“Perry Tetic—‘Pa’ to us juveniles. He’s the debaser you just mentioned.” Whitey was obviously making it up as he went along. “The commercializer. He’s very good at putting the most abstract ideas into words even the average dunce can understand.”
“Oh, really.” Stroganoff shook Dar’s hand with guarded interest. “Let’s hope we have time for a chat, Perry. I’m kind of interested in that kind of thing, myself.”
“Let’s make time.” Dar was sure of being able to hold up his end of that conversation; anyone who’d been through Cholly’s curriculum could. At least Whitey had given him a role he knew something about—and, looking back on it, he realized Whitey’d done the same for each of the others, too.
“… a little behind the state of the art,” he realized Lona was saying. “Could I have a look at your editing facilities?”
“Of course, of course! Tour of the whole place, in fact. Sound Stage Number Ten’s the first stop—I just ducked out of there, and I’ve got to quack back to make sure everything’s running smoothly. Come on, this way!”
He set off, Whitey beside him; the rest followed in their wake. They turned into a corridor that opened off the lounge, Whitey and Stroganoff talking double-speed.
“So you put together your own production unit, eh, Tod? Glad to see you were listening when I kept saying you ought to package up a tank-play—but I didn’t expect you to raft your own team!”
“Only way I’ll touch it, Dave.” Whitey shook his head, jaw set. “With me in control over the whole thing. You may notice we’re lacking a producer, though.”
“Yeah, I did kind of notice that.” Stroganoff grinned like a shark. “Is that an offer, Tod?”
“What do you want—thumbscrews?”
“Always the consummate diplomat. You know I can’t resist a chance on something this good—but you need backing, too. You can’t be crazy enough to try to finance something like this on your own.”
“Well, I don’t exactly have a reputation for thrift.” Whitey grinned. “But I’m not that far gone.”
“No thrift, my Aunt Asteroid,” Lona muttered. “He’s got enough in the Bank of Terra to buy a small planet—developed!”
It was a good chance to get close to her Dar sidled up and whispered, “They’re buddies. How come Stroganoff keeps calling him ‘Tod’?”
“ ‘Cause he doesn’t know about ‘Whitey,’ ” Lona muttered back. “Nobody does, outside the taverns.”
Well. That also explained the security problem that had been giving Dar heartburn. He’d thought Whitey was bringing sure disaster down on them by using his real name—but anyone on Falstaff who’d told Canis Destinus that Whitey the Wino was helping Dar Mandra wouldn’t have known him as Tod Tambourin. So his best alias was his real name.
“Right in here.” Stroganoff hauled open a door that looked like a huge airlock hatch. “Stage Ten.” As Sam filed past him, he added, “ ‘Fraid I didn’t catch your name, citizen.”
“She’s Ori Snipe,” Whitey called back over his shoulder, and Sam forced a quick smile and handshake as she left Stroganoff in her wake.
They walked into chaos. Dar’s first whirling impression was of a thousand people frantically everywhere, doing purposeless things and shouting at each other in an arcane jargon. But after a few minutes, he began to be able to make sense out of it. There weren’t really a thousand people—more like three dozen. And they weren’t really moving very quickly—it was just that there were so many of them moving in so many different directions that it seemed frantic. He locked his gaze onto one woman and watched her for a while. She was riding around on a lift, a slender telescoping column on top of a three-wheeled dolly, adjusting the lights that hung far above him. Her movements were methodical, almost plodding—nothing chaotic about them at all. He dropped his gaze to watch another person, then another.
“It may look confusing,” Stroganoff said beside him, “but everyone knows what he or she has to do, and does it.”
Dar glanced up at him, saw a frown. “Something wrong?”
Stroganoff shook his head. “No, it’s all going smoothly. A little ahead of schedule, in fact.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“Oh, nothing, really.” Stroganoff forced a smile. “It’s just that sometimes the phoniness of it gets to me.”
Dar frowned. “But you’re making stories, here—and stories have to be made-up; they can’t be real.”
“Oh yes, they can.” Stroganoff pursed his lips. “There’re a lot of really great stories in the history books.”
The statement had a ring of familiarity to Dar; suddenly, he could almost believe he was back in Cholly’s Tavern. He cleared his throat to get rid of a sudden tightness. “That almost sounds like education.”
“Sh!” Stroganoff hissed, finger to his lips. He glanced around furtively, then breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank heaven! No one heard you!”
“Why?” Dar stared. “What’s wrong with education?”
“Be quiet, can’t you?” Stroganoff glanced around again. “Don’t you dare say that word in here!”
“Why? What’s the matter with ed … uh … hum … you know!”
“What’s the matter with it is that it pulls low ratings,” Stroganoff explained in a lowered voice. “That kind of program never attracts more than a handful of viewers.”
“Yeah, but that’s a handful of all the people in Terran space! A handful out of a trillion-and-a-half!”
“So that ‘handful’ is a billion or so people; yes, I know.” Stroganoff nodded. “But that never sinks in, to the people who run this company. All they know is that they can get a higher price for a more popular show.”
“So.” Dar frowned. “You don’t dare put in anything ed … uh … at all deep, or they’ll cancel the script.”
Stroganoff nodded. “That’s the basic idea, yah.”
“And you don’t like it that way?”
Stroganoff hesitated; then he shook his head.
“So you don’t like your job?”
“Oh, I like it well enough.” Stroganoff looked around him. “There is still a fragrance left, out of the old glamor I thought was here when I was a kid. And it is exciting, putting together a story, even if it’s purely trivial dross. It’s just that … well, sometimes it gets to me.”
“But why?”
“Because I wanted to educate.” Stroganoff turned back to Dar with a gentle, weary smile. “Not just a few interested students in a classroom—but the whole, huge mass of the audience, the billions of people who aren’t interested, who don’t want to learn all those ‘irrelevant facts’ about Socrates and Descartes, and Simon de Montfort and the Magna Carta.”
“I kinda thought knowing about the Magna Carta was necessary for all the citizens in a democracy,” Dar said uneasily. “At least, if that democracy is going to survive …”
“If,” Stroganoff said, with a sour smile. “Look around you.”
Dar swallowed. “I think you’ve got a point.”
“Oh, I know I do.” Stroganoff looked up at the lights on their grid of pipes, gazing at them but not seeing them. “And I knew 3DT was the perfect thing to teach with—give the people lectures, but make them so visually interesting that they’d watch it in spite of themselves. Don’t just tell them about Waterloo—show it to them, the actual place, the way it is today, and the way it was then. Then show them the battle, reenact it, cut to an overhead shot so they can see how Wellington and Napoleon were moving their troops …” He trailed off, a faraway look in his eyes.