The Golden Globe

ACT 1

"I once played Romeo and Juliet as a one-man show," I said. "Doubling with Mercutio won't be a problem."

The curtain was already up, and Dahlia Smithson—our fair sun, the snowy dove trouping with crows, the rich jewel in the Ethiop's ear—had yet to appear backstage. This was not a surprise. The last two nights we'd had to winch her loveliness into the balcony and tie her down to keep her from falling out.

"You're out of your mind," shouted Larry "The Leech" Crocker, our producer-director-stage manager: the wax in the Ethiop's ear. He was bug-eyed with fury, trembling, drenched in sweat... and the picture of calm composure next to Dee, the assistant stage manager, who kept pushing Larry's ragged script away from her as if it might bite.

There had been talk of bringing in an understudy in view of La Smithson's recent behavior, but this was not the Schubert Traveling Shows, ladies and germs, this was The Crocker Players, and if you haven't heard of them it's probably because you live within a parsec of civilization. We were chronically undercapitalized (read "dirt-poor") and it fell to the ASM to understudy all the female roles. And while I'm sure Dee would have provided yeoman service as Ladies Montague or Capulet, and could probably have taken a creditable swing at the Nurse, the prospect of Juliet had turned her pale green.

"I don't know all the lines," Dee wailed.

"See?" I said. "She doesn't know the part."

"You're crazy," Larry exploded. "Aren't they onstage at the same time?"

"Mercutio and Juliet never meet," I said. "I know you've put Mercutio at the Capulets' party, but the Bard doesn't demand it, and it can be solved by letting the Prince wear my costume in the scene. Mercutio is masked, and has no lines. However"—and I cupped my ear to the stage—"you'd better make up your mind. Scene two is about to begin, and Juliet is in three. I'll need a little time."

"You're crazy," Larry the Leech muttered again, then jerked his head toward the dressing rooms.

"You'll never regret this," I said.

"I regret it already."

This being a Crocker show, it goes without saying that we were a lot more than forty-five minutes from Broadway. Hell, we were just about forty-five hours from Pluto. That's how long it had taken my last message to my agent to reach the System, and an equal time for the news to reach me that he wasn't answering his phone. No big surprise there; I'd been "on the road," as it were, for almost ten years now, and my agent hadn't been answering when I left. (The question I'd wanted him to answer? Simple, really: "Who booked me into this toilet?")

The plumbing fixture in question was know as Brementon. Who knows why? Humans have this need to name everything, no matter how little that thing may deserve it. When I saw the name on the travel itinerary it brought to mind a peaceful little hamlet. German, perhaps. Happy burghers in lederhosen, smiling frauleins in dirndls and pigtails and wooden shoes, cottages draped in swastika bunting. In reality, if they'd added "Maximum Security Prison" to the place's name they'd have been closer to the truth. About a quarter of it was a prison. We hadn't seen that part as yet, but if it was worse than the rest of the place, the mind reeled. B-town, as the players came to call it, could have provided the very definition of the word "boondock," except that the stop before B-town had actually been called Boondocks.

Brementon was a random collection of junk, natural and artificial, welded together in the cometary zone and pressed into service as a "City" by the escaped criminals, madmen, perverts, and other misfits who liked to call themselves Outlanders. Brementon, Boondocks, and ten thousand other similar wandering junkyards constituted the most far-flung "community" humanity had ever known.

As to where it was, that was something that could have mattered only to a celestial navigator. Upon arrival I'd looked for the Sun, and it took a while to find it. We were due to pass within ten billion miles of it in only four thousand years; to an Outlander, that qualified as a near miss.

It was tough to say how big Brementon was. Much of it was tied together with cables and hoses and it tended to drift around. If you'd grabbed two ends and yanked hard you might have stretched it out twenty kilometers or more, but you'd never get it unsnarled again. When I first saw it from the ship it presented a rude circular form about five kay across, like some demented globular cluster, or a picture of a spaceship a few seconds after a disastrous explosion.

One small part of this orbiting traffic-accident-in-progress was a silvery sphere called the Brementon Playhouse. It was tied to a counterbalancing ball containing the municipal sewer works, which gives a fair idea of the high esteem Outlanders held for The Arts. The balls rotated around a common center of gravity. The result was that we didn't have to play Shakespeare in free fall, as we'd done at Boondocks and several previous engagements. Friends, Romans, countrymen, throw me a tie-down! Talk about your theater in the round.

But enough about Brementon. Let's talk about me.

I raced up the spiral stairs in the wings and slammed into Dahlia's dressing room. I paused for just a second there, breathing the intoxicating air of the headliner. I'd hate to say how long it had been since I'd rated a private dressing room. I caressed the back of Juliet's chair, then pulled it back and sat in front of the light-girdled mirror and gazed into my face and centered myself.

I'd never actually done Juliet before. No point in telling Larry that. (The one-man show? A comic skit, really, with quick changes, slapstick, clown faces, and japery, lasting twenty minutes when I was really rolling.) No point in worrying him; I knew the part. But line reading is just the starting point, of course. You must get inside the character. All good acting is played from within. I had about five minutes.

It's not enough time, of course. It wouldn't have been enough even if I'd been able to use it to do nothing but think about the part. As it was, I'd need every minute to accomplish the physical transformation. But I did use the mental time to go back over the many, many performances of Juliet I had seen, going right back to Norma Shearer in 1936. As my mind ranged back over Juliets of the past, taking a bit of business here, a word emphasis there, my hands were busy changing hatchet-faced Mercutio into a visage with cheek to shame the fairest stars in all the heavens.

Once I had my own face. Well, I still have it, of course, the specs are somewhere in my trunk, the copyright number SSCO-5-441-J54902. It's a good face, and served me well in the trade for almost thirty years. But it became the wisest course not to use it.

Thirty years ago, with unaccustomed money in my pocket following a long and successful run, I invested in every makeup gadget then known to mankind. This required, among other things, that my entire head be taken apart and rebuilt. My body harbors enough tech wizardry to qualify as a public nuisance. Radios spit static when I walk by. Compasses are thrown off true. But when the part calls for a full-body alteration in a hurry, I'm your guy. Or gal, as the case may be.

My first appearance was a logistical nuisance, really. Juliet says, "It is an honor that I dream not" when asked if she wants to be married. To which the nurse hoots, "An honour! Were not I thine only nurse, I would say thou hadst suck'd wisdom from thy teat." A guaranteed laugh line, which dear sweet Angeline Atkins vamped outrageously, as she did the entire role.

The problem was that the next scene, Act One, scene four, was Mercutio's chance to shine. What to do, what to do?

First things first. I struggled into the costume, stuffing padding in the appropriate places. Luckily, the skirt reached all the way to the floor.

I pulled on a black wig, quickly combed it out, and then picked up the Masque-Aid. It's a nice little gadget consisting of two parts. The first is a thin plastic tube with a snap connector on the end. I fastened this to a matching connector hidden behind my left ear, turned it on, and heard the high hiss as air began to flow through it. The second part is a styling wand, which looks like a pencil with a broad, flat head. Both units are connected to a control console and a switching system buried in my cheekbone. I pressed the flat end of the wand to my face and got to work.

There's nothing real fancy about the wand itself. It contains a powerful magnet that rotates when I press a button with my thumb. When I put it in the right position it causes surgically implanted magnets to turn, which then turn screws... which slowly cause various bones or groups of bones to move apart or closer together.

I can vary the distance between my eyes. I can lengthen my jawbone, raise and lower my cheekbones. I can create a brow ridge. In five minutes I can be Quasimodo or Marilyn Monroe.

That's the base. The air hose was taking care of the rest. There are twenty little air bags embedded in my facial skin. Suck them all dry and I look like Death. Fill them up: Fatty Arbuckle.

The only problem with all this stage magic is it can hurt if done rapidly. Depending on how much I had to do, the pain could be like a mild toothache or a severe beating.

No one ever told me art would be painless.

I was brushing pink spots onto my cheeks when someone began frantically pounding on the dressing room door. "One minute!" Dee called.

"I'll be there." I slashed two bold eyebrows with strokes of a pencil, looked at myself critically one last time. I tasted blood, dabbed at a tooth with a towel, smiled broadly at myself in the mirror.

Larry was waiting for me in the wings, and I savored the expression of bafflement as I approached him. Beyond, Romeo and Benvolio were onstage, the curtain about to come down on the scene. Larry grabbed my arm.

"Listen, babe," he whispered, staring intently into my eyes. "You can't let us down. We're all counting on you, every last one of us. I know it's been a tough road. I know I've been hard on you, but I did it because I knew you had something, darling, some magical quality you can't buy in a store. I want you to go out there and knock 'em dead. When you come back, I want you to come back a star!"

"For pity's sake, Larry, get a grip on yourself." He stood there blinking for a moment.

"Sorry. I just always wanted to say that, that's all."

"Well, I'm glad it's out of your system."

From the stage: "What, lamb! What ladybird! God forbid!—where's this girl?—what, Juliet!"

Christ, that was my cue!

"How now, who calls?" It came out in a kind of croak, but at least it was a high-pitched croak. Lady Capulet and the Nurse looked at me strangely, but soldiered bravely on through one of the less interesting scenes in Shakespeare, all about Lammas-eve and other things of minimal importance to a modern audience. I let it all drone over me and concentrated on my vocal cords, which, in the rush, I had neglected to tune. I hummed softly to myself, earning a few sharp looks from Angeline. Finally I thought I had it, and just in time, too.

"It is an honour that I dream not of." Strange. I was sure I'd heard that voice before. Lady Capulet had her back to the audience... my god, she was stifling a laugh! I played the line back in my head. Blanche DuBois! I was using the same voice I'd last employed in our production of Streetcar.

I frantically cast back through the female roles of my career, looking for something I could slip on like a comfortable shoe. A voice, a voice. My kingdom for a voice!

"Speak briefly, can you like of Paris' love?"

And I said, "I'll look to like, if looking liking move." Damn, that one sounded familiar, too. "But no more deep will I endart mine eye than your consent gives strength to make it fly." Great Caesar's ghost! That was Natalie Wood with a bad Puerto Rican accent! My review of Juliets past had led me down a cinematic byway.

Maybe if I broke into a chorus of "I Feel Pretty" no one would notice.

I had no time to lose. Exeunt all, curtain down, curtain up, enter Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio, Maskers, Torchbearers, and others. I stood in the wings and went through a transmogrification that would have had Henry Jekyll green with envy while the company entered and stalled, as they'd been warned to do, until I was ready for my entrance.

Off with the dress. Off with the wig. And no time at all for a session in front of the mirror, this has to be quick, so with a wince very like a man in front of a firing squad, I jammed my face into a plastic mask and pressed the reset button on the Masque-Aid control console.

I don't recommend this. What happened next felt like I imagine having all your teeth removed at once might feel—if you had five hundred teeth.

The machine went back to square one, at warp speed. In ten seconds I was Mercutio.

The scene went well. In it, I wax fey about Queen Mab, the fairies' midwife. Somehow my pain and disorientation made the lines less stilted than they usually seemed, less a flight of fancy and more an oration of deep meaning to Mercutio, a complex and difficult character. By the end of it, when Romeo calms me down, I was weeping unfeigned tears, shaking with emotion.

It is Larry's theory that Romeo and Mercutio were homosexual lovers. He makes it explicit by having Mercutio kiss Romeo after the line "Turning his face to the dew-dropped south." It is a good-bye kiss, presaging the upcoming assault on Romeo's heart by fair Juliet, and a prescient surrender at the same time. Myself, I have no opinions in the matter. I think it's too tough for a person of our age to really imagine what homosexuality was like in a pre-Changing time. But the scene played well. The curtain rang down to long applause.

And thank god for that, because I don't know if I could have faced the retransformation ahead of me without that sound to buoy me up.

Dee and Larry were arguing about something as I came off. Dee shouted at Larry to shut up—which turned a few heads—and grabbed my arm and pulled me to the stairs.

"I've got you five minutes to change," she said, hauling me along. "I'm replacing you in the dance, and we're doing two choruses. You'll enter, stage left, across from Romeo, while Capulet is talking. I'll cue you."

"I know the spot," I said. "Thanks." I kissed her forehead and entered my dressing room. Elwood was there waiting for me. I nodded to him and collapsed in my chair.

"There's talk of deleting the first scene in the second act," he said. Elwood is a tall man who likes to wear period clothing that hangs on his lanky body like billowing sails. He looks just like Jimmy Stewart.

"That would help a lot," I said. The styling wand was whirring quietly in my hand and Juliet's face was taking shape in the mirror. Elwood sat in a chair beside me and stretched out.

"Yeah, but it sort of cuts the legs out from under Mercutio."

Of course it did, and I didn't need Elwood to tell me. The scene had Mercutio growing increasingly frantic in his search for Romeo, who, we all know, was by then deep in enemy territory and ready to deny his father and refuse his name. Cut it, and Mercutio would look silly in scene four.

"This talk," I said, shrugging Juliet's costume over my clothes. "Who's saying it?"

"Oh, I hear things," Elwood said, with a shrug. Which is all I'd ever get out of him.

I didn't want to cut it. I'd hired on to play Mercutio, and I meant to play him well. And I'd promised Larry I could double the parts, and I meant to do that, too. But Mercutio exits at the very end of scene one and Juliet appears on the balcony at the very start of scene two. If it was only a matter of more pain I'd do it willingly, but for this appearance of Juliet I had to have the whole change and I just didn't know if it could be done in a minute.

There are air bladders in my body, too. I plugged the hose fitting from the Masque-Aid into a socket (never mind where; you could search me pretty thoroughly and probably not find it), and warm saline began pumping.

Juliet was thirteen. She had to be covered in baby fat. She needed a slim waist. She needed boobs, and a bottom.

Those last two would have to wait, as they'd look passing strange under Mercutio's tights and jerkin.

Dee was knocking on my door.

I got through the dance without mishap, and without the voice of Blanche, praise all the muses. I don't know where the voice I used came from, but it was suitable to a love-struck teenager.

Then off and wrench my face back during the short intermission between acts, then Mercutio's plaintive search for Romeo... then I was tearing backstage, tearing off Mercutio's clothes, slapping my face into the Masque-Aid while Dee plugged in the saline hose... and she was the only witness to what may have been the fastest sex change since Roy Rogers gelded Trigger.

A couple of pints quickly produced a pair of breasts fit for peace to dwell in. Ditto the behind; no sense overdoing it in either place. Suck out a little more juice from the waist, swell the hip, and voila!

Only one small detail to attend to. Well, not that small.

The penis is just skin covering two blood-filled chambers. With the proper operation those chambers can be pulled back into the body, sort of like pulling a sock inside out. Extrude it and you're the leading man. Pull it back in for the ingenue effect. Do it several times quickly and you'll be popular at your next orgy.

My father would have been proud. I came off that stage Mercutio, and appeared sixty seconds later on the balcony, Juliet.

"With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls," said Romeo, tearing off his shirt. "For stony limits cannot hold love out: And what love can do, that dares love attempt. Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me." He kissed me as I shrugged out of my own shirt.

"If they do see thee, they will murder thee." I was breathing hard now. "Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye than twenty of their swords. Look thou but sweet, and I am proof against their enmity." Dropping the Montague britches as he spoke to reveal not hand, not foot, nor arm nor face, but another part belonging to a man. A fair sun, arising! He came into my arms and we fell back together on the bed.

"I would not for the world they saw thee here." Kissing him again. "I have night's cloak to hide me from their sight; and, but thou love me, let them find me here: my life were better ended by their hate than death prorogued wanting of thy love." And so, into the sex scene.

Yes, I hear you, all you purists out there. What can I say? Given my own druthers, I'd druther do it the traditional way, too. Passionate kisses, doe-eyed looks. But the public demands realism—especially in a backwater like Brementon—and that's what they get.

Or that's what they were supposed to get. A minute into the naked embrace, I began to wonder if Romeo had read the same script I had. His bud of love, which by summer's ripening breath should by then have proved a beauteous flower, had proved too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ere one can say, It lightens. In a word, impotency.

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo? Inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, thy love has proved likewise variable.

When I had a chance to reflect on it later, the reason for his trouble was obvious. It's the obvious problems most people overlook. Romeo had an odd sexual quirk. He was a dedicated heterosexual.

I realize they're common enough in the general population, but they are rare in the thespian community. Hell, I'm practically one myself, except on the stage. Perhaps that's why no one really understood that when it came to the sticking point, as it were, his will would fail him. None of us really understood the serpentine logic of his particular perversion.

As a male hetero, he could only get aroused by a female. And though I now gave every evidence of that gender, he had known me as Mercutio, and that's what I stayed, in his mind.

I can laugh at it now. It's become one of those theatrical disaster stories we all love to tell each other, like the prop telephone that rings at the wrong time. (Solution? Pick it up, listen for a moment, then hold it out to your worst enemy and announce, "It's for you.")

There was nothing funny about it at the time.

You wouldn't have known it from the audience reaction, however. They were laughing. It's one of the worst sounds you can hear in my business: laughter when you haven't made a joke.

But if you're getting laughs, it's best to keep getting them until you figure out what else to do. Rising from the bed and stalking naked around the stage, I became Kate, shrew of Padua.

"Nay, then, I will not go today. No, nor tomorrow, nor till I please myself. The door is open, sir; there lies your way. You may be jogging while your boots are green; for me, I'll not be gone till I please myself. 'Tis like you'll prove a jolly surly groom, that take it on you at the first so roundly." Suiting action to the word, a frustrated woman trying to please herself.

Romeo sat disconsolately on the edge of the bed, hunting The Taming of the Shrew for an appropriate comeback. He looked up at me. "Why does the world report that Juliet doth limp?" he said. "O slanderous world!"

We tossed lines back and forth for a while. The laughter gradually faded—not because they were taking us seriously, but because we could stretch this situation only so far. I had no idea how to salvage it.

Suddenly Romeo jumped from the bed. He embraced me with one arm, his free hand rubbing his buttocks. And I felt his interest begin to rise.

Dee had procured a drug banned on most worlds because of extreme hazard to the male recipient: they often hurt themselves attempting sexual congress with electric light sockets and household pets. She had crawled under the bed and jabbed a needle right through the foam rubber.

"Now, Juliet," he said, "I am a husband for your turn. For by this light, whereby I see thy beauty—thy beauty that doth make me like thee well—thou must be married to no man but me. We will have rings, and things, and fine array. And kiss me, Ka—Juliet, we will be married on Sunday."

And so, at long last, to bed. Where he performed like a trouper and, as if in an effort to make up, tried to jump me again while we were singing the second verse of "Tonight."

And at long last, a scene I wasn't in.

While Romeo poured out his heart to Friar Lawrence (and, this performance only, tried to hump the Friar's leg), I staggered back to my dressing room with a full ten minutes to change back to Mercutio. And who should I find there but Dahlia Smithson, by now neither rich jewel, fair sun, nor snowy dove. I'd say she was closer to an envious moon, sick and pale. That which we call a rose would smell of gin. See how she leans her cheek upon her hand! See how her eyes, twinkling in their spheres, bulge from her head as she points to me and says, "What the fuck are you doing in here, in my costume?"

She bent over and threw up on the floor.

Well, it wasn't my problem, was it? I opened the door and yelled for Larry. Then I sat at the mirror and did what I'd have been doing with or without Dahlia's reappearance: I turned myself back into Mercutio.

Dahlia Smithson was the only name with any star power in our motley cast. She was a fading star (you can't drink that much, miss that many shows, without entering a steady and inevitable decline), but her name above the titles of our little repertory was all that had drawn the working capital for this marathon mission to bring culture to the hinterlands. Did Larry have the nerve to fire her? Not a chance.

So I sang, "Farewell, ancient lady, farewell—lady, lady, lady," left the Nurse with Romeo, and hurried backstage with three or four minutes to perform my penultimate Capuletization—not knowing if it would be needed, half hoping it wouldn't.

At first it seemed the problem had solved itself. Dahlia was stretched out on the couch, limp as Romeo's willie. Larry, lavender with terror, and Dee, purple with rage, were both tiptoeing around the room.

And Dahlia demonstrated the true resilience of the longtime alcoholic by springing from her resting place and shrieking like something out of Act One of the Scottish play. She was getting her second wind.

"You can't do this to me, you pusillanimous toad," she cursed. "And you! You ridiculous old ham! How dare you stab me in the back like this? Can't get a starring role any other way but stealing it from your betters, is that it? You polymorphous, talentless, scenery-chewing, ass-kissing sorry excuse for a has-been actor! I'll get you. I'll show you, all of you." She stormed from the room, but her voice drifted back. "I'll get you all!"

"And your little dog, too!" I cackled. Dee laughed nervously, but not Larry. He sank into a chair, eyes staring blindly into the distance, where I don't doubt he saw his profits flying. Well, really. Has-been actor, indeed!

