Kennedy nodded. “Simple. Quick. All this food waiting for us on this planet—billions of human beings we can convert. All ours!”

  They gloated quietly, wordlessly for a moment. Then the doorbell chimed.

  “At this hour!” the creature that had been Marge Spalding exclaimed.

  “Answer it,” Kennedy said.

  Spalding walked toward the door and opened it. A man in his middle fifties stood there, looking abashed and uncertain about having rung the bell so late at night.

  “It’s Mr. Adams from next door,” Spalding said.

  Adams said, in an apologetic voice, “Hello there, Mr. Spalding. I know it’s late at night, and I hope I’m not intruding—but I was just coming home from the movies, and as I passed by outside our house I seem to have heard screams, and I think they were coming from in here—”

  “That’s right,” Spalding said calmly. “It was my wife Marge who was screaming.”

  Adams blinked. “Mrs. Spalding? But you all seem so calm now—I mean, I guess everything’s under control—”

  “Yes. Everything is under control,” Spalding said quietly.

  “If that’s the case,” Adams said, “I guess I’ll just be going along on home, then. Sorry to have bothered you. Just that I thought you might be needing help—”

  “We appreciate that very much, Mr. Adams. Wouldn’t you step in for a moment?”

  “Oh, but it’s late, and you say everything’s under control—”

  Spalding smiled. “All the same, if you’d come inside—”

  “Yes, do come in,” Marge urged. “We’ll fix you a little nightcap.”

  Adams hesitated doubtfully, wavering between his desire to be a good neighbor and his wish to get home and to bed. At length he said, “Well, just for a moment. I’ve always believed in being neighborly. Guess I’ll come in, if you’re nice enough to ask me.”

  “We’re glad to have you, Mr. Adams. There—don’t stand in the hall. Come on in and close the door. This is my brother-in-law, Ted Kennedy.”

  “How do you do,” Adams said, as Spalding closed the door. The little man looked around, suddenly confused. “Why—you all look so grim—”

  Hands reached for him. Mr. Adams uttered half a cry of surprise before Spalding’s hand tightened over his mouth. The absorption began . . .

  There was no stopping it. Mr. Adams was absorbed and transformed.

  The hunger of the mimic of Altair VI was insatiable. Today, Mr. Adams; tomorrow, the universe . . .

  THE END

  Counterpart

  MARK JENNER delivered the play’s final line with as much force as he could muster, and the curtain dropped like a shroud, cutting off stage from audience. Jenner gasped for breath and fashioned a warm smile for his face to wear. The other six members of the cast left the wings and arranged themselves around him, and the curtain rose again for the calls. A trickle of applause crossed the footlights.

  This is it, Jenner thought. We’re through.

  He bowed graciously, peering beyond the glare of the foots to count the house. The theater was about three quarters full—but half the people out there were free-riders, pulled in by the management just to give the house a semblance of fullness. And how many of the others were discount-ticket purchasers? Probably, Jenner thought as the curtain dropped again, there were no more than fifty legitimate customers in the house. And so another play went down the drain. A savage voice within him barked mockingly, telling him that it was his fault, that he no longer had what it took to hold an audience, that he lacked the subtle magnetism needed to pull people out of their homes and into the theater.

  There would be no more curtain calls. Tiredly, Jenner walked off into the wings and saw Dan Hall, the producer, standing there. Abruptly the tinsel glamor of curtain calls faded. There could be only one reason why Hall was here now, and the dour, sallow cast of the producer’s pudgy face left no doubt in Jenner’s mind. Closing notices would be posted tonight. Tomorrow, Mark Jenner would be back to living off capital again and waiting out his days.

  “Mark . . .”

  Jenner stopped. Hall had reached out to touch his arm. “Evening, Dan. How goes it?”

  “Bad.”

  “The receipts?”

  Hall chuckled dryly. “What receipts? We had a houseful of unemployed actors sitting out there on passes; and the advance sale for tomorrow night is about eleven bucks’ worth.”

  “There isn’t going to be any tomorrow night, is there, Dan?” Jenner asked leadenly.

