Bill Oxnard’s Holovision Laboratory was perched high enough on a Malibu hillside to be out of the usual smog banks, although when there was inversion the tinted clouds crept up and engulfed even the highest of the hills. But at the moment it was a beautiful spring day. Oxnard could lean back in Us desk chair and see the surfers ‘way down on the beach, in their colorful anticorrosion suits and motorized surfboards. In a few weeks—or perhaps days—he’d see the gardeners painting the lawns green and starting to worry about brush fires again. But for the moment, everything was beautiful.
His phone buzzed. He clicked it on and his secretary’s grandmotherly face appeared on the screen.
“Ms. Impanema’s here,” she said.
Oxnard couldn’t keep himself from grinning. “Send her right in.”
Maybe she’s the reason why I feel… he tried to identify exactly what it was that he did feel, and could only come up with a lame… happy.
Brenda strode into his office: tall, leggy, brightly dressed in a flowered slit-skirt sari that was becoming the hit of the new Oriental decorative style. Oxnard himself still wore his regular business clothes: an engineer’s zipsuit of plain orange.
“Hope I’m not late,” she said, smiling at him.
Oxnard came around the desk and took her hand. “No. Right on the tick. Here, have a seat. How’s everything in Toronto? Have you eaten? Want some coffee or something?”
She took the chair and let the heavy-looking handbag she was carrying clunk to the floor. “A Bloody Mary, if you can produce one. I haven’t had any breakfast. The damned airline didn’t serve anything again. It’s getting to be a regular scrooging with them.”
Leaning over his desk to get at the phone, Oxnard called, “May… can you dig up two Bloody Marys and some breakfast?”
His secretary’s face showed that she clearly disapproved of drinking on company time. But after all, it was his company. She nodded and switched off.
“So what’s happening in Toronto?” Oxnard asked as he went back around the desk and sat down. For some reason he felt that he needed the desk between them.
“Everything’s in a whirl,” Brenda replied. “Let’s see… when’s the last time we talked?”
“A week after you first went up there. Ron hadn’t gone yet; he was still here.”
She nodded. “Right… that was the flight where they didn’t serve any dinner. ‘Sorry to inconvenience you,’ she whined nasally, ‘but the food service on this flight has been rendered inoperative due to a malfunctioning of the ground-based portion of our logistical system.’ Fancy way of saying they didn’t stash any food aboard the plane.”
They chatted easily for a while. May brought in a pair of drinks in plastic cups and a tray of real eggs and imitation bacon from the cafeteria. Brenda wolfed down everything hungrily. Oxnard answered a couple of routine phone calls while she ate, then told his secretary to hold all calls and visits.
“So what’s happening in Toronto?” he asked again as she finished the last crumbs of her English muffin.
“Everything,” Brenda said between dabs at her lips with a paper napkin. “It’s wild.”
“Ron’s there? The scripts are being written?”
“Well…” she cocked her head slightly to one side, as if waiting for the right words to come out of the air. “He’s there… and there’s a lot of writing being done. The production team is starting to put the sets together…”
“But?”
Brenda’s smile turned a little desperate. “Wasn’t it you who told me about Murphy’s Law?”
He grinned. “If anything can go wrong with an experiment, it will.”
“Right. Well, that’s what’s happening in Toronto.”
“That’s too bad.”
“‘It’s worse than that. The show might never get on the air. All sorts of troubles have hit us.”
Oxnard shook his head sympathetically. “Everything’s going smoothly on this end. The new transmitters and cameras have tested out fine. We’ll be ready to ship them up to Toronto right on schedule. And I’ve got some new ideas, too, about… well…” Oxnard let his voice trail off. She’s got enough problems without listening to my untested brainstorms.
“Will you be coming up to Toronto with the equipment?” Brenda asked.
“No need to,” said Oxnard. “But I thought…”
“Oh, we’ll send a couple of technicians along. I wouldn’t. dump the equipment on you without somebody to show your crew how to work it…”
“I know,” she said. “But I thought you would come up yourself.”
For some reason, Oxnard’s insides went fluttery.
“I’d like to,” he said quickly. “But I can’t leave the lab here… I’m not just an executive, you know. I work here; the rest of the staff depends on me.”
Brenda nodded and looked distressed. “Bill… I wouldn’t want you to hurt your own company, of course. But we need you in Toronto. Ron needs you. He’s being driven crazy up there, trying to whip the scripts into shape and handle the technical details of building the sets and working out the special effects and a million other things. I’ve tried to help him all I can, but you’re the one he needs. You’ve got the scientific know-how. Nobody else up there knows anything…”
He refused, of course. He explained to her, very carefully, how his laboratory operated and how much he was needed for day-by-day, hour-by-hour decisions. He took her down to the labs and shop, showed her what a small, tightly integrated group he had. He explained to her over and over that these men and women didn’t work for him, they worked with him. And he worked with them. Every day; ten, twelve hours per day.
He explained it all morning. He explained it over lunch. He took the afternoon off and drove her down the coast so that they could be alone and away from phones and business conferences while he explained it thoroughly. He explained it over dinner at a candlelit table looking out at the surf, not far from La Jolla.
He wanted to explain it to her in bed, in one of those plush La Jolla hotels, but at the last minute he lost his nerve. Brenda nodded and smiled and accepted everything he said without argument. But she kept repeating that Ron Gabriel, and the whole show, was in dire trouble and needed him. Now. In Toronto. And he kept getting the unspoken message from her that she needed him. Not that she promised anything or even hinted at it. But Oxnard realized that if he helped the show, helped Gabriel and Finger and Montpelier, he would be helping her.
And Bill Oxnard found that more than anything else in the world, he wanted to help her.
So he drove her back to the airport and agreed that he would join her in Toronto.
“Only for the weekend,” he said. “I really can’t stay away from the lab during regular working days.”
“I know,” she answered, as they hurried down the terminal corridor toward her flight’s loading gate.
They made it to the gate with half a minute to spare. Brenda turned to him, breathless from running, while the gate computer examined her ticket and the overhead sensors scanned them both for everything from contraband lemons to plastic explosives.
“I really appreciate it, Bill. I’ll set you up with a hotel room and try to make your weekend comfortable. Thanks for a fun day!”
He stood there tonguetied, trying to think of an appropriate answer: something witty, maybe poetic.
The computer’s scratchy voice upstaged him: “Final boarding for Flight 68. Final boarding.”
She reached up on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Oxnard stood there grinning like a schoolboy as she scampered through the doorway of the access tunnel that led to the plane.
Two lights later, on Friday, he followed her.