"An hour?"
"We will be boosting for an hour and a half, approximately."
"An hour and a half!"
"To get you to Luna by the date specified."
I wondered if there was still time to abort. I wondered if I wanted to abort. While I was still thinking it over and the last seconds were ticking away, the computer voice destroyed what little wits I might have had left to make the decision.
"It will be quite uncomfortable," it said. "Before we leave, I wonder if you'd tell me something?"
"What's that?"
"Who are you? Are you really Sparky Valentine?"
The acceleration sat on me like a playful elephant, and I felt myself spiraling down, down, down, wild-eyed, sweaty-faced, seeing myself in the third person again, twisting through mad colors and flashing lights like Scotty Ferguson in the grip of his phobia in Vertigo, and I knew I was heading into another flashback.
ACT 4
The ravenous creature had no face. It shuffled down the broad spaceport concourse slow as a glacier but not nearly so quiet. Roughly circular in shape, it had scores of backs and hundreds of legs; approach it from any direction and that was all you saw. Backs of heads, backs of legs, the heels of shoes. It was a hungry ant colony with but one purpose: to feed upon the rays of charisma radiating from the jostling center. To feed, in a sense, upon itself.
In the center of the mass was a small boy, wearing a smile on his face and a jacket of gold brocade on his shoulders. His hair was copper-colored and stuck out stiffly to the sides. He was bathed in shafts of yellow and red and blue light, then momentarily frozen by strobes. Tiny skyrockets shot into the air from somewhere close to him, became dime-sized starbursts as they neared the ceiling.
The era when a paparazzi feeding frenzy like this would include bulky cameras and blinding lights and microphones on the end of poles was long over. These reporters had cameras embedded in their eyes, microphones in their ears. In each face one eye, usually the left, glowed softly with a red laser light. Some carried periscopes to get their points of view above the action.
Quite a while ago somebody had noticed that it just wasn't the same, the reporters crowding around without the lights, without the handicaps of technical gear to shoulder, notebooks to juggle and drop, microphones to thrust back and forth from mouth to mouth, and camera bags to swing around like incense thuribles. Especially the lights. It all looked rather drab without the lights.
So lights were brought in. At first they were carried by men and women. They still were, if the crowd of reporters wasn't large enough; anything to preserve the illusion that something important was going on here. But there was never any lack of reporters when Sparky was in town, so these lights and mini-pyros were rented from a firm specializing in hub-bub, called Hub-Bub Inc. The lights came from robotic helicopters the size of hummingbirds which circled slowly with no more noise than a bee and kept their beams always focused on the face of the Star. Other lights came from moving pylons, five feet tall, that shot up mini-rockets filled with flash powder and confetti and ticker tape, in addition to beams that swung back and forth like searchlights at a world premiere. Hub-Bub would also rent you a limo to cruise up to a theater or restaurant or tennis court along the public passageways, and outriders on electrocycles, all of them spouting glitz at a terrific rate.
Trailing at a discreet distance behind the beast were two automated sweepers, as required by city ordinance, feeding on brightly colored squares and strings of paper.
This was the ancient and honorable saturnalia that could spring up without warning at any time and any place, like fungus, if an important person happened to be in the neighborhood. It was the movable feast of the great bitch goddess Celebrity, the shufflin' charivari dedicated to the Public's Right to Know. It was a one-ring elephantine circus. Hoo, boy!
Sparky had spent a great deal of his life dealing with such circuses, but he saw them from the beast's belly. From here, the beast was all eyes and flashing teeth and moving lips. Ninety mouths and no butts, the beast had. He'd never seen it from the outside, where it was all ass.
Drop somebody down into the belly and he'd probably be frightened. There were so many teeth. Sparky knew that all it took to keep the beast fed was to keep smiling and keep moving. The bodyguards cleared a path, and he moved into it. Everyone was shouting questions and he couldn't hear any of them. He never could. But he nodded and smiled, and shuffled. It was enough. The beast was happy.
The bodyguards led the way to an unobtrusive door to the left of the main concourse. A storage locker, possibly, or a mop closet. There was no sign of any kind on the door. It opened to the man's thumbprint, and the three of them entered. Sparky turned at the last moment, paused, waving and smiling. Then the door closed behind him.
He put the smile away until it was needed again, let his shoulders and spine relax. He did a few neck rolls.
"Can I get you anything, boss?" one of the bodyguards asked.
"No, thanks, Rocko, I'll be fine." He walked across the thick-pile blue carpet toward a buffet table. There were heaps of fruit and veggies, attractively displayed, trays of cookies, a few steaming covered trays. Sparky filled a small bowl with radishes and pickles and other noshing food, carried them to a plush leather chair, and settled into it.
The room was provided by the airport for people like Sparky who could not wait out on the concourse. For an annual fee, Sparky could avail himself of this room and other places like it throughout Luna. Though it was nicely furnished and the food was always good, its chief attraction was the peace and quiet it offered. To that end, the one television screen was always on, but could be listened to only through headphones. There was a small library, a table with built-in chessboard, and another with poker chips and cards. Haircuts, massages, and manicures were available, on call.
The one really extravagant feature of the room was the fireplace. A real fire burning real wood crackled on the hearth. The first time here, Sparky had burned his hand, thinking it was a holo projection. He remembered wondering what it cost to clean the pollutants and combustion products out of the air. About twenty special permits were required on Luna to install and maintain such an outrageous thing. Since that first time he hadn't thought about it at all. Sparky was by now thoroughly accustomed to luxury.
Beyond the tall windows the massive hulks of deep-space ships were trundled back and forth from cargo bay to fueling station to launchpads just over the horizon. From time to time one of them lit its torch and leaped into the sky atop a light so bright the windows polarized automatically to protect human eyesight.
Sparky never looked at any of this. He sat with his back to the window and unrolled his Scrawlpad. When he pushed a button columns of figures raced across the screen. When he stopped, he made a note with his stylus in his small, precise hand. He occupied himself this way for ten minutes.
"Would you like some coffee, Sparky?"
He looked up. An attractive woman in a blue spaceport-worker uniform was holding a steaming cup on a tray. Sparky took it, smiled at her, and looked back to his work. After a minute he noticed she was still there.
"Can I do something for you?" The employees were not supposed to ask for autographs, but sometimes they did. Sparky was usually easy about it.
"Actually, you could." The woman produced a card and handed it to him. "My name is Hildy Johnson, and I'm a reporter for the News Nipple."
"A very new reporter, evidently," Sparky said, annoyed. "Didn't your editor ever tell you—" Johnson was holding up her hand.