Cyberbooks

by Ben Bova

  It's true! Ralph gasped to himself. It wasn't a dream. It really happened.

  He stared at Scarlet, half-covered by a twisted bedsheet, her blazing red hair flowing across the pillow like molten lava.

  It really happened, Ralph repeated to himself, so incredulous that he still could only half believe what he saw and remembered. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to picture Lori's face. She was the one he truly loved. He had betrayed her. Even though she had no inkling of his unswerving love for her, he had betrayed her. Guilt. Sin. How many Hail Marys would he have to say for this?

  But Lori's face would not come into focus for him. He saw her vaguely, but then her features melted and changed into the beautiful, willing, giving face of Scarlet Dean. Ralph popped his eyes open. Yes, it was her. She was really there. This was her cabin, and they had spent the night doing things that Ralph had only fantasized about.

  He studied Scarlet's face. Until last night he had thought her to be unfeeling, calculating, a hard-hearted bitch whose only interest was her career. A flame-haired ice princess. Eyes as cold and shrewd as a snake's.

  Now he wanted her to open those eyes, so that he could gaze into them while she gazed into his.

  Then a horrifying thought caught him. She was drunk. It was all a mistake. Or—worse still—she's trying to use me.

  For what? Why would she do that? Ralph sat up and tried to shake the cobwebs from his head. He turned back and stared at the sleeping woman. I love you, Red, he admitted silently. I love you.

  As quietly as he could, Ralph got out of the bed and started searching for his clothes. They had been thrown all over the cabin, as if they had exploded off his body.

  Scarlet Dean opened her eyes and saw the sinewy form of the man she loved. Without moving she watched him gathering up his clothes. She smiled inwardly at the bite marks on his naked chest and felt a glow deep inside her that she had never known before.

  Far, far off in a remote region of her brain a voice—her own—was warning her that this man was nothing more to her than a chemical dependency. Scarlet heard the voice and understood what it was saying. She remembered the pheromone spray and the accident on the dance floor.

  So what? she asked herself. This is what I've wanted all my life: a man who loves me and whom I can love, completely, endlessly, forever. The rest of life is meaningless. This wiry redheaded guy is my life.

  He had found almost all his clothes and was holding them in a rumpled, tangled mess in one hand as he tiptoed toward the bathroom. There was a puzzled, little-boy expression on his face. He had found only one of his shoes, she realized.

  "It's under the bed, I think," Scarlet said in a lazy, happy, sultry voice.

  "Oh!" He seemed startled. But then he grinned at her. "Good morning."

  "Good evening," she countered.

  "I . . . uh . . ."

  But Scarlet merely stretched her bare arms out to him and he dropped his clothes in a heap and came back to bed with her.

  *

  Lori and Carl, who had spent a chaste and miserable night in their separate cabins, as usual, met for breakfast. As usual, he ordered bacon and eggs, she asked for yogurt and honey.

  The dining salon was almost full and buzzing with three stories: P. T.'s dramatic entrance in the bar lounge last evening, Scarlet Dean and Ralph Malzone scurrying away arm in arm at the end of the evening, and the spectacular fireworks display off on the horizon around two in the morning.

  "Woody says it looked like something exploding," Lori said to Carl as she dipped a spoon into the honey-covered yogurt.

  He shrugged. "Somebody getting an early start on the Fourth of July, I guess."

  Looking around the tables of the crowded salon, Lori said, "I don't see Ralph or Scarlet."

  "Maybe they jumped ship."

  With a smirk, Lori said, "They way they hurried off last night, I think they jumped each other."

  Carl felt his face redden.

  She smiled at him and patted his hand, which raised his temperature even more. "Ralph is supposed to be at the sales conference this morning . . . I wonder if he's going to make it on time."

  "I don't see Mrs. Bee, either," said Carl.

  "She usually has breakfast in her stateroom. She'll be at the conference. She never misses a sales meeting."

  But when ten o'clock came, neither Mrs. Bunker, Ralph Malzone, nor Scarlet Dean was present. No one knew quite what to do, except that they all knew better than to ring their respective cabins. So the meeting was postponed until two in the afternoon.

