Cyberbooks

by Ben Bova

  Bunker lumbered after her, staggering slightly as he tried to make his newly muscled body obey the commands of his publisher's brain.

  *

  Three decks above the New Amsterdam's waterline, Scarlet Dean was making up her mind—and her face. She stood before the mirror over the sink in her cabin's compact bathroom, wearing only a pink bra and panties, carefully applying as little mascara and lipstick as she dared. The tiny tucks of the plastic surgery had tightened up her face beautifully. And the biochemical toners made her skin glow like a young girl's.

  The mirror seemed to be swaying slightly, and she felt a bit of a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. Frowning, she tried to concentrate on getting the lipstick on straight. Can't use too much of it, she told herself; can't have its scent masking the pheromone spray.

  "Attention, all passengers," said a very male voice from the little speaker grille set into the ceiling. "We are approaching the edge of a small storm system. The sea will be slightly rougher than usual. Please take care walking, especially on the outside decks. Use the handrails, both inside and outside."

  Scarlet shot an annoyed glance at the loudspeaker. They could at least wait until I've finished putting on my lipstick!

  Satisfied with her work, she stepped through the hatch and opened the clothes closet next to her queen-sized bed. Her clothes swayed slightly on their hangers, like a chorus line in a speeding subway train. As she pondered over what to wear for dinner, she reviewed where her business matters stood.

  The negotiation with Murray Swift over Sheldon Stoker's latest horror was successfully concluded. The other editors and most of the sales force were up in arms over the Cyberbooks project. Mrs. Bunker was fretting, and P. T. Bunker was getting his body rebuilt.

  Now was the time to bring young Carl Lewis to heel. She had toyed with him for three months. Now she would reel him in and net him, and when she was finished with him she would mount his head on the wall of her trophy room.

  She smiled at the thought.

  She selected a slim sheath, bright red, of course, and dressed quickly, efficiently. The last thing she did before heading for the dining salon was to dig the tiny phial of pheromone spray out of her locked briefcase and slip it into her glittering red handbag.

  *

  Alba Blanca Bunker was also dressing for dinner. Her cabin was very spacious, of course, but it seemed terribly empty without P. T. to share it. She worried about him, alone without her, deep down in the lower decks that had been turned into a hospital. The doctors were using a new type of synthetic steroid mixture to speed his recuperation, but still it would take several days for him to recover from the body-rebuilding surgery.

  She studied herself in the full-length mirrors that flanked both sides of the king-sized bed. Here on the ship she need not be a slave to the weekly fashions of New York. She wore a nineteen thirties ball gown of pure white silk that flowed gracefully to the floor and billowed behind her when she danced. She loved it and felt very beautiful and secure in it.

  The plastic surgery had erased most of the worry lines in her face, but not in her heart. Ralph Malzone had warned her that the sales force would not like Cyberbooks. Now it looked as if they would openly revolt against the project. She sighed deeply at the prospect of having dinner with Ralph, Woody, and several other disgruntled sales people. But business is business, she told herself firmly. Squaring her bare slim shoulders, she picked up her handbag and went to the stateroom door.

  The wind caught at her lovely gown and nearly twirled her around as she stepped out of the cabin. Up here on the topmost deck of the ship she could see in the last rays of the setting sun that the seas were heaving, whitecapped waves arching upward from the deep dark blue. Thick clouds were building up, gloriously crimson and violet in the dying sunset. Alba secretly thrilled to it. The deck slanted and rose beneath her feet, then dropped away. Even up here she could taste the tang of salt spray in the wind. It was exciting!

  She made her way on delicate spike heels toward the ladderway that led down to the dining salon's deck. Gripping the handrails, she carefully went down the stairs and stepped through the hatch that opened onto the bar lounge. The ship had been designed so that it was impossible to enter the dining salon without passing through the lounge and bar first. Some of Malzone's salesmen never made it to dinner. Or lunch. The bar did not open before noon, or they might not have gotten any solid nourishment at all.

