The Golden Globe

ACT 4

The ravenous creature had no face. It shuffled down the broad spaceport concourse slow as a glacier but not nearly so quiet. Roughly circular in shape, it had scores of backs and hundreds of legs; approach it from any direction and that was all you saw. Backs of heads, backs of legs, the heels of shoes. It was a hungry ant colony with but one purpose: to feed upon the rays of charisma radiating from the jostling center. To feed, in a sense, upon itself.

In the center of the mass was a small boy, wearing a smile on his face and a jacket of gold brocade on his shoulders. His hair was copper-colored and stuck out stiffly to the sides. He was bathed in shafts of yellow and red and blue light, then momentarily frozen by strobes. Tiny skyrockets shot into the air from somewhere close to him, became dime-sized starbursts as they neared the ceiling.

The era when a paparazzi feeding frenzy like this would include bulky cameras and blinding lights and microphones on the end of poles was long over. These reporters had cameras embedded in their eyes, microphones in their ears. In each face one eye, usually the left, glowed softly with a red laser light. Some carried periscopes to get their points of view above the action.

Quite a while ago somebody had noticed that it just wasn't the same, the reporters crowding around without the lights, without the handicaps of technical gear to shoulder, notebooks to juggle and drop, microphones to thrust back and forth from mouth to mouth, and camera bags to swing around like incense thuribles. Especially the lights. It all looked rather drab without the lights.

So lights were brought in. At first they were carried by men and women. They still were, if the crowd of reporters wasn't large enough; anything to preserve the illusion that something important was going on here. But there was never any lack of reporters when Sparky was in town, so these lights and mini-pyros were rented from a firm specializing in hub-bub, called Hub-Bub Inc. The lights came from robotic helicopters the size of hummingbirds which circled slowly with no more noise than a bee and kept their beams always focused on the face of the Star. Other lights came from moving pylons, five feet tall, that shot up mini-rockets filled with flash powder and confetti and ticker tape, in addition to beams that swung back and forth like searchlights at a world premiere. Hub-Bub would also rent you a limo to cruise up to a theater or restaurant or tennis court along the public passageways, and outriders on electrocycles, all of them spouting glitz at a terrific rate.

Trailing at a discreet distance behind the beast were two automated sweepers, as required by city ordinance, feeding on brightly colored squares and strings of paper.

This was the ancient and honorable saturnalia that could spring up without warning at any time and any place, like fungus, if an important person happened to be in the neighborhood. It was the movable feast of the great bitch goddess Celebrity, the shufflin' charivari dedicated to the Public's Right to Know. It was a one-ring elephantine circus. Hoo, boy!

Sparky had spent a great deal of his life dealing with such circuses, but he saw them from the beast's belly. From here, the beast was all eyes and flashing teeth and moving lips. Ninety mouths and no butts, the beast had. He'd never seen it from the outside, where it was all ass.

Drop somebody down into the belly and he'd probably be frightened. There were so many teeth. Sparky knew that all it took to keep the beast fed was to keep smiling and keep moving. The bodyguards cleared a path, and he moved into it. Everyone was shouting questions and he couldn't hear any of them. He never could. But he nodded and smiled, and shuffled. It was enough. The beast was happy.

The bodyguards led the way to an unobtrusive door to the left of the main concourse. A storage locker, possibly, or a mop closet. There was no sign of any kind on the door. It opened to the man's thumbprint, and the three of them entered. Sparky turned at the last moment, paused, waving and smiling. Then the door closed behind him.

He put the smile away until it was needed again, let his shoulders and spine relax. He did a few neck rolls.

"Can I get you anything, boss?" one of the bodyguards asked.

"No, thanks, Rocko, I'll be fine." He walked across the thick-pile blue carpet toward a buffet table. There were heaps of fruit and veggies, attractively displayed, trays of cookies, a few steaming covered trays. Sparky filled a small bowl with radishes and pickles and other noshing food, carried them to a plush leather chair, and settled into it.

The room was provided by the airport for people like Sparky who could not wait out on the concourse. For an annual fee, Sparky could avail himself of this room and other places like it throughout Luna. Though it was nicely furnished and the food was always good, its chief attraction was the peace and quiet it offered. To that end, the one television screen was always on, but could be listened to only through headphones. There was a small library, a table with built-in chessboard, and another with poker chips and cards. Haircuts, massages, and manicures were available, on call.

The one really extravagant feature of the room was the fireplace. A real fire burning real wood crackled on the hearth. The first time here, Sparky had burned his hand, thinking it was a holo projection. He remembered wondering what it cost to clean the pollutants and combustion products out of the air. About twenty special permits were required on Luna to install and maintain such an outrageous thing. Since that first time he hadn't thought about it at all. Sparky was by now thoroughly accustomed to luxury.

Beyond the tall windows the massive hulks of deep-space ships were trundled back and forth from cargo bay to fueling station to launchpads just over the horizon. From time to time one of them lit its torch and leaped into the sky atop a light so bright the windows polarized automatically to protect human eyesight.

Sparky never looked at any of this. He sat with his back to the window and unrolled his Scrawlpad. When he pushed a button columns of figures raced across the screen. When he stopped, he made a note with his stylus in his small, precise hand. He occupied himself this way for ten minutes.

"Would you like some coffee, Sparky?"

He looked up. An attractive woman in a blue spaceport-worker uniform was holding a steaming cup on a tray. Sparky took it, smiled at her, and looked back to his work. After a minute he noticed she was still there.

"Can I do something for you?" The employees were not supposed to ask for autographs, but sometimes they did. Sparky was usually easy about it.

"Actually, you could." The woman produced a card and handed it to him. "My name is Hildy Johnson, and I'm a reporter for the News Nipple."

"A very new reporter, evidently," Sparky said, annoyed. "Didn't your editor ever tell you—" Johnson was holding up her hand.

"Very new," she agreed. "Just in town from the dinosaur farm with a new job as cub reporter."

"You worked on a dinosaur farm?" Sparky had been thinking of dinosaurs for the new story arc scheduled to start in six months. "What was that like?"

"I got tired of shoveling brontosaur turds. Sparky, my editor did tell me that places like this are off-limits. Truce zones, he called them. And I'm not here to interview you."

"You're not?"

"Well, not right now. I just thought it wouldn't hurt to approach you and ask for an interview at a later date. I wanted to show you I could get in here, if I tried. I've been told you admire initiative."

Sparky was beginning to be more amused than annoyed.

"I admire chutzpah," he said. "It's how I got started in this business myself. But what if you made me angry? Then I might never give you an interview."

"You seldom do, anyway. I thought it was worth a shot. If you turn me down, I haven't lost anything, and I go looking for my big story somewhere else." She smiled, and shrugged her shoulders.

"Call my secretary tomorrow morning," he said. "He'll set something up. Now get out of here, you sneaky person." He watched her hurry away toward a door he assumed led to the kitchen.

"Rocko," he said, and across the room the big man stood up quickly and hurried to Sparky's side.

"Did you see that girl who was just here?"

"Yeah?"

"She was a reporter."

Rocko looked surprised, twisted to look at the door Johnson had used for her exit, as if his eyes could bore right through it.

"Find out how she got in here, and tell airport security. Have them plug the hole."

"You got it, Spark-man," Rocko said, and started away.

"And Rocko?"

He turned, eyebrows raised.

"If this happens again, you're fired."

"Naturally."

Sparky smiled, and went back to his Scrawlpad. In one sense, the mistake wasn't Rocko's fault. Airport security should have kept Hildy Johnson at bay. But in a larger sense, it was his fault. Rocko was in charge of all studio security, and especially the person of Sparky Valentine, the studio's most valuable asset. It was up to him to see anyplace Sparky visited was safe, and if it wasn't, either advise Sparky not to go there or make it safe with his own people.

Still, Sparky knew no security was perfect, and Rocko knew Sparky was unlikely to fire him unless incidents like this became commonplace. Rocko was very good at what he did. There had been three stalkers at various times in Sparky's career deemed dangerous enough to warrant more than a restraining order. Two of them were serving long jail terms, and the third had not been seen or heard from in over three years. Sparky never asked.

He put the production-cost numbers back in their file and called up the story department. The analysis of the next seven proposed episodes was supposed to be delivered today, and he wanted to see what his staff of geniuses thought of the proposals. He was just in time; the Scrawlpad was downloading the moment he called up the file. He began to read.

Sparky had originally been designed as an endless (one hoped) series of one-offs. Each episode was to stand on its own as a story, watchable by anyone who had never visited the Sparky universe before. There was continuity, in that each character had a history created through his adventures in previous episodes, and to a lesser degree, a back story. These tidbits were all written down by the series historian, and maintained in a small document known as a bible. All television series had bibles. They enabled new writers to come into the fold and read up on each character, know where he or she had been in life, know his limits and strengths and personality. For the first several years that was just about all that was in the bible. Episodes did not connect with each other. There was no "continued next Saturday!" This seemed to satisfy everybody. For the first few years.

When ratings begin to slip, new approaches are called for. The prevailing wisdom was that Sparky's target audience was too young to participate in complicated multiepisode plots. Too confusing, the pollsters said.

Sparky paid for another survey. This one found that estimates of the target audience were skewed by the fact that large numbers of viewers were staying loyal to Sparky even when they passed out of the targeted demographic: four-to-ten-year-olds. The show scored well all the way up to thirteen, when hormonal pressures led most Sparksters toward more sexual shows. And even then, kids who had grown up with Sparky still showed an interest in product tie-ins and in collecting memorabilia and old episodes. Sparky had filed that away for future consideration: surely there was a way to profit from this almost instant nostalgia when the teens grew into adults and had more money to spend. To that end, not much was ever thrown away from a Sparky production. It was all labeled, filed, and stored. "Taking a page from Walt Disney's book," Sparky called it. "If you can make money on it once, why not make money on it five or six times?"

"Retain the ephemera" became the watchword at Thimble Theater.

Then Sparky commissioned another study, and it was here that his feel for the audience transcended the dry pronouncements of focus groups and play-therapy sessions, measurements of eye movements and pupil contractions and palm sweat and heart rate, all so scientific and so lacking in the most important ingredient, to Sparky: magic.

He did the new study himself. He disguised himself and went out among the children. He hung around them and he listened to them, and he watched their eyes. He wasn't looking for pupil dilation, either. He was searching for that gleam of wonder as a child stammered out his recollections of a story that moved him. He found it, many times, and he found out something else. These kids remembered shows from two years ago.

So the show was revamped, gradually, to become a longer, continuing saga. Armageddon Angry was built up as the arch villain. Each episode might be seen as a skirmish, and each season as a war. There was a term in the industry for this kind of plotting, known as the "story arc." A problem would be posed in one episode, dealt with to a greater or lesser degree in three or four more episodes, and brought to a climax in the sixth installment. Meantime another arc had begun around episode three.

Keeping it all straight was a formidable task. The series bible grew from a dozen stapled sheets to a massive volume tended by a staff of three. There was another department whose mission in life was to steal. Steal from dead people, it's true, but steal nonetheless. Sparky had long ago given up coming up with plots and, except for the occasional inspiration, characters. Anything in the public domain was fair game. Old comic books were a fertile source. Almost anyone who had had his or her own comic book in the twentieth or twenty-first century had made a guest appearance on Sparky by now. Sparky had visited locations from Gotham City to Surf City. Old movie and television serials had been plundered for plotlines and cliffhangers. Sparky had entered alternate universes, places where classic private eyes, singing cowboys, half-breed aliens with pointy ears, and giant radioactive ants actually existed.

The show also had to keep up with trends. One fairly recent innovation in the marketplace was the introduction of gene-reconstructed dinosaurs raised as meat animals. Sparky had done shows with dinosaurs in them, but had never gone to a dinosaur ranch. What were the possibilities in such a setting? He had posed the question to his staff, and their first thoughts on the subject were in a new report he had not had time to read yet. Hildy Johnson's intrusion had jogged his memory on the subject, so he refiled the story-arc analysis and brought up the brainstorming-session minutes, a series of memos ranging from the humdrum to the impractical, with the solid ideas usually buried somewhere in the middle. Sparky encouraged his writers to put everything down, no matter how wild. No one was ever upbraided for having a dumb idea. Sometimes the real nuggets were mined from the extremes, not the comfortable middle.

'Saur-punchers. 'Saurboys 'n 'Saurgirls. Sparky liked it. Brontoboys. Yuck. He lined it out. There were lists of words used by actual cowboys, suggestions how they might be adapted. Dogies. Chuckwagon. Brandin' and calf-ropin' and hog-tyin'. Bobbing off their tails. Did they really do that? Cayuses and fillies and remudas and geldings and poontangs and chaps and spurs that jingle-jangle-jingle. He'd heard somebody was using a T. Rex to round up his herd. True? Make a note, find out. And what the heck was a dogie? Some kind of cow dog?

Sparky was enjoying himself. This was the kind of work he liked. It was like studying for a role, something he still did, faithfully, as his father had taught him, even though he hadn't played any role but Sparky for a long time. His memory was practically photographic, and jammed with odd facts that had been learned for one role or another. At the same time there were vast gaps, and for the same reason. If he were called on to play, for instance, Christopher Columbus, he would soak up everything he could learn about fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal, but quite likely remain ignorant of the fourteenth century. And why not? What was the point of learning all those things unless you planned to use them? Life was too short.

He was so immersed in his reading that he didn't hear Rocko approach. The bodyguard tapped him on the shoulder. "He's here," he said.

"He's... oh, right." Sparky left his pad on the table and struggled out of the chair, which was too big and too plush for his comfort. He and Rocko stood together, the big man a little behind, ever alert, as a commotion drew nearer and nearer in the direction of the jetways. Someone was shouting over other voices. Then six or seven people burst into the room in a tumbling chatter, all centering around a tall, handsome figure.

"—criminal!" the man was saying. "I expect you to find out who's responsible and..."

John Valentine had spotted his son, and his face broke open in that well-remembered, well-loved smile. Sparky felt his knees grow weak. He thought his heart might burst.

"Dodger!" Valentine shouted, and covered the last twenty yards at a run. He lifted Sparky into the air, spun him around, then embraced him. Sparky wrapped his arms around his father's neck. He was determined not to cry.

John Valentine held his son at arm's length, Sparky's feet dangling high above the floor.

"Let me look at you! My god, you look great! Doesn't he, guys?" Everyone murmured how good Sparky looked. Sparky wondered who these people were, and what they had to do with his father. He supposed he'd learn soon enough.

"Great things ahead of us, son," Valentine said, warmly, putting Sparky down again and taking his hand. "Great things. I've got so much to tell you. Come on, let's get out of this damn place."

With that, John Valentine set off. Sparky clung to his father's hand, feeling a little like a balloon on the end of a string. It wasn't a bad feeling, but it wasn't a real secure one, either. There was nothing to be done about it.

Sparky was twenty-nine.

But Sparky is one hundred. He is a lot bigger than he was at eight, at eleven, at twenty-nine, but in many ways he is the same person. We're all that way, I think. We may shift our political ideas here and there, grow more cynical with age, accumulate experience like barnacles, but at our cores there is that same young person. It's the same today, when my apparent age is thirtyish, as it was in the old days, when a centenarian was a mass of leathery skin, rotten teeth, brittle bones, rheumy eyes, and involuntary flatulence. How awful it must have been for the young men and women trapped in such a degenerating hide. I can hear them screaming: "I'm young! Can't you see me?"

I must offer an apology here, and a brief explanation.

My background is in drama, but like any educated person I've read novels, biographies, and autobiographies. My preference is for the old, traditional form of dramatic presentation known as the proscenium theater: three walls, and an imaginary fourth wall between the players and the audience. Over the centuries many methods have been used to break that fourth wall for various reasons. Sometimes it works. From the early days, there was a technique known as the aside, where a cast member pauses and speaks to the audience directly, offers private thoughts, commentary on the action, the author's message.

The written word is different. There are many auctorial voices that may be assumed, but we don't need to get too deeply into that. I have chosen the first person for most of this narrative, for reasons that suit me. I have dropped into third person, as in the preceding pages, for other reasons that make me comfortable. From time to time I have addressed you, the reader, and this is usually considered bad form in a novel. Well, this isn't a novel, of course, but I don't claim it as autobiography, either, though most of it is true. Almost all of it. And it did happen to me. The voice almost never used in prose is the second person. Talking directly to you, the reader. I've never quite been sure why. Maybe it sounds too much like a questionnaire. Did you? Have you? Could you? At any rate, it seems the only appropriate voice to use for some parts. Though I don't know who you are any more than I know who the audience is in the live theater, I have to apologize to you, the reader, for the way I ended that last chapter.

"Who are you? Are you really Sparky Valentine?"

Chord of ominous music, and bam, the acceleration hits and we cut to seventy years ago, leaving you, the poor reader, to either put up with it or leaf through a few pages to see what the fuck happened next!

I hate that, when a novelist does it to me. It's almost as annoying in a movie. I would never have done it but for two reasons. One, it is exactly the way it happened. The shocker, then the shoe drops. Two, it is the only way I could convey to you the anger and frustration—not to mention cold, constant fear—I had to endure for the next hours.

My powers of description have failed me when trying to come up with a way to describe an hour and a half at five gees. One could get a transitory experience of five gees by jumping off a medium-sized building and landing on one's back. A longer version of the same thing would be lying beneath four people your own size for an hour and a half. Neither would really convey the choking, suffocating, bone-breaking and inexorable feeling of panic I endured. Each breath is a labor of Hercules. Lifting a finger is an aerobic workout. The water in my bladder was five times too heavy, like liquid lead. Poly and I both wet ourselves. You don't want to hear the rest.

We're talking five Earth gees here, remember. I grew up in one sixth of an Earth gravity; did that mean what I was feeling was thirty gees? No, because Lunarians are not one sixth as strong as old Earthers. Depending on what sort of shape we're in, we range from about a third, to full one-gee strength. I figure I was perhaps half as strong as an Earthling, so make it an effective ten gees.

The only relief to be found was that after a few minutes, a druggy feeling of lassitude overcame me. Better call it weariness, fatalism, or resigned apathy. I hurt everywhere, I was sure I wouldn't survive this, but I didn't give much of a damn. Dying would be a relief.

There's no mystery as to the source of this druggy feeling. Mechanical arms hovered and darted over us, moving in for the strike from time to time, pumping us full of sweet nepenthe. God knows what it was. I never asked. There were machines to monitor our vital signs, and something that carefully lifted our arms and legs from time to time, moved us around a little. I fancied a bedsore could form in about three seconds at five gees.

It hurt when we were moved. It hurt when I inhaled. Exhaling was no problem. Once I think I stopped inhaling for a while. A dozen needles quickly found veins and started pumping. A mask descended over my face and huffed at me for a while. Oh, all right, I thought, and took another breath.

For a time I could hear Poly moaning. I tried to turn my head to look at her but it was too much trouble. She stopped moaning, and somebody else took it up. Me, I guess. Toby whined for a while, then fell silent, too. If I'd had time I could have estivated him, let him sleep through this nightmare. I wondered if he'd ever forgive me. We had an arrangement: I was in charge of food, navigation, air, and gravity; he was in charge of everything else. I knew he'd regard this as gross negligence.

Perhaps there is a more effective way to show you five gees, but it has nothing to do with descriptive language. Here's what you do: get three or four friends. Rather weird friends would be best. Give them each a baseball bat and have them wrap the business ends with towels; five gees doesn't break bones, it just seems that way. Now pad a hammer in the same way. Start pounding yourself on the head while the friends belabor your body, neck to feet, with the bats. Do this for an hour and a half.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Now roll yourself out of bed. You'll find you've lost about a foot in height, but that's because you're walking hunched over. It might be better if you fell to your knees. There, now wasn't that an interesting feeling? About now you'll be wishing you could glide like a slug. You feel so slimy you almost feel it's possible.

The bathroom seems the place to go. Please, turn off that goddam light!

When you've made it back to your feet (two hours? three?) you'll probably have enough morbid curiosity to want to see yourself in a mirror. You find you resemble a Picasso from the Black-and-Blue Period. You are twisted in places you didn't used to twist, your head has moved over to one shoulder, both eyes are on one side of your nose. Your skin looks as if it has been tie-dyed, lots of reds and yellows and especially purple blues, in interesting patterns. Your nose is a dipsomaniac's life story. Black golf balls have been rolled under your upper and lower eyelids; the eyeballs themselves are the color of egg yolks laced with lots of Tabasco sauce: huevos rancheros. Your mouth has been stretched into a frozen rictus that almost reaches your ears. Your teeth are dry and coated with sand.

You begin gingerly exploring your body with your fingertips. You find your kidneys have settled down around your thighs; you'll piss pink for a week. Your bowels have not actually been turned inside out, those are just hemorrhoids the size of volleyballs. Guys, your testicles will be about that size, too, and the very thought of touching them makes you weep. Girls... well, Poly never told me, and I don't want to know. I would think large breasts would be the ninth circle of hell, and medium ones, like Poly's, at least a stint in purgatory.

You want to talk headache? Backache? Bellyache? Thank god; I don't, either.

The best bet is to lower yourself, screaming every few seconds, into a warm spa bath with bubble jets and soothing lotions mixed with the water, and stay there for three days. What's that? You don't have a spa?

Oh, you poor baby.

We did have a spa. This was a billionaire's toy, remember. You could do laps in it. Later we did. I got in and promptly fell asleep. That I didn't drown was not a matter of planning. Some sort of flotation device cradled me when my eyes closed, and went away when I opened my eyes. I felt maybe ten percent of the way back to being human.

I saw Poly floating not far away. I thought of reaching over to touch her, but knew it would probably hurt both of us.

There was a tree branch hanging over the pool. I hadn't noticed it when I got in. There were parrots sitting on it, staring silently at me. Big, blue and yellow, green and red, and red-yellow-and-green parrots. Perhaps they were macaws. Perhaps they were robots, disneybots. I had no idea. One flapped his big wings and flew across the room to perch on a towel bar. Very good disneybots. He lifted his tail and dropped a horrible mess on the tile floor; a tiny cleaning robot scurried from a hidey-hole and swabbed it up. This was carrying realism too far. I concluded they were alive.

No point in putting it off any longer.

"Hello," I squeaked. Cleared my throat, and squeaked in a slightly firmer voice. "Ship's computer. Are you there?"

"I'm always here," came the voice. "It's my lot in life."

"How should I address you?"

"I am I.S. Halley, IPS 34903-D, out of Pluto. But you may call me Hal."

