His old partner didn’t know that he’d be coming here, let alone that he had a talkative briefcase to deliver to him. Deckard would be fast enough on his feet—or at least Holden hoped he still would be—not to blow it by reacting to one of his old friends’ unannounced presence; he’d know that Holden would only be there for a good reason, one that was best kept on the quiet until its exact nature was determined. Still, thought Holden, I’ve got to get him somewhere in private-handing the briefcase over in public view would be likely to get them both killed.
It appeared that the job might be easier than he’d originally expected. The loud confrontation down on the set—Deckard’s shouting, with the others standing around and trying to mollify him-ended with Deckard’s storming away, leaving a small bespectacled figure with clipboard far behind in his wake. The look in Deckard’s eyes—even from a distance, Holden was able to intercept a quick spark of it—was one of murderous rage. Or if not murder, at least serious asskicking; the hunched set of his shoulders indicated that he was going off looking for someone with whom he had a score to settle.
“Come on—” Holden had got into the habit of speaking that way to the briefcase, even though he knew it had no independent means of locomotion. “We can catch him over there.” He started walking again, picking up his pace as he skirted the video set, staying in the shadows beyond the range of the lights.
The sound of someone pounding on a door came to Deckard’s ears. And a voice shouting—he looked down the long hallway, determining from behind which door the noise was coming.
“Hey! Anybody!” The voice was Urbenton’s, pitched even higher with overexcitement. “Come on, this isn’t funny-let me out of here! You’re all going to be fuckin’ fired! I’m supposed to be on the set!”
Deckard halted when he saw one of the doorknobs futilely rattling. The adrenaline pumping through his system hadn’t ebbed—he’d lost none of the anger over the replicant’s murder during the taping. He took a step backward, raised one leg, and kicked straight out, hitting the door’s keyless lock.
The impact knocked over the person on the other side as the door wobbled to a stop, one hinge torn loose from the surrounding frame.
“Jeez—” The pudding-y director scrambled to his feet. Urbenton’s face, already starting to settle into jowls despite his relative youth, shone with sweat.
“You could’ve killed me!”
“Believe it—I still could.” Deckard completed the other man’s standing-up process by reaching down and grabbing Urbenton’s jacket lapels in his fists, then pulling and lifting. The video director hung in Deckard’s grasp, the same way the actor had hung in the grasp of the now-dead Kowalski replicant. “You sonuvabitch—I thought we had an agreement.” The last words rasped out of Deckard’s throat.
“What’re you talking about?” Urbenton’s feet kicked futilely in midair. “You gone nuts or something? What agreement?”
“Don’t bullshit me. You know what I mean.” He set the director down, but kept the lapels wadded in his grip. “When you brought me here-before even, when you came to Mars and talked me into this nonsense—you said that nobody would get hurt. Nobody—not even replicants.”
“Hey, come on!” Urbenton tilted his head back from Deckard’s fierce glare.
“You gotta be practical, man. When you’re on a video shoot . . . there’s just accidents that’re going to happen. That’s just the way it is; we live in an imperfect universe. There’s a lot of heavy equipment here-all it takes is for a lighting unit to fall on somebody’s head, wham, they got a concussion. Or a camera dolly rolls over somebody’s foot—”
“We’re not talking accidents here.” Deckard felt himself towering over the smaller man like some wrathful avenging deity. “What just happened on the set wasn’t an accident. It was planned that way.”
“How the hell would I know?” An indignant pitch shrilled in Urbenton’s voice.
“I wasn’t even near the set. I’ve been locked in here the whole time.”
“Right. Very convenient.”
“Convenient, nothing—” The director managed to pull himself free. He brushed down the front of his jacket with offended dignity. “It’s my shoot. I’m in charge here-at least, I’m supposed to be in charge.” Urbenton’s wide face turned to a mottled pink, as though he were contemplating active injustices.
