, and seated at a table of what passed for writers. They were a grubby lot. The high schoolers weren’t allowed to stay up late or drink alcoholic beverages (and marijuana was still illegal in Canada), so they hadn’t been invited. Gabriel sat amid a motley crew of semiretired engineers who had always wanted to write sci-fi, copyboys and reporters from the area news media who saw their futures in dramaturgy, and one transplanted Yank who had exiled himself to Canada milennia ago and could outwrite the entire staff, when he wasn’t outdrinking them.

Something about Finger’s male “discovery” was bothering Gabriel. His face looked vaguely familiar. Gabriel spent the entire dinner—of rubber chicken and plastic peas—trying to figure out where he had seen the man before. A bit player in some TV series? An announcer?

One of the gay blades who’ve always hanging around the studios and offices? Maybe a dancer?

None of them seemed to click.

Then, as coffee and joints were passed around by the well-beyond-retirement-age waiters. Finger got to his feet.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here this evening.”

Everyone roared with laughter. Except Gabriel, who clutched his stomach and tried to keep from shrieking.

“Even though I’ve been staying in sunny Southern California. . . .” More canned laughter from the throats of Finger’s lackeys. “. . . I’ve been keeping a close eye on your work up here. The Starcrossed’ is an important property for Titanic and even though we’re working with an extremely tight budget. . . .” Who’s paying for this bash tonight? Gabriel wondered. “... I can assure you that

Titanic is doing everything possible to make this show a success.”

Loud applause. Even the media people clapped. Local flaks, Gabriel knew. They want the show to succeed, too.

Finger cocked his head in Gabriel’s direction, like Cary Grant sizing up Katharine Hepburn. “I know we’ve had some troubles in the script department, but I think that’s all been ironed out satisfactorily.” Maybe, Gabriel answered silently.

“And thanks to our foresight in hiring one of the world’s foremost scientists as our technical consultant—Dr. William Oxnard, that is, who unfortunately couldn’t be with us here tonight because he’s literally spending night and day at the studio ... let’s heard it for Dr. Oxnard....”

They all dutifully applauded while Finger tried to figure out where he was in his speech. “Um, well, as I was saying, we’ve got terrific scientific advice. And we’re going to have the best show, from the technical standpoint, of anything in the industry.”

More applause.

“But when you get right down to it. . . .” Finger went on, reaching for a napkin to dab at his brow. The lights were hot, especially under those fur-trimmed robes. “When you get right down to it, what the audience sees is mainly the performers. Sure, the scripts and the sets are important, but those millions of viewers out there, they react to people . . . the performers who perform for them, right there in their living rooms—or bedrooms, whichever the case may be.”

I’ll never make it all the way through this speech without throwing up, Gabriel told himself.

“It’s crucially important to have a pair of brilliant co-stars,” Finger said, gesturing with the white napkin, “especially for a show like “The Starcrossed,’ which is, after all, a show about two young people, lovers, who will captivate the millions of viewers out there.”

Someone broke into enthusiastic applause, found that he was alone, quickly stopped, looked around and slid down in his chair halfway under the table.

Finger glanced in his direction, then resumed. “We are extremely fortunate in having one of the most exciting young new talents in the world to play our feminine lead, our Juliet: Rita Yearling.”

Rita stood up amid a pleasant round of applause and took a cautious bow. Considering the gown she’d been poured into and her cleavage, caution was of utmost importance.

She remained standing as Finger went on: “Isn’t she beautiful? And she can act!” Some laughter;

Rita herself smiled tolerantly, while Gabriel squirmed in his chair with indignation for her.

“But although Rita Yearling will be a superstar by the end of the coming season, she’s still relatively unknown to the TV audience. So what we needed, I knew, was a male co-star who would be instantly recognizable to the whole world.. ..”

Gabriel found his puzzlement deepening. The guy sitting at Finger’s right side looked vaguely familiar, but Gabriel knew he wasn’t a well-known actor.

“So I went out and got a guy who is known the whole world over,” Finger was at his self-congratulatory best, “and signed him up to play our Romeo, our male lead.

And here he isl A superstar in his own right! Francois Dulaq!”

Everyone in the big dining room rose to their feet and roared approval. “Du-laq! Du-laq!” they began chanting.

Even the crystal chandeliers started swaying in rhythm with their shouts.

And then it hit Gabriel. Francois Dulaq. The hockey star. The guy who broke Orr’s old scoring record and made the Canadian Maple Stars world champions. They even beat the Russo-Chinese All-Stars, Gabriel remembered from last season’s sportscasts.

A hockey player as the male lead? It’s Buster Crabbe all over again, Gabriel moaned to himself.

He had to climb up on his chair to see what was going on. The crowd was still on its feet, roaring. Dulaq had gone around Finger to where Rita was standing. They put their arms around each other and bared the most expensive sets of teeth in television history for the media cameramen.

Finger beamed approvingly.

The expatriate American tugged at Gabriel’s sleeve and yelled over the crowd’s hubbub, “Whaddaya think?”

Gabriel shrugged. “He might be okay. Looks good enough. Probably can’t act worth shit, but he wouldn’t be the first big star who couldn’t act.”

Frowning and shaking his head, the expatriate said, “Yeah, but he can’t even speak English.”

Gabriel almost fell off his chair. “What? What’s he speak, French?”

“Nope. Neanderthal.”

Not knowing whether it was a joke or not, Gabriel climbed off his perch and sat down. The crowd settled down, too, as Finger nudged Dulaq to the microphone.

“I wancha t’know,” Dulaq said, “dat I’ll t’row evert’ing

I got into dis job ... jus’ like I t’rew dem body checks inta dem Chinks last May!”

They all roared again. Gabriel sank his head down onto his arms and tried to keep from crying.

At precisely two a.m. Gabriel’s phone buzzed.

He wasn’t sleeping. His trusty suitcase was open on the bed, half filled with his clothes. Since the end of the dinner,

Gabriel had spent the night phoning Finger, Montpelier, Brenda, Sam Lipid and anyone else who would listen, telling them that if Dulaq was the male star of the show, they could get themselves another chief writer.

They all argued with him. They cited contracts and clauses. They spoke glowingly of Dulaq’s magnetic personality and star quality and sex appeal. They promised voice coaching and speech therapy and soundtrack dubbing.

Still, Gabriel packed his suitcase as he fought with them.

Then his phone buzzed.

Gabriel leaned across the bed and flipped the switch that turned it on. Rita Yearling’s incredibly lovely face appeared on the phone’s screen.

“Hi,” she breathed.

Gabriel hung suspended, stretched across the bed with one foot in his suitcase, tangled in his dirty underwear.

“Hello yourself,” he managed.

Her eyes seemed to widen as she noticed the open suitcase.

“You’re not leaving?”

Gabriel nodded. He couldn’t talk.

“Don’t you care about the show?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Don’t you care about me?”

With an effort, Gabriel said, “I care a lot. Too much to watch you ruin your career before it really starts. That hockey puck of a leading man is going to destroy this show.”

She dimpled at him. “You’re jealous!”

“No,” he said. “Just fed up.”

“Oh, Ron. . . .” Her face pulled together slightly in a small frown.

“I can’t take it anymore,” Gabriel said. “It’s just one battle after another . . . like fighting with a Hydra. Every time I chop off one head, seven more pop up.”

But she wasn’t listening. “Ron . . . you poor sweet boy.

Come out onto your balcony. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“On the balcony?”

“Go out and see,” Rita cooed.

Untangling himself from the suitcase, Gabriel padded barefoot to the balcony. He was wearing nothing but his knee-length dashiki and the chill night air cut into him the instant he opened the sliding glass door.

“Surprise!” he heard from over his head, Looking up, he saw Rita smiling lusciously down at him, She was on the balcony one floor up and one room over from his own. She stood there smiling down at him, clothed in a luminous wisp of a gown that billowed softly in the breeze.

“I took this room for the weekend. I wanted to get away from the suite where B.F. is,” she said.

Ron’s knees went weak. “It is the east,” he murmured, “and Juliet is the sun.”

 “This is a lot more fun than talking over the phone, isn’t it?” Rita gave a girlish wriggle. “Like, it’s more romantic, huh?”

Without even thinking about it, Gabriel leaped up on the railing of his own balcony. He stretched and his fingertips barely grazed the bottom of Rita’s balcony.

“Hey! Be careful!”

Gabriel glanced below. Ten floors down, the street lamps glowed softly in the cold night air. Wind whipped at his dashiki and his butt suddenly felt terribly exposed.

“What are you doing?” Rita called, delighted.

He jumped for her balcony. His fingers clutched at the cold cement, then he reached, straining, and grabbed a fistful of one of the metal posts supporting the railing.

His feet dangled in empty air and his dashiki billowed in the wind. Somewhere far back in his mind, Gabriel realized what a ridiculous picture this would present to anyone passing below. But that didn’t matter.

Beads of cold sweat popped out all over his body as he strained, muscles agonized by the unaccustomed effort, hand over hand to the edge of the balcony’s railing. His bare toes found a hold on the balcony’s cement floor at last and he heaved himself, puffing and trembling with exertion, over the railing to collapse at Rita’s feet.

She dropped to her knees beside him. “Ron, darling, are you all right?”

He smiled weakly up at her. “Hiya kid.” It wasn’t Shakespeare, he knew, but it was the best he could manage under the conditions.

They went arm in arm into her hotel room. Rita’s gown was a see-through and Gabriel was busily looking into it.

She sat him down on the edge of the bed. “Ron,” she said, very seriously, “you can’t leave the show.”

“There’s no reason for me to stay,” he said.

“Yes there is.”

“What?”

She lowered her eyelids demurely. “There’s me.”

