ROM

(Pensively.) All dose stars... all dat emptiness. I wish she was right here, instead of back on Rigel Six.

JULIE steps out from behind the electronic computer, where she’s been hiding since she stowed away on the Montague starship.

JULIE

(Shyly.) I am here, ROM. I stowed away aboard your ship.

ROM

(Dumbfounded.) You... you... Hey, Mitch, what th’ hell’s my next line?

“Cut!”

From up in the control booth, Les Montpelier kept telling himself, It’s not as bad as it looks. They’ll fix up all the goofs in the editing process. Maybe we can even get somebody to dub a voice over Dulaq’s lines. He looks pretty good, at least.

At that moment, Dulaq was pointing to the blank side wall of the set, where the Capulets’ starship would be matted in on the final tape.

“How’d your ship catch up wit’ us so soon?” he was asking Rita Yearling. But he was looking neither at her nor the to-be-inserted view of the other starship. He was peering, squint-eyed, toward Mitch Westerly. The director had his face sunk in his hands, as if he were crying.

“Rita looks stunning,” said Gregory Earnest, with a hyena’s leer on his face.

“She sure does,” Montpelier agreed. “But there’s something wrong about her... something...”

Rita’s face was all dewy-cheeked youth, her eyes wide and blue as a new spring sky. But her body was adult seductress and she slinked around the set with the practiced undulations of a bellydancer.

“...something about her that doesn’t seem quite right for the character she’s supposed to be playing,” Montpelier finished.

“The audience will love her,” Earnest said. “We’ve got to give them a little pizazz.”

Montpelier started to answer, but hesitated. Maybe he’s right.

“And Dulaq looks magnificent,” the Canadian went on. “Look at that costume. Shows plenty of muscles, doesn’t it?” Earnest’s voice was almost throbbing with delight.

“Too bad it doesn’t cover his mouth,” Montpelier said.

Earnest shot him an angry glance.

On the set, Dulaq was staring off into space. He thought he was looking at the red light of an active camera unit, as Westerly had instructed him to do. Actually, he was fixing his gaze on a red EXIT sign glowing in the darkness on the other end of the huge studio. Dulaq’s eyes weren’t all that good.

“I know it’s wrong,” he was saying, “But I love you, Julie. I’m mad about you.”

Rita was entwining herself about his muscular frame, like a snake climbing a tree.

“And I love you, Rom darling,” she breathed. The boom microphone, over her head, seemed to wilt in the heat of her torridly low-pitched voice.

“That’s a shy, innocent young girl?” Montpelier asked rhetorically.

Dulaq finally focused his ruggedly handsome gaze on her, as their noses touched. Suddenly he gave a strangled growl and clutched at her. Rita shrieked and they both went tumbling to the floor.

“Cut!” Mitch Westerly yelled. “Cut!”

The cameramen were grinning and training their equipment on the squirming couple. Then, out of the crowd, came a blur of fury.

Ron Gabriel leaped on Dulaq’s back and started pounding the hockey star’s head. “Leggo of her, you goddamn ape!” he screamed.

It took Dulaq several moments to notice what was happening to him. Then, with a roar, he swung around and flipped Gabriel off his back. The writer staggered to his knees, got up quickly and launched himself at Dulaq.

With a surprised look on his face, Dulaq took Gabriel’s charge. The writer’s head rammed into his stomach, but produced nothing except a slight “Oof” which might have come from either one of them. Gabriel rebounded, looking a bit glassy eyed. He charged at Dulaq again and kicked him in the shins, hard.

It finally seemed to penetrate Dulaq’s head that he was being attacked by someone who had no hockey stick in his hands. The athlete’s face relaxed into a pleasant grin as he picked Gabriel up off his feet with one hand and socked him between the eyes so hard that the writer sailed completely off the set while his shirt remained in Dulaq’s left fist.

Pandemonium raged. The only recognizable sound to come out of the roiling crowd on the set was Westerly, pathetically screaming “Cut! Cut!”

Montpelier and the technicians in the control booth bolted out the door and down the steps to the floor of the studio. Gregory Earnest sat in the darkened booth alone, watching the riot develop, and smiled to himself.

He knew at last how to get rid of Ron Gabriel. And how to cash in on what little money would be made by “The Starcrossed.”

12: THE SQUEEZE PLAY

Gregory Earnest’s home was a modest ranch house in one of the new developments between Badger Studio and the busy Toronto International Jetport. Although nearly half the expense to the house had gone into insulation—thermal and acoustic—the entire place still rumbled and shivered with the infrasonic, barely audible vibrations of the big jets screaming by just over the roof.

The living quarters were actually underground, in what was originally the basement level. Earnest had spent many weekends digging, cementing, enlarging the underground portion of the house, until now—after five years’ occupancy—he had a network of bunkers that would have made Adolf Hitler feel homesick. His wife made all her neighbors envious with tales of Gregory’s single-minded handiness and devotion to home improvement. While she turned the neighborhood women green and they nagged their husbands, Earnest dug with the dedication of a prisoner of war, happily alone and free of his wife and their two milk-spilling, runny-nosed, grammar-school children.

Les Montpelier was a little puzzled when he first rang Earnest’s doorbell. It was Sunday, the studio was still closed for repairs. Ron Gabriel had left the hospital with two black eyes and several painfully cracked ribs, but no broken bones. Francois Dulaq had a bruised hand and some interesting bite marks on his upper torso. Rita Yearling was doing television talk shows all weekend, back in the States. Mitch Westerly had disappeared under a cloud of marijuana smoke.

Montpelier was not in the jauntiest of moods. “The Starcrossed” was a dead duck, he knew, even before the second day of shooting in the studio. It was hopeless.

Yet Gregory Earnest obviously had something optimistic in mind when he had called Montpelier at the hotel.

So, puzzled and depressed, with a microfilm copy of the L.A. Free Press-News-Times Sunday help wanted ad section in the pocket of his severely styled mod Edgar Allan Poe business suit, he leaned on the bell button of Earnest’s front door. A jumbo jet came screaming up from what seemed like a few meters away, making the very ground shake with the roar of its mighty engines, and spewing fumes and excess kerosene in its wake. Montpelier suddenly realized why the lawns looked so greasy. He was glad that his suit was dead black.

The door opened and he was greeted by a smiling Eskimo. At least, she looked like an Eskimo. Her round face was framed by a furry hood. Her coat was trimmed with antlered designs from the far north. She smiled and moved her mouth, but Montpelier couldn’t hear a word over the rumbling whine of the dwindling jet.

“Can’t hear you,” he said and found that he couldn’t even hear himself.

They stood in the doorway smiling awkwardly at each other for a few minutes as the jet flew off into the distance.

“You must be Mr. Montpelier,” said the round-faced woman. Her accent was more Oxford than igloo and Montpelier realized that her face really had none of the oriental flatness of an Eskimo’s.