Dark Benediction

something of the old Thornier—or one of the many old Thorniers of earlier days. Which one? Which one’ll it be? Adolfo? Or Hamlet? Justin, or J. J. Jones, from “The Electrocutioner”? Any of them, all of them; for he was Ryan Thornier, star, in the old days.

“Where’ve you been, baby?” he asked his image with a tight smile of approval, winked, and went on home for the evening. Tomorrow, he promised himself, a new life would begin.

“But you’ve been making that promise for years, Thorny,” said the man in the control booth, his voice edged with impatience. “What do you mean, ‘you quit?’ Did you tell D’Uccia you quit?”

Thornier smiled loftily while he dabbed with his broom at a bit of dust in the corner. “Not exactly, Richard,” be said. “But the padrone will find it out soon enough.”

The technician grunted disgust. “I don’t understand you, Thorny. Sure, if you really quit, that’s swell—if you don’t just turn around and get another job like this one.”

“Never!” the old actor proclaimed resonantly, and glanced up at the clock. Five till ten. Nearly time for D’Uccia to arrive for work. He smiled to himself.

“If you really quit, what are you doing here today?” Rick Thomas demanded, glancing up briefly from the Maestro. His arms were thrust deep into the electronic entrails of the machine, and he wore a pencil-sized screwdriver tucked behind one ear. “Why don’t you go home, if you quit?”

“Oh, don’t worry, Richard. This time it’s for real.”

“Pssss!” An amused hiss from the technician. “Yeah, it was for real when you quit at the Bijou, too. Only then a week later you came to work here. So what now, Mercutio?”

“To the casting office, old friend. A bit part somewhere, perhaps.” Thornier smiled on him benignly. “Don’t concern yourself about me.”

“Thorny, can’t you get it through your head that theater’s dead? There isn’t any theater! No movies, no television either—except for dead men and the Maestro here.” He slapped the metal housing of the machine.

“I meant,” Thorny explained patiently, “‘employment office,’ and ‘small job,’ you… you machine-age flint-smith. Figures of speech, solely.”

“Yah.”

“I thought you wanted me to resign my position, Richard.”

“Yes! If you’ll do something worthwhile with yourself. Ryan Thornier, star of ‘Walkaway,’ playing martyr with a scrub-bucket! Aaaak! You give me the gripes. And you’ll do it again. You can’t stay away from the stage, even if all you can do about it is mop up the oil drippings.”

“You couldn’t possibly understand,” Thornier said stiffly.

Rick straightened to look at him, took his arms out of the Maestro and leaned on top of the cabinet. “I dunno, Thorny,” he said in a softer voice. “Maybe I do. You’re an actor, and you’re always playing roles. Living them, even. You can’t help it, I guess. But you could do a saner job of picking the parts you’re going to play.”

“The world has cast me in the role I play,” Thornier announced with a funereal face.

Rick Thomas clapped a hand over his forehead and drew it slowly down across his face in exasperation. “I give up!” he groaned. “Look at you! Matinee idol, pushing a broom. Eight years ago, it made sense—your kind of sense, anyhow. Dramatic gesture. Leading actor defies autodrama offer, takes janitor’s job. Loyal to tradition, and the guild—and all that. It made small headlines, maybe even helped the legit stage limp along a little longer. But the audiences stopped bleeding for you after a while, and then it stopped making even your kind of sense!”

Thornier stood wheezing slightly and glaring at him. “What would you do,” he hissed, “if they started making a little black box that could be attached to the wall up there”—he waved to a bare spot above the Maestro’s bulky housing—“that could repair, maintain, operate, and adjust—do all the things you do to that… that contraption. Suppose nobody needed electronicians any more.”

Rick Thomas thought about it a few moments, then grinned. “Well, I guess I’d get a job making the little black boxes, then.”

“You’re not funny, Richard!”

“I didn’t intend to be.”

“You’re… you’re not an artist.” Flushed with fury, Thornier swept viciously at the floor of the booth.

A door slammed somewhere downstairs, far below the above-stage booth. Thorny set his broom aside and moved to the window to watch. The clop, clop, clop of bustling footsteps came up the central aisle.

“Hizzoner, da Imperio,” muttered the technician, glancing up at the clock. “Either that clock’s two minutes fast, or else this was his morning to take a bath.”

Thornier smiled sourly toward the main aisle, his eyes traveling after the waddling figure of the theater manager. When D’Uccia disappeared beneath the rear balcony, he resumed his sweeping.

“I don’t see why you don’t get a sales job, Thorny,” Rick ventured, returning to his work. “A good salesman is just an actor, minus the temperament. There’s lots of demand for good actors, come to think of it. Politicians, top executives, even generals—some of them seem to make out on nothing but dramatic talent. History affirms it.”

“Bah! I’m no schauspieler.” He paused to watch Rick adjusting the Maestro, and slowly shook his head. “Ease your conscience, Richard,” he said finally.

Startled the technician dropped his screwdriver, looked up quizzically. “My conscience? What the devil is uneasy about my conscience?”

“Oh, don’t pretend. That’s why you’re always so concerned about me. I know you can’t help it that your… your trade has perverted a great art.”

Rick gaped at him in disbelief for a moment. “You think I—” He choked. He colored angrily. He stared at the old ham and began to curse softly under his breath.

Thornier suddenly lifted a. finger to his mouth and went shhhhh! His eyes roamed toward the back of the theater.

“That was only D’Uccia on the stairs,” Rick began. “What—?”

“Shhhh!”

They listened. The janitor wore a rancid smile. Seconds later it came-first a faint yelp, then Bbbrroommmpb!

It rattled the booth windows. Rick started up frowning.

“What the—?”

“Shhhh!”

The jolting jar was followed by a faint mutter of profanity.

“That’s D’Uccia. What happened?”

The faint mutter suddenly became a roaring stream of curses from somewhere behind the balconies.

“Hey!” said Rick. “He must have hurt himself.”

“Naah. He just found my resignation, that’s all. See? I told you I’d quit.”

The profane bellowing grew louder to the accompaniment of an elephantine thumping on carpeted stairs.

“He’s not that sorry to see you go,” Rick grunted, looking baffled.

D’Uccia burst into view at the head of the aisle. He stopped with his feet spread wide, clutching at the base of his spine with one hand and waving a golden lily aloft in the other.

“Lily gilder!” he screamed. “Pansy painter! You fancypantsy bona! Come out, you fonny fenny boy!”

Thornier thrust his head calmly through the control-booth window, stared at the furious manager with arched brows. “You calling me, Mr. D’Uccia?”

D’Uccia sucked in two or three gasping breaths before he found his bellow again.

“Thornya!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Itsa finish, you hear?”

“What’s finished, boss?”

“Itsa finish. I’ma go see the servo man. Pma go get me a swip-op machine. You gotta two wiks notice.”