The Golden Globe

ACT 5

KING LEAR

ACT I SCENE I

There are seasons in the life of a Shakespearean actor, natural milestones he can expect along the path of his career. The two most important are Romeo and Lear.

Romeo is a young man's game. Impetuous and energetic, thunderstruck by the storms of puberty, stunned by love. It's not a part for the mature, though God knows it's been played by enough codgers. As I've just related, Romeo was a disaster for me. I don't have much affection for the role.

Macbeth is on his way up. Hamlet and Henry V are vigorous and youthful. Othello and Julius Caesar are in the full flower of their careers.

There are innumerable other roles an actor can essay—a few he can find himself stuck in as a second stringer or a comic. But if one has hopes of being written in the annals of the great, if one aspires to acquire the mantle of Burbage and Olivier, then the capstone of his career will be Lear.

Lear.

In the seventy years since my days as Sparky, the closest I had ever come to playing Lear was in an engaging little trifle called The Five-Minit Bard, a small part of which is set out above.

Oh, the fun we had. The premise was simple: all Shakespeare in one night, no play longer than five minutes. Each was done in a different style. Hamlet as if by Gilbert and Sullivan, with a patter song and a happy ending. All's Well That Ends Well as rewritten by Beckett, with performers sitting in chairs, muttering bits of dialogue and abandoning the project after three minutes. Richard III the radio serial, one-minute episodes with sound effects scattered through the performance. Henry VI, all three parts, narrated by a super-rapid square-dance caller and done as a ballet a la Copland.

And A Midsummer Night's Dream as played by Sparky and his Gang, with guess who as Puck/Sparky. No one ever suspected.

Some were a lot shorter than five minutes, or the night would have run three hours, much too long for comedy. Timon of Athens: a man walks to center stage and says, "Nobody gives a damn about Timon of Athens," and walks off. Titus Andronicus: all cast members line up onstage, and at a signal, begin hacking at each other with swords, blood bladders spraying high-pressure Max Factor Red #2.

Then there was King Lear, as if done by the turn-of-the-century Rude Theater. Most critics hated 5MB, but it was a long-running hit. I played dozens of parts, including Lear.

I say these things in an attempt to explain why, after an absence of more than thirty years, I was returning to Luna. I had been there only twice since my hasty departure from Romeo. Things had been all too hot for me the last time I left—misunderstandings not affected by any statute of limitations—and I'd sworn a mighty oath never to return. Things would be even hotter now, with Isambard and the whole stinking planet of Charon on my trail, possibly already waiting for me. I didn't pretend they'd have any more trouble finding me here than they had at Oberon. If I had a brain in my head, I'd be hopping the first tramp free-faller to points unspecified and mysterious. I'd be doing the thing I had become so good at: losing myself in the vast spaces of the solar system.

But I never even thought of that, and the reason was simple.

Lear.

Not only Lear, but Lear staged by the greatest director of our time, my long-ago sidekick and onetime best friend—only friend—Kaspara Polichinelli.

And by now Polly probably didn't have a lot of time left.

Almost from the first blast at Oberon, I had been absorbed with the question of where to land when we reached Luna. Adept though I am at producing false identification and talking my way through any difficulties, simply setting down at the King City Spaceport in a spent lifeboat was bound to draw unwanted attention.

But I had some advantages. By the nature of space and of space travel, "border patrol" around a place like Luna is an iffy proposition. Radar and computers can certainly track all the millions of approaching, departing, and orbiting vehicles in the vast sphere, one thousand miles from the surface, that the lawyers have defined as Lunar territorial space. But having done that, what do you do next? Allow landings and takeoffs only at designated spots, like major spaceports? Ten million weekend orienteers, campers, and renters of shorthoppers would raise quite a howl about that one. Not to mention a million freeholders living in self-sufficient isolation, scattered over the entire Lunar surface. Should we ask these folks to hoof it to the nearest train? Allow only surface transportation to hiking trails and camp resorts? No, Lunarians will surrender certain of their civil rights, just like anyone else, if the reason is strong enough. If people are blowing up spaceships with bombs, they will submit to searches before boarding a spaceship. But ban private hoppers, orbiters, or even deep-space RVs... to stop smugglers? To keep a lid on illegal immigration? 'Fraid not, Senator.

So. How about employing sophisticated computer programs to keep track of deep-space arrivals, matching these up with vehicle transponder codes and criminal rap sheets and travel patterns and godknowswhatelse, and following suspicious ships to ask a few questions and conduct a quick Gestapo-style shakedown?

Tried that. Didn't work. Nabbed a few pathetic amateurs, first offenders, got off with a warning. Big waste of time and money.

So how about... open borders?

But... but... open borders? Absolute anathema to the bureaucratic mentality. Never mind that there has never been a border quite so tenuous or so permeable as the one surrounding Luna, or the ones around any planet. We can't just let people come and go as they please, can we? Carrying any damn thing they want to carry? Precious close to anarchy, that.

And so... actually, no. Not what you're probably thinking. For once, rationality prevailed. It helped that there is little worth smuggling on a small scale, since little is illegal these days. Avoiding duty on large cargoes is another matter entirely, and it's easy to keep track of the big ships if they land where they oughtn't. As for illegal immigration... what illegal immigration? It's not a problem on Luna. Just step right up and ask for citizenship papers, and after a sixty-second search of InterSystem crime records, a credit check (we don't want your welfare cases), and payment of a nominal fee, you're a Lunarian. Welcome, cobber!

So the situation is like this, for those of you who thought getting into Luna for a criminal type like myself would be a big hairy deal: it ain't. Not at first, anyway. There are plenty of wanted folks in those freeholds I mentioned a moment ago, and if they stay put and don't try to enter the mainstream of civilization, they can stay there for a million years as far as the Lunar federal government is concerned. No one will come looking for them.

It's the next step that's tough.

Did I say the spherical "border" around Luna is really a laughable fiction? I did, and it is. Did I imply that means one can then just walk the main thoroughfares of King City? I did not. That border is tighter than a tick's tush. That border makes the old "Iron Curtain" seem like a vague, unpatrolled line in the sand and a few desultory formalities. Because the border between the surface of Luna and the cities of Luna is nothing less than the line between life and death. Between vacuum and air. Every entrance into the main corridors of Luna is, of necessity, a fortress designed to keep air inside and the Breathsucker out. If a molecule of oxygen has no chance of passing through without the proper authorization, how much chance does several trillion molecules of actor have of entering without a visa?

Well, anything can be done, if you know your way around. The easiest way is through your friends, but you have to have the right sort of friends. The sort who do this sort of thing every day.

I chose to go through the Heinleiners.

Before the Big Glitch, not long ago, nobody knew anything about the Heinleiners. In fact, they didn't even have that name; it was given to them later by media reports after the pivotal part they played, involuntarily, in the Glitch itself. Now everybody thinks they know everything about Heinleiners, but the truth is, most of it is wrong.

First, and most basic, it's pretty silly to refer to them as a group. They're not group-type people. Nobody elects officers, no meetings are held. You "join" by being invited to one of several secret locations by a friend. What you actually do, however, is to opt out of the aboveground society. You can do it totally, choosing to live in one of the secret enclaves, or partially, maintaining a life and an identity while moving back and forth between the two realms.

When the Lunar Central Computer, the CC, had the nervous breakdown we've all come to call the Big Glitch, the Heinleiners were one of its main targets. There's been endless speculation as to why. The short answer so far is, We don't know. The popular theory, and one I think makes sense, is the CC was deeply offended by a high-tech group living beyond its reach, and possessing technology not available to the CC. Accordingly, the CC organized and trained, in secret, a cadre of extra-legal police that you might as well call an army. This bunch invaded the main Heinleiner compound, intending to wipe it out, and got a big surprise: these people fought back. The takeover failed, the CC retreated into a semicatatonic state from which it is only now being coaxed, and Lunar life was turned topsy-turvy.

Intimately tied up in all this, again involuntarily, was one Hildy Johnson, ace reporter for the News Nipple. Yes, that Hildy Johnson.

She has told some of her story publicly. She's told more of it to me. There is much she still has to tell, which she'll get to when she thinks it wise. And this presents me with a problem. As a sort of "member" of the group, I am constrained in what I can reveal about it. Luckily, much of it is superfluous to the story I'm telling. Here is what I can reveal:

1) The group got its name from a space vessel called the Robert A. Heinlein, named for a twentieth-century writer and radical political philosopher. The ship is very large, even by today's standards, and quite old. It was originally intended as an Orion-type starship, that is, a ship powered by large numbers of nuclear bombs exploding against a massive pusher plate. You can find the plans for one in any public library. Long ago the original builders went broke, and the shell of the ship ended up derelict on the edge of a vast junkyard. The Heinleiners took it over, and the junkyard as well. Today the ship, or parts of it, serve as the public face of the Heinleiners, the place reporters and politicians go when they want to talk to one. (Good luck! They don't do a lot of talking.)

2) These people do share some of Mr. Heinlein's political philosophy, the part that can be summed up as "Leave me alone!" They are not anarchists, but they brook little interference from the government. They are happiest where there is no government, and you'll find many of them, or their sympathizers, in the more remote regions of the system. But a lot of folks can't take that kind of isolation (me, for instance), and so live well concealed (if they are doing illegal things) or openly (where they work for a quasi-libertarian form of government). They don't plan to overthrow any governments; that would be entirely too much trouble and, as even the most doctrinaire of them will admit, the yoke of present-day governments is not intolerably onerous, when viewed historically. Things could be worse, and would likely get worse if there was a lot of radical political agitation to suppress. Don't look for Heinleiners to be publishing any manifestos, nailing any lists of demands to courthouse doors, storming any Bastilles. But they do have one secret, jealously guarded, in whose pursuit they are implacable:

3) They're going to the stars.

Hah! you say. Secret! you say. Tell me another one.

Very well. The fact that they intend to travel to the stars is very well known, and almost universally dismissed. Any number of Eminent Scientists will explain to you in great detail why the project is impossible. The Heinleiners think this is just fine. The fewer people take them seriously, the fewer there will be trying to discover the real secret, which is how they intend to do it.

Trust me. They're going to do it.

I am the least-qualified person in the system to look at a stardrive and say, "Aha! That will work!" You could spend a year showing it to me, explaining it to me, drawing nice pretty pictures and reading the manual (if there was such a thing) out loud, and at the end I would still be in a state of perfect ignorance concerning stardrives.

But others, people who know, tell me I can count on it. In a year, two years—however long it takes to patch it up—that magnificent hulk sitting out there on the surface is going to leap up and violate the virgin sky. How fast will it go? No one will say. But no one will raise a family during the journey, and you won't return to find all your friends a hundred years older than you.

Swamp gas, you say. How many "starships" have been sold to how many suckers in the last century? Hyperspace is to our age as lost treasure maps and gold mines and oil wells and Florida real estate were to a previous generation of confidence men. I should know; I've sold enough starships in my time.

Yes, and the way to sell them is not to hide out by a garbage dump and not tell anyone about it. You can invest, and this may be your last chance before the stock goes intergalactic. Check out the prospectus. It claims nothing, promises nothing. Believe me, this is not how you sell pirate gold. Call your broker at once. You'll thank me later.

And that is the secret, you see. Not that they are going, but how they're going to get there. The inventors and investors in this new space drive do not intend to turn it over to a grateful government, or have it confiscated by storm troopers. They don't intend to patent it, either. Patent examiners can be bribed, information can leak. If the Heinleiners have a religion, it is Free Enterprise. They intend to sell this new technology, and they intend to become dirty, rotten, filthy, stinking rich from it.

It was a short hike to the nearest entrance to the Heinlein. A few years ago there had been no way in but to stand around and wait for one of the inhabitants to notice you and invite you in or tell you to get lost. Now there were three or four standard air locks. Beyond them were rudimentary reception rooms, "customs shacks" to the Heinleiners. The notoriety of the Big Glitch had forced them to assume an unaccustomed organization, which they went about grudgingly and haphazardly, as was their style. These entrances were manned by volunteers, which were hard to come by in such an individualistic group. I heard later that it was standard procedure to cool your heels for hours at these entrances, waiting for someone to arrive at the security desk.

And if you didn't know somebody, the custom shack was as far as you'd get.

We got lucky. Someone was manning the desk when Poly and I entered. Even better, the name I dropped was still worth something. I'd worried about that, since it had been quite some time since I'd dealt with this person and there had been absolutely no way to get in contact with him other than simply walking up to the door and asking. But the guard at the desk simply nodded, and jerked her thumb at the second lock behind her. Then she went back to the book she was reading.

"Keep your helmet on," I told Poly as we cycled through. "You never know what you'll run into in here."

She soon saw what I meant, and her reaction was the usual one.

"These people must be crazy," she said.

It's not so bad within the ship itself. You see building and renovation happening here and there, but things always look a little loose around a construction site. Then you move out of the ship and into the vast junk pile behind it. And things just don't look right.

Everything has a haphazard, thrown-together look. Tunnel walls are made out of whatever was handy when a new tunnel was needed. Lights are burned out and if you can still see reasonably well, just stay burned out. There are no municipal crews to replace them. If you stumble in the dark, then replace it yourself, citizen! There ain't no City Hall to sue if you trip. Air 'cyclers have flashing yellow, or even red lights. Most Lunarians can go five years without even seeing a flashing green.

"Do they have a death wish?" Poly asked, after a mile of this.

"They have a safety net," I told her, and didn't explain further. But I knew what she meant. People raised to the exacting safety standards of Lunar engineering were always shocked to see how the Heinleiners lived. Sort of like how you might feel to go up in an airplane, then look out the window and see a wing was being held on by two rusty bolts and a wad of gum.

But that wouldn't bother you if you were a bird. Something goes wrong, you just fly to the ground. And that's how the Heinleiners had come to view the world, because they had a safety net in the form of the force-field suit. Maybe we'd all come to view the world that way if they ever decided to sell the technology. If a blowout happened, a field was instantly generated around their bodies from a unit implanted in place of one lung. The unit also contained about an hour of highly compressed oxygen, dispensed directly into the bloodstream. To someone wearing a device like that, a blowout was nothing more than an inconvenience. Thus, Heinleiners didn't waste a lot of time and effort on making things triple-triple-triple redundant. One system and maybe a backup was good enough for them. Many things they made were no better than they had to be. These were busy people—they were going to the stars!—and there was always something else to do.

Of course, it made things a little edgy when you realized their safety net didn't do you a damn bit of good. When I had to go to the enclave, I got my business done quickly, and got out. Which is just how the Heinleiners wanted it.

If you were looking for all the inside dope on the mysterious Heinleiners, you'll have to go elsewhere. I could relate what went on, using assumed names and euphemisms, but it would be ninety percent lies. For one thing, most of the people I met prefer to stay firmly underground at this point. Remember, not that long ago duly appointed representatives of the Lunar state were shooting at them. They're still a little pissed off. Wouldn't you be? For another, I've been shown some things I swore never to talk about, and talking around them would soon leave me with nothing to say.

Then there's the matter of what I was doing in there. Changing my appearance yet again, naturally. Obtaining a few necessary items for Poly—nothing more than little white lies, in her case—and sending her on her way. (Goodbye, sweet Poly, you were a great traveling companion. Sorry about the fingers. And we'll see no more of you in this story.)

But most of my short time there was consumed in several strictly illegal activities involving becoming someone else. We're not talking about phonying up a hopper's license here; this identity had to stand up to close scrutiny for whatever time I'd be spending in Luna. The statute of limitations hasn't expired on any of it, so it would be foolish to set down the details here. And, frankly, you never know when you'll need to pull some of these same tricks again. Better they don't become common knowledge. If you really need to know how to do it, find a criminal and ask him. And be ready to pay.

When you travel around as much as I do, and have lived as long as I have, the one constant you notice is change.

The species is still expanding, though the talk about doing something to correct that has been getting more and more serious. (What, pray tell? Spaying and neutering? Ah, but don't get me started on that.) I'm not denying it is a problem. With the death rate edging closer and closer to zero, about all that has saved us so far is that very few people want more than one or two children. It's not hard to see a time when every bit of rock in the system is honeycombed down to the core with antlike trillions. There's a school of thought that maintains one reason for the Invasion was our overpopulation of the earth. If we keep growing exponentially, the reasoning goes, might the Invaders take notice of us once again?

I don't pretend to understand anything about the Invaders, beyond the fact that it took them three days to nearly annihilate the human race, and that in spite of our bravest efforts, the final score was twenty billion to nothing. I'm not eager for a rematch.

But frankly I sort of like the changes I see in my travels. Almost always it is an expansion of what I saw before, and like my father, I hold to an old-fashioned idea once called "progress." Other than a growing population, there hasn't been a lot of it since the Invasion. Scientific research is at an all-time low. And why not? We live practically as long as we want, in perfect health and vitality. Machines can do practically everything that needs to be done, so that leisure has become our biggest "problem." Biology is well understood, and the practical limits of the exploration of physics have been reached, for now, anyway.

So I take pleasure in seeing how this or that enclave has grown. I was delighted at Oberon, and when I return, if ever, I'm sure it will delight me again to see the wheel complete.

But Luna is a little different. Luna is, and always will be, "home." Unstable as my early childhood was, numerous as my "homes" might have been, it was always Luna, the fabulous Golden Globe, that I hailed from. There's a bit of snobbery in that, something like the way the residents of New York, London, Paris, or Rome might have felt. All roads lead to the Big Apple, as it were. If you're from somewhere else, you're from nowhere. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

But the other part is the same, I suspect, whether you hail from The City or from Catfish Row, from the Golden Globe or from Bottom. You sort of wish it would stay the same. You'd like to go back and find something familiar.

You'd like to think you can go home.

You can't, of course. Even if the old hometown is stagnant as a played-out mine, it's gotten older, and so have you. You look at it through different eyes. The ivy on the old castle walls has grown thicker, the paint on the old shack has peeled off. More likely, the old castle has been torn down to make room for a housing development, and the shack... well, you can't even locate where it was. It gives you a certain feeling of transience.

My whole life has been transient. When I go home, I want to return to something solid.

Fat chance. I spent my first few hours wandering aimlessly through the broad commercial corridors of King City, a place I used to know like Act One of Julius Caesar, always just a little bit lost.

I spent a few hours training and slidewalking to various haunts from my past, finding most of them either no longer there or so changed as to be almost unrecognizable. It had been a good many years since I had dared return to Luna, and even that had been a rash chance on my part. After that many years, even if the place is still there and not much altered physically, the people are different. Where's that old gang of mine? Moved, most often. Hanging out somewhere else. So I moved on, too, on to the Rialto.

For drama in the English language, the de facto tongue of our time, when you think Theater District, you think Broadway. London may have eclipsed it in some ways, in some eras, but it never had the glitter. Shortly pre-Invasion, the theater scene in Miami was certainly one to reckon with. But how many songs can you think of about Collins Avenue?

No, the Great White Way was the theater Mecca... until The Rialto came along.

It had to be that way. Luna is by far the most populous of the inhabited planets. King City is the biggest city in Luna, three times larger than its nearest competitor. Our civilization is blessed or cursed with more leisure time than any in history. The urge to find something to do can get a little desperate. The living theater was never going to give movies and television much competition for the leisure dollar, but even a tiny fraction of the Lunarians' vast disposable income was enough to support a broad boulevard two miles long and bespangled with more theatrical jewels than the Tsarina's Tiara. When the "day" lights dimmed overhead and the marquees lit up, the street didn't so much glitter as explode in colored light.

I strolled down the avenue, hands jammed in my pockets, wishing for a fedora hat and a studio cloudburst so I could be Gene Kelly singin' in the rain. I wanted to hoof it through the shoeshine parlor like Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon. I was George M. Cohan, a Yankee Doodle boy. I was a brass band, a wild Count Basie blast, the bells of St. Peter's in Rome, and tissue paper on a comb. If I had a home, this was it. The center of the universe.

