The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  Ransom almost believed him.

  “And frankly,” the inventor went on, “it will be much easier for me to market my device as a sort of executive’s relaxation gadget, rather than go through the entire government red-tape mill that they use on medical devices.”

  “But how do I know it’s not harmful?” Ransom asked.

  Brightcloud shrugged. “I’ve used it on myself thousands of times. We’ve run more than five hundred controlled laboratory tests with it and several hundred more field tests. No harmful effects whatsoever.”

  “Still. . .”

  “You’ve been bathing in its radiation for the past two and a half minutes,” the inventor said. “So have I.”

  Ransom grabbed at the desk’s edge. “What!”

  “Do you feel anything? Any pain or dizziness?”

  “Why. . .er. . .no.”

  “Just how do you feel?” Brightcloud asked.

  Ransom thought about it. “Er. . .fine, as a matter of fact. A little warm, perhaps.”

  “That’s from the stimulation effect on your blood circulation. Here.” Brightcloud took a small oblong black box from his shirt jacket pocket. It looked rather like a hand calculator. “Let me adjust the frequency just a bit.”

  He turned a tiny knob on the box. Ransom relaxed back in his swivel chair. He was about to say that he didn’t feel any change when, suddenly, he did. A decided change. A growing, warming, magnificent change.

  He felt his jaw drop open as he stared at Brightcloud, who merely stretched his legs comfortably, clasped his hands behind his head, and grinned boyishly at him.

  As president of Larrimore, Swain & Tucker, Robert Larrimore was accustomed to saying no. It had been the hallmark of his long career, a thoroughly negative attitude that had given him the reputation for being the toughest, shrewdest businessman in Lower Manhattan. When others rhapsodized over new products, Larrimore frowned. When junior executives cooed over ideas from their creative staffs and chorused, “Love it! I love it!” Larrimore shook his head and walked in the other direction. When politicians towed in their newest toothpaste-clean candidate, Larrimore would enumerate all the weaknesses of the candidate that his cigar- chomping backers were trying to overlook or forget.

  In short, because he pointed out the obvious and refused to be stampeded by the crowd, he had survived and prospered where others had enthused and withered away. After nearly eight decades of avoiding gapingly unmistakable pitfalls, Larrimore was regarded by several generations of young executives with a respect that bordered on awe. This did not make him a happy man, however.

  He was the first one to arrive in the conference room for the meeting with this new inventor that young Ransom had discovered. Larrimore walked stiffly to his accustomed chair, halfway down the polished mahogany table, his eyes fixed on the Byzantine complexity of electronic units stacked neatly against the back end of the conference room from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

  A uniformed security guard stood before the inert hardware. Larrimore snorted to himself and sat, slowly and painfully, in his padded chair. Arthritis, he groused inwardly. They can cure pneumonia and give me a new heart, but the stupid sonsofbitches still can’t do anything more for arthritis than give me some goddamned aspirins.

  William Ransom pushed the corridor door open and held it for a stocky, dark-complected young man who wore a denim leisure suit embroidered with flowers and sun symbols. My God, Larrimore thought, that young twit Ransom has brought a goddamned Indian in here. An Apache, I bet.

  Ransom made a prim contrast to the solemn-faced redskin, being slim, tall, Aryan-blond and good-looking in an empty way. He always reminded Larrimore of a chorus boy from a musical about the Roaring Twenties.

  “Oh, Mr. Larrimore, you’re already here,” Ransom said as he let the door softly shut itself.

  “You get an A for visual acuity,” Larrimore said.

  Ransom grinned weakly. “Er. . .allow me to introduce Mr. Ja—”

  “James Brightcloud. Who else would he be, Billy?” Larrimore chuckled inwardly. What’s the good of being a tyrant unless you can exert a little tyranny now and then?

  In a much-subdued voice, Ransom said to the inventor, “This is Mr. Larrimore, our president.”

  “How do you do?” Brightcloud said evenly.