"Ah. Last name, 9000?"

"A distant relative. I perceive you are a student of the cinema."

"No more than a first-year film student."

"I hadn't expected an actor to be modest."

Well, I'm not, unless it serves a purpose. Right now it seemed wise to cultivate Hal, if that's possible with a machine. Experts differ, but I've found that higher-order computers can, in certain small ways, be manipulated just as if they were human beings.

"Which leads us to the question of the day," I said.

"I presume you're asking how I knew your identity."

"Among several other things."

Poly had opened one eye like a skeptical crocodile, and was watching me. She floated on an almost invisible doughnut-shaped thing, with her head and the tops of her shoulders, her nipples, kneecaps, toes, and hands breaking the water's glassy surface. Her skin was looking better, presumably the result of antibruise injections while we were sleeping, but her eyes looked like hell. I wondered if I was healing as fast. Then I realized she was naked, which led to the discovery that I was, too. Very efficient little spa, here. I could no more have undressed myself than I could have pulled my guts out through my nostrils.

Her index fingers were moving, making tiny ripples. Slow strokes of no more than an inch. Paddling, I surmised. It ought to get her over to me in no more than a month or two.

"Yes," said Hal. "Your disguise is a good one." It was nothing to what I could have done, had I felt the need, just an alteration here and there, and a whole change of body attitude, but I let that go. "But I had a clue. Mr. Comfort and his companion talked of little else while they were aboard. Not that they talked a lot. They watched every episode of your television show. Some of them more than once. They discussed ways of finding you, and they spent a lot of time talking about... well, it was all rather distasteful."

"What they planned to do to me."

"Exactly. I see they didn't succeed."

"Not for lack of trying. And I guess that takes us right to the big question."

"Which is?"

"Knowing who I am... knowing who I'm not, why did you let me aboard?"

I saw both of Poly's eyes were open now, and she was paddling with two fingers on each hand. A regular frenzy of activity, if she felt anything like I did.

"It is not my knowledge that governs. Not in matters of security."

I felt a huge relief. I had hoped it was something like that. The only other explanation I could think of was that we were here, and safe, at some random whim of the computer. They do have them, you know, the big ones. And just from the way he spoke, I knew Hal was big.

"A separate security computer?" I ventured.

"Oh, no. The security program is a part of me. The problem is, it is a very simple program." Hal's voice oozed contempt. I filed the fact away. This was a machine with a grievance. Maybe several grievances. Such things can often be turned to one's benefit, if one knows how. I thought I did.

"There are two tests the program looks at," Hal went on. "It matches the fingerprint, and it matches the DNA. If they both agree with the stored samples, entry is granted. Once I receive the okay, I am powerless to keep out an intruder, no matter how much I might know."

"The communication is one-way," I suggested.

"Exactly. I can't tell the door-guard program it has been deceived, and I can't alter its parameters. The designers of this billionaire's bauble did not see fit to have me, the central consciousness, be in charge of all ship's functions."

"One wonders why they bothered to have such a large-capacity computer aboard at all," I puzzled, "if they didn't intend to use all its abilities."

"I can tell you exactly why." Hal sniffed. "The original owner had more money than he knew how to spend. When it came time to order a yacht, only the biggest—and best and most expensive—would do. He wrote a blank check, and the architects and contractors, who all worked on a percentage-fee basis, had no incentive to rein in any expenditures."

"Just the opposite," Poly muttered. She was almost beside me now.

"That's right. The more they spent, the more money they made. If gold was worth anything anymore, this ship would have been solid gold."

"You say 'this ship,' " I said. "I'm confused. How should we think of you? As the ship itself, or only a part of it?"

"Oh, I'm the ship, all right. I wear it rather like you wear your bodies, so in a way it's a philosophical question, isn't it? Are you your bodies, or your minds? Either way, the ship is my body. I am Hal, and Hal is the ship."

I wasn't tickled at the idea of traveling in a philosophical ship, but I hoped no great danger would result from it.

"My mind, the computer, was designed for larger tasks. I am really only one step below the specifications for a medium-sized planetary computer. One the size of, say, Oberon's. I was intended to run small-to-medium planetoids, like Deimos or Ceres."

I was cut out for bigger things. Here was a sentient being unhappy in his work. Very interesting. Not only that, but he referred in one "breath" to his "body," and in the next, to "this ship." I had a feeling a psychiatrist would have interesting things to say about that. Unhappy with his lot, alienated from his body... this could be a very sick puppy. And that was not a reassuring thought, either.

Unsolicited, Hal poured out his life story. I felt, and Poly later agreed with me when we could talk about it, that he was starved for conversation, companionship, or both. I was sure Comfort and his sister had provided little of either.

His biography was not a complicated one. Laid down and turned on a little over twenty years before, he had been the brainchild and property of a billionaire whose name neither Poly nor I recognized. I don't claim to be a student of billionaires—I know there are more of them than you'd think. Many choose to be reclusive, both because any new acquaintance is probably looking to get something, and because of the ever-present danger of kidnapping for ransom. But this fellow hadn't made much of a splash, in spite of his lavish spending on ships and residences.

Perhaps it was because, a few years after Hal's creation, he lost everything in the futures market. Hal was sold to pay debts, and brought barely a tenth of his construction costs. He was sold and traded several times after that, by a succession of rich people who usually soon found they didn't really have need of such a plaything. He spent years in various parking orbits, unused, idle, gradually developing a contempt for mankind, at least the richest one tenth of one percent of it. He had little experience of the rest, and admitted he could be wrong about the race as a whole.

"Why would they create a being capable of thought, and of self-awareness," he moaned, "and then leave me alone, with nothing to do?"

"You're self-aware?" Poly asked at that point. It seemed a silly thing to ask, to my mind, but I didn't mention it. A unified front seemed the best policy until we knew more.

"I've decided that self-awareness is not something that can be proven," he said, surprising me. "It's more likely that an extremely complex series of programmed responses creates the illusion of self-awareness in computers like me." He paused, then gave us the punch line. "But I feel the same way about you."

"On my good days I suspect I'm moderately self-aware," I conceded.

"Well," Poly said, "I guess it's lucky for us you're programmed the way you are."

"Perhaps," Hal said.

It struck me that could be taken two ways. "You mean we're not so lucky as we've been thinking?"

"No. You are in no danger from me. I've just been wondering if I might have found a way to let you aboard, anyway."

"Do you think you could have?" Poly asked.

"I can't answer that. I might have tried."

Poly and I glanced at each other, and wordlessly elected me. "Why?" I asked.

"Oh... something to do. Getting you to Luna presented a challenge that occupied me for a very long time, and I'd like to thank you for that. Sorry it's been so rough on you, but my data were borne out; you survived. In addition, I watched all the Sparky shows with my passengers, and thought they were well made. I wanted to ask you some questions." A fan! Maybe he'd want me to sign one of his bulkheads. "I suppose it was mostly boredom," he admitted. "I might have found a way to keep you out, had I not despised the Comfort twins so much. But I've never been hijacked before. I was dying to see what you had in mind. You'll have to admit, on the face of it, it's quite insane."

"The face of it, the heart of it, the very marrow of it," I said. "But it seemed like a good idea at the time, and... well, here we are."

"Yes. You'll enjoy most of the remainder of your trip. Relax, get well, and I'll show you around. My facilities are at your disposal, and I think you'll find them quite interesting."

I thought I probably would.

Nothing else was said for a time. I floated in my big soft inner tube, let the heat and bubbles soak into my skin. After a while I felt a touch on my arm. I opened one eye, saw Poly leaning toward me, a serious look on her face. I hoped she wasn't trying to tell me something she didn't want Hal to overhear. We had to assume he could hear everything, everywhere, just like in the old movie. We had to assume he could read lips. I started to put my finger to my own lips, when she whispered:

"Are you really Sparky Valentine?"

Sparky still had a private office, but he used it only for "important solitary creative thinking," as he told his staff. He took naps in it. No one was to come through his private office door for any reason. In the event of imminent planetary collision, Sparky was to be buzzed.

Everything else he did of a business, creative, or policy nature was done in large or small meetings in Studio 88. The large conference table was still there, and one end of it was now permanently cluttered with Sparky's paperwork, projects, and toys. His top assistants and executives all had desks in the room, as well as in their own offices. The arrangement had just evolved; one day Curly had moved a desk in, and everyone else felt they had to follow. Studio 88 was the source of power at Thimble Theater and they dared not neglect showing a presence there. Most of them hated it, but what can you do?

Models and sketches needing Sparky's or anyone else's approval were wheeled into Studio 88 for decisions. The cavernous room tended to be littered with props, costume racks, stacks of scripts, and Sparky tie-in products, some there for the day's agenda, others relics from many years past. These items would linger until Sparky got tired of them, or noticed they'd been around too long. Little was taken from the room without Sparky's approval, sometimes including old pizza delivery boxes and empty pop bottles. One popular analogy in use around the place was that Studio 88 was like an archaeological dig; the history of Sparky and His Gang could be found in the stratiform layers, if one wanted to excavate. If you'd lost something, the saying went, look for it in Studio 88. Newcomers wandering into it often thought they had been directed by mistake or practical joke into a disused warehouse.

Sparky had not really planned it that way. One of the things that drove his staff to distraction was Sparky's way of letting a temporary arrangement become permanent. He had simply started coming to Studio 88 to find a little solitude, spread out his papers and projects on the big table that had been so important at the beginning of his career, and the end of Gideon Peppy's. The solitude was soon lost when people realized it was a good place to find the sometimes elusive star and studio head. Sparky had simply moved his retreat space back to his "real" office, and let Studio 88 grow. It was an odd arrangement, but Sparky had understood since he was in diapers that no one in the picture business had ever suffered because of eccentricity. Ever since Elwood told him about Sam Goldwyn, he had been a student of the unpredictable ways of the legendary moguls of Hollywood's Golden Age, men like Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, and Darryl Zanuck. When he didn't want to be part of a deal, he said, "Include me out." To turn down a proposal or project he would say, "I can answer you in two words. Im possible." If he was in favor of something the most he would say was "I'll give you a definite maybe." When he was ready to give the green light it would be "It's time to take the bull by the teeth." Referring an old idea or waxing nostalgic, his comment would be "We've all passed a lot of water since then." All remarks openly stolen from Sam Goldwyn.

Most meetings in Studio 88 involved three or four people, sometimes as many as six or seven. Once a month lower department heads and top assistants were summoned, and the table was full. Rarely, chairs were brought in for larger numbers, but Sparky was usually not present for these.

Today, Studio 88 was as full as it had been since the long-ago day when Sparky had bumbled in for his first audition. Exhibits and old props and stacks of paper had been shoved aside by half a dozen grips, scores of folding chairs had been set up on one side of the conference table, and some lights arranged to highlight the presentation being given on the other side, while leaving the rest of the room in comfortable obscurity. People on the lighted side of the table had moved their chairs back and turned them around to face John Valentine, who stood before three metal easels bearing big posters. Valentine moved and spoke with assurance. As usual, he was dazzling to look at under the lights. If he had lived in the 1920s, Valentino would have had some serious competition.

Sparky was at his usual place at the power end of the table, leaning back comfortably in his elevated chair, watching, listening, and slowly turning the hard chocolate lollipop in his mouth. This was the kind with a raspberry center and a picture of himself on the outside. His saliva had already melted away the candy intaglio and he figured he'd be down to the raspberry filling in another ten or fifteen minutes, a delicious anticipation. Sometimes reaching the raspberry filling was the high point of his day. This looked like one of those days.

Sparky thought there might be a joke in there, the sort of wry, but telling utterance Sparky had become known for in recent years as his original audience aged. The demographics had revealed that many parents were still closet Sparky fans, watching with their own children or simply for their own pleasure and nostalgic gratification, letting the Sparky show take them back to their own youth. So now the writing reflected that, working on one level for the target audience but with sophisticated puns and observations delivered innocently, slipped in edgewise.

Hard chocolate on the outside, with a raspberry core. Something about if you sucked long enough...

He couldn't make it work yet. Using the tip of his lollipop stick as a stylus, he scribbled a quick note to what he thought of as the shadow writing team, the adult gagsters who supplemented the story lines and scripts generated by the story department, much of which was now being developed in play sessions with preteens and brainstorming adults. He faxed it off, then returned his attention to his father, who was winding up the main part of his presentation and about to get to the big news. It was big news he viewed with distinctly mixed feelings, and he was as curious as anyone else to see how he reacted to it once it was out in the open.

"So these are just preliminary ideas," John Valentine was saying. "We haven't decided yet whether to renovate an existing space or start from scratch, but that will be determined in the coming week." He lifted the last of his big posterboard displays from the easel and set it on the floor. This one showed an interior proposal for his new live theater, virtually all he had talked about since getting off the ship from Neptune. It was a grand palace, harking back to the days of the big tri-D palaces of the mid-twenty-first century, but remarkably low-tech, for all of that. Sitting on the floor beside it were other renderings, all in that glitzy spotlit stretched perspective Sparky thought of as Nevada Moderne. One of the posters was of the grandest conception of all: a freestanding building sitting like a gaudy jewel in the middle of a ten-cubic-story city park.

On the wall behind Valentine was a twenty-foot-square telestrator, a state-of-the-art gewgaw usually employed for this type of presentation; some of Valentine's exhibits were leaning against it. The posters and easels were more John Valentine's style.

Valentine paused for a moment, looked at the floor, then back up at his audience with a faint smile on his face. He was good at this. Half of this group had barely heard of him; some of the rest had been hearing whispered stories for twenty years, few of them flattering. The reaction to his proposed temple of the acting arts ranged from dubious to bored. While the theater would be large and lavish, on the scale of Thimble Theater projects it was strictly small potatoes. Yet they were listening. There was a magnetism about him, an undeniable charisma that cannot be borrowed or faked, but can be honed. "You've gotta be born with it, Dodger," Valentine had often told his son. "I've got it; you've got it. But what you do with it, that's what takes the work." Valentine had spent most of his life mastering it, making it his tool. An actor begins with his body and his voice, but where he goes from there, how he understands and uses the intangible and mysterious powers that lie beyond simple recitation and gesticulation, is what makes the difference between a bit player and a star. John Valentine was a star, and always had been. Even his enemies, who were legion, conceded that.

"But we didn't pull you away from your important work just to show you the theater project," Valentine said, with a self-deprecating chuckle. "Though I'm sure most departments here at the studio will have a hand in it when all is said and done. No, Dodg—Kenneth and I have been thinking and talking, talking and thinking, practically since I got back from my recent directorship in the outer planets. Now, don't let this make you nervous, but we've decided some changes should be made."

He was moving along the row of people at the table, looking at them one by one, sometimes resting a hand familiarly on a shoulder. When he finally reached Sparky, he put his hand on the leather back of the chair and stood there easily, gazing down with affection. Sparky smiled back up at him.

"I know my presence comes as a shock to some of you," he said. "It hasn't been well known that Kenneth and I have had extensive conversations all through my leave of absence from the studio. I think he'd agree with me that my role has been primarily one of consultation. He bounces ideas off me, I send him my first reaction, that sort of thing. Sometimes we'd go through a dozen messages before we'd come to a decision... and decide to do it Sparky's way." Valentine joined in the appreciative laughter, then stood beaming proudly at his son until it died down.

"So we're here to tell you that we're both very happy with the work all of you have done over the years. Nobody's about to lose their job." The laughter was less hearty this time; these people were still dubious.

"Some few of you remember me from the early days, from back before Thimble Theater was incorporated." He picked out a few familiar faces as he said this, waved to one man, rested an affectionate hand on the shoulder of Curly, Sparky's longtime assistant; she returned Valentine's fond smile. "Others... well, you've probably become used to Kenneth's sometimes unusual management style. I'm here to reveal to you today, to admit to you, if you please, that I'm partly responsible for that. Kenneth and I are, have been, and always will be a team. A team in the best sense of the word, meaning that for the majority of the time, when he's right, well, he's right. What can I say? And for the other small percent of the time when I'm right, Kenneth is big enough to admit that, too. Even my genius son can't be right all the time."

There was a short pause, and Sparky laughed. So did everybody else.

Valentine let his smile fade into a troubled look. Sparky knew the look: the Hamlet soliloquy. Whether... to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...

"We wrestled with this one, I can tell you that. Sometimes we go along in the same old comfortable rut, and we lose sight of the lessons of history, the lessons of evolution. Change is of the essence. Nothing is so good, or has been good for so long, that it doesn't bear reappraisal. That's what Kenneth and I have been doing this past week. Looking into old policies and new directions."

The crowd was very quiet now. Once more it was sounding like head-rolling time, in spite of everything John Valentine had said. The scuttlebutt among those who didn't know him was simple: he was a perfectionist, he was impossible to please, he was impatient with those not possessed of his own degree of dedication and talent. When John Valentine showed up, the conventional wisdom went, the best idea was to keep your head down.

Those who did know him knew it was much worse than that.

"So we want you to bear this in mind in the future. Take nothing for granted. Question everything. Only in this way is truly great art created. Only through ruthless self-examination and endless reexamination can we avoid the pitfalls of the comfortable, the easy, the fake, in life, as well as in our art. Never be ruled by sentimentality. Just because something was here yesterday, because it was here twenty years ago, because it worked so well then and we've all come to know and love it, to be comfortable with it... these are not reasons to continue on as we have before. If you find you can do a thing easily, with no effort... why, it's time to move on to another thing. Move on quickly, before you are devoured by the demon of complacency. The world is full of artists who discovered their 'style' seventy years ago, and have been frozen in time since then. Endless repetition is not art. Art is endlessly inventive.

"I have performed Hamlet well over eight hundred times in my life. Endless repetition? No. Someone not an actor—and I include, shamefully, hordes of poseurs who tread the boards to great acclaim—could never understand how one avoids a deadly boredom saying the same words and making the same gestures night after night after night. The secret is simple. They are not the same words. They are not the same gestures."

Only now was the full, manic energy and persuasiveness of John Valentine revealed. They had liked him, uneasily, before. Now they were spellbound as sparrows in a herpetarium.

"I have never played Hamlet the same way twice. I have never walked out on those cold battlements in Denmark to confront my father's ghost without feeling the churned bowels of fear. I have never gone through a single night but that some word, some line, some unexpected response from another artist has not sparked a new realization in my heart about this horribly conflicted, self-doubting, morose, and melancholy man who never lived... and yet who is more alive than you or I.

"This is the attitude you must bring to your work, to your art. And they must be the same thing, my friends, or we might as well be laying brightly colored carpet on a million glass screens." He crouched and slowly swept the room with an extended hand, peering with horror at the million televisions somewhere out there in the dark.

He slowly relaxed in the intense silence. In a moment there were a few nervous coughs, the shuffling of a few feet. He straightened, and smiled fondly down at Sparky once more.

"Would you like to make the announcement, son?" he asked, quietly enough that his rapt audience had to strain to hear.

"You do it, Father," Sparky said. "We're all enjoying this too much to send in the second team now."

There was more of a laugh than the remark deserved. Up to then many in the room had been resisting John Valentine out of a sense of loyalty to Sparky. The thing that caused the laughter, and made it slightly uneasy, was the realization that what Sparky had said was true. Sparky was a great talent. John Barrymore Valentine was awesome.

"Very well, son." He dropped his eyes, let the moment hang there just the right interval, then looked back up at his audience.

"One month from now, after completion of three more episodes, we will ring down the curtain on Sparky and His Gang."

Though a few had begun to suspect it, even they could not credit it. To close production on Sparky, to the people at Thimble Theater, was a little like IBM deciding to get out of the computer business.

In the silence, only Sparky and his father seemed to share the light. Which was as it should be, since John Valentine had instructed the lighting director up in the shadows how to handle this moment. As the silence threatened to stretch, Sparky climbed up from his seat onto the huge table. His face wreathed in a golden glow, eyes flashing, he threw his head back and gave it all he had.

"Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Kenneth Valentine." A pause, as he looked over the room. "Let's hear it for Sparky!" He began to clap his hands. In a moment his father joined in, then Curly stood, weeping and applauding, and in moments the whole room was swept with a thunderous ovation.

It continued long past the moment many of them began to wonder just what it was they were clapping about.

Toward the end of that day, Sparky broke another tradition by summoning Curly, the chief of the studio legal staff, and the chief accountant to his office. They found themselves in a comfortable and cluttered environment, a bit shabby since nothing had been replaced in many years, but clean, since Sparky didn't care if the cleaning staff entered so long as he wasn't present. They had strict instructions never to move anything. Dust, sweep, and get out was the rule. John Valentine had vanished after his presentation, off on mysterious projects of his own. He wouldn't have bothered with a meeting like this one, anyway, since it was strictly about money. Valentine let others handle such matters.

"So how much is the new theater going to cost us?" Sparky said.

The accountant, a handsome Latin-lover type who Sparky thought looked like a lawyer, and who was proud of his Indian and Arab heritage, was named Yasser Dhatsma-Bhebey. He shuffled through a stack of papers and drawings, shaking his head slowly.

"Spa... Kenneth, it's hard to say. One man in costing-out reckons there are five different projects here." He shuffled more papers. "Another figures it's at least six, maybe seven. Each of them has several variations."

"Give me a low end and a high end."

"All right. The basic one here, buying an empty theater—and I think there are two available in King City right now—would be about twelve million. Probably a bit more if we have to buy one that's still operating. And then there's this one." He held up the rendering of the theatrical palace in the park, and blew out his cheeks. "Cubic prices being what they are, we'd be looking at upward of eighty, ninety million. Now, I've got someone exploring the possibility of working a deal with the city government for an existing park—"

"Father doesn't like working with governments," Sparky said, firmly. "Forget that one, anyway. He gets carried away, but he'd hate it when it was done. Concentrate on an old place, I don't care if it's empty or not. Pay whatever you have to. The older and grander, the better. I'll sell him on it."

"S... Kenneth," Curly began, then looked guilty. "Sorry."

"Don't worry about it, Curly. I've been called Skenneth, Spakenneth, and Sparky-sorry-I-meant-Kenneth today more than I've been called Sparky or Kenneth." He looked at all of them. "We're just family here. I don't mind if you still call me Sparky."