 

 

10: THE DIRECTOR

 

Mitch Westerly sat scowling to himself behind his archaic dark glasses. The other passengers on the jet airliner shuffled past him, down the narrow aisle, overcoats flopping in their arms and hand baggage banging against the seats and each other.

Westerly ignored them all, just as he had ignored the stewardesses who had recognized him and asked for his autograph. They were up forward now, smiling their mechanical “Have a good day” at the outgoing passengers and sneaking glances at him.

I should never have come back, he thought. This is going to be a bad scene. I can feel it in my karma.

He was neither tall nor particularly handsome, but since puberty he had somehow attracted women without even trying. His face was rugged, weatherbeaten, the face of an oldtime cowboy or mountaineer, even though he had spent most of his life in movie sound stages—and even in Nepal, where he had been for the past two years, he had seen the Himalayas only through very well-insulated windows. His body was broad shouldered, solid, stocky, the kind that goes to fat when you reach forty. But Westerly had always eaten very sparingly and hardly ever drank at all; there was no fat on him.

He wore his standard outfit, a trademark that never changed no matter what the current fashion might be: a pullover sweater, faded denims, boots, the dark shades and a pair of soft leather race driver’s gloves. He had started wearing the gloves many years earlier, when he had been second-unit director on a racing car TV series. The gloves kept him from biting his fingernails, and he rarely took them off. It ruined his image to be seen biting his fingernails.

Finally, all the passengers had left. The plane was empty except for the three stewardesses. The tallest one, who also seemed to be the boss stew, strode briskly toward him, her microskirt flouncing prettily and revealing her flowered underpants.

“End of the line, I’m sorry to say,” she told him.

“Hate to leave,” Westerly said. His voice was as soft as the leather of his gloves.

“I hope you enjoyed the flight.”

“Yeah. Sure did.” And the offers of free booze, the names and numbers your two assistants scribbled on my lunch tray and the note you slipped under the washroom door.

He slowly pulled himself out of the plush seat, while the stewardess reached up into the overhead rack and pulled out his sheepskin jacket.

“Will you be in Toronto for long?” she asked, as they started up the aisle together, with him in the lead.

“Directing a TV series here,” Westerly said, over his shoulder.

“Oh really?” Her voice said How exciting! without using the words. “Will you be staying at the Disney Hilton?

That’s where we stay for our layovers.”

That dump. Not even the fleas go there anymore.

“Nope. They’ve got us at one of the older places—Inn on the Park.”

“Ohhh. That’s beautiful. A ... friend, he took me to dinner there once.”

They were at the hatch now. The other two stews were smiling glitteringly at him. With his Himalayan-honed senses he could almost hear them saying, Put me in your TV series. Make me famous. I’ll do anything for that.

Glamour, glamour, romance and glamour.

He hesitated at the hatch and made a smile for them.

They shuddered visibly. “Y’all come out to the studio when you get a chance. Meet the TV people. Just ask for me at the gate. Anytime.”

“Ohh. We will!”

His smile self-destructed as soon as he turned his back on them and trudged down the connecting tunnel that led into the airport terminal building.

They were at the gate area waiting for him. The photographers, the media newshounds, the newspaper reporters, the lank-haired droopy-mouthed emaciated young women who covered Special Events for the local TV stations and show business magazines, the public relations flaks for Titanic and Badger and Shiva knows who else.

They all looked alike, from Bhutan to Brooklyn.

They might be the same people who were at the airport in Delhi . . . and in Rome . . . and in London, Westerly realized with a thrill of horror. My own personal set of devils hounding me wherever I go. Eternally. Hell is an airport terminal!

He kept his head down and refused even to listen to their shouting, pleading questions until the PR flaks—Why are they always balding and desperate faced?-- steered him to one of those private rooms with unmarked doors that line the long impersonal corridors of every airport terminal in the world.

The room inside had been set up for a press conference.

A table near the door was groaning with bottles of liquor and trays of hors d’oeuvres. A battery of microphones studded a small podium at the front of the room. Folding chairs were neatly arranged in rows.

Inside of three minutes, Westerly was standing at the podium (which bore the stylized trademark of Titanic Productions, a rakishly angled “T” in which the cross piece was a pair of wings), the hors d’oeuvres were totally demolished, half the booze was gone, the chairs were scattered as if by a tsunami and the PR men were smiling with self-satisfaction.

One of the lank-haired young women was asking, “When you left Hollywood two years ago, you vowed you’d never return. What changed your mind?”

Westerly fiddled with his glasses for a moment. “Haven’t changed my mind,” he said slowly, with just a trace of fashionable West Virginia accent. “Didn’t go back to Hollywood. This is Toronto, isn’t it?”

The news people laughed. But the scrawny girl refused to be embarrassed.

“You said you were finished with commercial films and you were going to seek inner peace; now you’re back.

Why?”

Because inner peace comes at eleven-fifty a -week at the Katmandu-Sheraton, baby. “I spent two years absorbing the wisdom of the East in the Himalayas,” Westerly replied aloud. “One of the most important things the lamas taught me is that a man should use his inborn talents and use them wisely. My talent is making movies and television shows. It’s my karma . . . my destiny.”

“Didn’t you make a movie in Tibet last year?” asked an overweight, mustachioed reporter.

“Surely did,” said Westerly. “But that was purely for self-expression ... to help release my soul from its bondage. That film will never be released for commercial viewing.” Not that bomb. Never make that mistake again—hash and high altitudes just don’t mix.

One of the media interviewers, his videotape camera strapped securely to the side of his head, asked, “You left the States right after the Academy Awards dinner, with no explanations at all except that you had to—quote, find yourself, end quote. Why did you turn down the Oscar?”

“Didn’t think I deserved it. A director shouldn’t get an Oscar for his first feature film. There were many other directors who had amassed a substantial body of work who deserved to get an Oscar before Mitch Westerly did.” And the IRS and the Narcs were getting too close; it was no time to show up at a prearranged affair.

 “Do you still consider yourself the Boy Genius of Hollywood?”

“Never been a boy.” Pushing forty and running scared.

“Why have you come here to Toronto, instead of going back to Hollywood?”

Taxes, pushers, alimony . . . take your pick. “Gregory Earnest convinced me that ‘The Starcrossed’ was a vehicle worthy of my Krishna-given talents.”

“Have you met the people who’ll be working for you on ‘The Starcrossed’?”

“Not yet.”

“Have you read any of the scripts?”

I gagged over the first six pages. “Looked over some of the scripts and read the general concept of the show.

Looks great.”

“Do you think Shakespeare and science fiction can be mixed?”

“Why not? If Will were alive today, he’d be writing science fiction.”

“What do you think is the best film you’ve ever directed?”

Without an instant’s hesitation, Westerly replied, “The one I’m working on now. In this case, the entire series, ‘The Starcrossed.’”

But in his mind, his life flashed before his consciousness like a videotape spun at dizzying, blurring speed. He knew the best film he had done; everyone in the room knew it; the one original piece of work he had been able to do, the first major job he had tackled, as a senior back at UCLA: The Reawakening. The hours, the weeks, the months he had spent. First as a volunteer worker at the mental hospital, then convincing them to let him bring his tiny pocket camera in. Following Virginia, sallow, pathetic, schizophrenic Virginia through the drug therapy, the primal sessions, the EEGs, the engram reversals.

Doctors, skinny fidgety nurses who didn’t trust him at first, Virginia’s parents tight and suspicious, angry at her for the dream world they had thrust her into, the psychotechs and their weird machines that mapped the brain and put the mind on a viewscreen. Virginia’s gradual awakening to the real world, her understanding that the parents who said they loved her actually wanted nothing to do with her, her acceptance of adulthood, of maturity, of her own individuality and the fact that she was a lovely, desirable woman. Mitch’s wild hopeless love for her and that heart-stopping instant when she smiled and told him in a voice so low that he could barely hear it that she loved him too. That was his best film; his life and hers recorded in magnetic swirls on long reels of tape.

Truth frozen into place so that people could see it and understand and cry and laugh over it

He had never done anything so fine again. He became successful. He directed “True to Life” TV shows and made money and fame. He married Virginia while they were both still growing and changing. Unlike the magnetic patterns on video tape, they did not stay frozen in place forever.

They split, slowly and sadly at first, then with the wild burning anger of betrayal and hate. By the time he directed his first major production and was nominated for an Oscar, his world had already crashed around him.

“Do you really think ‘The Starcrossed’ is award-winning material?”

The question snapped him back to this small stuffy overcrowded room, with the news people playing their part in the eternal charade. So be went back to playing his. ‘The Starcrossed’ has the potential of an award-winning series. It won’t be eligible for an Oscar because it’s not a one-time production. But it should be in contention for an Emmy as Best Dramatic Series.”

Satisfied that they had put his neck in the noose, the news people murmured their thanks and headed on to their next assignments.

Westerly went straight to the studio, while two of the PR flaks took his luggage to the hotel. He almost asked why it took a pair of them to escort his one flight bag to the hotel, but thought better of it. If he raised a question about it, Westerly knew, they’d wind up assigning a third PR man to supervise the first two.

Gregory Earnest met him at the studio, looking somber in a dark gray jumpsuit. His face was as deeply hidden by bushy beard and tangled mane as ever, but since Westerly had seen him last—many months earlier, in Nepal—Earnest’s face had subtly changed, improved. His nose seemed slightly different, somehow.

“I’m glad you’re finally here,” Earnest said, with great seriousness. “Now maybe we can start to bring some order out of this chaos.”

He showed Westerly around the sets that had been built in the huge studio. The place was empty and quiet, except for a small group of people off to one side who were working on some kind of aerial rigging. Westerly ignored them and studied the sets.

“This is impossible,” he said at last.

“What?” Earnest’s eyebrows disappeared into his bushy forelocks. “What do you mean?”

“These sets.” Westerly stood in the middle of the starship bridge, surrounded by complicated-looking cardboard consoles.

