Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  “Pandro, darling, we have guests downstairs.”

  He looked up at her, peering over the bifocal rims. “Do you know,” he said,” that we’ve been losing money steadily on every category we publish, except for the self-help books.” His voice was a sweet clear tenor, the voice of a born singer, a voice that should have led to the opera rather than conference calls with bankers in Beijing.

  “Self-help books always sell, dear,” Alba replied patiently. “The same awful people keep buying them, year after year.”

  “Don’t the books actually help them?”

  “Heavens, no! If they did, the entire category would have gone down the tubes ages ago.”

  Bunker wiped a bead of perspiration from the end of his nose. The office was uncomfortably warm. Windowless, totally undecorated except for the hologram view of the harbor, the stuffy little room held nothing but the desk and rows of aged filing cabinets. Despite the computer printouts that he was perusing, and despite the impressive array of electronic hardware on his desk, P.T. Bunker neither used nor trusted computers. Alba understood and sympathized; the poor dear had never learned to type, and it just would not be fair to expect him to embarrass himself trying to learn, since he was such an important and busy man.

  “We shouldn’t keep them waiting too long,” she urged gently.

  Bunker glanced at the calendar pad on his desk and the notes that his wife had written on it.

  “Do I have to see these people?”

  He had become a borderline agoraphobe, she knew. Over the years of his sweating and struggling to make Bunker Books profitable, he had slowly but steadily withdrawn into his own private, inner fortress. He trusted no one except his wife, and Alba wondered if the day would ever come when even she was shut out of his increasingly desperate broodings. He would much rather remain cooped up in this unhealthy little cell than come out and meet the people who had come to pay homage to him. He hardly ever left the house, and it was getting more and more difficult to get him to see anyone, even in the comfortable security of the downstairs parlor.

  “You know I wouldn’t bother you if it weren’t important, dear.”

  “Why can’t I talk to them over the Picturephone?” he asked unhappily.

  “I think they might find that a little strange.”

  “We could tell them I’m . . . I’m . . .” His voice trailed off and faded away into silence.

  “It’s all right, darling,” Alba said soothingly. “I’ll be right beside you.”

  With an unhappy frown, P.T. Bunker got up from his desk. He wore only a pair of boxer trunks beneath his stylish open-neck sport shirt. Like a TV newscaster, Bunker had no need to clothe himself below his navel. Not as long as he remained behind his desk.

  Now, however, he walked into the bedroom and began the ritual of showering, shaving, and dressing for company. He had been an impressive figure when Alba had first met him, nearly twenty years earlier. She had been an advertising copywriter for a small agency that still had its office on Madison Avenue. He had just started Bunker Books on the shoestring ten million his father had loaned him. It was love at first sight, a whirlwind courtship and marriage within a week. Never had either one of them regretted an instant of their life together. There had been hard times, businesswise, of course; in fact, the publishing business was always on hard times, it seemed. But Alba and Pandro loved each other with a steadfastness that defied all the strains and pressures of the lunatic world of publishing.

  While he dressed she explained once again about Carl Lewis and the electronic book. Pandro cast her a skeptical look, but said nothing. Alba also reminded him that he would meet Scarlet Dean, their new editor-in-chief. He nodded and grunted as he tugged on his muscle suit.

  It had been years since P.T. had taken the time to play tennis or swim in the four-lane pool they had built in the basement of their home. His once proud physique, with its flat stomach and powerful shoulders and arms, had slumped into middle-aged flabbiness. He avoided revealing this to the people with whom he did business over the Picturephone by wearing shirts that had impressive shoulder pads built into them.

  But when he had to meet people in person, sterner measures were required. The muscle suit gave him the same athletic physique he had possessed decades ago. Once covered with a tight-fitting sport shirt and even tighter jeans, no one could tell that P.T.‘s muscular build was made of plastic foam. He looked better than a matador, in Alba’s eyes.

