Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  Yakamoto stood motionless, but his face showed unbearable curiosity.

  “Axhelm ordered the new glue!” Hawks crowed. “The wise-ass ordered it because it’s half a cent per thousand cheaper!”

  While his faithful Japanese engineer watched incredulously, Hawks flung himself on the carpet and laughed hysterically.

  The Writer

  The Writer cringed in terror in the farthest corner of the warehouse. They had all gone mad. Wildly, murderously mad.

  His fellow employees—the bedraggled men and few equally unattractive women who worked the warehouse floor, those human dregs who daily risked life and sanity to do jobs that gleaming robots could not handle—they were capering and gibbering, ripping open the cartons that they were supposed to be neatly stacking, tearing out loose pages of books and flinging them high into the air until the entire warehouse looked like a blizzard was raging through it.

  They sang. They screamed with laughter. They danced through the paper snowfall and howled with animal glee. Several heaps of paper the size of mating couples were twitching and shuddering here and there across the warehouse floor. Even the Japanese supervisors, who had raced down from the control booth shouting and gesticulating, were now capering through the littered warehouse, eyeglasses askew, reeling for all the world as if they were dead drunk.

  “C’mon, pal! Don’ be ‘fraid!” One of the grimy-faced women was bending over the Writer, her faded blouse pulled open and her meager breasts hanging free.

  With wordless terror, the Writer scrabbled away from her until his back was pressed against the concrete wall and he could retreat no farther.

  The woman laughed at him. “Don’ be scared, pal. It’s okay. It’s our bonus. Lousy wages they been payin’ us, we’re entitled to a li’l bonus, huh?”

  She advanced on him. The Writer tried to push his emaciated body through the concrete wall. Behind the woman’s menacing form he could see the other warehouse employees gibbering and gamboling madly. Their insane shouts and laughter were a bedlam. All the robots stood immobile, inert, dead.

  “Look, pal, I got a present for ya . . . .” The woman reached into the back pocket of her jeans and tugged out a brand-new paperback book. It had obviously just been taken from its packing crate. The cover glistened pristinely.

  “Yer gonna love it,” she said, shoving it under the writer’s nose.

  He tried to bat it away. The pages fell apart and spilled into his lap. A spicy, pungent odor filled the Writer’s nostrils. His vision blurred for a moment. He rubbed his eyes, inhaling the wonderful perfume coming from the scattered pages of the book.

  When he looked up at the woman again, he saw that she was beautiful. And the music was beautiful. The whole world was just as he had always dreamed it would be, someday.

  Smiling, he began to sing the love duet from Tristan und Isolde in a better tenor voice than he had ever imagined possessing. She sang back in a breathtaking soprano.

  Seventeen

  Seven doctors and seven nurses, all in pale green smocks and masks, huddled over the surgical table beneath the shadowless light of powerful overhead lamps. In a corner of the tiny, intense room a row of electronic machines beeped and peeped, while miniature pumps and motors made a soft pocketa-pocketa sound. Otherwise the improvised surgical chamber was silent, except for the terse, whispered commands of the chief surgeon and the responses of the chief nurse:

  “Clamp.”

  “Clamp.”

  “Retractors .”

  “Retractors.”

  “Inserting left flexor digitorum longus.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  “Microviewer.”

  The nurse swung the elaborate electro-optical device toward the chief surgeon and deftly adjusted it to his eye level.

  “Microstapler.”

  She put the tiny staple gun in his right hand.

  For several moments the only sound from the group crowding around the surgical table was the clicking of the microstapler.

  Then the chief surgeon straightened up and wiped his own brow with his own blood-smeared gloved hand.

  “That’s it,” he said. They could all hear the smile behind his mask. “Close him up, Renshaw.”

  The thirteen men and women clapped their gloved hands in admiration. It sounded something like limp pillows clashing. The chief surgeon bowed, blew them all a kiss, and tottered off to wash up.

