The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  “Welcome to Sollywood, Garrett,” he began. “Hear you’re the great man in your field. Well, we’ll get on. I’m the great man in mine, and we’ll understand each other. And this is going to be beyond any doubt the greatest epic ever beamed even by Metropolis. Even as a personally supervised Breakstone Production. Devarupa will be proud of us from wherever he’s watching. And he’ll be trusting us, trusting me and trusting you to tell the truth about his life and bring his supernal message afresh to all mankind as only the greatness of the greatest art form of the centuries can bring it!”

  “Yes, sir,” said Gan Garrett. There seemed to be little else to say.

  Sacheverell Breakstone needed no prompting. “Yes, my boy,” he went on, “truth is what we want from you. Truth and accuracy, but especially truth. Don’t spend too much worrying on niggling little details. Supposing—mind you, I’m just thinking aloud—but supposing we put a woman in the picture. Now you and I know that there wasn’t any woman in Devarupa’s life. That’s accuracy. But he loved all humanity, didn’t he? And aren’t women more than half of humanity? So if we show him say loving a woman—you understand this is just groping with words—isn’t that truth in the deeper sense? You understand?”

  “Yes, sir. I am here to give the cachet of academic authority to all the non-academic changes you wish to ring on the story of Devarupa.”

  Breakstone hesitated, then burst out into a heavy laugh. “Good man. You do understand me. No pretense about you. We’ll get on, we will. You can understand the creative mind. Because that’s what I am, mind you. All this”—his broad gesture included every bit of Metropolis—“is my creation. And the creative mind creates its own truth which is higher than facts. All my life I’ve wanted to do a life of Devarupa—with all due reverence, you understand, but still showing he was a real man. A man of and for men. And I’m the man to do. They don’t call me the Little Hitler of Sollywood for nothing.”

  Garrett smiled to himself. No one with any knowledge of twentieth-century history could well consider a “Hitler” the ideal interpreter of that saint among men, the great Devarupa. But the evil that conquerors do may often be interred with their bones; he remembered from literary study how Caesar and Napoleon had become just such metaphorical figures of power, with no allusion to their manifold infamies.

  “Well,” Breakstone announced, “it’s been wonderful having this talk with you, Garner.”

  “Garrett.”

  “I said Garrett. It’s been a pleasure to hear your ideas on Devarupa, and that’s a real suggestion of yours about the woman. You’re no hidebound academician, I can see that. Now if you’ll take the left-hand walk for about two hundred meters, you’ll find Uranov’s office. He’s working on the script today—his third day, in fact. He’s lasting well. You talk it over with him. And enjoy yourself in Sollywood.”

  Garrett let the swizard jangle as he shook hands with his boss. Breakstone glanced at it. “Hm-m-m. Nice thing. Dinosaur of some kind, eh? Odd material; what’s it made of?”

  “Lovestonite.”

  “Lovestonite? Well, well. What next? The motto of Metropolis, by the way; remember that. What next? You understand? Always something new. Come see me any time you’re in trouble, but you won’t need to. We understand each other. Good luck.” Even as Garrett left, the Little Hitler of Sollywood had pulled several switches and begun dictating a letter to the Department of Allocation, giving instructions to a set designer, and receiving from his Calcutta exhibitor.

  The few people that Garrett passed on his way down the writers’ corridor looked fretful and hagridden—almost like men from the Twentieth Century. The responsibility of turning out the major entertainment device of the world weighed heavily upon them. For though Breakstone’s description of the “greatest art form of the centuries” might have been exaggerated, the solid picture was certainly the most widespread and important. With its own powerful impact, plus the freedom of a World State and the world-wide spread of Basic English, it had attained an influence that even the old two-dimensional pictures had never known.

  Garrett heard a rich, deep voice behind the door as he knocked. There was a pause, and he held up his plaque for scrutiny through a one-way glass. The door dilated, and as he entered the room’s occupant turned the switch on his dictotyper which altered it from recording to turning out a typed script.

