by Ben Bova
The Starcrossed
Ben Bova
Pink scented smog, 3-D TV and earthquake-proof aluminium skyscrapers capable of hurtling themselves and their occupants to a safe Pacific splashdown should tremors exceed desired tolerances. This is the twenty-first century of Ben Bova’s hilarious novel, where the Vitaform Process grants nubile new bodies to the aged and a new 3-D TV series offering the illusion of almost live entertainment in the home is all that Bernard Finger, the cigar-chewing loudmouth mogul of Titanic Productions needs to save his company from the brink of financial disaster.
Enter one Bill Oxnard, inventor of the 3-D holographic system, Brenda Impanema, Finger’s sexy lady assistant, Ron Gabriel, hot-tempered hot-shot script writer who hates Finger nearly as much as Finger hates him, and you’ve got the winning formula for a smashing new family series guaranteed to bring 3-D to the heart of the viewing public and make a fortune for Titanic.
Or will it?
Stay tuned as the whole sick crew of Titanic Productions struggles to bring you the greatest intergalactic show on earth… THE STARCROSSED.
The Starcrossed
by Ben Bova
To Cordwainer Bird…
May he fly high and strike terror in the hearts of the unjust.
1: THE BANKERS
“American ingenuity licked the pollution problem;” said Bernard Finger, glowingly. “And the energy arms too, by damn.”
Tamed and golden in his new Vitaform Process body, Finger was impeccably dressed in the latest neo Victorian style Bengal Lancer business suit, complete with epaulets and an authentic brigadier’s insignia. He stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his sumptuous, spacious office and gazed fondly out at the lovely pink clouds that blanketed the San Fernando Valley.
The late morning tan blazed out of a perfect blue sky. As far as me eye could see, the entire Greater Los Angeles area—from sparkling sea to the San Berdoo Mountains—was swathed in, perfumed, tinted clouds. Except for a few hilltops poking up tam and there, it all looked like one enormous dollop of pink cotton candy.
“American ingenuity,” Bernard Mugger repeated. “And American know-how! That’s how we beat those Arabs and those bleeding heart conservationists.”
Bill Oxnard watched Finger with some astonishment from his utterly comfortable position, sunk deep into a warmly plush waterchair. Surrounded by pleasantly yielding artificial hides, his loafers all but invisible in the thick pile of the office’s carpet, he still kept his attention on Finger.
It was uncanny. Oxnard had met the man eighteen months earlier, before he had gone in for the Vitaform Process. Then he had been a short, pudgy, bald, cigar. chewing loudmouth approaching sixty years of age. Now he looked like Cary Grant in costume for Gunga Din. But he still sounded like a short, pudgy, bald, cigar-chewing loudmouth.
The lovely pink clouds that Finger was admiring were smog, of course. Oxnard had driven from his lab in the Malibu Hills through thirty miles of the gunk to get to Finger’s lofty office. Sure, the smog was tinted and even perfumed, but you still needed noseplugs to survive fifty yards of the stuff and the price of them had gone up to eighteen-fifty a set. They only lasted a couple of weeks, at most. The cost of breathing keeps going up, he told himself.
Oxnard’s mind was wandering off into the equations that governed photochemical smog when Finger turned from the window and strode to his airport-sized desk.
“It makes me proud,” he pronounced, “to think of all the hard work that American men and women have put out to conquer the problems we faced when I was a kid”
As Finger sat in the imposing chrome and black leather chair behind his desk, Oxnard glanced at the two others in the room: Finger’s assistants. The man was lean and athletic looking, with a carefully trimmed red beard. The woman was also slim; she hid much of her face behind old-fashioned bombardier’s glasses. Her longish hair was also red, the same shade as the man’s. Red hair was in this week.
They both stared fixedly at their boss, eager for every word.
“A hundred and sixty-seven floors below us,” Finger went on, “down in that perfumed pink environment we’ve created for them, ordinary American men and women are hard at work. You can’t see them from up here, but they’re working, believe me. I know. I can feel them working. They’re the backbone of America… the spinal column of our nation.”
