We Open on Venus - Starship Troupers 2

by Christopher Stasheff

“High school students?” Ogden stared, totally dumfounded. “Come now, my dear! You must be confusing fantasy with reality!”

  “I didn’t think high school was all that long ago for you, Ms. Lulala,” Lacey said sweetly.

  Mamie turned slowly and fixed her with a long, cold look, but her tone was all forced sweetness. “Quite right, my dear. What was I thinking of? Surely no one will notice if we rewrite the Bard a bit.”

  “Nonetheless, we might want to have a fail-safe system,” Barry said, a musing look coming over his face. He turned to Merlo. “You don’t suppose you could concoct some sort of prompting machine, do you?”

  Merlo’s eyes clicked over into faraway-gaze mode. “Now that you mention it, the idea does have possibilities.”

  “We’d have to feed the script in as computer text.” Ramou’s gaze had gone into the fifth dimension, too. “And we’d have to couple it to a vocoder …”

  “Yes, and give everyone a hidden earphone.”

  Everyone turned in surprise, for it was neither Merlo nor Ramou who had spoken, but Charlie Publican.

  “Didn’t know you knew electronics,” Merlo said slowly. Charlie shrugged. “A little bit of everything—some computer programming, some nuclear physics, some music composition, some theory of aesthetics …”

  “A regular Renaissance man,” Mamie said with sarcasm. “No, I’m afraid I’m not much of an athlete.”

  “So how are you going to set up the earphones?” Ramou asked.

  “With a microchip that combines an FM receiver with a transducer. Then we’ll tape it behind the ear with a dab of adhesive.”

  “Glue?” Mamie said, as if she’d just bitten an apple and found a worm. “Never! Not on my skin!”

  “Robex should prove adequate,” I pointed out.

  Charlie looked up in surprise.

  “It’s a skin putty,” Merlo explained. “We use it for prosthetics in makeup. It sticks like iron to an electromagnet, and loosens up just like turning off the power—only instead of turning a switch, you swab on a solvent.”

  “Ah!” Charlie’s face lit up. “A miracle material! So we’ll have to design our earphones to be immune to the solvent …”

  “Yes, well, I’m sure it’s a fascinating topic,” Barry said firmly, “and I encourage the three of you to discuss it into the ground and work out all the difficulties—which, I think, is the signal for us all to break for dinner. Back in an hour, my friends—we’ve no time to lose.”

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t dine,” I noted. “The others can eat when they’re offstage.”

  “A point, but I’d like to enjoy my last chance to eat sitting down. I hope you will all enjoy it, too, my friends—it will probably be the last dinner break we will take until the show has opened. Good appetite.”

  The sword broke again.

  Macbeth and MacDuff were in the middle of their final duel. The movements were choreographed as precisely as a ballet. MacDuff swung up with his great two-handed broadsword, Macbeth swung down—and with a crack like a gunshot, MacDuff’s sword broke in half. The pointed end went spinning off into the wings, straight toward Mamie and Susanne, who were standing there watching. Mamie gave a shriek and leaped aside, yanking Susanne with her, and the blade hit the floor, clattering, right where they had been standing.

  Ramou was there beside Susanne, magically, it seemed. “Are you all right?”

  Susanne looked up, ashen-faced, but Mamie snapped, “Yes, no thanks to your chowderheaded boss!” She blazed into full fury. “Merlo Hertz! I told you those swords weren’t safe!”

  “Yeah, you sure did.” Merlo knelt to pick up the tip of the blade—his new flexible cast gave him much more ease of movement, but he was taking entirely too much advantage of it. He frowned at the break, inspecting it closely. “Must have been a flaw in the metal.”

  “You cheese-headed Neanderthal, do you realize you just came within an ace of killing us? You need your wits checked!”

  “You checked yours at the door,” he shot back. “If you’d spend half as much time working on your character as you do trying to tell me how to aim my lights, you might actually learn how to act!”

  “Learn how to act! Why, you peasant scoundrel, if you really had a smidgen of talent in design, you never would have had to learn how to pilot a spaceship!”

  Merlo reddened. “Smidgen of talent? You should know!”

  “Yes, my record speaks for me—and so does yours!” Before Merlo could respond, Susanne said, “That was quick thinking, Ms. Lulala.” She was ashen-faced—but not too shaken to keep from trying to pour oil on the waters.

