Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  “Yes, sir,” she replied. “Of course.”

  “Don’t call me otherwise. I’ll call you each night at this time.”

  Scarlet nodded and cut their link. The tiny picture of her face winked out, leaving Hawks nothing to see but the blue-green haze of his swimming pool, lit by its underwater lights. He sat at the bottom of the pool for several minutes, the only sound coming from the frothy bubbles of his breathing apparatus.

  As soon as she transmits the data on the Cyberbooks device, I could sink the damned ship and be rid of Bunker altogether. And all the evidence. Then I could present the Cyberbooks concept as my own to the board of directors. If the Old Man is still around, that by itself should be enough to remove him and put me at the top of the heap.

  He resolved to find a reliable terrorist group that had access to speedboats and anti-shipping missiles. Maybe some of the Atlantic City boys, he mused. Didn’t they sink a gambling ship that refused to pay them protection, a few years back?

  At precisely ten minutes after midnight Hawks made his second phone call. The miniature image of Vinnie DeAngelo’s beefy face screwed up in amazement.

  “Gee, you look funny, Mr. Hawks. Like your nose is too close to th’ camera, you know?”

  “Never mind that. How are you coming along on the special project?”

  The Beast’s eyes evaded Hawks’s. “Like I told you, this is a tough one. I been dopin’ it out, but it don’t look no easier than when I started. He’s got snakes, for Chrissakes. Poison snakes.”

  “He doesn’t stay in his office all the time. He goes home to his apartment.”

  “Yeah, but he takes th’ snakes with him. His chauffeur got bit a couple days ago. Damn near killed him.”

  Exasperated, Hawks snapped, “Then find a mongoose!”

  “Huh? A what?”

  “Never mind. Keep working at it. There’s got to be a weak link in the Old Man’s defenses. He’s a senile cripple, for god’s sake. There’s got to be a way to get to him.”

  “Not while all those snakes are sneakin’ around.” The Beast shuddered.

  Hawks fumed silently. “Stay with it. And, by the way, Vinnie, who was that outfit that sank the gambling boat off Atlantic City a few years ago?”

  “Oh, you mean my cousin Guido.”

  Alba Blanca Bunker allowed the chauffeur to help her out of the long white limousine and stepped onto the concrete surface of the massive dock. It was a gray, mean, John O’Hara kind of day in New York, threatening rain. But there alongside the shabby, deteriorating two-story passenger terminal rose the magnificently sweeping lines of the SS New Amsterdam, the cruise liner that would carry them off on a week-long jaunt on the sunny ocean. She took a deep breath of tangy salt air. Actually, the tang in the air was from a garbage barge being hauled down the Hudson River by a chuffing tugboat.

  Alba felt thrilled anyway. For more than a year she had been working on the dozens of different strings that led to this moment. Now everything seemed to be in place. The Cyberbooks project had reached the point where they could brief the sales force. The medical specialists had agreed to come along on the cruise on a contingency fee basis. And P.T. himself would arrive soon.

  In fact, there he was! Alba saw the blue-and-white helicopter loaned for the occasion by the American Express office droning purposefully against the gray sky up the river toward the pier. She knew that P.T. did not like to fly, did not like to leave the womblike safety of his office and bedroom, but she hoped that the panoramic view of lower Manhattan and the harbor would inspire him and be the first step toward reinvigorating her husband, the man she loved.

  He needs this ocean voyage, she told herself for the millionth time. I’m doing this for him.

  She watched as the helicopter settled briefly on the roof of the passenger terminal, its big rotors whooshing up a clatter of dust and grit. Even from this distance she recognized P.T., stuffed into his muscle suit and a double-breasted blazer topped by a jaunty white yachting cap. He scurried quickly up the special gangplank and into the ship without turning to see if his wife was watching. The chopper took off again, as though eager to hurry back to its ordained task of hunting down deadbeats with overdue bills.

