The Technicolor Time Machine Read online

  “I could translate it, it would be extremely difficult but possible, but what would be the point? He cannot read.”

  “Just hold on, Lyn. No, not you, Sam. I know, Sam… Of course I saw the estimate, I made it myself. No, you don’t have to ask me where I’m getting the LSD… Be realistic yourself. Yesterday neither of us was born not, I agree… what you don’t realize is that this picture can be produced within the figure I outlined, give or take fifty thousand… Don’t use the word impossible, Sam. The impossible may take a while, but we do it, you know the routine… What?… On the phone? Sam, be reasonable. I’ve got three rings of Barnum and Bailey in the office right now, this isn’t the time to go into details… Brush-off? Me? Never!… Yes, by all means, ask him. L.M. has been in on this picture from the beginning, every step of the way, and you’ll find that he’ll back me up in my own footsteps every step of the way … Right… And the same to you, Sam.”

  He dropped the phone into the cradle and Charley Chang said, “She could be captured in the raid, in the opening, she could fight with him with true hatred, but hatred would, in spite of itself, turn to love.”

  “I’ve never been captured in a raid before,” Slithey husked from the corner.

  “A good idea, Charley,” Barney agreed.

  “And even if he could read—he cannot write,” Lyn said.

  “We’ve had that problem with foreign actors more than once,” Barney told him. “Staple the true translation to the contract, have it notarized as a true translation by a bilingual notary, have the party of the second part make his mark and affix his thumb print on each document, both witnessed by two impartial witnesses, and it will stand up in any court in the world.”

  “There may be some difficulty in locating a bilingual English-Old Norse notary—”

  “Ask casting, they can find anyone.”

  “Here they are, Mr. Hendrickson,” his secretary said, coming in through the open door and placing a bottle of Benzedrine tablets before him on the desk.

  “Too late,” Barney whispered, staring at them, unmoving. “Too late.”

  The telephone and the intercom sounded at the same moment and he groped out two of the pills and washed them down with the cold, black, cardboardy coffee.

  “Hendrickson here,” he said flipping the key.

  “Barney, I would like to see you in my office at once,” L.M.’s voice said.

  Betty had answered the phone. “That was L.M. Greenspan’s secretary,” she said. “L.M. would like to see you in his office at once.”

  “I get the message.”

  His thigh muscles hurt when he stood up and he wondered how long it would take for the bennies to show some effect. “Stay with it, Charley, I’ll want a synopsis, a couple of sheets, as soon as possible.”

  When he started toward the door Ivan Grissini’s hand darted toward his lapel, but he moved away from it with reflex efficiency. “Stick around, Ivan, I’ll want to talk to you after I see L.M.” The chorus of voices was cut off as he closed the door behind him. “Lend me your towel, will you, Betty,” he asked.

  She took the towel from the bottom drawer of her desk and he draped it around his shoulders, tucking it carefully inside the collar of his shirt. Then he bent and placed his head under the faucet of the water cooler and gasped when Betty turned it on. He let the icy stream run over his head and the back of his neck for a few moments, then straightened up and dried himself off. Betty lent him her comb. He felt weaker but better, and when he looked in the mirror he looked almost human. Almost.

  “Lock the door behind you,” L.M. said when Barney came into the office, then grunted as he bent over to clip a telephone wire with a pair of angle-nose wire cutters. “Are there any more, Sam?”

  “That’s the last one,” Sam said in his gray, colorless voice. Sam was pretty much of a gray, colorless man, which was assuredly protective coloration since he was L.M.’s own personal, private accountant and was reputed to be a world authority on corporative finance and lax evasion. He clutched a folder of papers protectively to his chest and flicked his eyes toward L.M. “That is no longer necessary,” he said.

  “Maybe, maybe,” L.M. said, puffing as he fell into his chair. “But if I even say the word bank when the wires aren’t cut my heart gives palpitations. I got not so good news for you, Barney.” He bit off the end of a cigar. “We’re ruined.”

  “What do you mean?” Barney looked back and forth from one expressionless face to the other. “Is this some kind of gag?”

