Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  Raymond welcomed the call. The letters were boring: two of the most widely read authors in the country reduced to boyish slanders and insults over the issue of whether or not the organization should have an official necktie. He poked the button that consigned the libelous words to the computer’s memory bank.

  Lori Tashkajian’s lovely, worried face took form on the display screen.

  “Lori! I thought you’d be in court this morning.”

  “I am,” she answered. “We’re on a short recess.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ray, we need your help. I need your help. The future of publishing depends on you!”

  “On me?”

  “On the Author’s League.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Swiftly, Lori outlined what had been happening at the trial. Raymond nodded his understanding.

  “So we need the Author’s League to come in here and support us. Otherwise we’re going to go down the drain and Cyberbooks will be strangled in its cradle.”

  “A mixed metaphor,” said Raymond.

  “We don’t have time to argue syntax!” Lori almost shouted. “You’ve got to get the biggest number of authors you can contact to come into court on our side. Today! This afternoon!”

  Raymond sadly shook his bald, bearded head. “What makes you think they’ll come out to support Bunker Books? After all, authors and publishers aren’t usually the best of friends.”

  “It’s in your own best interest!” Lori insisted. “Cyberbooks will bring down the costs of publishing to the point where thousands of writers who can’t get their works published now will have a viable marketplace for their books.”

  “I know. I understand. And I applaud what you’re trying to do. But . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “But what?” Lori asked.

  Feeling weak and helpless, Raymond explained, “Well, you know this bunch. They’re writers, Lori. They can’t agree on what to have for lunch, for Pete’s sake. Half of them think Cyberbooks is the greatest idea since Gutenberg, the other half think it’s an invention of Satan.”

  “Oh, god.”

  “And they don’t like to go into courtrooms. Can’t say I blame them. The idea gives me the chills.”

  “But if the ALA won’t support this innovation in publishing, you’re dooming all the writers . . . .”

  Raymond raised a pudgy finger. “I understand and I agree with you, Lori. I’ll do what I can. I’ll start calling people right now. But don’t expect too much.”

  “Maybe Sheldon Stoker!” Lori suggested.

  “He’s in Indonesia, directing the movie they’re making from The Balinese Devil.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” said Raymond, knowing it sounded feeble.

  “Please,” Lori begged. “And quickly!”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  Lori nodded and broke the connection. Raymond Mariana sighed a great, heaving sigh and, like a general issuing orders for a hopeless charge against overwhelming odds, he began tapping out phone numbers on his keypad.

  “She doesn’t understand,” he muttered to himself. “Editors just don’t understand writers. We’re not really organized. It’s tough to get us to do anything except argue among ourselves. Christ, if we had any real organization, would the tax laws read they way they do?”

  The Book Signing

  Conrad Velour sat in the middle of the bookstore, ballpoint pen poised, surrounded by stacks and stacks of his latest steamy novel, Inside Milwaukee. (After seventy-some “Inside” novels, he was running out of interesting cities.)

  Not only was the table at which he sat heaped with copies of Inside Milwaukee. All the bookshelves in the front of the store were packed with the novel. Even more were stacked by the cash register, where a discreetly small sign suggested, HAVE YOUR COPY OF INSIDE MILWAUKEE SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR.

  But the bookstore was strangely, maddeningly, eerily quiet. No customers had come to the table where MR. CONRAD VELOUR, AUTHOR!!! sat under the garish sign proclaiming his presence. Not a single book had been purchased. The ballpoint pen held in his white-knuckled fist had not scrawled out one autograph.

  An icy anger was inching along Conrad Velour’s blue veins. The store manager was definitely avoiding him. The clerks were tiptoeing across the store’s plush carpeting and whispering behind his back.

  Someone in the promotion department of S&M books was going to hang by the thumbs for this foul-up, Velour told himself. Someone was going to pay for this humiliation. More than an hour sitting on this hard bridge chair at this table heaped high with the best novel anyone’s seen in years, and no customers. Not one.

  They got the address wrong in the advertisements. Instead of 333 Fourth Avenue, the ads had all read 444 Third Avenue. Velour had discovered the mistake too late to do anything about it. He himself had gone to the address the S&M publicist had given him, only to find that it was not a bookstore at all. It was Ching’s Pizza and Chinese Take-Out. He had found the bookstore after some frantic screaming into a street corner telephone’s voice-activated computer directory.

  Now he sat alone, flanked by piles of unbought books, while the store personnel avoided his furious stare. He had asked the youngsters behind the counter at Ching’s to send the thousands of readers who would undoubtedly show up there to the proper address. But they barely understood English and—most crushing of all—not a one of them recognized him or his name.

  You’d think that at least some of my faithful readers would recognize the mistake and find their way here, he groused to himself. But no, they’re probably filling up on pizza and Chinese dumplings, making Ching rich while I sit here like a leper with bad breath and psoriasis.

  Oh, they’ll pay, he told himself for the millionth time. They’ll pay!