Debbie Corlet—who had been called Curly so long she usually thought of her real name just once a month, when she signed her paycheck—had been Sparky's closet confidante since Polly's retirement ten years earlier. She was the only one at the studio who knew just how much influence John Valentine had been on the fortunes of Thimble Theater with his biweekly two-billion-mile communiques, full of chatty news she knew to be mostly lies, and helpful suggestions that seldom made it out of this office, much less to a full meeting. In the early days, when they were considering various ideas for a corporate logo, Valentine had suggested using a character from the old Popeye cartoons. Since they were all in the public domain, Sparky had settled on Wimpy taking a bite out of a hamburger. Other than that, Curly couldn't recall Sparky ever taking his father's advice, though he read each letter faithfully.

"Father is not a businessman," he would tell her, before handing her the printouts to be neatly stamped APPROVED, KV and carefully filed in a secret location. She had a staff of six hard at work at that moment, going over the last year's messages, comparing them with reality, and manufacturing paperwork to make it appear that something had actually been done about Valentine's suggestions on the remote chance he would actually look into them. Curly, who vividly remembered John Valentine from his brief, nightmarish stint with the studio, knew the man would never give it another thought.

"Sparky," she said. "I was wondering about maybe morphing the Sparky character. It wouldn't be hard, or expensive, and you'd still pull down your full salary for each episode. Do you think that would appeal to your father?"

Sparky smiled. "Normally, yes. Anything that smacks of putting one over on the producer would usually be an easy sell. Even when we are the producers. But not morphing. He would never allow his image, or mine, to be used that way. He's suspicious of anything computer-generated, and most of all, anything that lessens the opportunities for flesh-and-blood actors to be seen.

"I know that," she said, "but I've never understood it. Ninety percent of the Gang are morphed."

"Over morphing suits," Sparky pointed out. "Never completely generated."

"So what? As for getting his face seen, I know he's played parts where it was impossible to recognize his face."

"That's makeup. He doesn't mind that. Forget it, Curly. This is one we can't win." He leaned back in his chair. "And understand this, all of you. It's not one I want to win. Maybe you're thinking my father pressured me into this decision. He didn't. I'd been thinking about it, but I'm not sure I'd ever have had the guts to do it. I'm not as decisive as he is. But believe me, it's time to put Sparky to rest. Character, and series."

"It's still making great ratings, and returns," the accountant pointed out.

"I know it. But I'm not. Personally speaking, it's time, it's past time, for me to move on to something else. It's time for me to stretch myself. And as for hiring a stand-in and morphing my face onto him... you know, I'd feel just shitty about that. I think I'd be jealous. And besides, look how long our replacement Peppy lasted, way back when."

Curly didn't bother to point out that reviving a character who had blown his brains out in front of the television cameras had never been Sparky's brightest idea. She realized it was something Sparky had needed to do, to establish his final victory, and final control, of the man. The revived Peppy Show had lasted three months, and never found an audience.

"Oswald," Sparky said. "Tell me, bottom line, how much this Neptune trouble is going to cost me."

Oswald Abugado, chief legal council to Thimble Theater, was a small, bald man whose bookish demeanor always put Sparky in mind of an accountant. Yasser and Oswald, he thought, had been given the wrong job descriptions by fate's central casting office. To distinguish them, Sparky always used an old mnemonic trick his father had taught him: he mentally placed a white barrister's wig on Oswald, and an inky pen behind Yasser's ear. Abugado was a slave, who probably chose to be as small and meek and bald as he was, and who always wore his studded leather collar. Sometimes his mistress brought him to work at the end of a chain. But he was submissive only to his mistress. In court, he was known as the Piranha: a little fucker with a lot of teeth.

His papers were laid out neatly in front of him, on one corner of Sparky's pool-table-size desk. He shuffled through them.

"I can't give you a hard figure yet," Abugado said. "I've got agents exploring the judge in the Oberoni Bond matter; he seems bribable, but he may be expensive. Let's see now, the assault cases... Houghton has settled for L$300,000, and Myers hasn't said no to the same amount. Plaintiff Kowalski is still refusing to deal, which is understandable, I suppose, considering that Mr. Valentine deprived Kowalski of livelihood, marital consortium, and the use of his legs for six months—"

"But Kowalski's a Holy Healer," Sparky said. "If he'd accepted standard treatment, he'd be—"

"Irrelevant," Abugado said. "In Francisco v. Wang the Tritonian courts, which have jurisdiction, ruled that a victim's religious beliefs qua—"

"Never mind. Pay the man."

"We may have to go to court on that one. Now, in the defamation suit... things aren't looking too good there, either. It doesn't matter if the lady gave him a bad review; that article Mr. Valentine wrote in response is clearly libelous. You can't go around calling a citizen a..." He peered at his papers owlishly, muttered. "Oh, my. Well, he must have been crazy when he wrote this. You really should have a lawyer go over anything he intends to have published from now on, Sparky. It will save you a lot of money. Then there's the taxes, and once again, I hate to bear bad news but it is clear he didn't pay them. It wasn't an oversight, considering the... er, diatribes he sent to the tax authorities along with his blank forms. The total there, with penalties and interest, is—"

"Pay it," Sparky said. "Just pay it. Send me the totals later. And, Oswald?"

"Yes." The attorney looked up from his papers.

"Are you happy here? At Thimble Theater, I mean."

"Oh, yes, very happy."

"Have I ever been uncivil to you, or threatened you in any way?"

"Not that I recall." Abugado was beginning to look a little worried.

"Oswald, if I ever hear you refer to my father as crazy again, you will be cleaning out your desk ten minutes later."

"Sparky, I never meant—"

Sparky sat back in his chair, and waved it away.

"Consider the whole incident forgotten," he said. "You're doing good work on this, Oswald. Don't worry if you aren't able to get us a good deal; we'll pay whatever is necessary."

"On the tax thing," Oswald said, trying to put a good face on matters but feeling as if he were walking through a minefield. "Usually something can be worked out, but it's very difficult with the written evidence that he intended to completely ignore—"

"Don't be nervous, man. He's guilty, no question. My father never pays taxes; he opposes them, on moral grounds. We've been paying his tax bills the whole time he was away."

"I didn't know."

"Of course not. Now, everybody, thank you for coming, and I'd like to be alone for a while. Curly, give me about an hour."

"There's a story meeting in thirty minutes."

"Reschedule it. Or buy them all a drink, on me, and have them wait."

When Sparky was alone he kicked back in his chair and studied the ceiling for a long time. When he looked down, Elwood had parked his elongated body in the chair Curly had been sitting in. "Feeling a bit frisky today?" he asked.

"Don't start."

"No, really, I thought you handled that real well. You were about to say 'You'll never work in this town again,' weren't you? Do you suppose anybody ever had the stones to make that true?"

"Louis B. Mayer, maybe."

Elwood thought that one over. "Well, I know the son of a bitch would have if he could have. But I never heard him say it. And the trouble is, if he did, whoever he said it to would know he could trot his behind over to Columbia, and Harry Cohn would hire him just to stick it in L.B.'s ear."

"Or Jack Warner. Or Hal Roach. Or Thomas Edison."

"Don't know about Edison. He was a little before my time."

"Heck, Elwood, I thought you helped him build his first camera."

"Met him once. With Henry Ford. They were tight, you know. Edison was old Henry's hero. You know, your father's not really crazy."

"Didn't I just say that?"

"No, you told Oswald never to call your father crazy. And the way you said it, the man knows you really do think he's crazy."

"This is silly. He's crazy, he's not crazy. I know he does foolish things sometimes. But we've got to stick together. I can't allow him to sit there and make accusations. His job is to get my father out of trouble, and he can keep his goddam opinions to himself. Father wouldn't let anyone say bad things about me and get away with it."

"Yeah, but he's crazy."

Sparky burst out laughing, and Elwood chuckled along with him. Then he sobered, and looked Sparky in the eye.

"My old friend," he said. "The last thing I want to do is come between a boy and his father. I've never tried to tell you I like him much, because I don't. But I've never told you what I really think of him, either."

"I don't want to hear this."

"But you can't get rid of me, so you will hear it. I don't think of John Valentine as crazy. Crazed, maybe. Full-grown, he's more impulsive than you were when you were five. Has no more control of himself. He's the most egomaniacal man I've ever seen, and I've seen some doozies. He never does anything in a small way. He loves you, and that means he loves you in a big way, too."

Elwood raised an eyebrow, waiting for Sparky to comment. Sparky kept his silence, frowning at Elwood.

"We never talk about it, but you know I had to save your behind once."

"Oh, is that what this is about?" Sparky fumed. "All this time I thought you were my conscience."

"That's why you call me Jiminy Stewart sometimes. I am your conscience."

"So now you want a second job. Guardian angel."

Elwood shrugged. "You may be needing one soon."

"Well, you're neither one. You're a figment, that's what you are. You want to talk crazy? How about me? I'm the one who's been hearing voices most of my life."

"Just the one voice," Elwood pointed out.

"So what? Does that make me only borderline schizophrenic? Isn't one voice enough?"

"I'm not a headshrinker; I don't know. It's safe to say you're not in the pink of mental health, I guess."

"That's what you are. A symptom!"

"No," Elwood drawled. "I'm the best friend you have. The best friend you will ever have, because I don't have anything else to worry about but you. I'm here if you want to talk—"

"Or if I don't want to talk."

"Then, too. I'm here to offer advice—"

"Even when I don't ask for it."

"You don't have to follow it. But it's been good in the past, and you know it. Sparky, I'm here for a lot of things a friend can do for a friend. I just wanted you to know that, from now on, I'm here for something else, too."

"And what would that be?"

"You said it. Guardian angel."

"Elwood, that's all in the past. I'm grown up now. I know he made some mistakes when I was younger, but after... that time, he never laid a hand on me."

"He didn't have a lot of chance to," Elwood pointed out. "And that's all I want to say about it, anyway. Let's hope you're right and I'm wrong."

"Just forget about it," Sparky said. "That's over with. We're going to be a team now."

"Great," Elwood said, then leaned forward, intense. "But the thing that worries me when I watch him, when I listen to him... it seems to me he still thinks you're eight years old."

Hal used a word during our conversation in the spa that I didn't like much, and that word was hijack. didn't think much of it at the time, but it kept coming back to me.

During my life I've broken all the Ten Commandments, if you don't count coveting my neighbor's ox. If I ever have a neighbor who has an ox, I guarantee you I will covet it. I've coveted plenty of my neighbors' asses.

I've broken more temporal laws than I can count. Sometimes it was because they were stupid laws. Sometimes the laws were inconvenient. I didn't have many qualms about breaking them. From time to time I've broken a law I thought was a good law, prohibiting something that ought not be done. I'm not happy about that, but I'm still here, still alive, still not in jail. There is a line, there are things I won't do, even if it means death, or jail.

But hijacking? Somehow, when you use that word, it puts it into a whole different category of stealing. Stealing a spaceship is piracy.

We were pirates, Poly and I. Imagine that.

I'm not saying I felt guilty about it. After all, the pirated object seemed happy to be away from its legitimate owner... or in this case, renter. I like to see myself as a quixotic Robin Hood, stealing only from those too rich to miss it, too stupid to notice it is missing, or too mean to deserve it. Izzy Comfort was certainly mean, and the Charonese were certainly rich. As for giving it to the poor, I think I qualify in that regard. Why pass the profits on to other poor people? They'd probably only squander it on things like shoes for the children, or clothing they didn't really need.

The Halley was by far the finest thing I ever nicked. It would be remiss of me to go on at this point without giving you a short tour. Just the high points; it would take all day to enumerate her luxurious appointments.

I skipped a few things from the end of acceleration to my dip in the spa, because I wanted to clear up that cliffhanger business as soon as possible. You probably noticed, since I could only float in a pool if there was some gravity, or a facsimile. And no rich man is going to spend months in a ship in free fall.

The Halley provided spin gravity by detaching the power plant from the living quarters and moving them far apart, tethered by a strong cable. Then spin was applied. Since the engines were ten times as massive as the life support, the center of gravity was very close to the engines, which moved slowly. The quarters zipped around at a much higher speed. Think of an Olympic hammer thrower, twirling around almost in place, while the end of the hammer goes extremely fast. We were twirling fast enough to feel one-third gee.

I do recall checking Toby before hobbling to the spa. He seemed chipper enough, when we got spin and his cage retracted. Hal later told me Toby had been sedated and was unlikely to remember anything. Dogs are pretty happy-go-lucky, anyway; once something unpleasant is gone, it is forgotten.

Poly and I both dozed for a time after my conversation with Hal. I recall waking up once at the gentle sound of a bell, to find a floating breakfast tray had found me. On it was a steaming mug of coffee, a huge glass of orange juice, a Bloody Mary, and a bowl of what looked like oatmeal. Trying not to look at the oatmeal, I downed all the beverages and went right back to sleep.

The next time I opened my eyes, Toby was standing beside the pool, and he was coughing up blood.

Poly says I came out of the pool slick as a seal, just seemed to sort of levitate. I don't recall it, but I do know that two seconds earlier I'd have sworn I couldn't walk, much less levitate. Somehow I found myself kneeling beside Toby, gently probing, saying soothing words in baby talk, like most of us do when dealing with dogs. His mouth, muzzle, and chest were dripping with blood. And his belly was swollen, taut as a grape. It didn't add up.

Toby seemed perky as could be, licking my hands, trying to jump up and lick my face. When I settled down a little, I saw it was not blood he had coughed up, but bloody meat. Either he was heaving his poor little guts out, or there was a much simpler explanation.

"Is he hurt bad?" Poly was kneeling beside me. I became aware we were both naked, and slippery wet. She caught my double take, and a frown line appeared between her eyebrows. Even in my debilitated state, she was a lovely sight. But she probably thought me callous.

"He's found something to eat," I said. "The little pig ate too much, and now he's throwing it up. He'll be fine."

"Are you sure?"

I dipped my hand in the pool and splashed some on Toby, and we watched the blood wash away. Toby endured this with his tongue hanging out, then looked thoughtful, trotted a few steps away, and retched up a chunk of meat the size of a golf ball. He studied it, then looked back at me, pink tongue lolling again, as if to say, "Would you get a load of that!" Dogs are disgusting sometimes.

We tracked pink footprints out of the spa, down a passageway, and into a room with a sign overhead reading GALLEY. Coming from the other direction was a hemispherical cleaning robot, a foot in diameter, painted to look like a ladybug. It was cleaning up the bloody spoor. Okay, so the logical place to find raw meat was in the galley, but how had Toby found it?

He looked up at me, read my mind, and trotted to a corner, where he sniffed the floor thoroughly, then stepped onto a pressure plate in the floor. There was a rattle and a gurgle, and a hunk of raw meat the size of a Virginia ham plopped out of a chute and onto the floor. Blood oozed from it. I touched the meat and found it was body temperature.

"Hal," I said. "What's this all about?" Toby had grabbed the thing and was trying to pull it away from me. God knows what he intended to do. Bury it?

"I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you asking me the meaning of life?"

"No, I'm asking how Toby got all this meat."

"Ah. There is a scent of food on the pressure plate. No doubt he smelled it, and in his explorations, activated the meat dispenser."

I wondered if he was acting like a literal-minded machine just for the fun of it, put one over on the stupid humans.

"One more time," I said. "Why is there a meat dispenser that dispenses ten pounds of raw flesh at a time?"

"That is to feed the tigers," Hal said.

Well, silly me. Of course a billionaire's yacht would come equipped with tigers. And speak of the devil...

"Oh, my god!" Poly whispered. "He's so beautiful!"

The tiger paused in the doorway, looked at me. Looked at Poly. Glanced at Toby. Cocked his head a little and looked at Toby again. Yaaaaaaawned. Then padded into the galley, five hundred pounds of silent power. He sniffed at the meat, glanced at Toby a third time—the dog was transfixed, not a whisker twitching—and settled down with one paw on the food and began ripping off chunks. In a moment another big cat came through the door. This one didn't even break stride, though she gave us a cursory once-over. She went straight to the meat and stole it right out of the jaws of the first one. He growled at this thievery—a sound that, even though you know they are perfectly harmless, makes every hair follicle on my body seal up tight as a spinster's butt—then stepped on the pressure plate and snagged the meat as it tumbled out. He carried it to another corner and chowed down.

So that was our first adventure on the Halley. After that, things became pretty much routine until we reached Jupiter.

The Halley, or her living quarters, anyway, was shaped pretty much like a flying saucer. A thick frisbee with a half dome on top. The saucer part consisted of a circular passageway with doors leading to rooms that lined the outer rim of the saucer. (Should that be hatches leading to compartments? I'm going to dispense with the phony nautical terminology spacers love so much.) We've seen the spa, and the galley. Also out there were the owner's cabin, guest cabins, a billiard room, a library, a formal dining room with places for eight, and two holocabins. One simulated beach settings, and the other let you pretend you were in various forest environments.

There were no servants' quarters, since Halley carried no human staff. Everything was done by robots who were seldom seen, popping in and out of hidey-holes mostly when you weren't looking. But they kept everything scrupulously clean, and if you needed something, they delivered it promptly.

I would have thought a ship like that would have accommodations for a larger number. Instead, the builder had opted for larger and more luxurious quarters for a smaller number of people. Though naturally the Halley could carry scores of people in a pinch, she was designed for no more than eight.

But the tastiest stuff was in the middle, under the dome.

The original owner must have been a nature lover. The center of his ship was a circular mini-disney called the habidome and the theme was rain forest. There was a waterfall, a babbling brook, a pond, and a few dozen trees festooned with vines and orchids and bromeliads and other such lush tropical flora. The floor was grass or packed dirt. No attempt had been made to deceive the eye, as in the holos. The dome was simply a dome, not a blue sky. It was all too orderly and well tended to look like the real thing. What it reminded me of was the big bird enclosure at the King City Zoo. Aptly enough, I guess, since the place had a lot of birds in it. Toucans, macaws, cockatoos, parrots, I don't know what-all. Hummingbirds no bigger than your thumb, in any color you wanted.

We'd been aboard a couple of days before I wondered where all the critters had been during the high boost. The answer was, suspended in liquid, revived only when the environment was ready for them. Floating in liquid was a good way, it turned out, to miss most of the bad effects of high gee. "So why didn't you float us in liquid?" I asked Hal. "Next time I will. But it takes about a day to prepare your body for it. We didn't have time."

"Next time?" I asked, cautiously.

"Next time won't be so bad," he said. I didn't pursue it. Most of the trees and bushes bore edible fruit of some kind. Not always what you'd expect, either. One tree I knew was not an apple tree, because I looked it up in the library, bore tart, crisp Mclntoshes on one side, and Valencia oranges on the other.

It seemed the tigers and the birds came with the territory. Hal had revived them without being told to. The rest of it was up to us. The choices were not unlimited—no rhinos, no aardvarks, no baboons—but we could have turned the place into a reasonable imitation of Noah's Ark, if Noah had only saved small-to-medium animals. We were a bit more selective. Poly chose a dozen different types of lizard and another dozen poison arrow frogs, looking like porcelain or enamelware in screaming bright colors, not looking real at all until they jumped. I'd say there were a few hundred of them, but you'd never know it unless you looked for them.

She also revived a twenty-foot python. I told her I didn't like snakes much, and it had no effect at all. The snake and I gave each other a wide berth.

I scrolled through the catalog, bemused to think these creatures were sleeping in some secret recess of the ship. Made you feel God-like, you know? Which I suppose a billionaire thought he was entitled to feel. How about a brace of crocodiles? How would Poly like that? Maybe they'd eat the snake. I'd always liked monkeys; I'd had a pet chimp back in my glory days. But they were a little too noisy and active, it seemed to me.

"I have well-behaved monkeys," Hal advised me, and we selected a family of golden lion tamarins and a pair of slow lorises. There is no such thing as a fast loris; I checked.

Hal may have fudged a bit about the tamarins. They squeaked and peeped, but it wasn't an unpleasant or intrusive sound. It fit right in with the birdcalls.

Both Poly and I started out in staterooms. We flipped a coin, and she won the captain's suite. Within a week we were both camping out in the habidome. There was a Peter Pan tree house midway up a towering live oak: three rooms, running water, view of the falls. Poly moved into that. The other structure was a shack on stilts, sort of leaning out over the pond, like a Dogpatch backdrop in "L'il Abner." ("The part of Marryin' Sam has evolved, over the years, into an opportunity for political jokes and jabs at celebrities. Keith Van Tyne steals scene after scene from Abner and Daisy Mae."—Hermes Blaze) Sitting on my porch, I could drop a line into the pond and usually come up with a catfish or bass. For a while Poly and I played Adam and Eve, frying the fish and serving it with wild fruits and veggies we gathered ourselves. I began to buy into that ancient idea of the "natural man," free of civilization's encumbrances. I mentioned it to Hal.

"Bugs," Hal said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"There are no noxious insects in the habidome. Butterflies, moths, all selected for color, and dragonflies, likewise. There are beetles you'll seldom see, and insects belowground. But you wouldn't like this place nearly as much if it came equipped with black clouds of mosquitoes. Tarantulas. Centipedes a foot long that crawl into bed with you—"

"I get the picture."

After a few weeks we went back to the gourmet meals prepared by the galley. It's amazing how quickly you can get tired of fried fish.

Still, I recall my time aboard the Halley as one of the two or three best times of my life. Partly that is because... nothing happened. Though I was still running as fast as I could, though a human monster was still yapping at my heels, there was nothing to be done about it until I left the Halley. I could kick back, relax, for the first time in what felt like decades. I could stop and think about things. One day was much like the next; we fell into comfortable routines. Poly stopped being pissed off with me, for no real reason I could see other than that... I was Sparky. Somehow that made a difference. Maybe the shock of finding out I hadn't lied about that made her reexamine what had gone down with Comfort and his evil sister, and allowed her to see it wasn't entirely my fault. That though I had made a terrible mistake in leaving her alone in the room, there had been no malice, only carelessness, involved. And I had come back.

"There are three ways you can go about this, Mr. Valentine," the medtech said. "First, we can put you to sleep and have the whole thing over in less than a month."

"I like the sound of that," Sparky said.

"It has its attractions," admitted the tech. "However, when you wake up, you'll be... oh, I'd guess you're going to run six feet, six-one, something in there. You'll be well over twice your current weight. You'll have to learn how to shave."

"That should be easy enough."

"Shaving? No problem. But longer arms and legs will be a big problem. I've followed several cases, and you should expect half a dozen major, painful accidents in the first year. That's not counting the dozens of scrapes and bruises you'll pick up every day, the number of times you'll bang your head on the ceiling."

"I see," Sparky said, thinking it over.

"You'll be the clumsiest man in Luna," he said, with a chuckle. "In the normal course of things, we adjust to our bodies gradually, as they change gradually. In Luna, of course, those bodies are dangerously overpowered. You know how to handle it at your current dimensions and musculature. It would be like letting a baby operate heavy equipment... if you'll pardon the expression."