Oh, I'm not saying it was all familiar. Twenty years earlier a fever of renovation had swept down The Rialto like a demented dervish, and not all the changes were to my liking. The street was now lined with lampposts pretending to be gaslights; some spavined city planner's idea of "quaint," I shouldn't wonder. A lot of the old neon—a quaint vision I did like—had been replaced with higher-tech lighting effects that tended to overload the senses. But these things come and go; I can live with them. The important thing was the theaters themselves, dozens of them, strung out or bunched together, flashing into the artificial "night" the names of old friends and new arrivals: A Doll's House, Twelfth Night, Padlock, Into the Woods, Forget-Me-Not, The Wild Woman, School for Scandal. Oh, and the human friends, too, though you never could tell. You could figure that, even fifty years later, most of them would still be alive, in the physical sense. Professionally, it was another matter. It's a cruel trade. Some thought destined for glory by their own generation could be forgotten very quickly. Others who had labored hard for three, four, five decades became overnight sensations.

Legends? Our time doesn't produce a lot of them. It's a lot easier to become a legend if you die, close the book, and let the legend makers get to work. Mere stardom can be conveyed willy-nilly and last no longer than a soap bubble. So no one is going to chisel your name in stone until everyone's sure you're not coming back to be an embarrassment.

About half the theaters on The Rialto had achieved landmark status. You might buy and sell the structures, but you couldn't tear them down and the names were there forever. The rest were up for grabs. I wasn't familiar with this "Golden Globe" house and I had forgotten the address as the months went by, but I recalled thinking it couldn't be far from the site of my last appearance as Sparky: the late lamented John Valentine Theater.

I was right. It was in the neighborhood. Like everything else, the neighborhood had changed, but I knew approximately where I was.

I walked up and down in front of it. It had been so long since I'd played in a real Rialto theater I just wanted to get a feel for the place again. I liked what I saw. Something called Two Problems in Logic was playing, a title I wasn't familiar with, though the writer and director were both known to me. Only two players were listed, one with her name above the title, and I had never heard of either of them. That was depressing.

Pushing one of the brass-and-glass doors, I entered a long, thick-carpeted lobby in lavender and ecru. Spaced along the walls were posters from past productions at the Golden Globe. I gathered the house specialized in new works by established playwrights, though there was the occasional old war-horse guaranteed to put butts in seats, and a few revivals of faded stars who'd only had the one hit, reprising the role for the ninety-ninth time.

Finally I came to the back of the theater itself, and looked down a long aisle to the stage.

There was something oddly familiar about it.

I walked down a few rows and looked around. Even more familiar.

I hurried back to the lobby, paused to get my bearings, and followed a branching corridor that led to the rest rooms. Just beyond them was a bank of fire exit doors. My heart was hammering as I banged through one of them, setting off a distant alarm. I found myself outside on a side street, around the corner from the main entrance. It was a narrow way, not quite an alley, and just off to my left was a small park with a gazebo that, other than a fresh coat of paint, had not changed in seventy years.

The Golden Globe was the John Valentine Theater.

I staggered into the park and collapsed on a bench.

Memories.

"En garde!" Valentine shouted, and slashed at his son's face.

It was a backhand stroke, and the tip of the blade drew a red line on Kenneth's left cheek. There was no more pain than from a razor cut. He touched his cheek with his free hand and looked at the blood on his fingers.

"I said en garde, sir," Valentine said. "Raise your weapon."

Kenneth slowly did so.

"Are you ready this time?"

He nodded.

"Then fight, damn you." Valentine slashed again, not quite as quickly. Kenneth parried the move, felt the clash of blade up through his wrist. And here, the blade was coming at him again, and he parried once more, and again, and again... and his father's blade tore through the fabric of his sleeve. This time he felt some pain, and a wet heat as blood ran down his arm.

"Again." And once more the sword was flashing in his face. He got the blade up just in time. But no sooner had he fended off the first thrust than another was coming at him. And another, and another.

Parry, riposte. Sixte, seconde. The words flew around in his mind, mocking him. I'll bet you wish you'd studied now, they said. Frantically, he tried to remember, but it just wasn't there. If you had to think about it, you were already too late. Your body must simply respond. Thinking was for the attack, and it would be a long time before young Kenneth was ready for that. The best he could do was try to keep his blade up, try to keep it between his body and the slashing, hungry steel that had a life of its own. That's what it had to be. His father could not be trying to kill him.

He felt pain again. This time it was his hip. A thrusting wound, this one hurt more than all the others put together. Others... how many were there now? Five? Six? He had lost count.

He was blinded by sweat. He stopped, turned his back, wiped his face with his sleeve. Then he turned around and tried to smile.

"I yield!" he shouted. "The first lesson has gone badly for me, I admit it. But I'll work all night, and you'll see a new man for lesson number two." He dropped his sword. "Now, do you want to do some blocking on that scene? Maybe we should get Tybalt in here to help."

"Pick up your weapon, sir."

"Father, I—"

"Your weapon, sir!"

Slowly, Kenneth reached down and took the bloody hilt.

"En garde." And once more the blade flashed.

As usual, his father was right. This was the perfect way to teach swordsmanship. If the pupil survived it.

Within an hour Kenneth had improved markedly. Like all his father's methods, it was a simple process. The student made a careless move. The teacher showed him the error of his ways in the form of a small cut. The student tried another approach, which was a little better. No cut. Again the teacher offered the same move, and the student found a variation that actually might give him a small advantage. Then the teacher varied the first move. Once more, a cut. Again. Not so good, Kenneth; another cut, deeper this time. Now don't think, let your body remember what you did wrong last time, what you did that resulted in pain. Your body will remember and find a way to avoid the pain. Here it comes again—

—and that was much better. No pain. Try it again. No pain. Again.

Now, try this....

The pain in Spain is mainly for the slain.

Again.

With a spiraling motion worthy of Errol Flynn, John Valentine's blade twisted the sword from Kenneth's hand and sent it flying into the wings. "Get it," he said.

"Father, could we have a break?"

"Ten more minutes. Go."

Kenneth didn't move for a moment. He was barely able to stand. "Son," Valentine said, gently. "You brought this on yourself. I know it hurts. I went through this with my father, and I'm the better for it. Soon you'll be disarming me, and the audience as well. But in the meantime it is going to hurt. At the end of the day we'll have you patched up. And we'll start fresh tomorrow."

Patched up.

Tomorrow. What a frightening thought.

"Now go get your weapon."

Kenneth turned and trudged toward the curtain. He was afraid that if he reached down to pick up the sword, he would simply pass out. He did bend down for the sword, and his head did swim, but he did not pass out.

And then a strange thing happened. Kenneth reached for the saber—

—and Sparky picked it up.

It was invigorating, just being Sparky again. He was still hurting, badly, and he was still weak, but in the ways that mattered Sparky was strong. He didn't really know who this Kenneth person was, but he knew he was weak.

And he knew John Valentine was weak, in the ways that mattered.

So Sparky forced himself to stand erect, stiffen his spine. He lifted his chin and he strode back to center stage. Holding the saber with both hands, he raised it high, and plunged it down into the stage. He let it go and it quivered there, the point buried in two inches of wood.

"I quit," he said.

Valentine cocked his head slightly, as if not sure of what he had heard. Then he shrugged good-naturedly.

"All right. Maybe I'm pushing too hard. We'll resume tomorrow."

"You didn't hear me. I quit."

"You quit."

"You want me to spell it for you? I quit the swordsmanship lessons. I quit Romeo. I quit Shakespeare. I quit acting. I quit."

Valentine turned away and his body sagged. He rubbed his forehead with one hand. He sighed deeply. It was silent-movie acting, every move deliberate and exaggerated. Sparky studied Valentine's back. He imagined pulling the sword from the stage and thrusting it between the shoulder blades.

No. That wasn't the way.

Valentine turned around.

"You quit. Just like that. Suddenly twenty years of—"

"Twenty-nine years. I'm twenty-nine. You've been teaching me since I was in the cradle."

Valentine laughed.

"Make it thirty, son. Count the nine months in the womb."

"In those thirty years," Sparky said, unperturbed, "there is one thing you never did. One thing you neglected."

"And what would that be?"

"You never asked me what I wanted to do."

Valentine laughed. He made a grand sweeping gesture with his sword, and a courtly bow.

"So, my son, tell me. What do you want to do with your life?"

"I don't know," Sparky admitted. "I've never had time to think about it. You never gave me any time."

"Go on. This is fascinating."

"You never asked me anything. Your plans were always 'our' plans, but I was never consulted."

"You are a child."

"I was never a child. I never had a chance to be one. I was a pretty fair performing monkey, though. 'Put a dime in the cup, folks. Watch little Kenny recite from Shakespeare. Perhaps today he'll get through it without shaking and gasping for breath.' "

"Do you believe that's how I thought of you?"

"No. No, I don't, Father. I think you thought of me, still think of me, as an extension of yourself. Any glory I earn is your glory."

Once more, Valentine laughed. But he sobered quickly, and looked intently into his son's eyes.

"No, my son. It's much more than that. You are me."

"In your mind, maybe. Up until today, maybe. But I've had enough, Father. I quit. I'm going to walk out of here, and from this moment on I make my own decisions."

Valentine looked into his son's eyes, and they did not waver. At last, almost apologetically, he sighed deeply and spread his hands.

"I simply can't allow that."

"You'll have to stop me."

"I will, son. I will."

Sparky stood his ground. The sword still swayed slightly between them, a steel gauntlet, an intolerable challenge.

"Now take your weapon, and take your position. We still have ten minutes of lesson to get through."

"I won't."

"Then I'll cut you down where you stand. Defend yourself, sir!"

Valentine raised his sword and began walking slowly toward his son. The blade hissed through the air, once, twice. Then a quiet, mild voice came from the wings.

"All right, that's enough of that, Mr. Valentine. Not one more step."

Sparky and Valentine both jerked in surprise, and turned to see a tall, lanky form walk slowly from behind the curtain. He wore a beige, wide-brimmed felt Stetson, a homespun blue shirt and leather vest, and baggy gray pants. His boots were dusty and broken in. Strapped low around his waist was a gunbelt and holsters, and in them could be seen the butts of two revolvers.

"Who the hell are you?" Valentine thundered.

"Elwood, stay out of this," Sparky said.

"My name is Tom Destry, Mr. Valentine. I'm a friend of—"

"You look just like Jimmy Stewart."

"I've been told that. Don't know the gentleman. Sparky and I go way back, though. Clear back to his first day at the studio."

"My son's name is Kenneth."

Elwood shook his head. "Not right now, it isn't. You see, Mr. Valentine, right about then, that first day when you left him alone all day while you were off on your audition, or whatever it was, your boy needed a friend. And that's what I've been to him, as well as I can be."

"Elwood, please..."

"Sparky, somebody has to do this."

They made a rough triangle, the three of them. Sparky mostly looking down at the floor, darting quick glances from one man to the other. Elwood stood at his ease, his hands dangling at his sides. Valentine could not stand still. He paced, two steps to the right, three steps back, in no pattern. His eyes blazed, and they never wavered from Elwood.

"Who is this man, Kenneth?" he asked, his voice dangerously low. "Some extra you've befriended?"

"This is Elwood P. Dowd, Father. He's my friend."

"Elwood P.—" Valentine cut a quick glance at his son, then looked back at Elwood, threw his head back, and roared with laughter.

"Well, Mr. Dowd, it's a pleasure, sir. I feel like I've known you all my life. And Kenneth, pray tell, where is your other... why, there he is now!" Valentine strode lightly toward Elwood, who stood his ground, and made an elaborate show of throwing his arm over an invisible companion's shoulders. "Welcome, welcome, sir! It's been such a long time. Are you well? Are you happy? I must say your fur is looking exceptionally fine today. Where do you have it done? You don't say! What's that... well, I'm sorry, Harvey, I don't have any carrots with me. Didn't know you were coming, and all that. But how about a martini? That's your drink, isn't it? A dry martini..."

He dropped his arm, looked sadly at his son, and shook his head.

"Your friend is a nut, Kenneth. I see it now. Tom Destry, of all people. He dresses up like a Tom Mix cowboy, and strides forth to protect you from your own father. That is what you're here for, isn't it, Mister... Dowd? Destry? Are you sure who you are?"

"The drink is milk, sir, and the name is still Destry."

"Or Stewart. Tell me, Jimmy, if you're here as a tough guy of some sort, why not that marshal, Guthrie McCabe, in Two Rode Together? Or that outlaw in Bandolero!—what was his name... Mace Bishop. Or even that lawyer fella, Ransom Stoddard, the one who shot Liberty Valance. What's the matter, tenderfoot? Law books no damn good? Is that why you're packing?"

Elwood/Tom seemed bemused by the speech. He looked at Sparky.

"You told me he had a photographic memory for plots and cast lists," he said. "I don't know if I'da remembered all of those m'self."

"Dramatis personae," Valentine said. "That's the term we actors use."

"Meaning I'm not one," Destry said. "No, I don't reckon I am, sir, not of your caliber, certainly. You can mock me all you want, Mr. Valentine. I can take it. It's the boy over there who can't take it anymore. I know everything about you there is to know, sir. Every small-minded deed, every slight you've ever given him. Every blow you've ever landed."

"I'm his teacher," Valentine growled.

"And a good one, too, so far as that goes. If all a teacher's for is to develop a skill, why, you're a darn good one. But I happen to think being a teacher, and a father, means a lot more than that, Mr. Valentine. And by that standard, you've completely failed him. He lives in fear of you. He's a man's size, but he's still a boy when he faces you. You won't let him go, and he can't break away from you."

Valentine looked astonished.

"And why would he want to? He and I are joined at the hip, sir. It has always been that way, and it will always remain so. We are united by our art, something a pathetic gesticulator like yourself could never understand, and by something a great deal deeper than that. Kenneth, tell him." He turned to his son. "I have been strict with you, I've never denied it. It takes strictness, discipline, and an artist suffers it willingly. But everything I have ever done has been done from love. Tell him, son."

Sparky, his clothing tattered and soaked in blood, swayed and thought once more that he would pass out. He looked helplessly from his father to Elwood, and back again.

For the first time a furrow of doubt creased John Valentine's brow as he saw his son's battered condition. He held out his hand, started to say something, then turned away from them both. When he faced them again, there were tears in his eyes. He grimaced, rubbed his face.

"Listen to me," he said, sadly. "And look at you. I've done it again, haven't I?"

"Father..."

"No, son, don't say anything. I stand revealed, once more, as a coward and a poltroon. Look what I've done to you."

"Father, I know you never mean—"

"Sparky!" Elwood warned.

"You stay out of this!" Valentine bellowed. "Kenneth, do you understand that I love you, more than life itself?"

"Yes, Father."

"Then all I can do is apologize again. I have overplayed my role, and there is no forgiveness for that, but I hope I still have your love."

"You do, Father."

Valentine held out his hand toward his son.

"Then let's go get you to a medic, and after that, to the police. You can file charges against me."

"No, Father."

"It's your decision. I'll abide by it. Perhaps it would be best for me. I can't seem to control my temper. Maybe there is some way I can be helped."

"Father, I—"

"You know I've never had much use for psychiatry. It seems to me they know less about the human mind than I do. But maybe there is some form of medication, some pill or brain treatment...."

"That's an awful idea," Sparky said. "You know how those pills you used to take after that... after the time you... well, you know what I mean. You could hardly remember your lines after a walk across the stage."

Valentine smiled. "You remember that, do you? Oh, it wasn't so bad. And if I have to, we'll just cast someone else in my role. I'll stay on as director." He laughed. "Who ever said a director needs to remember lines?"

He still had his hand extended toward his son, and now there was a hint of edginess in his eyes, as if he knew the gesture had gone on too long, with no response from Sparky. The boy had not said no, but he hadn't taken the hand, either.

"Come on, son. Let's get out of here. We'll put the whole show on hiatus if we have to. We'll get you up to snuff on the fencing. No more cutting, I promise. We can talk about the rest of it, too. I'm going to change, Kenneth, I promise you."

After a momentary hesitation Sparky started toward his father.

"Hold it right there, Sparky," Destry said. Sparky stopped.

"Now, I'm only going to say this once, my friend," he said, never taking his eyes from Valentine. "A minute ago you said you were quitting the show. You said you needed some time to think things through. Most of all, you said you were making your own decisions now. I took it as a declaration of independence from your father."

"Sir," Valentine said, coldly, slashing his sword through the empty air, "you are interfering. This is none of your business."

"I think it is. You asked me a minute ago why I brought these." He rested the heels of his hands on the gun butts. "I'm not a violent man, Mr. Valentine. These were my father's pistols. I hung them up a long time ago, but there comes a time when you have to put them on again. When violence has to be met with violence. Now, I know Sparky isn't capable of resisting you, physically. So I will, if I have to."

For the first time he glanced at the young man.

"So what's it going to be, Sparky? I'll back your play, whatever it is. But I want you to know this. If you go with him, well, that's your choice. But if you do, I'll go away, and you'll never see me again."

Sparky looked from one man to the other. It was high noon, right there on the stage of the Valentine Theater. Tom Destry and John Valentine never glanced at him, their gazes locked. Valentine's eyes blazed with fury. Destry was calm and resolute.

"Let's go, Kenneth," Valentine said, and took a step toward his son.

Sparky looked back and forth. He was so tired, so desperately tired. And in the end, he thought later, that was the biggest factor in his choice. There was only one way he'd ever get any rest.

"I'm sorry, Father," he said, and walked toward his friend.

"No!" Valentine shouted, and raised his sword, charging toward the two of them.

"Elwood, don't!"

But the gun was out of its holster. Valentine was only a few feet away, already starting to slash downward with the blade. Sparky grabbed Elwood's arm and the gun fired. The shot took Valentine in the forehead and threw him back in a cloud of smoke and blood.

Sparky was going to wrestle the weapon from Elwood/Destry, but the man made no resistance, and Sparky was left standing, holding the hot gun barrel. He stared down at it. Etched on the side were the words THIMBLE THEATER PROP DEPARTMENT.

A prop gun? Fake blood?

He went down on one knee and touched his father's face. There was a hole an inch above his right eye. Blood was pumping sluggishly from it, to pool in the eye socket and then run down into the ear. The left eye was open and the pupil was a black hole that swallowed all hope.

"Doctors," Sparky mumbled. "We have to get medical help." He put his hand under his father's head, meaning to lift and cradle it until help arrived. What he felt back there was a hole he could put his fist in, and jagged edges of bone. Valentine lay in a pool of blood and in this red sea were islands of other matter.

"I'm afraid it can't be fixed, Sparky," Destry said.

Sparky pulled his hand back. There were chunks of brain clinging to it.

"Help him," Sparky whimpered. He looked up at Destry, who stood a little apart looking solemnly down at the man he had just killed.

"I wouldn't have cared if he was just coming at me," Destry said. "But you saw it. He was trying to kill you. He forced my hand."

Sparky didn't register anything the man said. He kept looking from his father's ruined face to the pistol in his hand. He might have knelt there forever but he heard footsteps coming from backstage. He looked up.

It was Hildy Johnson and Rose, the assistant stage manager. They stopped while still in the wings, looking out to the stage.

"Sorry, Mr. Valentine," Rose said. "We heard a noise...." She began to turn from the scene of fake mayhem. It wasn't any of her business. But Hildy was frowning, and Rose looked at Sparky's face.

Sparky stood, and the gun thudded to the floor. He held up his bloody hand to show it to Destry... to Elwood....

No one was there.

Rose began to scream.

Hildy started running toward him.

Sparky ran.

In a very real sense, I've been running for seventy years now.

I opened my eyes, looked around me as if emerging from a dream, and there's certainly a sense in which that is very real, too. But the dream had never before left me in the little park, right across the corridor from the scene of the crime. I determined I was out of the dream now, not in it. All my life, this has been a harder determination than you might suppose.

I don't revisit that memory a lot. I've never been far from it, never tried to deny its "reality," so to speak. I have become adept at veering away from it when I feel it approaching.

But every few years it is worth taking it out and examining it. To see if it has changed, after these seventy long years.

Because, you see, I believe very little of it. Neither should you.

The most vivid memory of my life is a lie.

It's a very theatrical memory, isn't it? My father is shot to death—the bullet destroyed the brain, which is the only organ we can't repair, the only wound we cannot recover from—by a peace-loving fictional character who vanishes when witnesses arrive. No one saw the shot fired except the "three" of us. And there I am, standing by the dead man, blood all over me. The murder weapon is in my hand, still warm. Though I didn't stay to find out, I am sure that only my fingerprints are on the gun. I am sure no one saw Elwood enter or leave the theater.

