Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  The man instantly grew wary. “Oh no you don’t. I’ve heard about deals for souls. Some of my best friends—”

  “But this is a deal to save your soul!”

  “How do I know that?” the man demanded. “How do I know you’re really what you say you are? The devil has power to assume pleasing shapes, doesn’t he?”

  The angel smiled joyfully. “Good for you! You remember some of your childhood teachings.”

  “Don’t try to put me off. I’ve negotiated a few tricky deals in my day. How do I know you’re really an angel, and you want to save my soul?”

  “By their fruits ye shall know them,” the angel replied.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Still smiling, the angel replied, “When the devil makes a deal for a soul, what does he promise? Temporal gifts, such as power, wealth, respect, women, fame.”

  “I have all that,” the man said. “I’m on top of the world, everyone knows that.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And I didn’t sign any deals with the devil to get there, either,” he added smugly.

  “None that you know of,” the angel warned. “A man in your position delegates many decisions to his staff, does he not?”

  The man’s face went gray. “Oh my God, you don’t think . . . “

  With a shrug, the angel said, “It doesn’t matter. The deal that I offer guarantees your soul’s salvation, if you meet the terms.”

  “How? What do I have to do?”

  “You have power, wealth, respect, women, fame.” The angel ticked each point off on his slender, graceful fingers.

  “Yes, yes, I know.”

  “You must give them up.”

  The man lurched forward in the wingchair. “Huh?”

  “Give them up.”

  “I can’t!”

  “You must, if you are to attain the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  “But you don’t understand! I just can’t drop everything! The world doesn’t work that way. I can’t just . . . walk away from all this.”

  “That’s the deal,” the angel said. “Give it up. All of it. Or spend eternity in hell.”

  “But you can’t expect me to . . . ” He gaped. The angel was no longer in the room with him. For several minutes he stared into empty air. Then, knees shaking, he arose and walked to the closet. It too was empty of strange personages.

  He looked down at his hands. They were trembling.

  “I must be going crazy,” he muttered to himself. “Too much strain. Too much tension.” But even as he said it, he made his way to the telephone on the bedside table. He hesitated a moment, then grabbed up the phone and punched a number he had memorized months earlier.

  “Hello, Chuck? Yes, this is me. Yes, yes, everything went fine tonight. Up to a point.”

  He listened to his underling babbling flattery into the phone, wondering how many times he had given his power of attorney to this weakling and to equally venal deputies.

  “Listen, Chuck,” he said at last. “I have a job for you. And it’s got to be done right, understand? Okay, here’s the deal—” He winced inwardly at the word. But, taking a deep manly breath, he plunged ahead. “You know the Democrats are setting up their campaign quarters in that new apartment building—what’s it called, Watergate? Yeah. Okay. Now I think it would serve our purposes very well if we bugged the place before the campaign really starts to warm up . . . “

  There were tears in his eyes as he spoke. But from far, far away, he could hear a heavenly chorus singing.

  Introduction to “A Slight Miscalculation”

  This story was literally cooked up over a bowl of mulligatawny soup.

  Back before she married Lester Del Rey and became one of the most innovative and successful book editors in the history of science fiction, Judy-Lynn Benjamin was managing editor of Galaxy magazine. (Or, as Robert Blocka slyly put it, she was “the man-aging editor.”) Judy-Lynn and I had lunch in one of Manhattan’s Indian restaurants and started talking about the dire news media fears of the Big One: an earthquake along the San Andreas Fault that would knock California into the Pacific Ocean.

  I muttered a “what if” kind of idea. Judy-Lynn laughed heartily and told me to write the story for Galaxy.

  But the joke was on me. When I sent the story in, Galaxy‘s editor in chief, knowing me as the author of scientifically accurate stories, demanded to know the scientific basis behind my story.

  I sold the story elsewhere, much to Judy-Lynn’s chagrin. And mine.

