And there was no question of her being Alis. With her hair down, she didn’t even look that much like her. Or else the ridigaine was kicking in.

The routine was Hollywood’s idea of ballet, more chiffon and a lot of twirling around, not the kind of routine Alis would have bothered with. If she’d had ballet back in Meadowville, and not just jazz and tap, but she hadn’t, and Virginia obviously had, so Alis wasn’t Virginia, and I was sober, and it was back to the bottles.

“Forward 64,” I said, and watched Doris smirk her way through the title number and an unnecessary reprise. The next number was a big production number. Virginia wasn’t in it, and I started to ff again and then stopped.

“Rew to music cue,” I said, and watched the production number, counting the frame numbers. A blond couple stepped forward, did a series of toe slides, and stepped back again, and a dark-haired guy and a redhead in a white pleated skirt kicked forward and went into a side-by-side Charleston. She had curly hair and a tied-in-front blouse, and the two of them put their hands on their knees and did a series of cross kicks. “Frame 75-004, forward 12,” I said, and watched the routine in slow motion.

“Enhance quadrant 2,” and watched the red hair fill the screen, even though there wasn’t any need for an enhancement, or for the slowmo, either. No question at all of who it was.

I had known the instant I saw her, the same way I had in the barn-raising scene, and it wasn’t the booze (of which there was at least fifteen minutes’ worth less in my system) or klieg, or a passing resemblance enhanced with rouge and eyebrow pencil. It was Alis. Which was impossible.

“Last frame,” I said, but this was the Good Old Days when the chorus line didn’t get into the credits, and the copyright date had to be deciphered. MCML. 1950.

I went back through the movie, going to freeze frame and enhance every time I spotted red hair, but I didn’t see her again. I ff’d to the Charleston number and watched it again, trying to come up with a theory.

Okay. The hackate had sent her to 1950 (scratch that — the copyright was for the release date — had sent her to 1949) and she had waited around for four years, dancing chorus parts and palling around with Virginia Gibson, waiting for her chance to clunk Virginia on the head, stuff her behind a set, and take her place in Brides. So she could impress the producer of Funny Face with her dancing so that he’d offer her a part, and she’d finally get to dance with Fred, if only in the same production number.

Even splatted on chooch, I couldn’t have bought that one. But it was her, so there had to be an explanation. Maybe in between chorus jobs Alis had gotten a job as a warmbody. They’d had them back then. They were called stand-ins, and maybe she got to be Virginia Gibson’s because they looked alike, and Alis had bribed her to let her take her place, just for one number, or had connived to have Virginia miss a shooting session. Anne Baxter in All About Eve. Or maybe Virginia had an AS problem, and when she’d showed up drunk, Alis had had to take her place.

That theory wasn’t much better. I called up the menu again. If Alis had gotten one chorus job, she might have gotten others. I scanned through the musicals, trying to remember which ones had chorus numbers. Singin’ in the Rain did. That party scene I’d taken all that champagne out of.

I called up the record of changes to find the frame number and ff’d through the nonchampagne, to Donald O’Connor’s saying, “You gotta show a movie at a party. It’s a Hollywood law,” through said movie, to the start of the chorus number.

Girls in skimpy pink skirts and flapper hats ran onstage to the tune of “You Are My Lucky Star” and a bad camera angle. I was going to have to do an enhance to see their faces clearly. But there wasn’t any need to. I’d found Alis.

And she might have managed to bribe Virginia Gibson. She might even have managed to stuff her and the Tea for Two redhead behind their respective sets. But Debbie Reynolds hadn’t had an AS problem, and if Alis had crammed her behind a set, somebody would have noticed.

It wasn’t time travel. It was something else, a comp-generated illusion of some kind in which she’d somehow managed to dance and get it on film. In which case, she hadn’t disappeared forever into the past. She was still in Hollywood. And I was going to find her.

“Off,” I said to the comp, grabbed my jacket, and flung myself out the door.

MOVIE CLICHE #419: The Blocked Escape. Hero/Heroine on the run, near escape with bad guys, eludes them, nearly home free, villain looms up suddenly, asks, “Going somewhere?”

SEE: The Great Escape, The Empire Strikes Back, North by Northwest, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Heada was standing outside the door, arms folded, tapping her foot. Rosalind Russell as the Mother Superior in The Trouble with Angels.

“You’re supposed to be lying down,” she said.

“I feel fine.”

“That’s because the alcohol isn’t out of your system yet,” she said. “Sometimes it takes longer than others. Have you peed?”

“Yes,” I said. “Buckets. Now if you’ll excuse me, Nurse Ratchet…”

“Wherever you’re going, it can wait till you’re clean,” she said, blocking my way. “I mean it. Ridigaine’s not anything to fool with.” She steered me back into the room. “You need to stay here and rest. Where were you going anyway? To see Alis? Because if you were, she’s not there. She’s dropped all her classes and moved out of her dorm.”

And in with Mayer’s boss, she meant. “I wasn’t going to see Alis.”

“Where were you going?”

It was useless to lie to Heada, but I tried it anyway. “Virginia Gibson was in Funny Face. I was going out to try to find a copy of it.”

“Why can’t you get it off the fibe-op?”

“Fred Astaire’s in it. That’s why I asked you if he was out of litigation.” I let that sink in for a couple of frames. “You said it might just be a likeness. I wanted to see if it’s Alis or just somebody who looks like her.”

“So you were going out to look for a pirated copy?” Heada said, as if she almost believed me. “I thought you said she was in six musicals. They aren’t all in litigation, are they?”

“There weren’t any close-ups in Athena,” I said, and hoped she wouldn’t ask why I couldn’t enhance. “And you know how she is about Fred Astaire. If she’s going to be in anything, it’d be Funny Face.”

None of this made any sense, since the idea was supposedly to find something Virginia Gibson was in, not Alis, but Heada nodded when I mentioned Fred Astaire. “I can get you one,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “It doesn’t even have to be digitized. Tape’ll work.” I led her to the door. “I’ll stay here and lie down and let the ridigaine do its stuff.”

She crossed her arms again.

“I swear,” I said. “I’ll give you my key. You can lock me in.”

“You’ll lie down?”

“Promise,” I lied.

“You won’t,” she said, “and you’ll wish you had.” She sighed. “At least you won’t be on the skids. Give me the key.”

I handed her the card.

“Both of them,” she said.

I handed her the other card.

“Lie down,” she said, and shut the door and locked me in.

MOVIE CLICHE #86: Locked In.

SEE: Broken Blossoms, Wuthering Heights, The Phantom Foe, The Palm Beach Story, The Man with the Golden Arm, The Collector.

Well, I needed more proof anyway before I confronted Alis, and I was starting to feel the headache I’d lied to Heada about having. I went into the bathroom and followed orders and then laid down on the bed and called up Singin’ in the Rain.

There weren’t any telltale matte lines or pixel shadows, and when I did a noise check, there weren’t any signs of uneven degradation. Which didn’t prove anything. I could do undetectable paste-ups with a fifth of William Powell’s Thin Man rye in me.