by Ben Bova
Still somewhat suspicious, Axhelm muttered, “It looks like a carton of our books.”
“Very perceptive of you,” said Hawks smoothly. “That’s exactly what it looks like.”
For an awkward moment neither man moved. Then Axhelm slowly bent to one knee and pulled from his back pocket a Swiss army knife. I might have known he’d have one on him, thought Hawks. The model with all the attachments, even the AM/FM radio and earplug.
Deftly Axhelm sliced the tape holding down the carton’s lid. He pulled it open and stared into his “present.”
Frowning, he dug into the carton and came up with a handful of loose book pages.
“I don’t understand . . . .”
Standing well away from the carton and quickly whipping a triply guaranteed Japanese filter over his face, Hawks replied with a vengeful chortle of glee.
Axhelm looked up at Hawks, his face a portrait of puzzlement. He started to say something, but suddenly his jaw went slack. His entire body sagged, as if every muscle in him had gone limp.
From behind his filter, Hawks crowed, “The goddamned glue you made us buy, you cheap asshole! It turns into a psychedelic gas! Take a deep breath, shithead! A deep breath!”
Axhelm was indeed breathing deeply, a blissful relaxed smile on his normally cold face. He plunged both hands into the carton and pulled a double handful of loose pages to his face, inhaling them as if they were the most fragrant flowers in the world.
Leaping to his feet, he flung the pages toward the ceiling.
“At last!” he shrieked. “At last I’m free! Free!”
Hawks watched with beady eyes as the Axe capered across the bare office, dancing like a Bavarian peasant at a maypole.
“I can sing! I can dance!” the erstwhile management consultant shouted. “All my life I have wanted to be like the immortal Gene Kelly! I’m si-i-ingin’ in the rain . . .”
Axhelm was still gibbering and dancing (with a total lack of grace) when Weldon W. Weldon wheeled his power chair into what was left of Hawks’s office. Hawks had, of course, arranged for the Old Man to come to his office at precisely this moment. The timing was perfect.
Crunching down viciously on his pacifier, Hawks took the filter from his face and let the astounded CEO of Tarantula watch his vaunted management consultant stumble and lurch up and down the bare office floor boards. The look on the Old Man’s face was priceless.
Christ, said Hawks to himself, as happy as the first time he had shot a rabbit, if looks could kill the Axe would be stone cold dead.
Autumn, Book III
The Buyer
The first snow of November was gently sifting past the window of Dee Dee Lowe’s office as she held court. It was a gray day in Des Moines, but the chief buyer for Cleaveland Book Stores was dressed in bright oranges and flaming reds. There were even brilliant yellow ribbons in her thick gray hair. Her face was tanned and taut; she looked as if she had just returned from a trip to the Bahamas. Actually, she seldom left her office and had not been on vacation since the entire Cleaveland chain was taken over by Tarantula Enterprises, many years earlier. Her good looks were a combination of cosmetic surgery, makeup, and the tanning parlor in the shopping mall across the road from Cleaveland’s offices.
Before her desk, four dozen sales people were seated in neat rows of folding chairs. This was Dee Dee’s monthly meeting, where she deigned to allow the sales people into her office and let them show her their companies’ wares for the month.
Each sales person, male or female, had a laptop computer open on his or her knees. Each computer was plugged into a complex electronics console that squatted on the floor next to Dee Dee’s desk like a square fireplug. The tangle of wires among the folding chairs was so fierce that Dee Dee had put a printed sign on her desk:
CLEAVELAND BOOK STORES INC. IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR INJURIES TO VISITING SALES PERSONNEL DUE TO ACCIDENTS OR OTHER NATURAL OR MAN-MADE CAUSES.
Not a word was being spoken. Each sales person was busily tapping on his or her keyboard, relaying glowing information about his or her latest batch of books into the central Cleaveland Stores computer.
