Laugh Lines Page 19

  “I have waited for you,” she panted. “I have crossed time and space to be with you. I have renounced my family and my home because I love you.”

  “Caught up with you at last!” announced a third performer, stepping out of the shadows where the holo image ended. This one was dressed very much like Dulaq, complete with sword, although his costume was blood red whereas Dulaq’s was (what else?) true blue.

  “You’re coming back with me,” the actor recited to Rita Yearling. “Our father is lying ill and dying, and only the sight of you can cure him.”

  “Oh!” gasped Rita, as she tried to stuff both her fists in her mouth.

  “Take yer han’s off her!” Dulaq cried, even though the other actor had forgotten to grasp Rita’s arm.

  “We can dub over that,” an engineer muttered in the darkness beside Oxnard.

  “Don’t try to interfere, Montague dog,” said the actor. “Stand back or I’ll blast you.” But instead of pulling out the laser pistol that was in the original script, he drew his sword. It flexed deeply, showing that it was made of rubber.

  “Oh yeah?” adlibbed Dulaq, And he drew his rubber sword.

  They swung at each other mightily, to no avail. The engineers laughed and suddenly reversed the tape. The fight went backwards, and the two heroes slid their swords back into their scabbards. Halfway. Then the tape went forward again and they fought once more. Back and forth. It looked ludicrous. It was ludicrous and Oxnard joined in the raucous laughter of the editing crew.

  “Lookit the expression on Dulaq’s face!”

  “He’s trying to hit Randy’s sword and he keeps missing it!”

  “Hey, hey, hold it . . . right there . . . yeah. Take a look at that terrific profile.”

  “Cheez . . . is she built!”

  Oxnard had to admit that structurally, Rita was as impressive as the Eiffel Tower—or perhaps the Grand Teton Mountains.

  “A guy could bounce to death off those!”

  “What a way to go!”

  “C’mon, we got work to do. It’s almost quittin’ time.”

  The fight ran almost to its conclusion and then suddenly the figures got terribly pale. They seemed to blanch out, like figures in an overexposed snapshot. The scene froze with Dulaq pushing his sword in the general direction of his antagonist, the other actor holding his sword down almost on the floor so Dulaq could stab him and Rita in the midst of a stupefyingly deep breath.

  “See what I mean?” came the chief engineer’s voice, out of the darkness. “It does that every couple minutes.”

  Oxnard looked down at the green glowing gauges on the control board in front of him. “I told them not to light the set so brightly,” he said. “You don’t need all that candlepower with laser imaging.”

  “Listen,” said the chief engineer, “if they had any smarts, would they be doin’ this for a living?”

  Oxnard studied the information on the gauges.

  “Can we fix it?” one of the editors asked. Oxnard smelled pungent smoke and saw that two of the assistants were lighting up in the dimness of the room.

  “We’ll have to feed the tape through the quality control computer, override the intensity program and manually adjust the input voltage,” Oxnard said.

  The chief engineer swore under his breath. “That’ll take all humpin’ night”

  “A few hours, at least.”

  “There goes dinner.”

  Oxnard heard himself say, “You guys don’t have to hang around. I can do it myself.”

  He could barely make out the editor’s sallow, thin face in the light from the control board. “By yourself? That ain’t kosher.”

  “Union rules?”

  “Naw . . . but it ain’t fair for you to do our work. You ain’t gettin’ paid for it.”

  Oxnard grinned at him. “I’ve got nothing else to do. Go on home. I’ll take care of it and you can get back to doing the real editing tomorrow.”

  One of the assistants walked out into the area where the holographic images stood. He wasn’t walking too steadily. Taking the joint from his mouth, he blew smoke in Dulaq’s “face.”

  “Okay, tough guy,” he said to the stilled image. “If you’re so tough, let’s see you take a swing at me. G’wan . . . I dare ya!” He stuck his chin out and tapped at it with an upraised forefinger. “Go on . . . right here on the button. I dare ya!”

  Dulaq’s image didn’t move. “Hah! Chicken. I thought so.”

