by Diane Duane
HARRY
(aback again)
What?
JOY
He is dead. He died in nineteen forty.
(wry beat)
His bomber was shot down and crashed into a Burger King.
Harry simply stares at her, completely confused.
JOY (CONT’D)
You saw how people in the hotel were just picking at their breakfasts —
HARRY
With that bacon, it’s no surprise.
JOY
It’s not the goddamn bacon! They only eat for practice! They’re from all kinds of times, and they’re stuck here, near where they died. Doris just gives them a place to stay. She has to!
(beat)
George is dead, too.
Harry rubs his face, finding all this a little too bizarre.
HARRY
George. And here I thought Gunter was the problem.
JOY
(cranky)
George is fine. He gave me a little scare when he came through the bedroom wall at me, but we’re friends now.
HARRY
Have you stopped taking the Zoloft?
JOY
(shocked)
Harry!
HARRY
I tried to be understanding about it, I really did. The doctor told me you were going to need some room and some time to get through the stress, the divorce going final and all, and dear God I tried to give it to you. But if you think you’re going to get some petty little vengeance on me now by acting like you’re going nuts—at this moment in time, when if I perform well enough, it could make my career —
Joy stares at him, stony-eyed. Harry glares back.
HARRY (CONT’D)
I can’t believe you’d be so selfish, so petty. I can’t believe it.
JOY
Believing does seem to be a problem for you. Doesn’t it…
Harry GETS UP, tosses his napkin onto the table, STALKS OUT.
HARRY
Just get back on the pills.
Joy sits there stunned.
INT. COMPUTER SHOW PARTY—NIGHT
One of the endless PR-driven boozefests that surround such events, this one thrown by Erickson Computers. A loud band, a lot of media and computer people talking and drinking nonstop. Harry wanders through this disconsolately, having come down from angry to vaguely miserable.
Off to one side, propping up the bar, are Harry’s immediate boss, Boyce, and another of the young Salesguys seen earlier at the computer show, NIGEL. Harry WANDERS over to them.
BOYCE
Harry! Great day!
HARRY
(unenthusiastic)
Yeah, thanks, Boyce. Hey, Nigel. How’d you do?
NIGEL
A hundred and fifty units, all by myself. I am a happy lad. What’re you having?
HARRY
A beer, thanks.
BOYCE
Hey, cheer up, Harry. You did just fine. And the whole group had a super day. Nine hundred units! The boss is pleased.
HARRY
(glancing around him)
That’s great. Looks like some people aren’t, though.
The others follow Harry’s glance. In B.G., MICHAEL CARLYLE, a tastefully dressed, slender, silver-haired older man, sits reading one of the trade papers (even in this bad light) and drinking doubles. No one sits with him: there’s a feeling that he’s being avoided.
BOYCE
Oh. Take more than a good sales day to cheer that one up.
HARRY
Who is it?
NIGEL
Michael Carlyle.
BOYCE
Formerly of Carlyle-Erickson.
HARRY
Thought he was bought out years ago.
Nigel hands Harry his beer. Harry takes a long drink.
NIGEL
He was. Still gets invited to these shindigs, though. Elder statesman, good will gesture and all that.
BOYCE
Not that the gesture produces much good will in him. Sour old sod.
HARRY
What’s his problem?
BOYCE
Oh, the usual. He was there when little Bobby was just getting started, Erickson would never have come to anything without him, blah blah blah.
NIGEL
I think it’s just ‘old school tie’ stuff.
HARRY
You lost me, Nige.
NIGEL
Oh, Carlyle was at Oxford, degrees out to here, and Erickson never made it past his local vocational school. Drives him nuts that Erickson was so good with the business angle, and now gets all these wads of money and the media attention as well.
Harry looks curiously over at Carlyle. Carlyle glances at him, an assessing look: then away again, dismissive.
HARRY
Is it bad to be seen talking to him?
BOYCE
Politically? Naah. Waste of time, though. He’d talk the ears off a donkey, that one. Listen, you coming to the Sega party later? They’re celebrating that new Russian helicopter-gunship game. Unlimited caviar, fountains of Stoly.
HARRY
Uh, yeah. Gotta catch up with the wife first.
He pulls out his cellphone, salutes the other two with it: they grin, move on. Harry goes off to one side, dials, hears:
PHONE NETWORK (V.O.)
The ErickNet customer you are trying to reach is out of cell or has their phone turned off. Please try again later. The ErickNet customer…
Harry puts the phone away, looking unhappy: then takes his beer and moves slowly over to where Carlyle sits by himself. Carlyle glances up. When he speaks, it is plain that Carlyle is several drinks along, but not at all slurred.
HARRY
Mr. Carlyle?
CARLYLE
Welcome to the leprosarium, Mr. —
(squints at Harry’s badge)
Collins.
HARRY
Call me Harry.
CARLYLE
The adorable instantaneous intimacy of our transatlantic cousins. Well, you may call me Michael. Not Mike.
HARRY
Thank you, Michael.