“They’re too deep. How’re we going to move cameras in and out around all this junk? It’ll take hours to make a single shot!”

Earnest sighed with relief. “Oh that. You’ve never directed a three-dee show before, have you?”

“No, but. ...”

“Well, one of the things audiences like is a lot of depth in each scene. We don’t put all the props against the walls anymore ... we scatter them around the floor. Makes a better three-dimensional effect.”

“But the cameras....”

“They’re small enough to move through the standing props. We measured all the tolerances. . . .”

“But I thought three-dee cameras were big awkward mothers.”

Earnest cast a rare smile at him. It was not a pleasant thing to see. “That was two years ago. Time marches on.

A lot of transistors have flown under the bridge. You’re not in the Mystic East anymore.”

Westerly pushed his glasses up against the bridge of his nose. “I see,” he said.

“Hey! There you are!” A shout came echoing across the big, nearly empty room.

Earnest and Westerly turned to see a stubby little guy dashing toward them. He wore a Starcrossed tee shirt and a pair of old-fashioned sailor’s bell-bottoms, complete with a thirteen-button trapdoor in front.

“Oh God,” Earnest whined nasally. “It’s Ron Gabriel.”

Gabriel skidded to a halt in front of the director. They were almost equal in height, much to Earnest’s surprise.

“You’re Mitch Westerly,” Gabriel panted.

“And you’re Ron Gabriel.” He grinned and took Gabriel’s offered hand.

“I’ve been a fan of yours,” Gabriel said, “ever since The Reawakening.’ Best damned piece of tape I ever saw.”

Westerly immediately liked the writer. “Well, thanks.”

“Everything else you’ve made since then has been crap.”

Westerly liked him even more. “You’re damn right,” he admitted.

“How the hell they ever gave you an Oscar for that abortion two years ago is beyond me.”

Westerly shrugged, suddenly carefree because there were no pretenses to maintain. “Money and politics, man. You know the game. Same thing goes for writers’ awards.”

Gabriel made a face that was halfway between rue and embarrassment. Then he grinned. “Yeah. Guess so.”

Earnest said, “I’m taking Mr. Westerly on a tour of the studio facilities....”

“Go pound sand up your ass,” Gabriel said. “I’ve gotta talk about the scripts.” He grabbed at Westerly’s arm.

“Come on, I’ll buy you a beer or something.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Great neither do I.” They started off together, leaving

Earnest standing there. Behind his beard, his face was redder than a Mounties jacket at sunset.

The studio cafeteria was murky with pot smoke, since smoking of all sorts was forbidden on the sets because of the fire hazard.

“Now let me get this straight,” Westerly was saying.

“The original scripts were written by high school kids as part of a contest?”

They were sitting at a corner table, near the air conditioning blowers, sipping ginger ales.

Gabriel nodded slowly. “I’ve been working since summer with Brenda and Bill Oxnard to make some sense out of them. I’ve also written two original scripts of my own.”

“And that’s all we’ve got to shoot with?”

“That’s right.”

“Krishna’s left eyebrow!”

“Huh?”

Westerly waved at the encroaching smoke. “Nothing.

But it’s a helluva situation.”

“They didn’t tell you about the scripts?”

“Earnest said there were some problems with you . . . you’re supposed to be tough to get along with.”

“I am,” Gabriel admitted, “when I’m being shat on.”

“I don’t blame you.”

Gabriel hunched forward in his chair, “So what do we do?”

With a small shrug. Westerly said, “I’ll have to talk to Fad about it ... it’s the Executive Producer’s job. . . .”

Gabriel shook his head. “Sheldon split. Went back to L.A. as soon as his girl moved out of his apartment, and turned over the E.P. title to Earnest.”

“Earnest?” Westerly felt his lip curling.

“The boll weevil of the north,” said Gabriel.

“Well,” with a deep sigh, “I guess I’ll have to mention it to Finger. I’m supposed to have a conference with him tonight. . . .”

“I thought he was back in L.A.”

“He is. We’re talking by phone. Private link . . . satellite relay, they tell me.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll just tell Finger we have to get better script material.”

 “You can read the scripts, if you want to.”

“I already saw a couple. I thought they were rejects. I’d like to see yours. At least we’ll have a couple to start with.”

Gabriel looked pleased, but still uncertain.

“Is there anything else?” Westerly asked.

With a grimace, Gabriel said, “Well, I hate to bring it up.”

“Go on.”

For an instant, the writer hesitated. Then, like a man who’s decided to step off the high board no matter what, “You’ve got a reputation for being an acid freak. Did they bring you in here just for the name or are you gonna stay straight and do the kind of work you’re capable of doing?”

So there it is, right out in the open. Westerly almost felt relieved. “Both,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Finger and Earnest called me back from the Roof of the World because I have a big name with the public and I need money so bad that I’m willing to work cheap. They know I’ve blown my head off; I doubt that they care.”

Gabriel gritted his teeth but said nothing.

“But I care,” Westerly went on. “I finally got off the stuff in Nepal and I want to stay off it. I want to do a good job on this series. I want to get back to work again.”

“No shit?”

“No shit, buddy.”

“You’re not kidding me? Or yourself?”

“No kidding.”

Gabriel broke into a grin. “Okay, bubble. We’ll show the whole world.”

By the time Westerly got back to the studio, the quiet little knot of technicians who had been working on the aerial rigging had turned into a studio full of shouting, milling people. One of the men was hanging suspended in the rig, wires disappearing up into the shadows of the high ceiling, his feet dangling a good ten meters off the floor.

Gregory Earnest seemed to rise up out of the floorboards as Westerly stood near the studio’s main door, watching.

“That’s Francois Dulaq, our star,” Earnest explained, pointing to the dangling man. “We’re getting him accustomed to the zero-gravity simulator.”

“Shouldn’t we use a stuntman? It looks kind of dangerous....”

Earnest shook his head. “We don’t have any stuntmen on the budget. Besides, Dulaq’s a trained athlete ... strong as an ox.”

Dulaq hung in midair, shouting at the men below him.

To Westerly, there was a faint tinge of terror in the man’s voice. Someone yelled from off in the distance, “Okay, try it!” Dulaq’s body jerked into motion. The rig started moving him across the vast emptiness of the studio’s open central area.

‘Hold it!” the voice yelled; the rig halted so abruptly that Dulaq was almost thrown out of his skin. Westerly could feel his own eyeballs slam against his lids, in psychic communion with the man in the rig.

“Shouldn’t we test the rig with a dummy first?” he asked

Earnest.

For the second time that day the executive smiled.

“What do you think we’ve got up there now?”

It was agonizing to watch. The technicians spent hours setting up the lights and whisking Dulaq backward and forward through the spacious studio on the aerial rig.

They slammed him against walls, amidst frantic yells of “Slow it down!” or “Watch it!” Once the rig seemed to slip and Dulaq went hurtling to the floor, only to be snatched up again and yanked almost out of sight, into the shadows up near the ceiling. From the far corner where the technicians manipulated the controls came the sounds of multilingual swearing. And from the rigging itself came shrieks and groans.

Finally, the star of the show went gracefully swooping past Westerly, smiling manfully, as a trio of tiny unattended cameras automatically tracked him from the floor, like radar-directed antiaircraft guns getting a bead on an intruding attack plane. The technicians were clustered around the controls and watched their monitor screens.

“Beautiful!” somebody shouted.

Meanwhile, Dulaq had traversed the length of the studio, still smiling, sailing like Superman through thin air and rode headfirst into the upper backwall of the starship bridge set.

Westerly heard a concussive thunk! The backwall tottered for a moment as Dulaq hung there, suddenly as stiff and wooden as a battering ram. Then the wall tumbled, taking most of the set apart with a series of splintering crashes. Amidst the flying dust and crashing two-by-threes, and all the rending, shrieking noises, Westerly clearly heard the same master technician shout out, “Hold it!”

They got Dulaq down from the rig, nearly dropping him from ten meters up in the process. He was still smiling and apparently conscious, although to Westerly his eyes definitely looked glassy. The technicians bundled him off to the infirmary, which fortunately was in the same building as the studio. By the time Westerly got there, a smiling medic was telling the assembled technicians:

“He’s all right . . . didn’t even get a splinter. I took an x-ray of his head and it showed nothing.”

The technicians smiled and joked and went back to their work. As they dispersed, Westerly introduced himself to the medic and asked permission to see the star of the show.

The medic graciously ushered him into the infirmary’s tiny emergency room. Dulaq was sitting up on the only cot, still smiling, with an icepack perched on his bead.

“Hi,” Westerly said. “How’re you feeling?”

“Okay.”

“That was one terrific shot you took out there.”

“I got worst,” Dulaq mumbled. “Onst, against de Redwings, I went right trough da glass.”

They talked together for about a half hour, as Westerly’s heart sank lower and lower. This is the star of the show? he kept asking himself.

“Do you think you’ll be all right to start working on

Monday?” he asked, feeling his head give a body-language no, despite his conscious efforts to keep it from shaking.

“Sure. I could go back now, if ya wanna.”

“No! No ... that’s all right. You rest.”

Westerly got up to leave, but Dulaq grasped his wrist in a grip of steel.

“Hey, one t’ing you do for me, huh?”

“Uh, sure. What?”

“Don’ gimme no long speeches t’remember, huh? I don’ want no long speeches. Too tough.”

Krishna, Shiva and Vishnu, Westerly prayed. Why have they done this to me?

“Sure,” he told Dulaq. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay. No long speeches.”

“Right.”

Dulaq let go of him and Westerly ducked through the accordion-fold door of the little sickroom, rubbing his wrist.

The doctor was at his cubbyhole desk.

“You examined him thoroughly?” Westerly asked.

“Yep,” said the doctor.

