The Starcrossed

by Ben Bova

  “That’s it,” he whispered to himself. “That’ll do it! But it’s got to be done in secret.” He squeezed his eyes shut and locked the secret deep within his convoluted brain.

  “You looking for me?”

  Fnger whirled, startled, and saw Brenda Impanema standing at the hatch that led inside to the bridge. She was out of costume now, wearing a comfortable kaftan that billowed in the breeze against her lean figure.

  “I got a phone message from the computer that said you wanted to see me,” Brenda said.

  Gathering himself together, Finger grumbled, “That was last night”

  “Gabriel’s two goons wouldn’t let me out of the bar until you two had finished your business talk,” she said. “By the time I got to my stateroom and saw the message, I figured you were asleep… or at least in bed.”

  From someone else, Finger would have taken that for insolence. But from Brenda—he smiled.

  “You were right. Smart girl.” Then he looked sharply at her. She seemed weary, red eyed. “You didn’t sleep good?”

  “Not very.”

  “Who were you with?”

  “Nobody,” she said.

  Finger considered the pros and cons for a moment. His ultimate, secret new idea glowed within him like a warming beacon. “Gabriel and I came to an agreement last night. We’re going to do the show up in Canada. Les will check on the available studios up there. The talent office will start looking for a suitable male lead this morning.”

  “What about the female lead?”

  “Rita Yearling.”

  Brenda’s mouth went tight.

  “Nobody’s going to find out about her previous life. That’s why I’ve got a publicity department, to keep things quiet.”

  “Sure,” Brenda said.

  “So you don’t like her,” Finger said. “That’s too bad.”

  Brenda looked away from him and let the salt wind blow at her hair. “No problem for me. I’m not going to have to work with her.”

  Taking a step closer to her, Finger said, “I still want you to go to Canada and keep an eye on things for me.”

  “You mean service Ron Gabriel.”

  “No. He’s seen Rita and he’s gone crazy over her. She’ll keep him busy enough.”

  “You don’t know Ron.” Still looking away from Finger, she said, “I don’t want to go.”

  “You’re going!”

  “I don’t want to!”

  “You’ll do what I tell you. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I wouldn’t send you up there if Gabriel was going to make things tough for you. You know that.”

  “Like hell.”

  She still wouldn’t look at him. Feeling hurt, Finger said. “It’s for the good of the show. There’ll be a promotion in it for you.”

  “Wonderful,” Brenda said. “But I’d rather jump over the rail.

  He could feel his face getting red with anger. “So jump already!” he snapped and stamped off to the hatch.

  8: THE TEAM

  It was spring in Southern California. The rains had finally stopped and for a few weeks everything was green and flowering. As long as it was domed over or otherwise protected from the smog.

  Bill Oxnard’s Holovision Laboratory was perched high enough on a Malibu hillside to be out of the usual smog banks, although when there was inversion the tinted clouds crept up and engulfed even the highest of the hills. But at the moment it was a beautiful spring day. Oxnard could lean back in Us desk chair and see the surfers ‘way down on the beach, in their colorful anticorrosion suits and motorized surfboards. In a few weeks—or perhaps days—he’d see the gardeners painting the lawns green and starting to worry about brush fires again. But for the moment, everything was beautiful.

  His phone buzzed. He clicked it on and his secretary’s grandmotherly face appeared on the screen.

  “Ms. Impanema’s here,” she said.

  Oxnard couldn’t keep himself from grinning. “Send her right in.”

  Maybe she’s the reason why I feel… he tried to identify exactly what it was that he did feel, and could only come up with a lame… happy.

  Brenda strode into his office: tall, leggy, brightly dressed in a flowered slit-skirt sari that was becoming the hit of the new Oriental decorative style. Oxnard himself still wore his regular business clothes: an engineer’s zipsuit of plain orange.

  “Hope I’m not late,” she said, smiling at him.

  Oxnard came around the desk and took her hand. “No. Right on the tick. Here, have a seat. How’s everything in Toronto? Have you eaten? Want some coffee or something?”

  She took the chair and let the heavy-looking handbag she was carrying clunk to the floor. “A Bloody Mary, if you can produce one. I haven’t had any breakfast. The damned airline didn’t serve anything again. It’s getting to be a regular scrooging with them.”

  Leaning over his desk to get at the phone, Oxnard called, “May… can you dig up two Bloody Marys and some breakfast?”

  His secretary’s face showed that she clearly disapproved of drinking on company time. But after all, it was his company. She nodded and switched off.

  “So what’s happening in Toronto?” Oxnard asked as he went back around the desk and sat down. For some reason he felt that he needed the desk between them.

  “Everything’s in a whirl,” Brenda replied. “Let’s see… when’s the last time we talked?”

  “A week after you first went up there. Ron hadn’t gone yet; he was still here.”

  She nodded. “Right… that was the flight where they didn’t serve any dinner. ‘Sorry to inconvenience you,’ she whined nasally, ‘but the food service on this flight has been rendered inoperative due to a malfunctioning of the ground-based portion of our logistical system.’ Fancy way of saying they didn’t stash any food aboard the plane.”

  They chatted easily for a while. May brought in a pair of drinks in plastic cups and a tray of real eggs and imitation bacon from the cafeteria. Brenda wolfed down everything hungrily. Oxnard answered a couple of routine phone calls while she ate, then told his secretary to hold all calls and visits.

