Star Song and Other Stories

"The same thing that's happened before, sir," Angus said calmly, letting Fogerty's glare bounce right off him. "The RebuScope made a mistake."

"Really," Fogerty said, turning the glare up another couple of notches. "The RebuScope. Convenient enough excuse."

"I don't think 'convenient' is exactly the word I would have chosen," Angus said. "But it is what happened."

He pressed keys on the RebuScope monitor, pulling up a copy of the ambassador's original Broadway request. "A very simple error, actually, compared with some we've seen. You see this letter C? It should have been a B."

A frown momentarily softened Fogerty's glare by a couple of horsepower.

"What?"

"The message wasn't 'I want to see a Broadway play,' " Angus amplified. "It was

'I want to be a Broadway play.' "

For a long minute Fogerty just stood there, staring down at the RebuScope, a look of disbelief on his face. "But that's absurd," he said when he finally found his voice again. " 'I want to be in a—?' No. It's ridiculous."

"Nevertheless, sir, that's what he wants," Angus said. "The question now is how you're going to get it for him."

Fogerty tried the glare again, but his heart was clearly no longer in it.

"Me?"

"You're the head of this operation," Angus reminded him. "You're the one who talks to the White House, authorizes the expenditures, and accepts the official plaudits. We await your instructions. Sir."

For another minute Fogerty was silent, gazing at and through Angus. Then, with obvious reluctance, he turned to look at me. "I suppose you have the contacts for this one, too?"

With anyone else who treated people the way Fogerty did, I'd have been tempted to demand a little groveling before I gave in. But, down deep, I suspected that being polite to underlings was as close as Fogerty ever got to a grovel. "I know a few people," I said. "There may be a way to pull it off."

"Seems to me there are at least two stage versions of 'Beauty and the Beast'

out there, aren't there?" Angus suggested. "He'd be a natural."

"Wouldn't work," I said, shaking my head. "Too many lines. Too much real acting."

"How about a non-speaking role, then?" Fogerty suggested. "Maybe a walk-on part?"

I snorted. "Would you travel a three hundred light-years for a walk-on part?"

A muscle in his jaw twitched. "No, I suppose not," he conceded. "I suppose that also lets out any chance of using him as part of the set decoration."

"It does," I agreed. "Which leaves only one approach, at least only one I can think of. We're going to have to have a play written especially for him."

Fogerty waved a hand. "Of course," he said, as if it had been obvious all along.

"Well. The phone's over there—better get busy."

"What, you mean now?" I asked, looking at my watch. "It's after one in the morning."

"New York is the city that never sleeps, isn't it?" he countered, jabbing a finger at the phone. "Besides, we need to get this on track. Go on, start punching."

There were six New York playwrights with whom I had at least a passing acquaintance. The first five numbers I tried shunted me to answering machines or services. My sixth try, to Mark Ski

"Oh, sure," he interrupted. "You're the one who came up with that rotating chandelier/staircase gizmo, weren't you? That was a snazzy trick—tell you the truth, I was damned if I could see how that was going to work when I wrote it into the play. So what's up?"

"I'm currently attached to the State Department group in charge of escorting the Fuzhtian ambassador around," I said. "We're—"

"Oh, yeah, sure—Lebowitz. Yeah, I remember seeing you in the background in one of those TV shots. Couldn't place you at the time—that was you in the brown suit and Fedora sort of thing, right? Sure. So what's up?"

"The ambassador wants to be in a Broadway play," I told him. "We need you to write it for him."

There was a long silence. "You what?"

"We need you to write a play for him," I repeated.

"Ah," he said. "Uh... yeah. Well... can he act?"

"I don't know," I said. "Oh, and the only translator he brought with him prints everything he says in rebus pictures."

"Uh-huh. And you're sure he really wants to do this?"

"We think so. He climbed up on the stage at the St. James tonight and started singing from 'How to Succeed.' "

Mark digested that. "So you're wanting a musical?"

"I don't think it really matters," I said. "Fuzhtian singing voices seem to be the same as their speaking ones, except a lot louder. Might help with stage projection, but otherwise it's not going to make much difference."

"Yeah," Mark said. "And how loud can you make a rebus, anyway? Sure, I'll take a

crack at it. How soon do you need this?"

I looked at Fogerty. "He says sure, and how soon."

"Tell him two days."

I goggled. "What?"

"Two days." Fogerty gestured impatiently at the phone. "Go on, tell him."

I swallowed. "Mr. Fogerty, the head of the delegation, says he needs it in two days."

I don't remember Mark's response to that exactly. I do know it lasted nearly five minutes, covered the complete emotional range from incredulity to outrage and back again, tore apart in minute detail Fogerty's heritage, breeding, intelligence, integrity, and habits, and never once used a single swear word.

Playwrights can be truly awesome sometimes.

Finally, he ran down. "Two days, huh?" he said, sounding winded but much calmer.

"Okay, fine, he's on. You want to tell him what it's going to cost?"

He quoted me a number that would have felt right at home in a discussion of the national debt. I relayed it to Fogerty and had the minor satisfaction of seeing him actually pale a little. For a second I thought he was going to abandon the whole idea, but he obviously realized he wouldn't do any better anywhere else.

So with a pained look on his face he gave a single stiff nod. "He says OK," I told Mark.

"Fine," Mark said, all brisk business now. "I'll have it ready in forty-eight hours. Incidentally, I trust you realize how utterly insane this whole thing is."

Privately, I agreed with him. Publicly, though, I was a company man now. "The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity," I told him.

"I hope you're right," he grunted. "So where do you want the play delivered?" The next two days were an incredible haze of whirlwind chaos. While Fogerty and a skeleton crew escorted the ambassador on a tour of New York, the rest of us worked like maniacs to organize his theatrical debut. There was a theater to hire on a couple of days' notice—no mean feat on Broadway—a complete stage crew to assemble, a casting agent to retain for whatever other parts Mark wrote into this forty-eight-hour wonder, and a hundred other details that needed to get worked out.

To my quite honest astonishment, they all did. We got the Richard Rodgers theater hired for an off-hours matinee, the backstage perso

The play was a masterpiece in its own unique way: an actual, coherent story completely cobbled together from famous scenes and lines from other plays and movies. Fogerty nearly had an apoplectic fit when he saw it, wondering at the top of his lungs why he should be expected to pay a small fortune for what was essentially a literary retread. I calmed him down by pointing out that (A)

this would allow an obvious entertainment buff like the ambassador to learn his lines with a minimum of rehearsal time, which would get this whole thing over with more quickly and enable us to get out of our overpriced Manhattan hotel and back to the overpriced Washington hotel which the government already had a lease on; and (B) that Mark had even managed to choose scenes and lines that should translate reasonably well on the RebuScope, which would help make the show at least halfway intelligible for the audience. Eventually, Fogerty cooled down.