“Did he talk that way before he hit his head?”

The doctor glowered at him.

Westerly had dinner with Rita Yearling, who seemed incredibly beautiful, utterly sure of herself and dismally cold toward him.

His hotel suite was sumptuously furnished, including a strange electronic console of shining metal and multicoloured buttons that squatted bulkily in the far corner of the sitting room. Gregory Earnest had explained that the device was a three-dee phone station, which would link him instantaneously via satellite with Fingers private office in Los Angeles.

Somehow the phone loomed in his mind like an alien presence as he and Rita ate their dinner at the other end of the sitting room, near the windows.

Rita was polite, respectful and distant. The vibes coming from her were strictly professional, totally impersonal.

 “Do you know Bernie Finger very well?”

“Of course.”

“He discovered you?”

“Yes.”

“Through an agent?”

“Oh, on his own.”

“Where was that?”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“No, I guess not. Um . . . what do you think of Ron

Gabriel?”

“His brain’s in his crotch.”

“And your co-star, Dulaq?”

“No brains at all.”

And so it went, right through dinner, all the way through to the ice cream dessert that neither of them would do more than taste.

A part of Westerly’s mind was almost amused. Here he was having dinner with the loveliest woman he had seen in years and he was bored silly by her. While she referred to other people as brainless, she came across as heartless, which in many ways was infinitely worse.

Finally he pushed aside his coffee cup and glanced at his wrist. “Finger will be calling in a few minutes, if he’s on time.”

“He’s always on time,” Rita said. She got up from her chair, a vision of Venus, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Harlow, Hayworth, Monroe—and equally cold, unalive.

“I’ll let you two talk business together,” Rita said.

Westerly got up and went to the door with her. She stopped just as he reached for the doorknob.

Without so much as a smile, Rita said, “B.P. won’t mind if we ball, but we’ll hafta keep it quiet from Gabriel. Ron thinks he’s got me falling for him.”

“Oh,” was just about all that Westerly could manage.

“Just let me know where and when,” she said,

He opened the door and she left the room.

For several minutes Westerly leaned against the closed door, his mind spinning. It’s not me, he kept telling himself.

She really said it and that’s the way it is with her. It means as much to her as filling out an application blank at the unemployment office.

Still his hands trembled. He wished for the pleasant euphoria that a pinch of coke would bring. Or even the blankness of cat, the synthetic hypnotic drug that he started taking when Virginia was still in chemotherapy.

The phone chimed.

For an instant, Westerly didn’t understand what the sound was. He had started the day in Rome, stopped in London and now—he remembered Earnest’s instructions on operating the three-dee phone. He went to the-‘desk near the rolling dinner table and picked up the handset. The red button, he mused. Turning toward the strange, squat apparatus across the room, he thumbed the red button.

The far half of the room seemed to disappear, dissolving into a section of Bernard Finger’s Los Angeles office. The bright blue sky of early twilight was visible in the window behind Finger’s imposing high-backed chair.

“H ... hello,” Westerly said shakily.

“Surprises you, eh?” Finger said back at him. “Just like being in the same room. That’s how good Oxnard’s new three-dee system is. It’s the system we’re using on ‘The Starcrossed’ and that’s what’s gonna make it a great show.”

“I’m glad we’ve got something going for us,” said

Westerly.

“Huh?” Whaddaya mean by that?” Finger said.

Westerly pulled up his chair. This wasn’t going to be a pleasant chat, he realized. “Well,” he said, “I’ve only been here a few hours, but this is the way it looks to me. ...”

He outlined what he had heard and seen, from his opening discussions with Earnest through his talk with Gabriel and the accident with Dulaq and its aftermath. He stopped short of telling about his dinner with Rita. Finger looked slightly upset at first, angry when he heard Gabriel’s name, then ultimately bored of the whole litany of problems.

“You finished?” he asked when Westerly stopped.

“That seems like enough for the first day.”

“H’mmp.” Finger got up from his desk and the camera tracked him. To Westerly, it looked as if half his sitting room was shifting around, the walls and furnishings moving, as Finger paced slowly toward a sofa that appeared in one corner and then centered itself in his view.

Finger sat on the sofa and touched a button that was set into its arm. On the wall behind him, a professional football game suddenly appeared on a flat, two-dimensional wall-sized TV screen.

“You see that?”

“Pro football. That’s our competition?”

Finger shook his head. “That’s our salvation, if everything works out right.”

“What do you mean?” asked Westerly.

Glancing furtively on either side of himself, Finger said, “This is a private, scrambled connection. If you try to tell anybody about this, I’ll deny it and sue you. I’ll make sure that you never work again anywhere!”

“What in hell....”

“Shut up and listen. Part of the money that the bankers put up for ‘The Starcrossed’ is now invested in the

Honolulu Pineapples.”

“The what?”

“The football team! The Honolulu Pineapples! If they win the Superbowl, Titanic Productions is out of the red.”

Westerly’s mind was reeling again. For a moment he couldn’t remember if he had brought the pills with him or not. I was going to dump them in the Ganges, but I think

I left them. ...

“I’ll give you the whole story,” Finger was saying, “because you’re the guy who’s got to come through for me.”

. . . in the zipper compartment of the flightbag.

“The bankers gave me enough money for one series. If it hits, Titanic gets more money to pull us out of debt. Got that? But we’re up to our assholes in bills right now, baby! Now! Not the end of next season, but now!”

None of this is real. Westerly told himself.

“So I’m using some of the bankers’ money to keep our heads above water, pay a few bills here and there. And the rest of it I’m betting on the Pineapples. As long as they keep winning, we can keep treading water. If they take the Superbowl, we’re home free.”

“What’s this got to do with ‘The Starcrossed’?” Westerly heard himself ask.

“Don’t you understand? The money for the show is already spent!” Finger’s voice was almost pleading. For what? Understanding? Mercy? Appreciation? “There isn’t any more money for ‘The Starcrossed.’ It’s spent. Bet on the Pineapples. The budget you’ve got is all you’re going to get. There’s not another nickel in the drawer.”

“There’s no money for writers?”

“No.”

 

“No money for better actors?”

“No.”

“No money for staff or technicians or art directors

“No money for nothing!” Finger bellowed. “Not another penny. Just what’s on the budget now. Nothing more.

You’ve got enough to do thirteen shows. That’s it. If the series isn’t a hit after the first couple weeks, it’s over.”

“I can’t work like that,” Westerly said. “I’ve got to have decent material, competent staff....”

“You work with what you’ve got. That’s it, baby!”

“No six. Not me.”

“That’s all there is,” Finger insisted.

“I can’t work that way.”

“Yes you can.”

“I won’t!”

“You’ve got to!”

Westerly got to his feet. For an instant he was tempted to walk over and grab Finger by the throat and make him understand. Then he realized that the man was a safe five thousand kilometers away.

“I won’t do it,” he said quietly. “I quit.”

“You can’t quit.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.” Finger’s voice went low and ugly. “You try quitting and I’ll send you some visitors. Guys you owe money to.”

“Who? The IRS? My ex-wife’s lawyers? They can’t touch me in Canada.”

“Not them. The guys you bought your goodies from, just before you took off for the far hills. They can touch you ... oh, brother, can they touch you.”

Westerly felt a river of flame run through his guts. “You told me you had squared that!” he shouted.

“I told them that I’d square it ... after you’d done the first thirteen shows. They’re waiting. Patiently.”

“You lying sonofabitch....”

“And you’re a cathead, an acid freak. So what? You do your job and you’ll be okay. You just make do with what you’ve got there. And no complaints.”

With his eyes closed. Westerly echoed, “No complaints.”

“Good,” Finger said. “Maybe we can all get out of this in one piece. Even if the show flops, the Pineapples are winning pretty good.”

“Wonderful.”

“Damned right it’s wonderful. Now you take good care of yourself and have fun. I’m already contacting the right people about the Emmies. They’ll be watching you. Them ... and others.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re entirely welcome. Good night.”

Finger and his office abruptly disappeared, replaced by the rest of the sitting room and the ugly three-dee console.

Westerly stood without moving for several minutes.

Then he stirred himself and headed for the bedroom. The flightbag was on the bed. And inside the zipper compartment, he knew, were enough pills to make him forget about this phone conversation.

At least, for a little while.

 

 

11: THE FIRST DAY’S SHOOTING

 

 Gregory Earnest sat in the control booth, high above the rebuilt starship bridge set.

Directly in front of him were the engineers and technicians who ran the complex three-dee holographic equipment.

They sat along a row of desk consoles, earphones clamped to their heads, eyes fixed on the green, glowing dials and viewscreens that were the only illumination in the darkened control booth.

Beyond the soundproof window in front of them, the set was alive with crewmen and actors. Electricians were trailing cables across the floor; cameramen were jockeying their self-propelled units and nodding their laser snouts up and down, right and left, like trainers taking high-spirited horses for a morning trot. Mitch Westerly was deep in conversation with Dulaq, one arm around the burly hockey star’s shoulders. Rita Yearling lounged languidly on her special liquafoam couch, glowing with the metallic sheen of her skintight costume. Ron Gabriel paced nervously around the set, orbiting closer and closer to Rita.

Earnest’s nose throbbed whenever he saw Gabriel. And a special vein in his forehead, reserved exclusively for passions of hatred and revenge, pulsed visibly.

 “The first take of the first scene,” a voice whispered from behind Earnest.

He turned to scowl, but saw that the speaker was Les Montpelier, from Titanic. He let his scowl vanish. Montpelier was B.F.’s special representative, here to lend an air of official enthusiasm to the first day’s shooting. He was higher in the peeking order than the Executive Producer, entitled to scowl but not to be scowled at.

For a moment neither man said anything. They simply sat there looking at each other, Montpelier’s trim little red beard nearly touching the Canadian’s shaggier black one.

