The Starcrossed

by Ben Bova

  Gabriel looked as if he was ready to lead a bayonet attack. “Canada! I can’t go to Canada! What in hell is there that you don’t have more of here? And better?”

  Sheldon sank back in his chair. It was going to be just as rough as he had feared. Only the friendly stare of Uncle Murray’s steady blue eye gave him the courage to go on.

  Two hours later, Sheldon was still in his desk chair. His jacket was crumpled on the floor and had Gabriel’s bootprints all over it. His suppshirt was soaked with sweat. Morgan hadn’t moved at all during that time, nor hardly spoken; he still looked calm, relaxed, almost asleep.

  But the walls were still ringing with Gabriel’s rhetoric. Two chairs were overturned. Both couches had been kicked out of shape. One of the holographic pictures was sputtering badly, for reasons unknown. The Bay Bridge kept winking and shimmering… or maybe, thought Sheldon, it was merely cringing.

  “This is the dumbest asshole trick I’ve ever heard of!” Gabriel was screaming. “I don’t want to go to Canada! There’s nothing and nobody in Canada! All the good Canadian directors and actors are here, in California, for Chrissakes! We’ve got everything we need right here. Going to Canada is crazy! With a capital K!”

  He was heading for the phone again when Morgan lifted one hand a few centimeters off the armrest of his chair. “Ron,” he said quietly.

  Gabriel stopped in midstride.

  “Ron, the decision’s already been made. It’s a money decision and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Gabriel frowned furiously at his agent.

  “That’s the way it is,” Morgan said blandly.

  “Then I want out,” Gabriel said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Morgan countered.

  “I’m walking.”

  “You can’t do that!” Sheldon protested.

  “No? Watch me!”

  Gabriel started for the door. Halfway there, he stopped and turned back toward Sheldon. “Tell you what,” he said. His face still looked like something that would stagger Attila the Hun. “If I have to go to Canada, I’m going first class.”

  Sheldon let his breath out a little. “Oh, of course. Top hotels. All the best.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m not going to let this show get stuck out in the boondocks, with no pipeline back to the money and the decision makers.”

  “But I’ll be there with you,” Sheldon said.

  Gabriel made as if to spit. “I want personal representation from top management, right there on the set every goddamned day. I want one of Finger’s top assistants in Canada with us.”

  “Ohhh.” The clouds began to dissipate and Sheldon could see a Canadian sunrise. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I could get Les Montpelier… or Brenda Impanema…”

  Gabriel pointed an index finger at him, pistol-like. “You’ve got the idea.”

  Nodding, Sheldon said, “I’ll ask B.F. tonight, at the party…”

  “Party?”

  That was a mistake! Sheldon knew. Backtracking, “Oh, nothing spectacular. B.F.’s just giving one of his little soirйes… on the ship, you know… just a couple of hundred people…” His voice trailed off weakly.

  “Party, huh?” was all that Gabriel said.

  After he and Morgan left the office, Sheldon went to his private john and took a quick needle shower. Toweling himself off, he yelled through the open door to Murray:

  “Well, what do you think of our star writer and creator?”

  The computer hummed to itself for a few moments, then the screen lit up:

  SUCH A KVETCH!

  5: THE DECISION MAKERS

  Sheldon was dressing for the party. It had been a long, exhausting day. And it wasn’t over yet. Bernard Finger’s parties were always something of a cross between a longdistance marathon and being dropped out of an airplane.

  After Gabriel and his agent had left, Sheldon spent the rest of the morning recuperating, popping tranquilizers and watching Murray run down lists of Canadian production companies. There weren’t very many. Then the computer system started tracking down freelance Canadian directors, cameramen, electricians and other crew personnel. Distressingly, most of them lived in the States. Most of them, in fact, lived in one state: California, southern, Los Angeles County.

  At a discreet lunch with Montpelier, Sheldon dropped the barest hint that he would have Titanic money to shoot the show in Canada. Montpelier scratched at his beard for a moment and then asked:

  “What about Gabriel? What’s he think of the idea?”

  “Loves it,” exaggerated Sheldon.