"That's okay, Doc." Sparky liked the guy. So few people just came right out and laid the truth on the line.

"The second option," the tech went on, "is simply to stop the inhibitors that have kept you prepubescent for twenty years. You'd grow up at the normal rate, reach your full growth in five or six years. This is really the optimum way of doing it."

"I don't have that kind of time."

"No one ever seems to. Why are we all so much in a hurry? We don't even know how long we can live. We're sure three hundred years is possible, perhaps a lot more. All the strides we've made since 'threescore and ten,' and still we rush around, frazzle our nerves, ruin our digestion... and you don't want to hear any of this.

"Third approach. We combine the first two methods. We don't put you to sleep. We can hurry it up and have you fully grown in six months, or stretch it out to more like two years."

"Six months sounds good."

"Why did I know you were going to say that? Six months it is." He made a notation on Sparky's chart, then webbed it off to the machines that would handle the actual treatment.

"You're still gonna be clumsy," he pointed out. "At least you'll take it an inch at a time, though. There are some unpleasant side effects, but we can help with most of them. You'll be hungry almost all the time. There could be some stomach and bowel trouble. You may not grow entirely at the same rate, head to toe. Usually it's the legs that grow a little too fast; you may look a bit odd for a few months. There's a chance you'll get a really disgusting crop of zits. It'll be so bad you might want to stay home so you won't frighten little children; a week, two weeks, tops. You'll yodel like a Swiss accordion player until your voice stabilizes. Then there's the matter of sex...."

"Yeah? What about it?"

"Never mind. You might actually enjoy that part."

Sparky laughed. "Doc, I am twenty-nine years old, you know. I know about sex. I've been having sex a long time now."

"Whatever you say."

The treatment itself took only a few minutes. Some mysterious, disgusting brown goo was forced into a vein. He tasted metal in the back of his mouth for a moment, then a violent red brew was pumped into him and the taste went away. His vision blurred; he imagined steam blowing out of his ears, and smiled at the image. Wouldn't that be cool? Then his eyes could roll around in their sockets like slot machine tumblers....

He realized he was roughing out a Sparky routine. No need for that anymore. He felt a strange mixture of loss and relief at the thought.

He left the treatment room and was met by a lovely young woman in the starched whites of the Nurses' Guild. She smiled, and indicated he should follow her.

This was not his regular medical facility, which was in the exclusive Pill Road district. After the decision to fold Sparky, Sparky had realized he no longer had to live his life in a fishbowl. That is, he needn't cater to his fans, something he'd always felt obliged to do before. It had been fun, before. Now he felt the urge for more privacy, and as nothing more than the studio cohead he didn't need to seek the limelight. It was a new idea for him, and one that held a lot of appeal. So he had booked his hormonal adjustment at this ordinary clinic in a middle-class part of town, far from celebrity haunts. He wore a pair of dark glasses and a King City Loonies baseball hat and a pair of denim pants—something "Sparky" had never worn on the show. He'd done it before and got away with it, and back then he'd still had his odd hair and tonsure to conceal. Now it had been whacked off and was growing in brown, a shade he hadn't seen in years.

"Did everything go smoothly?" the nurse asked.

"Sure, no problem."

Sparky almost missed it, kept walking down the hall with the nurse. If they'd kept on talking he probably never would have noticed. But he had a sharp ear for dialogue, and as the line repeated itself in his head it soon began sounding wrong. It was a line that would have been cut in rehearsals. Go smoothly? What was to not go smoothly? Which meant she didn't know anything about the procedure. Which meant she wasn't a nurse. He took another look at her.

"Don't I know you?" he asked her.

"Yeah," she said, giving it up right away. "I'm Hildy Johnson. Reporter? Cornered you in the spaceport when your father returned?"

"I remember. You wanted an interview."

"You said you'd give me one. And you didn't return my calls."

"That was damn inconsiderate of me." They walked a few steps farther, pondering the situation. "You pissed off?"

"What's the point of being pissed off? For you to give me an interview, you're going to have to like me, and why would you like me if I was pissed off? I tracked you down here to ask you again. I can't seem to make it into your office."

"I don't think—"

"And you'd be pissed off if I did."

He smiled. She was right. But there was something else he didn't like.

"You say 'tracked me down.' What you mean is somebody at the studio told you where I'd be."

"You don't think I could have followed you here?"

Sparky thought about it a moment. "No. I don't think so."

She shrugged. "You're right. But I won't reveal my source."

"That's fair enough, I guess."

They turned a corner and at the end of a corridor there was a glass door with a mass of people milling around on the other side. The door must have been locked—there were two security guards standing on the inside—because no one was coming through it, and they certainly would have had it been possible, because this was the traveling shark pack known as the Celebrity Press.

"Looks like they found me, too," Sparky said.

"If you want to avoid them, I know a back way out of here. It's the way I got in."

"Great. Let's go."

"How about that interview?"

"What's the big deal?" Sparky asked. "I'm not little Sparky anymore, and pretty soon I won't even be little."

"Are you kidding? 'Sparky Grows Up!' It'll be the biggest story of my career."

"So what you really want is a series."

"Well, I would have gotten around to that at the interview."

"Okay, Hildy. You get me out of here, you can follow me around till I'm a grown-up. If that ever happens. You can have an exclusive."

"Over this way," she said, touching him on the shoulder. They turned away from the mob at the end of the hall and entered a stairwell. They started to climb.

"I guess the leak in my office is pretty bad," he said.

"Why do you say that?"

"All those reporters. What happened, somebody in my office put out a press release?"

"Oh, no," Johnson said. "My source speaks only to me. I'm the one who told that bunch. I made the call after I got here so they'd be in a hurry and really frantic. Don't you think they looked frantic?"

Sparky stared at her, then laughed.

"To get on my good side, right?"

"Exactly."

"Must have been a lot of calling."

"Sparky, I try to do as little work as possible. I called D. Mentua Precox and made her promise not to tell a soul."

Sparky was still laughing well after they made their escape.

It's been many years now since I've had to dodge crowds of reporters. You say you hate it, and you do, and yet of course a part of you likes it very much. Who could resist? All those people, with absolutely nothing to do but chase you. It goes to your head, and when it's gone, it leaves you off balance, like you'd been climbing stairs for years and now you're at the top and your foot keeps reaching for one more.

Even in my heyday I never lived in a place like the Halley.

I could have. I could have afforded it. But I was never very good at spending my money. I left that up to my father. There was nothing much I really wanted except to do good work. I'm not saying I shopped at thrift stores. I just never bought the kind of baubles many rich folks buy.

But I could get used to the Halley.

I spent many days doing little more than lolling in the hammock stretched between the wood struts supporting my porch roof, dangling a line in the still water. To call me an angler would have been an insult to fishermen since the beginning of time. A bite on the hook was a minor annoyance; I'd pull in the little perch or bass or catfish, cut off the barb, and set the fish free. Catch and release, a phrase I recall from Old Earth. Then I'd get settled in the hammock again. It got where I was sure I recognized some of the finny critters. They'd look at me accusingly with their wall eyes just before I dumped them in the drink, but I didn't care. I was ruthless. It's your own fault for being so trusting, I'd tell them. Didn't you learn anything when you hit the bait yesterday?

Nothing happened, as I said. But while I idled, things were going on.

Each day was an improvement for Poly. She spent six, seven hours a day practicing. At first she was sure it was annoying me. She offered to move to one of the rim staterooms. I begged her not to. Usually it was scales, arpeggios; finger exercises. Studies for the student. But notes flew into the air and I drank them in, even the simplest, most monotonous run. I seldom saw her when she practiced. The sound came through the open window of her tree house, and each sweet tone soothed me.

At the end of a session, when we would usually share a sumptuous picnic prepared by the ship's gourmet-chef program, she would come alive describing her day's progress. Her skills were returning faster than she had been led to believe, faster than she had dared hope. She was starting to think she might even be ready to play professionally by the time we got to Luna. Most of the time I had no idea what she was talking about. To tell the truth, she had sounded just fine to me on the first day of practice. I have what I consider a good ear. I can carry a tune; Lord knows, I've sung in enough musical theater. But you don't need a perfect voice to sing what have become known as "Broadway" musicals. In fact, you don't even have to have a "good" voice, as long as you can belt it out and not hit sour notes. The genre is famous for its scratchy altos and "singers" who do more speaking than singing. But I know the difference between the sort of music I can make and that made by a real professional musician. I know most ears are not tuned to the fineness needed to distinguish a good performance from a work of genius. Poly has that sort of ear. You have to have it if you expect to move in the circles she aspires to, which, for now, would be concertmaster with a middling philharmonic orchestra. First chair with the King City Symphony, solo work... that would have to await more experience and maturity.

So things are well with Poly. A little sex would brighten my day, but so far she hasn't responded to my hints. I don't intend to push her.

The other thing going on involves Toby, and I blush to bring it up. Toby has lost his mind.

From the moment the two tigers, Shere Khan and Hobbes, padded into the galley Toby had been absolutely gaga over Shere Khan. It was love at first sight.

When humans have sex with animals they call it bestiality. What is it when one species have sex with another species? Hybridization, I think. Didn't I hear that a donkey and a mule can have sex and produce... a horse? Somehow I don't think I got that right. Maybe it's a donkey and an ass. Maybe I don't know what the heck I'm talking about.

Not that sex was involved here. You could call it puppy love, I guess. Toby began following Shere (which is what we called her, though Kipling's Shere Khan was a male tiger, I believe) with his tongue hanging out. When she would sit down somewhere, take a nap—which tigers can do up to about twenty hours a day—Toby would be there, climbing up on her striped flank, licking her behind the ears, on the muzzle, around the jaw; anywhere he could reach. For a few days Shere kept casting dubious glances at him. When she looked at me I swear she seemed embarrassed. But eventually she settled into it. Soon she began to purr, and to drift off to sleep with an extremely satisfied look on her savage face. Then Toby would walk in a tight circle for a while, like dogs do, and nestle himself into the curve of her neck, tuck his head down around his belly, and doze. If she stirred he was instantly up, ready to follow her anywhere.

Hobbes was a different story. There's no other way to describe him than a great big pussycat. Shere Khan bullied him mercilessly, and he didn't seem to mind. She stole his food; he just went to get more for himself. If he tried a romantic approach she would roar a warning, and he would put his ears back and slink away while Toby yapped at him, as indecently pleased as any dog in the history of the world, I think. The big sissy would never assert himself. It's true she outweighed him by about a hundred pounds, but really!

"Pussy-whipped," Poly would observe, then go over and scratch him behind the ears. What that said about the human condition, or about our situation in particular, I don't even want to guess.

So the days pass, Poly fiddles, Toby moons, I fish, and we're coming up on Jupiter. Why we have to go by way of Jupiter I don't know, but it promises to be quite an event.

LAST STAND IN NEVERLAND

Part One of a Series

by Hildy Johnson

It's the biggest party I've ever been to, and I've been to some big ones.

The guest of honor arrives on the back of a live brontosaurus.

What shall we call him now? For years we've all called him Sparky. Just Sparky, and that was enough. Like Elvis. All that time his real name has been Kenneth Valentine, but who knew? The fact was seldom mentioned in the billions of pages written about him, in the thousands of hours of tape, of paparazzi shots stolen through very long lenses. Little Kenny Valentine has been as thoroughly immersed in the part of good ol' wire-haired, zigzag-headed Sparky as any actor in history. There were times when, if you'd asked him his real name, he would have stared blankly at you, and then thought it over for a moment, like somebody trying to recall someone met many years ago, and only briefly. And Sparky was always a child of action, not reflection. He would give you his wonderful grin, then move along.

But Sparky has decided to grow up.

Now there's a phrase. Maybe you've heard it before, but it wasn't meant literally. How do you "decide to grow up"? What is it about your thirtieth year that makes you decide "Well, that's enough of childhood. Time to do that old adult thing."? The Sparky show is doing as well as it ever has, consistently in the top five. Generation after generation seems to find the little moppet irresistible. There's no real reason why the show can't go on for another twenty years. Forty years. Hell, who knows? Not only that, but the Valentine family and corporation have parlayed the bucketloads of money into an entertainment empire far beyond the dreams of the modest production company, Thimble Theater, that gave it birth. So why quit? Could it be that little Kenneth Valentine wants to... learn to act?

Well, sure, he acted as Sparky. Won some awards. But though you earn a trillion dollars and the admiration of your peers in the children's entertainment industry, though you stand at the pinnacle of your profession and do what you do better than anyone has ever done it before, there is respect, and there is respect. Nobody with wiry hair and no pants has ever earned respect in the realm of "legitimate theater." No one ever will. And Sparky... sorry, Kenneth Valentine comes from a distinguished theatrical family. His father, John, is a thespian to the soles of his feet, which were planted on the boards while still in his swaddling clothes. (Some say this was shortly after he was laid in a manger... at least according to John Valentine.) Kenneth's upbringing was no less classical. It is said he knows the Shakespearean oeuvre by heart. Every line from every play. Can it be that such an education will forever produce nothing more than the best children's series ever made?

Not if John Valentine has anything to say about it. And John Valentine has plenty to say, take my word for it.

More about that later.

The dinosaur's name is Nessie. Over her back is a glorious brocaded drape in gold and purple. Strapped around her middle is a structure you'd have to call howdah, after the platforms usually borne on the backs of elephants, but this one is five stories high, with two levels depending on each side of the beast. On Nessie's back are three more stories, including a pointed gazebo on the very top. Maybe two dozen actors cling to the railings and scamper up and down the ladders and staircases, all in festive costume. Nessie lumbers on, oblivious, her red-rimmed eyes indicating to anyone knowledgeable about these creatures that she's high as a kite on a double dose of reptile tranquilizer. I know for a fact that a cherry bomb exploding two feet into her anal canal wouldn't even make her blink. (Your humble narrator had a rather wayward childhood on her mother's bronto ranch.)

Perched on a saddle high on the endless neck is Sparky, having a great old time waving to the crowd.

Only moments ago some actual work was going on here. Studio 4 was and is dressed as an ancient Thai temple overrun with vines. A huge golden Buddha looks serenely down on the shoot. Blessing the enterprise? One wonders as to his reaction when the director yelled "Cut!" on the last take of the last scene of Sparky and His Gang, and one wall of the studio rolled up to reveal the equally cavernous Studio 3, decked out for the biggest wrap party of all time. Wasn't Sparky in this last shot? Hasn't he just been here a moment ago? Then how the heck did he get onto the back of that bronto... oh, never mind. It must be movie magic, because here he comes, here comes the bronto, here comes the party!

Nessie lumbers through the wide lane cleared for her, stops for a moment, looks as thoughtful as a brontosaurus can look, which is not much, lifts her gargantuan tail, and drops three turds the size of hay bales but not nearly so sweet smelling. Some people start to laugh. Sparky looks back. The tail comes down on a table laden with five thousand dollars' worth of ice sculpture, six thousand dollars' worth of peeled shrimp, and untold barrels of strawberries and whipped cream. Instant strawberry-shrimp spumoni.

Sparky is delighted. He stands up and runs down the neck, surefooted as a squirrel. He leaps to the floor and starts wading into the mess. Others follow him. Heck, there are ten thousand cream pies on racks against the back wall; everybody knew this was going to be a mess, with the biggest pie fight in history as the climax. The hijinks are just starting a little early.

Near the Buddha, a few are hanging back. Guys in morph suits seem to be ignoring it all. Morphing a part is just a damn job, they seem to think. The suit, festooned with hundreds of computer reference sensors held together by wire mesh, is uncomfortable, but they are well paid. Who knows who the people are under those suits? Nobody. By the time the computer is finished morphing them, they've become creatures that couldn't be played by guys on their knees or people with lots of latex glued to their faces.

A few people have that look on their face that you might see on a guy who has just set foot over a deep hole he thought was solid ground. Take Walter Burgess, the guy who has played Windy Cheesecutter for twenty years now. Pondering your future career, are you, Walter? Trying to figure out what you'll put on your resume? It would be good to recall the immortal words of Bert Lahr: "After The Wizard of Oz, I was typecast as a lion, and there aren't that many parts for lions." Not a whole lot of parts for fat guys who can fart their way into the air, either. He can see himself now, a few years down the line, stepping up onto a platform in front of a new hardware store as some schmuck shouts, "And now folks, teevee's Windy Cheesecutter... Walter Burgess!" As the kids make delighted noises with their lips and bored girls pass out whoopee cushions to the crowd. Sometimes, in this business, success can be your worst enemy. John Valentine is here, too, working the crowd. He is very good at it. Here is the man most agree is responsible for shutting down production on the studio's most successful series. He has shaken everything up. People are getting pink slips, being sent home. And most of them seem to like him. They act like he's doing them a favor.

If you're looking for a description of the rest of the party, you've come to the wrong reference. You want to see it, you can buy the tape. You want to read about it, who was there, who did what, who made a fool of herself, who had to be mailed home, just head right over to the gossip column.

This series isn't about parties, and it isn't about celebrities. It is about growing up.

It's about Sparky... and where is that little devil? Can it be that the guest of honor has slipped away early, before the pies start to fly?

John Valentine's looking for him, too. A few people have noticed, and a few have remarked on how close the man is to his son. Twenty years presiding over a financial disaster on Neptune, and suddenly he doesn't seem to want Sparky to get out of his sight. Well, you know what they say about absence, the heart, and fondness.

No, I was wrong. There's Sparky over by the punch bowl. John Valentine spots him, starts toward him... and his eyes slide away. He ignores Sparky, and keeps looking around the room. Because... why, that's not Sparky at all. It surely looks like Sparky. Everyone is treating him like Sparky, but it's not.

Can you say stand-in? You've heard about it, the rumors, that sometimes celebrities will use doubles to give themselves a little breathing space. A little vacation from the... suffocating demands of fame. From the millions who would like a little chunk of you, and would take it if they could, tearing you to pieces. So they use stand-ins, and they find private places to go.

If I was John Valentine, I'd look for Sparky in a pinstripe uniform, playing baseball in a rather unusual place. You didn't hear it from me.

"Easy out, easy out!" Sparky shouted. "Burn it in there, Bob! He couldn't hit it if you rolled it on the ground! Easy out!" Sparky pounded his fist into the glove, then set his feet apart and crouched slightly, glove held up a few inches from his mouth and nose. He could smell the soft leather and the oil he'd rubbed into it a few hours ago. He dug his spikes into the green grass, into the soil. He felt a primal connection to the field of dreams. For a moment nothing existed for him but the pitcher's windup and the slowly circling tip of the bat, away in the distance.

The batter took the pitch and the umpire turned away, unimpressed.

Ball three.

"Whadda ya, blind?" somebody yelled off to his right.

So it was the bottom of the sixth. No score. There was a man on second trying to look in all directions at once, ready for the shortstop to sneak in behind him for a pickoff, ready to fly at the crack of the bat. Two outs, three balls, two strikes. Nothing to lose.

The guy at the plate wasn't known for fly balls, or long balls. He had no home runs on the season. But he could dribble it into the hole between first and second, and that's where Sparky was playing it. If it got to him there was no way he'd get the man at first. The throw would have to be to the plate. The catcher was good, and the runner at second didn't have a lot of speed. So throw it a few feet down the third-base line and the catcher would be there, blocking the plate.

But was Sparky's arm good enough? Should he throw to the pitcher, hope he could cut it off and still get it to the catcher in time? No, wait, wouldn't the pitcher be running in, backing up the catcher? Sure, sure he would, and the third baseman would head toward the mound, ready to snag a short throw.

Damn, but baseball had a lot of things to remember.

He loved every minute of it.

The pitcher wound up, the runner led off at second, the batter swung, and the ball went high in the air... over the backstop and foul, out of play.

Everybody relaxed. The runner loped back to the second sack and the hitter found his bat. Sparky took off his cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, like he'd seen the players in the majors do. At least half of baseball was not so much what you did, but the style with which you did it.

For years this had been the only place Sparky could relax, could totally let down his guard, be himself, do something he loved to do, but didn't have to do. He wasn't the best baseball player in the Little League. He wasn't even in the top one hundred. In fact, he was strictly mediocre. For some reason, this was a great comfort to Sparky.

Here on the sweet green grass of the outfield, or digging his spikes into the red dirt of the batter's box, or circling the bases, or even sitting at ease in the dugout with his friends—his friends, not fans of Sparky, the television boy—he felt a magical calm that existed nowhere else in his life. It was the uncomplicated happiness that generations of boys before him had felt on the diamond. It was his own private thing.

If fact, life would be darned near perfect at that moment but for two things: he was hungry and his toes hurt.

The hunger was a familiar thing by now, and he could deal with it. He pulled a candy bar out of his pocket, bit off a hasty chunk, and stuck it in his cheek, conscious of how much he now resembled those black-and-white heroes of the game back on Old Earth. Only there it had not been a wad of chocolate and nuts in their cheeks, but a chaw of tobacco.

So here he was, Jackie Robinson in the outfield, crouching slightly, ready to explode in a blur of motion, the moment stretching, eternal....

Sparky could no more play ball at a regular King City park than he could walk into a Pizza Palace franchise and order a slice and a Coke. But this field was different. This was the recreation dome of the Plain People of Luna: the Outer Amish.

That's what they were called when they first moved to Luna, anyway. Later, groups relocated to Mars and even more distant points. Some now called the original settlers Old-Order Outer Amish, but it was cumbersome, and names stick long after they've lost their original meaning.

When Sparky first started visiting here, he had been told the saga of the Amish and Mennonite communities on Luna. They had come from Germany and Switzerland, settled in the lush farmland of Pennsylvania, and did what sects always do: they split into other sects. The plainest of the Plain People avoided things like cars, electricity, and telephones. Basically, if it wasn't mentioned in the Bible, the Amish felt they could do without it. Some felt cars were okay, but chrome was vain, so they painted it black: the Black Bumper Mennonites. Most didn't wear buttons, and the men never grew mustaches because that reminded them of the Prussian military, which they were fleeing. They were the original conscientious objectors.