  Carl went off happily to his workshop, where he spent the morning in conference with the factory in Mexico where the Cyberbook units were being manufactured. Lori took a thick manuscript up to the top deck, ensconced herself on a lounge chair, and spent the morning doing what she was not allowed to do in the office: reading.

  Woody Balogna also made use of the "free" morning. He called all the sales representatives together for an informal meeting in the forecastle lounge. Subject: mutiny.

  The forecastle lounge was the smallest of the several lounges aboard the New Amsterdam. It was decorated in a "nautical" motif: ropes and nets looped around the portholes, fake buoys hanging from the ceiling low enough for the taller sales people to bump their heads. The lounge was furnished with a few small sofas and deep plush chairs, all in bilious shades of blue-green, plus a built-in bar and a spinet piano—both closed at this time of the morning.

  Because it was up forward in the ship, the lounge rose and sank with each bite of the New Amsterdam's bow into the sea's swelling waves. It felt to the assembled sales folk who crowded into the rather small compartment as if they were jammed in an elevator that could not make up its mind; it rose a few floors, then sank a few floors. The motion, the press of bodies in the overcrowded cabin, and the fact that somehow the air-conditioning was not working, quickly turned several of the sales people a sickly shade of green.

  Including Woody Balogna. But despite the queasiness of his stomach, he called the meeting to order.

  "Okay, quiet down," he said, trying to keep his eyes off the portholes that showed the horizon rising and falling, rising and falling.

  "I don't feel so good," said one of the women sales reps.

  "You're gonna feel a lot worse if we let the Bunkers put this Cyberbooks deal through," Woody snapped.

  "So what do we do?"

  "Yeah. What can we do—go on strike?"

  "Something better than that," said Woody, struggling manfully to hold down his breakfast.

  "Such as?"

  "What does any red-blooded American do when somebody's tryin' to screw him?"

  "Hire a hit man."

  "Wait for them to fire you so you can collect your severance pay and pension."

  "Relax and enjoy it."

  His face growing greener by the millisecond, Woody waved down their asinine cracks. "Nah, you dummies. We sue the bastards."

  "Sue?"

  "Who?"

  "Bunker Books, that's who."

  "The Boss?"

  "The company?"

  "Mr. Bunker?"

  "That's right," Woody snarled. "They wanna put in this Cyberbooks thing, right? Get rid of all the distributors, wholesalers, jobbers—all our customers, right? Next thing you know they'll get rid of the bookstores, too. And you know what they'll get rid of after that?"

  "What?"

  "Us, that's what!"

  "But Mrs. Bee said—"

  "I don't give a damn what she said! Once they got these friggin' automatic books coming out, they won't need us. Out we'll go, out into the cold on our bare asses."

  "She wouldn't do that!"

  "The hell she wouldn't. And even if she wouldn't, P. T. would. So we sue the bastards."

  "About what?"

  "About Cyberbooks, of course."

  "But how can . . ."

  "It can't be done—can it?"

  "What do we sue them for?"

  Woody could feel the burning remains of breakfast se
aring up his throat. Still, he managed to say, "Don't worry about that. We can always find some lawyer who'll find some reason for suing."

  The sales staff stared at one another, stunned.

  "Well?" Woody demanded. "Anybody got a better idea?"

  Total silence.

  "Then we sue!"

  For a moment nobody moved. Then suddenly, like a startled pack of lemmings, they broke for the double doors of the lounge and raced for the ship's railing. Woody stood alone in the empty lounge, satisfied that he had done the right thing. Then he threw up on the bilious blue-green carpeting.

  *

  P. Curtis Hawks sat alone in his grandiose office. It had been stripped bare. The electronics console, the conference table, the pool table, even his desk and beautiful leather swivel chair had been removed, sent on their way to (ugh!) Brooklyn. The teak paneling had been torn from the walls. The lighting fixtures had been taken from the ceiling. The carpeting from the floors. There was nothing in this room that he had once loved so dearly except a single cardboard carton, big enough to hold exactly two dozen Webb Press books.