  Hall did not answer. Marie Haas, the ingenue, radiant in the sparkling gown that looked so immodest on so young a girl, glided toward them. She wrapped one arm around the rotund producer, one around Jenner. On stage, the hands were busy pulling the set apart.

  “Big house tonight, wasn’t it?” she twittered.

  “I was just telling Mark,” Hall said. “Most of those people were unemployed actors here on passes.”

  “And,” Jenner added, “there are seven more unemployed actors here on this stage right now.”

  “No!” Marie cried.

  Jenner tried to smile. It was rough on a girl of nineteen to lose her first big play after a ten-day run; but, he thought, it was rougher on a forty-year-old ex-star. It wasn’t so long ago, he told himself, that the name Mark Jenner on a marquee meant an automatic season’s run. Lovely to Look At, opened October 16, 1973, ran 630 performances. Lorelei, opened December 9, 1977, ran 713 performances. Girl of the Dawn, opened February 7, 1981, ran 583 performances. Misty Isle, opened March 6, 1989—ran ten performances. Jenner peered wearily at the producer. The rest of the cast had gathered round, now, half of them still in war paint and costume. As the star, Jenner had the right to ask the question. He asked it.

  “We’re through, aren’t we, Dan?”

  Hall nodded slowly. “The theater owner told me tonight that we’re below the minimum draw. He’s exercising option and throwing us out; he wants to rent the place for video. We’re through, all right.”

  Jenner climbed methodically out of his costume, removed his makeup, cocked a sardonic eye on the spangled star on the door of his dressing cubicle, and left the theater. He had arranged to meet his old friend Walt Hollis after the show for a drink. Hollis was an electrician, currently handling the lights for one of the other Broadway shows—one of the hits. They had agreed to meet in a bar Jenner liked, on Forty-ninth Street off Sixth Avenue.

  The bar was a doggedly old-fashioned one, without any of the strippers currently the mode in depuritanized New York, without B-girls, without synthetics, without video. Jenner felt particularly grateful for that last omission.

  He sat slumped in the booth, a big, rumpled-looking man just beginning to get fleshy, and gripped the martini in one of his huge hands. He needed the cold drink to unwind the knot of tension in his stomach. Once, acting had unwound it for him; now, an evening on the stage wound it only a little tighter.

  “What is it I’ve lost, Holly?” he demanded. His voice was the familiar crackling baritone of old; automatically, he projected it too far.

  The man opposite him frowned, as though he were sagging under the burden of knowing that he was Mark Jenner’s oldest and possibly last friend. “You’ve lost a job, for one thing,” Walt Hollis said lightly.

  Jenner scowled. “I don’t mean that. I mean—why have I lost what I once had? Why have I gone downhill instead of up? I ought to be at the peak of my acting career now; instead, I’m a has-been at forty. Was I just a flash in the pan, then, back in the seventies?”

  “No. You had talent.”

  “Then why did I lose it?”

  “You didn’t,” Hollis said calmly. He took a deep sip of his gin and tonic, leaned back, stared at his much bigger companion. “You didn’t lose anything. You just didn’t gain.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do,” Hollis said. His thumbs squeezed against his aching eyeballs for a moment. He had had this conversation with Jenner too often, in the past five years. Jenner simply did not listen. “Acting isn’t the easiest profession in the world, Mark. Lord knows I don’t have to tell you that. But what you’ve never grasped is that acting has toughened up tremendously since the days you broke in. And you’ve remained right at the same level you hit at the start of your career.”

  Jenner tightened his lips. He felt cold and curiously alone even in this crowded midtown bar.

  “I used to be a star,” he said.

  “Used to be. Look, Mark, these days you need something colossal to drag people out of their warm homes and into a Broadway theater. Homes are too comfortable; the streets are too risky. You never can tell when you’ll get mugged if you step out after dark. So you don’t step out. You stay home.”

  “People come out to see that British play, the one with what’s-his-name in it,” Jenner pointed out.

  “With Bert Tylor? Of course they do. Tylor has what it takes to get people into a theater.”

  “And I don’t, is that it?” Jenner fought to keep the crispness out of his voice.

  Hollis nodded slowly. “You don’t have it, Mark. Not any more.”

