Cyberbooks

by Ben Bova

  "Yeah. What do you think of it?"

  Quigly's eyes, small and deepset in folds of flesh that not even the cosmetic surgeons had been able to remove, shifted evasively. "It bothers me," she said.

  "Me too."

  "There's too many computers in this business already," muttered Quigly, glancing around to see if anyone was close enough to overhear. No one was. No one was sitting within thirty feet of them.

  "Yeah. Did you see what they did at Webb Press? They've got computers doing just about everything now. Only three editors left in the whole house! They've got to do everything!"

  "Who has time to do anything?" Quigly puffed out a weary sigh, then polished off the rest of her malted.

  "I sure don't," admitted Elton. "What with meetings and meetings and more meetings, I'm lucky if I open the morning mail."

  With a ponderous shake of her head, Quigly said slowly, "A book ought to have pages. It ought to be made out of paper."

  "Yeah. Something you can curl up with in bed at night."

  "Not some electronic box."

  "It's so cold!"

  "It isn't right," Quigly insisted. "Books should be made out of paper. That's the way they were meant to be made."

  "Wrong, girls."

  The two women jerked with guilty surprise. Standing over them was Woodrow Elihu Balogna, known to all as Woody Baloney, sales rep for the upper Midwest region.

  "Books," Woody said genially, waving a cigarette in a grand gesture, "were meant to be made out of clay tablets—or maybe papyrus scrolls."

  "Pass the bread," Elton announced ritualistically, "here comes the Baloney."

  Woody pulled out the empty chair and sat himself carefully on it, sighing out a puff of smoke as he settled down.

  "You know this is a no-smoking area," Elton said peevishly. "All indoor spaces on this ship are no-smoking."

  "Yeah, but what the hell. You girls won't fink on me, will you?"

  "They should have transplanted a human brain into your skull instead of just giving you a tummy tuck," Quigly chimed in.

  "And you're adorable too," croaked Woody in his husky voice, a big grin on his weatherbeaten face. But he stubbed the cigarette out in the crumb-littered plate that had once held Quigly's custard cream pie.

  He was a big man, and once had been handsome in a rawboned sort of way. But years of alcohol, cigarettes, sleeping in motels, and pounding his head against the ingrained obstinacy of wholesalers and jobbers had ravaged him. His face was seamed and scarred like the Grand Canyon, and scruffy with a day's growth of gray stubble. He wore a faded gray sweatshirt and patched jeans that hung loosely on his suddenly gangly frame.

  "What you should have done," Ashley Elton said more seriously, "was let them give you a facelift. You're still handsome, underneath all those wrinkles."

  Woody tilted his head back and guffawed. "Now, can you just picture me waltzing into Duluth Distributing's warehouse looking all prettied up! They'd throw me out on my ass!"

  Maryann Quigly refused to smile. She waited for Woody's whoops to die down, then said, "Don't you go telling anybody what we were saying about the Cyberbooks idea. Just because—"

  "Hey, I'm with you," Woody assured her. "I think this smart-aleck inventor is going to get us all thrown out of work. We gotta find a way to stop him."

  Quigly's porcine little eyes widened. "You mean it?"

  "It's him or us, that's the way I feel about it."

  "But Mrs. Bunker . . ." whispered Elton.

  "We gotta convince her that this Cyberbooks gadget is a mistake, a flop, a disaster. We gotta make her see that if she tries to market Cyberbooks it'll ruin the company."

  "But her mind's already made up," Elton countered, "the other way."

  "Then we've got to make her reverse her decision," said Quigly.

  "But how?"

  "That's the hard part," Woody admitted, his grin fading.

  *

  P. Curtis Hawks was standing at the sweeping windows of his spacious office, staring hard across the river toward Brooklyn.

  The goddamned Junker bastard wants to move us to Brooklyn! He shook his head for the ten-thousandth time. Brooklyn. It's the end of the world.

  He had to admit, however, that Gunther Axhelm's pruning was already showing results. The latest quarterly profit and loss statement on his desk was considerably better than it had been in years. The operation was actually in the black for the first time since the Reagan memoirs had swept the world with their candid charm and naively brutal insights.

  Sales were slipping, but that was to be expected when the sales force had been reduced from two hundred men and women to a single voice-activated computer and a fleet of roboticized trucks. They would pick up again, Hawks fervently prayed, once the wholesalers got accustomed to seeing robots instead of human beings. The big chain stores, where the really massive orders came from, had not even noticed the difference. Book orders went from their computers to Webb's computer as smoothly as snakes slithering on banana oil.

  Offsetting the downtrend in sales was the even larger downtrend in costs. The Old Man upstairs must be happy with the situation, Hawks told himself. He hasn't bothered me in weeks. Then he frowned. Or maybe he just doesn't want to see me anymore. Maybe Axhelm's axe is going to stab me in the back, too.

  The warehouse. The goddamned, mother-humping, sonofabitching warehouse. So far I've been able to keep Axhelm's beady little eyes off it. But how long can I hold out? How long can I keep him from finding out what a fiasco the damned warehouse is?

  His desk phone chimed.

  "Answer answer," he called out, thinking that the goddamned phones were just like most goddamned people, you had to tell them everything twice.

  "Sir," came the mechanical voice of his computer (where once there had been an achingly lovely red-haired lass), "Engineer Yakamoto is waiting to see you."

