Dark Benediction

THE DARFSTELLER

“Judas, Judas” was playing at the Universal on Fifth Street, and the cast was entirely human. Ryan Thornier had been saving up for, it for several weeks, and now he could afford the price of a matinee ticket. It had been a race for time between his piggy bank and the wallets of several “public-spirited” angels who kept the show alive, and the piggy bank had won. He could see the show before the wallets went flat and the show folded, as any such show was bound to do after a few limping weeks. A glow of anticipation suffused him. After watching the wretched mockery of dramaturgical art every day at the New Empire Theater where he worked as janitor, the chance to see real theater again would be like a breath of clean air.

He came to work an hour early on Wednesday morning and sped through his usual chores on overdrive. He finished his work before one o’clock, had a shower back-stage, changed to street clothes, and went nervously up-stairs to ask Imperio D’Uccia for the rest of the day off.

D’Uccia sat enthroned at a rickety desk before a wall plastered with photographs of lightly clad female stars of the old days. He heard the janitor’s petition with a faint, almost oriental smile of apparent sympathy, then drew himself up to his full height of sixty-five inches, leaned on the desk with chubby hands to study Thornier with beady eyes.

“Off? So you wanna da day off? Mmmph—” He shook his head as if mystified by such an incomprehensible request.

The gangling janitor shifted his feet uneasily. “Yes, sir. I’ve finished up, and Jigger’ll come over to stand by in case you need anything special.” He paused. D’Uccia was studying his nails, frowning gravely. “I haven’t asked for a day off in two years, Mr. D’Uccia,” he added, “and I was sure you wouldn’t mind after all the overtime I’ve—”

“Jigger,” D’Uccia grunted. “Whoosa t’is Jigger?”

“Works at the Paramount. It’s closed for repairs, and he doesn’t mind—”

The theater manager grunted abruptly and waved his hands. “I don’ pay no Jigger, I pay you. Whassa this all about? You swip the floor, you putsa things away, you all finish now, ah? You wanna day off. Thatsa whass wrong with the world, too mucha time loaf. Letsa machines work. More time to mek trouble.” The theater manager came out from behind his desk and waddled to the door. He thrust his fat neck outside and looked up and down the corridor, then waddled back to confront Thornier with a short fat finger aimed at the employee’s long and majestic nose.

“Whensa lass time you waxa the upstairs floor, hah?”

Thornier’s jaw sagged forlornly. “Why, I—”

“Don’ta tell me no lie. Looka that hall. Sheeza feelth. Look! I want you to look.” He caught Thornier’s arm, tugged him to the doorway, pointed excitedly at the worn and ancient oak flooring. “Sheeza feelth ground in! See? When you wax, hah?”

A great shudder seemed to pass through the thin elderly man. He sighed resignedly and turned to look down at D’Uccia with weary gray eyes.

“Do I get the afternoon off, or don’t I?” he asked hopelessly, knowing the answer in advance.

But D’Uccia was not content with a mere refusal. He began to pace. He was obviously deeply moved. He defended the system of free enterprise and the cherished traditions of the theater. He spoke eloquently of the golden virtues of industriousness and dedication to duty.

He bounced about like a furious Pekingese yapping happily at a scarecrow. Thornier’s neck reddened, his mouth went tight.

“Can I go now?”

“When you waxa da floor? Palisha da seats, fixa da lights? When you clean op the dressing room, hah?” He stared up at Thornier for a moment, then turned on his heel and charged to the window. He thrust his thumb into the black dirt of the window box, where several prize lilies were already beginning to bloom. “Ha!” he snorted. “Dry, like I thought! You think the bulbs a don’t need a drink, hah?”

“But I watered them this morning. The sun—”

“Hah! You letsa little fiori wilt and die, hah? And you wanna the day off?”

It was hopeless. When D’Uccia drew his defensive mantle of calculated deafness or stupidity about himself, he became impenetrable to any request or honest explanation. Thornier sucked in a slow breath between his teeth, stared angrily at his employer for a moment, and seemed briefly ready to unleash an angry blast. Thinking better of it, he bit his lip, turned, and stalked wordlessly out of the office. D’Uccia followed him trimphantly to the door. “Don’ you go sneak off, now!” he called ominously, and stood smiling down the corridor until the janitor vanished at the head of the stairs. Then he sighed and went back to get his hat and coat. He was just preparing to leave when Thornier came back upstairs with a load of buckets, mops, and swabs.

The janitor stopped when he noticed the hat and coat, and his seamed face went curiously blank. “Going home, Mr. D’Uccia?” he asked icily.

“Yeh! I’ma works too hard, the doctor say. I’ma need the sunshine. More frash air. I’ma go relax on the beach a while.”

Thornier leaned on the mop handle and smiled nastily. “Sure,” he said. “Letsa machines do da work.”

The comment was lost on D’Uccia. He waved airily, strode off toward the stairway, and called an airy “A rivederci!” over his shoulder.

“A rivederci, padrone,” Thornier muttered softly, his pale eyes glittering from their crow’s-feet wrappings. For a moment his face seemed to change—and once again he was Chaubrec’s Adolfo, at the exit of the Comman-Jant, Act II, scene iv, from “A Canticle for the Marsman.”

Somewhere downstairs, a door slammed behind D’Uccia.

“Into death!” hissed Adolfo-Thornier, throwing back his head to laugh Adolfo’s laugh. It rattled the walls. When its reverberations had died away, he felt a little better. He picked up his buckets and brooms and walked on down the corridor to the door of D’Uccia’s office.

Unless “Judas-Judas” hung on through the weekend, he wouldn’t get to see it, since he could not afford a ticket to the evening performance, and there was no use asking D’Uccia for favors. While he waxed the hall, he burned. He waxed as far as D’Uccia’s doorway, then stood staring into the office for several vacant minutes.

“I’m fed up,” he said at last.

The office remained silent. The window-box lilies bowed to the breeze.

“You little creep!” he growled. “I’m through!”

The office was speechless. Thornier straightened and tapped his chest.

“I, Ryan Thornier, am walking out, you hear? The show is finished!”

When the office failed to respond, he turned on his heel and stalked downstairs. Minutes later, he came back with a small can of gold paint and a pair of artists’ brushes from the storeroom. Again he paused in the doorway.

“Anything else I can do, Mr. D’Uccia?” he purred. Traffic murmured in the street; the breeze rustled the lilies; the building creaked.

“Oh? You want me to wax in the wall-cracks, too? How could I have forgotten!”

He clucked his tongue and went over to the window. Such lovely lilies. He opened the paint can, set it on the window ledge, and then very carefully he glided each of the prize lilies, petals, leaves, and stalks, until the flowers glistened like the work of Midas’ hands in the sun-light. When he finished, he stepped back to smile at them in admiration for a moment, then went to finish waxing the hall.

He waxed it with particular care in front of D’Uccia’s office. He waxed under the throw rug that covered the worn spot on the floor where D’Uccia had made a sharp left turn into his sanctum every morning for fifteen years, and then he turned the rug over and dusted dry wax powder into the pile. He replaced it carefully and pushed at it a few times with his foot to make certain the lubrication was adequate. The rug slid about as if it rode on a bed of bird-shot.

Thornier smiled and went downstairs. The world was suddenly different somehow. Even the air smelled different. He paused on the landing to glance at himself in the decorative mirror.

Ah! the old trouper again. No more of the stooped and haggard menial. None of the wistfulness and weariness of self-perpetuated slavery. Even with the gray at the temples and the lines in the face, here was 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.”

“Tell him you don’t want any notice,” Rick grunted softly from nearby. “Walk out on him.”

“All right, Mr. D’Uccia,” Thornier called evenly. D’Uccia stood there sputtering, threatening to charge, waving the lily helplessly. Finally he threw it down in the aisle with a curse and whirled to limp painfully out. “Whew!” Rick breathed. “What did you do?” Thornier told him sourly. The technician shook his head.

“He won’t fire you. He’ll change his mind. It’s too hard to hire anybody to do dirty-work these days.”

“You heard him. He can buy an autojan installation. ‘Swip-op’ machine.”

“Baloney! Dooch is too stingy to put out that much dough. Besides, he can’t get the satisfaction of screaming at a machine.”

Thornier glanced up wryly. “Why can’t he?”

“Well—” Rick paused. “Ulp!… You’re right. He can. He came up here and bawled out the Maestro once. Kicked it, yelled at it, shook it—like a guy trying to get his quarter back out of a telephone. Went away looking pleased with himself, too.”

“Why not?” Thorny muttered gloomily. “People are machines to D’Uccia. And he’s fair about it. He’s willing to treat them all alike.”

“But you’re not going to stick around two weeks, are you?”

“Why not? It’ll give me time to put out some feelers for a job.”

Rick grunted doubtfully and turned his attention back to the machine. He removed the upper front panel and set it aside. He opened a metal canister on the floor and lifted out a foot-wide foot-thick roll of plastic tape. He mounted it on a spindle inside the Maestro, and began feeding the end of the tape through several sets of rollers and guides. The tape appeared wormeaten-covered with thousands of tiny punch-marks and wavy grooves. The janitor paused to watch the process with cold hostility.

“Is that the script-tape for the ‘Anarch?’” he asked stiffly.

The technician nodded. “Brand new tape, too. Got to be careful how I feed her in. It’s still got fuzz on it from the recording cuts.” He stopped the feed mechanism briefly, plucked at a punchmark with his awl, blew on it, then started the feed motor again.

“What happens if the tape gets nicked or scratched?” Thorny grunted curiously. “Actor collapse on stage?”

Rick shook his head. “Naa, it happens all the time. A scratch or a nick’ll make a player muff a line or maybe stumble, then the Maestro catches the goof, and compensates. Maestro gets feedback from the stage, continuously directs the show. It can do a lot of compensating, too.”

“I thought the whole show came from the tape”

The technician smiled. “It does, in a way. But it’s more than a recorded mechanical puppet show, Thorny. The Maestro watches the stage… no, more than that… the Maestro is the stage, an electronic analogue of it.” He patted the metal housing. “All the actors’ personality patterns are packed in here. It’s more than a remote controller, the way most people think of it. It’s a creative directing machine. It’s even got pickups out in the audience to gauge reactions to—”

He stopped suddenly, staring at the old actor’s face. He swallowed nervously. “Thorny don’t look that way. I’m sorry. Here, have a cigarette.”

Thorny accepted it with trembling fingers. He stared down into the gleaming maze of circuitry with narrowed eyes, watched the script-belt climb slowly over the rollers and down into the bowels of the Maestro.

“Art!” he hissed. “Theater! What’d they give you your degree in, Richard? Dramaturgical engineering?”

He shuddered and stalked out of the booth. Rick listened to the angry rattle of his heels on the iron stairs that led down to stage level. He shook his head sadly, shrugged, went back to inspecting the tape for rough cuts.

Thorny came back after a few minutes with a bucket and a mop. He looked reluctantly repentant. “Sorry, lad,” he grunted. “I know you’re just trying to make a living, and—”

“Skip it,” Rick grunted curtly.

“It’s just… well… this particular show. It gets me.”

“This—? ‘The Anarch,’ you mean? What about it, Thorny? You play in it once?”

“Uh-uh. It hasn’t been on the stage since the Nineties, except—well, it was almost revived ten years ago. We rehearsed for weeks. Show folded before opening night. No dough.”

“You had a good part in it?”

“I was to play Andreyev,” Thornier told him with a faint smile.

Rick whistled between his teeth. “The lead. That’s too bad.” He hoisted his feet to let Thorny mop under them. “Big disappointment, I guess.”

“It’s not that. It’s just… well… ‘The Anarch’ rehearsals were the last time Mela and I were on stage together. That’s all.”

“Mela?” The technician paused, frowning. “Mela Stone?”

Thornier nodded.

Rick snatched up a copy of the uncoded script, waved it at him. “But she’s in this version, Thorny! Know that! She’s playing Marka.”

Thornier’s laugh was brief and brittle.

Rick reddened slightly. “Well, I mean her mannequin’s playing it.”

Thorny eyed the Maestro distastefully. “Your mechanical Svengali’s playing its airfoam zombies in all roles, you mean.”

“Oh, cut it out, Thorny. Be sore at the world if you want to, but don’t blame me for what audiences want. And I didn’t invent autodrama anyhow.”

“I don’t blame anybody. I merely detest that… that—” He punched at the base of the Maestro with his wet plop.

“You and D’Uccia,” Rick grunted disgustedly. “Except—D’Uccia loves it when it’s working O.K. It’s just a machine, Thorny. Why hate it?”

“Don’t need a reason to hate it,” he said snarly-petulant. “I hate air-cabs, too. It’s a matter of taste, that’s all.”

“All right, but the public likes autodrama—whether it’s by TV, stereo, or on stage. And they get what they want.”

“Why?”

Rick snickered. “Well, it’s their dough. Autodrama’s portable, predictable, duplicatable. And flexible. You can run ‘Macbeth’ tonight, the ‘Anarch’ tomorrow night, and ‘King of the Moon’ the next night—in the same house. No actor-temperament problems. No union problems. Rent the packaged props, dolls, and tapes from Smithfield. Packaged theater. Systematized, mass-produced. In Coon Creek, Georgia, yet.”

“Bah!”