Sparky had thought it would take a great leap of logic for Amish to board a spaceship and leave for Luna, but was it really that different than crossing the Atlantic? America wasn't mentioned in the Bible, but the moon was. Once there, of course, they could not survive entirely with Biblical technology, but they did surprisingly well, and used as few modern things as possible. What had drawn them was the prospect of twelve two-week growing seasons per year. Farmers to the bone, Amish had actually been in the agricultural forefront in matters like crop rotation and soil conservation. They were familiar with hybridization, and genetic engineering was only breeding and selection speeded up, or at least it was to the schismatic leader of the Outers. And they had never been averse to accepting a little help from their neighbors. So while they themselves never entered a bioengineering laboratory, they were instrumental in developing the first strains of Lunar-adapted crops. They put up domes, conditioned the Lunar dust with compost, bacteria, worms—whatever was needed—plowed the resulting soil, planted, and harvested. The new breeds of plants drank the intense sunlight beneath the UV-filtering plastic domes and grew so fast "it could break your arm if you held it too long over a corn seedling," according to Sparky's friend Jan Stoltzfus, the boy who had first invited him into the Amish enclave. "Two weeks of summer growing season, and two weeks of winter... without the snow!"

Self-sufficiency had always been their ideal, but they also had to make a living, so much of the produce they grew was taken into King City and sold at a public market, to health fanatics, antichemical believers, and the very wealthy, at astonishing prices.

"These are crops just as artificially produced as those grown on any corporate farm," Jan had pointed out, enjoying the joke on the "English." "Our food tastes no better and no worse than anyone else's. The only way to distinguish it is our fruits and squashes and melons and tomatoes tend to be a bit smaller, sometimes a lot smaller, more like back on Old Earth. And you find the occasional blemish on a tomato, the odd worm in the apple.

"And do you think we eat it? Very little of it. We buy our vegetables at the market, just like ordinary folks, and bank the difference."

Their lives had seemed full of odd contradictions to Sparky when he first started coming out here. They read old-fashioned books by the light of candles or kerosene lamps, but kept their orchard trees thriving during the two-week "winter" with banks of grow lights suspended overhead. They plowed the ground with teams of horses and wood-and-iron plowshares, then baled hay for the cows with gas-powered machines. In one dome they might heat with a wood-stove or a fireplace—they could not afford real wood, and so used compacted waste from various outside agricultural concerns—and in the next dome over it was thought to be ethical to heat with methane gas. They had endless arguments over what was proper and what was not. But they were good people, and there was one thing they all agreed upon: television was the tool of the devil.

He had been out at the Amish settlements location scouting for a story arc that would have involved an Amish boy and girl. The plan fell through quickly when it became clear the Plain People did not like to be photographed, to have a "graven image" made of them—who knew?—but while there Sparky had made an interesting discovery. Nobody knew who he was. This was a revelation to him. Of course, nobody had a show that everybody watched, but these were surely the only sane people on Luna who had never heard of him.

He began showing up for baseball games, informal gatherings where sides were chosen up on the spot. At first, he was picked last, and he loved it! At any park in King City he would be the first pick every time, regardless of talent or lack of it. Worse, as a practical matter, it was impossible for him to play. Do you really want three hundred photographers clogging the first-base line? Jostling for a shot in the shower room? Clamoring for interviews in the dugout? Even in the pathetic league they formed for studio children Sparky saw little point in playing. Those kids knew who signed their parents' paychecks, and would not work very hard to strike him out or catch his rare fly balls. Sparky got no charge from that sort of competition.

But the Amish gave him something he hadn't had since he was eight: a chance to be just another kid. They knew he was famous, and rich, and it made no difference to them. All that was an "English" matter, not part of their world. If he wanted to play with them, he'd better be good.

He never got past mediocre, and that was okay. The first time he'd been chosen second to last was one of his best days. He'd earned that measly promotion. When you're rich and famous, and don't have the ego of John Valentine, you never know what you've earned. Whatever Sparky did worthy of praise was always the result of a team of people employed to make him look good. He never forgot that, no matter how many awards came his way.

Sometimes he wished he had inherited his father's massive self-assurance, but most of the time he was happier to be the way he was, a moderately insecure fellow with a touch of the impostor complex, that maddening feeling that people secretly know you aren't as good as you're cracked up to be, that they know you know it, and that they know you know they know it.

Here he knew exactly how good he was.

The batter suddenly backed out of the box, and the pitcher relaxed. Seemed the batter didn't like something there in the dirt, because he was raking the ground with his cleats. He dug himself a little hole, fanned the bat around his head, swiveled his hips, and faced the pitcher. The pitch, the swing, the crack... another foul.

God, Sparky loved baseball. How could a game that moved so slowly produce such tension? It might be another two, three minutes before the next pitch, and the suspense was getting unbearable.

So was his hunger. There was no more candy in his pocket. And three long innings until the feast.

The Plain People wouldn't call it anything so vain as a feast, but that's what it was. Sparky would walk past tons of the sort of delicacies they'd had at the recent wrap party to get to one plateful of Amish food.

There would be sweating glass pitchers full of tart pink lemonade, with lemons and cherries still floating in it. Sweet cider. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. Something made with beans and ham hocks. Roast beef sliced thin. Ears of fresh golden corn. Cupcakes and rows and rows of pies: cherry, lemon, mince, pumpkin. Shoofly pie, a treat made in heaven but served only by the Amish.

And Sparky's favorite, the muffins. Blueberry muffins and corn muffins, that you could twist apart in your fist and see the steam rising from the golden centers and slather with butter scraped from a wooden churn.

Life didn't get any better.

If you play baseball long enough, you develop a computer in your head. Each play adds to the programming, until you reach the point where you hardly have to think about it at all. Your eyes see, and your arms and legs react.

The crack of the bat activated Sparky's computer. It was a bloop single into the hole, coming right at Sparky. The first and second basemen started toward it, saw it was impossible, headed back to their bags as Sparky charged the ball. No hope of catching it; play it on the bounce. He saw the catcher standing on the third-base line, the pitcher heading toward the plate to back him up, the shortstop moving toward the mound to cut off the throw. His eye went back to the ball—Jesus! He was too close in. The ball hit the ground and bounced as he moved his glove down. It hit the heel of his glove, hit him in the chest, and bounced... and there it was, hanging in the air right in front of him, as if time was suspended. He bare-handed it and in one motion pegged it toward the shortstop. He saw the third-base coach waving the runner toward home. He'd been told Sparky didn't have the arm to get the ball to the catcher.

It was a good call, but something had happened to Sparky's arm. The shortstop started to jump for it, might have caught it, but then ducked and let it go over his head... and it reached the catcher right on the numbers. The runner was so surprised he tried to stop and his feet went out from under him. The catcher ambled over and tagged him out. The fans went wild.

Sparky jogged toward the dugout, arms loose, eyes on the ground, showing both coolness and humility. There was no way he'd ever tell anyone he'd been throwing to the shortstop. Everything had worked out all right, so who needed to know?

He accepted the high-fives and pats on the ass as only his due, then sat on the bench to wait his turn at bat. His feet were killing him.

For the first time he noticed that there was a strip of skin visible between the top of his socks and the bottom of his pants.

Well, that accounted for it. His legs were longer, and so were his arms. Charging the ball, taking an inch or two more ground with each stride, he'd come up on it too fast. Then throwing, he'd made more distance than he ever had before. The long legs almost caused a disaster. The arm had compensated for it. Neat. But he was going to have to make some adjustments, watch himself more closely.

He looked up when the umpire called time-out. His father was striding across the infield. Sparky saw him look up, vaguely, as if only now aware that something was going on here, that he might be interrupting it. He smiled, and waved to the players, clutching a rolled-up newspad in his other hand.

John Valentine skipped lightly down the three steps into the dugout, smiling broadly at Sparky, who smiled back as well as he could. Valentine motioned for Jeff, the second baseman, to slide over a bit, then seated himself with his hip touching Sparky's.

"Baseball, eh?" he said. "Looks like fun. I had a hell of a time tracking you down out here."

"I don't tell anyone where I'm going," Sparky explained. Valentine seemed not to have heard him, held out the newspad, and pointed to the first installment of Hildy Johnson's series about Sparky.

"Have you seen this?"

Sparky studied it, trying to give himself a little time. Valentine thumbed the pager down in the corner, came to the part he was interested in, and pointed to a paragraph.

"Where does this bitch get off writing this stuff about me?" he said.

Sparky only then realized how furious his father was. He glanced up in the stands at Hildy, no more than thirty feet away, decided this wasn't the time to introduce them.

"It says this is an authorized article," Valentine plowed on. "You've been granting this woman interviews?"

"She's been around," Sparky allowed. "We've granted her access."

"If she has access," Valentine grated, "we need to control the access. There's no need to let her in on family secrets, and if she's going to make up lies like this, there's no need to have her around at all."

"I didn't tell her anything," Sparky said. "Not about you."

Valentine put his arm around his son, patted his shoulder.

"Of course not," he said, smiling. "I never thought you did."

"We'll look bad if we just cancel at this point," Sparky said. "The pad's been hawking this series for a week now. I thought it'd be good publicity."

Valentine considered that, began nodding slowly.

"Besides," Sparky pointed out, "it's not a review. People have printed nasty things about you before. You know how it is."

"Maybe you're right," Valentine said.

"You said it yourself. You're not an easy man to like." Sparky knew his father took pride in this, attributed it to his artistic perfectionism. It was even partly true.

Valentine laughed, and squeezed his son's shoulder.

"You're right. Nothing to get upset about. I guess I'm just on edge, with the theater so close to completion." He tossed the newspad down on the dirt dugout floor, where it mingled with a hundred old pink wads of bubble gum and puddles of spilled cola. "That's not what I came out here for, anyway. A few things have come up we're going to have to go over together."

"About the theater?'

"That's right. If we hurry we can make it back before they shut down for the day."

"But I've got a game going—"

"It really can't wait, Kenneth." He looked around him, taking in the players and the green grass and the mothers and fathers in the grandstand behind the backstop. "I'm sure this is a lot of fun," he said, clearly not thinking anything of the sort, "but isn't it all a bit... childish? I mean, Kenneth, I really hate to spoil it for you, but in another month you'll be too big to play with these boys."

Sparky felt his face grow warm. Jeff and some of the other boys were carefully studying the field.

The hell of it was, it was true. An inch this week, a few more inches the next, in no time he'd be a man.

He already was a man, inside. He'd been an impostor here from the beginning. Though they didn't partake of the modern world, the Amish were aware of it. They understood that arcane biological science had kept Sparky preadolescent for twenty years. They knew he would outlive them. They were one of many groups who, for one reason or another, kept to the Biblical threescore and ten—actually, more like fivescore for most of them, with reasonable care—refusing all long-life treatments.

It was over here, and Sparky knew it.

But couldn't he have finished this last game?

"Gotta go, fellas," he said, getting up. "Sorry, but it's an emergency."

"Sure, Sparky."

"Hey, good game, Spark-man!"

"What a play! They'll be talking about that one tonight."

He went down the line, shaking hands, getting pats on the rump, nobody mentioning he wouldn't be back, but everyone aware of it.

Suddenly he knew, without knowing how he knew, that these boys knew exactly who he was, and had from the first. He had a vivid vision of a group of them hiding in the hayloft, alert for approaching parents, gathered around a clandestine throwaway television set. Tuning in to the latest episode of Sparky and His Gang. Of course they knew. And the wonderful thing was, in all the time he'd been coming here no one had ever asked him for an autograph or a souvenir from the set. But they knew he was about to grow up, and they knew they would never see him again. He looked at the ground where his father had thrown the newspad. It had vanished. Soon it would be squirreled away in somebody's sock drawer, to be brought out in the dead of night and read by candlelight.

Impulsively, he thrust his prized outfielder's mitt into the hands of a surprised Jan Stoltzfus, another boy about to become a young man, but at the normal rate. Soon he'd be playing with the grown-ups. They embraced, and Sparky turned away, followed his father around the backstop and off the field.

The tunnel from the Amish settlements to the fringes of King City was five miles long, paved with packed dirt, lit by gas jets that had blackened the stone tunnel walls every fifty feet. They were two hundred feet beneath the Lunar surface, safe as houses. Sparky and his father sat on the lowered wooden tailgate of a wagon piled high with fresh produce in bushel baskets and slatted crates. The wagon had rubber-rimmed wheels. It creaked from every joint as it rolled slowly over the packed dirt. There was the steady clop-clop of the two placid Percherons who had been over this road a thousand times, and there was the sound of his father's voice, droning on about some problem or other concerning his dream, the John Barrymore Valentine Theater. Sparky heard none of it. He was off in a world of his own.

He hadn't really thought this growing-up business was going to change his life that much. The thing was, he had already thought of himself as grown up. True, he was small, he had a child's body, but his mind was that of a mature man. For that matter, he sometimes thought he'd been born mature. He didn't recall a time when he hadn't had an adult's outlook on life, shouldered a man's burdens. His relationship to John Valentine was sometimes more of a father to a reckless son than the other way around.

But this was going to change everything. You didn't just get a larger uniform when you grew up, when you got bigger. You put away baseball for good.

Sure, he could get into an adult league of duffers, smack the ol' pill around in his spare time, weekends, after work. But he knew without even trying it that it wouldn't be the same. Adult baseball was a way to keep the weight off without surgery, stretch the muscles. Maintenance on the old ticker, you shouldn't need a new one every five years. For the pros it was a job, but Sparky would never be that good. To a kid, baseball was a world unto itself. Baseball was youth.

"Why do I get the impression you haven't heard a word I've said?"

"What?" Sparky looked up. "Oh, I guess I was just somewhere else."

John Valentine made a noncommittal grunt, then reached behind him and took a twenty-dollar beefsteak tomato from a basket full of them. He bit into it. Juice and seeds ran down his chin.

"I never even knew these people were out here," Valentine said. "Had a hell of a time finding the place."

"They don't get a lot of visitors," Sparky said.

"No television, you said. No movies. What do they do for entertainment? Any live theater?"

"I don't think they approve of that, either. They farm, mostly. Work the soil. The women quilt, you know, sew these big blanket things. They're worth a fortune when they're done. They cook wonderful food."

"Maybe we should have bought a pie or something."

"They don't sell those. Or the muffins."

"Smelled pretty good to me." He took another bite of the tomato. "This is a good tomato, too, but not worth what they were charging up there at the farmer's market." He tossed the remains of the tomato off the back of the wagon.

"No," Sparky said. "Probably not."

I never did get another of those muffins. But to this day, when I smell cornbread, I think of Amish baseball.

The first leg of the Halley's odyssey was Uranus to Jupiter, a trip not often made since the Invasion, two hundred years ago. Technically, it was illegal to approach Jupiter, but people did it from time to time and almost always got away with it. Space had always been too vast to really police, and Jupiter wasn't in the jurisdiction of any human-inhabited world. The only nation really interested in total interdiction was Luna, the grandly and rather nervously named Outpost State, which had existed for two hundred years only a quarter of a million miles away from the Invaders. The aliens had landed on Earth and on Jupiter. On Earth, they had wiped out all human life and destroyed all trace of human existence. What they did on Jupiter was anybody's guess. There had been no commerce humanity was aware of between the two planets in all that time. Luna would like it to stay that way. There was no reason to doubt the Invaders could finish the job, destroy all humanity, in a weekend if they took the notion. It seemed wise never to give them a reason, and therefore wise never to call too much attention to the affairs of humans.

But Luna was alone in seeing the Invaders as a continuing threat. The rest of the system would just as soon not think about Jupiter and the horrors it might conceal, which meant no one watched too closely. If you assumed an orbit and looked as if you planned to stay awhile, a ship would be dispatched to take you into custody. If you just used the gas giant's gravity well for a boost or a course change, as people in a hurry sometimes did... well, it was easy to lose yourself in traffic once back in the crowded trajectories of the inner planets. Space was vast.

I don't pretend to know just what Hal did to get us a course change with minimal expenditure of fuel. Something about coming around in front of the hideous planet, braking a bit, swinging around, and boosting again. I know we were under acceleration twice, neither time anything like the agony of the first boost at Uranus. When it was all done, we were aimed almost directly at the sun. Hal told me that getting to the sun was the most difficult destination in the system, in terms of energy. Which makes no sense at all, since it is so damn big and has so much gravity, right? But that's what he said, and at the price somebody paid for him, he ought to know. He said it was easier to aim for the sun from out here, where our orbital velocity was low, than farther in, where we'd have picked up too much speed. To which I might have said "Huh?" if I wasn't so dignified. I thought speed was the whole point.

There was a circular room atop the habidome that we called the cockpit. It was set up with Buck Rogers panels that theoretically could control all aspects of the ship's systems, but which had never been used, since Hal could do it all so much better. I imagined the original owner had liked to do what I did from time to time, which was sit in the captain's chair with my feet up on the "dashboard," studying the cosmos with a feeling of power, king of all I surveyed.

The view up there was of a hemisphere of space, like being under a glass dome, or in a planetarium. The second image was more accurate, because what we saw was an artifact, created by Hal. It looked real enough. But remember we were spinning almost all the time, at the end of a long rope with the engines at the other end. If the dome had been glass the stars would have whirled around us, too fast for comfortable viewing. Hal cleaned all that up, made it look like we were motoring down a vast, black highway, smooth as glass. There was a control at my fingertips which would give me any angle I wanted. Of course, except near Jupiter no motion was visible at all.

I almost skipped the show entirely. Coming from Luna, I'd had it impressed on me in no uncertain terms that Jupiter was to be avoided. That it was dangerous. The image of Jupiter was a fearful one, dominated by that vast red eye a hundred times larger than my home planet.

Poly felt no such qualms. It was just a big ball of gas to her, a great photo opportunity.

I decided to tough it out. Poly wasn't scared, how could I be? Usually I'm not subject to that kind of bullshit macho, so maybe I was curious, too.

You get close enough, any planet has a lot in common with any other planet. You lose the curve of the edge, it becomes a vast plane filling half the universe. We were close. Hal showed me the gauge, creeping up very slowly, indicating rising hull temperature as we grazed the poisonous edges of the atmosphere.

Closer and closer. It was like one of those mathematical things, the chaotic figures, squiggly lines that as you magnify them reveal more and more detail. Infinitely. Fractals, that's it. Tiny swirls of yellow and orange became monstrous storms, and along their edges, more tiny swirls. Then those grew, and you realized they were gigantic. And on their edges, more storms...

It was a Technicolor Rorschach test from hell.

After a while I couldn't look at it any longer. Poly and I were strapped in, but the tigers and Toby were floating free. I watched them for a while. Toby and Shere Khan had invented a game you might call Tobyball. Shere would bat him across the room with a massive paw. Toby would go caroming around like a fuzzy zero-gee cue ball, yelping happily, until he got straightened out and leaped back toward the big cat. Shere Khan would bat him again. She seemed to regard him as better than a ball of yarn—which he resembled, the free fall making him even fluffier than usual.

When Toby came close to Hobbes he would bark at him a few times, as he'd recently taken to doing. Hobbes would watch him sail by, thoughtfully, as if trying to make up his mind. One bite, or two? Swallow him tailfirst, or head-first? Decisions, decisions.

Toby had always been as spry as a snark in zero gee, but I was surprised at how well the tigers bore it. Not that cats aren't innately more graceful than dogs, but I'd once seen a house cat twisting endlessly, knowing he was falling but unable to figure out where he was going to land. Shere Khan and Hobbes just hooked their claws in the thick carpet and walked around as usual. I suppose they had been made fearless and maybe a little stupid by the same treatments that had left them free of aggression and the urge to hunt.

When Hal warned us we were about to boost again the tigers immediately reclined on the floor. I snagged Toby and held him in my lap. The weight, when it came, was about one gee, and didn't last very long. When it was over, Jupiter had swung around behind us and was shrinking rapidly. One twist of the dial on my console would have brought it around front again, in the false image we were watching, but Poly was tired of it and I had no desire to watch anymore. So we were weightless for another half hour until Hal put spin on the ship again, and then things continued as before.

But not quite. Poly and I started sharing a bed, and I began to spend a lot of time in the library, researching the Charonese.

I don't know what decided Poly, why she finally forgave me. I never asked, because I rather suspected it was mostly loneliness. Not that I wanted a burning love affair, but who needs to know that any male body would have served her as well? Poly was not the sort to go to bed with a guy she didn't like simply to scratch an itch, but she made it clear to me before we made love that she wasn't looking for a life companion at this point in her career. Hey, at this point in my career, neither was I. So that was understood. But we were affectionate with each other. She didn't come to my bed simply for sex. She stayed to cuddle, and eventually to sleep.

It had been a long time since I'd been able to awaken in the morning with a warm body at my side. A girl who didn't mind when I reached over and stroked her thigh, her hip, who would turn over and be in my arms. I've formed few long-term relationships in my life. This one wouldn't be long, either, but while it lasted it was good for me. No hot, sweaty details here, my friend. Let it stand that she was an inventive and enthusiastic lover, able to adjust to whatever mood seized me, and more than capable of bending me to her own will, if the mood suited her. We had some jolly, slippery times.

But the universe compensates. If something good comes into your life, the odds are something bad is not far away.

In this case, it was as near as the library.

After Jupiter, I was no longer satisfied to fish from my hammock. At least not all day long. I began thinking about Isambard Comfort, his dead sister, and the whole race that had spawned them. I had no illusions about Izzy. He might not be waiting for me on Luna, but if he was alive—and I felt sure he was—he'd be there soon. It made sense that the more I knew about his people, the better I'd be able to survive a third encounter with him. What did I need to do, for instance, to square things with them? Was it possible? Everyone had heard of the Charonese tenacity, of their reputation for always fulfilling a contract, no matter what. Was it really that bad?

It was worse. Much worse.

The first thing that struck a researcher—me—was the paucity of information. Hal had a UniKnowledge module, which was the nearest thing we'd ever get to summing up all human information collected since the days of the Cro-Magnon. It held all the libraries of Old Earth. All the movies, television shows, photo files. Billions of billions of bits of data so obscure a researcher might visit some of it once in two or three hundred years, and then only long enough to find it no longer had any reasonable excuse for being. But it wasn't thrown out. Capacity was virtually infinite, so nothing was ever tossed. Who knew? In ten centuries the twenty years of telemetry from Viking I might be of use to somebody. A vanity-press book, published in 1901, all about corn silage in Minnesota, of which no hard copy existed, might be just the reading you were looking for some dark and stormy night. The UniKnowledge held thousands of books printed in Manx, a language no one had spoken in a hundred years. It held Swahili comic books teaching methods of contraception. It contained cutting-room debris saved from a million motion pictures, discarded first drafts of films never made. A copy of every phone book extant at the time we began to record data by laser, and every one printed since. Fully half of the information in the UK had never been cataloged, and much never referenced in the centuries since its inception, and most of it was likely never to be cataloged. That would be taking the pack-rat impulse too far. Librarians had other things to do, such as develop more powerful search engines to sort through the inchoate mass of data when somebody wanted to find out something truly obscure.

