This was not, in point of fact, the Titanic, as I had told Roy, but her sister ship, the Britannic. A third ship, Olympic, completed the trio, faithful external copies of the White Star Line behemoths of the early twentieth century. It was a very Plutonian thing, to name a cruise fleet after such an ill-omened trio. Everybody knows what happened on that Night to Remember back in 1912; it's passed into the language as a synonym for catastrophe, and hubris. Titanic proved all too sinkable. Less familiar is the sad story of Britannic, converted to a hospital ship during a war and sunk by a mine. Would you believe there was actually a woman, Violet Jessop, who had the bad luck to be aboard both ships when they went down? And the incredible good luck to survive both disasters. It was in the tour brochure.
I'm as superstitious as any actor—a notoriously twitchy lot. I didn't know what to make of it. I know my father would never have set foot aboard either vessel. He made many an astrologer rich during his lifetime. He believed in hexes, hoodoos, and bad karma of any description. My own life seems more like Violet's: depressingly regular disasters followed by perilous escapes that made Pauline of the silent melodramas seem tame.
Two flights of spiral stairs took me a bit closer to the engines, which I had expected to throb but instead made a deep humming sound. Pluto White Star's devotion to authenticity didn't extend to coal-fired steam engines. I gathered the vessel was propelled by some infernal nuclear contrivance, probably generating a pure sleet of insalubrious particles to careen through my unprotected body every instant I spent in my dressing room. However, I try not to think about things I can't see, and the dressing room did have a star on the door.
I kicked it open and edged in sideways because of the sousaphone still slung over my shoulder. The big silver horn had to be the most awkward single object ever invented by man, and for a week now I'd been stuck with it between shows. The property manager said there simply wasn't space in the narrow flies of the shipboard theater for all the gear needed for our two shows, so would I just be a dear and pitch in...? I'd foolishly agreed, not yet knowing there is absolutely no good place to store a sousaphone.
I nudged the door shut with my knee, and put my lips experimentally to the mouthpiece, puckered my lips, and blew. All I got was the same merry flatulence I'd produced on my first attempt. It had been days before a guy from the ship's band had played a tune for me on it... and I'd been amazed to discover it was supposed to sound like that. Now I shrugged it off my shoulders and attacked the screws that held the monstrous bell onto the loops of silver tubing, wondering once again where they had found such a ridiculous item. The flea market of Hell, no doubt. It was supposed to nest inside a case that might have held two moose heads side by side, but there I had put my foot down. It actually took up less of my limited space if I hung the bell on a clothes hook above the door, then put the rest on the bed. When it came time to sleep, the instrument was propped against the door, where it made a nice informal burglar alarm. You never know, with all the crooks around these days.
In addition to the bunk there was a makeup table with lighted mirror and a chair mounted on casters. And there you have the catalog of my furniture. In the wall opposite the table were two doors, one leading to a coffin-sized head, the sort where you stood on the toilet to take a shower, and the other to a locker where I stored my costumes between shows. The architect hadn't planned on the occupant bringing something the size of the Pantechnicon with him. I had to roll it in front of the head to get in the closet, and vice versa. Three people in this cabin was a considerable crowd. Add a fourth and you had the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera.
I was glad to have it. The chorus bunked together in a room not much larger than this. If they all inhaled at once the door burst from its hinges.
I pulled the chair around and opened a desk shelf on the side of the Pan-tech. Speaking a pass phrase—which I don't think I'll mention here, thank you very much—caused a small drawer to spring open. I took out the thin stack of large bills inside the drawer and thumbed through them. Sadly, they had once more refused to mate and multiply. I took a dinner menu and an eyebrow pencil and a well-thumbed booklet of interplanetary rates and schedules, shoved my straw boater back on my head, and once more tried to make my bankroll add up to a trip to Luna before October. Improvise! I told myself. Rhapsodize! Steerage is fine, no problem, but the ships had to be reasonably fast.
It just didn't compute. I had enough for passage, but not in any reasonable time. Or, I could get as far as the Jupiter trailing Trojans by early May, only to arrive dead broke.
I took the little netsuke frog from the drawer and set it beside the stack of money. I sighed. It just didn't make sense to keep the thing. Not that selling it would get me to Luna in time, but it would provide me with some walking around money when I reached the Trojans. Perhaps something would turn up there. I really had no choice. Time was the operative factor.
There was a knock on the door, and I hastily stowed my valuables back into their hiding place and sealed it up. I put on my dressing gown and opened the door to find a man standing there, looking up at me with a faint smile.
"Mr. Valentine?"
"Yes?"
"You wouldn't happen to be Sparky Valentine, the guy I used to watch on Sparky and His Friends?"
"Careful," I said. "You're dating yourself."
"You are? Really?"
"Guilty."
"I knew it, I just knew it," he said, his grin growing wider. "I told my wife, 'That's just got to be Sparky Valentine,' I said, but she didn't believe me. Isn't she going to be surprised? She said everybody knew you died years ago."
"Those rumors were greatly exaggerated."
"That's what I told her. But no, she insisted you'd been murdered in some back alley in Luna forty, fifty years ago." His smile faded a little. "To tell you the truth, I'd heard that story, too."
"I'm not surprised. I've heard it as well. Once these stories get going they turn into urban legends. Who knows how they start." Well, this one started because I got it going myself, having a great need at the time to avoid a certain party who just wasn't going to stop looking for me short of the grave... but that's another story.
There followed an awkward moment of the sort I used to be quite familiar with, but which had become infrequent. I used to be recognized all the time, stopped on the street, buttonholed, quizzed, importuned. Mostly complimented, because Sparky was beloved to a whole generation of children. You never become completely comfortable with it. Somebody is standing there telling you how much he admires you, or your work. Sometimes, it's that he frankly idolizes you, that you've changed his life. Even saved his life. I'm not going to try telling you it isn't enjoyable to be told things like that. If you hate compliments you should never get into show business. But it is awkward, and soon you find yourself standing there with a false smile on your face listening to the fan extol your virtues and wondering how quickly you can gracefully get away. The more effusive the praise, the tougher this is. I soon begin to wonder, if my work in that long-ago series changed your life, what sort of pitiful life do you have? Are you going to bend my ear all day long? And most important, are you stalking me?