"Call me Zeus," said the Director. "Zeus?" said his wife, a beautiful woman not over a thousand years old. "What an egomaniac! Comparing yourself to a god, even if he is the god of those—those savages!"
She gestured at the huge screen on the wall. It showed, far below, the blue sea, the black ships on the yellow beach, the purple tents of the Greek army, the broad brown plain, and the white towers of Troy.
The Director glared at her through hexagonal dark glasses and puffed on his cigar until angry green clouds rolled from it. His round bald head was covered by a cerise beret, his porpoise frame by a canary yellow tunic, and his chubby legs by iridescent green fourpluses.
"I may not look like a god, but as far as my power over the natives of this planet goes, I could well be their deity," he replied.
He spoke sharply to a tall handsome blond youth who wore a crooked smile and bright blue and yellow tattoo spiraling around his legs and trunk. "Apollo, hand me the Script!"
"Surely you're not going to change the Script again?" said his wife. She rose from her chair, and the scarlet web she was wearing translated the shifting micro-voltages on the surface of her skin into musical tones.
"I never change the Script," said the Director. "I just make the slight revisions required for dramatic effects."
"I don't care what you do to it, just so you don't allow the Trojans to win. I hate those despicable brutes."
Apollo laughed loudly, and he said, "Ever since she and Athena and Aphrodite thought of that goofy stunt of asking Paris to choose the most beautiful of the three, and he gave the prize to Aphrodite, Hera's hated the Trojans. Really, Hera, why blame those simple, likable people for the actions of only one of them? I think Paris showed excellent judgment. Aphrodite was so grateful she contrived to get that lovely Helen for Paris and—"
"Enough of this private feud," snapped the Director. "Apollo, I told you once to hand me the Script."
Achilles at midnight paced back and forth before his tent. Finally, in the agony of his spirit, he called to Thetis. The radio which had been installed in his shield, unknown to him, transmitted his voice to a cabin in the great spaceship hanging over the Trojan plain.
Thetis, hearing it, said to Apollo, "Get out of my cabin, you heel, or I'll have you thrown out."
"Leave?" he said. "Why? So you can be with your barbarian lover?"
"He is not my lover," she said angrily. "But I'd take even a barbarian as a lover before I'd have anything to do with you. Now, get out. And don't speak to me again unless it's in the line of business."
"Any time I speak to you, I mean business," he said, grinning.
"Get out or I'll tell my father!"
"I hear and obey. But I'll have you, one way or another."
Thetis shoved him out. Then she quickly put on the suit that could bend light around her to make her invisible and transport her through the air and do many other things. Out of a port she shot, straight toward the tent of her protégé. She did not decelerate until she saw him standing tall in the moonlight, his hands still raised in entreaty. She landed and cut the power off so he could see her.
 
"Mother, Mother!" cried Achilles. "How long must I put up with Agamemnon's high-handedness?"
Thetis took him by the hand and led him into the tent. "Is Patroclos around?" she asked.
"No, he is having some fun with Iphis, that buxom beauty I gave him after I conquered the city of Scyros."
"There's a sensible fellow," said Thetis. "Why don't you forget this fuss with King Agamemnon and have fun with some rosy-cheeked darling?" But a painful expression crossed her face as she said it.
Achilles did not notice the look. "I am too sick with humiliation and disgust to take pleasure in anything. I am full up to here with being a lion in the fighting and yet having to give that jackal Agamemnon the lion's share of the loot, just because he has been chosen to be our leader. Am I not a king in Thessaly? I wish—I wish—"
"Yes?" said Thetis eagerly. "Do you want to go home?"
"I should go home. Then the Greeks would wish they'd not allowed Agamemnon to insult the best man among them."
"Oh, Achilles, say the word and I'll have you across the sea and in your palace in an hour!" she said excitedly. She was thinking, The Director will be furious if Achilles disappears, but he won't be able to do anything about it. And the Script can be revised. Hector or Odysseus or Paris can play the lead role.
"No," Achilles said. "I can't leave my men here. They'd say I had run out on them, that I was a coward. And the Greeks would call me a yellow dog. No, I'll allow no man to say that."
Thetis sighed and answered sadly, "Very well. What do you want me to do?"
