by C. L. Moore
“Put more bite into it,” I told Roy critically. “It’s good. Let’s have it once more.”
Polly gave me a grudging smile. “Had lunch?” she asked. “I’ll open something.”
I nodded casually. “Thanks. I wish you would.”
No, I’d never been away. And yet in a very clear sense I had been, and my absence had wrought some change in the troupe. I wasn’t sure what. And it didn’t matter. They’d known I’d come back. After last night they’d known no power on earth could keep me off the stage in Douglass Flats. I felt thankful for small favors. Life would be simpler now with the Swann Players.
I asked about a permit to open tonight, and Polly, setting a freshly unsealed plate of what looked like beef stew before me, said Guthrie had seen to it on the way in. She handed me a fork. Roy dipped his finger in spilled coffee and drew an oval on the tabletop.
“The rebels aren’t very strong in Douglass Flats,” he said, giving the oval eyes, nose, and mouth. “Guthrie saw the local mayor and he says it’s okay.” He added a band across the forehead, and a padlock. Then he wrote “Rohan” instead of “Comus” as a label for the padlock, and gave me a wry grin. “Rehearsal this afternoon? God, how I hate the stage.”
I took a bite of the stew and shook my head at him. I felt fine, confidence was warm in me, but exhaustion had begun to shiver under the confidence and I knew I was going to fold up if I didn’t get some rest between now and tonight. The Cropper years had left me tough, but there’s a limit to what any man can take.
“You might run through it once from about twenty-one on,” I said. “Just to make sure. We skipped some of it last night. I’m sorry about that. We’ll play it straight from now on. But I’ve got to get some rest. Maybe Guthrie would read my lines for you.”
At this point Guthrie came to the door of the sound truck, saw me, and yelled, “Mr. Rohan!” in an arbitrary voice. I picked up my plate of stew and crossed over to join him.
Cressy looked at me, large-eyed and startled, from the window that opened into the body of the truck from behind the driver’s seat. All I could see of her was her round folded arms on the sill, and her chin on her hands and the halo of silvery-yellow curls with the light behind them. I gave her a wary look. After last night who knew how she felt?
She said in a perfectly friendly voice, “When did you get back? We were all wondering——” Here she paused and then asked, “Anything wrong?”
I shook my head slowly. “No. Nothing wrong.” But I hardly heard my own words. Seeing her there framed in the window like a three-dimensioned portrait of herself, I thought again, automatically, Miranda—a copy of Miranda—not like her, and yet—Miranda.
And the strange thing was that not until this moment had I thought of Miranda since I left the camp that morning. It was the longest time I’d ever gone, waking and sober or sleeping and drunk, without the unquiet ghost that moved between me and the world. I felt strangely lightened and relieved, and strangely saddened. “No,” I said again. “Nothing wrong.”
Guthrie said to her in a gentle voice, “Run along, Cressy. Mr. Rohan and I have to talk business awhile.” She raised her eyebrows at him, gave me an impersonal smile, and said, “Okay, I can take a hint.” Guthrie stood for a moment watching her go, some of the old sadness returning to his face. It was curious how she made us both feel sad at this moment. But when he turned to me the anger came back, and in my own mind the bright, hot confidence which sadness had submerged came flooding up in response. I swung around to face the television screen as he switched it on with a loud, impatient click.
Space dissolved in front of us. We spanned the Rockies with a glance, swooped across the Great Plains, leaped the Appalachians, and without passing through doors at all were suddenly inside Comus City, New York, talking to unstable secretaries who kept dissolving as we talked to them into other secretaries just as unstable. The last one of all dissolved into Ted Nye.
He looked up across his littered desk, distracted and irritable. His eyes were sunken into dark hollows in his little pinched face. He didn’t look as if he’d slept in a week.
“What the hell do you want?” he demanded. “Talk fast. You’ve got one minute.” I could hear two of his intercoms buzzing and winking out of sight, and there were voices in the room talking with a note of hysteria in them. Things weren’t going too well in Comus City. Above the voices I heard one distinct trilling cheep and grinned with the realization that one denizen at least of the heart of empire felt pretty good today.
