"On the record..." she said, finishing the legal litany. "Sparky, would you agree with the proposition that the pubescent human male is the stupidest animal on two legs?"
He laughed. "If you want to take me as an example... yeah. Or on four legs, or six, or eight." He glanced down at his semierect penis. "Maybe we should say three legs."
Hildy glanced down, too—or at least her right eye did. The left remained stabilized on the establishing shot, recording a solid image she would use mainly as earlier reporters had used sound recorders. There would be Hyper-Text image bites, of course, but she doubted she would use much from this particular session. Sparky was still gazing down with boundless affection. It was like he had a new friend. In a way, he did.
"Say," he said, brightly. "Maybe it's not me that's dumb at all. Maybe when your cock starts to grow, it sort of sucks up your brains." He made a sucking sound with his lips. "Pow! And your IQ drops like a stone. You're at the mercy of any female who walks past you. You'd do anything to... sure, sure, that's it." He grasped his newly burgeoned manhood and waved it more or less in Hildy's direction. "This fellow gets it into his head... so to speak—"
"Off," Hildy said. "Sparky, it's a very bad sign when you start referring to your cock in the third person. Next thing you know you'll give it a name... and I'm out of here."
"You're right, you're right." Sparky apologized. "I'm crazy, but I'm not loony." That look came into his eyes again and his gaze dropped down her body. It landed where it usually did, and he was no longer semierect. "How about it, while we're off the record? Do you think we could—"
The bedroom door swung open and three bellhops hurried in, pushing carts groaning with bacon and eggs and pastries and fruit. For a moment there Sparky was so funny, his head moving rapidly back and forth between Hildy and the food, back to Hildy again, back to the food, totally unable to decide which he wanted more... she fell over laughing.
...and by Friday, though he was not back to anything like "normal," he could at least be trusted again around livestock.
NEXT WEEK:
Part Five
The New Sparky, as Romeo!
What amused Kenneth the most was that growing up felt like the world was shrinking. He wondered if normal boys, growing up in the normal way, experienced it like that. Did it seem their clothing had gotten too tight? That doorways were lower now, so they could reach up and touch them as they passed through? Or was it all too gradual?
Rooms imploding, shoes pinching, stumbling on stair risers that seemed to get lower even as he climbed them... these he could handle.
But people getting smaller...
He was now the same height as his father. He found it enormously disconcerting. For thirty years his father had been this vast presence, towering, stern, but loving. The fact that other men were taller was completely beside the point. In the ways that mattered, John Valentine had been the tallest man in the world.
But in this new, changed world, his father was only slightly over average height. He had a way of standing that made people think he was taller than he was, a way of dominating a gathering of people so that, from Kenneth's old perspective and even without the elevator shoes the loving son's uplifted gaze provided, made him stand out above anyone but a basketball team. But now they were eye to eye.
This was inconceivable.
This was preposterous.
This was... something a billion sons had encountered during their youth, nothing unusual at all. Except they had crept up on the idea. They had done it as a proper son should, a millimeter a week, not sprouted insolently like some demented beanstalk.
Kenneth was profoundly embarrassed by it. He now habitually stood slumped, slouched, hipshot. It just made him look sullen, and didn't really help anyway.
John Valentine put his hand on Kenneth's shoulder and squeezed affectionately.
"Who says dreams can't come true? Right, son?"
"That's right, Dad."
They were standing in the almost-finished park across from the dream. The park was three acres in area and ten levels high. The ground was bare soil, with sprinklers and electrical outlets naked. Soon they would be covered with sod. But a fountain was bubbling off to their left, and a white gazebo to their right sported electric flags that snapped in the nonexistent wind. In a few hours the orange fences would come down and people would begin using the paths, sitting on the benches. Children would climb in the small playground and splash in the pond with golden koi and the park's resident pair of otters.
John Valentine barely noticed any of this. The park had been part of his specifications for the project—and he would never know how many headaches this had caused-—but it had really been no more important to him than the color of the ushers' uniforms. A thing he would notice if it were done wrong, never see if it was right. He had said the theater should be across from a park. Here was the park. Enough said.
His attention was fixed firmly on the edifice across the wide pedway.
The Valentine. His dream. Well, Kenneth's, too.
"You remember that day at the spaceport, Kenneth?" he asked. "It was the day after I took you to the Sparky audition. Maybe you were too young."
"I remember it, Father."
"It's funny," John Valentine went on. "I don't recall exactly where we were going. Mars, wasn't it?"
"Yes, Father."
"Can't think why we'd want to go to Mars. Brutal gravity on Mars. Anyway, we'd had this offer, and we didn't know what to do with it. Television. A series. The money sounded good, but... television! Remember?"
"Oh, yes," Kenneth said, with a smile.
"And that's where the dream was born. The Valentine." He waved his arm grandly at the marquee. "Shakespearean repertory. We never knew it would take this long. This many years, you laboring with the kiddie schlock, me languishing in the sticks. But we got the money, and now we have the time."
Kenneth knew his father had no notion of just how much money. But following John Valentine's gaze, he had to admit it was money well spent.
The facade was wood, recalling what the exterior of the Globe Theater might have looked like. It stretched for half a city block, facing the park. The actual entrance took up half that much of the frontage: four sets of wood-and-glass doors, a small box office off to one side. Above it was a tasteful marquee, brightly lit, but with nothing that flashed or moved. "This ain't a casino," Valentine had said. On all three sides it advertised:
ROMEO AND JULIET
Kenneth Valentine
Maya Chang
John Valentine
with the tasteful logo featuring a rose and a sword that had come from the top graphic-design firm in King City. And not cheaply. Above that was a two-story tower with THE VALENTINE spelled vertically, THE floating over the v, in a type style called BROADWAY.
It had once been the Roxy Theater. Even in its heyday the Roxy had not been a premiere venue. Located on a seldom-traveled side street just off the Rialto, it had struggled along for almost twenty years presenting the sort of experimental works beloved of acting students and practically nobody else, playing to audiences composed mostly of relatives of those students. It was far too large a house for that. The balcony had been walled off early on, but even then the four hundred main-floor seats were usually half-empty. Sometimes nine-tenths empty. The theater had been owned by a man with some money, a man almost as eccentric as John Valentine. He was content to lose small sums yearly, until a change in the tax situation made it impossible to continue. And it sat there, dark, boarded up, for fifteen years until Sparky's real-estate scouts discovered it. Valentine didn't give a hoot about the bad location: "They'll come to us; you wait and see."