  “So!” said Hesekth Uranov. “You’re S.B.’s newest find. You’re the bright boy that’s to ride herd on me, huh?”

  Uranov represented the new interbred type that was rising to dominance in the world. It was rare by now, of course, to see any sample of such a pure racial type as the sheer Irishness of the black-haired, blue-eyed girl in the liner—doubtless a fortuitous throwback—but it was almost equally rare to see such a successful fusion as Hesketh Uranov. His skin was a golden brown, closest perhaps to the Polynesian, but not exactly that of any pure racial type. His aquiline nose, his thick lips, his slightly slanted eyes seemed not so much a heterogeneous collection of racial fragments as the perfectly right lineaments of a new race.

  Garrett was still trying to find the friendly response to this unfriendly greeting when Uranov said, “You drink? I thought not. Historian— However.” He upended the bottle. “Stay in Sollywood long enough and you’ll learn worse than this, my boy. What’re you sticking your hand out for? Can’t wait to get your researcher’s fingers on my script?”

  “All I want,” said Garrett patiently, “is that bottle.” He took it.

  After that swig, Uranov looked at him with new respect. “Maybe you’re all right. But I doubt it. S.B. sent you.”

  “Look,” said Gan Garrett. “I’ve seen S.B. for only five minutes. I’ve heard about you as Metropolis’ ace writer for five years. So you have—sixty times twenty-four times three hundred and sixty-five—you have roughly half a million times as much cause to dislike him as I have. But I’ll still enter the race with you.”

  “O.K.,” said Uranov. “Don’t mind if I bark. I just don’t like anybody much these days, which is, of course, the perfect mood in which to approach a script on Devarupa.”

  “What’re you doing to that script?” Garrett sat down, near the bottle. “S.B. babbled something about a woman.”

  Uranov groaned. “I know. These epics have the highest erotic value of any form of entertainment yet created. You probably know the old varieties of theater. Imagine how a burlesque audience would have reacted if its queen were ten times life size and visible in detail from the top of the gallery. Imagine how the flat film fan would have felt if his glamour girls had had three dimensions and the true color of flesh. So we musn’t waste these possibilities and there’s got to be a woman. I’m trying to tone her down; just a loyal disciple with a sort of hopeless spiritual love. But S.B.’s got his eye on Astra Ardless for it; and have you ever thought of what it’ll be like to tone that last year’s space-warmer down?” He took another drink and this time handed over the bottle unasked.

  “Garrett,” he said, “you’re not going to believe this. But in some twisted, crazy, and very damned beautiful way I’m proud of this assignment. Sure, I know, I’m the guy that was going to write for posterity and here I am making a fortune under a dome in Sollywood and drinking my liver out of existence. But some things are still important to me, and Devarupa’s one of them. People take him for granted now. They take for granted the whole state of peace that he created. They’re forgetting that peace itself is the greatest of all battles. What I want to do—”

  The dictotyper pinged. Uranov removed the finished copy, looked at it, and crumpled it up with a curse. Then he smoothed it out again and laid it on his desk. “It might do. I can’t write this right; but I’m going to die trying. What I want to stress is his early years. Even before that. I want to show the false peaces in the War of the Twentieth Century, the T9 to ’39 gap, for instance. The way the smug sat back and said ‘Swell, it’s peace, now there’s nothing to worry about.’ And you stop worrying and you cease to belong
to mankind. Then I want to take some of Devarupa’s own utterances—the Bombay Document, for example—and show the real fighting strength that’s in them. I’ve got to make these dopes see that pacifism isn’t passivism—while S.B.,” he added despondently, “bewitches the whole thing up with our darling Astra.”

  Garrett drank. “I’m with you,” he said simply.

  “What I’d even like,” Uranov went on heatedly, “is to work in a little propaganda at the end on this Martian business—show how a true living peace can function. You know, a sort of ‘Join the space crews and see another world’ whoozit. And, God, there is something you can get really excited about. To think of those—how many is it, near thirty now?—who’ve made the landing, accomplished man’s impossible dream, and died there, on a bitterer one-way trip than any criminal ever made, all because this peaceful world—”

  He broke off as Garrett was reaching for the bottle again. “Sorry. I talk too much. And in another minute you’ll be asking me why I don’t sign up myself if I feel so strongly. For the matter of that, why don’t I? Nice swizard you’re wearing there.”

