“So what’s happening in Toronto?” he asked again as she finished the last crumbs of her English muffin.
“Everything,” Brenda said between dabs at her lips with a paper napkin. “It’s wild.”
“Ron’s there? The scripts are being written?”
“Well…” she cocked her head slightly to one side, as if waiting for the right words to come out of the air. “He’s there… and there’s a lot of writing being done. The production team is starting to put the sets together…”
“But?”
Brenda’s smile turned a little desperate. “Wasn’t it you who told me about Murphy’s Law?”
He grinned. “If anything can go wrong with an experiment, it will.”
“Right. Well, that’s what’s happening in Toronto.”
“That’s too bad.”
“‘It’s worse than that. The show might never get on the air. All sorts of troubles have hit us.”
Oxnard shook his head sympathetically. “Everything’s going smoothly on this end. The new transmitters and cameras have tested out fine. We’ll be ready to ship them up to Toronto right on schedule. And I’ve got some new ideas, too, about… well…” Oxnard let his voice trail off.
“Will you be coming up to Toronto with the equipment?” Brenda asked.
“No need to,” said Oxnard. “But I thought…”
“Oh, we’ll send a couple of technicians along. I wouldn’t. dump the equipment on you without somebody to show your crew how to work it…”
“I know,” she said. “But I thought you would come up yourself.”
For some reason, Oxnard’s insides went fluttery.
“I’d like to,” he said quickly. “But I can’t leave the lab here… I’m not just an executive, you know. I work here; the rest of the staff depends on me.”
Brenda nodded and looked distressed. “Bill… I wouldn’t want you to hurt your own company, of course. But we need you in Toronto. Ron needs you. He’s being driven crazy up there, trying to whip the scripts into shape and handle the technical details of building the sets and working out the special effects and a million other things. I’ve tried to help him all I can, but you’re the one he needs. You’ve got the scientific know-how. Nobody else up there knows
He refused, of course. He explained to her, very carefully, how his laboratory operated and how much he was needed for day-by-day, hour-by-hour decisions. He took her down to the labs and shop, showed her what a small, tightly integrated group he had. He explained to her over and over that these men and women didn’t work for him, they worked with him. And he worked with them. Every day; ten, twelve hours per day.
He explained it all morning. He explained it over lunch. He took the afternoon off and drove her down the coast so that they could be alone and away from phones and business conferences while he explained it thoroughly. He explained it over dinner at a candlelit table looking out at the surf, not far from La Jolla.
He wanted to explain it to her in bed, in one of those plush La Jolla hotels, but at the last minute he lost his nerve. Brenda nodded and smiled and accepted everything he said without argument. But she kept repeating that Ron Gabriel, and the whole show, was in dire trouble and needed him. Now. In Toronto. And he kept getting the unspoken message from her that she needed him. Not that she promised anything or even hinted at it. But Oxnard realized that if he helped the show, helped Gabriel and Finger and Montpelier, he would be helping her.
And Bill Oxnard found that more than anything else in the world, he wanted to help her.
So he drove her back to the airport and agreed that he would join her in Toronto.
“Only for the weekend,” he said. “I really can’t stay away from the lab during regular working days.”
“I know,” she answered, as they hurried down the terminal corridor toward her flight’s loading gate.
They made it to the gate with half a minute to spare. Brenda turned to him, breathless from running, while the gate computer examined her ticket and the overhead sensors scanned them both for everything from contraband lemons to plastic explosives.
“I really appreciate it, Bill. I’ll set you up with a hotel room and try to make your weekend comfortable. Thanks for a fun day!”
He stood there tonguetied, trying to think of an appropriate answer: something witty, maybe poetic.
The computer’s scratchy voice upstaged him: “Final boarding for Flight 68. Final boarding.”
She reached up on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Oxnard stood there grinning like a schoolboy as she scampered through the doorway of the access tunnel that led to the plane.
Two lights later, on Friday, he followed her.
The studio was impressive.
It was huge, about the size of a modern jetliner hangar, Oxnard realized. But it looked even bigger because it was almost completely empty. The bare skeleton of its wall bracings and rows of rafter-mounted old-fashioned spotlights looked down on a bare wooden floor.
“You won’t need all those lights,” Oxnard said to his guide. “With laser holography, you can…”
“We know all about it,” said Gregory Earnest. He was small and wiry, with thickly curled dark hair and beard that hid most of his face, so that Oxnard couldn’t see that he looked like one of Canada’s most numerous residents—a weasel. “We’re just as modern and up-to-date as you Yanks, you know.”
Oxnard completely missed the edge to Earnest’s voice. They continued their tour of Badger Studios, with Earnest proudly showing off his company’s shops, equipment and personnel—most of them idle.
They ended in the model shop, where a half dozen intense young men and women were putting together a fourmeter-long plastic model. It lay along a table that was too short for it, overlapping both ends. To Oxnard it looked something like a beached whale in an advanced stage of decomposition.
“The latest and most modern modeling techniques,” Earnest told Oxnard. “Straight from Korea. No secondrate stuff around here.”
“I see,” Oxnard said.
“Americans always think that we Canadians are behind the times,” Earnest said. “But we’ve learned to survive in spite of Yankee chauvinism. Like the flea and the elephant” His voice had an irritating nasal twang to it.
Oxnard replied with something like “Uh-huh.”
His main interest was focused on the modeling team. They were buzzing around the long cylindrical model that rested on the chest-high worktable. They had a regular bucket brigade system going: two girls were taking tiny plastic pieces from their packing boxes and using whirring electrical buffers to erase the Korean symbols painted on them. Another woman and one of the men took the clean pieces and dabbed banana-smelling plastic glue on them. Then the remaining two men took the pieces, walked around the model slowly and stuck pieces onto the main body.
“Hand craftsmanship,” exuded Earnest; “The mark of true art.”
Still watching the team at work, Oxnard asked, “What’s it supposed to be?”
“The model? It’s one of the starships! For the series, of course.”
“Why does it have fins on it?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
Ignoring the business-suited executive, Oxnard stepped between the two gluers and asked one of the stickers:
“What’re you using for a blueprint?”
The youth blinked at him several times. “Blueprint? We don’t have no blueprint.”
One of the young women said with a slightly French sneer, “This is artistry, not engineering.”
Oxnard scratched at his nose. The banana smell made him want to sneeze. “Yes,” he said mildly. “But this, model is supposed to be a starship, right? It never flies in a planet’s atmosphere… it stays out in space all the time. It doesn’t need aerodynamic fins.”
“But it looks smash-o with the fins!” said one of the other young men.
“It looks like something out of the Nineteen Fifties,” Oxnard replied, surprised at the sudden loudness of his