In the old days the salesmen—they had all been men when Dee Dee had started in this job—the salesmen would personally show her the information on each and every individual title they were trying to sell. They would show her a color proof of the cover, statistics about the author’s previous books, monumental lies about how much money and effort the publisher was going to put into advertising and promotion for this individual title, tremendous whoppers about how wonderful this title was and how it was going to hit the top of the best-seller lists the instant it was released.
“But they can’t all be best-sellers,” Dee Dee would respond, smiling slyly.
The salesmen knew that only one out of a thousand of their titles would be successful. And they knew that if Dee Dee bought a hundred thousand copies or so for the vast chain of Cleaveland Stores, that particular title would be among the precious few. So they wined her and dined her and, when she felt like it, bedded her. Four times salesmen even wedded her. None of them took, although she now wore an impressive array of diamonds on her clawlike fingers.
But those were the good old days, Dee Dee thought with a sigh. Now it’s all done by computers. We don’t even need to have the sales people come to my office at all, she realized. They could pump their information into my computer system from their own offices, or even from New York.
But if they did it that way, she would not get to see any of the sales people, ever. And she clung to these monthly meetings because, after the computers had completed their intercourse, the sales folk—being sales people—hung around complimenting Dee Dee on her good looks, her great taste in clothes, her incredible business acumen, her deep love for literature.
Actually, Dee Dee had not read a book since she had graduated college, so many years ago that she dreaded even thinking about it.
Every month the sales people seemed to get younger, she said to herself sadly. None of them ever makes a pass at me anymore—except for old lechers like Woody Baloney, and even his leering suggestions were strictly routine these days. I wonder if he can still get it up? A couple of the saleswomen had hinted at availability, but Dee Dee felt she was too old to experiment.
She sighed as she looked out at the office full of bowed heads. All those eager young kids bent over their laptop computers instead of kissing my ass. No, the business isn’t what it used to be.
Deep down in the basement of the Cleaveland Stores building, behind electronically locked steel fireproof doors, sat a single Nisei woman in front of a bank of four dozen display screens. The screens cast an eerie flickering light across the young woman’s blankly impassive face. They curved around her single swivel chair like the compound eye of some giant insect examining her. But in truth, she was examining them. Each screen flickered for a bare three seconds with the cover proof and other data on each of the titles the sales people were pumping into the central Cleaveland computer. Then the next title came on. This one lonely woman’s task was to select which titles Cleaveland would actually buy.
For the vaunted Cleaveland computer system could not actually decide which titles to buy, out of the thousands presented each month. No automated expert system or decision-tree program could handle the avalanche of incoming data that the sales people unloosed each month. So the entire international chain of bookstores depended on this one solitary young woman to make the selections. Each month she sat on that chair, watched the madly flickering screens, and made selections that determined the fate of most of the books published in North America.
Her right hand gripped a knobbed joystick while the fingers of her left flew madly across a small keyboard. With her left hand she indicated to the computer which screen she was glancing at; if she pushed the joystick up that meant the book would be bought by the chain, the amount of upward push indicated the number of copies bought—ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million. If she pushed
the stick down the book was bypassed, doomed to oblivion.
Her qualifications for this key position? She had been, as a teenager, the champion video game player of California.
Nineteen
Even with the lawsuit looming over them, and the sales force virtually on strike as far as Cyberbooks was concerned, Bunker Books staggered along, trying to stay solvent.
Lori Tashkajian was in her cubbyhole office that same dreary November morning. The storm that was bringing snow to Iowa was already smothering the New York skyline with gray tendrils of fog and spatterings of drizzle. Mountains of manuscripts still littered Lori’s tiny office. But she ignored them as she pondered over the data on her computer display screen.
According to the computer’s program, it would be foolhardy to print more than five thousand copies of Capt. Clunker’s novel about the Battle of Midway. The title for the book was still under discussion at the editorial meetings. Every one of the editors except Lori thought that Midway Diary would not sell, although Ralph Malzone (the only one with sales experience at the conferences) liked the title well enough. Currently its working title was Forbidden Warrior’s Love, which Lori hated. But at least it was better than Pacific Lust, which she had narrowly averted, after several screaming matches.