“Anything new on the Anti-Com?” I asked casually. Nye scowled at me, punched something on the desk, and picked up his earphone cup, as I had thought he would. Unless there were lip readers behind him, whatever else I said would be fairly confidential.
He said snappishly, “Go on. What have you got?”
“Good news. If you’re worried about the Anti-Com getting completed too soon you can relax. I got one of the important units blown up this morning. It’ll take a while to rebuild unless they’ve got replacements.”
His little tense face went slowly dark with a heavy flush. “How do you know? Tell me what happened. Talk fast.”
I laughed. The careless confidence I floated on was intoxicating as liquor. Now I had him. Now I couldn’t fail. I gave him the story. He listened, tapping a pencil against his teeth and watching me as if he could drag the words out faster by sheer concentration.
When I was through he said, “But you don’t know the package was what you think?” He was almost pleading with me to say I was sure, and the hand that held the earcup shook against his cheek.
“I know what I think,” I said. “I know how they acted—how they handled it. How they felt when they had to blow it up. No, I couldn’t swear it was an Anti-Com unit, but I know who could swear. That man with the gray hair I pinned down for your boys to arrest. He was in charge. He seemed to know all about the job. Run him through a psychoscreening under Pentothal and then you can tell me.”
Nye banged his teeth with the pencil again. Then without another word he reached out and switched off the screen. He was already turning swiftly away as he shrank to do a dot that receded at infinite speed to the other side of the continent.
I looked at Guthrie and grinned. “Wake me when he calls back,” I said. “I’m going to catch up on sleep. With any luck, I’ll wake up a rich man again.”
I went out, walking confidently. I knew it would work just as I’d said it would. I couldn’t fail. The cast looked up as I came by but I only nodded. They weren’t important any more.
Dimly as I dropped off to sleep in my bunk the face of Elaine drifted across my mind. The face of the gray-haired man crossed it like a dissolve on a movie screen. Remotely I thought of what they would be thinking and feeling now. What all this might mean to the rebels in sill the areas in the country. What it might mean to us all. It didn’t touch me. I did what I had to do. I knew what I wanted.
Sleep sucked me down into a vortex of nothingness and all thinking shrank, like Ted Nye, to a shining dot that vanished.
CHAPTER XXI
THIRTY SECONDS LATER someone shook me heavily. I looked up into Pod Henken’s face. I couldn’t figure out how he happened to be wearing make-up, hearty pink with black lines carefully worked in at the eye corners. There hadn’t been time, for one thing. I’d seen him playing cards at the table less than a minute ago. But beyond him the truck door framed blue twilight with trees blowing in a gentle wind.
“Guthrie wants you in the sound truck,” Pod said. “Got some kind of message for you. He says hurry. It’s time to wake up anyhow. We open in less than an hour.”
I groped my way dimly across the campsite, foggy with sleep. In the sound truck for a groggy moment I thought Ted Nye had somehow teleported himself three thousand miles in less than a minute and was sitting here in the truck bouncing excitedly. But it was only his image on the screen flipping off intercom switches as soon as he saw me and beaming from ear to ear. He started talking before I got my
mouth open.
“You’ve done it, Howard!” he cried. “God love you, you’ve done it! The rebel spilled everything he knew, and he knew plenty.”
“So it was an Anti-Com part,” I said, not surprised.
“A big part. One of the last units. Howard, we’ve got them now. With any kind of luck, we’ve got them.”
“What do you mean, luck?” I asked, rubbing my face to clear the fog away. I couldn’t help feeling this was part of the last talk I’d had with him only a few seconds ago. Time seemed to have taken a long jump and I wasn’t caught up with it yet. “Haven’t you got the Anti-Com? Isn’t everything over?”
A shadow crossed Nye’s face. “Well, not quite. Not yet. We still need your help, Howard. And, incidentally, I was dead wrong about the kind of help you can give. You can name your own price. You’ve done a job none of my trained men seemed able to do. I keep wondering——” Here he paused and looked at me with narrowed eyes. He sounded baffled. “Howard, how did you know?”
