Page 3 - Unlikely Stories 2

Hitch MacGuffin’s Last Role

cameras once again. Their faces fell when the autocar returned and
they saw her look of utter dejection and exhaustion.
“What happened?” asked Mala Kuehl, once a golden-haired
dimpled girl, known for upstaging any adult unlucky enough to share
a frame with her. “Did you get in a fight with the director?”
“Director?” Val replied wearily, easing herself gingerly into a
recliner. “You mean the hologram giving me orders? No way to
challenge that authority.”
Russell Hurd, typecast almost from infancy as a precocious
troublemaker, snorted through a scraggly white handlebar mustache.
“I’ll bet they made him look and act like Regius Egg, that damned
martinet.”
“Your contempt would be wasted on idiot machinery,” observed
Helen Highwater, whose big-screen tomboy portrayals had not taxed
her thespian talents. “I’d guess any outbursts of temperament would
be met by some anodyne persuasion to do yet another take.”
“Oh, let her give us the story instead of stealing her lines!”
Hitch MacGuffin waved his cane theatrically. His scratchy whisper,
once the cracked adolescent adenoidal warble of Scrappy
Hempelhoser, Boy Explorer, commanded attention. He was the
senior member of the home’s residents, soon to reach his hundredth
birthday. Assault by a poorly-trained chimpanzee had left him badly
disfigured in his youth, unemployed, embittered and envious of his
working peers. It also made him a man of few words.
“Thank you, Hitch.” Val treated him to a mock curtsy. “I had no
trouble learning my part—not a speaking part, of course!—or
submitting to a rather distasteful slathering of multicolored mottled
makeup. I’m convinced they used rejects from the robotic surgeons’
college to enhance my already convincing appearance of organic
decay. The stuff didn’t smell that wonderful, either. But I didn’t
understand why they needed a bona fide living person to play the
protagonist’s inamorata. In fact, the system didn’t want to tell me
why, because what it needed was an instinctive reaction not already
recorded in Simulapedia.”
“Really?” Russell’s surprise might have been genuine. “I thought
the little sons of switches had us down pat.”
“Horripilation,” said Val. “You can’t fake it. In the old days the
prop man would throw a bucket of ice water on you to make your

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