They’re working, all right, Oxnard thought. Every morning he stared with dismay at the black waves of the Pacific turgidly lapping the blacker beaches, while the oil rigs lining the ocean shore busily sucked up more black gold.
“Men and women hard at work,” Finger went on, almost reverently. “And when they come home from their labors, they want to be entertained. They demand to be entertained. And they deserve the best we can give them.”
The woman dabbed at her eyes. The man, Les Something-or-Other, nodded and muttered, “With it, B.F.”
Finger smiled. He carefully placed his palms down on the immaculately glistening, bare desktop. Leaning forward ever so slightly he suddenly bellowed:
“So how come we don’t have one single top-rated series on The Tube? How come?”
Les actually leaned back in his chair. The woman looked startled, but never wavered from staring straight at Finger. Oxnard’ almost thought he could feel a shock wave blow across the room.
With the touch of a button, Finger projected a column of names and numbers on a wall where a Schoenheer had been hanging.
“Look at the top ten!” he roared. “Do you see a Titanic Productions series? Not Look at the top twenty. The list grew longer. “The top fifty…” And longer.
Les Montpelier, that’s his name, Oxnard remembered. He seemed to be trying to sink deeper into his waterchair. He slumped further and further into its luxurious folds, pulling in his chin until his beard scraped his chest. The woman was just the opposite: she perched on the edge of her chair, all nerves, fists knotted on knees. Nice legs.
Finger flashed more lists on the screen. And pictures. All two-dimensional, Oxnard noted. Everything about the room was two-dimensional. Flat paintings on the walls. Flat desktop dominating the decor. The waterchairs were sort of three-dimensional, but only to the tactile sense. They looked, just as flat as everything else. All planes and angles. Nothing holographic. Even the woman wasn’t as three-dimensional as she should be, despite her legs.
It was a pleasant enough office, though. Brightly colored carpeting and draperies. Everything soft looking, even the padded walls. Up here on the one hundred and sixty-seventh, floor of the Titanic Tower they never had to worry about, smog or noise or dust. The air was pristine, cool, urged smoothly through the sealed offices by gently whispering machinery hidden behind the walls. Very much the same way that people were moved through Titanic’s offices: quietly, efficiently, politely, relentlessly.
Oxnard remembered how nice everyone had been to him’ the first time he had visited Titanic, eighteen months earlier. They had all been very polite, very enthusiastic, had even pronounced laser and holographic correctly, although they never quite seemed to grasp the difference between a hologram and a holograph. He had first met Las Montpelier then, and had been ushered into Finger’s lofty sanctuary, right here in this same room. Finger wasn’t looking like Cary Grant in those days and his comment on Oxnard’s invention was:
“Stop wasting my time with dumb gadgets! What we need is a show with growth potential. Spinoffs, repeats, byproducts. This thing’s a pipedream!”
That was eighteen months ago. Now Finger was saying:
“Every major network has three-dee shows on the air! All top ten series are three-dees! People are standing in line all over the country to buy three-dee sets. And what have you and the other flunkies and drones working for me produced? Nothing! No-t
hing: Not a goddamned thing.”
Finger was perspiring now. The sculptured planes of his face were glistening and somehow looked as if they might be beginning to melt. He touched another button on his desk and the faint whir of an extra air blower sounded from somewhere in the padded ceiling.
“I had to go out myself and find the inventor of the three-dee process and personally coax him to come here and consult with us,” Finger said, his voice sounding at once hurt and outraged.
It was almost true. The woman, whose name Oxnard still couldn’t recall, had called him and said, Mr. Finger would like to meet with him. When Oxnard reminded her that they had met eighteen: months earlier, the woman had merely smiled on the phone screen and suggested that the future of her career depended on getting him into Finger’s office. Oxnard reluctantly agreed to a date and time.
“All right, then,” Finger went on. “A less loyal man would make some heads roll in a situation like this. I haven’t fired anybody. I haven’t panicked. You still have your jobs. I hope you appreciate that.”