“Know what?” I felt an uneasy stirring in my mind.
He shook his head. “I’m not even sure what I’m asking. You went so straight to the mark—somehow. Right from the beginning. Right from the time you asked for the Swann Players and hit San Andreas instead of some other town in the area. How did you know San Andreas was the spot?”
“Is it?” I asked.
“You know what I mean. No, San Andreas was just the jumping-off point for you. But you jumped so straight. I—Howard, why did you ask for the Swann Players?”
Something in the back of my mind said, “Be careful, Rohan.” I said, “If I knew I’d tell you. Luck, I suppose. It had to happen to somebody and the somebody turned out to be me. That’s all. What do you mean, you haven’t got the Anti-Com yet? Didn’t my boy know where it is?”
“No, he didn’t. He knew only about the part he supervised. He couldn’t tell us how the Anti-Com works or where it’s being assembled. These rebels are playing it cagey. No one person knows very much. They’re smart—but not smart enough. Not quite. With any luck, we’ve got them. That’s where you come in, Howard.”
I rubbed my face again, gingerly because my cuts and bruises hurt. I was going to have quite a job of make-up to do tonight. I said, “Go on, go on. Where do I come in?”
“You put your play on tonight exactly as it’s written. Understand? Exactly. And tomorrow I’m changing your itinerary. According to what your man spilled, Carson City’s a hotbed. We’re going to screen it with everything we’ve got. I want you to get every rebel in the township into your grandstands tomorrow night. I’ll leave it to you to figure out how, but it’s important. Can you do it?”
I said, “Sure. I’ll think of something. But why, Ted? What’s this about the theater? I don’t see——”
“Forget it. Let me worry about that. I’ll explain later on, after we’ve won.”
We looked at each other warily. What he was thinking I don’t know, but there was a little riot of thoughts rushing around in my own head. I’d had to ask. It would have looked as if I knew more than I really did know if I hadn’t. Naturally he wasn’t giving anything away. Just as naturally he’d made it clear the theater was part of the screening process of California. I wondered if I should say, “By the way, Ted, the rebels know quite a lot about what’s in this sound truck and why. They know it’s a gimmick for tracking down some of the Anti-Com parts. Does that make any difference in our plans?”
I didn’t say it. I wanted to find the Anti-Com as badly as he did. I didn’t care how I went about it. But that quiet voice in the back room of my mind, the one that had said a moment ago, “Be careful, Rohan,” now said, “Keep your mouth shut, Rohan. That’s an order.” And I didn’t speak. I didn’t even question the voice. So far it had led me right. I was willing to play along—up to a point.
Nye peered at me, elated but nervous. “If we pull in the right man tonight or tomorrow, you can ask for anything you want,” he said. “I mean it, Howard.” He shifted uneasily. “Well, I guess that’s about it. See you later. Good night and good luck, Howard.”
I crossed my fingers at him as he faded out of sight.
I stood under the grandstand in the street of Douglass Flats listening to the shuffle of feet overhead, the creak of the benches, the voices pitched a little high with excitement. Something new had come to Douglass Flats and the audience sounded responsive already. I breathed in the night air as deep as my chest would take it. I felt wonderful. I felt the world turn underfoot and knew it was turning because I walked on it. I wanted to turn it faster. I wanted to hurry on that hour when I stepped out into the floodlights and bought the play to life around me. There isn’t any more wonderful experience in life. Not any. Tonight I’d play it straight, but it would still be my part, my play. I knew it. I could feel alreay what those first moments would be like when I felt the act of creation spark to life inside me, reach out and flood the stage and the audience and the world and fuse them all to one single breathing unit, me at the center.
Roy and Polly stood beside me, a million miles away, wrapped in their little separate worlds, creating their new personalities around them. Cressy was smoothing her skirts with nervous, unconscious gestures, her gaze focused inward, turning herself into the Susan Jones she would be in another minute or two when she crossed the threshold from darkness into floodlight on her cue. She and Polly had not spoken to each other at all on the way here. I could guess why, but it wasn’t any concern of mine.