  Hours later, consciousness returned to the newly rebuilt body of Pandro T. Bunker. He lay on the same table; it had been wheeled into the recovery room (actually a passenger’s cabin four decks below the New Amsterdam‘s waterline, a few yards down the passageway from the movie theater that the plastic surgeons had been using for their operations). A single nurse, young, blond, and nubile, was polishing her fingernails while a bevy of sensors kept tabs on Bunker’s recuperation.

  The nurse did not notice the first sign of her patient’s return to consciousness, a slight trembling of Bunker’s fingers. Then his eyelids fluttered.

  P.T. Bunker took a deep breath. The sensors arrayed beside his table beeped along merrily. He growled at them. Then he saw the nurse, her back to him.

  He felt—strangely powerful. Young. Virile. Horny as hell. Looking from the nurse to the white sheet that covered his body, he saw a large protuberance poking toward the ceiling.

  With a malicious grin he slowly pulled himself up to a sitting position. The effort made him grunt slightly. After all, he had spent several hours in surgery.

  The noise made the nurse turn toward him in her swivel chair. Her china-blue eyes went wide.

  “Mr. Bunker, you’re supposed to rest!”

  He tried to reply that he did not feel like resting, that he felt strong and fine, but his throat was so dry that all he could utter was a sort of menacing strangled growl.

  “No, no!” said the nurse, getting to her feet, never realizing that the sensors were reporting Bunker’s condition to be completely healthy.

  Bunker swung his legs off the table and stood up. The sheet dropped away. The surgeons had closed his incisions with quick-acting protein glue, so there was not a bandage on his rebuilt naked body.

  The nurse’s eyes went still wider, focusing on Bunker’s aroused musculature. His eyes were focused on the strained front of her starched white blouse. She was panting. He began panting.

  With a shriek, the nurse dropped her bottle of nail polish and bolted to the door. She ran down the passageway screaming, “He’s alive! He’s alive!”

  Bunker lumbered after her, staggering slightly as he tried to make his newly muscled body obey the commands of his publisher’s brain.

  Three decks above the New Amsterdam‘s waterline, Scarlet Dean was making up her mind—and her face. She stood before the mirror over the sink in her cabin’s compact bathroom, wearing only a pink bra and panties, carefully applying as little mascara and lipstick as she dared. The tiny tucks of the plastic surgery had tightened up her face beautifully. And the biochemical toners made her skin glow like a young girl’s.

  The mirror seemed to be swaying slightly, and she felt a bit of a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. Frowning, she tried to concentrate on getting the lipstick on straight. Can’t use too much of it, she told herself; can’t have its scent masking the pheromone spray.

  “Attention, all passengers,” said a very male voice from the little speaker grille set into the ceiling. “We are approaching the edge of a small storm system. The sea will be slightly rougher than usual. Please take care walking, especially on the outside decks. Use the handrails, both inside and outside.”

  Scarlet shot an annoyed glance at the loudspeaker. They could at least wait until I’ve finished putting on my lipstick!

  Satisfied with her work, she stepped through the hatch and opened the clothes closet next to her queen-sized bed. Her clothes swayed slightly on their hangers, like a chorus line in a speeding subway train. As she pondered over what to wear for dinner, she reviewed where her business m
atters stood.

  The negotiation with Murray Swift over Sheldon Stoker’s latest horror was successfully concluded. The other editors and most of the sales force were up in arms over the Cyberbooks project. Mrs. Bunker was fretting, and P.T. Bunker was getting his body rebuilt.

  Now was the time to bring young Carl Lewis to heel. She had toyed with him for three months. Now she would reel him in and net him, and when she was finished with him she would mount his head on the wall of her trophy room.

  She smiled at the thought.

  She selected a slim sheath, bright red, of course, and dressed quickly, efficiently. The last thing she did before heading for the dining salon was to dig the tiny phial of pheromone spray out of her locked briefcase and slip it into her glittering red handbag.

  Alba Blanca Bunker was also dressing for dinner. Her cabin was very spacious, of course, but it seemed terribly empty without P.T. to share it. She worried about him, alone without her, deep down in the lower decks that had been turned into a hospital. The doctors were using a new type of synthetic steroid mixture to speed his recuperation, but still it would take several days for him to recover from the body-rebuilding surgery.