  Ralph was standing in a little knot of people that included Woody, Lori Tashkajian, and Carl Lewis. Alba knew she would have to detach Carl and Lori from the sales people, but she expected that neither of them would mind. They would obviously rather have dinner by themselves than with the sales department.

  As she started toward them, a worried-looking gray-haired man fairly dashed across the open space and intercepted her.

  "Mrs. Bunker, I'm Dr. Karloff. . . ."

  She recognized his immaculately groomed face, the carefully trimmed little gray mustache, the utterly expensive three-piece suit. He seemed unaccustomedly harried, not his usual smiling confident suave self.

  "I'm afraid there's been something of a problem. . . ."

  "Pandro!" she gasped. "What's happened to Pandro?"

  "The surgery went fine, no problems at all, everything went very well." Karloff was visibly upset; perspiration dotted his brow, he was almost babbling.

  "What happened?"

  "The recuperative chemotherapy. You recall that I specifically explained to you both that the synthetic steroids were new and relatively untried. . . ."

  "You assured us they were safe!" Alba felt cold terror clutching her.

  "They are! They are. But the dosage . . . we may have given your husband a higher dose than he actually—"

  Just then the double doors at the far side of the lounge were ripped off their hinges with a blood-chilling screech, and the naked lumbering figure of Pandro T. Bunker lurched into the area. Women screamed. Men ducked for cover. Dr. Karloff turned whiter than Alba's gown and fainted dead away.

  "Alba!" came a strangled cry from deep within P. T. Bunker. Arms outstretched, he staggered across the thickly carpeted lounge toward her.

  She stood frozen with shock, her eyes registering that Pandro seemed taller, stronger, more urgently virile than she had seen him in years. He was a naked Greek god, a young Tarzan, an Adonis with a hard-on.

  "Alba!" He lurched toward her.

  She ran to him. He scooped her up in his mighty arms and staggered off the way he had come, her virginal white gown trailing after them. Alba nestled her head against her husband's new bulging pectoralis major and let him carry her back to their private stateroom. He seemed rather clumsy, uncoordinated, but she was sure that he would learn to control his rebuilt body properly, given time. Tonight, self-control was the last thing she wanted from him.

  *

  Midnight once again.

  Everyone aboard seemed to be still in a state of shock over P. T.'s escapade at the start of the evening. In the main salon little foursomes and couples huddled over tiny cocktail tables, largely ignoring the dance music of the robot band, still talking about it.

  "You can see why he's the top man." Woody was leering drunkenly at three of his cohorts, two of them women.

  "It's a transplant," said the other man. "Must have been."

  One of the women shot back, "And all you got was a tummy tuck, Woody."

  Scarlet Dean had suffered through dinner with Maryann Quigly, Ted Gunn, and the boorish Jack Drain, just so she could keep Carl Lewis in her sight. Maryann had consumed food the way a horde of locusts does, then immediately waddled off to the afterdeck lounge to get ready for the late night snack. Ted had wisecracked that he could hear her body cast creaking from the pressure she was putting against it.

  All through dinner, while Maryann stuffed herself and Drain sneered at everything, Scarlet watched for an opportunity to intrude on Carl and Lori. They gazed at one another adoringly and hardly noticed the meal bei
ng served to them. Scarlet knew they were not sleeping together, yet they were behaving like a pair of love-smitten teenagers.

  Their romance has gone farther than I thought, she realized. The effects of too much salt air and moonlight. Well, I'll put an end to that tonight, she told herself, patting the handbag resting in her lap. One puff of the pheromone spray and he'll never look at another woman again.

  The spray had come from the research laboratories of Tarantula Enterprise's biogenetic division in Stuttgart. It was actually an outgrowth of their genetic warfare work, an attempt to create a weapon that would selectively incapacitate only the enemy's troops and no one else. Based on an artificial virus that affected certain nerve pathways into the brain, it had been designed to make its victims fall asleep as long as they could smell the subliminal odor of their military uniforms. The Stuttgart scientists fondly hoped that once used on the battlefield, the spray would be so effective that the enemy troops would only wake up after their captors had stripped them down to their skivvies.

