"Don't worry; he's not dead. He'll wake up in a few hours with nothing worse than a bad headache."
I had been leaning against the door, which I had closed behind me before I saw him. I was dripping wet, my gray hair in untidy ropes that reached my shoulders.
I had prepared a few automatic surprises for him, but none of them could be used without harming Toby. They had been a forlorn hope, anyway. There were weapons here and there, some concealed, some not looking much like weapons, but I doubted my ability to use any of them against his reptilian reactions and hideous strength.
"I've had a little time," he told me. "I've located a few electronic traps and disabled them." He made a gesture toward the Pantechnicon. "I left the life support running in your tricky luggage. We'll use it to smuggle you out of here. The rest of it, the deadly stuff, won't work. I took the trouble to memorize Mac—sorry, 'The Scottish Play' before I got here, so don't try speaking any lines from it in here. I've read up on other actors' beliefs, if you have any ideas about triggering something verbally."
I sighed, pushed myself off the wall, and walked to my dressing table.
"Then go get that costume on the rack over there," I told him. "The one labeled 'Act Three, scene four.' And hurry. We don't have much time to get me changed and back out there."
He looked at me for only a moment, then stood and put Toby in a hip pocket and zipped it closed. He was dressed in the costume of one of the King's knights, his helmet on the floor beside the chair. I assumed that was how he got backstage. He took the costume off the rack and came up behind me as I stood at the big mirror. I was already unbuttoning my costume. Tom would have done that for me, but I only wanted as much help from Izzy as I absolutely needed.
"You keep surprising me," he said. "I don't like that. Not many people surprise me."
"Get used to it."
"I think I have. But since we have some time together, would you explain how you knew I was going to let you finish the performance?"
"I didn't know," I said, shrugging out of the kingly robes of Lear. "But I thought it was worth a try. The worst you could do was coldcock me and shove me in my suitcase, and you're going to do that sooner or later, anyway."
"You don't think killing you is the worst I might do?" He held up the new robe—outwardly, exactly like the one I had just taken off—and I slipped my arms into it.
"If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it as soon as I got here. When you didn't do it, I knew you had other plans. I don't think I'll like those plans."
"I can guarantee it. Why the costume change, Sparky? It looks like a waste of time to me." I'd seen him feeling the seams, quickly going over it for concealed weapons. There were none. I gestured toward the television screen, the one he had been watching as I entered, and had made me hope he might be content to hold Toby hostage and give me a little more time.
"Watch and you'll learn something," I said. On the screen, Gloucester and Edmund were finishing their scene.
"That's my cue," I said, and hurried out the door.
"In such a night, to shut me out! Pour on, I will endure. In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril, your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all—O, that way madness lies; let me shun that. No more of that."
Pure poetry. Not just the lines, but my situation. As Lear, I was going mad. Soon I would be tearing my hair and rending my raiment (the reason for the costume change; this one was strategically weakened so it would tear properly). I was more than good. I was brilliant.
And as Kenneth Valentine—some might say the least successful role in my career—I thought I might go mad as well. Just the thing to put an edge in one's performance.
"Prithee go in thyself; seek thine own ease. This tempest will not give me leave to ponder on things would hurt me more."
The edge of the stage seemed to me an abyss; the wings, dark chances. What was to stop me from leaping the footlights and charging down the aisle, out the lobby, and into the wide world beyond? Or finishing my lines, strolling casually offstage and out the back door.
Well, professionalism, for one thing. Laugh if you must, but I would almost rather die than abandon a performance in the third act. There is that old axiom, the show must go on. Not only do I owe it to my craft to give my best, and give my all, I owe it to the audience. If I lived to tonight's final curtain and somehow could escape from my nemesis... then it's a case of Sorry, Polly. Sorry, cast members. I'm outta here. But nothing short of death was going to keep me from finishing tonight.
Later I realized I'd had no way of knowing if the exits were covered by Izzy's people. If, in fact, half the audience were Charonese agents. But I swear that, at the time, it never entered my head. Somehow I knew that Izzy was handling this alone. I had come to know something about him in our two brief, bloody encounters, come to know something of his culture in my researches aboard Hal. He would handle this alone. Call it pride, call it honor. Call it lunacy. After what had happened in Oberon, he would not be calling in the national guard.
But there was a more important reason I could not flee and that was, of course, Toby. Did Izzy know me well enough to rely on my sense of loyalty to hold me hostage even if my fear and my sense of duty would not? Bet on it.
When I took Toby as my companion so many years before, we had made a deal. As I said before, I was responsible for food, shelter, and safety, and he was in charge of everything else. Oh, I also handled minor matters, such as career decisions, travel itineraries, and our pathetic financial affairs. There had been no need to write any of this down; I considered it a part of the original agreement between man and dog, struck during the Stone Age. This may have been the first deal, the primordial deal, before either written or verbal agreements, and any human who fails to honor it is a pretty poor human in my estimation. Some have found irony in the fact that dogs have accompanied the human race into space, but I fail to see anything odd about it. A dog was the first earthling in orbit, and the first casualty of space travel.
Toby was in charge of love and absolute loyalty, and I could return nothing less to him.
"Is man no more than this?" I shouted. "Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here."
And I began tearing my clothes.
It seemed unusually quiet as I exited the stage. You expect a few slaps on the back, a wink, a thumbs-up. Some encouragement, acknowledgment that things are going well. There was none of that, and for a moment I was worried. Then I saw the faces of the cast and knew the silence meant something else. They were moving out of my way. Some did not even dare to look at me. They were afraid of intruding on me, afraid that anything they might do or say would short-circuit the magic. Theater people are intensely superstitious, always alert for the potential jinx, the careless word or gesture that will shatter someone's concentration.
I think they were a little afraid of me.
"It's a wonderful performance, Sparky."
"I wish you'd quit calling me that."
"It's how I think of you. How I remember you. I really was a fan, you know."
Incredible as it may seem, I believed him. And I also believed he appreciated Shakespeare, and my performance as Lear. How a man raised in such a perverted society could still cherish the arts of a common humanity I will leave for the reader to research, accept, or disbelieve, as takes your pleasure. But his desire to see the end of the play was my only current hope of salvation, his only window of weakness. I didn't dare question it.