"Go ask Zeus if he will give Agamemnon so much trouble he'll come crawling to me, begging for forgiveness and pleading for my help."
Thetis had to smile. The enormous egotism of the beautiful brute! Taking it for granted that the Lord of Creation would bend the course of events so Achilles could salvage his pride. Yet, she told herself, she need not be surprised. He had taken it calmly enough the night she'd appeared to him and told him that she was a goddess and his true mother. He had always been convinced divine blood ran in his veins. Was he not superior to all men? Was he not Achilles?
"I will go to Zeus," she said. "But what he will do, only he knows."
She reached up and pulled his head down to kiss him on the forehead. She did not trust herself to touch the lips of this man who was far more a man than those he supposed to be gods. The lips she longed for ... the lips soon to grow cold. She could not bear to think of it.
She flicked the switch to make her invisible and, after leaving the tent, rose toward the ship. As always, it hung at four thousand feet above the plain, hidden in the inflated plastic folds that simulated a cloud. To the Greeks and Trojans the cloud was the home of Zeus, anchored there so he could keep a close eye on the struggle below.
It was he who would decide whether the walls of Troy would stand or fall. It was to him that both sides prayed.
The Director was drinking a highball in his office and working out the details of tomorrow's shooting with his cameramen.
"We'll give that Greek Diomedes a real break, make him the big hero. Get a lot of close-ups. He has a superb profile and a sort of flair about him. It's all in the Script, what aristocrats he kills, how many narrow escapes, and so on. But about noon, just before lunch, we'll wound him. Not too badly, just enough to put him out of action. Then we'll see if we can whip up a big tearjerker between that Trojan and his wife—what's her name?"
He looked around as if he expected them to feed him the answer. But they were silent; it was not wise to know more than he.
He snapped his fingers. "Andromache! That's it!"
"What a memory! How do you keep all those barbaric names at your tongue's tip? Photographic!" and so on from the suckophants.
"O.K. So after Diomedes leaves the scene, you, Apollo, will put on a simulacrum of Helenos, the Trojan prophet. As Helenos, you'll induce Hector to go back to Troy and get his mother, the Queen, to pray for victory. We can get some colorful shots of the temple and the local religious rites. Meantime, we'll set up a touching domestic scene between Hector and his wife. Bring in their baby boy. A baby's always good for ohs and ahs. Later, after coffee break, we'll...."
Apollo drifted through the crowd toward the Director's wife. She was sitting on a chair and moodily drinking. However, seeing Apollo, she smiled with green-painted lips and said, "Do sit down, darling. You needn't worry about my husband being angry because you're paying attention to me. He's too busy shining down on his little satellites to notice you."
Apollo seated himself in a chair facing her and moved forward so their knees touched.
"What do you want now?" she said. "You only get lovey-dovey when you're trying to get something out of me."
"You know I love only you, Hera," he said, grinning. "But I can't meet you as often as I'd like. Old Thunder-and-Lightning is too suspicious. And I value my job too much to risk it, despite my overwhelming passion for you."
"Get to the point."
"We're way over our budget and past our deadline. The shooting should have been finished six months ago. Yet Old Fussybritches keeps on revising the Script and adding scene after scene. And that's not all. We're not going home when Troy does fall. The Director is planning to make a sequel. I know because he asked me to outline the Script for it. He's got the male lead picked out. Foxy Grandpa Odysseus."
Hera sat upright so violently she sloshed her drink over the edge of her glass. "Why, my brother means to kill Odysseus at the first opportunity! My brother is mad, absolutely mad about Athena, but he can't get to first base with her. She's got eyes only for Odysseus, though how she could take up with one of those stupid primitives, I'll never understand."
"Athena claims he has an intelligence equal to any of us," said Apollo. "However, it's not her but Thetis I meant to discuss."
"Is my stepdaughter interfering again?"
"I think so. Just before this conference I saw her coming out of the Director's room, tears streaming from her big cow eyes. I imagine she was begging him again to spare Achilles. Or at least to allow the Trojans to win for a while so Agamemnon will give back to Achilles the girl he took from him, that tasty little dish, Briseis."
"You ought to know how tasty she is," said Hera bitterly. "I happen to know you drugged Achilles several nights in a row and then put on his simulacrum."
