“So do I,” Garrett grunted. “But first”—he played with the swizard—“what do you know about lovestonite?”
“Just enough to worry a little. I know that there’s an irrational amount of lovestonite processing going on, and I know Stag Hartle’s mixed up in it which means no good. And I know that the . . . that some people I know are concerned about it.”
“Can you tell me any more? Or can you put me in touch with anyone who can?”
“A, no. B, yes. This is, of course, all part of your technical-historical research?” Garrett grinned. “I guess research workers don’t go armed, do they? Nor have new lethal weapons tried out on them. Hardly much use to keep up the masquerade for you.”
“W.B.I.?”
“Check.”
“Come on home with me,” Uranov decided suddenly. “God knows what kind of booby trap they may have rigged up where you’re staying. You can explain it all right at the studio—we wanted to live together for closer collaboration on the epic. And tomorrow we’ll see what we can do about more information. You know Mig Valentinez?”
“I know his work.” Garrett sounded a little awed. “He’s marvelous.”
“I haven’t seen him for a couple of months, but I know he was playing around with lovestonite. We can run down there and— But first, comrade, how about a nightcap?”
Garrett woke from a confused dream of a naked Irish girl who was riding tandem on a swizard with a man with a melancholy and wistful smile. The swizard was of the fire-breathing variety, and its breath was searing hot on Garrett’s cheek. The cheek still burned when he was wide awake and looking up at the multiracial face of Hesketh Uranov.
“Sleep all right? No hangover?”
“None. But I’ve got the damnedest sensation here in my cheek—right where whatever it was missed me. Do you suppose it was an atomic weapon, and this is like a radium burn?”
Uranov bent over and stared at the cheek. When he rose he was half-laughing, half-worried. “I don’t know what we’re getting into,” he said. “I should stick to my dictotyper and leave melodrama and lovestonite to the W.B.I. or to the . . . those friends I mentioned. Because this is nuts. Purely nuts.”
“Yes? What goes?”
“What you received from the new lethal weapon, comrade, is nothing more nor less than a very nasty patch of sunburn.”
II.
Uranov paused on their way to the research lab. “Want to watch ’em shooting? That’s usually a thrill to the new visitor.”
Garrett rubbed his salved but still burning cheek. “I’ve got thrills enough.”
“Just for a minute. Then you can talk more plausibly when I tell S.B. I’ve just been showing you around.”
A red light glowed in front of one of the studios. Their plaques admitted them to the soundproof observers’ gallery. “This is an interior, of course,” Uranov explained. “Exteriors are all shot outside under dome, some of them here at the main plant, most of them on the various locations. You probably saw them from the ship?”
Garrett nodded.
“California’s amazing enough naturally, and after our landscapers went to work— It’s really extraordinary. We can shoot any possible aspect of the world’s surface, and we have a condensed replica of every city of any importance, from Novosibirsk to Luna City. Southern California is the world in miniature; destroy the rest of civilization, and an archaeologist could re-create it all from our locations.” There was a certain possessive pride in his voice, despite his avowed contempt for Sollywood.
“All the shooting is under dome?”
Uranov nodded. “The cameramen say sunlight through dome is better than direct, and there are never any delays because of weather. The sky clouds over, and your artificial light comes on automatically at exactly the right strength.”
Garrett looked down at the shooting interior. To judge from sets and costumes, it was a scene from a glamorous drawing-room comedy—probably the standard plot about the beautiful hostess on the lunar rocket who marries the son of the owner and longs fretfully for her exciting old life until she finds her true self in domesticity. There were only two actors in the scene. The man he recognized as that charmingly suave Eurasian Hartley Liu, but the woman— He glanced at Uranov questioningly.
“Astra Ardless,” said Uranov. “Looks older, doesn’t she? But wait till you see what those cameras make of her.”
She did look older than Garrett had ever seen her on the beam. But that was not surprising; he had fallen adolescently in love with her when she first became famous, and that was almost fifteen years ago. She looked older and not nearly so glamorous, and yet in a strange way more beautiful. There was a quality of resigned sadness about her.
To fans all over the globe, only actors mattered. The heart that pounded at the thought of Astra Ardless or Hartley Liu would never have heard of a writer such as Uranov or even a producer-director such as S.B. And even Garrett, more intelligently perceptive than the average fan, had never realized how outnumbered the actors were on the set.
Two of them, and sixteen cameramen, to say nothing of the assistant technicians and prop men and the sound engineers dimly glimpsed in their niches in the opposite wall. The synchronized cameras all shot the scene at once from their sixteen different angles. Later those sixteen beams would be cast from sixteen similarly placed projectors onto a curtain of Cassellite, that strange, translucent, solid-seeming gas which had made the epics possible.
A slighdy false inflection on the part of Astra Ardless’ speaking voice, and perhaps one critic in Kamchatka or Keokuk might notice it and observe that Miss Ardless was slipping. One slightly false adjustment on the part of a single technician, and the entire scene would be