  “And what is this—this magic something-or-other that I lack?”

  “It’s empathy,” Hollis said. “The power to get yourself across the footlights, to set up a two-way flow, to get those people in the audience so damned involved in what you’re saying that it turns into part of themselves.”

  Jenner glowered at the small man. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. All you did just now was to define what any actor has to do.”

  Hollis shook his head. “It’s more than that, now. Now you need special help—techniques for reaching the soul of the fellow in the six-buck seat. I’ve been offering you these techniques for almost a year, but you’ve been too damned stubborn to listen to me—too proud to admit a gadget could help you.”

  “I had a part lined up,” Jenner said in a weak voice. “Last May Dan Hall came to me, said he was doing a play that looked good for me, and was I interested? Hell, sure I was interested. I hadn’t worked for two years; I was supposed to be box-office poison. But Dan signed me.”

  Hollis said, “And you rehearsed all summer, and half the fall. And played the sticks half the winter while that poor hapless devil of a playwright tried to fix up the play you were killing, Mark.”

  Jenner sucked in his breath sharply. He began to say something, then throttled it. He shook his head slowly like a bull at bay. “Go on, Holly. I have this coming to me. Don’t pull the punches.”

  The small man said thinly, “You weren’t putting that play across the footlights, Mark. So when it finally got to New York it opened in March and closed in March. Okay. You had all the rope you needed, and you sure hanged yourself! Where do you go from here?”

  “Nowhere. I’m at the bottom of the heap now.”

  “You still have a chance,” Hollis said. He leaned forward and seemed to be hanging on Jenner’s words like an anxious chickenhawk. “I can help you. I’ve been telling you that for a year.”

  “I don’t want my mind tinkered with.”

  “You could have your name up in lights again, live in a Fifth Avenue penthouse. You could get back all the things you used to have, before—before you started to slide.”

  Jenner stared at the little man’s pale, unlined face as if Hollis were nothing but a pane of glass, and as if all the secrets of the universe were inscribed on the back of the booth behind him. In a low voice Jenner said, “I won’t get everything back. Fame, maybe. Money, maybe. But not everything.”

  “You didn’t need to make your wife run away from you,” Hollis said with deliberate cruelty. “But maybe you could make her want to come back.”

  “Would I want her back?”

  “That’s up to you. I can’t answer all your questions for you. What time is it?”

  “One-fifteen a.m. The morning papers will be out soon. Maybe they’ll mention the closing of Misty Isle. Maybe there’ll be a sticky little paragraph about how Mark Jenner has helped to kill another good play.”

  “Forget all that,” Hollis said sharply. “Stop brooding about the past. You’re going to start everything over tonight.”

  Jenner looked up, surprised. “When did I agree to let you monkey with me, Holly?”

  “You didn’t. But what else can you do, now?”

  The surprise widened on Jenner’s face. He looked down and stared at the formica tabletop until the pattern blurred before his eyes. Hollis was right, Jenner realized numbly. There was nothing else to do now, no place else to go, no more ships to come in.

  “Okay,” Jenner said in a harsh, throaty voice. “You win. Let’s get out of here.”

  They took the Bronx undertube to Hollis’ Riverdale home. Jenner kept a car stored in a Fifty-ninth Street garage, but four martinis in little more than an hour and a half had left him too wobbly to drive, and Hollis did not have a license. At half past one in the morning, the tube was crowded; Jenner and Hollis sat in one of the middle cars, and Jenner was bitterly amused to note that nobody seemed to recognize him, or at least no one cared to come over and say, “Pardon me, but are you really . . .”

  In the old days, Jenner recalled, his agents had forbade him strictly to enter the subways. They didn’t even have the undertubes then. But if the Mark Jenner of 1977 had entered a subway, he would have been ripped apart, Orpheus-like, by the autograph hunters. Now, he was just another big man with a martini-glaze on his face.

  Hollis remained silent all through the twenty-minute trip, and that forced Jenner back on his own inner resources. It was not pleasant for him to have to listen to the output of his own mind for twenty minutes. There were too many memories rising to confront him.

