He learned that there was an order to things and that the order was everything. He learned to inspect a reel on the rewind bench before it ever went near a projector, running the film between two gloved fingers as it wound from one reel to another, feeling for a torn sprocket hole or a bad splice the way you'd feel for a splinter on a banister. He learned to clean the gate with a soft brush and a little can of compressed air. He learned that the xenon bulb in each lamphouse was under so much pressure that if it ever shattered it could kill you, and that Ansel had worn a quilted welder's jacket and a face mask to change them ever since a man he knew in Salina lost an eye in 1976. He learned that the old carbon-arc lamphouse sitting dusty in the corner had burned two rods of copper-coated carbon at four thousand degrees to make light, and that Ansel had run it for thirty-six years before the conversion, and that the conversion had been Mrs. Dunning's idea and he had sulked about it for a month.
He learned the cue marks. They came at the end of every reel, the first set eight seconds before the end, the second set right at it: four frames each, a tiny dot of scratched-out emulsion in the upper right-hand corner of the picture, there and gone faster than a blink. On Tuesday he couldn't see them at all. On Wednesday he saw the second set but not the first. On Thursday, the day he was supposed to go to the dealership and didn't, he saw both, and Ansel let him put his hand on the motor switch of the right-hand machine and wait.
"Don't look at the switch," Ansel said. "Look at the picture. Your hand knows where the switch is."
On screen, Marty McFly was in his parents' kitchen in 1955, being stared at over a meatloaf.
The dot came. Danny's hand moved. The motor on the second projector began to turn, a rising hum, film beginning to pull through the gate behind its closed douser. He counted. One. Two. Three. His heart was going so hard he could feel it in the bruise on his collarbone. Six. Seven. The second dot flicked in the corner of the screen and Ansel's foot came down on the douser pedal and the picture leapt from one machine to the other and Marty kept on being stared at and not one of the three hundred people in the house knew that anything had happened at all.
"That's a changeover," Ansel said. He reached over and stopped the first machine. "Next time you do the foot."
Danny found that his face was wet, and he didn't know why, and Ansel very carefully didn't look at him, and began unthreading the reel that had run out.
* * *
Mrs. Dunning had been right about the bulbs. The bulbs were a symptom.
The fire marshal came on Friday. His name was Lonnie Ebert and he was a decent enough man who coached Little League and owed his appointment to the city commission, three of whose five members had been to Royce Hadley's Fourth of July barbecue. He walked through the building with a clipboard and a flashlight for two hours. He went up into the attic above the balcony with Ansel and came down gray with plaster dust and looking unhappy. He spent a long time in the booth and the boiler room and the alley behind the stage.
He was sorry, he said, sitting at the little desk in Mrs. Dunning's office with his cap in his hands. He truly was. He'd seen The Ten Commandments in this building when he was eight years old. But the roof truss above the balcony had rot in it, and water damage to the plaster ceiling, and if a section came down during a show with people underneath, it'd be on him. The balcony stayed closed, which it already was. And unless the roof was repaired and certified by a licensed engineer within forty-five days, he'd have no choice but to issue an order closing the auditorium to the public.