It was a blazing hot July day, the kind of molten heat and humidity that drives even the mildest man to thoughts of murder. An Ed McBain day in the city, where the detectives of the eighty-seventh precinct knew that each ring of the phone meant another body had met a meat cleaver.
The Writer had found a job. Not in the city. He could no more afford to live in Manhattan than he could fly to the moon by flapping his arms. His job, and his miserable one-room apartment, were in New Jersey. He could see Manhattan's skyline every day; see the myriad gleaming lights of the city each night. But he was separated from it by a river of poverty whose current was too strong for him to cross.
He worked in the warehouse of Webb Press, one of the dispensable men who were not supposed to be there, but who were needed because the automated machinery could not do what it had been designed to do, and ordinary expendable human beings were required to carry out the work of the imperfect machines.
Twice in the past month he had almost been killed by heavy cases of books falling from the wobbly overhead conveyor belts. Six times he and his fellow nonentities had spent whole work shifts searching the entire warehouse for cartons of books that had been misplaced by the robots. On one frightening occasion the entire workforce had to battle a robot that resisted having a truckload of books taken out to the loading dock. Somehow the robot got it into its minuscule electronic brain that its job was to protect the huge crates from being moved. While the Japanese-American foreman screamed in two languages, the men risked injury and death to duck beneath the robot's menacing arms, pry off its access panel, and turn it off.
Now the Writer worked at the most thankless job of them all: the furnace. Another stroke of some architect's genius, the furnace burned the books that were returned from the stores unsold. In the brilliant design of the automated warehouse, the furnace supplied heat for the winter months and electricity all year long. During the summer the electricity not only powered the lights and computers, it ran the air-conditioning system.
But the heat of the burning books overburdened the air-conditioning system, so the computer program that ran the warehouse's environmental controls shut down the air-conditioning and there was no way to override its dogmatic decision. The supervisors up in their control booth sneaked in a few room-sized air conditioners for themselves. The men and machines on the warehouse floor worked in summer's heat—supplemented by the flames of the book-burning furnace.
The Writer knew that he was going mad. He spent his days shovelling paperback books into the furnace's hungry red fire. He worked stripped down to his shorts, sweat streaming along his scrawny ribs and lanky arms and legs, blurring his vision. The heat made him feel dizzy, crazy. Like O'Neill's Hairy Ape, he began to shout aloud, "Who makes the warehouse work? I do! Who makes the publishing industry work? I do!"
The other men on the warehouse floor started to avoid him.
But the Writer never noticed, never cared. He knew that he was right. If these books were not destroyed there would be no room for the new books coming off the presses. The whole industry would grind to a halt, strangled to death on a glut of books. So he shovelled the paperbacks into the flames: romance novels, westerns, mysteries, cookbooks, diet books, revealing biographies, lying autobiographies, books about God, about sin, about how to get rich in just ninety days. He scooped them all up in his heavy black shovel and threw them into the baleful blood-red fiery furnace.
These were the bad books, the books that did not sell, the books that had been returned to the warehouse by the stores and the distributors. Some of the books had been on store shelves for all of a week, some less. Some had never gotten to the shelves; their cartons came back to the warehouse unopened.
The Writer giggled as he worked. He cackled. These were other writers' books! If only he could burn enough of them, he told himself, there might one day be room in the world for his own book to be published. He scooped and threw, scooped and threw, making room for his own book and cackling madly all the while.
"Bad books! Bad books!"
Meanwhile, at the far end of the warehouse one of the robots trundled a newly opened carton of books to the inspection station next to the loading dock.
"Malfunction," it said in its limited vocabulary. "Malfunction."
The human inspector looked inside the box and turned pale.
Carl Lewis's life was being dominated by three strong women, and he was not certain that he disliked it.
Since that brief, weird moment nearly three months earlier when he had met P.T. Bunker and the great man had okayed the project—and named it—Carl had become a full-time consultant to Bunker Books. That is, he worked for the company exclusively but was not entitled to any of the fringe benefits or government-ordained insurance that a regular employee received.