  Alas, it never worked that well. The virus was too specific. In nature, it affected only one individual out of a hundred or more. And instead of putting a man to sleep, it imprinted unbearable sexual longing in the victim. Like a love potion of old, it made the victim fall hopelessly for whomever he or she first smelled after being hit by the spray. The scandal among the volunteer units of the Swabian Rifles led to a dozen resignations, three suicides, and five homosexual marriages.

  Scarlet was going to spray Carl and make certain that the first person he smelled was herself. And after that, she knew, she would be the only person he would sniff after.

  But she had to be very careful to get Carl away from Lori—and everyone else—before she spritzed him.

  During dinner, Ralph Malzone had presided over a rowdy table of sales people. Afterward, looking thoroughly wrung out, he had stopped by Lori and Carl's table and the three of them had gone together into the main lounge.

  It had been easy enough for Scarlet to insinuate herself into the threesome, and for the past several hours the four of them had been drinking, talking, and dancing. The robot dance band was built and costumed to look like a vague amalgamation of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and other popular groups of the sixties and seventies. This cruise ship usually catered to retirees who were fixated on the music of their teen years.

  Scarlet kept her drinks long and soft, and noticed that Lori did the same. Good old Ralph never drank anything but beer; he seemed to have an infinite capacity for it, although he excused himself every hour or so: "Time to recycle the beer," he would invariably say.

  Carl, the innocent one, drank a steady stream of cuba libres. Rum and Coke. He downed them as if there was no rum in them at all, and Scarlet began to suspect that somebody—maybe Lori—had made a deal with the waiter to make his drinks innocuous. While he and Lori were dancing she had stolen a sip. No, the rum was there all right. Young Mr. Edison has a wooden leg, apparently.

  Try as she might, though, she could not get Carl off by himself. The handsome young engineer danced with her several times, slipping and tripping as the dance floor sloshed back and forth in the storm-tossed sea. But Lori was either on the floor beside them, dancing with Ralph, or sitting at their ringside table watching Carl. And he was always looking around for her.

  Maddening.

  Scarlet danced with Ralph, too, from time to time. The wiry guy was athletically light on his feet, a good dancer despite the worried, preoccupied look on his lank face.

  "The sales force giving you hell?" Scarlet asked him as they worked their way uphill on the tilting dance floor.

  "Yeah," he said, making it a long flat exasperated syllable. "Worse than I thought it could be."

  "Maybe they should drop the Cyberbook project."

  Malzone shook his head. "P. T. never gives up on anything. You know that. And—dammit! It's a good idea. I think it could work if we'd give it half a chance."

  The dance floor shuddered and then started slanting downhill. Ralph held Scarlet firmly in his surprisingly strong arms and guided her past the other dancing couples. The band was playing "Hey Jude" on its synthesized instruments. Carl and Lori were sitting at the table alongside the dance floor, gazing raptly at each other over a forest of tall glasses and empty bottles. Scarlet felt the anger of frustration heating her.

  The song ended just as the dance floor gave another lurch. The couple next to Scarlet and Ralph staggered slightly into them. The woman's heel caught in the hem of her floor-length dress and she clutched at Scarlet for support. Scarlet's slim little handbag slid off her shoulder and hit the floor with a thunk as the woman—one of Ralph's sales people—straightened up and murmured an apology.

  The couple scurried back to their table as Ralph bent down to pick up Scarlet's purse. She dropped to one knee beside him, anxious to scoop up the things that had spilled out of the bag and into the polished wood of the dance floor.

  Ralph helped her. "Hey, what's this?" he asked, picking up the pheromone spray.

  "Ah . . . perfume," Scarlet improvised, making a grab for it. Her hand clutched for the phial just a touch too hard, and a microscopic mist sprayed from it with an almost inaudible hiss.

  Malzone blinked as the spray hit his face. "Doesn't smell at all," he muttered, handing the phial back to Scarlet.

  Scarlet felt the spray tingle on her face, too. She looked deeply into Ralph Malzone's eyes and knew beyond the trace of any doubt that this was the one man in the world that she absolutely lad to have for her very own.