I stumbled through the end of Act Two, re-Mercutivated myself, and shambled out into the public square to meet my doom. By then I was a little delirious with the pain. I began to see an actual dusty street in Verona swimming in and out of view. I think it was the one from the Zeffirelli production. I frankly think I outdid myself in the swordplay that followed. I damn sure gave a hell of a performance after I was stabbed. I looked down at my wound—not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve—and realized that in the confusion I'd forgotten to have the target area numbed. In one side and out the back the sword had gone, and damn me but the sucker hurt!

"Help me, Benvolio," I said, "or I shall faint. A plague on both your houses! They have made worm's meat of me." And never, dear hearts, were those words uttered in a more heartfelt manner.

Some artists can only work when all is calm about them. I seem to thrive on disorder. The worse things get, the more strongly my craft asserts itself. By Act Four I was solidly in the role. I was Juliet. Cast members began to come up to me in the wings and whisper encouragement and congratulations. It meant very little to me; I was living the next scene already.

But at one point I did become aware of a tall, broad-shouldered man holding out a piece of paper to Dee, who was looking at it and shaking her head. He moved on to Friar Lawrence and Paris, who were awaiting their entrance. Paris frowned at the paper, shrugged and shook his head, and went on. The fellow drifted over to me.

"Excuse me," he said, in a voice like sandpaper on a bass fiddle. "I'm looking for a man by the name of Kenneth C. Valentine."

"And who might you be?"

He produced a private detective's license which alleged his name was Manuel P. Garcia, and that he was authorized by the principality of Brementon—an autonomous region of the great Outland Free State—to issue bail bonds, apprehend fugitives, conduct investigations, carry a nonnuclear weapon, and in general skulk, lurk, pussyfoot, slink, creep, and lie in ambush. What it really meant was he'd been thrown off the Brementon police force and was eking out a living the only way he knew how.

"Is he in trouble again?" I asked.

"I just need to talk to him, lady. Do you know where he lives?"

"Right now, in the same hotel with the rest of us. Look, I'm sort of busy here. But I know who might be able to help you." I grabbed my makeup bag from its emergency perch in the wings and rummaged through it. "His name is Dowd. Elwood P. Dowd. Here, let me give you one of his cards." I handed it to him. "Now if you want to call him use that number, not this one. That number is the old one. Or you can hang around for the curtain. I'm sure Mr. Valentine will show up then."

I went out on the stage, fuming. God alone knew what Sparky Valentine had been up to this time. He was always in trouble of one sort or another. Having him hauled off into court would cause the production a lot of trouble.

"Yea, noise?" I whispered. I felt a steely resolve building within me. I could barely see for the tears streaming down my face. "Then I'll be brief. O happy dagger! This is thy sheath." I plunged it into my breast. "There rest, and let me die." I collapsed across Romeo's prostrate body and felt the total relaxation of death steal over me. God, was I good.

I could actually hear sobs from the audience, that group of tough, semiliterate Outlanders. Well, it may be the saddest story ever told. It's been making people weep for six hundred years.

Could real death be any more peaceful than this? Could an actor get so far into a role as to actually die onstage? I'm not saying I felt death, but I had been so deep in Juliet that some reasonable imitation had taken me. I did not want to open my eyes. I did not wish to get up. When the curtain came down they had to lift me off of Romeo and carry me into the wings.

I was alive enough to take my bows. They'll have to screw me into a real coffin before I miss that. The applause was deafening.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to stick around for the second curtain call. I hurried up the stairs to the dressing room, where Elwood had my trunk already packed. We wrestled it into the elevator and rode up to the weightless, centrifugal hub, took a moving beltway to a taxi dock, and a taxi to the spaceport, where a high-gee was boosting for Pluto in one hour.

It was a nervous hour, but soon I could see Brementon dwindling on the ship's rear screen, and relaxed for the first time since the curtain rose.

For you see, I am K. C. Valentine. But call me Sparky; all my friends do.

Judy was hollering something about Brick and Skipper, so Punch shouted back.

"You shut up or I'm gonna hit you with this crutch!"

But Judy never shuts up. So Punch started whaling away.

That's not the way it's written, but sometimes you have to punch up a play here and there if it lacks action. For a long time I'd stuck faithfully to the classical Punch and Judy repertoire, putting on everything from The Brigand Chief to Vendetta, or The Corsican's Revenge. After you've spent three or four weeks staring up Judy's skirt at her wide, flat butt, you get a little desperate to try some new material.

Now Maggie was shouting something about no-neck monsters, which didn't sit well with Dixie. They began to tussle back and forth across the stage. Judy got the upper hand and flung Dixie out into the audience. (I could see fifteen people through the peephole in the curtain; it was the best I'd done all day.)

Even if I could have held my hands above my head for three hours, no one but vagrants was going to stick around that long. Street theater is meant to be performed for people with a little time to kill while going from one place to another. Thirty minutes is about tops. Fifteen is a lot better. So Henry VI parts one, two, and three was right out. A Midsummer Night's Dream had gone over fairly well, as had King Lear. The critics had been cool to Cyrano, for some reason; with all the swordplay, I'd thought it a natural. All the above had needed a little pruning here and there, of course. But my last performance had left me a little cool to the Bard. I moved on to musical comedy. It turned out Punch and Judy were naturals at it. The children loved the songs, and the adults liked the jokes. I began alternating My Fair Lady with Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and managed to keep myself diverted for two weeks.

"I'm not dyin' of cancer, Gooper. It's nothing but a spastic colon."

"Of course not, Big Daddy. Have you made out your will yet?"

That's right. It was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Punch and Judy as Brick and Maggie, the Devil as Big Daddy, the Crocodile as Big Mama, Toby the Dog as Gooper, and Hector the Horse as Sister Woman. And featuring Tennessee Williams as Man Spinning in Grave. Don't cry for me, Mississippi.

I don't know how many times Punch and Judy have saved my bacon. For an itinerant thespian, the skills of the Punchman can be a heaven-sent alternative to a life of crime, or worse, honest work.

It costs nothing. I have carefully preserved in my trunk six character heads made for me many years ago by a fan. But I make new ones regularly from papier-mache, the ingredients for which can be mined from garbage bins behind any large food store. For paints, go to a flea market, engage an artist in conversation, and soon you will have the use of a palette and brushes. Costumes can be made from scraps begged from a dressmaker, or scrounged from dustbins, if you're handy with a needle and thread. Any actor who is not handy with a needle and thread needs to get out and see the real world more often.

There is a standard plastic packing crate you will locate easily if you haunt the delivery ways backing a mall. Sticks or stiff wire will make a frame to support the box above your head. Cut a hole in front, paint the proscenium with gay finials, arabesques, and dadoes. Now attach the curtain to the bottom edges of the box. If you can't find enough scraps, use your bedroll. Presto! You've just made a castelli, or swazzle-box, which, if you didn't know, is a curtained enclosure the size of a shower stall, with the Punch and Judy stage above it.

As my father used to say, "If you've got some ham, play Hamlet."

And I'd reply, "If you lay an egg, scramble it."

Thus we dined on many a meal of ham and eggs. And in the process, I learned how to make something out of nothing.

"I do love you, Brick. I do!" said Judy.

"Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?"

I pressed on the pedal with one foot, causing the music to swell to a climax, and as Brick went into Maggie's arms I bit the cork dangling at my left and yanked the stage curtain closed.

There was applause, so I pulled the cord on the other side and opened the curtain again, slapping Punch and Judy down into the character rack in front of me, jamming my hands into Hector and the black glove I use to handle Toby, holding them up to take their bows. Toby yapped excitedly, dangling from his harness, six kilos of French ham. He's the only dog I ever knew who preferred plaudits to provender. I dropped him to the floor along with his bucket. He picked it up and ducked under the curtain to work the crowd.

The Crocodile, the Devil, then Punch and Judy. If a Punchman ever figured how to let the whole cast take bows at once, I never heard of it. I'll continue to bring them on in pairs until I grow another arm. I put my eye to the judas and saw the crowd had grown to perhaps two dozen. Toby trotted from one to another in his ruffled collar and pointed hat, holding out the bucket, barking if he didn't think enough was dropped into it, walking on his hind legs for the really hard cases, doing a back flip for the big spenders. Nobody can turn a tip like Toby.

I pulled the curtain closed and waited awhile. Lots of puppeteers reveal themselves at the end, take a bow of their own. I don't approve of it. My hands have done the performing. No need to break the spell. Let them go their separate ways with visions of brightly painted imps dancing in their sugarplum heads.

While I waited I reached into my mouth and popped out the silver swazzle. I always get a warm feeling when I handle it. It's nearly three hundred years old, and was given to me by my father. Families used to pass along expensive pocket watches, father to son. In my family, it was the swazzle.

It's a simple device. This one had been hammered from two coins, shaped to fit into the roof of the mouth. The two pieces were wired together, and between them was... well, I'm not going to tell you. Swazzle-making was a closely guarded secret among Punchmen for centuries, and though I'm sure no one cares today, it just wouldn't feel right to spill the beans. But I can say it works something like a kazoo. With the swazzle in your mouth (and with a lot of practice) you can make that distinctive Punch twang/buzz/screech, like no other sound I've ever heard.

Everybody swallows the swazzle at least once while learning the trade. Getting it back is one of the prices you pay. Nobody ever told me art would be painless.

Toby stuck his nose under the curtain and set his pail at my feet. I lifted the castelli from its sockets in my belt, shrugged the curtain over my shoulders, and set the box on the floor, inverted. All the puppets fit neatly inside, and the curtain folded over it. (The curtain was also my sleeping bag, but since the bag is edged with gold braid and patterned in a comedy/tragedy mask motif, few ever suspected.) As I was doing this Toby nipped at my sleeve. When I frowned at him he looked off to his left, where my following gaze discovered a uniformed policeman leaning against a wall and twirling his nightstick at the end of a leather thong.

"Box, Toby," I said, and the dog leaped in on top of the curtain. I lifted it and walked past the flatfoot.

"Top o' the mornin' to you, Officer," I said, tipping my hat. He nodded, still regarding me thoughtfully, probably comparing my face with the ones he'd studied, pinned to the precinct wall, at the start of his shift. With any luck, he wouldn't make a match.

Or he could have been deciding whether or not to brace me on the matter of a performance permit, or a puppeteer's license, or a canine registration, or any of the thousand other forms citizens see fit to employ to harass people like me. I had no idea if any of the above were required here; it had been a long time since I'd been on this planet. I remembered it as reasonably loose, easygoing, even a little eccentric, like its orbit. But if history teaches us anything it is that frontiers become settled, then set, then rigidly bureaucratized, and the more bureaucrats there are, the more laws are needed to keep them fed. I hadn't been here in many years. It was time enough for lawyers to have sucked the blood from this society.

"Hey, you," said the minion of law and order. They are two of the most dreaded words I know, when coming from a blue suit. Well, Sparky, you can play deaf, you can play innocent, or you can run. But can you hide? I turned, and gave him Tom Sawyer. He made a poor Aunt Becky.

I barely got my hand up in time to snag the spinning coin that was coming my way.

"Good show," he said. A patron of the arts, a possibility I hadn't considered. "Nice dog, too," he added.

"Bless you, guv'nor," I said, tipping my hat again. "Punch thanks you, Judy thanks you, my dog thanks you, and I thank you."

And I sauntered away down the central promenade of a mall that could have been on Mercury, could have been on Mars, but happened to be on Pluto. Civilization at last.

The high-gee transport in which I made my hasty exit from Brementon was called the Guy Fawkes, following an Outlander tradition of naming their vessels after famous rogues. Fawkes was a Norwegian, I believe, who invented some sort of explosive. Our trip outward had been aboard the Quisling.

Ships in the outlands fell into three categories, I learned on the long inbound voyage. There were the medium-sized "hoppers" that served local city clusters and returned to Pluto or the Neptunian moons every decade or so. The Quisling (named, if I recall, after someone involved in rigging game shows in the early days of television), or Big Q as we called her, was one of these. She had started her days as an inner planet cruise ship, but had been obsolete for that purpose for a century. And she was showing her age.

Then there were the vast, slow cargo carriers, unmanned, that might take seventy or eighty years to reach the markets on Mars or Mercury. You know, I never did find out what it was they carried. You know something else? I never did really care. What I do know is it must be very valuable, and it must be found nowhere else. There's no other possible explanation for people being in the outlands in the first place. I postulate they were shaving the tails off comets. What else is out there?

And last, there were the "zipper" ships, small and fast, like the Guy. The Guy Fawkes was infinitely superior to the Big Q in one area, and that was velocity. In every other way, it suffered.

Certainly, the Quisling's staterooms smelled bad. Sure, the food was indifferently prepared and usually cold. Yes, the whole cast did come down with an infestation of fleas just short of Boondocks. The tiny bars of soap crumbled in your hand—if you could get the rusty water to flow in your shower in the first place—and the toilets muttered menacingly all night and flooded on some sort of lunar cycle. Ah, but a smelly stateroom is better than no room at all. The toilets were unreliable, but they were there, one to a room. There's an old joke about one actor turning to another and commenting on how terrible the food is in this hotel. To which the other replies, "Yes, and such small portions." I'd never really appreciated it until boarding the Guy. Soon I was thinking of my cantankerous toilet on the Quisling with real nostalgia: a poor thing, but mine own. There was one toilet on the Guy, for 150 passengers. There had been two, but one had exploded a few months before. That's right, I said exploded. You could still see blood stains on the ceiling above it. I'll say this: it reduced the waiting time. Most of us stalled until we were dancing, then sort of hovered over it, alert for any premonitory gurgle. Which proved to be a good idea, as one brave soul who actually sat became the victim of a "transient pressure deficit," a term I wrote down as soon as the captain told us, it being the best euphemism for vacuum—a word spacers avoid—I'd heard in my many years in space. If you want to know what happened, I propose an experiment for the curious student. Drop a few burning matches into a beer bottle, then set a hard-boiled egg over the mouth. We pried for fifteen minutes before we could get him loose. He described the experience as "like an enema in reverse" and improvised a bedpan for the rest of the trip, as did most everyone else.

I know it's in mighty poor taste to dwell at length on such a subject. Normally I wouldn't, but nothing else could so quickly and succinctly give you a picture of conditions aboard the Guy. It had all the stinks, fleas, cockroaches, rats, and rusty water the Quisling did, and it was crammed into a much smaller space. It had worse food, and not enough of it. We slept on drawers that rolled in and out of the wall like slabs in a morgue. This put you about a foot away from your neighbors on each side, above, and below, and gave you a unique opportunity for research into the sounds and smells of a class of humanity most people never get to meet.

I did mention that much of Brementon was a prison colony, didn't I? Then it stands to reason that more than half my fellow passengers were parolees, or people who had finished their terms. Mostly the latter, as Brementon didn't get a lot of the sort anybody would ever trust on parole. So night after night I lay there and listened to conversations that would curl your hair, and to other, involuntary sounds polite society tries to pretend don't exist. So that's what a man who murdered his mother sounds like when he farts. Interesting. And that smell, that's the dirty socks of a ritual cannibal.

"It's all material, Dodger," my father used to say when events had brought us to a particularly perilous pass. "You can use all of this. Next time you have to play despair, why, you can just think back to this." And he'd smile, and pinch my cheek.

I said "night after night," but that's misleading, too. Of course, there is no night in space, particularly out where we were. And my sleep period was not even ship's night. We shared the bunks, you see, in eight-hour shifts. And if you think the linen got changed between shifts you haven't been listening. I don't think the linen got changed between flights.

And while I've got the chance, I'd like to complain to the management about that transit time of six months. Is this any way to run a railroad? What we did was blast at an ungodly acceleration for what seemed like days (they swore it was more like hours), and then we coasted the entire trip, until it was time to slow down at Pluto. I tried complaining to the captain, but he was exasperating about it, as spacers always are. Trying to tell me it was more "economical" to use all our reaction mass in one big kick, as hard as we could stand it, and then another one at the end. I ask you, does that make sense? Wouldn't it be better to boost at a sane, comfortable one gee until we got halfway there, then do the same thing slowing down? Or if we didn't have enough fuel for that (I'll admit I'm a bit vague on some of the details), at least spread the acceleration out. It stands to reason we'd build up more speed that way, and I'm sure we'd get there more rapidly. I'm convinced we were cheated. I shall write my congressperson, really I shall.

Because the kicker to the whole sorry mess was that, for all that uncomfortable "economy," we ended up paying an eighty percent surcharge on our tickets! As if that third-rate cattle car were some crack liner! And what did we get for our money? Bone-breaking jackrabbit starts and stops, and six months of free fall with no soap or showers.

That eighty percent fee almost killed me. After beating a hasty retreat from the Playhouse, thinking the hounds were literally nipping at my heels, I trundled my trunk into the spaceport secure in the knowledge that I had a confirmed booking on the next ship out, which was the Fawkes. Out of long habit I had made such a reservation, in Elwood's name, on every ship that was scheduled to leave Brementon. This wasn't much of a chore, as Bremen-ton was not King City Interplanetary; arrivals and departures were at an average rate of one every three days. At more civilized facilities I would memorize flight schedules for a selection of possible emergency destinations. At Brementon, it was take it or leave it.

One precept my father put right up there with "always cut the cards" was never to embark on a road trip without your return ticket in your pocket. If you were my best friend, and came to me swearing that without the loan of a fiver your dear sweet mother would die of a horrible disease, and all I had in my pocket was my return ticket, I would look you in the eye and swear I was penniless. I would cheerfully listen to the old broad croak her last, secure in the knowledge I'd done the right thing.

So I thought I was in good shape when I slapped my ticket down on the counter, trying not to look over my shoulder, and that's when I was let in on the closely guarded secret (actually, it was buried in the fine print when I looked, later) that sent me scrambling to my purse to discover that, even with gold fillings in my teeth, I couldn't do better than sixty percent. Not, that is, until I recalled the antique diamond brooch I'd discovered only the day before, carelessly and shamefully neglected upon Dahlia Smithson's dresser top. I'd just been passing by in the corridor, honest, when the thing seemed to call out to me. I feel that when you own something as fine as that you are obligated to be more careful with it. I'd meant to tell her that, too, but events intervened, and here I was shy a bit of cash, so there was nothing for it but to sell the brooch to a larcenous ticket agent for a twentieth of what it would have fetched in any pawnshop in Luna.

All this, mind you, when Larry held a tidy sum in his accounts, two weeks' pay, that rightly should have come to me but which I was by then powerless to collect. I gnashed my teeth, leveled a mighty curse on the ticket agent, his heirs and assigns unto the seventh generation, and boarded ship.

This is why I debarked at Lowell Interplanetary with three dollars and a set of Punch and Judy dolls.

You're probably wondering just what the private detective wanted to talk to me about. I know I was, though I didn't dwell on it. There's nothing to be gained by that, and certainly nothing to be gained by sticking around to find out. It was sheer luck he came searching for "Mercutio," armed with his picture from the playbill, and that the poor boy was by then a grave man. Fortune doesn't smile so brightly on me every day, and when she does I don't insult her by asking a lot of questions.

But I'll admit, I did wonder. Was it that business on Boondocks? I swear, I didn't know the girl was the governor's daughter.

This mall that happened to be on Pluto was called Cerberus Place, and that name forces me to admit that, though a mall is a mall is a mall, this one couldn't really be on Mars or Mercury. Not unless the Martian or Mercurian mall was attempting a Plutonian look.

It is a major failing of modern society, to my mind, that most of the inhabited planets don't have a style of their own. Oh, there are minor differences, of course, a few things here and there that would lead you to believe you were on Miranda and not on Luna. Mostly these are in the category of monuments, tourist attractions. As on Old Earth the Statue of Liberty was emblematic of New York, the Eiffel Tower meant Paris. There was no Lunar look, as there had been a Japanese, or a Danish, or Mexican or Nigerian look. No one would be walking around in "Lunarian" costume, living in Lunarian buildings, doing Lunarian folk dances in their peculiarly Lunarian steel shoes. Cultural and stylistic differences were dealt a death blow by the Invasion, which left only one human ethos really viable. That culture has been called Techno-English by its admirers, Judeo/Anglo/Cyber/NASA/Caucasian and much less flattering combinations by those who love it less. Certainly the Techno-part was indispensable; people who didn't take their machines seriously soon found themselves gulping vacuum.

Pluto was the exception to the rule of uniformity. The first thing you noticed was that there was a definite, strong Plutonian accent. Other planets had slight differences in word choice and pronunciations. Plutonians (or Stygians, or Hadeans, as they sometimes called themselves) spoke with a pronounced twang that could be indecipherable to the untrained ear.

Then there was the architecture. There was a distinct Hadean style, most pronounced in older structures. The remarkable thing was that a Hadean style existed at all. Its reason for being lay in Pluto's unique historical place among the Eight Worlds. For its first century of human habitation, it had been a prison planet.

