The music mounted to a crescendo. It was The End.
The audience seemed to agree. They were still laughing as the lights came up. Drukker was already barging out of his seat, carrying all before him.
Cavanagh and Corry followed him up to the projection room.
“That’s the one,” Mike said as Drukker burst in. He nodded to a reel.
Drukker grabbed it, scanning the last footage at a rate that sent celluloid snakes writhing all over the confined space. A dumbfounded look spread over his large features. He handed the reel to Cavanagh as if in a bad dream.
And Cavanagh jumped at what he saw.
As far as he had thought it out, there had been a switch of reels—whether for a hoax or for darker reasons. Yet—the frames he was holding were obviously the right ones. There was a midget Esther stroking her triceps like mad.
Which meant—
He looked at Drukker. Drukker’s small eyes became even smaller as they came to rest on the operator. “Cavanagh, call my lawyer. Get him here right away. Nobody leaves this place until I find those phony reels.”
“Oh, yeah?” protested the operator. “I’m a union man. Either I get double time or—”
“You’ll get it,” Drukker snapped. Then, disgusted at his own magnanimity, he added menacingly, “Which may not be the only kind of time you’ll be concerned with before I get through here.”
Some time after two o’clock, Cavanagh and Drukker returned wearily to the latter’s offices. With them was Braun, the lawyer, a sharp-faced man with bushy black eyebrows. They gave him a top-heavy look. Corry had been sent home with Mike when Drukker had realized two things: first, that the star’s powers of solution were limited; second, that he was due on set at dawn for the last shots of his current picture.
“Well?” Drukker demanded as soon as they were inside. “When do I start getting some answers from the brains it costs me a small fortune to hire?”
Cavanagh turned from pouring a large whiskey. Braun patted his briefcase smugly. “Well, there’s at least a dozen counts we can sue on. Libel, infringement of copyright and trade mark, fraud—”
Drukker almost howled. “That’s a fat lot of good when we don’t know who’s doing it!”
“Well, this one instance isn’t anything to go haywire over,” said Cavanagh.
Drukker snorted. “Hasn’t it penetrated that bone head of yours that this could be the end of Mammoth?”
“Exactly. But every time it happens will be one more chance to find out how it’s being done.”
“Yeah? We didn’t get very far this time.”
“Perhaps,” Braun put in soothingly, “your technicians will find out something when they’re putting that projection room back together.”
“Well, if they didn’t find anything when they took it apart, I don’t see—”
The telephone bell cut across Drukker’s speech. He grabbed it. After a few seconds he put it back. “That,” he announced stonily, “was the technicians. They didn’t find a thing.”
“Well,” Cavanagh observed cheerfully, “then the interference doesn’t come from the projection room.”
“Then from where?”
“From the audience. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? If anybody was tampering with the projection system, the manager would have to be in on it, wouldn’t he? So why should he call you? No, it must be somebody in the audience.”
“But that’s fantastic!”
“So was what we saw tonight,” Cavanagh reminded him. He shrugged. “Though heaven knows how it’s done, or how anybody could make an apparatus portable enough.”
“So what do we do? Frisk everybody when they come out?” Drukker’s voice was scathing.
“No, nothing as crude as that. Just get camera apparatus fitted at every ticket-office of every cinema in town showing our films, so that a shot is automatically taken of everyone who buys a ticket. Sooner or later the number of faces common to each repetition of tonight’s performance will narrow down to one—or one group, if it’s a gang doing it.”
“But the cost!” Drukker wailed.
“Can you think of anything better?” Cavanagh asked him.
It took Drukker sixteen hours to decide that he couldn’t. Even then, it took another incident the very next evening to convince him. It happened at yet another cinema, and the report he got back really had him shuddering. What had happened to an ordinary light romance woke horrible visions of the studio’s being closed by the police for making indecent pictures. He signed the authority for the necessary apparatus with a sweaty hand.
* * * *
In the next fortnight four more cases of tampering were reported and shots of the cash customers duly rushed to the studio. By that time Drukker had learned something which went a little way to easing his torment.
Whoever was doing it wasn’t carrying on a vendetta against Mammoth alone. One by one the other major studios were finding themselves up against the same baffling problem.
Rumors began to fly. Cryptic notes started to appear at the foot of the film columns. The police raided one cinema, on a complaint of indecency, but found nothing.
Meanwhile the narrowing-down process went on. The first set of films yielded eight hundred and thirty-seven faces. The second set, sixty-one definite, and five not so definite, common with the first. The third, though it ruled out the five not-so-definites, showed up stubbornly with forty-three. “Real fans!” Drukker commented disgustedly.
But the last one, an afternoon performance, really narrowed the field down—to five. Drukker was all for acting and straightaway pouncing on all of them. Braun managed to restrain him with a reminder of what four damage suits could cause. .