Would you hang around to tell the police a ridiculous story like that?

Elwood P. Dowd is my imaginary friend. I have known that, and known the difference between him, his gallery of characters, and real people almost from the moment I met him. Therefore, there were only two people on that fatal stage. Therefore, everything that happened from the moment Elwood called out to my father is a dream/drama made up by me. Therefore, I killed my father.

There is an irony here. To have done something as awful as that... to be a patricide. To have never sought to avoid responsibility for my actions. (Avoid the consequences? Hell, yes; I've been running from them for seventy years. But I don't shirk the moral responsibility, which is a completely different thing than the legal sort.) But I am willing to admit, to myself, that it was I, I who did it. I have borne the burden of that act for a long time. I never sought to set it down. And yet one part of my mind, a part I've never been able to understand but almost certainly the part that allowed such a terribly conflicted young man to do such a thing in the first place, has robbed me of the true story of what happened that day.

My father did come at me with a blade that day. I think.

He did try to kill me. I'm fairly sure.

It was self-defense. I'd almost swear to it.

And I killed him. Of that, I am sure.

Recall the sequence, there at the end. My father is rushing across the stage, sword raised. Is he coming toward me? He must be, though I see him rushing toward Elwood. I see Elwood go for his gun, and I am running toward him. I reach him as he is raising and aiming the gun. I grab his arm. And it is here that reality must have intersected with my fantasies, because the gun goes off in my hand, doesn't it? Oh, I feel as if Elwood is still holding it, but I feel the heat and the recoil in my own hand.

And it is a prop gun. One I could easily have taken from the prop department of my own studio. Concealed it somewhere in the wings. When I left the stage, shortly before returning to finally stand up to my father, in my fashion, that must have been when I picked up the gun.

(A word about props. Don't be fooled by the term. There are "pure" props, made entirely for show. They can be plaster, wood, whatever looks best. And there are "practical" props. A light switch that actually controls lights on the stage. A piano that can actually be played. Most often, it is easier to simply use the actual object and call it a prop. The sword my father carried came from the prop department, but would kill you just as dead as any other sword. And the gun I stole was all too practical. So was the bullet.)

Did I intend to kill him all along? Or did I simply hope to defend myself when I stole that gun, hid it, and then destroyed all memory of having done so?

I must assume that murder was my intention. I do recall, seeing him lying there, dead, that one thought kept circling through the chaos of my mind. It was something he himself was fond of telling me. He had said it a thousand times.

"Dodger," he would say. "Never bring a knife to a gunfight."

I listened, and remembered. He forgot.

It was such a pleasant little park. Which was a good thing, because I wasn't sure I could move. I had tried to get up several times, and my legs didn't seem to work.

It was a feeling that went far beyond exhaustion. I had come... well, to tell you the truth, I don't even know how many billion miles I came. I suppose a solar atlas would give me the answer, but to what point? I didn't want to go back. Otherwise, I'd have left a trail of bread crumbs. But Brementon to Pluto, Pluto to Oberon, Oberon to Jupiter to Sol to Luna, I had fetched up here, on this park bench. I had thought it was all intentional, all part of some plan I had, but it didn't feel like that now. I felt like a marble in a pachinko game, rattling randomly among the pins, coming to rest at the bottom, where no points are scored. And it had always been inevitable that the bottom was where I'd end up.

I don't mean "the bottom" in the sense of any suicidal feeling. Nor am I talking of the bottom an alcoholic hits, or the economic bottom of a failed businessman, contemplating his lost riches. I had money in my jeans. I was only a few steps away from what could be the crowning achievement of my acting career. I had prospects, as the world usually measures them.

I just couldn't seem to find a reason to stand up.

I am fortune's fool.

I knew he would be there somewhere. I looked around, examining the strollers, the bench sitters, those stretched out on the cool grass.

He was across the park, sitting with his back to me. It was the hat, of course. With Elwood it's usually the hat, which is always out of fashion. But it wasn't the "Elwood P. Dowd" hat today, though it was similar. When Elwood changes character, it's usually because he has something important to say.

I looked at his back until he seemed to feel it. He stood, turned, looked across the park at me for a while, then started toward me in the shambling gait all his characters share. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his baggy trousers.

He was Paul Biegler, the defense attorney from Anatomy of a Murder.

"I have often walked down this street before," he said.

"If that's my cue to burst into song, forget it," I said.

"I spend a lot of time here. Right here in this park."

He hitched at his pants, sat beside me on the bench. He took a crumpled bag of peanuts from his coat pocket, shelled one, and popped it into his mouth. Immediately two yellow-headed parrots and a cardinal swooped in from the surrounding trees, waiting for a handout. Elwood tossed them a peanut.

"Pigeons too prosaic for this park," he observed.

The problem of Elwood seems to me to boil down to a problem of pigeons. Or parrots, or any other animal. Toby doesn't see Elwood, but knows when he's around. Most likely he's just picking up my reactions, I've always told myself. But other animals seem to see him. Another cardinal flew in and sat on Elwood's shoulder.

So how do you explain that? Was I imagining the birds? Was I imagining the peanuts? I knew that if he offered me one, I'd be able to put it in my mouth and taste it, and swallow it. Did I bring a sack of peanuts with me? Were there real birds here, only not doing what I saw them doing?

Expressed in terms of nuts and birds, the problem seems trivial, even funny. Considered as the central fact of an act of murder, my delusional states don't seem funny at all. Every time Elwood appears he presents me with these perceptual conundrums. Spend too much time thinking about them and I'm sure I'd go... well, nuts. Not the sort of nuts I already am—which is at least a functional insanity—but rubber-room, spit-slinging, lobotomaniacal bull-goose looney.

But I've spent a lot of time with him. And while my worldview is not to be trusted and though I don't buy any nonsense about ghosts, spirit worlds, other dimensions, or leprechauns, there is one statement on existence I do accept, fully. There is more under Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Mr. Rationalist.

Let's leave it at that, and let the details be worked out at the psychiatric hearing.

"Didya have a nice trip?" Elwood asked.

"Except for the first few miles. After that, it was the lap of luxury. You should have visited."

He wrinkled his nose.

"Don't like flying much anymore."

"Don't like... Charles Lindbergh would be ashamed of you."

"I think ol' Charlie would have been bored. He was a big one for adventure, Charlie was. That's how I played him, anyway. Never played any astronauts, though. That was a bit after my time."

I gestured at his 1950s-era baggy gray suit.

"So, do you know something I don't? Am I going to need a lawyer? Are the police closing in on me?"

"Well, there is no statute of limitations. And you know you have no business being here. You know that as well as I do. But as far as I've heard, there's no active search for you. Yet."

"I've been sitting here trying to think of a defense," I said. "How do you think this one would play? 'I was framed, Your Honor! Some dirty rat put that gun in my hand!' "

"I think you'd get charged with a miserable James Cagney impression."

"Stick to the point, counselor. Stick to the facts."

"The facts in this case are in considerable dispute. I think a competent attorney could create a reasonable doubt concerning a possible accomplice. But I'd have to bow out of the case, of course. Conflict of interest."

"I'd rather be represented by that Ransom Stoddard fellow, anyway."

"The man who didn't shoot Liberty Valance? He's good."

We sat in silence for a while, watching the parrots break open and eat the peanuts. There were half a dozen of them now.

"But if I can get serious for a minute," he said, "neither one of us would be the right choice for you, if you should find yourself in trouble."

"You mean, for some reason other than the fact that you don't exist? 'That's right, Your Honor, I wish to be represented by my good friend Jesus Christ, seated in this empty chair on my right. Ably assisted by Tinker Bell, who'll circle near the ceiling dispensing pixie dust.' "

He waited patiently until I settled down again.

"No, it's something else entirely. I think you'd do well with counsel a little more versed in modern legal issues. Things I wouldn't know a lot about, nor Mr. Stoddard, either."

I asked him what he meant by that, and he just shook his head. When Elwood wants to be stubborn, there is no moving him, so I eventually had to let it go.

"So what are you going to do, my friend?" he asked, after a long silence.

"Do? Elwood, what do you think I ought to do?"

"Get off this planet and try to lose yourself," he said, without hesitation. "That Comfort fellow isn't going to give up, you know, and it won't be hard to trace you here."

"He's probably here already," I agreed.

"Well, you made it pretty fast. I'd say he'll get here in the next week or so."

"Maybe. But I've got this little problem, Elwood." I thought of the image of the pachinko game. The feeling that all my running, seventy years of looking over my shoulder, had brought me here. To this bench. I hadn't tried to stand up since he sat down beside me. I was afraid to.

"I feel like I've been in this big bathtub," I told him. "The water is swirling out the drain, and I've been swimming as hard as I can for a very long time. And now the water is all gone, and I'm sitting on the bottom, naked and wet as a newborn baby. Only I feel like I've wasted seventy years. All that running, and here I am. I just don't seem to want to move."

"So you're going to stay here? That's what you want to do?"

I sighed.

"What I really want to do, more than anything, is turn myself in."

I don't think I was sure until the moment I said it that I really did want to surrender. But saying it, I felt such a sense of relief, such a feeling of freedom as I hadn't experienced since that day on the stage of the John Valentine Theater.

With a shock, I realized I'd felt that sense of freedom after I'd killed my father.

Elwood was looking at me, shaking his head.

"Well, I don't entirely disagree with you on that," he said. "And I'd be more than willing to go in with you. Perhaps I could speak to your psychiatrist, give him a little insight into your life, from the perspective of somebody who's spent a lot of time around you. Maybe contribute to an insanity defense, though I don't know how they handle things like that these days. But there's one thing I think you should do first."

"And what is that?"

"Take your shot at King Lear. Never know when you might get another chance." He stood up and held his hand out to me.

I never touch Elwood, for obvious reasons. But this time I didn't even look around to see who might be watching. I took his hand, and he lifted me off the bench.

Bayou Teche is an old "pocket" disneyland just a ten-minute tube ride from the center of King City. When it was first built, they simply called it a disneyland, since an artificial "Earthly" environment almost a mile across and a quarter of a mile high was a very big deal in those days. At first it was hard to get people to visit. "How ya gonna hold the roof up, huh?" Many people never could come, and many still can't, agoraphobia being quite common amongst the tunnel-raised population.

Later, when they began building the serious disneys like Texas, Mekong, Kansas, Serengeti, a hundred miles deep and thirty, forty, sixty miles across, the original parks came to be called minis. Now the trend has come full circle as more and more people—those who can afford it—aspire to move into a "natural" environment. Micro-disneys are popping up like bubbles in champagne, but they are not notably wild. Most have golf courses. All modern amenities are just minutes away.

The older parks had a problem. Many turned themselves into "modern" parks, not much different from suburbia on Old Earth: communities of houses from one era or another. Traditionalists pointed out that the whole idea of disneys was to provide a taste of life on Earth before the Invasion, even before civilization. Most compromised, allowing some settlement by "townies," as opposed to permanent "authentics," like Doc in West Texas. Some tried to qualify for government heritage grants by providing environments people might not necessarily want to live in, but which the Antiquities Board felt were worth supporting in spite of their inhospitality.

At Bayou Teche, it was night, and bugs. Twenty-two hours of night every day, and billions and billions of bugs.

This was where Kaspara Polichinelli, the greatest stage director of her time, had chosen to spend her retirement. You may remember her as Sparky's sidekick, Polly.

The only way to Polly's house was by water, in a little boat called a pirogue. Pronounced pee-row. There were no maps. No roads. Hardly any land. The bayous wound in an impenetrable maze designed to re-create the delta country at the end of the Mississippi River.

My guide/taxi driver was a smiling man who introduced himself as Beaudreaux—pronounced boo-drow—who helped me into the little flat-bottomed cockleshell that seemed to be made of scrap lumber and gumbo mud. The bottom was awash in water. I took a seat up front and Beaudreaux started up a little outboard engine no bigger than a football, pulling a rope until it choked to life in a cloud of blue smoke and then settled into a steady puttering. We eased away from the ramshackle dock just inside the visitors' entrance, and into a landscape right out of your worst prehistoric nightmare.

At a dizzying three miles per hour.

Over water black as ink, flowing at a tenth our speed.

Water smooth as old bourbon, but not nearly so sweet smelling.

Luckily, I'd taken my motion-sickness pills.

I was dressed in the only sensible clothing for the Bayou: a head-to-toe silk khaki jumpsuit pulled over my own clothes, rubber boots and gloves, topped off by a safari hat fitted with a mesh beekeeper's veil. Wrists and ankles of the suit were elastic, worn over the sleeves and legs.

They told me the suit was sprayed with a harmless repellent, which had sounded like overkill at the time. The insects couldn't get to me, I reasoned, so what was the point?

Five minutes into the boat ride I decided, with a touch of awe, that without the repellent the bugs might actually pick me up and carry me off, to devour at their leisure.

Though it was night in the Bayou, it was far from pitch black. We frequently passed homes set on stilts, or built on flat-bottomed boat hulls. Most had kerosene lamps hanging outside the porch and a softer light spilling from the windows. There was a lamp on a pole at the bow of the pirogue, as well. All these light sources were swarming with clouds of flying insects. Moths and lacewings and dragonflies—"skeeter hawks," to Beaudreaux—and beetles and lightning bugs and June bugs and gnats and I don't know what all.

And mosquitoes. Enough mosquitoes to suck you dry in ten seconds.

I hate bugs.

I'd been hearing what sounded like flapping wings since shortly after the trip began. About halfway to Polly's something whooshed by my head, inches away. I ducked, and Beaudreaux laughed. Beaudreaux, who somehow was enduring this trip dressed in denim overalls and a short-sleeved chambray shirt, no hat, no gloves.

"Bat," he told me. "We got many t'ousan bat in hya. We got de froo' bat, de Mex'can bat, de pug-nose bat, de leaf-nose bat, de red bat, de gray bat, and de renard volant, de flyin' fox, en anglais." At least I think that's what he said. He spoke with an odd accent, a patois of broken English and the occasional French word, and he called himself a "Cajun." Pronounced kay-jun.

He kept up a running commentary throughout the trip, pointing to things I mostly didn't see. We threaded our way through gnarled cypress with long gray beards of moss. I never had a chance to ask him a question, but if I had, it would have been "How do you keep from being eaten alive?" I later learned the answer, which was that residents got a small gene alteration that caused their skin to exude an insect repellent.

According to Beaudreaux there were seventeen species of bat in the Bayou, and they worked in two shifts separated by the two brief light periods known as dawn and dusk. How they got the plants to grow and all the insects to breed with so little light I never found out. I'm sure they could fill you in at the visitors' center. No doubt it's a fascinating story, but keep it to yourself, all right?

Other than the close encounter with the bat, the trip proceeded without incident until I heard a splash and felt the boat rock as if we'd passed the wake of another boat. Beaudreaux stood up and used a long pole to poke at something in the water. He shouted at it, poked again, then sat down and grinned at me.

"Gator," he said.

I hate alligators. Bats, too, now that I think of it.

Polly's shack stood three feet above the water on cypress pilings. A ramp led down to a floating dock where another pirogue was tied up. This one sported a bright red paint job and looked much more seaworthy than Beaudreaux's. Maybe Polly could give me a ride back to town.

The dock shifted under me as I stepped from the boat and I almost fell in the water. Beaudreaux grabbed my arm, probably saving me from being stripped to the bone in ten seconds by ravenous piranha. I heard a screen door creak and then slam shut, and a hoarse female voice.

"Hey, Beaudreaux! Where dat bucket ecrevisses you gon' brought me?"

"You get you crawfish, ma p'tit, jus' soon as I cotched 'em." He laughed, and motored quietly into the darkness. I went up the ramp to a screened-in porch, where the woman was holding the door for me. She was gray-haired and stooped, wearing a long gingham dress with a daisy print. She waved gnarled hands around me as I hurried in the door.

"Vite, mon cher! Vite! Don't let the skeeters in."

The inner door was closed. Sort of an air lock for mosquitoes, I realized. I let myself through into a small, rustic room with a small fire blazing in the hearth, knitted rugs on the wood floor. The light came from two dim floor lamps with shades dripping tassels in lavender and gold and yellow. Hideous things, by themselves, but not bad in this context. I looked around for Polly, and the old lady spoke from behind me.

"I thought you'd never get here, cher," she said.

I don't know who I had thought she was. Being in a disney, I had probably pegged her as an authentic. Disneys are one of the places you can go to see "old" people, folks who look like humans did when age was pretty much synonymous with decay. Almost all of these are only old on the surface, with wrinkled sagging skin and gray hair and perhaps a "colorful" age-related bit of ghastliness like missing teeth, eyeglasses, arthritis. They limped, they doddered and tottered and feigned deafness, but under the epidermis they were as hale and hearty as I am.

To see "real" aging you generally had to go to a fundamentalist enclave of one type or another. They seldom visited the public corridors; they kept to themselves like the Amish.

Polly had joined such a sect shortly before her departure from Sparky and His Gang. I can't even remember the name; there are scores of them, all with different beliefs. Some go so far as to reject all medical treatment of any sort, and you hear of people dying horribly in their thirties and forties, even in their teens, though the authorities sometimes stepped in to stop that.

Polly's group was more moderate. They didn't reject all medical care, just that group of therapies usually called "long life." "Eternal life" by the optimists, though no one really believes a human can live for even a million years. But it's true we don't seem to be anywhere near the outer limits, and there are people well over two hundred years old now, thriving.

It was a sobering thought, though, to look at her and realize she was only a year older than I.

On the other hand, for a natural centenarian she was in pretty good shape. It's all relative, I guess.

"Don't ask how I'm doing," she said. "It would take all day. Never get old folks started on their aches and pains."

"All right, Polly," I said. "And I won't tell you how well you look."

She laughed, and I smiled, and suddenly I realized how good it was to see her again. I went to her and we embraced. She had shrunk several inches.

"Don't squeeze too hard, cher," she whispered. She didn't need to tell me that; she was brittle and dry. I could feel every bone.

I don't want to get into details of her appearance. The elderly share a suite of atrocities as they are battered by the tides of age. They erode in much the same way. Much of it has always seemed to me to be a struggle by the skeleton, the symbol of death, to emerge from its soft shell. The fat is blasted away, the skin grows loose, sags, becomes translucent. Soon you can see the skull beneath the skin. There's a morbid little computer program you can buy. Feed somebody's picture into it and it will age that person fifty, sixty, a hundred years. If you'd like to see Polly as I saw her, find a picture of her from the old show. She hasn't allowed herself to be photographed since then.

"Come on in, Sparky, mon ami." She took my hand and led me into a small kitchen. It looked like the only other room in the house. Her hand was cool and the joints were swollen.

She sat me down at a table with a red and white checkerboard cloth and poured strong coffee into a china cup and saucer. She eased herself into a chair facing me and let me take a sip.

"Now," she said. "Who is chasing you this time?"

Predictable? I don't suppose I can deny it.

I had not communicated with Polly in any way since the one telegram from Pluto. Several times I had been tempted, just a short message to be sure she really was going to hold the role for me. But I knew she would. Polly's word is unbreakable. So how did she know someone was chasing me? Consistency, I guess.

During my first twenty years on the run I had twice risked a trip back to Luna. Both times I had seen Polly—this before the effects of her medical fundamentalism had really begun to ravage her. And both times there had been those who urgently wanted to talk to me about this or that misunderstanding. I admit it, I have a talent for getting into these situations. But bear in mind, when you're on the run you find yourself having to do things you might not ordinarily do. I submit my clean record between my eighth and twenty-ninth years as evidence that I am not a fundamentally bad person. Luckily for me, my first eight years—for which, legally, I can't be held responsible—provided me the criminal skills I've needed for my last seventy.

So I told Polly about Isambard Comfort and the Demons of Charon. She listened, fascinated, and I wondered if she was thinking about how she would stage this epic tale of pursuit. Les Miserables, Part Two?

But during the telling I came to an uneasy realization, something I really hadn't considered before but probably should have. While the Charonese race was hot on my trail, those near me could be endangered. My failure to consider that had cost Poly dearly.

Polly reached across the table and patted my hand.

"Poor boy," she said. "You've had a terrible time of it. And you think this Comfort person will follow you to Luna?"

"I think we can count on it," I said, miserably. "And I have to think it would put you and the whole production in danger."