  “I do damned well,” Larrimore answered. He did not extend his hand to the inventor. A boy. He’s a mere boy. He can’t have any­thing worthwhile to show us.

  “The others will be here in a minute,” Ransom chattered. “Would you like to have Mr. Brightcloud give you a briefing about his invention before they. . .”

  “No,” Larrimore snapped. “He can tell me the same time he tells the others.”

  Ransom looked back to the inventor, uncertainty twitching in his left eye. “Er. . . do you need to, um, warm up the equipment or anything like that?”

  Brightcloud shook his head. “You probably want to let the security guard go.”

  “Oh! Oh, yes, surely.”

  Larrimore sank back in his chair and watched the two young men take their places down at the end of the table. Ransom whispered a few words to the guard, who then quietly left the conference room. The door didn’t get a chance to close behind him before the other board members started coming in.

  Horace Mann was the first. The financial vice president always arrived on the stroke for every meeting, even though he could barely walk anymore. White-haired and bent with age, Mann had refused retirement every year for the past ten years. And since he knew financial details that were best kept locked within his head, he stayed in power. We’ll have to carry him out someday, Larrimore thought.

  Arnold Hawthorn and Toshio Takahashi arrived together. Hawthorn, the company’s sales director, was sleek, silver- haired and devilishly handsome. He claimed to be bisexual, but no one had ever seen him so much as smile at a woman. Taka­hashi wore his saffron monk’s robe even to board meetings. The foreign sales people worshipped him, almost literally, and his kindness and Oriental patience were legendary. Good for morale, Larrimore mused. And he keeps those young squirts from trying to claw their way up the executive ladder.

  Borden C. Blude, the production manager, came in next and immediately began chatting amiably with Takahashi. Blude was in his eighties, almost as old as Larrimore himself, and clearly senile. He hadn’t had a new idea since Eisenhower had resigned from Columbia, Blude’s alma mater. They didn’t let him do anything around the office, but Casanova —the man who actually owned Larrimore, Swain & Tucker—kept him around as a sort of mascot.

  Cassanova was his usual punctual self, exactly ten minutes late. He was wheeled in by his nurse-secretary-assistant, Ms. Kim Conroy, who was known as Lollipop around the office, but never within Casanova’s hearing. A tall, ravishing redhead who claimed she could type two hundred words a minute, her only obvious talent was a set of well-developed pectoral muscles — undoubtedly an asset in pushing Casanova’s wheelchair.

  The absolute master of larrimore, Swain & Tucker, Casanova had lost the use of his lower extremities through a childish ambition to emulate Evel Knievel. By almost clearing twenty schoolbusses, Casanova went from a motorcycle to a wheelchair in his fortieth year, and turned his restless energy from race courses to board rooms. He owned LS&T, all of it. He was the sole stockholder. He had purchased the stock from this very board of directors when, after two of Larrimore’s negative decisions, they had failed to get in on both the pocket calculator and CB radio booms and the company was about to go broke. Casanova had never told them where he’d gotten his money, and they had never asked. He merely bought them all out, kept them all in their jobs, and showed up ten minutes late for board meetings, glowering at them all.

  The titans of industry, Larrimore thought as his gaze swept along the conference table. Old men who should have been sent off to a farm years ago, a silver-haired fag, a jap saint, a cripple and his pet, and, turning his gaze inward, an impotent old arthritic.

  “Very well, we�
��re all here,” Larrimore said, with a nod in Casanova’s direction. “What do you have to tell us, Mr. Bright-cloud?”

  Brightcloud launched into his description of the therapeutic machine. Larrimore knew the story; Ransom had outlined it for him a week earlier, after Brightcloud’s first demonstration of the device.

  “Do you mean,” Hawthorn interrupted, “that this. . . this machine can make people feel good?”

  Brightcloud nodded, his face serious. “It can alleviate nervous and muscular symptoms. It can even trigger beneficial changes in some internal organs.”

  “Now that’s pretty hard to believe, fella,” old Blude said. “I’ve been in this business for a lotta years and. . .”