Rick finished feeding in the script tape, closed the panel, and opened an adjacent one. He ripped the lid from a cardboard carton and dumped a heap of smaller tape-spools on the table.

“Are those the souls they sold to Smithfield?” Thornier asked, smiling at them rather weirdly.

The technician’s stool scraped back and he exploded: “You know what they are!”

Thornier nodded, leaned closer to stare at them as if fascinated. He plucked one of them out of the pile, sighed down at it.

“If you say ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ I’ll heave you out of here!” Rick grated.

Thornier put it back with a sigh and wiped his hand on his coveralls. Packaged personalities. Actor’s egos, analogized on tape. Real actors, once, whose dolls were now cast in the roles. The tapes contained complex psychophysiological data derived from months of psychic and somatic testing, after the original actors had signed their Smithfield contracts. Data for the Maestro’s personality matrices. Abstractions from the human psyche, incarnate in glass, copper, chromium. The souls they rented to Smithfield on a royalty basis, along with their flesh and blood likenesses in the dolls.

Rick loaded a casting spool onto its spindle, started it feeding through the pickups.

“What happens if we leave out a vital ingredient? Such as Mela Stone’s tape, for instance,” Thornier wanted to know.

“The doll’d run through its lines like a zombie, that’s all,” Rick explained. “No zip. No interpretation. Flat, deadpan, like a robot.”

“They are robots.”

“Not exactly. Remote marionettes for the Maestro, but interpreted. We did a run-through on ‘Hamlet’ once, without any actor tapes. Everybody talked in flat monotones, no expressions. It was a scream.”

“Ha, ha,” Thornier said grimly.

Rick slipped another tape on the spindle, clicked a dial to a new setting, started the feed again. “This one’s Andreyev, Thornier-played by Peltier.” He cursed suddenly, stopped the feed, inspected the tape anxiously, flipped open the pickup mechanism, and inspected it with a magnifier.

“What’s wrong?” asked the janitor.

“Take-off’s about worn out. Hard to keep its spacing right. I’m nervous about it getting hung up and chewing up the tape.”

“No duplicate tapes?”

“Yeah. One set of extras. But the show opens tonight.” He cast another suspicious look at the pickup glideway, then closed it and switched the feed again. He was replacing the panel when the feed mechanism stalled. A ripping sound came from inside. He muttered fluent profanity, shut off the drive, jerked away the panel. He held up a shredded ribbon of tape for Thorny to see, then flung it angrily across the booth. “Get out of here! You’re a jinx!”

“Not till I finish mopping.”

“Thorny, get D’Uccia for me, will you? We’ll have to get a new pickup flown in from Smithfield before this afternoon. This is a helluva mess.”

“Why not hire a human stand-in?” he asked nastily, then added: “Forgive me. That would be a perversion of your art, wouldn’t it? Shall I get D’Uccia?”

Rick threw the Peltier spool at him. He ducked out with a chuckle and went to find the theater manager. Halfway down the iron stairs, he paused to look at the wide stage that spread away just beyond the folded curtains. The footlights were burning and the gray-green floor looked clean and shimmering, with its checkerboard pattern of imbedded copper strips. The strips were electrified during the performance, and they fed the mannequins’ energy-storage packs. The dolls had metallic disks in their soles, and rectifiers in their insteps. When batteries drained low, the Maestro moved the actor’s foot an inch or so to contact the floor electrodes for periodic recharging during the play, since a doll would grow wobbly and its voice indistinct after a dozen minutes on internal power alone.

Thorny stared at the broad expanse of stage where no humans walked on performance night. D’Uccia’s Siamese tomcat sat licking itself in the center of the stage. It glanced up at him haughtily, seemed to sniff, began licking itself again. He watched it for a moment, then called back upstairs to Rick.

“Energize the floor a minute, will you, Rick?”

“Huh? Why?”—a busy grunt.

“Want to check something.”

“O.K., but then fetch D’Uccia.”

He heard the technician snap a switch. The cat’s calm hauteur exploded. The cat screamed, scrambled, barrel-rolled, amid a faint sputter of sparks. The cat did an Immelmann turn over the footlights, landed in the pit with a clawing crash, then scampered up the aisle with fur erect toward its haven beneath Imperio’s desk.

“Whatthehell?” Rick growled, and thrust his head out of the booth.

“Shut it off now,” said the janitor. “D’Uccia’ll be here in a minute.”

“With fangs showing!”

Thornier went to finish his routine clean-up. Gloom had begun to gather about him. He was leaving—leaving even this last humble role in connection with the stage. A fleeting realization of his own impotence came to him. Helpless. Helpless enough to seek petty revenges like vandalizing D’Uccia’s window box and tormenting D’Uccia’s cat, because there was not any real enemy at which he could strike out.

He put the realization down firmly, and stamped on it. He was Ryan Thornier, and never helpless, unless he willed it so. I’ll make them know who I am just once he thought, before I go. I’ll make them remember, and they won’t ever forget.

But that line of thought about playing one last great role, one last masterful interpretation, he knew was no good. “Thorny, if you ever played a one-last-great,” Rick had said to him once, “there wouldn’t be a thing left to live for, would there?” Rick had said it cynically, but it was true anyhow. And the pleasant fantasy was somehow alarming as well as pleasant.

The chic little woman in the white-plumed hat was explaining things carefully—with round vowels and precise enunciation—to the Playwright of the Moment, up-and-coming, with awed worshipfulness in his gaze as he listened to the pert little producer. “Stark realism, you see, is the milieu of autodrama,” she said. “Always remember, Bernie, that consideration for the actors is a thing of the past. Study the drama of Rome—ancient Rome. If a play had a crucifixion scene, they got a slave for the part and crucified him. On stage, but really!”

The Playwright of the Moment laughed dutifully around his long cigarette holder. “So that’s where they got the line: ‘It’s superb, but it’s hell on the actors.’ I must re-write the murder scene in my ‘George’s Wake.’ Do it with a hatchet, this time.”

“Oh, now, Bernie! Mannequins don’t bleed.”

They both laughed heartily. “And they are expensive. Not hell on the actors, but hell on the budget.”

“The Romans probably had the same problem. I’ll bear it in mind.”

Thornier saw them—the producer and the Playwright of the Moment—standing there in the orchestra when he came from backstage and across toward the center aisle. They lounged on the arms of their seats, and a crowd of production personnel and technicians milled about them. The time for the first run-through was approaching.

The small woman waved demurely to Thorny when she saw him making his way slowly through the throng, then turned to the playwright again. “Bernie, be a lamb and get me a drink, will you? I’ve got a butterfly.”

“Surely. Hard, or soft?”

“Oh, hard. Scotch mist in a paper cup, please. There’s a bar next door.”

The playwright nodded a nod that was nearly a bow and shuffled away up the aisle. The woman caught at the janitor’s sleeve as he passed.

“Going to snub me, Thorny?”

“Oh, hello, Miss Ferne,” he said politely.

She leaned close and muttered: “Call me ‘Miss Ferne again and I’ll claw you.” The round vowels had vanished.

“O.K., Jade, but—” He glanced around nervously. Technicians milled about them. Ian Feria, the producer, watched them curiously from the wings.

“What’s been doing with you, Thorny? Why haven’t I seen you?” she complained.

He gestured with the broom handle, shrugged. Jade Ferne studied his face a moment and frowned. “Why the agonized look, Thorny? Mad at me?”

He shook his head. “This play, Jade—‘The Anarch,’ well—” He glanced miserably toward the stage.

Memory struck her suddenly. She breathed a compassionate ummm. “The attempted revival, ten years ago—you were to be Andreyev. Oh, Thorny, I’d forgotten.”

“It’s all right.” He wore a carefully tailored martyr’s smile.

She gave his arm a quick pat. “I’ll see you after the run-through, Thorny. We’ll have a drink and talk old times.”

He glanced around again and shook his head. “You’ve got new friends now, Jade. They wouldn’t like it.”

“The crew? Nonsense! They’re not snobs.”

“No, but they want your attention. Feria’s trying to catch your eye right now. No use making them sore.”

“All right, but after the run-through I’ll see you in the mannequin room. I’ll just slip away.”

“If you want to.”

“I do, Thorny. It’s been so long.”

The playwright returned with her Scotch mist and gave Thornier a hostilely curious glance.

“Bless your heart, Bernie,” she said, the round vowels returning, then to Thornier: “Thorny, would you do me a favor? I’ve been trying to corner D’Uccia, but he’s tied up with a servo salesman somewhere. Somebody’s got to run and pick up a mannequin from the depot. The shipment was delivered, but the trucker missed a doll crate. We’ll need it for the runthrough. Could you—”

“Sure, Miss Ferne. Do I need a requisition order?”

“No, just sign the delivery ticket. And Thorny, see if the new part for the Maestro’s been flown in yet. Oh, and one other thing—the Maestro chewed up the Peltier tape. We’ve got a duplicate, but we should have two, just to be safe.”

“I’ll see if they have one in stock,” he murmured, and turned to go.

D’Uccia stood in the lobby with the salesman when he passed through. The theater manager saw him and smirked happily.

“…Certain special features, of course,” the salesman was saying. “It’s an old building, and it wasn’t designed with autojanitor systems in mind, like buildings are now. But we’ll tailor the installation to fit your place, Mr. D’Uccia. We want to do the job right, and a packaged unit wouldn’t do it.”

“Yah, you gimme da price, hah?”

“We’ll have an estimate for you by tomorrow. I’ll have an engineer over this afternoon to make the survey, and he’ll work up a layout tonight.”

“Whatsa ’bout the demonstration, uh? Whatsa ‘bout you show how da swhip-op machine go?”

The salesman hesitated, eying the janitor who waited nearby. “Well, the floor-cleaning robot is only a small part of the complete service, but… I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll bring a packaged char—all over this afternoon, and let you have a look at it.”

“Fine. Datsa fine. You bring her, den we see.”

They shook hands. Thornier stood with his arms folded, haughtily inspecting a bug that crawled across the frond of a potted palm, and waiting for a chance to ask D’Uccia for the keys to the truck. He felt the theater manager’s triumphant gaze, but gave no indication that he heard.

“We can do the job for you all right, Mr. D’Uccia. Cut your worries in half. And that’ll cut your doctor bills in half, too, like you say. Yes, sir! A man in your position gets ground down with just plain human inefficiency—other people’s inefficiency. You’ll never have to worry about that, once you get the building autojanitored, no sir!”

“T’ank you kindly.”

“Thank you, Mr. D’Uccia, and I’ll see you later this afternoon.”

The salesman left.

“Well, bom?” D’Uccia grunted to the janitor.

“The keys to the truck. Miss Ferne wants a pickup from the depot.”

D’Uccia tossed them to him. “You hear what the man say? Letsa machines do alla work, hah? Always you wantsa day off. O.K., you takka da day off, ever’day pretty soon. Nice for you, hah, ragazzo?”

Thornier turned away quickly to avoid displaying the surge of unwanted anger. “Be back in an hour,” he grunted, and hurried away on his errand, his jaw working in sullen resentment. Why wait around for two humiliating weeks? Why not just walk out? Let D’Uccia do his own chores until the autojan was installed. He’d never be able to get another job around the theater anyhow, so D’Uccia’s reaction wouldn’t matter.

I’ll walk out now, he thought—and immediately knew that he wouldn’t. It was hard to explain to himself, but when he thought of the final moment when he would be free to look for a decent job and a comfortable living—he felt a twinge of fear that was hard to understand.

The janitor’s job had paid him only enough to keep him alive in a fourth floor room where he cooked his own meager meals and wrote memoirs of the old days, but it had kept him close to the lingering remnants of something he loved.

“Theater,” they called it. Not the theater—as it was to the scalper’s victim, the matinee housewife, or the awestruck hick—but just “theater.” It wasn’t a place, wasn’t a business, wasn’t the name of an art. “Theater” was a condition of the human heart and soul. Jade Ferne was theater. So was Ian Feria. So was Mela, poor kid, before her deal with Smithfield. Some had it, others didn’t. In the old days, the ones that didn’t have it soon got out. But the ones that had it, still had it, even after the theater was gobbled up by technological change. And they hung around. Some of them, like Jade and Ian and Mela, adapted to the change, profited by the prostitution of the stage, and developed ulcers and a guilty conscience. Still, they were theater, and because they were, he, Thornier, hung around, too, scrubbing the floors they walked on, and feeling somehow that he was still in theater. Now he was leaving. And now he felt the old bitterness boiling up inside again. The bitterness had been chronic and passive, and now it threatened to become active and acute.

If I could only give them one last performance! he thought. One last great role.

But that thought led to the fantasy-plan for revenge, the plan that came to him often as he wandered about the empty theater. Revenge was no good. And the plan was only a daydream. And yet—he wasn’t going to get another chance.

He set his jaw grimly and drove on to the Smithfield depot.

The depot clerk had hauled the crated mannequin to the fore, and it was waiting for Thornier when he entered the stockroom. He rolled it out from the wall on a dolly, and the janitor helped him wrestle the coffin-sized packing case onto the counter.

“Don’t take it to the truck yet,” the clerk grunted around the fat stub of a cigar. “It ain’t a new doll, and you gotta sign a release.”

“What kind of a release?”

“Liability for malfunction. If the doll breaks down during the show, you can’t sue Smithfield. It’s standard prack for used-doll rentals.”

