Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  They chuckled. Somewhat grudgingly, Carl thought.

  “Well, with Cyberbooks you eliminate all the middlemen. You deal directly with the point of sales. And you don’t have to carry six hundred pounds of paper around with you!”

  The discussion went on and on. Carl stepped down from the stage and let Ralph and Mrs. Bunker argue with the sales force. The editors shifted uncomfortably on their seats, whether from irritation, boredom, or low-grade postsurgical pain, Carl could not tell.

  The men and women of the sales force were clearly hostile toward Cyberbooks. Even when Mrs. Bunker explained to them that since sales were bound to increase, the company would have to hire more sales people, which meant that most of the present sales personnel would get promoted, they expressed a cynical kind of skepticism that bordered on mutiny.

  The most telling counterthrust came from one of the women. “So we start selling Cyberbooks direct to the stores,” she said in a nasal Bronx accent. “So what about our other lines? They’ll still be regular paper books. How do you think the wholesalers are gonna behave when they see us going around them with the Cyberbooks, huh? I’ll tell you just what they’ll do: they’ll say, ‘You stop going behind our backs with these electrical books or we’ll stop carrying Bunker Books altogether.’ That’s what they’ll say!”

  Telephone Transcript

  “I can hear you clear as a bell, Scarlet.”

  “You ought to, for what Bunker’s paying to have its own satellite communications link from ship to shore.”

  “I’m glad you’re with Bunker now. Webb seems to be going downhill.”

  “Stop fishing for dirt, Murray. We’re discussing the Stoker contract and that’s all.”

  (Laughing.) “Okay, okay. The terms are acceptable, all except the split on the foreign rights. Sheldon wants ninety percent instead of eighty.”

  “Eighty-five is the best I can do.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk him into eighty-five. But just for you. I wouldn’t do it for anybody else.”

  “You’re a sweetheart.”

  “Oh, yeah. The advance. It’s still no bigger than his last contract.”

  “That’s because his last book still hasn’t earned out, Murray. His stuff is getting stale. The readers aren’t buying it the way they used to.”

  “Not earned out yet? Are you sure?”

  “Sad but true.”

  “Hmm. Well, I guess Sheldon can live with a million until the next royalty checks come in. In his tax bracket, it isn’t so bad.”

  “The self-discipline will be good for him.”

  “But how about making it a two-book deal?”

  “On the same contract? Two books?”

  “Right. You know he can pump out another one in six months or less.”

  “I think he pumps them out in six weeks or less, doesn’t he?”

  “Whatever. Two books, two million up front, and the same terms we’ve been discussing.”

  “You’ve got a deal, Murray.”

  “Nice doing business with you. Have a pleasant cruise.”

  Fifteen

  Walking through the vast offices of Webb Press is like walking through a mausoleum these days, thought P. Curtis Hawks. That damned Axhelm has depopulated the company. Where once there sat dozens of lovely red-haired lasses with dimpled knees and adoring eyes that followed his every gesture, now there was row upon row of empty desks.

  Even worse, the Axe had brought in automated partitions for the editorial and sales offices. The amount of office space those people had now depended on how well their books were selling. “Psychological reinforcement,” Axhelm had called it. What it meant was, if your sales figures for the week were good, your office got bigger, the goddamned walls spread out automatically, in response to the computer’s commands.

  But if your sales figures were down, the walls crept in on you. Your office shrank. It was like being in a dungeon designed by the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu: the walls pressed in closer and closer. Already one editor had cracked up completely and run screaming back home to her mother in the wilds of Ohio.

  “The next step,” Axhelm was saying as the two men surveyed the emptiness that had once been filled with doting redheads, “is to sell all this useless furniture and other junk.” Eyeing Hawks haughtily, he added, “The teak panelling in your spacious office should be worth a considerable sum.”

  Hawks chomped hard on his pacifier. Maybe I should put Vinnie onto this sonofabitch instead of the Old Man, he thought.