  The guy turned to face Rita’s image. He walked all around her, almost disappearing from Oxnard’s view when he stepped behind her. Oxnard could see him, ghostlike, through Rita’s image. The other assistant drew in a deep breath and let it out audibly. “Boy,” he said, with awe in his voice, “they really are three-dimensional, aren’t they? You can walk right around them.”

  “Too bad you can’t pinch ‘em,” said the chief engineer.

  “Or do anything else with ‘em,” the assistant said.

  Oxnard lost track of time. He simply sat alone at the control desk, working the buttons and keys that linked his fingers with the computer tape and instruments that controlled what stayed on the tape.

  It was almost pleasant, working with the uncomplaining machinery. He shut off the image-projector portion of the system, so that he wouldn’t have to see or hear the dreadful performances that were on the tape. He was interested in the technical problem of keeping the visual quality of the images constant; that he could do better by watching the gauges than by watching the acting.

  All of physics boils down to reading a dial, he remembered from his undergraduate days. He chuckled to himself.

  “And all physicists are basically loners,” he said aloud. Not because they want to be. But if you spend enough time reading dials, you never learn how to read people.

  Someone knocked at the door. Almost annoyed, Oxnard called, “Who is it?” without looking up from the control board.

  Light spilled across his field of view as the door opened. “What are you doing here so late?”

  He looked up. It was Brenda, her lean, leggy form silhouetted in the light from the hallway.

  “Trying to make this tape consistent, on the optical quality side,” he said. Then, almost as an afterthought, “What about you? What time is it?”

  “Almost nine. I had a lot of paperwork to finish.”

  “Oh.” He took his hands off the control knobs and gestured to her. “Come on in. I didn’t realize I’d been here so long.”

  “Aren’t you going back to L.A. tomorrow?” Brenda asked. She stepped into the tiny room, but left the door open behind her.

  He nodded. “Yes. That’s why I thought I’d stick with this until the job’s done. The editors can’t handle this kind of problem. They’re good guys, but they’d probably ruin the tape.”

  “Which show are you working on?” Brenda asked, pulling up a stool beside him.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. They all look alike to me.”

  Brenda agreed. “Will you be at it much longer?”

  “Almost finished . . . another ten-fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Can I buy you dinner afterward?” she asked.

  He started to say no, but held up. “I’ll buy you some dinner.”

  “I can charge it off to Titanic. Let B.F. buy us both dinner.”

  With a sudden grin, he agreed.

  He worked in silence for a few minutes, conscious of her looking over his shoulder, smelling the faint fragrance of her perfume, almost feeling the tickling of a stray wisp of her long red hair.

  “Bill?”

  “What?” Without looking up from the control board.

  “Why do you keep coming up here every weekend?”

  “To make sure the equipment works okay.”

  “Oh. That’s awfully good of you.”

  He clicked the power off and looked up at her. “That’s a damned lie,” he admitted, to himself as much as to her. “I could stay down at Malibu and wait for you to have some trouble
. Or send one of my technicians.”

  Brenda’s face didn’t look troubled or surprised. “Then why?”

  “Because I like being with you,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “You know I do.”

  She didn’t look away, didn’t laugh, didn’t frown. “I hoped you did. But you never said a word . . . .”

  Suddenly his hands were embarrassingly awkward appendages. They wouldn’t stay still.

  “Well,” he said, scratching at his five o’clock shadow, “I guess I’m still a teenager in some ways . . . retarded . . . I was afraid . . . afraid you wouldn’t be interested in me.”

  “You were wrong,” she said simply.

  She leaned toward him and his hands reached for her and he kissed her. She felt warm and safe and good.

  They decided to have dinner in his hotel room. Oxnard felt giddy, as if he were hyperventilating or celebrating New Year’s Eve a month early. As they drove through the dark frigid night toward the hotel, he asked:

  “The one thing I was afraid of was that you’d walk out on the show, like everybody else has.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Brenda said, very seriously.

  “Why not?”

  “B.F. wouldn’t let me.”

