“Let’s get him to an ER,” said Nick, which I thought to his credit.
“No — no need, but thank you. I can give myself a shot.”
“Is that something you have with you?” asked the director.
“In the trailer. Really, Nickie — thank you but it’s not a problem.”
“Will it make you groggy?” wondered the solicitous actor-king. Politeness and hushed tones ruled, as if we had hastily gathered on a tarmac in the wake of a minor civic disaster.
“No! They’re vasoconstrictors. Let me go do my thing then we’ll finish the scene.”
I offered to walk him to the trailer but Nick held me back, sending the First in my place. The director desperately sought reassurance — as if I were the “brain man.” He asked if I thought Thad was going to be all right; I joked that we should arrange a consultation with X-Ray. Nick wasn’t amused. As I rushed to catch up, I heard one of the grips say, “Piece o’ fuckin work.” Another rejoined, “Guy’s nutsoid.”
When a very upset Clea arrived at the trailer, I told her that he gave himself an injection and we should probably let him sleep it off. Things were obviously running behind; the pressure to complete his scenes was only going to worsen.
“What exactly happened?” she said, softly stroking his forehead with the back of her hand. He snored like an elf who’d gorged in a mushroom patch.
“I don’t know. It’s like he heard something — something he thought the actor said.”
“Oh shit.”
“Part of the migraine thing?”
She shrugged her shoulders and I got the feeling Clea knew more than she let on. “He takes this other medicine,” she said. “Maybe he’s not taking his other medicine.”
They shot around him, so he’d have more time to recover. Thad refused any attempts by production to have him examined by a doctor. Clea and I were the only ones he allowed in his trailer. (I chose to stay away.) She gave out the occasional bulletins — he was resting, he was much better, he was going over his lines — that sort of thing. Meanwhile, Nick and his A.D. huddled over a folding board of colored strips, deciding which of Thad’s scenes might be shot after lunch. The actors were naturally concerned. They asked how he was and I did my best to downplay the trouble, becoming the de facto spokesman for that insidious nemesis, Migraine.
Thanks to the writers, the show went on. By now they’d contrived for the entire bridge to be jailed by Morloch — but that was only the half of it. The gravitational pull of the Great Dome had worked an outlandish effect upon our crew. Suddenly realizing he hadn’t yet had a single impulse to escape, the Demeter’s normally testosterone-charged captain came to the conclusion that he was losing his sap — and the will to command. Laughton complained of feeling “vulnerable,” holding our captors responsible for confounding new emotions that washed over him “as waves upon shifting sand.” His voice trembled, Hamlet-like and positively premenstrual; it was all he could do to keep from busting into tears.
The android was having problems himself. The unexpected incarceration (among other dilemmas) required urgent analysis yet Cabott had undergone a curious degradation of deductive powers. “In the past,” he said, clinging pitifully to the painted plastic bars of his cell, “I have enjoyed my solitary time by solving Holstrum’s Conundrum — visualizing the beauty of its axioms. Most peculiarly, I’ve been pondering the formula for days now, unable to make even the slightest headway… yet, somehow — the mere fact I am stymied seems to have caused me… irrepressible glee!” He shrieked and twittered like a hyped-up fembot.2 “A veil is lifting from my eyes,” said Cabott, seized by a mystical vision. “There’s so much in the universe to see—to touch, smell, hold, feel. When I think of all the time wasted on… mind games and logical one-upmanship — I want to live, not think. I hereby send Mr. Holstrum and his precious conundrum to hell!” He tossed back his head like an amateur-hour Nijinsky, throatily declaring. “Love is the glue of God, not logic, but love! Love! Love! Love!—”
I won’t bore you with further details. Suffice to say that my character, Commander Karp, disgusted and ashamed over past chauvinistic behavior, not only vowed celibacy but a lifelong penance wherein he promised to resign from his post on the Demeter in exchange for citizenship on a rough-hewn planet famously known for the asceticism of the religious order that had adopted its name. I turned to an adjacent cell in an attempt to engage Dr. Chaldorer; unfortunately, X-Ray was far too disturbed to take confession. Staring into space with dead, weepy eyes, he proclaimed he had never been a true healer — he was just a “mechanic” who knew “how to oil the parts” and nothing more. The diabolical Dome (and those devilish writers) had forced him to admit to something he’d never told a living souclass="underline" in his first year of practice, he lost a twenty-two-year-old woman on the table because of a dubious judgment call. “My arrogance killed that young girl — she had a husband and a little boy! How fitting: the Star Legion’s star butcher, finally behind bars where he belongs… where he should have been confined — long, long ago!” The oaths he uttered, which were more than Hippocratic, played havoc with his mascara.
I was glad the migraine, or whatever the hell it was, forced us to get those ludicrous set pieces out of the way. Thad and Clea’s scene was slated for late afternoon, a good thing because the medication had left him subdued; he turned in an adroitly skilled and elegiac performance, and Nick Sultan was a happy man. Directors can be nervous individuals; Nick must have spent the better part of lunch strategizing with his agent, various producers, and casting gals over worst-case scenarios. Of course, everyone knew the “situation” wasn’t Nick’s fault — but you know what they say about crimes being committed under one’s watch.
The thrones of king and queen were empty. Thad and Clea loitered in the palace hall, alone save for dog-headed sentinels in rigid attention. There came a moment of awkward intimacy when Trothex uncomfortably confessed that she and Morloch had been — were — a couple. As testimony to his skill as an actor, Thad’s very skin seemed to color with the crude complexities of what she had shared. Just then, Morloch (a double whom Thad would later replace, digitally) entered with wolfish royal retinue.
“It is done!” the stand-in exclaimed triumphantly, referring to whatever internecine machinations. “The people demand it!”
With the rotten taste of a romance betrayed still in his mouth, the ensign selflessly switched gears. “I insist you release the others — at once!”
“All issues will be settled in the Outback.”
“I do not understand….”
“Then I shall make it clear, brother dearest! We will fight with our hands3—in twenty-four of your precious Earth hours. Forewarned is forearmed!”
The stand-in for the demon prince froze as the camera pushed in on Mr. Rattweil. After what seemed an eternity, the director “cut”—evidently, Thad forgot his final line but Nick was thrilled nonetheless. They would do a pickup.
Camera reset.
The First ordered everyone to settle.
“And… action!”
Again, the lens pushed in on Thad as he peered off, his gaze lost in the tarry, starry depths of the Outback.