Bettide shrugged. “Have it your own way, Derek. As to your problem of sequential access, I believe we might have a possible solution.”
For once Derek had no comment. He edged forward in his seat.
“Your dilemma,” Bettide said, “is to choose the memory to be accessed through the drug. Other than volition—which seems to be locked in your case—the only other known way would be to use electronic probing. Unfortunately, that method is out.”
“Why?”
“Because the government is not in the business of pandering to destructive and expensive habits that don’t already have a criminal purveyor! We provide you Temporin to keep you out of the clutches of the Black Chemists and other underworld sources, and to see that you have every opportunity to freely choose a productive lifestyle again.”
“But if this electrical gizmo is the only way…”
“There might be another.” Bettide took off his glasses and wiped them. “It’s untried, and J certainly wouldn’t attempt it. But then, I would never have gotten myself in your fix in the first place. Once again I ask you to accept the coalition’s offer to send you to an ecology camp for a rest and work cure, instead.” Bettide made his entreaty as if he knew what the answer would be in advance.
Derek felt tense under his scalp. He shook his head vigorously, as if to drive out a threatening uncertainty. “No!… If you won’t help me, I’ll go to the Black Chemists,” he threatened. “I swear, I’ll—”
“Oh, stop.” Bettide sighed in tired surrender.
Derek’s headache vanished just as quickly. “Okay.” He brightened. “What do we do?”
“Well try you out on a potent new version of Temporin B the Black Chemists have just developed and we’ve managed to resynthesize. One hit drives the reliving process about five times longer on average, than the old drug, and at three times the subjective/objective rate.”
“But—but that won’t help me get back to where I want to go. It’ll only make the sequences go by faster!”
“True. However, some believe your strange type of locked, sequential recall will break down as more recent memories are accessed. You’ll have revisited your entire life, so to speak, and no long-term memory will have greater excitation potential than any other.”
“I’ll have free access again after that?”
“That’s my best guess, Derek.”
Derek chewed on one end of his moustache. “I’ll have to go through some pretty rotten times,” he muttered.
“Quickly, yes.” Bettide nodded.
“I don’t know.” Derek knitted his brow.
Bettide closed the file folder. “Well, our time is up. If you can’t decide now, we’ll just make an appointment for next week.”
Derek looked up quickly. “I’ll do it! Please. Can we start now?”
Bettide shrugged. He opened the cardboard box and put about a dozen small bottles into a paper bag.
“Sign here.” He indicated a release form.
Derek scribbled his signature and took the bottles. They clinked as he rose to go. “Thanks, Doc. I know you’re trying to help. Maybe if I can just get some peace for a while—get back to Sycamore Street for a rest—I’ll be able to think about things…”
Bettide nodded reservedly. But, as Derek opened the door to leave, the doctor said, “I saw Realm of Magic on the Late Show last week, Derek. I enjoyed it a great deal. You were very good in that film, even if you were better on the stage.”
Derek half turned, but couldn’t make himself meet the physician’s eyes. He nodded, clutching the bag, and left quickly without shutting the door behind him.
4
The amber-white fluid enticed, and he sought salvation in the past…
Enola Gay closed before summer. He hadn’t much liked the part, anyway. It made him nervous. Claude Eatherly, the protagonist, was a hard mind to get into.
No matter. When Peter Tiersjens hired a fresh-faced kid for the road show, that suited Derek fine. He was getting sick of Peter and his damned sanctimony anyway. At the last cast party the elderly director tried to give Derek some “fatherly advice.” Derek fumed in his cups.
“The Catskills? The fucking Catskills? Jesus, Peter! What kind of shit have you got for brains? What would I do in the friggin’ Catskills over the whole summer? I went there as a kid and all I can remember is being bored enough to kill myself, while my mother and father listened to accordion music and the sound of their arteries hardening!”
Derek tossed back the last of his drink. He took a cube from the ice chest on his dressing table and dropped it into the glass. His hands shook a little as he poured two jiggers of gin after it, spilling some onto the marble tabletop.
The sounds of the cast party could be heard through a crack in the door. Old Peter Tiersjens sat back in a folding chair, his feet propped up on a box of costumes. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Derek, I am thinking of you. What will you do now that the show has closed? Do you have any other offers? Do you have savings?”
Derek shrugged. “My agent says he’s looking over the off-season possibilities. But most of them are out in the sticks, so maybe I’ll just stay in the city this summer. Who knows? I may get a call from the Coast for another movie.” Derek sipped at his drink. Already the evening was shimmering in a fine inebriated gloss—like gauze over a camera lens. He would be grateful for the fog later, when he went out to select a bed partner from the groupies. The Vaseline vagueness would make the stalest teeny-bopper shine like Fay Wray. It was easy to forget Melissa when he was loaded.
“Derek…” There was a long pause as Tiersjens grew uncharacteristically reticent. Derek experienced the strangest sense of déjà vu, almost as if he knew the director’s very words before they were spoken.
“Derek, there will be no offers from Hollywood. Your name is mud out there, has been, ever since you walked out on Tunnel in the Sky. Who would hire you after that? To be honest, Derek, your taking the Catskills job wouldn’t be a great favor to me. It’s my way of trying, one last time, to help you.”
Derek sneered. “Like you helped me by hiring that snot-nosed Todd Chestner to play Eatherly on the road? Dumping me in the process?”
“Don’t blame that on Todd. The kid idolizes you, Derek. I did it for the good of the show. Todd’s been covering for you half of the time anyway. Anyone but me would have replaced you three months ago.”
“But Derek, I am willing to give it one more go, for old times’ sake. Take the Catskills job, and get off this cycle of self-destruction while there’s still a chance!”
For a moment, Derek found himself captured by the man’s intensity. Peter Tiersjens could take a platoon of blase actors and light the fire of Melpomene inside them with a few words. “Derek,” he urged. “You used to say there was nothing more contemptible than the artist who lost himself on the Edge. Now you are sacrificing everything on the altar of Bacchus. ’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the god!”
In the half-drunken fog, Derek’s belligerent side won a brief, but bitter, struggle.
“ ‘Cry, Troyans, Cry!’ ” He mocked the older man, quoting from the same play. “Cassandra, you can go to hell.” He stood up and walked unsteadily to the door. On the way he kicked Peter’s chair. His fists clenched in pleasure at the resultant shout and crash, and he left without looking back.
Later he had the satisfaction of punching Todd Chestner in his fatuous, earnest young face. It would take makeup an extra half hour to get the twerp ready, during the first week of the road show. That was some satisfaction, at least.