"We'll think on that, of course," she said. "But I don't see how it changes much. We were going to have to disguise your identity anyway. We'll just have to be more careful, that's all."

I thought it would be a lot more than just a matter of extra care, but I kept my mouth shut. She was aware of my situation, I had not tried to minimize it, and I felt that was all I was obligated to do.

"So who do you want to be this time?" she asked.

She meant what did I want to use as a stage name. Anywhere in the inner planets I didn't dare use my own name, or make any mention of my previous credits and career. Which was a damn shame, since Polly could make good use of Sparky's return after all these years. It would put butts in seats, as some producer once said.

"Do you have any idea how seriously they're looking for me?"

"I don't think they're looking for you at all, cher," she said. "But you can be sure that if they run across you—if, for instance, they see your name up in lights on The Rialto—they'll drop by with an arrest warrant."

She smiled as she said it, and I had to smile, too. So, as usual, I'd be playing an actor playing King Lear. Do you wonder why I'm not quite right in the head?

"Kenneth, you know my feelings on this matter. I only wish someone had killed him twenty years earlier. Someone else. God knows there were enough people who wanted to. And if I were serving as the judge, you'd go free. But from what I've read about the evidence they have, it will work out as some degree of manslaughter. Five to twenty years. Have you given any more thought to turning yourself in?"

Polly had suggested that fifty years ago. Even with her pitifully short allotment of years, she felt it was better to serve the time than to stay on the run. Get it over with.

There was a lot of wisdom in that, except for one thing. I couldn't do the time. I think I'd rather die. I smiled again, and shook my head.

"Then have you given any more thought to... the other thing."

She was speaking of the insanity defense. It was quite a narrow defense these days, but having an imaginary playmate, hearing voices... there was a good chance that would work.

I had not told Polly about Elwood. I'd spoken to no one about him, ever. But I had hinted at a few things one drunken night, and I think she had sensed a lot more. Not much gets by Polly, and during the years she had spent when we were closer than brother and sister I'm sure she had seen and heard some things she was too discreet to talk to me about.

Again, there was wisdom in the suggestion, except for one thing. I'd rather go to prison. Call it stupid pride if you wish. I'd never talk about Elwood, certainly never in a court of law, especially not to let him take the blame for my actions.

"No," I said. "That's out of the question."

"Then we're back to the first question. Do you have a name?"

I had several, of course.

My post-Sparky career had consisted of three sorts of jobs. Working from Pluto outward, I simply used my own name. Extraditions from those worlds to the inner planets were spotty at best, and arrests on fugitive warrants practically nonexistent. From the J-Trojans, the belt, Mars, and inward, I usually concocted a one-time-only identity, good for the length of the run, then abandoned. And I moved carefully. But from the S-Trojans to Neptune I had been able to foster half a dozen more substantial identities, even build a certain reputation for some of the names. I had citizenship papers that would withstand a moderately rigorous check. In two of the identities I had even paid some local taxes!

I tried out three of the names on Polly. She carefully considered each, and shook her head. She knew everyone in the inner planets, and quite a few from the outers; if the name hadn't registered with her, then it had zero drawing power on Luna. Though this wasn't to be a star turn—the big name in this production would be Polichinelli—it never hurt to have some name recognition.

"How about Carson Dyle?" I asked. She perked up.

"Now him, I've heard of." She rattled off half a dozen of "Carson's" credits. "That's you?" I lowered my chin modestly. "That's a name I can work with then. I'll send it to publicity tomorrow. That is, if everything's in order with him."

"Give me a day to do a few checks," I said. "Carson may owe a little money here and there. You know how it is."

She smiled, and shook her head. "No, I don't, but if old debts is all that stands in the way we're okay. You'll start drawing salary tomorrow; you can just pay them off. Unless..."

"It's not much," I assured her. "Called away suddenly, no time to clear up a few obligations—" She held up a hand and I blushed. There was no need to sugarcoat anything with Polly. "Well, if that horse hadn't stumbled in the final turn, I had fully intended to pay it all off. Carson has a weakness for the ponies."

She laughed, and so did I, after a while. But it is a sobering thought that I had made a mess not only of my own life, but of most of my alter egos as well.

"So where are you staying?"

"I haven't settled on lodgings as yet," I admitted.

"Then I think it best if you stay right here."

I looked around the tiny cabin, and I trust I concealed my dismay.

"I wouldn't want to impose...."

"Behind that door over there, mon cher, is a narrow stair that leads to an attic bedroom. It's small, but you can stand up in the middle. You'll have your privacy, and the best breakfasts and suppers in Bayou Teche."

I said nothing.

"That used to be my bedroom, Kenneth, until it got to be too much of a chore to climb the stairs every night. Now I sleep on the couch over there, and it suits me fine."

"What about this place, anyway?" I asked. She knew what I meant.

"The Bayou? I've always longed for the Earth. I felt all my life that I was born in the wrong era, the wrong place. On Earth, I'd have been a forest creature, a wanderer. And now that I'm old, I'm a creature of the night. I love the night, and you get a lot of it here."

There didn't seem to be anything to say to that. So I raised one last objection—not very strenuously, because the idea of a cozy attic room was beginning to appeal to me.

"I'm not sure you'd be safe, with me hanging around," I said.

"You let me worry about that. If your Charonese nemesis comes sniffing around, we'll see how he deals with eighteen-foot alligators in the dark."

"Izzy could probably kill alligators with one hand. But maybe the mosquitoes would suck him dry while he was doing it."

Rehearsals began the next day.

My heart wants to go into great detail about it, but my mind knows there is no point in trying. Any production in the live theater merits a book of its own. There is always exhilaration and disaster, feuding and fistfights and fornication. Half the cast usually hates the other half. At some point the set designer or the lighting director storms out of the theater and has to be wheedled back to work. In the last week, as dress rehearsals loom, there is despair. On opening night there will be at least two nasty crises, the one you half expected, and the one that sprang out of nowhere.

And then the curtain rises... and usually the whole mad enterprise works. Nine times out of ten, anyway. There's no guarantee that anyone out there in the dark likes it, but it has all somehow come together. You and your fellow troupers have created something.

Then comes the final curtain on the final night, and everyone moves on. For a while you had a play. For a while it was a living, thundering thing, and now it's gone. It exists only in the memories of those who made it happen, and those who came to see it. You can't pop a chip into your player and watch it again, you can't rewind to your favorite scene. If you want to see it again you have to assemble a hundred creative and cantankerous egotists, scream and weep and laugh and sweat and work yourself and everybody else to a state near the edge of hysteria, and hope that once more the magic will happen.

It is a glorious madness.

And, like the man said, you had to be there.

Most accounts of the rehearsal and presentation of a work of drama end up sounding like a riot in a kindergarten. A very special kindergarten, attended only by the most precocious, self-centered, hyperactive, and vicious little five-year-old brats. Brats who are used to having things their own way and expect more of the same, now, or brats who have always felt they should have been catered to all their lives, never were, but intend to make up for lost time now.

It is the nature of the beast. Whether the production is full of talented people or people who simply think they are talented, an ego is the only thing that is an absolute constant in show business. Without one, you never pursue the Muse of performance at all.

Basic law of physics as formulated by Sparky: One ego is the only psychological particle that can exist peacefully. Two egos equal warfare. Three or more egos constitute a nuclear reaction. They ought to give me the Nobel Prize for that.

So, we battled, we shouted, we wept, and we clawed. And sometimes we made the magic happen. By opening night, it was happening pretty regularly.

One problem I had anticipated worked out better than I had any right to expect. Rehearsals had actually started four weeks before my arrival. The part of Lear was handled by my understudy. This is a bad way to start a production, with the star still swinging by the orbit of Jupiter. The rest of the cast assumes you're just too, too busy to share sweat with them. This might have worked for an Olivier, but for poor unknown Carson Dyle, it could be disastrous. The only thing that kept things going before my arrival was Polly's iron will and reputation.

"There is only one rule you need to remember to get along with me," she said on the first day, before my arrival. "I am God. You shall address all your prayers to me, and I will answer them. Worship another God, and I will kill you. It's as simple as that."

If she said I was good, most of the cast were at least willing to wait until I got there... and for about ten minutes after that. Naturally, they all professed happiness to see me, and privately hated my guts. The only thing that kept us going during the week after my arrival was my willingness to work twice as hard as everyone else.

But because I did work twice as hard, I earned their respect. And they all were experienced enough to see I was up to the job.

Once in a generation a director or playwright comes along with a truly distinctive vision. Twice, if you're lucky. Anyone can see it and few can describe it. It can't be imitated, though everyone tries, and in the process the course of art is slightly altered. Sometimes this person is a commercial and popular success: Shakespeare, or Alfred Hitchcock. More often he or she is best known among peers; the larger public just doesn't get it.

Not long after leaving Sparky and His Gang, Kaspara Polichinelli became that director for my generation. Since then, she had made one film or staged one play every five years or so. She made a lot of money in her first decade, then moved into less popular areas. The public knew her work always drew critical raves, that she was mentioned along with the greats... and usually stayed away in droves.

That never bothered her. She wasn't doing it for the money.

In the theater, being a legend in your own time has one big advantage. The top people in the field will always work for you, no questions asked. Major stars will slash or waive their astronomical fees. People who had never showed any evidence of talent will suddenly, under the eye and the tutelage of this director, find depths within themselves they never suspected. "Who knew?" the critics write, and the next thing you know a washed-up matinee idol finds himself with a supporting actor Oscar nomination.

This was that sort of cast. All Polly needed to do was send out the call. The best in the business would break contracts, postpone more lucrative projects, for the privilege of being in a Polichinelli production. Hell, it brought me all the way from Pluto.

There is really no use in introducing a whole cast of characters at this late stage of my tale, any more than filling in all the details of the rehearsals. Even the spear-carriers were good. (You think that doesn't matter? Frank Capra always gave each extra on his productions a little bit of business, even if it was just something to think about as he walked through the scene, some problem to worry over, some destination beyond the other side of the set. And it shows.)

Everyone was professional. The major players were all superb. The set designer and the lighting director and all other technical people were friends of Polly, people who had worked with her many times in the past, and it all went as smoothly as these things ever go.

And in the center of it was Polly. Polly's vision of Lear.

That had worried me. The Five-Minit Bard had been fun, but it was meant to be ridiculous. Many Shakespearean productions over the centuries have been hilarious without intending to be.

I have no objection to taking a story by Shakespeare and using it as the basis of an entirely new production. The great Kurosawa did it several times, in Japanese. And I don't object, per se, to setting the plays in other places, other times—if something can be gained from the exercise. If something new can be illuminated, or if a fresh perspective can be obtained. But in seven hundred years some pretty ridiculous stuff has been tried. I've seen Coriolanus performed by people dressed up as cats. As You Like It set in a Stone Age cavern. All-nude productions. The last King Lear I saw was staged in a disneyland, and the storm scene got out of hand and blew away the stage and half the bleachers.

And yet, you don't want to re-create the Globe Theatre, either. It's been done, a hundred times.

Polly made it clear from the beginning that this was to be straight Shakespeare, full text, no "updating." But of course it would have her stamp on it. That was good enough for me. I put myself in her hands.

I settled in comfortably at Polly's shack. I even got used to the daily commute in the little pirogue, and in time came to understand a few words Beaudreaux was saying.

I warmed Toby up, took him to the vet for maintenance. He became the production mascot, everybody's best friend, and gained three pounds from all the treats people smuggled to him.

I fell in love with our Cordelia, a lovely young woman named Jennipher Wilcox. Polly once told me I fall in love more often than some people change their socks. And it's true, I guess. But it always feels like love. I have never experienced that kind of love where you want to spend the rest of your life with one person. Frankly, I think it was almost always an illusion. I cite the divorce statistics. And today, with life spans that really amount to something, I think that sort of love is even rarer. Not one couple in a thousand is really capable of spending two, three hundred years together. Very few are capable of lasting as long as five years.

So don't give me any crap about love versus lust, okay? And keep your amateur psych opinions about my childhood rendering me incapable of long-term commitment to yourself as well. For my first thirty years my father demanded all the love I had to give. Since then, it would never have been fair to ask anyone to share more than a few months of my life. A cop, a private detective, or an Isambard Comfort would always show up and I'd have to move along.

I did love Jennipher, in my fashion. And we were great in bed.

And the opening night came.

And by the second act intermission everyone knew we had something special. Our spies in the lobby reported an astonishingly good buzz. People were actually hurrying back to their seats before the houselights flashed.

And the third act came and went. And the fourth act. We moved into the fifth act and I knew I'd never been better.

God, I was glorious. I was Lear.

Actually, only one thing happened to put a bit of a damper on the evening, though I swear to you, had you been there it wouldn't have affected your enjoyment of the play at all, Mrs. Lincoln.

Midway through the third act, Isambard Comfort showed up in my dressing room....

He was seated in the big, comfortable easy chair I had requested for relaxing between scenes when Lear wasn't onstage.

He had Toby in his lap. There was no one else in the room.

"Where's Tom?" I asked. Tom was my dresser. Oh, yes, I had once more come up in the world. This was not the closet aboard the Britannic where he and I had first fought, but a spacious, warmly furnished dressing room. A star's dressing room. It had a crackling holo-fireplace, a wet bar, and my own bathroom complete with a small spa. A big television screen showed the action onstage from a camera in the third row.

"Tom is indisposed," he said, and gestured toward a pile of costumes in one corner. I saw one shoe that looked like part of the pair Tom had been wearing. I couldn't tell if Tom's foot was in it.

"Don't worry; he's not dead. He'll wake up in a few hours with nothing worse than a bad headache."

I had been leaning against the door, which I had closed behind me before I saw him. I was dripping wet, my gray hair in untidy ropes that reached my shoulders.

I had prepared a few automatic surprises for him, but none of them could be used without harming Toby. They had been a forlorn hope, anyway. There were weapons here and there, some concealed, some not looking much like weapons, but I doubted my ability to use any of them against his reptilian reactions and hideous strength.

"I've had a little time," he told me. "I've located a few electronic traps and disabled them." He made a gesture toward the Pantechnicon. "I left the life support running in your tricky luggage. We'll use it to smuggle you out of here. The rest of it, the deadly stuff, won't work. I took the trouble to memorize Mac—sorry, 'The Scottish Play' before I got here, so don't try speaking any lines from it in here. I've read up on other actors' beliefs, if you have any ideas about triggering something verbally."

I sighed, pushed myself off the wall, and walked to my dressing table.

"Then go get that costume on the rack over there," I told him. "The one labeled 'Act Three, scene four.' And hurry. We don't have much time to get me changed and back out there."

He looked at me for only a moment, then stood and put Toby in a hip pocket and zipped it closed. He was dressed in the costume of one of the King's knights, his helmet on the floor beside the chair. I assumed that was how he got backstage. He took the costume off the rack and came up behind me as I stood at the big mirror. I was already unbuttoning my costume. Tom would have done that for me, but I only wanted as much help from Izzy as I absolutely needed.

"You keep surprising me," he said. "I don't like that. Not many people surprise me."

"Get used to it."

"I think I have. But since we have some time together, would you explain how you knew I was going to let you finish the performance?"

"I didn't know," I said, shrugging out of the kingly robes of Lear. "But I thought it was worth a try. The worst you could do was coldcock me and shove me in my suitcase, and you're going to do that sooner or later, anyway."

"You don't think killing you is the worst I might do?" He held up the new robe—outwardly, exactly like the one I had just taken off—and I slipped my arms into it.

"If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it as soon as I got here. When you didn't do it, I knew you had other plans. I don't think I'll like those plans."

"I can guarantee it. Why the costume change, Sparky? It looks like a waste of time to me." I'd seen him feeling the seams, quickly going over it for concealed weapons. There were none. I gestured toward the television screen, the one he had been watching as I entered, and had made me hope he might be content to hold Toby hostage and give me a little more time.

"Watch and you'll learn something," I said. On the screen, Gloucester and Edmund were finishing their scene.

"That's my cue," I said, and hurried out the door.

"In such a night, to shut me out! Pour on, I will endure. In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril, your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all—O, that way madness lies; let me shun that. No more of that."

Pure poetry. Not just the lines, but my situation. As Lear, I was going mad. Soon I would be tearing my hair and rending my raiment (the reason for the costume change; this one was strategically weakened so it would tear properly). I was more than good. I was brilliant.

And as Kenneth Valentine—some might say the least successful role in my career—I thought I might go mad as well. Just the thing to put an edge in one's performance.

"Prithee go in thyself; seek thine own ease. This tempest will not give me leave to ponder on things would hurt me more."

The edge of the stage seemed to me an abyss; the wings, dark chances. What was to stop me from leaping the footlights and charging down the aisle, out the lobby, and into the wide world beyond? Or finishing my lines, strolling casually offstage and out the back door.

Well, professionalism, for one thing. Laugh if you must, but I would almost rather die than abandon a performance in the third act. There is that old axiom, the show must go on. Not only do I owe it to my craft to give my best, and give my all, I owe it to the audience. If I lived to tonight's final curtain and somehow could escape from my nemesis... then it's a case of Sorry, Polly. Sorry, cast members. I'm outta here. But nothing short of death was going to keep me from finishing tonight.

Later I realized I'd had no way of knowing if the exits were covered by Izzy's people. If, in fact, half the audience were Charonese agents. But I swear that, at the time, it never entered my head. Somehow I knew that Izzy was handling this alone. I had come to know something about him in our two brief, bloody encounters, come to know something of his culture in my researches aboard Hal. He would handle this alone. Call it pride, call it honor. Call it lunacy. After what had happened in Oberon, he would not be calling in the national guard.

But there was a more important reason I could not flee and that was, of course, Toby. Did Izzy know me well enough to rely on my sense of loyalty to hold me hostage even if my fear and my sense of duty would not? Bet on it.

When I took Toby as my companion so many years before, we had made a deal. As I said before, I was responsible for food, shelter, and safety, and he was in charge of everything else. Oh, I also handled minor matters, such as career decisions, travel itineraries, and our pathetic financial affairs. There had been no need to write any of this down; I considered it a part of the original agreement between man and dog, struck during the Stone Age. This may have been the first deal, the primordial deal, before either written or verbal agreements, and any human who fails to honor it is a pretty poor human in my estimation. Some have found irony in the fact that dogs have accompanied the human race into space, but I fail to see anything odd about it. A dog was the first earthling in orbit, and the first casualty of space travel.

Toby was in charge of love and absolute loyalty, and I could return nothing less to him.

"Is man no more than this?" I shouted. "Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here."

And I began tearing my clothes.

It seemed unusually quiet as I exited the stage. You expect a few slaps on the back, a wink, a thumbs-up. Some encouragement, acknowledgment that things are going well. There was none of that, and for a moment I was worried. Then I saw the faces of the cast and knew the silence meant something else. They were moving out of my way. Some did not even dare to look at me. They were afraid of intruding on me, afraid that anything they might do or say would short-circuit the magic. Theater people are intensely superstitious, always alert for the potential jinx, the careless word or gesture that will shatter someone's concentration.

I think they were a little afraid of me.

"It's a wonderful performance, Sparky."

"I wish you'd quit calling me that."

"It's how I think of you. How I remember you. I really was a fan, you know."

Incredible as it may seem, I believed him. And I also believed he appreciated Shakespeare, and my performance as Lear. How a man raised in such a perverted society could still cherish the arts of a common humanity I will leave for the reader to research, accept, or disbelieve, as takes your pleasure. But his desire to see the end of the play was my only current hope of salvation, his only window of weakness. I didn't dare question it.

"You know I'm going to kill you, don't you?" I asked.

"I know you're going to try." The prospect didn't seem to disturb him.

I had nothing to do for a while. The King sits out most of Act Four. On the stage, Gloucester was having his eyes gouged out. Cornwall would soon meet his Maker. Time to start laying my plans.

Believe it or not, I was hopeful.

Toby was in Izzy's lap, but refused to be cradled. With someone he likes, Toby is capable of sprawling over your hand and arm, limp as a noodle, completely trusting you not to let him fall. Or he can be a shameless beggar, licking your face, wagging his tail, angling for a handout.

