The Starcrossed

by Ben Bova

  “Oh God,” Earnest whined nasally. “It’s Ron Gabriel.”

  Gabriel skidded to a halt in front of the director. They were almost equal in height, much to Earnest’s surprise.

  “You’re Mitch Westerly,” Gabriel panted.

  “And you’re Ron Gabriel” He grinned and took Gabriel’s offered hand.

  “I’ve been a fan of yours,” Gabriel said, “ever since ‘The Reawakening.’ Best damned piece of tape I ever saw.”

  Westerly immediately liked the writer. “Well, thanks.”

  “Everything else you’ve made since then has been crap.”

  Westerly liked him even more. “You’re damn right,” he admitted.

  “How the hell they ever gave you an Oscar for that abortion two years ago is beyond me.”

  Westerly shrugged, suddenly carefree because there were no pretenses to maintain. “Money and politics, man. You know the game. Same thing goes for writers’ awards.”

  Gabriel made a face that was halfway between rue and embarrassment Then he grinned. “Yeah. Guess so.”

  Earnest said, “I’m taking Mr. Westerly on a tour of the studio facilities…”

  “Go pound sand up your ass,” Gabriel said. “I’ve gotta talk about the scripts.” He grabbed at Westerly’s arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you a beer or something.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Great Neither do I.” They started off together, leaving Earnest standing there. Behind his beard, his face was redder than a Mounties jacket at sunset.

  The studio cafeteria was murky with pot smoke, since smoking of all sorts was forbidden on the sets because of the fire hazard.

  “Now let me get this straight,” Westerly was saying. “The original scripts were written by high school kids as part of a contest?”

  They were sitting at a corner table, near the air conditioning blowers, sipping gingerales.

  Gabriel nodded slowly. “I’ve been working since summer with Brenda and Bill Oxnard to make some sense out of them. I’ve also written two original scripts of my own.”

  “And that’s all we’ve got to shoot with?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Krishna’s left eyebrow!”

  “Huh?”

  Westerly waved at the encroaching smoke. “Nothing. But it’s a helluva situation.”

  “They didn’t tell you about the scripts?”

  “Earnest said there were some problems with you… you’re supposed to be tough to get along with.”

  “I am,” Gabriel admitted, “when I’m being shat on.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  Gabriel hunched forward in his chair. “So what do we do?”

  With a small shrug, Westerly said, “I’ll have to talk to Fad about it… it’s the Executive Producer’s job…”

  Gabriel shook his head. “Sheldon split. Went back to L.A. as soon as his girl moved out of his apartment, and turned over the E.P. title to Earnest.”

  “Earnest?” Westerly felt his lip curling.

  “The boll weevil of the north,” said Gabriel.

  “Well,” with a deep sigh, “I guess I’ll have to mention it to Finger. I’m supposed to have a conference with him tonight…”

  “I thought he was back in L.A.”

  “He is. We’re talking by phone. Private link… satellite relay, they tell me.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll just tell Finger we have to get better script material.”

  “You can read the scripts, if you want to.”

  “I already saw a couple. I thought they were rejects. I’d like to see yours. At least we’ll have a couple to start with.”

  Gabriel looked pleased, but still uncertain.

  “Is there anything else?” Westerly asked.

  With a grimace, Gabriel said, “Well, I hate to bring it up.”

  “Go on.”

  For an instant, the writer hesitated. Then, like a man who’s decided to step off the high board no matter what, “You’ve got a reputation for being an acid freak. Did they bring you in here just for the name or are you gonna stay straight and do the kind of work you’re capable of doing?”

  So there it is, right out in the open. Westerly almost felt relieved. “Both,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Finger and Earnest called me back from the Roof of the World because I have a big name with the public and I need money so bad that I’m willing to work cheap. They know I’ve blown my head off; I doubt that they care.”

  Gabriel gritted his teeth but said nothing.

