Cyberbooks

by Ben Bova

  "The remaining one-third is sufficient," said the Axe smugly.

  "You're going to run the company into the ground," moaned Hawks.

  Axhelm eyed the shorter man as if through a monocle. "My dear sir, the task given me by corporate management was to make Webb Press more efficient. I have pruned excess personnel and now I shall reduce costs further by moving the offices out of this overly expensive location. Operating the company is your responsibility, not mine. If you cannot show a profit even after I have reduced your costs so drastically, then I suggest that you tender your resignation and turn over the reins of authority to someone who can run an efficient operation."

  Slowly, with the certainty of revealed truth dawning upon him, Hawks took the plastic cigar butt out of his mouth. So that's it, he said to himself. Axhelm wants to take over Webb Press. He wants my job. He wants my head as a trophy on his wall.

  He said nothing aloud. But to himself, Hawks promised, I'm going to chop you down, you Prussian martinet. And I'm going to use your own methods to do it.

  *

  Sunset at sea. Scarlet Dean lay back on a deck chair, splendidly alone up on the topmost deck of the New Amsterdam, and watched the sun dip toward the horizon, blazing a path of purest gold across the sparkling waters directly toward her. It was if the huge glowing red sphere were trying to show her a path to wealth and happiness, she thought.

  She knew she was in some danger. Not from anyone with Bunker Books. As far as she could tell they were all pleasantly incompetent nincompoops. Even Alba Bunker, who had a reputation for being the real brains behind the company, seemed totally unaware of what a tiger she had by the tail in Cyberbooks. Just about the only person who seemed to understand what was going on, really, was the sales manager. Ralph Malzone. A wiry, intense kind of guy. And a lot smarter than he pretended to be.

  The danger came from Hawks and his temper. The man had no patience. God knows what demons are after his hide, Scarlet told herself. But it wouldn't be beyond him to order someone to sink this ship and drown everyone on it.

  Including me.

  But he won't do that unless and until he has the Cyberbooks machine in his grubby little paws. Or will he? Does he see Cyberbooks as a threat? Does he think he'd be better off putting the whole problem at the bottom of the Atlantic?

  On the other hand, she thought, suppose I had control of Cyberbooks. Me. Myself. I could write my own ticket with Webb Press. Or with any publishing house in New York. I could probably get the top publishers together to buy me off, pay me millions to suppress the invention. I could retire for life.

  Or start my own company. Take their money and then go to Japan and start a Cyberbooks company there. She smiled to herself. Or Singapore, even better. I could live like a queen in the Far East. The Dragon Lady. Empress of worldwide publishing. What a trip!

  To do that, though, I'll have to get our young inventor to trust me. He's got to come along with me, at least at the beginning. The machine means nothing without the inventor to show others how to build it.

  Scarlet realized, with a start, that she was sitting up tensely in the deck chair, every nerve taut with anticipation. She forced herself to lean back in the chair as she thought about Carl Lewis.

  Lori Tashkajian is after him, she knew. Probably in love with him. Certainly the little twit understands that Carl is the key to her personal success. I'll have to pry Carl loose from her. More important, I'll have to pry him loose from his work. He's married to his damned invention, Scarlet realized. Oblivious to everything else. Lori is practically throwing herself at him and he just glides along without seeing it.

  He's susceptible, though. I could see that the first time I met him. The tongue-tied engineer type. I'll have to be much more aggressive than Lori's been. His type calls for special measures.

  Scarlet practiced smiling, alone up there on the top deck, while the sun slid slowly toward the gleaming red-gold sea and the sky turned to majestic flame.

  *

  Lori and Carl were standing side by side at the ship's rail, just one deck below Scarlet Dean's solitary perch.

  "Isn't the sunset beautiful?" she murmured.

  "So are you," Carl said. And she was, with the sea breeze caressing her shimmering ebony hair and the blazing red glory of the setting sun on her face. Lori wore a sleeveless white frock. In the last light of the sunset it glowed like cloth of gold.

  She acknowledged his compliment with a smile, then looked back toward the sea.

  "I think you and I are the only people on board," Carl went on, "who haven't had any plastic surgery done on them."

  Lori giggled. "That's true enough! Have you seen Ted Gunn? Hair implants and artificial bone in his legs to make him two inches taller. Even Concetta has had her breasts and backside lifted."

  Carl chuckled. "The one that gets me is Quigly. The pain she must have gone through!"

  "And now she's eating five meals a day," Lori said, "even before the bandages come off! She'll be the same weight at the end of this cruise as she was at the beginning."

  "But think of the great time she's having," Carl countered.

  They both laughed. Then he said, "You don't need plastic surgery. You're gorgeous just as you are."

  "I'm overweight. . . ."

  "You're perfect."

  "No I'm not."

  "Yes you are."

  "Carl, I'm far from perfect." Lori's face grew so serious that he did not reply. Then she went on, "In fact, I have a confession to make. I've been using you, Carl—for my own purposes."

  "I don't understand."

  She looked into his steady blue-gray eyes, a turmoil of conflicting emotions raging within her. As if beyond her conscious control, her voice said, "Carl, back in my office there's a manuscript. . . ."

  "There's hundreds of 'em!"

  "This is serious," Lori insisted. "One of those manuscripts is by a completely unknown writer. Nothing the author has written before has ever been published. And it's good, Carl! It's better than good. It's a masterpiece. It's raw, even crude in places. It's an unpolished gem. But it's a masterpiece. I want to publish it."

