"We know the line," Prane said as this additional pause lengthened conspicuously. "Who says it?"
Helva gulped. "You do."
For a moment a terrible expression haunted his eyes. Then he burst out laughing and the terror was gone. "Tis always the littlest line that escapes," and he briskly cued Mercutio.
That night, as everyone slept, Prane was restless. Shamelessly, Helva turned up the volume in the cabin he shared with five other men. He was repeating scene iv over and over. Then he lay silent. Helva thought he slept, until she saw his right hand slowly creep to his belt, carefully extract a small pill from the waistband fabric of his shipsuit. With a gesture counterfeiting a random sleepy movement, the pill reached his mouth.
The secretiveness of his action, added to the intense rehearsal of that scene, gave Helva a tragic insight to the Solar. He was an addict, in the most horrifying degree: mindtrap, listed as harmless in the galactic pharmacopoeia, had become poisonous to him, fatal to mind and body. And he knew it. Yet more devastating to Solar Prane was loss of memory and to prevent that, he courted self-destruction.
Except for Ansra, rehearsals proceeded well. How Prane kept his temper with such deliberate obstructionism, Helva did not know. Every scene the Solara played began to sag, lose fire, drop pace. But Prane did not react. And Ansra apparently gave up trying to goad him into an action no one could condone. She took to needling Kurla, a far more vulnerable personality.
Fortunately, Nia Tubb, the Lady Capulet, shared the pilot's cabin, which was the women's room. She was wise in the ways of human relations and if she said nothing to the point, she did buffer Kurla from Ansra's hostility. She also helped Kurla in her lines, kept up a lighthearted monologue when the women were alone. But even she could see Ansra's tactics increasing the pressure on the sensitive, anxious medical attendant. "Honey, you have any real trouble with Colmer, you let me help, huh?" Nia Tubb said to Kurla one morning.
"Thanks," Kurla answered with a wan smile.
"Say, just between the two of us, Prane's no addict, is he? He doesn't look like one and I've seen enough to know, but still--"
"Solar Prane developed an adverse chemical reaction to long use of mindtrap."
"I always thought mindtrap was the most harmless thing in the world. I've used it myself times without number."
"Ordinarily. But the Solar has been using it for over 70 years. A residue of the silicon content, which ought to have been flushed out of his system, has built up in his tissues. He also has a liquid retention problem and the diuretic originally prescribed combined unfavorably with the mindtrap residue, leaching potassium from his system in an unremediable process."
"What does that mean? He looks fine to me." Kurla's voice, dispassionately clinical, was more tragic than tears.
"In low-grav conditions, in free-fall particularly, there is no strain on the skeleton and he's fine. But his bones are soft, a fall, a blow, any long period of heavy physical strain and he would. . . in effect. . . break up. And the silicon is gradually choking his vital organs to death."
"Replace 'em!"
Kurla shook her head. Nia. patted her hand rhythmically,. Helva interrupted them with a rehearsal call. And that was the worst rehearsal yet. Ansra's attitude had insidiously unnerved the entire cast, Evervone was off. They blew their lines, forgot stage business. When Mercutio and Paris got into a fight that was not in the script, Prane called a halt.
"We've gone stale. We will take today off and tomorrow. Helva, break out the finer rations. Nia and Kurla, would you be so kind, please, to see what surprises the gallev might serve up? Helva, have you some tri-casts of interest? We need to relate to the evervdav worlds that we have forgotten, immersed as we have been in ancient England."
Ansra stalked out of the main cabin, slamming the door to the women's Quarters. Helva looked in to find her staring angrily into a mirror. It was disconcerting for Helva to watch her frustrated, brooding self-examination while Nia and Kurla chattered inconsequentialities in the galley.
Helva tried to be everywhere, keeping an ear out for any trouble. . . any more trouble, that is. Davo floated purposefully toward Prane. Since Helva had been speaking onlv from the main cabin, she fostered the tendency for her passengers to forget she had ears and eyes everywhere in the ship.
"You must realize by now, Prane," Davo was saying, "that Ansra is determined to ruin this production. And she is succeeding admirably."
Prane regarded his friend for a long moment, a slow smile beginning. "You've a solution?"
"Let's put her off balance. Remember what we used to do on the long hauls on tour?"
"Reshuffle all the parts?"
"Exactly. Christ, we all know each other's lines and movements."
Prane began to grin mischievously. "And. . . let Helva be Juliet?"
"No, Kurla is Juliet!" Davo returned Prane's surprised stare with a dead serious dare.
"And Romeo?"
"That part need not change," Davo said evenly, then added in a light voice, "but I shall be Friar Lawrence and marry you two."
Prane waited till everyone had eaten and was relaxed with Thracian beer. The announcement met with approval, raucous and bawdy.
"I'll be Lady Capulet," Escalus announced in a squeaky falsetto.
"And I'll be Lady Montague," said Friar Lawrence in a quavering contralto, reverting to his own normal bass to add, "Always thought she was a wino."
"I'll be Escalus," Helva volunteered in a voice so like the real actor's the man dropped his tankard.
"You could be the whole damn play all by yourself," Davo vowed, his voice far more slurred than it should be on Thracian beer. "There isn't one part you couldn't do."
"Really? In that case, I'll be the Nurse," Ansra Cornier announced. "Then Helva can see how the part should be played."
"And Kurla will be Juliet," Davo cried, his eyes on Ansra. "Set the stage, oh chorus. Places, everyone. Places."
"Two households, both alike in dignity. . . " Helva began promptly in a basso, sweeping everyone into the act before they had time for second thoughts.
Davo came on as Sampson, and Chadress, normally Lord Capulet, as Gregory, hamming their lines and indulging in slapstick nonsense. Balthasar rolled on, as though drunk, slurring through the establishment of conflict between the two houses. Lines were rattled off, and actors bodily moved each other into proper stage position or deliberately upstaged the speaker.
When Escalus, Lady Capulet glided on in the company of Nurse Angelica, Ansra, with deliberate malice, dispensed with fun and played her part as she had not played Juliet. And somehow twisted her lines as Nurse to mean something entirely different. Her exit line, "Go girl, seek happy nights to happy days," was barbed enough to make Escalus falter.
But then Juliet met Romeo at the feast, and Ansra's spitefulness backfired. For Prane was a different, tenderer Romeo, his voice trembled not with fatigue but with newfound love, gentle, protective, eager. And Kurla, her eyes equally discovering her lover, was Juliet, breathless, shy, daring, and precious. She blushed shyly as she said,
"For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss."
She turned her hands palms down on Romeo's, as he had so often directed Ansra only to have her mis-time the words and action as to make them meaningless.
Romeo raised Juliet's hands on his, and the ardor in his eyes, the answering joy in hers, made that little scene so tender that everyone was spellbound.
"Thus from my tips, by thine, my sin is purg'd" said Romeo in so soft a voice it seemed a faint echo, but it hung clearly until his tips met Juliet's in a kiss that was as devout an avowal as a shout.