  A little old lady wandered into the hushed and nearly unpeopled store. Velour straightened up on his chair and gave her his most charming smile. He could be very charming when he wanted to be. He had the slim, elegant, slightly decayed looks of a bankrupt British lord. He wore the uniform of a successful author: white silk turtleneck shirt, informal Angora cardigan of royal blue, crisply creased gray slacks, and butter-soft moccasins of genuine artificial squirrel hide.

  The little old lady doddered around the front of the store, casting furtive glances toward the table where Velour and his oversupply of novels were stashed. She hesitated, took a few uncertain steps toward the author, stared up at the sign proclaiming who he was, then made a sour face, shook her head, and turned around and left the store.

  Velour’s hand clenched so tightly the ballpoint pen snapped in two.

  The store manager, a young wisp of a man, approached him as if he were a live bomb.

  “Uh, sir . . . there’s a telephone call for you, sir.”

  Velour fixed him with an evil stare. Sweat broke out on the youngster’s upper lip.

  “Uh . . . I could bring the mobile phone here, I guess.”

  Velour raised his left eyebrow one centimeter.

  “It . . . uh, it doesn’t have a picture screen, though. Sir.”

  “Good,” he snapped. “Then whoever is phoning will not see the humiliation I’m being put through.”

  The store manager scuttled away and returned half a minute later with the portable phone instrument in his trembling hand.

  Velour took a deep breath, then made himself smile as he sang, “Velour here!”

  “Conrad. Glad I located you. It’s Raymond Mañana.”

  “What can I do for you, Ray?”

  “I’m not interrupting important business, am I?”

  “For you, Ray, I can set aside business for a few moments. What’s so important that you tracked me down here in the middle of a signing session?”

  “It’s about the Cyberbooks trial, Conrad.”

  “Oh, yes. I read something about that in PW last week, I think.”

  For the next ten minutes Mañana explained what was happening in the courtroom. “So
I thought, you’re almost around the corner from the courthouse already, maybe when you’ve finished your signing you could pop over there and offer them some moral support.”

  Conrad Velour sighed a patient, long-suffering sigh. It was so difficult to deal with fools. “Raymond, it’s impossible. I’m not a Bunker author, to begin with, and I don’t see why authors should be called upon to pull Bunker’s chestnuts out of the fire. If this Cyberbooks deal falls through, so what? It won’t affect me or my sales.”

  “But—”

  “No, Raymond. I will not lift a finger to help P.T. Bunker.” And he clicked the phone’s disconnect button.

  It won’t affect me or my sales, Velour repeated to himself as he stared out across the empty bookstore. It won’t affect me or my sales.

  Twenty-Five

  Carl was surprised to hear his own name called as the plaintiff’s next witness. For a moment he felt the cold pain of fear surging through him. But then he looked the cowboy lawyer squarely in the eyes and rose to his feet. The fear burned away in the rising heat of righteousness. I’ll show this hotdog what Cyberbooks is all about. I’ll set them all straight. He patted his jacket pocket, where he always carried one of the Cyberbooks readers. I’ll show them all.

  Swearing to a deity he did not believe to exist, Carl took the witness chair and calmly watched the lawyer approach him the way a gunfighter in the Old West might saunter up a dusty town’s main street.

  “Your name?” the lawyer asked.

  “Carl Lewis.”

  “Your profession?”

  “I am an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

  “That’s your position,” the lawyer corrected. “What is your profession?”

  “Software composer.”

  “And what does that entail? What do you actually do?”

  Glancing up at the judge, who hovered over him like an implacable death’s head, Carl said, “I create the software programs that make computers run. Without such programs, a computer is nothing but a box full of electronic or optical switches.”

  “You make the computers actually perform, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You bring the machines to life.”

  “Right.”

  “Sort of like Dr. Frankenstein, huh?”

  Carl felt his cheeks heat up. “It’s not at all—”

  But the lawyer cut him off with more questions. Soon Carl was explaining how Cyberbooks worked, and he even pulled his electro-optical reader from his jacket pocket to show the lawyer and the judge how to operate it. Justice Fish seemed fascinated with the device. The book it showed was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, complete with dozens of beautiful full-color illustrations.

  After nearly fifteen minutes of tinkering with the Cyberbooks reader, while the lawyer and the entire courtroom waited with growing impatience, the judge finally put the device down on his banc next to his silver-plated water pitcher.

  “Exhibit A,” he instructed the bailiff. Carl began to wonder if he would ever get it back.

  “Now, Mr. Lewis,” the lawyer said smoothly, running a hand through his long silver-streaked hair, “just what motivated you to invent this here Cyberbook machine?”

  “What motivated me?” Carl felt puzzled.

  “Why’d you do it? What was going through your mind while you were working to perfect it? The desire for money? Wealth? Fame? A way to get promoted to full professor?”

  Shaking his head, Carl said, “None of those.”

  “Then what?”

  Carl smiled slightly. The lawyer had talked himself into a trap. Now I can tell them the real truth, make them understand why Cyberbooks is so important.

  He took a deep breath, then began, “The main difference between human beings and other animals is our ability to communicate. Speech. Without true speech you can’t have a truly intelligent species. The two most important inventions in the history of the human race were writing and printing. Writing allowed us—”

  “Mr. Lewis,” intoned the judge, “spare us the history lesson and answer the question.”