That did not matter to Carl one whit. He was being paid handsomely enough to afford a three-room apartment for himself, in the same Gramercy Park building that Lori lived in. He worked all day every day of the week and most of every night. His social life consisted of an occasional lunch with Lori, or a dinner with Scarlet Dean, who insisted on being kept up-to-date on the Cyberbooks project.
Cyberbooks.
Carl liked the name that Bunker had come up with; he did not realize that it was Ralph Malzone's original idea. Nor did it occur to him that the name was now formally registered as a trademark belonging to Bunker Books, Inc. Carl just plugged away at the task of turning his prototype into a device that could be manufactured as inexpensively as possible, while still maintaining quality and reliability. His goal was to have the device on sale nationwide for the Christmas buying season, priced at less than $200.
It was at one of the dinners Scarlet Dean insisted on that he first heard about the cruise.
"Cruise?" Carl almost sputtered out the salad he had been chewing. "Why do I have to go on a cruise?"
They were in the Argenteuil, one of the oldest and finest restaurants of Manhattan. Although it seemed to be Scarlet's favorite place, the restaurant always made Carl feel uneasy. An expense account restaurant, like so many in midtown Manhattan. Too formal and grand for his simple tastes. The maître d' always made Carl feel as if he were a shabby hobo who had drifted into the restaurant by mistake, even when he wore the new suit that Scarlet had sent him and his formal shirt with the blue MIT tie painted on it.
Daintily spearing an ear of asparagus, Scarlet replied, "It's the company sales meeting. We've rented out the ocean liner for the week."
"A week? I can't take a week off . . . ."
Scarlet smiled soothingly and touched his hand with her own. "Relax, Carl. Relax. You won't have to take the time off your work. I know how important it is. It's vital! We'll fix you up with a workshop and a satellite communications link to the office here in New York."
Somewhat relieved, he muttered, "I've also got to be able to work with the guys in the factory."
"That too," Scarlet assured him. "Interactive picture, voice and data links. Don't worry about it."
But he replied, "I still don't see why I have to go. Why can't I stay here?"
"Two reasons: First, Mrs. Bunker will be on the cruise, and she doesn't want you to be out of her sight."
"Really?"
"Really. Second, the whole sales force will be aboard. We'll need you to demonstrate the Cyberbooks hardware to them. And it will be good for you to meet them all informally, talk with them, get them pumped up about Cyberbooks."
"Hmm. I suppose so," he admitted grudgingly.
"And besides," said Scarlet, "think how much fun it will be to be out on the ocean for a whole week. It's very romantic, you know."
He nodded absently. "Will Lori be there, too?"
Her smile fading just a little, Scarlet said, "Yes, of course. The whole editorial staff will be aboard."
Sitting at the bottom of his swimming pool, P. Curtis Hawks made two telephone calls that night. Although he was certain that all the phones in his expansive Westchester home had been bugged by the Old Man's minions, he had obtained a surplus U.S. Navy underwater communications system from a Washington friend in the munitions business. In his fishbowl helmet and wet suit, breathing canned air that smelled faintly of machine oil and carcinogenic plastic, Hawks knew that the ultralow frequency of this communications equipment was beyond the range of the Old Man's tapping.
His first call was to Scarlet Dean, at a prearranged time and place: the ladies' room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel lobby, at precisely ten minutes before midnight. A little square area of his glass helmet glowed with strangely shifting colors, then her face came into focus two inches in front of his nose.
"Good evening, Ms. Dean."
She frowned slightly. "Your voice sounds strange. Like you're in an echo chamber or something. Are those bubbles coming out of your ear?"
"Never mind that," Hawks snapped. "What's going on over there?"
"The entire sales and editorial staffs will be on the cruise. And I've talked Mrs. Bunker into bringing young Tom Edison along, too."
"Tom Edison? Who in hell is—"
"The Cyberbooks inventor, Carl Lewis."
"Oh."
"They'll all be on the ship together. There's talk that P.T. Bunker will be coming along, too, but so far that's just unconfirmed rumor."
"Christ. If I had a submarine or a cruise missile I could wipe out the whole company."
"Not before I get the complete data for the Cyberbooks machine," Scarlet said.
Hawks nodded inside his helmet. "Yes. Right." Then a brilliant thought occurred to him. "You could sink the ship and get away in a lifeboat with the device!"