There's a deep urge in the human soul to send the bad people as far away as possible from "decent folk." On Earth, Australia was a prime example. Post-Invasion, Pluto seemed to fit the bill, and today, it's Brementon. If society succeeds in pushing criminals any farther, we'll find we have achieved star travel. I don't know what Australia was like. Probably a fairly awful place for urban transportees. In the case of Pluto, the urge for distant exile was purely a psychological one. Living in one place where the atmosphere is inimical or nonexistent is pretty much like living in any other. You burrow underground, you husband your oxygen, you struggle to grow things you can eat, you bear and raise children. As time goes by, all these things get easier. Who really cares if the struggle is on Luna or on Pluto?

Obviously, the early Lunarian voters did. They sent their prisoners there by the thousands over the decades. There must have been a lot of self-righteous satisfaction in shipping your incorrigibles off to a place that was a synonym for hell.

Like remote prison colonies before it, Pluto had developed a convict/citizen society. Sentences were always for life, but could be served behind bars, in labor camps, or in relative freedom, depending on the offense. But even the "free" prisoners despised the guard class and the ruling elite, a social division that survives, in some respects, to this very day. The place is run, by and large, by descendants of criminals. But the richest families trace themselves back to the Regents, as they call themselves. Or "screws," as everyone else knows them.

Had enough history for today? Hold on, I'm almost through. The Hadeans, as many downtrodden people had before them, eventually made being outcasts a source of pride. Send us to Hell, will you? All right, we'll glory in it. We'll be hellcats, hellhounds, and hellions. We'll be hellacious hellraisers, hellborn and hellbred.

Aesthetically, the Plutonian style embraced the colors red and black—excessively, to my eye. Shapes were massive, and tended to loom. Fire was a frequent motif, stone a frequent building material. Hadeans were big on obsidian. There was something vaguely Egyptian to it all... if the Pharaohs had painted their temples glossy black, with crimson highlights.

Philosophically, the obsession with all things Abyssal led to the founding of one of the two great religions established since the Invasion: Diabolism.

Morally, the combination of distance, banishment, and rebellion (the result, I'd always felt, of a planetary inferiority complex) had formed a society viewed as permissive in a milieu not noted for social constraints. It was easier to murder someone on Pluto, for instance, than anyplace in the system. You could mount a valid defense based on a legal principle the locals summed up as "He needed killin'," and if you could prove it, not even pay a fine to your victim's survivors.

And practically, the interactions of frontier vigor, strong competitive instincts, a neurotic impulse to prove oneself better than one's rivals, and something hardly known elsewhere in the system—a solid work ethic—had produced a civilization perpetually nipping at the heels of those old-line bastions, those stuffier, more comfortable, and much more smug rival claimants to the mantle of Center of Humanity: Luna and Mars.

So it was through these infernal environs I trudged after my last show of the day. And I do mean trudged; Pluto's gravity is not much, but I'd been in free fall a very long time and didn't have my ground legs back yet. When you add in the fact that I'd been standing in the castelli for almost six hours with only a few rests, you get one tired polymorphous, scenery-chewing, talentless, sorry excuse for a has-been actor.

Six months later, and that still stung!

But I wouldn't think about that now. I'd think about it tomorrow.

Toby had very little sympathy for the pains human flesh is heir to. He trotted along five or six steps ahead of me, pausing every ten or fifteen seconds to look back, impatient but too polite to say anything.

Toby? That's right, you haven't really been introduced, yet, have you?

I picked him up at a theatrical supply shop, it must be forty-five, fifty years ago. Toby comes from a line of show folk almost as long as my own. He's a Bichon Frise, in theory, which is French for "curly lapdog." His forebears capered in the court of the Sun King. They fared no better in the French Revolution than the Bourbons themselves, and afterward eked out a living in the circus ring. Like many other dog breeds, they were wiped out in the Invasion, revived during the following century from the Genetic Library, and in Toby's case, extensively tinkered with in the process.

He looks just like a standard pre-Invasion Bichon, which is to say he is covered with fleecy white curly hair, has beady black eyes set in a head like the puffball of a dandelion. When combed out and groomed he looks much bigger than he really is, which is about fourteen inches tall. Somewhere in his chromosomes are genes that evolved in squirrels before being snipped out and pasted into the canine species. This enables him to hibernate, with the proper chemical stimulus.

He doesn't seem to grow any older while he's hibernating. This, and a bit more genetic high jinks, accounts for his good health at such an extreme age. And there's something else in the mix. Some say it's monkey genes, some whisper that it's human—but that, of course, would be illegal, so I'm sure it's not true. Ahem. Whatever the source, he does have a remarkable brain. He learns very quickly, responds to over two hundred verbal commands and about as many gestures, and has even demonstrated initiative and discrimination, as when he recognized the idling cop as a possible source of trouble. On the other hand, being from a line of actors, he might have inherited that ability honestly. He tolerates costumes of all sorts. He knows his part in twenty-five Punch and Judy plays and learns his cues in new shows with no more than two rehearsals. He can prance all day on his hind legs, climb ladders, walk a tightrope, jump through a hoop of fire. He gets horribly depressed if the show bombs and would walk by a raw sirloin to steal that extra bow. In short, a trouper down to his little toenails.

He's also something of a mathematical whiz, being able to count to five. I know this to be true because numbers six and above confuse and depress him. He'll worry for hours about the difference between a pile of six coins and a pile of eight coins. Ask him which is larger and he'll mope all day. But he can make change for a nickel.

I've often thought that, with just double the IQ, he could master the decimal system and become a stockbroker.

I counted the day's take as we strolled the eighteenth promenade of Cerberus Place, and realized this was going to be a big day for us.

"Looks like we've got enough, Toby," I said. "With a few shekels left over for some dinner." He understood only the last word of that, but he understood that word very well, and turned a back flip in celebration. Then he led me to the pushcart on the nineteenth level, no doubt recalling how we'd had to pass it by the evening before, a terrible day for the theater. I bought two hot pretzels and two steaming, juicy bratwurst on sourdough buns, slathering mustard, relish, and a little sauerkraut on the latter. I cajoled the vendor into giving us a cup of water and a plastic bowl, then carried the whole glorious mess to a nearby picnic table, where we sat down, just like citizens, and had our evening's repast.

Well, I sat. Toby stood on the table and watched me cut the brat with my pocketknife and put the slices in the plastic bowl. I added a dab of the pickle relish and more of the mustard.

"Is that enough mustard?" I asked him, and he barked once. "Enough" was the key word there; I don't think he knew "mustard." He knew he liked it, you understand. He just wouldn't recognize the word if I said it to him. Toby likes mustard, can deal with relish, prefers to leave the sauerkraut alone.

The one bark, you may have figured out, meant "yes." One for yes, two for no. Can you count to two, boys and girls?

"Too bad there's no wine, eh, Toby?" He didn't answer, too busy with his little muzzle in the bowl, chowing down. And I wasn't really complaining. For weeks we'd had mostly rice cakes. Twice I'd splurged on a jar of peanut butter. The brats were straight from heaven.

The business day was winding down around us. Cerberus Place was not a big mall, just another dozen levels above us, possibly half a mile across and two miles long. It looked to have been a natural surface feature at one time, roofed over, pressurized, heated, then terraced like a farmer contour plowing, tunneled, excavated, paved, lighted, landscaped, painted, decorated, and presto! Open for business. What nightlife there was seemed to be concentrated on the upper levels. Down here on the nineteenth the stores were closed, a few employees locking the doors and trudging off to the slideways, patrolbots and a few human security guards making their entrances. The vendor had shut down his grill and wheeled his cart away. Toby and I were left with the little pocket park to ourselves. I gazed out over the mall as I ate, registering nothing really novel. The floor was a manicured park, with tidy trees and streetlights lining the walking paths, a little railroad running around the edges. There were half a dozen freestanding apartment buildings in the park, all fifteen stories high, all mounted on turntables so the residents had ever-changing views. Rents would be high in those sparkling jewel boxes.

I could see a little amusement park down there. A carousel turned, the horses bobbing up and down with no one riding them. For some reason it made me sad.

We finished our meal. I poured a little water in Toby's dish and let him lap it up. He had mustard stains around his mouth, so I wet part of my handkerchief and dabbed at him until he was clean, then combed the hair on his head until it stood out as it was supposed to. He never trusts me on that; he began to bark, so I sighed and took out the small hand mirror and held it up for him. He studied his image until he was satisfied he was in a fit state to meet his public, then graciously allowed me to carry the wrappings to a garbage can.

Two of the human security guards had paused as they walked by our table. A person alone is suspicious to the cop mind. Two people together, of course, are probably planning something. Three is a gang, and five is a riot waiting to happen. You can't win. Can you count to five, Officer?

We set off for the Outland Lines freight office.

The second thing I hadn't counted on in my journey from Brementon to Pluto, after the eighty percent surcharge, was the new Wandering Thespian Harassment Assessment Fee. They didn't call it that, naturally—some bullshit about a Spaceport Improvement Luggage Excise—but that was the effect. There now was a duty on each piece of luggage you brought in to Pluto. I spent most of my first day on Pluto shouting at an endless series of obstinate officials. Result: no tickee, no luggee. The one bright point was that they couldn't simply confiscate my trunk, though it was plain in their eyes they all viewed this as an unfortunate technical oversight in the law, soon to be remedied. But they could damn sure keep it until I paid the fee. I left there with my tail between my legs—and my dog in my hand. Arguments that the tools of my trade, my means of making the money to pay their goddam extortion, were all in my trunk, fell on the usual deaf ears. But I told them that if I couldn't get my hibernating dog out of his box and feed him he would die in a week and I'd hit the spaceport, the city, the county, and most important, you, asshole, with a lawsuit the likes of which this stinking iceball of a planet had never seen. They leafed through their books of regulations and found nothing to cover the situation and so, grudgingly, let me open the trunk and get Toby out. While I did it I got my bedroll and my puppets, as well, and no one said anything.

All bunkum. Toby would have been fine for five months. I was dying to tell one of them that, but when we entered the freight office and announced I was ready to pay the ransom on my belongings, none of the officials there had been present at my disembarking. That's the way it is with these people, you know. You never see the same ones twice. I think they're composted at the end of the day, and new ones spring full-grown from the muck, like toadstools.

"All the world's not a stage," my father had been fond of saying. "Only the best part of it. Between shows, you'll need good luggage."

It's good advice, and I've always taken it to heart. In my career I've lived in nine-room hotel penthouse suites and plush-carpeted modular winnies trucked to location sites. I've owned luxury condos and homes in the most exclusive Disneylands. At times I've owned enough things to lease storage modules simply to accommodate the excess.

More often, everything I own could be packed into one trunk. It's a big trunk, granted, but if you think it's easy, look around your own surroundings and ask yourself if you could do it.

Remember I talked about a return ticket, when going on the road? My attachment to that ticket would rate as a pale thing indeed compared to the tenacity with which I would hold on to that trunk. Imagine how you'd feel if murdering rapists were holding your children hostage, and you'll get some idea how upset I was to learn I couldn't take my trunk with me on arrival.

Pawnbrokers weep with joy when they see me coming, begin planning that long-delayed rumpus room in the basement or a nice vacation on Oberon. But while the trunk may contain many items I'll cheerfully hock, the trunk itself is sacred. It contains everything of any importance to me.

Don't shop for one like it at your local outfitter. It was custom-made for me thirty years ago by the firm of Signe Powell, christened the Pantechnicon Mark III. (I also owned the original, and the Mark II, replacing each not so much because it had worn out or become obsolete, but because I had the money, and a few new ideas.) It is waterproof, vacuumproof, fireproof, and proof against most forms of radiation. It's... well, it has so many features that any useful description would quickly start sounding like an operator's manual, so perhaps it's best just to mention them as needed. But if in the course of my story the Pantechnicon blacks up, gets down on one knee, and starts to belt out "Swanee River," don't be too surprised.

The nine-room penthouse suites were but a passing memory these days. Lately, Toby and I had been sleeping rough in mall service corridors.

You can spend a long life beneath the surface of one of the Eight Worlds without ever visiting a service corridor, unless you are a delivery person or work in the stockroom of one of the stores it adjoins. These are not exactly public spaces, but they're not precisely private, either. You don't need a permit or a security badge to enter most of them, but finding the entrance is usually beyond the powers of the uninitiated, at least the sort of entrance I was looking for. Getting to them should have been easy. Simply walk into any store, any retail outlet at all, follow the signs to the emergency fire exit. This will take you through the stockroom... where you will be seen, bothered, and usually turned back by some meddlesome employee, especially if you're wheeling a trunk the size of a small asteroid. No, it was seldom that easy in practice. The public and service corridors are like the human circulatory system. Arteries carry goods from the factories to the point of sale, veins carry them back to consumers' homes. The great engine of commerce flows freely at all points, but the two flows never mix.

But if you know how to get back there, unchallenged—and I'd learned it at my father's knee—you will find a Spartan realm free of the madding crowds. It is a place of dim lighting, high ceilings, gray walls, completely utilitarian as few places in the public world are.

It's a dangerous place until you know the ropes. Robot and manned vehicles zip along paths whose system is not intuitively obvious, following signals and signs you may not even see unless you know what to look for. It's a good place to get squashed like a bug beneath a fifty-wheel flatbed goods train equipped with only token lights and brakes; the operator usually will never know he hit you. So don't go back there unless you're with somebody like Uncle Sparky, who knows the ropes, okay, boys and girls?

The great advantage to this huge, unknown city is that people will usually leave you alone once you've gained entrance. This is where the down-and-outers hide from the rousting nightstick and the contemptuous stare. Winos, tramps, vagabonds, swagmen, and other ladies and gentlemen of leisure drift away from their daytime endeavors to find a private corner here where one can spread his kip and not be bothered. Did you ever wonder where city pigeons go to build their nests and raise their pidglings? This is the place.

This is also the site of that peculiar abode known as the jungle. By following a few seemingly random chalk marks on walls, marks that you probably would not even have seen, and certainly couldn't have read even if you knew there was information in them, I made my way to a warehouse door. There was a court seal on it, promising me that if I broke it I would be subject to a fine and jail time. But the date was twenty years previous and the printing was almost illegible. Places like these, full of useless merchandise attached in connection with a bankruptcy dating to when dinosaurs walked the Earth, were among the least frequented and policed areas on any civilized planet. Which was just fine with the hoboes who came here to gather around the fire and swap stories just as they had in the heyday of the railroads on Earth. Toby and I picked our way through towering stacks of dusty crates in the darkness, guided only by a light from the Pantechnicon. We came to a huge open space, at the far end of which was a flickering orange light with human shapes sitting around it. Toby took off, barking. You don't sneak up on a group of 'bos, but I never had to worry about announcing myself when Toby was up and around.

I got there to find Boots Lumpkin putting down a plate for the dog. Toby himself was working his way around the circle, greeting his friends, some of whom he'd known for thirty years, others he'd met the night before.

"Easy on the mulligan, Boots," I said, setting the trunk down on its end. "That rascal put away a sausage big as his own hind leg an hour ago."

"Gotcha," said Boots, and ladled a bit of stew into the bowl while Toby threw me a reproachful look. The crazy hound would have eaten whatever was put in front of him, though his belly was round as a beach ball, because it's rude to turn down stew in a hobo jungle, and because that's just what dogs do.

I was greeted around the circle by those who knew me, introduced to those few I hadn't met.

"Looks like you finally got your bindle back," Sarge Pollito called out, which was always good for a laugh. While nobody there actually had his goods tied in a handkerchief and hung from a stick, comparing the Pantechnicon Mark III with the canvas backpacks, haversacks, kitbags, portmanteaux, and valises that contained the belongings of these happy mudlarks was comical indeed.

"Will the butler be arriving soon?" someone called out.

"Had to let the blighter go, Skids," I said, ruefully. "He just wouldn't keep the silver polished." I accepted a plate of stew, shook my head to the offer of coffee. It keeps me awake.

"Hard to get good help these days," said Rivkah the Jewess.

"You said it, Riv. I'm looking for a new upstairs maid. Interested?"

She punched my shoulder, and I sat on the trunk and spooned up the stew.

One night in 1867, in a railyard in Ohio—so the story goes—a 'bo knocked over a rabbit with a good toss of a stone. He skinned it, chopped in a potato and a few wild onions and carrots he found growing trackside, added some flour and salt and pepper, then tossed the whole mess in his billy and boiled it up. It tasted so good he saved some for the next night, when another hobo offered some venison jerky to add to the mix. The third night he met a man who had some beans and a chili pepper. The night after that it was raccoon. And since that unfortunate coney met his maker, every bird of the air and beast of the earth, every fish that swims in the sea, every creep-crawlie that wriggles on its belly or burrows in the mud has had its turn in the stewpot. The mulligan had been ladled over chow mein noodles, spooned over eggs, slapped into sloppy joe sandwiches, sizzled with dumplings, rolled up in crepes, and slipped under mashed potatoes. The Eternal Mulligan is boiled anew every night; you donate what you can to the pot, take out what you need—it is always shared with all present.

And somewhere on my plate, I fancied, was the tiniest bit of that jackrabbit who was just a little bit too slow one night in Ohio, almost four hundred years ago, on the poor Old Earth.

Highly unlikely, I'm well aware. But hey, cobber, there's no need to rain on my parade, eh? A sense of continuity is nothing to sneer at in this impermanent world. Does it matter if that continuity is a fable? Is reality that sacred to you?

I put a few bread loaves, scrounged from a bakery's waste bin only an hour before, beside the stewpot as my part of the night's meal. Then I rolled the Pantech into a dim corner and prepared for the night.

The trunk sprouts two wheels and a handle for upright movement, a wheel on each corner if you'd prefer to get behind it and shove. I popped the wheels back into their sockets and opened a panel on what had been the top end before I laid the trunk on its side. An air compressor began to chug quietly, and my tent began to inflate itself.

It's made out of memory plastic. Folded, it adds about an inch to the thickness of the trunk. Deployed, it makes a cube about five feet on a side. Five of those sides are rigid as plywood and much stronger; an elephant could dance on my tent roof. The floor is full of pockets and makes quite a good air mattress.

I shoved my bedroll through the sphincter door that, in a pinch, can be almost as effective as a formal airlock. Then I squeezed myself in, reached out, and snapped on the light. I just sat there a moment, breathing my own air. It was the first time, literally the first moment I had felt safe and secure since the PI tapped me on the shoulder in Brementon.

This was the second thing that kept me sane in the Guy Fawkes. When I was feeling the worst, I'd slip down to the cargo hold, deploy the tent, crawl in, and sit there and shake. I'd have cheerfully passed the whole voyage in here, but the cargo area was off-limits to passengers and I lived in fear I'd be discovered and watched more carefully, so I rationed my time. What luxury to sit on my own bed, with my own six walls around me!

I ran a quick systems check, determined that the Hadean Customs Service hadn't managed to wreak any real harm, probably not from lack of trying.

Most of one wall was the top end of the trunk. I lowered a shelf from it, a shelf containing a hot plate and a teapot. I brewed up and poured into a porcelain cup that had once been the property of Judy Garland. Luckily, there was no way of authenticating this, so I was never tempted to pawn it since, in the world of collectible Terriana, provenance is all. I pulled out a drawer and using the spoon and freeze-dried cream I found there, made the tea the proper color. I noticed I was almost out of cream. (Actor: "I'll have a cuppa tea, without cream." Waiter: "We're out of cream, sir. It'll have to be without milk." Rimshot.) Where the shelf had been there was (what else) a mirror lined with strip lights, so the tent could be used as a dressing room. The whole side would fold away, providing me access to the trunk without lifting the upper lid or leaving the tent.

I spread my blankets and took off my coat, and in the process remembered something else I'd filched from the baker's garbage. Toby slipped through the lock as I took the cupcake out of my coat pocket and set it on the shelf. He watched me curiously as I rummaged in another drawer and came up with a single candle. I poked it into the cupcake.

I'd been trying to forget it, trying to make it add up another way, but there was no avoiding it. Today was my birthday. Please, in lieu of presents, send your contributions to Actors' Relief. It was a rather significant birthday, too.

"How about it, Toby?" I asked him. "Can you count to one hundred?" He barked once, which I'm sure everyone in the class remembers meant "Yes!" Well, of course he could. Toby can count one of anything, including hundreds.

I lit the candle and was about to offer him a piece, but he scratched at the lock and looked inquiringly at me.

Ah, Toby, what am I going to do with you? For the last week he'd been going out at night, after I was asleep. I suspected he had a girlfriend out there somewhere. That, or he was getting together with one of the packs of wild dogs rumored to live in the service corridors. Probably peeing on everything in sight. Toby is quite the ladies' man. I'd seen him, with more optimism than common sense, mooning over a Great Dane bitch he'd need a stepladder just to sniff. Sure, you can write that off to high hopes. But the amazing thing was, the bitch was looking really interested.

