I figured I had two weeks, maybe three if the Columbia takeover really went through. Mayer’d be so busy trying to make up his mind which way to jump he wouldn’t have time to worry about AS’s, and neither would Arthurton. I thought about calling Heada — she’d know what was happening — and then decided that was probably a bad idea. Anyway, she was probably busy scrambling to keep her job.

A week anyway. Enough time to give Myrna Loy back her hangover and watch the rest of the musicals. I’d already found most of them, except for Good News and The Birds and the Bees. I put the dulce la leche back in Guys and Dolls while I was at it, and the brandy back in My Fair Lady and made Frank Morgan in Summer Holiday back into a drunk. It went slower than I wanted it to, and after a week and a half, I stopped and put everything Alis had done on disk and tape, expecting Mayer to knock on the door any minute, and started in on Casablanca.

There was a knock on the door. I ff’d to the end where Rick’s bar was still full of lemonade, took the disk of Alis’s dancing and stuck it down the side of my shoe, and opened the door.

It was Alis.

The hall behind her was dark, but her hair, pulled into a bun, caught the light from somewhere. She looked tired, like she had just come from practicing. She still had on her lab coat. I could see white stockings and Mary Janes below it, and an inch or so of pink ruffle. I wondered what she’d been doing — the “Abba-Dabba Honeymoon” number from Two Weeks with Love? Or something from By the Light of the Silvery Moon?

She reached in the pocket of the lab coat and held out the opdisk I’d given her. “I came to bring this back to you.”

“Keep it,” I said.

She looked at it a minute, and then stuck it in her pocket. “Thanks,” she said, and pulled it out again. “I’m surprised so many of the routines made it on. I wasn’t very good when I started,” she said, turning it over. “I’m still not very good.”

“You’re as good as Ruby Keeler,” I said.

She grinned. “She was somebody’s girlfriend.”

“You’re as good as Vera-Ellen. And Debbie Reynolds. And Virginia Gibson.”

She frowned, and looked at the disk again and then at me, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something. “Heada told me about her job,” she said, and that wasn’t it. “Location assistant. That’s great.” She looked over at the array, where Bogart was toasting Ingrid. “She said you were putting the movies back the way they were.”

“Not all the movies,” I said, pointing at the disk in her hand. “Some remakes are better than the original.”

“Won’t you get fired?” she said. “Putting the AS’s back in, I mean?”

“Almost certainly,” I said. “But it is a fah, fah, bettah thing I do than I have evah done before. It is a—”

“Tale of Two Cities, Ronald Colman,” she said, looking at the screens where Bogart was saying good-bye to Ingrid, at the disk, at the screens again, trying to work up to what she had to say.

I said it for her. “You’re leaving.”

She nodded, still not looking at me.

“Where are you going? Back to River City?”

“That’s from The Music Man,” she said, but she didn’t smile. “I can’t go any farther by myself. I need somebody to teach me the heel-and-toe work Eleanor Powell does. And I need a partner.”

Just for a moment, no, not even a moment, the flicker of a frame, I thought about what might have been if I hadn’t spent those long splatted semesters dismantling highballs, if I had spent them out in Burbank instead, practicing kick-turns.

“After what you said the other night, I thought I might be able to use a positioning armature and a data harness for the lifts, and I tried it. It worked, I guess. I mean, it—”

Her voice cut off awkwardly like she’d intended to say something more, and I wondered what it was, and what it was I’d said to her. That Fred might be coming out of litigation?

“But the balance isn’t the same as a real person,” she said. “And I need experience learning routines, not just copying them off the screen.”

So she was going someplace where they were still doing liveactions. “Where?” I said. “Buenos Aires?”

“No,” she said. “China.”

China.

“They’re doing ten liveactions a year,” she said.

And twenty purges. Not to mention provincial uprisings. And antiforeigner riots.

“Their liveactions aren’t very good. They’re terrible, actually. Most of them are propaganda films and martial-arts things, but a couple of them last year were musicals.” She smiled ruefully. “They like Gene Kelly.”

Gene Kelly. But it would be real routines. And a man’s arm around her waist instead of a data harness, a man’s hands lifting her. The real thing.

“I leave tomorrow morning,” she said. “I was packing, and I found the disk and thought maybe you wanted it back.”

“No,” I said, and then, so I wouldn’t have to tell her good-bye, “Where are you flying out of?”

“San Francisco,” she said. “I’m taking the skids up tonight. And I’m still not packed.” She looked at me, waiting for me to say my line.

And I had plenty to choose from. If there’s anything the movies are good at, it’s good-byes. From “Be careful, darling!” to “Don’t let’s ask for the moon when we have the stars,” to “Come back, Shane!” Even, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

But I didn’t say them. I stood there and looked at her, with her beautiful, backlit hair and her unforgettable face. At what I wanted and couldn’t have, not even for a few minutes.

And what if I said “Stay"? What if I promised to find her a teacher, get her a part, put on a show? Right. With a Cray that had maybe ten minutes of memory, a Cray I wouldn’t have as soon as Mayer found out what I’d been doing?

Behind me on the screen, Bogart was saying, “There’s no place for you here,” and looking at Ingrid, trying to make the moment last forever. In the background, the plane’s propellers were starting to turn, and in a minute the Nazis would show up.

They stood there, looking at each other, and tears welled up in Ingrid’s eyes, and Vincent could mess with his tears program forever and never get it right. Or maybe he would. They had made Casablanca out of dry ice and cardboard. And it was the real thing. “I have to go,” Alis said.

“I know,” I said, and smiled at her. “We’ll always have Paris.” And according to the script, she was supposed to give me one last longing look and get on the plane with Paul Henreid, and why is it I still haven’t learned that Heada is always right?

“Good-bye,” Alis said, and then she was in my arms, and I was kissing her, kissing her, and she was unbuttoning the lab coat, taking down her hair, unbuttoning the pink gingham dress, and some part of me was thinking, “This is important,” but she had the dress off, and the pantaloons, and I had her on the bed, and she didn’t fade, she didn’t morph into Heada, I was on her and in her, and we were moving together, easily, effortlessly, our outstretched hands almost but not quite touching on the tangled sheets.

I kept my gaze on her hands, flexing and stretching in passion, knowing if I looked at her face it would be freeze-framed on my brain forever, klieg or no klieg, afraid if I did she might be looking at me kindly, or, worse, not be looking at me at all. Looking through me, past me, at two dancers on a starry floor.

“Tom!” she said, coming, and I looked down at her. Her hair was spread out on the pillow, backlit and beautiful, and her face was intent, the way it had been that night at the party, watching Fred and Ginge on the freescreen, rapt and beautiful and sad. And focused, finally, on me.

MOVIE CLICHE #1: The Happy Ending. Self-explanatory.

SEE: An Officer and a Gentleman, An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Shall We Dance, Great Expectations.