We Open on Venus - Starship Troupers 2

by Christopher Stasheff

  He played dead. Fast. I didn’t blame him; the idea of Ogden sitting on me would have made me drop dead, too.

  Then there was the little matter of Burnham Wood.

  “A tree?” Laro demanded—but quietly. “I gotta carry a bloomin’ tree!”

  “Just a few branches,” I said, “and they’re fake, so they won’t trigger your hay fever.”

  “What’s hay fever?”

  “Nothing compared to what you’re going to get if you don’t pick up that flaming branch!” I was beginning to catch on to their slang. “It’s supposed to be camouflage, see? Soldiers have been using it forever! The marines used it in World War II, back on Terra! Hunters use it, to catch deer! You’re going to use it, or you’re going to catch a pink slip!”

  “No need to go torching, Ramou,” Laro grumbled. “I’m going.”

  They just barely made it onstage in time. Of course, there were three bushes that made it all the way to the battlements, and one that started climbing the platforms, before Malcolm called them to lay aside their greenery and come out Fighting like humans, but I was sure Mamie was offstage taking notes about those little details.

  Then we got to the battle.

  I was coaching Malcolm’s army, and Horace was advising Macbeth’s forces on the other side of the stage. We both knew the blocking, but getting it across to our eager but raw recruits was another matter.

  “Enter upstage right,” Horace was telling his troops, “and cross downstage left. Stop in center stage and exchange a few blows and blocks with the enemy.”

  They stared at him in blank incomprehension.

  “Not real blows, mind you!” he hastened to add.

  They still didn’t look as if they understood much.

  I was a little more direct. “You come in down there, around that low platform,” I told them, “and go running diagonally across the stage, toward that curtain that’s supposed to represent the sky, all the way across to the other side of the stage.”

  “So we come out at the back on the other side,” Chovy clarified.

  “Right. But when you get to the middle, you’re going to meet a bunch of other guys in red coming toward you. You stop and swing at them—but make sure you don’t connect; those blades are plastic, but they could still hurt. They’ll swing at you, so you block and swing from another direction. Then you, Laro, fall down—you, too, Peppo. The other guys will run past you. Bolo and Chovy, you two pick up Laro and carry him off. Mozz and Cal, you guys carry Peppo off. When you’re out of sight of the audience, everybody get back on your feet and ask Horace what to do— he’s the old guy who’s about my height. Everybody got it?”

  “Sure.” Laro grinned. “We charge out, knock down, and drag out.”

  “Right,” I said. “Now get out there!”

  Everything went fine, except that one of Horace’s boys apparently hadn’t understood that bit about not really connecting on the blows with his billhook; he caught Mozz right over the head. The plastic helmet soaked up most of the blow, but there was enough left to hurt, and Mozz took exception to it. He took exception so hard that Bolo and Hilber eventually had to pick up Mozz and the overeager attacker and actually carry them off, still trying to fight. In the fracas, Cal really did get knocked down, so there was nobody left to carry Mozz off—but that was okay, since he hadn’t fallen. Chovy and Laro carried Cal out, and the other corpse got up and made it offstage on his own.

  They came off to see Horace standing there covering his eyes with his hand, but he gamely smiled up at them, took a breath, and said, “Right, lads. Now, for the next pass …”

  That was pretty much the tone of it—the blocking for the battle was basically right, except for the wrong people getting knocked down and the draggers becoming draggees, on every fight. Nothing really bad—until the last tableau, where everybody’s supposed to end up in a circle and slam their pole-arms down to form a sort of upside-down funnel. They were a bit too far apart, so instead of all those poles stopping each other, they all came down and met on top of Bomy’s head. He went down, for real, and it took Susanne five minutes to bring him to offstage. He woke up talking about hazard pay, saw who was ministering to him, and grabbed for her. I intercepted the pass and told him that if he could still go after Susanne, he wasn’t really all that badly hurt, but she made me call an ambulance for him anyway; she wanted an X-ray, just to be sure. Bomy tried to shrug it off as sissy stuff, but Susanne turned on the charm and he got into the medi-van, even though she had to stay for notes.

