“You’re not kidding me? Or yourself?”
“No kidding.”
Gabriel broke into a grin. “Okay, buhbie. We’ll show the whole world.”
By the time Westerly got back to the studio, the quiet little knot of technicians who had been working on the aerial rigging had turned into a studio full of shouting, milling people. One of the men was hanging suspended in the rig, wires disappearing up into the shadows of the high ceiling, his feet dangling a good ten meters off the floor.
Gregory Earnest seemed to rise up out of the floorboards as Westerly stood near the studio’s main door, watching.
“That’s Francois Dulaq, our star,” Earnest explained, pointing to the dangling man. “We’re getting him accustomed to the zero-gravity simulator.”
“Shouldn’t we use a stuntman? It looks kind of dangerous....”
Earnest shook his head. “We don’t have any stuntmen on the budget. Besides, Dulaq’s a trained athlete... strong as an ox.”
Dulaq hung in midair, shouting at the men below him. To Westerly, there was a faint tinge of terror in the man’s voice. Someone yelled from off in the distance, “Okay, try it!” Dulaq’s body jerked into motion. The rig started moving him across the vast emptiness of the studio’s open central area.
“Hold it!” The voice yelled; the rig halted so abruptly that Dulaq was almost thrown out of his skin. Westerly could feel his own eyeballs slam against his lids, in psychic communion with the man in the rig.
“Shouldn’t we test the rig with a dummy first?” he asked Earnest.
For the second time that day the executive smiled. “What do you think we’ve got up there now?”
It was agonizing to watch. The technicians spent hours setting up the lights and whisking Dulaq backward and forward through the spacious studio on the aerial rig. They slammed him against walls, amidst frantic yells of “Slow it down!” or “Watch it!” Once the rig seemed to slip and Dulaq went hurtling to the floor, only to be snatched up again and yanked almost out of sight, into the shadows up near the ceiling. From the far corner where the technicians manipulated the controls came the sounds of multilingual swearing. And from the rigging itself came shrieks and groans.
Finally, the star of the show went gracefully swooping past Westerly, smiling manfully, as a trio of tiny unattended cameras automatically tracked him from the floor, like radar-directed antiaircraft guns getting a bead on an intruding attack plane. The technicians were clustered around the controls and watched their monitor screens. “Beautiful!” somebody shouted.
Meanwhile, Dulaq had traversed the length of the studio, still smiling, sailing like Superman through thin air and rode headfirst into the upper backwall of the starship bridge set.
Westerly heard a concussive thunk! The backwall tottered for a moment as Dulaq hung there, suddenly as stiff and wooden as a battering ram. Then the wall tumbled, taking most of the set apart with a series of splintering crashes. Amidst the flying dust and crashing two-by-threes, and all the rending, shrieking noises, Westerly clearly heard the same master technician shout out, “Hold it!”
They got Dulaq down from the rig, nearly dropping him from ten meters up in the process. He was still smiling and apparently conscious, although to Westerly his eyes definitely looked glassy. The technicians bundled him off to the infirmary, which fortunately was in the same building as the studio. By the time Westerly got there, a smiling medic was telling the assembled technicians:
“He’s all right... didn’t even get a splinter. I took an x-ray of his head and it showed nothing.”
The technicians smiled and joked and went back to their work. As they dispersed, Westerly introduced himself to the medic and asked permission to see the star of the show.
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.