  “Very. It’s a Kubi— Hey! Did you say swizard? Then you know her?”

  “Know who?”

  “The girl who used to call them swizards when she was little. Black hair. Blue eyes. Funny little nose that tilts up. You know her?”

  Uranov frowned. “I know her,” he said abstractedly. “Works here in public relations. Fix you up any time, though how you— But what’s your swizard made of? Lovestonite?”

  “Yes.”

  “Funny use for it. Why, you don’t maybe—” He killed the bottle. “If we’re going to get together on this, comrade, you know what we need? A drink. Come on. We’re going to paint Sollywood a bright magenta and end up seeing pink swizards. And maybe before the evening’s over, we’ll even have a talk about lovestonite.”

  “I should just warn you,” said Gan Garrett. “Don’t mind if a dagger hits you. It’ll be meant for me.”

  But the next attack was not made with a dagger. It took place hours later when they were leaving the Selene, that resplendent night spot with its exact replica of its famous namesake in Luna City, even down to the longest bar in the universe—a safe enough statement so long as no spaceship had yet managed to return from another planet.

  “In a way, you can’t blame S.B.,” Uranov was saying. This surprising tolerance was the only noticeable effect on him of the evening’s liquor. “He’s a frustrated creator. He’d flopped as a writer and as a musician before he discovered his executive talents. He hasn’t a spark of the creative ability that I used to have or that a man like Mig Valentinez has; but he’s got all the urge. And he takes it out in shoving around the ones who can create and then crying, ‘Behold my creation!’ In a way, it’s sad rather than—”

  The man appeared out of nowhere. He wore a heavy cloak and was only a black blob in the bright night. The flash came from the core of the blackness of his cloak, and there was no noise with it.

  Gan Garrett’s eyes blinked as he jumped, his popgun appearing automatically in his hand, and when they opened, the man was gone. Ten minutes of joint search failed to disclose him, though his cloak lay abandoned around the next corner.

  “Did you see what he had in his hand?” Uranov asked. “It looked like a prop pistol from an historical picture. But it didn’t—” He stopped by the wall where the attack had happened, stared, and whistled.

  Garrett looked at the charred xyloid.

  “Could it—” Uranov groped. “It can’t be that. . . that somebody really has found the power of disintegrator guns, like in that world-of-the-future epic I turned out last year?”

  Garrett rubbed his cheek. “I felt something. I didn’t dodge quite enough to—”

  “Look, my boy.” Uranov was serious. “I thought it was a gag when you babbled about daggers. I don’t know what this lad was playing, but it wasn’t nice games. You’re the best drinking companion I’ve found since Schwanberg quit epics to make a hopeless try for Mars; but if I’m to see much more of you, I want to know who’s trying to kill you and why.”

  “So do I,” Garrett grunted. “But first”—he played with the swizard—“what do you know about lovestonite?”

  “Just enough to worry a little. I know that there’s an irrational amount of lovestonite processing going on, and I know Stag Hartle’s mixed up in it which means no good. And I know that the . . . that some people I know are concerned about it.”

  “Can you tell me any more? Or can you put me in touch with anyone who can?”

  “A, no. B, yes. This is, of course, all part of your technical-historical research?” Garrett grinned. “I guess research workers don’t go armed, do they? Nor have new lethal weapons tried out on them. Hardly much use to keep up the masquerade for you.”

  “W.B.I.?”

  “Check.”

  “Come on home with me,” Uranov decided suddenly. “God knows what kind of booby trap they may have rigged up where you’re staying. You can explain it all right at the studio—we wanted to live together for closer collaboration on the epic. And tomorrow we’ll see what we can do about more information. You know Mig Valentinez?”

  “I know his work.” Garrett sounded a little awed. “He’s marvelous.”

