Part 15 (1/2)

”A trenchant image of history,” Ivan said. ”Too bad Sh.e.l.ley got to it first. Meanwhile, the truth is that after making the decision to go on with the raid, Colonel Jackson appeared, in the words of his subordinates, somewhat stunned. When they landed on the emba.s.sy roof he led the first unit in, and when they got lost inside, the whole force was effectively without leaders.h.i.+p for most of the crucial first half-hour. All the accounts of this period describe it as the utmost chaos, saved only when Sergeant Payton-not Colonel Jackson; the TV movie lied about that-when Payton found Ms. Bellows, and she led them to all the hostage rooms they hadn't found.” Colonel Jackson; the TV movie lied about that-when Payton found Ms. Bellows, and she led them to all the hostage rooms they hadn't found.”

”All right, all right.” John frowned. ”So I'm supposed to be kind of s.p.a.ced out in this scene.”

”Don't go for too deep an a.n.a.lysis, John, you might strain something. But essentially you have it. Having committed the force to the raid, even though you're vastly undermanned because of the d.a.m.ned helicopters breaking down, you're a bit frozen by the risk of it. Got that?”

”Yeah. But I don't believe it. Jackson was a hero.”

”Fine, a hero, lots of medals. Roomfuls of medals. If he pinned them on he'd look like the bride after the dollar dance. He'd collapse under their weight. But now let's try showing what really happened.”

”All right.” John drew himself up. ”I'm ready.”

The shooting of the scene was the part they all enjoyed the most; this was the heart of the activity, the reason they kept making movies to occupy their free hours at Luna Three. Ivan and John and Melina and Pierre-Paul, the theoreticians who traded directing ch.o.r.es from project to project, always blocked the scenes very loosely, allowing a lot of room for improvisation. Thus scenes like this one, which were supposed to be chaotic, were played out with a manic gusto. They were good at chaos.

And so for nearly a half-hour they rushed about the interior of their Teheran emba.s.sy compound-the base storage warehouse, with its immense rows of boxes arranged behind white panels of plywood to resemble the compound's buildings and their interiors. Their shouts were nearly drowned by the clatter of recorded helicopters, while intermittent lights flashed in the darkness. Cutouts representing the helicopters were pasted to the clear dome overhead, silhouetted against the unearthly brilliance of the stars-these last had become a trademark of Luna Three Productions, as their frequent night scenes always had these unbelievably bright stars overhead, part of the films' dreamlike effect.

The actors playing Marines bounded about the compound in their gas masks, looking like aliens descended to ravage a planet; the actors playing hostages and Revolutionary Guards lay scattered on the floor, except for a few in protected rooms, who fought or cried for help. John and Pierre-Paul and the rest hunted the compound for Melina, playing Annette Bellows. For a while it looked as if John would get to her first, thus repeating the falsehood of the De Niro film. But eventually Pierre-Paul, playing Sergeant Payton, located her room, and he and his small unit rushed about after the clear-headed Bellows, who, as she wrote later, had spent most of her months in captivity planning what she should do if this moment ever came. They located the remaining comatose hostages and lugged them quickly to the plywood helicopter on the compound roof. The sound of shots punctuated the helicopters' roar. They leaped through the helicopter's door, shafts of white light stabbing the air like Islamic swords.

That was it; the flight away would be filmed in their little helicopter interior. Ivan turned off the helicopter noise, shouted ”Cut!” into a megaphone. Then he shut down all the strategically placed minicams, which had been recording every minute of it.

”What bothers me about your movies, Ivan,” John said, ”is that you always take away the hero. Always!”

They were standing in the shallow end of the base pool, cooling off while they watched the day's rushes on a screen filling one wall of the natatorium. Many of the screens showed much the same result: darkness, flickering light, alien shapes moving in the elongated dance-like way that audiences on Earth found so surreal, so mesmerizing. There was little indication of the pulsing rhythms and wrenching suspense that Ivan's editing would create from this material. But the actors were happy, seeing arresting images of desperation, of risk, of heroism in the face of a numbingly loud confusion.

Ivan was not as pleased. ”s.h.i.+t!” he said. ”We're going to have to do it again.”

”Looks okay to me,” John remarked. ”Son of Film Noir Returns from the Grave. But really, Ivan, you've got to do something about this prejudice against heroes. I saw Escape from Teheran Escape from Teheran when I was a kid, and it was an inspiration to me. It was one of the big reasons I got into engineering.” when I was a kid, and it was an inspiration to me. It was one of the big reasons I got into engineering.”