“Why didn’t they send a new one, then?”

“Discontinued production on this model. You want it, you take a used one, and sign the release.”

“Suppose I don’t sign?”

“No siggy, no dolly.”

“Oh.” He thought for a moment. Obviously, the clerk had mistaken him for production personnel. His signature wouldn’t mean anything—but it was getting late, and Jade was rushed. Since the release wouldn’t be valid anyhow he reached for the form.

“Wait,” said the clerk. “You better look at what you’re signing for.” He reached for a wrecking claw and slipped it under a metal binding strap. The strap broke with a screechy snap. “It’s been overhauled,” the clerk continued. “New solenoid fluid injected, new cosmetic job. Nothing really wrong. A few fatigue spots in the padding, and one toe missing. But you oughta have a look, anyhow.”

He finished breaking the lid-fastenings loose and turned to a wall-control board. “We don’t have a complete Maestro here,” he said as he closed a knife switch, “but we got the control transmitters, and some taped sequences. It’s enough to pre-flight a doll.”

Equipment hummed to life somewhere behind the panel. The clerk adjusted several dials while Thornier waited impatiently.

“Let’s see—” muttered the cleric. “Guess we’ll start off with the Frankenstein sequence.” He flipped a switch.

A purring sound came faintly from within the coffin-like box. Thornier watched nervously. The lid stirred, began to rise. A woman’s hands came into view, pushing the lid up from within. The purring increased. The lid clattered aside to hang by the metal straps.

The woman sat up and smiled at the janitor.

Thornier went white. “Mela!” he hissed.

“Ain’t that a chiller?” chuckled the clerk. “Now for the hoochy-coochy sequence—”

“No—”

The clerk flipped another switch. The doll stood up slowly, chastely nude as a window-dummy. Still smiling at Thorny, the doll did a bump and a grind.

“Stop it!” he yelled hoarsely.

“Whassa matter, buddy?”

Thorny heard another switch snap. The doll stretched gracefully and yawned. It stretched out in its packing case again, closed its eyes and folded its hands over its bosom. The purring stopped.

“What’s eating you?” the clerk grumbled, slapping the lid back over the case again. “You sick or something?”

“I… I knew her,” Ryan Thornier wheezed. “I used to work—” He shook himself angrily and seized the crate.

“Wait, I’ll give you a hand.”

Fury awakened new muscles. He hauled the crate out on the loading dock without assistance and dumped it in the back of the truck, then came back to slash his name across the release forms.

“You sure get sore easy,” the clerk mumbled. “You better take it easy. You sure better take it easy.”

Thorny was cursing softly as he nosed the truck out into the river of traffic. Maybe Jade thought it was funny, sending him after Mela’s doll. Jade remembered how it had been between them—if she bothered to think about it. Thornier and Stone—a team that had gotten constant attention from the gossip columnists in the old days. Rumors of engagement, rumors of secret marriage, rumors of squabbles and reunions, break-ups and patch-ups, and some of the rumors were almost true. Maybe Jade thought it was a howl, sending him to fetch the mannequin.

But no—his anger faded as he drove along the boulevard—she hadn’t thought about it. Probably she tried hard not to think of old times any more.

Gloom settled over him again, replacing rage. Still it haunted him—the horrified shock of seeing her sit up like an awakened corpse to smile at him. Mela… Mela

They’d had it good together and bad together. Bit parts and beans in a cold-water flat. Starring roles and steaks at Sardi’s. And—love? Was that what it was? He thought of it uneasily. Hypnotic absorption in each other, perhaps, and in the mutual intoxication of their success—but it wasn’t necessarily love. Love was calm and even and lasting, and you paid for it with a dedicated lifetime, and Mela wouldn’t pay. She’d walked out on them. She’d walked to Smithfield and bought security with sacrifice of principle. There’d been a name for what she’d done. “Scab,” they used to say.

He shook himself. It was no good, thinking about those times. Times died with each passing minute. Now they paid $8.80 to watch Mela’s figurine move in her stead, wearing Mela’s face, moving with Mela’s gestures, walking with the same lilting walk. And the doll was still young, while Mela had aged ten years, years of collecting quarterly royalties from her dolls and living comfortably.

Great Actors Immortalized—that was one of Smithfield’s little slogans. But they had discontinued production on Mela Stone, the depot clerk had said. Overstocked.

The promise of relative immortality had been quite a bait. Actors unions had resisted autodrama, for obviously the bit players and the lesser-knowns would not be in demand. By making dozens—even hundreds—of copies of the same leading star, top talent could be had for every role, and the same actor-mannequin could be playing simultaneously in dozens of shows all over the country. The unions had resisted—but only a few were wanted by Smithfield anyhow, and the lure was great. The promise of fantastic royalties was enticing enough, but in addition immortality for the actor, through duplication of mannequins. Authors, artists, playwrights had always been able to outlive the centuries, but actors were remembered only by professionals, and their names briefly recorded in the annals of the stage. Shakespeare would live another thousand years, but who remembered Dick Burbage who trouped in the day of the bard’s premiers? Flesh and bone, heart and brain, these were the trouper’s media, and his art could not outlive them.

Thorny knew the yearnings after lastingness, and he could no longer hate the ones who had gone over. As for himself, the autodrama industry had made him a tentative offer, and he had resisted—partly because he was reasonably certain that the offer would have been withdrawn during testing procedures. Some actors were not “cybergenic”—could not be adequately sculptured into electronic-robotic analogues. These were the portrayers, whose art was inward, whose roles had to be lived rather than played. No polygraphic analogue could duplicate their talents, and Thornier knew he was one of them. It had been easy for him to resist.

At the corner of Eighth Street, he remembered the spare tape and the replacement pickup for the Maestro. But if he turned back now, he’d hold up the ran-through, and Jade would be furious. Mentally he kicked himself, and drove on to the delivery entrance of the theater. There he left the crated mannequin with the stage crew, and headed back for the depot without seeing the producer.

“Hey, bud,” said the clerk, “your boss was on the phone. Sounded pretty unhappy.”

“Who… D’Uccia?”

“No… well, yeah, D’Uccia, too. He wasn’t unhappy, just having fits. I meant Miss Ferne.”

“Oh… where’s your phone?”

“Over there. The lady was near hysterical.”

Thorny swallowed hard and headed for the booth. Jade Ferne was a good friend, and if his absent-mindedness had goofed up her production—

“I’ve got the pickup and the tape ready to go,” the clerk called after him. “She told me about it on the phone. Boy, you’re sure on the ball today, ain’t ya—the greasy eight ball.”

Thorny reddened and dialed nervously.

“Thank God!” she groaned. “Thorny, we did the run-through with Andreyev a walking zombie. The Maestro chewed up our duplicate Peltier tape, and we’re running without an actor-analogue in the starring role. Baby, I could murder you!”

“Sorry, Jade. I slipped a cog, I guess.”

“Never mind! Just get the new pickup mechanism over here for Thomas. And the Peltier tape. And don’t have a wreck. It’s two o’clock, and tonight’s opening, and we’re still short our leading man. And there’s no time to get anything else flown in from Smithfield.”

“In some ways, nothing’s changed, has it, Jade?” he grunted, thinking of the eternal backstage hysteria that lasted until the lights went low and beauty and calm order somehow emerged miraculously out of the prevailing chaos.

“Don’t philosophize, just get here!” she snapped, and hung up.

The clerk had the cartons ready for him as he emerged. “Look, chum, better take care of that Peltier tape,” the clerk advised. “It’s the last one in the place. I’ve got more on order, but they won’t be here for a couple of days.”

Thornier stared at the smaller package thoughtfully. The last Peltier?

The plan, he remembered the plan. This would make it easy. Of course, the plan was only a fantasy, a vengeful dream. He couldn’t go through with it. To wreck the show would be a stab at Jade—

He heard his own voice like a stranger’s, saying; “Miss Ferne also asked me to pick up a Wilson Granger tape, and a couple of three-inch splices.”

The clerk looked surprised. “Granger? He’s not in ‘The Anarch,’ is he?”

Thornier shook his head. “No—guess she wants it for a trial casting. Next show, maybe.”

The clerk shrugged and went to get the tape and the splices. Thornier stood clenching and unclenching his fists. He wasn’t going to go through with it, of course. Only a silly fantasy.

“I’ll have to make a separate ticket on these,” said the clerk, returning.

He signed the delivery slips in a daze, then headed for the truck. He drove three blocks from the depot, then parked in a loading zone. He opened the tape cartons carefully with his penknife, peeling back the glued flaps so that they could be sealed again. He removed the two rolls of pattern perforated tape from their small metal canisters, carefully plucked off the masking-tape seals and stuck them temporarily to the dashboard. He unrolled the first half-yard of the Peltier tape; it was unperforated, and printed with identifying codes and manufacturer’s data. Fortunately, it was not a brand-new tape; it had been used before, and he could see the wear-marks. A splice would not arouse suspicion.

He cut off the identifying tongue with his knife, laid it aside. Then he did the same to the Granger tape.

Granger was fat, jovial, fiftyish. His mannequin played comic supporting roles.

Peltier was young, gaunt, gloomy—the intellectual villain, the dedicated fanatic. A fair choice for the part of Andreyev.

Thornier’s hands seemed to move of their own volition, playing reflexively in long-rehearsed roles. He cut the tapes. He took out one of the hot-splice packs and jerked the tab that started the chemical action. He clocked off fifteen seconds by his watch, then opened the pack and fitted into it the cut ends of the Granger tape and the Peltier identifying tongue, butted them carefully end to end, and closed the pack. When it stopped smoking, he opened it to inspect the splice. A neat patch, scarcely visible on the slick plastic tape. Granger’s analogue, labeled as Peltier’s. And the body of the mannequin was Peltier’s. He resealed it in its canister.

He wadded the Peltier tape and the Granger label and the extra delivery receipt copy into the other box. Then he pulled the truck out of the loading zone and drove through the heavy traffic like a racing jockey, trusting the anti-crash radar to see him safely through. As he crossed the bridge, he threw the Peltier tape out the window into the river. And then there was no retreat from what he had done.

Jade and Feria sat in the orchestra, watching the final act of the run-through with a dud Andreyev. When Thorny slipped in beside them, Jade wiped mock sweat from her brow.

“Thank God you’re back!” she whispered as he displayed the delayed packages. “Sneak backstage and run them up to Rick in the booth, will you? Thorny, I’m out of my mind!”

“Sorry, Miss Ferne.” Fearing that his guilty nervousness hung about him like a ragged cloak, he slipped quickly backstage and delivered the cartons to Thomas in the booth. The technician hovered over the Maestro as the play went on, and he gave Thornier only a quick nod and a wave.

Thorny retreated into misty old corridors and unused dressing rooms, now heaped with junk and remnants of other days. He had to get a grip on himself, had to quit quaking inside. He wandered alone in the deserted sections of the building, opening old doors to peer into dark cubicles where great stars had preened in other days, other nights. Now full of trunks and cracked mirrors and tarpaulins and junked mannequins. Faint odors lingered—nervous smells—perspiration, make-up, dim perfume that pervaded the walls. Mildew and dust—the aroma of time. His footsteps sounded hollowly through the unpeopled rooms, while muffled sounds from the play came faintly through the walls—the hysterical pleading of Marka, the harsh laughter of Piotr, the marching boots of the revolutionist guards, a burst of music toward the end of the scene.

He turned abruptly and started back toward the stage. It was no good, hiding away like this. He must behave normally, must do what he usually did. The falsified Peltier tape would not wreak its havoc until after the first run-through, when Thomas fed it into the Maestro, reset the machine, and prepared to start the second trial run. Until then, he must remain casually himself, and afterwards—?

Afterwards, things would have to go as he had planned.

Afterwards, Jade would have to come to him, as he believed she would. If she didn’t, then he had bungled, he had clumsily wrecked, and to no avail.

He slipped through the power-room where converters hummed softly, supplying power to the stage. He stood close to the entrance, watching the beginnings of scene iii, of the third act. Andreyev—the Peltier doll—was on alone, pacing grimly in his apartment while the low grumble of a street mob and the distant rattle of machine-gun fire issued from the Maestro-managed sound effect system. After a moment’s watching, he saw that Andreyev’s movements were not “grim” but merely methodical and lifeless. The tapeless mannequin, going through the required motions, robotlike, without interpretation of meaning. He heard a brief burst of laughter from someone in the production row, and after watching the zombie-like rendering of Andreyev in a suspenseful scene, he, too, found himself grinning faintly.

The pacing mannequin looked toward him suddenly with a dead-pan face. It raised both fists toward its face.

“Help,” it said in a conversational monotone. “Ivan, where are you? Where? Surely they’ve come; they must come.” It spoke quietly, without inflection. It ground its fists casually against its temples, paced mechanically again.

A few feet away, two mannequins that had been standing frozen in the off-stage lineup, clicked suddenly to life. As ghostly calm as display window dummies, they galvanized suddenly at a signal pulse command from the Maestro. Muscles—plastic sacs filled with oil-suspended magnetic powder and wrapped with elastic coils of wire, like flexible solenoids—tightened and strained beneath the airfoam flesh, working spasmodically to the pulsing rhythms of the polychromatic u.h.f. commands of the Maestro. Expressions of fear and urgency leaped to their faces. They crouched, tensed, looked around, then burst on stage, panting wildly.

