Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  Moriarty dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. “Not Miles. He didn’t even drink.”

  “Then what was he doing down in the financial district? He lived in Queens, didn’t he?”

  “He set up his own business after retiring from the force,” said Moriarty. “Might have been down here on a case.”

  The cop went silent. Moriarty continued, thinking aloud, “I’ll get the records from his office and see what he was working on. Must be a connection there.” He watched as the medical team gently lifted the inert body onto a stretcher and carried it to the ambulance waiting at the head of the alley, lights flashing.

  “You think there’s a connection with the other Retiree Murders?” the uniformed policeman asked.

  Moriarty looked sharply at him. “Is that what they’re calling ‘em? ‘Retiree Murders’?”

  “In the newspapers, yeah. And on TV. This makes the fifth one, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s right. But I don’t think their murders have anything to do with their being retired. Hell, the Social Security clerks aren’t going around bumping off their clients.”

  The cop shrugged and started up the alley. Their work here was finished. Moriarty followed behind him, thinking, I ran the other four through the computer to look for correlations. The only thing the victims had in common was that they were elderly, retired, and living off pensions, Social Security, and the income from a few odd shares of stocks.

  Sixteen

  Weldon W. Weldon frowned balefully at the computer’s holographic display. It showed a graphic presentation of the owners of Tarantula’s stock, twisted threads of colored lines that weaved and interlinked in a three-dimensional agony of confusion. Like a tangled mess of spaghetti. Like a pit of snakes slithering over and around one another. Or the snarled, twining stems of jungle vines struggling to find the sun.

  He snorted in self-derision as he glanced from the display to the rotting jungle that infested his once immaculate office. Leaning forward in his powered wheelchair, he squinted at the display and tapped commands on the remote controller he held in one hand.

  Who the hell really owns Tarantula? Ever since the Sicilians had started their takeover effort, that one question had burned through Weldon’s brain like a laser beam cutting through naked flesh.

  I don’t have enough of the stock to stop them by myself, although I’ve climbed over the twenty-five percent mark. Synthoil is the largest single shareholder, that much is clear. The sky-blue line threading through the heart of the display was General Conglomerates, which owned eight percent of Tarantula. Are they in with the Sicilians? Not likely, Weldon thought, although you could never be entirely certain. The Benevolent International Brotherhood of Bureaucrats, a kinked muddy-brown line, owned twelve percent. Twelve percent! And the BIBB is a known Mafia subsidiary. Damnation.

  And then there was the blood-red line pulsing through the others like an aorta: Rising Sun Electronics. They already had seventeen percent and were busily buying more. Weldon had encouraged the Japanese to buy Tarantula stock. Better in their hands than the Sicilians’. Play the Nips against the Wops, he had cackled to himself. But now the Japanese share of the company was becoming large enough to be a threat of its own.

  The rest of the ownership was in the hands of individuals, thank god. Ordinary men and women who each owned a few shares apiece. Thousands of them. How would they vote at November’s stockholders’ meeting? Most of ‘em never vote at all, never even send in their proxies, bless them. Then I vote their stock for them.

  But what would they do if some smarmy jerkoff with olive oil in his hair offers to buy their stock at ten percent above the current market value? I’d have to make them a better offer, and the only way to do that is to liquidate half the company’s assets to generate the cash for such a buy-back. Once Axhelm’s finished with Webb Press I’ll have to turn him loose on other divisions of the corporation. The old man sighed heavily. It can’t be helped. We can’t fight through an unfriendly takeover bid without spattering some blood on the floor, he thought grimly.

  Maryann Quigly and Ashley Elton sat forlornly in the afterdeck lounge at the stern of the SS New Amsterdam. It was nearly midnight, and Quigly was working her way through her fifth meal of the day, a dainty snack of steak, french-fried potatoes, custard pie, and malted milk. Elton was nursing a tall concoction made of various rums and fruit juices.

  The lounge was beautifully decorated in deep blue and silver, with glittering wall panels of faceted crystal that could be turned into giant display screens for video presentations. Beyond the curving windows that overlooked the ship’s stern, the New Amsterdam‘s churning wake glistened against the placid moonlit ocean. The muted strains of dance music from the main salon wafted through the afterdeck lounge.