Pierre-Paul objected. ”John, just how did seeing a commando film get you interested in engineering?”

”Well,” John replied, frowning, ”I thought I'd design a better helicopter, I guess.” He ignored his friends' laughter. ”I was pretty shocked at how unreliable they were. But the way old De Niro continued on to Teheran! The way he extricated all the hostages and got them back safely, even with the choppers dropping like flies. It was great! We need heroes, and history tells the story of the few people who had what it takes to be one. But you're always downplaying them.”

”The Great Man Theory of History,” Pierre-Paul said scornfully.

”Sure!” John admitted. ”Great Woman too, of course,” nodding quickly at the frowning Melina. ”It's the great leaders who make the difference. They're special people, and there aren't many of them. But if you believe Ivan's films, there aren't any at all.”

With a snort of disgust, Ivan took his attention from the rushes. ”h.e.l.l, we are going to have to do that scene again. As for my theory of history, John, you both have it and you don't. As far as I understand you.” He c.o.c.ked his head and looked at his friend attentively. On the set they both played their parts to the teeth: Ivan the tormented, temperamental director, gnas.h.i.+ng his teeth and ordering people about; John the stubborn, temperamental star, questioning everything and insisting on his preeminence. Mostly this was role-playing, part of the game, part of what made their hobby entertaining to them. Off the set the roles largely disappeared, except to make a point, or have some fun. Ivan was the base's head of computer operations, while John was an engineer involved in the Mars voyage; they were good friends, and their arguments had done much to shape Ivan's ideas for his revisionist historical films, which were certainly the ones from their little troupe making the biggest splash downside-though John claimed this was because of the suspenseful plots and the weird low-gee imagery, not because of what they were saying about history. ”Do I understand you?” Ivan asked curiously. I understand you?” Ivan asked curiously.

”Well,” John said, ”take the one you did last time, about the woman who saved John Lennon's life. Now that was a perfect example of heroic action, as the 1982 docudrama made clear. There she was, standing right next to a man who had pulled out a d.a.m.n big gun, and quicker than he could pull the trigger she put a foot in his crotch and a fist in his ear. But in your remake, all we concentrated on was how she had just started the karate cla.s.s that taught her the moves, and how her husband encouraged her to take the cla.s.s, and how that cabbie stopped for her even though she was going the other direction, and how that other cabbie told her that Lennon had just walked into his apartment lobby, and all that. You made it seem like it was just a coincidence!”

Ivan took a mouthful of pool water and spurted it at the spangled dome, looking like a fountain statue. ”It took a lot of coincidences to get Margaret Arvis into the Dakota lobby at the right time,” he told John. ”But some of them weren't coincidences-they were little acts of generosity or kindness or consideration that put her where she could do what she did. I didn't take the heroism away. I just spread it around to all the places it belonged.”

John grimaced, drew himself up into his star persona. ”I suppose this is some d.a.m.n Commie notion of ma.s.s social movements, sweeping history along in a consensus direction.”

”No, no,” Ivan said. ”I always concentrate on individuals. What I'm saying is that all our individual actions add up to history, to the big visible acts of our so-called 'leaders.' You know what I mean; you hear people saying all the time that things are better now because John Lennon was such a moral force, traveling everywhere, n.o.bel Peace Prize, secular pope, the conscience of the world or whatnot.”

”Well, he was was the conscience of the world!” the conscience of the world!”

”Sure, sure, he wrote great songs. And he got a lot of antagonists to talk. But without Margaret Arvis he would have been killed at age forty. And without Margaret Arvis's husband, and her karate instructor, and a couple cabbies in New York, and so on, she wouldn't have been there to save his life. So we all become part of it, see? The people who say it was all because of Lennon, or Carter, or Gorbachev-they're putting on a few people what we all all did.” did.”

John shook his head, scattering water everywhere. ”Very sophisticated, I'm sure! But in fact it was precisely Lennon and Carter and Gorbachev who made huge differences, all by themselves. Carter started the big swing toward human rights. Palestine, the new Latin America, the American Indian nations-none of those would have existed without him.”