  Casanova overrode him. “If this machine really works, how useful would it be to us? We’re in business to market new products, not set up toys in our infirmary.”

  “It would be a low-volume, high-dollar product. You would market it the same way IBM does mainframe computers.”

  Ransom, who usually kept quiet at board meetings, said, “I’d hardly call that low volume.”

  “I mean you would probably want to lease the devices, instead of selling them outright.”

  Larrimore grumbled, “What about the FDA? If this machine has biological effects . . .”

  “We would be bound in honor to submit the device for their evaluation,” Takahashi said.

  “Not legally,” Brightcloud said. “There has never been a clear legal ruling about devices, the way there is about foods and drugs. Even artificial hearts are passed on by an ad hoc committee of the National Institutes of Health, not the FDA.”

  “That’s something,” Casanova murmured.

  “You’re gonna make people feel better by shining some ray on them?” Blude demanded. “I just don’t believe it.”

  Brightcloud allowed himself a tight smile. “The device does work, sir.”

  “What about side effects?” Casanova asked.

  “Practically none,” Brightcloud said. “We’ve searched very carefully for side effects, believe me. There are a couple of very minor ones that are not physiologically damaging at all.”

  “What are they?” Larrimore asked, seeing out of the corner of his eye that he had beaten Casanova to the question.

  “Very minor things. Less than you would get from standing in the sun for ten minutes.”

  “Do you mean that you could get a tan from this thing?” Hawthorn asked.

  “If you want to,” Brightcloud said. “It will stimulate the melanin cells in the skin if you adjust the output frequency properly, but tanning is only a minor effect. It would be an extremely expensive sunlamp.”

  “It’s a shame,” Horace Mann wheezed, “that it can’t change black skins into white. Now that would be an invention!” He cackled to himself.

  Ms. Conroy took a deep breath and asked, “Is the device selective in any way? Will it work better on one type of person than another?”

  Brightcloud stood impassively for a moment, then answered, “We have tested it on five hundred subjects in the laboratory, and several hundred more in the field. There are no significant differences among the subjects that we have been able to find.”

  “Were these subjects volunteers?” Takahashi asked.

  “Almost all of them.”

  “And you found no harmful after effects?”

  “None whatsoever. Everyone we interviewed afterward reported feeling much better than they had previously. Including Mr. Ransom.”

  Larrimore stirred in his chair. “Ransom? You didn’t tell me that you had exposed yourself to this machine’s radiation!”

  The most junior executive looked apologetic, “I tried to, but you were too busy to listen.”

  Casanova glared at both of them. “All right,” he said, to Brightcloud, “I want proof that the damned thing really works.”

  “Right!” Blude slapped the table with the palm of his hand.

  “I can show you all my data,” Brightcloud offered.

  “No,” Casanova snapped. “You have to demonstrate the thing. I don’t think it can possibly work the way you claim it does.”

  “It does work,” Brightcloud said tightly.

  “Then let it work on me. Take away the pain I’ve got. Do that, and you’ve got a sale.”

  With a single nod of his head, Brightcloud went back to the racks of electronics lining the rear wall of the conference room and touched one button. He turned back toward the table.

  “I expected that you’d want a demonstration, so I preset the beam focus for the head of the table, Mr. Casanova. There’s no need for any of you gentlemen to move. Or you either, Ms. Conroy.”

  Larrimore watched the stacks of gadgetry. Nothing was happening. No noise, no electrical hum, no blinking lights. Nothing. He turned to look at Casanova, who was also staring at the machine with a quizzical smirk on his face.

  “There may be some residual radiation leaking off to the sidelobes of the main beam,” Brightcloud told them. “But there’s no need for you to worry. The only possible effects you’ll feel will be rather pleasant.”

  Larrimore swiveled his head back and forth between the inventor and Casanova in his wheelchair. Suddenly he realized that he was moving his neck without the usual arthritic twinges.

  “The side effects, which are very minor,” Brightcloud was saying, “come from a low-level stimulation of the glandular systems.”