  “All these men on board,” murmured the cadaverous Ms. Elton, “and not one of them has asked us even for a dance.”

  “I couldn’t dance in this body cast,” Quigly said through a mouthful of french fries. “It itches all over. I think they made it too tight for me.”

  Elton had availed herself of the plastic surgeons to transplant some of her gluteus maximus to her pectoral area. There was hardly enough meat on her to make any difference, but she felt better for it, although for the time being she had to sit on an inflated plastic ring, like a hemorrhoid victim.

  “Well, I can dance, but nobody’s asked me,” she whined.

  Maryann stuffed half the custard pie into her mouth. The afterdeck lounge was almost empty. The evening floor show had ended an hour ago, and now most of the ambulatory men and women aboard the ship were in the main salon, dancing to the syntho-rock music of a robot band.

  “Don’t feel bad about it,” Maryann advised her colleague. “All the men on this cruise are either macho or gay.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so. Still, you’d think . . .” Ashley Elton’s voice trailed off wistfully.

  “That’s not important,” said Quigly, reaching for her malted milk. “What’s important is this Cyberbooks deal.”

  “Yeah. What do you think of it?”

  Quigly’s eyes, small and deepset in folds of flesh that not even the cosmetic surgeons had been able to remove, shifted evasively. “It bothers me,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “There’s too many computers in this business already,” muttered Quigly, glancing around to see if anyone was close enough to overhear. No one was. No one was sitting within thirty feet of them.

  “Yeah. Did you see what they did at Webb Press? They’ve got computers doing just about everything now. Only three editors left in the whole house! They’ve got to do everything!”

  “Who has time to do anything?” Quigly puffed out a weary sigh, then polished off the rest of her malted.

  “I sure don’t,” admitted Elton. “What with meetings and meetings and more meetings, I’m lucky if I open the morning mail.”

  With a ponderous shake of her head, Quigly said slowly, “A book ought to have pages. It ought to be made out of paper.”

  “Yeah. Something you can curl up with in bed at night.”

  “Not some electronic box.”

  “It’s so cold!”

  “It isn’t right,” Quigly insisted. “Books should be made out of paper. That’s the way they were meant to be made.”

  “Wrong, girls.”

  The two women jerked with guilty surprise. Standing over them was Woodrow Elihu Balogna, known to all as Woody Baloney, sales rep for the upper Midwest region.

  “Books,” Woody said genially, waving a cigarette in a grand gesture, “were meant to be made out of clay tablets—or maybe papyrus scrolls.”

  “Pass the bread,” Elton announced ritualistically, “here comes the Baloney.”

  Woody pulled out the empty chair and sat himself carefully on it, sighing out a puff of smoke as he settled down.

  “You know this is a no-smoking area,” Elton said peevishly. “All indoor spaces on this ship are no-smoking.”

 
“Yeah, but what the hell. You girls won’t fink on me, will you?”

  “They should have transplanted a human brain into your skull instead of just giving you a tummy tuck,” Quigly chimed in.

  “And you’re adorable too,” croaked Woody in his husky voice, a big grin on his weatherbeaten face. But he stubbed the cigarette out in the crumb-littered plate that had once held Quigly’s custard cream pie.

  He was a big man, and once had been handsome in a rawboned sort of way. But years of alcohol, cigarettes, sleeping in motels, and pounding his head against the ingrained obstinacy of wholesalers and jobbers had ravaged him. His face was seamed and scarred like the Grand Canyon, and scruffy with a day’s growth of gray stubble. He wore a faded gray sweatshirt and patched jeans that hung loosely on his suddenly gangly frame.

  “What you should have done,” Ashley Elton said more seriously, “was let them give you a facelift. You’re still handsome, underneath all those wrinkles.”

  Woody tilted his head back and guffawed. “Now, can you just picture me waltzing into Duluth Distributing’s warehouse looking all prettied up! They’d throw me out on my ass!”