Then, over the loudspeaker, they heard Westerly’s voice crackle: “Okay, let’s get started.”

A technician held out the clapboard and shouted, “Star- crossed. Episode One. Scene One. Take One.”

“We’re on our way!” Montpelier said with almost genuine enthusiasm, as the clapboard cracked and fell apart.

The embarrassed technician picked up the pieces and scuttled out of camera range, shaking his head at the broken clapboard in his hands.

An omen? Earnest wondered.

Brenda Impanema stayed well back in the shadows, away from the bustling men and women on the blazingly lighted set.

“Would you like a chair?”

Startled, she looked around to see Bill Oxnard smiling at her. He was carrying a pair of folding chairs, one in each hand.

“I won’t be able to see if I sit down,” she whispered.

“Then stand on it,” he said as he flicked the chairs open and set them down on the cement floor.

With a grin of thanks, Brenda clambered up on a chair.

Oxnard climbed up beside her.

“I thought you were back at Malibu,” she said, without taking her eyes from the two minor actors who were going through their lines under the lights.

“Couldn’t stay there,” he replied. “Kept fidgeting. Guess I wanted to see how the equipment works the first day.

And I’ve got some new ideas to discuss with you, when you have some free time.”

“Business ideas?”

He looked at her and Brenda saw a mixture of surprise, hurt and anticipation in his face.

With a slow nod, he replied, “Uh, yes ... business ideas.”

“Fine,” said Brenda.

The actors were clomping across the bridge set, pronouncing their lines and fiddling with the props that were supposed to be the starship’s controls. Out of the corner of her eye, Brenda could see Oxnard shaking his head and muttering to himself.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered.

“The lights. I told them we don’t need so much wattage with this holographic system. They’re going to wash out everything . . . the tape will be overexposed.”

“Can’t they take care of that electronically, up in the control booth?”

“Up to a point. I just wish they’d listen to what I tell them. Once, at least.”

His teeth were clenched and he looked very unhappy.

“It’ll be all right,” she said soothingly.

Oxnard grimaced and jabbed a finger toward the actors.

“You don’t use an astrolabe for navigating a starship! I told Earnest and the rest of them . . . why don’t they listen?”

Mitch Westerly wasn’t worried about the astrolabe or any other technical details. His head was still buzzing from last night’s high. Faced with the first day’s shooting, he hadn’t been able to get to sleep without help. Which came in the form of pills that floated him up among the stars and then dumped him on the cement floor of the studio with a bad case of shakes.

Liven it up, you guys! he ordered the actors, mentally.

We don’t have time or money for retakes. Put some life into it.

“We haven’t seen any signs of the Capulet starship since we left Rigel Six,” said the first bit player, pronouncing

“Wriggle” instead of “Rye-gel.”

“Maybe they never got away from the planet,” spoke the second, as if he were being forced to repeat the words at gunpoint. “They were having trouble with their engines, weren’t they?”

With some feeling! Westerly pleaded silently.

“I’ll check the radars,” said Actor One.

“Cut!” Westerly yelled.

Both actors looked blankly toward him. “What’s the matter?”

Westerly strode out onto the set. He felt the glare of the lights on his shoulders like a palpable force.

“The word in the script is ‘scanners,’ not “radar,*”

Westerly said, squinting in the light despite his shades.

The actor shrugged. “What’s the difference?”

Ron Gabriel came trotting up. “What’s the difference?

You’re supposed to be seven hundred years in the future, dim-dum! They don’t use radar anymore!”

The actor was tall and lanky. When he shrugged, it looked like a construction crane stirring into motion.

“Aww, who’s gonna know the difference?”

Gabriel started hopping up and down. “I’ll; know the difference! And so will anybody with enough brains in his head to find the men’s room without a seeing-eye dog!”

Westerly placed a calming hand on the writer’s shoulder.

“Don’t get worked up, Ron.”

“Don’t get worked up?”

Turning back to the actor. Westerly said, “The word is scanners.”

“Scanners.” Sullenly.

“Scanners,” Westerly repeated. “And you two guys are supposed to be joking around, throwing quips at each other. Try to get some life into your lines.”

“Scanners,” the actor repeated.

Westerly went back to his position next to the Number One camera unit. The script girl—a nondescript niece of somebody’s who spoke nothing but French—pointed to the place in the scene where they had stopped.

“Okay,” Westerly said, with a deep breath. “Let’s take it from ... ‘Maybe they never got away from that planet.’

With life.” Cat, he said to himself. I’ve got to find some cat or I’ll never sleep again.

Ron Gabriel was trying not to listen. He prowled around the edges of the clustered crew, peeking between electricians and idle actors as they stood watching the scene being taped. They’re mangling my words, he knew.

They’re taking the -words I wrote and grinding them up in a cement mixer. Whatever’s left, they’re putting into a blender and then beating it with a stick when it comes crawling out.

He felt as if he himself were being treated the same way.

He paced doggedly, his back to the lighted set.

Farther back, away from the action, Brenda and Oxnard were standing on their chairs, watching. Off to one side, Rita Yearling reclined on her couch, the one Finger had flown up from Hollywood for her.

Gabriel stopped pacing and stared at her. If it wasn’t for her, he thought, I’d have walked out on this troop of baboons long ago. Maybe I ought to split anyway. She’s a terrific lay, but....

Rita must have felt him watching her. She looked up and smiled beckoningly. Gabriel went over to her side and hunkered down on his heels.

“Nervous?” he asked her.

Her eyes were extraordinarily blue today and they widened with girlish surprise. “Nervous? Why should I be nervous? I know all my lines. I could say them backwards.”

Gabriel frowned. “We’ve already got one clown who’s going to be doing that.”

“What do you mean?” Her voice was an innocent child’s.

 “Dulaq. He’s going to get it all ass-backwards. I just know it.”

“Oh, he’ll be all right,” Rita said soothingly. “Don’t get yourself flustered.”

“He’s an idiot. He’ll never get through one scene.”

Rita smiled and patted Gabriel’s cheek. “Francois will be all right. He can be very much in control. He’s a take-charge kind of guy.”

“How do you know?” Gabriel demanded.

She made her surprised little girl face again, and Gabriel somehow found it irritating this time. “Why, by watching him play hockey, of course. How else?”

Before Gabriel could answer, the assistant director’s voice bellowed (assistant directors are hired for their lungpower): “Okay, set up for Scene Two, Dulaq and Yearling, front and center.”

“I’ve got to go to work,” Rita said, swinging her exquisite legs off the couch.

“Yeah,” said Gabriel.

“Wish me luck.”

“Break a fibia.”

She blew him a kiss and slinked off toward the set.

Gabriel watched her disappear among the technicians and actors, and suddenly realized that her walk, which used to be enough to engorge all his erectile tissue, didn’t affect him that way anymore. The thrill was gone. With a rueful shake of his head, he walked toward the set like Jimmy Cagney heading bravely down the Last Mile toward the little green door.

Scene Two: Int., starship bridge. BEN is sitting at the control console, watching the viewscreens as the ship flies through the interstellar void at many times the speed of light. On the viewscreens we see nothing but scattered stars against the blackness of space.

BEN

(To himself.) Guess we’ve shaken off those Capulets. Haven’t seen another ship within a hundred parsecs of us.

FROM enters. He is upset, despondent. (Tell Dulaq that the Redwings will win the Stanley Cup next year; that should work him up enough for this scene.) He glances at the viewscreens, then goes to BEN and stands beside him.

BEN

(Looking up at From.) Greetings, cousin. How are you this day?

FROM

Not as good. (Shakes his head)

BEN

What’s the trouble, cousin?

FROM

I dunno. Must’a been somet’in I picked up back on Rigel Six. Maybe a bug. . . .

“Cut!”

“Francois ... the script says ‘virus,’ not ‘bug.’”

“Ahh. “Bug” sounds better. I don’t like all close fancy words.”

“Try to say ‘virus,’ will you? And watch your diction.”

“My what?”

“Your pronunciation!”

“Hey, you want me to say all close funny words and pemounce everyt’ing your way? At de same time? Come on!”

“Take it from, ‘What’s the trouble, cousin.’”

BEN

What’s the trouble, cousin?

FROM

I dunno. Must’a been somet’in I picked up back on Rigel Six.

Maybe a b... a virus or somet’ing.

BEN

(With a grin.) Or that Capulet girl you were eyeing, Julie.

FROM grabs Ben’s lapels and lifts him out of his chair.

FROM

(With some heat.) Hey, I don’t mess around with Capulets. Dey’re our enemies!

BEN

(Frightened.) Okay . . . okay! I was only joking.

FROM

(Lets him go. He drops back into his seat.) Some t’ings you shouldn’t kid about. . . . Go on back and grab somet’ing to eat. I’ll take over.

BEN

(Glad to get away.) Sure. It’s all yours, cousin.

BEN hurries off-camera. FROM sits at the command console, stares out at the stars.

FROM

(Pensively.) All close stars ... all dat emptiness. I wish she was right here, instead of back on Rigel Six.

JULIE steps out from behind the electronic computer, where she’s been hiding since she stowed away on the Montague starship.

JULIE

(Shyly.) I am here, FROM. I stowed away aboard your ship.

FROM

(Dumbfounded.) You... you...

Hey, Mitch, what th’hell’s my next line?

“Cut!!!”

From up in the control booth, Les Montpelier kept telling himself, It’s not as bad as it looks. They’ll fix up all the goofs in the editing process. Maybe we can even get somebody to dub a voice over Dulaq’s lines. He looks pretty good, at least.

At that moment, Dulaq was pointing to the blank side wall of the set, where the Capulets’ starship would be matted in on the final tape.