  "Ralph," she said, her voice shuddering with the urgency of t all. "Would—would you please take me back to my cabin?"

  Nodding absently, as though something had just happened that vas beyond his understanding, Ralph straightened up, took Scarlet by the hand, and walked with her right past Lori and Carl without saying a word.

  FISHING BOAT EXPLODES,

  FOUR FEARED KILLED

  Brigantine, N.J. A forty-five-foot fishing boat, Calamara, was blown to bits last night in a mysterious explosion a few miles off the south Jersey coast, according to a Coast Guard spokesman.

  Four men aboard the vessel are missing and feared dead.

  "It was like she was hit by a missile,"" said Lt. (j.g.) Donald Winslow.

  Coast Guard radar, on a routine drug surveillance sweep, picked up the Calamara while it was heading out to sea. "One instant it was there, the next it was gone," said Lt. Winslow. A Coast Guard helicopter sent to investigate found only floating debris and an oil slick.

  "The sea was getting rough, but not dangerously so. There were no other ships within fifty miles of Calamara except a cruise liner, the SS New Amsterdam," Lt. Winslow stated.

  The missing men are Marco DeAngelo, Guido DeAngelo, and Vincenzio DeAngelo, all of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Salvatore Baccala, of Brigantine, N.J., owner of the boat.

  THEFT OF CRUISE MISSILE REPORTED

  Staten Island, N.Y. An unnamed Navy official reluctantly admitted that a fully armed cruise missile was stolen from the Staten Island weapons depot three nights ago. She stressed, however, that the missile was armed with a conventional warhead, not a nuclear weapon.

  Defense Department and F.B.I. antiterrorist teams are investigating the incident, which may be linked to the mysterious explosion of a New Jersey fishing boat last night.

  The Navy spokesperson, who insisted on anonymity, claimed that all cruise missiles in storage are equipped with automatic self-destruct systems, as a protection against terrorist seizure. "If the people who stole the missile tried to launch it, it would blow up in their faces," she averred.

  WHITE HOUSE BLAMED

  FOR MISSILE THEFT

  AND BOAT EXPLOSION

  Washington, D.C. Sen. Mario Pazzo (D., N.J.) accused the White House today of "culpable guilt" in the explosion last night of a New Jersey fishing boat in which four men were apparently killed.

  "The President should realize that all the Navy's cruise missiles are booby-trapped, and thus
a danger to those who operate them," said Sen. Pazzo. "And if he doesn't know that, then he isn't doing the job he was elected to do."

  Reminded that the only way the four men in question could have obtained a cruise missile was to steal it from the Navy weapons depot in Staten Island, Sen. Pazzo insisted, "The issue here is not crime. It's the safety of human lives."

  A Pentagon spokesman, when confronted with the Senator's statement, expressed surprise. "Hell, there's red lettering eight inches high that says 'DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LAUNCH UNTIL SELF-DESTRUCT SYSTEM IS DEACTIVATED.' Maybe the guys who stole the missile couldn't read."

  F.B.I. officials theorize that the missile was stolen as part of the gang wars over narcotics smuggling.

  "If they're escalating to cruise missiles," said the F.B.I. agent in charge of the investigation, "then we're going to have ask Congress for antimissile weaponry to protect the lives of innocent citizens and the Bureau's agents."

  EIGHTEEN

  Ralph Malzone struggled up from sleep like a man clawing his way out of an immense, cloying, suffocating ball of cotton candy. He was still half dreaming of childhood guilts and terrors while the rational side of his brain was telling him to open his eyes and wake up.

  It was not easy. He was physically exhausted and emotionally spent. But with a supreme effort of will he unglued his gummy eyes and focused blearily on the ceiling panels of off-white acoustical tile.

  For long minutes he lay unmoving, almost afraid to look about him. Usually he sprang out of bed full of vigor, ready to start the new day. But he was not home in his bare little studio apartment now, he was aboard the cruise ship.

  His heart skipped a beat. He was not in his own cabin, either.

  With a mixture of dread and joy he slowly turned his head. Scarlet Dean lay sound asleep beside him, a sweet smile of bliss curving her red lips.