boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

One-Way Trip 225
One-Way Trip
PROLOGUE
“Twenty years from the discovery of lovestonite before anyone finds a practical use for it;
and it takes an artist to do it!” Emigdio Valentinez smiled the famous smile which the
gossip writers called melancholy—or occasionally wistful—but which meant nothing
more than simply a smile.
“Yeah, I know. That’s swell. You got a nice set-up for tinkering here.” Stag Hartle
glanced around indifferently at the today literally Pacific Ocean and at the undulant
dunes of sand, empty save for his two-seater copter. “You got fun out here.”
“Fun?” Valentinez smiled down at the curious object in his hand, a mirror in shape,
but made of what looked like dark glass and surrounded with a complex of coils and
tubes. “I suppose it is fun to do what you are fitted for—in my case to solve an age-old
problem of art by a twenty-year-old discarded problem of science.”
“Yeah,” said Stag Hartle. “But that ain’t all you’re fitted for, and you know it. O.K.,
so you paint the greatest self-portrait ever painted. Who cares? The people, they’ve seen
your famous smile plenty of times on the air, and that’s enough for them. But if you’d
come back to Sollywood and do the sets for S.B.’s epic on Devarupa—”
Valentinez interrupted him with three short sentences. “I do not like designing sets. I
do not like the notion of an epic on Devarupa. I do not like Mr. Breakstone.”
“Hold on, Mig. Climb down out of the stratosphere and be a human being. Think
of the pleasure you can give people with solly sets that’d never see one of your paintings.
Think of—” He lowered his voice to a seductive rasp, “S.B. said in confidence, mind
you, and I shouldn’t be telling you a word of this, but S.B. said he was willing to listen to
any reasonable proposition. And when he says reasonable, Mig, I’m telling you he means
unreasonable. How’s about five thousand credits a week?”
Valentinez released a button on his gadget, turned it over, and contemplated the other
side with satisfaction. “No,” he said quietly.
“Six? Seven and a half ?”
Emigdio Valentinez laid the mirror down. “It was nice of you to drop out to see me,
Hartle. It was nice of you to listen to my fun-and-games with lovestonite. But now, if
you don’t mind, I’m going down to the cove. There’s an effect of the sun on the algae there
at this time of day—”
Stag Hartle watched the departing figure of the man who was possibly the world’s
greatest living painter and certainly its most successful. He swore to and at himself with
dull persistence for a good five minutes.
225