  “What L.M. means,” Sam said, “is that Climactic Studios will soon be bankrupt.”

  “On the rocks, the work of a lifetime,” L.M. said in a hollow voice.

  Sam nodded once, as mechanically as a ventriloquist’s dummy, and said, “That is, roughly, the situation. Normally it would be at least three more months before our financial report would be sent to the banks, who, as you know, own the controlling percentage of this corporation. However, for some reason unknown to us, they are sending their accountants to examine the books this week.”

  “And… ?” Barney asked, feeling suddenly lightheaded. The silence lengthened unbearably until he jumped to his feet and began to pace the room. “And they’ll find the company is on the rocks, and that all the profits are on paper”—he turned and pointed dramatically to L.M.—“and that all the hard cash has been bled off into the untaxable L.M. Greenspan Foundation. No wonder you’re not suffering. The company may go down the drain, but L.M. Greenspan goes marching on.”

  “Watch it! That’s no way for an employee to talk to the man who gave him his first break—”

  “And his last one too—right here!” Barney said, and chopped himself on the neck with the edge of his hand, much harder than he had planned. “Listen, L.M.,” he pleaded, rubbing the sore spot, “until the ax falls we still have a chance. You must have thought there was the possibility of a salvage operation or you wouldn’t have got involved in this deal with Professor Hewett and his machine. You must have felt that a big box-office success would get the pressure off, make the firm solvent again. We can still do it.”

  L.M. shook his head morosely. “Don’t think it doesn’t hurt to shake hands with the knife that stabs you in the back, but what else can I do? A big box-office hit, sure, even a big picture in the can and we could laugh at the teeth of the banks. But you can’t make a picture in a week.”

  You can’t make a picture in a week! The words hissed and sizzled through the caffeine-clogged, Benzedrine-loaded channels of Barney’s brain, levering up a reluctant memory.

  “L.M.” he said dramatically. “You’re going to have a heart attack.”

  “Bite your tongue!” L.M. gasped, and clutched a roll of fat roughly near that vital organ. “Don’t say that. One coronary’s enough to last a lifetime.”

  “Listen to this. You go home with Sam to work on the books tonight, you take them with you. You get sick. It could be indigestion, it could be a coronary. Your doctor says it could be a coronary. The fees you’ve been paying him he should deliver at least that one small favor. Everyone runs around and shouts for a few days and the books are forgotten about and then it is the weekend, and nobody even considers looking at the books until Monday, maybe Tuesday.”

  “Monday,” Sam said firmly. “You don’t know banks. No books on Monday and they’ll have a hired car full of doctors over to the house.”

  “All right, Monday then. That will be time enough.”

  “So Monday—but what difference does it make? Frankly, I’m puzzled,” L.M. said, and knitted his brow and looked puzzled.

  “It makes this difference, L.M. On Monday I will bring you the new picture in the can. A picture that will have to gross two, three million on length, width of screen and color alone.”

  “But you can’t!”

  “But we can. You’re forgetting about the vremeatron. This gadget works. Remember last night when you thought we had all gone for about ten minutes?” L.M nodded reluctantly. “That was how long we wer
e gone from here and now. But we were an hour or more in the Viking times. We could do it again. Take the company and everything we need back there to shoot the picture, and use just as much time as we need to do it right before we came back.”

  “You mean… ?”

  “Correct. When we come back with the film in the can we need only have been gone ten minutes as far as you’re concerned.”

  “Why didn’t they ever think of this before?” L.M. gasped with happy appreciation.

  “For a lot of reasons…”

  “Do you mean to tell me…” Sam leaned so far forward in his chair that he was almost out of it, and the hint of some expression, perhaps a smile?, touched his face. “Do you mean that we will have to pay production costs for just ten minutes?”

  “I do not mean that,” Barney snapped. “I can tell you in advance that there are going to be some headaches for bookkeeping. However, to cheer you up, I can guarantee that we can shoot on location—with more extras—for about one-tenth the cost of filming in Spain.”

  Sam’s eyes glittered. “I don’t know the details of this project, L.M., but some of the factors make very good sense.”

  “Can you do it, Barney? Pull this thing off?”