  But that’s getting ahead of the story. There was still the little matter of the swords.

  MacDuff swung down, Macbeth swung up, and everybody winced. But the two swords clanged like gongs and bounced off each other. We stared and all held our breaths. Then Macbeth chopped overhand, and MacDuff chopped sideways, and the two blades crashed against each other again—and we all winced and ducked. But amazingly, the swords held, and the two knights backed off and started whirling their swords around in circles.

  “What’s everybody ducking for?” Chovy wanted to know.

  “Those swords have a track record of breaking,” I advised. “Keep your head down.”

  “You’re kidding,” Chovy said, staring at the two swords just as they came together with a crash like a meteor striking a hull. Both swords broke across, and the tips went pinwheeling off into the wings.

  “Heads up!” Horace shouted.

  “Get down!” I yelped.

  Somehow, all the extras managed to follow both directions as Macbeth’s blade bounced off the masking flat and clattered to the floor, taking a piece out of Seeholder’s expensive finish job. “Oh, hell,” I said, turning gray at the thought of the look on his face.

  The other one hit the backing flat point first, went right on through, and had enough energy left over to hit the upstage light boom. It swayed, it tipped, but it righted itself— and the sword tip clattered down onto Larry’s helmet. He yelped and fainted dead away.

  “Larry!” Susanne dashed over to him and started checking his vital signs. It was almost enough to distract me from the battle royal that was about to erupt—but not quite. Lacey stood by and stared, looking stunned.

  “Why, you arrogant, vegetable-headed imbecile!” Mamie advanced on Merlo like the Victory rounding on the French fleet. “Do you want to kill us all? What do you think you’ve done to that poor boy?”

  “Absolutely nothing.” Merlo met her advance with a stony glare. “The force was spent by the time it hit him, and his helmet was more than strong enough to ward it off.”

  “He’s lying there unconscious on the floor! That could have been any one of us! It could have been me!”

  “Oh, we were all braced for it.” Merlo wasn’t about to give up a good fight, even if he was in the wrong. “Nobody was hurt, were they? We all knew enough to duck.”

  The extras looked up, wide-eyed, and Bolo snapped, “ We didn’t!”

  “You stay out of this!” Mamie flared at him, then turned back to Merlo.

  Bolo’s face darkened, “Now, look …”

  “Good idea.” I touched his arm. “Just watch. Best performance you’ll ever get, and you’re getting paid to watch it. But whatever you do, don’t get caught in the middle.”

  “Anyone so incompetent as to furnish breaking swords ought to be fired on a moment’s notice!” Mamie raged. “A second’s inattention, and one of us might have been skewered!”

  “Not as far up as those swords flew,” Merlo retorted. “I know you’re high and mighty, Mamie, but you’re not that lofty.”

  “No, nor as high as your opinion of yourself! Where did you learn your blacksmithing—the Hammerhand Toy Company?”

  “Thought that was where you got your wardrobe. Sorry, Grudy—I was talking about her street clothes.”

  “Whereas you would never be caught dead in anything but corduroy and denim! Which is exactly what you’re going to be, if you’re too close during that fight scene some night!”

&nb
sp; “Good point. What were you hanging around for, anyway—hoping to see some blood?”

  “The only blood I long for is yours! Oh, it’s all well and good for you—you’re over there by your board, thirty meters away from all this! If anybody is hit by flying metal, it’s not going to be you!”

  “Yes, but it might be someone in the audience.” Barry finally stepped in, looking rather severe. “I’m afraid the period of experimentation is over, Merlo. We must have swords that won’t break.”

  Merlo sighed, deflated. “Yeah, I know. Ramou and I will run back to the ship and make new ones out of the safety formula. Sorry, Barry—but they should have worked, damn it!”

  “Two hours in customs, each way?” Horace stepped up. “And they close down at midnight; it’s thirteen o’clock now. Even if they rush you through, you will have to sleep on the ship, and will barely be on time for rehearsal tomorrow morning.”

  “Uh, boss?” I said.

  “Not now, Ramou,” Merlo said, and turned to Horace.