They both bobbed their heads.
“After lunch, the New York people, will want to see what we’ve got. Take him,” Finger barely glanced in Oxnard’s direction, “back to the studio and make sure all this fancy gadgetry is working when I arrive there.”
“With it, B.F.,” Montpelier said as he struggled up out of his waterchair.
The woman got to her feet and Oxnard did the same. Finger swivelled his chair slightly and started talking into the phone screen. They were dismissed.
It took exactly twenty-eight paces through the foot-smothering carpet to get to the office door. Les Montpelier swung it open gingerly and they,stepped into the receptionist’s area.
“One good thing about fiightweight doors,” Montpelier muttered. “You can’t slam them.”
The Titanic Tower was built to earthquake specificstions of course. Which meant that it was constructed like an oversized rocket booster, all aluminum or lighter metals, with a good deal of plastics. If the sensors in the subbasement detected an earth movement beyond the designed tolerances, rocket engines built into the pods along the building’s sides roared to life and hurtled the entire tower, along with its occupants, safely out to a splashdown in the Pacific, beyond the line of oil rigs.
The whole system had been thoroughly tested by NASA; even though a few diehard conservative engineers thought that the tests weren’t extensive enough, the City of Los Angeles decided that it couldn’t grow laterally any more—all the land had been used up. So skyscrapers were the next step. Earthquake-proof skyscrapers.
There hadn’t been an earthquake severe enough to really test the rocket towers, although the Tishman Tower had been blasted off by a gang of pranksters who tinkered with the seismographic equipment in its basement. The building arched beautifully out to sea, with no injuries to its occupants beyond the sorts of bruises and broken bones you’d expect from bouncing off the foam plastic walls, floors and ceilings. A few heart attacks, of course, but that was to be expected. The pedestrians who happened to be strolling on the walkways around the Tower were, unfortunately, rather badly singed by the rocket exhaust. A few of them eventually died, including eighty-four in a sightseeing bus that was illegally parked in front of the Tower. Most of them were foreign visitors, though, and Korean missionaries at that.
As they walked down the corridor toward the studio, Oxnard noted how the foam plastic flooring absorbed the sounds of their footfalls, even without carpeting. It was a great building for sneaking up behind people.
“Why did you let Finger yell at you like that?” Oxnard wondered aloud. “Les, you brought me up here to see him a year and a half ago.”
Montpelier glanced at the woman, who answered: “We’ve learned that it’s best to let B.F. have his little tantrums, Dr. Oxnard. It’s a survival technique. “
Her voice was low, throaty, the kind that would be unbearably exotic if it had just the faintest trace of a foreign accent. But her pronunciation was flat Southern California uninspired. Over the phone she had managed to sound warm and inviting. But not now.
“I don’t have a Doctorate, Miz… uh…” Oxnard grimaced inwardly. He could remember equations, but not names.
“Impanema.” She flashed a meaningless smile, like a reflex that went along with stating her name. “Brenda Impanema.”
“Oh.” For the first time, Oxnard consciously overrode his inherent shyness and really looked at her. Something about her name reminded him of an old song and a girl in an old-fashioned covered-top swimsuit. But Brenda didn’t look like that at all. She seemed to be that indeterminate age between twenty and forty, when women used style and cosmetics before resorting to surgery and Vitaform Processing. She had the slight, slim body of the standard corporate executive female who spent most of her money on whatever style of clothing was fashionable that week and got most of her nutrition on dates with overeager young stallions. Good legs, though. Flat chested, probably: it was difficult to tell through all the ribbons and flouncy stuff on her blouse. But she had good legs and the good sense to wear a miniskirt, even though it wasn’t in style this week.
Behind those overlarge green glasses, her face was knotted into a frown of concentrated worry.
“Don’t get upset,” Oxnard said generously. “The laser system works like a charm. Finger and his New York bankers will be completely impressed. You won’t lose your jobs.”
Montpelier laughed nasally. “Oh, B.F. could never fire us. We’ve been too close for too many years.”