  Alba had suppressed her sudden urge to wave to him, knowing how silly it would look to the other people gathering on the pier. She turned to the chauffeur and ordered him to begin unloading her voluminous trunks and suitcases. P.T. was safely ensconced in their private suite; the medical specialists and the rest of the company could begin boarding the ship now.

  Ms. Lori Tashkajian

  Fiction Editor

  Bunker Books

  Synthoil Tower

  New York NY 10012

  Dear Ms. Tashkajian:

  Thank you so much for accepting Midway Diary! I’m so delighted I almost got out of my wheelchair and danced a jig! The signed contracts are enclosed. How soon will the book be published? You know, I am the last surviving man to have been in the Battle of Midway, and I’d like to at least see the book before I report to the Big Admiral up yonder.

  Thank you again. You’ve made an old man very happy. The advance money will come in handy when next month’s bills arrive.

  Thanks once again,

  Capt. R. Clanker, U.S.N. (Ret.)

  P.S. Do you think we could make a movie out of the book?

  Fourteen

  The first night out of New York, the good ship New Amsterdam ran into a bit of foul weather. Nothing serious, merely a line of squalls that marked the leading edge of a weather front. Herman Melville would barely have noticed it. Yet the night resounded with the thump of landlubbers’ bodies rolling out of their bunks.

  Ralph Malzone leaned his scrawny forearms against the ship’s rail and squinted out toward the bright, clean horizon. The morning was clear as crystal, the sun warm, the sea down to a light chop. Grinning dolphins rode along the ship’s bow wave, gliding effortlessly up to the surface and disappearing beneath the sea, only to rise again glistening and sleek a few moments later.

  Carl Lewis came up beside him and gripped the rail with white-knuckled hands.

  “You okay?” Malzone asked.

  “I think so. This is the first time I’ve been out of sight of land.”

  “You look a little green.”

  “I feel a little green,” Carl admitted.

  “Did you eat anything at dinner last night?”

  “Not much.”

  “Keep it down?”

  “Some of it.”

  Ralph chuckled. “Come on, kid. What you need is a decent breakfast.”

  Carl shook his head. “I’m not so sure . . . .”

  “Trust me. I spent two years on destroyers. I’ve seen more upchucking than a men’s room attendant at an ancient Roman banquet.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Every once in a while I forget that sales managers aren’t supposed to know anything about literature. Neither are engineers.”

  “I read Classic Comics in my freshman English class,” Carl said defensively.

  Ralph sighed heavily and put an arm around the younger man’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s get some breakfast. You’ll feel a lot better with something in your stomach.”

  Uncertainly, Carl let the sales manager lead him to the ship’s dining room. It was a spacious, sumptuously appointed room, decorated in cool, soothing ocean greens and blues. Most of the tables were for four, a few for two, and only the captain’s table big enough to hold eight or ten places.

  Carl had to admit, half an hour later, that he did feel better. Some tomato juice, a couple of poached eggs, toast, and tea had revived him.

  “You know a lot about a lot of things, don’t you?” Carl asked.

  Malzone shrugged his slim shoulders. “Mostly useless junk. How many times do you get the chance to help somebody get over a slight case of seasickness?”

  Carl leaned back in his chair. The dining room was almost empty. Past Malzone’s grinning face he could see the o
cean through the ship’s wide windows. The slight rise and fall of the horizon did not bother him at all now.

  “Listen,” Malzone said, his face growing serious. “I’ve been talking with my sales people, and I think you’re in for some real problems.”

  “Problems?”

  “Yeah. Y’see, what you’re doing with this Cyberbooks idea, basically, is asking the sales force to learn a whole new way of doing their job. It’s kinda like asking a clerk in a shoe store to start selling airplanes to the Pentagon.”

  Carl felt puzzled. “But selling Cyberbooks will be easy!”

  Malzone made a lopsided grin that was almost a grimace. “No it won’t. My sales people are used to dealing with book distributors, wholesalers, truck drivers, bookstore managers. If I understand the way Cyberbooks is going to work, we’re going to be selling directly to the customer.”

  “That’s right. We eliminate all those middle men.”

  “You eliminate most of my sales force.”