  “But I care,” Westerly went on. “I finally got off the stuff in Nepal and I want to stay off it. I want to do a good job on this series. I want to get back to work again.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit, buddy.”

  “You’re not kidding me? Or yourself?”

  “No kidding.”

  Gabriel broke into a grin. “Okay, buhbie. We’ll show the whole world.”

  By the time Westerly got back to the studio, the quiet little knot of technicians who had been working on the aerial rigging had turned into a studio full of shouting, milling people. One of the men was hanging suspended in the rig, wires disappearing up into the shadows of the high ceiling, his feet dangilng a good ten meters off the floor.

  Gregory Earnest seemed to rise up out of the floorboards as Westerly stood near the studio’s main door, watching.

  “That’s Francois Dulaq, our star,” Earnest explained, pointing to the dangling man. “We’re getting him accustomed to the zero-gravity simulator.”

  “Shouldn’t we use a stuntman? It looks kind of dangerous…”

  Earnest shook his head. “We don’t have any stuntmen on the budget. Besides, Dulaq’s a trained athlete… strong as an ox.”

  Dulaq hung in midair, shouting at the men below him. To Westerly, there was a faint tinge of terror in the man’s voice. Someone yelled from off in the distance, “Okay, try it!” Dulaq’s body jerked into motion. The rig started moving him across the vast emptiness of the studio’s open central area.

  “Hold it!” the voice yelled; the rig halted so abruptly that Dulaq was almost thrown out of his skin. Westerly could feel his own eyeballs slam against his lids, in psychic communion with the man in the rig.

  “Shouldn’t we test the rig with a dummy first?” he asked Earnest.

  For the second time that day the executive smiled. “What do you think we’ve got up there now?”

  It was agonizing to watch. The technicians spent hours setting up the lights and whisking Dulaq backward and forward through the spacious studio on the aerial rig. They slammed him against walls, amidst frantic yells of “Slow it down!” or “Watch it!” Once the rig seemed to slip and Dulaq went hurtling to the floor, only to be snatched up again and yanked almost out of sight, into the shadows up near the ceiling. From the far corner where the technicians manipulated the controls came the sounds of multilingual swearing. And from the rigging itself came shrieks and groans.

  Finally, the star of the show went gracefully swooping past Westerly, smiling manfully, as a trio of tiny unattended cameras automatically tracked him from the floor, like radar-directed antiaircraft guns getting a bead on an intruding attack plane. The technicians were clustered around the controls and watched their monitor screens.

  “Beautiful!” somebody shouted.

  Meanwhile, Dulaq had traversed the length of the studio, still smiling, sailing like Superman through thin air and rode headfirst into the upper backwall of the starship bridge set.

  Westerly heard a concussive thunk! The backwall tottered for a moment as Dulaq hung there, suddenly as stiff and wooden as a battering ram. Then the wall tumbled, taking most of the set apart with a series of splintering crashes. Amidst the flying dust and crashing two-by-threes, and all the rending, shrieking noises, Westerly clearly heard the same master technician shout out, “Hold it!”

  They got Dulaq down from the rig, nearly dropping him from ten meters up i
n the process. He was still smiling and apparently conscious, although to Westerly his eyes definitely looked glassy. The technicians bundled him off to the infirmary, which fortunately was in the same building as the studio. By the time Westerly got there, a smiling medic was telling the assembled technicians:

  “He’s all right… didn’t even get a splinter. I took an x-ray of his head and it showed nothing.”

  The technicians smiled and joked and went back to their work. As they dispersed, Westerly introduced himself to the medic and asked permission to see the star of the show.

  The medic graciously ushered him into the infirmary’s tiny emergency room. Dulaq was sitting up on the only cot, still smiling, with an icepack perched on his head.

  “Hi,” Westerly said. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  “That was one terrific shot you took out there.”

  “I got worst,” Dulaq mumbled. “Oust, against de Redwings, I went right t’rough da glass.”