And then the next report came in. Drukker summoned Cavanaugh, Braun, Crowe and Philp, together with Mike and a strong-arm squad.
The shots arrived. Drukker personally ran them through the projector. Minutes passed. One shot after another was passed over. Then one matched. Drukker marked the film strip, then started off again. The number left dwindled. A strip only inches long was left, then— the screen glared whitely.
Drukker ran back to the marked shot.
“That’s him,” he announced. “The enemy. Everybody take a good look. Right, let’s go.”
* * * *
On the way to the picturehouse, leading in one of three long black cars, Drukker made gloating noises from between cigar-clamping teeth.
“I’ll teach him to monkey with Mammoth,” he proclaimed to the world in general.
Cavanagh stirred. “But it’s not just Mammoth any more. I don’t get why—”
“Why I treat it as my personal pigeon?” Drukker chuckled. “I’ve always been a staunch defender of the film industry’s interests, haven’t I? The others know I’ve got a lead on this. I’m sure they’ll recognize the value of my efforts.” He chuckled again.
Cavanagh grimaced, knowing what that chuckle meant. Drukker was seeing a fat profit in the deal.
“Another thing,” Drukker said grimly. “The scheming skunk got me first. I’ll have a personal satisfaction in shaking the truth out of him.”
Cavanagh said nothing. He was thinking of the face they had just seen on the screen, thinking that Drukker sounded ridiculously melodramatic, talking like that about a little old man with a monk’s tonsure of white hair, who looked as if he wouldn’t harm a mouse. . . .
In the flesh he looked even smaller, frailer. His cheeks were pink and innocent as a child’s. Drukker spotted him as the crowds streamed from the cinema.
They pounced.
The little man looked up, startled.
“I’m Mammoth Pictures,” Drukker told him. “I made that picture you’ve been tampering with.”
The little man started to expostulate, then shrugged resignedly. “Well?”
“I think you owe us a visit, don’t you?”
“Do I? Oh, I see. Ah—tomorrow morning?”
“Right now.”
“But—my landlady. I always—
”
“We’ll call your landlady,” said Drukker, steering him into the foremost car.
* * * *
The little man sat awkwardly in the canvas bucket with a hole that some expensive designer had called a chair. He looked up at the faces that ringed him.
“First,” said Drukker, “your name.”
“Alfred Stephens.”
Drukker nodded expectantly. “Now—how do you do it?”
The little man hesitated, then smiled slightly. “I don’t know.”
“What!” Drukker’s huge fists clenched. “Now look—”
“No, I mean it. Believe me, I don’t know.”
Drukker took a grip on himself. “All right, we’ll let that one ride. What do you use?”
“Use?”
“What do you do it with?”
“Why, nothing.”
Drukker spluttered. His eyes sought the strong-arm squad—A blue-jowled member lumbered over. Braun coughed nervously. Cavanagh slid in front of Mr. Stephens.
“Now—let’s all remember that Mr. Stephens is our guest. I’m sure that if we give him time to express himself—”
“Thank you,” said the little man, with a composure striking in one so frail. “If you will be good enough to point out to this gentleman that intimidation will not help, I will do my best to oblige.”
Drukker growled, met Cavanagh’s eye and subsided. He gestured to the goons to remove themselves to the anteroom.
“That’s better,” the little man said. “Now. You will understand if I speak with a certain reserve. I ask you to imagine a man who has been, all his life, a lover of the cinema. Let us imagine that he often gets impatient with what is offered him for his entertainment. He has seen films become more and more stereotyped, you understand?”
“Go on,” Drukker said heavily.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Oh, those cobwebbed situations, that weary old dialogue!”
“Do you know how much it costs to make a picture?” Drukker shouted, stung. Cavanagh grinned.
“Then they might as well be made properly,” Mr. Stephens said reprovingly. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes. Our critical friend begins to get discontented with a film. He starts thinking how it could be, and then—it happens.”
When Drukker became intelligible he was saying, “. . . trying to tell me the film goes off the rails because youthink it off!”
Mr. Stephens clucked. “Becausehe thinks it off. The man I’m talking about.”
Drukker looked helplessly to Philp and Crowe. The two technicians closed ranks as if for mutual protection. Two pairs of shoulders rose and fell weakly.
“It could be,” Cavanagh put in, “some form of telekinesis.”
“Tele—what?”
“Telekinesis. Moving objects at a distance by the power of thought. Remember The Poltergeist? I did research for that. Cases are pretty well authenticated of people’s moving heavy vases, things like that. So why not somebody being able to move a collection of shadows on a screen?”
“But the sound’s changed, too.”
“Is that any harder?”