  “You mean you allow him to run your whole life? He tells you to freeze your . . . your nose off here in Toronto all winter, on a dead duck of a show, and you do it?”

  She nodded. “That’s right.”

  He pulled the car into the hotel’s driveway as he asked, “Why don’t you just quit? There are lots of other studios and jobs . . . .”

  “I can’t quit Titanic.”

  “Why not? What’s Finger got on you?”

  “Nothing. Except that he’s my father and I’m the only person in the world that he can really trust.”

  “He’s your father?”

  Brenda grinned broadly at him. “Yes. And you’re the only person in the whole business who knows it. So please don’t tell anyone else.”

  Oxnard was stunned.

  He was still groggy, but grinning happily, as they walked arm-in-arm through the hotel lobby, got into an elevator and headed for his room. Neither of them noticed the three-dee set in the lobby; it was tuned to the evening news. A somber-faced sports reporter was saying:

  “There’s no telling what effect Toho’s injury will have on the playoff chances of the Honolulu Pineapples. As everyone knows, he’s the league’s leading passer.”

  The other half of the Folksy News Duo, a curly haired anchorperson in a gingham dress, asked conversationally, “Isn’t it unusual for a player to break his leg in the shower?”

  “That’s right, Arlene,” said the sports announcer. “Just one of those freak accidents. A bad break,” he said archly, “for the Pineapples and their fans.”

  The woman made a disapproving clucking sound. “That’s terrible.”

  “It certainly is. They’re probably going crazy down in Las Vegas right now, refiguring the odds for the playoff games.”

  15: The Warning

  “You don’t understand!” Bernard Finger shouted. “Every cent I had was tied up in that lousy football team! I’m broke! Ruined!”

  He was emptying the drawers of his desk into an impossibly thin attache case. Most of the papers and mememtoes—including a miniature Emmy given him as a gag by a producer, whom Finger promptly fired—were missing the attache case and spilling across the polished surface of the desk or onto the plush carpet.

  The usually impressive office reminded Les Montpelier of the scene in a war movie where the general staff has to beat a fast retreat and everybody’s busy stripping the headquarters and burning what they can’t carry.

  “But you couldn’t have taken everything out of Titanic’s cash accounts,” Montpelier said, trying to remain calm in the face of Finger’s panic.

  “Wanna bet?” Finger was bent over, pulling papers out of the bottommost drawer, discarding most of them and creating a miniature blizzard in the doing.

  Montpelier found himself leaning forward tensely in his chair. “But we still get our paychecks. The accounting department is still paying its bills. Isn’t it?”

  Finger straightened up and eyed him with a look of scorn for such naivete. “Sure, sure. You know Morrie Witz, down in accounting?”

  “Morrie the Mole?”

  “Who else? He worked out a system for me. We keep enough in the bank for two weeks of salaries and bills. Everything else we’ve been investing in the Pineapples. Every time they win, we bet on ‘em again. The odds keep going down, but we keep making sure money. Better than the stock market.”

  “Then you must have a helluva cash reserve right now,” Montpelier said.

  “Its already bet!” Finger bawled. “And the Pineapples play the Montana Sasquatches this afternoon . . . .” He glanced at the clock on his littered desk. “They’re already playing.”

  “Shall I turn on the game?” Montpelier asked, starting to get up from his chair.

  “No! I can’t bear to watch. Without Toho they’re sunk.” Montpelier eased back into the chair. “Yes!” Finger burst. “Turn it on. I can’t stand not knowing!”

  He went back to rummaging through the desk drawers as Montpelier walked across the room to the control panel for the life-sized three-dee set in the corner.

  “The Pineapples still have their defensive team intact,” Montpelier reasoned. “And Montana’s not that high-scoring a team . . . .”

  He found the right channel and tuned in the game. The far corner of the office dissolved into a section of a football field. A burly man in a Sasquatch uniform was kneeling, arms outstretched, barking out numbers. The crowd rumbled in the background. It was raining and windy; it looked cold in Montana.