“Comrade, she’s come, she’s come!” one of them screamed. “She’s come with him, with Boris!”

“What? She has him prisoner?” came the casual reply. “No, no, comrade. We’ve been betrayed. She’s with him. She’s a traitor, she’s sold out to them.”

There was no feeling in the uninterpreted Andreyev’s responses, even when he shot the bearer of bad tidings through the heart.

Thornier grew fascinated with watching as the scene progressed. The mannequins moved gracefully, their movements sinuous and more evenly flowing than human, they seemed boneless. The ratio of mass-to-muscle power of their members was carefully chosen to yield the flow of a dance with their every movement. Not clanking mechanical robots, not stumbling puppets, the dolls sustained patterns of movement and expression that would have quickly brought fatigue to a human actor, and the Maestro coordinated the events on stage in a way that would be impossible to a group of humans, each an individual and thinking independently.

It was as always. First, he looked with a shudder at the Machine moving in the stead of flesh and blood, at Mechanism sitting in the seat of artistry. But gradually his chill melted away, and the play caught him, and the actors were no longer machines. He lived in the role of Andreyev, and breathed the lines off-stage, and he knew the rest of them: Meta and Pettier, Sam Dion and Peter Repplewaite. He tensed with them, gritted his teeth in anticipation of difficult lines, cursed softly at the dud Andreyev, and forgot to listen for the faint crackle of sparks as the mannequins’ feet stepped across the copper-studded floor, drinking energy in random bites to keep their storage packs near full charge.

Thus entranced, he scarcely noticed the purring and brushing and swishing sounds that came from behind him, and grew louder. He heard a quiet mutter of voices nearby, but only frowned at the distraction, kept his attention rooted to the stage.

Then a thin spray of water tickled his ankles. Something soggy and spongelike slapped against his foot. He whirled.

A gleaming metal spider, three feet high came at him slowly on six legs, with two grasping claws extended. It clicked its way toward him across the floor, throwing out a thin spray of liquid which it promptly sucked up with the spongelike proboscis. With one grasping claw, it lifted a ten-gallon can near his leg, sprayed under it, swabbed, and set the can down again.

Thornier came unfrozen with a howl, leaped over the thing, hit the wet-soapy deck off balance. He skidded and sprawled. The spider scrubbed at the floor toward the edge of the stage, then reversed directions and came back toward him.

Groaning, he pulled himself together, on hands and knees. D’Uccia’s cackling laughter spilled over him. He glanced up. The chubby manager and the servo salesman stood over him, the salesman grinning, D’Uccia chortling.

“Datsa ma boy, datsa ma boy! Always, he watcha the show, then he don’t swip-op around, then he wantsa day off. Thatsa ma boy, for sure.” D’Uccia reached down to pat the metal spider’s chassis. “Hey, ragazzo,” he said again to Thornier, “want you should meet my new boy here. This one, he don’t watcha the show like you.”

He got to his feet, ghost-white and muttering. D’Uccia took closer note of his face, and his grin went sick. He inched back a step. Thornier glared at him briefly, then whirled to stalk away. He whirled into near collision with the Mela Stone mannequin, recovered, and started to pass in back of it.

Then he froze.

The Mela Stone mannequin was on stage, in the final scene. And this one looked older, and a little haggard. It wore an expression of shocked surprise as it looked him up and down. One hand darted to its mouth.

“Thorny—!” A frightened whisper.

“Mesa!” Despite the play, he shouted it, opening his arms to her. “Mela, how wonderful!”

And then, he noticed she winced away from his sodden coveralls. And she wasn’t glad to see him at all.

“Thorny, how nice,” she managed to murmur, extending her hand gingerly. The hand flashed with jewelry.

He took it for an empty second, stared at her, then walked hurriedly away, knots twisting up inside him. Now he could play it through. Now he could go on with it, and even enjoy executing his plan against all of them.

Mela had come to watch opening night for her doll in “The Anarch,” as if its performance were her own. I’ll arrange, he thought, for it not to be a dull show.

“No, no, noo!” came the monotone protest of the dud Andreyev, in the next-to-the-last scene. The bark of Marka’s gun, and the Peltier mannequin crumpled to the stage; and except for a brief triumphant denouement, the play was over.

At the sound of the gunshot, Thornier paused to smile tightly over his shoulder, eyes burning from his hawklike face. Then he vanished into the wings.

She got away from them as soon as she could, and she wandered around backstage until she found him in the storage room of the costuming section. Alone, he was sorting through the contents of an old locker and muttering nostalgically to himself. She smiled and closed the door with a thud. Startled, he dropped an old collapsible top-hat and a box of blank cartridges back into the trunk. His hand dived into his pocket as he straightened.

“Jade! I didn’t expect—”

“Me to come?” She flopped on a dusty old chaise lounge with a weary sigh and fanned herself with a program, closing her eyes. She kicked off her shoes and muttered: “Infuriating bunch. I hate ’em!”—made a retching face, and relaxed into little-girlhood. A little girl who had trouped with Thornier and the rest of them—the actress Jade Ferne, who had begged for bit parts and haunted the agencies and won the roles through endless rehearsals and shuddered with fright before opening curtain like the rest of them. Now she was a pert little woman with shrewd eyes, streaks of gray at the temples, and hard lines around her mouth. As she let the executive cloak slip away, the shrewdness and the hard lines melted into weariness.

“Fifteen minutes to get my sanity back, Thorny,” she muttered, glancing at her watch as if to time it.

He sat on the trunk and tried to relax. She hadn’t seemed to notice his uneasiness, or else she was just too tired to attach any significance to it. If she found him out, she’d have him flayed and pitched out of the building on his ear, and maybe call the police. She came in a small package, but so did an incendiary grenade. It won’t hurt you, Jade, what I’m doing, he told himself. It’ll cause a big splash, and you won’t like it, but it won’t hurt you, nor even wreck the show.

He was doing it for show business, the old kind, the kind they’d both known and loved. And in that sense, he told himself further, he was doing it as much for her as he was for himself.

“How was the run-through, Jade?” he asked casually. “Except for Andreyev, I mean.”

“Superb, simply superb,” she said mechanically.

“I mean really.”

She opened her eyes, made a sick mouth. “Like always, Thorny, like always. Nauseating, overplayed, perfectly directed for a gum-chewing bag-rattling crowd. A crowd that wants it overplayed so that it won’t have to think about what’s going on. A crowd that doesn’t want to reach out for a feeling or a meaning. It wants to be clubbed on the head with the meaning, so it doesn’t have to reach. I’m sick of it.”

He looked briefly surprised. “That figures,” he grunted wryly.

She hooked her bare heels on the edge of the lounge, hugged her shins, rested her chin on her knees, and blinked at him. “Hate me for producing the stuff, Thorny?”

He thought about it for a moment, shook his head. “I get sore at the setup sometimes, but I don’t blame you for it.”

“That’s good. Sometimes I’d trade places with you. Sometimes I’d rather be a charwoman and scrub D’Uccia’s floors instead.”

“Not a chance,” he said sourly. “The Maestro’s relatives are taking that over, too.”

“I know. I heard. You’re out of a job, thank God. Now you can get somewhere.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know where. I can’t do anything but act.”

“Nonsense. I can get you a job tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“With Smithfield. Sales promotion. They’re hiring a number of old actors in the department.”

“No.” He said it flat and cold.

“Not so fast. This is something new. The company’s expanding.”

“Ha.”

“Autodrama for the home. A four-foot stage in every living room. Miniature mannequins, six inches high. Centralized Maestro service. Great Plays piped to your home by concentric cable. Just dial Smithfield, make your request. Sound good?”

He stared at her icily. “Greatest thing in show business since Sarah Bernhardt,” he offered tonelessly.

“Thorny! Don’t get nasty with me!”

“Sorry. But what’s so new about having it in the home? Autodrama took over TV years ago.”

“I know, but this is different. Real miniature theater. Kids go wild for it. But it’ll take good promotion to make it catch on.”

“Sorry, but you know me better than that.”

She shrugged, sighed wearily, closed her eyes again. “Yes, I do. You’ve got portrayer’s integrity. You’re a darfsteller. A director’s ulcer. You can’t play a role without living it, and you won’t live it unless you believe it. So go ahead and starve.” She spoke crossly, but he knew there was grudging admiration behind it.

“I’ll be O.K.,” he grunted, adding to himself: after tonight’s performance.

“Nothing I can do for you?”

“Sure. Cast me. I’ll stand in for dud mannequins.”

She gave him a sharp glance, hesitated. “You know, I believe you would!”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

She stared thoughtfully at a row of packing cases, waggled her dark head. “Hmmp! What a spectacle that’d be—a human actor, incognito, playing in an autodrama.”

“It’s been done—in the sticks.”

“Yes, but the audience knew it was being done, and that always spoils the show. It creates contrasts that don’t exist or wouldn’t be noticed otherwise. Makes the dolls seem snaky, birdlike, too rubbery quick. With no humans on stage for contrast, the dolls just seem wistfully graceful, ethereal.”

“But if the audience didn’t know—”

Jade was smiling faintly. “I wonder,” she mused. “I wonder if they’d guess. They’d notice a difference, of course—in one mannequin.”

“But they’d think it was just the Maestro’s interpretation of the part.”

“Maybe—if the human actor were careful.”

He chuckled sourly. “If it fooled the critics—”

“Some ass would call it ‘an abysmally unrealistic interpretation’ or ‘too obviously mechanical’.” She glanced at her watch, shook herself, stretched wearily, and slipped into her shoes again. “Anyway,” she added, “there’s no reason to do it, since the Maestro’s really capable of rendering a better-than-human performance anyhow.”

The statement brought an agonized gasp from the janitor. She looked at him and giggled. “Don’t be shocked, Thorny. I said ‘capable of’—not ‘in the habit of.’ Auto-drama entertains audiences on the level they want to be entertained on.”

“But—”

“Just,” she added firmly, “as show business has always done.”

“But—”

“Oh, retract your eyeballs, Thorny. I didn’t mean to blaspheme.” She preened, began slipping back into her producer’s mold as she prepared to return to her crowd. “The only thing wrong with autodrama is that it’s scaled down to the moron-level—but show business always has been, and probably should be. Even if it gives us kids a pain.” She smiled and patted his cheek. “Sorry I shocked you. Au revoir, Thorny. And luck.”

When she was gone, he sat fingering the cartridges in his pocket and staring at nothing. Didn’t any of them have any sensibilities? Jade too, a seller of principle. And he had always thought of her as having merely compromised with necessity, against her real wishes. The idea that she could really believe autodrama capable of rendering a better-than-human performance—

But she didn’t. Of course she needed to rationalize, to excuse what she was doing—

He sighed and went to lock the door, then to recover the old “March” script from the trunk. His hands were trembling slightly. Had he planted enough of an idea in Jade’s mind; would she remember it later? Or perhaps remember it too clearly, and suspect it?

He shook himself sternly. No apprehensions allowed. When Rick rang the bell for the second run-through, it would be his entrance-cue, and he must be in-character by then. Too bad he was no schauspieler, too bad he couldn’t switch himself on-and-off the way Jade could do, but the necessity for much inward preparation was the burden of the darfsteller. He could not change into role without first changing himself, and letting the revision seep surfaceward as it might, reflecting the inner state of the man.

Strains of Moussorgsky pervaded the walls. He closed his eyes to listen and feel. Music for empire. Music at once brutal and majestic. It was the time of upheaval, of vengeance, of overthrow. Two times, superimposed. It was the time of opening night, with Ryan Thornier—ten years ago—cast in the starring role.

He fell into a kind of trance as he listened and clocked the pulse of his psyche and remembered. He scarcely noticed when the music stopped, and the first few lines of the play came through the walls.

“Cut! Cut!” A worried shout. Feria’s.

It had begun.

Thornier took a deep breath and seemed to come awake. When he opened his eyes and stood up, the janitor was gone. The janitor had been a nightmare role, nothing more.

And Ryan Thornier, star of “Walkaway,” favored of the critics, confident of a bright future, walked out of the storage room with a strange lightness in his step. He carried a broom, he still wore the dirty coveralls, but now as if to a masquerade.

The Peltier mannequin lay sprawled on the stage in a grotesque heap. Ryan Thornier stared at it calmly from behind the set and listened intently to the babble of stage hands and technicians that milled about him:

“Don’t know. Can’t tell yet. It came out staggering and gibbering-like it was drunk. It reached for a table, then it fell on its face—”

“Acted like the trouble might be a mismatched tape, but Rick rechecked it. Really Peltier’s tape—”

“Can’t figure it out. Miss Ferne’s having kittens.”

Thornier paused to size up his audience. Jade, Ian, and their staff milled about in the orchestra section. The stage was empty, except for the sprawled mannequin. Too much frantic conversation, all around. His entrance would go unnoticed. He walked slowly onstage and stood over the fallen doll with his hands in his pockets and his face pulled down in a somber expression. After a moment, he nudged the doll with his toe, paused, nudged it again. A faint giggle came from the orchestra. The corner of his eye caught Jade’s quick glance toward the stage. She paused in the middle of a sentence.

Assured that she watched, he played to an imaginary audience-friend standing just off stage. He glanced toward the friend, lifted his brows questioningly. The friend apparently gave him the nod. He looked around warily, then knelt over the fallen doll. He took its pulse, nodded eagerly to the offstage friend. Another giggle came from orchestra. He lifted the doll’s head, sniffed its breath, made a face. Then, gingerly, he rolled it.

He reached deep into the mannequin’s pocket, having palmed his own pocket watch beforehand. His hand paused there, and he smiled to his offstage accomplice and nodded eagerly. He withdrew the watch and held it up by its chain for his accomplice’s approval.

A light burst of laughter came from the production personnel. The laughter frightened the thief. He shot an apprehensive glance around the stage, hastily returned the watch to the fallen dummy, felt its pulse again. He traded a swift glance with his confederate, whispered “Aha!” and smiled mysteriously. Then he helped the doll to its feet and staggered away with it—a friend leading a drunk home to its family. In the doorway, he paused to frame his exit with a wary backward glance that said he was taking it to a dark alley where he could rob it in safety.

Jade was gaping at him.

Three technicians had been watching from just off the set, and they laughed heartily and clapped his shoulder as he passed, providing the offstage audience to which he had seemed to be playing.

Good-natured applause came from Jade’s people out front, and as Thorny carried the doll away to storage, he was humming softly to himself.

At five minutes till six, Rick Thomas and a man from the Smithfield depot climbed down out of the booth, and Jade pressed forward through the crowd to question him with her eyes.

“The tape,” he said. “Defective”

“But it’s too late to get another!” she squawked.

“Well, it’s the tape, anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“Well—trouble’s bound to be in one of three places. The doll, the tape, or the analogue tank where the tape-data gets stored. We cleared the tank and tried it with another actor. Worked O.K. And the doll works O.K. on an uninterpreted run. So, by elimination, the tape.”

She groaned and slumped into a seat, covering her face with her hands.

“No way at all to locate another tape?” Rick asked.

“We called every depot within five hundred miles. They’d have to cut one from a master. Take too long.”

“So we call off the show!” Ian Feria called out resignedly, throwing up his hands in disgust. “Refund on tickets, open tomorrow.”

“Wait!” snapped the producer, looking up suddenly. “Dooch—the house is sold out, isn’t it?”

“Yah,” D’Uccia grunted irritably. “She’sa filled op. Wassa matter with you pipple, you don’getsa Maestro fix? Wassa matter? We lose the money, hah?”

“Oh, shut up. Change curtain time to nine, offer refunds if they won’t wait. Ian, keep at it. Get things set up for tonight.” She spoke with weary determination, glancing around at them. “There may be a slim chance. Keep at it. I’m going to try something.” She turned and started away.

“Hey!” Feria called.

“Explain later,” she muttered over her shoulder.

She found Thornier replacing burned-out bulbs in the wall fixtures. He smiled down at her while he reset the clamps of an amber glass panel. “Need me for something, Miss Ferne?” he called pleasantly from the stepladder.

“I might,” she said tersely. “Did you mean that offer about standing in for dud mannequins?”

A bulb exploded at her feet after it slipped from his hand. He came down slowly, gaping at her.

“You’re not serious!”

“Think you could try a run-through as Andreyev?” He shot a quick glance toward the stage, wet his lips, stared at her dumbly.

“Well—can you?”

“It’s been ten years, Jade… I—”

“You can read over the script, and you can wear an earplug radio—so Rick can prompt you from the booth.”

She made the offer crisply and matter-of-factly, and it made Thorny smile inwardly. It was theater-calmly asking the outrageously impossible, gambling on it, and getting it.

“The customers—they’re expecting Peltier.”

“Right now I’m only asking you to try a runthrough, Thorny. After that, we’ll see. But remember it’s our only chance of going on tonight.”

“Andreyev,” he breathed. “The lead.”

“Please, Thorny, will you try?”

He looked around the theater, nodded slowly. “I’ll go study my lines,” he said quietly, inclining his head with what he hoped was just the proper expression of humble bravery.

I’ve got to make it good, I’ve got to make it great. The last chance, the last great role—

Glaring footlights, a faint whisper in his ear, and the cold panic of the first entrance. It came and passed quickly. Then the stage was a closed room, and the audience—of technicians and production personnel—was only the fourth wall, somewhere beyond the lights. He was Andreyev, commissioner of police, party whip, loyal servant of the regime, now tottering in the revolutionary storm of the Eighties. The last Bolshevik, no longer a rebel, no longer a radical, but now the loyalist, the conservatist, the defender of the status quo, champion of the Marxist ruling classes. No longer conscious of a self apart from that of the role, he lived the role. And the others, the people he lived it with, the people whose feet crackled faintly as they stepped across the floor, he acted and reacted with them and against them as if they, too, shared life, and while the play progressed he forgot their lifelessness for a little time.

Caught up by the magic, enfolded in scheme of the inevitable, borne along by the tide of the drama, he felt once again the sense of belonging as a part in a whole, a known and predictable whole that moved as surely from scene i to the final curtain as man from womb to tomb, and there were no lost years, no lapse or sense of defeated purpose between the rehearsals of those many years ago and this the fulfillment of opening night. Only when at last he muffed a line, and Rick’s correction whispered in his ear did the spell that was gathered about him briefly break—and he found himself unaccountably frightened, frightened by the sudden return of realization that all about him was Machine, and frightened, too, that he had forgotten. He had been conforming to the flighty mechanical grace of the others, reflexively imitating the characteristic lightness of the mannequins’ movements, the dancelike qualities of their playing. To know suddenly, having forgotten it, that the mouth he had just kissed was not a woman’s, but the rubber mouth of a doll, and that dancing patterns of high frequency waves from the Maestro had controlled the solenoid currents that turned her face lovingly up toward his, had lifted the cold soft hands to touch his face. The faint rubbery smell-taste hung about his mouth.

When his first exit came, he went off trembling. He saw Jade coming toward him, and for an instant, he felt a horrifying certainty that she would say, “Thorny, you were almost as good as a mannequin!” Instead, she said nothing, but only held out her hand to him.

“Was it too bad, Jade?”

“Thorny, you’re in! Keep it up, and you might have more than a one-night stand. Even Ian’s convinced. He squealed at the idea, but now he’s sold.”

“No kicks? How about the lines with Piotr?”

“Wonderful. Keep it up. Darling, you were marvelous.”

“It’s settled, then?”

“Darling, it’s never settled until the curtain comes up. You know that.” She giggled. “We had one kick all right—or maybe I shouldn’t tell you.”

He stiffened slightly. “Oh? Who from?”

“Mela Stone. She saw you come on, turned white as a sheet, and walked out. I can’t imagine!”

He sank slowly on a haggard looking couch and stared at her. “The hell you can’t,” he grated softly.

“She’s here on a personal appearance contract, you know. To give an opening and an intermission commentary on the author and the play.” Jade smirked at him gleefully. “Five minutes ago she called back, tried to cancel her appearance. Of course, she can’t pull a stunt like that. Not while Smithfield owns her.”

Jade winked, patted his arm, tossed an uncoded copy of the script at him, then headed back toward the orchestra. Briefly he wondered what Jade had against Mela. Nothing serious, probably. Both had been actresses. Mela got a Smithfield contract; Jade didn’t get one. It was enough.

By the time he had reread the scene to follow, his second cue was approaching, and he moved back toward the stage.

Things went smoothly. Only three times during the first act did he stumble over lines he had not rehearsed in ten years. Rick’s prompting was in his ear, and the Maestro could compensate to some extent for his minor deviations from the script. This time he avoided losing himself so completely in the play; and this time the weird realization that he had become one with the machine-set pattern did not disturb him. This time he remembered, but when the first break came—

“Not quite so good, Thorny,” Ian Feria called. “Whatever you were doing in the first scene, do it again. That was a little wooden. Go through that last bit again, and play it down. Andreyev’s no mad bear from the Urals. It’s Marka’s moment, anyhow. Hold in.”

He nodded slowly and looked around at the frozen dolls. He had to forget the machinery. He had to lose himself in it and live it, even if it meant being a replacement link in the mechanism. It disturbed him somehow, even though he was accustomed to subordinating himself to the total gestalt of the scene as in other days. For no apparent reason, he found himself listening for laughter from the production people, but none came.

“All right,” Feria called. “Bring ’em alive again.”

He went on with it, but the uneasy feeling nagged at him. There was self-mockery in it, and the expectation of ridicule from those who watched. He could not understand why, and yet—

There was an ancient movie—one of the classics—in which a man named Chaplin had been strapped into a seat on a production line where he performed a perfectly mechanical task in a perfectly mechanical fashion, a task that could obviously have been done by a few cams and a linkage or two, and it was one of the funniest comedies of all times—yet tragic. A task that made him a part in an over-all machine.

He sweated through the second and third acts in a state of compromise with himself-overplaying it for purposes of self-preparation, yet trying to convince Feria and Jade that he could handle it and handle it well. Overacting was necessary in spots, as a learning technique. Deliberately ham up the rehearsal to impress lines on memory, then underplay it for the real performance—it was an old trick of troupers who had to do a new show each night and had only a few hours in which to rehearse and learn lines. But would they know why he was doing it?

When it was finished, there was no time for another run-through, and scarcely time for a nap and a bite to eat before dressing for the show.

“It was terrible, Jade,” he groaned. “I muffed it. I know I did.”

“Nonsense. You’ll be in tune tonight, Thorny. I knew what you were doing, and I can see past it.”

“Thanks. I’ll try to pull in.”

“About the final scene, the shooting—”

He shot her a wary glance. “What about it?”

“The gun’ll be loaded tonight, blanks, of course. And this time you’ll have to fall.”

“So?”

“So be careful where you fall. Don’t go down on the copper bus-lugs. A hundred and twenty volts mightn’t kill you, but we don’t want a dying Andreyev bouncing up and spitting blue sparks. The stagehands’ll chalk out a safe section for you. And one other thing—”

“Yes?”

“Marka fires from close range. Don’t get burned.”

“I’ll watch it.”

She started away, then paused to frown back at him steadily for several seconds. “Thorny, I’ve got a queer feeling about you. I can’t place it exactly.”

He stared at her evenly, waiting.

“Thorny, are you going to wreck the show?”

His face showed nothing, but something twisted inside him. She looked beseeching, trusting, but worried. She was counting on him, placing faith in him—

“Why should I botch up the performance, Jade? Why should I do a thing like that?”

“I’m asking you.”

“O.K. I promise you—you’ll get the best Andreyev I can give you.”

She nodded slowly. “I believe you. I didn’t doubt that, exactly.”

“Then what worries you?”

“I don’t know. I know how you feel about autodrama. I just got a shuddery feeling that you had something up your sleeve. That’s all. I’m sorry. I know you’ve got too much integrity to wreck your own performance, but—” She stopped and shook her head, her dark eyes searching him. She was still worried.

“Oh, all right. I was going to stop the show in the third act. I was going to show them my appendectomy scar, do a couple of card tricks, and announce that I was on strike. I was going to walk out.” He clucked his tongue at her, looked hurt.

She flushed slightly, and laughed. “Oh, I know you wouldn’t pull anything shabby. Not that you wouldn’t do anything you could to take a swat at autodrama generally, but… there’s nothing you could do tonight that would accomplish anything. Except sending the customers home mad. That doesn’t fit you, and I’m sorry I thought of it.”

“Thanks. Stop worrying. If you lose dough, it won’t be my fault.”

“I believe you; but—”

“But what?”

She leaned close to him. “But you look too triumphant, that’s what!” she hissed, then patted his cheek.

“Well, it’s my last role. I—”

But she had already started away, leaving him with his sandwich and a chance for a nap.

Sleep would not come. He lay fingering the .32 caliber cartridges in his pocket and thinking about the impact of his final exit upon the conscience of the theater. The thoughts were pleasant.

It struck him suddenly as he lay drowsing that they would call it suicide. How silly. Think of the jolting effect, the dramatic punch, the audience reaction. Mannequins don’t bleed. And later, the headlines: Robot Player Kills Old Trouper, Victim of Mechanized Stage, Still, they’d call it suicide. How silly.

But maybe that’s what the paranoid on the twentieth-story window ledge thought about, too—the audience reaction. Wasn’t every self-inflicted wound really aimed at the conscience of the world?

It worried him some, but—

“Fifteen minutes until curtain,” the sound system was croaking. “Fifteen minutes—”

“Hey, Thorny!” Feria called irritably. “Get back to the costuming room. They’ve been looking for you.”

He got up wearily, glanced around at the backstage bustle, then shuffled away toward the makeup department. One thing was certain: he had to go on.

The house was less than packed. A third of the customers had taken refunds rather than wait for the postponed curtain and a substitute Andreyev, a substitute unknown or ill-remembered at best, with no Smithy index rating beside his name in lights. Nevertheless, the bulk of the audience had planned their evenings and stayed to claim their seats with only suppressed bad humor about the delay. Scalpers’ customers who had overpaid and who could not reclaim more than half the bootleg price from the box-office were forced to accept the show or lose money and get nothing. They came, and shifted restlessly, and glanced at their watches while an m.c.’s voice made apologies and introduced orchestral numbers, mostly from the Russian composers. Then, finally—

“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have with us one of the best loved actresses of stage, screen, and auto-drama, co-star of our play tonight, as young and lovely as she was when first immortalized by Smithfield—Mela Stone!”

