Isaac Asimov - The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

It wasn’t enough for Kessler. “That doesn’t mean a thing to me. What are we, a bunch of hacks?”

Johnson was thinking about his bank balance. “Five more. Two years, maybe four.”

Marrs was skeptical. “Who do you think you’re going to kid that long? Where’s your studio? Where’s your talent? Where do you shoot your exteriors? Where do you get costumes, and your extras? In one single shot you’ve got forty thousand extras, if you’ve got one! Maybe you can shut me up, but who’s going to answer the questions that Metro and Fox and Paramount and RKO have been asking? Those boys aren’t fools; they know their business. How do you expect me to handle any publicity when I don’t know what the score is myself?”

Johnson told him to pipe down awhile and let him think. Mike and I didn’t like this one bit. But what could we do — tell the truth and end up in a straitjacket?

“Can we do it this way?” he finally asked. “Marrs: these boys have an in with the Soviet Government. They work in some place in Siberia, maybe. Nobody gets within miles of there. No one ever knows what the Russians are doing—”

“Nope!” Marrs was definite. “Any hint that these came from Russia and we’d all be labeled a bunch of Reds. Cut the gross in half.”

Johnson began to pick up speed. “All right, not from Russia. From one of those little republics on the fringe of Siberia or Armenia or some such place. They’re not Russian-made films at all. In fact, they’ve been made by some of the Germans and Austrians the Russians captured and moved after the war. The war fever has died down enough for people to realize that the Germans knew their stuff occasionally. The old sympathy racket for these refugees struggling with faulty equipment, lousy climate, making super-spectacles and smuggling them out under the nose of the Gestapo or whatever they call it— That’s it!”

Doubtfully, Marrs said: “And the Russians tell the world we’re nuts, that they haven’t got any loose Germans?”

That, Johnson overrode. “Who reads the back pages? Who pays any attention to what the Russians say? Who cares? They might even think we’re telling the truth and start looking around their own backyard for something that isn’t there! All right with you?” he said to Mike and me.

“O.K. with us.”

“O.K. with the rest of you? Kessler? Bernstein?”

They weren’t too agreeable, and certainly not happy; but they agreed to play along until we gave the word.

We were warm in our thanks. “You won’t regret it.”

Kessler doubted that very much, but Johnson eased them all out, back to work. Another hurdle leaped — or sidestepped.

Rome was released on schedule and drew the same friendly reviews. “Friendly” is the wrong word for reviews that stretched ticket lines that were blocks long. Marrs did a good job on the publicity. Even that chain of newspapers that afterward turned on us so viciously fell for Marrs’ word wizardly and ran full-page editorials urging the reader to see Rome .

With our third picture, Flame Over France , we corrected a few misconceptions about the French Revolution and began stepping on a few tender toes. Luckily, however, and not altogether by design, there happened to be a liberal government in power in France. They backed us to the hilt with the confirmation we needed. At our request they released a lot of documents that had hitherto conveniently been lost in the cavernous recesses of the Bibliothèque nationale. I’ve forgotten the name of whoever was the perennial pretender to the French throne. At, I’m sure, the subtle probbing of one of Marrs’ ubiquitous publicity men, the pretender sued us for our net worth, alleging defamation of the good name of the Bourbons. A lawyer Johnson dug up for us sucked the poor chump into a courtroom and cut him to bits. Not six cents damages did he get. Samuels, the lawyer and Marrs received a good-sized bonus, and the pretender moved to Honduras.

It was sometime about then, I believe, that the tone of the press began to change. Up until then we’d been regarded as a cross between Shakespeare and Barnum. Because long-obscure facts had been dredged into the light, a few well-known pessimists began to wonder sotto voce if we weren’t just a pair of blasted pests. “Should leave well enough alone.” Only our huge advertising budget kept them from saying more.

I’m going to stop right here and say something about our personal life while all this was going on. Mike I’ve kept in the background pretty well, mostly because he wants it that way. He lets me do all the talking and stick my neck out while he sits in the most comfortable chair in sight. I yell and I argue, and he just sits there; hardly ever a word coming out of that dark-brown pan, certainly never an indication that behind those polite eyebrows there’s a brain — and a sense of humor and wit — faster than and as deadly as a bear trap. Oh, I know we’ve played around, sometimes with a loud bang, but we’ve been, ordinarily, too busy and too preoccupied with what we were doing to waste any time. Ruth, while she was with us, was a good dancing and drinking partner. She was young, she was almost what you’d call beautiful, and she seemed to like being with us. For awhile I had a few ideas about her that might have developed into something serious. We both — I should say, all three of us — found out in time that we looked at a lot of things too differently. So we weren’t too disappointed when she signed with Metro. Her contract meant what she thought was all the fame and money and happiness in the world, plus the personal attention she was doubtless entitled to have. They put her in Class B’s and serials and she, financially, is better off than she ever expected to be. Emotionally, I don’t know. We heard from her some time ago, and I think she’s about due for another divorce. Maybe it’s just as well.

But let’s get away from Ruth. I’m ahead of myself. All this time Mike and I had been working together, our approaches to the final payoff had been divergent. Mike was hopped on the idea of making a better world, and doing that by making war impossible. “War,” he’s often said, “war of any kind is what has made man spend most of his history in merely staying alive. Now, with the atom to use, he has within himself the seed of self-extermination. So help me, Ed, I’m going to do my share of stopping that, or I don’t see any point in living. I mean it!”

He did mean it. He told me that in practically those words the day we met. At the time, I tagged that idea as a pipe dream picked up on an empty stomach. I saw his machine only as a path to luxurious and personal Nirvana, and I thought he’d soon he going my way. I was wrong.

You can’t live, or work, with a likable person without admiring some of the qualities that make that person likable. Another thing: it’s a lot easier to worry about the woes of the world when you haven’t any yourself. It’s a lot easier to have a conscience when you can afford it. When I donned the rose-colored glasses half my battle was won; when I realized how grand a world this could be, the battle was over. That was about the time of Flame Over France , I think. The actual time isn’t important. What is important is that, from that time on, we became the tightest team possible. Since then the only thing we’ve differed on was the time to knock off for a sandwich. Most of our leisure time, what we had of it, has been spent in locking up for the night, rolling out the portable bar, opening just enough beer to feel good, and relaxing. Maybe, after one or two, we might diddle with the dials of the machine and go rambling.

Together we’ve been everywhere and seen anything. It might be a good night to check up on François Villon, that faker, or maybe we would chase around with Haroun-el-Rashid. (If there was ever a man born a few hundred years too soon, it was that careless caliph.) Or if we were in a bad or discouraged mood we might follow the Thirty Years’ War awhile, or if we were real raffish we might inspect the dressing rooms at Radio City. For Mike the crackup of Atlantis has always held an odd fascination, probably because he’s afraid that man will do it again, now that he’s rediscovered nuclear energy. And if I doze off he’s quite apt to go back to the very Beginning, back to the start of the world as we know it now. (It wouldn’t do any good to tell you what went before that.)