  “I can do it if you give me all the help I ask for and no questions. This is Tuesday. I see no reason why we can’t have everything we need sewn up by Saturday.” He counted off on his fingers. “We’ll have to get the contracts signed with the principals, get enough raw film to last for all the shooting, the technicians, at least two extra cameras…” He began to mumble to himself as he ran through all they might possibly need. “Yes,” he said finally, “we can do it.”

  “Still, I don’t know,” L.M. said pensively. “It’s a wild idea.”

  The future teetered on the balance and Barney groped desperately for inspiration.

  “Just one more thing,” he said. “If we’re on location for, say, six months, everyone has to be paid six months’ salary. But we rent the cameras and sound equipment, all of the expensive hardware, we will only have to pay for a few days rental fees for them.”

  “Barney,” L.M. said, sitting up straight in his chair, “you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  5

  “You haven’t heard the last of Cinecittá yet, Mr. Hendrickson.”

  “Barney.”

  “Not yet, Barney, not by a long shot. The new realism came out of Italy after the war, then the kitchen-sink film that the British picked up. But you’ll see, Rome ain’t dead yet. Guys like me come over here to Hollywood for a bit, pick up some techniques—”

  “Pick up some loot.”

  “…can’t deny that, Barney, working for the Yankee dollar. But you know, you’re not going to get much on color this time of day.” He swung the 8-mm Bolex that hung on a thong from his wrist. “I should have loaded this HP with Tri-X. It’s five in the afternoon.”

  “Don’t worry, Gino, you’ll have plenty of light, take my word for that.” He looked up as the warehouse door opened and Amory Blestead came in. “Over here, Amory,” he said. “This is our cameraman, Gino Cappo. Amory Blestead, technical adviser.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Amory said, shaking hands, “I always wondered how you got those repulsive effects in Autumn Love.”

  “You mean in Porco Mondo? Those weren’t effects. That’s just the way that part of Yugoslavia looks.”

  “Christ!” He turned to Barney. “Dallas told me to tell you they’ll be down with Ottar in about five minutes.”

  “About time. We’ll have the Prof warm his machine up.”

  Barney climbed painfully into the back of the army truck and dropped onto the boxes. He had managed to grab about an hour’s sleep on the couch in his office before another urgent message from L.M. had dragged him awake and up to L.M.’s office for an extended wrangle over budgeting. The pace was beginning to tell.

  “I have recalibrated all my instruments,” Professor Hewett said, tapping happily on a dial face, “so that now I can guarantee the utmost precision temporally arid geographically in all future time transports.”

  “Wonderful. See if you can recalibrate us to arrive just after our last trip, close to the same time, the same day, The light was good—”

  The door crashed open, and loud, guttural singing filled the warehouse. Ottar stumbled in with Jens Lyn and Dallas Levy each clutching one of his arms, holding him up rather than restraining him, since he was obviously roaring drunk. Tex Antonelli came behind them wheeling a handtruck loaded with packing cases. It needed all three of them to heave the Viking up into the truck, where he passed out, mumbling happily to himseli. They piled the boxes in around him.

  “What’s all this?” Barney asked.

  “Trade goods,” Lyn said, pushing the crate labeled JACK DANIELS in over the tailgate. “Ottar signed the contract. I was very surprised to discover an Icelandic notary public here—”

  “You can find anything in Hollywood.”

  “And Ottar agreed to study English once he was back in his own house. He has developed a decided taste for distilled beverages and we agreed on a payment of one bottle of whiskey a day for every day of study.”

  “Couldn’t you have fobbed him off with some rotgut?” Barney asked as a second crate of Jack Daniels slid into the truck. “I can see myself trying to justify this on the gyp sheet.”

  “We did try,” Dallas said, shoving in a third case. “Slipped him some Old Overcoat 95 per cent grain neutral spirits, but it was no sale. He developed an educated palate early. Two months, five cases, that’s the bargain.”

  Jens Lyn climbed in and Barney admired his knee-high engineer’s boots, puttees, many-pocketed hunting jacket and sheath knife. “Why the Jungle Jim outfit?” he asked.