  “I haven’t seen him for a couple of months, but I know he was playing around with lovestonite. We can run down there and— But first, comrade, how about a nightcap?”

  Garrett woke from a confused dream of a naked Irish girl who was riding tandem on a swizard with a man with a melancholy and wistful smile. The swizard was of the fire-breathing variety, and its breath was searing hot on Garrett’s cheek. The cheek still burned when he was wide awake and looking up at the multiracial face of Hesketh Uranov.

  “Sleep all right? No hangover?”

  “None. But I’ve got the damnedest sensation here in my cheek—right where whatever it was missed me. Do you suppose it was an atomic weapon, and this is like a radium burn?”

  Uranov bent over and stared at the cheek. When he rose he was half-laughing, half-worried. “I don’t know what we’re getting into,” he said. “I should stick to my dictotyper and leave melodrama and lovestonite to the W.B.I. or to the . . . those friends I mentioned. Because this is nuts. Purely nuts.”

  “Yes? What goes?”

  “What you received from the new lethal weapon, comrade, is nothing more nor less than a very nasty patch of sunburn.”

  II.

  Uranov paused on their way to the research lab. “Want to watch ’em shooting? That’s usually a thrill to the new visitor.”

  Garrett rubbed his salved but still burning cheek. “I’ve got thrills enough.”

  “Just for a minute. Then you can talk more plausibly when I tell S.B. I’ve just been showing you around.”

  A red light glowed in front of one of the studios. Their plaques admitted them to the soundproof observers’ gallery. “This is an interior, of course,” Uranov explained. “Exteriors are all shot outside under dome, some of them here at the main plant, most of them on the various locations. You probably saw them from the ship?”

  Garrett nodded.

  “California’s amazing enough naturally, and after our landscapers went to work— It’s really extraordinary. We can shoot any possible aspect of the world’s surface, and we have a condensed replica of every city of any importance, from Novosibirsk to Luna City. Southern California is the world in miniature; destroy the rest of civilization, and an archaeologist could re-create it all from our locations.” There was a certain possessive pride in his voice, despite his avowed contempt for Sollywood.

  “All the shooting is under dome?”

  Uranov nodded. “The cameramen say sunlight through dome is better than direct, and there are never any delays because of weather. The sky clouds over, and your artificial light comes on automatically at exactly the right strength.”

  Garrett looked down at the shooting interior. To judge from sets and cost
umes, it was a scene from a glamorous drawing-room comedy—probably the standard plot about the beautiful hostess on the lunar rocket who marries the son of the owner and longs fretfully for her exciting old life until she finds her true self in domesticity. There were only two actors in the scene. The man he recognized as that charmingly suave Eurasian Hartley Liu, but the woman— He glanced at Uranov questioningly.

  “Astra Ardless,” said Uranov. “Looks older, doesn’t she? But wait till you see what those cameras make of her.”

  She did look older than Garrett had ever seen her on the beam. But that was not surprising; he had fallen adolescently in love with her when she first became famous, and that was almost fifteen years ago. She looked older and not nearly so glamorous, and yet in a strange way more beautiful. There was a quality of resigned sadness about her.

  To fans all over the globe, only actors mattered. The heart that pounded at the thought of Astra Ardless or Hartley Liu would never have heard of a writer such as Uranov or even a producer-director such as S.B. And even Garrett, more intelligently perceptive than the average fan, had never realized how outnumbered the actors were on the set.

  Two of them, and sixteen cameramen, to say nothing of the assistant technicians and prop men and the sound engineers dimly glimpsed in their niches in the opposite wall. The synchronized cameras all shot the scene at once from their sixteen different angles. Later those sixteen beams would be cast from sixteen similarly placed projectors onto a curtain of Cassellite, that strange, translucent, solid-seeming gas which had made the epics possible.

  A slighdy false inflection on the part of Astra Ardless’ speaking voice, and perhaps one critic in Kamchatka or Keokuk might notice it and observe that Miss Ardless was slipping. One slightly false adjustment on the part of a single technician, and the entire scene would be so much junk.