  “And then we move to smaller quarters,” Axhelm went on. “Where the rents are more reasonable. Perhaps across the river, in Brooklyn Heights.”

  “Never!” Hawks exploded. “No publishing house could survive outside of Manhattan. It’s impossible.”

  Axhelm looked down at his supposed superior with that damned pitying smile of his. “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, your grasp on what is possible and what is impossible seems not to be very strong.”

  “Now see here . . .”

  “You said it would be impossible to run Webb Press with only one-third of the staff that was present when I joined the company. Yet look!” The Axe gestured toward the empty desks. “Two thirds of the personnel are gone and the company functions just as well. Better, even. More efficiently.”

  “Our sales are down.”

  “A temporary dip. Probably seasonal.”

  “Seasonal nothing!” Hawks almost spat the pacifier out of his mouth. “How can we sell books when two-thirds of our sales force has been laid off?”

  “The remaining one-third is sufficient,” said the Axe smugly.

  “You’re going to run the company into the ground,” moaned Hawks.

  Axhelm eyed the shorter man as if through a monocle. “My dear sir, the task given me by corporate management was to make Webb Press more efficient. I have pruned excess personnel and now I shall reduce costs further by moving the offices out of this overly expensive location. Operating the company is your responsibility, not mine. If you cannot show a profit even after I have reduced your costs so drastically, then I suggest that you tender your resignation and turn over the reins of authority to someone who can run an efficient operation.”

  Slowly, with the certainty of revealed truth dawning upon him, Hawks took the plastic cigar butt out of his mouth. So that’s it, he said to himself. Axhelm wants to take over Webb Press. He wants my job. He wants my head as a trophy on his wall.

  He said nothing aloud. But to himself, Hawks promised, I’m going to chop you down, you Prussian martinet. And I’m going to use your own methods to do it.

  Sunset at sea. Scarlet Dean lay back on a deck chair, splendidly alone up on the topmost deck of the New Amsterdam, and watched the sun dip toward the horizon, blazing a path of purest gold across the sparkling waters directly toward her. It was if the huge glowing red sphere were trying to show her a path to wealth and happiness, she thought.

  She knew she was in some danger. Not from anyone with Bunker Books. As far as she could tell they were all pleasantly incompetent nincompoops. Even Alba Bunker, who had a reputation for being the real brains behind the company, seemed totally unaware of what a tiger she had by the tail in Cyberbooks. Just about the only person who seemed to understand what was going on, really, was the sales manager. Ralph Malzone. A wiry, intense kind of guy. And a lot smarter than he pretended to be.

  The danger came from Hawks and his temper. The man had no patience. God knows what demons are after his hide, Scarlet told herself. But it wouldn’t be beyond him to order someone to sink this ship and drown everyone on it.

  Including me.

  But he won’t do that unless and until he has the Cyberbooks machine in his grubby little paws. Or will he? Does he see Cyberbooks as a threat? Does he think he’d be better off putting the whole problem at the bottom of the Atlantic?

  On the other hand, she thought, suppose I had control of Cyberbooks. Me. Myself. I could write my own ticket with Webb Press. Or with any publishing house in
New York. I could probably get the top publishers together to buy me off, pay me millions to suppress the invention. I could retire for life.

  Or start my own company. Take their money and then go to Japan and start a Cyberbooks company there. She smiled to herself. Or Singapore, even better. I could live like a queen in the Far East. The Dragon Lady. Empress of worldwide publishing. What a trip!

  To do that, though, I’ll have to get our young inventor to trust me. He’s got to come along with me, at least at the beginning. The machine means nothing without the inventor to show others how to build it.

  Scarlet realized, with a start, that she was sitting up tensely in the deck chair, every nerve taut with anticipation. She forced herself to lean back in the chair as she thought about Carl Lewis.