  A Slight Miscalculation

  Nathan French was a pure mathematician. He worked for a research laboratory perched on a California hill that overlooked the Pacific surf, but his office had no windows. When his laboratory earned its income by doing research on nuclear bombs, Nathan doodled out equations for placing men on the Moon with a minimum expenditure of rocket fuel. When his lab landed a fat contract for developing a lunar flight profile, Nathan began worrying about air pollution.

  Nathan didn’t look much like a mathematician. He was tall and gangly, liked to play handball, spoke with a slight lisp when he got excited and had a face that definitely reminded you of a horse. Which helped him to remain pure in things other than mathematics. The only possible clue to the nature of his work was that lately he had started to squint a lot. But he didn’t look the slightest bit nervous or high strung, and he still often smiled his great big toothy, horsy smile.

  When the lab landed its first contract (from the State of California) to study air pollution, Nathan’s pure thoughts turned—naturally—elsewhere.

  “I think it might be possible to work out a method of predicting earthquakes,” Nathan told the laboratory chief, kindly old Dr. Moneygrinder.

  Moneygrinder peered at Nathan over his half-lensed bifocals. “Okay, Nathan, my boy,” he said heartily. “Go ahead and try it. You know I’m always interested in furthering man’s understanding of his universe.”

  When Nathan left the chief’s sumptuous office, Moneygrinder hauled his paunchy little body out of its plush desk chair and went to the window. His office had windows on two walls: one set overlooked the beautiful Pacific; the other looked down on the parking lot, so the chief could check on who got to work at what time.

  And behind the parking lot, which was half-filled with aging cars (business had been deteriorating for several years), back among the eucalyptus trees and paint-freshened grass, was a remarkably straight little ridge of ground, no more than four feet high. It ran like an elongated step behind the whole length of the laboratory grounds and out past the abandoned pink stucco church on the crest of the hill. A little ridge of grass-covered earth that was called the San Andreas Fault.

  Moneygrinder often stared at the Fault from his window, rehearsing in his mind exactly what to do when the ground started to tremble. He wasn’t afraid, merely careful. Once a tremor had hit in the middle of a staff meeting. Moneygrinder was out the window, across the parking lot, and on the far side of the Fault (the eastern, or “safe” side) before men half his age had gotten out of their chairs. The staff talked for months about the astonishing agility of the little waddler.

  A year, almost to the day, later the parking lot was slightly fuller and a few of the cars were new. The pollution business was starting to pick up since the disastrous smog in San Clemente. And the laboratory had also managed to land a few quiet little Air Force contracts—for six times the amount of money it got for the pollution work.

  Moneygrinder was leaning back in his plush desk chair, trying to look both interested and noncommittal at the same time, which was difficult to do, because he never could follow Nathan when the mathematician was trying to explain his work.

  “It’s a thimple matter of transposing the progression,”

  Nathan was lisping, talking too fast because he was excited as he scribbled equations on Moneygrinder’s fuchsia-colored chalkboard with nerve-ripping squeaks of the yellow chalk.

  “You thee?” Nathan said at last, standing bes
ide the chalkboard. It was totally covered with his barely legible numbers and symbols. A pall of yellow chalk dust hovered about Nathan.

  “Um . . . ” said Moneygrinder. “Your conclusion, then . . . ?”

  “It’s perfectly clear,” Nathan said. “If you have any reasonable data base at all, you can not only predict when an earthquake will hit and where, you can also predict its intensity.”

  Moneygrinder’s eyes narrowed. “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve gone over it with the CalTech geophysics people. They agree with the theory.”

  “H’mmm.” Moneygrinder tapped the desktop with his pudgy fingers. “I know this is a little outside your area of interest, Nathan, but . . . ah, can you really predict actual earthquakes? Or is this all theoretical?”

  “Sure you can predict earthquakes,” Nathan said, grinning like Mr. Ed, the talking horse. “Like next Thursday’s.”

  “Next Thursday’s?”

  “Yeth. There’s going to be a major earthquake next Thursday.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here. Along the Fault.”

  “Ulp!”

  Nathan tossed the stubby remainder of his chalk into the air nonchalantly, but missed the catch and it fell to the carpeted floor.