Everybody looked stiff and scared. Second-night stage fright isn’t quite as bad as first-night, but it takes a long while to wear off. For some people it never does wear off no matter how long they play. I was a little surprised to realize that for myself I didn’t feel scared at all. This was new. It seemed almost unnatural.
Over our heads the girders creaked. I looked up, noticing for the first time that a streak of some dull-colored paint ornamented the undersides of the girders and benches, with a thin line of silver drawn down the middle of each streak. It was thick enough to make a little ridge on the metal, and I rubbed my thumb absently across the nearest streak, wishing the earth would turn a little faster.
I heard Eileen Henken’s voice from beyond the bleachers, full and easy and carrying. “Dad! Dad, you hear me? With all these people in town tonight, seems like you could find something better to do …”
I bided my time impatiently. In four minutes, three minutes, two minutes more I would feel my own personality reach out and take that familiar, easy, confident, infinitely satisfying grip on the audience, feel their warm response start flowing in. One minute more.
Cressy beside me lifted her finger and counted with careful beats, unconsciously nodded in time with her finger. On the last beat she drew a deep breath, smiled radiantly at empty air, and stepped forward onto the stage.
My cue came. I drew a deep breath of my own and stepped confidently out into the hot, bright pavilion of light. …
The ax fell.
The ax that had been poised right over my head for twenty-four hours, except I’d never thought to glance up and see it, dropped with a soundless thud right on my head.
Cressy swung toward me, radiant in the lights, tipped her head back, and said in a voice pitched a little bigger than her own, because of the way the stage was encircled, “I didn’t think you’d come. I really didn’t.”
I stared down into her face in paralyzed silence. My lines had gone out of my mind forever, stone-cold, totally forgotten. I could221;217;t even ad-lib. I didn’t know what the play was about. I didn’t know who Cressy was supposed to be. I didn’t know my own name or what year it was or what planet I stood on. Everything had stopped dead with me dead in the middle, out on my feet. And the audience waited in silence.
The pause drew out agonizingly. Sweat formed like ice on me everywhere a sweat gland operates. The world had stopped turning forever, and if it was up to me to start things again then we were all frozen right here in this moment until time ran out to i
ts eternal end and the last trump sounded.
Cressy looked up at me in dawning horror. She repeated her last lines, rephrasing them just enough to sound normal. “I really didn’t think you’d come at all,” she said. “Did you know I felt that way?” She was throwing me a direct question that wasn’t in the script, trying in any way she could to break my block. Clearly she thought if she could get me to speak at all maybe I could pass over the bad spot and ad-lib my way back into my lines.
I just looked at her. The cold sweat was running down my sides now and popping out through the make-up in big, obvious beads. My stomach was tight in an agonized knot and I was so sick with nausea that if I could have moved a muscle I’d have run for the wings. But I couldn’t move.
Nothing like this had ever happened to me before in my life. I’d had stage fright, sure. But nothing like this absolute, paralyzed agony. It seemed incredible. It seemed impossible. But right then I wasn’t even trying to figure it out. I was too frozen in the nightmare to think why.
Cressy laughed, a lighthearted ripple of sound, and rose suddenly on tiptoe to clasp my neck and brush my cheek with a kiss. Still clinging, she said, “There! That’s for not disappointing me. Surprised?” Then with her lips near my ear she whispered my next line fiercely.
I stammered it after her like an automaton, my voice flat. In the same moment the rest of the cast, paralyzed as I was with surprise, swept simultaneously into action. The hell with the play at this point. All anybody wanted now was to get Rohan moving.
Roy rushed on stage and grabbed Cressy by the arm, yelling angrily at me for having apparently kissed Susan Jones right here on the street. Pod Henken waded sturdily in to separate them. Roy, fighting him off, lurched against me and muttered my next lines in my ear.
I parroted the words in that strange, flat voice, imitating every inflection Roy had fed me whether it fitted or not. Cressy pulled me away from Roy, clasped my neck with both hands, leaned her head on my shoulder, and fed me the next line. God help me, if I could have spoken in falsetto I’d have done it, imitating her voice as I’d imitated Roy’s. I was a machine that could give back only what had been put into it, exactly as it was put.
