Brenda raised her glass. “Hail to thee, blithe spirit,” she said, and realized she was slightly drunk.
The gay on the stool at her left nudged her with a gentle elbow. “Hey, you a Pineapples fan?”
He wasn’t bad looking, if you ignored the teeth, Brenda decided. She smiled at him. “Perforce, friend. Perforce.”
Even though he knew better than anyone else exactly what to expect, the sight still exhilarated Bill Oxnard.
He was sitting in the darkened editing room—more a closet than a real room. He knew that what he was watching was a holographic image of a group of actors performing a teleplay. (A poor teleplay, but that didn’t matter much, really.)
Yet what he saw was Francois Dulaq, life-sized, threedimensional, full, real, solid, standing before him. He was squinting a little and seemed to be staring oft into space. Oxnard knew that he was actually trying to read his cue cards. He wore an Elizabethan costume of tights, tunic and cape. A sword dangled from his belt and got in his way whenever he tried to move. His boots clumped on the wooden deck of the set. But he was as solid as real flesh, to the eye.
“You!” Dulaq was saying, trying to sound surprised. “You’re here!”
“You” was Rita Yearling, who in her own overly heated way, was every bit as bad an actor as Dulaq. But who cared? All she had to do was try to stand up and breathe a little. Her gown was metallic and slinky; it clung in all the right places, which was everywhere on her body. She was wearing a long flowing golden wig and her childinnocent face gave the final touch of maddening desirability to her aphrodisiacal anatomy.
“I have waited for you,” she panted. “I have crossed time and space to be with you. I have renounced my family and my home because I love you.”
“Caught up with you at last!” announced a third performer, stepping out of the shadows where the holo image ended. This one was dressed very much like Dulaq, complete with sword, although his costume was blood red whereas Dulaq’s was (what else?) true blue.
“You’re coming back with me,” the actor recited to Rita Yearling. “Our father is lying ill and dying, and only the sight of you can cure him.”
“Oh!” gasped Rita, as she tried to stuff both her fists in her mouth.
“Take yer han’s off her!” Dulaq cried, even though the other actor had forgotten to grasp Rita’s arm.
“We can dub over that,” an engineer muttered in the darkness beside Oxnard.
“Don’t try to interfere, Montague dog,” said the actor. “Stand back or I’ll blast you.” But instead of pulling out the laser pistol that was in the.original script, he drew his sword. It flexed deeply, showing that it was made of rubber.
“Oh yeah?” adlibbed Dulaq. And he drew his rubber sword.
They swung at each other mightily, to no avail. The engineers laughed and suddenly reversed the tape. The fight went backwards, and the two heroes slid their swords back into their scabbards. Halfway. Then the tape went forward again and they fought once more. Back and forth. It looked ludicrous. It was ludicrous and Oxnard joined in the raucous laughter of the editing crew.
“Lookit the expression on Dulaq’s face!”
“He’s trying to hit Randy’s sword and he keeps missing it!”
“Hey, hey, hold it… right there… yeah. Take a look at that terrific profile.”
“Cheez… is she built!’
Oxnard had to admit that structurally, Rita was as impressive as the Eiffel Tower—or perhaps the Grand Teton Mountains.
“A guy could bounce to death off those!”
“What a way to got”
“C’mon, we got work to do. It’s almost quittin’ time.”
The fight ran almost to its conclusion and then suddenly the figures got terribly pale. They seemed to blanch out, like figures in an overexposed snapshot. The scene froze with Dulaq pushing his sword in the general direction of his antagonist, the other actor holding his sword down almost on the floor so Dulaq could stab him and Rita in the midst of a stupefyingly deep breath.
“See what I mean?” came the chief engineer’s voice, out of the darkness. “It does that every couple minutes.”
Oxnard looked down at the green glowing gauges on the control board in front of him. “I told them not to light the set so brightly,” he said. “You don’t need all that candlepower with laser imaging.”
“Listen,” said the chief engineer, “if they had any smarts, would they be doin’ this for a living?”
Oxnard studied the information on the gauges.
“Can we fix it?” one of the editors asked. Oxnard smelled pungent smoke and saw that two of the assistants were lighting up in the dimness of the room.
“We’ll have to feed the tape through the quality control computer, override the intensity program and manually adjust the input voltage,” Oxnard said.
The chief engineer swore under his breath. “That’ll take all humpin’ night.”
“A few hours, at least.”
“There goes dinner.”
Oxnard heard himself say, “You guys don’t have to hang around. I can do it myself.”
He could barely make out the editor’s sallow, thin face in the light from the control board. “By yourself? That ain’t kosher.”
“Union rules?”
“Naw… but it ain’t fair for you to do our work. You ain’t gettin’ paid for it.”
Oxnard grinned at him. “I’ve got nothing else to do. Go on home. I’ll take care of it and you can get back to doing the real editing tomorrow.”
One of the assistants walked out into the area where the holographic images stood. He wasn’t walking too steadily. Taking the joint from his mouth, he blew smoke in Dulaq’s “face.”
“Okay, tough guy,” he said to the stilled image. “If you’re so tough, let’s see you take a swing at me. G’wan… I dare ya!” He stuck his chin out and tapped at it with an upraised forefinger. “Go on… right here on the button. I dare ya!”
Dulaq’s image didn’t move. “Hah! Chicken. I thought so.”
The guy turned to face Rite’s image. He walked all around her, almost disappearing from Oxnard’s view when he stepped behind her. Oxnard could see him, ghostlike, through Rite’s image. The other assistant drew in a deep breath and let it out audibly. “Boy,” he said, with awe in his voice, “they really are three-dimensional, aren’t they? You can walk right around them.”
‘Too bad you can’t pinch ’em,” said the chief engineer.
“Or do anything else with ’em,” the assistant said.
Oxnard lost track of time. He simply sat alone at the control desk, working the buttons and keys that linked his fingers with the computer tape and instruments that controlled what stayed on the tape.
It was almost pleasant, working with the uncomplaining machinery. He shut off the image-projector portion of the system, so that he wouldn’t have to see or hear the dreadful performances that were on the tape. He was interested in the technical problem of keeping the visual quality of the images constant; that he could do better by watching the gauges than by watching the acting.
All of physics boils down to reading a dial, he remembered from his undergraduate days. He chuckled to himself.
“And all physicists are basically loners,” he said aloud. Not because they want to be. But if you spend enough time reading dials, you never learn how to read people.
Someone knocked at the door. Almost annoyed, Oxnard called, “Who is it?” without looking up from the control board.
Light spilled across his field of view as the door opened. “What are you doing here so late?”