Drukker shook himself like a Labrador coming out of water. “No, it’s too fantastic. I’m not going to believe it.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Stephens promptly. “I’m glad. If that’s all, then—”
He started to rise. Drukker, coming to, pushed him back.
“All right,” he snarled. “I believe you. Now listen to me. You’re a nuisance in any cinema you enter,. More than that, there’s evidence that you’ve changed some films into—well, they’d never have got by the Hays Office like that.”
The little man’s cheeks became a shade pinker. “Ah yes. Well, perhaps our friend’s imagination did run rather wild.”
“Then he’ll have to stop it, won’t he?”
“Umm. Well, perhaps. It’s not that he’s of a particularly sensual nature, you understand? But love scenes on the screen do get tediously unreal, don’t you agree? Even in Theda Bara’s day they were wearing a bit thin, but at least there was something then.”
“I didn’t mean just the love scenes,” Drukker told him heavily. “I meant all of it.”
The little man looked at him regretfully. “But our friend can’t help it.”
“In that case,” said Drukker, “he’ll just have to stop going to the movies.”
The little man returned his gaze steadily. “But that’s out of the question.”
“Is it? We’ll see about that. My attorney here says that you can be sued on at least a dozen counts already. If you play ball with us, then we’ll play—” He jerked irritably. “Yes, Braun, what is it?”
“Intent,” Braun whispered urgently in his ear. “None of those charges would stick if we couldn’t prove intent.”
“But you told me—”
Mr. Stephens had sharp ears. “You’d need proof, too,” he interrupted blandly.
Drukker scowled. “All right, Mr. Stephens. What’s the price?”
“Price?”
“For staying out of picturehouses for the rest of your life.”
“Oh. Dear me, does everybody have a price in your world? I’m sorry, but my annuity is enough for me. And I haven’t any relatives living. In any case, I thought I had made my interest in the cinema clear enough. Nothing is worth sacrificing that for.”
The look of chagrin on Drukker’s face was suddenly replaced by a quite lifelike geniality. “Well, I can make you a happy man. A preview of every picture we make —right here at the studios. And any picture from any other company, I could arrange that. A car to pick you up. One of our starlets to keep you company. How’s that?”
Mr. Stephens sighed. “Well . . . no, I’m sorry, but that wouldn’t be the same thing at all. It’s not just the picture, you see, but . . . well, the atmosphere, the feeling of being one in a crowd, sharing the experience of hundreds of other people, the—yes, even the crackling of candy papers.”
“Candy papers!” Drukker raised his hands and dropped them wearily.
“Perhaps,” Cavanagh observed dryly, “you could offer Mr. Stephens a job as director. From what I’ve seen of his abilities—”
Drukker had started to glare. But now, suddenly, he was laughing. He shook the little man’s hand jovially, hoisting him to his feet at the same time.
“Well, that’s all right, Mr. Stephens. If we can’t reach agreement, then we can’t. And it’s skin off nobody’s nose. Glad to have met you. And good night.”
The rest looked on blankly as Drukker ushered a slightly bewildered Mr. Stephens to the door.
“Take Mr. Stephens home, Mike,” Drukker called out. “Good night again, Mr. Stephens.”
He closed the door on the little man and turned back benignly to the rest of them.
Cavanagh spoke quickly: “Listen, you’re not going to—”
Drukker looked pained. “I’m not going to do anything. Except to see that our friend has a bodyguard from now on. If he ever goes near a picturehouse, Mike, or whoever’s on duty, will just tip off the manager. It’s as simple as that.” He surveyed them with the air of a mother hen rebuking her brood. “So I don’t know what everybody was getting so steamed up about.”
* * * *
Cavanagh found the house—a modest rooming-place downtown, and paid off his cab. Mike was lounging against a lamppost, picking his teeth.
“Any sign?” Cavanagh asked.
“Hasn’t shown his face once.” Mike stirred morosely. “This private eye stuff gripes me.”
Cavanagh nodded sympathetically. “Enjoy your lunch?”
“Huh? Aw—” Mike threw away his toothpick disgustedly. “Just trying to kid myself. I don’t get a bite till Louie comes on at two.”
“I’ll take over, Mike, till then, how’s that?”
Mike beamed. “Gee, thanks, Mr. Cavanagh.” He lumbered off, but turned. “Don’t forget to ring Drukker if you move—”
“I won’t, Mike. Bon appétit.”
As soo
n as Mike was out of sight, Cavanagh went up the steps and rang the bell. The door was opened by a birdlike woman. He had just asked for Mr. Stephens when the little man himself came down the stairs. He had a topcoat on. “Oh, hello,” he said when he saw Cavanagh. Cavanagh thought he sounded rather tired.
“Remember me—Cavanagh? Mind if I tag along?”
Star Science Fiction 5 - [Anthology] Page 15