Ben Bova - The Starcrossed

“Oh yeah?” adlibbed Dulaq. And he drew his rubber sword.

They swung at each other mightily, to no avail. The engineers laughed and suddenly reversed the tape. The fight went backwards, and the two heroes slid their swords back into their scabbards. Halfway. Then the tape went forward again and they fought once more. Back and forth. It looked ludicrous. It was ludicrous and Oxnard joined in the raucous laughter of the editing crew.

“Lookit the expression on Dulaq’s face!”

“He’s trying to hit Randy’s sword and he keeps missing it!”

“Hey, hey, hold it… right there… yeah. Take a look at that terrific profile.”

“Cheez… is she built! ’

Oxnard had to admit that structurally, Rita was as impressive as the Eiffel Tower—or perhaps the Grand Teton Mountains.

“A guy could bounce to death off those!”

“What a way to got”

“C’mon, we got work to do. It’s almost quittin’ time.”

The fight ran almost to its conclusion and then suddenly the figures got terribly pale. They seemed to blanch out, like figures in an overexposed snapshot. The scene froze with Dulaq pushing his sword in the general direction of his antagonist, the other actor holding his sword down almost on the floor so Dulaq could stab him and Rita in the midst of a stupefyingly deep breath.

“See what I mean?” came the chief engineer’s voice, out of the darkness. “It does that every couple minutes.”

Oxnard looked down at the green glowing gauges on the control board in front of him. “I told them not to light the set so brightly,” he said. “You don’t need all that candlepower with laser imaging.”

“Listen,” said the chief engineer, “if they had any smarts, would they be doin’ this for a living?”

Oxnard studied the information on the gauges.

“Can we fix it?” one of the editors asked. Oxnard smelled pungent smoke and saw that two of the assistants were lighting up in the dimness of the room.

“We’ll have to feed the tape through the quality control computer, override the intensity program and manually adjust the input voltage,” Oxnard said.

The chief engineer swore under his breath. “That’ll take all humpin’ night.”

“A few hours, at least.”

“There goes dinner.”

Oxnard heard himself say, “You guys don’t have to hang around. I can do it myself.”

He could barely make out the editor’s sallow, thin face in the light from the control board. “By yourself? That ain’t kosher.”

“Union rules?”

“Naw… but it ain’t fair for you to do our work. You ain’t gettin’ paid for it.”

Oxnard grinned at him. “I’ve got nothing else to do. Go on home. I’ll take care of it and you can get back to doing the real editing tomorrow.”

One of the assistants walked out into the area where the holographic images stood. He wasn’t walking too steadily. Taking the joint from his mouth, he blew smoke in Dulaq’s “face.”

“Okay, tough guy,” he said to the stilled image. “If you’re so tough, let’s see you take a swing at me. G’wan… I dare ya!” He stuck his chin out and tapped at it with an upraised forefinger. “Go on… right here on the button. I dare ya!”

Dulaq’s image didn’t move. “Hah! Chicken. I thought so.”

The guy turned to face Rite’s image. He walked all around her, almost disappearing from Oxnard’s view when he stepped behind her. Oxnard could see him, ghostlike, through Rite’s image. The other assistant drew in a deep breath and let it out audibly. “Boy,” he said, with awe in his voice, “they really are three-dimensional, aren’t they? You can walk right around them.”

‘Too bad you can’t pinch ’em,” said the chief engineer.

“Or do anything else with ’em,” the assistant said.

Oxnard lost track of time. He simply sat alone at the control desk, working the buttons and keys that linked his fingers with the computer tape and instruments that controlled what stayed on the tape.

It was almost pleasant, working with the uncomplaining machinery. He shut off the image-projector portion of the system, so that he wouldn’t have to see or hear the dreadful performances that were on the tape. He was interested in the technical problem of keeping the visual quality of the images constant; that he could do better by watching the gauges than by watching the acting.

All of physics boils down to reading a dial , he remembered from his undergraduate days. He chuckled to himself.

“And all physicists are basically loners,” he said aloud. Not because they want to be. But if you spend enough time reading dials, you never learn how to read people .

Someone knocked at the door. Almost annoyed, Oxnard called, “Who is it?” without looking up from the control board.

Light spilled across his field of view as the door opened. “What are you doing here so late?”

He looked up. It was Brenda, her lean, leggy form silhouetted in the light from the hallway.

“Trying to make this tape consistent, on the optical quality side,” he said. Then, almost as an afterthought, “What about you? What time is it?”

“Almost nine. I had a lot of paperwork to finish.”

“Oh.” He took his hands off the control knobs and gestured to her. “Come on in. I didn’t realize rd been here so long.”

“Aren’t you going back to L.A. tomorrow?” Brenda asked. She stepped into the tiny room, but left the door open behind her.

He nodded. “Yes. That’s why I thought rd stick with this until the job’s done: The editors can’t handle this kind of problem. They’re good guys, but they’d probably ruin the tape.”

“Which show are you working on?” Brenda asked, pulling up a stool beside him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. They all look alike to me.”

Brenda agreed. “Will you be at it much longer?”

“Almost finished… another ten-fifteen minutes or so.”

“Can I buy you dinner afterward?” she asked.

He started to say no, but held up. “I’ll buy you some dinner.”

“I can charge it off to Titanic. Let B.F. buy us both dinner.”

With a sudden grin, he agreed.

He worked in silence for a few minutes, conscious of her looking over his shoulder, smelling the faint fragrance of her perfume, almost feeling the tickling of a stray wisp of her long red hair.

“Bill?”

“What?” Without looking up from the control board.

“Why do you keep coming up here every weekend?”

“To make sure the equipment works okay,.”

“Oh. That’s awfully good of you.”

He clicked the power off and looked up at her. “That’s a damned lie,” he admitted, to himself as much as to her. “I could stay down at Malibu and wait for you to have some trouble. Or send one of my technicians.”

Brenda’s face didn’t look troubled or surprised. “Then why?”

“Because I like being with you,” he said.

“Really?”

“You know I do.”

She didn’t look away, didn’t laugh, didn’t frown. “I hoped you did. But you never said a word…”

Suddenly his hands were embarrassingly awkward appendages. They wouldn’t stay still.

“Well,” he said, scratching at his five o’clock shadow, “I guess I’m still a teenager in some ways… retarded… I was afraid… afraid you wouldn’t be interested in me:”

“You were wrong,” she said simply.

She leaned toward him and his hands reached for her and he kissed her. She felt warm and safe and good.

They decided to have dinner in his hotel room. Oxnard felt giddy, as if he were hyperventilating or celebrating New Year’s Eve a month early. As they drove through the dark frigid night toward the hotel, he asked: