by Ben Bova
All the magazine articles he had studiously read in the town library said that the longer a publishing house held on to a manuscript, the more likely they were to eventually buy it. It meant that the manuscript had been liked by the first reader and passed on to the more important editors. They, of course, were so busy that you couldn't expect them to sit right down and read your manuscript. They were flooded with hundreds of manuscripts; thousands, more likely. It took time to get to the one that you had sent in.
But six months? The Writer had sent follow-up letters, servilely addressed to "First Reader" and "Editor for New Manuscripts." No response whatsoever. On one daring night, emboldened by several beers at Jumping Joe's Bar, he sent an urgent, demanding telegram to the Editor-in-Chief. It was never answered, either.
As he sat in the only unbroken chair in the cramped living room area and turned on the noontime news, the Writer felt close to despair. For all he knew, the manuscript had never even gotten to Bunker Books. Some wiseguy in the post office might have dumped it in a sewer, figuring it was too heavy to carry. He'd heard plenty of stories like that, especially around Christmastime.
On the TV screen the solemn yet bravely smiling face of the network anchorman was replaced by a scene somewhere in the Middle East. The U.S. secretary of state was back there, trying to get the Arabs and Jews to stop shooting at each other. Fat chance, thought the Writer.
But something the secretary of state said to the reporters caught his attention. "We must do everything we can do to bring about a satisfactory solution to the problem. No matter how slim the chances, we must not shrink from doing everything we can do."
It was as if the TV screen had gone blank after that. The Writer saw no more, heard no more. He stared off into a distant, personal infinity. He must do everything he can do, no matter how slim the chances.
Absolutely right! Instead of going to the fridge and pulling out a frozen dinner, the Writer stalked out the front door of the mobile home and got into his battered old GMota hatchback. He gunned the engine and drove out to the throughway heading north. Toward New York. They would probably fire him, back at the garbage recycling plant, when he didn't show up for work that night. The bill collectors would probably grab his mobile home and all its contents. So what? He was heading for New York, for Bunker Books, for his rendezvous with destiny.
He was already more than a hundred miles north when the tornado ripped through town. Suddenly his ex-home became very mobile and wound up in the bottom of the bay, seven miles from its original site. Police dredged the bay for three days without finding his body.
THREE
As he sat in the stuffy conference room, Carl thought he had somehow fallen down a rabbit hole or plunged into another dimension. Here he was with the greatest invention to hit the publishing world since Gutenberg, and the people around the conference table were ignoring him completely. The table looked cheap, hard-used. Carl ran a fingertip across its top: wood-grained Formica.
As one of the female editors droned on endlessly, Carl leaned toward Lori, sitting next to him. "They're talking about books," he whispered.
With a small grin she whispered back, "Of course, silly. This is the editorial board meeting."
"But what about my presentation?"
Lori's eyes flicked to the empty chair at the head of the table. "Not until the Boss comes in."
"The boss isn't here?"
"Not yet."
Carl sank back in his chair. It creaked. Or is it my spine? he wondered. The chair was old and stiff and uncomfortable. He was sitting at the foot of the table, farthest from the conference room's only door, squeezed in beside Lori. The Formica table top was scratched and chipped, he noticed. The walls of the windowless conference room bore faded color prints from the covers of old Bunker books.
Eight other editors sat slumped in various attitudes of boredom and frustration. Four men, four women, plus the male editor-in-chief, a pudgy little fellow with a dirty white T-shirt showing beneath his unzippered leather jacket, a fashionable two-day growth of beard on his round little chinny-chin-chin, pop eyes, and thick oily lips. He reminded Carl of a scaly fish. The editors all were dressed in ultramodish biker's black leathers with chains and studs, except for Lori in her simple golden-yellow sweater and midcalf denim skirt. A burst of sunshine in the midst of all the black gloom.
Editorial bored meeting, Carl said to himself. Then, with a mental shrug of his cerebral shoulders, he decided to pay attention to what the editors were saying. Maybe he could learn something about how the publishing business worked. It beat chewing his fingernails waiting for his moment to speak.
The editor sitting next to the chief, an enormous mountain of flesh, was droning like a Tibetan lama in a semitrance about Sheldon Stoker's latest horror novel. Her name was Maryann Quigly, and she gave every appearance of loathing her job.
"It's the same old tripe," she said in a voice that sounded totally exhausted, as if just the effort of getting up in the morning and dragging her bloated body to this meeting had almost overwhelmed her. "Blood, devil-worship, blood, supernatural doings, blood, and more blood. It's awful."
"But it sells," said Ashley Elton, the bone-thin, nasal-voiced editor sitting across the table from the lugubrious Ms. Quigly. Ashley Elton was not her real name: she had been born Rebecca Simkowitz, but felt that her parents should have given her a name that sounded more literary. Hence Ashley Elton. She was an intense, beady-eyed toothache of a woman with the pale pinched face and smudged black eye makeup of a Hollywood vampire.
"Sure it sells," Maryann Quigly agreed, barely squeezing the words past her heavy-eyed torpor.
The editor-in-chief shook his wattles. "Stoker writes crap, all right, but it's commercial crap. It keeps this company afloat. If we ever lose him we all go pounding the pavements looking for new jobs."
Quigly sighed a long, pained, wheezing sigh.
"What'd we give him as an advance for his last book?" asked the editor-in-chief.
"One million dollars." Quigly drew out the words to such length that it took almost a full minute to say it.
"Offer him the same for this one."
"His agent will want more," snapped Ashley Elton (nee Simkowitz).
"Murray Swift," muttered the editor-in-chief. "Yep, he'll hold us up for a million two, at least." Turning back to Quigly, he instructed, "Offer a million even. Give us more room for negotiating."
One by one, the editors presented books that they thought the company should publish. Each presentation was made exactly the same way. The editor would give the book's title and author, and then a brief description of the category it fit into. Thus:
Jack Drain, the young ball of fire who sported a small Van Dyke on his receding chin, proposed Taurus XII: The Return of the Bull. "It's by Billy Bee Bozo, same as the other eleven in the series. Fantasy adventure, set in a distant age when men battled evil with swords and courage."
"And all the weemen have beeg breasts," said Concetta Las Vagas, the company's Affirmative Action "two-fer," being both Hispanic and female. There were those in Bunker Books who claimed she should be a "three-fer," since her skin was quite dark as well. There were also those who claimed that Concetta's idea of Affirmative Action was to say "Si, si," to any postpubertal male. The standard line among the office gossips was that a man could get lucky in Las Vagas.
"Look who's talking about beeg breasts," mimicked Mark Martin, who wore a pale lemon silk T-shirt beneath his biker's leather jacket, and a tastefully tiny diamond on his left nostril.
Drain frowned across the table at Las Vagas. "There are women warriors in this one. Bozo's not as much of a male chauvinist as he used to be."
"There go his sales," somebody mumbled.
Ted Gunn, sitting next to Drain, perked up on his chair. Although he wore leathers and metal studs just like the rest of the editors, he gave off an aura of restless energy that announced he was a Young Man Headed for the Top. He was the only one in the conference room who smoked; his
place at the table was fenced in by a massive stainless-steel ashtray smudged with a layer of gray ash and six crushed butts, and a pair of electronic air purifiers that sucked the smoke out of the air so efficiently that they could snatch up notepaper and even loose change.
"What have sales been like for the Taurus series lately?" Gunn asked.
Drain said, "Good. Damned good." But it sounded weak, defensive.
"Haven't his sales been dropping with every new book?"
"Not much."
"But if a series is effective," Gunn said, suddenly the sharp young MBA on the prowl, "his sales should be going up, not down."
That started a long, wrangling argument about the marketing department, the art director's, choice of cover artists, the hard winter in the Midwest, and several other subjects that mystified Carl. What could all that have to do with the sales of books? Why didn't they all have pocket computers, so they could punch up the sales figures and have them in hard numbers right before their eyes?
Carl shook his head in bewilderment.
*
With great reluctance, P. Curtis Hawks entered the private elevator that ran from his spacious office to the penthouse suite of the Synthoil Tower. Lapin had been ushered away in the grip of two burly security men to learn the lessons of failure. Now Hawks had to report that failure to the Old Man.
Once he had enjoyed talking with the Old Man, gleaning the secret techniques of power and persuasion that had built Tarantula Enterprises into one of the world's largest multinational corporations. But ever since the takeover battle had started, the Old Man had seemed to recede from reality, to slide into a private world that was almost childlike. Senility, thought Hawks. Just when we need him most, his mind turns to Silly Putty.
He whacked the only button on the elevator's control board four times before the doors could close, like a true New Yorker, impatient, urgent, demanding. The doors swished shut and he felt the heavy acceleration of upward thrust. Years ago, when he had first become president of Tarantula's publishing subsidiary, whenever Hawks entered this elevator he had pictured himself as an astronaut blasting off to orbit. I could have been an astronaut, he told himself. If only I could have passed algebra in high school.
The ride was all too swift. Hawks felt a moment of lightness as the elevator slowed to a stop. ("Zero gravity," he used to say to himself. "We have achieved orbit.") The doors slid smoothly open. The office of Weldon W. Weldon, president and chief executive officer of Tarantula Enterprises (Ltd.) lay before him.
It was a jungle. The office had been turned into a tropical greenhouse. Or maybe a zoo. All sorts of lushly flowering shrubs were growing out of huge ceramic pots dotting the vast expanse of the Old Man's office. Palm trees brushed their fronds against the ceiling. Raucous birds jeered from perches in the greenery, and Hawks heard a new sound—a hooting kind of howl that must have been a monkey or baboon or some equally noisome animal. Vines trailed along the incredibly expensive Persian carpeting. Hawks wrinkled his nose at the clashing, cloying scents of the jungle. For god's sake, look at the stains on the carpeting! Those goddamn birds!
There were snakes in those bushes, too, he knew. Poisonous snakes. The Old Man said he needed them for protection. Ever since the takeover struggle had started he had become more and more paranoid. Said he was training them to guard him and attack strangers.
Wishing he had brought a machete, Hawks made his perilous way slowly through the Old Man's personal jungle. The heat and humidity were intolerable. Hawks's expensive silk suit was already soaked with perspiration. It dripped off the end of his pudgy nose and trickled along his belly and legs. His skull steamed under his toupee. He felt as if he were melting.
The old bastard changes the layout every day, he fumed to himself. One of these days I'm going to need a native guide to find his goddamned desk.
After nearly ten minutes of stalking around potted orchids and stepping over twisted vines (and hoping they were not snakes lying in wait), Hawks ducked under a low palm bole, turned a corner, and there in a clearing was the Old Man. Watering a row of Venus flytraps with a seltzer bottle.
Weldon W. Weldon sat in his powered chair, in his usual undertaker's black suit, a heavy plaid blanket tucked over his lap, blissfully spritzing the Venus flytraps. His back was to the approaching Hawks. A line from Shakespeare sprang into Hawks's mind: "Now might I do it, Pat."
Hawks had never understood who Pat was, and why he had no lines to speak in the scene. But he understood opportunity when he saw it. I could come up behind him, whisk the blanket off his lap, and smother him with it. Nobody would know, and I would be elected to replace him, Hawks told himself.
Then he saw the jaguar lying indolently in the corner by the picture windows. Its burning eyes were fastened on Hawks, and there was no chain attached to its emerald-studded collar. Hawks was not certain that anyone could train a snake to attack on command, but he had no doubts whatsoever about the jaguar. He swallowed his ambition. It tasted like bile. The sleek cat purred like the rumble of a heavy truck.
The president and chief executive officer of Tarantula Enterprises (Ltd.) spun his powered chair around to face Hawks. Weldon was old, stooped, wrinkled, totally bald, and confined to his powered chair since his massive coronary more than a year earlier. The coronary, of course, had come in the midst of Tarantula's battle to avoid an unfriendly takeover by Etna Industries, a multinational corporation headquartered in Sicily and reputed to be a wholly owned Mafia subsidiary. A decidedly unfriendly takeover bid. The struggle was still going on, the battlefields were the stock exchanges of New York, London, and Rome, the law courts of Washington and Palermo. This war had already cost Weldon his health. Maybe his sanity.