  Montpelier’s eyebrows went up. “He’s willing to leave that sex palace he’s got in Sherman Oaks to go to the Frozen North?”

  “He wants the show to be a success,” Sheldon explained, crossing his ankles underneath the table. “When I explained that we’d be able to make our limited budget go much farther in Canada, he agreed. He was reluctant at first, I admit. But he’s got a huge emotional commitment to this show. I know how to lever him around.”

  With a shrug, Montpelier said, “Fine by me. If Gabriel won’t screw up the works…”

  “He, eh… he wants one favor from us.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not back breaking; don’t get worried.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “He wants Brenda up there with him.”

  Grinning, Montpelier asked, “Does she know about it?”

  “That Gabriel wants her?”

  “No. The Canada part.”

  “Not yet.”

  “So if she doesn’t go, Gabriel doesn’t go.”

  Feeling somewhat annoyed at Montpelier’s smirk, Sheldon replied, “Yes, I suppose that’s so.”

  After a long silent moment, Montpelier finally said, “Well, I guess that means Brenda’s going to Canada.” Sheldon let his breath out. It was going to work!

  “I mean,” Montpelier justified, “if its vital to the company’s interests, she’ll just have to go to Canada.”

  “Right.”

  “Her relationship with Gabriel is her own business.”

  “Right,” Sheldon said again.

  “We’re not responsible for her private life; after all. She’s an adult. It’s not like we’re forcing her into Gabriel’s clutches.”

  “Right.” It was an important word to know.

  Their lunch went on for several hours while they discussed serious matters over tasteful wines and a bit of anticaloric food. Sheldon tried to suppress the nagging memory of a recent magazine article about the carcinogenic properties of anticaloric foods. Muckraking journalism, of course. Who could work in an industry where more business was conducted in restaurants and bars than in offices, without the calorie-destroying active enzyme artificial foods? Besides, the news from the National Institutes of Health was that a cure for cancer was due within another few years. For sure, this time.

  By the time lunch was over, Sheldon was too exhausted to go back to the office. So he drove home for a short nap, before getting ready for the party. Gloria was out when he got home and he gratefully jumped into the unoccupied bed and was asleep in seconds.

  She woke him when she returned, but it didn’t matter. She was already beginning to look slightly fuzzy at the edges, becoming transparent to Sheldon’s eyes. Not that he could see through her, so much as the fact that now he could look past her. Beyond her swollen belly and sarcastic mouth he could see lovely, pristine Canada.

  She whined about not going to the party, of course. Sheldon just stared at her bloated body and said, “Now really!” Instead of starting one of her scenes, she cried and retreated to the already rumpled bed.

  Sheldon didn’t tell her about Canada. He wanted to be barricaded in his office, with Murray at his side, when he popped that surprise. On the phone he could handle almost anything.

  Now he stood at the costumer’s, being cleverly made over into his Party Personality. While the two makeup men we
re building up his new plastic face, the viewscreen in front of Sheldon’s chair played a long series of film clips showing his Personality in action. It was an old film star named Gary Cooper and it seemed to Sheldon that all he had to do was to say “Yep” and “Nope” at the appropriate times. He concentrated on remembering those lines while the makeup men altered his face.

  As the sun sank into the sea—sank into the smog bank hovering over the line of drilling platforms out there, actually—Sheldon drove toward the harbor, where the party was already in progress.

  Bernard Finger almost always gave his parties on shipboard. It wasn’t that he could cruise outside the limits of U.S. and/or California law enforcement. After all, the nation claimed territorial rights out to the limits of the continental shelf and there were a few California legislators who claimed the whole ocean out as far as Hawaii.

  It’s just that a cruise ship relaxes people, Sheldon realized as he drove up to the pier. You forget your landbound inhibitions once you pull away from the shore. And you can’t walk home.

  He parked his bubble-topped two seater in the lot on the pier and sprinted the fifty meters through smog to the air curtain that protected the main hatch of the ship. Out here, on the docks, the smog was neither perfumed nor tinted. It looked and smelled dirty.

