by Ben Bova
“Ron?” Brenda called again.
With a worried expression on her face, she waded through the litter and went into the other bedroom.
“Ron?” Her voice sounded panicky now.
Oxnard went into the bedroom after her. The double bed was rumpled. Drawers were hanging out of the dresser. The TV—a flat, two-dimensional set—was on and babbling some midday women’s show.
The window was open.
“My god, he escaped!” Brenda shouted. “Or jumped!”
She ran to the window and peered down.
Oxnard pushed open the door to the bathroom. The floor was wet. Towels were hanging neatly beside the tub. The shower screen was closed.
Almost as if he were a detective in a mystery show, Oxnard gingerly slipped the shower screen back a few centimeters, wondering if he ought to be careful about fingerprints.
“Brenda,” he said. “Here he is.”
She hurried into the bathroom. “Is he…”
Gabriel lay in the tub, up to his armpits in water. His eyes were closed, his mouth hung open. There was several days’ stubble on his chin. His face looked awful.
Brenda gulped once and repeated, “is he…”
Without opening his eyes, Gabriel said, “He was asleep, until you two klutzes came barging in here.”
Brenda sagged against Oxnard and let out a breath of relief.
Within a few minutes they were all sitting in the sitting room, Gabriel with the inevitable towel draped around his middle.
“They’ve had me going over these abortions they call story treatments for six days straight! They won’t let me out of here. They even took out the goddamned phone! I’m a prisoner.”
Brenda said, “They need the scripts, Ron. We’re working against a deadline now. If we’re not in production by…”
“In production?” Gabriel’s voice rose. “With what? Have you looked at these treatments? Have you tried to read any of them? The ones that are spelled halfway right, at least?”
“Are they that bad?” Oxnard asked.
“Bad?” Gabriel jumped to his feet. “Bad? They’re abysmal! They’re insufferable! They’re rotten! Junk, nothing but junk…”
He kicked at the paper on the floor and stomped over to the desk. “Listen to these treatments… these are the ideas they want to write about…” Riffling through the pile of papers on the desk, he pulled out a single sheet.
Oxnard started to say, “Maybe we ought to…”
“No, no… you listen. And you!” he jabbed a finger toward Brenda— “You better get back to Big Daddy in L.A. and tell him what the hell’s going on here. If we were in the States, I’d call the Civil Liberties Union. If I had a phone.”
“What about the story ideas, Ron?” she asked.
“Hah! Story ideas. Okay, listen… here’s one about two families working together to build a dam on a new planet that’s described as, get this now… ‘very much like upper Alberta Province, such as around Ft. Vermillion.’”
Oxnard looked at Brenda. She said, “Okay, so you don’t care for the setting. What’s the story idea?”
“That is the story ideal That’s the whole treatment… about how to build a dam! Out of logs, yet!”
Brenda made a disapproving face. “You picked the worst one.”
“Oh yeah? Lemme go down the list for you…”
Gabriel spent an hour reading story treatments to them:
• A monster from space invades one of the starships, but it turns out to be a dream that the hero is having.
• The heroine (Rita Yearling) gets lost on an unexplored planet and the natives find her and think she’s a goddess. She gets away by explaining astronomy to them.
• The heads of the two competing families of star traders engage in an Indian wrestling match in a frontier saloon “very much like those in upper Alberta Province, such as around Ft. Vermillion.”
• The hero and heroine are stranded on an unpopulated planet and decide to call themselves Adam and Eve. Before they can bite the apple, they are rescued.
• A war between the two families is averted when the women of both families decide to. stop cooking for their men if they fight.
By the end of the hour, Oxnard felt as if his head was stuffed with cotton wool. Brenda was stretched out on one of the sofas, looking equally dazed.
“And those are the best of them,” Gabriel finished grimly.
“That’s the best they can do?” Oxnard asked.
“Who’s doing the writing?” Brenda wanted to know.
Gabriel glowered from his desk chair. “How the hell should I know? This Earnest Yazoo from Beaver Studios…”
“Badger,” Oxnard corrected.