“There’s been some funny stuff going on around here, though. From the beginning. The money people, the ones putting up the financing for the production—they’ve had some of their thugs hanging around since the shoot began. And they really give me the creeps—”
“My heart bleeds.” Deckard had no intention of letting the fat little weasel off the hook. “But as you said, you’re in charge. It’s your shoot. So if somebody gets killed on the set—if even a replicant gets killed—it’s because you ordered it to happen that way.”
“What?” Urbenton blinked in puzzlement. “I don’t get it. What do you mean?”
“Killed. Dead. A bullet through the back of the skull and out the front, brains all over the pavement. What the hell do you think I mean?”
“You’re out of your mind, Deckard.” Repulsion filtered through the director’s voice and face. “I knew it was a bad idea to hire you for this project. Any time you bring civilians around a video shoot, they get these weird ideas about what’s going on. People like you just don’t understand the nature of the industry.”
“What I understand,” grated Deckard, “is that there’s a corpse lying on your set. If your crew hasn’t cleaned it up by now.”
Urbenton sighed wearily. “Whose corpse?”
“The replicant you had for that last street scene. The Leon Kowalski replicant—”
The director’s round shoulders lifted in a shrug. “We’ve got more than one of those here.”
“How many of them were you planning on killing off? All the Kowalskis?”
Another shrug. “Well, we could if we wanted to. I mean, it’d be legal. They’re only replicants-hell, they’re not even covered under the law regarding the treatment of animals in video production. Now, if we’d brought a real snake up here—you know, for that scene in Zhora’s dressing room, in that club—and anything had happened to it, the authorities would’ve been all over our asses.
You need a major permit just to take a living animal up out of the Earth’s atmosphere.” A thin smile formed on Urbenton’s lips. “Different situation with replicants, though. As long as you got all your security precautions in place, so they’re not going to escape or anything, you can pretty much do what you want with them. Inasmuch as they’re technically classified as manufactured products, and not really living things. Not like you and me.”
“So you were planning on killing them.” Deckard’s gaze narrowed on the other man. “Just to make your goddamn video.”
“I keep telling you. Nobody’s getting killed on this shoot. Jeez.” Urbenton shook his head. “You were the one who insisted on all these conditions, just so you’d come here at all. I didn’t want you as a technical adviser on this production; it was the money people who laid that on me. Believe me, I could do without you hanging around, griping about the things that happen to what should be some perfectly expendable production items. For Christ’s sake, Deckard, on a video shoot, replicants are nothing but fancy-shmancy props, that’s all.” He rolled his eyes, lifting his short-fingered hands in a gesture of defeat. “But you’ve got some hair up your butt about ’em, so fine; that’s why I agreed we weren’t going to harm any replicants on this shoot. For your tenderhearted sake, I should compromise my artistic vision—but who am I, right? I’m just the director.” Urbenton emitted a dramatic sigh.
“Spare me.” Deckard leaned closer in to the other man. “Just tell me why, if our little agreement’s in place, you’ve got a replicant with his head drilled open lying at your lead actor’s feet.”
“You sure about this? Come on.” Urbenton peered skeptically at him. “Like I said, you’re not exactly hip, video production-wise. I’ve got some awfully good special effects people on the crew. Not just digital postproduction stuff, either; these guys do real-time.” The director smiled appeasingly. “You know what? You probably saw a squib go off on this Kowalski replicant’s forehead, a makeup load went splat they, it’s supposed to look realistic.”
“He went down. And he didn’t get up.”
“The big lug probably fainted.” Urbenton shook his head. “The crew probably didn’t tell him ahead of time what was going to happen. Hell, I didn’t even know that was what they had planned. There’s some real practical jokers around here. That’s why I wasn’t worried-at first-when I got yanked off the set just when the tape had started rolling. Supposed to’ve been a call from the money people, down on Earth; you take those calls, no matter what. Then somebody, I didn’t see who, slammed the door on me and I found myself locked in here. Until you came along—”
“Can it.” Deckard had had enough of the director’s rattling on. “The Kowalski replicant didn’t faint. I don’t need to know about video production to see what happened to him. I’m hip to death.” His voice lowered to a grim