And there was no end in sight. The swarthy little men from Sicily had great persistence. And long memories. Hawks could feel the brooding Sicilians hovering over them, like dark angels of death, waiting for the chance to grab Tarantula in their rapacious claws.
"You didn't get it," the Old Man snapped. His voice was as sharp and scratchy as an icepick scraping along a chalk board.
"Not exactly," said Hawks from around his pacifier. His tone was meekly servile. He hated himself for it, but somehow in the face of the Old Man he always felt like a naughty little kid. Worse: an incompetent little kid.
"And what do you mean by that?" Weldon laid his seltzer bottle on the blanket across his lap and drove the chair over to his desk. Its electric motor barely buzzed, it was so quiet. The once immaculate expanse of Philippine mahogany was now a miniature forest of unidentifiable potted plants. Hawks had to sit at just the right angle to see his boss through a clearing in the greenery.
"The man we hired to copy the device used too strong an X-ray dose," Hawks confessed, feeling sheepish.
"And? And?"
"The hologram contains a complete three-dimensional picture of the device, but it's a very weak image. Blurred. Very difficult to make out any details."
Weldon snorted. His wizened old face frowned at Hawks. "I see," he sneered. "If I want a perfect three-D image of a taxicab's rear axle, you can get it for me. But not the device we're after."
Hawks felt a shudder of fright burn through him. He's bugged my office! He's been listening to everything that I do!
Pointing a crooked, shaking finger at Hawks, the old man commanded, "You get the best people in NASA, or the air force, or wherever to work on that fudged hologram. I want to see that device!"
Hawks swallowed again. Hard. "Yessir."
"And get somebody who knows what he's doing to make another copy of it. Steal the damned thing if you have to!"
"Right away, sir."
Weldon's frown relaxed slightly. He almost smiled, a ghastly sight. "Now listen, son," he said, suddenly amiable. "Don't you understand how important this device is? It's going to revolutionize the publishing industry."
"But publishing is such a small part of Tarantula," Hawks heard himself object. "Why bother . . ."
He stopped himself because
the old man's smile faded into a grimace.
"How many times do I have to tell you," Weldon said sharply, "that publishing is the keystone to all of Tarantula's business lines? Control publishing and you control people's minds, their attitudes. Books and magazines and newspapers tell people what to think, how to vote, where to spend their money. How many idiots do you know who let the Times book reviews decide for them what's good reading and what isn't?"
"But what about TV?" Hawks asked, unfazed by the non sequitur. "And even radio . . ."
The old man snarled at him, making the jaguar's ears perk up. "Television? Are you serious?" He cackled. "Those Twinkies and egomaniacs get their ideas and their information from books and magazines and newspapers! Don't you understand that yet? Why do you think I put you in charge of our publishing subsidiary? Because I thought you were incompetent?"
That was exactly why Hawks thought he had been made president of Webb Press. But he remained silent as Weldon continued:
"Sure, Webb runs in the red every year. It's a good tax shelter for us; the more money Webb loses, the less taxes we pay. But the books Webb publishes are important to the rest of Tarantula. The magazines and newspapers even more so."
Hawks nodded to show he understood. He did not agree, of course, but if the Old Man thought publishing was that important, he was not going to argue.
"This device," Weldon went on, "this electronic book doohickey . . . it's the wave of the future. We've got to have it!"
"But—"
"Don't you understand?" Weldon's eyes began to shine, he seemed to vibrate with inner energy. "With electronic books we can undercut all the other publishers. We can corner the entire publishing industry!"
"Do you really think so?" Hawks felt entirely dubious. Clearly the Old Man's trolley was derailed.
Weldon's eyes were glowing now. His arms stretched out to encompass the world. Hawks almost thought he was going to rise out of his chair and walk.