  Surprised, Carl said, “But I am, Your Honor.”

  “The question was about your motivation for creating this invention, not about the history of the human race. Be specific.”

  There was a slight commotion at the defense table. Carl saw Mrs. Bunker whispering furiously to the lawyer closest to her, who abruptly turned to the one next to him, and so on down the line until the last of the five clones got to his feet and said—rather weakly, Carl thought—“Objection, Your Honor.”

  “On what grounds?” Judge Fish demanded.

  “Plaintiffs’ counsel asked the witness about his motivations for inventing Cyberbooks. The question permits the widest allowable interpretation. Restricting the witness to—”

  “Denied,” snapped the judge. Turning to Carl, he commanded, “Restrict yourself to the time period when you were inventing the device, young man.”

  Carl’s guts churned with boiling hot anger. He glared at the judge, then turned back to the smirking cowboy lawyer.

  “My motivations were simple. I wanted to make this world a better place to live in.”

  Carl had expected a gasp of awe from the audience. Perhaps some scattered applause. Nothing. Dead silence.

  He plunged ahead. “Books are the life blood of our society. Our racial memory. Poor people can’t afford books. Kids in ghetto schools hardly ever even see a book. Certainly they don’t buy any. That’s because they can’t afford them. Books are too expensive for poor kids. Too expensive for the poor people in Latin America and Africa and Asia. Cyberbooks will bring the cost of buying books down to the point where even the poorest of the poor can afford it.”

  “But as I understand it,” the lawyer said, “the reading device will cost several hundred dollars. How do you expect the poor to buy your fancy machines?”

  “The government can buy them and distribute them free, or at nominal cost. The publishing industry could even donate a certain number of them, out of the profits they’ll make from Cyberbooks.”

  “And then all these poor people will have to buy Cyberbooks and nothing else, is that right? You’ll have them hooked on your product. Very neat.”

  “They will be reading books!” Carl countered. “They will be learning. They’ll be able to afford to learn, to grow, to pick themselves up and make better lives for themselves. Even people who’ve never learned to read will be able to use Cyberbooks that talk to you. The books themselves will teach them how to read.”

  “While Bunker Books makes a fortune and corners the entire publishing industry.”

  Ignoring that, Carl went on. “There’s another factor here. Today the publishing industry consumes millions of acres of trees every year. Paper mills pollute the air and water around them. They contribute to the greenhouse effect and alter the world’s climate. They contribute to acid rain. When the publishers turn to Cyberbooks we’ll be able to stop that awful waste and make the world cleaner and greener.”

  “Is that so?” The lawyer smiled craftily as he turned back toward the plaintiff’s table. He opened his saddle bag and took out a slim sheaf of papers bound in a set of green covers.

  “I have here in my hand a report by the Wildlife Foundation, a respected international environmental organization.” The lawyer waved the report over his head as he approached the witness box. “It says here that if the existing Canadian logging industry were to cease its operations—which they find environmentally sound, by the way—then the beaver population of the forests would undergo a population explosion that could upset the ecological balance of the entire Canadian forest system!”

  Now the audience gasped. One odd-looking fellow in a maroon suit and plaid shirt actually clapped his hands together once.

  “Far from making the world cleaner and greener,” the lawyer continued, “your invention could lead to an ecological catastrophe!”

  Carl sat in stunned silence
, unable to summon a word of rebuttal.

  The cowboy turned dramatically to the defense table. “Your witness.”

  The middle one of the five identical mice peeped, “No questions.”

  “Witness may step down. Call your next witness.”

  Shakily, Carl walked away from the witness box and headed for his seat. Lori looked sad and sympathetic, waiting for him in the first row of benches. Just before he sat down, Carl heard the western lawyer boom out:

  “I call Mrs. Alba Blanca Bunker.”

  “Mrs. Bunker to the stand.”

  It was a nightmare. The lawyer badgered and hounded Mrs. Bee, trying to twist every word she said into an admission that Bunker Books was attempting to drive thousands of innocent, hardworking men and women out of their jobs and into miserable lives of perpetual poverty.

  Mrs. Bunker, all in white as usual, seemed to shrink on the witness chair like a little girl being scolded by an unforgiving parent. Her face was so pale that Carl thought she was about to faint.

  “And isn’t it true,” the lawyer snarled at Mrs. Bee, “that the only reason you became interested in Cyberbooks was your vision of making huge fortunes in profits? That you didn’t care if thousands of ordinary men and women were thrown out of work? That sheer, vicious greed was driving you to commit this horrible act of economic mass murder?”

  Mrs. Bunker’s eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open. She was staring not at the tormenting lawyer but beyond him, at the muscular figure who had barged through the courtroom’s double doors, past the startled uniformed guard there, and now strode up the aisle toward the front of the courtroom.

  Vaulting over the low rail that divided the audience from the front of the court, Pandro T. Bunker reached the cowboy before Judge Fish could even grasp his gavel. P.T. grabbed the westerner by a padded suede shoulder, whirled him around, and socked him squarely on the jaw. The lawyer sailed four feet off the ground and landed in a crumpled suede heap at the foot of the judge’s banc.