boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

236 Anthony Boucher
“I know his work.” Garrett sounded a little awed. “He’s marvelous.”
“I haven’t seen him for a couple of months, but I know he was playing around
with lovestonite. We can run down there and— But first, comrade, how about a
nightcap?”
Garrett woke from a confused dream of a naked Irish girl who was riding tandem
on a swizard with a man with a melancholy and wistful smile. The swizard was of
the fire-breathing variety, and its breath was searing hot on Garrett’s cheek. The
cheek still burned when he was wide awake and looking up at the multiracial face
of Hesketh Uranov.
“Sleep all right? No hangover?”
“None. But I’ve got the damnedest sensation here in my cheek—right where
whatever it was missed me. Do you suppose it was an atomic weapon, and this is
like a radium burn?”
Uranov bent over and stared at the cheek. When he rose he was half-laughing,
half-worried. “I don’t know what we’re getting into,” he said. “I should stick to my
dictotyper and leave melodrama and lovestonite to the W.B.I. or to the … those
friends I mentioned. Because this is nuts. Purely nuts.”
“Yes? What goes?”
“What you received from the new lethal weapon, comrade, is nothing more nor
less than a very nasty patch of sunburn.”
II.
Uranov paused on their way to the research lab. “Want to watch ’em shooting? That’s
usually a thrill to the new visitor.”
Garrett rubbed his salved but still burning cheek. “I’ve got thrills enough.”
“Just for a minute. Then you can talk more plausibly when I tell S.B. I’ve just
been showing you around.”
A red light glowed in front of one of the studios. Their plaques admitted them to
the soundproof observers’ gallery. “This is an interior, of course,” Uranov explained.
“Exteriors are all shot outside under dome, some of them here at the main plant,
most of them on the various locations. You probably saw them from the ship?”
Garrett nodded.
“California’s amazing enough naturally, and after our landscapers went to work—
It’s really extraordinary. We can shoot any possible aspect of the world’s surface, and we
have a condensed replica of every city of any importance, from Novosibirsk to Luna
City. Southern California is the world in miniature; destroy the rest of civilization,
and an archaeologist could re-create it all from our locations.” There was a certain
possessive pride in his voice, despite his avowed contempt for Sollywood.
“All the shooting is under dome?”
Uranov nodded. “The cameramen say sunlight through dome is better than
direct, and there are never any delays because of weather. The sky clouds over, and
your artificial light comes on automatically at exactly the right strength.”
Garrett looked down at the shooting interior. To judge from sets and costumes,
it was a scene from a glamorous drawing-room comedy—probably the standard plot