STARSHIP TROUPERS IV: THE UNKNOWN GUEST
Chapter Three: Ghost in the Machine
by
Christopher
Stasheff
Copyright 2011
I know I shouldn't have stared—but to a newcomer like me, Ogden seemed like a down-to-earth type, for an actor. If he claimed to have lived through a ghost story, I wanted to hear it.
"The theater was several hundred years old when I played there," Ogden said. "Scarcely any new ones being built now, more's the pity—but when it was brand-new, it had the latest state-of-the-art piece of stage machinery—an elevator that came up from the scene shop below, so that you could simply put the scenery on the elevator and run it up twenty feet to the stage, where you could unload the flats and platforms to set them up."
Larry nodded with a snide smile. "None of that heavy lugging up stairs that so tires the stagehands."
I didn't even bother glancing at him.
"I take it there was a trap door in the stage floor, to close the elevator hole when it wasn't in use," Marnie said.
"Quite so—but if you needed a trap, say for Ophelia's grave or for Mephistopheles to make an imposing entrance, you only had to park the elevator a few feet down and build a fence around it."
"Very handy," I said. "How come they don't build them any more?"
"Oh, they do," Winston assured me, "in New York or London and the other theatrical capitals."
"You'll even find them in the provinces now and then," Barry added, "but not in primitive playing spaces on remote planets."
"We are kind of out of the mainstream," I admitted. "So how does the elevator tie in with the ghost light?" Then it hit me, and my eyes went round. "Oh."
"Precisely." Ogden nodded. "The very first night the theater was open for rehearsals, someone left the trap door open when the elevator was all the way down—thought to come back and finish the job in the morning, I suppose..."
"And they forgot to leave the ghost light on." Marty's face turned lugubrious.
Ogden nodded. "We can only guess what the apprentice was thinking—decided to take a shortcut across the stage to the house, no doubt, instead of going out the stage door and around the building to the parking lot. Whatever his reason, he must have felt confident in his ability to feel his way a foot at a time across a darkened stage."
"He wasn't careful enough." My stomach sank.
Ogden nodded sadly. "They found him the next morning, crumpled on the elevator floor—so we were never in much doubt as to whose ghost haunted that theater."
We were silent as the implications of an actor dying so young, and in such a horrible fashion, sank in. Then Lacey asked, "What kind of haunting did he do?"
"Only the usual run of poltergeist mischief," Ogden said, "tie lines coming loose, lamps popping loose from their sockets, that sort of thing. But he had a sympathetic side."
Barry nodded. "That happened while Horace and I were there. A young woman looked up and froze, then backed away, pointing and cawing instead of giving her line."
"Quite a trial to cover with an ad lib, I assure you," Horace said.
"Especially when we heard the snatch chains snap, and a hardened-foam tree trunk slammed down right where she had been standing," Barry said.
Ogden nodded. "Not the ghost's work—he was up on the fly gallery, waving frantically at her. She had seen him; that was why she had gone speechless and backed away."
"What did break the snatch chains?" I asked.
"Metal fatigue—or a defect in manufacture. It happens." Ogden shrugged. "And with one broken, the other couldn't take the weight. It broke, too."
Suzanne shuddered. "Let's hope the ghost here is on our side the same way."
We were silent again, thinking that over. Then Prudence asked, "You don't suppose she was trying to tell us something, do you?"
Silence again.
"Well, she was telling us to leave this theater," Suzanne offered.
"Yes, we could puzzle through that much," Marnie said, "but why?"
"Wait a minute, wait a minute." I waved my hands in a referee's "stop" signal. "Aren't we getting carried away here? So we saw something we could mistake for a ghost. That doesn't mean it was real."
"Don't be obtuse," Marnie snapped. "Of course it was a real ghost. This is a theater, isn't it?"
"But theaters don't have to give house room to phantoms," I objected.
"Perhaps not," Marnie said, "but they do."
My head was a little on the light side as I hit the light patch and closed my door. I decided a cup of mocha might settle me a bit, so I went over and punched the order into the beverage dispenser. While it was brewing, I changed into pajamas, then came back and reached for the cup.
It wasn't there. Come to that, the "brewing" light wasn't even lit. The dispenser hadn't dispensed.
I frowned, irritated—I wasn't exactly in the mood to troubleshoot a recalcitrant machine. Still, I wanted that mocha, so I could at least make sure it was plugged in.
I did. It was.
I muttered something impolite, pulled out my keyboard, plugged it into the diagnosis socket, and ran a couple of quick tests.
Nothing wrong.
Everything wrong. Why the dickens wouldn't it brew if all its circuits checked out?
Now I was wide awake, and determined to have an answer. I ran a couple of quick tests to make sure all the wires were still connected where they should be, and that current still flowed through all of them.
I ran the full diagnostic program, and was irked when it said the software was in fine shape. I downloaded the beverage dispensing program into my keyboard and ran a flyswatter program (for de-bugging). It found nothing to swat.
Now I was beginning to get frustrated and angry. I ran the virus checker, though where a beverage dispenser could pick up a virus I couldn't imagine—or didn't want to.