”In fact,” Melina added, glancing mischievously at Pierre-Paul, ”if I understand the Margaret Arvis movie correctly, if she hadn't been going to see Carter thank his New York campaign workers for the 1980 victory, she wouldn't have been in the neighborhood of the Dakota, and so she wouldn't have had the chance to save Lennon's life.”

John rose up like a whale breaching. ”So it's Carter we have to thank for that, too! As for Gorbachev, well, I don't have to tell you what all he did. That was a hundred-eighty-degree turnaround for you Russkies, and no one can say it would have happened without him.”

”Well-he was an important leader, I agree.”

”Sure was! And Carter was just as crucial. Their years were the turning point, when the world started to crawl out from under the shadow of World War Two. And that was their doing. There just aren't many people who could've done it. Most of us don't have it in us.”

Ivan shook his head. ”Carter wouldn't have been able to do what he did unless Colonel Ernest Jackson had saved the rescue mission to Teheran, by deciding to go on.”

”So Jackson is a hero too!”

”But then Jackson wouldn't have been a hero if the officer back in the Pentagon hadn't decided at the last minute to send sixteen helicopters instead of eight.”

”And,” Melina pointed out quickly, ”if Annette Bellows hadn't spent most of a year daydreaming about what she would do in a rescue attempt, so that she knew blindfolded where every other hostage was being kept. They would have left about half the hostages behind without her, and Carter wouldn't have looked so good.”

”Plus they needed Sergeant Payton to find Bellows,” Ivan added ”Well s.h.i.+t!” John yelled defensively, which was his retort in any tight spot. He changed tack. ”I ain't so sure that Carter's reelection hinged on those hostages anyway. He was running against a flake, I can't remember the guy's name, but he was some kind of idiot.”

”So?” Melina said. ”Since when has that made any difference?”

With a roar John dove at her, making a big splash. She was much faster than he was, however, and she evaded him easily as he chased her around the pool; it looked like a whale chasing a dolphin. He was reduced to splas.h.i.+ng at her from a distance, and the debate quickly degenerated into a big splash fight, as it often did.

”Oh well,” John declared, giving up the attack and floating in the shallow end. ”I love watching Melina swim the b.u.t.terfly. In this gravity it becomes a G.o.dlike act. Those muscular arms, that sinuous dolphin motion...”

Pierre-Paul snorted. ”You just like the way the b.u.t.terfly puts her bottom above water so often.”

”No way! Women are just more hydrodynamic than men, don't you think?”

”Not the way you like them.”

”G.o.dlike. G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses.”

”You look a bit G.o.dlike yourself,” Melina told him. ”Bacchus, for instance.”

”Hey.” John waved her off, jabbed a finger at the screens. ”I note that all this mucho sophisticated European theorizing has been sunk. Took a bit of Texas logic, is all.”

”Only Texas logic could do it,” Pierre-Paul said.

”Right. You admit my point. In the end it's the great leaders who have to act, the rare ones, no matter if we ordinary folks help them into power.”

”When you revise your proposition like that,” Ivan said, ”you turn it into mine. Leaders are important, but they are leaders because we made them leaders. They are a collective phenomenon. They are expressions of us.”

”Now wait just a minute! You're going over the line again! You're talking like heroic leaders are a dime a dozen, but if that were true it wouldn't matter if Carter had lost in 1980, or if Lennon had been killed by that guy. But look at history, man! Look what happened when we did lose great leaders! Lincoln was shot; did they come up with another leader comparable to him? No way! Same with Gandhi, and the Kennedys, and King, and Sadat, and Olof Palme. When those folks were killed their countries suffered the lack of them, because they were special.”

”They were were special,” Ivan agreed, ”and obviously it was a bad thing they were killed. And no doubt there was a short-term change for the worse. But they're not irreplaceable, because they're human beings just like us. None of them, except maybe Lincoln or Gandhi, was any kind of genius or saint. It's only afterward we think of them that way, because we want heroes so much. But we're the heroes. All of us put them in place. And there are a lot of capable, brilliant people out there to replace the loss of them, so that in the long run we recover.” special,” Ivan agreed, ”and obviously it was a bad thing they were killed. And no doubt there was a short-term change for the worse. But they're not irreplaceable, because they're human beings just like us. None of them, except maybe Lincoln or Gandhi, was any kind of genius or saint. It's only afterward we think of them that way, because we want heroes so much. But we're the heroes. All of us put them in place. And there are a lot of capable, brilliant people out there to replace the loss of them, so that in the long run we recover.”