"A handy little invention, that simulacrum," said Apollo. "Put one on and you can look like anybody you want to look like. Your jealousy is showing, Hera. However, that's not the point. If Thetis keeps playing on her father's sympathies like an old flute, this production will last forever. Frankly, I'd like to shake the dust of this crummy planet from my feet, get back to civilization before it forgets what a great script writer I am."
"What do you propose?"
"I propose to hurry things up. Eventually, Achilles is supposed to quit sulking and take up arms again. So far, the Director has been indefinite on how we'll get him to do that. Well, we'll help him without his knowing it. We'll fix it so the Trojans will beat the Greeks even worse than the Director intends. Hector will almost run them back into the sea. Agamemnon will beg Achilles to get back into the ring. He'll give him back the loot he took from him, including Briseis. And he'll offer his own daughter in marriage to Achilles.
"Achilles will refuse. But we'll have him all set up for the next move. Tonight a technician will implant a post-hypnotic suggestion in Achilles that he send his buddy Patroclos, dressed in Achilles' armor, out to scare the kilts off the Trojans. We'll generate a panic among the Trojans with a subsonic projector. Then we'll arrange it so Hector kills Patroclos. That is the one thing to make Achilles so fighting mad he'll quit sulking...."
"Patroclos? But the Director wants to save him for the big scene when Achilles is knocked off. Patroclos is supposed to put Achilles' armor on, storm the Scaian gate, and lead the Greeks right into the city."
"Accidents will happen," said Apollo. "Despite what the barbarians think, we are not gods. Or are we? What do you say to my plan?"
"If the Director finds out we've tampered with the Script, he'll divorce me. And you'll be blackballed in every studio from one end of the Galaxy to the other."
Apollo winked and said, "I'll leave it to you to make Old Stupe think Patroclos' death was his own idea. You have done something like that before, and more than once."
She laughed and said, "Oh, Apollo, you're such a heel."
He rose. "Not a heel. Just a great script writer. Our plan will give me a chance to kill Achilles much sooner than the Director expects. And it'll all be for the good of the Script."
That night two technicians went into the Greek camp, one to Achilles' tent and one to Agamemnon's. The technician assigned to the King of Mycenae gave him a whiff of sleep gas and then taped two electrodes to the royal forehead. It took him a minute to play a recording and two to untape the electrodes and leave.
Five minutes later, the King awoke, shouting that Zeus had sent him a dream in the shape of wise old Nestor. Nestor had told him to rouse the camp and march forth even if it were only dawn, for today Troy would fall and his brother Menelaos would get back his wife Helen.
Agamemnon, though, who had always been too clever for his own good, told the council of elders that he wanted to test his army before telling them the truth. He would announce that he was tired of this war they could not win and that he wanted to go home. This news would separate the slackers from the soldiers, his true friends from the false.
Unfortunately, when he told this to the assemblage, he found far less men of valor than he had expected. The entire army, with a few exceptions, gave a big hurrah and stampeded toward the ships. They had had a bellyful of this silly war, fighting to win back the beautiful tart Helen for the King's brother, spilling their guts all over foreign plains while their wives were undoubtedly playing them false with the 4-Fs, the fields were growing weeds, and their children were starving.
In vain, Agamemnon tried to stop the rush. He even shouted at them what they had only guessed before, that more was at stake than his brother's runaway wife. If Troy was crushed, the Greeks would own the trading and colonizing routes to the rich Black Sea area. But no one paid any attention to him. They were too concerned with knocking each other over in their haste to get the ships ready to sail.
At this time, the only people from the spaceship on the scene were some cameramen and technicians. They were paralyzed by the unexpectedness of the situation, and they were afraid to use their emotion-stimulating projectors. By the flick of a few switches the panic could be turned into aggression. But it would have been aggression without a leader. The Greeks, instead of automatically turning to fight the Trojans, would have killed each other, sure that their fellows were trying to stop them from embarking for home.
The technicians did not dare to waken the Director and acknowledge they could not handle a simple mob scene. But one of them did put a call through to one of the Director's daughters, Athena.
Athena zipped down to Odysseus and found him standing to one side, looking glum. He had not panicked, but he also was not interfering. Poor fellow, he longed to go home to Penelope. In t............