  “Sheer reflexes, dear,” Mamie assured her. Then, to Merlo, who was red-faced but no doubt biting his tongue, “Flaw? The flaw was in you, not the sword! Whatever possessed you to bring a prop that could be lethal?”

  Merlo’s eyes flashed, and he opened his mouth for an acid comeback, but Ramou was there before him. “It was my responsibility, Ms. Lulala. I’m prop master.” But he looked tom.

  Susanne looked up at him, startled and apprehensive, but Merlo snapped, “Yeah, you put the swords on the prop table—but I bought ’em! Don’t claim any more blame than is due you, Ramou.”

  “Let the blame rest for a few minutes.” Barry came up beside them. “It was obviously a fluke, a rare event. The flaw was in the metal, not in Merlo.”

  “Nonetheless,” Mamie snapped, “it was his responsibility to provide safe properties.” She wasn’t about to let a perfectly good reason for blaming go without a fight.

  “Mamie—” Barry sighed, “—you know that no sword fight onstage can ever be totally safe. Almost totally safe, perhaps, but there is always a margin for error.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Mamie said grudgingly, “but there’s no reason to make that margin any wider than it has to be.”

  “We were speaking of stage properties, not word processors,” I reminded her.

  “The only typing you’ve done is in your casting, Horace,” she retorted. “Can’t you do anything to make this idiot provide us with safe props?”

  “Oh, we’ll make ’em safe,” Merlo growled. “Next rehearsal. Ramou and I will duel with every single one of ’em, and after that, I’ll resurface them, just to be sure.”

  “You could make new ones,” Barry suggested.

  “New? Please, Barry!” Mamie rolled her eyes up. “Bad enough we must work with antiques that this incompetent selected—if you let him make them afresh, they’re bound to be twice as dangerous!”

  “Not unless I sharpened them as much as your tongue,” Merlo returned.

  “We need an edge on the competition, not on each other,” Barry interjected.

  “Competition?” Mamie stared at him, wide-eyed, and Merlo spun to face him. “ What competition?”

  “Seeholder and his management,” Barry returned. “They are in competition with you two to see who can min this production most quickly. Might we return to rehearsal now?”

  15

  Merlo woke me at six, after four hours’ sleep. “Go kill the rooster yourself,” I groaned.

  “Come on, kid!” Merlo clapped his hands. “Move-in today. The actors go to the hotel, and the set goes to the theater—well, the playing space, anyway.”

  “Just great.” I cranked myself upright in bed, an inch at a time. “And just how are we going to get it there? Carry it?”

  “That’s the first item on the agenda—finding a truck.”

  “Truck?” I looked up, squinting against the light he’d turned on. “Wait a minute, I might have a lead.” I reached out for my shirt, fumbled in the pocket, and pulled out the business card the cabbie had given me when he had brought us back to the terminal. I shoved myself to my feet, stepped over to the desk, and punched for an outside radiophone connection. Then I punched in the number, checked the screen to verify it—I wasn’t too sure of my reading, so early—then punched “Enter.” The number disappeared, and the word RINGING appeared—I don’t know why, the sound’s more like a c
hirp. I let it ring. And chirp. And warble.

  Suddenly, the screen went black, and Chovy’s voice grumbled, “I’m not turning on the flaming light at a time like this. Who the hell is calling when any decent man is still abed?”

  “It’s Ramou Lazarian,” I said, “the guy you took for a tour with the pretty actresses the other day.”

  “You don’t need a cab so early!”

  “Three of them,” I said, “but I suspect Horace has already called one of your buddies about that. What we need, Chovy, is a truck. Got anything handy?”

  There was a considerable silence—almost a minute— then Chovy said, wide awake and very interested, “A lorry? Yeah, it might be possible, mate. Let me call around and see what I can find. What’s your code?”

  I gave him the string of numbers and signed off. I looked up at Merlo, but he was already grinning. “Unless I miss my guess, we’ve got transport.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I think Chovy knows the angles.” Turned out he knew the whole geometry book. An hour later, he pulled up at our loading door with not just a truck, but a whole crew, too.