CARLYLE
So doubtless the young minions of British mammon have suggested that you come over and poke the hoary old fossil to hear his sullen borborygmal complaints.
Harry SITS DOWN by him.
HARRY
Wow, you know big words, Michael. I didn’t really have poking in mind.
CARLYLE
Oh come, young man. Grant the spectre at the feast enough intelligence to know what’s going on at the far end of the table. They all loathe me, these wretched little market-driven parvenus, for having had what they so desire and fear, a classical education. Yet such advantage counts for little in the crass world outside the university gates.
(another drink)
Would that a truck had hit me in the Carfax before they pedestrianized it. I’d have died young and poor and happy.
HARRY
(in the mood to be rude)
Instead of old and rich and cranky. But not so cranky that you’ll pass on drinking their booze.
CARLYLE
(taken with him)
Why, Harry, there’s a bite under your bark. What a welcome change from these buttery-mouthed, whey-faced youths.
Carlyle GESTURES at a passing BARPERSON for more drinks for the two of them.
HARRY
The scuttlebutt says you’re not entirely happy with Erickson.
CARLYLE
Heresy! Heresy most foul. Here we are all one happy worker-friendly family, awash in employee stock options and corporate handouts to keep the pixel-stained technopeasants content.
(beat)
For myself, I saw which way the wind was blowing, and I took the option package that was offered me and got out of the line of fire.
HARRY
And onto the billionaires’ list.
CARLYLE
(contemptuous)
The land of the many zeroes.
Money I may have, but not what matters: respect. There’s nothing more pitiful than a discarded mentor, as even these contemptible graduates of bargain basement MBA programs and gaming arcades can see.
He finishes one of his drinks, picks up another.
HARRY
Why did you get out?
CARLYLE
You ask almost as if you’re genuinely interested.
HARRY
I am interested.
CARLYLE
Ingratitude. An awful thing, especially when it thinks itself invulnerable.
HARRY
Ingratitude… It doesn’t seem like much.
CARLYLE
Oh, there’s more. I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would frizzle thee up like the fretful porpentine.
HARRY
Okay. So unfold and let’s frizzle.
Carlyle spends a long thoughtful moment staring at Harry.
CARLYLE
Not here, for pity’s sake. Come on.
They EXIT.
INT. NEARBY OLD LONDON PUB—NIGHT
A quiet place, leaded-glass windows, dark wood paneling, worn plank floor, empty: “fruit machine” video-gambling console DINGING forlornly in b.g. Harry and Carlyle sit at the empty bar. Each has a half-finished pint, empty glasses of the previous round off to one side. Harry takes a drink.
HARRY
It’s really not bad for warm beer.
CARLYLE
Barbarian.
HARRY
That’s “mister” barbarian to you. You were really his tutor?
CARLYLE
Every great university has some bloom of ancient students about it, degreed and undegree’d people who can’t bear to leave, but stay on to learn, and damn the sheepskin. I was one. Like many others of my kind, I took on younger students of other schools for pay and coached them for exams.
HARRY
And you coached Erickson.
CARLYLE
(mild)
I wish I’d slammed the door in his earnest spotty face the first day I saw him. He was no mathematician, though before God I tried to make him one. A gift for engineering he did have. But none at all for languages.
(grim beat)
And therein lay my downfall.
HARRY
Oh. Is this the ‘porpentine’ part?
CARLYLE
Yes, and mine’s a pint.
Harry SIGNALS for new pints, finishes his glass and pushes it away. Carlyle hangs onto his, gazing into it.
CARLYLE (CONT’D)
He used to go down to Islington, where his parents had a house, and he’d tend their allotment—that’s a plot in a communal garden—in exchange for using its shed as a workshop, where he’d put together electronic components and try to swindle the laws of thermodynamics into doing something profitable. One day young Robert was trenching up the potatoes when he came upon a canister, made of lead, with a curious design on top.
Carlyle wets his finger in a puddle on the bar and traces a circle-and-star design which by now is familiar, except that the point of the star is up.
HARRY
The Erickson logo?
CARLYLE
The pentagram major. Known everywhere in ancient times as the chief sign of white magic. Some called it Solomon’s Seal and claimed that the great King had used it to bind mighty energies… jinni and demons and the lingering spirits of the dead.
Harry is surprised.
HARRY
You believe in that kind of thing? Dead people haunting places?
CARLYLE
Many men much wiser than I have believed in it implicitly. Personal survival… sometimes under most strange circumstances. In this world, only a fool would say “impossible”.
Each of them looks slightly haunted now.
HARRY
So what was in this canister?
CARLYLE
Ah. A rolled-up parchment, half a millennium old or thereabouts, written in the hilarious bastard Latin the alchemists used. On the parchment was a diagram of tremendous complexity, all covered with alchemistic signs and scribbles. And there at the bottom, a signature. Johannes Dee, Doctor Mysteriae et Divinitas.
HARRY
Someone I should know?
CARLYLE
He was Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer. Or a mighty sorcerer, or a clever quack, depending on who you talk to. Robert begged me to translate the thing. I couldn’t understand this sudden interest in medieval curiosities, but I translated the scroll as best I could, while Robert copied the design. He took the translation, and thanked me, and went back to his shed to start work on something.
