"Sir! Your ship is boarding right now! You'll have to run to—"
"Oh, my goodness, no!" said the man. "Oh, most frightfully no. My most esteemed lady, the sacred monkeys of the New Temple of Amritsar have deemed this a most insuspicious point in time to be traveling. What a surprise this has become to myself and my most excellent son, Rahman, I shall have left to your imaginings. However, the upshooting of the situation is this: that we should now be seeking a refunding of our monies. We shall be guided to the New Temple at a date to be later determined." He paused, and smiled. "Or perhaps I should be saying, 'piloted.' " He slapped the plastic boarding pass on the counter.
The woman knew little of religions other than her own Catholic upbringing, had never really heard of Sikhs. But as she was refunding the money (including, to her later chagrin, amusement tax, transaction tax, and Beggar's Breath), she decided Sikhs must be a sort of Buddhist. She was familiar with the Buddha. She recalled thinking the son looked a lot like his father, but she could see now she had been wrong.
No, the satisfied smile on the small face was the very image of the Enlightened One.
From that moment on, my father was just about the only person that ever called me Dodger anymore. From then on, I was Sparky. I wasn't Kenneth even in the credits, and no one at Sentry ever called me Dodger.
If I had it to do over again, would I choose to go with Father to Mars? To this day I don't know. Being strongly identified with a part can be a blessing, but is usually a curse in my business. Ask Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Boris Karloff. It goes back at least that far. Like a singer asked to endlessly repeat his one monster hit, you get very tired of it. Reviewers will forever after make much of the fact that it was little Sparky who played the part of Willy Loman, will more than likely treat the whole enterprise as a stunt. That's one reason I've used so many pseudonyms in my career.
But being Sparky has been helpful from time to time. It's an image you can trade on, when you're otherwise down-and-out. It will get your foot in the door, get you special attention even if half the time it is only to be told Sorry, I just can't see little Sparky as Stanley Kowalski. It gets you attention as somebody-who-used-to-be-somebody while Wanda B. Somebody, Mita Bean, and Neva Hoydova are cooling their heels at a cattle call. And brother, when you're out there riding on a smile and a shoeshine, it can give you that edge you need.
Hi, it's me again. The artist formerly known as Sparky.
I am waking up for the third time this voyage, being as careful as I can not to tamper with my meditative state, trying not to become fully awake, since you can never tell if you'll convince yourself again of the Big Lie you managed to swallow getting into this state.
I checked my clock and found I'd been asleep for seven days. I took the news calmly—of course it had been seven days; I'd taken powerful narcotics—and I had in fact already suspected it, because I was twice as hungry as I had been each previous time. It looked to be starvation on the installment plan, which was a lot better than a continuous forty days of it.
I ate. You don't want to know what I ate any more than I want to revisit the tastes by telling about it. Just recall the items I bought back on Pluto, imagine them all swirled together in a blender, and I'll leave the rest to your imagination. It was vile stuff, and it killed the hunger pangs, which was all it was supposed to do.
I shook out three pills. They were now plainly labeled POWERFUL NARCOTICS, I noticed. I washed them down with deadball solution that was actually starting to taste pretty good.
I slept.
"Interesting," said John Valentine, when he saw his son. "But what about the pants?"
"Donald Duck never wore pants," said Gideon Peppy, around his lollipop.
Sparky had spent the entire morning with Rose, the nice production-designer lady, and her staff of hair, costume, and makeup people. His hair had been restored in its tripartite pattern, but instead of banana yellow it was now metallic and bronze, spiraled and wiry. The side wings were swept back instead of spread out, and the front part of the Mohawk drooped down over his forehead. The electric zigzags were back, joined now by a pair on his chest. His eyes were mascaraed from eyelash to brow in a deep rose fading to black, then tapering to more zigzags at the corners. He wore black lipstick. He had been prodded and pampered, trimmed, teased, and flattered by the deft boys and girls of the makeup department, and made to feel very important indeed. He had been massaged with warm oils until his skin glistened. If he wanted something to eat or drink he had merely to ask and it appeared. He had received his first manicure and pedicure. Then he had been put into his costume, which was a red jerkin or waistcoat (which his father said was pronounced weskit) with gold embroidery suggestive of a circuit board. It could be fastened with a frog in front, or left open. It had no sleeves or lapels. It reached the middle of his hips. When he had it on Sparky immediately asked the same question his father would ask a few minutes later, and when he was told that was it, the entire costume, he knew there was going to be trouble.
Now he stood silently in front of the huge mirror that backed the conference table on the edge of the bustling pirate-ship tank set. Gideon Peppy liked conference tables, had one brought in anywhere he was going to meet with people, and immediately installed himself in a big chair at one end. His staff clustered at that end, drawn like iron filings to a magnet. He sat there now, feet up on the table as was his custom, and looked at Sparky. Behind him and to his right was the usual pandemonium of a set being constructed, wired, painted, and lit all at once. A wharf had been built and a Caribbean port town was almost complete. Nail guns stuttered and paint sprayers hissed and table saws howled as gangs of grips carried Styrofoam barrels and inflatable bales of cotton to stack on the wharf. A paving machine was moving along like a giant metal termite queen, laying cobbles in irregular rows on the steep main street. Set dressers were strewing straw and garbage and imitation horseshit, daubing weathered-wood walls with ersatz mildew. Somewhere underwater frogmen were positioning battery-powered mini-brutes to shine upward through the turquoise water. And anchored just off the wharf was the pirate ship itself, swarming with gaffers and riggers testing the complex system of ropes, pulleys, and canvas.
Sparky watched it all in the mirror, and remembered Orson Welles's description of a motion picture soundstage: the greatest toy a boy ever had.
"Yes," his father thundered, bringing Sparky back to reality. "And Donald Duck was a cartoon, a water fowl, and imaginary. And, apparently, sexless. You should bear in mind that my son is a real little boy."
Valentine had grasped the dynamic of the conference table instantly, weeks ago when he had his first meeting with Peppy and his staff. He had marched unerringly to the far end of the table and had been camping out there ever since. It meant he had to raise his voice to reach Peppy, especially on a noisy set like this one, but it was no problem for John Valentine, who liked to boast that he had never been miked in his life and always projected to the last row of the balcony.
Peppy and Valentine had loathed each other on sight and each had yet to speak an impolite word to the other. The tension at the table had grown so unbearable that the faint of heart among Peppy's entourage hyperventilated and had to breathe into paper bags when the meetings adjourned.
"I never forget it for a minute, my good friend," Peppy replied. "A wonderful talent, your son. He's going to be a big star, and very soon. Maybe even bigger than me." He chuckled wryly, bemused at such a thought, and a few of his people chuckled with him. He leaned forward. But we're dealing in a fantasy world here, John B. We're making movie magic. We've researched this high and low—haven't we, Rose? Tell him about the research—and what you're seeing in that sweet little boy is the coming thing, John B., the coming thing. We won't be in business very long if we wait around until the coming thing is already here. We've got to be the ones who define what it is. Tell him, Rose."