"Oh, sure, party time again," I said. "And may I ask you, young man, when you're going to settle down and make something of yourself?" He waited patiently. He knows that when I get in certain moods I'm apt to toy with him, take unfair advantage of the fact I know a few more words than he does. "Go, then, and be quick about it," I said. "But so help me, if you come back smelling of strong drink..." He was already out the door.

So I blew out the candle, ate the cake, and pulled the covers up around my neck. I left a small night light on for Toby... and because I had trouble sleeping in complete darkness.

How about you, boys and girls? Can you count to one hundred?

"I still feel so foolish, Detective Friday," said the lovely Miranda Mayard-Tate as she rose from her genuine Earth-crafted Louis Quinze settee, a piece of furniture equivalent in price to the Gross Planetary Product of some smaller Uranian moons.

"Don't worry about it, ma'am," I said, in Friday's flat, affectless voice, giving her his flat, unemotional-but-earnest stare, and thinking, Foolish? Any more foolish and respiration would be a big intellectual challenge, you pathetic screw. I trust that opinion never showed in my face, and I continued: "You weren't the only one taken in by this bunch. But don't worry. We'll get 'em." I sketched a flat, wry smile, the only sort Joe Friday was capable of. You know Joe, the taciturn, humorless homicide dick from that old warhorse, LA. Blues? I've played him in three different productions. ("Thursday. 8:03 P.M. Went to the Larson Theater, 5543 Main Street. Heard there was a 437 in progress. Acting without dramatic license. The sign said LA. Blues. Went in. Sat Down. Watched the show. Gathered enough evidence to convict four cast members of emoting, hamming it up, chewing the scenery, and felonious gesticulating. Figured out the plot during first act. Issued a warrant for the playwright. The charge: cliches in the first degree. Had to let Ken Valentine go. No basis to the charge of woodenness. Found him to be resolute, implacable, just after the facts."—Flip City Courier.) (There was similar schtick the other times I played Friday. Why do reviewers have to be so cute?) Dropping back into Friday for Miranda M-T's benefit was like putting my flat feet into a pair of comfortable old shoes.

"Goodness! I certainly hope so." What can I tell you? I'm not responsible for other people's lines. I merely report what I hear, even when it contains "goodness" as an exclamation.

A long, gloomy silence settled over the scene. As it threatened to become funereal, or possibly even permanent, I decided a prompt was in order. "Well," I said, "we can get started on it if you'll just get the money."

"Oh, certainly," she said, getting up and looking around vaguely. It was obvious she'd forgotten where she put it. The rich really are different. "I'll just go... are you sure you won't have a drink?"

"Not while I'm on duty, ma'am." There was a double meaning to that. Every line Friday uttered screeched teetotaler. He wouldn't drink, on or off duty, not so much because alcohol was evil, but because it would get in the way of his relentless pursuit of crime. You just knew his evenings at home were spent perusing his old notebooks, and his idea of a good time was oiling his gun. As he said in the last line of L.A. Blues; "Just the facts, ma'am." That's all he was interested in. Just the facts.

Me, I would have gladly joined Miranda in a glass of something, but when I'm "on duty," playing a role, I never step out of it.

As Mrs. Mayard-Tate fluttered away to unknown regions of her palatial warren, I stood and looked at her parlor closely for the first time. What had caught my eye was a wood and glass display case housing dozens of yellow-white carvings, none much larger than a golf ball. Of all the fabulous riches in that room, the loot of generations, these are what drew me.

I was still studying them when Miranda returned carrying a small canvas bag emblazoned with the name and logo of the Bank of Hell. "You like them?" she asked, handing the bag to me.

"I was wondering what they were, ma'am," I said.

"They're called netsuke. I've never cared for them, myself. I keep wondering if I ought to sell them. I'm told they'd bring a good price."

She probably had no idea. Any pre-Invasion artifact is worth something, but there is earthcraft, and then there is Earthcraft! There are societies that collect mass-produced paper clips and pencils from the twentieth century. These people keep their treasures in glassine envelopes and handle them only with tongs, but they are not the same crowd that traffics in netsuke.

"I think they were some sort of hair clip," she was saying, shoving vaguely at her great mass of chocolate hair. "Kind of a barrette. I never could get any of them to work. There was probably some trick to it. I guess I'm missing something."

How about several billion brain cells, darling? Netsuke... hair clips? I was tempted to tell her the cunning little wooden-and-ivory objects had been used to suspend items from the ceremonial sashes, or obis, of the gentlemen of Japan, as depicted on many a vase and jar, many a screen and fan, three or four hundred years ago. But Friday wouldn't have known that. For that matter, Sparky Valentine wouldn't have known it but for the fact I'd worn one many years before during a production of the Noh opera Yurigi at the Straits of Awa ("...a not entirely successful attempt at mating Akira Kurosawa with Victor Herbert, enlivened considerably by the puckish performance of K. C. Valentine in the role of Yasuhiro."—Neptune Trident).

"You seem to be staring at that one."

"Was I? I hadn't realized." But it was obvious which one she was talking about. It was a frog, perched on a human skull. The skull had a thick brow ridge, and the long, bulb-tipped fingers of the frog wrapped around it and into the eye sockets. Somehow, the artist had portrayed a coiled power in the little beast, and had given it a predator's lazy eyes. They looked at you without fear or mercy, and you just knew you couldn't show them anything they hadn't seen many times already.

"Would you like a closer look?" Without waiting for a reply she reached behind the cabinet and produced an oddly shaped piece of metal—copper or brass, it looked like—which I soon realized was an antique key. She opened the case, took the frog and skull, and handed it to me.

It was cool at first, but quickly warmed, seemed almost to soften in my hand. My thumb automatically caressed the frog's back. I looked up at her and smiled.

"Maybe I will have that drink, ma'am," I said.

Elwood was waiting for me at the edge of the big park that marked the boundary of Miranda Mayard-Tate's upper-upper-class neighborhood. He was seated on a bench, his hands jammed into the pockets of his baggy trousers, his long legs stretched out before him, the gray fedora pushed forward to almost cover his eyes. Toby sat on the bench beside him. Behind them, people in red jackets and white riding breeches and black riding boots sat atop their magnificent steeds and cantered grandly back and forth in a ritual as old as money itself. And the funds of these equestrian dandies were ancient indeed, so old that their primordial corruption served as its own fertilizer, so old that the sweet whiff of its decay overpowered the honest stink of the piles of horseshit that was all most of these people ever produced. And true to the breeding habits of the very, very rich, some of these people made my Sweet Miranda seem a mental giant.

Perhaps those thoughts seem unworthy. I knew where they came from: I was psyching myself up for Elwood, who didn't much approve of my recent activities.

Toby spotted me first, and came scampering in my direction. Elwood followed in his relaxed, shambling gait. "You get what you came for?" he asked.

"Don't I always?"

When Toby realized I was talking to Elwood and not to him, he started to growl and bark. You don't know what terror is until you've heard a Bichon growling. After you've heard it, you still don't have a clue. Back in the park, I'm sure all the squirrels in earshot were helpless with laughter.

It made me sad. The fact is, Toby really can't stand Elwood. Elwood hadn't been around much since our arrival at Pluto. Now he was back, and Toby didn't like it a bit. I had to speak to him sharply, which made his head hang and his tail droop. He fell behind us and trudged along under a dark cloud of gloom, his every movement calculated to wring the last drop of guilt from his pitiless master. The awful thing was, it worked. But it wouldn't do to let Toby know that, so I shrugged my shoulders and tried to ignore him. "I just don't think that robbing from one of the most powerful families in Pluto is the smartest thing you ever did," Elwood went on.

"Godfrey Daniel!" I exploded. "Getting somebody to hand you money is not robbery. It's a short con. They're two different things. And the fact that the Mayard-Tates are rich and powerful isn't why you object; it's that you object to thieving of any kind, from anyone, including these rich old screwish families who wouldn't miss a billion if I lifted it from them, much less the paltry and entirely reasonable sum in question."

"That's your father talking," Elwood drawled. "The last of the Wobblies."

"Here's another line from my father, while we're at it," I said. " 'Never give a sucker an even break, nor smarten up a chump.' "

"That has a familiar ring. Could it be he stole it?"

"Of course he stole it! What do you think actors do?" "Always remember, son," he had told me many times. "Authors write. Producers produce. Directors interfere. Angels write checks. And it's all for us. We make the art, and if you need to borrow something to make it work, then borrow it!" Borrow was a euphemism my father used frequently, steal being a word he disliked. But he was an anarchist, didn't believe in property or laws.

That's how I was raised, and if it gives you a liberal comfort you can use that fact to explain or forgive my admittedly piratical attitude toward other people's possessions. Or you can think of me as a goddamn thief; I don't mind. I do believe in property, and in laws, though as few of them as needed to curb our animal tendencies. I own the things in my trunk, for instance, and would be peeved if they were taken from me. My father never owned anything he wouldn't have cheerfully given away if you asked him for it. Of course, he seldom owned anything worth giving away.

But take the screws. Does it make sense to you that they should have access to these almost infinite amounts of money simply because their grandparents excelled in brutality, bribery, chicanery, sadism, and the nearest thing to chattel slavery humanity has known since the American Civil War? Not far from where we were walking human beings had been traded on a computerized auction block—though they used the polite fiction that it was the prisoners' labor contracts that were being bought and sold. That's what the old fortunes on Pluto were founded on: cheap and plentiful labor.

My father was capable of going on for hours on the subject.

I myself don't hold to any doctrine concerning wealth, and the inheritance thereof. On the one hand, who has more right to the money one has amassed during one's lifetime? Some opportunistic layabout with nothing more to recommend him than his ease-softened, skeletal, extended hand? Or one's own children? The answer seems obvious. But maybe it should be neither. Well then, how about the state? Why not let the government take it all, and use it for the public good? Mainly because when it's been tried in the past, it merely financed more official thievery.

But it is equally obvious to me that something is badly wrong when one person has billions, and another has nothing.

Damn it all! Miranda would never miss what I had taken.

It's called the Bank Examiner, and some say it was first used by one Lucius the Louse in 113 B.C., when he persuaded an octogenarian widow named Octavia to withdraw thirty pieces of silver from her account at the First Imperial Bank of the Tiber, Circus Maximus Branch, and hand them over to him: i.e., Lucius. But it's said that Lucius learned it from Agamemnon "Aggie Pop" Popodopoulis, a Greek panderer, picaroon, and president of the Athenian Bar Association, who swore he happened upon it while reading a book of Chaldean pornography to pass the time while cooped up in a giant wooden horse during his involuntary hitch in the Greek army.

In a word, it was old. One of the oldest in the book. That it would still work at this late date was a tribute to another adage my father liked to quote: "There's a sucker born every minute, and two to take him." We like to think there's been progress in the human species since the days of Aggie Pop. We like to think we're somehow smarter than previous generations. Hell, we live in outer space, don't we? Don't we build fast spaceships that violate the virgin sky with impulses of villainous saltpeter? Can't we harness the power of the heart of the sun? Don't we know what E=mc² means? (Well, I don't, but somebody does, okay?)

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. And if you think that makes us one bit smarter—where it really counts—than our ancestors, I'd like to drop in on you and discuss the purchase of a fine set of leather-bound Classics of Human Literature, only twenty dollars down, the rest when they arrive. Don't worry, I'll give you a receipt for the twenty.

There was another thing about the Bank Examiner, other than its age, and perhaps we've finally arrived at the source of Elwood's silent reproof and my own uneasiness. It has to do with yet a third adage my father was likely to quote when the vicissitudes of our profession forced us once again into a closer and more personal contact with the audience, and their pocketbooks. When it became necessary to take to the streets for a spot of improvisation. When, in short, it was time to run a short con.

"Dodger," he would say to me, "don't worry about it. You can't cheat an honest man." Well...

I'm not aware of any rules without exceptions, and the Bank Examiner was the exception to that one. With any other of the dodges we pulled, those golden words from Mr. Fields were pure gospel. The Spanish Lottery, the Jamaican Handkerchief, the Priceless Pooch, and Put and Take, the Gold Brick, the Pigeon Drop... all these swindles rely in large part on the avarice of the average man. (Did I say the Bank Examiner was old? On a wall of one of the Temples of Karnak there is a line of hieroglyphs showing a puzzled mark looking at the worthless wad of cut-up papyrus in his hand while two sharpies from Abyssinia skedaddle with the real loot he put up for "good faith." Welcome to the Pigeon Drop.)

The mark either sees an opportunity to make a quick profit with no risk, or is offered a foolproof way to steal money from someone else. His greed blinds him to the shenanigans going on right under his nose, and he's left holding the bag. (That's where that expression came from. Really!) The empty bag. Often he doesn't go to the cops, because to do so he'd have to explain how he planned to steal from the folks who stole from him. Most citizens could care less about the victims of these scams. The general consensus is, they got what they deserved.

Not so with the Bank Examiner. Here's how it works, reduced to its essentials:

You are approached in or near the financial institution where you keep your money. Someone working at this fine establishment has been pilfering, you are told. I, the Examiner/Policeman/Bank President/Security Officer (or almost any authority figure) am onto this miscreant, and I need your help to gather evidence against him. Would you be so kind as to withdraw X number of shekels from your account?

With the money in hand, I tell you I must take it away to... oh, photograph it, say. Just about any explanation will do, because if you have withdrawn the cash at all it is because you have bought me as an authority figure. I'll be right back, I say. That's what Jesus said, too.

Now I can almost hear the creaking as your credulity is strained. Nobody would fall for that, you protest.

The fact is, they do. Year after year after year. I have no idea if the Egyptians really even had banks, but if they did, you can be sure somebody really did pull this one on the banks of the Nile. Because that's one of only two things you need to make the Bank Examiner work: a banking system.

The other thing, of course, is a mark who is (a) trusting, or (b) stupid. In my own thesaurus, those words are listed as synonyms.

It worked fine when banks wrote their accounts in huge ledgers with quill pens, and it works now when it's all electronic impulses in machines. If we ever go to a cashless society (and don't hold your breath), someone will find a way to make it work there, too. So as long as the human race keeps producing idiots, I'll never be broke.

But wait! There's more!

Technically what I had just educated Miranda Mayard-Tate in was not the Bank Examiner at all, but the second act sometimes known as the Copper Comeback. You see, some marks just exude a charming naivete that, to a veteran con, screams, "Take me! Take me again and again and again...!" It seems cruel to abandon these people to other con men who might be slipshod or clumsy, who might not consummate the affair with the proper aplomb. It was for people like these—and my darling Miranda could have been the very prototype—that the Comeback was developed.

The original hit on Miranda had taken place while I was still a month away from Pluto's frigid orb. When her money was not returned after a few days, and when no one called, she contacted the bank, who of course were quite familiar with this scam. The police were called in. The Mayard-Tates being the considerable cheeses they were, no expense or effort was spared by the boys and girls in blue to run frantically in circles, look under carpets and rocks and in toilet tanks, handcuff and question dozens of hapless citizens, shout "Stop, thief!" in a loud, firm constabulary voice, and generally create the impression that something was being done, and that a resolution of the case could be expected at any moment. Then all that wound down and the cops went away, and Miranda was left to realize that it was really all over. That no one was going to be charged with the crime. That, sometimes, money can't buy justice. Ain't it awful?

The people who put the con together let her worry about it for a suitable length of time. Their thinking was that, after she'd stewed about it, she'd be ripe for an opportunity to see the rascals in jail. Enter K. C. Valentine, who just blew in from parts unknown, made contact with one of the swindle ring, and asked if they had anything going suitable to his talents. They steered me to Miranda and off I went, Junior G-Man badge in hand, armed with nothing but Friday's flat voice, stare, smile, and feet.

As it turned out, the waiting time hadn't been necessary. Revenge was the farthest thing from Miranda's mind. The sum of money in question, though large by my standards, had literally been forgotten in the madcap, dizzy fandango that qualified as a life in her circle of friends. I had to remind her that she'd been taken, then keep bringing her attention back from unknown areas as I explained that at last we had a lead in her case and that I, Friday, was the man to run it down. We had learned there really was a dishonest teller at her bank, and that he had been in cahoots with the swindlers all the time. Now we intended to catch him dead to rights, and get him to squeal, to rat out his gang of nefarious hoodlums. All she had to do to help us bring this about was to withdraw X number of shekels from her account so we could... well, by now you should be able to fill in the blanks with a story of your own.

She couldn't have been more delighted to help. Her guileless, canine eyes danced with excitement when I used words like "squeal" and "cahoots," but went a little glassy at "nefarious." So in the end it was her relentless stupidity... sorry, I meant unblemished honesty... that led her into folly again.

And so it was that I found myself walking along beside the equestrian park in the richest neighborhood in Pluto, carrying an unaccustomed amount of money, paced by a lanky conscience, and trailed by a pissed-off poodle-dog. I should have been happy, but my heart was, I admit, a bit heavy. But my wallet was about to become even heavier. These things even out.

If only she hadn't been so goddam honest.

When a felon's not engaged in his employment or maturing his felonious little plans, where do you suppose he goes?

I went to church. You have to fence the loot somewhere.

If any of you in the audience are true-believing members of the First Latitudinarian Church of Celebrity Saints, better known as the Flacks, you might want to skip this next scene. The fact is, wherever you attend services, from Coronaville to Brementon and points beyond, you have found your way into a den of thieves. The chances are excellent that the fellow standing next to you, helping you hold the hymnal and bellowing "Blue Suede Shoes" off-key in a state of exalted presleyan bliss, is not somebody you'd be eager to see marry your brother or sister. He might very well be... well, somebody like me.

A lot of Flackites I've mentioned this to have a hard time believing it. As my father used to say, "Denial is more than a big river in Egypt."

All churches have their share of sinners, of course. You might say that's what they're for. You can't get very far in the redemption business without some genuine sinners. But in other churches they're not organized into a band of brothers. I doubt that most churches often see actual crimes being originated and planned at meetings in the church basement. It would surprise me to learn that stolen goods were actually being fenced on the grounds of, say, the synagogue down the lane. And aside from a little bingo and the occasional bit of buggery, Catholic churches are relatively free of crime. As for Diabolists, don't ask me. It's all veiled in secrecy.

But if it's a spot of larceny you're after, I recommend the Flackites. Every grifter I know shows up there regularly, to find out what's going down, coming off, falling together. It's where I heard about the Mayard-Tate sting, and it's where I went, swag in hand, to dispose of it.

Uncle Roy is choreographer in chief at the Main Planetary Studio, First Latitudinarian Church, Pandemonium, Phlegethon Province, Pluto. As a song-and-dance man he had been only mediocre, and he wasn't exactly setting the planet on fire now that he'd hung up his tap shoes. Busby Berkeley's ghost had nothing to fear from Roy. But he was the guy to see if buying wholesale no longer satisfied you, if what you were seeking was really deep discounts. That is, as long as what you were shopping for didn't require a legal tide, and if you didn't mind that the serial numbers had been filed off, there was no owner's manual, and the merchandise might have a few dents and scratches from falling off the back of a freightlorry.

I found him in the studio itself, sitting in the third row with his hands steepled in front of him, watching with great concentration what looked to be a final dress rehearsal. The stage was jammed with sequined chorus dancers, just a-hoofin' their little hearts out, and dazzling spotlights swept them like the fingers of angels. I paused to drink it in. When the houselights go down and the stage lights brighten, a new world is created, a world where I've spent most of my life. It's a magic trick I never grow tired of.

I recognized the show immediately as Work in Progress, the musical version of Finnegans Wake that had bombed at its opening on the Alameda in King City fifty years ago. I know it bombed, because I was there, in the part of Cromwell. ("Val Tiner turns in his usual competent performance in a production more confusing than its source material."—News Nipple) Since then Work had developed quite a cult following. I myself had revisited it only ten years earlier, this time in the lead role of Humphrey Earwicker/Joyce, ("overwrung. A charmful waterloose prixducktion, dacently gaylaboring the auld meanderthalltale from jayjay's mythink Dyoublong of farago. D'ya dismember what a mnice old mness it all mnakes? But Hark! Hark! Tray chairs fur Muster Casey Valentoon in a roustering vendition of 'Miss Hooligan's Christmas Cake,' the topsiest mnoment of a quarky under-parformance. Stillanall, the shows a way a lone a last a long a little"—Arean Gazette).

The Pluto studio is one of the largest indoor proscenium theaters in the system. It seats twenty thousand, which means the cheap seats are in a different postal zone, and high enough for a nosebleed. I've been in the last row, and from that vantage you might as well be watching A Doll's House performed by a flea circus. From the stage, you can get through most of Hamlet's soliloquy before the echo of your voice reverberates the first "to be" back to your waiting ears. There's a fair chance of a rain delay on account of thunderheads forming in the fly lofts.

But not to worry. The hall is surrounded by several thousand television screens, from a few inches to twenty feet across. The people in back see just about the same show you get from front row center, from a bigger variety of camera angles.

Not my sort of house at all. Give me a three- or four-hundred seater and I'm a happy man. Let it be my own leathery lungs shouting down the rafters, or making them lean forward in dead silence to catch my whispered words.