  It cost us a fortune to have that set moved. Chovy wouldn’t let us into the truck, and he’d hired a buddy to stay inside with him and load the set pieces, costumes, and props. Of course, the truck couldn’t quite get close enough for its tailgate to meet the hatch door—there was a meter’s space between them—so Chovy had hired two more guys to take the units from Merlo and me and pass them into the truck.

  “But that’s ridiculous!” I protested. “We can get them far enough for you guys in the …”

  I stopped and looked down at Merlo’s hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Ramou,” he told me. “Believe me—it’s okay.”

  Chovy nodded, grinning. “Now there’s a chap who knows the world. Just pass it over, mate.”

  I clamped my jaw shut and helped Merlo pass the stair unit out. As we turned back to pick up the next unit, I hissed, “Why, Merlo?”

  “Union jurisdiction,” he explained in a low tone. “They may be illegal here, but the unions are as alive as they ever were on Terra, and if we want to get anything done, we deal with them on their own terms. Also, if I want to keep my IATSE membership, I’ve got to support the locals.”

  “ What locals?” I said. “All they have here are petroleum handlers!”

  “And truckers,” he reminded me. “Truckers are teamsters.”

  I stared at him a minute, then nodded reluctantly. “Okay, so we have to deal with the teamsters. I take it Chovy and his buddy inside the truck are them. But why the two guys in the middle?”

  “Because the set units are passing over solid ground,” Merlo said, “which is neither teamsters’ jurisdiction, nor IATSE’s—it’s stevedores’. Just haul, Ramou. You’ll understand after you’ve joined up.”

  “If I ever do,” I grumbled. “So if Chovy could have backed the truck close enough for its tailgate to actually touch the hatch rim, we wouldn’t have to pay those two stevedores?”

  “Of course not. Why do you think he made sure he couldn’t get close enough? Okay, lift!”

  I lifted.

  It griped me, but it did go fast. We had the set loaded and out while the actors were still swearing at their alarm clocks.

  Mamie looked about her and wrinkled her nose. “This is a hotel?’

  “It is the only one in town, Mamie,” I whispered, leaning close to her ear. “And I don’t doubt that, by New Venus’s standards, it is quite luxurious.”

  “Well … if you say so, Horace.” It was quite a concession, for her, but the memory of our last two-hour bout with customs was fresh in her mind—and the more fresh because the second hour was doubtless due to her own tantrums. She loathed being in a position in which she could not fly into a rage with impunity about anything that took her notice—so she accepted the hotel, albeit ungraciously. “It should be minimally comfortable.” But she glared about her at the deep-pile carpet with armchairs and table lamps as islands of light in a sea of subdued illumination. Everything was synthetic, of course; there was no shortage of petroleum, but also no local supply of wood or fiber. By Terran standards, it was Spartan.

  Barry turned to address us all. “Aboard ship, there are more cabins than people, so everyone has had his or her own chamber. Here, however, we have to pay for every room, and we have developed a need to economize— nothing drastic, I assure you, but necessary nonetheless …”

  We older actors all nodded with understanding, but the young folk exchanged puzzled glances. To them, being stranded in the boondocks was something mentioned only in history books, and those not of the sort used in classrooms.

  “Accordingly,” Barry went on, “though the more mature actors shall each have a room to themselves, we shall ask those of you who are younger to double up.”

  Instant consternation. Lacey glared, reddening with outrage; Larry turned pale, and Marty glanced at him uneasily.

  “Ah, Barry,” I said, “perhaps we should set an example by bunking in together.”

  Barry looked up in surprise, then nodded with a smile of gratitude. “Thank you, Horace. Yes, I think that would be apropos. Surely, Ms. Lark, if we two old troupers can forego the privilege of our position, you cannot take offense.”

  “Oh, yes I can!” Lacey snapped. “If you think for a minute that I’m going to share a room with that … that cow …” She pointed at Susanne.

  For an instant, hurt showed in Susanne’s face. Then anger replaced it, and she snapped, “No one asked you, Lacey—and no one will!”

  “Oh, he was going to, right enough! After all, we’re both female and young, so we should be roommates—right, Mr. Tallendar?”

  “It was logical.” Barry seemed rather casual about the whole thing. “However, if you insist on private accommodations, Ms. Lark, I’m sure you’ll be welcome to the single that Horace has just given up.”