  Moneygrinder, slightly paler than the chalk, asked, “A major quake, you say?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did . . . did the CalTech people agree with your prediction?”

  “No,” said Nathan, frowning slightly. “They claim I’ve got an inverted gamma factor in the fourteenth set of equations. I’ve got the computer working on it right now.”

  Some of the color returned to Moneygrinder’s flabby cheeks. “Oh . . . I see. Well, let me know what the computer says.”

  “Sure.”

  The next morning, as Moneygrinder stood behind the gauzy draped of his office window watching the cars pull up, his phone rang. His secretary had put in a long night, he knew, and she wasn’t in yet. Pouting, Moneygrinder went over to the desk and answered the phone himself.

  It was Nathan. “The computer still agrees with the CalTech boys. But I think the programming’s slightly off. Can’t really trust computers. They’re only as good as the people who feed them data, you know.”

  “I understand,” Moneygrinder said. “Well, keep working on it.”

  He chuckled as he hung up. “Good old Nathan. Great at theory, but hopeless in the real world.”

  Still, when his secretary finally showed up and brought him his morning coffee and pill and nibble on the ear, he said thoughtfully:

  “Maybe I ought to talk with those bankers in New York after all.”

  “But you said that you wouldn’t need their money now that business is picking up,” she purred.

  He nodded bulbously. “Yes, but still . . . arrange a meeting with them for next Thursday. I’ll leave Wednesday afternoon. Stay the weekend in New York.”

  She stared at him. “But you said we’d . . . “

  “Now, now. Business comes first. You take the Friday afternoon jet and meet me at the hotel.”

  Smiling, she answered, “Yes, Cuddles.”

  Matt Climber had just come back from a Pentagon lunch when Nathan’s phone call reached him.

  Climber had worked for Nathan several years earlier. He had started as a computer programmer, assisting Nathan. In two years he had become a section head and Nathan’s direct superior. (On paper only; nobody bossed Nathan, he worked independently.) When it became obvious to Moneygrinder that Climber was heading his way, the lab chief helped his young assistant to get a government job in Washington. Good experience for an up-and-coming executive.

  “Hi, Nathan, how’s the pencil-pushing game?” Climber shouted into the phone as he glanced at his calendar appointment pad. There were three interagency conferences and two staff meetings scheduled for this afternoon.

  “Hold it now, slow down,” Climber said, sounding friendly but looking grim. “You know people can’t understand you when you talk too fast.”

  Thirty minutes later Climber was leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk, tie loosened, shirt collar open, and the first two meetings of his afternoon’s schedule crossed off.

  “Now let me get this straight, Nathan,” he said into the phone. “You’re predicting a major quake along the San Andreas Fault next Thursday afternoon at two-thirty p.m. Pacific Standard Time. But the CalTech people and even your own computer don’t agree with you?”

  Another ten minutes later Climber said, “Okay, okay . . . sure, I remember when we’d screw up the programming once in a while. But you made mistakes, too. Okay, look—tell you what, Nathan. Keep checking. If you find out definitely that the computer’s wrong and you’re right, call me right away. I’ll get to the President himself, if we have to. Okay? Fine. Keep in touch.”

  He slammed the phone back onto its cradle and his feet back on the floor, all in one weary motion.

  Old Nathan’s really gone ‘round the bend, Climber told himself. Next Thursday. Hah! Next Thursday. H’mmm . . .

  He leafed through his calendar pages. Sure enough, he had a meeting with the Boeing people in Seattle next Thursday.

  If there is a major quake the whole damned West Coast might slide into the Pacific. Naw . . . don’t be silly. Nathan’s cracking up, that’s all. Still . . . how far north does the Fault go?

  Climber leaned across his desk and tapped the intercom button.

  “Yes, Mr. Climber?” came his secretary’s voice.

  “That conference with Boeing on the hypersonic ramjet transport next Thursday,” Climber began, then hesitated a moment. But, with absolute finality, he said, “Cancel it.”

