Got to stop squirming. Can’t have a dead Andreyev floundering about like a speared fish on the stage. Wait a minute—just another minute—hang on.
But he couldn’t. He clutched at his side and felt for the wound. Hard to feel through all the stickiness. He wanted to tear his clothes free to get at it and stop the bleeding, but that was no good either. They’d accept a mannequin fumbling slightly in a death agony, but the blood wouldn’t go over so well. Mannequins didn’t bleed. Didn’t they see it anyway? They had to see it. Clever gimmick, they’d think, Tube of red ink, maybe. Realism is the milieu of—
He twisted his hand in his belt, drew it up strangle-tight around his waist. The pain got worse for a moment, but it seemed to slow the flow of blood. He hung onto it, gritting his teeth, waiting.
He knew about where it hit him, but it was harder to tell where it had come out. And what it had taken with it on the way. Thank God for the bleeding. Maybe he wasn’t doing much of it inside.
He tried to focus on the rest of the stage. Music was rising somewhere. Had they all walked off and left him? But no—there was Piotr, through the haze. Piotr approached his chair of office—heavy, ornate, antique. Once it had belonged to a noble of the czar. Piotr, perfectly cold young machine, in his triumph—inspecting the chair.
A low shriek came from backstage somewhere. Mela. Couldn’t she keep her mouth shut for half a minute? Probably spotted the blood. Maybe the music drowned the squeal.
Piotr mounted the single step and turned. He sat down gingerly in the chair of empire, testing it, and smiling victory. He seemed to find the chair comfortable.
“I must keep this, Marka,” he said.
Thorny wheezed a low curse at him. He’d keep it all right, until the times went around another twist in the long old river. And welcome to it—judging by the thundering applause.
And the curtain fell slowly to cover the window of the stage.
Feet trouped past him, and he croaked “Help!” a couple of times, but the feet kept going. The mannequins, marching off to their packing cases.
He got to his feet alone, and went black. But when the blackness dissolved, he was still standing there, so he staggered toward the exit. They were rushing toward him—Mela and Rick and a couple of the crew. Hands grabbed for him, but he fought them off.
“I’llwalk by myself now!” he growled.
But the hands took him anyway. He saw Jade and the beefy gent, tried to lurch toward them and explain everything, but she went even whiter and backed away.
“I was trying to duck. I didn’t want to—”
“Save your breath,” Rick told him. “I saw you. Just hang on.”
They got him onto a doll packing case, and he heard somebody yelling for a doctor from the departing audience, and then a lot of hands started scraping at his side and tugging at him.
“Mela—”
“Right here, Thorny. I’m here.”
And after a while she was still there, but sunlight was spilling across the bed, and he smelled faint hospital odors. He blinked at her for several seconds before he found a voice.
“The show?” he croaked.
“They panned it,” she said softly.
He closed his eyes again and groaned.
“But it’ll make dough.”
He blinked at her and gaped.
“Publicity. Terrific. Shall I read you the reviews?”
He nodded, and she reached for the papers. All about the madman who bled all over the stage. He stopped her halfway through the first article. It was enough. The audience had begun to catch on toward the last lines of the play, and the paging of a surgeon had confirmed the suspicion.
“You missed the bedlam backstage,” she told him. “It was quite a mess.”
“But the show won’t close?”
“How can it? With all the morbidity for pulling power. If it closes, it’ll be with the Peltier performance to blame.”
“And Jade—?”
“Sore. Plenty sore. Can you blame her?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I’m sorry.”
She watched him in silence for a moment, then: “You can’t flounder around like you’ve been doing, Thorny without somebody getting hurt, without somebody hating your guts, getting trampled on. You just can’t.”
It was true. When you hung onto a piece of the past, and just hung onto it quietly, you only hurt yourself. But when you started trying to bludgeon a place for it in the present, you began knocking over the bystanders.
“Theater’s dead, Thorny. Can’t you believe that now?”
He thought about it a little, and shook his head. It wasn’t dead. Only the form was changed, and maybe not permanently at that. He’d thought of it first last night, before the ikon. There were things of the times, and a few things that were timeless. The times came as a result of a particular human culture. The timeless came as a result of any human culture at all. And Cultural Man was a showman. He created display windows of culture for an audience of men, and paraded his aspirations and ideals and purposes thereon, and the displays were necessary to the continuity of the culture, to the purposeful orientation of the species.
Beyond one such window, he erected an altar, and placed a priest before it to chant a liturgical description of the heart-reasoning of his times. And beyond another window, he built a stage and set his talking dolls upon it to live a dramaturgical sequence of wishes and woes of his times.
True, the priests would change, the liturgy would change, and the dolls, the dramas, the displays—but the windows would never—no never—be closed as long as Man outlived his members, for only through such windows could transient men see themselves against the back-ground of a broader sweep, see man encompassed by Man. A perspective not possible without the windows.
Dramaturgy. Old as civilized Man. Outlasting forms and techniques and applications. Outlasting even current popular worship of the Great God Mechanism, who was temporarily enshrined while still being popularly misunderstood. Like the Great God Commerce of an earlier century, and the God Agriculture before him.
Suddenly he laughed aloud. “If they used human actors today, it would be a pretty moldy display. Not even
By the time another figure lounged in his doorway, he had begun to feel rather expansive and heroic about it all. When a small cough caused him to glance up, he stared for a moment, grinned broadly, then called: “Ho, Richard! Come in. Here… sit down. Help me decide on a career, eh? Heh heh—” He waved the classified section and chuckled. “What kind of little black boxes can an old ham—”
He paused. Rick’s expression was chilly, and he made no move to enter. After a moment he said: “I guess there’ll always be a sucker to rerun this particular relay race.”
“Race?” Thorny gathered a slow frown.
“Yeah. Last century, it was between a Chinese abacus operator and an IBM machine. They really had a race, you know.”
“Now see here—”
“And the century before that, it was between a long-hand secretary and a typewriting machine.”
“If you came here to—”
“And before that, the hand-weavers against the automatic looms.”
“Nice to have seen you, Richard. On your way out, would you ask the nurse to—”
“Break up the looms, smash the machines, picket the offices with typewriters, keep adding machines out of China! So then what? Try to be a better tool than a tool?”
Thorny rolled his head aside and glowered at the wall. “All right. I was wrong. What do you want to do? Gloat? Moralize?”