Uncle Roy glanced over at me as I sat at the end of the row. I nodded, and he smiled briefly, then stood and started pacing rapidly back and forth at the edge of the orchestra pit, pointing at people and shouting things I couldn't hear over the thunder of the music. The conductor frowned at Roy over his shoulder, but by this time he must have learned better than to protest. He hunched his shoulders and continued to saw at the air with his big, glowing baton.

I don't know Uncle Roy's last name, nor why he's universally called uncle. There's probably a story behind it. If you hear it, let me know. I love stories like that. He's a big man who has pegged his apparent age in the late fifties, with a wrinkled face and receding hairline. He has a shock of unkempt silvery hair streaked with black, and eyes of purest newman blue. His lips are thick and rubbery, and he has a habit of chewing on the lower one when he's thinking. When he's not thinking he chews tobaccoid, certainly the least attractive retro fad in the last century, one that's finally showing signs of having outworn its welcome. Forget the occasional brown drool from the corners of one's mouth, or the necessity of carrying around a can sloshing with the vilest stuff imaginable, or the truly disgusting sight of someone spitting into it. The habit kept Roy's teeth stained an abhorrent greenish brown, like fungus growing on a corpse. If the smell of his mouth was any guide, the taste of it must have been unimaginable.

Like quite a few dancers I've known, as soon as Roy left the chorus line he blimped up like a satyriastic's condom, twenty, thirty kilos above his boogeying weight. He claimed it was all by design, part of his scheme to be a more physically commanding presence, the other parts being his high forehead, white hair, and wrinkled face. A director ought to have dignity. I had done a little experimenting myself, the few times I had lowered myself into the director's chair. I'd helmed productions looking like King Lear, and like Shirley Temple, and got about the same amount of respect and attention either way—which is to say, very little.

And there's this about ex-dancers: I think a lot of them are just plain tired of being human greyhounds. The girls cultivate exuberant boobs of the sort never seen jiggling beneath a tutu. A lady with a butt like two BBs suddenly lets her hips spread out, finds she has something comfortable to sit on for a change. The guys turn into the spitting image of a nineteenth-century banker: prosperous, corpulent, paunchy, chipmunk-cheeked. The reason for such a delightful word as portly. And all of them like to lounge around like neutered house cats in the sunshine, thinking about supper.

"...and five, and six and seven and EIGHT!" Uncle Roy was bellowing over the roar of the orchestra. "And lights out! Aaaaaand... curtain, curtain, applause, applause, applause... okay, stop the curtain. Houselights, please!"

From far overhead a few harsh, unshielded work lights descended on cords, cruel things no performer would ever let into his house because of the ghastly effect they had on tired, sweating people in pancake makeup. It makes us all look like the charpeople those lights were designed to aid when they descended on the spilled drinks, crumpled programs, and wilted flowers, long after the magic had retired to wherever it is magic goes between performances.

These lights revealed a stage full of people in outrageous costumes, breathing hard, some sitting down, others leaning on friends. The shadowless, sourceless light had no mercy. Gold turned to tinsel, silver to tinfoil, diamonds became rhinestones. Every chipped nail and scuffed shoe was exposed. Pearly white teeth turned out to be flaked with lipstick.

When the magic is over, it's over.

"One hour for tiffin, boys and girls," Roy said, leaping onto the plank that spanned the orchestra pit and striding confidently among his players. I followed, more slowly. "Except you, Haynes, and you, Dallman. You get to go down to the rehearsal hall and do it again, and again, and again, until you get it right three times in a row. You know the part I'm talking about." A man and a woman, presumably Haynes and Dallman, slumped off to the wings. Roy whistled loudly, looking up into the fly loft. "Mr. Lacon, if you please. If your people can't get the bar set rung off in twelve seconds tonight, I'll tie you to a rope and use you for a sandbag." There was angry shouting from on high, which I didn't understand and Roy didn't listen to. He was putting a beefy arm around my shoulders and guiding me through the bustling wings and through a door with a big star on it, labeled DIRECTOR. He slammed the door behind us, threw himself into a groaning jurist's chair, leaned back, and laced his fingers behind his head.

"So. What did you think?" he asked.

"All I saw was the Flying Dutchman number," I said. "How's your budget? Do you have elephants?"

"I've got elephants."

"Then I don't see how you can go wrong."

"Elephants? Hell, I got ten elephants. I got peacocks and horse-drawn carts, and I got horses guaranteed not to crap on anybody's tap shoes. I have a trained seal. I have thirty-seven set changes. I have three ultracopters to bring people in from the lofts, gonna land 'em right there on the stage. I have a thirty-foot pool, seventeen fountain jets, and eight gals willing to give up sex for the run of the show so we can morph them into mermaids. I got every piece of gimcrackery anybody ever thought of when they were staging this overblown turkey, and I got a guaranteed opening night sellout. I even have a chorus line that can get across the stage without tripping over either of their left feet."

He paused to draw a breath, then leaned slightly forward and spoke in a more confidential tone.

"You know what I don't have? Ask me what I don't have, Sparky."

"Leapin' lizards, Uncle Roy!" I squeaked, in my old "Sparky" voice. "What don't you have?"

He leaned over even farther.

"What I don't have is an Anna Livia Plurabelle who can reach a high C three times in a row without I shove a hot poker up her ass." He leaned back in his chair. "Which I'd be perfectly happy to do."

I tsked a few sympathetic-sounding tsks.

My sympathies for directors who miscast and then complain about it are severely limited. After all, it's usually me out there trying my best to make some pathetic hambone look good, and cursing the moment the little shit got into the mighty director's pants.

"Who is this up-and-comer?" I asked. "Was that Haynes?"

"Little Miss Drury Haynes," he confirmed. "Sparky, you know that montage in Citizen Kane, the one where the no-talent broad tries to sing grand opera and stinks up the place? That no-talent broad looks good compared to Drury Haynes. Or how about the traveling troupe in The Court of Babylon? Take the worst of those mugs and stand her up against Drury...." He finally ran out of steam. He glared down at his desk, then looked up at me again.

"I want you to ask me one more question, Sparky," he said.

"Roy..."

"Just one more. Ask me the name of the Grand Exalted Super-Flack of this particular Studio."

"Uh-oh."

"Aloysius J. Haynes is the good worthy's name, and he just couldn't be prouder of fathering little Drury, who thinks the musical theater is simply ripping, and who has wanted to be a singer and an actress just ever so long. And who has been taking singing lessons since she was three from a series of increasingly desperate voice teachers, at least three of whom can be seen this very moment sitting on filthy beds in the charity ward of Pandemonium General, gibbering to themselves, in restraints to prevent them from driving sharp objects into their ears.

"So when little Drury showed up at the auditions and the word came down that she was to be treated 'just like any other singer,' that's exactly what I did. I treated her just like any other producer's favorite daughter, and gave her the part. 'I can fix it,' I said to myself at the time. 'She'll get better.' We can mike her and cover it up. Or I can pull a Singin' in the Rain, have a real singer behind a curtain. Something. Only when I tried, she went running to daddy, of course. And the Word came down.

"And if you were still asking questions, Sparky, I'd ask you to ask me if I give a free-falling fuck anymore about the Word coming down, and you know what I'd answer? I'd say no. Because yesterday I found myself cleaning out my left ear with a very sharp pencil, and wondering what it'd feel like, and thinking it might not be half-bad. And in my dreams I see them making up the empty fourth bed in that padded ward in the giggle academy, and I see them putting me in it and murmuring 'There, there, Roy. There, there.' "

I admit my attention had drifted. Roy likes to hear himself expound, and this all had the sound of a set piece, one he'd honed on many an unsympathetic ear over the last few weeks. But now he stood up and leaned over the desk, putting his weight on his clenched fists, and he got my attention in about the only way he could have done.

"So how about it, old friend? The part's yours. Say the word."

I opened my mouth to say yes. Folks, unless you have the acting fever yourself you can't possibly know the idiotic things one will do to get a shot at a part he has never played. Or one he's already played, and knows he could do again, and better.

Or a chance to carry a gold-painted wooden spear onto the stage and shout "Caesar approaches!" to an audience of bored schoolchildren.

I am an absolute sucker for somebody who says those magic words: "You've got the part." It has got me into more hot water than yearly flows through Phlegethon, the famous River of Fire in Pandemonium Park, not three miles from where I sat. It has made a shambles of my life, this puppy-dog-like eagerness to perform.

So I was a tenth of a second from taking the part, when I looked up and saw that Elwood had silently opened the door behind Uncle Roy just enough to stick his narrow, dour physiognomy through the crack. He was looking at me, pursing his lips in that pensive way of his, and shaking his head.

"I'm not a singer," I managed to cough.

"You're not primarily a singer, granted," Roy said. "However, we're not talking grand opera soprano here. We're talking Broadway, Sparky, we're talking musical comedy, and I don't know anybody in the system can handle that kind of part any better than you. Believe me, you're ten times the singer Drury is. I saw you—what was it, ten years ago? Fifteen?—as Mrs. Lovett. Best I ever saw, and that music is lots tougher than Work. Then there was... what was it... The Three Masks. I've never heard Mabel Parsons sung better. Swear to god, Sparky, you had me thinking Streisand."

Well. How bad could it be? I'd already done the male lead for several hundred performances; I could swot up Anna Livia's lines in a few hours' intense cramming. I'm a very quick study. I looked up to say yes...

...and Elwood was still shaking his head, no. There were frown lines on his forehead now.

"...I'm pretty much sticking to male roles these days." This was partially true. The memory of my recent painful Juliet was still fresh enough in my mind that I didn't regard a radical body shift in a short time with a lot of enthusiasm.

"Please, Sparky," he said, leaning across his desk with his hands folded. If he came across and grabbed my lapels I'd have no choice but to run like a scared rabbit. There was no other resistance I could offer.

"Please, please, please!" he groveled.

"All right," I said. "I accept." Or that's what I opened my mouth to say, but what came out was more like "Awwwrrrgh," followed by a strangling sound I can't transliterate, as Elwood was now drawing a finger across his throat—

—and the full depth of my folly was revealed to me in a blinding burst of temporary sanity. I'd been on Pluto three, four weeks? Already I'd committed at least two felonies—ones I was aware of, though the place had so many new laws now it was likely I'd committed a handful more simply by getting up and going about my daily business. So what did I now propose to do? Nothing but get put down on the shit list of one of the most powerful men on Pluto, in letters ten meters tall and written in fire: The Man Who Wrecked My Daughter's Life.

No thank you! No, I thank you! And again, I thank you!

"I'm really sorry, Roy," I said. "I have a previous engagement on... on the, er... the Titanic."

"Dinner theater? You're giving up Anna Livia for dinner theater?"

"At least I won't get trampled by elephants."

"And between shows you can bus tables. I never heard of—"

I slapped the bag of swag onto the desk between us, possibly the only action I could have taken at that moment that would get his attention. He looked at it suspiciously, then took it and zipped it open. He hauled out the wad of crisp, new banknotes and then looked at me.

"Any trouble at all?"

"No trouble. She was just like you said."

He nodded. He'd met her before, having been the original bank examiner in our little true-life sketch. He moistened a thumb and started shuffling through the bills, sorting them into two piles: nine for him, one for me. Hey, I'm not complaining. Ten percent is not bad for coming in so late in the sting. They'd done all the groundwork.

"All right, Sparky. Here's your share."

I pocketed the loot, and placed a small object on the desk in front of him. He frowned at it, picked it up.

"What is this? A chessman?"

"It's called 'Dutchman.' It's netsuke, nineteenth century, dating from a few years after the opening of Japan. This is how the Japanese saw the Western invaders. Notice how his little eyes are slanted?"

"You got this from Mayard-Tate?"

"No, I found it lying in the street. Jesus, Roy."

He frowned at the tiny mannequin while his thumb absently caressed it.

"Reason I asked," he said, "we talked about it before you went in. The Charonese Mafia."

"We sure as hell did talk about it. You said it wouldn't be a problem."

"It ain't. Only I didn't figure on you pinching any sukiyaki."

"Netsuke. What's the difference?"

He rolled his shoulders, nervously rubbed the back of his neck.

"Come on, Roy. Don't do this to me. You said the Mayard-Tates wouldn't bother to tell the Mafia."

"Normally, no, they wouldn't. They'd be embarrassed, for one thing. And it's a small enough amount of money—to them—it's easier just to let it go. In fact, I was gonna ask you if you'd like to be in on stage three of the sting. We're planning to—"

"Not for all the netsuke in Pluto."

"Okay. Just a thought. They didn't do anything after the first sting, and I don't see why they'd do it now, 'cause it's even more embarrassing to fall for it twice. Still, I didn't count on you lifting the furniture."

"Get real, Roy. I walk into a house like that, you think I'm walking out with my pockets empty? Would you?"

He grinned. "There's that," he admitted. "What do you want for it?"

"What'll you give?"

He named a ridiculous price. I just shook my head. But instead of making a counteroffer, he shook his head, too.

"I'm out of my element here," he said. "I never dealt in Nipponiana. Let me talk to a few people." He swiveled his chair to the side and started typing on his keyboard, studying the results on a clear glass pane whose angle made the returning answers invisible to me.

"What do you hear these days?" I asked him, more to be making conversation than anything else. "Anything interesting going on?"

"My show's just about it," he said. "A few other revivals here and there. I don't think there's been three new plays debuted on Pluto this year. Things are pretty dead." He glanced at me, smiled. "Unless you count Polichinelli coming out of retirement to direct King Lear."

Sure. I returned his smirk. "And I heard Hitchcock's come back from the dead to direct John Wilkes Booth in Our American Cousin, too." Both events were about equally likely. If there was something good coming up, Roy wouldn't tell me. He wanted me for Work in Progress.

His attention had returned to his screen.

"I hope those questions aren't going out over the public cables."

"Don't teach grandpa how to get under a skirt, little boy," he said. "This is encoded nine different ways. The police could never trace it. Of course, if the Charonese are looking for you, nothing's gonna help."

Did he have to bring that up? I expected Elwood to stick his nosy phiz back through the door again and croon, Don't say I didn't warn you.

He had warned me, not that I'd really needed it. The hardest part of the Mayard-Tate sting had been knocking on that front door with the red handprints on each jamb, like the fresh lamb's blood beside the doors of the Israelites. Those prints meant, to anyone who had spent any time on Pluto, "This residence protected by the Red Hand." I read them in a more colorful way: Burglar, pass by this place. Had a more Biblical sound, and the Charonese Mafia was nothing if not Biblical.

After the end of the penal system on Pluto and the establishment of democracy, there was never much enthusiasm for the institution of police. Too many voters—ex-transportees—had nothing but negative associations with the color blue. No very large society can get along without something in the way of law enforcement, and Pluto did have police, both municipal and planetary. But they were weaker than on any other major planet.

The trouble was that crime doesn't stop just because the people don't like cops. The resulting gap between an anemic constabulary and a healthy and growing—some even argued genetically predisposed—criminal class was filled, as such gaps always are, by free enterprise, in the form of vigilance committees, posses, and protective associations. And of these sellers of protection, the greatest and most feared was the Charonese Mafia.

If you'd like an historical parallel, there's a good one from the Old Earth. The nation of Italy had organized crime, like many other countries. But in one particular province, known as Sicily, the Cosa Nostra, or Black Hand, was far more ruthless and relentless than in any other region. They were so good at what they did that they ended up actually exporting their brand of gangsterism to other countries, particularly America. I know this because I had to study it when I played in The Martian Godfather ("Valentine is effective in the role of Don Tharsisini, mugging and brandoing his way through some lines that might have choked a less professional thespian. Go see it, or I'll break ya fuckin' kneecaps."—The Quicksilver Messenger).

You'd think being an inmate in a planetary prison was about as low as one could sink. You'd be wrong. In any prison there is a hierarchy. It may be topsy-turvy to outside eyes—murderers usually got more respect than embezzlers, for instance—and it varies from culture to culture, but there are always those who the run-of-the-mill convict views with the same contempt that civilians view him. Baby killers, for instance. Cannibals. Crazed serial murderers. Try to parole such people into a population of ex-transportees and you'll get the same uproar you'd get anywhere. So Pluto found itself in need of a prison planet of its own, and the logical choice was forlorn, useless, and neglected little Charon, Pluto's largest moon, named for the ferryman of Hell.

Taxpayers are loath to squander a lot of money on the care of people such as they were exporting to Charon. They must have air, water, and, Charon being from two to four billion miles from the sun, a certain amount of heat. Those things were provided, though not generously. As for food, they could learn hydroponic farming or they could damn well eat each other. I think the Plutonian electorate had the Kilkenny cats in mind: throw them together, stand back, and in a little while there would be just teeth, hair, and eyeballs left.

But politics has a natural ebb and flow. Regimes came and went for nearly two hundred years. Sometimes standards relaxed and genetic criminals were sent to Charon. During a brief right-wing coup any number of political prisoners were transported. There were times when no one went to the rock, as do-gooders tried one more futile time to "reform" the worst of the worst with some new "therapy," or as more pragmatic souls scrambled offenders' brains with the newest lobotomy equivalent that left them happy droolers, or, as the pragmatists would have it, "perfect citizens."

It had been over fifty years since the penal colony was closed and Charon became a more-or-less-equal member of the Plutonian Fed. But in the century before that something had been bred that, save for Areoformed Martians, was nearer to a subspecies of human than anything yet seen in this tired old solar system. They were the Charonese.

They looked like normal human beings, though they tended to a choleric complexion and red hair. Where they differed from the bulk of humanity was not so visible. This difference has been described in a dozen ways, depending on what sort of expert you're talking to. They were said to be empathically dysfunctional. That, or they lived their lives according to an antisocial cultural ethic. Or they suffered from a planetary traumatic stress syndrome. Or, as my father had once put it, "They are mean sumbitches."

Traumatic, dysfunctional, antisocial, deprived, depraved, depraved on account o' being deprived, genetically abnormal, or just plain mean, I lean toward a simpler explanation. They had no souls.

I know it's not scientific, but I never laid claim to a rigorous point of view. Don't ask me to define a soul because I can't. But I know one when I see one, and the Charonese don't have them. I have one. Uncle Roy does, though we're both not very nice. Toby has one, and I'll bet you do, too.

Basically, all Charon had to export was viciousness. And they made a hell of a good living at it. There have always been people who have need of really tough guys.

Charonese were often referred to as "ferrymen."

This was all unprofitable reflection, and I was glad to be drawn away from it when Roy turned from his screen and named a much more satisfactory figure. I might as well admit it: I had no idea what the thing was worth. I was merely following another valuable piece of advice from my father. "Never take the first offer," he said. "It makes you look hungry." A corollary to that was to try not to take the second offer, either, so I named a higher figure and, sure enough, he came up a little bit.

I'm sure we would have ended up splitting the difference if we could have spent the next hour haggling, but he was due back onstage, and he didn't know something, which was that he would have to do this twice more.

"Deal," I said, and put a lovely little recumbent water buffalo on the table between us. "Now how much for this?"

The rest of our negotiations were quickly concluded, on terms a bit more favorable to me, I like to think. Then he was hustling me out of his office, into the breathless rowdy-dowdy, randy-dandy, rollicky-ranky that is backstage at a major musical before the second curtain. He guided me to the stage door, which disgorged me into the end of the traditional long, dark alley, the door lit by a single overhead bulb. With the door already closing behind him, he stuck his head out again.

"You want to come tonight and catch the opening? I'll leave a ticket at the box office."

"No, thanks," I said, with a tip of my hat and a bow. "I'll come tomorrow night, and catch the closing."

He extended his middle finger, then smiled and waved.

"Break a leg!" I shouted as the door clicked shut.

For the last ten days I had been staying in modest quarters at the Lambs Club. For the last three of those days I had been making my entrances and exits while the front desk was not occupied, or when the clerk was busy with something else. A few times I'd been reduced to the back stairs and the freight doors. At the Lambs they know actors, you see, most of them being either aspiring or ex-actors themselves. One of the things they know is that an actor with a hit series or a big part in a picture doesn't stay at the Lambs. Another is that an actor lies. It's his business. They have heard every variation on I-Shall-Positively-Pay-You-Next-Tuesday. Your best story about how your saintly mother needed the dough to pay off an unsympathetic bookie will be met by a stony silence. They will regard your crystal martini mixer, said to have belonged to Shirley Temple, with sneering disbelief, and direct you to a pawnbroker known to have a heart of pure flint. Or they'd simply point to the big sign behind the front desk: ALL ROOMS TO BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE.

Yesterday I'd been ready to throw myself on the mercy of a desk clerk. There was one who looked like Mickey Rooney. Could such a man be a rogue?