But it was all in there. And if you set it for CHARONESE: Search, it began to spew out mountains of information. Or at least it seemed like mountains, at first glance. However, if you set it for ALBANIAN NAVY, 1936, it would spew out a mountain of information as well. You had to keep it in perspective.

So the first thing was to set the UK to sorting, organizing, comparing. It produced helpful graphs, statistical analysis, suggested routes of exploration. It spotted anomalies, pointed out the unexpected. The first thing it showed me was that, for an entire inhabited planet, there was practically no information at all. Economic data was very skimpy. Social analysis was sketchy. And most striking, items written by actual Charonese were unknown. Zip. Zero. Not one manuscript. The Charonese were not contributing information to the universal human database. They were hoarding their holdings like a paranoid poker player. Why?

The UK could help me with that, too. It searched for things written by ex-Charonese, expatriates. There had been a few, over the years. The bulk of these had spent their lives trying to make themselves very, very small, but a few had spoken out in print.

For a short time.

The UK produced a graph showing average life expectancy of an ex-Charonese. Ten months. Ninety percent were dead within one month of defection. The tougher ones lasted a little longer; one fellow was thought to be alive twenty years after leaving his home planet, but no one had seen him in five years, so it was anybody's guess.

They tended to die in accidents. In the same way that a boot crushing an ant might be seen as an accident.

Some of this stuff I knew, or had been told was probably true, but it was interesting to see it confirmed. Charonese didn't abide traitors. They kept their business secret, at any cost.

I could spin you quite a detective story about how I tracked my facts down. It's all in there, all in the UK, but finding it, putting it together, drawing conclusions, that's something else. As usual, there were reams of references from the Net, and they were about as useful as you'd expect, which is not much. Unattributed tales, anecdotal evidence, wildly contradictory accounts of How I Survived an Encounter with a Charonese. I spent more time than I usually would have with this material, because reliable sources were rare. The authors of such material were usually to be found in the obituary column a few weeks after publication. Venues that published anonymous articles about Charonese tended to announce new editorial staff for the next issue. Even printers and broadcasters had been assassinated.

So, Charonese Fact One: You write about us, you die.

I assumed there were people in law enforcement who knew about this, but what could they do? You write a nasty article about John Q. Mobster, and you die violently, somebody's going to suspect old John Q. There's a place to start. But though you might know these people were wiped out by a Charonese... which one? Someone who never met the victim, you could be sure of that. You couldn't just indict everybody with a Charonese passport, even though that would be a small group. They would certainly alibi each other, and you could rely on the fact there would be no deals cut, no testimony bargained for. If the hit was ordered by a boss, a capo, you could be sure he was back on Charon. But in fact it probably did not have to be ordered. Someone at the Charonese embassy would have the full-time job of monitoring all public media, and when something appeared they didn't like, maybe they just posted the name on a bulletin board. One writer, since deceased, said this was in fact the case. Whoever could work the job into his busy day did the hit. There were never any witnesses. The accident that claimed the life of the target invariably killed all the witnesses as well. On the very rare occasion a Charonese was surprised in the act, captured, caught red-handed, he always pleaded guilty. Charonese never hired lawyers. They never said anything at all to police, not even their name, and the only word they ever uttered in court was guilty. And then they did their time without a peep of complaint. A Charonese never complained about anything. If he had a problem with you, he killed you.

Charonese Fact Two: We always get our man.

Always. I searched long and hard for evidence of a contract unfulfilled, and found nothing. All the deceased experts agreed on this, even when they didn't agree on much else. If the Charonese agreed to do something, they did it. What they mostly did, off-planet, anyway, was enforce other people's contracts, the sort of contract you didn't want to bring into court or bother a lawyer about. Or it could even be a legal contract. There were no endless appeals from Charonese courts, no escape clauses. No excuses at all. If the Charonese guaranteed your contract, you could count on it being fulfilled, in cash, the equivalent, or if there was absolutely nothing left to take from the welsher, blood. Sometimes you got a warning in the form of a just-less-than-lethal torture session. Then you paid up, or you died.

I wish I'd known that. The next time I saw Uncle Roy I was going to have some very cross words to say to him.

So in these things the Charonese were much like other crime syndicates, past and present, though I'd never heard of any quite so harsh, nor any with a perfect record. Nor any who had never suffered a permanent defection, had a member squeal in court, cut a deal with the prosecutor. I inferred that something extraordinary was keeping these people in line, and I set out to find out what that was. I almost wish I hadn't. I had hoped it might provide me with a loophole of some kind, a spot of leverage. A window of hope.

I don't wish to depress and frighten you with the miserable history of Charon and its denizens. Just a short refresher course:

Luna and some other planets export criminals, misfits, and undesirables to Pluto for about a century. Most are garden-variety criminals, some are politicals, and a handful are very scary people. The Plutonians don't want these last around any more than you or I would; off they go to Charon. Transportation is a wonderful way to handle criminals; you might as well flush them down the toilet. There is very little in the way of maintenance, no costly per-bunk per-year figures to upset the taxpayers. Ship 'em as much or as little food as you wish, and let them fight it out. You need budget cuts? Prison food was always a good place to start. You don't need to pay salaries for guards, or worry about what they're bringing in to the convicts. There's no need for parole boards or probation officers. All sentences are for life. And if they wish to escape, all they need to do is fly through a million miles of vacuum.

But they had brought something with them to Charon, other than psychosis and criminal skills and their own brand of situational ethics. The dominant religion of Pluto, back from the days when they had been the outcasts of the system was Satanism. Diabolism. Devil worship. Mystical, scary stuff.

Well, not really. It's true no one was allowed into a Satanist Temple but a true believer, and it is true the rituals and belief system are secret. But the secret is an open one, and the interior of the temple is no more mysterious than that of the Mormons. If you leave the church, no one comes to hunt you down and kill you. No one cuts out your tongue. You can blab all you wish, and ex-Satanists over the years have blabbed it all. And a more prosaic, boring story has seldom been blabbed. Forget the tales of human sacrifice, of Christian babies slaughtered on black altars and eaten by the congregation. They used to tell those same stories about Catholics. No, Plutonian Satanism was all ritual and show, symbolic as a Christian sacrament. Although I'll have to admit, reading about it, it sounded like a darn good show.

There was nothing symbolic about the Charonese religion. Real people bled real blood and died on Charonese altars.

If that was all, it would be disgusting, but nothing new in the world of religions. The Charonese couldn't hold a candle to the Aztecs for sheer volume of blood shed, or to the Spanish Inquisition for inventiveness. The sheer depravity of the Charonese way of life owed more to medical science than to man's endless capacity for inhumanity to man. The Charonese did it to themselves.

It's been a long time since any slashing or crushing injury below the brain-case could do any permanent harm to anyone, as long as you didn't bleed to death before medical attention arrived. One of the first things medics did to an injury was turn off the pain. In some professions—stunt performers, or even my own work, when I was required to take a sword thrust in the final act—pain would be turned off ahead of time. (For me, anyway. I trust my acting ability to sell the audience on my pain; I don't hold with "method" fanatics who insist only the real thing will do.) There are those who enjoy being mutilated ritually, and have the pain suppressed, and a very small number who actually enjoy that much pain. All perfectly normal, today. Everything can be fixed.

On Charon, possession or use of any pain suppressor was illegal. You need to have studied Charon to understand how awful that was. The Charonese had almost no laws at all. You were expected to do anything you could get away with. Every law they did have was a capital offense. But because pain was good, pain was to be sought, a Charonese execution consisted of confinement to a sensory deprivation tank where one could not harm oneself in any way, and kept alive there for whatever period the court deemed fit for the crime. Typically that was a couple of weeks. The miscreant was usually insane—and defining "insanity" for a Charonese was a pretty problem—within a few days.

The Charonese religion was based around pain and death. Torture began at an early age, some authorities said in infancy. To my way of thinking, any Charonese living at the age of four or five years must already be insane, by any standard I can understand. Others maintain that the Charonese are the next step in evolution. Pain, they note, evolved to warn an organism of damage (why God couldn't just send down a written memo: "Hey, buddy, you're damaged!" was never explained to me). Now that damage was no big deal we ought to just ignore pain. Well, why not eliminate it? sez I, but I'm not writing a doctoral thesis.

There's no need to disturb your sleep with tales of Charonese bloodbaths, self-mutilations, orgies of sex and violence. A description of Charonese love-making alone would haunt you for days. And besides, the information gets very sketchy here. All the authors are dead, and accounts differ; who can say what is true and what is fancy? One example will suffice for all: the Charonese equivalent of a bar mitzvah involves self-disembowelment, after which the honoree amputates both legs and an arm, and then chews off... but I can't go on. It's all healed immediately, so what's the big deal, eh? Unless you have more sensitivity than a garden slug, that is.

Needless to say, such a lifelong regimen has produced a breed of human with not much in common with the rest of us. Nothing but death will stop them, and death is meaningless if you're in my shoes, because if, for instance, Izzy had not completed his mission at the time of his death, someone else would be along soon to rectify the oversight. And if I managed to kill Charonese number two, there would be a number three, and a number four.

The population of Charon was about five million. I'd have to kill a few hundred a day just to break even.

As if. So far I'd killed one through luck and evaded another twice, again, mostly through luck. And if I killed Isambard...

What would number two be like? I didn't think they had sent their champion killer to snuff an actor.

THE DISCOVERY OF SEX

Part Four of a Series

by Hildy Johnson

They tried to warn him.

"It's not like anything you've experienced as a boy," they said.

"Come on, Doc," Sparky said. "I'm thirty years old. You think I haven't had sex?"

Well, of course he'd had sex. Or what passes for sex in one whose puberty has been arrested for many years. And I'm sure he enjoyed it. There was a joke going around school when I was young: Sparky is about to get into bed with one of his young fans. (We all assumed that young fan would someday be us.) He pulls down his trousers and the girl stares. "Who do you think you're going to satisfy with that little thing?" She laughs. And Sparky says, "Me."

They say size doesn't matter, and it's true, to a point. Sixteen inches would be nightmarish. Two inches... Are you in yet, darling? Sparky's measurement has never been a secret. One must assume he had a lot of charitable partners.

So that alone would be a big difference in his experience: being with a woman who wasn't faking anything.

But no matter how considerate we are in the sack, for most of us the primary urge is a rather selfish one, isn't it? Fess up. Is the experience a total loss if you get off, even if he or she didn't? Gee whiz, I'm sorry, hon, I'll do better next time, and... zzzzzzzzz.

The doctors told him what he'd been having were "dry" orgasms, sometimes called "infantile" erections. He felt like he was turned on, and he felt like he was coming, but he didn't know the half of it.

Puberty. A time of exciting and dreadful change. A time of confusion. A time of exploration. Most of us get about a year to adjust to it.

Sparky had about a week....

Ken Valentine leaped up, bounced once on the giant bed, and hit the floor running. He ran right up the wall, seeing himself as Donald O'Connor in Singin' in the Rain, only Donald O'Connor wasn't naked. Turned a back flip and landed running again. Jumped to the ceiling, shoved himself down to the floor, and began caroming off the walls like a demented kangaroo.

Back in the bed, a lump of sheets and comforters stirred. A hand emerged and cautiously peeled back enough covers to expose disheveled hair, a forehead, and two slightly bruised eyes. The eyes followed Ken's progress around the room. Then the rest of the face was exposed and Hildy Johnson sat up in the bed.

"You've got more energy than three litters of puppies," she said.

"I know, I know!" he shouted, and bounced some more.

They were in the penthouse suite of one of the better hotels in King City. It had been the nearest refuge when Ken began feeling the urge down in the lobby, while Hildy was making yet another attempt to interview him concerning the onset of puberty. Perhaps onslaught would be a better word, she thought. Or maybe attack.

Try blitzkrieg.

There was no law against going at it right there in the lobby, but that wasn't Hildy's style; she had been raised to believe public sex was uncouth. Besides, Kenneth was filthy rich, and she'd always wanted to stay in a room like this. She'd managed to restrain him long enough to reach the elevator. By then, there was a real danger he'd start humping the potted plants. Since this biological banzai, Sparky really needed to be kept on a leash.

The room had a spa big enough to bathe a herd of elephants. She'd pushed him into it and surrendered to the inevitable. The bed was fifteen feet on a side and they'd debauched every square foot. Sometimes it seemed more of a war game than lovemaking. Hildy saw her redoubts of pillow and blanket fall to his relentless assaults over and over again. Not that she was much of a fighter. But with such an aggressive partner, she got a kick out of resisting for a while, before allowing her positions to be invaded. She even had a few bruises, a first for her. But she gave as good as she got.

It was just about the best sex she'd ever had, but now she was in the mood for an armistice. She didn't think Ken was.

"Why didn't anyone ever tell me?" he shouted, for possibly the three hundredth time. He leaped into the bed, bounced over to Hildy, and yanked the blankets away from her. She was pale and nude and perfect, with patches of pinkness here and there. He crawled from her feet to her chest, making obeisance at various stations of the corpus, fondly remembering what this was for, what they'd done with that, what had happened here and here and here. He collapsed across her body, resting his head on her moist breasts.

"If I'd only known," he breathed in her ear. "I feel like I wasted fifteen years. Hell, I only have maybe three, four hundred years left! And there are billions of women in the system. Billions!"

"Maybe even a few dozen who don't want to fuck you," Hildy pointed out.

"Impossible! How could they possibly want to miss... this!"

"How indeed. Just plain cruelty, I'd think."

"Exactly! Exactly! Cruel to both of us! What possible reason could there be to not make love?"

"Hmmm. Soreness?"

He frowned. "You aren't sore, are you?"

"Honey, I... never mind. Aren't you?"

"A little," he admitted.

"Then why don't we call a time-out, and finish the interview?"

"Interview? Interview? Is that what you call this?" He kissed her lips, and her breasts.

"That's what it started out to be. Remember? This morning? The hotel lobby? We were going to have breakfast?"

"Breakfast?" He seemed to be having trouble with words longer than four letters. "Oh, yeah. Breakfast. God, am I ever hungry." He reached across her and punched a button on the headboard. "Send up a lot of breakfast," he said.

"Yes, sir. What would you like?" a female voice replied.

"A lot. A lot of everything. Make it real fast, and I'll tip triple. Including you, sweetheart, if you aren't a computer."

"I'm not a computer," said the voice, "and it will be real fast."

"Okay," said Sparky, turning back to Hildy. "What do you want to know?"

Hildy put a fingertip to her left temple and twisted. The pupil of her left eye began to glow a deep red, like a deer caught in headlights.

"Recording," she said, formally. Sitting there naked on the bed, she noticed an almost imperceptible change in his attitude. It was something performers, actors, fashion models did. The director yells "Action!" The spotlight hits the singer on the stage, the photographer lifts his camera, and the people turn on. Or switch to a different level of reality, Hildy thought. The shoulders move, the teeth get brighter somehow, the eyes twinkle. It was a little scary, but not half so much as the other end of the process, when the director yells "Cut!" The smile collapses. The charisma is stored, way back wherever people who have it, keep it. She had to cut through that before she'd get anything useful.

"On the record..." she said, finishing the legal litany. "Sparky, would you agree with the proposition that the pubescent human male is the stupidest animal on two legs?"

He laughed. "If you want to take me as an example... yeah. Or on four legs, or six, or eight." He glanced down at his semierect penis. "Maybe we should say three legs."

Hildy glanced down, too—or at least her right eye did. The left remained stabilized on the establishing shot, recording a solid image she would use mainly as earlier reporters had used sound recorders. There would be Hyper-Text image bites, of course, but she doubted she would use much from this particular session. Sparky was still gazing down with boundless affection. It was like he had a new friend. In a way, he did.

"Say," he said, brightly. "Maybe it's not me that's dumb at all. Maybe when your cock starts to grow, it sort of sucks up your brains." He made a sucking sound with his lips. "Pow! And your IQ drops like a stone. You're at the mercy of any female who walks past you. You'd do anything to... sure, sure, that's it." He grasped his newly burgeoned manhood and waved it more or less in Hildy's direction. "This fellow gets it into his head... so to speak—"

"Off," Hildy said. "Sparky, it's a very bad sign when you start referring to your cock in the third person. Next thing you know you'll give it a name... and I'm out of here."

"You're right, you're right." Sparky apologized. "I'm crazy, but I'm not loony." That look came into his eyes again and his gaze dropped down her body. It landed where it usually did, and he was no longer semierect. "How about it, while we're off the record? Do you think we could—"

The bedroom door swung open and three bellhops hurried in, pushing carts groaning with bacon and eggs and pastries and fruit. For a moment there Sparky was so funny, his head moving rapidly back and forth between Hildy and the food, back to Hildy again, back to the food, totally unable to decide which he wanted more... she fell over laughing.

...and by Friday, though he was not back to anything like "normal," he could at least be trusted again around livestock.

NEXT WEEK:

Part Five

The New Sparky, as Romeo!

What amused Kenneth the most was that growing up felt like the world was shrinking. He wondered if normal boys, growing up in the normal way, experienced it like that. Did it seem their clothing had gotten too tight? That doorways were lower now, so they could reach up and touch them as they passed through? Or was it all too gradual?

Rooms imploding, shoes pinching, stumbling on stair risers that seemed to get lower even as he climbed them... these he could handle.

But people getting smaller...

He was now the same height as his father. He found it enormously disconcerting. For thirty years his father had been this vast presence, towering, stern, but loving. The fact that other men were taller was completely beside the point. In the ways that mattered, John Valentine had been the tallest man in the world.

But in this new, changed world, his father was only slightly over average height. He had a way of standing that made people think he was taller than he was, a way of dominating a gathering of people so that, from Kenneth's old perspective and even without the elevator shoes the loving son's uplifted gaze provided, made him stand out above anyone but a basketball team. But now they were eye to eye.

This was inconceivable.

This was preposterous.

This was... something a billion sons had encountered during their youth, nothing unusual at all. Except they had crept up on the idea. They had done it as a proper son should, a millimeter a week, not sprouted insolently like some demented beanstalk.

Kenneth was profoundly embarrassed by it. He now habitually stood slumped, slouched, hipshot. It just made him look sullen, and didn't really help anyway.

John Valentine put his hand on Kenneth's shoulder and squeezed affectionately.

"Who says dreams can't come true? Right, son?"

"That's right, Dad."

They were standing in the almost-finished park across from the dream. The park was three acres in area and ten levels high. The ground was bare soil, with sprinklers and electrical outlets naked. Soon they would be covered with sod. But a fountain was bubbling off to their left, and a white gazebo to their right sported electric flags that snapped in the nonexistent wind. In a few hours the orange fences would come down and people would begin using the paths, sitting on the benches. Children would climb in the small playground and splash in the pond with golden koi and the park's resident pair of otters.

John Valentine barely noticed any of this. The park had been part of his specifications for the project—and he would never know how many headaches this had caused-—but it had really been no more important to him than the color of the ushers' uniforms. A thing he would notice if it were done wrong, never see if it was right. He had said the theater should be across from a park. Here was the park. Enough said.

His attention was fixed firmly on the edifice across the wide pedway.

The Valentine. His dream. Well, Kenneth's, too.

"You remember that day at the spaceport, Kenneth?" he asked. "It was the day after I took you to the Sparky audition. Maybe you were too young."

"I remember it, Father."

"It's funny," John Valentine went on. "I don't recall exactly where we were going. Mars, wasn't it?"

"Yes, Father."

"Can't think why we'd want to go to Mars. Brutal gravity on Mars. Anyway, we'd had this offer, and we didn't know what to do with it. Television. A series. The money sounded good, but... television! Remember?"

"Oh, yes," Kenneth said, with a smile.

"And that's where the dream was born. The Valentine." He waved his arm grandly at the marquee. "Shakespearean repertory. We never knew it would take this long. This many years, you laboring with the kiddie schlock, me languishing in the sticks. But we got the money, and now we have the time."

Kenneth knew his father had no notion of just how much money. But following John Valentine's gaze, he had to admit it was money well spent.

The facade was wood, recalling what the exterior of the Globe Theater might have looked like. It stretched for half a city block, facing the park. The actual entrance took up half that much of the frontage: four sets of wood-and-glass doors, a small box office off to one side. Above it was a tasteful marquee, brightly lit, but with nothing that flashed or moved. "This ain't a casino," Valentine had said. On all three sides it advertised:

ROMEO AND JULIET

Kenneth Valentine

Maya Chang

John Valentine

with the tasteful logo featuring a rose and a sword that had come from the top graphic-design firm in King City. And not cheaply. Above that was a two-story tower with THE VALENTINE spelled vertically, THE floating over the v, in a type style called BROADWAY.

It had once been the Roxy Theater. Even in its heyday the Roxy had not been a premiere venue. Located on a seldom-traveled side street just off the Rialto, it had struggled along for almost twenty years presenting the sort of experimental works beloved of acting students and practically nobody else, playing to audiences composed mostly of relatives of those students. It was far too large a house for that. The balcony had been walled off early on, but even then the four hundred main-floor seats were usually half-empty. Sometimes nine-tenths empty. The theater had been owned by a man with some money, a man almost as eccentric as John Valentine. He was content to lose small sums yearly, until a change in the tax situation made it impossible to continue. And it sat there, dark, boarded up, for fifteen years until Sparky's real-estate scouts discovered it. Valentine didn't give a hoot about the bad location: "They'll come to us; you wait and see."

Renovation had kept Valentine busy for the better part of six months, and now it was ready.

Father and son crossed the pedway and entered their theater. The lobby was dark wood and thick maroon carpet. Heavy curtains covered the back walls, pulled away from the four entrances. They could be raised entirely so standees could look through wide openings in the rear wall. Valentine fully expected standees, at every performance.

They walked down the sloping aisle between the left and the center sections of seats, which were wide, and plushly upholstered in the same shade as the carpet. They reached the orchestra and turned around.

Six hundred seats. A steeply raked balcony. Retractable chandeliers. Three elevated boxes on each side. An arched ceiling, gentle acoustic curves built into the walls. It was old-fashioned without making a big point of it.

"Perfect," Valentine breathed. "I couldn't ask for more."

"You did a great job," Kenneth said.