  “No, no! We’ll need them to—”

  “They won’t change,” Malzone said quietly. But very firmly. Hunching forward in his chair, leaning on his forearms until his head almost touched Carl’s, he said in a low voice, “They’ve spent their careers in this business doing their jobs a certain way. They work on the road. They live in their cars. They’re not going to give up everything and sit in front of a phone all day.”

  Carl felt a flare of anger at the pigheadedness Malzone was describing. But he saw that the sales manager was genuinely concerned, truly worried about the conflict that was about to break over his head.

  “What should I do?” he heard himself ask.

  Malzone’s lips twitched in a smile that was over before it started. “Nothing much you can do. Tomorrow morning you show them how Cyberbooks works. Half the sales staff will jump overboard before lunchtime. The other half will try to throw you overboard.”

  “Terrific!”

  “I’ll handle them. That’s my responsibility. I just wanted to warn you that they’re not going to fall down and salaam at the end of your presentation.”

  “But they all know the basic idea already, don’t they?”

  “Yep. And they’re loading their guns to convince Mrs. Bee that Cyberbooks won’t work.”

  Carl felt worse than seasick. “Jeez . . .”

  Malzone straightened up and made an expansive gesture with both hands. “Like I said, that’s not your worry. It’s mine.”

  “But the whole purpose of this voyage is to familiarize the editorial and sales staffs with Cyberbooks,” Carl insisted.

  Laughing, Malzone countered, “Not exactly. That’s the excuse for this sea voyage, but it’s not the real reason for it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Didn’t you notice the big contingent of medical people who came aboard with us?”

  “Is that who they are?” Carl had noticed several dozen men and women, elegantly groomed and well dressed, who had arrived at the pier in limousines and shining luxury cars. Obviously neither editors nor sales people. Even their expensive matched luggage had stood out in pointed contrast to the worn, shabby bags of the Bunker Books employees.

  “Plastic surgeons,” Malzone explained. “It’s time for Mrs. Bee’s facelift again. And several other people are going in for lifts and tucks and some body remodelling.”

  “Here on the ship?”

  “Sure. They get the job done and the bruises are all healed up by the time we get back to New York. Everybody home says how great they look, how much good the ocean voyage did them. Nobody knows they had plastic surgery aboard ship.”

  “My god,” said Carl. “A facelift cruise.”

  Thus it was that the following morning, when Carl made his presentation of Cyberbooks to the assembled sales staff, he stood before an audience of bruised and bandaged men and women. They were dressed casually, in shorts and sports tops for the most part. Nearly all of them wore dark glasses. Maryann Quigly was in a whole-body cast, wrapped in white plastic from chin to ankles as a result of a fat-sucking procedure that had drained fifty pounds from her, and the follow-up procedure of tightening her skin so that her body would not be wrinkled like a dieting elephant.

  Mrs. Bunker sat in the first row of the ship’s auditorium, wearing an elegant hooded jacket and dark glasses that effectively hid the bandages around her eyes and jawline. Carl felt as if he were addressing the survivors of the first wave of an infantry assault team that had been caught in a deadly ambush. There was more bandaging showing than human flesh.

  Unbeknownst to Carl or anyone else except Mrs. Bunker, at that very moment P.T. Bunker was on the surgical table, undergoing the multiple procedures that would replace his middle-aged flab with firm young muscle, a transplant procedure that was still very much in the experimental phase.

  Just about the only two people in Carl’s audience who were not bandaged were Ralph Malzone and Lori Tashkajian. Even Scarlet Dean, slimly beautiful and meticulously dressed as she was, sported a pair of Band-Aids just behind her ears. She had combed her hair into a smooth upsweep, obviously relishing the opportunity to show the bandages rather than hide them.

  Feeling somewhat shaken by all this, Carl launched into his demonstration of Cyberbooks. Standing alone on the little stage at the front of the ship’s auditorium, he used not his original prototype, but a new model fresh from the manufacturing center. It was exactly the size of a paperback book, small enough to fit in Carl’s hand easily.

