Lynd dutifully laughed, but Sorokin snarled: "Shut up!"
"Nobody shuts me up in my own studio!" retorted Knight.
"But you will ruin the indoctrination, you conceited fool!"
"Why you —"Knight's words became obscene. Both men glared and snarled at each other in stage-whispers.
"Hey, Ego, save it till later!" said Hahn. Lynd added his whispers to the effort to pacify Knight.
"Okay," muttered Knight. "But as soon as the series is over, this guy goes out of WCNQ on his can. He swindles us on that snake —"
"You think I work with you again?" hissed Sorokin. "Do I look crazy? Wait till my new drug is going and I will put all you bastards out of business."
"Huh? What drag?" said Knight.
"Somnone-beta. With that I indoctrinate, not the actors, but the customers. One of Hahn's tapes takes place of all the apparatus in this building."
"You mean," said Franklin Hahn, "you give the customer a shot, and run off a tape, and then at the time he's told to he goes into a trance and dreams the show?"
"Is right. No actors, no sets, no engineering, no nothing. Customer makes up his own story according to the directions on the tape. He can be participant or onlooker. The entertainment is much more vivid than anything you can get watching a stage or screen."
"You slimy snake —" began Knight.
"Snakes not slimy. And it will be only what you deserve, you paranoid megalomaniac!"
"Now who's shouting?" said Knight. "You shut up!"
Cassia MacDermott's recorder ran out of tape and stopped with a click. Remington Dallas' did likewise. Sorokin touched a finger to his lips and removed the earphones.
Cassia and Dallas — or Princess Lululu and Cornzan the Mighty, as they now believed themselves to be — rose and shambled out. The others followed.
Lululu went directly to the jungle set. Dallas threw himself down on a cot near the stage and closed his eyes. Near the stage stood two other actors in costume: Robert Gelbman as King Djurk in goatee and drooping Fu Manchu mustache, and William Harris as his henchman Bogar.
The stout Jaffe puffed up. He glanced at Sasha, shut his eyes, shuddered, and resolutely turned his back on the ophidian prodigy.
"Quiet, everybody," said Knight. "We're ready to roll. Take it away, Eisenhower."
Over the body of Sasha the floor men had placed an oversized stepladder, like a stile over a fence. Robert Gelbman (King Djurk) and William Harris (Bogar) climbed up one side of the ladder and down the other, so that they were inside the circle of Sasha's body.
Meanwhile another pair of floor men tied up Lululu with a rope, being careful neither to tie her too tightly nor to smudge her makeup. When they had finished, one of them snapped a springhook on the end of a rope to the heroine's harness. Two others, pulling on the free end of the hoisting rope (which went over a pulley in the cavernous overhead) hoisted Lululu into the air. Another guided her over Sasha's body. Gelbman and Harris caught her as she swung across, lowered her to the ground, and unsnapped the hoisting line, which was whisked away. "Roll it," said Eisenhower Lynd.
The cameras went into action as Djurk and Bogar carried the struggling princess up the steps of the temple. Although technical improvements had made television sequences shot from moumpictures fully as convincing as live television broadcasts, so that this method was now used for all fictional presentations, the limitations of the consiline treatment made it necessary to photograph such sequences in one continuous filming, as with live broadcasts, without the retakes of normal moumpic practice. If a scene were flubbed it could be remade, but that meant re-drugging and reindoctrinating the actors the next day.
Djurk and Bogar placed the volubly protesting Lululu in a sitting position in the entrance to the shrine.
"Ha ha!" laughed King Djurk. "Now you shall see whether your hero will come to rescue you — and what will happen to him if he does!" He blew on a small instrument that gave forth a wail.
"What are you doing, Father?" cried Lululu.
"That, my dear, is the mystic call used by the priests of Yak to summon Dingu, the spirit of the forest. Come, Bogar!"
Still laughing fiendishly, King Djurk swaggered down the temple steps. He and Bogar climbed back over the stepladder, which the floor men then removed from Sasha's body. The cameras had not photographed the stepladder, or Sasha either, because Sasha was not yet supposed to have come onstage. A couple of action-shots of Sasha creeping would be spliced in after Djurk's departure. Neither Gelbman nor Harris was under consiline, as the former had reacted badly to the drug and the latter's part was not important enough to justify the step.
Lululu uttered a piercing scream as (in theory) she perceived the snake slithering out of the jungle. Cornzan, aroused, rose from his cot, stretched his thews, and walked to the stage. Arriving within camera range, he recoiled at the sight of Lululu and Sasha. He began stalking forward, slinking from bush to bush, sometimes shading his eyes with his hand.
Cornzan attracted Lululu's attention by whistling and throwing pebbles. Lululu gave a pretty squeak and raised her bound hands.
Cornzan scouted around and found a convenient vine. With his dagger he cut the lower attachment of the vine, took a good grip on the dangling upper section, and swung himself across Sasha's barrel and up again in an arc to the foot of the steps of the shrine. Pausing only to belay the loose end of the vine, he bounded up the steps and clasped Lululu in his brawny arms.
Having cut her bonds, Cornzan made torrid love to her. When the dialogue became coherent again it ran:
Lululu: "But Cornzan, how did you find me?"
Cornzan: "Darling, such is my passion for you that instinct leads me to wherever you are." (Long kiss.) "Let me bear you off to be my mate in the clean free wilds."
Lululu: "But Father's spies and armies will follow us to the ends of Anthon!"
Cornzan: "Let the old guntor try! He shall learn what a chase a wilderness-bred barbarian can lead him!" (Cornzan jumped up and clapped a hand to the hilt of his sword.) "How now, you secret, black, and midnight hag! What is't you do?"
There was a general dropping of jaws among the spectators. Knight turned fiercely to Hahn and whispered: "Hey, that ain't in the script, is it?"
"Hell no!" said Hahn. "That's Shakespeare."
Knight made hair-tearing motions. "But what — why —"
Sorokin beckoned. When Knight and Hahn had followed him back from the stage far enough so that their voices would not affect the sound track, Sorokin said:
"I told you your talking would affect the indoctrination! It is that poem. I am not Shakespearean scholar, but was that interpolated line not from Macbeth?"
"Yeah," said Knight, peering back towards the stage. "Let's hope it's the only one. Remington seems to have gotten back in the groove. We can cut out that one fluff."
The three men trailed back towards the stage,-on which Cornzan was again explaining his plans between kisses to
Lululu, who did not seem to have noticed the unflattering description that he had just applied to her.
Cornzan: "If we can but win south through the jungle to the plains of Syrp, the Green Men will befriend us. I learned the arts of war among them in my youth. What man dare, I dare: approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, the arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger; take any shape but that, and my firm nerves shall never tremble: or be alive again, and dare me to the desert with thy sword; if trembling I inhabit then, protest me the baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow! Unreal mockery, hence!"
Lynd came back from the stage with dismay on his face. Sorokin said: "He is getting worse."