Thornier watched tight-lipped from shadows as she stepped gracefully into the glare of the footlights. She seemed abnormally pale, but makeup artistry had done a good job; she looked only slightly older than her doll, still lovely, though less arrogantly beautiful. Her flashing jewelry was gone, and she wore a simple dark gown with a deep-slit neck, and her tawny hair was wrapped high in a turbanlike coiffure that left bare a graceful neck.

“Ten years ago,” she began quietly, “I rehearsed for a production of ‘The Anarch’ which never appeared, rehearsed it with a man named Ryan Thornier in the starring role, the actor who fills that role tonight. I remember with a special sort of glow the times—”

She faltered, and went on lamely. Thorny winced. Obviously the speech had been written by Jade Feme and evidently the words were like bits of poisoned apples in Mela’s mouth. She gave the impression that she was speaking them only because it wasn’t polite to retch them. Mela was being punished for her attempt to back out, and Jade had forced her to appear only by threatening to fit out the Stone mannequin with a gray wig and have the doll read her curtain speeches. The small producer had a vicious streak, and she exercised it when crossed.

Mela’s introductory lines were written to convince the audience that it was indeed lucky to have Thornier instead of Peltier, but there was nothing to intimate his flesh-and-blood status. She did not use the words “doll” or “mannequin,” but allowed the audience to keep its preconceptions without confirming them. It was short. After a few anecdotes about the show’s first presentation more than a generation ago, she was done.

“And with no further delay, my friends, I give you—Pruchev’s ‘The Anarch.’”

She bowed away and danced behind the curtains and came off crying. A majestic burst of music heralded the opening scene. She saw Thornier and stopped, not yet off stage. The curtain started up. She darted toward him, hesitated, stopped to stare up at him apprehensively. Her eyes were brimming, and she was biting her lip.

On stage, a telephone jangled on the desk of Commissioner Andreyev. His cue was still three minutes away. A lieutenant came on to answer the phone.

“Nicely done, Mela,” he whispered, smiling sourly.

She didn’t hear him. Her eyes drifted down to his costume—very like the uniform he’d worn for a dress rehearsal ten years ago. Her hand went to her throat. She wanted to run from him, but after a moment she got control of herself. She looked at her own mannequin waiting in the line-up, then at Thornier.

“Aren’t you going to say something appropriate?” she hissed.

“I—” His icy smile faded slowly. The first small triumph—triumph over Mela, a sick and hag-ridden Mela who had bought security at the expense of integrity and was still paying for it in small installments like this, Mela whom he once had loved. The first small “triumph” coiled into a sick knot in his throat.

She started away, but he caught her arm.

“I’m sorry, Mela,” he muttered hoarsely. “I’m really sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

But it was. She didn’t know what he’d done, of course; didn’t know he’d switched the tapes and steered his own selection as a replacement for the Peltier doll, so that she’d have to watch him playing opposite the doll-image of a Mela who had ceased to exist ten years ago, watch him relive a mockery of something.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered again.

She shook her head, pulled her arm free, hurried away. He watched her go and went sick inside. Their frigid meeting earlier in the day had been the decisive moment, when in a surge of bitterness he’d determined to go through with it and even excuse himself for doing it. Maybe bitterness had fogged his eyesight, he thought. Her reaction to bumping into him that way hadn’t been snobbery; it had been horror. An old ghost in dirty coveralls and motley, whose face she’d probably fought to forget, had sprung up to confront her in a place that was too full of memories anyhow. No wonder she seemed cold. Probably he symbolized some of her own self-accusations, for he knew he had affected others that way. The successful ones, the ones who had profited by autodrama—they often saw him with mop and bucket, and if they remembered Ryan Thornier, turned quickly away. And at each turning away, he had felt a small glow of satisfaction as he imagined them thinking: Thornier wouldn’t compromise—and hating him, because they had compromised and lost something thereby. But being hated by Mela was different somehow. He didn’t want it.

Someone nudged his ribs. “Your cue, Thorny!” hissed a tense voice. “You’re on!”

He came awake with a grunt. Feria was shoving him frantically toward his entrance. He made a quick grab for his presence of mind, straightened into character, and strode on.

He muffed the scene badly. He knew that he muffed it even before he made his exit and saw their faces. He had missed two cues and needed prompting several times from Rick in the booth. His acting was wooden—he felt it.

“You’re doing fine, Thorny, just fine!” Jade told him, because there was nothing else she dared tell him during a performance. Shock an actor’s ego during rehearsal, and he had time to recover; shock it during a performance, and he might go sour for the night. He knew, though, without being told, the worry that seethed behind her mechanical little smile. “But just calm down a little, eh?” she advised. “It’s going fine.”

She left him to seethe in solitude. He leaned against the wall and glowered at his feet and flagellated himself. You failure, you miserable crumb, you janitor-at-heart, you stage-struck charwoman—

He had to straighten out. If he ruined this one, there’d never be another chance. But he kept thinking of Mela, and how he had wanted to hurt her, and how now that she was being hurt he wanted to stop.

“Your cue, Thorny—wake up!”

And he was on again, stumbling over lines, being terrified of the sea of dim faces where a fourth wall should be.

She was waiting for him after his second exit. He came off pale and shaking, perspiration soaking his collar. He leaned back and lit a cigarette and looked at her bleakly. She couldn’t talk. She took his arm in both hands and kneaded it while she rested her forehead against his shoulder. He gazed down at her in dismay. She’d stopped feeling hurt; she couldn’t feel hurt when she watched him make a fool of himself out there. She might have been vengefully delighted by it, and he almost wished that she were. Instead, she was pitying him. He was numb, sick to the core. He couldn’t go on with it.

“Mela, I’d better tell you; I can’t tell Jade what I—”

“Don’t talk, Thorny. Just do your best.” She peered up at him. “Please do your best?”

It startled him. Why should she feel that way?

“Wouldn’t you really rather see me flop?” he asked.

She shook her head quickly, then paused and nodded it. “Part of me would, Thorny. A vengeful part. I’ve got to believe in the automatic stage. I… I do believe in it. But I don’t want you to flop, not really.” She put her hands over her eyes briefly. “You don’t know what it’s like seeing you out there… in the middle of all that… that—” She shook herself slightly. “It’s a mockery, Thorny, you don’t belong out there, but—as long as you’re there, don’t muff it. Do your best?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It’s a precarious thing. The effect, I mean. If the audience starts realizing you’re not a doll—” She shook her head slowly.

“What if they do?”

“They’ll laugh. They’ll laugh you right off the stage.”

He was prepared for anything but that. It confirmed the nagging hunch he’d had during the run-through.

“Thorny, that’s all I’m really concerned about. I don’t care whether you play it well or play it lousy, as long as they don’t find out what you are. I don’t want them to laugh at you; you’ve been hurt enough.”

“They wouldn’t laugh if I gave a good performance.”

“But they would! Not in the same way, but they would. Don’t you see?”

His mouth fell open. He shook his head. It wasn’t true. “Human actors have done it before,” he protested. “In the sticks, on small stages with undersized Maestros.”

“Have you ever seen such a play?”

He shook his head.

“I have. The audience knows about the human part of the cast in advance. So it doesn’t strike them as funny. There’s no jolt of discovering an incongruity. Listen to me Thorny—do your best, but you don’t dare make it better than a doll could do.”

Bitterness came back in a flood. Was this what he had hoped for? To give as machinelike a performance as possible, to do as good a job as the Maestro, but no better, and above all, no different? So that they wouldn’t find out?

She saw his distressed expression and felt for his hand. “Thorny, don’t you hate me for telling you. I want you to bring it off O.K., and I thought you ought to realize. I think I know what’s been wrong. You’re afraid—down deep—that they won’t recognize you for who you are, and that makes your performance un-doll-like. You better start being afraid they will recognize you, Thorny.”

As he stared at her it began to penetrate that she was still capable of being the woman he’d once known and loved. Worse, she wanted to save him from being laughed at. Why? If she felt motherly, she might conceivably want to shield him against wrath, criticism, or rotten tomatoes, but not against loss of dignity. Motherliness thrived on the demise of male dignity, for it sharpened the image of the child in the man.

“Mela—?”

“Yes, Thorny.”

“I guess I never quite got over you.” She shook her head quickly, almost angrily.

“Darling, you’re living ten years ago. I’m not, and I won’t. Maybe I don’t like the present very well, but I’m in it, and I can only change it in little ways. I can’t make it the past again, and I won’t try.” She paused a moment, searching his face. “Ten years ago, we weren’t living in the present either. We were living in a mythical, magic, wonderful future. Great talent, just starting to bloom. We were living in dream-plans in those days. The future we lived in never happened, and you can’t go back and make it happen. And when a dream-plan stops being possible, it turns into a pipe dream. I won’t live in a pipe dream. I want to stay sane, even if it hurts.”

“Too bad you had to come tonight,” he said stiffly.

She wilted. “Oh, Thorny, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. And I wouldn’t say it that strongly unless”—she glanced through the soundproof glass toward the stage where her mannequin was on in the scene with Piotr—“unless I had trouble too, with too much wishing.”

“I wish you were with me out there,” he said softly. “With no dolls and no Maestro. I know how it’d be then.”

“Don’t! Please, Thorny, don’t—”

“Mela, I loved you—”

“No!” She got up quickly. “I… I want to see you after the show. Meet me. But don’t talk that way. Especially not here and not now.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Please! Good-by for now, Thorny, and—do your best.”

My best to be a mechanism, he thought bitterly as he watched her go.

He turned to watch the play. Something was wrong out there on the stage. Badly wrong. The Maestro’s interpretation of the scene made it seem unfamiliar somehow.

He frowned. Rick had spoken of the Maestro’s ability to compensate, to shift interpretations, to redirect. Was that what was happening? The Maestro compensating—for his performance?

His cue was approaching. He moved closer to the stage.

Act I had been a flop. Feria, Ferne, and Thomas conferred in an air of tension and a haze of cigarette smoke. He heard heated muttering, but could not distinguish words. Jade called a stagehand, spoke to him briefly, and sent him away. The stagehand wandered through the group until he found Mela Stone, spoke to her quickly and pointed. Thorny watched her go to join the production group, then turned away. He slipped out of their line of sight and stood behind some folded backdrops, waiting for the end of a brief intermission and trying not to think.

“Great act, Thorny,” a costumer said mechanically, and clapped his shoulder in passing.

He suppressed an impulse to kick the costumer. He got out a copy of the script and pretended to read his lines. A hand tugged at his sleeve.

“Jade!” He looked at her bleakly, started to apologize.

“Don’t,” she said. “We’ve talked it over. Rick, you tell him.”

Rick Thomas who stood beside her grinned ruefully and waggled his head. “It’s not altogether your fault, Thorny. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.

“Take scene five, for example,” Jade put in. “Suppose the cast had been entirely human. How would you feel about what happened?”

He closed his eyes for a moment and relived it. “I’d probably be sore,” he said slowly. “I’d probably accuse Kovrin of jamming my lines and Aksinya of killing my exit—as an excuse,” he added with a lame grin. “But I can’t accuse the dolls. They can’t steal.”

“As a matter of fact, old man, they can,” said the technician. “And your excuse is exactly right.”

“Whh—what?”

“Sure. You did muff the first scene or two. The audience reacted to it. And the Maestro reacts to audience reaction—by compensating through shifts in interpretation. It sees the stage as a whole, you included. As far as the Maestro’s concerned, you’re an untaped dud—like the Peltier doll we used in the first run-through. It sends you only the script-tape signals, uninterpreted. Because it’s got no analogue tape on you. Now without an audience, that’d be O.K. But with art audience reaction to go by, it starts compensating, and since it can’t compensate through you, it works on the others.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Bluntly, Thorny, the first scene or two stunk. The audience didn’t like you. The Maestro started compensating by emphasizing other roles—and recharacterizing you, through the others.”

“Recharacterize? How can it do that.”

“Easily, darling,” Jade told him. “When Marka says ‘I hate him; he’s a beast’—for example—she can say it like it’s true, or she can say it like she’s just temporarily furious with Andreyev. And it affects the light in which the audience see you. Other actors affect your role. You know that’s true of the old stage. Well, it’s true of auto-drama, too.”

He stared at them in amazement. “Can’t you stop it? Readjust the Maestro, I mean?”

“Not without clearing the whole thing out of the machine and starting over. The effect is cumulative. The more it compensates, the tougher it gets for you. The tougher it gets for you, the worse you look to the crowd. And the worse you look to the crowd, the more it tries to compensate.”

He stared wildly at the clock. Less than a minute until the first scene of Act II. “What’ll I do?”

“Stick it,” said Jade. “We’ve been on the phone to Smithfield. There’s a programming engineer in town, and he’s on his way over in a heliocab. Then we’ll see.”

“We may be able to nurse it back in tune,” Rick added, “a little at a time—by feeding in a fake set of audience—restlessness factors, and cutting out its feeler circuits out in the crowd. We’ll try, that’s all.”

The light flashed for the beginning of the act.

“Good luck, Thorny.”

“I guess I’ll need it.” Grimly he started toward his entrance.

The thing in the booth was watching him. It watched and measured and judged and found wanting. Maybe, he thought wildly, it even hated him. It watched, it planned, it regulated, and it was wrecking him.