  He complained about putting in his contact lenses, and worried that his toupee might have been askew. His cowboy boots returned the inch or so that had been taken away by years of bending over a desk. All in all, he looked handsome, trim, tanned, and ready to face the world—thanks to a touch of makeup and a constant stream of encouraging chatter from his wife.

  Grasping her arm tightly, P.T. Bunker reluctantly entered the tiny elevator that took them down to the second floor. Alba reviewed the names of the people waiting to see him, and why they were there.

  “This electronic book invention is very important, dear. It could mean the salvation of the company.”

  He nodded to show that he understood, but still he dreaded facing the people.

  “Ralph Malzone has come up with a sexy name for the invention,” Alba went on. “You know, we can’t just call it the electronic book. We need a catchy name for it.”

  He nodded again. God, my stomach’s turning itself inside out. I wish this was over and done with.

  The elevator stopped and the door slid open automatically before Alba had a chance to tell him the name she had thought of. So she stood on tiptoes and whispered it into his ear.

  To the three people waiting in the parlor, it looked as if Mrs. Bunker was whispering sweet nothings into the ear of the man she adored. He looked tight-lipped and slightly flustered. She smiled at their guests, as if somewhat embarrassed.

  Carl’s heart was thundering in his ribs. This is the big moment, he told himself. This is it. Go or no-go. This man holds the power of life and death over your invention.

  Mrs. Bunker introduced her husband. As if in a dream, Carl took the prototype from his jacket pocket and showed P.T. Bunker how it worked. He watched in silence as Carl demonstrated with The Illustrated Moby Dick. Bunker said nothing. When Carl offered the device to him, Mrs. Bunker took it and played with it for a few minutes. They were all still standing, clustered around the great man a few steps in front of the elevator. No one had taken a chair.

  “You see, darling?” said Mrs. Bunker. “It works beautifully.”

  Bunker finally made a single nod of his head as he handed the prototype back to Carl. “Okay. Looks good. We’ll call it Cyberbooks.”

  And with that he turned abruptly and ducked back into the elevator, leaving Carl, Lori, Scarlet Dean, and his wife standing there gaping at his retreating back.

  Summer, Book II

  The Writer

  It was a blazing hot July day, the kind of molten heat and humidity that drives even the mildest man to thoughts of murder. An Ed McBain day in the city, where the detectives of the eighty-seventh precinct knew that each ring of the phone meant another body had met a meat cleaver.

  The Writer had found a job. Not in the city. He could no more afford to live in Manhattan than he could fly to the moon by flapping his arms. His job, and his miserable one-room apartment, were in New Jersey. He could see Manhattan’s skyline every day; see the myriad gleaming lights of the city each night. But he was separated from it by a river of poverty whose current was too strong for him to cross.

  He worked in the warehouse of Webb Press, one of the dispensable men who were not supposed to be there, but who were needed because the automated machinery could not do what it had been designed to do, and ordinary expendable human beings were required to carry out the work of the imperfect machines.

  Twice in the past month he had almost been killed by heavy cases of books falling from the wobbly overhead conveyor belts. Six times he and his fellow nonentities had spent wh
ole work shifts searching the entire warehouse for cartons of books that had been misplaced by the robots. On one frightening occasion the entire workforce had to battle a robot that resisted having a truckload of books taken out to the loading dock. Somehow the robot got it into its minuscule electronic brain that its job was to protect the huge crates from being moved. While the Japanese-American foreman screamed in two languages, the men risked injury and death to duck beneath the robot’s menacing arms, pry off its access panel, and turn it off.

  Now the Writer worked at the most thankless job of them all: the furnace. Another stroke of some architect’s genius, the furnace burned the books that were returned from the stores unsold. In the brilliant design of the automated warehouse, the furnace supplied heat for the winter months and electricity all year long. During the summer the electricity not only powered the lights and computers, it ran the air-conditioning system.

