CHAPTER I
Von Zorn Is Perturbed
Whenever Von Zorn, chief of Nine Planets Films, ran into trouble he automatically started the televisors humming with calls for Anthony Quade. The televisors were humming now. In fact they were shrieking hysterically. Quade’s code number bellowed out through a startled and partially deafened Hollywood on the Moon.
Von Zorn, teetering on the edge of his chair behind the great glass-brick desk, was throwing a fit.
“You can’t do this to me!” he yelped into the transmitter, his scrubby mustache bristling with outrage. “I know you can hear me, Quade! It’s a matter of life and death! Quade!”
A covey of anxious secretaries winced involuntarily as he swung the chair around.
“Get Quade!” he screamed. “Bring me Quade! All you do is stand around with your mouths open. I—” He paused, the light of an unpleasant idea dawning across his face. He was grinning disagreeably as he switched the televisor to a private wavelength.
“I’ll fix him!” he muttered. “I’ll—oh, hello.” This to the face that flashed onto the screen before him. Rapidly Von Zorn spoke to the face. It nodded, smiling grimly.
Afterward Von Zorn leaned back and called for a drink.
“Nine Planets on the brink of ruin,” he growled into the tilted glass, “and Quade runs out on me. I’ll fire him! I’ll blackball him all over the System! But not till he does this job.”
Meanwhile Tony Quade, relaxing comfortably in a seat at the Lunar Bowl, listened to a distant orchestra in the depths of the crater crash into the opening strains of the Star Symphony. Under his coat a pocket televisor was buzzing shrill commands.
Quade chuckled and shifted his big-boned body more comfortably in the padded chair. Kathleen Gregg, beside him, smiled in the dimness and he told himself that she was prettier than ever.
It was to her credit that she loathed the title of “The System’s Sweetheart” which an enthusiastic publicity department had bestowed upon her. She was one of Nine Planets’ brightest stars and Tony Quade was in love with her.
“Hello, stupid,” he said lazily. “You look worried. Anything wrong?”
“I suppose you know what you’re doing,” Kathleen murmured. “Of course, Von Zorn’s only been calling you half an hour.”
The cries from the pocket televisor had been all too audible, Quade realized. He grinned largely and laid an arm along the back of her chair.
“Let him yell.”
“It must be important, Tony.”
“I,” said Quade, “am resting. Shooting Star Parade was hard work. I need a rest. Anyhow, it’s much too nice a night to listen to Von Zorn.”
“It is nice,” the girl agreed. She glanced around them. This was the topmost tier of the Lunar Bowl. At their feet the long rows of seats swept down endlessly to the central platform far below, where an orchestra sat in the changing play of varicolored searchlights.
Behind these uppermost seats stretched Hollywood on the Moon, the strangest city in the Solar System. The wonder of Hollywood on the Moon does not quickly fade, even to eyes that have seen it often. It is a garden metropolis on the far side of Earth’s satellite, in a gigantic valley bounded by the Great Rim.
Here the film studios had built their city, washed by an artificially created, germ-free atmosphere, anchored in the crater by electro-magnetic gravity fields maintained in the caverns below. Far distant, the Silver Spacesuit glowed with pale radiance, the broad, white-lit expanse of Lunar Boulevard stretching past it toward the Rim.
From somewhere above a beam of light shot suddenly downward full upon them. Blinded, Quade and Kathleen looked up, seeing nothing at all. Then, without any warning, Quade arose and floated starward.
Kathleen made a quick, involuntary snatch at his vanishing heels, missed, and cried distractedly.
“Tony!”
From somewhere above his voice spoke with annoyance.
“They’ve got a gravity beam on me. I could get loose, but I’d break my neck.” The sound trailed off into a distant murmur. “I’ll murder Von Zorn for this....”
Quade felt solid metal beneath his feet. The beam faded. Blinking, he looked around. This was the lower lock of a police ship. Black-clad officers were wheeling away the great anti-gravity lens. A man with a captain’s bars took his finger off the button that had closed the lock and looked at Quade speculatively.
“What’s the idea?” Quade demanded crossly.
“Sorry, sir. We’re looking for a Moonship stowaway. You answer his description.”