She seemed startled for a moment, but she quickly composed herself. "Mr. Hawks, I'm an editor first, and a spy for you second. I am not an underwater demolitions expert."
"Yes, of course, I understand," he mumbled, his mind filled with visions of the Titanic slipping beneath the ice-choked waves. He saw Bunker and his whole staff huddled on the slanting deck while the orchestra played "Nearer My God to Thee." Refuse to sell out to us, will you? Then down you go, Bunker, you and all your flunkies, down to a watery grave.
"Mr. Hawks?" Scarlet Dean's insistent voice broke into his fantasy.
"Eh? What?"
"You were—cackling, sir."
"Nonsense!" he snapped. "Must be something wrong with this phone link."
She said nothing.
"Get me the data on that Cyberbooks machine as quickly as you can. I don't care if you're in the middle of the ocean, as soon as you have the machine in your hands or a copy of its circuitry, send it to me over the special Tarantula communications satellite."
"Yes, sir," she replied. "Of course."
"Don't call me otherwise. I'll call you each night at this time."
Scarlet nodded and cut their link. The tiny picture of her face winked out, leaving Hawks nothing to see but the blue-green haze of his swimming pool, lit by its underwater lights. He sat at the bottom of the pool for several minutes, the only sound coming from the frothy bubbles of his breathing apparatus.
As soon as she transmits the data on the Cyberbooks device, I could sink the damned ship and be rid of Bunker altogether. And all the evidence. Then I could present the Cyberbooks concept as my own to the board of directors. If the Old Man is still around, that by itself should be enough to remove him and put me at the top of the heap.
He resolved to find a reliable terrorist group that had access to speedboats and anti-shipping missiles. Maybe some of the Atlantic City boys, he mused. Didn't they sink a gambling ship that refused to pay them protection, a few years back?
At precisely ten minutes after midnight Hawks made his second phone call. The miniature image of Vinnie DeAngelo's beefy face screwed up in amazement.
"Gee, you look funny, Mr. Hawks. Like your nose is too close to th' camera, you know?"
"Never mind that. How are you coming along on the special project?"
The Beast's eyes evaded Hawks's. "Like I told you, this is a tough one. I been dopin' it out, but it don't look no easier than when I started. He's got snakes, for Chrissakes. Poison snakes."
"He doesn't stay in his office all the time. He goes home to his apartment."
"Yeah, but he takes th' snakes with him. His chauffeur got bit a couple days ago. Damn near killed him."
Exasperated, Hawks snapped, "Then find a mongoose!"
"Huh? A what?"
"Never mind. Keep working at it. There's got to be a weak link in the Old Man's defenses. He's a senile cripple, for god's sake. There's got to be a way to get to him."
"Not while all those snakes are sneakin' around." The Beast shuddered.
Hawks fumed silently. "Stay with it. And, by the way, Vinnie, who was that outfit that sank the gambling boat off Atlantic City a few years ago?"
"Oh, you mean my cousin Guido."
Alba Blanca Bunker allowed the chauffeur to help her out of the long white limousine and stepped onto the concrete surface of the massive dock. It was a gray, mean, John O'Hara kind of day in New York, threatening rain. But there alongside the shabby, deteriorating two-story passenger terminal rose the magnificently sweeping lines of the SS New Amsterdam, the cruise liner that would carry them off on a week-long jaunt on the sunny ocean. She took a deep breath of tangy salt air. Actually, the tang in the air was from a garbage barge being hauled down the Hudson River by a chuffing tugboat.
Alba felt thrilled anyway. For more than a year she had been working on the dozens of different strings that led to this moment. Now everything seemed to be in place. The Cyberbooks project had reached the point where they could brief the sales force. The medical specialists had agreed to come along on the cruise on a contingency fee basis. And P.T. himself would arrive soon.
In fact, there he was! Alba saw the blue-and-white helicopter loaned for the occasion by the American Express office droning purposefully against the gray sky up the river toward the pier. She knew that P.T. did not like to fly, did not like to leave the womblike safety of his office and bedroom, but she hoped that the panoramic view of lower Manhattan and the harbor would inspire him and be the first step toward reinvigorating her husband, the man she loved.
He needs this ocean voyage, she told herself for the millionth time. I'm doing this for him.
