"Seven and a half," said Knight.
"Well, I hate snakes, and I think the less anaconda the better. Send a memo to my desk if you think it's that important, and I'll deal with Dr. Sorokin."
Jaffe walked elephantinely off. Franklin Hahn looked at his back with mixed feelings. Ben Jaffe was nice to everybody, but when it came to protecting anybody in the lower echelons from the tyranny of his turbulent subordinate he was always somewhere else.
Hence, under Mortimer Knight, the directors, assistant directors, actors, script writers, news editors, floor men, prop men, artists, and other employees writhed in well-paid slavery. The Moumpicture Division commanded almost as imposing a plant and numerous a personnel as had one of the motion-picture studios of Hollywood, back in the days when Hollywood made motion-pictures to be shown in theaters which people had to pay to enter.
Knight glanced at his wrist watch. "What's the matter with you people? Indoctrination's in three minutes, and you dawdle over your coffee. Come on!" He glared around and sighted Remington Dallas, who played Cornzan.
"Remington!" he screamed. "Indoctrination!"
Knight strode towards the exit, the others straggling after. Cassia said softly:.
"Frank, I don't see how you get away with being so fresh to Mr. Knight."
"Oh, Mort considers insolence a sign of genius, because that's how he is. The way to get along with him is to insult him before he does you."
In the dispensary, Franklin Hahn found that Eisenhower Lynd, the director of Cornzan the Mighty, had preceded them. The nurse handed Sorokin the yellow folders containing the health records of Cassia MacDermott and Remington Dallas. The great biochemist studied these, frowning through his glasses.
Lynd, a tall, big-nosed, sandy-haired yes-man, asked if the others had heard the new limerick about the bearded old barkeep named Tucker. Receiving a negative, he recited the verse. Everybody laughed except Sorokin, who solemnly took the squirt pistol from the nurse and said:
"Pull up your shorts, please."
Cassia and Dallas hiked up their shorts until each displayed the outer side of a thigh four inches below the hip joint. Sorokin checked the pistol to make sure that the capsule containing the charge of consiline was in place. Then he aimed at Remington Dallas' thigh and pulled the trigger. There was a sharp little sound. Dallas winced and rubbed a tiny red spot on his leg. The slug of liquid consiline had been squirted at high velocity through his skin and would take effect in due course. Sorokin reloaded the squirt pistol and repeated the process with Cassia MacDermott. He said:
"You have one hour to get dressed and made up. I shall see you back here then for indoctrination."
"Okay," said Remington Dallas. He and his leading lady went out, followed by the others.
Dallas was an ex-boxer with some experience as a Shakespearean bit-player: a hugely muscular young, man with a mild amiability that covered an almost complete lack of a mind of his own. The blankness of his docile personality made him an ideal subject for acting under consiline indoctrination. Having no individuality, he could be given hypnotic suggestions to play almost any kind of part and would do so with complete conviction, unmarred by personal idiosyncrasies.
Hahn followed Knight and Lynd through the long corridors of the main WCNQ building to the stages.
"Not too much noise, please," said Sorokin. "Sasha gets nervous. He is conditioned against eating people —"
"How'd you do that?" asked Hahn. "Feed him a few tough ones like the Ego here?"
"No; by electric shocks. But a snake has so little learning-capacity that you have very little leeway. A big shock or fright might cancel his training."
The cavernous north end of the building devoted eight stages to Cornzan. There was the patch of jungle to be used in today's sequence, a piece of desert, the main square of the city of Djelibin, and so on.
The party picked its way over cables and around cameras and lights to the jungle set. This, besides its synthetic rainforest flora, included the small ruined temple or shrine of the Elder God Yak, whence Cornzan was to rescue Lululu. Around the temple, nose almost touching tail, Sasha lay in a circle. Hahn's eye, sweeping along the huge scaly olive-gray barrel with big purplish-brown splotches, rested on the three small but significant bulges that told of the fate of the drugged sheep.
Sorokin stepped near to Sasha's five-foot head to peer at his pet. The snake lay still.
"You need not be afraid," said Sorokin. "Sasha is too big to be efficient. If he chases you, just run away. He can only move at a slow walk."
Back in the dispensary, Franklin Hahn smoked a cigarette as he waited. Eisenhower Lynd clamped a pair of earphones on his head and started the recorder. After listening for a few minutes he said:
"D'you tell 'em not to notice the cameras and crewmen?"
"Yep. Further along," replied Hahn. Indoctrinees had to be given, by suggestion, a selective blindness towards incongruous elements in the scene. Too much strain on the illusion under which they would act might send them into a psychotic collapse.
Knight stormed back into the dispensary, followed by Ilya Sorokin, Cassia MacDermott, and Remington Dallas. Cassia wore a kind of abbreviated Mardi-gras costume, glittering with spangles. Dallas was dressed in sandals and a super-fancy loin-cloth. A harness of straps supported a long heavy sword and a big dagger. Both actors wore the woozy, peering expressions that marked the first stage of the consiline trance.
Under Sorokin's instructions, the actors lay down on the couches. Eisenhower Lynd had run the spool of his record back to the beginning. Sorokin put earphones on the heads of his two subjects and started both recorders. The recorders made a faint, shrill cheeping sound because they were being run at quadruple speed.
The tapes told the actors that they were Cornzan and Lululu respectively and summed up the story to that point. The epic of Cornzan was laid on the imaginary planet Anthon, revolving around the sun at the same distance as the earth but on the opposite side.
Hahn's original name for the planet had been Antichthon, Greek for "counter-earth" and used in this sense in some fiction and scientific speculations. However, Knight had decided that three syllables were too many. "Antic" would not do; "Tichthon" sounded like a trade name for an alarm clock; so "Anthon" was chosen.
Cornzan was the son of an earthly scientist, John Carson, and his wife. Their spaceship had crashed on the first expedition to Anthon, killing everybody but the infant Cornzan, who spent his boyhood among the tree-men of Ea. Swinging from branch to branch with them had developed his colossal thews. Reaching invincible manhood, he became a mercenary soldier under the wicked King Djurk of Djelibin. He had, however, quarreled with King Djurk and fallen in love with Djurk's daughter Lululu.
After escapes and adventures with which the previous series of broadcasts had dealt, Cornzan was about to rescue Princess Lululu from the Temple of Yak, where the heartless Djurk had left her tied up in the hope that Cornzan, in trying to rescue her, would be killed by the giant snake.
Franklin Hahn lounged in his chair and stared at the recumbent Cassia, indulging in fantasies in which she was his mate and the couch was that in his own little apartment. Mortimer Knight leaned across in front of him to say to Eisenhower Lynd:
"Hey, I got a limerick that caps yours: