The medic graciously ushered him into the infirmary’s tiny emergency room. Dulaq was sitting up on the only cot, still smiling, with an icepack perched on his head.

“Hi,” Westerly said. “How’re you feeling?”

“Okay.”

“That was one terrific shot you took out there.”

“I got worst,” Dulaq mumbled. “Onst, against de Redwings, I went right t’rough da glass.”

They talked together for about a half hour, as Westerly’s heart sank lower and lower. This is the star of the show? he kept asking himself.

“Do you think you’ll be all right to start working on Monday?” he asked, feeling his head give a body-language no, despite his conscious efforts to keep it from shaking.

“Sure. I could go back now, if ya wanna.”

“No! No... that’s all right. You rest.”

Westerly got up to leave, but Dulaq grasped his wrist in a grip of steel.

“Hey, one t’ing you do for me, huh?”

“Uh, sure. What?”

“Don’ gimme no long speeches t’remember, huh? I don’ want no long speeches. Too tough.”

Krishna, Shiva and Vishnu, Westerly prayed. Why have they done this to me?

“Sure,” he told Dulaq. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay. No long speeches.”

“Right.”

Dulaq let go of him and Westerly ducked through the accordion-fold door of the little sickroom, rubbing his wrist.

The doctor was at his cubbyhole desk.

“You examined him thoroughly?” Westerly asked.

“Yep,” said the doctor.

“Did he talk that way before he hit his head?”

The doctor glowered at him.

Westerly had dinner with Rita Yearling, who seemed incredibly beautiful, utterly sure of herself and dismally cold toward him.

His hotel suite was sumptuously furnished, including a strange electronic console of shining metal and multicolored buttons that squatted bulkily in the far corner of the sitting room. Gregory Earnest had explained that the device was a three-dee phone station, which would link him instantaneously via satellite with Finger’s private office in Los Angeles.

Somehow the phone loomed in his mind like an alien presence as he and Rita ate their dinner at the other end of the sitting room, near the windows.

Rita was polite, respectful and distant. The vibes coming from her were strictly professional, totally impersonal.

“Do you know Bernie Finger very well?”

“Of course.”

“He discovered you?”

“Yes.”

“Through an agent?”

“Oh, on his own.”

“Where was that?”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“No, I guess not. Um... what do you think of Ron Gabriel?”

“His brain’s in his crotch.”

“And your costar, Dulaq?”

“No brains at all.”

And so it went, right through dinner, all the way through to the ice cream dessert that neither of them would do more than taste.

A part of Westerly’s mind was almost amused. Here he was having dinner with the loveliest woman he had seen in years and he was bored silly by her. While she referred to other people as brainless, she came across as heartless, which in many ways was infinitely worse.

Finally he pushed aside his coffee cup and glanced at his wrist. “Finger will be calling in a few minutes, if he’s on time.”

“He’s always on time,” Rita said. She got up from her chair, a vision of Venus, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Harlow, Hayworth, Monroe—and equally cold, unalive.

“I’ll let you two talk business together,” Rita said.

Westerly got up and went to the door with her. She stopped just as he reached for the doorknob.

Without so much as a smile, Rita said, “B.F. won’t mind if we ball, but we’ll hafta keep it quiet from Gabriel. Ron thinks he’s got me falling for him.”

“Oh,” was just about all that Westerly could manage.

“Just let me know where and when,” she said.

He opened the door and she left the room.