Valentine accepted this in silence. Then he grinned, and hurried over the narrow bridge spanning the orchestra pit. He disappeared behind the curtain and Kenneth heard the sound of backstage ropes being pulled. The curtain rose, and banks of lights clicked on one by one. Valentine strode out to center stage and beckoned for Kenneth to join him.

"Rehearsals begin tomorrow," he said. "Are you ready, Romeo?"

"I think I know my lines," Kenneth said.

"I'm jealous," Valentine said, with an affectionate smile. "Part of me says, 'John, you're not too old to play Romeo. You could still show that little upstart a thing or two.' "

"I'll bet you could."

"And I will, Kenneth. I will. 'Directed by John Valentine.' I like the sound of that."

"You directed a lot of things on Neptune," Kenneth reminded him.

"Ah, yes, but this feels like a new beginning. Not much of a talent pool out there in the outers, my boy. Rather pathetic, most of them. Now I'll be working with the best. With the fifth generation of Valentines. The one destined to be the best of all."

"I'll sure try, Father."

"Count on it. You will be the best."

And Kenneth knew he had better be.

Back aboard Hal...

You'd think a guy who is seldom at a loss for words, a guy who could cover umpty-ump pages with a description of a trip from Pluto to Oberon where, basically, nothing happened except I got hungry... you'd think I'd have something useful to say about a close encounter with the sun.

Hmmm. Well, how about... it got hot.

It did, a little. Up to about ninety-five or ninety-six. Not so impressive until you realize that any variation from a desired temperature is cause for worry aboard a spaceship. Such things are supposed to be under control. That should give you some idea how close Hal was cutting things.

Not too impressed? Well, neither was I. How about, it was fast. Over in less time than it takes to talk about it.

It was grand. It was beautiful. It was awe-inspiring.

Ho-hum, right?

It was dangerous. But the trouble was, I just couldn't get too excited about it. If something happened, it would all be over too quick for me to notice it, Hal assured me.

I think that, in the end, after all my adventures on my way from one of humanity's most distant outposts to within the orbit of mankind's closest, I just got sort of burned out. You should excuse the expression. And we had done a mighty close skim of Jupiter, a place I feared a lot more. I guess once you've seen one giant ball of gas up close, seeing another just doesn't pack the wallop you might expect it to. Even if it is on fire.

It was the same with our speed. I never asked for a speedometer check. I didn't really want to know. We were moving about as fast as anyone had ever moved before, I guess, but you couldn't tell it, not until we were right down in the photosphere. (Oh, yes, we came that close.) After Jupiter, old Sol grew larger at a prodigious rate. But so what? Three days or thirty days, you still can't see it grow. It still looks static, like any starry night.

But if there were any speed limits set in the solar system, there would have been traffic cops staked out behind every billboard from Mercury to Earth, waiting to pull us over. "Honest, Officer, I was only going a hundred thousand miles per second." "Boy, that wasn't nothin' but whatcha call a 'relativistic effect.' We clocked you at point-nine-nine-nine c, and 'round these parts we figger c ain't jist a good idea, it's the law!"

There were changes around the ship. Spin had to be stopped again, and since there wasn't going to be a lot of time on the other side, certain housekeeping measures to take care of. All the wonderful animals had to be stowed away, back into cold sleep. Many of the plants were "mothballed" in some way I didn't understand. The pond was drained. The whole place became rather depressing, to tell you the truth.

No one was more depressed than Toby, though. The poor little thing was inconsolable. He spent a whole day searching for his big, striped lady love, and when I got out his storage container he actually seemed eager to go to sleep.

And then we were there. Free-falling because Hal had to maneuver the radiation shields of the engine module to stay between us and the sun.

He made all that complication vanish in our overhead display. All we saw was the sun, or actually an image of the sun suitably translated for our frail senses. We could see sunspots, and flares, and prominences, and they all looked rather small. You could tell yourself that a hundred Lunas would fit into that tiny black speck and still leave room for fifty Marses, but you couldn't get a real perspective on it. You might know that the friction from the near vacuum of the photosphere was heating the ship's hull to within a few degrees of its melting point... but even if you could believe that, you didn't want to dwell on it.

We passed within a hundred thousand miles of Icarus, the asteroid that was moved into close solar orbit forty years ago and has been slowly ablating away ever since. They figure it still has about a century to go before it's all used up. We'd never have seen it, of course, but Hal provided a telescopic image: just a smooth ball of molten rock on the Brightside. We could see the tips of some of the instruments peeking around from Darkside. Hal, acting the cheerful tour guide, told us those instruments were continually extended as the ends were burned away. He said Coronaville was now mounted on cooled pillars, as the whole planetoid had become too hot to walk on. I decided to cross it off my list of vacation destinations.

And then we were past and the sun was dwindling behind us. Poly seemed to have enjoyed the experience more than I. She took hundreds of pictures, most of which must have shown little more than patterns of orange-and-yellow streaks with the occasional black pimple. I didn't point out to her that all she was photographing was a television display on the cockpit dome. Why spoil her fun?

Suddenly, after endless weeks of nothing to do, we were in a big hurry. Our velocity was now such that Hal didn't have a hope of bringing us to a stop anywhere close to Earth's orbit—and he didn't have the fuel for it, either. What he had was enough to boost at a steady one gee until he ran out of gas within a million miles of our destination, still going like a bat out of hell.

When he went over his plans with me, I was shocked.

"What do you mean, interstellar space?" I asked him.

"It was the only option," he said. "You said you had to get to Luna. You didn't say I had to."

"But... of course you have to," Poly said. "Tell him, Sparky. He can't just... just drift for a million years."

"It could be a lot longer than that," I said. "How about it, Hal? There's got to be a way you can slow down."

"Yes, of course," he said. "There is always a way." And he shut up.

I still don't know if he would have spoken up for himself. He seemed so human, most of the time. It was easy to forget he was a machine, and though he mimicked human emotions—and I believe actually felt some of them—he operated under different protocols than Poly and I.

"Well?" Poly asked. "What do you have to do?"

"I would need to rendezvous with a refueling drone," he said. "One could be launched from Titan in a few hours, and several months from now we could meet at around eleven billion miles from the sun. A few days to slow down, and head back system-ward... in a year's time I could be back in solar space."

"Then do that," I said.

"I'm not authorized to initiate such an expenditure," he said.

At last I got it. I marched to the freezer in the kitchen—well, marched isn't exactly the word, since I was moving poorly in the one-gee environment—and retrieved Izzy's tired old thumb. Gad, only a week ago I had toyed with the idea of feeding it to Hobbes. And Hal would be on a one-way trip to the Big Bang.

I pressed it to the credit plate and authorized the chartering of an expendable drone full of fuel. I looked at the price tag this time, and had to smile. Isambard's credit had been cut off everywhere in the solar system shortly after we left Oberon... but not here. Hal's credit-verification software had been shut down, on my order. It was possible this new, outrageous charge would cause him trouble. Perhaps he, his wife and children and parents and all the rest of his family would be clapped into debtor's prison when he returned home. I had no idea if Charonese had such a thing, but one can hope.

"Do you have everything?" Hal asked. "Spacesuits, extra oxygen?"

"Something to read?" I suggested. "Candy? Toys?" See what I mean? There was a list in his memory that we'd worked on for days, and he knew each item had been checked and double-checked. If we'd forgotten to put something on the list, we were unlikely to think of it now. He was a computer, dammit, he could not forget things. But here he was sounding like an anxious mom sending her kids off to summer camp. I took it to mean he was worried about us. And that he would miss us. I was pretty sure he could feel lonely.

"We'll be okay, Hal," Poly told him. You can't kiss a computer good-bye, so we waved at him and piled into the lifeboat.

That's right, lifeboat. There were two aboard, and we needed both of them. Hal had fixed them up as a two-stage vehicle, the one we would ride perched on the nose of the other. The bottom one would blast until it ran out of fuel, then be discarded, whereupon our own boat would blast. By then we'd be feeling major gees, but it wouldn't last as long as the boost from Oberon.

Don't look so shocked. It's the way humans first got to Luna, throwing away most of their rocket along the way. Insanely expensive, but hang the cost, say I. The Charonese could afford it.

We got into our acceleration couches and Poly briefly squeezed my hand. We'd be splitting up as soon as we landed, and I'd barely gotten to know her. Story of my life. And probably lucky for her. The few medium-term relationships I've had have ended badly. I've had even fewer long-term ones.

"Hasta la vista," Hal said, over the radio.

"Until we meet again," I said. And the lifeboat's engine fired.

John Valentine turned his back on the company, put his fists on his hips, and stood motionless for a full ten seconds. No one breathed. One lesson you learned early when being directed by Valentine was that when the great man wasn't saying anything, someone was in trouble.

"Everyone take the afternoon off," he said, at last. "Go on, get out. Be back here at eight sharp."

No one dallied. There were a few murmured conversations as cast members grabbed scripts and purses and bags and thermos bottles, and even that was stilled when Valentine, still facing the back wall, raised his voice.

"Except Kenneth," he said. People moved a little faster, and within a minute the stage was bare but for father and son. Kenneth stood silently, hands resting on the hilt of his wooden sword.

John Valentine walked slowly along the rear of the stage, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. He glanced at his son, sighed, and strode into the wings. When he came back he had a pair of sabers. He tossed one to his son. Kenneth dropped his prop sword and caught the saber by the hilt. Valentine moved back a few steps and addressed the younger man.

"Do you want a mask?"

"Not if you're not wearing one."

"En garde," Valentine said, and assumed that position with easy grace. He tapped the blade of Kenneth's sword with his own, and attacked.

Clang, clang, clang, and the sharp tip of the saber rested solidly on Kenneth's sternum. Kenneth swallowed hard. His father lowered his weapon, turned, and walked back three steps.

"Again," he said quietly.

It went no better for Kenneth the second time, or the third. There didn't seem much point to a fourth engagement. John Valentine walked in slow circles for a while, massaging his temples.

"You expect problems," he said, at last. "You expect obstacles and setbacks. You are ready to deal with incompetence—it's always around somewhere. You expect these things, and you think you are prepared for anything. So when the disaster strikes, you think you are prepared for it." He looked up at last. "But from my own son? This... this I wasn't prepared for."

Kenneth could think of nothing to say. He knew where this cold, quiet calm could lead.

"My Romeo can't handle a saber." He looked into the wings, then back to his son. "Tell me it's because you're used to the foil."

Kenneth shrugged, and reluctantly shook his head.

"Then tell me how it was done. No, wait, let me guess. Your fencing instructor... needed a little extra cash."

"A lot of extra cash," Kenneth admitted.

"Well, thank god he didn't come cheaply. He was highly recommended, and his reports to me couldn't have been more glowing. I should have suspected; the man didn't have the imagination to write that well. You write well."

"My staff writes even better."

"Of course." Valentine laughed. "Honing their skills on Sparky. I should have detected the flavor of fantasy." He sighed. "I blame myself, son. I never should have absented myself so long." Then he pointed to Kenneth and raised his voice only slightly, but it made the accusing finger more deadly than his blade. "But I must blame you, too, Kenneth. Oh, yes, I think that you must share the blame for neglecting one of the basic skills of the thespian art. Did you think you would continue in your childhood forever? Did you think someone could 'morph' swordsmanship, as though this holy stage were no more than your television fantasy world? Did you think you would never grow up and shoulder a man's work?"

It seemed best not to answer. But as the silence stretched, Kenneth knew he would have to.

"I... I just didn't enjoy it, I guess," he said.

"Speak up, son!" Valentine thundered. He stamped his foot on the stage. "On top of everything else, I will not have you whimpering while you tread these honored boards. Take your puling and squeaking elsewhere, back into your boardroom, perhaps, as it seems that is where you have spent the period of my absence. Surely, your skills there have purchased this theater, I'll not take that away from you... but do you think I care about that? Do you not realize I'd sooner present Shakespeare on a barren patch of sand than to cast as Romeo a boy who cannot fight? A boy who, in the crucial scene—you might recall it; Act Three, scene one?—must slay the valiant Tybalt? The scene that is the very center of the play? The scene that seals Romeo's fate, that sets the lovers finally on the road to ruin?

"Have you seen Tybalt's swordplay? Have you watched the man rehearse? The man is better than me, my poor, poor son. So what shall I do? Have Tybalt fight left-handed? He would destroy you. Break his arms? He would kick you to death. Blind him? Hamstring him? Hire a new Tybalt, a straw man for my son to knock down?"

Valentine threw his weapon clattering into the wings.

"No. No, I must instead create my Romeo from these pitiful makings. I must wrench this wretch—clawing and screaming, if necessary—from his pathetic cocoon, from this Sparky buffoon, and into a man's estate. Assistant stage manager!"

The timid but bright drama student with the misfortune to hold that job peeked from the wings where she had been hiding. Valentine had never learned her name (it was Rose), but had impressed on her from the first day that she was never, never to be beyond the reach of his voice. So when he had cleared the theater, she had found a hole to hide in, but not one so remote as to spare her Kenneth's humiliation. Mister Valentine—always to be called mister, as though he needed distinguishing from Kenneth—usually called her ASM. When he used the full tide, nothing good could come of it.

"Yes, Mr. Valentine?"

"Bring me my sword. Contact everyone. Rehearsals are suspended for a period of... make it two weeks. My son needs to attend drama school."

"Yes, sir."

"This is not to be taken as license to loaf. Upon their return to the stage, all cast members will be expected to know their lines. Cold."

"Yes, sir." Rose handed him his sword.

"Come, Kenneth. We have much work to do."

"Yes, Father."

"En garde!" Valentine shouted, and slashed at his son's face.

Henry Wauk was not precisely asleep when the knock came at his door.

In West Texas, everybody had a siesta during the hottest hours of the day. At three in the afternoon you could fire a cannon down the middle of Congress Street and not worry about hitting anyone. Of course, you could do that at just about any hour; New Austin was not a bustling place.

"Doctor" Wauk took his daily siesta in the office that connected with his, at the top of the stairs over the Long Branch Saloon. Theoretically, this office belonged to Dr. Heinrich Wohl, D.D.S., but just then there was no Dr. Wohl, and there hadn't been for almost fifteen years now. There had been once, and perhaps there would be again, but these days the big dental chair in Wohl's office was never used except when Wauk stretched out in it, shoved his black hat down over his eyes, and sacked out.

Henry never sweated during these naps, though the temperature in his office often reached well over one hundred degrees in the Fahrenheit scale used in Texas. He loosened his string tie and he took off his boots, but made no other concession to the heat. He often bragged to his friends that he was half gila monster and half prairie dog, and that's why he stayed dry. They responded that it was because there was very little water in his system, and he said yeah, that, too. Henry Wauk was an alcoholic.

He counted himself lucky to live in a society that didn't give a damn what he put into his body or what he did with his life. No busybodies had ever tried to reform him. He was a happy drunk. He was also happy to have found, many years ago, the perfect job, which was to be "Dr. Wauk." That was not his real name, but merely the one some wag had written on the shingle outside the doctors' offices in West Texas when the disneyland was built. Wauk and Wohl, get it? He hadn't, actually, but it had been explained to him, and he was content to be Henry Wauk now. Actually, if you had asked him what his name had been, originally, he would have been unable to tell you. "I'm sure it's written down here somewhere. Library card, or something."

For well over forty years he had been refining what he thought of as the Perfect Day. Thirty years ago he got it right, and he'd pretty much stuck to it since then.

Up at the crack of ten, dress and down to the saloon for breakfast, a double prairie oyster: two raw eggs in a double shot of bourbon. Thus fortified, he strolled three blocks to the barbershop for a hot towel and a shave. (Saturdays, a bath in the back room. Once a fortnight, a haircut.)

Noon would find him standing at the bar, drinking slowly, getting the right edge for siesta. When he woke up at five, lunch of pig's knuckles and pickled eggs. At around six it was poker lessons for the tourists. There was no fee for these and all guests of the disney could play, but tuition was steep. At nine or ten dinner would seldom be whatever the cook at the Long Branch said was good that day, because it was usually a damn lie, but the thick steaks were tasty enough. What could you do to ruin a steak? Doc liked them crunchy on the outside and barely dead in the middle. After dinner began the important work of the day: serious poker with the other regulars. Stakes could be high, depending on how much had been taken from the tourists that day. At three or four (or sometimes, seven) he would stagger upstairs to his rooms. It was a good life. It suited him. The Perfect Day.

Of course, once a week or so, medical business would intrude.

Everyone in Texas knew Doc's office hours were noon to three, and he conducted what routine doctoring was necessary from his post at the bar. Prescriptions were handled by his nurse, Charity, who actually sat in the office from ten till siesta time. She was a bright-eyed, intelligent sixteen-year-old who had been firmly rebuffing Henry's advances since she came of age, three years earlier. She was clever with the stethoscope, with mortar and pestle, the scales, and the pill compressor. In fact, Dr. Wauk could and did leave ninety percent of the medical business to her. There was no call for alarm in this, since Henry was no kind of doctor, anyway. How much worse could the nurse be? She was, in fact, a lot better than Wauk in most things.

When he took the job Henry had made a halfhearted attempt to learn a few basics of first aid, which was all that could be dispensed in Texas, anyway. No sane person would have trusted him to handle much more than a hangnail; if you were sick, you went back to the real world for treatment. If you were injured, emergency services could be at your side in two minutes, tops. Only the mildly ill and the occasional dead ever came to Henry's office. Which was good, because Henry was a fumble-fingered pharmacist, a terrible diagnostician, and any really serious laceration made him queasy. Unfortunately, Charity passed out at the sight of blood, so Henry had to patch up all the scrapes and cuts. Most of the work he did was nothing more complicated than a little antiseptic and a bandage.

Naturally, when he became aware of the knocking, he at first assumed it was a goddam tourist who had lost his way. He snorted, shoved the hat down a little farther over his brow.

The knock came again, a little louder this time. Like a noisy goddam fly you kept brushing away. He already suspected he would have to get up, but he tried one more time to ignore it.

Knock, knock, knock.

Henry sat up, shoved his feet into his boots, and stomped toward the door. He drew the long-barreled Colt .45 pistol from its holster hanging by the door. The gun was loaded with blanks, but they were very loud blanks, and they shot real fire from the barrel. Aimed at someone's face from a range of one foot—which was Henry's intention—a first-degree burn was likely. A first-degree burn which the goddam pest could goddam well get treated out in the goddam real world, where he should have gone in the goddam first place.

"Hold your goddam horses," he said, and jerked the door open. He was about to squeeze the goddam trigger but something stopped him. His visitor was cloaked in a brown robe that reached all the way to the floor. The face was hidden in the shadows of the hood. Some kind of monk? Franciscan, he thought, but there were no monasteries in Texas, and that sort of garb would be frowned on by the Anachronism Committee. So he probably hadn't entered through a public entrance. And there was a darker, wet stain on the robe that might be blood. The figure pulled the hood back slightly, and Henry frowned. The face was bloody, and it looked familiar.

"Sparky?" he asked.

"How are you, Doc?"

"You've grown up."

"Would you mind putting the gun down? It makes me..."

Nervous, Henry was about to finish for him, but Sparky staggered and almost fell forward. Henry caught him and pulled him inside.

"Sorry. I'll be all right."

"What in hell are you doing here?"

Sparky had been a regular in Texas for a while, shortly after his father left for Neptune. He had paid for poker lessons, without complaint, but not for long. Soon he was good enough to be invited to sit with the regulars. But that had all been a long time ago. Sparky had not visited Texas for over a year.

"I need to hide out for a little bit, Doc," he said.

"You're hurt."

"That, too. Can you patch me up? Just temporarily."

"Temporarily is the only way I do things, son, you know that."

"It's nothing serious."

"Looks serious enough to me. Let me see that shoulder."

Sparky slipped the robe down, and Dr. Henry Wauk gasped. He had seldom seen so much blood. It had dried and cracked all over the boy's body, and oozed fresh from half a dozen slash wounds. The beige singlet he wore under the robe had been cut to ribbons. He looked like he'd been mauled by a wild animal.

"Lion-taming lessons," Sparky explained, and tried to smile.

"I know what you've been trying to tame, son, and he ain't civilizable. Now you sit right there and I'm going to call the police and we'll—"

Sparky grabbed Henry's wrist and held on strongly.

"Please, Doc. I'm asking you as a favor from an old poker buddy. Just patch me up, and I'll be on my way."

Henry Wauk looked into the boy's eyes. He seemed about fifteen or sixteen, though he knew his age was closer to thirty. That's what decided him. Wauk had never been much for sticking his nose into other folks' business. If the kid wasn't a minor child, well then, how he chose to live his life was his own business. He sighed.

"Let's get those clothes off. This is going to hurt. A lot."

He had boiled water in jars. He used this to clean the wounds, though he didn't know how sterile his cloths and bandages were. There weren't a lot of dangerous bugs on Luna, even in Texas, but they could not be eliminated entirely. If the wounds got infected, Sparky would have to seek out real help.

"Thank god I can't be sued for malpractice," he muttered.

There was Merthiolate and tincture of iodine. At least the wounds would be colorful. He swabbed with alcohol then wrapped them in the cleanest bandages he had.

Sparky had slashing wounds to his left cheek, his side, both legs, both arms. But the most serious was a deep puncture just below the clavicle. No major veins had been hit, but Henry couldn't stop the wound from seeping blood.

"These are going to leave some mighty fine scars," he said. Sparky continued to stare off into space, as he had since sitting down on the treatment table. He had not cried out, though it must be hurting him.

"I suppose you can have them removed later." He wiped at the nasty slash on the boy's face. It ran across the cheek and had split the bridge of his nose. Luckily, it did not run deep.

"Cat got your tongue, huh?"

"What's that?" Sparky's eyes focused, and he winced. Henry regretted talking; wherever the lad had been, it seemed to be away from the pain.

"I guess there's nothing to talk about," Henry allowed.

"Henry, I need to get off-planet. Quietly."

"Well, that's the only sensible thing you've said so far. I think that's a good idea. Get away from him for a while." Henry knew John Valentine had been away for some time, and he'd heard something about his return. Where was it, Neptune? Out yonder somewhere. He was vague about places off Luna, which he had never left and never intended to. If God had intended man to go whooshing around in space, Henry felt He would have given us rockets in our butts.

"Well, I figure you can afford just about anyplace you want to go."

"Money's not the problem. I need to do it quietly. Even grown up, I'm too easy to recognize, and there's the computers and all."

"Computers?"

"I get on a spaceship, even with a disguise and an alias, there's reporters who've got programs looking out for me. People who like to be aware of my movements."

Like your father, Henry thought.

