Ben Bova - The Starcrossed

At a discreet lunch with Montpelier, Sheldon dropped the barest hint that he would have Titanic money to shoot the show in Canada. Montpelier scratched at his beard for a moment and then asked:

“What about Gabriel? What’s he think of the idea?”

“Loves it,” exaggerated Sheldon.

Montpelier’s eyebrows went up. “He’s willing to leave that sex palace he’s got in Sherman Oaks to go to the Frozen North?”

“He wants the show to be a success,” Sheldon explained, crossing his ankles underneath the table. “When I explained that we’d be able to make our limited budget go much farther in Canada, he agreed. He was reluctant at first, I admit. But he’s got a huge emotional commitment to this show. I know how to lever him around.”

With a shrug, Montpelier said, “Fine by me. If Gabriel won’t screw up the works…”

“He, eh… he wants one favor from us.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not back breaking; don’t get worried.”

“Tell me about it.”

“He wants Brenda up there with him.”

Grinning, Montpelier asked, “Does she know about it?”

“That Gabriel wants her?”

“No. The Canada part.”

“Not yet.”

“So if she doesn’t go, Gabriel doesn’t go.”

Feeling somewhat annoyed at Montpelier’s smirk, Sheldon replied, “Yes, I suppose that’s so.”

After a long silent moment, Montpelier finally said, “Well, I guess that means Brenda’s going to Canada.” Sheldon let his breath out. It was going to work!

“I mean,” Montpelier justified, “if its vital to the company’s interests, she’ll just have to go to Canada.”

“Right.”

“Her relationship with Gabriel is her own business.”

“Right,” Sheldon said again.

“We’re not responsible for her private life; after all. She’s an adult. It’s not like we’re forcing her into Gabriel’s clutches.”

“Right.” It was an important word to know.

Their lunch went on for several hours while they discussed serious matters over tasteful wines and a bit of anticaloric food. Sheldon tried to suppress the nagging memory of a recent magazine article about the carcinogenic properties of anticaloric foods. Muckraking journalism, of course. Who could work in an industry where more business was conducted in restaurants and bars than in offices, without the calorie-destroying active enzyme artificial foods? Besides, the news from the National Institutes of Health was that a cure for cancer was due within another few years. For sure, this time.

By the time lunch was over, Sheldon was too exhausted to go back to the office. So he drove home for a short nap, before getting ready for the party. Gloria was out when he got home and he gratefully jumped into the unoccupied bed and was asleep in seconds.

She woke him when she returned, but it didn’t matter. She was already beginning to look slightly fuzzy at the edges, becoming transparent to Sheldon’s eyes. Not that he could see through her, so much as the fact that now he could look past her. Beyond her swollen belly and sarcastic mouth he could see lovely, pristine Canada.

She whined about not going to the party, of course. Sheldon just stared at her bloated body and said, “Now really!” Instead of starting one of her scenes, she cried and retreated to the already rumpled bed.

Sheldon didn’t tell her about Canada. He wanted to be barricaded in his office, with Murray at his side, when he popped that surprise. On the phone he could handle almost anything.

Now he stood at the costumer’s, being cleverly made over into his Party Personality. While the two makeup men were building up his new plastic face, the viewscreen in front of Sheldon’s chair played a long series of film clips showing his Personality in action. It was an old film star named Gary Cooper and it seemed to Sheldon that all he had to do was to say “Yep” and “Nope” at the appropriate times. He concentrated on remembering those lines while the makeup men altered his face.

As the sun sank into the sea—sank into the smog bank hovering over the line of drilling platforms out there, actually—Sheldon drove toward the harbor, where the party was already in progress.

Bernard Finger almost always gave his parties on shipboard. It wasn’t that he could cruise outside the limits of U.S. and/or California law enforcement. After all, the nation claimed territorial rights out to the limits of the continental shelf and there were a few California legislators who claimed the whole ocean out as far as Hawaii.

It’s just that a cruise ship relaxes people, Sheldon realized as he drove up to the pier. You forget your landbound inhibitions once you pull away from the shore. And you can’t walk home.

He parked his bubble-topped two seater in the lot on the pier and sprinted the fifty meters through smog to the air curtain that protected the main hatch of the ship. Out here, on the docks, the smog was neither perfumed nor tinted. It looked and smelled dirty.

The ship was called the Adventurer , a name that Bernard Finger apparently thought apt. Titanic had bought it as a mammoth set for an ocean liner series they made a few years back. They had gotten it cheaply after the old Cunard Line had collapsed in economic ruin. For a while, Finger wanted to rename the ship Titanic, but a team of PR people had finally dissuaded him.

Now Sheldon stepped through the curtain of blowing air that kept the shoreside smog out of the ship. He stood for a moment just inside the hatch, while the robot photographer—a stainless steel cylinder with optical lenses studding its knobby top—squeaked “Smile!” and clicked his picture.

Sheldon smiled at the camera. Gary Cooper smiled back at him, from the elaborate mirrors behind the photographer. Dressed in buckskins, with a pearl-handled sixgun on his hip, lean, tanned, full of woodsy lore, Sheldon actually felt that he could conquer the West single handedly.

John Wayne bumped into him from behind. “Well, move it, fella,” he snarled. “This here wagon train’s gotta get through!”

Feeling a little sheepish and more than a little awkward in his platform boots, Sheldon made room for John Wayne. The cowboy was taller than Sheldon. “Wait ’til I get my hands on the costumers,” he muttered to himself. They had promised him that nobody would be taller than Gary Cooper.

Maneuvering carefully up the stairway in his boots, Sheldon made his way up to the Main Lounge, It was decorated in authentic midcentury desperation: gummy-looking velvet couches and genuine formica cocktail tables. The windowless walls glittered with metal and imitation crystal.

The party was already well underway. As he took the usual set of greenies from one live waiter and a tall drink from another to wash them down, Sheldon saw a sea of old movie stars: Welches, Hepbums, Gables, Monroes, Redfords, a pair of Siamese twins that looked like Newman and Woodward, Marx Brothers scuttling through the crowd, a few showoff Weismullers, one stunning Loren and the usual gaggle of Bogarts.

No other Coopers. Good.

Up on the stage, surrounded by Harlows and Wests, stood Bernard Finger. He was instantly recognizable because he wore practically no makeup at all. He looked like Cary Grant all the time and now he merely looked slightly more so. Sheldon didn’t have to look around to know that there were no other Cary Grants at the party.

He drank and let the greenies put a pleasant buzz in his head. After a dance with a petite Debbie Reynolds, the ship’s whistle sounded and everybody rushed up to the main deck to watch them cast off.

As the oil-slicked dock slid away and the ship throbbed with the power of its engines, everyone started back to the various bars sprinkled around the lower decks. Or to the staterooms.