  Hawks stood at the window, breathing his final silent farewell to the grand view that once had been his. Now all he had to look forward to was a tiny slit of a window that looked out on a trash-to-energy powerplant. The plastic pacifier in his teeth tasted sour, bitter.

  He heard the door behind him open, stealthily, as if a burglar or assassin was trying to slip in unnoticed.

  "Come right in, Gunther," he called without turning from his magnificent view. He knew it was Axhelm, worse than any burglar or assassin.

  "The movers have finished, except for this single packing case here on the floor," said the Axe in his usual precise, icy tones.

  Hawks turned toward him, and made his lips smile. Axhelm was wearing his customary dark turtleneck and slacks, but this time he had a Luftwaffe-blue sports coat over them.

  "That package isn't going to Brooklyn. It's a present, from me to you."

  "A . . . present?" For the first time since Hawks had met the sonofabitch, Axhelm seemed surprised, unsure of himself.

  "A going-away present, you might say." Hawks stepped toward the innocent-looking cardboard box, resting all alone on the vast empty expanse of the bare plywood flooring.

  "This is unexpected."

  It was laughable, watching the stiff-backed Axhelm trying to figure out how he should behave in the face of a personal gift. Hawks could see a shadow of suspicion in those cold gray Nordic eyes. He's wondering if I'm trying to bribe him, Hawks realized, but he knows there's nothing left for me to bribe him about. He's ruined my life and wrecked my office. His work here is finished. The company will be out of business in another six months; he's seen to that.

  Just before they took away his computer (and the desk on which it rested), Hawks had run a check on Webb's sales projections. They were down. Shockingly down. Almost to zero. In his zeal to cut costs, Axhelm had decreed that the company stop buying new books and sell only the books it had already published. Like Scribley's and many another publishing house that depended too much on its backlist, Webb Press was on a steep, terminal dive into bankruptcy.

  "Open it up," Hawks said as genially as he could manage.

  Still somewhat suspicious, Axhelm muttered, "It looks like a carton of our books."

  "Very perceptive of you," said Hawks smoothly. "That's exactly what it looks like."

  For an awkward moment neither man moved. Then Axhelm slowly bent to one knee and pulled from his back pocket a Swiss army knife. I might have known he'd have one on him, thought Hawks. The model with all the attachments, even the AM/FM radio and earplug.

  Deftly Axhelm sliced the tape holding down the carton's lid. He pulled it open and stared into his "present."

  Frowning, he dug into the carton and came up with a handful of loose book pages.

  "I don't understand. . . ."

  Standing well away from the carton and quickly whipping a triply guaranteed Japanese filter over his face, Hawks replied with a vengeful chortle of glee.

  Axhelm looked up at Hawks, his face a portrait of puzzlement. He started to say something, but suddenly his jaw went slack. His entire body sagged, as if every muscle in him had gone limp.

  From behind his filter, Hawks crowed, "The goddamned glue you made us buy, you cheap asshole! It turns into a psychedelic gas! Take a deep breath, shithead! A deep breath!"

  Axhelm was indeed breathing deeply, a blissful relaxed smile on his normally cold face. He plunged both hands into the carton and pulled a double handful of loose pages to his face, inhaling them as if they were the most fragrant flowers in the world.

  Leaping to his feet, he flung the pages toward the ceiling.

  "At last!" he shrieked. "At last I'm free! Free!"

  Hawks watched with beady eyes as the Axe capered across the bare office, dancing like a Bavarian peasant at a maypole.

  "I can sing! I can dance!" the erstwhile management consultant shouted. "All my life I have wanted to be like the immortal Gene Kelly! I'm si-i-ingin' in the rain . . ."

  Axhelm was still gibbering and dancing (with a total lack of grace) when Weldon W. Weldon wheeled his power chair into what was left of Hawks's office. Hawks had, of course, arranged for the Old Man to come to his office at precisely this moment. The timing was perfect.

  Crunching down viciously on his pacifier, Hawks took the filter from his face and let the astounded CEO of Tarantula watch his vaunted management consultant stumble and lurch up and down the bare office floor boards. The look on the Old Man's face was priceless.