  “So what’s happening in Toronto?” he asked again as she finished the last crumbs of her English muffin.

  “Everything,” Brenda said between dabs at her lips with a paper napkin. “It’s wild.”

  “Ron’s there? The scripts are being written?”

  “Well…” she cocked her head slightly to one side, as if waiting for the right words to come out of the air. “He’s there… and there’s a lot of writing being done. The production team is starting to put the sets together…”

  “But?”

  Brenda’s smile turned a little desperate. “Wasn’t it you who told me about Murphy’s Law?”

  He grinned. “If anything can go wrong with an experiment, it will.”

  “Right. Well, that’s what’s happening in Toronto.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “‘It’s worse than that. The show might never get on the air. All sorts of troubles have hit us.”

  Oxnard shook his head sympathetically. “Everything’s going smoothly on this end. The new transmitters and cameras have tested out fine. We’ll be ready to ship them up to Toronto right on schedule. And I’ve got some new ideas, too, about… well…” Oxnard let his voice trail off. She’s got enough problems without listening to my untested brainstorms.

  “Will you be coming up to Toronto with the equipment?” Brenda asked.

  “No need to,” said Oxnard. “But I thought…”

  “Oh, we’ll send a couple of technicians along. I wouldn’t. dump the equipment on you without somebody to show your crew how to work it…”

  “I know,” she said. “But I thought you would come up yourself.”

  For some reason, Oxnard’s insides went fluttery.

  “I’d like to,” he said quickly. “But I can’t leave the lab here… I’m not just an executive, you know. I work he
re; the rest of the staff depends on me.”

  Brenda nodded and looked distressed. “Bill… I wouldn’t want you to hurt your own company, of course. But we need you in Toronto. Ron needs you. He’s being driven crazy up there, trying to whip the scripts into shape and handle the technical details of building the sets and working out the special effects and a million other things. I’ve tried to help him all I can, but you’re the one he needs. You’ve got the scientific know-how. Nobody else up there knows anything…”

  He refused, of course. He explained to her, very carefully, how his laboratory operated and how much he was needed for day-by-day, hour-by-hour decisions. He took her down to the labs and shop, showed her what a small, tightly integrated group he had. He explained to her over and over that these men and women didn’t work for him, they worked with him. And he worked with them. Every day; ten, twelve hours per day.

  He explained it all morning. He explained it over lunch. He took the afternoon off and drove her down the coast so that they could be alone and away from phones and business conferences while he explained it thoroughly. He explained it over dinner at a candlelit table looking out at the surf, not far from La Jolla.

  He wanted to explain it to her in bed, in one of those plush La Jolla hotels, but at the last minute he lost his nerve. Brenda nodded and smiled and accepted everything he said without argument. But she kept repeating that Ron Gabriel, and the whole show, was in dire trouble and needed him. Now. In Toronto. And he kept getting the unspoken message from her that she needed him. Not that she promised anything or even hinted at it. But Oxnard realized that if he helped the show, helped Gabriel and Finger and Montpelier, he would be helping her.

  And Bill Oxnard found that more than anything else in the world, he wanted to help her.

  So he drove her back to the airport and agreed that he would join her in Toronto.

  “Only for the weekend,” he said. “I really can’t stay away from the lab during regular working days.”

  “I know,” she answered, as they hurried down the terminal corridor toward her flight’s loading gate.

  They made it to the gate with half a minute to spare. Brenda turned to him, breathless from running, while the gate computer examined her ticket and the overhead sensors scanned them both for everything from contraband lemons to plastic explosives.

  “I really appreciate it, Bill. I’ll set you up with a hotel room and try to make your weekend comfortable. Thanks for a fun day!”

  He stood there tonguetied, trying to think of an appropriate answer: something witty, maybe poetic.

  The computer’s scratchy voice upstaged him: “Final boarding for Flight 68. Final boarding.”

  She reached up on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Oxnard stood there grinning like a schoolboy as she scampered through the doorway of the access tunnel that led to the plane.

  Two lights later, on Friday, he followed her.

  The studio was impressive.

  It was huge, about the size of a modern jetliner hangar, Oxnard realized. But it looked even bigger because it was almost completely empty. The bare skeleton of its wall bracings and rows of rafter-mounted old-fashioned spotlights looked down on a bare wooden floor.

  “You won’t need all those lights,” Oxnard said to his guide. “With laser holography, you can…”

  “We know all about it,” said Gregory Earnest. He was small and wiry, with thickly curled dark hair and beard that hid most of his face, so that Oxnard couldn’t see that he looked like one of Canada’s most numerous residents—a weasel. “We’re just as modern and up-to-date as you Yanks, you know.”

  Oxnard completely missed the edge to Earnest’s voice. They continued their tour of Badger Studios, with Earnest proudly showing off his company’s shops, equipment and personnel—most of them idle.

  They ended in the model shop, where a half dozen intense young men and women were putting together a fourmeter-long plastic model. It lay along a table that was too short for it, overlapping both ends. To Oxnard it looked something like a beached whale in an advanced stage of decomposition.

  “The latest and most modern modeling techniques,” Earnest told Oxnard. “Straight from Korea. No secondrate 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 Ad
venturer.”

  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.