Ben Bova - The Starcrossed

“Probably both,” Finger grunted.

Sheldon nodded and pressed on. He told Finger that only Brenda’s body stood between him and a face-to-face confrontation with Gabriel.

“And he’s carrying a Tommygun,” Sheldon concluded.

“Now? Here?”

Sheldon nodded. “I think it’s going to be very vital to us to have Brenda go with us to Canada.”

“You’re damned right,” B.F. agreed.

“But she doesn’t want to go.”

“She’ll go.”

“I’m not sure…”

“Don’t worry about it. What I tell her to do, she does.”

“She might quit”

B.F. shook his head, a knowing smile on his lips. Somehow, it didn’t look pleasant. “She won’t quit. She can’t. She’ll do what I tell her, no matter what it is.”

Ron Gabriel sipped a gingerale as he sat at one of the Sky Bar’s tiny round tables. Brenda Impanema sat on the couch beside him, staring moodily out at the moonlit ocean. On his other side, Allen Jenkins and Frank McHugh were playing poker on a little table of their own.

The crowd in the bar had thinned considerably. Many couples had drifted outside, now that the ship was clear of the L.A. smog and the moon could be seen. Others had gone down to their staterooms for some serious sexual therapy.

“It’s like a movie scene,” Brenda said, reaching for her Hawaiian Punch. “Moonlight on the water, the ship plowing through the waves, romantic music…”

Gabriel scowled at the computer, which was now issuing a late 1970s rotrock wail. “Call that romantic?”

Brenda, still in Lauren Bacall’s looks, made a small shrug. “It could be romantic.”

“If it was different music.”

“Right.”

“Then all you’d need would be Fred Astaire tapdancing out on the deck.”

“And sweeping me off my feet.”

Gabriel looked in the mirror across the room and saw Jimmy Gagney. But he no longer felt like Cagney. I should have come as Astaire , he told himself. But Cagney fitted his personality better, he knew.

“How come I can’t sweep you off your feet?” he asked Brenda.

Becall grinned back at him. “It’s chemistry. We just don’t react right.”

“I’m crazy about you.”

“You’re crazy about every girl you meet. And I don’t want to go to Canada with you.”

Gabriel remembered why he had come aboard. He picked up his glass of gingerale. In the mirror, Cagney’s face hardened.

“I don’t want to go to Canada at all. Period.”

“We can drink to that.” Brenda touched her glass to Gabriel’s.

Cagney scowled.

She tossed her head slightly, so that the long sweep of her hair flowed back over her bare shoulder. “Are you really after me or just my body? Or just a grip on B.F.?”

“That’s a helluva question,” he said.

“It’s of more than passing interest to me.”

Gabriel put his glass down firmly on the tabletop. Without looking up from it, he said, “I’m crazy about you. I don’t know anything about your body. I’ve seen it clothed and it looks pretty good. But more than that I can’t tell. And I don’t go after girls for business reasons.” He looked up at her. “What I have to settle with Finger I’ll settle for myself. And it’s time that I did.”

Brenda put a hand on his arm: “If you confront B.F. you’ll blow the whole series. He’ll have you kicked off the ship and out of any connection with Titanic.”

“So I’ll take the idea someplace else. I don’t need Titanic. He needs me.”

“He’ll make life miserable for you.”

Gabriel pulled his arm free of her. With a light tap on her cheek, he went back to pure Cagney. “Don’t you worry about me, kid. I know how to handle myself.”

To his cronies, who looked up from their cardgame, Gabriel said, “Keep her out of trouble.”

They nodded. Both unemployed, nonselling young writers, they were looking forward to script assignments on the series. If they could avoid starvation long enough to wait for the series to go into production. At the moment they were avoiding starvation—and work—by living in Gabriel’s house.

The rest home for starveling writers , Gabriel thought as he made his way around the dancefloor and toward the Sky Bar’s exit. But he remembered his own beginning years, the struggle and the hollow-gutted days of hunger. Somehow he seemed to have more fun in those days than he did now. Shit! You’d think there’s be a time when a guy could relax and enjoy himself .

He reached the exit and gave a final glance back. Jenkins and McHugh had resumed their cardgame. Bacall had moved closer to them and started kibbitzing.

Gabriel hitched up his pants and made a Cagney grimace. “Okay, Schemer,” he whispered to himself. “Here’s where you get yours.”

It took a while for Gabriel to figure out where Finger had gone. He searched the Main Lounge, the pool area and all the bars before realizing that Finger must have retreated to his private suite.

Theoretically, the suite was impregnable. Only one entrance, through double-locked steel watertight doors. Nobody in or out without Finger’s TV surveillance system scanning him. Gabriel considered knocking off one of the fire alarms, but rejected that idea. People might get hurt or even jump overboard and drown. Besides, Finger had his own motor launch just outside the emergency hatch of his suite. That much Gabriel knew from studying the ship’s plans.

For a few moments he considered scrambling over the ship’s rail and down the outer hull to get to the emergency hatch. But then he realized that there would still be no way for him to get inside.

With a frown of frustration, Gabriel paced down the ship’s central staircase, thinking hard but coming up with no ideas.

He stopped on the deck where the ship’s restaurant was. Looking inside the elaborately decorated cafeteria, where the walls and even the ceiling were plastered with photos from Titanic’s myriad TV shows—all off the air now— Gabriel started on a chain of reasoning.

It was a short chain, the last link said that there must be some connection between the ship’s galley, where the food was prepared, and Finger’s suite on the deck above.

Gabriel made his way through the restaurant-turnedcafeteria, heading for the galley. A few couples and several singles were scroffing food hastily, as if they expected someone to tap them on the shoulder and put them off the ship. Gabriel noticed almost subliminally that they weren’t the young hungry actors or writers or office workers; they were the older, middle-aged ones. The kind who dreaded the inevitable day when they were turned out to the dolce vita of forced retirement on fixed pensions and escalating cost of living.

Move up or move out , was the motto at Titanic and most other business establishments. The gold watch for a lifetime of service was a thing of ancient history. Nobody lasted that long unless they owned the company or were indispensable to it.

Gabriel walked like Cagney through the cafeteria: shoulders slightly forward, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He entered the galley, where a couple of cooks were loafing around a TV set.

“Hey, whatcha doin’ back here?” one of them asked, a black tall enough for college basketball.

“City Health Inspector,” Gabriel replied in his own voice.

The cook towered over Gabriel and waved a frozen dinner-sized fist at him. “What is this? We paid you guys off last week, on your regular collection day.”

Gabriel shook his head. “Those guys are in jail. There’s been a crackdown. Didn’t anybody tell you?”

The cook’s face fell.

“I ought to get your name and number,” Gabriel bluffed, “so that you can be subpoenaed…”