She watched as the helicopter settled briefly on the roof of the passenger terminal, its big rotors whooshing up a clatter of dust and grit. Even from this distance she recognized P.T., stuffed into his muscle suit and a double-breasted blazer topped by a jaunty white yachting cap. He scurried quickly up the special gangplank and into the ship without turning to see if his wife was watching. The chopper took off again, as though eager to hurry back to its ordained task of hunting down deadbeats with overdue bills.
Alba had suppressed her sudden urge to wave to him, knowing how silly it would look to the other people gathering on the pier. She turned to the chauffeur and ordered him to begin unloading her voluminous trunks and suitcases. P.T. was safely ensconced in their private suite; the medical specialists and the rest of the company could begin boarding the ship now.
Ms. Lori Tashkajian
Fiction Editor
Bunker Books
Synthoil Tower
New York NY 10012
Dear Ms. Tashkajian:
Thank you so much for accepting Midway Diary! I'm so delighted I almost got out of my wheelchair and danced a jig! The signed contracts are enclosed. How soon will the book be published? You know, I am the last surviving man to have been in the Battle of Midway, and I'd like to at least see the book before I report to the Big Admiral up yonder.
Thank you again. You've made an old man very happy. The advance money will come in handy when next month's bills arrive.
Thanks once again,
Capt. R. Clanker, U.S.N. (Ret.)
P.S. Do you think we could make a movie out of the book?
The first night out of New York, the good ship New Amsterdam ran into a bit of foul weather. Nothing serious, merely a line of squalls that marked the leading edge of a weather front. Herman Melville would barely have noticed it. Yet the night resounded with the thump of landlubbers' bodies rolling out of their bunks.
Ralph Malzone leaned his scrawny forearms against the ship's rail and squinted out toward the bright, clean horizon. The morning was clear as crystal, the sun warm, the sea down to a light chop. Grinning dolphins rode along the ship's bow wave, gliding effortlessly up to the surface and disappearing beneath the sea, only to rise again glistening and sleek a few moments later.
Carl Lewis came up beside him and gripped the rail with white-knuckled hands.
"You okay?" Malzone asked.
"I think so. This is the first time I've been out of sight of land."
"You look a little green."
"I feel a little green," Carl admitted.
"Did you eat anything at dinner last night?"
"Not much."
"Keep it down?"
"Some of it."
Ralph chuckled. "Come on, kid. What you need is a decent breakfast."
Carl shook his head. "I'm not so sure . . . ."
"Trust me. I spent two years on destroyers. I've seen more upchucking than a men's room attendant at an ancient Roman banquet."
"Huh?"
"Don't worry about it. Every once in a while I forget that sales managers aren't supposed to know anything about literature. Neither are engineers."
"I read Classic Comics in my freshman English class," Carl said defensively.
Ralph sighed heavily and put an arm around the younger man's shoulders. "Come on, let's get some breakfast. You'll feel a lot better with something in your stomach."
Uncertainly, Carl let the sales manager lead him to the ship's dining room. It was a spacious, sumptuously appointed room, decorated in cool, soothing ocean greens and blues. Most of the tables were for four, a few for two, and only the captain's table big enough to hold eight or ten places.
Carl had to admit, half an hour later, that he did feel better. Some tomato juice, a couple of poached eggs, toast, and tea had revived him.
"You know a lot about a lot of things, don't you?" Carl asked.
Malzone shrugged his slim shoulders. "Mostly useless junk. How many times do you get the chance to help somebody get over a slight case of seasickness?"
Carl leaned back in his chair. The dining room was almost empty. Past Malzone's grinning face he could see the ocean through the ship's wide windows. The slight rise and fall of the horizon did not bother him at all now.
"Listen," Malzone said, his face growing serious. "I've been talking with my sales people, and I think you're in for some real problems."
"Problems?"
"Yeah. Y'see, what you're doing with this Cyberbooks idea, basically, is asking the sales force to learn a whole new way of doing their job. It's kinda like asking a clerk in a shoe store to start selling airplanes to the Pentagon."
Carl felt puzzled. "But selling Cyberbooks will be easy!"