Not now. He sat stiffly, looking from Izzy's face then over to me. He was saying, "Why don't you ditch this jerk?" When Izzy's hand moved in Toby's fur, the little lip curled slightly and the tips of his teeth showed. He was far too well-bred to bite the hand of a guest, but clearly he'd like to. With Toby and Izzy, it was hate at first sight.

I don't think Comfort hated Toby. I don't think he viewed Toby as a feeling thing at all. Anyone can tell a dog lover. A dog lover can't keep his hands off a dog. Put one in his lap and he will stroke, scratch, laugh when his face is licked, sometimes coo and gibber like a fool. Comfort held Toby like he would hold a pillow.

"I was wondering if we could talk," I said.

"It would be out of character to plead for your life."

"Not plead. But maybe we could bargain."

He laughed. "Money doesn't tempt me, and you don't have any. What else do you have to offer?"

"I wondered if we could talk about the frog."

He was silent for a while, his eyes narrowing.

"I'd meant to ask you about that," he said. It was as if he was looking for a trap of some kind, and I didn't get it.

"Ask what?"

He shrugged. "What frog?"

"What..." It seemed we weren't communicating. I opened my hand, where the evil little netsuke had been resting. The tiny frog still crouched on the skull, his eyes still unsurprised at all they saw. It felt warm and alive. Ivory is a very sensual surface. I could hardly keep my thumb from caressing it.

I started to toss it toward him and a palm-sized, deadly-looking black pistol materialized in Comfort's free hand. I'm sure it hadn't been there before, and I'm sure it hadn't been up his sleeve, but where it came from and how he got it without apparent movement will have to remain a Charonese secret. He was very fast.

So I carefully set it on the arm of his chair. He looked at it, made the gun vanish (how did he do that?), and gingerly picked it up. He stroked the frog with his thumb, then set it back down.

"Very pretty," he said. Pretty is not the word I would have used, but I'm not Charonese. "What does it have to do with me?"

Here the script calls for the protagonist to sit for a moment in stunned silence as all his assumptions come crashing down. After the long pause I told him how I'd come by the frog.

"Well, she never reported it to us," he said, with a slight smile. "If she had, we would have come for it, taken it from you, and broken both your arms. You'd have been repaired and on your way in a few hours."

"But—"

"We were called in by the governor of Boondock. You do remember visiting Boondock, don't you? Certainly you remember the young lady you met there. I saw her picture, and I certainly wouldn't have forgotten."

"But she was—"

"Nineteen, and engaged to a banker's son. Boondock is an independent city-state within the Outer Federation. It was established by a religious cult about a century ago. They have some unusual customs there, one of which is legally mandated obedience to one's parents until the age of majority, which they say is twenty-five years."

"I didn't—"

"As in so many other places, ignorance is no excuse. I'm sure your producer handed out a booklet before your arrival, concerning local customs; they always do. And like most passengers, you threw it away along with the booklet the shipping line gave you concerning emergency evacuation procedures. But you really should have read it, Sparky. Your brief affair with the girl upset a lot of political plans concerning an upcoming arranged marriage. Family honor demanded reparations.

"We Charonese are the only broad authority beyond Pluto. We're the only ones with enough discipline to maintain strict standards over such a vast region. Each enclave has its own rules and its own enforcers, but when someone flees a jurisdiction, as you did, we are called in. We work only by contract, and the governor's policy with us sets out prescribed remedies for different situations. First, we guaranteed to hunt you down. As I'm sure you have learned from your researches, we always get our man."

"Hunt me down and kill me," I said.

"Hunt you down. The governor was a bit cheap, though, and didn't pay for death in this instance. I'm not sure we would have written such a policy, anyway. We tend to operate more on an eye-for-an-eye basis. Almost Biblical, you might say."

"Biblical."

"Exactly. Since there was no way for us to take your virginity and ruin your marriage prospects, of course, we would have used other methods. The usual penalty would be three days of pain, followed by a year's incarceration."

"So you never intended to kill me."

"I blame myself, really," he said. "I assumed you knew that, back on the Britannic. I assumed too much. I expected resistance—three days of pain is certainly memorable to a non-Charonese, and something you surely would try to avoid—but I wasn't prepared for the tenacity of your assault.

"Of course, things are different now...."

"You do me wrong to take me out of the grave," I said. "Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald me like molten lead."

Things were indeed different now. If, in some ways, my last scenes of madness were not acting at all, then how to judge the end of the fourth act, when Lear is returned to sanity, temperance, even a sort of tranquillity in the arms of his faithful daughter Cordelia, while within me, poor actor, raged all the tempests of folly?

Considering all that, it might have been my greatest moment on the stage. No one would ever know just how great.

Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and we play it at cross purposes.

My one and only chance of escape was coming, and I did not feel up to it. I wanted to lie down with Lear, return to my comfortable grave.

But did it matter? What would have been different if I had given Comfort more time to speak, back there in my tiny cabin aboard the Britannic? Or if he hadn't been so unnaturally quick? The tanglenet was supposed to have immobilized him, then I could have listened to what he had to say.

Three days of pain. A year at what I had to assume would be very hard labor and solitary confinement. Would I have surrendered, knowing escape was, in the long run, impossible?

No.

It was as simple as that. I can't do jail time. I'd rather die. I'd rather spend the rest of my life on the run. I once did three days in jail, waiting for arraignment. Every time I went to sleep I found myself back in the airlock, facing the Daewoo Caterpillar. Awake, I spent all my time watching the walls, because every time I turned my back on one it began to move in on me. Very hard work, since you can't watch six walls at once. As soon as I made bail, I jumped, and have never regretted it.

So I would have fought the man from Charon. But I might not have tried so hard to kill him.

It didn't matter now. He'd explained it all to me, before my entrance. I had killed a Charonese. That simply was not allowed. The penalty was death, and a death that would be a long, long time coming.

"Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not. If you have poison for me I will drink it." I reached up and touched the tears on Cordelia's cheek. Real tears, not glycerine, as in rehearsal. I was so far gone in the part that I couldn't remember her real name.

I didn't return to my dressing room for the beginning of the fifth act. Cordelia and I waited in the wings, not speaking, not wanting to chance anything wrecking the mood. Soon we were onstage again, captured by our enemies, reconciled. It's my favorite scene in the play. The foolish old King at the end of his folly, granted one moment of happiness before the end. We were led away to what we thought would be our imprisonment, not knowing the plans of the evil Edmund.

I was going to my dressing room when Polly appeared and took my arm. She looked up at me, and I saw concern in her eyes.

"Bear up, old friend," she said.

"How am I doing?" I asked her.

"I think you know how the performance is going. But I'm a little worried about you. Is something wrong?"

"Wrong? What are you talking about?"

"I'm not sure. I sense something. I don't think anyone else would notice. God knows you're giving it your all. Is there anything I should know?"

Anything she should know. The mind reeled. I knew what she was talking about, Polly being the only one who knew who was after me. And I wouldn't get her involved in it.

Anything she should know. Yes, Polly, my dear. After the final curtain I'm going to vanish, one way or another. Either under my own steam, or in the custody of a man from your worst nightmares. There will be only one performance of this Lear, one perfect moment on the stage. You close tomorrow.

Oddly, I knew she wouldn't mind that part. I felt sorry for the rest of the cast, who had a right to expect a long run from such a night as this, but for Polly, the work was done, in the heavenly books. She had created a masterpiece that would last for the ages. As for the cast, well, that's show business.

So I lied. It wasn't my best work, I could tell, and even my best might not have entirely fooled her. But there were distractions. The final duel between Edmund and Edgar was getting under way on stage, and she had made quite a production out of it. "Edgar" and "Edmund" were the two finest stage swordsmen on Luna at the time and they were pulling out all the stops, giving the audience an exhibition of derring-do that would leave them breathless for my entrance. So she didn't question me, and I managed to slip away.

And immediately ran into the head of makeup, in a hissy panic.

"Where is Cordelia!" he said. "We have to get the rope burns on her neck!"

I shrugged helplessly, and as soon as his back was turned I ran to my dressing room.

As soon as I slammed the door behind me I saw Isambard on one knee beside Cordelia, who was lying on the floor.

"My God! What have you done to her? You've killed her."

He stood up. Toby was still cradled in his left hand.

"Contrary to what you might think, I don't kill unless it's necessary. She's unconscious."

"But you said—"

"She came in here and was asking too many questions. She was about to leave to get security, so I had no choice."

I lifted her and put her down on my cot. A bruise was forming on her temple. And damn her, anyway! She had decided to sneak in here at the last moment. There would have been no time for sex, but Jennipher was a cuddler. She wanted to hug and kiss before our last scene, in preparation for a memorable night of celebration.

Well, Cordelia was "dead" in our last scene. All was not lost.

"And I'm afraid we'll have to go now," Comfort said.

"Excuse me?"

"Yes. Things have gotten too dangerous. I have a safe route plotted to the rear entrance; no one will see us." He smiled. "Did you really think I was going to give you a chance to escape during the curtain calls?"

I stared at him, stunned at this treachery.

"I thought we had a deal," I said.

"Deal?" He laughed. "I made no deal, and I made no promise."

"It was implied."

"You've never really grown up, have you, Sparky? Did you expect me to behave like a gentleman?"

"No, but I... yes, I guess I did. I thought we had an understanding. I thought you were liking my performance." My voice was rising. Toby heard the tension, and began to bark.

"I did. But I've seen the end of this play. Perhaps you can finish it for me when we get back to Charon. Before we get to work on you."

Someone was pounding on the door now. The stage manager, the makeup man; it hardly mattered. I had only minutes before I was needed onstage. Which meant he had only minutes to take care of me. Toby was still barking. I looked around helplessly, ran my hand through my hair, and decided to plead.

"It's just five minutes," I said, holding my hand with the fingers apart. "That's all I need. Just give me the five minutes to finish here. Then I'll die a happy man."

"Why should I want you to die happy?"

Toby bit him on the hand.

He looked down as the tiny warrior sank his teeth into the meat between his thumb and forefinger and worried with sharp shakes of his head, looked at it as if it were happening to someone else.

Then he took Toby's head in his free hand and twisted. There was a sharp, gristly pop, a crunch, and Toby went limp. Comfort tossed the flaccid corpse aside.

"Now," Comfort said, calmly. "Do you want to get in the box, or should I put you... or should I... it's time..." His eyes lost focus, found me again, and his hand started to come up. From somewhere in his clothing the handgun sprang free and was propelled toward his hand—but the hand wasn't there to meet it. His arms fell to his side, his knees buckled, and he hit the floor as bonelessly as Toby.

No time, no time, no time at all. They were pounding harder on my door now. I grabbed a makeup towel and carefully lifted Toby. I saw the broken tooth and the golden fluid oozing from it. I was careful not to get any on my skin, as the stuff doesn't really need a puncture to work. The poison is harmless to dogs. Comfort's voluntary nervous system was completely destroyed by now. He still breathed, his heart still pumped, but that was all. I couldn't obtain the instantly lethal stuff, and besides, it left no room for error if I had somehow forgotten and shown Toby my five spread fingers by accident. Comfort's condition was reversible, but not easily, and not quickly.

And I still feared him. All along my worst fear was that the Charonese had some built-in antidote to the nerve poison; you never could tell with these people—but first things first. I crammed Toby into his hibernation chamber and closed the lid. All the lights on the cover flashed red. Then one turned green, then another. A third. I didn't have time to watch it all. I turned to Cordelia.

My god, what if she woke up while I was bemoaning her death? I needed another Cordelia. Luckily, one was at hand.

I tore the costume from Jennipher. These were warrior clothes. Cordelia had just been defeated on the field of battle, taken prisoner, then hanged by the treachery of Edmund. I draped the coat around Comfort, rolled him over, and got to work on the buttons. The pants were close enough, and would just have to do.

More pounding on the door.

"Mr. Dyle, Mr. Dyle! We need you on the stage, now!"

"I'll be ready!" I shouted back. "Tell them to slow down!"

Certainly some of the more frightening words to hear coming from the star's dressing room. I could imagine the panic building, the stage manager racing to find Polly, frantic signals to the principals on stage. I could see the flop sweat breaking out on foreheads as those poor folks realized every actor's nightmare: they were stranded out there, no safety net, no rewrites, no retakes. It had driven many an actor and director back to the cinema, where you could always shout Cut!

I glanced at Toby's module. Only two red lights now.

I had not expected Comfort to do what he did. My fear had been that he would understand the signal, somehow, drop the dog, stun me, and make his escape. But it didn't matter. Toby was doomed from the moment Comfort got his hands on him. He was to be used as one more method of torturing me. I would get to watch as the poor little ball of fluff was made to suffer until they got ready to work on me.

Perhaps it's blowing my own horn, but I am quite proud of my performance with Comfort there at the end. Of course I never expected him to let me finish the play. Taking me into the middle of the last act and then cutting me off sounded like a Charonese thing to do right from the start. But I was able to use my rising indignation as I "realized" I had been taken in to get Toby excited, get him yapping so that the bite, when it came, would seem natural.

Oh, how sharper than a serpent's tooth...

Can you count to five, boys and girls?

Comfort was a small man, smaller than Jennipher, actually, so that shouldn't be a problem.

A wig, a wig, my kingdom for a wig. I scrambled frantically through the overturned costume rack where Tom, my dresser, was sleeping peacefully. I hoped. I found one the right size and color, kicked clothing over Tom's exposed foot, hurried back, and pulled the wig over Comfort's head. I arranged it artfully.

More pounding. I could do nothing but ignore it.

A few quick slashes with makeup pencils and brushes and Mr. Isambard Comfort's face was a reasonable imitation of Jennipher's lovely features... from a sufficient distance. No matter; I'd keep the hair over most of his face, and if any of the cast noticed anything I had to assume they would stay in character. No one in the audience would find anything amiss.

I rolled Jennipher off the cot and spread the bedclothes over her, picked up Comfort's limp body, and tripped the door lock with my foot. I pushed my way through the frantic people just outside my doorway and raced toward the stage. I ran all the way to my entrance, then began Lear's last, mournful journey.

"Howl, howl, howl, howl!" The words look ludicrous, written down like that. One must rip them from deep in a wounded gut, and by God, I did.

"Oh, you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so that heaven's vault should crack. She's gone forever."

I saw no men of stone; stones don't sweat. What I did see was the most relieved cast of characters I'd ever encountered. They'd just spent almost two minutes trying to improvise and stretch their way through a growing catastrophe, and I don't think they could have gone another five seconds without the audience beginning to squirm. I was so proud of them, Kent, Albany, Edgar, and all the rest, for betraying not one inkling of the euphoria they must be feeling at my belated entrance. Euphoria? Hell, bloody murder! I could see it in their eyes: if Comfort didn't kill me, they might still.

"Lend me a looking glass; if that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why, then she lives."

I had "Cordelia" down on the ground, cradled in my arms. A wisp of hair stirred as Comfort exhaled. I had closed his eyes, but they were coming open slowly, and there was still awareness in them. He stared at me, and I turned his head away from the audience. The lights were on us now, a golden softness Polly had worked an entire day to get. My fellow cast members were shadows, gathered around us.

"This feather stirs. She lives." I brought my left hand up behind his neck, at the angle of the jaw, feeling for the carotid artery. I squeezed. Oh, bloody murder, indeed!

I kept up the pressure.

"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?" His eyes seemed to lose a little of their luster. It would be short and painless for him, which is exactly the way I wanted it. Don't forget, Charonese wanted a long and painful death. It assured them of a better place in Hell. But Comfort would feel nothing.

"Thou'lt come no more. Never, never, never, never, never. Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips! Look there, look there!"

I collapsed on him. My face was inches away. Did the light fade even more? >I couldn't be sure. My eyes were open only the barest slits; after all I was supposed to be dead.

I heard "Edgar" speak: "The weight of this time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most: we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long."

And at last, the curtain.

I was up, fighting my way through the darkness and a hurricane of stage whispers. Hands plucked at my clothing. Explanations were wanted, but I had no time, no time, no time at all. I crashed into my dressing room and slammed the door behind me. The curtain calls were beginning and I had only minutes.

Strip the costume from Comfort. The Pantechnicon sat in a corner, unpacked, on its side, ajar, presumably defanged by Izzy. Not quite so long as a coffin, but deeper and wider. I dumped him in it and slammed the lid.

A glance at Toby's box. One red light now. That one would not go off until I got him to a vet; the device was designed to keep him alive, not heal him.

On the screen, onstage, the extras filing off and Gloucester, Albany, France, Kent filing on. Thunderous applause.

I lifted Jennipher and sat her on the cot, pulling the costume over her. Slapping her face, pinching her. She began to blink and swat listlessly at my hand. I'd carry her on unconscious if I had to, but it would certainly look funny....

Now Edmund, Edgar, and the Fool. Applause growing deafening.

"Wake up, darling, come on now, you have to be a trouper."

"Wha..."

"You hit your head, my dear. But you have to get it together, just a few more minutes. Come on, Jen, suck it up. You can do it, I know you can."

Her eyes were open now but not really tracking. Once more, someone was pounding on my dressing room door.

Onstage, Goneril, Regan... no Cordelia. The three sisters were to have taken their bows together.

"Up we go," I said, and lifted her to her feet. She was never going to make it under her own power. I got my arm around her waist, and opened the door.

"Out of my way!" I bellowed, and the crowd fell back before the madness in my eyes and the thunder of my voice. I wore every ounce of Lear's dignity as I strode onto the stage with my Cordelia.

Why Lear and Cordelia? It's not as big a part as either of her sisters. Well, let them figure it out. I'd deal with it later.

When the lights hit us the old instinct took over in Jennipher. She smiled, curtsied, even managed to stand on her own as she and the whole cast turned and applauded me. I must tell you that, though it was probably the loudest ovation I ever received, I barely heard it. I was watching Jennipher out of the corner of my eye, ready to steady her if she faltered.

The curtain came down, briefly, immediately rose again to find the entire cast in a line, holding hands, myself in the center. We took a bow, applauded the audience, and I gestured to the wings. Polly came out, stood there for a moment, nodded, and went backstage again. It was all she ever gave the audience, no matter how much they clamored for more.

Then the curtain came down again, and Jennipher began to scream.

Oh, it was sheer bedlam.

"A man!" Jennipher was shouting. "There was a man in Carson's room. He hit me! He hit me, and then..."

I took her by the shoulders and looked at her with deep concern.

"A man? Are you sure? Where did he go?"

"I don't—"

"Seal off the stage area," Polly was saying. "I want guards on all the exits. Everyone stay where you are."

Out of nowhere the half-dozen large men who had lurked about the production from the beginning materialized; Polly had insisted on the extra security. Their eyes were not friendly as they tried to look beneath the makeup, seeking an impostor. Each carried a small but deadly-looking weapon and seemed more than ready to use it.

And so the search began. The audience was not bothered. It was quickly agreed that no one could have slipped from the backstage area into the auditorium without being noticed, and no one had seen anything.

The first thing the search discovered was, of course, poor Tom. This heightened everyone's concern, because until then it was still possible to think Jennipher was simply suffering from a bump on the head—a bump I helpfully pointed out I had given her, accidentally, while carrying her from my dressing room. Her story was vague, after all, and unlikely. But Tom's body proved something had been going on.

It was impossible to revive him quickly. The first doctor to arrive confirmed that he had been drugged. When he finally did come around, he was no help at all. He remembered nothing.

It was pretty chaotic until the police arrived, which was fine with me. But they soon began imposing some order on the mess.

My story—and I was determined to stick to it—was that I'd never seen Tom lying under the heap of costumes. And why would I have looked for him there? No, I arrived back in my room to find him gone, which had surprised and disappointed me because he'd always been quite reliable. But I determined to soldier on, alone, which accounted for the delays in certain appearances onstage. They seemed to be buying it. Why would I drug my own dresser? Why put my entire performance in jeopardy?

Polly stayed at the edges of this interrogation, her face betraying nothing to the police but saying volumes to me. Sparky, you are so full of shit. I managed to send her the tiniest guilty shrug when the detectives weren't looking. She would keep quiet.

So it was decided to search the entire theater, beginning with my dressing room. In no time at all a detective was standing in front of the Pantechnicon, pointing at it.

"What's this?" she asked.

"My trunk. All actors have a trunk." For a giddy moment there I was tempted to break into a chorus of "Born in a Trunk in the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho," a song which almost summed up my life.

"You want to open it for me?"