  He could remember the tall, gawky teen-age Ohio boy who had overnight turned into the tall, confident New Yorker of twenty-one, back in ’70. The School of Dramatic Arts; the wide-eyed hours of discovering Ibsen and Chekhov and Pirandello; the big break, the lead in Right You Are at a small off-Broadway house, with a big-name Broadway mogul happening to come to the dingy little second-story theater to see young Jenner’s mordant, incisive Laudisi.

  The following autumn, a bit part in a short-lived comedy, thanks to that lucky break. Then some television work; after that, a longer part in a serious drama. Finally, in the spring of 1973, an offer to play the juvenile lead in a bit of froth called Lovely to Look At. Jenner was twenty-four and obscure when the show opened, that fall; when it closed, two years later, he was famous. He owned two Cadillacs, lived in a penthouse apartment, gave away vintage champagne the way other men handed out cigarettes. In 1976, while out in Hollywood doing the film version of Lovely, he unexpectedly married dazzling, bosomy, much-publicized, twenty-year-old Helene Bryan, current queen of the movie colony. Experts predicted that the fabulous Jenner would weary of the pneumatic blonde within months; but Helene turned out to have unexpected depth, wearing a real personality behind her sleek personality mask. In the end it was she who wearied of a down-slipping, bitterly irascible, and incipiently alcoholic Jenner, eleven years later. Eleven years, Jenner thought! They seemed like a week, and the two years of separation a lifetime.

  Jenner thought back on the successes. Two years of Lorelei; a year and nine months of Girl of the Dawn; then the ill-starred turkey, Hullaballoo; and finally his last big hit, Bachelor Lady, which ran a year—October 1982 to September 1983. After that, almost overnight, people stopped coming to see Mark Jenner act; he had lost his hold. In the season of 1986-87 he appeared in no less than three plays, the longest-lived of which held the boards for five weeks. Somewhere along the line, he had lost his magic. He had also lost Helene, in that dreadful spring of 1987 when she returned to California to stay.

  And somewhere along the line, Jenner realized he had lost the eager young man who loved Ibsen and Chekhov and Pirandello. As a professional, he had specialized almost exclusively in frothy romantic confections. That was unintentional; it was simply that he could never resist a producer waving a fat contract. It wouldn’t have mattered, much, except that he kept up contact with Walt Hollis, one of the first people he had met when he came to New York, and Hollis served to remind Jenner of the Pirandello days.

  Hollis had never been an actor. He was a lighting technician in the old days, and a lighting technician he still was, the best of his craft—a slim, mousy little man who looked no older at fifty than he had at thirty. Hollis had been more than a mere electrician, though. He was a theoretician, a student of the acting technique, a graduate engineer as well. He tinkered with gadgets, and sometimes he told Jenner about them. Jenner listened with open ears, never retaining a thing.

  Two years ago, Hollis had told him of something new he was developing—a technique that might be able to turn any man with a bit of acting skill into a Barrymore, into an Olivier. Jenner had laughed. In that year, ’87, his main concern had been to show the world how self-sufficient he was in the face of adversity. He was not going to grasp at any electronic straws, oh no! That would be admitting he was in trouble!

  Well, he was in trouble. And as Misty Isle sank rapidly into limbo under a fierce critical barrage, Jenner bleakly realized he could sink no lower himself. Now was the time at last to listen to Hollis. Now was the time to clutch at any offer of salvation. Now.

  “We’re here,” Hollis said, breaking a twenty-minute silence. “Watch your step getting out. You don’t want to trip and mash up your pretty profile.”

  In the twenty years he had known Walt Hollis, Jenner had been inside the little man’s home no more than a dozen times, and not at all in the last decade. It was a tidy little place, four small rooms, overfastidiously neat. Bookshelves lined the walls—an odd assortment of books, half literary, half technical. Hollis lived by himself; he had never married. That had made it hard for Jenner to see him socially very often; Helene had hated to visit bachelors.

  Now Jenner allowed himself to be deposited in a comfortable armchair, while Hollis, ever tense, paced the worn broadloom carpet in front of him. Jenner felt completely helpless. Hollis was his last hope.

 

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