(bitter)
Last thing he ever thanked me for.
Harry, uncomfortable at the growing weirdness of the conversation, DRINKS faster.
HARRY
So what did he do with it?
CARLYLE
I’m not sure. He became very secretive after that. A year later, he came to me and said he needed venture capital for a business he wanted to start. Then he showed me the prototype Erickson chip. Tremendous speed and storage capacity, processor and memory on the same chip, somehow burned in indelibly. Of course I gave him the capital. And of course I saw a resemblance in the chip’s circuitry to the design on that parchment I’d translated. But there was no way to compare them more closely. Robert wasn’t willing to show me his copy…and the original was gone.
HARRY
Gone? Where?
CARLYLE
Stolen from my house months earlier. Someone tore the place apart looking for it.
(long beat)
Anyway, the company grew by leaps and bounds. Robert bought me out as soon as he decently could: and the rest of the story can be seen in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
Carlyle reaches for a bar towel and WIPES the design out.
HARRY
How does the damn thing work, I wonder…?
CARLYLE
I don’t know.
He’s grim through his tipsiness. Harry eyes Carlyle, suddenly sure he’s lying.
CARLYLE (CONT’D)
But I will rue to my dying day that I helped him.
Carlyle gets up, EXITS slowly and a little unsteadily. After a few beats, Harry EXITS too.
EXT. STREET OUTSIDE OLD LONDON PUB—NIGHT
Harry looks up and down the street for Carlyle: he’s gone. Harry stands thinking, wobbling slightly from drinking too fast. He pulls out his phone, brings up Joy’s number, looks at it: then puts the phone away. Wearing that guilty look again, he heads down the street toward where the computer show’s signs can be seen in b.g. He walks slowly, like a man thinking serious and troubled thoughts.
INT. ORMONDE HOTEL—EVENING
Joy comes in, unhappy. She stops by the front desk: Doris is there. She turns to get Joy’s key, finds it’s not there.
DORIS
Good evening, Joy—oh, you’ve got your key.
JOY
I know. I didn’t know I’m supposed to leave it. Sorry.
DORIS
You look like you’ve had a long day.
JOY
It shows, huh? I wish I could get a drink or something.
DORIS
I can do that for you, dear. What would you like?
JOY
At the moment, a double Scotch sounds good.
Down the hall, in b.g., Lorna can be seen walking calmly through the lounge wall and OUT OF SHOT.
DORIS
Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have a spirit license.
JOY
(reacting to Lorna)
You could have fooled me.
DORIS
We have wine or beer, if you’d like some.
JOY
Some red wine, maybe.
DORIS
You go down to the lounge, dear, and I’ll bring it along for you.
Joy goes down to the lounge, finds Lorna there.
JOY
Good evening!
LORNA
Good evening, madame. Have you been out to the theater?
JOY
(too tired to cope)
No, I’ve been having a fight with my husband.
LORNA
How shocking! Tell me all about it.
Gunter PUTS HIS HEAD IN. Joy is in such mixed mood that she isn’t even particularly happy to see him: he notices.
GUNTER
Guten abend!
JOY
Oh, hi, Gunter.
GUNTER
Lorna, have you seen Sarah anywhere?
LORNA
The little one? Not since this morning.
Doris ENTERS with Joy’s wine.
GUNTER
Doris, have you seen Sarah? She usually asks me for a story about this time. But there is no sign of her.
DORIS
Now that you mention it, no.
(toward the door)
George, have you seen Sarah?
George leans in through the wall.
GEORGE
Not since this afternoon. But she never goes far.
DORIS
It’s just not like her to be out this late. She’s such a thoughtful child.
JOY
Oh, George, I saw your weird TV van again, a while ago, down the road. Does Erickson run them for the government or something? It had their logo on it.
GEORGE
The TV vans? No, they’re just plain, usually.
DORIS
And you saw this van the other night, too? I wonder what it’s for.
GUNTER
Well, never mind the van. But I will go out and have a look around for Sarah. It is not like her to be missing so late.
He EXITS. Lorna leans in closer to Joy.
LORNA
You were going to tell us all about your fight with your husband.
Doris and George look at each other with slight embarrassment and take themselves away, leaving Joy drinking her wine and giving Lorna a dry look.
EXT. STREET NEAR ORMONDE HOTEL—NIGHT
Gunter looks for Sarah. The street is quiet: only a little traffic passes. He walks on.
GUNTER
Sarah? Sarah!
Then down the street, coming slowly toward him, he sees that van. He’s curious. Gunter slips into the shadows between two houses.
The van stops down the street in front of a late-opening convenience store. The driver and the passenger, the TWO TECHS we saw previously, get out, lock the van and go in.
Gunter makes his way cautiously toward the van, staying out of sight by STEPPING INTO AND THROUGH THINGS. Looking through the van windows into the shop, he sees the guys buying coffee, cigarettes and newspapers, paying no attention.