The faces of the dolls, the hands, the voices—belonged to it. The wizard circuitry in the booth rallied them against him. It saw him, undoubtedly, as one of them, but not answering to its pulsing commands. It saw him, perhaps, as a malfunctioning doll, and it tried to correct the effects of his misbehavior. He thought of the old conflict between director and darfstellar, the self-directed actor—and it was the same conflict, aggravated by an electronic director’s inability to understand that such things could be. The darfsteller, the undirectable portrayer whose acting welled from unconscious sources with no external strings—directors were inclined to hate them, even when the portrayal was superb. A mannequin, however, was the perfect schauspieler, the actor that a director could play like an instrument.

It would have been easier for him now had he been a schauspieler, for perhaps he could adapt. But he was Andreyev, his Andreyev, as he had prepared himself for the role. Andreyev was incarnate as an alter anima within him. He had never “played” a role. He had always become the role. And now he could adapt to the needs of the moment on stage only as Andreyev, in and through his identity with Andreyev, and without changing the feel of his portrayal. To attempt it, to try to fall into conformity with what the Maestro was doing, would mean utter confusion. Yet, the machine was forcing him—through the others.

He stood stonily behind his desk, listening coldly to the denials of the prisoner—a revolutionary, an arsonist associated with Piotr’s guerrilla band.

“I tell you, comrade, I had nothing to do with it!” the prisoner shouted. “Nothing!”

“Haven’t you questioned him thoroughly?” Andreyev growled at the lieutenant who guarded the man. “Hasn’t he signed a confession?”

“There was no need, comrade. His accomplice confessed,” protested the lieutenant.

Only it wasn’t supposed to be a protest. The lieutenant made it sound like a monstrous thing to do—to wring another confession, by torture perhaps, from the prisoner, when there was already sufficient evidence to convict. The words were right, but their meaning was wrenched. It should have been a crisp statement of fact: No need, comrade; his accomplice confessed.

Thorny paused, reddening angrily. His next line was, “See that this one confesses, too.” But he wasn’t going to speak it. It would augment the effect of the lieutenant’s tone of shocked protest. He thought rapidly. The lieutenant was a bit-player, and didn’t come back on until the third act. It wouldn’t hurt to jam him.

He glowered at the doll, demanded icily: “And what have you done with the accomplice?”

The Maestro could not invent lines, nor comprehend an ad lib. The Maestro could only interpret a deviation as a malfunction, and try to compensate. The Maestro backed up a line, had the lieutenant repeat his cue.

“I told you—he confessed.”

“Sol” roared Andreyev. “You killed him, eh? Couldn’t survive the questioning, eh? And you killed him.”

Thorny, what are you doing? came Rick’s frantic whisper in his earplug.

“He confessed,” repeated the lieutenant.

“You’re under arrest, Nichol!” Thorny barked. “Report to Major Malin for discipline. Return the prisoner to his cell.” He paused. The Maestro couldn’t go on until he cued it, but now there was no harm in speaking the line. “Now—see that this one confesses, too.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant replied stonily, and started off-stage with the prisoner.

Thorny took glee in killing his exit by calling after him: “And see that he lives through it!”

The Maestro marched them out without looking back, and Thorny was briefly pleased with himself. He caught a glimpse of Jade with her hands clasped over her head, giving him a “the-winnah” signal from concealment. But he couldn’t keep ad libbing his way out of it every time.

Most of all, he dreaded the entrance of Marka, Mela’s doll. The Maestro was playing her up, ennobling her, subtly justifying her treachery, at the expense of Andreyev’s character. He didn’t want to fight back. Marka’s role was too important for tampering, and besides, it would be like slapping at Mela to confuse the performance of her doll.

The curtain dipped. The furniture revolved. The stage became a living room. And the curtain rose again.

He barked: “No more arrests; after curfew, shoot on sight!” at the telephone, and hung up.

When he turned, she stood in the doorway, listening. She shrugged and entered with a casual walk while he watched her in suspicious silence. It was the consummation of her treachery. She had come back to him, but as a spy for Piotr. He suspected her only of infidelity and not of treason. It was a crucial scene, and the Maestro could play her either as a treacherous wench, or a reluctant traitor with Andreyev seeming a brute. He watched her warily.

“Well—hello,” she said petulantly, after walking around the room.

He grunted coldly. She stayed flippant and aloof. So far, it was as it should be. But the vicious argument was yet to come.

She went to a mirror and began straightening her wind-blown hair. She spoke nervously, compulsively, rattling about trivia, concealing her anxiety in his presence after her betrayal. She looked furtive, haggard, somehow more like the real Mela of today; the Maestro’s control of expression was masterful.

“What are you doing here?” he exploded suddenly, interrupting her disjointed spiel.

“I still live here, don’t I?”

“You got out.”

“Only because you ordered me out.”

“You made it clear you wanted to leave.”

“Liar!”

“Cheat!”

It went on that way for a while; then he began dumping the contents of several drawers into a suitcase. “I live here, and I’m staying,” she raged.

“Suit yourself, comrade.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Moving out, of course.”

The battle continued. Still there was no attempt by the Maestro to revise the scene. Had the trouble been corrected? Had his exchange with the lieutenant somehow affected the machine? Something was different. It was becoming a good scene, his best so far.

She was still raving at him when he started for the door. She stopped in mid-sentence, breathless—then shrieked his name and flung herself down on the sofa, sobbing violently. He stopped. He turned and stood with his fists on his hips staring at her. Gradually, he melted. He put the suitcase down and walked back to stand over her, still gruff and glowering.

Her sobbing subsided. She peered up at him, saw his inability to escape, began to smile. She came up slowly, arms sliding around his neck.

“Sasha… oh, my Sasha—”

The arms were warm, the lips moist, the woman alive in his embrace. For a moment he doubted his senses. She giggled at him and whispered, “You’ll break a rib.”

“Mela—”

“Let go, you fool—the scene!” Then, aloud: “Can I stay, darling?”

“Always,” he said hoarsely.

“And you won’t be jealous again?”

“Never.”

“Or question me every time I’m gone an hour or two?”

“Or sixteen. It was sixteen hours.”

“I’m sorry.” She kissed him. The music rose. The scene ended.

“How did you swing it?” he whispered in the clinch. “And why?”

“They asked me to. Because of the Maestro.” She giggled. “You looked devastated. Hey, you can let go now. The curtain’s down.”

The mobile furniture had begun to rearrange itself. They scurried offstage, side-stepping a couch as it rolled past. Jade was waiting for them.

“Great!” she whispered, taking their hands. “That was just great.”

“Thanks… thanks for sliding me in,” Mela answered.

F“Take it from here out, Mela—the scenes with Thorny, at least.”

“I don’t know,” she muttered. “It’s been so long. Anybody could have ad libbed through that fight scene.”

“You can do it. Rick’ll keen you cued and prompted. The engineer’s here, and they’re fussing around with the Maestro. But it’ll straighten itself out, if you give it a couple more scenes like that to watch.”

The second act had been rescued. The supporting cast was still a hazard, and the Maestro still tried to compensate according to audience reaction during Act I, but with a human Marka, the compensatory attempts had less effect, and the interpretive distortions seemed to diminish slightly. The Maestro was piling up new data as the play continued, and reinterpreting.

“It wasn’t great,” he sighed as they stretched out to relax between acts. “But it was passable.”

“Act Three’ll be better, Thorny,” Mela promised. “We’ll rescue it yet. It’s just too bad about the first act.”

“I wanted it to be tops,” he breathed. “I wanted to give them something to think about, something to remember. But now we’re fighting to rescue it from being a total flop.”

“Wasn’t it always like that? You get steamed up to make history, but then you wind up working like crazy just to keep it passable.”

“Or to keep from ducking flying groceries sometimes.”

She giggled. “Jiggle used to say, ‘I went on like the main dish and came off like the toss salad.’” She paused, then added moodily: “The tough part of it is—you’ve got to aim high just to hit anywhere at all. It can get to be heartbreaking, too-trying for the sublime every time, and just escaping the ridiculous, or the mediocre.”

“No matter how high you aim, you can’t hit escape velocity. Ambition is a trajectory with its impact point in oblivion, no matter how high the throw.”

“Sounds like a quote.”

“It is. From the Satyricon of an ex-Janitor.”

“Thorny—?”

“What?”

“I’m going to be sorry tomorrow—but I am enjoying it tonight-going through it all again I mean. Living it like a pipe dream. It’s no good though. It’s opium.”

He stared at her for a moment in surprise, said nothing. Maybe it was opium for Mela, but she hadn’t started out with a crazy hope that tonight would be the climax and the highpoint of a lifetime on the stage. She was filling in to save the show, and it meant nothing to her in terms of a career she had deliberately abandoned. He, however, had hoped for a great portrayal. It wasn’t great, though. If he worked hard at Act III, it might—as a whole—stand up to his performances of the past. Unless—

“Think anybody in the audience has guessed yet? About us, I mean?”

She shook her head. “Haven’t seen any signs of it,” she murmured drowsily. “People see what they expect to see. But it’ll leak out tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Your scene with the lieutenant. When you ad libbed out of a jam. There’s bound to be a drama critic or maybe a professor out there who read the play ahead of time, and started frowning when you pulled that off. He’ll go home and look up his copy of the script just to make sure, and then the cat’s out.”

“It won’t matter by then.”

She wanted a nap or a drowse, and he fell silent. As he watched her relax, some of his bitter disappointment slipped away. It was good just to be acting again, even for one opiate evening. And maybe it was best that he wasn’t getting what he wanted. He was even ready to admit to a certain insanity in setting out on such a course.

Perfection and immolation. Now that the perfection wasn’t possible, the whole scheme looked like a sick fanatic’s nightmare, and he was ashamed. Why had he done it—given in to what he had always been only a petulant fantasy, a childish dream? The wish, plus the opportunity, plus the impulse, in a framework of bitterness and in a time of personal transition—it had been enough to bring the crazy yearning out of its cortical wrinkle and start him acting on a dream. A child’s dream.

And then the momentum had carried him along. The juggled tapes, the loaded gun, the dirty trick on Jade—and now fighting to keep the show from dying. He had gone down to the river and climbed up on the bridge rail and looked down at the black and swirling tide—and finally climbed down again because the wind would spoil his swan dive.

He shivered. It scared him a little, to know he could lose himself so easily. What had the years done to him, or what had he done to himself?

He had kept his integrity maybe, but what good was integrity in a vacuum? He had the soul of an actor, and he’d hung onto it when the others were selling theirs, but the years had wiped out the market and he was stuck with it. He had stood firm on principle, and the years had melted the cold glacier of reality from under the principle; still, he stood on it, while the reality ran on down to the sea. He had dedicated himself to the living stage, and carefully tended its grave, awaiting the resurrection.

Old ham, he thought, you’ve been flickering into mad warps and staggering into dimensions of infrasanity. You took unreality by the hand and led her gallantly through peril and confusion and finally married her before you noticed that she was dead. Now the only decent thing to do was bury her, but her interment would do nothing to get him back through the peril and confusion and on the road again. He’d have to hike. Maybe it was too late to do anything with the rest of a lifetime. But there was only one way to find out. And the first step was to put some mileage between himself and the stage.

If a little black box took over my job, Rick had said, I’d go to work making little black boxes.

Thorny realized with a slight start that the technician had meant it. Mela had done it, in a sense. So had Jade. Especially Jade. But that wasn’t the answer for him, not now. He’d hung around too long mourning the dead, and he needed a clean, sharp break. Tomorrow he’d fade out of sight, move away, pretend he was twenty-one again, and start groping for something to do with a lifetime. How to keep eating until he found it—that would be the pressing problem. Unskilled laborers were hard to find these days, but so were unskilled jobs. Selling his acting talent for commercial purposes would work only if he could find a commercial purpose he could believe in and live for, since his talent was not the surface talent of a schauspieler. It would be a grueling search, for he had never bothered to believe in anything but theater.

Mela stirred suddenly. “Did I hear somebody call me?” she muttered. “This racket—I” She sat up to look around.

He grunted doubtfully. “How long till curtain?” he asked.

She arose suddenly and said, “Jade’s waving me over. See you in the act, Thorny.”

He watched Mela hurry away, he glanced across the floor at Jade who waited for her in the midst of a small conference, he felt a guilty twinge. He’d cost them money, trouble, and nervous sweat, and maybe the performance endangered the run of the show. It was a rotten thing to do, and he was sorry, but it couldn’t be undone, and the only possible compensation was to deliver a best—possible Act III and then get out. Fast. Before Jade found him out and organized a lynch mob.

After staring absently at the small conference for a few moments, he closed his eyes and drowsed again.

Suddenly he opened them. Something about the conference group—something peculiar. He sat up and frowned at them again. Jade, Mela, Rick, and Feria, and three strangers. Nothing peculiar about that. Except… let’s see… the thin one with the scholarly look—that would be the programming engineer, probably. The beefy, healthy fellow with the dark business suit and the wandering glance—Thorny couldn’t place him—he looked out of place backstage. The third one seemed familiar somehow, but he, too, looked out of place—a chubby little man with no necktie and a fat cigar, he seemed more interested in the backstage rush than in the proceedings of the group. The beefy gent kept asking him questions, and he muttered brief answers around his cigar while watching the stagehands’ parade.