  Nathan French was not a drinking man, but by Tuesday of the following week he went straight from the laboratory to a friendly little bar that hung on a rocky ledge over the surging Pacific.

  It was a strangely quiet Tuesday afternoon, so Nathan had the undivided attention of both the worried-looking bartender and the freshly-painted hooker who worked the early shift in a low-cut black cocktail dress and overpowering perfume.

  “Cheez, I never seen business so lousy as yesterday and today,” the bartender complained. He was fidgeting around the bar, with nothing to do. The only dirty glass in the place was Nathan’s, and he was holding onto it because he liked to chew the ice cubes.

  “Yeah,” said the hooker. “At this rate I’ll be a virgin again by the end of the week.”

  Nathan didn’t reply. His mouth was full of ice cubes, which he crunched in absent-minded cacophony. He was still trying to figure out why he and the computer didn’t agree on the fourteenth set of equations. Everything else checked out perfectly: time, place, force level on the Richter scale. But the vector, the directional value—somebody was still misreading the programming instructions. That was the only possible answer.

  “The stock market’s dropped through the floor,” the bartender said darkly. “My broker says Boeing’s gonna lay off half their people. That ramjet transport they was gona build is getting’ scratched. And the lab up the hill is getting’ bought out by some East Coast banks.” He shook his head.

  The hooker, sitting beside Nathan with her elbows on the bar and her Styrofoam bra sharply profiled, smiled at him and said, “How about it, big guy? Just so I don’t forget how to, huh?”

  With a final crunch on the last ice cube, Nathan said, “Um, excuse me. I’ve got to get check that computer program.”

  By Thursday morning Nathan was truly upset. Not only was the computer still insisting that he was wrong about equation fourteen, but none of the programmers had shown up for work. Obviously, one of them—maybe all of them—had sabotaged his program. But why?

  He stalked up and down the hallways of the lab searching for a programmer, somebody, anybody—but the lab was virtually empty. Only a handful of people had come in, and after an hour or so of wide-eyed whispering among themselves in the cafeteria over coffee, they started to sidle out to the parking lot and get into their ca
rs and drive away.

  Nathan happened to be walking down a corridor when one of the research physicists—a new man, from a department Nathan never dealt with—bumped into him.

  “Oh, excuse me,” the physicist said hastily, as he started to head for the door down at the end of the hall.

  “Wait a minute,” Nathan said, grabbing him by the arm. “Can you program a computer?”

  “Uh, no, I can’t.”

  “Where is everybody today?” Nathan wondered aloud, still holding the man’s arm. “Is it a national holiday?”

  “Man, haven’t you heard?” the physicist asked, goggle-eyed. “There’s going to be an earthquake! The whole damned state of California is going to slide into the Pacific Ocean!”

  “Oh, that.”

  Pulling his arm free, the physicist scuttled down the corridor. As he got to the door he shouted over his shoulder, “Get out while you can! East of the Fault! The roads are jamming up fast!”

  Nathan frowned. “There’s still an hour or so,” he said to himself. “And I still think the computer’s wrong. I wonder what the tidal effects on the Pacific Ocean would be if the whole state collapsed into it?”

  Nathan didn’t really notice that he was talking to himself. There was no one else to talk to.

  Except the computer.

  He was sitting in the computer room, still poring over the stubborn equations, when the rumbling started. At first it was barely audible, like very distant thunder. Then the room began to shake and the rumbling grew louder.

  Nathan glanced at his wristwatch: two-thirty-one.

  “I knew it!” he said gleefully to the computer. “You see? And I’ll bet the rest of it is right, too, including equation fourteen.”

  Going down the hallway was like walking through the passageway of a storm-tossed ship. The floor and walls were swaying violently. Nathan kept his feet despite some awkward lurches here and there.

  It didn’t occur to him that he might die until he got outside. The sky was dark, the ground heaving, the roaring deafened him. A violent gale was blowing dust everywhere, adding its shrieking fury to the earth’s tortured groaning.