Malzone made a lopsided grin that was almost a grimace. "No it won't. My sales people are used to dealing with book distributors, wholesalers, truck drivers, bookstore managers. If I understand the way Cyberbooks is going to work, we're going to be selling directly to the customer."
"That's right. We eliminate all those middle men."
"You eliminate most of my sales force."
"No, no! We'll need them to—"
"They won't change," Malzone said quietly. But very firmly. Hunching forward in his chair, leaning on his forearms until his head almost touched Carl's, he said in a low voice, "They've spent their careers in this business doing their jobs a certain way. They work on the road. They live in their cars. They're not going to give up everything and sit in front of a phone all day."
Carl felt a flare of anger at the pigheadedness Malzone was describing. But he saw that the sales manager was genuinely concerned, truly worried about the conflict that was about to break over his head.
"What should I do?" he heard himself ask.
Malzone's lips twitched in a smile that was over before it started. "Nothing much you can do. Tomorrow morning you show them how Cyberbooks works. Half the sales staff will jump overboard before lunchtime. The other half will try to throw you overboard."
"Terrific!"
"I'll handle them. That's my responsibility. I just wanted to warn you that they're not going to fall down and salaam at the end of your presentation."
"But they all know the basic idea already, don't they?"
"Yep. And they're loading their guns to convince Mrs. Bee that Cyberbooks won't work."
Carl felt worse than seasick. "Jeez . . ."
Malzone straightened up and made an expansive gesture with both hands. "Like I said, that's not your worry. It's mine."
"But the whole purpose of this voyage is to familiarize the editorial and sales staffs with Cyberbooks," Carl insisted.
Laughing, Malzone countered, "Not exactly. That's the excuse for this sea voyage, but it's not the real reason for it."
"I don't understand."
"Didn't you notice the big contingent of medical people who came aboard with us?"
"Is that who they are?" Carl had noticed several dozen men and women, elegantly groomed and well dressed, who had arrived at the pier in limousines and shining luxury cars. Obviously neither editors nor sales people. Even their expensive matched luggage had stood out in pointed contrast to the worn, shabby bags of the Bunker Books employees.
"Plastic surgeons," Malzone explained. "It's time for Mrs. Bee's facelift again. And several other people are going in for lifts and tucks and some body remodelling."
"Here on the ship?"
"Sure. They get the job done and the bruises are all healed up by the time we get back to New York. Everybody home says how great they look, how much good the ocean voyage did them. Nobody knows they had plastic surgery aboard ship."
"My god," said Carl. "A facelift cruise."
Thus it was that the following morning, when Carl made his presentation of Cyberbooks to the assembled sales staff, he stood before an audience of bruised and bandaged men and women. They were dressed casually, in shorts and sports tops for the most part. Nearly all of them wore dark glasses. Maryann Quigly was in a whole-body cast, wrapped in white plastic from chin to ankles as a result of a fat-sucking procedure that had drained fifty pounds from her, and the follow-up procedure of tightening her skin so that her body would not be wrinkled like a dieting elephant.
Mrs. Bunker sat in the first row of the ship's auditorium, wearing an elegant hooded jacket and dark glasses that effectively hid the bandages around her eyes and jawline. Carl felt as if he were addressing the survivors of the first wave of an infantry assault team that had been caught in a deadly ambush. There was more bandaging showing than human flesh.
Unbeknownst to Carl or anyone else except Mrs. Bunker, at that very moment P.T. Bunker was on the surgical table, undergoing the multiple procedures that would replace his middle-aged flab with firm young muscle, a transplant procedure that was still very much in the experimental phase.
Just about the only two people in Carl's audience who were not bandaged were Ralph Malzone and Lori Tashkajian. Even Scarlet Dean, slimly beautiful and meticulously dressed as she was, sported a pair of Band-Aids just behind her ears. She had combed her hair into a smooth upsweep, obviously relishing the opportunity to show the bandages rather than hide them.
Feeling somewhat shaken by all this, Carl launched into his demonstration of Cyberbooks. Standing alone on the little stage at the front of the ship's auditorium, he used not his original prototype, but a new model fresh from the manufacturing center. It was exactly the size of a paperback book, small enough to fit in Carl's hand easily.
