After I took my anti-suburbia pills and gassed up the car, I headed out. MagicLantern Works was about 100 miles out of town, in the mountain foothills. Steve had bought it as a retreat twenty years ago, after the first money came in, and he had been continuously buying up the land in all directions until it was now virtually all "Nebula Valley" -- studios, digital warehouses, living quarters for his racing team, you name it. He once said to me that he never expected that a kid who sent in coupons from Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine for Bela Lugosi masks would ever rule the world, but he was working on it. He had begun with plasticine dinosaurs and a stop motion 8mm, and was now the subject of conferences on "Jung and the Lutzman Universe".

Mile after mile of mile after mile dragged on -- Pinewood Estates gave way to Buena Vista Village and Orchard View, and they were all identically treeless and lifeless . It was easy to see why kids growing up here would take to AK-47s -- what was surprising was that it didn't happen every day, that the Shopping Malls didn't run red with machete wielding youth, which showed that human beings, like lab rats, will submit to almost any humilation. Steve had parlayed his high school yearnings into imagining the mowing down of aliens as opposed to cheerleaders, which was a big difference, and certainly paid the big money.

I first met Steve 7 years earlier on a bad day: they had been shooting Nebula Warrior II in a water tank, and something went wrong and two extras died -- the kind of guys you see getting killed on Star Trek all the time, the ones who are walking about 3 feet behind or in front of William Shatner, but it turned out that these two guys had wives, and children. It also turned out that there had been what looked like sabotage of one of the tanks, and there were questions raised by the Coroner, and I was on the spot because I had been hired earlier by Lutzman Enterprises to do some undercover work on some psycho threats to him, that never went anywhere. Neither the threats nor my investigation. It all just petered out. Nebula Warrior II, as everyone knows, was an even bigger smash than Nebula Warrior I, and the rest was marketing.

Anyway, the day before the Coroner's Inquest, I got to meet the great man, who was just an ordinary nerd, but he seemed to take the whole thing seriously -- though I could never quite figure out if it was because he was such a control freak that anything going wrong was upsetting, or that he was genuinely concerned about his actors. If they were more than just plasticine in spandex. I told him what I had found, which was not enough to validate the amount they were paying me, and what my testimony was going to be, but his response was to offer me a bit part in his next film, Professor Challenger and the Return of the Lost World. He wasn't out to lay me: he was just always thinking about his movies. I turned him down: why I don't know, I just didn't like the whole operation. Bad at control freaks, I guess. The movie was his only big flop, anyway.

I turned off the main road, and passed the nebular sign pointing down into the valley. I still had a distance to go, but from the curve on the narrowing road I could see the Towers of Trobizam that were the home of the Nerd People in Nebula IV, or whatever. The fact that I had failed the last time I had been here bugged me, since it was one of the first big cases I had ever landed. I was already in a bad mood, and I didn't need little miss ancient guilt playing her games today.

It was coming up to one o'clock. Steve had agreed to see me at two.

I parked the car next to what had originally been a rustic cabin, and was now extended in all directions, with a couple of ecologically friendly multi-story buildings built into the hillside, loaded up with solar panels. There were huge trucks everywhere, which somewhat undermined the ethos. I checked my purse to see if my laser spear was there, and headed for the door.

The lobby was a strange mixture of those offices you go to when you rent a cabin on a fishing trip, and IBM. A woman, casually dressed in plaid, but with the eyes of a hawk -- needed to work on her hair colouring though -- looked up from her desk, and said:

"Yes?"

"Bette Monroe. Private detective to see Steve Lutzman."

She looked at me, and then looked down at her docket. She looked up again, a bit surprised.

"What's cooking?" I said for conversation.

She smiled, and replied: "You have X clearance, which doesn't happen usually to people who just walk in. We are shooting today, you know." X clearance meant that I could go on the set, and it was assumed that I would not talk about what I had seen to anyone. My mood improved -- at least his memory was a good one.

"Follow me," she said, and pressed a button, which opened the wall, just like the scene in NWIII where the dumb clucks get vaporised by Prince Radziwill and the Duchess of Trobizam. We got on an escalator that zipped us along, down long empty halls into the middle of the mountainside, as near as I could figure.

After a couple of minutes of this, we came to two massive doors that opened with a clang, and we walked onto what looked like the main deck of a wrecked spacecraft. There were people everywhere, with belt walkie talkies and cellphones and antennae yelling at each other, and crashes of exotic sound, and in the centre of the mayhem, sitting on a dolly with his cameraman, Steve was pointing out the next couple of shots. The lady with the bad hair colouring sat me down on a chair, and got me a cup of coffee. In the next chair sat a big beefy woman, who I recognised as Carla Dales, the stuntwoman. "Hey Carla, its Bette Monroe."

She looked over: "Bette, well, what are you doing here? Haven't seen you since --" and her face clouded over," well, you know." Carla had nearly died trying to pry open the sabotaged pocket submarine.

"Oh, just here to find out if Trobizam will finally defeat the Enemies of Time."

She laughed, "What, and lose the McDonald's tie-in? I don't think so. Anyway, you picked a good day, we are shooting pink today."

"What?" I said.

"No, its not what you think. They picked up the term from the porno industry -- it means that there are flesh actors talking to flesh actors today, not just a lot of blue screening. So, as you can see -- "she pointed over towards a mangled quarterdeck -- "even Julie Caraway is here." There she was, talking to a man in a robot suit. She was in her full Duchess regalia, and, in typical movie absurdity, was wearing a baseball cap.

Now if there was anyone above Agnetta von Trosch's level, it was Julie Caraway. She did nothing for me, not my type, but that meant that my type was ABNegative, because the rest of the world was gaga for her. Had been, ever since that moment in Nebula Warrior I when she cradled her dying father, the Duke Imperial, in her arms, and uttered those immortal words: "We will overcome even this, People of Trobizam. To your laser spears!!"

She had stuck with the franchise and Steve through the whole series, but also taking time off to do Cleopatra with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and other spread her wings enterprises: but this was the bread and butter. And the jam.

I scanned the rest of the company, and then a wave from Steve caught my eye, and I waved back. A few seconds later, there was the first call for quiet, and then the call for action. And the scene began.