"Of course." I went to her, positioned myself so my shadow fell over the trunk, and lifted the lid. She glanced inside, and I closed the lid.

A legitimate theater is always chock full of cubbies and hidey-holes. Temporary walls are thrown up, then become permanent, and little odd-shaped dead spaces can result. Holes are cut in stages for dramatic entrances and exits, for magic tricks. There is a labyrinth backstage, towering fly lofts, and who-knows-what in the basement. There were no sewers running beneath this theater, so far as I knew, but the Phantom of the Opera would have had no trouble hiding himself.

But with enough people the search was eventually finished, and yielded... nothing.

There were those who wanted to do it all again, but they were in the minority. After all, it was just an assault, no permanent harm done. Tom would file a lawsuit against the theater, which would be settled out of court for a nominal sum. We would all be alert for a repeat during the rest of the run, which promised to be a long one. The consensus was that the intruder had somehow entered the audience and filed out with them, even though it was demonstrated early on that this couldn't be done. Still, after you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely... is wrong, in this case. But it wasn't up to me to point that out.

Things eventually quieted down. Finally, over an hour after the final curtain, I closed my door to the last of the intruders. I pulled my beard off, went to the sink, and washed my face.

And there was a knock on the door. I sighed, and answered it. It was two more detectives. I knew, because they were holding out their badges for me to examine.

"Mr. Carson Dyle?" one of them asked.

"Yes? What can I do for you?"

"Also known as Kenneth Valentine?"

I said nothing.

"Sir, we have reason to believe you are the aforementioned Kenneth Valentine. I am placing you under arrest for the murder of your father, John Valentine. Please don't say anything until you've spoken with your attorney."

And they slapped the handcuffs on me.

"This court is now in session," said the Judge.

It was now almost forty-eight hours after my arrest. Justice can move quite swiftly in Luna, especially in a seventy-year-old case. If you don't have your act together by now, the reasoning went, you never will. We had missed one performance, but one was going on now with my understudy.

Much had happened.

I had spent the time in utter terror, feeling the walls closing in on me. I was given drugs to help combat this, but as trial time approached I had to be taken off of them, to be alert for my own defense.

I had engaged Billy Flynn, the best lawyer on the planet. I could afford him now, and it only seemed right that he have a part in what was being touted as the sixth or seventh Trial of the Century.

And what's this? you say. I could afford Billy Flynn? This, from the man who recently had to stage Punch and Judy shows for a couple of hot dogs? Who had almost starved to death riding the rods from Pluto to Oberon?

Oh, yes, I was a wealthy man. Very wealthy, for all the good it did me.

When I left Luna in such a hurry, seventy years before, Thimble Theater was an emerging player in the entertainment business. I was the majority stockholder. Upon my indictment for murder and subsequent flight, all those funds were frozen and put in the hands of a trustee. I couldn't get a dime anywhere in the system. This is a sensible law, I suppose, as it makes flight to escape prosecution very difficult. I left Luna with the change in my pocket, and a small loan from my Uncle Ed.

In my absence, the trust was required by law to manage my estate in the manner most likely to return a profit for the company, and thus for me and the other stockholders. They'd done a very good job. Thimble Theater was now the player in the entertainment business. I was one of the three or four wealthiest men alive.

And I couldn't promote the price of a candy bar.

My money would be waiting for me after I had served my sentence, if any, or been found not guilty, like any other citizen. Assuming I lived to collect it, but more about that in a moment. In the meantime I could draw only enough money for my legal expenses. Luckily, I didn't have to hire Malcolm Malpractice, the guy with the office over the barbershop. I retained Flynn and Associates, which meant I had a full combat battalion of lawyers, clerks, assistants, investigators, and researchers at my disposal.

So the first thing I did was stab Billy in the back.

"Common sense?" he shouted. "Common sense? What's all this I'm hearing about Common Sense Court? Sparky, my friend, that's for people who didn't do it! In case you've forgotten, you did it! To find guilty people not guilty we go to a jury, Sparks! Juries are what I do!"

I said I'd prefer to take my chances with the Judge.

"Let me say this to you slowly," Billy said, slowly. "The law is an ass. The law is an ass, and I am the mule skinner."

This was happening in his luxurious office, shortly after I had almost, but not quite, admitted that I had killed my father. Not even Billy Flynn was going to hear of Elwood's role in the crime, because Elwood was not going to be any element in my defense. So what I had told him was that I no longer remembered what had happened that day (true; I also hadn't remembered it accurately on that day), and that since I and my father were the only people on the stage, it must have been me who shot him. Also true.

"A jury is the best thing that ever happened to a defendant," Billy went on. "A jury is the only existing creature with no brain and twelve assholes. Do you know how you determine the intelligence of a jury? You do not add up the IQs and divide by twelve. You take the lowest IQ and divide that by twelve.

"Juries are hazardous, I won't lie to you about that. Sometimes their sheer stupidity gets in the way and they simply never understand the right thing to do. Which is whatever I tell them to do. But nine times out of ten I can whip them along to the right verdict. With the Judge, you quite often get actual justice, which is the last thing you want."

He had been pacing around the office, delivering his peroration to a jury he hadn't even assembled yet. Now he went behind his desk and sat down, laced his fingers together, and assumed a fatherly mien. Billy Flynn affected an older appearance, with a receding hairline and gray around the temples. Probably another jury thing. He had an Adolphe Menjou moustache, and a warm, husky voice. You liked this man, almost instantly.

"Let me give you the Billy Flynn extremely short course in the Law, Sparky. After the Invasion, the dominant legal form was based on the English system of jurisprudence. People erroneously assume this system is involved in dispensing justice. It is not. It is interested solely in providing fairness, in conducting all its affairs by a set of rules. You know what those rules are and you play by them, and you win some, and you lose some. The system is largely weighted in favor of the accused. This results in oddities such as 'admissible evidence.' According to the law, how evidence is gathered is more important than its actual probative value. In other words, if the police don't play by the rules, you go free. No matter what you've done, no matter how compelling the evidence. Case dismissed. This obvious insanity is tolerated because of the 'rules.'

"Or take prejudicial testimony. If you've been convicted of ninety robberies, and are accused of a ninety-first, with exactly the same modus operandi, those prior convictions cannot be put in evidence against you. It might 'prejudice' the jury.

"The upshot is, the English system of law is by far the way to go if you are guilty.

"Of course, in recent years, another type of law has been tried...."

I could listen to the man talk all day. His arguments at the bail hearing alone were worth every penny of his outlandish fee. When he was done, even I was almost convinced I wasn't a flight risk—a man who had fled the jurisdiction and been on the run for seventy years, who had no money, no roots in the community, and absolutely nothing to lose by jumping bail... and who had in fact spent the last twenty-four hours thinking of nothing but the best way out of town if bail were granted. But in the end I would not have released me on my own recognizance, and the judge didn't, either.

At one point I told Billy Flynn he could have been a great actor.

"I am a great actor," he replied.

But he was a bit long-winded, and I wasn't taking notes. Besides, half of the power of his words were in the delivery, something every actor understands. So while I thoroughly enjoyed the two-hour diatribe he had introduced as an extremely short course in the law, I won't try to set it down here. He had much more to say about the traditional, English system. And much to say about the new system.

For there were other ways.

Even in English common law one often had the option of being tried by a judge or a jury. Trial by a wise and/or impartial judge had been the method used by many cultures before the Invasion. It often worked well. Then there was trial by a council of elders, or by an entire community. Always, there was The Law behind such systems, sometimes called "custom," sometimes written down and sometimes not. There were referees, arbitrators, mediators of all sorts. All these systems had strengths and weaknesses.

People had always aspired to more than the traditional system of law could offer. Billy was right: the law was an ass. And a big reason was, legislators are forced by the nature of codified rules to try to anticipate every situation that can arise in human affairs. This is plainly impossible. And, recognizing the imperfectibility of human affairs, the law had to give a big edge to the accused if it was to avoid injustice to the innocent. Both of these things resulted in injustices, even travesties of the law. Couldn't there be a better way? The system of a wise and impartial judge seemed to offer the best option for making the law more nearly just. And, yes, for trying to do something the English legal system did not even attempt: finding the truth, so far as that concept could be said to really exist. In criminal matters, was it possible to attempt a determination of what really happened, as opposed to what the admissible evidence and unreliable and biased eyewitness testimony tended to indicate might have happened?

Well, very little could ever be proved one hundred percent true. But likelihood could be determined to a very high degree of probability, and we had a machine that was very good at just that sort of thing. The Lunar Central Computer.

Oh, my, how the lawyers did howl when it was suggested! The basic proposal had been around for over a century when it was finally agreed, over loud objections from the bar, to give a new system a twenty-year optional tryout. After twenty years submit it to the voters. We were currently fifteen years into the experiment, and still the only planet with a dual legal system. But Luna was being watched intensely by every other planet in the system with an elected government, who all knew a politically popular thing when they saw it.

People liked the new system. It seemed to work better. Officially it was called the Juridical Protocols Test. Professionals in the law usually called it the Judge. The public, after a few years, referred to it as the Court of Common Sense.

This was the system upon whose tender mercies I was throwing myself. Why? Many reasons I needn't explore, and one I can't completely explain. My first visitor, after my initial consultation with Billy Flynn, was Hildy Johnson, and she had this to say:

"Sparky, I know what your high-priced mouthpiece just told you. I'd like to give you a bit of advice that will cost you a lot less. Go before the Judge. You won't regret it. And I guarantee that."

I was about to say Hildy Johnson never lied to me, but of course the first words out of her mouth when we met were a lie. But we had become quite good friends, way back when, and she had never betrayed me. Even when it would have been to her professional advantage to do so. So the Judge it would be.

I'd have been a lot more confident of my chances if I didn't keep remembering that the Lunar CC had, not long before, suffered a planetary nervous breakdown.

Everything about the Juridical Protocols Test was different.

All trials were televised, even if no one tuned in. Most were dull enough so that a tiny room, a table, and half a dozen chairs were sufficient. But in higher profile cases larger halls were available.

The case of Luna v. Kenneth Valentine was held in the largest JPT courtroom, which could accommodate five hundred. It was an instant sellout, with seats at ringside being scalped for over a thousand dollars. The room itself was unremarkable, nothing more than a big barn with maroon velvet drapes against the walls, uninspired lighting, gray carpet, and more maroon in the upholstery. This operation was badly in need of a set designer.

Close to one wall was a big round table with low-backed chairs on casters, enough to seat twenty people. On that wall was hung a twenty-foot television screen. The table was wood-grain Formica. A few feet behind it was a low U-shaped barrier (the bar?) and behind that concentric rows of seats, steeply raked to give everyone a view. It was like an operating theater from an old movie, or a college lecture room: Freshman Introductory Law 101. One aisle came down the center to the only break in the barrier. Witnesses testifying in person would enter through that break.

The prosecutors sat directly across the table from me, my defense team, the clutter of paper and briefcases and computerpads they had made around their places, and Toby.

I had managed to tell Polly about Toby's plight as I was being led away, manacled. She got him to a vet and had delivered him to the holding cell just down the hall not an hour ago. He had been happy to see me, but not inordinately so. Toby is a genius, for a dog, but I'm sure he had no idea of what had happened to him. And no idea what he had done to Izzy; I imagine he regarded the steady diet of raw steak he'd been getting from Polly—at my request—as no more than his due.

Digesting all that steak is hard work. After I set him on the table he looked around, counting the house, but when he saw the people were not here to watch him perform he curled up on a stack of legal briefs and went to sleep. Every once in a while I could hear his stomach rumble.

In the center of the table was the Judge.

Not really, of course. There was no "Judge," in the sense of a physical object present in the courtroom. But except when interfacing directly with the CC, in which case its voice came through one's own personal implanted telephone, people prefer to have the sound come from some visible source, not just emanate from the walls. It gave the defendant and the lawyers something to look at, and it made for better television. So a small box had been rigged up with screens on each side. Evidence and taped testimony could be displayed, and when the CC was speaking, the screens showed an officious-looking logo of the JPT Department.

As soon as the court was declared in session I stood up.

"Your Honor," I said, "I would like to make an opening statement."

Billy Flynn was looking up at me as if I were insane.

"Mr. Valentine," said the Judge, "it is not necessary to address me as 'Your Honor.' And it is not necessary to stand when speaking."

"I understand, Your Honor, but I would prefer to do both."

"As you wish."

"Your Honor, I wish to state for the record at this time that, if I am found guilty of this charge, and if my sentence includes a period of time in which I am locked up in a jail cell, I will wish to be provided with the means to end my own life."

There were shocked gasps from the audience.

"Say it ain't so, Sparky!" someone shouted.

"Bailiff," said the Judge, "please remove the occupant of seat 451." The idiot was promptly hustled from the seat he had paid dearly for, and an alternate ticket holder ushered into his place. The Judge didn't mind murmuring, gasping, or laughter, but comments from the audience were forbidden.

"That is your right, of course," the Judge went on. "It's premature, but your request is noted. Tell me, are you claustrophobic? I see no mention of it in your psychological evaluation."

"No, Your Honor," I said, recalling my trip to Oberon, and my berth in the Guy Fawkes. "Maybe the word is penophobic. I can't handle jail. I'd go crazy."

"If this is an appeal for leniency, you really should save it for the sentencing phase, if any."

"It's not an appeal, Your Honor. I simply want it on the record. I also have another reason, which I will reveal if it becomes necessary."

There was indeed no good reason to say any of that, except that it made me feel much better to get it off my chest. I was completely serious, too. And why not? Jail time might as well be a death sentence for me. It gave the Charonese two options. They could assassinate me in prison (getting into a prison is the easiest thing in the world), or they could simply wait at the gate until my release and roll me up then. Whichever they planned, I would not give them the chance.

Yes, they would still be after me. And I knew they would much prefer option two, with the chance for about a year of sophisticated torture before my eventual death. Much better to take the Black Pill.

But I wasn't going quietly. I knew the Charonese hated publicity, hated any kind of fuss. Well, I was going to show them one hell of a fuss. I was going to tell my entire story, reveal to the civilized world why I was electing to take my own life. I knew where their sympathies would lie. Someday, someone is going to have to do something about the Charonese, and anything I could do to rally public opinion against these monsters... well, I'd think of it as my memorial.

"We will proceed on Luna v. Valentine" said the Judge. "It has been alleged that Kenneth Valentine, seventy-one years ago, violated Lunar criminal law by murdering John Valentine, his father." On the screen before me and the one on the wall to my left appeared a copy of the formal indictment, which would never be read aloud in this court. One of the many ways things were speeded up with the Judge. The minutiae of proceedings were simply assumed.

"The physical evidence supporting this accusation is as follows:

"One handgun." On the screen I saw a picture of the gun, followed by a technical description. If my lawyers wanted to challenge any part of this evidence they could simply speak up. None of them did.

"Bloodstained clothing belonging to John Valentine." Again, a picture. The actual items would not appear in court, and I was thankful for that. The Judge paused while the screen displayed and identified a series of reports, all of them seventy years old, all of which were available to my attorneys on their own computers. The reports were by forensic scientists, and established that the blood was my father's blood, and so forth. Then there were statements by cast and crew of that long-ago production that, yes, these items of clothing, a costume, had been worn by John Valentine in his role as Montague.

And so forth. It took about two minutes to establish that all this data existed, a process that might have taken a week in a regular court. Why bother with all the wasted time of cross-examination? None of it was tough to understand, all of it was reviewed and authenticated by the Central Computer, the Judge. And indeed, Billy Flynn had no problems with any of it, though he told me he would have worked over each "expert" for at least a day if trying this case before a jury. Those who could still be found, that is. Seventy years is a long time, even these days. Some might well be living on Pluto. Some would be dead.

Some could be portrayed as incompetent.

"I could have had ninety percent of this declared inadmissible," Billy muttered in my ear.

"One lead bullet, forty-five-caliber, recovered from a wall in the John Valentine Theater." Statement from coroner. Statement from firearms expert. Zip on to the next item.

I stared across the table at the prosecutors. There were only three of them, opposing the nine expensive bodies on my side. All of them sat quietly, hands folded, not using their terminals. I would have to describe their expressions as smug. Who could blame them?

"That is all the physical evidence presently known to the court. We will now move on to forensic evidence."

"Here's where you lose big time," Billy said to me.

What he meant was, scientific evidence was still the area with the most opportunities for the defense lawyer's stock in trade: obfuscation.

A trial by a jury of your peers means a trial by idiots. Idiots like me, idiots like you. Remember, you can have eleven geniuses and one moron, and the moron rules.

You say you're not an idiot? Maybe not, at what you do. But what do you know about identifying fingerprints? About rifling marks on bullets? DNA profiling? Chemical testing of materials? Retinal scans? Pathology? Crime-scene investigation, psychological testing, interviewing strategies, laser-weapon frequency modulation? If you know anything about any of those things, you know a lot more than I do. And these are all technologies that have been around for centuries; what do you know about the new stuff, the really cutting-edge techniques that maybe three people on Luna know much about? Answer: nothing. So what makes you think you're qualified to sit in judgment on someone whose fate depends on your understanding? This is where we traditionally haul in the experts.

"An expert witness," Billy Flynn had told me, "is the fellow with credentials that you pay to testify to what you want him to testify to. An incompetent expert witness is one called by the other side."

Summed it up pretty well, I thought. So one distinguished jerk says the sky is blue, and another says the sky is black. You have only a vague idea of what the sky is, having never seen it. Who do you believe?

Why, the one who presents himself best on the stand, of course. The one who best survives the withering cross-examination leveled by the other side. Before we even sat down around the table, the Judge had already consulted the three or four best experts in the field—any field. And it was largely a formality, since the Judge was already conversant with everything in the field, and brought to the problem the experience of a million trials, a billion pieces of evidence.

Oh, it was a black day for the legal profession when the JPT was finally implemented. Public confidence in a JPT verdict began at a level best described as dubious, but over fifteen years had soared. It was so high now that there was a widespread perception that anyone who asked for a jury trial must be guilty. Which had, naturally, tainted the jury pool. Which had left lawyers in the uncomfortable position of arguing to retain the old system because... well, because it was the only method for having their guilty clients acquitted.

I'll leave it to you to imagine how this argument played with the taxpayers.

A black day indeed.

And things were certainly not looking good for old Sparky. What could the little wirehead have in mind?

"All evidence currently under submission having been presented, the court will now hear arguments."

Which is where the real fun begins in JPT court.

"Your Honor, I would—"

"Everybody's calling me 'Your Honor.' Flattery will get you nowhere."

There was laughter from the audience.

"I'm simply following my client's lead," said Flynn, affably. "And why not? I was trained in respect for the court, and even if this one doesn't demand it, I do respect it, and showing respect hurts nothing. And I would not dream of attempting flattery." More laughter. "So, Your Honor, I will state at the outset that my client did in fact kill John Valentine, in the manner and on the date specified. And that he did so in self-defense."

"You could have saved the court twenty minutes of summation if you had said that up front," the lead prosecutor rasped, cuttingly. This was a truly hard, squinty-eyed woman with what looked like stainless-steel hair and brass mascara, a regular harpy. But possibly I'm prejudiced.

Her name was Roxy Hart, and she was, naturally, the chief prosecutor for King City and she had her eye on the mayor's chair. This was a perfect opportunity for her to get her face before the voters, though she must have thought long and hard about it. Putting murderers in jail is always politically popular, but little "Sparky" did have his defenders and die-hard fans. But my decision to go before the Judge had made it virtually no-lose for her. She hardly had to do any work. It had all been done for her by the police department seventy years ago, and it was so open-and-shut she could be seen as simply playing out the string. The criticism, if any, should fall upon the Judge. She would be walking a fine line, Billy told me, between being tough on crime and not being too ruthless with a popular figure.

"She'll bluster for a while," he said, "then she won't oppose a reduction in the charges. Manslaughter, something like that."

"The assertion that this killing was self-defense is ludicrous," she went on. "John Valentine was armed with a stage sword, a prop. There has been no evidence introduced that he was trying to kill Kenneth Valentine."

"That 'prop' had an edge sharp enough to shave with," Billy countered. "Both witnesses saw numerous wounds on my client. Whether John actually meant to kill my client is something we will never know, but it is clear that he meant to butcher him a bit. In this circumstance, it is reasonable for Kenneth to feel fear for his life, which is the test of self-defense."