The computer was saying that, no matter what the book’s title, they could expect to sell no more than two or three thousand copies of the hardcover. That meant printing no more than five thousand.
Lori frowned at the glowing screen. Dammit, this novel deserves better than that! But it had been cursed with the strategy of minimal success. The editorial board had decided to take no chances with a first novel by an unknown writer. No money was to be risked on publicity or advertising. No effort made to sell the book to reluctant buyers in bookstore chains or major distribution centers. Minimum success. Spend as little as possible and “let the book find its own level of sales.” The level would be on the bottom, Lori knew from bitter experience.
If only she could get to Mrs. Bunker and make a personal pitch for the novel. She knew it could sell much better, maybe even make a run at the best-seller lists, if they would give it some support.
But Mrs. Bee was hardly in the office these days. Ever since the cruise—and the lawsuit whipped on them by the sales force—Mrs. Bunker had spent more time out of the office than in it. Strange, though. Even though the company was in dire trouble, with sales down and morale even lower, with a lawsuit by its own sales force threatening to close down Bunker Books entirely, Mrs. Bee seemed smiling, radiant, even girlishly happy on those increasingly rare occasions when she did make an appearance in the office.
Then Lori’s thoughts turned to Carl and his Cyberbooks project. The outlook for him was bleak. Very bleak.
But Carl Lewis was whistling while he worked. Hunched in front of his own computer display screen in the workshop/office he had made out of the apartment the Bunkers were paying for, Carl traced out the circuitry for an improved Cyberbook model that would reduce the costs of the hand-held reader by at least ten percent.
He leaned back in the little typing chair and let out a satisfied sigh. Yep, we can make it cheaper. The cheaper it is, the more poor people will be able to afford Cyberbooks. Carl had tried, during the last few months, to interest Mrs. Bunker in a program of giving away a few hundred thousand Cyberbook readers to the children of urban ghettos. Mrs. Bee had given him a puzzled look and a vague smile instead of a definite answer.
His phone buzzed. Carl rolled in his little chair to the desk and tapped the phone keyboard. Ralph Malzone’s long-jawed face appeared on the screen.
“Hey, are we going to lunch or are you on a diet?”
“Lunch! I forgot all about it!”
“Okay. I’m down at Pete’s. Meet me at the bar.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Carl was damp and chilled by the time he entered Pete’s Tavern. The drizzle had not looked serious from his hotel window, but walking three blocks with no umbrella or raincoat had not done his tweed jacket much good.
“Where’s the duck?” Ralph asked him, grinning from behind a schooner of beer.
“Duck?” Carl wondered.
“You look like a retriever that’s just come out of the water.”
Carl laughed, a little self-consciously, and ordered a double sherry to warm himself.
They took their drinks into the crowded dining room beyond the bar and ordered lunch.
“You’re still working on the gadget?” Ralph asked, his face more serious now.
“Sure. Why not?”
“The trial starts next week.”
“So?”
Ralph leaned forward, bringing his face close to Carl’s. “So if Woody and his pals win this suit, the court will enjoin Bunker to stop all work on Cyberbooks.”
Despite a slight pang of fear in his gut, Carl replied, “That can’t happen.”
“Oh no?”
“What judge in his right mind would stop a whole new industry just because some salesmen are afraid it will force them to learn a slightly different way of doing their work?”
Justice Hanson Hapgood Fish was a man of rare perceptions. So rarefied were his perceptions, in fact, that some whispered they actually were hallucinations.
He sat in his chambers, behind the massive mahogany desk that had belonged to Malcolm (Malevolent Mal) F. Fortunata until the unhappy day when the Feds had carted Mal away for seventeen counts of bribery, obstructing justice, and aiding and abetting organized crime. The room was large, panelled in dark wood where it was not lined with glass-enclosed bookcases. The leather chairs and solitary long couch were heavy, massive, uninviting. Thick curtains flanked the windows. A gloomy chamber, dreary even on the sunniest day.