  Oh Christ, thought Hawks. Just what I need. Yakamoto. Something else has gone wrong at the warehouse.

  With a reluctant, shivering sigh, Hawks told the computer to let the Japanese warehouse manager enter his office.

  Hideki Yakamoto was pure Japanese. He had come over from Osaka as a field engineer to oversee the installation of the robotic equipment at the warehouse. When it became apparent that he was the only man on the continent of North America who could make the robots function the way they should, Hawks had insisted to his parent company, Rising Sun Electronics, that they allow him to remain at the warehouse as supervisor. Rising Sun, happy to have a spy inside the Tarantula organization, allowed itself to be reluctantly persuaded.

  Yakamoto, small, wiry, round-faced, clad in a Saville Row three-piece summerweight suit, bowed from the waist and inhaled through his teeth with a sharp hiss meant to express his unworthiness to breathe the same air as his illustrious superior. Hawks found himself bowing back. Not that he wanted to, his body just seemed to bow whenever the little Nip did it to him.

  Annoyed at himself, he snapped, "What's wrong, Yakamoto?"

  The Japanese engineer said blandly, "Nothing that cannot be put right by the wealth of knowredge that you possess. I am ashamed to bother you with what must be a small detail . . ."

  "Come to the point, dammit!" Hawks went to his desk and stood behind it. It made him feel safer.

  Yakamoto bowed again. "It is shameful for me to intrude on your extremery busy schedule . . ."

  "What is it?" Hawks fairly screamed.

  Yakamoto braced himself. Standing at rigid attention, he said, "The grue, sir."

  "The grue? What grue?"

  "The grue used to bind the pages of the books together, sir."

  "You mean glue! Well, what about it?"

  Yakamoto closed his eyes, as if standing before a firing squad. "It evaporates, sir."

  "What?"

  "The grue evaporates while the books are in their packing cases. When the cases are open, there is nothing in them but roose pages and covers."

  Hawks sank heavily into his padded chair. "Oh, my
sweet baby Jesus."

  Yakamoto said nothing, he just stood there with his fists clenched by his sides, eyes squeezed shut. He did not even seem to be breathing.

  "How many . . . cases . . ."

  Without opening his eyes, "This month's entire print run, sir. We began receiving compraints from stores and warehouses rast week. Whenever a case is opened—nothing but roose pages, fruttering rike butterflies in the summer breezes."

  "Spare me the goddamned poetry!" Hawks snapped.

  "I have taken the riberty of firing a comprete report in your personal computer system," Yakamoto said, "so that you have all the details avairable at your industrious fingertips. However, I felt it necessary for me to tell you of this catastrophe in person."

  Hawks grunted and reached out a reluctant hand to access the data. His screen soon showed the gory details. Millions of dollars' worth of books, reduced to millions of loose pages. Tens of millions of pages. Hundreds of millions . . .

  He groaned. We're ruined. Absolutely ruined.

  Yakamoto was making strange, gargling sounds. Hawks looked up. Is he trying to commit suicide, right here in my office?

  No, the man was merely trying to get Hawks's attention by repeatedly clearing his throat.

  "Don't tell me there's more," Hawks moaned.

  Yakamoto stood rigidly silent.

  "Well?"

  "You told me not to tell you," the Japanese engineer said pleadingly.

  "Tell me!" Hawks snapped. "Tell me all of it! Every goddamned ball-breaking detail. Give it to me, all of it. Then we can both jump out the frigging window!"

  Yakamoto bowed as if to say, You asked for it. "Apparentry, exalted sir, the grue used to bind the books decomposes into a psychederic gas. When the crates are opened, whoever is within ten feet becomes intoxicated—they have immediate and invoruntary 'head trips' that approximate the effects of taking a sizable dose of harrucinogen."

  Hawks felt his breakfast making its burning way up his digestive tract, toward his throat. Glue sniffing! With the effects of LSD!

  "And . . ." Yakamoto said as quietly as a dove gliding through tranquil air.

  "Still more?"

  Barely nodding, Yakamoto said, "Those who have been affected by the narcotic nature of the residual gas from the faired grue are initiating rawsuits against Webb Press. Several such riabirity suits have already been fired against the company."

  "Several? How many?"

  With a pained expression, Yakamoto replied, "Seven hundred thirty-four, as of this morning."

  Hawks slammed both palms down on his desk and hauled himself to his feet. "That's it! Hara-kiri! That's the only road left open to us, Yakamoto!" He strode toward the sliding glass partition that led to the terrace. "It's a fifty-story drop. That ought to do the job."

  Yakamoto did not stir from where he stood. "Most respected and brave sir, it is not my place to kill myself over this matter. I had nothing to do with putting this unfaithful grue on the books. It is not my responsibility."

  Hawks stopped with one hand on the handle of the sliding glass partition.

  "Wait a minute," he said. "You're right. I didn't order any new kind of glue for binding the books."

  Yakamoto said softly, "Still, it is your responsibility, sir."

  "Is it? We've been binding books by the zillions for years without this kind of trouble. Who the hell ordered different glue? I'll nail his balls to the wall!"

  Suddenly a happy thought penetrated Hawks's consciousness, and he broke into a slight grin. As eagerly as a teenaged boy reaching for a condom, he jumped back onto his desk chair and sent his fingers flying across the computer keyboard.

  "Yes!" he shouted triumphantly after several frenzied minutes. "Yes! Yes! Yes!"

  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. Th
e 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!"