Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 3, Number 1, January, 1955

“Eight o’clock okay? I did quit. I’m tying up the loose ends.”

“Eight is fine.”

I left her smiling in the doorway to 32b, and when I reached the lobby of the swank Madison Avenue building, I located a phone booth and called Tom Goldin, my agent. When I’d passed his battery of secretaries and assistants, I said, “Hello, Tom. Good news.”

“Yeah?” Tom said drily. “Did Cynthia Finch drop dead?”

“Better. I dropped her dead.”

“What?”

“I quit the show, Tom.”

“You crazy son,” Tom said. “Why’d you do that?”

“Food poisoning.”

“What? How’s that again?”

“Relax, Tom. I’ve got friends at Captain Jet. I’m going over to the studio now, but after rehearsal I’ll drop in to see Binx.”

“Binx is just as crazy as Cynthia,” Tom said drily. “Besides, his legs ain’t as pretty.”

“His money is just as pretty,” I said.

“What’s money?” Tom asked. “Can you buy happiness with money?”

“No. But can you buy money with happiness?”

“Ha-ha,” Tom said. “Very funny.”

“You’ll get the ten percent, so stop kicking. What’s new on the novel?”

“Did somebody write a novel?” Tom asked.

“No takers yet?”

“No, not yet. I’m having lunch with a guy at Simon and Schuster tomorrow. Maybe I can fool him into taking it.”

“That’s why I love you, Tom. Your coat is so warm.”

“I love you too,” he said. “You shouldn’t have quit Cynthia.”

“ ’Bye-’bye, Thomas.”

“Hey, just a...”

I hung up, grinning, and then walked out of the building to hail a cab. The studio was in the loft of what used to be a factory. The station had done wonders with the loft, and if you didn’t have to climb up through two deserted stories, you’d never suspect you were in an abandoned factory.

I walked up the clattering iron steps, and then into the studio, waving at Artie Schaefer in the control booth, and then stepping onto the floor. I took a seat up front, and watched the cameramen dolly in for a closeup of Marauder. Dave Halliday, the show’s director, held a mike in one hamlike fist, and he brought the mike closer to his face now.

“That you, Jon?” he asked.

“That’s me,” I shouted.

“Want to come up here a minute? We’re having a little trouble.”

I left my brief case on the seat of my chair, and walked past the cameras and onto the brilliantly lit portion of the studio. The set designers had really gone all out with the Martian landscape. They had a bunch of weird looking plants, and a couple of tons of interplanetary sand strewn all over the stage. In the distance, painted against a very realistic-looking sky, was Earth and its satellite, the Moon.

Marauder , an actor who normally used the name Fred Folsom, stood by with a godawful-looking contraption strapped onto his head. He also had what appeared to be fifty pound oxygen cylinders strapped to his back. I looked through the contraption at his face, and Fred Folsom seemed positively miserable.

Dave took my hand, shook it briefly, almost crushing my knuckles, and then said, “You’re late.”

“I had a session with Cynthia,” I said.

“Oh?” Dave was a heavy man with a round, cherubic face, and a lot of beer fat around his middle. He raised shaggy brown eyebrows now, and a devilish smile marred the cherub’s look. “Make out?” he asked.

“Do rabbits make out?” I kidded.

Dave shrugged massive shoulders, and the inflated tire around his middle nudged up toward his chest. “Well, we got troubles,” he said. “Is Cynthia coming down?”

“She didn’t say.”

“So tell me,” Dave said, “how we supposed to hear anyone through these goddamn helmets?”

“What goddamn helmets?”

Fred Folsom said something behind the contraption on his head, but all I heard was a sullen mumble.

“I didn’t write any helmets,” I said.

“I know,” Dave answered, shrugging again. “Cynthia says there’s no oxygen on Mars, though.”

“Did Cynthia also tell you about the gravity on Mars?”

“Gravity?” Dave Halliday looked puzzled.

“Oh, what the hell! Throw the helmets away. Forget the oxygen.”

“Cynthia says no.”

“Then give your boys face masks. They’ll just cover the noses, and you’ll be able to hear something other than Martian rumblings.”

“You hear that, Stu?” Dave called.

Stu Shaughnessy, the show’s prop man, looked up from a pad and nodded. Stu was a thin-faced man with. serious brown eyes behind black-rimmed bop classes. He attacked his job as prop man with the same intensity a physicist gave the atomic bomb, and he exhibited the same pride in the completed product.

“Take off the helmet, Fred,” Dave said. “We’ll play it straight until Stu gets the masks for us.”

Fred Folsom took off the helmet and sighed, and Dave said, “We got another problem, Jon. The death-ray gun.”

“What about it?” I said wearily.

“Cynthia says it’s impossible.”

“Cynthia is impossible, damnit. What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s supposed to burn a man to cinders. She says a weapon that small wouldn’t be capable of containing the energy necessary to...”

“Make it a larger weapon. For Christ’s sake!”

“You got that, Stu?” Dave called.

“I’ll fix it,” Stu answered. His voice was quiet, and he nodded resolutely. There was no doubt he’d fix it. Fred reached into the holster at his waist and pulled out the ultramodern death-ray gun, hefting it on his palm. He pulled the trigger, and a shower of harmless sparks drifted from the disc-surrounded spray nozzle.

“Point that the other way,” Dave said.

Fred smiled. “Dave is going Martian,” he explained. “He thinks all the props Stu rigs are real.”

“That’s the only way to direct it,” Dave said. “Let’s run it through, yes? You’re sticking around, aren’t you, Jon?”

“Like a dirty shirt,” I said.

“The letdown is all on film,” Dave explained to me. “A really nice job, Jon. I think you’ll like it. Jets blasting, all that junk. You watch it on the monitor.”

“I will,” I said.

“We pick up Marauder on a boom shot, looking straight down on him. All you see is the top of his head and his ray gun sticking out in front of him — that and the Martian sand. It’s a nice effect. Besides, we cut out the necessity of having the ship right on the set, you follow?”

“I follow.”

“After Marauder is in, we pick up Cadet Holmes. As if suddenly remembering,” Dave put his mike to his mouth and shouted, “On stage, Cadet Holmes. Let’s roll!”

I took a seat near the monitor, and watched the film of Marauder’s ship putting down on sands of Mars. I was really interested until Cynthia’s voice behind me said, “Isn’t he supposed to be braking for descent before this?”

I turned. “Hello, Professor,” I said.

“You think it’s funny,” Cynthia said, pouting. She looked pretty as hell when she pouted, and she knew it. “I’m interested in getting a good show.”

“You are getting one,” I told her. I watched the monitor as the boom camera picked up Marauder , and then Cadet Holmes came onto the screen.

“Where are their helmets?” Cynthia said. “And are they still using those stupid guns? I told Dave...”

“Stu’s working on that now. Relax, Cynthia.”

Instead of relaxing, Cynthia Finch strode away from me purposefully. She stopped alongside Dave, said a few words to him, and Dave bellowed, “Cut, cut.”

The actors slouched into weary positions while Cynthia kept chewing out Dave. Then Dave said, “Take a break, fellows,” and I heard Cynthia’s voice, close to his mike, say, “If Stu is working on it, I want to see it.”