"There's an end to your plunder, Captain!" He threw his head back and laughed, triumphantly. "Get the point?" Then he turned to his men, arms held high, and gestured firmly toward the stern.
"Come on, men!" he shouted. "There's no time to waste! Over the side with you, and swim for your lives!"
He pounded down the deck, saw the rail ahead of him, and leaped. He was falling, falling, the black sea below rushing up to meet him, and shit! It was a gray carpet!
Dodger just had time to tuck a little and try to roll, but his head still hit the floor with a loud thump.
He sat up and shook his head. There was a ringing sound in his ears. He visualized a ring of twittering bluebirds circling his head, and wondered if this was the Daffy Duck part. Then he looked up, to see four faces looming over him. Larry spoke first.
"Did you see that? Did you see what he did? Jesus, I thought he was going to run right into you, Mr. Peppy. Did you see that? He just jumped right over him. Right over him! Jesus!"
"The kid's crazy," Curly was saying. "I never saw anything like it."
"Kenneth," Peppy said, an island of calm. "Kid, look at me. Are you okay? Should I get a doctor?"
Dodger shook his head again.
"No, I'm all right."
Peppy took the lollipop out of his mouth and looked at it.
"Damn," he said. "I bit my candy in half."
There didn't seem to be any end to the damn place. After Dodger escaped from the audition, he realized he was still lost. Not only was he lost, but it was getting late. His hopes that his father's audition had gone long were fading rapidly, and every corner he turned seemed to bring him back to a place he'd already seen before. Yet it didn't seem as if he were walking in circles.
When he felt a large hand on his shoulder he almost shouted aloud. He looked up into a narrow, frowning face.
"What's the matter, son?" the man drawled. "You look like you stumbled through a time warp."
You should talk, Dodger thought. They both stopped, and Dodger looked him over. It was a tall man, dressed anachronistically in baggy wool trousers, a gray coat and vest, and a white shirt. The only spot of color about him was a cloth strip knotted around his neck, under his collar. Dodger searched for the word, one he had underlined a few months ago. Necktie. And the shapeless hat perched on his head was a fedora.
He certainly wasn't the only oddly dressed person Dodger had seen in the corridors; this was a motion-picture studio. He'd seen red Indians in buckskins and yellow Chinamen in silk pajamas and black Hottentots in tuxedos. He'd seen green-and-purple extraterrestrials in ancient pressure suits. But they'd all had the look of costumes, somehow. This fellow looked as if he'd just stepped out of a time machine. He looked a little faded, yellowed, like an old photo in an album. He was in color, but it wasn't Technicolor.
"I guess I'm a little lost," he admitted. He was immediately appalled. He was never supposed to admit that. Luna was a strange place, as his father reminded him every time they played there. They had some odd ideas here, ideas that didn't necessarily make single parenting an easy thing. The child-welfare authorities, for instance, would have taken a dim view of Dodger's being left alone all day while his father auditioned. It didn't make much sense to Dodger. What did they expect? His father was a little short of cash right now and couldn't afford to hire a sitter—an idea which offended Dodger anyway. How did they expect a person to get parts, earn a living, put bread on the table if he couldn't look for work?
But if Dodger was picked up, lost, alone, he would surely be taken to the State School. Dodger had never seen this State School, but he had seen Oliver Twist, with Sir Alec Guinness as Fagin, and his father assured him the State School was pretty much like that.
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.