  “I brought ’em with me.”

  Merlo looked up, startled. “You went ahead and made ’em after I told you not to?”

  “Well, yeah.” I shrugged. “I mean, you told me to be ready for anything.”

  He just gave me a very long look before he said, “Yeah, I guess I did. Thanks, Ramou.”

  But Chovy was holding Macbeth’s sword tip and hilt, gazing at the break with a very thoughtful look. “You didn’t buy them with these drips of welding wire on the flat surfaces, did you?”

  “Huh?” Merlo looked up, startled. “Well, no, I didn’t. I used a spot welder to decorate ’em.”

  “That’s your problem, then. The welding ruined the temper—made the metal crystallize just enough.”

  Merlo stared. “How the hell would you know?”

  “I started out in maintenance.” Chovy flashed him a grin. “Welding’s one of the things I did. Made that mistake back in school—trying to weld an impact plate back together. It split on the first strike, and the teacher had to explain the hard facts to me.”

  Merlo just stared at him. Then he turned to me. “Anything else your encyclopedic friend over here can tell us about how to fix our problems?”

  “You know how to get Larry to finish memorizing his lines by tomorrow?” I asked Chovy.

  A slow grin spread over his face. “Happen I do, mate— but I don’t think it’s legal, even here.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that, too,” I admitted, “but Barry wouldn’t let me. How about running me back to the hotel, so I can pick up the swords?”

  Later, as we waited in the dawn light for Chovy and his buddies to bring up the cabs, Horace sighed. “Oh, well— there’s an old tradition in the theater, Ramou, that if you have a bad dress rehearsal, you’ll have a good opening night.”

  “Really?” I asked, relieved. “Then our first performance ought to be a real work of art.”

  17

  I woke up as I was snapping bolt-upright in bed, with the thought chilling through me that tonight was opening—and we weren’t anywhere near ready. “Oh, well, bad dress, good performance,” I growled to myself as I rolled out of bed and pulled on my trousers. Quietly, so as not to wake Marty. It reminded me of Horace’s tiptoeing around, when I’d been a guest on his couch; I wondered if he was awake yet. Probably, even though the poor old guy needed his sleep more than I did. I’d noticed, though, that he usually couldn’t sleep past six; they say age does that to you.

  Today was an exception, of course, because we’d stayed up all night in the gym; the coach had to have it back for classes at eight A.M.—so we had rehearsed until six, running everything except the battle scenes again and again. Eyelids grew heavy and people grew glum; movements became slower and slower, and the sword fights deteriorated into slow-motion pantomimes. By the time Barry told us we could quit, it was all we could do to drag ourselves back into the cabs.

  The alarm chimed—high noon. I hit its “off” button and told it, “You’re a little late.” But at least I wasn’t—six hours’ sleep—Barry had insisted—and I was ready to meet Charlie Publican for one more try at getting our homemade prompting machine ready. I felt logy and gritty, but I could function. I grabbed my shirt and headed for the door.

  “It’s no use, Charlie.” I sighed half an hour later, in the improvised electronics shop he’d set up on top of the table in his room. If the hotel ever found out about it, they’d probably raise hell—but they wouldn’t find out; Charlie had put up a mar-proof board, and all our instruments stood on that. The board folded into suitcase size; I had a notion Charlie was used to doing clandestine work—probably in cheap hotels, or a faculty office.

  “Never give up hope, lad,” Charlie consoled me. “We have it broadcasting the lines that we feed in from the ROM cube; it only needs to do it reliably.”

  “Yeah, but if the actors can’t depend on it, it’s worse than useless,” I pointed out.

  “Pity.” Charlie sighed. “Another twenty-four hours, and we might have it debugged and on line—but we don’t have twenty-four.”

  “No, we’ve got about two, till we have to show up for rehearsal. Good thing Marty and the girls memorized their lines as soon as they were assigned.”

  “Yes, and that the old-pro contingent had theirs memorized from previous productions,” Charlie agreed. “That leaves only Larry.” ‘

  “I wish it did,” I sighed, “but he’s still with us.”