“How’d your ship catch up wit’ us so soon?” he was asking Rita Yearling. But he was looking neither at her nor the to-be-inserted view of the other starship. He was peering, squint-eyed, toward Mitch Westerly. The director had his face sunk in his hands, as if he were crying.

“Rita looks stunning,” said Gregory Earnest, with a hyena’s leer on his face.

“She sure does,” Montpelier agreed. “But there’s something wrong about her . . . something. . . .”

Rita’s face was all dewy-cheeked youth, her eyes wide and blue as a new spring sky. But her body was adult seductress and she slinked around the set with the practiced undulations of a bellydancer.

“. . . Something about her that doesn’t seem quite right for the character she’s supposed to be playing,” Montpelier finished.

“The audience will love her,” Earnest said. “We’ve got to give them a little pizazz.”

Montpelier started to answer, but hesitated. Maybe he’s right.

“And Dulaq looks magnificent,” the Canadian went on.

“Look at that costume. Shows plenty of muscles, doesn’t it?” Earnest’s voice was almost throbbing with delight.

“Too bad it doesn’t cover his mouth,” Montpelier said.

Earnest shot him an angry glance.

On the set, Dulaq was staring off into space. He thought he was looking at the red light of an active camera unit, as Westerly had instructed him to do. Actually, he was fixing his gaze on a red exit sign glowing in the darkness on the other end of the huge studio. Dulaq’s eyes weren’t all that good.

“I know it’s wrong,” he was saying, “But I love you, Julie. I’m mad about you.”

Rita was entwining herself about his muscular frame, like a snake climbing a tree.

“And I love you, from darling,” she breathed. The boom microphone, over her head, seemed to wilt in the heat of her torridly low-pitched voice.

“That’s a shy, innocent young girl?” Montpelier asked rhetorically.

Dulaq finally focused his ruggedly handsome gaze on her, as their noses touched. Suddenly he gave a strangled growl and clutched at her. Rita shrieked and they both went tumbling to the floor.

“Cut!” Mitch Westerly yelled. “Cut!”

The cameramen were grinning and training their equipment on the squirming couple. Then, out of the crowd, came a blur of fury.

Ron Gabriel leaped on Dulaq’s back and started pounding the hockey star’s head. “Leggo of her, you goddamn ape!” he screamed.

It took Dulaq several moments to notice what was happening to him. Then, with a roar, he swung around and flipped Gabriel off his back. The writer staggered to his knees, got up quickly and launched himself at Dulaq.

With a surprised look on his face, Dulaq took Gabriel’s charge. The writer’s head rammed into his stomach, but produced nothing except a slight “Oof” which might have come from either one of them. Gabriel rebounded, looking a bit glassy eyed. He charged at Dulaq again and kicked him in the shins, hard.

It finally seemed to penetrate Dulaq’s head that he was being attacked by someone who had no hockey stick in his hands. The athlete’s face relaxed into a pleasant grin as he picked Gabriel up off his feet with one hand and socked him between the eyes so hard that the writer sailed completely off the set while his shirt remained in Dulaq’s left fist.

Pandemonium raged. The only recognizable sound to come out of the roiling crowd on the set was Westerly, pathetically screaming “Cut! Cut!”

Montpelier and the technicians in the control booth bolted out the door and down the steps to the floor of the studio. Gregory Earnest sat in the darkened booth alone, watching the riot develop, and smiled to himself.

He knew at last how to get rid of Ron Gabriel. And how to cash in on what little money would be made by “The Starcrossed.”

 

 

12: THE SQUEEZE PLAY

 

Gregory Earnest’s home was a modest ranch house in one of the new developments between Badger Studio and the busy Toronto International Jetport. Although nearly half the expense to the house had gone into insulation—thermal and acoustic—the entire place still rumbled and shivered with the infrasonic, barely audible vibrations of the big jets screaming by just over the roof.

The living quarters were actually underground, in what was originally the basement level. Earnest had spent many weekends digging, cementing, enlarging the underground portion of the house, until now—after five years’ occupancy—he had a network of bunkers that would have made Adolf Hitler feel homesick. His wife made all her neighbors envious with tales of Gregory’s single-minded handiness and devotion to home improvement. While she turned the neighborhood women green and they nagged their husbands. Earnest dug with the dedication of a prisoner of war, happily alone and free of his wife and their two milk-spilling, runny-nosed, grammar-school children.

Les Montpelier was a little puzzled when he first rang Earnest’s doorbell. It was Sunday, the studio was still closed for repairs. Ron Gabriel had left the hospital with two black eyes and several painfully cracked ribs, but no broken bones. Francois Dulaq had a bruised hand and some interesting bite marks on his upper torso. Rita Yearling was doing television talk shows all weekend, back in the States. Mitch Westerly had disappeared under a cloud of marijuana smoke.

Montpelier was not in the jauntiest of moods. “The Starcrossed” was a dead duck, he knew, even before the second day of shooting in the studio. It was hopeless.

Yet Gregory Earnest obviously had something optimistic in mind when he had called Montpelier at the hotel.

So, puzzled and depressed, with a microfilm copy of the L.A. Free Press-News-Times Sunday help wanted ad section in the pocket of his severely styled mod Edgar Allan Poe business suit, he leaned on the bell button of Earnest’s front door. A jumbo jet came screaming up from what seemed like a few meters away, making the very ground shake with the roar of its mighty engines, and spewing fumes and excess kerosene in its wake. Montpelier suddenly realized why the lawns looked so greasy. He was glad that his suit was dead black.

The door opened and he was greeted by a smiling Eskimo. At least, she looked like an Eskimo. Her round face was framed by a furry hood. Her coat was trimmed with antlered designs from the far north. She smiled and moved her mouth, but Montpelier couldn’t hear a word over the rumbling whine of the dwindling jet.

“Can’t hear you,” he said and found that he couldn’t even hear himself.

They stood in the doorway smiling awkwardly at each other for a few minutes as the jet flew off into the distance.

“You must be Mr. Montpelier,” said the round-faced woman. Her accent was more Oxford than igloo and Montpelier realized that her face really had none of the oriental flatness of an Eskimo’s.

“I’m Gwendoline Earnest, Gregory’s wife. I was just taking Gulliver and Gertrude to the skating rink....”

Two more Eskimos appeared. Little ones, round and furry in their plastiskin parkas. It wasn’t that cold outside, Monteplier realized. Maybe Eskimo is the next big style trend.

Gwendoline Earnest shooed her two little ones out and down the driveway. “Greg’s down in the study, waiting for you,” she said, squeezing past Montpelier at the doorway.

She started down the driveway toward the minibus parked at the curb. “And thank you,” she called over her shoulder,  “for taking him away from his eternal digging for one

Sunday! It’s such a pleasure not to hear the pounding and the swearing!”

She waved a cheery “Ta-ta!” and pushed the kids into the yawning side door of the minibus.

With a bewildered shake of his head, Montpelier stepped inside what he thought would be the house’s living room.

It looked more like an attic. There were bicycles, toys, crates, suitcases, piles of books and spools of videotape.

Another jetliner roared overhead; even with the front door closed, the ear-splitting sound made Montpelier’s teeth ache.

He threaded his way through the maze of junk, looking for a living area. The entire house seemed to be cluttered with storage materials.

It took ten minutes of shouting back and forth before Montpelier tumbled to the fact that Earnest—and the real living quarters—were downstairs in the erstwhile basement.

Another few minutes to find the right door and the stairs leading down, then the usual meaningless words of greeting, and Montpelier found himself sitting in a comfortable panelled den, in a large overstaffed chair, with a beer in his hand.

Gregory Earnest sat across the corner from him, equally at ease with a beer mug in one hand. It had an old corporation logo on it: GE. Gregory, Gwendoline, Gulliver and Gertrude Earnest, Montpelier reflected. He must’ve bought a case of those mugs when the antitrust boys broke up old GE.

In the opposite corner of the den, the three-dee set was tuned to the National Football League’s game of the week.

Montpelier couldn’t tell who was playing: all he saw was a miniature set of armored players tumbling and grunting across the other side of Earnest’s den, like Lilliputian buffoons who’d been hired to entertain a sadistic king. Only the scintillations and shimmerings of the imperfect three-dee projection betrayed the fact that they were watching holographic images, rather than real, solid, miniature figures.

Earnest touched a button in the keyboard that was set into the arm of his recliner chair and the sound of pain and cheering disappeared. But the game went on.

“Imagine how terrific the games will look,” Earnest said in his nasal, oily way of speaking, “when Oxnard’s new system is used. Then you can buy giant-sized three-dee tubes. It’ll look like you’re right there on the field with them.”

Montpelier nodded. There was something about Earnest that always disturbed him. The man was too sly, too roundabout.

He’d fit in well at Titanic.

Earnest was wearing a pullover sweater and an ancient pair of patched jeans. He seemed utterly at ease, smiling.

Montpelier was reminded of the cobra and the mongoose, but he didn’t know who was supposed to be which.

“You look relaxed and happy,” Montpelier said.

Earnest’s smile showed more teeth. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

After a sip of beer, Montpelier said, “If I were the producer of a show that started off as disastrously as “The Starcrossed’ did last week....”

“Oh that.” Earnest made a nonchalant gesture. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“No?”

“Why worry? Is B.F. worried?”

“He sure is,” Montpelier said. “He almost went into shock when I told him what happened in the studio.”

“Really?”

Earnest’s voice got so arch that Montpelier found himself getting angry, something he never did with a potentially. Or enemy. It was a luxury you couldn’t afford in this business. Not if you wanted to survive.

“What are you driving at?” Montpelier asked, trying to keep his voice level.

Earnest nodded toward the three-dee game that still rolled and thudded across the far side of the den.

“The Pineapples,” he said. “They’re winning.”

“So?”

 “So long as they keep winning, B.F.’s money is safe.

Right?”