  "So?" It was obvious from his puzzled expression that Carl did not understand the problem.

  "It doesn't fit into any of the marketing categories. It's not a mystery, or a Gothic, or an historical novel. It's just the finest piece of American literature I've ever read. I get tears in my eyes whenever I think about it, that's how good it is. Pulitzer Prize, at least. Maybe the Nobel."

  "Then why don't you publish it?"

  "No New York publisher would touch it. It's a thousand manuscript pages long. It's not category. It's literature. That's the kiss of death for a commercial publishing house. They don't publish literature because literature doesn't make money."

  "But if it's so good . . ."

  "That's got nothing to do with it," Lori said, almost crying. "Quality doesn't sell books. Can you imagine the sales people on this ship going out and selling Crime and Punishment or Bleak House?"

  Carl's expression turned thoughtful. "Didn't I read someplace that every publisher in New York turned down Gone With the Wind at one time or another?"

  Nodding, Lori said, "Yes. And for twelve years none of them would touch Lost Horizon. There's a long list of great novels that nobody wanted to publish."

  "But they all got into print eventually."

  "But how many others didn't?" Lori almost shouted with a vehemence that surprised her. "How many truly fine novels have never been published because the people in this business are too blind or stupid to see how great they are? How many really great authors have gone to their graves totally unknown, their work turned to dust along with them?"

  "My god, you're trembling."

  Lori rested her head against Carl's shoulder. "It's a fine novel, a great work of art. And it's going to die without seeing the light of day—unless . . ."

  "Unless what?" he asked, folding his arms around her.

  "Unless we can make a success of C
yberbooks. Then they'll let me take a chance on an unknown, on a work of literature. I need to be able to tell Mrs. Bunker that the price of my bringing you to her is letting me publish this novel."

  "That makes sense, I guess."

  She pushed slightly away from him, enough to be able to look up into his eyes. "But don't you understand? I'm using you! I'm not interested in your invention just for its own sake. I want it to be a success so that I can have the power to publish this book!"

  Carl smiled at her. "Okay. So what? I'm using you too, aren't I? Using you to get me inside a big New York publishing house so I can get my invention developed. Otherwise I'd still be sitting in some publisher's waiting room, wouldn't I?"

  "But that's not the same. . . ."

  "Listen to me. Cyberbooks can help you in more ways than one. How big is this great novel of yours? A thousand pages? How much would it cost to print a book that long?"

  "A fortune," Lori admitted.

  "With Cyberbooks it won't cost any more than a regular-sized book. And the retail price of the novel will be less than five dollars."

  Lori brightened. "I hadn't even thought about that part of it. I was still thinking in terms of printing the novel on paper."

  "Come on." He crooked a finger under her chin. "Cheer up. You help me bring Cyberbooks to life and I'll help you get your novel published. That's what the biologists call a symbiotic relationship."

  Dabbing away the tears at the corner of her eyes, Lori allowed Carl to lead her along the deck toward the hatch that opened into the dining salon. Neither of them noticed Scarlet Dean, leaning over the railing of the deck just above where they had been standing, a knowing little smile curving her narrow red lips.

  MURDER FIVE

  Miles Archer was an ex-police officer. A retired homicide detective, in fact. He had even been named after a detective. A small, unremarkable man who had gray hair by the time he was thirty, Archer had cracked many cases during his long distinguished career with the NYPD simply by the fact that hardly anyone could recognize the steel-trap mind behind his bland, utterly forgettable facade.

  "He must have known he was being followed," said the uniformed cop.

  Lt. Moriarty nodded. "Yeah. Miles would never have wandered up an alley like this for no reason."

  Moriarty's steely gaze swept up and down the narrow alley. It was littered with paper, but otherwise clean enough. They were down in the financial district, near Wall Street. No winos huddled in the alleys here. Brokers might sneak martinis into their Thermos jugs, but they went home to posh suburbia after the day's frenzied work.

  Archer's slight body lay facedown, where it had fallen, rumpled gray trenchcoat twisted around him, in front of a rusted metal door that led into the rear of a high-rise office building. The alley dead-ended at the brick rear wall of another high rise. A third skyscraper formed the other side of the narrow alley. Moriarty sniffed disdainfully; there was no garbage or urine smell to the alley. It seemed unnatural to him.

  The forensics team was taking holographic pictures and lifting samples of litter from the area around the body. One of the team members was scanning the alleyway with an infrared detector for latent footprints. The binocularlike black detector steamed slightly as the summer evening's heat boiled away some of its liquid nitrogen coolant.

  "He figured somebody was following him," Moriarty reconstructed the event aloud, "and ducked up here to see if whoever it was would come in too."

  "And the perpetrator did follow him," said the cop in blue.

  Moriarty nodded. "Must've been one person, and not a rough-looking type at all. Miles wasn't the kind for personal heroics. He must've thought whoever he was being followed by was lightweight enough for him to face down by himself."

  "He made a mistake."

  "The last one he'll ever make."

  "Uh, Lieutenant . . ." The uniformed cop hesitated. "You don't think maybe he was deliberately meeting somebody here, do you?"

  "In an alley?"

  "They do a lot of designer drugs around here. Those brokers got a lot of money to throw around."

  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 he 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 with the Sicilians? Not likely, Weldon thought, although you would 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 withou
t 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 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."