Today I swept into the seedy marble-columned lobby in my best black cape and top hat. There was a shine on my shoes and a melody in my heart. I don't think I mentioned it, but when I smile, I can look a lot like Fred Astaire. That thought so cheered me that I actually danced a few steps, past the eternal contingent of office boys, barmaids, and young mechanics who come from Chillicothes and Paducahs with their bazookas to get their names up in lights. And they end up sitting hunched in the Lambs' shabby novodeco armchairs with their attractive but worried faces buried in copies of Casting Call and Pluto Variety. I grabbed the hand of one comely lass, pulled her from her chair, and we Fred'n'Gingered through the dusty potted palms, up the seven steps from the lounge, where I rolled her into my arms and planted a kiss of purest em-gee-em on her rosebud mouth.

I was striding by the front desk on my way to the elevators when I suddenly stopped and looked thoughtful, as if remembering something... just as the clerk held up a finger and opened his mouth. (I admit it. I was watching from the corner of my eye for just such a moment.) I hurried to the desk, taking out my wallet as I went. I let him see the stack of bills inside as I peeled off three large ones and placed them on the blotter.

"I believe this will cover any arrears, my good man," I said.

The clerk (not Mickey Rooney) gave me a sour look that told me he'd been anticipating my ouster with relish. But he took the money and turned to his computer. I dug in the pocket of my cape and removed Toby and set him on the counter. He sniffed at the inkwell, and promptly knocked over the "No Pets Allowed" sign. I told him to sit, which he did.

The clerk's already prunelike mouth wrinkled even further when he turned from his ledgers with my change.

"I'm afraid no pets are allowed in the guest rooms, sir," he said.

"Toby is not a pet. He is a performer." I put my palm flat on the blotter between us.

"Nevertheless, I'm afraid..." He had finally noticed the edge of the twenty sticking out from under my hand.

"Seems there's a lot you're afraid of," I said. "You'll have to stop going around in such a frightened state." I pushed the bill a little closer, and he took it, making no effort to be discreet. A bribe's a bribe, as far as he was concerned.

"No need for any change just now," I said, airily. "We shall be checking out tomorrow morning, and I may be charging some interplanetary calls to my room. Tomorrow I shall need my bags delivered to dockside, H.M.S. Britannic, in time for the afternoon sailing."

"Of course," he said, making a note. Then he looked up, sneering. "Shall I have them sent to the crew deck?"

"And have your mother drop them over the side? You should let that old woman retire. No, no, send them to my dressing room. It's the one with the star on it."

I picked up Toby while the clerk was still sputtering, and swept away to the elevators.

It's always a melancholy time when I must once more put Toby down. Melancholy for me, not him. He always knows it's coming because for the two days prior I stuff him with food. A full belly extends his downtime and makes him recover more rapidly from the effects of hibernation, but the real reason I do it is guilt. It's entirely self-induced. Toby never offers a word of reproach.

I'm sure dogs don't experience the passage of time in the same way we do. He's sharp enough, I think, to know a hibernation is not the same as a regular night's sleep. While there are no actual seasons in our modern environments, there are periodic daily, weekly, and quarterly changes in temperature, humidity, pressure, and so forth, because it's been found people do better that way. Toby surely noticed those when awakened. But I doubt he had any notion of how much time had passed. So it was no skin off his nose, right?

I just hated treating him like a little, warm machine. I'd never thought of him as property. A dog sticks to you out of loyalty. And, pragmatically, because you're his meal ticket.

I called him over and tossed the sleepy pill in his direction. He leaped into the air and caught it. I heaped praise on him, which he took as only his due, clever dog, smart dog. Then, old hand that he is, he sat down and waited. He used to stagger about, run into things. He didn't like to be held at such times, as he sometimes became delirious, hallucinated. Once he bit my hand, and felt rotten about it for days after I woke him up. So he just sits there, and pretty soon he begins to nod. Sometimes he growls at things I can't see. But in no time his heart rate is falling, along with all his other metabolic signs.

He fell over and I scooped him up.

When I bought him he came with a little hard-sided carrying case, about the size of a hatbox. It was a hideous aluminum color. I had it covered with the finest crocodile skin, replaced the plastic handle with leather. I put him in the case, curled into a fluffy ball, and pasted a sensor to his pink belly. Green lights came on in the lid, which I then snapped closed. If anything went wrong, alarms would sound, and if I was close enough to hear I could rush him to a vet. Nothing had ever gone wrong.

I packed him into the Pantechnicon, laid out my clothing for the next day, then showered, brushed my teeth, put on my nightgown and cap, said my prayers, and crawled into the narrow, lumpy bed provided by the Lambs.

I heard the door squeak open on rusty hinges.

"I don't want to talk now, Elwood," I said. I could see his shadow on the floor. He nodded, and closed the door quietly. He knows I'm moody when I've just packed Toby.

Soon I was asleep.

About an hour later I sat up, instantly awake. I had the terrible feeling I'd forgotten something important. Something impossibly important. I cast my mind back over the day, which had been a fairly eventful one. I could come up with only one thing, and it was silly.

Surely he had been kidding. Surely...

There was nothing for it but to call the union. I got a computer. Don't tell me PFPA never sleeps. I showed my union card to the screen, which agreed I was a member in good standing of the Pluto Federation of Performing Artists (luckily for me you can still be in good standing though in arrears on your dues), delivered a canned lecture concerning the matter of P$795.03 due and payable or we are entitled to deduct said sum from any residuals received by this office (don't hold your breath), and asked what it could do for me.

"Search announced productions. Stage. King Lear. Polichinelli."

There was a short pause, and the computer was sorry to inform me no such production had been billboarded. Not on Pluto, not on Charon—

"Not Pluto, you idiot. Polichinelli never travels. Check the Luna listings."

"Inner-planet bookings are not handled by this office, sir. Please call—" Which I did, only to be answered by an identical computer voice. After the same rigmarole (oddly, this office felt I owed them P$795.13), I asked the same question.

The pause was even shorter.

"General casting call, all parts, King Lear, by William NMI Shakespeare (b. 1564, d. 1616). Production announced E-day 1/1/38. Casting begins 10/1/38. Venue: Golden Globe Theater, 2001 The Alameda, King City, Luna. Director: Kaspara V. Polichinelli. Producer—"

"Lear! Lear!" I was shouting. "Has Lear been cast?"

There was that little gurgle a voice program sometimes makes when shifting protocols.

"Dramatis personae," it intoned. "Lear, King of Britain: TBA. Goneril, daughter to Lear: TBA. Cordelia—"

I broke the connection so hard I almost broke my finger as well. Then I was fumbling with the card by the room phone, trying to find out how to call Luna. I got the hotel computer—the same voice I'd just heard from the union; a very good program salesman had been through here at one time—which regretted to inform me that such calls must be paid in advance.

After a bit of shouting I figured it out. That goddamn clerk was trying to pocket the change from my payment!

I stormed into the lobby in my dressing gown and slippers. Naturally the blackguard was not on duty. The night clerk looked up, doe-eyed, from a large crossword she was working on. I throttled my anger; she looked like a sweet kid, probably a drama student. She had enough heartbreaks in her future without me adding mine.

"I would like to send a telegram to Luna," I said.

"A what?"

"Eight letters, starts with T, a Western Union wire. Good lord, child, haven't you ever read about Flo Ziegfeld? He used to send them from stage right to people standing at stage left, because they made an impact. I want to send a written message. A fax, if you please."

"Okay." She shrugged. "But you can get voice and picture at the same price."

"Polichinelli dislikes telephones," I said.

"Polichinelli?" she whispered. Apparently she had heard of Polly, because her lovely fawn-colored orbs grew even wider. "You're sending a fax to Kaspara Polichinelli?"

I sighed, and lifted the flap in the counter and came around to stand beside her. I selected a pen from a great pot full of them, and pulled a sheet of white paper from a cubbyhole. I held them up for her to see, then pushed up my sleeves and rested my elbows on the counter. I chewed on the end of the pen for a moment. She leaned close to watch as I wrote the following:

Kaspara Polichinelli

c/o Directors Guild of Luna

1750 The Alameda

King City, Luna.

We two alone will sing like birds in the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing I'll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies. You have found your Lear, and he draws nigh.

K. C. Valentine

I handed the paper to her, and she read it unabashedly. Then she read it again. When she looked up her eyes were misty.

"That's beautiful," she breathed. "Did you write this yourself?"

Perhaps she should consider a career in hotel management. Drama school hadn't taught her much. I took the paper from her and put it on the desk, placed a bill on top of it.

"This should cover the cost of the telegram," I said. I took her tiny hand and kissed the back of it, then turned it over and pressed a shiny new ten dollar piece into it, folded the fingers over the coin. "This is for your trouble. And this"—I put my arms around her, gabled my eyes down into hers for a moment, and said—"this is for me." I gave her a long, black-and-white kiss: that is to say, no tongue. Her lips were very warm. She made no resistance. How could she resist, and call herself an actress?

It begins to be silly in a minute, with nothing to fade out to, so I broke the kiss, and smiled at her.

"Wish me luck," I said.

"Break a leg," she whispered.

There was going to be no chance at all of getting any more sleep.

The room had no chair. I dragged the bed over to the single, narrow window, which I cranked open. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked out over Pandemonium's neon hell.

This was the notorious Thirteenth Avenue. Two blocks to my left was Pluto's equivalent of the Great White Way, the Rialto. It was six blocks of exclusive shops and restaurants, and about a dozen legitimate theaters. If I stuck my head out the window I could almost see it. But what was the point? It was late; the last show had let out hours ago, and the tasteful marquees were dark. Most of the restaurants were empty, too, their patrons on the trains to the suburbs or already snuggled in bed. Anyone who still wanted to party had to come here, to 'Teenth. If you want a parallel, think of Forty-second Street in little old New York. Naughty, gaudy, bawdy, sporty; the 'Teenth was all of that, and more. Here the lights still flashed, urging one in to baser amusements. At one end was the slash-boxing arena. Ten blocks away, beyond the Rialto, was the Motorpsycho racetrack. In between were dozens of orgy rooms, virtuality dens, rough bars and spike bars and squeeze bars and cyberpunk bars, dance halls, bordellos, live sex shows, and the Salvation Army mission. There were other theaters, too, the stepchildren of the glittering palaces around the corner, our modern equivalents of vaudeville and burlesque, revues and skit houses and stand-up comedy stages. There was an actual old-fashioned strip show. There were three or four experimental theaters, though most of that was farther downtown, sub-Rialto. Across from my room was the menacing edifice of the Grand Guignol, granddaddy of the Theater of Cruelty. Headlined in flashing lights: The Garden of Torture. I decided to skip that one.

It was "summer" in Pandemonium. The bright, hot overheads were out, but the air was still balmy. My room was on the fourth floor, just one below the roof. I sat on my bed and watched the traffic in the street.

It was a colorful bunch. I saw people being led around on leashes. A group of motorcyclists thundered by, on their way to a competition at the velodrome. Directly below me, two naked whores laughed and chatted with a beat cop, cool in his summer khaki.

I looked at the clock with the skull face and the skeletal hands across the street at the Grand Guignol. It had been three hours since I sent the wire. At least another three hours to go. With any luck, Polly should be getting my message just about then.

I can't imagine why no one has yet done anything about this speed-of-light business. To think that in this day and age we have to wait three hours for a message to crawl to Luna, and three hours for an answer to return. No amount of bribery will get it there any faster. My father, for one, never believed that. All his life he was convinced that rich people had a faster way, and that they kept it from the populace out of spite.

My thumb caressed the little frog-and-skull netsuke there in the semidark. At the last moment I had decided not to set it on Roy's desk. Don't ask me why. I opened my hand and looked at it, pulsing red and blue, pale washes from the neon outside. A truly evil little thing. The frog looked back at me impassively. He wasn't impatient. He had plenty of time. A fly would drift by sooner or later.

I heard the door creak behind me, then a soft sound as it closed. I knew I wasn't alone.

"I don't much feel like talking, Elwood," I said.

"Who's Elwood?" came the soft whisper. "Are you gay?"

"How can you ask that of a man who kisses like that?"

"Good." I heard soft footsteps, and looked to my left. She was across the room, by the dresser, nude, with some sort of wrap in her right hand. With her left she was placing something on the dresser, something that glinted in the next flash of blue neon that turned her from a gray shadow to a magical dolphin girl. I saw the sway of her hanging breast as she bent over the dresser, and again as she straightened and turned toward me, dropping the gown, hips moving, a bit pigeon-toed, her pubic triangle bold and black as her skin now burned the red of smoldering coals. I looked back out the window. I'd seen enough; I was in love. She'd put the ten dollar coin on the dresser so there would be no question of the nature of the coming transaction.

I heard springs creak and felt the bed move as she put first one knee, then the other, on the mattress. I felt soft hands on my shoulders, massaging gently.

"My name is Margaret Sawyer," she whispered. I wondered if she always whispered, or just around me. "People call me Peggy." Everyone has a cross to bear. "Are you having a hard time waiting for your answer?"

I gestured at the dark room. "These luxurious surroundings go a long ways to soothe my anxieties."

"Mine enemy's dog," she said, "though he had bit me, should have stood that night against my fire; and wast thou fain, poor father, to hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn, in short and musty straw? Alack, alack!"

Alack indeed. "Do not laugh at me, for as I am a man, I think this lady to be Cordelia." I tried to look at her over my shoulder, but she kept massaging me. "And not the ignorant bumpkin I took her for."

"I've been reading the last few hours," she admitted. "And I've been wondering if you're old enough to play King Lear."

"Pray, do not mock me," I quoted. "I am a very foolish fond old man, five score and upward, not an hour more nor less."

She pressed herself against me, all softness but for the stiff brush of hair against my spine, all firm but for the pillows of her breasts on each side of my neck. Her hair fell around me, smelling of soap and jasmine. She still wouldn't let me turn as her hands moved over my face, chest, belly.

God, it had been a long time. What had happened to my sex life? Miranda didn't count, of course. That was business. Before that, the brief run as Juliet, and I'd been catching, not pitching. Oh, yes, of course. The governor's daughter. Sweet as she'd been, I realized I hadn't really stopped running since that goddamn gumshoe tapped me on the shoulder, way back in Brementon. I certainly hoped little Peggy Sawyer didn't come with so many strings attached.

"Your father isn't a member of Congress, is he?" I murmured.

"My father was two cc's of white fluid in a test tube."

"The best kind." I twisted, took her in my arms, pressed her against the bed. She wrapped her legs around me and looked up with flashing eyes.

"Lord, you feel wonderful," I said. There's nothing like a woman's body. She must have been reading my mind.

"Why are our bodies soft and weak, and smooth, unapt to toil and trouble in the world, but that our soft conditions and our hearts should well agree with our external parts?"

Good question. It had always seemed to me to strike at the heart of the eternal mystery of sex. And she was no shrew.

I could have bid her kiss me, Kate, but I'd used that line in more comical circumstances, and besides, another was at hand.

"The wren goes to it, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight," I told her. "Let copulation thrive."

And it did prosper mightily there on that short and musty straw.

Eventually we repaired to the facilities down the hall to see if anything could be done about the damages. I examined myself in the mirror while she got busy at the bidet. There were a few bite marks, nothing a little maxfac couldn't cover up. Lips a bit swollen. Hair... well, perhaps a good beautician could give me a cost estimate.

"Once again, my father was right," I said.

"How's that?"

"When he urged me to brush up my Shakespeare. Claimed it was the quickest way to get girls in the sack. 'Just declaim a few lines from Othella, and they'll think you're a helluva fella.' "

"Well, it's the first time Shakespeare got me in the sack." She looked up, suspiciously. "Are you sure that was your father's line?"

"Dad stole all his best lines," I admitted. "But he only stole from the best. In this case, Cole Porter."

She shook her head; never heard of him. And to think, I was considering asking her hand in marriage.

By the time we got dressed and I was packed, "day" was dawning on the street outside, and there was still no reply from Polly.

Cordelia followed me as I trundled the Pantechnicon to the lobby and out onto the street. We embraced there, kissed, and I told her I'd drop in again as soon as the cruise run was over. And I would have, too....

That's when the bellboy shambled up, pillbox hat askew, shirttail out, and pressed an envelope into my hand. He turned on his heel and left us standing there, apparently never dreaming I might actually tip him.

I tried not to let my hands tremble as I opened the envelope and unfolded the yellow paper within.

If thou wert my fool, Nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou had been wise. Sparky, if you can make it, Phileas Fogg was a piker. But, as the Bard says:

The sweet and bitter fool will presently appear;

The one in motley here, the other found out there.

If he says you can do it, maybe you can. Lear is yours.

I modestly took my place as the one and only bass. I would have been tickled pink to oompah my little heart out except I had somehow neglected to take sousaphone lessons in preparing for a life on the stage. Though I knew it was rumored that if one pressed the middle valve down the music would go 'round and 'round and come out way up there somewhere, I had no personal experience of this. Hell, for the first two hours of rehearsal I'd worn the thing on the wrong shoulder. It still looked more like some plumber's catastrophic mistake than a musical instrument, but at least now, after a dozen performances, I knew where to blow.

Or pretend to blow. The sound system backstage took care of the actual music. My job was simply to be in the right place when the sousaphone was dropped from the fly loft, like a human horseshoe peg.

The "Seventy-six Trombones" number was the climax of the twenty-minute "Sounds of Old Broadway" piece we did twice a day, at six and eleven. At seven and midnight, it was "Caribbean Rhythms," where I got to fake it at a set of steel drums, dressed up like Carmen Miranda.

So when's the last time you demanded Oedipus Rex on a cruise ship? It was legitimate stage work, and I was glad to have it.

So I continued my high-kicking march step, in place, waving my Panama straw hat and grinning like mad at the audience as the music thundered to its conclusion and the curtain dropped down before me, seventy-six trombonists, a hundred and ten cornet players, and more than a thousand reeds.

Close enough. There were actually three 'bone pickers, four cornets, and five woodwinds. As Busby Berkeley is rumored to have said when informed he could only have twenty chorus girls for a dance he was staging, "That's all right. I know how to make twenty look like a thousand."

The way he did it was through artistry and film editing. The director of this particular turkey had used a holographic echo generator. The images of my dozen chorus kids was picked up by this gizmo, and a computer introduced variations in height, skin color, facial shape, and so forth, then endlessly replicated the first row—the only row I had—into twelve infinitely long files, vanishing into the distance of a stage that was actually no deeper than a starlet's intellect.

Don't bother notifying the union about this, you dirty snitch. The contract plainly states that holo-echoes can be used for crowd scenes in medium-to-small houses. Nobody ever called Sparky Valentine a scab. Not under my real name, anyway.

I waited in the wings while the boys and girls took their bows, then bounded out as the spotlight picked me up. People were standing, but not, I was forced to admit, in an ovation. They had drinks in their hands waiting for the aisles to clear. I bowed as the music swelled, gestured to the maestro, who turned and smiled as one hand continued to conduct his three-piece augmented orchestra. I knew the applause would not extend for long, and besides, I'm not one of those pathetic hams who milk it beyond that Zen moment of one hand clapping. I bowed once more, and the curtain came down.

This was not, in point of fact, the Titanic, as I had told Roy, but her sister ship, the Britannic. A third ship, Olympic, completed the trio, faithful external copies of the White Star Line behemoths of the early twentieth century. It was a very Plutonian thing, to name a cruise fleet after such an ill-omened trio. Everybody knows what happened on that Night to Remember back in 1912; it's passed into the language as a synonym for catastrophe, and hubris. Titanic proved all too sinkable. Less familiar is the sad story of Britannic, converted to a hospital ship during a war and sunk by a mine. Would you believe there was actually a woman, Violet Jessop, who had the bad luck to be aboard both ships when they went down? And the incredible good luck to survive both disasters. It was in the tour brochure.

I'm as superstitious as any actor—a notoriously twitchy lot. I didn't know what to make of it. I know my father would never have set foot aboard either vessel. He made many an astrologer rich during his lifetime. He believed in hexes, hoodoos, and bad karma of any description. My own life seems more like Violet's: depressingly regular disasters followed by perilous escapes that made Pauline of the silent melodramas seem tame.

Two flights of spiral stairs took me a bit closer to the engines, which I had expected to throb but instead made a deep humming sound. Pluto White Star's devotion to authenticity didn't extend to coal-fired steam engines. I gathered the vessel was propelled by some infernal nuclear contrivance, probably generating a pure sleet of insalubrious particles to careen through my unprotected body every instant I spent in my dressing room. However, I try not to think about things I can't see, and the dressing room did have a star on the door.

I kicked it open and edged in sideways because of the sousaphone still slung over my shoulder. The big silver horn had to be the most awkward single object ever invented by man, and for a week now I'd been stuck with it between shows. The property manager said there simply wasn't space in the narrow flies of the shipboard theater for all the gear needed for our two shows, so would I just be a dear and pitch in...? I'd foolishly agreed, not yet knowing there is absolutely no good place to store a sousaphone.