  They talked together for about a half hour, as Westerly’s heart sank lower and lower. This is the star of the show? he kept asking himself.

  “Do you think you’ll be all right to start working on Monday?” he asked, feeling his head give a body-language no, despite his conscious efforts to keep it from shaking.

  “Sure. I could go back now, if ya wanna.”

  “No! No… that’s all right. You rest”

  Westerly got up to leave, but Dulaq grasped his wrist in a grip of steel.

  “Hey, one t’ing you do for me, huh?”

  “Uh, sure. What?”

  “Don’ gimme no long speeches t’remember, huh? I don’ want no long speeches. Too tough.”

  Krishna, Shiva and Vishnu, Westerly prayed. Why have they done this to me?

  “Sure,” he told Dulaq. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay. No long speeches.”

  “Right.”

  Dulaq let go of him and Westerly ducked through the accordion-fold door of the little sickroom, rubbing his wrist.

  The doctor was at his cubbyhole desk.

  “You examined him thoroughly?” Westerly asked.

  “Yep,” said the doctor.

  “Did he talk that way before he hit his head?”

  The doctor glowered at him.

  Westerly had dinner with Rita Yearling, who seemed incredibly beautiful, utterly sure of herself and dismally cold toward him.

  His hotel suite was sumptuously furnished, including a strange electronic console of shining metal and multicolored buttons that squatted bulkily in the far corner of the sitting room. Gregory Earnest had explained that the device was a three-dee phone station, which would link him instantaneously via satellite with Fingers private office in Los Angeles.

  Somehow the phone loomed in his mind like an alien presence as he and Rita ate their dinner at the other end of the sitting room, near the windows.

  Rita was polite, respectful and distant. The vibes coming from her were strictly professional, totally impersonal.

  “Do you know Bernie Finger very well?”

  “Of course.”

  “He discovered you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Through an agent?”

  “Oh, on his own.”

  “Where was that?”

  “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “No, I guess not. Um… what do you think of Ron Gabriel?”

  “His brain’s in his crotch.”

  “And your costar, Dulaq?”

  “No brains at all.”

  And so it went, right through dinner, all the way through to the ice cream dessert that neither of them would do more than taste.

  A part of Westerly’s mind was almost amused. Here he was having dinner with the loveliest woman he had seen in years and he was bored silly by her. While she referred to other people as brainless, she came across as heartless, which in many ways was infinitely worse.

  Finally he pushed aside his coffee cup and glanced at his wrist. “Finger will be calling in a few minutes, if he’s on time.”

  “He’s always on time,” Rita said. She got up from her chair, a vision of Venus, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Harlow, Hayworth, Monroe—and equally cold, unalive.

  “I’ll let you two talk business together,” Rita said.

  Westerly got up and went to the door with her. She stopped just as he reached for the doorknob.

  Without so much as a smile, Rita said, “B.F. won’t mind if we ball, but we’ll hafta keep it quiet from Gabriel. Ron thinks he’s got me falling for him.”

  “Oh,” was just about all that Westerly could manage.

  “Just let me know where and when,” she said.

  He opened the door and she left the room.

  For several minutes Westerly leaned against the closed door, his mind spinning. It’s not me, he kept telling himself. She really said it and that’s the way it is with her. It means as much to her as filling out an application blank at the unemployment office.

  Still his hands trembled. He wished for the pleasant euphoria that a pinch of coke would bring. Or even the blankness of cat, the synthetic hypnotic drug that he started taking when Virginia was still in chemotherapy.

  The phone chimed.

  For an instant, Westerly didn’t understand what the sound was. He had started the day in Rome, stopped in London and now—he remembered Earnest’s instructions on operating the three-dee phone. He went to the desk near the rolling dinner table and picked up the handset. The red button, he mused. Turning toward the strange, squat apparatus across the room, he thumbed the red button.