  “A simple matter of survival and creature comfort,” Lyn said, making room for the sleeping bag and a packing crate that Dallas pushed up to him. “I have DDT for the body lice that are sure to abound, halazone tablets for the drinking water and a quantity of tinned food. The diet of the time is restricted, and I am sure unwholesome to modem tastes. Therefore I have taken a few simple precautions.”

  “Fair enough,” Barney said. “Climb m and lock up the tailgate, let’s get rolling.”

  Though the vremeatron still whined and crackled with the same intensity, there was no longer the tension there had been on the first trip. The conditioned reflexes of mechanized man took over and the voyage through time became just as commonplace as a ride in a high-speed elevator, a trip in a jet plane, a descent in a submarine or a blast-off in a rocket. Only Gino, the newcomer, showed some apprehension, darting rapid glances at the bank of electronic gadgetry and the sealed warehouse. But in the face of the others’ calm—Barney managed to doze off Airing the transition while Dallas and the Danish philologist quarreled over the opening of one of the whiskey bottles and the resultant loss thereby of a day’s English lessons—he relaxed a little. When the transition did occur he half rose, startled, but sat down again when the bottle was passed to him, though his eyes did widen considerably when the ice-blue sky appeared outside and the tang of salt spray filled the truck.

  “That’s a pretty good trick,” he said, pointing his light meter. “How’s it done?”

  “For details you have to ask the Prof here,” Barney said, gasping over too large a swallow of the whiskey. “Very complex. Something about moving through time.”

  “I get it,” Gino said, stopping his diaphragm down to 3.5. “Something like the time zones when you fly from London to New York. The sun doesn’t seem to move and you arrive at the same time you took off.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Good light. We can get some good color with light like this.”

  “If you drive don’t drink,” Dallas said, leaning out to hand the bottle to Tex, who sat behind the wheel in she cab. “One slug and let’s get on the trail, pardner.”

  The starter whined the motor to life and, looking out over the cab, Barney saw that they were following the tire
tracks of another truck, clearly visible in the damp sand and gravel. Memory pushed up through the layers of fatigue and he hammered on the metal roof of the cab over Tex’s head.

  “Blow your horn,” he shouted.

  They were coming to the rocky headland and the horn sounded as they swung around it. Barney stumbled over the crates and trod on the sleeping Viking as he rushed to the rear of the truck. There was the rising grumble of another engine as an identical army truck passed them, going in the opposite direction. Barney reached the open rear and clutched the bent-wood canvas support over his head. He had a quick glimpse of himself in the rear of the other truck, white-faced and wide-eyed and gaping like a moron. With a feeling of sadomasochistic pleasure he raised his open hand, thumb to nose, and wiggled his fingers at his shocked other self. The rock headland came in between them.

  “Get much traffic around here?” Gino asked.

  Ottar sat up, rubbing his side, muttering something foul under his breath. Jens quieted him easily with a lone drag from the bottle as they braked to a sliding stop in the loose gravel.

  “Primrose Cottage,” Tex shouted back, “last stop.”

  Reeking smoke still drifted down from the chimney hole of the squat, turf house, but there was no one in sight. Weapons and clumsy tools littered the ground. Ottar half fell, half jumped from the truck and bellowed something, then clutched at his head with instant regret.

  “Hvar erut per rakka? Komit út!” [6] He held his head again and looked around for the bottle, which Jens Lyn had wisely tucked out of sight. The servants began tremblingly to appear.

  “Let’s get moving,” Barney said. “Get these cases unloaded and ask Dr. Lyn where he wants them. Not you, Gino, I want you to come with me.”

  They climbed the low hill behind the house, pushing through the short, stubbly grass and almost tripping over a ragged and wild-looking sheep that went baaing down the hill away from them. From the top they had a clear view of the curving bay that swept away from them on both sides, and the vast, slate-gray ocean. A long roller came in, breaking up on the beach, then hissing away again through the pebbles. A grim-looking island with cliff sides that fell straight to the foaming ocean stood in the middle of the bay, and farther off, just a dark blur on the horizon, was another, lower island.