No virus.
I was getting really frustrated. I scrolled through the program, hoping that I could find something the de-bugger had missed. I couldn't. I had a strong impulse to go through it carefully, line by line, but I remembered what time it was and how early I had to be up the next day. Besides, I had the feeling that the line-by-line search would only leave me feeling even more frustrated. It was time to cut my losses. I put away the keyboard and tried to put the dispenser out of my mind as I rolled into bed.
I called to the 3DT tank, "Roll program," and wondered why we said "roll" for "begin" when we were talking about a laser scanning the faces of a cube. I was braced for more glitches, but the tank dutifully lit and showed me an excellent, though small, three-dimensional program of my favorite comedy. It took up right where I had shut it down the night before, of course.
It took a bit longer than usual to get sleepy, but I was more uptight than usual, too. After an hour of wit and pratfalls, though, I found my eyelids growing heavy, so I called, "Hold program." The tank blanked and I rolled over, secure in the knowledge that it would start right where I'd left off, the next night. I told the cabin, "Cut light," and it went dark, except for the glow from the baseboards. I closed my eyes, letting sleep flow over me.
Something clicked in the darkness.
I went rigid.
There was a hum, then the sound of pouring.
I stayed rigid, telling myself it couldn't be, but that if it was, it was just a delayed relay, some hang-up in the program, some timing error, but that didn't matter, because it couldn't be.
The aroma of hot chocolate and coffee filled the room and permeated my head.
I will pay no attention, I thought sternly, and started reciting a koan to take my mind off the delicious scent. Meditation worked—almost. I fell asleep—but as I sank into oblivion, I was still wondering what had gotten into that machine.
I woke up thinking about the malfunction, of course. I wasn't so steamed that I didn't remember to throw out the cold mocha, but the problem still nagged at me all the way down the companionway and into the dining room—but what I found there wiped away my own troubles in an instant.
"What ho, Ramou!" Ogden waved at me, and nearly fell.
I dashed to prop him up and got a nosefull of used bourbon as he said, "Why, how kind."
I peeked out from under his arm at the first face I saw, which happened to be Suzanne's. "Where?" I asked.
"Merlo's searching his quarters right now." Suzanne took Ogden's hand, unobtrusively pressing fingers to his wrist to find his pulse. "Time for breakfast, Mr. Wellesley. Here's your chair."
"I'll take the chair, and gladly." Ogden stumbled in the general direction of the table. Suzanne and I steered, then braced him enough to slow his fall so that he sat without breaking the seat. Ogden nodded with satisfaction, as though at a compliment. "The seat, but not the meal. Not hungry, somehow."
"Yeah, you already drank your breakfast." I looked up at Suzanne and saw no distance now, only concern. "How is he?"
"Just fine, lad, just fine!" Ogden boomed.
"His pulse is strong and I think his blood pressure's within safe limits." Suzanne had trained as a nurse before she gave in to temptation and auditioned for summer stock. "I can't tell for sure without my gauge, though."
"But I can gauge what you might tell." Ogden blinked owlishly up at her. "Something about Ramou, isn't it."
Suzanne stiffened. "Please, Mr. Wellesley, have some coffee."
Oho! I thought. Did I still have a chance?
"Call me Ogden, dear, and coffee would be very nice."
Larry, of all people, was there with a huge steaming cup. "You take it black, don't you, Mr. Wellesley?"
"Any way I can get it, lad—like most things in life." Ogden managed to take a sip without sloshing too much out of the cup.
"Thanks, Larry." I tried to hide my surprise. He looked up at me in shock before he masked it with a tight smile and a nod.
Merlo came in with a bottle in his hand.
"Where was it?" Barry asked.
"In my cabin." Merlo showed him the label. "I stopped by to pick up the cure."
Barry nodded with satisfaction and produced a juice glass. Merlo filled it and handed it to Suzanne, who gave it to Ogden. "Drink it straight down, Mr. Wellesly."
"I'm not one for sipping, thank you, dear." Ogden chugged the fluid and set the glass down with a satisfied sigh that changed into gagging. His eyes bulged; he clasped his throat.
Merlo nodded with satisfaction. "Granny Hoorhee's Home Hangover Cure works every time. Just give him a minute."
"And a sip of coffee to wash the taste out." Suzanne held up the cup.
Ogden's tone was strangled. "I told you, my dear—I don't sip." His face creased in doubt. "Though perhaps I should have."
Nonetheless, he took a good couple of swallows. As he set the cup down, I asked, "Where'd you get the bottle, Mr. Wellesley?"
"No bottle," he gasped. "I only had a morning cup from the beverage dispenser."
I looked up at Merlo wide-eyed; he nodded. "I dialed one myself, Ramou. It was Irish coffee without the whipped cream."
"But I programmed his dispenser to stop synthesizing alcohol!"
"Well, the programming wore off." Merlo's look told me that he knew what I knew—programs don't wear out.
I frowned. Could Ogden's dispenser have picked up a virus?
Where from? Each unit had a stand-alone dedicated computer, not networked to the ship's central computer.
