"I remember it, Father."
"It's funny," John Valentine went on. "I don't recall exactly where we were going. Mars, wasn't it?"
"Yes, Father."
"Can't think why we'd want to go to Mars. Brutal gravity on Mars. Anyway, we'd had this offer, and we didn't know what to do with it. Television. A series. The money sounded good, but... television! Remember?"
"Oh, yes," Kenneth said, with a smile.
"And that's where the dream was born. The Valentine." He waved his arm grandly at the marquee. "Shakespearean repertory. We never knew it would take this long. This many years, you laboring with the kiddie schlock, me languishing in the sticks. But we got the money, and now we have the time."
Kenneth knew his father had no notion of just how much money. But following John Valentine's gaze, he had to admit it was money well spent.
The facade was wood, recalling what the exterior of the Globe Theater might have looked like. It stretched for half a city block, facing the park. The actual entrance took up half that much of the frontage: four sets of wood-and-glass doors, a small box office off to one side. Above it was a tasteful marquee, brightly lit, but with nothing that flashed or moved. "This ain't a casino," Valentine had said. On all three sides it advertised:
ROMEO AND JULIET
Kenneth Valentine
Maya Chang
John Valentine
with the tasteful logo featuring a rose and a sword that had come from the top graphic-design firm in King City. And not cheaply. Above that was a two-story tower with THE VALENTINE spelled vertically, THE floating over the v, in a type style called BROADWAY.
It had once been the Roxy Theater. Even in its heyday the Roxy had not been a premiere venue. Located on a seldom-traveled side street just off the Rialto, it had struggled along for almost twenty years presenting the sort of experimental works beloved of acting students and practically nobody else, playing to audiences composed mostly of relatives of those students. It was far too large a house for that. The balcony had been walled off early on, but even then the four hundred main-floor seats were usually half-empty. Sometimes nine-tenths empty. The theater had been owned by a man with some money, a man almost as eccentric as John Valentine. He was content to lose small sums yearly, until a change in the tax situation made it impossible to continue. And it sat there, dark, boarded up, for fifteen years until Sparky's real-estate scouts discovered it. Valentine didn't give a hoot about the bad location: "They'll come to us; you wait and see."
Renovation had kept Valentine busy for the better part of six months, and now it was ready.
Father and son crossed the pedway and entered their theater. The lobby was dark wood and thick maroon carpet. Heavy curtains covered the back walls, pulled away from the four entrances. They could be raised entirely so standees could look through wide openings in the rear wall. Valentine fully expected standees, at every performance.
They walked down the sloping aisle between the left and the center sections of seats, which were wide, and plushly upholstered in the same shade as the carpet. They reached the orchestra and turned around.
Six hundred seats. A steeply raked balcony. Retractable chandeliers. Three elevated boxes on each side. An arched ceiling, gentle acoustic curves built into the walls. It was old-fashioned without making a big point of it.
"Perfect," Valentine breathed. "I couldn't ask for more."
"You did a great job," Kenneth said.
Valentine accepted this in silence. Then he grinned, and hurried over the narrow bridge spanning the orchestra pit. He disappeared behind the curtain and Kenneth heard the sound of backstage ropes being pulled. The curtain rose, and banks of lights clicked on one by one. Valentine strode out to center stage and beckoned for Kenneth to join him.
"Rehearsals begin tomorrow," he said. "Are you ready, Romeo?"
"I think I know my lines," Kenneth said.
"I'm jealous," Valentine said, with an affectionate smile. "Part of me says, 'John, you're not too old to play Romeo. You could still show that little upstart a thing or two.' "
"I'll bet you could."
"And I will, Kenneth. I will. 'Directed by John Valentine.' I like the sound of that."
"You directed a lot of things on Neptune," Kenneth reminded him.
"Ah, yes, but this feels like a new beginning. Not much of a talent pool out there in the outers, my boy. Rather pathetic, most of them. Now I'll be working with the best. With the fifth generation of Valentines. The one destined to be the best of all."
"I'll sure try, Father."
"Count on it. You will be the best."
And Kenneth knew he had better be.
Back aboard Hal...
You'd think a guy who is seldom at a loss for words, a guy who could cover umpty-ump pages with a description of a trip from Pluto to Oberon where, basically, nothing happened except I got hungry... you'd think I'd have something useful to say about a close encounter with the sun.
Hmmm. Well, how about... it got hot.
It did, a little. Up to about ninety-five or ninety-six. Not so impressive until you realize that any variation from a desired temperature is cause for worry aboard a spaceship. Such things are supposed to be under control. That should give you some idea how close Hal was cutting things.
Not too impressed? Well, neither was I. How about, it was fast. Over in less time than it takes to talk about it.
It was grand. It was beautiful. It was awe-inspiring.
Ho-hum, right?
It was dangerous. But the trouble was, I just couldn't get too excited about it. If something happened, it would all be over too quick for me to notice it, Hal assured me.
I think that, in the end, after all my adventures on my way from one of humanity's most distant outposts to within the orbit of mankind's closest, I just got sort of burned out. You should excuse the expression. And we had done a mighty close skim of Jupiter, a place I feared a lot more. I guess once you've seen one giant ball of gas up close, seeing another just doesn't pack the wallop you might expect it to. Even if it is on fire.
It was the same with our speed. I never asked for a speedometer check. I didn't really want to know. We were moving about as fast as anyone had ever moved before, I guess, but you couldn't tell it, not until we were right down in the photosphere. (Oh, yes, we came that close.) After Jupiter, old Sol grew larger at a prodigious rate. But so what? Three days or thirty days, you still can't see it grow. It still looks static, like any starry night.
But if there were any speed limits set in the solar system, there would have been traffic cops staked out behind every billboard from Mercury to Earth, waiting to pull us over. "Honest, Officer, I was only going a hundred thousand miles per second." "Boy, that wasn't nothin' but whatcha call a 'relativistic effect.' We clocked you at point-nine-nine-nine c, and 'round these parts we figger c ain't jist a good idea, it's the law!"
There were changes around the ship. Spin had to be stopped again, and since there wasn't going to be a lot of time on the other side, certain housekeeping measures to take care of. All the wonderful animals had to be stowed away, back into cold sleep. Many of the plants were "mothballed" in some way I didn't understand. The pond was drained. The whole place became rather depressing, to tell you the truth.
No one was more depressed than Toby, though. The poor little thing was inconsolable. He spent a whole day searching for his big, striped lady love, and when I got out his storage container he actually seemed eager to go to sleep.