Montpelier fought down a gnawing panic. Either Earnest had completely flipped, which was not too unlikely, and was now certifiably insane—or he knew something that he himself didn’t know, which was a very dangerous position for Montpelier to be in.

“Are, ah ... you betting on the Pineapples?” he fished.

“Sure I am. Especially since I found out that B.F. is sinking almost all his cash into them. When they win the title, we can forget about “The Starcrossed.’ Won’t matter if the show never goes beyond the first seven weeks.”

Slowly, without revealing how little he actually knew,

Montpelier coaxed the story out of Earnest. It wasn’t difficult. The Canadian was very proud of himself. He had some friends in the local phone company tap all the special three-dee phones that Finger had installed in the various hotel suites. Montpelier was suddenly grateful that he didn’t rank high enough for such luxury. Only Westerly, Gabriel and Yearling had them. And Gabriel got one only because he screamed and threw tantrums until Brenda put through a call to Finger’s office.

“You should hear the conversations between Rita and B.F.,” Earnest said, licking his chops. “And see the display she puts on for him. In three-dee yet! I’ve got some of them taped, you know.”

Montpelier guided him back to the main subject. “So as long as the Pineapples keep winning their football games, Titanic’s cash is safe.”

“Right,” Earnest answered. “And “The Starcrossed’ is just a front operation to keep those New York bankers convinced that B.F. has invested their money in a show.”

“So the show gets as little money as possible. . . .”

“Sure. Just enough to keep it going. Oh, I think B.F. really wants to make Rita into a star . . . but that doesn’t mean he’s going to spend more than he has to. Just enough to get her on The Tube for a few weeks and see how the public reacts to her.”

 “Yeah, that sounds like B.F.’s way of doing business,”

Montpelier agreed.

But Earnest had turned his attention to the football game. One of the miniature players was scampering like mad and other players were chasing after him while the background whizzed past. Yet none of them actually moved very far across Earnest’s floor. It was like watching midgets struggling on a treadmill.

“The Pineapples just intercepted another pass!” Earnest was chorting. “I knew those Mexicans couldn’t play our style of football!”

Montpelier leaned over and nudged his shoulder. “I didn’t come here to watch a football game. You said you had something important to tell me,”

Earnest’s smile went nasty. “That’s right. What do you think would happen if those New York bankers found out what B.F.’s doing with their money? Those banks are Mafioso, you know. The mob owns the banks and the WASPS are just front-men.”

Montpelier didn’t answer. But he had figured out which of them was the cobra.

“Now, I happen to be smart enough,” Earnest went on, “to understand what’s going on in B.F.’s mind. ‘The Starcrossed’ is supposed to flop. When it does, B.F. will tell his bankers that the show went broke and their investment is down the drain. Maybe they’ll get Rita or some other goods as a booby prize.” He grinned at his feeble pun.

“That’s crazy....”

“Is it?” Earnest shrugged, the scratched at his beard.

“Maybe so. But it would make a fun story in New York, don’t you think?”

“If anybody believed you....”

“They would. But why should I cut off the hand that feeds me? Especially when it’s going to feed me so well.”

“You mean blackmail.”

Earnest shook he head. “No, that’s not nice. And it could be risky. No, you just tell B.F. that I understand what he wants and I’m willing to help him. It won’t cost him an extra cent.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing very much. I’ll bet on the Pineapples, too.

Maybe he can put me in touch with his own brokers, so that I can get the same rates he does.”

From the inflection in Earnest’s voice, Montpelier knew that there was more.

“And what else?” he asked.

“Oh nothing much, really.” Earnest spread his arms out, expansively. “Just control of the show. I am the Executive Producer, after all. All I want is complete authority. I want to do the hiring and firing. All of it. From here on. With no interference from you or Brenda or anybody at Titantic.”

“Complete authority,” Montpelier echoed.

“Right. I can handle Westerly. He’s through as a director, but he still has a good name. I can keep him supplied with enough cat to make him docile. . . .”

“Cat?” Montpelier’s insides winced, as if they’d been electroshocked.

“Oh, it’s all completely legal,” Earnest assured him. “I have a few friends at the hospital here who’ll make out prescriptions for him. I get a cut of their fees and the pharmacy price, of course; cat’s very expensive stuff, you know. But that’ll keep Westerly happy and under control.”

Montpelier found that his hands were shaking.

“And then there’s Gabriel,” Earnest said with relish. “He goes. I’m going to fire his ass right out of here so fast he won’t know what hit him.”

“Now wait... we need him for the scripts. Those high school kids can’t turn out shootable scripts and you know it.”

“I can find a dozen writers who’ll work for free,”

Earnest crowed, “just for the glory of getting their names on The Tube. The local science fiction writers’ chapter has plenty of people who’ll gladly fill in.”

“But Gabriel has talent! His scripts are the only decent thing we’ve got going for us!”

“Who cares?” The show’s not supposed to be a hit. Get that through your skull. Think of it as a tax writeoff.”

Montpelier felt his jaw muscles clenching. “But Ron is... .”

“Ron Gabriel is out!” Earnest shouted, a vein on his forehead throbbing visibly. “His scripts are out, too. Wait until the network censors see them! There won’t be enough left to wipe your backside with.”

“But the censors have already. . . .”

“No they haven’t,” Earnest said, with the most malicious grin Montpelier had ever seen. “Gabriel was so late turning them in. ...”

“That’s because he had to work on all the other scripts.”

“. . . that I let the crew start up production before sending the scripts to the censors. I’ll be meeting with them tomorrow. And with the sponsor’s representatives, too. That will finish Mr. Gabriel and his high-and-mighty scripts!”

“But...”

“And what do you think B.F. is going to say about Gabriel when I tell him how he’s been sacking with Rita all these weeks, behind his back?”

“It hasn’t been exactly behind his back.”

Earnest smiled another chilling smile. “I know that, and you know that, and B.F. knows that. But what will the gossip programs say about it? Eh? Can B.F. afford to have his image belittled in public?”

Calling this character a snake is insulting the snakes, Montpelier told himself. But he said nothing.

“Come on,” Earnest said, suddenly very hearty and full of beery good cheer. “Don’t look so glum. We’re all going to make a good pile of money out of this. So what if the series folds early? We’ll cry all the way to the bank.”

For the first time in many years, Montpelier found himself contradicting one of his primary survival rules. Out of the depth of his guts, he spoke his feelings:

“I’d always heard that the rats were the first to leave a sinking ship. But I never realized that some of the rats are the sonsofbitches that scuttled the ship in the first place.”

 

 

13: THE THREE MONKEYS

 

The restaurant was poised atop Toronto’s tallest office tower, balanced delicately on a well-oiled mechanism that smoothly turned the entire floor around in a full circle once every half hour. It was too slow to be called a merry-go-round, so the restaurant management (it was part of an American-owned chain) called it the Roundeley Room.

The building was very solidly constructed, since there were no earthquake fears so close to the Laurentian Shield. Since the worldwide impact of a theater movie a generation earlier, dealing with a fire in a glass tower, there were sprinklers everywhere—in the ceilings, under the tables of the restaurant, in the elevators and restrooms and even along the walls, cleverly camouflaged as wrought iron decorations.

The restaurant was up high enough so that on a clear day diners could see the gray-brown smudge across Lake Ontario that marked the slums of Buffalo. To the north, they could watch the city of Toronto peter out into muskeg and dreary housing developments.

The weather had turned cold, with an icy wind howling down from the tundra. But it was a clear, dry cold, the kind of air meteorologists call an Arctic High. Air crisp enough to shatter like crystal.

From his seat in a soundproofed booth, Les Montpelier watched the last rays of the sinking sun turn the city into a vermillion fantasyland. Lights were winking on; automobile traffic made a continuous ribbon of white light on one side of the highways, red on the other. Safely behind the insulated windows, Montpelier could hear the polar wind whispering past. But he felt warm and comfortable.

Physically.

“It’s a beautiful view,” said the man across the booth from him.

“That it is,” Montpelier agreed.

The man was Eiton Good, who had flown up from New

York. He was a tall, spare, almost cadaverous man in that indistinct age category between Saturday afternoon softball games and Saturday afternoon checkers games. His eyes were alive, deep brown, sparkling. He wore an almost perpetual smile, but it looked more like an apology than anything joyful. His clothes were straight Madison Avenue chic—neo-Jesuit, minus the religious icons, of course.

Eiton Good worked for the Federal InterNetwork Combine (FINC), the quasipublic, quasigovernmental, quasicorporate overview group that interconnected the rulings of the Federal Communications Commission, the pressures of the Consumer Relations Board, the demands of the national networks, and the letters from various PTA and religious groups. Since network executives usually filled the posts of the FCC and CRB, the job wasn’t as taxing as it might sound to an outsider.

Eiton Good was a censor. His job was to make certain that nothing disturbing to the public, contrary to FCC regulations or harmful to network profits got onto The Tube.

“Is Mr. Gabriel always this late?” Good asked, with a slight edge to his reedy voice.

Montpelier couldn’t reconcile the voice with the sweetly smiling face. “He had to stop at the hospital. They’re taking the bandages off his face.”

“Oh, yes ... that . . . brawl he got himself into.” Good edged back away from the table slightly, as if he might become contaminated by it all. “Very ugly business. Very ugly.”

This is going to be some dinner, Montpelier knew.

In another soundproofed booth, across the restaurant, Brenda Impanema was smiling at Keith Connors, third assistant vice president for marketing of Texas New Technology, Inc.

Connors wore a Confederate-gray business suit, hand tooled Mexican boots, and had an RAF mustache that curled up almost to the corners of his eyes.

“I knew I’d spot y’all in the middle of a crowded restaurant even though I’d never see y’all befoah,” he was saying. “I jes’ tole myself, Keith, of’ buddy, y’all jes’ go lookin’ for the purtiest gal in the place. These Canadian chicks don’t have the class of California gals.”

