“I’ve been monitoring your concerns from my quarters, Lieutenant Commander,” said the droid. “Status report.”
“It seems almost… sentient,” said Shazuki, eyes glued to the screen.
“I can hear… words. Almost like great populated cities—”
The captain and ship’s doctor whooshed in. The ingot was discussed. Everyone was pissed at the idea of anything fucking up our long-planned R&R on the pleasure colony Darius 9. In an unmotivated segue, the captain wondered out loud where the hell the new ensign was; the doc said Rattweil had motion sickness. I made a crack about how Legion recruiters were scraping the bottom of the barrel and the captain told me to stow it. Someone else made a disparaging jibe and the captain said, “I will not tolerate gossip or the species-ism it dresses up in. Ensign Rattweil is a Vorbalid — one of the very few, I may add, to have migrated outside that closed, repressive system. I’ll remind you such a journey is punishable by death, and not for the faint of heart. He will be afforded the respect presumed—demanded—by each and every member of the starship crew. Understood?”
Our penitent eyes were still cast downward as Thad whooshed in, cued by a second A.D.
The captain looked him over. “Feeling better, Mister?”
Thad stood in comically rigid attention. “Yes sir!”
“I hope you found our infirmary… adequate.” The captain’s mood turned lighthearted, suddenly curious about the curious new man.
“Dr. Chaldorer gave me something for my nerves.”
“A motion sickness suppository coupled with a jigger of old malt whiskey did the trick,” said X-Ray.
“I think,” said Thad, “the culprit may well have been the commissary bouillabaisse.”
“We have the finest chef in all the Legion,” the captain remonstrated. “The bouillabaisse is native to his undersea world and considered an exquisite delicacy.”
“The Vorbalidian stomach,” Thad said dryly, “is bicameral.” The crew suppressed a collective titter. “I was merely faulting my own physiolo—”
Suddenly, a jolt.3 Alarms blared as we braced ourselves against the curvaceous sides of the bridge. Lights flickered, and things went generally bat shit. The starscreen that hung above grew blank then staticky. We lurched to our posts as the ship stabilized.
“Lieutenant Commander!” shouted the captain. “What’s going on?”
“The energy ingot, sir! It’s — pulling us in!”
“Commander!” barked the captain, jarring me from an erotic reverie that had ranged, in milliseconds, from my darling Miriam to a newbie at AA to the young Judi Dench, whom I’d just seen in a seventies film on TNN. “Engage! Warp five!”
“Captain,” I shouted. “The instruments are frozen!”
“Then unfreeze them. Do it, Commander!”
“Aye, sir!—”
“Red alert! Engine room, damage report!”
“Still checking, Captain!” said the script supervisor, tucked behind a camera. (Her voice would eventually be looped.)
“Warp plasma inducers?”
“Intact. We have full power, but we’re ‘locked in.’ I’ve never seen a tractor beam of this magnitude, sir—”
“Bypass?”
“There’s no way,” said Cabott. “If we continue the attempt to free ourselves, we risk implosion.”
The captain leaned into the subwoofer-thingie to bark the patented bridge-to-engine-room “Realign the power grid!” (always a crowd-pleaser) before asking Cabott how much time we had. The android nanocalculated point-two-seven hours, at the outset.
“Will,” said Laughton, with (patentedly) urgent, almost seductive intimacy — it was the writers’ idea that whenever the shit hit the fan, crew members were to be addressed by first names—“Get us out of here.”
I tried the instruments again but they wouldn’t budge. I shouted that we were being sucked into a vortex (at that moment, hating myself as both actor and man). The captain puzzled over what—who—was pulling us — while Thad stepped forward to stare gravely at the starscreen.
“I believe,” he said, “we are being appropriated by the Vorbalidian System.”
“Appropriated? What’s the meaning of it, Ensign?”
“It’s obvious they feel that a hostile incursion on their sacred Dome is imminent.”
“But, that’s… madness!” the captain opined, a bit over the top. It was one of those days where it seemed like he was doing an impression of himself.
“If I am to read the situation correctly,” said Thad, “their behavior can have only one meaning.” The bridge grew quiet as the camera dollied in on the rubbery, fetal face of the tyro ensign, his sweaty gaze pitched upward toward blue screen. A slow-zoom intercut would later reveal the lame-ass ingot in all its hoary, kandy-kolored tangerine-flaked digital glory. “It is a declaration of war.”
Before cutting, the director bade us stare a few extra beats in varying degrees of freaked-outedness at the screen, which in postproduction would project the twisted, Alfred E. Newmanesque visage of the badasssssssss Prince Morloch, his psychotic smile glaring down at us from the garish, faux-marbleized sanctuary of the Vorbalidian Dome.
1 You may be legion.
2 The door was actually pulled open on ropes by hidden grips, with the whoosh added in post. Everything you always wanted to know about space opera but were afraid to ask.
3 Again, for the cognoscente: whenever the Demeter came under assault, an A.D. would instruct the actors to “shake”—but only the cameras moved. Also, I implore the readers to forgive excerpted “Prodigal” dialogue, for it is not my own.
~ ~ ~
THAT DAY, MIRIAM FLEW IN.
Ostensibly, she was here on business — to see Thad do his bit on the Starwatch set. Naturally, my secret hope was that she’d arranged her visit for the sole purpose of our getting, ahem, reacquainted. With a jealous twinge, I wondered if she’d been on any dates herself and if I’d popped into her head as she had into mine. The agent was ensconced a few floors below her client, who’d sensibly downgraded (with Miriam’s prodding) from the penthouse to an Art Deco apartment replete with piano, sixties-style kitchen, and long stone terrace. The girlie part of me thought it would have been fun if she’d rebooked our first-fling digs; maybe she wasn’t the nostalgic type. Still, there was a brave new boudoir to explore and I looked forward to beginning the courtship afresh.
The four of us planned a late supper. Mr. Michelet wrapped at 3:00 P.M. (the sudden onset of a headache being coincidental to his early release) and went back to the Chateau to lie down. Clea and I finished “chores” a few hours later. We drove to my gym on Sepulveda. I liked spending an hour on the treadmill, watching the latest dumb and dumber CNN horrors while Clea went through her paces in a cardio class of bitch-slapping, Showgirls-style aerobics. By the time we shook, showered, and protein-shaked, it was nearly eight.