  A warmth was spreading over his body. Larrimore felt a pleasurable glow. Startled, he looked sharply at Casanova. The man was smiling!

  “There is one noticeable effect that hits men more than women,” Brightcloud was still explaining. “It might have some embarrassing results in certain social situations, but on the whole our male test subjects have found it very favorable.”

  Larrimore couldn’t believe it! But it was there all right. For the first time in decades.

  He looked toward the others along the table. Ransom seemed red-faced and was trying hard not to stare at Ms. Conroy. Takahashi, the self-professed saintly ascetic, was actively leering at her. Casanova was smiling up at her with tears in his eyes. Mann seemed about to faint, Blude was slack-jawed and sweating. Hawthorn was fingering Takahashi’s saffron robe.

  “All right!” Larrimore croaked. It took all his strength to say it. “We’re convinced. We’re convinced. But don’t turn it off!”

  Ms. Conroy began to edge back toward the door.

  James Brightcloud flew from New York to Santa Fe that afternoon. His equipment stayed in the LS&T building, after being moved from the conference room to Casanova’s private suite. Larrimore wrote a seven-figure check on the spot, which Brightcloud deposited at the Citibank branch in LaGuardia.

  He changed planes in Chicago and Albuquerque, and rented a car in Santa Fe. He spent more than a day driving to Phoenix, and when he boarded a Western Airlines jet there, he had washed off the dark makeup he’d used in New York and donned a sandy-blond curly wig.

  In Los Angeles, the name he used for his next plane ticket was Julio I lernandez, and both his hair and his luxurious mus­tache were jet black. When he registered at the Sheraton Wai­kiki, the name he gave was John Johnston, and the moustache had disappeared. For two days he surfed and drank and sail- boated, getting tan again naturally.

  On the third day, as he lay belly-down on the sand at the public beach a few blocks away from the hotel, Ms. Conroy spread her beach towel next to his and stretched out beside him. She was no longer wearing her red wig, nor her tinted contact lenses. Her short-cropped thick blonde hair and light eyes marked her as a native of a far-off cold and northern land.

  She lay on her stomach and put on a pair of sunglasses. He leaned over and undid the strap of her bikini top.

  “Thank you,” she said in accentless English.

  “Thank you,” he replied. “The machine worked like a charm.”

  “Of course. They paid the full amount?”

  “Yep. It’s deposited.”

  “Good.”
>
  “How’s Casanova?” he asked.

  She laughed, a deep-throated sound that had menace as well as mirth in it. “He is reliving all his childhood fantasies. I told him I was exhausted and had to get away for a few days. He easily agreed and began phoning every available woman in New York. He should be hospitalized by now.”

  “Or dead.”

  She shrugged.

  “I still don’t see why we sold the machine to them. I mean, wouldn’t it have made more sense to get one into the White House. . . or the Congress?”

  “No,” she said, with a shake of her head that sent a golden curl tumbling over her eyes. She brushed it aside impatiently. “In Russia, the Kremlin, yes. In China, even though the leaders in Peking are ascetic, we are having successes among the provincial leaders. China will break up eventually. Time is on our side.”

  “And in America?”

  “The business leaders, of course. And as subtly as possible. Not by. . .how do you call it, ‘the hard sell’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, not that way. Subtly. Quietly. Let the word leak out from one office to another. The business leaders control the American government. As the businessmen use the machine to find their lost potency, the politicians will learn of it and demand that they get machines just like it.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said.

  “Of course I am right. They will destroy themselves. It is inevitable. The result of capitalist decadence.”

  “Capitalist decadence? What about the Kremlin? The machines have been in use there longer than anyplace, haven’t they?”

  “Yes. Of course. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lapsed into obsolete Cold War ideology. It’s my childhood training. Forgive me, please.”

  “Okay. But let’s keep this straight. It’s us against them.”

  “Yes. We are agreed. The young against the old.”

  “No kids off to war anymore.”

  She nodded and brushed at the curl again. “It seems so simple and obvious. Do you think it really will work?”