  Lori Tashkajian is after him, she knew. Probably in love with him. Certainly the little twit understands that Carl is the key to her personal success. I’ll have to pry Carl loose from her. More important, I’ll have to pry him loose from his work. He’s married to his damned invention, Scarlet realized. Oblivious to everything else. Lori is practically throwing herself at him and he just glides along without seeing it.

  He’s susceptible, though. I could see that the first time I met him. The tongue-tied engineer type. I’ll have to be much more aggressive than Lori’s been. His type calls for special measures.

  Scarlet practiced smiling, alone up there on the top deck, while the sun slid slowly toward the gleaming red-gold sea and the sky turned to majestic flame.

  Lori and Carl were standing side by side at the ship’s rail, just one deck below Scarlet Dean’s solitary perch.

  “Isn’t the sunset beautiful?” she murmured.

  “So are you,” Carl said. And she was, with the sea breeze caressing her shimmering ebony hair and the blazing red glory of the setting sun on her face. Lori wore a sleeveless white frock. In the last light of the sunset it glowed like cloth of gold.

  She acknowledged his compliment with a smile, then looked back toward the sea.

  “I think you and I are the only people on board,” Carl went on, “who haven’t had any plastic surgery done on them.”

  Lori giggled. “That’s true enough! Have you seen Ted Gunn? Hair implants and artificial bone in his legs to make him two inches taller. Even Concetta has had her breasts and backside lifted.”

  Carl chuckled. “The one that gets me is Quigly. The pain she must have gone through!”

  “And now she’s eating five meals a day,” Lori said, “even before the bandages come off! She’ll be the same weight at the end of this cruise as she was at the beginning.”

  “But think of the great time she’s having,” Carl countered.

  They both laughed. Then he said, “You don’t need plastic surgery. You’re gorgeous just as you are.”

  “I’m overweight . . . .”

  “You’re perfect.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “Carl, I’m far from perfect.” Lori’s face grew so serious that he did not reply. Then she went on, “In fact, I have a confession to make. I’ve been using you, Carl—for my own purposes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She looked into his steady blue-gray eyes, a turmoil of conflicting emotions raging within her. As if beyond her conscious control, her voice said, “Carl, back in my office there’s a manuscript . . . .”

  “There’s hundreds of “em!”

  “This is serious,” Lori insisted. “One of those manuscripts is by a completely unknown writer. Nothing the author has written before has ever been published. And it’s good, Carl! It’s better than good. It’s a masterpiece. It’s raw, even crude in places. It’s an unpolished gem. But it’s a masterpiece. I want to publish it.”

  “So?” It was obvious from his puzzled expression that Carl did not understand the problem.

  “It doesn’t fit into any of the marketing categories. It’s not a mystery, or a Gothic, or an historical novel. It’s just the finest piece of American literature I’ve ever read. I get tears in my eyes whenever I think about it, that’s how good it is. Pulitzer Prize, at least. Maybe the Nobel.”

  “Then why don’t you publish it?”

  “No New York publisher would touch it. It’s a thousand manuscript pages long. It’s not category. It’s literature. That’s the kiss of death for a commercial publishing house. They don’t publish literature because literature doesn’t make money.”

  “But if it’s so good . . .”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it,” Lori said, almost crying. “Quality doesn’t sell books. Can you imagine the sales people on this ship going out and selling Crime and Punishment or Bleak House?”

  Carl’s expression turned thoughtful. “Didn’t I read someplace that every publisher in New York turned down Gone With the Wind at one time or another?”

  Nodding, Lori said, “Yes. And for twelve years none of them would touch Lost Horizon. There’s a long list of great novels that nobody wanted to publish.”

  “But they all got into print eventually.”

  “But how many others didn’t?” Lori almost shouted with a vehemence that surprised her. “How many truly fine novels have never been published because the people in this business are too blind or stupid to see how great they are? How many really great authors have gone to their graves totally unknown, their work turned to dust along with them?”

  “My god, you’re trembling.”