Justice Fish’s desk was neurotically bare, except for the inevitable computer display screen, blank and silent. In its empty screen, the judge saw his own face reflected: totally bald, tight-lipped and narrow-eyed, aging pale skin stretched over the skull so tightly that every blue vein could be seen throbbing sluggishly.
He was engaged in his morning ritual. First the mental exercises: reciting the logarithmic tables of his ancient school trigonometry text, then leaning his head back against the padding of his oversized chair and recalling from his memory the looks of every woman in his courtroom the previous day. There had been only two, both of them aging and lumpy. Nothing had happened in his courtroom except the sentencing of a miscreant embezzler. But he enjoyed replaying before his mind’s eye the stunned look on the man’s face when he sentenced him to ninety-nine years without probation.
The damned superior court will lighten his sentence, he thought grouchily. But still, that look on his face was worth it.
Now he rose slowly from his chair and went to the nearer of the two windows in his office. He moved carefully, with all due deliberation, as much from the desire to appear dramatically dignified as from the arthritis that plagued both his knees. The window was so filthy that he could barely make out the grimy gray City Hall across the way. Standing there, Justice Fish took three deep breaths. Never two, nor four. Never with the window open, either: he knew that fresh air, in Manhattan, could kill.
Now he returned, still with self-conscious dignity, to his desk and lowered himself onto his imposing chair. Reaching out a long lean finger that barely trembled, he touched the computer’s keypad to see what his next case would be.
Bunker vs. Bunker. A publishing house’s sales force was suing its employer over some new contraption that they felt would eliminate their jobs. Hm. Labor relations. Always a thorny issue.
Pressing keypads carefully, Justice Fish called up the secret, coded program that only he could summon from the computer because only he knew the special code word that accessed it: Polaris.
It was an astrology program, and the aging judge pecked at the keyboard, asking how he should decide the case he would soon be judging. The computer blinked and hummed, then gave him an answer.
Justice Fis
h nodded, satisfied. Now he knew what his decision would be. Now he did not have to listen to the evidence that the various lawyers would present over the next long, boring weeks. It was all decided. Sifting evidence and weighing the slick arguments lawyers dished up to him was just a waste of time, he felt. The stars told him what his decision would be, so he could relax and fantasize about the women in his courtroom without the fear of making a wrong decision. Pleased, he shut down the computer and leaned back in his chair for his morning nap.
Murder Six
Detective Lieutenant Jack Moriarty was not merely a good cop, he was a brave man. Brave in two ways: he had physical courage, the ability to stand up to a man with a gun or a gang of street toughs; he also had the courage of his convictions, the strength to play his hunches even when they seemed crazy.
Shortly after the murder of retired detective Miles Archer, several months earlier, Moriarty had come to certain conclusions about the Retiree Murders. The computer records of each victim hinted at the possibility of a motive that seemed so farfetched, so tenuous, that only a man as convinced of himself as Moriarty would dare to act on it. But act he did. He bought stock in a multinational conglomerate corporation called, of all things, Tarantula Enterprises.
It had not been an easy thing to do. Tarantula shares were expensive, more than $1,000 each. And the stockbroker he had contacted told him that not much Tarantula stock was available on the open market.
“Most of it is held by other corporations,” the broker had said, sniffling so much that Moriarty began to look for traces of white powder on his fingertips. “The big boys hold it and sell it in enormous blocks. It’s not traded in onesy-twoseys very much.”
Moriarty had assured him that he only wanted a few shares. He could not afford more; twenty shares cleaned out his savings account.
For months he waited patiently, even buying single shares now and then as they became available. Nothing had happened. His hunch had gone cold. The Retiree Murderer refused to strike at anyone, let alone an active police detective who held a grand total of twenty-four shares of Tarantula Enterprises, Ltd.