" . . . and as you can see," he was saying, holding up one of the minuscule program wafers, "we can package an entire novel, complete with better graphics than any printing press can produce, in a wafer small enough to tuck into your shirt pocket."
"And how do you sell these chips?" asked someone in the audience.
"Two ways," replied Carl. "The customer can buy the wafers from retail outlets, or can get them over the phone, recording the book he or she asks for on a blank wafer, the same way you record a telephone message or a TV show."
"What about copyright protection?" asked Mrs. Bunker. Her hood and oversized dark glasses reminded Carl of movie stars who pretended to avoid public recognition by a disguise so blatant you could not help but stare at it.
"The wafers cannot be copied," he answered. "Once a book is printed on a wafer, instructions for self-destruction are also printed into the text, so if someone tried to recopy the wafer it will erase itself completely."
"Until some ten-year-old hacker figures a way around the instructions," a voice grumbled.
Everybody laughed.
Carl shook his head. "I've had the nastiest kids in the Cambridge public school system try to outsmart the programming. They found a couple of loopholes that surprised me, but we've plugged them."
"You hope."
"I know," Carl shot back with some heat.
A man at the rear of the auditorium stood up, slowly. No bandages showed on him, but the careful way he moved convinced Carl that he must have had a tummy tuck done the day before, or worse.
"I'm just an old war-horse who's been workin' out in the field for damn near thirty years," he said in a rough voice deepened by a lifetime of cigarettes and alcohol. "I don't know anything about this electronics stuff. Hell, I got to get my nephew to straighten out my computer every time I glitch it up!"
The other sales people laughed.
"Now, what I wanna know is this: If this here invention of yours is gonna replace books printed on paper, what happens to the regional distributors, the warehouses, the truck drivers, and the bookstores?"
"The bookstores will still stay in business," Carl said. "They'll just carry electronic books instead of paper ones."
Maryann Quigly yelped from inside her body cast, "You mean there'll be no paper books at all?"
"Eventually electronic books will replace paper books entirely, yes," replied Carl.
"I ain't worried about eventually," the old salesman said. "I'm worried about this coming season. What do I tell the distributors in my area?"
"As far as Cyberbooks is concerned, you won't have to deal with them at all. You can show the line directly to the bookstores. We can supply them from the office in New York, over the telephone lines, with all the books they want."
A hostile muttering spread through the audience.
"In fact," Carl continued, raising his voice slightly, "the bookstores won't have to order any books in advance. They can phone New York when a customer asks for a Cyberbook and we can transmit it to them instantly, electronically."
The muttering grew louder.
"In other words," said the old war-horse, "first you're gonna replace the entire wholesale side of the business, and then you're gonna replace us!"
Carl's jaw dropped open.
Mrs. Bunker got to her feet and turned to face the salesman. "Woody—nobody could possibly replace you."
A ripple of laughter went through the group.
"Seriously," Mrs. Bunker continued, "we have got to learn how to adapt to this new innovation. That's why I've brought us all together on this ship, so we can hammer out the new ways of doing things that we're all going to have to learn."
"Mrs. Bee," retorted Woody hoarsely, "I been with you and P.T. for damn near thirty years. Through good times and lean. But it seems to me that this Cyber-thing is gonna mean you won't need us sales people. You won't need anything except a goddamned computer!"
"That's just not true," Mrs. Bunker snapped. "I don't care how the books are produced or distributed, they will not sell themselves. We will always need good, dedicated, experienced sales people. The techniques might change, the system may be altered, but your jobs will be just as important to this company with Cyberbooks as before. More important, in fact."
Ralph Malzone sprang to his feet. "Hey, listen, guys. How many times have you come to me complaining about this knuckleheaded distributor or some dopey truck driver who brings the books back for returns without even opening the cartons? Huh?"
They chuckled. Somewhat grudgingly, Carl thought.
"Well, with Cyberbooks you eliminate all the middlemen. You deal directly with the point of sales. And you don't have to carry six hundred pounds of paper around with you!"
The discussion went on and on. Carl stepped down from the stage and let Ralph and Mrs. Bunker argue with the sales force. The editors shifted uncomfortably on their seats, whether from irritation, boredom, or low-grade postsurgical pain, Carl could not tell.