“What he means,” Brenda said, “is that we know too much about him.”
Pointing a lean finger at her, Montpelier added, “And he knows too much about us. We’re married to him—for better or for worse.”
Oxnard wondered how far the marriage went. But he kept silent as they reached the elevator, stepped in and dropped downward.
“It must make for a nerve-wracking life,” Oxnard said.
“Oh, no… the elevator’s completely safe,” Montpelier said over the whistling of the slipstream outside their shuddering, plummeting compartment.
“I didn’t mean that,” Oxnard said. “I mean… well, working for a man like Finger. He treats you like dirt.”
Brenda shrugged. “It only hurts if you let him get to you.”
Montpelier scratched at his beard. “Listen. I’ll tell you about B.F. There’s a lot more to him than you think. Like that time he kicked me down the elevator shaft…”
“He what?”
“It was an accident,” Brenda said quickly.
“Sure,” Montpelier agreed. “We were discussing something in the hallway; my memory’s a little hazy…”
“The chess show,” said Brenda.
“Oh, yes.” Montpelier’s eyes gleamed with the memory of his idea. “I had this terrific idea for a chess show. With real people—contestants, you know, from the audience—on each square. We’d dress them in armor and all and let them fight it out when they got moved onto the same square…”
“And the final survivor gets a million dollars,” Brenda said.
“And the Hospital Trust gets the losers… which we would then use on our ‘Medical Miracles’ show!”
Oxnard felt a little dizzy. “But chess isn’t…”
Brenda touched him with the fingertips of one hand. “It doesn’t matter. Listen to what happened.” She was smiling. Oxnard felt himself grin back at her.
Montpelier went on, “Well, B.F. and I went round and round on this idea. He didn’t like it, for some reason. The more I argued for it, the madder he got. Finally we were at the end of the hallway, waiting for the elevator and he got so mad he kicked me! He actually kicked me. He was taking Aikido lessons in those days and he kicked me right through the goddamned elevator door!”
“You know how flimsy the doors around here are,” Brenda quipped.
Before Oxnard could say anything, Montpelier resumed:
“I went bum-over-tea-kettle right down the elevator s
haft!”
“Geez…”
“Luckily, the elevator was on its way up the shaft, so I only fell twenty or thirty floors. They had me fixed up in less than a year.”
“Les was the star of ‘Medical Miracles’ for a whole week… although he didn’t know it at the time.”
“And Bernard Finger,” said Montpelier, his voice almost trembling, “personally paid every quarter Of my expenses, over and above the company insurance. When I finally regained consciousness, he was right there, crying over me like he was my father.”
Oxnard thought he saw the glint Of a tear in Montpelier’s right eye.
“That’s the kind of man B.F. is,” Montpelier concluded.
“Cruel but fair,” Brenda said, trying to keep a straight face.
Just then the elevator stopped with a sickening lurch and the flimsy doors opened with a sound like aluminum foil crinkling.
Everything here happens on cue, Oxnard thought as they stepped out into the studio.
The laser system was indeed working quite well. Montpelier clapped his hands in childish glee and pronounced it “Perfect!” as they ran through the demonstration tapes, although Oxnard noted, from his perch alongside the chief engineer’s seat in the control booth, that the output voltage on the secondary demodulator was down a fraction. Nothing to worry about, but he tapped the dial with a fingernail and the engineer nodded knowingly.
No sense scaring them, Oxnard thought. He went down the hall to the cafeteria and munched a sandwich with Brenda and Montpelier. There wasn’t much conversation. Oxnard put on the abstrated air of a preoccupied scientist: his protective camouflage, whenever he didn’t know what to say and was afraid of making a fool of himself.
Finger and his New York bankers glowed with the aura of haute cuisine and fine brandy when they entered the . studio. Despite the NO SMOKING signs everywhere, they all had long black Havanas clamped in their teeth. Finger had changed his costume; now he wore a somber, stylish Pickwick business suit, just as the bankers wore. Protective coloration, Oxnard thought. I’m not the only one who uses camouflage.