  But the heat of the burning books overburdened the air-conditioning system, so the computer program that ran the warehouse’s environmental controls shut down the air-conditioning and there was no way to override its dogmatic decision. The supervisors up in their control booth sneaked in a few room-sized air conditioners for themselves. The men and machines on the warehouse floor worked in summer’s heat—supplemented by the flames of the book-burning furnace.

  The Writer knew that he was going mad. He spent his days shovelling paperback books into the furnace’s hungry red fire. He worked stripped down to his shorts, sweat streaming along his scrawny ribs and lanky arms and legs, blurring his vision. The heat made him feel dizzy, crazy. Like O’Neill’s Hairy Ape, he began to shout aloud, “Who makes the warehouse work? I do! Who makes the publishing industry work? I do!”

  The other men on the warehouse floor started to avoid him.

  But the Writer never noticed, never cared. He knew that he was right. If these books were not destroyed there would be no room for the new books coming off the presses. The whole industry would grind to a halt, strangled to death on a glut of books. So he shovelled the paperbacks into the flames: romance novels, westerns, mysteries, cookbooks, diet books, revealing biographies, lying autobiographies, books about God, about sin, about how to get rich in just ninety days. He scooped them all up in his heavy black shovel and threw them into the baleful blood-red fiery furnace.

  These were the bad books, the books that did not sell, the books that had been returned to the warehouse by the stores and the distributors. Some of the books had been on store shelves for all of a week, some less. Some had never gotten to the shelves; their cartons came back to the warehouse unopened.

  The Writer giggled as he worked. He cackled. These were other writers’ books! If only he could burn enough of them, he told himself, there might one day be room in the world for his own book to be published. He scooped and threw, scooped and threw, making room for his own book and cackling madly all the while.

  “Bad books! Bad books!”

  Meanwhile, at the far end of the warehouse one of the robots trundled a newly opened carton of books to the inspection station next to the loading dock.

  “Malfunction,” it said in its limited vocabulary. “Malfunction.”

  The human inspector looked inside the box and turned pale.

  Thirteen

  Carl Lewis’s life was being dominated by three strong women, and he was not certain that he disliked it.

  Since that brief, weird moment nearly three months earlier when he had met P.T. Bunker and the great man had okayed the project—and named it—Carl had become a full-time consultant to Bunker Books. That is, he worked for the company exclusively but was not entitled to any of the fringe benefits or government-ordained insurance that a regular employee received.

  That did not matter to Carl one whit. He was being paid handsomely enough to afford a three-room apartment for himself, in the same Gramercy Park building that Lori lived in. He worked all day every day of the week and most of every night. His social life consisted of an occasional lunch with Lori, or a dinner with Scarlet Dean, who insisted on being kept up-to-date on the Cyberbooks project.

  Cyberbooks.

  Carl liked the name that Bunker had come up with; he did not realize that it was Ralph Malzone’s original idea. Nor did it occur to him that the name was now formally registered as a trademark belonging to Bunker Books, Inc. Carl just plugged away at the task of turning his prototype into a device that could be manufactured as inexpensively as possible, while still maintaining quality and reliability. His goal was to have the device on sale nationwide for the Christmas buying season, priced at less than $200.

  It was at one of the dinners Scarlet Dean insisted on that he first heard about the cruise.

  “Cruise?” Carl almost sputtered out the salad he had been chewing. “Why do I have to go on a cruise?”

  They were in the Argenteuil, one of the oldest and finest restaurants of Manhattan. Although it seemed to be Scarlet’s favorite place, the restaurant always made Carl feel uneasy. An expense account restaurant, like so many in midtown Manhattan. Too formal and grand for his simple tastes. The maître d’ always made Carl feel as if he were a shabby hobo who had drifted into the restaurant by mistake, even when he wore the new suit that Scarlet had sent him and his formal shirt with the blue MIT tie painted on it.

  Daintily spearing an ear of asparagus, Scarlet replied, “It’s the company sales meeting. We’ve rented out the ocean liner for the week.”