The men and women of the sales force were clearly hostile toward Cyberbooks. Even when Mrs. Bunker explained to them that since sales were bound to increase, the company would have to hire more sales people, which meant that most of the present sales personnel would get promoted, they expressed a cynical kind of skepticism that bordered on mutiny.
The most telling counterthrust came from one of the women. "So we start selling Cyberbooks direct to the stores," she said in a nasal Bronx accent. "So what about our other lines? They'll still be regular paper books. How do you think the wholesalers are gonna behave when they see us going around them with the Cyberbooks, huh? I'll tell you just what they'll do: they'll say, 'You stop going behind our backs with these electrical books or we'll stop carrying Bunker Books altogether.' That's what they'll say!"
Telephone Transcript
"I can hear you clear as a bell, Scarlet."
"You ought to, for what Bunker's paying to have its own satellite communications link from ship to shore."
"I'm glad you're with Bunker now. Webb seems to be going downhill."
"Stop fishing for dirt, Murray. We're discussing the Stoker contract and that's all."
(Laughing.) "Okay, okay. The terms are acceptable, all except the split on the foreign rights. Sheldon wants ninety percent instead of eighty."
"Eighty-five is the best I can do."
"Okay, I'll talk him into eighty-five. But just for you. I wouldn't do it for anybody else."
"You're a sweetheart."
"Oh, yeah. The advance. It's still no bigger than his last contract."
"That's because his last book still hasn't earned out, Murray. His stuff is getting stale. The readers aren't buying it the way they used to."
"Not earned out yet? Are you sure?"
"Sad but true."
"Hmm. Well, I guess Sheldon can live with a million until the next royalty checks come in. In his tax bracket, it isn't so bad."
"The self-discipline will be good for him."
"But how about making it a two-book deal?"
"On the same contract? Two books?"
"Right. You know he can pump out another one in six months or less."
"I think he pumps them out in six weeks or less, doesn't he?"
"Whatever. Two books, two million up front, and the same terms we've been discussing."
"You've got a deal, Murray."
"Nice doing business with you. Have a pleasant cruise."
Walking through the vast offices of Webb Press is like walking through a mausoleum these days, thought P. Curtis Hawks. That damned Axhelm has depopulated the company. Where once there sat dozens of lovely red-haired lasses with dimpled knees and adoring eyes that followed his every gesture, now there was row upon row of empty desks.
Even worse, the Axe had brought in automated partitions for the editorial and sales offices. The amount of office space those people had now depended on how well their books were selling. "Psychological reinforcement," Axhelm had called it. What it meant was, if your sales figures for the week were good, your office got bigger, the goddamned walls spread out automatically, in response to the computer's commands.
But if your sales figures were down, the walls crept in on you. Your office shrank. It was like being in a dungeon designed by the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu: the walls pressed in closer and closer. Already one editor had cracked up completely and run screaming back home to her mother in the wilds of Ohio.
"The next step," Axhelm was saying as the two men surveyed the emptiness that had once been filled with doting redheads, "is to sell all this useless furniture and other junk." Eyeing Hawks haughtily, he added, "The teak panelling in your spacious office should be worth a considerable sum."
Hawks chomped hard on his pacifier. Maybe I should put Vinnie onto this sonofabitch instead of the Old Man, he thought.
"And then we move to smaller quarters," Axhelm went on. "Where the rents are more reasonable. Perhaps across the river, in Brooklyn Heights."
"Never!" Hawks exploded. "No publishing house could survive outside of Manhattan. It's impossible."
Axhelm looked down at his supposed superior with that damned pitying smile of his. "If you don't mind my saying so, sir, your grasp on what is possible and what is impossible seems not to be very strong."
"Now see here . . ."
"You said it would be impossible to run Webb Press with only one-third of the staff that was present when I joined the company. Yet look!" The Axe gestured toward the empty desks. "Two thirds of the personnel are gone and the company functions just as well. Better, even. More efficiently."
"Our sales are down."
"A temporary dip. Probably seasonal."
"Seasonal nothing!" Hawks almost spat the pacifier out of his mouth. "How can we sell books when two-thirds of our sales force has been laid off?"
"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 Cyberbooks. 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.