Brenda smiled demurely. “Actually, I was born in New Mexico.”

“Hey! That’s practically in Texas! No wonder yo’re so purty.”

Connors was beaming at her, the glow of his toothy smile outshining the candle on their table by several orders of magnitude. He had already shown Brenda holograms of his Mexican wife and their six children—all under seven years of age. “Guess I’m jes’ a powerful of’ lover,” he had smirked when she commented on the size of his family.

Brenda hadn’t quite known what to expect of the executive from TNT. Bernard Finger had called her that afternoon and ordered her to have dinner with the man and show him some of Toronto’s night life.

“TNT could take over sponsorship of the whole show, all by themselves,” Finger had said. “They’re big and they’re not afraid to spend money.”

Brenda glowered at Titanic’s chief. “How nice do you want me to be to him?”

Finger glowered back at her. “You get paid for using your brains, not your pelvis. There’s plenty action for a Texas cowboy in town. You just show him where the waterholes are.”

So she had dressed in a demure, translucent knee-length gown and decorated it with plenty of the electronic jewelry that TNT manufactured. As she sat in the booth, silhouetted against the gathering twilight, she glittered like an airport runway.

“Yes sir, you shore are purty,” Connors said, with a puppy dog wag in his voice.

“Do you think,” Brenda asked coolly, “that your company will want to advertise your electronic jewelry on “The Starcrossed’? Seems like a natural, to me.”

The booths at the Roundeley Room were soundproofed so that private conversations could not be overheard, and also to protect the restaurant’s patrons from the noisy entrances made by some customers.

Gloria Glory swept into the restaurant’s foyer, flanked by Francois Dulaq, Rita Yearling and Gregory Earnest.

The effect was stunning.

Once a regally tall, statuesque woman, Gloria Glory had allowed many years of success as a gossip columnist to freeze her self-image. While she still thought of herself as regal and statuesque, to the outside world she closely resembled an asthmatic dirigible swathed in neon-bright floor-length robes.

No one ever told her this, of course, because her power to make or destroy something as fragile as a “show business personality” was enormous. In the delicate world of the entertainment arts, where talent and experience counted for about a tenth of what publicity and perseverance could get for you, Gloria Glory possessed a mega-tonnage unapproached by any other columnist. Her viewers were fanatically devoted to her: what Gloria said was “in” was in; who she said was “out” went hungry.

So words such as fat, overweight and diet had long since disappeared from Gloria’s world. They were as unspoken near her as descriptions of nasal protuberances went unsaid near Byrano de Bergerac.

The maitre d’, the hatcheck girl, two headwaiters who usually did nothing but stand near the entrance and look imperious, and a dozen other customers all clustered around Gloria and her entourage.

The hatcheck girl and most of the customers were asking Dulaq for his autograph. They recognized the hockey star’s handsome face, his rugged physique, and his name spelled on the back of the All-Canadian All-Stars team jacket that he was wearing.

The headwaiters and most of the men in the growing crowd were panting around Rita Yearling, who wore a see- through clingtight dress with nothing under it except her own impressive physique. The traffic jam was beginning to cause a commotion and block the newcomers who were piling up at the head of the escalator.

The maitre d’, with the unerring instinct of the breed, gravitated toward Gloria Glory. He had never seen her before and never watched television. But he knew money when he sniffed it. Calmly ignoring the rising tide of shrieks and curses from the top of the escalator as body tumbled upon body, he gave Gloria the utmost compliment: he didn’t ask if she had a reservation.

“Madam would you prefer a private room, perhaps?”

Gregory Earnest, roundly ignored by all present, started to say, “I made a reserva....”

But Gloria’s foghorn voice drowned him out. “Naah . . .

I like to be right in the middle of all the hustle and bustle.

How about something right in the center of everything?”

“Of course,” said the maitre d’.

Gloria swept regally across the crowded restaurant, like a Montgolfler Brothers hot-air balloon trailing pretty little pennants and fluttering ribbons of silk. Earnest and the two stars followed in her wake, while the maitre d’ preceded her with the haughty air of Grand Vizier. The jumbled, tumbled, grumbling crowd at the top of the escalator was left to sort itself out. After all, that’s what insurance lawyers were for, was it not?

Montpelier couldn’t hear the shouts and shrieks from the foyer, of course. But he watched Gloria and her entourage march to the table nearest the computer-directed jukebox.

He breathed a silent thanksgiving that Gabriel hadn’t arrived at the same time as Earnest.

“Um, would you like a drink, Mr. Good?” he asked.

Good held up a long-fingered hand. “Never touch alcohol, Mr. Montpelier....”

“Les.”

“Alcohol and business don’t mix. Never have.”

“Well, that’s one thing you and Ron Gabriel have in common,” Montpelier said.

“Oh? What’s that?”

“He doesn’t drink, either.”

“Really?” Good’s perpetual smile got wider and somehow tenser. “That’s a surprise.”

“What do you mean?”

“From all the depravity in his scripts, I assumed he was either an alcoholic or a drug fiend. Or both.”

“Depravity?” Monteplier heard his voice squeak.

“Yer not married or nuthin’, are yew?” asked Connors.

Brenda shook her head slowly. “No, I’m a rising young corporate executive.”

He was working on his second bourbon and water. Their dinners remained on a corner of the table, untouched.

“Must be tough to get ahead. Lotsa competition.”

“Quite a bit” Brenda sipped at her vodka sour.

“If TNT sponsored yer new show, it’s be a real feather in yore cap, huh?”

“Yes it would. But I won’t go to bed with you for it.”

Connors’ face fell. “Wh . . . who said anything about that? I’m a married man!”

Now Brenda permitted herself to smile again. “I’m sorry,” she said with great sincerity. “I didn’t mean to shock you. But, well . . . there are lots of men who try to take advantage of a woman in a situation like this. I’m glad you’re not that kind of man.”

 “Hell, no,” said Connors, looking puzzled, disappointed and slightly nettled.

Brenda sweetened her smile. Have to introduce him to some of the professional ladies working at the hotel, she knew, before he decides to get angry.

Earnest sat across the table from Dulaq. Between the two men sat Gloria Glory and Rita Yearling. Four appetizers had been served; two were still sitting untouched but Dulaq’s and Gloria’s were already demolished.,

“And you, you great big hunk of muscle,” Gloria turned to Dulaq, “how do you like acting?”

The hockey star shrugged. “It’s okay. Ain’t had a chance t’really do much . . . wit’ the riot and all. . . .”

Earnest felt his blood pressure explode in his ears.

“Riot?” Gloria looked instantly alert. “What riot?”

“It wasn’t a riot,” Earnest said quickly. “It was just a bit of a misunderstanding....”

“I’m afraid it was all my fault,” Rita offered.

“Dis Gabriel guy gimme a hard time, so I punched him out.”

“You hit Ron Gabriel?”

For an instant there was absolute silence at the table.

Even Dulaq seemed to realize, in his dim way, that Gloria’s reaction would have enormous implications for his future in show business.

“Uh ... yeah. Once. Between de eyes.”

Gloria’s bloated face seemed to puff out even more and she suddenly let loose a loud guffaw. “Oh no! You punched that little creep between the eyes! Oh, it’s too marvelous!” She roared with laughter.

Dulaq and Rita joined in. Earnest laughed too, but his mind was racing. Fearfully, he touched Gloria’s bouffant sleeve. She wiped tears from her eyes as she turned to him.  “Um, Gloria,” he begged. “You’re not going to, uh . . .  broadcast this, are you?”

“Broadcast it? Ron Gabriel getting what he’s always asking for? It’s too delicious!”

 “Yes, but it could, well ... it could reflect poorly on the show.”

Gloria put her napkin to her lips and for a wild instant Earnest thought she was going to devour it. But instead she wiped her mouth and then flapped the napkin in Earnest’s direction, saying:

“Greg . . . you don’t mind me calling you Greg, do you?”

Earnest hated being called Greg, but he said, “No, of course not.”

“All right, Greg, now listen. It has always been my policy to speak no evil of the people I like. I like Bernie

Finger and I love this heavyweight champion you’ve got here. . . .” She nodded in Dulaq’s direction. “And you’ve got a lovely new starlet She’s going to be a winner, I know. So, no matter how much I loathe Gabriel, I won’t breathe a word about the fight over the air.”

Earnest sighed. “Oh, thank you, Gloria.”

“Nothing to it you are getting rid of the little creep, though, aren’t you?”

“Oh we certainly are,” Earnest assured her. “He’s on his way out never fear.”

Ron Gabriel, meanwhile, had arrived and let himself be led quietly to Les Montpelier’s booth. He didn’t see Gloria, Earnest, et. al., mainly because he was wearing dark glasses and the restaurant’s twilight lighting level was quite dim. As it was, Gabriel had a little difficulty following the head waiter who showed him to the booth. He tripped over a step and bumped into a waitress on the way. He cursed at the step and made a date with the girl.

As he slid into the booth, he said, “I’m not eating anything.

They just pumped me so full of antibiotics at the hospital that all I want to do is go home and sleep. Let’s just talk business and skip the socializing.”

Before Montpelier could respond, Eiton Good pulled a thick wad of notes from his jacket pocket.

“Very well, Mr. Gabriel. I like a man who speaks his mind. There are eighty-seven changes that need to be made in your script before its acceptable to FINC.”

“Eighty-seven?”

Good nodded smilingly. “Yes. And as you know, heh heh, without FINC’s mark of approval, your script cannot be shown on American television.”

“Eighty-motherloving-seven,” Gabriel moaned.

“Here’s the first of them,” said Good, peering at his notes in the dim lighting. His smile widened. “Ah, yes . . . when you have the character from standing behind the character Ben, who’s sitting at the command console, I believe....”