  She stared, taken aback by his ready acquiescence—too ready, certainly.

  Grudy Drury reached out to pat Susanne’s hand. “That’s all right, dear. You can share with me.”

  Susanne flashed her a look of gratitude, and I could see by Ramou’s face that he would have liked to have made the same invitation. So would Larry and Marty, though they hid it better. Training has some advantages.

  Lacey didn’t notice; her brow was furrowed, and you could see that she was still wondering why Barry had not only surrendered the point so easily, but also not taken offense at her impertinence.

  “I suppose I could bunk in with Publius,” Ogden offered, entirely too easily. Susanne glanced at him with concern, but Publius was looking surprised and gratified, and Barry was nodding. “Very good of you to offer, Ogden. Publius, if you have no objection … ? Excellent. Now, are there any other volunteers?”

  “I volunteer for a single,” Larry said immediately. “Surely you can’t expect me to share accommodations with either of these two clowns.”

  Ramou flashed him a glare, but Marty only grinned. “Hey! Thanks for the compliment, Larry!”

  Larry opened his mouth for a scathing retort, but Barry’s words came first. “If you wish, Mr. Rash. Mr. Kemp, might I suggest that the two of you last named consider cohabiting?”

  “Hey, okay with me.” Marty glanced at Ramou. “How about you?”

  Ramou nodded. “Sounds good. You got the cards?”

  Marty grinned, producing a deck and executing a shuffle that was pure sleight of hand, ending with the cards cascading from one hand to the other, landing in perfect order. Ramou stared. “I don’t know if I want to play with you” “We could go partners in bridge,” Marty offered, “if anybody else thinks they stand a chance.” He looked around at the older actors. “Anyone want to lose some money? The game starts as soon as we unpack.”

  “I might try that,” Merlo said slowly.

  Ogden nodded. “So will I—if one of you has a bottle.”

  “Deal me in,” Susanne said immediately.

  Ogden sighed. “My dea
r, you trust me not at all.”

  “Oh, yes she does,” Marty countered. “She trusts you to drink every drop in every glass you can lay your hand on.”

  “Accordingly,” Barry said, “I will ask you all to abstain until we have completed our opening performance. Now if you would follow the porter, please?”

  We all set off after the floating platform that was piled high with our luggage.

  “Hey, Ramou, this isn’t bad!” Marty looked around at our cubicle.

  I nodded. “Only a little larger than our cabins aboard the Cotton Blossom. Of course, there’re two people in it instead of one, but it’s big enough for two of us.”

  It was. The beds were singles, but there was a half-meter space between them, and a meter on either side. The table was in the corner by the window—a tight fit, but possible.

  “Only two chairs,” Marty said. “The game will have to be BYOC as well as B.”

  “ ‘Bring your own chair and bottle,’ ” I interpreted. I opened a closet. “Little cramped in here, Mar—”

  A muffled yell came through the door. Marty looked up at me in surprise. As its echoes were dying, it was answered by a shriek of pure rage, likewise muffled by the walls.

  “What in unholy hell was that?” Marty asked.

  “Larry and Lacey,” I said with a grin. “They just found out how small the singles are.”

  By the time we’d finished checking in and unpacking, Chovy called to say customs had finally finished going over every nut and bolt, or at least every cavity and hidden crevice. Merlo told him to meet us at the high school, collected me, and we hopped a cab.

  Since we’d hired Chovy to drive the truck, now we were stuck with an even younger friend of his, Hoby. Hoby had a fine disregard for both traffic laws and Newton’s laws. We peeled ourselves off the windows, took ourselves out the door joint by quaking joint, and paid him off with a large tip not to come back. Then we went over to the truck.

  It wasn’t very long before I was mighty glad to have those stevedores Chovy had hired—because, of course, they hadn’t planned the Grand Gymnasium with road shows in mind. They hadn’t planned it for much of anything else to be moved in, either, except a visiting team—so there was a door, but it was only a meter wide, and it led down into the locker rooms. Chovy had had to back the truck up to the loading dock, which opened into the utilities room, which had a door into a corridor. So the stevedores had to carry every load half the length of the school to get to the Grand Gym. It wasn’t quite as bad as it sounded—they’d brought their own floater. Still, that was a lot of hauling.