He turned back to Herman and Gawain. "Okay, Mirane'll tidy that up and get hard copies for you. But let's tape it with the script the way it is first, just in case."
The vampire and the hero nodded happily and went back to their places. The little sorcerer followed, grumbling contentedly.
"Places!" Mirane spoke into a ring on her index finger, and her voice boomed out of a loudspeaker. "Quiet on the set."
"Mist," Whitey said quietly.
Fog seemed to grow out of the ground, rising up to obscure Herman and Clyde.
"Lights," Whitey commanded.
High in the air, light suddenly glared from six spots. The two camera operators sauntered out to the side and turned toward the actors. Everyone was silent for a moment, then Harve said, "Balanced."
"Ditto," George called.
Whitey nodded. "Roll."
"Rolling," the camera ops responded.
"Confirm," said a man at a console behind Whitey.
"Action," Whitey called.
The set was quiet a moment longer. Then Gawain came out of the hotel, looked around him with a bemused smile, and inhaled deeply.
"It is pleasant, is it not?" said a sepulchral voice with a heavy accent. "The air of my Transylvania."
The mist thinned, gradually revealing the tall, cloaked figure and the stooped, gnarled silhouette behind him.
"The approach of dawn clears the air," Gawain agreed, and the scene went on.
Whitey stood by, approving, at peace.
Finally, Clyde stepped forward, hurling the silk kerchief. Hilda watched, alert, pushing sliders and twisting a knob, and the kerchief fluttered straight at Gawain, settling over the crucifix. Herman grinned, showing his fangs, but this time everyone froze. Silence enveloped the set again.
Then Whitey sighed, and called, "Cut."
Everyone relaxed, and Herman came striding out of the mist, grinning and chatting with Clyde. Gawain grinned and turned away to have a word with a young lady. Noise swelled up, as everyone started chattering, released from the thralldom of silence.
Whitey turned to Rod with a raised eyebrow. "Little better that time?"
"Uh… yeah!" Rod stared, astounded. "It, uh… it helps to do it for real, huh?"
"Yeah, it does." Whitey turned and looked around. "But the new dialogue will make it work better." He turned back to Rod with a smile. "It only seems natural if you don't break the spell, you see."
Rod gazed at him for a moment, then said, "No, I don't think I do. You mean the old dialogue might make the audience realize they were just watching a show?"
"It might," Whitey said. "If it stood out for you, it might distract them. Then we might as well have never come to this place. Our work here would have been wasted." He smiled suddenly. "But I don't think the new version will distract anybody. No. It'll hold their attention."
Rod frowned. "Why do you care about that so much? Isn't it enough just to know you did the job right?"
Whitey shook his head. "If the audience is bored, they'll spread the word, and nobody'll buy the cube to view, and if nobody buys a copy, we won't make money. If we don't make money, we can't make any more epics."
"But that's not the main reason."
"No, of course not." Whitey grinned. "Let's get down to basics—if nobody watches it, there was no point in making it."
"What point?" Rod demanded. "You've been the top poet of your time! Your place in history is guaranteed, and so is your bankroll, if you can afford to make an epic like this! Why should you sully your reputation by making 3DT epics?"
"Because people need to learn things," Whitey said, "or they'll let themselves fall prey to slavemasters—the way the Terrans actually voted in the PEST regime. And that hurts me, because I want everybody to be free to read what I write. I don't want to take a chance that some censor might lock up my manuscript and not let anyone read it. So I'm going to teach them what they need to know, to insist on staying free."
"With a horror story? A Dracula spectacula?" Rod exclaimed.
"You've got it," Whitey affirmed. "Even this, just a cheap work of entertainment, can do it. What'll they learn? Oh, just a few random bits about Terran geography. After all, most people don't know where Transylvania was, or how the Dracula legend came to be, so we give them just a few facts about that. And along with it, just a touch of the history of Terra's Europe—and the peasants' struggle out of the chains of feudalism. Just a few facts, mind you; just a dozen, in a whole two hours. But if they watch two hours and twelve facts every day of their lives, they can learn enough to yell 'No!' when the next man on horseback comes riding in."
"You're a teacher!" Rod exploded. "On the sly! This is covert action! Subversive education!"
"I'll plead guilty again." Whitey grinned. "But I can't claim all the credit. Most of these techniques, I picked up from a cheery old reprobate on a frontier planet."
"Cholly!"
"Oh, you've met him?" Whitey grinned again. "Charles T. Barman, officially."
"I, uh, did hear something of the, uh, sort…"
"The rogue educator," Whitey said, "the only professor living who doesn't worry about tenure. Business, maybe, but not tenure. Strog and I spent a year with him out on Wolmar. Quite a chap, that. Couldn't believe how much he taught me—and at my age!" He grinned. "Not that I didn't throw him a curve or two. Dave and I thought up some techniques between us that he'd never dreamed of."
But his words had suddenly moved away from Rod, become remote. He was remembering that Whitey the Wino had been the creative force behind the DDT's mass-education movement. It had culminated in the coup d'etat that eliminated PEST, and brought in the Decentralized Democratic Tribunal of his own times. But the history books hadn't exactly stressed the fact that Whitey the Wino was the same person as the revered, austere poet, Tod Tambourin.
He'd been quiet too long; Whitey's attention had strayed.
He turned away to call the extras, bustling around to set them up in a rough semicircle, facing toward the cameras. A portly man in a tan coverall moved among them, passing out flails and pitchforks.
"And you two lounge out here in the middle for your dialogue." Whitey waved, shooing two actors into place. "Come on, now, hit your marks! You know, ninety degrees to each other! Upstage man sets up the over-the-shoulder! Okay, let's run through the lines."
"I don't know… maybe we shouldn't try it," the innkeeper said through his walrus mustache.
"We got to try it," the old farmer answered, testing one of his pitchfork points with a finger. "Ow! Ya, that's sharp enough."
"To do what?" the innkeeper was irritated. "To poke him in his zitsfleisch? What good is that going to do with a vampire, hanh?"
"You talk like an old woman," the farmer snorted. "The pitchfork is just to hold him off while we get a rope around him."