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they danced and sang over the closing credits, Chad watched the names and titles go whizzing by at
incredible speed. Many of them were oriental. But despite their unfamiliarity and the velocity at which
they flashed across the screen, one name stood out clearly in tandem with a title.
Mindy Mariann Collins
Story Editor
He sat there for a long time, until a clutch of jut-jawed, half-naked heroes and heroines wielding lasers
and other assorted weapons had disposed of half a dozen similarly clad evildoers, the latter
distinguishable from the good guys and gals only by the hue of their armor and the fact that their eyes
were devoid of pupils. A real human being appeared on the screen and began to talk about tide-pools.
The shock was sufficient to jolt Chad hack to real time. He picked up the remote and switched off the
box.
His sister. The entire improbable business had nothing to do with the long-departed High-red-Chanter
and his mate. It was his sister. This was how she dealt with the trust of Runs-red-Talking and the colony.
This was how she kept the great secret by splashing it all over the airwaves every Saturday morning,
indoctrinating the youth of America in the ways of the QuozL Everything Runs-red-Talking had told her,
everything she d been able to glean from her brother s previous four years of contact, all the long
conversa-tions she d held with members of different surface study teams, was all there on the screen
rendered in cheerful pastels for anyone to see and absorb.
No wonder she d done so much sketching.
He knew she d been making a living writing for television, but she always named a company, never a
show, and he d never bothered to inquire deeply, being too wrapped up in his own studies. He regretted
his lack of familial
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curiosity even as he wondered how long this had been going on. Probably the show was produced right
here in L.A., though there was the matter of all those oriental names. Perhaps actual production took
place in Japan, or Tai-wan. It was time to find out.
His first thought was to call the local network affiliate which showed the program, until he remembered
that it was Saturday. Business offices would be closed. He d have to wait until Monday morning. There
was an optional oneP.M.seminar but that could wait. Everything could wait.
For lack of anything better to do he dressed himself, wondering how his sister was capable of such
complete betrayal. Revealing the secret to a friend or two he could understand, but to put the entire
colony on television? Beyond belief!
Too late to do anything about it now. The genie was out of the bottle. She d delivered up the Quozl for
more than thirty pieces of silver, much more.
Was it all the result of artistic frustration? He could remember Mindy yelling aloud when unable to
compose the right sentence, or when she couldn t think of the proper word, or when a page didn t read
back right. Could recall her endless efforts to finish a novel. All those years of struggling to make it as a
writer, of humiliating visits to their parents to ask for still another loan whereupon her mother would sigh
and come up with another few dollars, another pitiable check, insisting quietly and unconvincingly that this
would be absolutely, positively, the last time they could help her out. The rejections coming in the mail,
one close upon the posting of the next.
She d sold a couple of short stories to magazines that paid in copies and criticism, two or three magazine
articles for three-figure paybacks, and one lamentable concept for a slasher film that never got beyond
the talking stage. Yet she struggled on. To her mother she showed perseverance, to her father unremitting
stubbornness.
Then the big breakthrough which he heard about only casually. A writing job with some big production
company. No movies, just television, but nice, steady, well-paying work. If Judas were alive today, Chad
thought grimly, would he have a piece of the ancillary rights to the story of the crucifixion?
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