  The far half of the room seemed to disappear, dissolving into a section of Bernard Finger’s Los Angeles office. The bright blue sky of early twilight was visible in the window behind Finger’s imposing high-backed chair.

  “H… hello,” Westerly said shakily.

  “Surprises you, eh?” Finger said back at him. “Just like being in the same room. That’s how good Oxnard’s new three-dee system is. It’s the system we’re using on ‘The Starcrossed’ and that’s what’s gonna make it a great show.”

  “I’m glad we’ve got something going for us,” said Westerly.

  “Huh?” Whaddaya mean by that?” Finger said.

  Westerly pulled up his chair. This wasn’t going to be a pleasant chat, he realized. “Well,” he said, “I’ve only been here a few hours, but this is the way it looks to me…”

  He outlined what he had heard and seen, from his opening discussions with Earnest through his talk with Gabriel and the accident with Dulaq and its aftermath. He stopped short of telling about his dinner with Rita. Finger looked slightly upset at first, angry when he heard Gabriel’s name, then ultimately bored of the whole litany of problems.

  “You finished?” he asked when Westerly stopped.

  “That seems like enough for the first day.”

  “H’mmp.” Finger got up from his desk and the camera tracked him. To Westerly, it looked as if half his sitting room was shifting around, the walls and furnishings moving, as Finger paced slowly toward a sofa that appeared in one corner and then centered itself in his view.

  Finger sat on the sofa and touched a button that was set into its arm. On the wall behind him, a professional football game suddenly appeared on a flat, two-dimensional wall-sized TV screen.

  “You see that?”

  “Pro football. That’s our competition?”

  Finger shook his head. “That’s our salvation, if everything works out right.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Westerly.

  Glancing furtively on either side of himself, Finger said, “This is a private, scrambled connection. If you try to tell anybody about this, I’ll deny it and sue you. I’ll make sure that you never work again anywhere!”

  “What in hell…”

  “Shut up and listen. Part of the money that the bankers put up for ‘The Starcrossed’ is now invested in the Honolulu Pineapples.”

  “The what?
”

  “The football team! The Honolulu Pineapples! If they win the Superbowl, Titanic Productions is out of the red.”

  Westerly’s mind was reeling again. For a moment he couldn’t remember if he had brought the pills with him or not. I was going to dump them in the Ganges, but I think I left them…

  “I’ll give you the whole story,” Finger was saying, “because you’re the guy who’s got to come through for me.”

  …in the zipper compartment of the flightbag.

  “The bankers gave me enough money for one series. If it hits, Titanic gets more money to pull us out of debt. Got that? But we’re up to our assholes in bills right now, baby! Now! Not the end of next season, but now!”

  None of this is real, Westerly told himself.

  “So I’m using some of the bankers’ money to keep our heads above water, pay a few bills here and there. And the rest of it I’m betting on the Pineapples. As long as they keep winning, we can keep treading water. If they take the Superbowl, we’re home free.”

  “What’s this got to do with ‘The Starcrossed’?” Westerly heard himself ask.

  “Don’t you understand? The money for the show is already spent!” Finger’s voice was almost pleading. For what? Understanding? Mercy? Appreciation? “There isn’t any more money for ‘The Starcrossed.’ It’s spent. Bet on the Pineapples. The budget you’ve got is all you’re going to get. There’s not another nickel in the drawer.”

  “There’s no money for writers?”

  “No”

  “No money for better actors?”

  “No.”

  “No money for staff or technicians or art directors or…”

  “No money for nothing!” Finger bellowed. “Not another penny. Just what’s on the budget now. Nothing more. You’ve got enough to do thirteen shows. That’s it. If the series isn’t a hit after the first couple weeks, it’s over.”

  “I can’t work like that,” Westerly said. “I’ve got to have decent material, competent staff…”

  “You work with what you’ve got. That’s it, baby!”

  “No sir. Not me.”

  “That’s all there is,” Finger insisted.

  “I can’t work that way.”