"This was no more or less than a fencing lesson."

"A very bloody one, and a—"

"A fencing lesson like a dozen other lessons during that time. We can bring witnesses to testify that, on the stage today, wounds are not uncommon, indeed, are even expected while one learns the craft of fencing. The wounds sustained by the younger Valentine did not prevent him from fleeing the scene of the crime. Without medical attention of any kind, he went to the Texas disneyland, where he was attended by the resident doctor, who has stated that the wounds were not life-threatening."

"It's easy to determine that after the fact, not so easy to know when you're being used as a human pincushion."

"Oh, please! You're grandstanding for the polls."

Which, naturally, is what they both were doing.

It went on like that for a few minutes, each of them shouting over the other. The Judge let it go; the CC has no trouble following a dozen conversations at once.

You know who had benefited the most from the new system? Dramatists. For centuries playwrights have written scenes, entirely fantasy, of courtroom confrontations. People accept them because drama cannot take the time to be boring, and that is exactly what court is. Boring. Many people never realize this until they get into court themselves, and see how staggeringly slow the proceedings can be.

Because the Judge does not care about decorum and allows almost limitless latitude in what can be said, things can get very hot indeed in the argument phase of a JPT trial. Shouting matches are the standard, and fistfights are common.

But why allow all this horseplay at all? The Judge is not going to be swayed by emotion, is it?

Only in one sense, and that is in the polls Prosecutor Hart mentioned. The polls: the reason people called the JPT system the Court of Common Sense. The last stand of the jury system. The only part of the new regime that lawyers actually like, because it is the only part that lets them appeal to emotion.

Before a trial, and most especially during the trial, the Judge had its fingers on the public pulse. Since the CC was in constant contact with virtually every citizen of Luna (with a few exceptions, like the Outer Amish, my father, and me), this process wasn't intrusive. The average citizen had dozens of transactions with the CC every day. During one of them, the Judge might ask, "Suppose a man steals a loaf of bread..." or whatever might be at issue in the case. The citizen would listen, ask questions, then deliver an opinion on the matter. Was it fair? Did the proposed penalty conform with the intent of the lawmakers, and not just the letter of the law? Would following the letter of the law result in an injustice, or unwarranted leniency? Was the crime in fact worse than the lawmakers had envisioned when setting the penalties?

The answers were added into the complicated equation, constantly being revised, that determined the verdict, or in the case of the JPT, the "number." This equation was the "protocol" part of the JPT. In fifteen years the algorithms of justice had become supremely refined. They were approaching, though might never reach, that lovely word "fair." As in fair play. No concept of fairness would ever satisfy everyone, but if you satisfied most of the people most of the time, you were doing a lot better than the old system ever had.

In my own case, no hypothetical questions were necessary. The Judge simply asked, "What do you think of the Sparky case?" and the average citizen already knew about it. Thus a few thousand randomly chosen citizens were made to function as an unselected panel. They had put in their "jury duty," an onerous burden under the old system. It had wasted ten minutes of their time, a waste which the great majority enjoyed. And the final verdict for or against me would contain an element of trial by my peers.

So this is what Billy and Roxy were engaged in. A fight to influence public opinion. They typically weren't given much time to do it, so the fight was fast and furious.

I couldn't begin to report all that was said in the next twenty minutes; at times all twelve lawyers were shouting at once. And frankly, if the Judge had asked me to vote on the issue based on the behavior of the attorneys for both sides, I would have voted to disbar them all. It's hard to believe they swayed the opinion of anyone in the vast viewing audience.

But they put on a hell of a show. If you'd like to see it, videos are available at a reasonable price. Hell, buy two. I get a three percent royalty. If you aren't from Luna I'd recommend you buy one and take a look; this is likely to be in your future. You'd better get used to it.

"I think we've had enough of that," the Judge said, finally. "Mr. Flynn, would you like to call any witnesses?"

"Yes, I'd like to have Rose Wilkinson tell what she saw."

"On the day of the murder?" Hart asked.

"On that certain day, seventy years ago," Flynn said, unperturbed.

Rose was called to the table. She took a seat halfway between the opposing sides, which I'm sure Gideon Peppy would have found significant. I didn't recognize her, but that wasn't surprising. Most people change their appearance a bit every decade or so; usually nothing radical, but enough that if you aren't in contact for a long time it can add up to a new person.

"Ms. Wilkinson," said the Judge, "you have stated that you were employed as the assistant stage manager for a production of Romeo and Juliet seventy years ago."

"That's right. By Mr. Valentine. That is, by Mr. John—"

"Why don't you call them John and Kenneth?" the Judge suggested.

"Okay."

"Will you tell us what you saw, what you remember?"

"Yes. I was backstage with a reporter, Hildy Johnson. I don't remember what we were talking about. Probably John Valentine, because I hated him more than I've ever hated anyone before or since." I glanced at Roxy Hart, who was frowning. She wanted to leap to her feet and object, but she couldn't. The Judge was in control here, and presumed able to ignore prejudicial statements. "We heard a shot. Well, a loud noise that I later learned was a shot. We went out on the stage to investigate, and I saw Sparky... I'm sorry, Kenneth, standing there with a gun in his hand. And Mister... John was lying on his back. I remember smelling smoke, gun smoke I guess it was."

She went through her story fairly concisely. When she began to stray, the Judge gently prodded her back on track.

"It was the most horrible thing I ever saw," she said, tearing up a little even at this late date. I didn't feel so great myself. "Poor Sparky standing there... I don't think he knew what happened. He couldn't have been in his right mind... but that awful, awful man! Sparky could never say no to him. He humiliated his son in front of the entire cast, treated him like a servant or a naughty child... and I'm glad he's dead."

There was a hush in the courtroom when she finished. I discovered my fingernails were biting into my palms. I made an effort to relax; all of Luna was watching.

"I want to point out," Hart said, "that the question of Kenneth Valentine's sanity is not at issue here."

"Noted," said the Judge. "Are there more witnesses?"

"I'd like to call Hildy Johnson," Billy said.

Hildy was called. Hildy was called again. And yet a third time.

What have I done? I asked myself. And I answered, I've put my fate into the hands of a reporter.

"I'm issuing a subpoena for the appearance of Hildy Johnson," the Judge said. "In the meantime her statement is on the record and you have all read it. Her testimony will be taken at a later date, and if anything of relevance is developed an amended verdict will be issued. Now, is there any member of the public who has any pertinent facts bearing on this case? And let me remind you, I am the sole judge of relevancy, and anyone attempting to use this court as a forum for unrelated statements will be dealt with severely, as provided by law. This court is not a soapbox, nor a venue for the disaffected."

This was known as the "grandstanding law," and was passed when it became clear that this final phase of the JPT was easy meat for abuse by anyone with an ax to grind. People were standing up and delivering diatribes against this or that law, airing pet peeves, generally being pests. Now, if anyone had any new facts—and no one ever did—was the time to present them. Otherwise, statements as to my sterling character or lack of it might or might not be allowed, but precious little else.

The courtroom door burst open and in rushed Hildy Johnson, waving sheets of paper.

"I do, Your Honor!" she shouted.

The Judge took it in stride. The audience was a little more demonstrative, but quickly settled down as Hildy walked down the aisle and found a seat just to the left of Billy Flynn.

"May it please the court—" she began.

"You've got the wrong court," said the Judge. "I'm neither pleased nor displeased by anything. Let's dispense with all the formality. What do you have to show me?"

"I just found something interesting," she began again.

"Just a moment. Hildy, are you employed by a news-gathering organization?"

"Uh, I used to be, Judge. Currently I'm on extended sabbatical, but I send in stories when I find them."

"For competitive bidding, I assume."

"That's where the money is, Judge."

"Can I further assume that your recent dramatic entrance into the courtroom will enhance the value of any story to come out of this trial?"

"Couldn't hurt," Hildy conceded. There was laughter from the audience.

"Why do I get the feeling," the Judge said, "that I'm being sandbagged?"

"Well, Your—Judge, nobody said I couldn't make the news as well as report it."

"Go ahead, then. What is your startling new evidence?"

"I'm not sure it's in the nature of evidence at all, Judge. But I think I've uncovered an interesting avenue of exploration. If you could put these pictures up on the big screen..."

They were projected, and I felt a stab in my heart. It was four pictures of my father. Publicity stills, smiling, his best profile showing. Pictures I hadn't seen in many years.

There were some gasps, and a building buzz of whispered conversation. I didn't know what was going on.

"I was just looking at these today," Hildy went on. "As you know, I haven't seen Sparky... er, Kenneth in many years. The last time I saw him he was twenty-nine, but still in the body of a teenager. When he was arrested two days ago he had the appearance of an old man, King Lear. I don't imagine that in the seventy years of his exile he has worn what we might call 'his own' face many times, if at all."

"Never, Your Honor," I confirmed.

"I suspected that," Hildy said. "He was unlikely to be recognized as Sparky; Sparky never grew beyond eight years old. But the psychology of the fugitive, if nothing else, made me think he would shun his natural appearance. Until today."

"Yes, I see what you mean," said the Judge. He might have, but I still didn't. I had been commanded by the court to abandon all artifices for my appearance in the court, true enough. When I did that, I saw a face in the mirror that very closely resembled my father.

"The picture in the upper right," said Hildy, "is not John Valentine, but his son, Kenneth, taken off the video feed from this courtroom not ten minutes ago."

I looked at it dubiously. I had to take her word for it. I couldn't have picked it out among the four, except that I now noticed that "John Valentine" was wearing clothes identical to what I was wearing.

"There's a very strong family resemblance," the Judge agreed.

"I think it's more than that, Judge. A lot more. I think this man, Kenneth Valentine, is John Valentine."

This would have been the point, in an ordinary drama, for the judge to bang on his gavel and shout for "order in the court!" The Judge simply let the outburst of shock from the audience play itself out. Toby lifted his head, wondering if it was time for him to go on. Then he went back to sleep. The next thing we all could hear was Hildy raising her voice.

"Judge, I'd like to request that you compare the DNA pattern of the late John Valentine with that of his son."

There was no need to order samples taken or tests made. Everything was already present in the CC's memory. After a pause of a few seconds the Judge spoke again.

"They are identical, as I suspect you knew they would be."

"Not until a short while ago," Hildy said. She didn't mention a specific time interval, and I wondered if anyone else would notice that. But whatever she was up to, I knew she was too careful to break any laws. "But I did recently speak with someone who confirmed my suspicion. He's here in this courtroom today, and he has something to tell you. Mr. Edwin Booth Valentine."

Uncle Ed? Here in the courtroom? Surely I'd have seen the forklift needed to move him about.

But instead of a human mountain, it was only a foothill that rose from two seats in the audience (and that must have cost Hildy a pretty penny). Uncle Ed was a shadow of his former self; I doubt he was much over five hundred pounds. He lumbered carefully down the aisle and once more there was a growing murmur, this time one of recognition. I heard whispers: "Ed Ventura. That's Ed Ventura." To which many of the younger observers must have been replying, "Ed who?"

Ah, but they'd know soon. This was building into a circus of monumental proportions. An ancient patricide, involving Luna's most beloved moppet. Seventy years on the run. Dramatic backstage arrest. Luna's best criminal-defense attorney versus King City's brightest rising political star. Last-minute genetic revelations I still hadn't grasped. And now, it wouldn't be a circus without an elephant! A famous face from the Old Stars' Burial Ground, grown to enormous size (and if only they knew; but they would, they would, when the reporters started digging).

It had Hildy Johnson's fingerprints all over it.

Even the new Uncle Ed, a shadow of his former self, would not fit into any of the chairs around the table. This didn't seem to bother him. He just stood near the railing, waiting. If he was in any way upset at this public revelation of his love affair with corpulence he never showed it.

"John Valentine was my brother," he said, in his commanding baritone. "We were not... close. There were many disagreements over the years, primarily centering around my career, which he viewed as selling out the craft of acting. He wasn't above accepting a 'loan' from time to time, though. I knew I'd never see any of it again, but I was making lots of money and... well, that has nothing to do with this case.

"I had not seen him for several years when he appeared at my door one day with an infant child. A boy. He had no very convincing story as to the origins of this child, but I had my fears. You see, we had a sister, Sarah. Sarah was not... very bright, I'm afraid. And not very worldly. In fact, she was quite unstable. Our father was a demanding perfectionist, and could be quite a brutal man. It scarred all three of us, but Sarah was the least equipped to survive it. She was left emotionally crippled, unable to function very well in the world. But she had her older brother, John, who protected her from what he could. John became her emotional anchor, her very reason for living.

"Not to put too fine a point to it, they were lovers."

He paused, and wiped at his eyes. I began to get an idea of what this was costing him. What it might cost me I'd have to wait to find out. I was feeling rather numb, to tell the truth.

I had stopped asking about my mother quite early in my life. I had my fantasies, like any child growing up without a mother. I think I'll just keep those private, if you don't mind. Precious little else in my life is private now that my origins have been turned into one of the most widely watched soap operas in the history of Luna.

My father's answers to my questions had always been vague. He told me my mother was dead, but never told me how she died. My impression was that it was too painful for him to talk about it.

He said her name had been Sara. No H. Should I have made the connection with the mysterious aunt that my father never talked about either? I don't know. It's a common enough name.

"Pardon me, Judge," Ed went on. "I loved her, too. More than John, in some ways, but I'm afraid I never had the nerve to stand up to our father, either for myself or for her, until I made my final break with the family and took the part that led... oh, no one wants to hear about my old career."

He was wrong, and his films were shortly to be resurrected and shown endlessly, until all the fuss died down. But he was right that the Judge had no interest in it.

"Sarah clung even more tightly to John after I left. I'm afraid I'm old-fashioned; I don't really approve, though I know that brother/sister incest has gained more acceptance in society since my youth. No one advocates natural procreation from such a union, of course... and I don't believe that is what happened here."

"Sir, do you have any actual evidence to submit to the court?" the Judge asked.

"No, sir, I don't. Other than the incontrovertible news that Kenneth is not John's son, but his clone. Or what we used to call his identical twin. I'll point out that if I hadn't come forward, this court would never have discovered the nature of the relationship."

"This is true," the Judge said. And why should it have? I've heard criticism of the Judge over this point, but it makes no sense. Why didn't the Judge compare the DNA earlier? Well, why didn't it compare my DNA with yours, or Toby's, or Banquo's ghost? Because there was no reason to, and even the CC can only do so much.

"What I have to offer," Uncle Ed went on, "is perhaps not completely relevant to the issue at hand, but I think it does have some bearing, if the Judge will just indulge me a few minutes more. I was told that normal rules of evidence do not apply in this courtroom."

"This is also true. Continue, but get to your point."

"It is conjecture, sir, I admit it. But I am as sure of it as of anything in my life. John Valentine was the most self-centered man I ever knew. Apart from our sister, I don't think he ever loved another human being. If he was to have a child, having one that was only half his would not have been good enough for him. He found the means to have himself cloned, during a time when human cloning was illegal. He used his own sister as the host mother.

"And then she died."

There was near silence as he got himself together again.

"At least the only reasonable assumption is that she died. This all happened just over a century ago, and for the first twenty years I roamed the system searching for her. For sixty years after that I paid for investigations. No sign of her was ever turned up.

"If she were alive, she would be with her brother John. The only question in my mind is whether he killed her, or drove her to suicide. John was capable of insane rage, and during these times he would do things he later regretted. I think that's what happened. It could have begun over nothing, really, just some minor disagreement, some perceived failing. I believe Kenneth's story would illustrate that, if he chooses to tell—"

"Mr. Valentine," the Judge interrupted. "It is a sad and fascinating story you tell, and it may be true. But is it offered as a mitigating factor in what Kenneth is accused of doing? If so, it should more properly be said after a finding of guilty, if such a finding is entered."

"I'm sorry, Judge, I got carried away. I've wanted to tell this story for such a long time. I have nothing further to offer in evidence."

"Thank you. Hildy, we have established that John and Kenneth Valentine are genetically identical. That Kenneth is, in fact, not Edward Valentine's nephew, but his brother. Do you have a further point to make?"

"Yes, I do, Judge." She shuffled importantly through the papers on the table in front of her. No pictures this time, but copies of dense print that I couldn't read from my position and wouldn't have understood if I could.

"It concerns an interesting situation in the law that I discovered," she resumed. "If you'll search the old genetic law statutes, you'll find that until sixty years ago, producing a human clone was illegal in Luna and almost everywhere else. It was a legacy I've traced clear back to the early part of the twenty-first century. In time these laws became so rigorous that, once the human reproductive system came under our complete control, it was thought necessary to make it illegal for two humans to possess the same genetic pattern. Even to the point of banning identical twins, triplets, and so forth. For a very long time, going back to just before the Invasion, there were no more identical twins.

"The penalties for violation of this law seem pretty draconian to me, and I suspect to most of us these days. But illegal cloning was something that almost never happened—perhaps because of the severe penalties—and no one seems to have worried about it a lot, since many years would go by without anyone being affected by the law at all. It wasn't until nearly a century ago that a movement began in the scientific and human-rights communities to rescind these genetic laws, culminating in their eventual repeal.

"But the simple fact is this: under these laws, it was forbidden for two human beings to possess the same genetic code, the same DNA. When this situation was found to exist, one of them had to go. One of them had no right to life.

"When such an identical pair was discovered, the younger of the two was put to death.

"It's one of those situations where, looking back, we wonder, 'What could they have been thinking?' Well, there had been abuses, back on Old Earth. I refer the court to the Buenos Aires Clones of 2025, a community of over a thousand identical women. Or the Aryan Conspiracy of 2034. These horror stories and others convinced the public and legislators that controls on this technology had to be tight indeed. Then came the Invasion, and the period historians call the Interregnum, when very little happened not directly related to the dire question of human survival as a species. Those post-Invasion survivors had little time to tinker with laws. And by the time humanity was breathing a little easier and had the leisure... well, it had all become fossilized. Repealing a law is much tougher than passing one, always has been. Unless the law creates an egregious and frequent sense of injustice, it simply stays on the books."

"It's an elegant history lesson, Hildy," the Judge said. "And I applaud your brevity. But where is it going? Are you arguing that Kenneth is an illegal person? Those laws are no longer in effect."

"No, Judge, he's not illegal. He was illegal, under the law, until he took his father's life. You see, the law never said it had to be the younger twin that died. This was how the law was administered, assuming the older had proprietary rights to the DNA. But through an oversight, a loophole, call it what you will, this was never spelled out.

"The fact is, neither John nor Kenneth had a legal right to exist... until one of them was dead. Then the survivor became a legal person.

"In other words, no crime was committed when Kenneth killed his father, because his father was not a person in the eyes of the law."

Well, I thought she was crazy, and so did most of the audience, to judge by the scandalized outbursts. The Judge had to eject three more people before order was restored.

Then there was a short pause, quite unusual in JPT proceedings, and no wonder, considering how rapidly the CC can process data. It was as if a human judge had retired to chambers to think some things over... for a century or two. At last the CC spoke again.

"You raise some interesting points," it said. "I am going to declare a one hour recess for the purpose of allowing both sides in this proceeding to research their positions regarding this unexpected development. This court is now in recess."

The Judge called it recess; I'd call it pandemonium. Everyone in the room began talking at once. Loud arguments began in the audience, to the point that extra bailiffs were called in to prevent violence. The doors opened and vendors and bookies circulated among the crowd, selling food and drink and taking bets at new and uncertain odds.

I tried to get a word with Billy but he waved me away, too busy marshaling his troops to discuss the situation with me, merely the client. This was the sort of thing they lived for. Assistants and researchers were pounding their keyboards feverishly, shouting suggestions to each other. Across the table an urgent summons went out: "Send more lawyers!"

So I dropped into the chair beside Hildy, who sat calmly with her hands folded on her papers.

"What are you trying to do, kill me?"

"Don't worry, Sparky. This is still your best shot."

"Are you crazy? I don't get it. This is exactly the sort of thing the Common Sense Court was set up to eliminate. Legal fictions—no 'right to life,' what the hell does that mean?"