  “Don’t fret, lad—I told him last night that the prompter might not be ready on time. Presumably, he was up half the night cramming.”

  I frowned at him. “You talk like it was an exam.”

  “ ‘As if it were,’ Ramou, not ‘like it was.’ And yes, it is an examination—of the worst sort: in front of an audience.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” I admitted. “If we ever get this thing working, Charlie, you ought to patent it.”

  “You, lad—it’s as much your work as mine, and more, since you came up with the original idea. I don’t need the money, and I’m not about to go back to Terra to collect it in any case.”

  That reminded me of the bridges we had burned behind us. “I don’t think any of us will, Charlie—unless we can be sure Rudders would call off his dogs. No point in going back to an arrest. Come on, time to go.”

  “Then we’d best tidy up,” Charlie said. “Wouldn’t want to startle the chambermaid, now would we?”

  Five minutes later, the prompter was stowed in a suitcase along with the work-top and the tools, the table top was pristine and unmarked—and Charlie and I were going out the door and heading for the theater. Excuse me—for the lobby.

  I was back at the old stand, administering coffee and doughnuts to hung over actors—only this time they were hung over with exhaustion, not booze. Except Ogden, that is. Susanne was giving him her best glare, but it bounced right off the alcoholic miasma that surrounded him. She couldn’t figure out where he was getting it.

  I could, though—the same place I’d gotten the coffee and doughnuts. I decided I’d have to ask Chovy how much Ogden was paying him, then see if I couldn’t pay more to have our friendly local declare that his sources had suddenly and literally dried up.

  Barry came into the hotel lobby last of all; I think he’d had to shoo Mamie and Larry out of their respective rooms. He accepted a cup of coffee and sat down, carefully. “All right, friends,” he said. “We will be in the gymnasium at three o’clock; the coach feels that he absolutely cannot cancel classes to allow us to rehearse.”

  There were rumbles of anger throughout, but none with much conviction; we were all too tired.

  “The gym isn’t really necessary for this morning, though,” Barry went on. “I’m satisfied that we all know our blocking and can cover for whatever little slips we make. However, I’m not quite so sanguine about the lines; we all seem to have them fairly well, but ‘fairly well’ isn’t enough, in front of an audience. Accordingly, we will spend the time in a line ru
n. Fire them off as quickly as you can, please, and don’t try for interpretation or characterization; we—”

  “We know what a line run is, Barry,” Mamie groaned.

  Anger sparked in Barry’s eye, and I realized he was running on fumes, too—but all he said was, “A matter of phasing us in to the morning’s work, my dear. I merely wished to recapitulate.”

  “Not in public!” Mamie snapped.

  We all looked up at her, startled.

  “Is it so odd that I would attempt a witticism?” she demanded, then held up a hand to forestall Marty. “I know, I know—some can tell them, and some cannot.”

  “And some can’t hear them.” Marty grinned. “Which is all of us, right now. Sorry, Ms. Lulala. I’m too tired to laugh.”

  “As long as you can remember your lines.” She sighed. “Very well, Barry. If we finish this two-hour play in fifty-five minutes, can we have the second hour for sleep?”

  “An excellent idea.” Barry nodded. “Grudy, would you lead?”

  “Whenshallwethreemeetagain,” Grudy shot out, and we were off running into the wildest, rattling spin-through of MacScottish that Shakespeare ever dreamed of.

  MacDuff swung up, Macbeth swung down, and we all held our breaths. The two swords cracked together, then rebounded off one another, ringing like bells; the actors had to swing around with their blades to keep them under control. “Very good, Merlo,” Winston said, looking a little dazed.

  “Yes, indeed,” Barry agreed, “though the elasticity will take some getting used to. Still, it should prove a delight. I can begin to conceive all manner of effects it might produce.”

  “Please!” Mamie begged. “Not in this production!”

  “No, no, certainly not, Mamie,” Barry said quickly. “Not when we’re about to open. But don’t you think the swords have possibilities, Winston?”

  “Oh, undoubtedly—and without question, a superior formula for a stage sword. Certainly a better tone than the iron ones, and I don’t doubt they’ll hold up.”