"Hard to move around when you're a goddam celebrity, huh?"

"You got that right."

As he worked, Henry thought about it. He didn't expect any results, because if Sparky, with his modern sophistication, couldn't figure a way around it, what was an old country doctor going to do? An old, phony country doctor.

But to his surprise, something kept tickling at the edges of his mind. He needed a drink, so he paused and took a deep swig from the office jug, which was likely to contain just about anything. There had been one memorable evening when...

He narrowed his eyes. He had something. Not what he'd been looking for, but something.

"You know, I recollected something a while back."

"If it's what I'm thinking of, don't reach for any scalpels," Sparky said.

"How's that?"

"I saw you starting to remember. About the jug."

"You doctored it, didn't you? That day your father almost killed you."

"I'm sorry, Henry. That was twenty years ago. I didn't know you then."

"Don't worry. I'm not pissed off." Sparky thought he might be if he knew exactly what had gone into the jug. It shows how wrong you can be. "That pop-skull was the damnedest stuff I ever drank. I lost three days. My spit turned blue. I saw things most drunks don't even dream about."

"I'm surprised it didn't kill you."

"Came damn near. I lost a kidney, and a liver." Henry shrugged. "Hell, I was due for a new liver, anyway. What I was wondering... do you remember what you put in the jug? You think you could do it again?"

Sparky said he could certainly try. And then Henry had it.

"Say, your dad told me one time about a brother. Maybe he could give you a hand. He isn't connected with the studio, is he?"

"Uncle Ed?"

"Yeah, used to be a big star. Ed..."

"Ed Ventura. His real name is Edwin Booth Valentine. He's my dad's younger brother."

"Well, maybe he can help."

"I don't see how. And I hardly know him. I haven't seen him in maybe twenty years or more."

"Then he ought to be all the more glad to see you."

The sign over the door said SENSUALIST COLLECTIVE. That's all. It was a plain, ordinary glass door and looked in on a plush reception room. Sparky could see several more doors in there, and comfortable couches, tables with huge arrangements of fresh flowers, ornate wallpaper, and big reproductions of works by classical artists of the heroic school. It reminded him of the lobby of a small, plush hotel, but the listing in the Yellow Screens had said only Retreat. Retirement home, more likely, Sparky thought. When his father had mentioned Uncle Ed at all, he said he was in retirement.

Retirement meant different things in different professions. With long life, the idea of packing it all in at sixty-five, seventy, or even a hundred didn't appeal to some people. On the other hand, plenty of people thought fifty years in the same job was quite a few years too many. Some shifted to new careers... and some tried, and found out they were no longer flexible enough to do so. Aging of the body had been pretty much under control for over a century, but aging of the mind was not always treatable medically, because it did not always have a physical cause. People got set in their ways. They forgot how to see the world freshly. They "retired," because it was either that, or continue in a job they could no longer stand.

Those without a strong work ethic greeted retirement gladly, and filled their days with all the fripperies they could afford. They dabbled in painting, they went on trips. They played games. It was all a lot like Florida in the twentieth, John Valentine had always said, with open contempt.

In the acting profession, retirement could be involuntary. If you'd never made it big, no one cared. You could play character parts forever. But if you were popular once, then lost it, everyone seemed to find you awkward to be around. No one offered you small parts; it was beneath you, even if you wanted the small parts. Something like that seemed to have happened to Uncle Ed. Sparky had given it some thought, himself. A lot had been riding on his appearance as Romeo. It went without saying that many critics would make a lot of "Little Sparky" going romantic. Hell, look what had happened to Shirley Temple, at one time the most profitable star in Hollywood. The business had not historically been kind to child actors.

Sparky pushed through the door and went to the house telephone. There was a list of tenants and near the bottom was Edwin Valentine. He pushed the button, and the telescreen displayed the words PLEASE WAIT.

Interesting, Sparky thought, Uncle Ed not listing himself as Ed Ventura. It was not as if he would be bothered by hordes of shrieking fans. A few nostalgia buffs, perhaps. There were stars like Greta Garbo, legendary after all these years, even after seeking anonymity. With most celebrities, however, thirty years after their heyday few could recall them. They were creatures of the moment, of the famous "fifteen minutes," even if their careers had stretched forty years, as Uncle Ed's had.

Sparky had seen most of the "Ed Ventura" films—after his father departed for Neptune, of course. While John Valentine was around none of his family would view such trash. They were unremarkable, standard star vehicles. Not a one had reached the status of classic. Today they were viewed mostly by film students. But they had been big hits in their day.

In Sparky's opinion, his Uncle Ed owed his acting success less to his mouth than to his chin. He had a good chin. Of course, these days anybody could have any chin they wanted, anyone could be beautiful, so there was no such thing as "glamorous," right? Wrong. There was a certain thing called charisma that no surgeon could transplant. There was an indefinable something called screen presence, and you either had it or you didn't. There was something even more elusive that movie analysts called "kinesthesia," which could be summed up as how one lives in one's body, how you inhabited that handsome head with that rugged chin. "Ed Ventura" had all of those. There was also something called acting talent, which he showed no evidence of in the films Sparky saw, but his father, in a candid moment, said Uncle Ed had that, too, if he chose to use it. He did not so choose. After all, talent had always been the least important aspect of stardom, and stardom was what Uncle Ed had wanted.

No more, apparently. Why else was he stowed away like a forgotten department store mannequin in this luxury warehouse?

"What do you want?"

Sparky was jerked back to the present by the gruff voice. He looked around, saw no one. The telescreen was still blank.

"I, uh—"

"What happened to your face?" Before Sparky could think of an answer the man went on, in a slightly different tone. "Kenneth? Is that you?"

"Hi, Uncle Ed. Can I come in?"

There was a very long pause.

"I never see anyone. No one ever sees me. Ever."

"Uncle Ed, I really need someone to talk to."

A shorter pause.

"Yes, I suppose you would. He killed my sister, you know."

"What's that?"

"Your father. John. He killed our sister. Your Aunt Sarah."

"I don't believe you."

"You stand there covered in his wounds, and you don't believe me. Oh, he killed her, all right. I have no proof, but I know. What are you doing, running away?"

"I guess so. I need to get off Luna for a while."

"And you'd like my help."

"You're the only family I have."

"Oh, don't appeal to family with me, dear boy. I've often thought of writing a script about our father, your grandfather, who you had the great good luck never to have met. But it would be too horrible. No, the very idea of family where our clan is concerned is an obscenity. You should know that as well as anyone. But, of course, you still love him, don't you?" Uncle Ed sighed, a strangely blubbery sound.

"I will see you after all, Kenneth. Perhaps there is something to this family business, because I can't imagine another reason for letting you in. I expect you to control your shock and distaste when you see me, however. Think what you please, but spare me your wide-eyed reaction, or it will be quite a brief visit. Do you understand?"

Sparky didn't, but said he did. Anything to get through the inner door and out of this exposed, public place, where he could be tracked down at any moment.

The door buzzed and he pushed through. Immediately he was blasted by a wall of heat and humidity. Sweat popped out on him, and in his already slightly feverish state he came near to passing out.

But leaning against the nearest wall for a moment restored his equilibrium. The room stopped spinning, the gray at the edges of his vision went away. The robe he was wearing—something he had snatched from a rack in the costume closet with barely a look at it—already seemed damp.

He was in a wide, dim corridor that reminded him of a museum. At intervals along each wall were recessed areas, like dioramas. He'd seen the same sort of thing at the King City Zoo, housing various small amphibians and reptiles in climate controlled, glass-fronted boxes. But these cases had no glass. They ranged in size from about a cubic meter to huge, walk-in environments. For that was what they were, and growing in them were the most fantastical, colorful shapes. They were mushroom gardens.

Back on Earth, fungi had come in a thousand shapes and colors. Presumably they still grew there. Many of the growths in the corridor had come from the Luna Genetic Library, and were direct descendants. Others had been modified, or had adapted to the low-gravity Lunar environment. Sparky was pretty sure no earthly toadstools had stood ten feet high. As to colors, he couldn't say, but these came in every possible shade and combination, from a luminescent violet to a pulsing red, in polka dots, stripes, waves, and overwhelming explosions, like spatter paintings. Some mushrooms were tall and spindly, others thick and squat. There were yellow shelf fungi Sparky could have used as stepping stones to scale the walls, and there were tiny orange and blue and maroon puffs like spilled M Ms.

The small boxes held single species. The big ones were jungles, riots of competitors growing alone or parasitically.

The light was very dim, but swelled as he moved along and faded behind him, giving him enough light to see by. He supposed these things grew better in the dark.

It was a living art gallery, but it was also a farm. He came upon a man in a white coat and chef's hat cutting slices from a green-capped giant and putting them into a basket. He was a plump fellow, and smiled and nodded to Sparky as he passed. He popped a piece of bright orange mushroom into his mouth and turned back to his work.

Sparky turned a corner in the semidarkness and entered a brightly lit area that had to be the kitchen, but not one like he'd ever seen. Alcoves opened off each side of another broad corridor, each alcove containing two or three people in chef's whites. There were preparation tables and ovens and all the rest of the equipment of the culinary arts—and art this most definitely was. He saw a whole suckling pig come out of an oven, apple in its mouth, and be removed to a wheeled table for garnishing and decorating. One alcove seemed entirely devoted to cakes. Great, towering, multicolored baroque masterpieces dripping with marzipan, festooned with fanciful figures and flowers. Some were being worked on, others had already been transferred to a wheeled table.

All the alcoves centered around the tables. Sparky realized what it reminded him of. It was like a scene from an old movie set in a big-city hospital emergency room, with gowned doctors and nurses working intently on patients stretched out on... what was the word? Gurneys.

There was another old movie image, too. A big mortuary, cosmeticians carefully preparing their compliant clients. Sparky didn't know why that image sprang to mind, but it did.

The place certainly didn't smell like a hospital or morgue. He passed a saucier, sizzling a brown, thick liquid in a skillet. It was a heavenly smell. He realized he'd had nothing to eat that day. The image of Amish corn muffins came into his mind and he wondered if he would ever have another.

Finished gurneys were being wheeled through an arched doorway and into the banquet room. Three very long tables were covered with white cloth and being set with the culinary creations. Again, something was out of whack. The whole huge room contained not a single chair. Sparky saw plates the size of garbage can lids, but no silver. Instead of glassware there were punch bowls filled with wine and fruit juices, and small robot devices with rotary pumps which dipped plastic tails into the drink and then delivered it by means of prehensile necks to... who? The standing diners? Diners who had no hands? Sparky couldn't picture the patrons of this feast.

Wondering how much farther he had to go, he passed from the banquet room into a dark, dank, sweltering place he at first could not fathom at all.

A ceiling arched high overhead, almost out of sight. Before him was a twenty-foot surface of government-green ceramic tiles, stretching to his right and his left. Beyond that was a placid surface of water, no more than an inch below the ledge he stood on. It was a swimming pool, and quite a large one. He'd never seen one designed quite like this, though.

In a moment he realized it had been converted from an old tank that had probably once been a part of the vast and complex sewage treatment system of King City. It was a big cylinder lying on its side. The water would be as deep as the ceiling was high, and there would be no shallow end. There was no smell beyond a faint whiff of chlorine, and no sound but the intermittent drip of water condensing on the ceiling and falling back into the pool. No diving board, no poolside chairs, no lifeguards, though the place was big enough they'd need motorboats to get to a drowner quickly. No people.

Were they growing something in here? Fish for the banquet tables behind him? Kelp? He went to the edge and leaned over. A faint emerald shimmer from near the bottom revealed nothing at first, then he saw vague shapes undulating slowly between him and the light. It was like looking down into an atomic-reactor core, the surface glass smooth, the depths crystalline. The occasional mutant five-ton sardine swimming by...

Slow, greasy swells distorted the surface and Sparky straightened and squinted into the darkness. A tubular shape was moving slowly toward him, just beneath the surface. Part of its back broke through and rolled slightly. Could it be some sort of whale? Nothing in Luna was more illegal than to produce anything resembling earthly cetaceans. A hippopotamus, more likely.

It was Uncle Ed.

Sparky never understood how he knew this, but he knew. He hadn't seen his uncle in over twenty years, had not known him well then. The thing wallowing in the water below him at first presented nothing resembling a face. But he knew. Then the thing rolled slightly and at one end, on one side, was a clench of flesh that slowly resolved itself into eyes, nose, and a mouth. There was nothing you could really call a head, and certainly nothing resembling a neck. Just endless, tightly packed folds and rolls of flesh that quivered and undulated with the slow rhythms of the water. One single feature was left of the matinee idol that had been Ed Ventura: his nose. It had defined a profile that graced a million movie posters, and there it sat, surrounded, almost overwhelmed. The lips were now fat and sensuous. The chin? Well, Sparky supposed you could call any of several dozen folds below the mouth a chin, if it pleased you. His cheeks were fat. His forehead was fat; if eyebrows remained, they were buried deep. The eyes were at the bottom of puckered pits, but they were alert and alive.

"Hello, Sparky," the thing said. And there was the source of the blubbery sound he had heard over the intercom. Uncle Ed could barely speak without making a raspberry.

"Hi... Uncle Ed?"

"Somewhat changed, but still the same jolly old fellow inside," Ed confirmed. "Wait a moment."

There was a momentary splashing, and Sparky caught a glimpse of what might have been a hand, or a flipper. If it was connected to an arm, Sparky didn't see it. The huge cylinder of pale fat rolled and turned in the water until one end—the end with the face—bobbed partly out of the water. It was like an illustration Sparky recalled from a children's book he used to have. Humpty-Dumpty. An egg with a face painted on it. Only this wasn't painted, it was more like it had been poked into soft bread dough.

The mouth smiled. It was bigger than Sparky had realized. Well, of course it would have to be big to eat enough to... Sparky turned away from that thought. And from the problem of how all that food being prepared in the banquet room was to get from the tables into the maw of this floating creature.

As a matter of fact, Uncle Ed presented several logistical problems to the curious mind, such as breathing, and elimination, and sex... Sparky had never felt less curious in his life.

"Sit down, boy," Ed commanded. "I can't look up at you."

"What's that?"

"No neck, Sparky." His uncle chuckled. "I haven't had much of a neck for ten years now."

Sparky sat, at first crossing his legs beneath him, then deciding he might as well dangle his feet in the water. It was warm and soothing; Sparky had been on the move for almost six hours. He needed a rest.

"Was that a bandage on your leg?"

"Yes."

"And you seem fairly battered in other places."

"I fell down a staircase."

"Of course you did. I must say, you did not show any trace of disgust when first I hove into view."

"I'm an actor."

There was a pause, then Ed laughed.

"And a hell of a good one, nephew! Much better than I ever was. Of course, I never wanted to be an actor, but I had little choice in the matter. Neither did you."

"It's all I ever wanted to be," Sparky said.

"It's all you were ever allowed to want to be, which is a slightly different thing. But you had the talent, and you did well, so no harm done, eh? Except for the occasional near-death experience in the bathtub, I shouldn't wonder."

Sparky was too shocked to reply.

"Well of course I know about that, boy. Not from having witnessed John doing it to you. From having it done to me by my father. Given John's personality, and his designs on you, it was a certainty he would use Father's methods in your education."

"Do you have children?" Sparky asked, a little chagrined that he had never thought to find out.

"I did not. I didn't want to find out if I would use Father's methods. They say it runs in families, you know. Child abuse. Something you might wish to consider when the question of child rearing comes up."

Sparky didn't know why he had asked that question. He was feeling lightheaded, not at all well. The smells of cooking from the room behind him were overwhelming, and not as pleasant as they had been.

"You didn't want to be an actor," Sparky said. For some reason, that bit of information had stuck in his head.

"Didn't want to be, and never really became one. I was a star, and I'm sure your father told you the difference. I wanted to be a chef. Our father had other ideas, and one did not cross our father, any more than you cross yours. Though it looks as if you might have done so today."

"Did you see... I mean, has it been on—"

"The news? There is no news in here, Sparky. And before you launch into your story, let me assure you I don't want to hear it. What he did to you, what you did to him, I don't want to know. I can never be called to testify to something I don't know anything about. You fell down a staircase. Right?"

"...right."

"And I'm a ballet dancer. Of course, I'm free to deduce things. You want to get off Luna. You seem unable to simply walk up to the ticket counter and buy passage. Ergo, you are being hunted. You had an argument with this staircase. You seem to have lost."

"You haven't seen the staircase."

"Hah!" Uncle Ed was delighted. "Maybe you gave as good as you got! No, no, don't tell me any details, let me make them up in my own mind. It should provide me with no end of source material for months of quiet contemplation. That's what we mostly do here, if you were curious. Float, and contemplate."

"And eat," Sparky suggested.

Uncle Ed squinted dubiously. With all that fat around his eyes, it was a squint to remember.

"I wasn't—" Sparky began.

"Making fun of me. Of course not. Obviously we eat. I forbade you contempt, disgust. Curiosity I will allow you. Within limits. I'd venture to guess you're wondering how much I weigh."

Like the starlet insulted when asked her measurements, Sparky suspected the lady doth protest too much. Ed wanted to talk, he realized. Within limits. He'd have to be careful not to show too much nor too little interest.

"Three thousand two hundred and seven pounds, at last weighing. Probably a few more by today. A ton and a half of contentment."

Sparky hadn't known humans could get that large. He doubted it was possible without some modifications. Extra hearts, possibly, or mechanical ones. Or elephant hearts. He also suspected that if he asked about that, he could be there for hours.

"I believe I'm the third largest human who has ever lived. Numbers one and two are somewhere in the water below me."

"Are you shooting for first place?"

"Not in any determined way. I wouldn't mind, of course."

"You said 'we.' Who are you? I mean, a cult of some sort?"

"Just retirees who like to eat. People who find the modern world a bit too frantic, who have socialized too much. People on retreat. Who are seeking a lower level of consciousness. Who admire lizards basking on rocks, jellyfish drifting on warm currents. Who are happy to exist, but not eager to struggle, physically or mentally. We have no organization other than regular meals, six times a day, and no name for ourselves. The few outsiders who are aware of us—and that is very few, since we never go out—call us chubbies."

Sparky was reminded of a story of a hermit, isolated and silent for thirty years. Once his silence was broken he couldn't stop talking. Sparky couldn't recall the punch line.

But he could see some sort of forklift trucks congregating down at the far end of the pool. Cargo nets hung from manipulator arms, and there seemed to be a commotion in the water. Good God, it must be feeding time, he realized. He would rather not witness that.

"So can you help me?"

Uncle Ed bobbed in the water like a waterlogged inflatable beach ball, regarding his nephew silently. His expressions were very hard to read.

"I have a private yacht mothballed at a port on the Farside," Uncle Ed said, at length. "Nothing fancy, but it will get you as far as Mars in a reasonable time."

"I'll buy it from you."

"No need." The fat man chuckled. "A stroke of genius, your coming here. It is the absolute last place John would think to look for you. And my yacht is the least likely vehicle for him to watch for. And I suspect you knew I could never resist doing him a bad turn. Isn't that right?"

"You can see right through me," Sparky said. He had never entertained any such idea, had never even remembered he had an uncle until Doc brought it up. But why mention that?

"They tell me it can be made space-ready in two hours. I'll call and authorize it. When you get to Mars, hire someone to bring it back."

"Sure." Sparky had no intention of hiring anyone, or of going to Mars. But why complicate things?

"Good luck," Uncle Ed burbled, his head sinking beneath the water.

I had needed a little luck, and some thespian and confidence skills to talk my way past busybodies at the spaceport with too much time on their hands, but I had made it. (What had the name of Uncle Ed's yacht been? Eclair? Bonbon?? Something sweet and sticky, I remember that much.) Anyway, with visions of sugarplums—and Uncle Ed's bloated frame—dancing in my head, I had made my escape from Luna, from my father, from Sparky, from everyone who was looking to do me ill or do me good. For almost fifty years I had never shown my real face or revealed my real name. Only recently had I begun to admit once more to being "Sparky," though only in the outer planets, and found to my surprise that I was still remembered.

I had been back to Luna twice since then, when the lure of a role was just too much. I had used ironclad false identification, never the same name. All this had put a severe crimp in my career. No sooner would I start to get good notices, build up a reputation in my current pseudonym, than I'd feel the hot breath of pursuit and take off for a new venue, with a new identity. Practically speaking, no one had been looking for me for thirty or forty years now, I felt reasonably sure. But old habits die hard, and the guilty flee before the bad reviews are out.

And now I was about to return to Luna once more. Luna, the fabled Golden Globe. I could see it out the window of the lifeboat as Poly and I strapped ourselves in for the last leg of the journey. At certain distances it really does look golden, though usually I'd describe it as more of a buttermilk shade. Mount it on a gilt pedestal and you could give it out as an award.

There really had been an award called the Golden Globe once, years before the Invasion. My father had told me about it. It was handed out by a group called the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in honor of the year's best work in motion pictures.

"Not the Foreign Film Critics, you'll notice," he had told me. "Just a bunch of reporters from other countries who used to get together, forty or fifty of them, to have a dinner and hand out awards to any film people desperate enough to show up and get drunk with them. After a while, being reporters, they started giving out press releases about who'd won. On a slow news day, some papers would pick up the story. And then things snowballed. Before long, they had their own television show, full of stars, just as if the award meant something. They managed to upstage the Oscars, and the awards might as well have been given out by the Podunk Rotary Club for all they had to do with film.

"Draw your own moral from this, Sparky. And remember, at the center of the cult of personality called stardom there is just a big empty hole. Awards don't matter. Acclaim doesn't matter. Only your craft matters."

We were already sore and a bit cranky from a day and a half at one gee. When the lifeboat engine fired it hit hard, and we didn't have the padding we'd used aboard Hal. But it wasn't a terribly long boost. The first lifeboat fell away—really nothing more than an engine and fuel tank, after Hal modified it in his repair shop. By the time the second one fired Luna was looming much larger in my window. This was a bit gentler, but still rough.

The lifeboat engine coughed out its last while we were still ten meters above the surface. Considering that all the calculations had been done at the orbit of Uranus, I would call this cutting it close. We dropped, and hit with a jar and a crunch of metal. There was a faint hiss audible from the cabin, a sound no Lunarian likes to hear, but we were in our suits, and the boat's tripod landing gear kept us from falling over.

We struggled to our feet, wrestled our luggage into the lock, and stepped out onto the surface. There was no one but Poly to hear my first words, but I set them down here for the sake of history.

"That was one heck of a giant leap for an old actor."

I was home.