“Same damned thing,” Gabriel grumbled. “Earnest won’t let me meet any of the writers. I have to write memos, suggestions, rewrites… which means I have to start from scratch and write everything! All thirteen goddamned scripts. I’m gonna have to do it all myself.”
Brenda sat up and ran a hand through her hair. “But you can’t! Our agreement with Badger and the Canadian government says that at least fifty percent of the scripts have to be written by Canadian citizens.”
Gabriel threw a flistful of papers into the air.
“This is terrible,” Oxnard said.
“I would’ve walked out a week ago,” Gabriel told him, “if it wasn’t for the goddamned guards. They’ve got me locked up in here!”
Brenda looked at him. “That’s because you yelled so much about walking out on them when they first gave you the story treatments.”
Oxnard was shaking his head. “And I thought the modeling and sets were bad…”
“What?” Gabriel was beside him instantaneously. “What about the models and the sets? What’re they doing to them?”
Oxnard told him of his morning’s tour of the studio shops.
“That did it!” Gabriel screeched. “Get that sonofabitch in here! I’ll kill him!”
Wearily, Brenda asked, “Which sonofabitch do you mean?”
“Any of them! All of them! I’ll take them all on at once!”
Oxnard got up and stood beside the betoweled writer. “We’ll both take ’em on,” he said grimly. “I don’t like what they’re doing either.”
Brenda grinned at the two of them. “Laurel and Hardy, ready to take on the whole Canadian army. Okay… I’ll get you some action.”
She returned twenty minutes later with an already flustered-looking Gregory Earnest.
In the interval, a maid had cleared up most of the mess, Oxnard had ordered a bottle of beer for himself and Gabriel had started packing. The two men were in the bedroom when they heard the front door of the suite open and Brenda call, “Ron? Bill?”
“In here,” Gabriel yelled, as he tossed handfuls of socks into his open suitcase.
Oxnard saw that Earnest’s face was red and he was a trifle sweaty. Brenda must have filled his ears but good, he thought.
“What’re you doing?” Earnest asked as soon as he saw the half-filled suitcase on the bed.
“Leaving,” replied Gabriel.
“You can’t go.”
“The hell I can’t!”
Brenda walked over to the edge of the bed and sat down. “Ron,” she said, her voice firm, “I brought him here to listen to your problems. The least you can do is talk to him.”
“I’m talking,” Gabriel said as he rummaged through a dresser drawer and pulled out a heap of underwear.
Oxnard sat back in the room’s only chair and tried to keep himself from grinning.
“I, uh… understand,” Earnest said to Gabriel’s back, “that you’re not, uh, happy with the story material so far.” Gabriel turned and draped a bathrobe over the bed, alongside the suitcase. He started folding it.
“You understand correctly,” he said, concentrating on the folding. The robe was red and gold, with a barely discernible image of Bruce Lee on its back.
“Well,” said Earnest, “you knew when you came here t
hat fifty percent of the scripts would have to be written by Canadians.”
“Canadian writers,” Gabriel said, as he tenderly placed the folded robe in the suitcase. “What you’ve given me was produced by a team of Mongoloid idiots. It’s hopeless. I’m leaving.”
“You can’t leave.”
“Watch me.”
“The guards won’t let you out of here.”
Oxnard raised his beer bottle. “Have you ever had your nose broken, Mr. Earnest?”
The Canadian backed away a short step. “Now listen,” he said to Gabriel, “you know that Titanic hasn’t given us the budget to take on big-name writers…”
“These guys couldn’t even spell a big name.”
“…and we’re on a very tight production schedule. You can’t walk out on us. It would ruin everything.”
Gabriel looked up at him for the first time. “I can’t make a script out of a turd. Nobody can. I can’t write thirteen scripts, or even six and a half, in the next couple of weeks. We need writers!”