  “ . . . and as you can see,” he was saying, holding up one of the minuscule program wafers, “we can package an entire novel, complete with better graphics than any printing press can produce, in a wafer small enough to tuck into your shirt pocket.”

  “And how do you sell these chips?” asked someone in the audience.

  “Two ways,” replied Carl. “The customer can buy the wafers from retail outlets, or can get them over the phone, recording the book he or she asks for on a blank wafer, the same way you record a telephone message or a TV show.”

  “What about copyright protection?” asked Mrs. Bunker. Her hood and oversized dark glasses reminded Carl of movie stars who pretended to avoid public recognition by a disguise so blatant you could not help but stare at it.

  “The wafers cannot be copied,” he answered. “Once a book is printed on a wafer, instructions for self-destruction are also printed into the text, so if someone tried to recopy the wafer it will erase itself completely.”

  “Until some ten-year-old hacker figures a way around the instructions,” a voice grumbled.

  Everybody laughed.

  Carl shook his head. “I’ve had the nastiest kids in the Cambridge public school system try to outsmart the programming. They found a couple of loopholes that surprised me, but we’ve plugged them.”

  “You hope.”

  “I know,” Carl shot back with some heat.

  A man at the rear of the auditorium stood up, slowly. No bandages showed on him, but the careful way he moved convinced Carl that he must have had a tummy tuck done the day before, or worse.

  “I’m just an old war-horse who’s been workin’ out in the field for damn near thirty years,” he said in a rough voice deepened by a lifetime of cigarettes and alcohol. “I don’t know anything about this electronics stuff. Hell, I got to get my nephew to straighten out my computer every time I glitch it up!”

  The other sales people laughed.

  “Now, what I wanna know is this: If this here invention of yours is gonna replace books printed on paper, what happens to the regional distributors, the warehouses, the truck drivers, and the bookstores?”

  “The bookstores will still stay in business,” Carl said. “They’ll just carry electronic books instead of paper ones.”

  Maryann Quigly yelped from inside her body cast, “You mean there’ll be no paper books at all?”

  “Eventually electronic books will replace paper books entirely, yes,” replied Carl.

  “I ain’t wo
rried about eventually,” the old salesman said. “I’m worried about this coming season. What do I tell the distributors in my area?”

  “As far as Cyberbooks is concerned, you won’t have to deal with them at all. You can show the line directly to the bookstores. We can supply them from the office in New York, over the telephone lines, with all the books they want.”

  A hostile muttering spread through the audience.

  “In fact,” Carl continued, raising his voice slightly, “the bookstores won’t have to order any books in advance. They can phone New York when a customer asks for a Cyberbook and we can transmit it to them instantly, electronically.”

  The muttering grew louder.

  “In other words,” said the old war-horse, “first you’re gonna replace the entire wholesale side of the business, and then you’re gonna replace us!”

  Carl’s jaw dropped open.

  Mrs. Bunker got to her feet and turned to face the salesman. “Woody—nobody could possibly replace you.”

  A ripple of laughter went through the group.

  “Seriously,” Mrs. Bunker continued, “we have got to learn how to adapt to this new innovation. That’s why I’ve brought us all together on this ship, so we can hammer out the new ways of doing things that we’re all going to have to learn.”

  “Mrs. Bee,” retorted Woody hoarsely, “I been with you and P.T. for damn near thirty years. Through good times and lean. But it seems to me that this Cyber-thing is gonna mean you won’t need us sales people. You won’t need anything except a goddamned computer!”

  “That’s just not true,” Mrs. Bunker snapped. “I don’t care how the books are produced or distributed, they will not sell themselves. We will always need good, dedicated, experienced sales people. The techniques might change, the system may be altered, but your jobs will be just as important to this company with Cyberbooks as before. More important, in fact.”

  Ralph Malzone sprang to his feet. “Hey, listen, guys. How many times have you come to me complaining about this knuckleheaded distributor or some dopey truck driver who brings the books back for returns without even opening the cartons? Huh?”