by John Varley
He looked up to gauge the man's reaction. He frowned. Hadn't he seen this guy somewhere before? The man pursed his lips thoughtfully.
"A little lost, is it? Well, I know how that feels. Been a little lost myself here and there. Come to think of it, it was more there than here, or at least that's what it felt like."
"I don't know where here is," Dodger said.
"That's it, exactly!" the man crowed. "What's that in your hand?"
Dodger gave him the paper, and he took something from his pocket and put it on his face, squinting through pieces of glass as he read. Dodger had never seen anyone use spectacles as anything other than a stage prop. The man pointed to the bottom of the page.
"Gideon Peppy? Did you meet Gideon Peppy?"
Dodger nodded.
"Well, I'm impressed, I must say. Mr. Peppy's a mighty big man around here. Yes sir, a mighty big man. Not just everybody gets in to see him."
Dodger didn't care so much about that. All he could think about now was the clock ticking, and his father waiting.
"Do you work here?" he asked.
"Oh, no, it's not that way at all," the man said. "You might say I live around here. But I don't work, not anymore. I did, though. A long time ago, back before it was Sentry/Sensational." He started walking, his hands jammed into the baggy pockets of his pants, and Dodger decided to walk along with him. Where else did he have to go?
"Jack Sensational bought Sentry Studios... oh, it must have been forty, fifty years ago. Only his name wasn't Sensational back then. It was Pudding. Jack Pudding. I guess he figured not many people would come to see a film from Pudding Pictures, so he changed it."
Dodger laughed in spite of himself, then looked up to see if the lanky stringbean was kidding him. He could see no sign of it in the deadpan face. He was more sure than ever he'd seen the man before.
"It's an old Hollywood tradition, you know. I used to know a man by the name of Goldfish. Samuel Goldfish. Jewish fellow, I believe. Well, I don't know what Goldfish means in Hebrew, or maybe Jewish folks just think Goldfish is a mighty fine name—and they'd get no argument from me, you understand—but old Sam realized pretty quick that in America, which is where he lived, Americans thought it was a pretty silly name. So he changed it to Goldwyn, which didn't mean anything at all."
"You mean... the guy from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer?"
"That's him. Only old Sam bailed out of it before Metro really got off the ground. It was old Louis B. that ran the show. Louis B. Mayer. And that's the fellow I worked for. Metro pretty much fell apart a long time ago, and for a while I think it was Sony Pictures, or something like that. But Sony became something else, and that was swallowed by a big corporation, and when all the dust settled, why, there was the Sentry Motion Picture Company." The man stopped, and assumed the well-known position of the giant sentry with his rifle Dodger had seen on the way in, only when he did it, it was comical, his face sort of pop-eyed, his mouth making a little O of surprise. That's when Dodger got it.
"You're Jimmy Stewart," he said.
"Well, no, that's not right," the man said, reaching into his hip pocket and removing a wallet. "The name's Dowd. Elwood P. Here, let me give you one of my cards." Dodger took it, and looked at it. A phone number had been scratched out with a pencil, and a new one written in:
Call (Northside 777)
Pennsylvania 6-5000
* * *
"Now, if you want to call me use this number, not that one. That number is the old one."
Dodger was going to say that he'd seen the man just a few weeks ago in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with John Wayne and Lee Marvin, directed by John Ford, but the talk of telephones brought him back to his problem.
He was supposed to call only in emergencies.
John Valentine was suspicious of most technological advances, regarded even the ones he took advantage of as no better than necessary evils. To him, the telephone was still a newfangled gadget. He refused to have one implanted in his head, like most people. But one could never tell when one's agent might be frantically looking for one, so he carried a pocket portable.
Telephones for children were both improper and an unwarranted expense. Dodger had no instrument at all, internal or otherwise. There were public phones for emergencies.
But telephones also functioned as the omnipresent ears of the government, of law enforcement, and John Valentine had never been on good terms with either. Every conversation was monitored and recorded, he was convinced. So it had damn well better be an emergency.
