The Golden Globe

Quite a while ago somebody had noticed that it just wasn't the same, the reporters crowding around without the lights, without the handicaps of technical gear to shoulder, notebooks to juggle and drop, microphones to thrust back and forth from mouth to mouth, and camera bags to swing around like incense thuribles. Especially the lights. It all looked rather drab without the lights.

So lights were brought in. At first they were carried by men and women. They still were, if the crowd of reporters wasn't large enough; anything to preserve the illusion that something important was going on here. But there was never any lack of reporters when Sparky was in town, so these lights and mini-pyros were rented from a firm specializing in hub-bub, called Hub-Bub Inc. The lights came from robotic helicopters the size of hummingbirds which circled slowly with no more noise than a bee and kept their beams always focused on the face of the Star. Other lights came from moving pylons, five feet tall, that shot up mini-rockets filled with flash powder and confetti and ticker tape, in addition to beams that swung back and forth like searchlights at a world premiere. Hub-Bub would also rent you a limo to cruise up to a theater or restaurant or te

Trailing at a discreet distance behind the beast were two automated sweepers, as required by city ordinance, feeding on brightly colored squares and strings of paper.

This was the ancient and honorable saturnalia that could spring up without warning at any time and any place, like fungus, if an important person happened to be in the neighborhood. It was the movable feast of the great bitch goddess Celebrity, the shufflin' charivari dedicated to the Public's Right to Know. It was a one-ring elephantine circus. Hoo, boy!

Sparky had spent a great deal of his life dealing with such circuses, but he saw them from the beast's belly. From here, the beast was all eyes and flashing teeth and moving lips. Ninety mouths and no butts, the beast had. He'd never seen it from the outside, where it was all ass.

Drop somebody down into the belly and he'd probably be frightened. There were so many teeth. Sparky knew that all it took to keep the beast fed was to keep smiling and keep moving. The bodyguards cleared a path, and he moved into it. Everyone was shouting questions and he couldn't hear any of them. He never could. But he nodded and smiled, and shuffled. It was enough. The beast was happy.

The bodyguards led the way to an unobtrusive door to the left of the main concourse. A storage locker, possibly, or a mop closet. There was no sign of any kind on the door. It opened to the man's thumbprint, and the three of them entered. Sparky turned at the last moment, paused, waving and smiling. Then the door closed behind him.

He put the smile away until it was needed again, let his shoulders and spine relax. He did a few neck rolls.

"Can I get you anything, boss?" one of the bodyguards asked.

"No, thanks, Rocko, I'll be fine." He walked across the thick-pile blue carpet toward a buffet table. There were heaps of fruit and veggies, attractively displayed, trays of cookies, a few steaming covered trays. Sparky filled a small bowl with radishes and pickles and other noshing food, carried them to a plush leather chair, and settled into it.

The room was provided by the airport for people like Sparky who could not wait out on the concourse. For an a

The one really extravagant feature of the room was the fireplace. A real fire burning real wood crackled on the hearth. The first time here, Sparky had burned his hand, thinking it was a holo projection. He remembered wondering what it cost to clean the pollutants and combustion products out of the air. About twenty special permits were required on Luna to install and maintain such an outrageous thing. Since that first time he hadn't thought about it at all. Sparky was by now thoroughly accustomed to luxury.

Beyond the tall windows the massive hulks of deep-space ships were trundled back and forth from cargo bay to fueling station to launchpads just over the horizon. From time to time one of them lit its torch and leaped into the sky atop a light so bright the windows polarized automatically to protect human eyesight.

Sparky never looked at any of this. He sat with his back to the window and unrolled his Scrawlpad. When he pushed a button columns of figures raced across the screen. When he stopped, he made a note with his stylus in his small, precise hand. He occupied himself this way for ten minutes.

"Would you like some coffee, Sparky?"

He looked up. An attractive woman in a blue spaceport-worker uniform was holding a steaming cup on a tray. Sparky took it, smiled at her, and looked back to his work. After a minute he noticed she was still there.

"Can I do something for you?" The employees were not supposed to ask for autographs, but sometimes they did. Sparky was usually easy about it.

"Actually, you could." The woman produced a card and handed it to him. "My name is Hildy Johnson, and I'm a reporter for the News Nipple."

"A very new reporter, evidently," Sparky said, a

"Very new," she agreed. "Just in town from the dinosaur farm with a new job as cub reporter."

"You worked on a dinosaur farm?" Sparky had been thinking of dinosaurs for the new story arc scheduled to start in six months. "What was that like?"

"I got tired of shoveling brontosaur turds. Sparky, my editor did tell me that places like this are off-limits. Truce zones, he called them. And I'm not here to interview you."

"You're not?"

"Well, not right now. I just thought it wouldn't hurt to approach you and ask for an interview at a later date. I wanted to show you I could get in here, if I tried. I've been told you admire initiative."

Sparky was begi

"I admire chutzpah," he said. "It's how I got started in this business myself. But what if you made me angry? Then I might never give you an interview."

"You seldom do, anyway. I thought it was worth a shot. If you turn me down, I haven't lost anything, and I go looking for my big story somewhere else." She smiled, and shrugged her shoulders.

"Call my secretary tomorrow morning," he said. "He'll set something up. Now get out of here, you sneaky person." He watched her hurry away toward a door he assumed led to the kitchen.

"Rocko," he said, and across the room the big man stood up quickly and hurried to Sparky's side.

"Did you see that girl who was just here?"

"Yeah?"

"She was a reporter."

Rocko looked surprised, twisted to look at the door Johnson had used for her exit, as if his eyes could bore right through it.

"Find out how she got in here, and tell airport security. Have them plug the hole."

"You got it, Spark-man," Rocko said, and started away.

"And Rocko?"

He turned, eyebrows raised.

"If this happens again, you're fired."

"Naturally."

Sparky smiled, and went back to his Scrawlpad. In one sense, the mistake wasn't Rocko's fault. Airport security should have kept Hildy Johnson at bay. But in a larger sense, it was his fault. Rocko was in charge of all studio security, and especially the person of Sparky Valentine, the studio's most valuable asset. It was up to him to see anyplace Sparky visited was safe, and if it wasn't, either advise Sparky not to go there or make it safe with his own people.