  The camera angle changed to an overhead shot and Montpelier saw that the Sasquatches were trying to kick a field goal. The ball was snapped, the kicker barely got the kick past a pair of onrushing Pineapple defenders, who ruined their orange and yellow uniforms by sprawling in the mud.

  Again the camera angle changed, to show the football sailing through the uprights of the goal post. The announcer said, “It’s gooood!” as the referee raised both arms over his head.

  Finger groaned.

  “It’s only a field goal,” Montpelier said.

  “So as the teams prepare for the kickoff,” the announcer said cheerily, “the score is Montana seventeen, Honolulu zero.”

  With a gargling sound, Finger pawed through the attache case. He grabbed a bottle of pills as he yelled, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” and poured half the bottle’s contents down his throat.

  Montpelier turned the game off, just catching a view of the scoreboard clock. Only eight minutes of the first quarter had elapsed.

  He turned to Finger. “What are you going to do?”

  His face white, Titanic’s boss said softly, “Get out of town. Get out of the country. Get off the planet, if I can. Maybe the lunar colony would be a safe place for me . . . if I could qualify. I’ve got a bad heart, you know.”

  Like an ox, Montpelier thought. Aloud, he asked, “But you’ve been through bankruptcy proceedings before. Why are you getting so upset over this one?”

  Raising his eyes to an unhelpful heaven, Finger said, “The other bankruptcy hearings were when we owed money to banks. Or to the government. What we owe now, we owe to the mob. When they foreclose, they take your head home and mount it on the goddamn wall!”

  “The gamblers . . . .”

  Finger wagged his head. “Not the gamblers. I’m square with them. The bankers who backed us on ‘The Starcrossed.’ It’s their money I’ve been betting. When the show flops they’re gonna want their money back. With interest.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “Yeah, ohhh.” Finger knuckled his eyes. “Turn the game on again. Maybe they’re doing something . . . .”

  The three-dee image solidified, despite annoying flickers and shimmers, to show an orange-and-yellow Pineapple ball carrier br
eak past two would-be tacklers, twist free of another Sasquatch defender and race down the sidelines. The crowd was roaring and Finger was suddenly on his feet, screaming.

  “Go! Go! Go, you black sonofabitch!”

  There was only one Sasquatch left in the scene, closing in on the Pineapple runner. They collided exactly at the Montana ten yard line. He twisted partially free, and as he began to fall, another Sasquatch pounced on him. The ball squirted loose.

  “Aarrghh!”

  What seemed like four hundred men in muddied uniforms piled on top of each other. There was a long moment of breathless suspense while the referees pulled bodies off the mountain of rain-soaked flesh.

  Finger stood frozen, his fists pressed into his cheeks.

  The bottom man in the pile was a Sasquatch. And under him was the ball.

  “Turn it off! Turn it off!”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon like that, alternately turning on the three-dee, watching the Sasquatches hurt the Pineapples, and turning off the three-dee. Finger moaned, he fainted, he swallowed pills. Montpelier went out for sandwiches; on Sunday the building’s cafeterias were closed.

  He idly wondered how far the bankers’ revenge would go. If they can’t get B.F., will they come after me? He tried to put the thought aside, but ugly scenes from Mafia movies kept crawling into his skull.

  Finger wolfed down his sandwich as if it were his last meal. They turned the game on one final time, and the Sasquatches were ahead by 38-7 with less than two minutes to play. Finger started calling airlines.

  He set up seven different flights for himself, for destinations as diverse as Rio de Janeiro and Ulan Bator.

  “I’ll dazzle them with footwork,” he joked weakly. His face looked far from jovial.

  The phone chimed. With a trembling hand, Finger touched the ON button. The same corner that had showed the football game now presented a three-dee image of a gray-templed man sitting a a desk. He looked intelligent, wealthy, conservative and powerful. His suit was gray, with a vest. The padded chair on which he saw was real leather, Montpelier somehow sensed. The wall behind him was panelled in dark mahogany. A portrait of Nelson Rockefeller hung there.