I nudged the door shut with my knee, and put my lips experimentally to the mouthpiece, puckered my lips, and blew. All I got was the same merry flatulence I'd produced on my first attempt. It had been days before a guy from the ship's band had played a tune for me on it... and I'd been amazed to discover it was supposed to sound like that. Now I shrugged it off my shoulders and attacked the screws that held the monstrous bell onto the loops of silver tubing, wondering once again where they had found such a ridiculous item. The flea market of Hell, no doubt. It was supposed to nest inside a case that might have held two moose heads side by side, but there I had put my foot down. It actually took up less of my limited space if I hung the bell on a clothes hook above the door, then put the rest on the bed. When it came time to sleep, the instrument was propped against the door, where it made a nice informal burglar alarm. You never know, with all the crooks around these days.

In addition to the bunk there was a makeup table with lighted mirror and a chair mounted on casters. And there you have the catalog of my furniture. In the wall opposite the table were two doors, one leading to a coffin-sized head, the sort where you stood on the toilet to take a shower, and the other to a locker where I stored my costumes between shows. The architect hadn't planned on the occupant bringing something the size of the Pantechnicon with him. I had to roll it in front of the head to get in the closet, and vice versa. Three people in this cabin was a considerable crowd. Add a fourth and you had the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera.

I was glad to have it. The chorus bunked together in a room not much larger than this. If they all inhaled at once the door burst from its hinges.

I pulled the chair around and opened a desk shelf on the side of the Pan-tech. Speaking a pass phrase—which I don't think I'll mention here, thank you very much—caused a small drawer to spring open. I took out the thin stack of large bills inside the drawer and thumbed through them. Sadly, they had once more refused to mate and multiply. I took a dinner menu and an eyebrow pencil and a well-thumbed booklet of interplanetary rates and schedules, shoved my straw boater back on my head, and once more tried to make my bankroll add up to a trip to Luna before October. Improvise! I told myself. Rhapsodize! Steerage is fine, no problem, but the ships had to be reasonably fast.

It just didn't compute. I had enough for passage, but not in any reasonable time. Or, I could get as far as the Jupiter trailing Trojans by early May, only to arrive dead broke.

I took the little netsuke frog from the drawer and set it beside the stack of money. I sighed. It just didn't make sense to keep the thing. Not that selling it would get me to Luna in time, but it would provide me with some walking around money when I reached the Trojans. Perhaps something would turn up there. I really had no choice. Time was the operative factor.

There was a knock on the door, and I hastily stowed my valuables back into their hiding place and sealed it up. I put on my dressing gown and opened the door to find a man standing there, looking up at me with a faint smile.

"Mr. Valentine?"

"Yes?"

"You wouldn't happen to be Sparky Valentine, the guy I used to watch on Sparky and His Friends?"

"Careful," I said. "You're dating yourself."

"You are? Really?"

"Guilty."

"I knew it, I just knew it," he said, his grin growing wider. "I told my wife, 'That's just got to be Sparky Valentine,' I said, but she didn't believe me. Isn't she going to be surprised? She said everybody knew you died years ago."

"Those rumors were greatly exaggerated."

"That's what I told her. But no, she insisted you'd been murdered in some back alley in Luna forty, fifty years ago." His smile faded a little. "To tell you the truth, I'd heard that story, too."

"I'm not surprised. I've heard it as well. Once these stories get going they turn into urban legends. Who knows how they start." Well, this one started because I got it going myself, having a great need at the time to avoid a certain party who just wasn't going to stop looking for me short of the grave... but that's another story.

There followed an awkward moment of the sort I used to be quite familiar with, but which had become infrequent. I used to be recognized all the time, stopped on the street, buttonholed, quizzed, importuned. Mostly complimented, because Sparky was beloved to a whole generation of children. You never become completely comfortable with it. Somebody is standing there telling you how much he admires you, or your work. Sometimes, it's that he frankly idolizes you, that you've changed his life. Even saved his life. I'm not going to try telling you it isn't enjoyable to be told things like that. If you hate compliments you should never get into show business. But it is awkward, and soon you find yourself standing there with a false smile on your face listening to the fan extol your virtues and wondering how quickly you can gracefully get away. The more effusive the praise, the tougher this is. I soon begin to wonder, if my work in that long-ago series changed your life, what sort of pitiful life do you have? Are you going to bend my ear all day long? And most important, are you stalking me?

I'd stopped really worrying about stalkers years ago. I had plenty of more concrete things to worry about. So I wasn't really uneasy as I stood there in the doorway, listening to him gush about how much he'd enjoyed the show, how he still caught it every chance he could in reruns, how he'd loved me and all the other characters in Sparky's Gang. I figured the nicest way to give him the bum's rush was to offer an autograph, and was trying to figure how to slip the offer into the stream of words, when he said, "Say, would you mind? I went back to my cabin and got this. I found it in the Tokyo gift shop and I'm going to give it to my son. Could I get your autograph on it?"

He was holding out a book. I took it and flipped through the pages. It was a reprint edition of Sparky and His Gang, something I hadn't seen in decades. I quickly sought the copyright page, only to discover no date or copyright information. Printed in Brementon, it said.

The nerve of the guy! This was a pirated edition, printed by convict labor, of a book to which I still, theoretically, owned the rights—for all the good it had done me the last seventy years.

...But what the hell. The guy probably had no idea I'd written the thing (well, ghostwritten, but I'd paid the ghostwriter, and now it was mine). Trying not to clench my teeth, I took the book and pencil from him.

I guess I bore down too hard, because the point broke off. He started patting all his pockets, looking for a pen. I knew that to get rid of him I'd better find one myself, so I turned around, and the back of my head exploded.

The thought processes must keep going during unconsciousness. As I swam my way up through sluggish depths toward a distant light, it all came clear to me, so that when I opened my eyes and saw that my straw hat had landed on what looked like a dead cat, I knew exactly what it was. I knew just what had happened, and it's hard to say if I was more frightened or disgusted.

He just happened to have bought a copy of Sparky and His Gang, which he just happened to have in his room? Unlikely. That should have alerted me. His rubicund complexion I had taken for the flush of too much liquor. But it was the wig that should have tipped me, should have warned me never to turn my back on him.

I reached for the straw hat with an arm that had grown to be six meters long. The crown was crushed where his cosh had hit it. It just might have cushioned the blow enough that I only stayed out for a few minutes, instead of the several hours he had intended.

And that could be the difference I needed, if I could take advantage of it. I took a deep breath. I didn't want to look up, but I had to, so I did.

Sure enough, he had a dazzling red head of hair. Mister Carrot-top. The wig had come off as he swung the blackjack, and my hat had landed on it.

Unforgivable! Incredible stupidity. I had known it was a rug from the first moment I opened the door. Civilians don't know how to wear toupees, they always get it wrong. This one had not even been gummed down around the edges; he had worn it so loosely that simply swinging his arm overhead had knocked it off.

"I really did enjoy Sparky and His Gang," said the diminutive agent of the Charonese Mafia. He had moved my chair in front of the door and was sitting in it, feet flat, back straight, bright and alert. He had a pistol of some sort, and it never wavered. I had no doubt he could pick which of my eyeballs to hit, shooting from the hip.

"I'd like to get up and give you the frog," I said.

"Just stay where you are. I'll take care of everything."

That's what I was afraid of. With the Charonese there were usually only two options: a quick bullet, or prolonged torture.

"Should I order a drink?" I sighed. Don't imagine I was as cool as I sounded. The line and the attitude belonged to Nick Charles, from The Thin Man's Last Stand. ("...nobody could be quite so cool as Mr. Charles in the face of the many dangers he stares down, but Casey Valens had a grand old time making us believe it."—JMMT Channel 70 Minute Reviews).

"Just wait awhile."

"Don't want to make a scene?" I asked.

"It's best to keep these things quiet. When we dock at Honolulu a friend of mine will be coming aboard. You'll leave with us. I can give you a drug to keep you docile if you make it necessary. But I hate to use it. It's annoying. When I'm annoyed, I do things you wouldn't like."

"It won't be necessary," I said. "I'm... say, you never told me your name. Or is that an annoying request?"

"Comfort," he said.

"Beg pardon?"

"Isambard Comfort."

I looked at him dubiously, but he gave no sign he was kidding. I'd asked his name not so much because I wanted to add him to my Christmas card list, but in hopes he would refuse to tell me. Traditionally, if they don't care about you learning their names, it means they plan to kill you. "He can identify you in court, Rocko. Better wax him." However, this was Pluto and the Charonese Mafia, who did more or less what they pleased. His distaste for taking and disposing of me publicly had more to do with decorum on the part of the ferrymen.

But I had a plan.

"I'm going in there and splash some water in my face," I told him. He made the slightest of shrugs, so I struggled to my feet. I stood there swaying, looking down at the hat in my hands, then set it on my head. The impression I wanted to give was of someone still woozy from the blow. Part of my tortured mind was howling in pain and I was keeping it rigidly under control. I knew how to do this since I once did the last two acts of Hamlet with a broken arm, sustained in a fall backstage. ("The Prince of Denmark is one of the more tortured figures in the theatrical canon, but never have I seen so much naked pain brought to the stage as in Mr. K. Valentine's portrayal last night at the Metro Forum. As he lay dying, poisoned, I wanted to leap from my seat and call for medical attention. Bravo, Valentine!"—Liz Harcourt, The Oberonian.)

I washed my face in the tiny sink in the head, then staggered back out toward the dressing table mirror, where I leaned forward and studied myself.

"God," I said. "I look like Macbeth in the last act. After Macduff cuts off his head." I prodded around my left eye, which seemed to be swelling up. I must have hit something on my way down. " 'Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests,' " I quoted. " 'I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to one of woman born.' "

He knew little of the theater, apparently, but he was sharp. Oh, so sharp. I saw his eyes narrow and dart around quickly. I suppose they teach them, in Charonese survival schools—of which there are no better in the solar system—to beware the inconsistent, the unexplained, the unexpected. Something about my lines must not have rung true to his predatory ear.

I didn't give him a lot of time to chew on it, though. Nor did I betray, I trust, the rising tension in my body as I looked down at my crumpled hat, sighed, and tossed it on the bed.

Sharp? Hell, yes. And fast!

I didn't even see the tanglenet as it flew from the tiny hole in the Pantechnicon. I did see the line of red laser light that hit his weapon. Saw it, heard it sizzle, and pretty soon smelled it in the form of ozone and the stink of crisping flesh.

Nothing went quite the way it was supposed to. He was so damn fast!

The laser shouldn't have been on more than a fraction of a second. It's supposed to locate a weapon, hit it, heat it very quickly, and that's that. It would melt the lead in a bullet. I could see his finger pull the trigger until the finger was sliced off as the laser ray passed through it.

He was trying to rise from his chair. He got halfway out of it, but the force of the expanding tanglenet hitting him threw his body back against the door... with one arm still free. The net was supposed to hit him so quickly that both arms would be pinned to his sides, but that snakelike speed had enabled him to keep his gun arm out of its clutches. Now that free hand was a blackened mess, all his fingers off, only the thumb intact.

That's when I got a bit of luck. The force of his impact knocked the sousaphone bell loose and it fell over his head. He stumbled and went down tangled up with his chair.

I knew it wasn't over yet. Casting about for a club of some sort, my hand fell on the other part of the great horn. I grabbed it and turned around, in time to see him shrugging off the bell, his free hand at his side ready to lift him to his feet. I swung the heavy metal tubing over my head and brought it down around his shoulders.

And it still wasn't over. I could have wished for a tighter fit of horn and body. The only way I had to keep him within the circle was to move in close and keep it jammed down around him. That gave him a chance to use his feet and his knees, and to gnash at me with his teeth, which had been filed sharp. I will never forget that sight: those teeth snapping closed inches from my nose, and those eyes, showing no pain, no fear... no emotion at all but a determination to do his job, to kill me.

What we did then was a violent close-quarters ballet, a road-show version of the famous fight in the cabin of the Quantum Belle from The Pusher's Return. It's thirty seconds of mayhem in a five-sided shoe box, based on a similar situation on the Orient Express from a much earlier movie, and they said it could never be done on boards until Dixon de la Nash and I made it the spine-tingling centerpiece of that year's smash hit of the Alameda season. ("Look for the names Sparkman and de la Nash when they draw up the list of this year's Alley nominees. Their incredible fight in the cabin has to be seen to be disbelieved, and is merely the capstone of two of the best performances of this or any other year. If there's any justice, they should both get the award."—The Alamedan)

Friends, Pusher ran six months, eight shows a week, and if I hadn't been there for the whole run I don't think I'd have come out of that Brittanic cabin alive.

With one hand almost off, one arm stuck to his side by the tanglenet, the other arm held by the ring of brass tubing, six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than me... even with all that about the only edge I had on him was the weight. I could horse him around by tugging on the horn, while at the same time being sure it stayed down around him. I wrestled him to the bed, all the time soaking up a punishing series of kicks to the shin and a jackhammering of his knees to my crotch. I scrambled among the bedclothes, meaning to strangle him if possible, managing only to jam a sheet down over his head and shoulders. His kicking lost some accuracy, but never let up. I hurled him face-first into the makeup mirror, pulled him away, and then did it again now that it was broken and jagged. The sheet over his face turned red. I searched for his eyes with my thumbs and felt something squish, but that gave him a chance to shrug the tuba up over his free shoulder and he began flailing at me. He used the arm as a club, getting in one ringing blow that almost broke my collarbone, then another to my side, before bringing his forearm down like a swung baseball bat on the edge of the makeup table. Face powder blossomed into the air, and both bones in his forearm snapped like dry spaghetti. I thought I heard him grunt a little from that, but it never slowed him. He kept swinging the arm, which now bent in three places, the mangled and blackened remains of his fist like a grisly mace at the end of a bloody rope.

But I managed to jam the horn back down over him. Fumbling behind me, I came up with a big jar of cold cream and swung it up and over and down, as if trying to pound a stake into the ground. I heard something crack, and he stopped moving for a moment, staggered, and almost fell down. Then he began moving toward me again, blind, almost immobilized. I heard a high, shrill sound that I thought was some sort of Charonese war cry, then realized it was me. I couldn't stop making the sound. I hit him again and he went to his knees but still wouldn't fall over. I hit him a third time.

When things became clear again I was on my knees in front of him looking at bits of matted, bloody hair sticking to the edge of the cold-cream jar.

Nick Charles would have shrugged off being sapped, shinned, and drop-kicked in the crotch. He'd have straightened his tie, dabbed at a trickle of blood with an immaculate handkerchief, and delivered a trenchant line. Well, folks, I am an actor, and the thought of Nick and others like him from violent melodrama had kept me going through the fight—me, basically a coward and not the least bit stoic—but when it was over I did what most humans do. What you would most likely do. I howled like a dog.

Everything hurt. Getting sapped, in particular, is not at all what it seems in the comic books.

One thing that didn't hurt was the family jewels. That's because they were in a safe-deposit tube in a Lunar hospital, near absolute zero. My father taught me that testicles were God's joke on the male species, good only for procreation and the delivery of agony. Testosterone comes in pills.

I got to my feet. When I turned my head a team of horses clattered over the top of it. I thought I might throw up, but mastered the urge. I stood looking down at my vanquished foe, then at the Pantechnicon. I told you not to be surprised at what it might do.

I banged my fist on the top of it, and with an apologetic little sproinnnng! the collapsible billy club popped out of the side and clattered to the deck.

"Where were you when I needed you?" I asked it, then fell down and slept.

It should have been one, two, three!

One, the laser, and two, the tanglenet, arriving almost simultaneously. Then, with him disarmed and restrained, the steel shillelagh pops into my hand and I belabor him about the head, shoulders, and any other sensitive parts that strike my fancy.

All for want of a spring...

The ejection mechanism worked fine when I tried it later. No doubt years of disuse and infrequent testing had frozen it just enough to nearly get me killed. It wasn't the Pantech's fault, but my own.

When designing the thing I'd given a lot of thought to a lethal attack. The laser was quite capable of slicing heads from shoulders like lunch meat. But killing is a step you can never draw back from. Nor can you ever be sure you might accidentally set your infernal machine into motion. I had been as careful as I could, requiring that the Pantech get not one but two cues from me. In this case, in the dressing room, the quote from Macbeth had primed the mechanism, jacked a shell into the chamber, as it were, causing the Pantech's brain to come alert, size up the threat, locate the weapon, if any, and await further orders. Which came when I tossed my hat onto the bed. Both these are things an actor never does in the dressing room. Had I been elsewhere there were other signals, which will remain within my own purview. There are enemies lurking everywhere, and who knows but that you might be one of them?

Thank God for The Pusher's Return. It wasn't the first time my craft had saved my life. One day I might even put my sword-fighting skills to good use.

And by the way, there is no damn justice. Dixon de la Mare won that Alley Award, stole that Alley Award. It's the same old story. I played the villain so well the voters subconsciously didn't like me.

When I woke up I did so all at once, nearly falling off the bed as every muscle in my body jerked. I'd dreamed he was hovering over me, the bloody ruin of his face twisted into a deadly grin, his white, sharp teeth getting star billing. I looked at the floor and he was still in the same position.

Bad mistake, that, not taking the time to check him out. But I'd really had little choice. I looked at him now.

All right, Sparky. You've cleverly lured your prey to you, and you've vanquished it. Now, do you stuff it and mount it in the den, release it back into its native habitat, or eat it?

Maybe I didn't have much choice. Maybe he was already dead. I reached down and pinched his nostrils together. In a moment a breath came bubbling from his lips, a comical sound in another situation.

Good. He might still die—I might yet decide I had to kill him, for that matter—but it's always best to have a choice. And Father always used to say you should never kill anyone unless it's absolutely necessary. Of course, he viewed getting a bad review as fulfilling that condition.

This might be one of those times. The Charonese had a bulldog reputation for pursuit. There was no way they were going to let this matter remain in its current state. They would be coming after me. I was not safe on Pluto, or the Neptune or Uranus systems. It was said the ferrymen had considerable clout as far sunward as Saturn's orbit. Beyond that I didn't know.

So step one was to depart the balmy shores of Pluto. Five minutes from now would be about right, I thought. It would take me a bit longer in actual practice.

What about Isambard Comfort, then? Could that really be his name? Should I let him survive to inflict its ridiculous syllables on other innocent ears? I frowned down at him again. Under a flap of detached scalp I thought I saw a gleam of metal.

I nudged the skin aside with the tip of my billy club. It looked like a stainless-steel egg in there. There were broken bits of skull bone but beneath it all he seemed to have encased his brain in a protective shell.

I'd heard of it, but never seen it. We monkey with our bodies these days—Lord knows I'd done enough of it myself, for professional reasons—but there are a few hard constants that resist our best efforts. That wrinkled, red-gray, be-veined and be-flustered mass known as the brain was one of them. You could augment it with crystal memory, wire it for radio reception, or bronze it for posterity, as Comfort had done, but if you tampered with it too much it simply stopped working. So I knew that, whatever he had done, it hadn't been proof against repeated blows from a jar of cold cream. That sphere of metal would prevent the gray matter from being penetrated by a knife or a bullet, but nothing could alter its inertia, and slamming it against the inside of the shell produced a concussion, and you were out. Worse, the not infrequent sequella of concussion was brain swelling, which could be fatal even in our current state of medical grace. Isambard's brain would be swelling now, with no more place to go than if it had been in a standard-issue skull.

As I came to that conclusion I saw a tiny network of cracks appear in the metal carapace. The whole construction grew by about a quarter of an inch. It was now more of a fine metal mesh than a seamless helmet.

This was commando stuff, I realized. Damage-control circuits were coming into play.

That's when I realized I wasn't going to kill him. Mainly, it was the conclusion that killing him would not further my cause in any way.

And he'd said he liked Sparky and His Gang.

For well over twenty years Britannic had been cruising a triangular route meant to simulate a trans-Pacific voyage. The original ship could not have made the crossing in less than two weeks. The Plutonian copy did it in four days. This was no great feat of speed, as the entire journey took place in the hundred-kilometer bubble of rock deep beneath the planetary surface known as the Pacifica Environmental Park, still the largest disneyland in the system.

It was a voyage in both space and time, and don't ask me how they did it. I mean, the ship when under weigh always seemed to be making good speed, cutting smartly through the blue water, leaving a long, straight wake behind. It stood to reason that she was actually either tethered in place, or going in large circles, but you couldn't tell it by looking.

The trip started in Edo, in 1853, the year of the arrival of the Black Ships in the bay of what would become Tokyo. Passengers embarked after sampling the culture of feudal Japan, sailed out with magnificent Mount Fuji in the distance as Commodore Perry sailed in.

The next morning brought them to Tahiti in 1789—a very cute trick: two thousand leagues south by southwest, and sixty years into the past in about eighteen hours. Britannic would drop anchor at Papeete alongside the Bounty, met by dozens of outrigger canoes filled with happy, naked brown people throwing tropical flowers, and the passengers would be ferried ashore for a day of sensual pleasures in the sun, surf, and sand. They'd feast, frolic, and fornicate (all included in the price of your ticket, no tipping, please!), have their pictures taken with Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh, then stagger back to feast and frolic and fornicate most of the night, until the morning, when the ship arrived at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, where the Pacifica disneyland management had prepared a little show for them, which the less hungover among the vacationers might actually watch. Even those you might have thought dead to the world were usually awakened; the show was very noisy.