Once when answering he took his cigar out of his mouth and glanced quickly across the floor in Thorny’s direction. Thorny stiffened, felt bristles rise along his spine. The chubby little gent was—

The depot clerk!

Who had issued him the extra tape and the splices. Who could put the finger on the trouble right away, and was undoubtedly doing it.

Got to get out. Got to get out fast. The beefy fellow was either a cop or a private investigator, one of several hired by Smithfield. Got to run, got to hide, got to— Lynch mob.

“Not through that door, buddy, that’s the stage; what’re you— Oh, Thorny! It’s not time to go on.”

“Sorry,” he grunted at the prop man and turned away. The light flashed, the buzzer sounded faintly.

“Now it’s time,” the prop man called after him. Where was he going? And what good would it do? “Hey, Thorny! The buzzer. Come back. It’s line-up. You’re on when the curtain lifts… hey!”

He paused, then turned around and went back. He went on-stage and took his place. She was already there, staring at him strangely as he approached.

“You didn’t do it, did you, Thorny?” she whispered. He gazed at her in tight-lipped silence, then nodded. She looked puzzled. She looked at him as if he were no longer a person, but a peculiar object to be studied.

Not scornful, nor angry, nor righteous—just puzzled. “Guess I was nuts,” he said lamely.

“Guess you were.”

“Not too much harm done, though,” he said hopefully.

“The wrong people saw the first act, Thorny. They walked out.”

“Wrong people?”

“Two backers and a critic.”

“Oh!”

He stood stunned. She stopped looking at him then and just stood waiting for the curtain to rise, her face showing nothing but a puzzled sadness. It wasn’t her show, and she had nothing in it but a doll that would bring a royalty check or two, and now herself as a temporary substitute for the doll. The sadness was for him. Contempt he could have understood.

The curtain lifted. A sea of dim faces beyond the foot-lights. And he was Andreyev, chief of a Soviet police garrison, loyalist servant of a dying cause. It was easy to stay in the role this time, to embed his ego firmly in the person of the Russian cop and live a little of the last century. For the ego was more comfortable there than in the skin of Ryan Thornier—a skin that might soon be sent to the tannery, judging the furtive glances that were coming from backstage. It might even be comfortable to remain Andrevev after the performance, but that was a sure way to get Napoleon Bonaparte for a roommate.

There was no change of setting between scenes i and ii, but only a dip of the curtain to indicate a time-lapse and permit a change of cast. He stayed onstage, and it gave him a moment to think. The thoughts weren’t pleasant.

Backers had walked out. Tomorrow the show would close unless the morning teleprint of the Times carried a rave review. Which seemed wildly improbable. Critics were jaded. Jaded tastes were apt to be impatient. They would not be eager to forgive the first act. He had wrecked it, and he couldn’t rescue it.

Revenge wasn’t sweet. It tasted like rot and a sour stomach.

Give them a good third act. There’s nothing more you can do. But even that wouldn’t take away the rotten taste.

Why did you do it, Thorny? Rick’s voice, whispering from the booth and in his earplug prompter.

He glanced up and saw the technician watching him from the small window of the booth. He spread his hands in a wide shrugging gesture, as if to ask: How can I tell you, what can I do?

Go on with it, what else? Rick whispered, and withdrew from the window.

The incident seemed to confirm that Jade intended for him to finish it, anyhow. She could scarcely intend otherwise. She was in it with him, in a sense. If the audience found out the play had a human stand-in, and if the critics didn’t like the show, they might pounce on the producer who “perpetrated such an impossible substitution”—even harder than they’d pounce on him. She had gambled on him, and in spite of his plot to force her into such a gamble, it was her show, and her responsibility, and she’d catch the brunt of it. Critics, owners, backers, and public—they didn’t care about “blame,” didn’t care about excuses or reasons. They cared about the finished product, and if they didn’t like it, the responsibility for it was clear.

As for himself? A cop waiting backstage. Why? He hadn’t studied the criminal code, but he couldn’t think of any neat little felonious label that could be pinned on what he’d done. Fraud? Not without an exchange of money or property, he thought. He’d been after intangibles, and the law was an earthy thing; it became confused when motives carried men beyond assaults on property or person, into assaults on ideas or principles. Then it passed the buck to psychiatry.

Maybe the beefy gent wasn’t a cop at all. Maybe he was a collector of maniacs.

Thorny didn’t much care. The dream had tumbled down, and he’d just have to let the debris keep falling about him until he got a chance to start climbing out of the wreckage. It was the end of something that should have ended years ago, and he couldn’t get out until it finished collapsing.

The curtain lifted. Scene ii was good. Not brilliant, but good enough to make them stop snapping their gum and hold them locked in their seats, absorbed in their identity with Andreyev.

Scene iii was his Gethsemane—when the mob besieged the public offices while he waited for word of Marka and an answer to his offer of a truce with the guerrilla forces. The answer came in one word.

“Nyet.”

His death sentence. The word that bound him over to the jackals in the streets, the word that cast him to the ravening mob. The mob had a way: the mob was collecting officials and mounting them. He could see their collection from the window, looking across the square, and he discussed it with an aide. Nine men impaled on the steel spikes of the heavy grillwork fence in front of the Regional Soviet offices. The mob seized another specimen with its thousand hands and mounted it carefully. It lifted the specimen into a sitting position over a two-foot spike, then dropped him on it. Two specimens still squirmed.

He’d cheat the mob, of course. There were the barricades in the building below, and there would be plenty of time to meet death privately and chastely before the mob tore its way inside. But he delayed. He waited for word from Marka.

Word came. Two guards burst in.

“She’s here, comrade, she’s come!”

Come with the enemy, they said. Come betraying him, betraying the state. Impossible! But the guard insisted.

Berserk fury, and refusal to believe. With a low snarl, he drew the automatic, shot the bearer of bad tidings through the heart.

With the crash of the gunshot; the mannequin crumpled. The explosion startled a sudden memory out of hiding, and he remembered: the second cartridge in the clip—not a blank! He had forgotten to unload the deadly round.

For an instant he debated firing it into the fallen mannequin as a way to get rid of it, then dismissed the notion and obeyed the script. He stared at his victim and wilted, letting the gun slip from his fingers and fall to the floor. He staggered to the window to stare out across the square. He covered his face with his hands, awaited the transition curtain.

The curtain came. He whirled and started for the gun. No, Thorny, no! came Rick’s frantic whisper from the booth. To the ikon… the ikon!

He stopped in mid-stage. No time to retrieve the gun and unload. The curtain had only dipped and was starting up again. Let Mela get rid of the round, he thought. He crossed to the shrine, tearing open his collar, rumpling his hair. He fell to his knees before the ancient ikon, in dereliction before the God of an older Russia, a Russia that survived as firmly in fierce negation as it had survived in fierce affirmation. The cultural soul was a living thing, and it survived as well in downfall as in victory; it could never be excised, but only eaten away or slowly transmuted by time and gentle pressures of rain wearing the rock.

There was a bust of Lenin beneath the ikon. And there was a bust of Harvey Smithfield beneath the Greek players’ masks on the wall of D’Uccia’s office. The signs of the times, and the signs of the timeless, and the cultural heartbeat pulsed to the rhythm of centuries. He had resisted the times as they took a sharp turn in direction, but no man could swim long against the tide as it plodded its zigzag course into timelessness. And the sharp deflections in the course were deceptive—for all of them really wound their way downstream. No man ever added his bit to the flow by spending all his effort to resist the current. The tide would tire him and take him into oblivion while the world flowed on.

Marka, Boris, Piotr had entered, and he had turned to start at them without understanding. The mockery followed and the harsh laughter, as they pushed the once haughty but now broken chieftain about the stage like a dazed animal unable to respond. He rebounded from one to another of them, as they prodded him to dispel the trancelike daze.

“Finish your prayer, comrade,” said Mela, picking up the gun he’d dropped.

As he staggered close to Mela, he found his chance, and whispered quickly: “The gun, Mela—eject the first cartridge. Eject it, quickly.”

He was certain she heard him, although she showed no reaction—unless the slight flicker of her eyes had been a quick glance at the gun. Had she understood? A moment later, another chance to whisper.

“The next bullet’s real. Work the slide. Eject it.”

He stumbled as Piotr pushed him, fell against a heavy couch, slid down, and stared at them. Piotr went to open the window and shout an offer to the mob below. A bull-roar arose from the herd outside. They hauled him to the window as a triumphal display.

“See, comrade?” growled the guerrilla. “Your faithful congregation awaits you.”

Marka closed the windows. “I can’t stand that sight!” she cried.

“Take him to his people,” the leader ordered.

“No—” Marka brought up the gun, shook her head fiercely. “I won’t let you do that. Not to the mob.”

Piotr growled a curse. “They’ll have him anyway. They’ll be coming up here to search.”

Thorny stared at the actress with a punted frown. Still she hadn’t ejected the cartridge. And the moment was approaching—a quick bullet to keep him from the mob, a bit of hot mercy flung hastily to him by the woman who had enthralled him and used him and betrayed him.

She turned toward him with the gun, and he began to back away.

“All right, Piotr—if they’ll get him anyway—”

She moved a few steps toward him as he backed to a corner. The live round, Mela, eject it!

Then her foot brushed a copper bus-lug, and he saw the faint little jet of sparks. Eyes of glass, flesh of airfoam plastic, nerves of twitching electron streams.

Mela was gone. This was her doll. Maybe the real Mela couldn’t stomach it after she’d found what he’d done, or maybe Jade had called her off after the first scene of the third act. A plastic hand held the gun, and a tiny flexible solenoid awaited the pulse that would tighten the finger on the trigger. Terror lanced through him.

Cue, Thorny, cue! whispered his earplug.

The doll had to wait for his protest before it could fire. It had to be cued. His eyes danced about the stage, looking for a way out. Only an instant to decide.

He could walk over and take the gun out of the doll’s hand without giving it a cue—betraying himself to the audience and wrecking the final moment of the show.

He could run for it, cue her, and hope she missed, falling after the shot. But he’d fall on the lugs that way, and come up shrieking.

For God’s sake, Thorny! Rick was howling. The cue, the cue!

He stared at the gun and swayed slightly from side to side. The gun swayed with him—slightly out of phase. A second’s delay, no more

“Please, Marka—” he called, swaying faster.

The finger tensed on the trigger. The gun moved in a search pattern, as he shifted to and fro. It was risky. It had to be precisely timed. It was like dancing with a cobra. He wanted to flee.

You faked the tape, you botched the show, you came out second best to a system you hated, he reminded himself. And you even loaded the gun. Now if you can’t risk it—

He gritted his teeth, kept up the irregular weaving motion, then—

“Please, Marka… no, no, nooo!”

A spiked fist hit him somewhere around the belt, spun him around, and dropped him. The sharp cough of the gun was only a part of the blow. Then he was lying crumpled on his side in the chalked safety area, bleeding and cursing softly. The scene continued. He started to cry out, but checked the shout in his throat. Through a haze, he watched the others move on toward the finale, saw the dim sea of faces beyond the lights. Bullet punched through his side somewhere.

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’ll walk 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 must look a bloody mess, he thought.

“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 true, considering the times.”

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?”

“No. I’m just curious. It keeps happening—a specialist trying to compete with a higher-level specialist’s tools. Why?”

“Higher level?” Thorny sat up with a snarl, groaned, caught at his side and sank back again, panting.

“Easy, old man,” Rick said quietly. “Sorry. Higher organizational-level, I meant. Why do you keep on doing it?”

Thorny lay silent for a few moments, then: “Status jealousy. Even hawks try to drive other hawks out of their hunting grounds. Fight off competition.”

“But you’re no hawk. And a machine isn’t competition.”

“Cut it out, Rick. What did you come here for?”

Rick glanced at the toe of his shoe, snickered faintly, and came on into the room. “Thought you might need some help finding a job,” he said. “When I looked in the door and saw you lying there looking like somebody’s King Arthur, I got sore again.” He sat restlessly on the edge of a chair and watched the old man with mingled sadness, irritation, and affection.

“You’d help me… find a job?”

“Maybe. A job, not a permanent niche.”

“It’s too late to find a permanent niche.”

“It was too late when you were born, old man! There isn’t any such thing—hasn’t been, for the last century. Whatever you specialize in, another specialty will either gobble you up, or find a way to replace you. If you get what looks like a secure niche, somebody’ll come along and wall you up is it and write your epitaph on it. And the more specialized a society gets, the more dangerous it is for the pure specialist. You think an electronic engineer is any safer than an actor? Or a ditch-digger?”

“I don’t know. It’s not fair. A man’s career—”

“You’ve always got one specialty that’s safe.”

“What’s that?”

“The specialty of creating new specialties. Continuously. Your own.”

“But that’s—” He started to protest, to say that such a concept belonged to the highly trained few, to the technical elite of the era, and that it wasn’t specialization, but generalization. But why to the few? The specialty of creating new specialties—

“But that’s—”

“More or less a definition of Man, isn’t it?” Rick finished for him. “Now about the job—”

“Yes, about the job—”

So maybe you don’t start from the bottom after all, he decided. You start considerably above the lemur, the chimpanzee, the orangutan, the Maestro—if you ever start at all.

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