  The ship was called the Adventurer, a name that Bernard Finger apparently thought apt. Titanic had bought it as a mammoth set for an ocean liner series they made a few years back. They had gotten it cheaply after the old Cunard Line had collapsed in economic ruin. For a while, Finger wanted to rename the ship Titanic, but a team of PR people had finally dissuaded him.

  Now Sheldon stepped through the curtain of blowing air that kept the shoreside smog out of the ship. He stood for a moment just inside the hatch, while the robot photographer—a stainless steel cylinder with optical lenses studding its knobby top—squeaked “Smile!” and clicked his picture.

  Sheldon smiled at the camera. Gary Cooper smiled back at him, from the elaborate mirrors behind the photographer. Dressed in buckskins, with a pearl-handled sixgun on his hip, lean, tanned, full of woodsy lore, Sheldon actually felt that he could conquer the West single handedly.

  John Wayne bumped into him from behind. “Well, move it, fella,” he snarled. “This here wagon train’s gotta get through!”

  Feeling a little sheepish and more than a little awkward in his platform boots, Sheldon made room for John Wayne. The cowboy was taller than Sheldon. “Wait ’til I get my hands on the costumers,” he muttered to himself. They had promised him that nobody would be taller than Gary Cooper.

  Maneuvering carefully up the stairway in his boots, Sheldon made his way up to the Main Lounge, It was decorated in authentic midcentury desperation: gummy-looking velvet couches and genuine formica cocktail tables. The windowless walls glittered with metal and imitation crystal.

  The party was already well underway. As he took the usual set of greenies from one live waiter and a tall drink from another to wash them down, Sheldon saw a sea of old movie stars: Welches, Hepbums, Gables, Monroes, Redfords, a pair of Siamese twins that looked like Newman and Woodward, Marx Brothers scuttling through the crowd, a few showoff Weismullers, one stunning Loren and the usual gaggle of Bogarts.

  No other Coopers. Good.

  Up on the stage, surrounded by Harlows and Wests, stood Bernard Finger. He was instantly recognizable because he wore practically no makeup at all. He looked like Cary Grant all the time and now he merely looked slightly more so. Sheldon didn’t have to look around to know that there were no other Cary Grants at the party.

  He drank and let the greenies put a pleasant buzz in his head. After a dance with a petite Debbie Reynolds, the ship’s whistle sounded and everybody rushed up to the main deck to watch them cast off.

  As the oil-slicked dock slid away and the ship throbbed with the power of its engines, everyone started back to the various bars sprinkled around the lower decks. Or to the staterooms.

  Sheldon turned from the glassed-in rail to go back to the Main Lounge, but a tall smoldering Lauren Bacall was slouching insolently in his path.

  She held a cigaret up in front of her face and asked casually, “Got a match?” Her voice was sultry enough to start a forest fire.

  Trying to keep his hands from trembling, Sheldon said, “Yep.” He rummaged through his buckskin outfit’s pockets and finally found a lighter. Bacall watched him bemusedly. He finally got it out and touched the spot that started the lighter glowing.

  “Good,” said Bacall. She slowly drew on the cigaret, then puffed smoke in Sheldon’s face. “Now stick it up your nose. And Canada too!”

  “Brenda?” Sheldon gasped. “Is that you?”

  She angled a hip, Bacall-like, and retorted, “It’s not Peter Lorre, Sheldon.”

  “How’d you know who I was? I mean.…”

  “Never mind,” she said; her voice became less sultry, more like Brenda Impanema’s normal throatiness. “What I want to know is what gives you the right to decide ‘The Starcrossed’ is going to Canada. And me with it.”

  “Oh,” Sheldon said. There didn’t seem to be any Cooper lines to cover this situation. “Les told you about it.”

  “No he didn’t,” Brenda-Bacall said. “Les is as big a snake as you are. Bigger. He kept his mouth shut.”

  Sheldon glanced around for a possible escape route. None. He and Brenda were alone on the sealed-in weather deck. The rest of the crowd had gone inside. Brenda stood between him and the nearest hatch leading to the party. If he tried to run for another hatch in these damned platform boots, he’d either fall flat on his face or she would catch him in a few long-legged strides. Either way it would be too humiliating to bear. So he stood there and tried to look brave and unshaken.