  She studied herself in the full-length mirrors that flanked both sides of the king-sized bed. Here on the ship she need not be a slave to the weekly fashions of New York. She wore a nineteen thirties ball gown of pure white silk that flowed gracefully to the floor and billowed behind her when she danced. She loved it and felt very beautiful and secure in it.

  The plastic surgery had erased most of the worry lines in her face, but not in her heart. Ralph Malzone had warned her that the sales force would not like Cyberbooks. Now it looked as if they would openly revolt against the project. She sighed deeply at the prospect of having dinner with Ralph, Woody, and several other disgruntled sales people. But business is business, she told herself firmly. Squaring her bare slim shoulders, she picked up her handbag and went to the stateroom door.

  The wind caught at her lovely gown and nearly twirled her around as she stepped out of the cabin. Up here on the topmost deck of the ship she could see in the last rays of the setting sun that the seas were heaving, whitecapped waves arching upward from the deep dark blue. Thick clouds were building up, gloriously crimson and violet in the dying sunset. Alba secretly thrilled to it. The deck slanted and rose beneath her feet, then dropped away. Even up here she could taste the tang of salt spray in the wind. It was exciting!

  She made her way on delicate spike heels toward the ladderway that led down to the dining salon’s deck. Gripping the handrails, she carefully went down the stairs and stepped through the hatch that opened onto the bar lounge. The ship had been designed so that it was impossible to enter the dining salon without passing through the lounge and bar first. Some of Malzone’s salesmen never made it to dinner. Or lunch. The bar did not open before noon, or they might not have gotten any solid nourishment at all.

  Ralph was standing in a little knot of people that included Woody, Lori Tashkajian, and Carl Lewis. Alba knew she would have to detach Carl and Lori from the sales people, but she expected that neither of them would mind. They would obviously rather have dinner by themselves than with the sales department.

  As she started toward them, a worried-looking gray-haired man fairly dashed across the open space and intercepted her.

  “Mrs. Bunker, I’m Dr. Karloff . . . .”

  She recognized his immaculately groomed face, the carefully trimmed little gray mustache, the utterly expensive three-piece suit. He seemed unaccustomedly harried, not his usual smiling confident suave self.

  “I’m afraid there’s been something of a problem . . . .”

  “Pandro!” she gasped. “What’s happened to Pandro?”

  “The surgery went fine, no problems at all, everything went very well.” Karloff was visibly upset; perspiration dotted his brow, he was almost babbling.

  “What happened?”

  “The recuperative chemotherapy. You recall that I specifically explained to you both that the synthetic steroids were new and relatively untried . . . .”

  “You assured us they were safe!” Alba felt cold terror clutching her.

  “They are! They are. But the dosage . . . we may have given your husband a higher dose than he actually—”

  Just then the double doors at the far side of the lounge were ripped off their hinges with a blood-chilling screech, and the naked lumbering figure of Pandro T. Bunker lurched into the area. Women screamed. Men ducked for cover. Dr. Karloff turned whiter than Alba’s gown and fainted dead away.

  “Alba!” came a strangled cry from deep within P.T. Bunker. Arms outstretched, he staggered across the thickly carpeted lounge toward her.

  She stood frozen with shock, her eyes registering that Pandro seemed taller, stronger, more urgently virile than she had seen him in years. He was a naked Greek god, a young Tarzan, an Adonis with a hard-on.

  “Alba!” He lurched toward her.

  She ran to him. He scooped her up in his mighty arms and staggered off the way he had come, her virginal white gown trailing after them. Alba nestled her head against her husband’s new bulging pectoralis major and let him carry her back to their private stateroom. He seemed rather clumsy, uncoordinated, but she was sure that he would learn to control his rebuilt body properly, given time. Tonight, self-control was the last thing she wanted from him.

  Midnight once again.