“We’ve got writers…”
“We’ve got shit!” Gabriel yelled. “Excrement. Poop. Ka-ka. I’ve seen better-looking used toilet paper than the crap you’ve given me to work with!”
“It’s the best available talent for the budget.”
“Where’d you get these people?” Gabriel demanded. “The funny farm or the Baffin Island Old Folk’s Home?”
He snapped the suitcase lid shut, but it bounced right up again.
“Too much in there,” Oxnard said.
Gabriel gave him a look. “It’ll close. I got it here and I’ll get it out.” He pushed the lid down firmly and leaned on it.
“Ron, those are the only writers we can afford,” Earnest said, his voice taking on a faint hint of pleading. “We don’t have the money for other writers.”
Gabriel let go of the suitcase and the lid bounced up again. “As if that explains it all, huh? We go on the air with a public announcement: ‘Folks, please excuse the cruddy quality of the scripts. We couldn’t afford better writers.’ That’s what you want to do?”
“Maybe if you worked with the writers…”
“You won’t even let me meet them!”
Earnest shifted back and forth on his feet uneasily. “Well, maybe I was wrong there…”
But Gabriel was peering at the suitcase again. “It won’t work.”
“I told you it wouldn’t,” Oxnard said.
Brenda added, “Try putting it on the floor and then leaning on it.”
Earnest gaped at her, shocked.
Gabriel picked up the open suitcase and carefully placed it on the floor. “Where’d you get these so-called writers from?” he asked, squatting down to lean on the lid again.
Earnest had to step around the bed to keep him in sight. “Uh… from here in the city, mostly.”
“What experience do they have?” What credits?”
“Well,” Earnest squirmed, “not much, truthfully.”
Holding down the lid, Gabriel said to Earnest, “Hey, you look like the heaviest one here. Stand on it.”
Obediently, Earnest stepped up on the jiggling, slanting lid. Gabriel began to click the suitcase shut.
“Where’d you get these writers?” he asked again.
Earnest stood on the now-closed suitcase, looking foolish and miserable. “Uh, we had a contest…”
“A contest?”
“In the local high schools…”
Brenda gasped.
Oxnard began to laugh.
Gabriel got to his feet. His nose was about at the height of Earnest’s solar plexus.
“You didn’t say what I just heard,” he said.
“What?”
Looking murderously up into Earnest’s flustered face, Gabriel said, “You didn’t tell me just now that the story treatments I’ve been beating out my brains over for the past two weeks were written by high school kids who sent them in as part of a writing contest.”
“Uh… well…”
“You didn’t imply,” Gabriel went on, his voice low, “that you haven’t spent penny number one on any writers at all.”
“We can use the money on…”
Oxnard didn’t think that Gabriel, with his short arms, could reach Earnest’s head. But he did, with a punch so blurringly swift that Oxnard barely saw it. He heard the solid crunch of fist on bone, though, and Earnest toppled over backwards onto the bed, his face spurting blood.
“Sonofagun,” Oxnard said, “you broke his nose after all.”
Earnest bounced up from the bed and fled from the room, wailing and holding his bloody nose with both hands.
Brenda looked displeased. “You shouldn’t have done that. It just complicates things.”
Gabriel was rubbing his knuckles. “Yeah. I should’ve belted him in the gut a few times first. Would’ve been more satisfying.”
“He’s probably going straight to the lawyers. Or the police,” she said.
Starting for the door, Oxnard said, “I’m going to the American consulate. They can’t hold an American citizen prisoner like this.”
“No. Wait,” Brenda said. “Let me handle this.”
“I don’t care how you do it,” Gabriel said, “but I want out.”
Brenda faced him squarely. “Ron, that would be the end of everything. The show, the series, the whole Titanic company…”
“What do I care? Those bastards have been screwing me…”
“Ron, please!” Now it was Brenda who was pleading, and Oxnard wished he were in Gabriel’s place.
“I’m walking,” Gabriel insisted. “High school kids in a writing contest… making models and sets like tinkertoys…”
“I’ll straighten things out,” Brenda said, as strongly as Gabriel. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why you wanted me here, wasn’t it?”