  “If you must know how I found out,” Brenda went on, “I asked Murray what you were up to.”

  “Murray told you?” Sheldon heard his voice go up an octave with shock. Uncle Murray was a fink!

  “Murray’s everybody’s friend. Knows all and tells all.”

  “But he’s not supposed to tell about private conversations! Only business matters!”

  “That’s all he told me,” Brenda said. “Your business conversation with Ron Gabriel.”

  Sheldon felt a wave of relief wash over him. Or maybe it was a swaying of the ship. At any rate, Murray could be trusted. At least one central fixture in the universe stayed in place.

  Lauren Bacall grinned at him and Brenda’s voice answered, “I called Lees secretary for a lunch appointment and she told me he’d already gone to lunch with you. When he got back, he was kinda smashed. As usual. I dropped into his office before his sober-up pills could grab hold of him. He leered at me and asked how I like cold winters. Which means he approves of your plans.”

  Sheldon shook his head in reluctant admiration. “You ought to be a detective.”

  “I ought to be a lot of things,” she said, “but I’m not a call girl. I’m not going to Canada.”

  “But I thought you liked Gabriel. “

  “Whatever’s between Ron and me is between Ron and me. I’m not going to become part of his harem just to suit you.”

  “It’s not me,” Sheldon protested. “It’s for Titanic.”

  “Nope,” Brenda stole Cooper’s line.

  “It’s for B.F.”

  She shook her head, but Sheldon thought he noticed the barest little hesitation in her action.

  “B.F. wants you to do it,” Sheldon pressed the slight opening.

  “B.F. doesn’t know anything about it yet,” Brenda said, “and when he does find out…”

  The roar of a powerful motor drowned out her words. Looking around, Sheldon saw that a small boat was racing alongside the ship, not more than twenty meters from the Adventurer. The cruise ship had cleared the line of off shore oil rigs and was out of the smog area. The sky above was clear and awash with moonlight. A few very bright stars twinkled here and there.

  “That damned fool’s going to get h
imself killed,” Sheldon said.

  The motorboat was edging closer to the Adventurer, churning up a white wake as it cleaved through the ocean swells.

  “He’s going to sideswipe us!” Brenda shouted. “Do something, Sheldon.”

  But there was nothing he could do. No emergency phone or fire alarm box in sight along this stretch of plastic-domed deck.

  The motorboat disappeared from their view, it was getting so close to the liner. Brenda and Sheldon pressed their noses against the plastic, but they’d have to be able to lean over the railing to see the motorboat now.

  They heard a thump.

  “Oh my god!” Brenda’s voice was strangely high and shrill.

  More bumps.

  “They must be breaking up against our hull,” Sheldon said. He still couldn’t think of anything to do about it.

  Then something hit against the plastic wall not five meters away from Sheldon’s face. He shrieked and leaped backwards.

  “Giant squid!” Sheldon shouted.

  It did have suction cups on it. But after that first wild flash of panic, he saw that it was a mechanical arm, not a tentacle.

  “It looks like a ladder,” Brenda said.

  His stomach churning, Sheldon said, “I think we’d better get back inside and tell somebody…”

  Brenda blocked his way and took hold of his buckskin sleeve. “No. Wait a minute…”

  As Sheldon watched, firmly clutched by Brenda, a man’s hand appeared on one of the rungs that extended from either side of the mechanical tentacle. A small man in a dark suit came into view. He was wearing a 1920s Fedora pulled down low over his forehead.

  “He’ll never get through the dome. It’s airtight,” Sheldon said.

  The man ran a hand along the outside of the transparent plastic, seemingly searching for something. Twice he made a sudden grab for his hat, which was flapping wildly in the twenty-knot breeze. His hand finally stopped below the line of the railing, so Sheldon couldn’t see what he was doing. But from the action of his shoulder, it looked as if he pushed hard against something. The section of the plastic dome in front of him popped open with a tiny sigh and slid backward. The wind suddenly swirled along the deck.