  Lori rested her head against Carl’s shoulder. “It’s a fine novel, a great work of art. And it’s going to die without seeing the light of day—unless . . .”

  “Unless what?” he asked, folding his arms around her.

  “Unless we can make a success of Cyberbooks. Then they’ll let me take a chance on an unknown, on a work of literature. I need to be able to tell Mrs. Bunker that the price of my bringing you to her is letting me publish this novel.”

  “That makes sense, I guess.”

  She pushed slightly away from him, enough to be able to look up into his eyes. “But don’t you understand? I’m using you! I’m not interested in your invention just for its own sake. I want it to be a success so that I can have the power to publish this book!”

  Carl smiled at her. “Okay. So what? I’m using you too, aren’t I? Using you to get me inside a big New York publishing house so I can get my invention developed. Otherwise I’d still be sitting in some publisher’s waiting room, wouldn’t I?”

  “But that’s not the same . . . .”

  “Listen to me. Cyberbooks can help you in more ways than one. How big is this great novel of yours? A thousand pages? How much would it cost to print a book that long?”

  “A fortune,” Lori admitted.

  “With Cyberbooks it won’t cost any more than a regular-sized book. And the retail price of the novel will be less than five dollars.”

  Lori brightened. “I hadn’t even thought about that part of it. I was still thinking in terms of printing the novel on paper.”

  “Come on.” He crooked a finger under her chin. “Cheer up. You help me bring Cyberbooks to life and I’ll help you get your novel published. That’s what the biologists call a symbiotic relationship.”

  Dabbing away the tears at the corner of her eyes, Lori allowed Carl to lead her along the deck toward the hatch that opened into the dining salon. Neither of them noticed Scarlet Dean, leaning over the railing of the deck just above where they had been standing, a knowing little smile curving her narrow red lips.

  Murder Five

  Miles Archer was an ex-police officer. A retired homicide detective, in fact. He had even been named after a detective. A small, unremarkable man who had gray hair by the time he was thirty, Archer had cracked many cases during his long distinguished career with the NYPD simply by the fact that hardly anyone could recognize the steel-trap mind behind his bland, utterly forgettable facade.

  “He must have known he was being followed,” said the uniformed cop.


  Lt. Moriarty nodded. “Yeah. Miles would never have wandered up an alley like this for no reason.”

  Moriarty’s steely gaze swept up and down the narrow alley. It was littered with paper, but otherwise clean enough. They were down in the financial district, near Wall Street. No winos huddled in the alleys here. Brokers might sneak martinis into their Thermos jugs, but they went home to posh suburbia after the day’s frenzied work.

  Archer’s slight body lay facedown, where it had fallen, rumpled gray trenchcoat twisted around him, in front of a rusted metal door that led into the rear of a high-rise office building. The alley dead-ended at the brick rear wall of another high rise. A third skyscraper formed the other side of the narrow alley. Moriarty sniffed disdainfully; there was no garbage or urine smell to the alley. It seemed unnatural to him.

  The forensics team was taking holographic pictures and lifting samples of litter from the area around the body. One of the team members was scanning the alleyway with an infrared detector for latent footprints. The binocularlike black detector steamed slightly as the summer evening’s heat boiled away some of its liquid nitrogen coolant.

  “He figured somebody was following him,” Moriarty reconstructed the event aloud, “and ducked up here to see if whoever it was would come in too.”

  “And the perpetrator did follow him,” said the cop in blue.

  Moriarty nodded. “Must’ve been one person, and not a rough-looking type at all. Miles wasn’t the kind for personal heroics. He must’ve thought whoever he was being followed by was lightweight enough for him to face down by himself.”

  “He made a mistake.”

  “The last one he’ll ever make.”

  “Uh, Lieutenant . . .” The uniformed cop hesitated. “You don’t think maybe he was deliberately meeting somebody here, do you?”

  “In an alley?”

  “They do a lot of designer drugs around here. Those brokers got a lot of money to throw around.”