Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

“The latest and most modern modeling techniques,” Earnest told Oxnard. “Straight from Korea. No second-rate stuff around here.”

  “I see,” Oxnard said.

  “Americans always think that we Canadians are behind the times,” Earnest said. “But we’ve learned to survive in spite of Yankee chauvinism. Like the flea and the elephant.” His voice had an irritating nasal twang to it.

  Oxnard replied with something like “Uh-huh.”

  His main interest was focused on the modeling team. They were buzzing around the long cylindrical model that rested on the chest-high worktable. They had a regular bucket brigade system going: two girls were taking tiny plastic pieces from their packing boxes and using whirring electrical buffers to erase the Korean symbols painted on them. Another woman and one of the men took the clean pieces and dabbed banana-smelling plastic glue on them. Then the remaining two men took the pieces, walked around the model slowly and stuck pieces onto the main body.

  At random, apparently, thought Oxnard.

  “Hand craftsmanship,” exuded Earnest. “The mark of true art.”

  Still watching the team at work, Oxnard asked, “What’s it supposed to be?”

  “The model? It’s one of the starships! For the series, of course.”

  “Why does it have fins on it?”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  Ignoring the business-suited executive, Oxnard stepped between the two gluers and asked one of the stickers:

  “What’re you using for a blueprint?”

  The youth blinked at him several times. “Blueprint? We don’t have no blueprint.”

  One of the young women said with a slightly French sneer, “This is artistry, not engineering.”

  Oxnard scratched at his nose. The banana smell made him want to sneeze. “Yes,” he said mildly. “But this model is supposed to be a starship, right? It never flies in a planet’s atmosphere . . . it stays out in space all the time. It doesn’t need aerodynamic fins.”

  “But it looks smash-o with the fins!” said one of the other young men.

  “It looks like something out of the Nineteen Fifties,” Oxnard replied, surprised at the sudden loudness of his own voice. “And out of Detroit, at that!”

  “Now wait a moment,” Earnest said, from well outside the ring of workers. “You can’t tell these people how to do their jobs . . . .”

  Oxnard asked, “Why? Union rules?”

  “Union?”

  “We don’t have trade unions.”

  “Lord, that’s archaic!”

  Earnest smiled patiently. “Trade unions were disbanded in Canada years ago. That’s one of the many areas where our society is far ahead of the States.”

  Shaking his head, Oxnard said, “All right. But a starship can’t have wings and fins on it. What it does need is radiative surfaces. You can change those fins from an aerodynamic shape . . . .”

  They listened to him with hostile, sullen countenances. Earnest folded his arms across his chest and smiled, like an indulgent uncle who would rather let his oddball nephew make an ass of himself than argue with him. Oxnard tried to explain some of the rationale of an interstellar vehicle and when he saw that it wasn’t penetrating, he asked the crew if they’d ever seen photos of spacecraft or satellites. “They don’t look like airplanes, do they?”

  They agreed to that, reluctantly, and Oxnard had to settle for a moral victory.

  For the time being, he thought.

  When Earnest showed him the set they were constructing for the bridge of the starship, it was the same battle all over again. But this time it was with Earnest himself, since the carpenters and other contractors were nowhere in sight.

  “But this looks like the bridge of a ship . . . an ocean liner!” Oxnard protested.

  Earnest nodded. “It’s been built to Mr. Finger’s exact specifications. It’s a replica of the bridge on his ship, the Adventurer.”

  Oxnard puffed out an exasperated breath. “But a starship doesn’t sail in the ocean! It wouldn’t have a steering wheel and a compass for godsake!”

  “It’s what Mr. Finger wants.”

  “But it’s wrong!”

  Earnest smiled his patient, infuriating smile. “We’re accustomed to you Yanks coming here and finding fault with everything we Canadians do.”

  And no matter what Oxnard said, the Badger Studios executive dismissed it as Yankee imperialism.

  Brenda met him for lunch and drove out to one of the hotel restaurants, away from the studio cafeteria.

  “I’m beginning to see what you’re up against,” Oxnard told her. “They’re all going every which way with no direction, no idea of what the show needs.”

  “That’s right,” Brenda agreed.

  “But where’s Ron? Why isn’t he straightening this out? He knows better . . . .”

  “After lunch,” Brenda said, “I’ll take you to Ron’s place . . . if the guards let us through, that is.”

  She wasn’t kidding.

  Two uniformed security police flanked the door of Gabriel’s hotel suite. One of them recognized Brenda, asked her about Oxnard, then reluctantly let them both through.

  The foyer of the suite looked normal enough, although there was an obviously broken typewriter on the floor next to the door. Its lid was open and it looked as if someone had stomped on its innards in a rage of frustration.

  The sitting room was a mess. Wadded up sheets of paper were strewn everywhere, ankle deep. The sofas and chairs were covered with paper. The chandelier was piled high with it. The paper crackled and scrunched underfoot as they walked into the room. Invisible beneath the wads lay a luxurious carpet. Two more typewriters sat on two separate desks, near the windows. A huge pile of papers loomed over one of the typewriters.

  “Ron?” called Brenda.

  No answer.

  She looked into the bedroom on the right, as Oxnard stood in the middle of the paper sea feeling rather stunned.

  “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 a
sked.

  “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 LA. 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 idea! 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 fistful 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 that 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.