"Feeling better now, Mr. Wellesley?" Suzanne asked.
"Considerably worse." Ogden made a face. "Wherever did you find that vile concoction, Merlo?"
"Oklahoma City," Merlo answered. "Granny Hoorhees got her B.A. from a college there."
"Thank heavens she didn't stay for graduate school!" Ogden drained the cup and held it out to Suzanne. "Another coffee, if you would, my dear. I don't quite feel strong enough to totter over to the coffeepot after that."
Rehearsal went okay, though Barry had to coax Prudence quite a bit to get her to suffer loudly enough for the first row to hear her.
When we were winding up, Barry called, "Cast on stage, please."
Lacey frowned and put down her coat—it was autumn on Sandrock, and it was a pretty chilly planet to begin with—but Marnie kept hers on as she swept back onstage. "A little early for notes, isn't it, Barry?"
"Yes, we've only managed second tech," Ogden agreed.
"Just a brief announcement, friends. The director of the Sandrock Mineral Corporation has invited us all to a party Friday night."
There was a general groan. I looked the question at Suzanne, but she avoided my glance, so I turned to Ogden.
"A performance after the performance, Ramou," he explained. "We'll be on display—living trophies, of a sort."
"Yes, proving how wealthy and important our 'benefactor' is." Marnie managed to hide most of her anger, but enough of it came through for me to look at her in suspire. I hadn't realized she'd felt that way about Valdor. No wonder she'd devoted her time to spending his money.
"So the last thing we want to do is have fun," Larry interpreted.
"Exactly—and drink lightly while you're there. We don't want our hosts to see our less attractive characteristics."
"I don't have unattractive characteristics," Larry said with a frown.
Suddenly I found an overwhelming need to cough—and keep coughing. Larry transferred his frown to me. Suzanne looked over anxiously, then caught herself and turned back to Barry. I didn't know whether to be reassured or not.
As the spasm ended, Marnie said in a refrigerated tone, "I take it you disagree."
A scrap of Latin came to my rescue. "In vino veritas—and veritas ain't show business."
"Rather, its place is at the deepest level of a show," Ogden said, frowning. He looked around, collecting stares of blank incomprehension, and translated for them, "'In wine there is truth.'"
"And Ramou is saying there is no truth in theater?" Marnie exclaimed, outraged.
"We're in the business of making illusions, aren't we?" I asked.
"Yes, but they can cloak the truth! In fact, the whole point of drama is to reveal deeper truths than most people perceive of the world about them!"
"I stand corrected," I said humbly.
"Preferably in the corner," Larry said, "wearing a pointed hat."
Before I could answer with something about the shape of his head,
"I didn't know you had studied Latin, Ramou," Horace said, pleased.
"Didn't," I said. "I picked it up from a 3DT epic."
Winston didn't seem to notice my pale attempt at culture. "Perhaps Picasso said it best: 'Art is the lie that tells the truth.'"
"Or, at least, reveals the playwright's honest opinion," said Horace, "and the greatest dramatists were able to perceive deeper truths than most of us can."
"That's true of all the arts, though, isn't it?" Lacey asked.
"Quite so." Barry nodded. "Even though they cannot be stated in words, what Van Gogh and Beethoven and Rodin perceived communicates itself to us through their work and, if we are wise enough to heed them, changes the way we live our lives."
"We provide entertainment to illuminate and enlighten, Ramou," Marnie said severely, "not merely to titillate."
Ogden nodded. "The great artists were able to perceive concepts that permeate our culture, and to express them in ways that touch us to the core."
"Appropriate to the cap," Larry said.
I gave him an irritated glance. "Acta est fibula, Plaudite!"
Ogden suppressed a smile but kept his mouth shut. Horace, however, hid a sour expression by muttering something about preferring to decline six drinks.
"I didn't know you spoke Latin, Ramou," Charles said with agreeable surprise.
My face heated up, and I suddenly thought of something I needed to write on my tablet. "It was a comedy set in ancient Rome."
"What epic featured that line?" Barry asked.
"Ben Heard," I answered.
"Oh yes, I remember now." Ogden's gaze turned distant. "Lovely young woman played an extra in that one."
"Great comic bits," Marty said with a grin, "even if it is fifty years old."
"Excellent comedians endure as long as excellent actors," Ogden said, "and Ivan Beyrilius is one of the best."
"I suppose it is necessary to redo every classic whenever a new medium is invented," Barry sighed, "though I should think the computers could turn Charlton Heston's role into a three-dimensional format."
"Lew Wallace will never know what he started," Horace said.
"I take it he was the author?" Lacey asked.
"Yes, wrote it shortly after resigning his commission as a general," Barry said, "and while he was governor of the New Mexico Territory."
"Capped his triumph there by promising Billy the Kid amnesty, then resigning his post while the Kid was still in jail," Merlo said with a coagulated look.
"Try to remember all of these bon mots, will you, friends?" Barry stood up. "They will make wonderful small talk at the party tomorrow night. Well then, home to the Cotton Blossom. We should all be able to squeeze in six hours' sleep before we begin dress rehearsals tomorrow."