“My name’s Quade. I don’t suppose you’d even look at my credentials.”
The captain looked blank.
“Might be forged, you know. We can’t afford to take chances. If you’re Tony Quade, Mr. Von Zorn can identify you.”
“He will,” Quade said between his teeth. “Yeah—he will!”
Five minutes later they stood in Von Zorn’s office. The film executive looked up from a script and nodded coldly.
“Tell him who I am,” Quade said in a weary voice. “I’ve got a date.”
“It’s not as easy as that. You’re either Quade or a Moonship stowaway. If you’re Quade I’ve got to talk to you.”
“I’ve got a date. Also, I quit.”
Von Zorn ignored this.
“If you’re not Quade it means jail, doesn’t it?” He glanced at the captain, who nodded.
Quade thought it over. Of course he could get out of jail without much trouble, but not perhaps for some hours. Besides, he was beginning to wonder what mishap had occurred. It must be pretty serious.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m Quade. Now tell your stooge to rocket out of here.”
Von Zorn nodded with satisfaction, waved the captain away and pushed toward Quade a box of greenish, aromatic Lunar cigars. Quade pointedly lit one of his own cigarettes and sat down in a glass-and-leather chair.
“Shoot.”
But Von Zorn wasn’t anxious to begin. He took a cigar, bit the end off savagely, and applied flame. Finally he spoke.
“Udell’s dead.”
Quade was startled. He put down his cigarette.
“Poor old chap. How did it happen?”
“In the Asteroid Belt. A meteor smashed his ship. He was coming back here from Titan. A patrol ship just towed his boat in.”
Quade nodded. He had met Jacques Udell only a few times, but he’d liked the eccentric old fellow, who was somewhat of a genius in his own fashion. A scientist who had turned to film-making, he had once or twice created pictures that had amazed the System—like Dust, the saga of the nomad Martian tribes.
“All right.” Von Zorn punctuated his sentences with jabs of the cigar. “Get this, Tony. Last month Udell sent me a package and a letter. In the package was a can of film. I ran it off. He’d filmed the Zonals.”
“That’s been done before—for what it’s worth. They’re sub-humans, aren’t they? Not much story-value there.”
“They’re the queerest race in the system. Ever see one? Wait till you do—you won’t believe it! Udell worked some sort of miracle—he really got a story. The Zonals acted in it for him. Intelligently!”
“That doesn’t seem possible.”
“It isn’t. But Udell did it. He shot one reel and sent it to me with the scenario. It’s a good story. It’ll be a smash hit. I bought the pic on the strength of the first reel. Paid plenty for it. I’ve sent out advance blurbs and it’s too late to call them all back now.”
“Udell didn’t finish?”
Von Zorn shook his head.
“He was on his way back here for some reason or other, with two more reels finished, when a meteor cracked him up. The reels are spoiled, of course. Udell didn’t have sense enough to insulate ’em.”
Von Zorn snapped his cigar in two.
“I own the picture. I paid him for it. But he was the only man who knew how to make the Zonals work for the camera. See the catch, Tony?”
“You want me to finish the pic. A nice easy job. Why not fake the rest of it?”
“I don’t dare,” Von Zorn admitted frankly. “I’ve already blurbed this as the real thing. It’d raise too big a howl if we used robots. I can imagine what that Carlyle dame would do.”
Quade grinned maliciously.
“Catch-’em-Alive” Carlyle, interplanetary explorer extraordinary, was Von Zorn’s vulnerable point, his heel of Achilles.
“She’s suing me,” Von Zorn said, breathing audibly. “For libel. Says the Gerri Murri cartoons are libelous.”
“Well, aren’t they?” Quade asked. This animated cartoon series, depicting Gerry Carlyle as an inquisitive bug-eyed Venusian Murri, had proved immensely popular with everybody but Gerry. She had created a fair-sized riot in Froman’s Mercurian Theatre when she first recognized her counterpart on the screen.
“We won’t discuss that—that—” Von Zorn gulped and finished weakly, “that tomato. Do you want to see Udell’s film on the Zonals?”
“Might as well,” Quade agreed, getting up. “I may get some ideas about his method.”
“You’d better get some ideas,” Von Zorn said darkly, “or we’ll all be in the soup.”