This was the problem Dodger had been wrestling with, then. He was already beyond hoping he could get out of this without consequences he didn't even like to think about. Father was going to be angry no matter what. Would calling make things worse, or better? And even more important, did he dare make a call when the people from the State School were listening in?
"So what would your name be?"
"Huh?" Dodger had almost forgotten about Mr. Dowd. "Oh, I'm Kenneth. Kenneth Valentine."
"No. You don't say. You wouldn't be Dodger Valentine, John B. Valentine's son, would you?"
Dodger looked up in astonishment, and momentary hope.
"Do you know my father?"
"Why, sure I do. To speak to, anyway, it's not like we're buddies. And I certainly know his work. Anyone who knows theater knows John Valentine's work."
"Mr. Dowd, could you—"
"Call me Elwood. Everybody calls me Elwood."
"Elwood, I've got a—"
"Why, I believe I saw him not thirty minutes ago. Now where was that...?"
Dodger was jumping up and down in his excitement.
"Mist—Elwood, please remember. I've just got to find him."
Elwood squatted down and looked at Dodger, then took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the boy's eyes.
"Yes, sir. I believe you do. Well, we'll just have to do something about that, won't we? He stood and took Dodger's hand.
* * *
They went around one corner, down a long hallway with doors on each side, then two more corners and there he was, John Valentine, standing tall as he always did, smiling at passersby. Giving no hint of the agitation he was certainly feeling.
Dodger swallowed hard, started forward, then looked around for Elwood.
He was gone.
Then he looked again toward his father, and there was Elwood, standing beside him. The differentness about Elwood was even more pronounced when he saw him standing by his father. Dodger couldn't quite put his finger on it. Elwood's presence was not as solid, somehow. He was not translucent. He cast a shadow. But Dodger knew he wasn't like other people.
He started forward again, and in a moment his father saw him. John Valentine turned toward his son, and something dangerous flashed in his eyes. Dodger kept coming but he reached into his pocket and pulled out the papers he had been given, then held them out before him like a shield.
"What have you done to your hair?" his father asked.
Dodger clapped his hand to his head. He had forgotten!
After everything settled down in the audition room a makeup man had been called. Dodger was swept into a chair and before he quite knew what was happening the man was cutting his hair. This was over the ineffectual protests of Auntie Equity, who kept asking where the boy's parents were. Peppy had turned on his considerable charm, pointing to the signature at the bottom of the release form, and reading a paragraph about agrees to undergo such changes in personal appearance as may be required pursuant to the audition. Dodger thought it best to keep quiet at that point. Maybe signing the paper in his father's name hadn't been such a good idea after all.
Before he knew it, Dodger's long hair had been butchered. It had been blond before; now it was a violent yellow, a yellow never before seen on a human head. On each side it now stuck straight out, like wings. The top of his head was shaved bald, except for a narrow Mohawk strip that was moussed into a topknot four inches high. On each of the strips of bare scalp th
e hairdresser had tattooed orange lightning bolts. His eyebrows had been shaved and also replaced with lightning bolts.
Dodger looked like a kid who had stuck his finger in an electric outlet.
It was this apparition, not the cherubic child he had left in the waiting room, that now approached John Valentine. That his dismay was not evident on his face—except to Dodger—was tribute to a truly massive acting talent.
But the Dodger could see it in his eyes. He was in big trouble.
There really wasn't anything to say. He held out the paper, and eventually his father took it.
It was crumpled, and there was a big mustard stain right in the middle. But at the bottom was the signature of Gideon Peppy. And at the top were the words Letter of Intent to Tender Offer of Employment.
Stapled to it was a check for twenty thousand dollars.
* * *
When I awoke this time I just lay there for a while, remembering that long-ago audition. Ninety-two years ago. Where did the time go?
God, that hair was awful. But I know I liked it at the time.
I shifted and found the clock.
