“You’re walking out then?”
“Aye. That I am. I’ve destroyed too many father images.”
“Jon...”
“Honey, you’ve got the nicest legs at Bradley and Brooks. You’re a pretty enough creature, and sometimes I love you to pieces. But I turned to writing after I got rid of Ulcer Number One, and I don’t want to start on Number Two — not while I’m only twenty-nine. So off I am to Captain Jet, where the legs and faces may not be as pretty, but where I won’t have to worry about the number of doom rays I use, or the Oedipus complexes of my lizard-like Venusians.”
“What about the current sequence?” Cynthia asked.
“I’ll stick it through. I’m going down to the studio now in fact. Jonny on the spot, they call me. Always willing to help.”
Cynthia Finch did not look happy when I left her, but I did not much give a damn about her state of mind. When someone tried to take an acknowledged hack show and shove it up into the Studio One bracket, it was time for me to fold my tent. And my typewriter. I started down the large, open-door-flanked corridor of Bradley and Brooks, the advertising outfit that was handling Rocketeers and a half-dozen other radio and TV shows for International Foods.
I passed 32b unconsciously, and I whirled abruptly when the voice hissed, “Hey, you!”
Andrea Mann stood in the open doorway to 32b, leaning against the doorjamb like the stereotyped picture of a Panamanian beauty. She narrowed her eyes in exaggeration and said, “Want a date, mister?”
“What’ll it cost?” I asked, smiling at her playacting.
“The best in New York,” she said, and she wiggled her hips a little. Andrea was a small blonde who proved the adage about good things coming in small packages. “Won’t cost you much more than a dinner and movie.”
“That’s too expensive. See you, Andy.”
“Hey, rat,” she said, dropping the loose girl pose. “Weren’t you even going to stop and say hello?”
“Hello,” I said.
Andy came out of the doorway, and grabbed my arm, yanking me back into her office. “It’s a good thing I love you,” she said.
“It’s a good thing somebody loves me,” I told her.
“Trouble with the Lord High Executioner?” She moved her head towards Cynthia’s office down the hallway.
“No more trouble,” I answered. “Finished, done, over with. I am now, as they say in Variety, at liberty.”
“You quit!” Andy burst.
“I did.”
“You didn’t!”
“But I did, I did.”
“But why,” she said, distressed. “Jon, you didn’t really.”
“Father images running rampant,” I said cryptically. “I really did tender my resignation, Andy doll, and how about that dinner and movie this evening?”
“Can you afford it?” she asked, smiling.
“I’ll hock my typewriter.”
“I was kidding about...”
“Yes or no? I’m due at the studio.”
“Yes. But you said you’d quit?”
“Eight o’clock okay? I did quit. I’m tying up the loose ends.”
“Eight is fine.”
I left her smiling in the doorway to 32b, and when I reached the lobby of the swank Madison Avenue building, I located a phone booth and called Tom Goldin, my agent. When I’d passed his battery of secretaries and assistants, I said, “Hello, Tom. Good news.”
“Yeah?” Tom said drily. “Did Cynthia Finch drop dead?”
“Better. I dropped her dead.”
“What?”
“I quit the show, Tom.”
“You crazy son,” Tom said. “Why’d you do that?”
“Food poisoning.”
“What? How’s that again?”
“Relax, Tom. I’ve got friends at Captain Jet. I’m going over to the studio now, but after rehearsal I’ll drop in to see Binx.”
“Binx is just as crazy as Cynthia,” Tom said drily. “Besides, his legs ain’t as pretty.”
“His money is just as pretty,” I said.
“What’s money?” Tom asked. “Can you buy happiness with money?”
“No. But can you buy money with happiness?”
“Ha-ha,” Tom said. “Very funny.”
“You’ll get the ten percent, so stop kicking. What’s new on the novel?”
“Did somebody write a novel?” Tom asked.
“No takers yet?”
“No, not yet. I’m having lunch with a guy at Simon and Schuster tomorrow. Maybe I can fool him into taking it.”
“That’s why I love you, Tom. Your coat is so warm.”
“I love you too,” he said. “You shouldn’t have quit Cynthia.”
“ ’Bye-’bye, Thomas.”
“Hey, just a...”
I hung up, grinning, and then walked out of the building to hail a cab. The studio was in the loft of what used to be a factory. The station had done wonders with the loft, and if you didn’t have to climb up through two deserted stories, you’d never suspect you were in an abandoned factory.
I walked up the clattering iron steps, and then into the studio, waving at Artie Schaefer in the control booth, and then stepping onto the floor. I took a seat up front, and watched the cameramen dolly in for a closeup of Marauder. Dave Halliday, the show’s director, held a mike in one hamlike fist, and he brought the mike closer to his face now.
“That you, Jon?” he asked.
“That’s me,” I shouted.
“Want to come up here a minute? We’re having a little trouble.”
2.
I left my brief case on the seat of my chair, and walked past the cameras and onto the brilliantly lit portion of the studio. The set designers had really gone all out with the Martian landscape. They had a bunch of weird looking plants, and a couple of tons of interplanetary sand strewn all over the stage. In the distance, painted against a very realistic-looking sky, was Earth and its satellite, the Moon.
Marauder, an actor who normally used the name Fred Folsom, stood by with a godawful-looking contraption strapped onto his head. He also had what appeared to be fifty pound oxygen cylinders strapped to his back. I looked through the contraption at his face, and Fred Folsom seemed positively miserable.
Dave took my hand, shook it briefly, almost crushing my knuckles, and then said, “You’re late.”
“I had a session with Cynthia,” I said.
“Oh?” Dave was a heavy man with a round, cherubic face, and a lot of beer fat around his middle. He raised shaggy brown eyebrows now, and a devilish smile marred the cherub’s look. “Make out?” he asked.
“Do rabbits make out?” I kidded.
Dave shrugged massive shoulders, and the inflated tire around his middle nudged up toward his chest. “Well, we got troubles,” he said. “Is Cynthia coming down?”
“She didn’t say.”
“So tell me,” Dave said, “how we supposed to hear anyone through these goddamn helmets?”
“What goddamn helmets?”
Fred Folsom said something behind the contraption on his head, but all I heard was a sullen mumble.
“I didn’t write any helmets,” I said.
“I know,” Dave answered, shrugging again. “Cynthia says there’s no oxygen on Mars, though.”
“Did Cynthia also tell you about the gravity on Mars?”
“Gravity?” Dave Halliday looked puzzled.
“Oh, what the hell! Throw the helmets away. Forget the oxygen.”
“Cynthia says no.”
“Then give your boys face masks. They’ll just cover the noses, and you’ll be able to hear something other than Martian rumblings.”
“You hear that, Stu?” Dave called.
Stu Shaughnessy, the show’s prop man, looked up from a pad and nodded. Stu was a thin-faced man with. serious brown eyes behind black-rimmed bop classes. He attacked his job as prop man with the same intensity a physicist gave the atomic bomb, and he exhibited the same pride in the completed product.