“Well…” He kicked lightly at the suitcase, still on the floor.
Brenda turned to Oxnard. Her eyes are incredibly green, he noticed for the first time. “Bill, if I get B.F. to straighten out Earnest and give you authority to act as science consultant, will you stay?”
“I’ve really got to get back…”
She bit her lower lip, then said, “But you can come up here on weekends, can’t you? To make sure that the crew’s building things the right way?”
With a shrug, he agreed, “Sure, I suppose I could do that.”
Turning to Gabriel again, Brenda went on, “And Ron, if I get you complete authority over the scripts and make Earnest bring in some real writers and a story editor, will you stay?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Gabriel scuffed at the suitcase again, like a kid punishing the floor for tripping him. “Because these flatwormbrained idiots are just going to screw things over, one way or the other. They’re a bunch of pinheads. Working with them is hopeless.”
“But we’ll form a team, the three of us,” Brenda said. “You head up the writing and creative side, Ron. Bill will handle the scientific side. And I’ll make sure that Titanic does right by you.”
Gabriel shook his head.
“Listen,” Brenda said, with growing enthusiasm. “They haven’t made a decision on the male lead for the series. Suppose I tell B.F. that if we don’t get a major star the show will fold. He’ll understand that kind of talk. We can go out and get a big name. That’ll force everybody else to live up to the star’s level.”
Gabriel’s eyebrows inched upward. “A big name star?”
“Right.” Brenda smiled encouragingly.
Oxnard could see wheels within wheels at work inside Gabriel’s head.
“Okay,” the writer said at last. “You go talk to B.F. But first… get Rita Yearling over here. I want to talk with her. About who she thinks would make a good costar.”
Oxnard looked at Brenda. She understood perfectly what was going on in Gabriel’s mind. And she didn’t like it.
But she said, “All right, Ron. If that’s what you want.” Flat.
Emotionless.
She started for the door. Gabriel stooped down and pushed the suitcase under the bed. Oxnard called out: “Wait up, Brenda. I’m going with you.”
9: THE STAR
The studio was alive at last. It rang with the sounds of busy workmen: carpenters hammering; electricians yelling to each other from atop giddy-tall ladders; painters and lighting men and gofers carrying the tools of their trades across the vast floor of the hangar-sized room.
Four different sets were being erected in the four comers of the studio, fleshing over its bare metal walls and reaching upward to the girders that supported row after row of lights which seemed to stare down at the beehive below in silent disbelief.
Ron Gabriel was standing in the middle of the big, clangorous whirl. He wore what had come to be known over the past few months as his “official working costume:” a pair of cutoff Levis and a tee shirt with Starcrossed lettered on front and back. Somewhere in the offices and workshops adjoining the studio, the art director was dreaming up a special symbol for the show. Gabriel would get Badger or Titanic to make tee shirts for the entire cast and crew with the symbol on them, no matter who protested about the cost.
Standing beside him, in a conservative one-piece business suit, was Sam Lipid. He was only slightly taller than Gabriel, roundish, with a prematurely balding pate. His face was soft and young looking. Lipid was Production Manager for the show and Gabriel’s major point of contact with Badger Films. Gregory Earnest had given Gabriel a wide berth ever since bouncing off the bed in his hotel room, months earlier. There had been same talk of a lawsuit, but Brenda got Titanic to pay for a nose job and Earnest wound up looking better than he ever had before Gabriel socked him.
“…and here on the turntable,” Lipid was saying, “will be the ‘planet’ set. Well redress it every week to make it look like a different world.”
Gabriel nodded. “Why the turntable?”
Lipid’s babyface actually pinked sightly with enthusiasm, “Oh, we used to use this studio for filming a musical show, the Lawrence Welk Simulacrum, you know? It was very popular. They had audience seats along all four walls of the studio and the orchestra rotated at a different speed for each song, in time with the music.”
“You’re kidding,” Gabriel said.