From there the ship sailed for San Francisco, arriving in time for the earthquake of 1906.

I said the trip was triangular, and you might have noticed this triangle seemed to have four corners. No real mystery this time: San Francisco Bay was actually just a few miles on the other side of Fuji. During the night the ship was brought around through a tunnel under the mountain, ready for another group of revelers. Actually, the trip through the tunnel, which the passengers never saw, was as interesting as the Great Quake, in my opinion. I'd gone through it twice.

This schedule allowed Titanic and Olympic to follow at twenty-four hour intervals, which meant that every fourth day Pearl Harbor was spared, Frisco didn't burn, and the Clark Gable and Charles Laughton clones and all the other actors in the four locations got a day off. (Not the crews. We worked thirty days, then had a ten-day furlough.)

Not this time, though. My hiatus would last a bit longer, as I was about to bid an informal good-bye to Britannic.

It was not the first time I'd had to abandon a show in the middle of a run. In fact, thinking back, it had been some time since I'd been able to finish one. There'd been two more before my hasty departure from Brementon. I never felt good about it. The show must go on, don't you know. You hate to let your fellow troupers down. But there was no point in sticking around if you were about to be sent to jail, or the grave. Any way you looked at it, it was understudy time.

Dawn was just breaking as we rounded Diamond Head and steamed into Pearl Harbor. Just down the beach I could see rows of resort hotels that had not been there in 1941. Even at this hour I could see a few fanatics out in the water perched on fiberglass boards, engaging in a Hawaiian version of attempted suicide known as "surfing." I'd tried it my last time through. If God had intended me to surf, He'd have given me gills.

Disembarking was going to be something of a problem. If I waited until we tied up at the wharf, I'd be sure to encounter whoever Mr. Comfort had intended to meet. I felt I could elude him or them with a suitable disguise, but there was no good way to disguise the Pantechnicon, and somebody was bound to wonder why that odd-looking fellow was stealing my luggage. Embarrassing questions were sure to be asked, attracting unwanted attention.

That meant an unceremonious dunk in the drink. Even that presented problems. It would be a good idea not to be seen. With the Day of Infamy about to begin, the decks were jammed with spectators. My one lucky break was that the port side offered much the better view of the festivities, and the stewards had advertised that fact. That was also the side that would tie up to the dock after the show, so the crew preparing hatches and ramps were over there, too. I had found a big cargo hatch near the starboard bow and in the fifteen minutes I'd been standing there, watching the water flow by twenty feet beneath me, not a soul had come down the passageway. Until now.

"Good morning, Elwood," I said. He was ambling toward me, hands jammed down into his pockets, hat jammed down on his head. I hadn't seen much of him during the voyage. No doubt he was spending his time at the bar, telling his tall tales to anyone who would listen.

" 'Lo, Sparky," he drawled.

"Feel like a swim?" I asked him.

"No. No, I think I'll pass on that one." He leaned on the pole that blocked the open hatch door and gazed out at the gray Navy ships, dozens of them, clustered around the dry docks and repair yards of Keanapuaa. All the bigger ones, the behemoths, the battleships named after political divisions of the old United States, were on the port side.

"I looked in on that feller in your dressing room," he said.

"How's he doing?"

"Gonna be a close thing," he said. "A real close thing."

"That's what I thought, too."

He turned to squint up at me.

"Didja have to hit him so hard?"

"You didn't see the fight, Elwood."

"No, you're right. I didn't see it. He must have come at you really hard, for you to do that to him."

"Actually, he didn't come at me at all. He was just holding me at gunpoint."

He looked surprised. "You don't mean it. What was he, some sort of cop?"

"In a way. Private security."

He shook his head slowly and looked down at the water.

"It's usually not a good idea, beating a cop half to death."

"Didn't have much choice. He was going to kill me."

"He said that, did he?"

"Well, not in so many words."

He gave me another long look, and this time I looked away. Sometimes I wish Elwood would just go away. He's always second-guessing me.

"What did you want me to do?" I protested. "Wait around and see?"

"Now don't you get all excited. I'm just asking, that's all. I don't want to try to run your life for you."

"Sure you do."

"That's not true, Sparky. I'm just looking out for your welfare. If that man dies, you know good and well there'll be more trouble—"

"Getting killed isn't your idea of trouble?"

He looked me over again, then nodded. I was beginning to hear a low, droning noise, still distant but getting nearer. Elwood looked up. The sky was blue, and still clear.

"All I was gonna suggest," he said, "is when you get ashore, would it hurt anything to give a call and have somebody go get him? It might make a big difference."

"They'll find him soon enough."

"Maybe, maybe not." He kept looking at me.

"All right. I'll call."

"That's good." He looked down at the water again. "I'm glad I won't be diving into that. Looks cold to me."

"Are you kidding? This is Hawaii. It's warm as soup."

"Yeah? Seems to me there's a nip in the air."

With that the droning noise got a lot louder, and the first wave of torpedo bombers of the Japanese Imperial Navy appeared over the pineapple fields to the north. I gave Elwood a sour look, and shoved the Pantech over the side. When I hesitated for a moment, he planted a foot encouragingly, and I tumbled into the water.

The next half hour kept me busy as a one-man show of Cast of Thousands. It wasn't nearly as dangerous as it looked... or so I kept telling myself.

Pacifica's Pearl Harbor spectacular, known in the trade as a Vegas, employed every trick in the book to make it seem life-sized and historically accurate, including one of the more subtle tricks I know: having parts of it actually be life-sized. The aircraft were all exact replicas, powered by real gasoline engines. The torpedoes they dropped were to scale, but had no warheads, explosions being provided by charges already in place. The battleships themselves were also big as life... on the side the audience saw, anyway.

The show employed a cast of several thousand. Most of them simply had to run around shouting and pointing. Others did actual stunts, from simply swimming through water dotted with burning oil slicks, to being blown from the deck of an exploding battleship. There were fire gags, with sailors running around engulfed in flame, and bomb gags, where men bounced off concealed trampolines at the moment the gas and flash powder went off.

Only about a hundred of these were full studio-certified expert stunt performers, and they were clustered near the center of the action. The rest were journeymen, getting extra wages because of the marginal dangers involved, but not qualified for the more exacting gags. My plan was to stay in the areas where these guys were assigned, and try not to get my hair singed off.

The Pantechnicon is equipped to deliver motive power in a variety of mediums. Today I'd rigged a small propeller to a shaft that would normally power a set of wheels, and I trailed behind at the end of a three-meter cord. The Pantech is about as streamlined as a brick. Its progress might best be described as wallowing, but it managed a steady three knots, which would eventually get me there.

I'd seen the show twice before, so I had some idea where the biggest effects were produced. Still, it could get dicey. The best thing I had going was the clarity of the water, at least before the worst of the explosions roiled the bottom and filled the water with foamy bubbles. I could duck my head under and see where the charges were placed.

My worst moment came when I felt a vibration in the water, turned my head, and saw a torpedo headed straight for me. I saw it pass about ten feet below, a lethal silver shark, then the water all around me turned to foam and my clothes filled up with air for a while.

But a few minutes later I ran aground on a concrete shore to the south side of Ford's Island. I dragged myself and my luggage out of the water and sat down to await the end of the show.

If you think the sinking of the Arizona is spectacular, you should see the raising.

Britannic had gone to her berthing point before it was over, all the fire and noise and fountains of water and planes crashing in flames. Then the heavenly director shouted, "Cut, that's a wrap," and it all stopped for a moment... then went into reverse. Torpedoes bobbed to the surface, then headed for a submarine tender like schools of fish. Half a dozen enormous gray metal battlewagons were lifted from the bottom, still smoking, paint blistered. Sailors who had gone down with the ship spit out breathing tubes and broke out the paint cans. Everywhere water cascaded off buckled "wooden" decks, which now started to unbuckle along the invisible hinge lines. All over the harbor little boom skimmers darted, corralling the black bunker fuel, sucking it into big tanks.

Everybody went about his business without a single cheer being raised, nor a solitary high-five exchanged. They call it theater, but it's not, to my mind. I know it's hard to maintain enthusiasm after a long run. The solution to that is to get out when you no longer feel excitement as the curtain falls. This particular Vegas had been running for twenty years. Some of the people around me were the children of the original cast. Their own children would no doubt take over the jobs when this generation moved on to something else. I found these disneyland shows overproduced and cheerless. If you want a history lesson, a holograph movie would serve.

Ah, well. It created a lot of jobs in the system's number-one industry: tourism. I'll confess I've played in them when at liberty from more rewarding projects.

No one gave me a glance as I found my way to the freight elevator that took me down into the bowels of Pacifica and deposited me at the employees' train station, which in turn dumped me at the spaceport fifteen minutes later. Even on the train car I drew no curious stares as I dripped Hawaiian water onto the red seats and black carpet. Plutonians are a mind-your-own-business crowd, one of the best things about them.

One more train ride and I was at the freight terminal at the most remote point of the spaceport. If I'd come there two weeks before, I could have avoided a great deal of trouble, and Isambard Comfort could have missed a monumental headache.

I hadn't come here for one big reason. It scared me to death. Now the alternative was worse, so I marched resolutely up to the express counter of Pillock and Burke Interplanet Carriers and inquired as to the cost of mailing myself to Uranus.

I didn't put it in just those words, of course.

"What's in it?" the clerk asked, with a big yawn, looking without interest at the Pantech, sitting there seeming as new as the day it was built, having shaken off all signs of its recent adventure like a duck's back sheds water.

"Personal effects," I said. "Tools of my trade." I knew that would get me a discount, under the Interplanetary Artists' Convention.

"Anythin' t'd'clare?"

"No contraband. There's a Bichon Frise inside."

"A what?"

"A dog. Here's his license. I'll need Oh-two and H-two-Oh feeds, and a two-twenty power connection." I didn't really need the power, since the Pantech has its own internal source, but it was illegal to ship that power plant without having it inspected and certified, and why bother them with all that red tape? Better to pay for the power hookup and not raise any questions.

Such as the one he now asked.

"What about food? The dog gonna need food?"

"He has his own." He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "He doesn't eat much," I explained. "It's a small dog." I could feel myself getting too elaborate. My father always said to keep your lies simple, and never answer a question you're not asked. But he kept looking, so I shoved the license closer to him and let the P$20 bill peek out from under it. His eyes shifted, and he picked up the license and shoved it into a machine. The bill was gone. He handed the license back to me with a new stamp on it. I really hated to do this, since anyone who knew about Toby might be able to trace me through him, but I had no choice.

He took a yellow form from a stack and started filling it in with a pencil. It was almost Dickensian, and a blatant waste of time since he had a voice-capable computer at his elbow, but Pluto, like most planets, had some archaic and fiercely protected labor laws. Reading upside down, I saw him fill in the spot for breed of dog as Bitching Freeze.

Finally he slapped a shipping tag on the side of the Pantech, and I watched it trundle away on a conveyor belt into unknown depths. Now I was in a big hurry.

There was a convenience store at the train station. I filled a grocery bag full of granola bars, jerky, honey, corn syrup, and as many other items of concentrated fat, sugar, and carbohydrates as I could carry. Then I set off in search of the sort of merchant you can always find hanging around a spaceport. The sort who doesn't display his wares on shelves, or hang out a sign.

She wasn't too hard to find. Most drugs are legal on Pluto, and even the ones they try to control are readily available if you know where to look—as has always been the case. I was directed to a back booth of a coffee shop on one of the lower levels. I sipped a hot chocolate while we haggled about price, then she left and I sat looking out a big picture window overlooking the freight-sorting yard. Millions of crates and parcels slid down ramps and along conveyors until they fetched up at the doors that would soon open and disgorge their loads onto shuttle trucks.

The pusher returned with a small plastic envelope, and told me the quickest way to the yard.

This place was probably more dangerous than Pearl. The mechanized mayhem of the Vegas was predictable, most of it was smart, and programmed to be on the lookout for fragile humans getting in the way. Not so in the freight yard. If you didn't stay on your toes something might roll up behind you and crush you like a bug under silent wheels. I moved quickly, following the homer beacon in my pocket, and soon I was standing where the Pantechnicon had come to rest, midway down a line of larger crates.

I was about to activate it when a movement in the corner of my eye made me stop and duck down. I looked up cautiously... and let out a deep breath. Two lines over a man was on his hands and knees, crawling under the metal frame of a conveyor. This was all right with me; cops never crawl, and they never look furtive. Neither do yard bulls. They can sneak just fine, but they do it with entirely different body language.

In fact... I thought I knew this guy.

I gave a low whistle, three notes known to hoboes throughout the system, and he looked up at me and grinned.

"Sparks," he said, in a husky voice.

"Lou? Is that the uke man?"

"You don't believe me, I'll play you a tune."

Ukulele Lou was a legend in his own time. He was rumored to have some sort of brain damage, which made his conversations a little hard to follow, and he was crazy as a mudlark. But his memory for music was amazing. He claimed to know words and music to fifteen thousand songs, and I'd never doubted him. He was wearing a battered pressure suit. His precious ukulele was in his hand.

I swear, the helmet faceplate had a crack in it. It made me sweat just to think about it. Lou and some of the other 'bos always traveled this way, and without the comforts of top-of-the-line luggage.

"Where you bound?" I asked him.

"Where else? Uranus." He pronounced it your-anus.

Where else, indeed? I'm largely ignorant of these things, but my understanding was that due to orbital dynamics, nearly all the outer planet commerce for the last decade, and for a few decades to come, was the triangle of Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune, then back to Pluto, in that order. It had to do with the relative positions of the planets. Pluto had for some years been at the lowest point in its orbit, which meant it was closer to the sun than Neptune. Uranus was about sixty degrees ahead, and Neptune clear around the sun from Uranus. No orbit in the outer planets that gets you there in a reasonable time is a truly economical orbit, but going against the direction of planetary motion is the least economical orbit of all. It's like stepping off a moving train. Before you go anywhere else, you first have to kill your own motion.

"What about you?" Lou asked.

"Uranus," I confirmed. I pronounced it Urine-us. Was there ever an orb so inelegantly named? Nobody's ever agreed on how to say it, and both ways stink.

"The Bard's World?" he asked, with a cackle.

"Where else?"

"Can't get them stars outta your eyes, is that it? Gonna stand at the corner of Columbia and Paramount and gawk at the names in the pavement? Buy a map to the stars' condos? See how your feet fit in Henry Collyer's footsteps?"

I ignored the ribbing and saluted him. "Good luck, Lou," I said.

"Break a leg," he urged. Then he pried up a corner of a three-story packing crate and squeezed himself inside. I could hear him working, faintly, as I activated the shelter on the Pantech.

I did a little research on tramps and hoboes while struggling through an ill-advised update of The Grapes of Wrath. ("Kenneth Valentine struggles through this ill-advised update as Tom Joad, an asteroid miner thrown out of work when the 'Tailings Crisis' of '86 shuts down all operations. He would have been better off playing this material for laughs, of which there are many, few of them intended."—Daily Cereal) Back then it was boxcars on freight trains, and you would weep in terror to know what these men went through. They rode in them, on them, and under them—"riding the rods"—their bodies inches from the murderous wheels.

Then, as now, the owners of the railroads were aware of the informal passengers, and then, as now, they didn't like it much. What they did about it depended largely on where you hopped the freight, or where you got off.

The clerk I'd bribed had been fully aware of my real intentions. Declaring a live animal was the most common ruse to obtain air and water en route. He'd heard that story about the dog before. (Ironically, I really had a dog, of course, but he would not need any consumables.)

Maybe that clerk meant what he said when he wrote "bitching freeze." It would be one hell of a bitchin' freeze if anything went wrong with any of the Pantech's systems along the way. Or any of the freighter's systems, for that matter, and let's face it, they just aren't as careful about things as they are in even the worst passenger liner. You lose a passenger and it's lawsuit time. If the Pantech sprang a leak I'd be little more than spoiled freight, who shouldn't have been in there in the first place. Like those old 'bos who fell off the rods; gathered up, bagged, and tossed in a hole in potter's field. Maybe a token effort to contact the kinfolk.

We are used to a high standard of safety, and fear of vacuum is the most common phobia, one I share with eighty percent of humanity. Though I believe I have it in a greater degree than most.

Then there are the old space rats like Ukulele Lou. Cracked faceplate and all. He seemed immune to the fears that now began to bore into my spine like an electrified dental drill.

I heard him as I squeezed myself through the lock and into the newly deployed shelter half-made of memory plastic. He was doing what you might expect a guy named Ukulele Lou to do: singing.

The memory plastic can remember a variety of shapes. This time, since the Pantech was standing on end, and since we'd soon be in vacuum, it was best to be spherical. From the outside it looked like a cubist's idea of an icecream cone, and from inside, the hatch I could open to gain access to the interior was now under my feet, the Pantech becoming my basement. I lifted this hatch and fiddled with the environmental controls, preparing it to accept the external air and water feeds when they were hooked up, just prior to loading aboard the ship.

Luck. I'd need some of it. The trip would be eighty-four days. I had enough food to stretch for about thirty... if I stayed awake and my metabolism worked as usual. I didn't plan on staying awake.

I broke open the package I'd bought from the pusher, took out two of the pills, and swallowed them.

I heard the vacuum alarm going off outside, and I took a deep breath. I realized I'd been taking a lot of them. Now the huge doors to the outside started to rumble up toward the ceiling, and the sound died away as the air puffed out into space.

I felt like I was choking. My tongue seemed to swell until it filled my mouth, and became dry as an old wool sock. I could see the curved wall of my tent bulge outward the tiniest bit, and I was suddenly drenched in sweat.

"To be, or not to be," I gasped. "That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them."

That felt a little better. The conveyor began to move. I was bumped along quickly, and soon loaded onto a cargo pallet. Small robot handlers were climbing all over the pressure crates, metal spiders no bigger than my hand, stabbing shipping labels with red laser lights. I watched as they snapped lines to the pallet's air and water tanks. I saw the two yellow lights at my feet turn to green; I closed the basement hatch and sat down in lotus position as the shuttle truck lumbered out onto the dark surface of Pluto at high noon of a midsummer's day.

I was reminded of a postcard I once saw. Christmas in Vermont. A horse-drawn sleigh wound down a lane between leafless trees, snow-covered hills in the background. Out here the sun cast about as much light as the full moon in that postcard. Dozens of distant, skeletal cargo ships might have been Vermont maples designed by a mad geometer. There was a tractor moving along beside mine, pulling a cargo pallet on skids, that could do for a one-horse open sleigh...

No, sorry. Let's face it. This wasn't Currier and Ives. Those snow-covered hills were massive bergs of frozen methane. The glaciers coming down the sides were solid oxygen and nitrogen—pollutants, actually, not present on Pluto's crust until man arrived. On a busy day at the spaceport the rocket exhausts sometimes melted parts of these glaciers and they became murmuring streams. What a shame no Plutonians actually came out here for a sleigh ride, or to picnic by the little brooks a-gurgling.

I was choking up again, and didn't feel the least bit sleepy.

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines."

A movement caught my eye. On the next crawler the corner of a packing crate had popped open from the inside. I saw Lou scramble out and start moving like a scuttling crab, over and around and under the other crates.

Jesus, Lou! He was holding one hand over the crack in his faceplate, and I fancied I could see a fine mist of oxygen snow like a halo around his head. Baby, it was cold outside. Midsummer, and the weather forecast was for another scorching day at 370 below zero. Something must have been wrong with the first crate to force Lou to change his lodgings this late in the game. A problem with the hookups, a defective seal, who knows? But there wasn't a thing I could do to help him.

Like a swimmer in a Siberian lake, you only get a couple of minutes. No spacesuit yet built protects well from frozen methane, and Lou's was an antique.

I watched him pry up the corner of another crate and slither inside. The corner was pulled back into place... and I realized I wouldn't know for another eighty-four days whether or not he was alive or frozen stiff.

When I turned away I seemed to be moving in slow motion. That's when I realized the drugs had started taking effect. It was a pleasant feeling, a warm heaviness in my limbs. My breathing became slow and deep and relaxed. I smiled. I closed my eyes.

I heard a distant wind blowing. There was the sound of dry leaves being swept along. I saw a great hourglass, grains of sand the size of houses rolling silently through the narrow neck. Slowly, the glass turned, the sand tumbled from the bottom to the top, and began to flow quickly in the other direction.

And I'm sorry as hell about this, but I can only report what happened. I'd been watching old movies all my life, and when it came time to flash back on my own life there was no way in the world it would come to me as anything but a black-and-white montage of whirling clock hands and fluttering calendar pages going backward, backward, ever backward in time....