Four days.
Trouble. Big-time trouble.
In the best of circumstances, you can't take your friendly neighborhood drug pusher to the Better Business Bureau to complain about the quality of her wares. You have to handle your complaints yourself, and I would cheerfully have broken her kneecaps and her elbows if I could get my hands on her. But if that had been in the cards she no doubt would never have diluted her product. It was a sweet racket she had going. Anybody she sold deadballs to was on his way off-planet, unlikely to be back in months, or years... or ever, if things worked out right. Right for her, that is. Spectacularly wrong for me. It was outright murder.
Well, what did I expect from a dope pusher?
* * *
I chewed slowly on a hard granola bar dipped in honey while I considered my options.
Number one was the most obvious. Simply eat as little as I could during these waking periods, and try to make it through the final forty days on what I had left. Torture, surely... but was it possible? I added it up a dozen different ways and kept reaching the same answer: I don't know. I just didn't have enough data about rates of starvation. I knew people had fasted for very long times, but I didn't have any reliable numbers on it. And hadn't they damaged themselves? I thought I'd heard that. Brain damage can be irreversible.
What I was sure of was that I would be mighty hungry the whole time. And I thought I might go crazy out here with no companion but my appetite.
Option number two involved leaving the Pantech and making my way to the ship's central core. A risky business at best, but I could probably make it. Once I got there, of course, I'd have food. They always carried plenty of good food on these cargo ships, gourmet meals being one of the inducements for taking such a lonely job at all.
Sure, they'd feed me well. And turn me over to the police as soon as they landed. Since I couldn't pay the fare that meant a prison term, and on Oberon that meant the gravity gang. No, thank you.
The third option was a little vague, and was really sort of a suboption to number one. Some of these cargo canisters around me were certain to contain food. If I prowled through them long enough I might find some.
Maybe three hundred tons of onions, or a shipment of parsley, or a tank of diet soda pop that would blow up in my face.
I put those options to one side, and concentrated on number four.
I almost hate to mention option number four, because it was nebulous, at best. I asked myself, is there any way to extend the periods of sleep back to the full week I had been counting on? And the answer to that was... could be. What I had in mind was self-hypnosis.
One of the things I do to tide myself over times of no work is magic. Not just three-card monte and its infinite variations, though I have been known to run a game. And not the manipulation of cards to gain an advantage at the poker table, though I am quite capable of that, too. The same skills useful in running a street con can also be put to use on the semilegitimate stage where no money hinges on the outcome. Prestidigitation. Sleight of hand. Misdirection and showmanship. In my luggage beside the Punch and Judy show are the basic tools of The Amazing Klepto, Mentalist Extraordinary. It consists mainly of a black cape, top hat, and magic wand, and in a pinch I can do without the wand. Most of the tricks I do can be performed with found or hastily manufactured objects. I can work up close in a small room or on the street, on a cabaret or theater stage, and I'm available for birthdays, charivaris, menarches, and bar mitzvahs.
I'm up-front about it. There is no real magic, so far as I know. It's all illusion, and I tell you so before I begin. I'm known as Klepto because a good part of the close-in work involves relieving the audience of jewelry, wallets, and other items worn or carried about the person, then producing them again to amused astonishment all around.
Or not, if I think the item won't be missed.
No real magic, I said, but hypnotism always seems close to it, even to me. I can hypnotize others and have them go through the ancient repertoire of parlor tricks mesmerists have been putting their victims through for centuries: making animal sounds, reverting to childhood, removing their clothing, and generally making damn fools of themselves. Or I can hypnotize myself, and certain parts of the act become much easier for me. Call it yoga if you wish. It is mostly increased control of involuntary body functions, and I learned most of what I know from—who else?—a gypsy woman in a hobo jungle just outside Marsport. Most of the lessons took place in bed.
The trick is to convince yourself you are able to do some unlikely thing. If it is not utterly impossible—I wouldn't recommend trying to fly by flapping your arms—you'd be surprised at the things you can do. Could I convince myself to sleep for a week?