  Maryann Quigly refused to smile. She waited for Woody’s whoops to die down, then said, “Don’t you go telling anybody what we were saying about the Cyberbooks idea. Just because—”

  “Hey, I’m with you,” Woody assured her. “I think this smart-aleck inventor is going to get us all thrown out of work. We gotta find a way to stop him.”

  Quigly’s porcine little eyes widened. “You mean it?”

  “It’s him or us, that’s the way I feel about it.”

  “But Mrs. Bunker . . .” whispered Elton.

  “We gotta convince her that this Cyberbooks gadget is a mistake, a flop, a disaster. We gotta make her see that if she tries to market Cyberbooks it’ll ruin the company.”

  “But her mind’s already made up,” Elton countered, “the other way.”

  “Then we’ve got to make her reverse her decision,” said Quigly.

  “But how?”

  “That’s the hard part,” Woody admitted, his grin fading.

  P. Curtis Hawks was standing at the sweeping windows of his spacious office, staring hard across the river toward Brooklyn.

  The goddamned Junker bastard wants to move us to Brooklyn! He shook his head for the ten-thousandth time. Brooklyn. It’s the end of the world.

  He had to admit, however, that Gunther Axhelm’s pruning was already showing results. The latest quarterly profit and loss statement on his desk was considerably better than it had been in years. The operation was actually in the black for the first time since the Reagan memoirs had swept the world with their candid charm and naively brutal insights.

  Sales were slipping, but that was to be expected when the sales force had been reduced from two hundred men and women to a single voice-activated computer and a fleet of roboticized trucks. They would pick up again, Hawks fervently prayed, once the wholesalers got accustomed to seeing robots instead of human beings. The big chain stores, where the really massive orders came from, had not even noticed the difference. Book orders went from their computers to Webb’s computer as smoothly as snakes slithering on banana oil.

  Offsetting the downtrend in sales was the even larger downtrend in costs. The Old Man upstairs must be happy with the situation, Hawks told himself. He hasn’t bothered me in weeks. Then he frowned. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to see me anymore. Maybe Axhelm’s axe is going to stab me in the back, too.

  The warehouse. The goddamned, mother-humping, sonofabitching warehouse. So far I’ve been able to keep Axhelm’s beady little eyes off it. But how long can I hold out? How long can I keep him from finding out what a fiasco the damned warehouse is?

  His desk phone chimed.

  “Answer answer,” he called out, thinking that the goddamned phones were just like most goddamned people, you had to tell them everything twice.

  “Sir,” came the mechanical voice of his computer (where once there had been an achingly lovely red-haired lass), “Engineer Yakamoto is waiting to see you.”

  Oh Christ, thought Hawks. Just what I need. Yakamoto. Something else has gone wrong at the warehouse.

  With a reluctant, shivering sigh, Hawks told the computer to let the Japanese warehouse manager enter his office.

  Hideki Yakamoto was pure Japanese. He had come over from Osaka as a field engineer to oversee the installation of the robotic equipment at the warehouse. When it became apparent that he was the only man on the continent of North America who could make the robots function the way they should, Hawks had insisted to his parent company, Rising Sun Electronics, that they allow him to remain at the warehouse as supervisor. Rising Sun, happy to have a spy inside the Tarantula organization, allowed itself to be reluctantly persuaded.

  Yakamoto, small, wiry, round-faced, clad in a Saville Row three-piece summerweight suit, bowed from the waist and inhaled through his teeth with a sharp hiss meant to express his unworthiness to breathe the same air as his illustrious superior. Hawks found himself bowing back. Not that he wanted to, his body just seemed to bow whenever the little Nip did it to him.

  Annoyed at himself, he snapped, “What’s wrong, Yakamoto?”

  The Japanese engineer said blandly, “Nothing that cannot be put right by the wealth of knowredge that you possess. I am ashamed to bother you with what must be a small detail . . .”

  “Come to the point, dammit!” Hawks went to his desk and stood behind it. It made him feel safer.

  Yakamoto bowed again. “It is shameful for me to intrude on your extremery busy schedule . . .”