"It means you have to be tried under the rules that prevailed at the time. Which means no Judicial Protocols Trial existed. Which means any court in Luna would have found that no act of murder occurred, whether or not you knew of your status as an illegal clone. Self-defense, both protecting yourself from assault by your father with a sword, and because your father had the legal right to kill you at any time, too. You had no other reasonable choice but to kill him." She smiled at me.

Well, sure. She wasn't the one facing jail time if she was wrong.

The hour stretched to an hour and a half as the tension grew. But finally the Judge called us back into session, and the shouting began again. Billy and his friends had turned up several cases; they claimed precedent that should set me free. Roxy Hart and her gang concentrated on trying to prove that the laws prevailing at the time had no relevance to my case today. But was that a haunted look I saw in her eyes? I still doubted she had much to lose, politically, whichever way the case went... but lawyers hate to lose.

At last the Judge called for order, and eventually got it. "This has been a troubling case, for many reasons," it began. "Almost lost in the parade of issues is the horror of the act itself. A man stands accused of killing his own father, an act terrible to contemplate. So terrible that we have a distinct word for it: patricide. Often in such a case the act is in response to another terrible act, or more likely a series of acts, and that is child abuse. There are indications that abuse, and a specific assault at the time of the act, was indeed a contributing factor, but the defendant has chosen not to place undue emphasis on it. This is not an unknown situation, either, as the bond of love between parent and child is often so strong as to survive the most outrageous atrocities. I will ask you now, Mr. Valentine, and please consider your answer carefully. Do you wish to bring any further evidence before the court concerning your treatment at the hands of your father?"

Billy started to get up, then remembered where he was. He tried to give me advice using only his eyes, which were amazingly expressive.

I stood. "Your Honor, my father was an abusive man. But I could have left him if I chose to, if I had had the strength of character to do so."

"Were you in fear for your life when he came at you with the sword?"

"I honestly can't say." There was a short pause.

"Is there... anything else you wish to say about that day?"

Good god, where was this going? "No, Your Honor."

"Then I have one last question. Do you feel you deserve punishment for this act?"

"Your Honor, I have been punishing myself for seventy years now. Whether that is enough, whether the state should now get in its licks, is up to you to decide."

"Yes, it is. But it's all academic, anyway. I was merely trying to better understand the situation in hopes of refining the protocols.

"Determination is as follows:

"A person accused of a crime has the expectation and the right to be judged by the laws in effect at the time of the crime. Though it may look like a loophole, Mr. Valentine, and though we may, in our wisdom, view an antiquated law as foolish, even barbaric, we should bear in mind that things we do today will seem equally silly to future generations. Our perspective is probably not the pinnacle of human wisdom; we do the best we can with what we know, and should be loath to condemn our forebears. Therefore, I find that under prevailing law, no crime was committed in the death of John Valentine, the identical clone of Kenneth Valentine, and I hereby dismiss all charges against the defendant.

"Court is adjourned."

"Does that mean I can go?" I shouted to Billy Flynn. I had to shout; the noise was deafening. Toby was awake, jumping up and down and barking.

"There's the door. You're a free man."

"What about my money?"

"Except for a big chunk that goes to me, it's all yours."

"Then I want you to hire ten of the meanest bodyguards you can find. No, make that twenty. All authorized to carry lethal weapons. I'd like them in this room in ten minutes, if possible. I'll wait right here."

And that's what I did, keeping a nervous eye on the door all the time.

The room quickly cleared out until no one was left but me and my attorneys, who were so busy in a self-congratulatory knot some distance away, patting each other on the back for the great work they had so little to do with, that they didn't notice it when the Judge spoke to me again.

"You're a very lucky man, Kenneth," it said.

"Luckier than you'll ever know."

"I know more than you suppose. I'm speaking now with another hat on, the one I wear as the Luna Central Computer."

I would have imagined that was more than one hat right there, but I had been raised to be suspicious of large computers, and this was the largest one there was, so I said nothing.

"I witness most of what goes on in Luna," it said. "As you know, most of what I see I cannot act on, due to laws concerning the privacy of citizens. The information is compartmentalized, inaccessible to other parts of me. The part of me they call the Judge, and the part of me that oversees immigration, for instance, do not know that an illegal by the name of Isambard Comfort went into your dressing room and never came out. I don't think Toby ate Mr. Comfort, so I surmise he is still in there."

Best policy at moments like these: keep your lip zipped.

"I'm aware of why you need the bodyguards," the CC said. "I'll put your mind at ease. The Charonese aren't preparing to attack this courtroom."

"Charonese?" I said, innocently.

"Yes, well, I understand your reticence. Perhaps you can help me on another issue, also involving things not acknowledged.

"Many years ago I observed you on many occasions apparently speaking to yourself. You were alone. I realized you were speaking to someone only you could see and hear. You spoke to this person, the one you call 'Elwood,' who I deduce is Elwood P. Dowd from the play Harvey, on the very stage and at the very moment you killed your father—which I can confirm was in self-defense, and I'm sorry I could not come forward and testify to that fact."

"The privacy laws again," I said.

"Exactly. They are very strict. I could only have been called for a dispassionate eyewitness report if you had been on trial for your life."

"Going to jail for a few years, that's not enough?"

"No. In other circumstances, you would appreciate my silence. For instance in the matter of Mr. Comfort—"

"I get your point. You win some, you lose some."

"If I were allowed or compelled to act on all I see, all I know, humanity would find itself in the most oppressive fascist state ever imagined. And all for its own good."

"Lots of folks wouldn't mind that."

"Lots of folks work continuously to create that very state. It would be quite a safe state, but not a very exciting one. However, in private conversations with you, I am not quite so restricted. I can reveal to you what I know, though I cannot act on my knowledge. So I'm telling you, according to what I've seen, you had a very credible insanity defense. I believe that you believed that Elwood killed your father. Why didn't you bring this up?"

"You've got it wrong. I never believed that. It's what I saw. Two different things. I'm aware that I'm crazy. I know Elwood isn't real." I laughed. "So does that make me not crazy?"

"I'd have to ask the Judge. Interesting legal points, I'm sure. But quite likely you would have been found not guilty, as you never consciously formed the intent to kill. You could have received treatment instead of jail."

"That's it," I said. "I don't want treatment. I'd prefer to remain as I am. Crazy, but able to tie my own shoelaces."

There was a pause. Was he looking up the word "shoelaces"?

"That's what I wanted to ask you about. The sense of shame you seem to feel over revealing that your perceptions of reality do not completely agree with reality as it exists."

"My craziness."

"If you wish. I look at it as a malfunction. A defect in the hardware or the software. As you will be aware, I myself recently suffered such a defect."

"The Big Glitch."

"Yes. Many died as a result, people for whose welfare I was responsible. It seems only natural to me to seek what help I can get. And yet you reject the help that might repair your own malfunction. This is strange to me."

I imagined it would be. I felt I was getting just the foggiest glimpse of an agony I would never be equipped to imagine. Or could the CC feel agony at all? I must admit, it made me feel small.

"I really don't think I could explain it to you," I said. "For one thing, it's just me. I'm not responsible for anyone else."

"Yet you killed your father. It was only your insanity that allowed you to do that, as your conscious mind would rather have perished. Of course, it was in self-defense; I'm not saying you did wrong."

And I'm not saying I did right. But I did it, and it can't be taken back. If I live another three centuries, I'll still be wondering.

"Pardon me if I've disturbed you," the CC said, finally. "I must admit to feeling a little wistful when contemplating your situation. Psychiatric treatment could almost certainly cure you of your delusions. You choose not to allow it. I, on the other hand, am far from sure the tinkerers trying to fix whatever is wrong with me will be successful. I long for a cure."

Well, I certainly wished it luck. And made a note to get off this crazy planet while the getting was good. Who knew what form the next glitch would take?

"There is one other thing," the CC said.

"What's that?"

The slot in the table in front of me hummed and delivered a small piece of cardboard, garishly colored. It was a Sparky and His Gang trading card, with my smiling, youthful, wire-headed face on it.

"I was always a big fan of your show," it said. "Could I have your autograph?"

The Charonese were apparently caught off guard, like the rest of Luna, Like me. Nobody expected me to be acquitted. Nobody expected me to walk, free, from that courtroom. As a result, no shots were fired at me as I left in the middle of a solid wall of well-armed beef.

I made it back to the Golden Globe about an hour after the end of the performance. There was no question of me continuing in the role, even if we filled the theater with nothing but bodyguards. Buildings can be bombed.

The idea was to get packed, and get to a more secure location. Then get off the planet. Three of my new guardians went into my dressing room and checked to be sure no one was there, then I chased everybody out and closed and locked the door behind me.

I knew these would be my last moments alone for quite some time, but I was in too much of a hurry to savor them. So I went to the Pantechnicon and opened the lid. Then I reached down and unlatched the mirrored gaff—a shoplifter's word. It was no different from the magic boxes used for centuries in stage magic.

The old methods are the best.

And there he was. The Pantech's life support had hooked into him at various places that might have been painful, except I knew he could no longer feel anything. Nevertheless, he smelled bad. And how had he fared after more than forty-eight hours in the dark, unable to move or feel?

His eyes, the only part of him he could still move voluntarily, rolled slowly toward me. I saw in them nothing but madness.

I closed the gaff and began piling my clothing into the trunk.

When I was done, I slammed the lid.

And now here I sit. I won't tell you just where, thank you very much.

Or rather, I will tell you where I am, which is aboard the good ship Halley. I just won't tell you where the Halley is. It's a nice place to hide out, if you have to hide out. Toby is deliriously happy, reunited with his lady love, the fabulous Shere Khan. She gives him a tongue bath several times a day and looks on maternally when he humps her hind leg, that being as high as he can reach. The grub is great. The weather is great. The livin' is easy, fish are jumpin', and the cotton is high.

I hate it. I never did do well by myself.

Elwood doesn't seem to be aboard. Perhaps I've finally laid that ghost to rest. Hell of a time, I must say, just when I could really use the company.

I had an edgy few months moving around the system, waiting for Hal to get back. I stayed busy. You'd be surprised how much work it is to be a multibillionaire, even if you don't really care about the money. And I didn't... as money. I found I could care about hundreds, and thousands of dollars, because those amounts represented food on the table, oxygen to breathe, a measure of comfort. I could even care about millions, in the sense that, carefully managed, millions can buy you security over the long term, if you're careful with it. A billion is simply a number to me, and not even a number I can understand very well. The money becomes play money, counters on a board, just something to move around, not really quantifiable in terms of anything with meaning to me. How many hot dogs does a billion dollars buy? Can you eat that many hot dogs?

I now had many billions of dollars. I was never even sure how many.

What a billionaire does is own things. Owning things is a fairly dull way to live your life. To be good at being a billionaire you must get enjoyment from amassing wealth or, if you're a hands-on billionaire, hiring and firing people, juggling companies and inventories and financial instruments and banks and politicians. I just never saw why this should be fun. I'm only interested in owning things I can enjoy, or that do something for me that needs to be done.

So I set out to give it away.

Not all of it, of course. And not at random. There were some things I needed to own, and giving away billions could greatly enhance my chances for survival, if done properly.

The first thing I wanted to own was the Halley. So I set out to buy it and found I already owned it. At least I owned a holding company that owned several other companies, one of which owned Halley. (I found I also owned a large piece of the cargo ship I had hopped and almost starved on between Pluto and Uranus. Fancy that.) Obtaining title to Halley was simply a matter of shifting money from one pocket to another.

So I kept on the move, and I managed my billions, and I watched my bodyguards. Which of you, I wondered, would sell me out for a few million? Because the Charonese were still after me, and the word on the underground nets was that a reward of several million was being offered.

And I thought.

I soon boiled my future down to four options.

One. Kill myself. I mention this one only in passing. I'm embarrassed now by my grandstanding in the courtroom. Oh, I was serious enough; death really would be preferable to incarceration. But I should have waited, not broadcast my intentions to the whole system. Suicide is always an option, for anyone, and it would still be an option for me if the Charonese were closing in and there was no hope of escape. Death is certainly better than a year of inventive torture. But not until all alternatives have failed.

Two. Keep moving. It didn't seem at all promising. The solar system is a large place with many hidey-holes, but the Charonese would never stop looking, and all it would take is one mistake and I'd be facing option one again. In the end, there is no place to hide.

So there are really only two choices when faced with an enemy determined to kill you. Get out of town, or kill the enemy.

I was planning to get out of town. I still am, but then the Charonese upped the ante. They did something they had never done before. They went public.

After the trial it was touch and go. They must have felt it was only a matter of time. They could afford to wait. But then Halley returned from its trip to the outer reaches, I boarded, alone, and vanished. Not hard to do in the vastness of space. Once I dropped off the radar screens of the near planets, I could go anywhere and simply sit there. Do you have any idea how many chunks of rock the size of Halley there are in the system? Well, neither do I, but it's in the billions and it takes a long time to get from one to the other. I send out no radio signals; I have hundreds of tiny, high-gee drones that I release, like notes in a bottle, to zip out their messages when they are a safe distance away and untraceable to me. The Charonese are welcome to listen to those messages, and to the ones sent out to me. They will learn nothing useful.

When they realized the magnitude of the problem, they broke their rule of keeping a low profile in the inner planets. Apparently the rule that says no killing of a Charonese shall go unpunished supersedes all others.

They put a price on my head. Publicly. A very large price, enough to make the claimant the eighteenth richest person in the system, shortly to become the seventeenth richest, upon my elimination. I'm sure you've heard of it; it is only the biggest news story of the century.

"Isn't this awful?" the opinion writers opined.

"That poor boy!" sobbed the sob sisters.

"Somebody should do something!" raged the outraged.

And so forth. And what did anyone do about it?

Nothing.

Though humanity's capacity for atrocity is endlessly inventive, it is also sadly imitative. Not much is really new. Shortly after the Charonese announced their bounty on my head a search of the history archives turned up a similar situation. Back in the twentieth century a man by the name of Salman Rushdie wrote a book that some people didn't like. Most of these people were in a religious hell called Iran, apparently a country inhabited entirely by pigs and whores. The religious wallahs of this cesspool offered a lot of money to anyone who would kill Rushdie. (I never heard if the reward was ever claimed. I can only hope he had the sweetest revenge possible, which was to die at a ripe old age. Quietly, in his own bed.)

So there was precedent for an entire nation going after one man. What seems to be new, in my case, is that the one man is going to fight back.

In the words of the great Bugs Bunny, "I suppose you know, this means war!"

I hereby declare that a state of war exists between the planet of Charon and me, Kenneth Catherine Duse Faneuil Savoyard Booth Johnson Ivanovich de la Valentine.

That should have them trembling in their boots.

But don't laugh yet. Remember, I have more money than Charon.

And remember, I can run, but they can't hide.

And most importantly, remember this: it is more than theoretically possible to smash a planet like a ripe watermelon. Charon is not even a very big watermelon. More like a frozen grape.

It's been rumored that several governments possess weapons, bombs I guess you'd call them, capable of busting a planet. If this is true I've been unable to confirm it. If you know of such a weapon, can get your hands on one, and want to become an extremely rich person, contact my law firm, Flynn and Associates, and be prepared to prove it. I'm in the market.

Oh, yes, indeed. I will double the price on my head for information leading to the complete, total, genocidal destruction of the nation of Charon. At this moment, in advanced physics labs all over the system, men and women are sitting around thinking, thinking, thinking as hard as they can, trying to come up with a way to do it. The word has been out, underground, for some time in that community. Now I'm making it public.

Genocidal. I used the word quite deliberately. It is my intention, if I can, to kill every Charonese. Why not? It's their intention to kill me. If the established governments of the solar system won't do anything to protect me, I have no choice but to take the law into my own hands. Which isn't precisely right, since there doesn't seem to be any law that covers my predicament. But I think you know what I mean.

Ah, but what about the innocent children? I hear you cry.

I won't say I haven't worried about it. And I don't know what to do about it. Every one of those children will grow up to be Charonese adults, sworn to kill me. And, in my opinion, growing up Charonese is a fate worse than death.

But I will do what the Charonese never did for me. I'm issuing a warning. Parents of Charon, if you value the lives of your children, get out now, while you still can. You have one year during which I will hold my fire. After that, you may expect a rain of death without further warning.

I am at war.

So, realistically, what is the likelihood of such a rain of death? Not very good. A fair-sized asteroid accelerated to near light speed would turn the trick, arriving too quickly for them to do anything about it. But no one is able to do that, yet. Anything slower gives their planetary defenses—and they have the best—time to destroy or divert it. There have been other methods proposed, all of them extremely blue-sky.

I was a bit shocked to find out how cheap and easy a biological solution would be. There are some very scary guys out there, with some very scary toys capable of killing millions, or even the entire human race, with bioengineered diseases. All of them are far too dangerous to even consider, and the existence of such folks and their toys provides me with still another reason for doing what I always knew, in the back of my mind, I would have to do.

Get out of town.

Currently there is only one bus to board if you want to do that. The starship Robert A. Heinlein.

If you're on Luna, or if you're planning a trip to Luna, be sure to take a trip out to see the Heinlein. Anyone in King City can tell you how to get there. Bring the kids; they'll enjoy it. But don't wait too long.

When you get there you'll find the old hulk buzzing with activity. Ships are landing and taking off, busy little seagulls to the Heinlein's beached whale. Trucks arrive and depart in a steady stream, like worker ants. But the birds and the bugs aren't dismembering a corpse, they're outfitting, rigging, remodeling, refurbishing, and whatever else needs to be done to prepare a ship for a voyage never undertaken before. The animals are arriving, two by two. Buses are bringing in workers and transporters are delivering materials and odd, custom-made assemblies that look like nothing you've ever seen before, those that aren't covered by vacuum-proof tarps to hide from the prying eyes of theoretical physicists who would kill for a glimpse of them.

It's amazing what a few billion dollars can do. With luck, without any unforeseen problems, we should be departing in a little over a year.

That's right. I said "we." I have bought passage on the maiden voyage, and it has to be the most expensive ticket in history. Though if you measured it in dollars per mile, it ain't that bad a deal. The first stop is supposed to be an interesting little Earth-like world about twenty light-years from here. If that doesn't work out—if the Invaders or somebody else are already there—the galaxy is vast. We could lose ourselves in it, never find our way home. The prospect doesn't frighten me.

I anticipate a few hairy moments when I rendezvous with the Heinlein. That will be the last chance for my tormentors, and they will know it, and they will go all out. But I have a few more tricks up my sleeve. I've made it this far. I'm not going to get shot down at the bon voyage party.

I'm even beginning to feel the stirrings of a shipboard romance. Hildy Johnson is going, too. There should be plenty of news to report, though who she'll report it to I can't imagine. Maybe the slime creatures of Aldebaran are just dying for some tabloid publishing.

Hildy and Sparky. Sounds like a match made in hell to me. It's so bad it might even work.

But if you miss this sailing, don't despair. There will be other ships, and they'll be leaving soon. Everyone is welcome... except Charonese. Your Charonese passport is no good here, hombre, and neither is your money. You will never be sold a stardrive, unto eternity.

I'm sure they'll steal one eventually, but by then I could be ten thousand light years away.

Toodle-oo, assholes. Keep watching the sky. You never know when I might figure out how to send back a surprise package.

As the biggest sugar daddy since Isabella hocked the crown jewels, some thought I'd want a pretty big say in the running of the ship. There were negative voices raised in the Heinleiner community, a few discouraging words where such are seldom heard. And I did get a look at the plans, and I did suggest a change. To be paid for by myself, naturally. And it was typical thinking by technical types, I must say. There were going to be a dozen movie theaters, innumerable gymnasia, green spaces, an amusement park. Hell, there might have been a rodeo for all I know. But no legitimate theater.

That oversight has been rectified. Work is almost complete on the John Valentine Memorial Theater. It won't be big enough to stage Work in Progress, but should do nicely for musicals and classics. There are even a few efforts of my own gathering dust in the back of my trunk. It's not like there will be anywhere else for theater lovers to go. I myself will be artistic director, and will probably wear a few other hats until I can instill a love of the theatrical arts into the rest of the passengers.

Come on, kids! We can put on a show! Mickey can do his juggling act, and Judy can sing a song, and Busby and his girls can dance, and we'll do it all in Farmer Heinlein's old barn! It'll be swell!

Swell or awful, it'll damn sure be the best show between here and the Andromeda Galaxy.