  Everyone aboard seemed to be still in a state of shock over P.T.‘s escapade at the start of the evening. In the main salon little foursomes and couples huddled over tiny cocktail tables, largely ignoring the dance music of the robot band, still talking about it.

  “You can see why he’s the top man.” Woody was leering drunkenly at three of his cohorts, two of them women.

  “It’s a transplant,” said the other man. “Must have been.”

  One of the women shot back, “And all you got was a tummy tuck, Woody.”

  Scarlet Dean had suffered through dinner with Maryann Quigly, Ted Gunn, and the boorish Jack Drain, just so she could keep Carl Lewis in her sight. Maryann had consumed food the way a horde of locusts does, then immediately waddled off to the afterdeck lounge to get ready for the late night snack. Ted had wisecracked that he could hear her body cast creaking from the pressure she was putting against it.

  All through dinner, while Maryann stuffed herself and Drain sneered at everything, Scarlet watched for an opportunity to intrude on Carl and Lori. They gazed at one another adoringly and hardly noticed the meal being served to them. Scarlet knew they were not sleeping together, yet they were behaving like a pair of love-smitten teenagers.

  Their romance has gone farther than I thought, she realized. The effects of too much salt air and moonlight. Well, I’ll put an end to that tonight, she told herself, patting the handbag resting in her lap. One puff of the pheromone spray and he’ll never look at another woman again.

  The spray had come from the research laboratories of Tarantula Enterprise’s biogenetic division in Stuttgart. It was actually an outgrowth of their genetic warfare work, an attempt to create a weapon that would selectively incapacitate only the enemy’s troops and no one else. Based on an artificial virus that affected certain nerve pathways into the brain, it had been designed to make its victims fall asleep as long as they could smell the subliminal odor of their military uniforms. The Stuttgart scientists fondly hoped that once used on the battlefield, the spray would be so effective that the enemy troops would only wake up after their captors had stripped them down to their skivvies.

  Alas, it never worked that well. The virus was too specific. In nature, it affected only one individual out of a hundred or more. And instead of putting a man to sleep, it imprinted unbearable sexual longing in the victim. Like a love potion of old, it made the victim fall hopelessly for whomever he or she first smelled after being hit by the spray. The scandal among the volunteer units of the Swabian Rifles led to a dozen resignations, three suicides, and five homo
sexual marriages.

  Scarlet was going to spray Carl and make certain that the first person he smelled was herself. And after that, she knew, she would be the only person he would sniff after.

  But she had to be very careful to get Carl away from Lori—and everyone else—before she spritzed him.

  During dinner, Ralph Malzone had presided over a rowdy table of sales people. Afterward, looking thoroughly wrung out, he had stopped by Lori and Carl’s table and the three of them had gone together into the main lounge.

  It had been easy enough for Scarlet to insinuate herself into the threesome, and for the past several hours the four of them had been drinking, talking, and dancing. The robot dance band was built and costumed to look like a vague amalgamation of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and other popular groups of the sixties and seventies. This cruise ship usually catered to retirees who were fixated on the music of their teen years.

  Scarlet kept her drinks long and soft, and noticed that Lori did the same. Good old Ralph never drank anything but beer; he seemed to have an infinite capacity for it, although he excused himself every hour or so: “Time to recycle the beer,” he would invariably say.

  Carl, the innocent one, drank a steady stream of cuba libres. Rum and Coke. He downed them as if there was no rum in them at all, and Scarlet began to suspect that somebody—maybe Lori—had made a deal with the waiter to make his drinks innocuous. While he and Lori were dancing she had stolen a sip. No, the rum was there all right. Young Mr. Edison has a wooden leg, apparently.

  Try as she might, though, she could not get Carl off by himself. The handsome young engineer danced with her several times, slipping and tripping as the dance floor sloshed back and form in the storm-tossed sea. But Lori was either on the floor beside them, dancing with Ralph, or sitting at their ringside table watching Carl. And he was always looking around for her.

  Maddening.

  Scarlet danced with Ralph, too, from time to time. The wiry guy was athletically light on his feet, a good dancer. Despite the worried, preoccupied look on his lank face.