  “What is it?” Hawks fairly screamed.

  Yakamoto braced himself. Standing at rigid attention, he said, “The grue, sir.”

  “The grue? What grue?”

  “The grue used to bind the pages of the books together, sir.”

  “You mean glue! Well, what about it?”

  Yakamoto closed his eyes, as if standing before a firing squad. “It evaporates, sir.”

  “What?”

  “The grue evaporates while the books are in their packing cases. When the cases are open, there is nothing in them but roose pages and covers.”

  Hawks sank heavily into his padded chair. “Oh, my sweet baby Jesus.”

  Yakamoto said nothing, he just stood there with his fists clenched by his sides, eyes squeezed shut. He did not even seem to be breathing.

  “How many . . . cases . . .”

  Without opening his eyes, “This month’s entire print run, sir. We began receiving compraints from stores and warehouses rast week. Whenever a case is opened—nothing but roose pages, fluttering rike butterflies in the summer breezes.”

  “Spare me the goddamned poetry!” Hawks snapped.

  “I have taken the liberty of firing a comprete report in your personal computer system,” Yakamoto said, “so that you have all the details avairable at your industrious fingertips. However, I felt it necessary for me to tell you of this catastrophe in person.”

  Hawks grunted and reached out a reluctant hand to access the data. His screen soon showed the gory details. Millions of dollars’ worth of books, reduced to millions of loose pages. Tens of millions of pages. Hundreds of millions . . .

  He groaned. We’re ruined. Absolutely ruined.

  Yakamoto was making strange, gargling sounds. Hawks looked up. Is he trying to commit suicide, right here in my office?

  No, the man was merely trying to get Hawks’s attention by repeatedly clearing his throat.

  “Don’t tell me there’s more,” Hawks moaned.

  Yakamoto stood rigidly silent.

  “Well?”

  “You told me not to tell you,” the Japanese engineer said pleadingly.

  “Tell me!” Hawks snapped. “Tell me all of it! Every goddamned ball-breaking detail. Give it to me, all of it. Then we can both jump out the frigging window!”

  Yakamoto bowed as if to say, You asked for it. “Apparently, exalted sir, th
e grue used to bind the books decomposes into a psychedelic gas. When the crates are opened, whoever is within ten feet becomes intoxicated—they have immediate and invoruntary ‘head trips’ that approximate the effects of taking a sizable dose of harrucinogen.”

  Hawks felt his breakfast making its burning way up his digestive tract, toward his throat. Glue sniffing! With the effects of LSD!

  “And . . .” Yakamoto said as quietly as a dove gliding through tranquil air.

  “Still more?”

  Barely nodding, Yakamoto said, “Those who have been affected by the narcotic nature of the residual gas from the faired grue are initiating rawsuits against Webb Press. Several such riabirity suits have already been fired against the company.”

  “Several? How many?”

  With a pained expression, Yakamoto replied, “Seven hundred thirty-four, as of this morning.”

  Hawks slammed both palms down on his desk and hauled himself to his feet. “That’s it! Hara-kiri! That’s the only road left open to us, Yakamoto!” He strode toward the sliding glass partition that led to the terrace. “It’s a fifty-story drop. That ought to do the job.”

  Yakamoto did not stir from where he stood. “Most respected and brave sir, it is not my place to kill myself over this matter. I had nothing to do with putting this unfaithful grue on the books. It is not my responsibility.”

  Hawks stopped with one hand on the handle of the sliding glass partition.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re right. I didn’t order any new kind of glue for binding the books.”

  Yakamoto said softly, “Still, it is your responsibility, sir.”

  “Is it? We’ve been binding books by the zillions for years without this kind of trouble. Who the hell ordered different glue? I’ll nail his balls to the wall!”

  Suddenly a happy thought penetrated Hawks’s consciousness, and he broke into a slight grin. As eagerly as a teenaged boy reaching for a condom, he jumped back onto his desk chair and sent his fingers flying across the computer keyboard.

  “Yes!” he shouted triumphantly after several frenzied minutes. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”