The trick of hypnosis is to fool yourself into believing that something that is possible is in fact true. Sleep was the end result I was seeking, but that was the end. What I proposed was to start at the beginning, with the means of sleep.
So I dissolved two of the white pills in a glass of water, and I held it up before me. I gazed into the milky depths.
You are powerful, I told the potion. You will make me sleep for a week. Yeah. Right.
I made my bubble transparent and assumed the lotus position on my mattress. The cold stars looked down at me, but I ignored them. I looked instead at the gently rocking horses of the future carousel. They were sleeping peacefully. If they could do it, so could I.
"Oh, money pump mayhem. Oh, money pump mayhem." This was my mantra, suitably dodgerized for my delectation. The gypsy woman had her own version, some unpronounceable Romanian or Romany transliteration of the original... Hindi? Urdu? Sanskrit? I didn't know, but most people would recognize the ancient chant of Om mani padme hum. The words don't mean anything, anyway, unless you're a Buddhist, and my version was better than the one an old girlfriend of mine had used: "Oh, Mommy! Pop, me humped!" I never got around to asking her if it was true. "Oh money-pumpmay hem! Oh, money pumpmay hem!" I did that for half an hour. I succeeded in getting myself into a dreamy, receptive state, but not deep enough to believe the deadball was full strength. That was okay. I hadn't expected to.
But didn't I have something in my medicine chest that might help...? I opened it and pawed through the meager contents, and there it was. It was a bottle half-full of white pills. The label said ASPIRIN. Ah, yes, but hadn't I replaced them back on... was it Brementon? Yes, yes, it was. On Brementon I had replaced the innocent white headache pills with innocent white powerful narcotics. Very powerful narcotics. I remember doing so. I could see myself emptying the aspirin. I saw myself dump the aspirin in the trash. I saw myself opening a brown bottle, pouring powerful narcotic pills into my hand, and carefully putting them into the aspirin bottle. I heard them rattling down through the narrow neck.
Great! Now I had a bottle of powerful narcotics. Maybe they would enable me to sleep for a week, along with the dea
dballs.
I shook two of the pills into my hand. No, better make it four.
On each of them, in tiny red letters, was the word ASPIRIN.
For a moment the whole house of cards wavered, threatened to topple.
Ah, but wait!
I would have laughed, except for the rarefied state of Zen bliss I was in, so I contented myself with a beatific smile. Foolish boy! Don't you recall? Of course you do. The... the... the guy you bought them from told you, he said... he said... he had written ASPIRIN on the powerful narcotics so if anybody looked at them, they would see ASPIRIN, and think they weren't worth stealing. But they were really powerful, powerful narcotics.
In fact, they might be too powerful. Don't take four of them. I put one back into the bottle. Three should be enough.
I popped them into my mouth and washed them down with the chalky deadball solution. Then I set about tidying things up, knowing I'd be asleep soon.
I came across the frog and skull netsuke and I picked it up. I stared at the frog, and it stared back at me.
I liked the way it felt in my hand, so I kept it out. I resumed the lotus position, and stroked the ancient, cool ivory with my thumb. It gradually warmed under my hand. I could feel a pulsing in the frog's throat.
I fell asleep.
* * *
Dodger hurried through the busy passenger terminal of the King City Spaceport, clinging to his father's hand, feeling a little like a balloon at the end of a string. It wasn't a bad feeling, but it wasn't a real secure one, either. There was nothing to be done about it. When his father got excited, he moved very fast.
Father and son were dressed in white pants and shoes, long white coats that buttoned all the way down the front and had stiff, upright collars. They wore orange turbans wrapped around their heads. The skin of their hands and faces was now a light brown color, and John Valentine sported a neatly trimmed black beard and mustache. Under the turban Dodger was bald as an egg. The shocking yellow hair was all gone, and so were the lightning-bolt tattoos.