  Christ, said Hawks to himself, as happy as the first time he had shot a rabbit, if looks could kill the ax would be stone cold dead.

  AUTUMN,

  BOOK III

  THE BUYER

  The first snow of November was gently sifting past the window of Dee Dee Lowe's office as she held court. It was a gray day in Des Moines, but the chief buyer for Cleaveland Book Stores was dressed in bright oranges and flaming reds. There were even brilliant yellow ribbons in her thick gray hair. Her face was tanned and taut; she looked as if she had just returned from a trip to the Bahamas. Actually, she seldom left her office and had not been on vacation since the entire Cleaveland chain was taken over by Tarantula Enterprises, many years earlier. Her good looks were a combination of cosmetic surgery, makeup, and the tanning parlor in the shopping mall across the road from Cleaveland's offices.

  Before her desk, four dozen sales people were seated in neat rows of folding chairs. This was Dee Dee's monthly meeting, where she deigned to allow the sales people into her office and let them show her their companies' wares for the month.

  Each sales person, male or female, had a laptop computer open on his or her knees. Each computer was plugged into a complex electronics console that squatted on the floor next to Dee Dee's desk like a square fireplug. The tangle of wires among the folding chairs was so fierce that Dee Dee had put a printed sign on her desk:

  CLEAVELAND BOOK STORES INC. IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR INJURIES TO VISITING SALES PERSONNEL DUE TO ACCIDENTS OR OTHER NATURAL OR MAN-MADE CAUSES.

  Not a word was being spoken. Each sales person was busily tapping on his or her keyboard, relaying glowing information about his or her latest batch of books into the central Cleaveland Stores computer.

  In the old days the salesmen—they had all been men when Dee Dee had started in this job—the salesmen would personally show her the information on each and every individual title they were trying to sell. They would show her a color proof of the cover, statistics about the author's previous books, monumental lies about how much money and effort the publisher was going to put into advertising and promotion for this individual title, tremendous whoppers about how wonderful this title was and how it was going to hit the top of the best-seller lists the instant it was released.

  "But they can't all be best-sellers," Dee Dee would respond, smiling slyly.

  The salesmen knew that only one out of a thousand
of their titles would be successful. And they knew that if Dee Dee bought a hundred thousand copies or so for the vast chain of Cleaveland Stores, that particular title would be among the precious few. So they wined her and dined her and, when she felt like it, bedded her. Four times salesmen even wedded her. None of them took, although she now wore an impressive array of diamonds on her clawlike fingers.

  But those were the good old days, Dee Dee thought with a sigh. Now it's all done by computers. We don't even need to have the sales people come to my office at all, she realized. They could pump their information into my computer system from their own offices, or even from New York.

  But if they did it that way, she would not get to see any of the sales people, ever. And she clung to these monthly meetings because, after the computers had completed their intercourse, the sales folk—being sales people—hung around complimenting Dee Dee on her good looks, her great taste in clothes, her incredible business acumen, her deep love for literature.

  Actually, Dee Dee had not read a book since she had graduated college, so many years ago that she dreaded even thinking about it.

  Every month the sales people seemed to get younger, she said to herself sadly. None of them ever makes a pass at me anymore—except for old lechers like Woody Baloney, and even his leering suggestions were strictly routine these days. I wonder if he can still get it up? A couple of the saleswomen had hinted at availability, but Dee Dee felt she was too old to experiment.

  She sighed as she looked out at the office full of bowed heads. All those eager young kids bent over their laptop computers instead of kissing my ass. No, the business isn't what it used to be.

  Deep down in the basement of the Cleaveland Stores building, behind electronically locked steel fireproof doors, sat a single Nisei woman in front of a bank of four dozen display screens. The screens cast an eerie flickering light across the young woman's blankly impassive face. They curved around her single swivel chair like the compound eye of some giant insect examining her. But in truth, she was examining them. Each screen flickered for a bare three seconds with the cover proof and other data on each of the titles the sales people were pumping into the central Cleaveland computer. Then the next title came on. This one lonely woman's task was to select which titles Cleaveland would actually buy.