  “A week? I can’t take a week off . . . .”

  Scarlet smiled soothingly and touched his hand with her own. “Relax, Carl. Relax. You won’t have to take the time off your work. I know how important it is. It’s vital! We’ll fix you up with a workshop and a satellite communications link to the office here in New York.”

  Somewhat relieved, he muttered, “I’ve also got to be able to work with the guys in the factory.”

  “That too,” Scarlet assured him. “Interactive picture, voice and data links. Don’t worry about it.”

  But he replied, “I still don’t see why I have to go. Why can’t I stay here?”

  “Two reasons: First, Mrs. Bunker will be on the cruise, and she doesn’t want you to be out of her sight.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Second, the whole sales force will be aboard. We’ll need you to demonstrate the Cyberbooks hardware to them. And it will be good for you to meet them all informally, talk with them, get them pumped up about Cyberbooks.”

  “Hmm. I suppose so,” he admitted grudgingly.

  “And besides,” said Scarlet, “think how much fun it will be to be out on the ocean for a whole week. It’s very romantic, you know.”

  He nodded absently. “Will Lori be there, too?”

  Her smile fading just a little, Scarlet said, “Yes, of course. The whole editorial staff will be aboard.”

  Sitting at the bottom of his swimming pool, P. Curtis Hawks made two telephone calls that night. Although he was certain that all the phones in his expansive Westchester home had been bugged by the Old Man’s minions, he had obtained a surplus U.S. Navy underwater communications system from a Washington friend in the munitions business. In his fishbowl helmet and wet suit, breathing canned air that smelled faintly of machine oil and carcinogenic plastic, Hawks knew that the ultralow frequency of this communications equipment was beyond the range of the Old Man’s tapping.

  His first call was to Scarlet Dean, at a prearranged time and place: the ladies’ room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel lobby, at precisely ten minutes before midnight. A little square area of his glass helmet glowed with strangely shifting colors, then her face came into focus two inches in front of his nose.

  “Good evening, Ms. Dean.”

  She frowned slightly. “Your voice sounds strange. Like you’re in an echo chamber or something. Are those bubbles coming out of your ear?”

  “Never mind that,” Hawks snapped. “What’s going on over there?”

  “The entire sales and editorial staffs will be
on the cruise. And I’ve talked Mrs. Bunker into bringing young Tom Edison along, too.”

  “Tom Edison? Who in hell is—”

  “The Cyberbooks inventor, Carl Lewis.”

  “Oh.”

  “They’ll all be on the ship together. There’s talk that P.T. Bunker will be coming along, too, but so far that’s just unconfirmed rumor.”

  “Christ. If I had a submarine or a cruise missile I could wipe out the whole company.”

  “Not before I get the complete data for the Cyberbooks machine,” Scarlet said.

  Hawks nodded inside his helmet. “Yes. Right.” Then a brilliant thought occurred to him. “You could sink the ship and get away in a lifeboat with the device!”

  She seemed startled for a moment, but she quickly composed herself. “Mr. Hawks, I’m an editor first, and a spy for you second. I am not an underwater demolitions expert.”

  “Yes, of course, I understand,” he mumbled, his mind filled with visions of the Titanic slipping beneath the ice-choked waves. He saw Bunker and his whole staff huddled on the slanting deck while the orchestra played “Nearer My God to Thee.” Refuse to sell out to us, will you? Then down you go, Bunker, you and all your flunkies, down to a watery grave.

  “Mr. Hawks?” Scarlet Dean’s insistent voice broke into his fantasy.

  “Eh? What?”

  “You were—cackling, sir.”

  “Nonsense!” he snapped. “Must be something wrong with this phone link.”

  She said nothing.

  “Get me the data on that Cyberbooks machine as quickly as you can. I don’t care if you’re in the middle of the ocean, as soon as you have the machine in your hands or a copy of its circuitry, send it to me over the special Tarantula communications satellite.”