Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  LAUGH LINES

  Ben Bova

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  The Starcrossed — copyright © 1975 by Ben Bova.

  Cyberbooks — copyright © 1989 by Ben Bova.

  “Crisis of the Month” — originally published in F&SF, March 1988, copyright © by Ben Bova.

  “The Great Moon Hoax, or, A Princess of Mars”) — originally published in F&SF, September 1996, copyright © by Ben Bova

  “The Supersonic Zeppelin” (originally published as “The Great Supersonic Zeppelin Race”) — published in The Far Side of Time, ed. Roger Elwood, 1974, copyright © by Ben Bova

  “Vince’s Dragon” — originally published in Dragons of Darkness, ed. Orson Scott Card, 1981 copyright © by Ben Bova.

  “The Angel’s Gift” — published under the pseudonym of Oxford Williams. First published in The Omni Book of Science Fiction #1, ed. Ellen Datlow, 1983, copyright © by Ben Bova

  “A Slight Miscalculation” — originally published in F&SF, August 1981, copyright © by Ben Bova.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-5560-9

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-5560-?

  Cover art by Bob Eggleton

  First Baen printing, July 2008

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bova, Ben, 1932-

  Laugh lines / by Ben Bova.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-4165-5560-9 (hc)

  1. Science fiction. 2. Humorous stories. I. Title.

  PS3552.O84L38 2008

  813’.54—dc22

  2008010835

  Printed in the United States of America

  Introduction

  Science fiction is serious business. Usually.

  After all, science fiction writers are almost always dealing with the fate of the universe, or at least the future of the human race. That’s serious stuff. Exploring the unknown. Facing hostile aliens. Dealing with artificial intelligences. Handling nanomachines. Hell, I have my hands full trying to program my DVD recorder.

  But science fiction doesn’t have to be somber and serious all the time. There’s a humorous side to the future, just as there’s a humorous side to everything.

  Even the saintly Albert Einstein wasn’t above cracking a joke now and then. Right after Hiroshima, a reporter asked him, “If World War III is fought with atomic bombs, what weapons will be used in World War IV?” Without missing a beat, Einstein replied, “Spears.”

  One of science fiction’s many wonderful attributes is its ability to make social commentary. In the old, dark days of the Soviet Union I asked a Russian writer if the government in Moscow tolerated science fiction. He told me that the Kremlin didn’t mind stories in which the government of Mars, hundreds of years in the future, was composed of bumbling idiots. A similar story about the existing government of the USSR would earn the writer an extended stay in Siberia. Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek in large part because television network executives would allow him to present ideas in a science fiction context that they would never permit in a “realistic” drama.

  There’s no better way to make social commentary than through humor. You can skewer stuffed shirts and show the ridiculous side of life. You can make your points by making people laugh.

  So here’s a hatful of stories that look at the funny side of the future: two full-length novels and six shorter works of science fiction. Most of these stories are based on people and situations that I have personally known, although the circumstances have obviously been altered.

  If these stories make you laugh, all to the good. But remember, you may be laughing at yourself.

  Have fun!

  Ben Bova

  THE STARCROSSED

  by Ben Bova

  To Cordwainer Bird . . .

  may he fly high and strike terror

  in the hearts of the unjust.

  Introduction to the Stars

  The Starcrossed is roman á clef, a novel in which real persons and events are depicted, thinly disguised. Usually, the disguise is to protect the innocent. In this case, it’s to protect the guilty. And one innocent person: Harlan Ellison.

  Anyone who has met Harlan or heard of his rather ferocious reputation might be surprised to see him categorized as an innocent. But he is really. Harlan is at heart a moralist who is infuriated by the stupidity and evil that most of us ignore.

  He’s also one of my closest friends, despite the fact that we live several thousand miles apart.

  Harlan originated a television series: The Starlost. It was such a beautiful idea that Twentieth-Century Fox bought it. Harlan asked me to serve as the science advisor, and I quickly agreed.

  Alas, a writers’ strike hit Hollywood before The Starlost started filming. Fox moved production to Toronto, a move that ultimately spelled disaster.Aside from the star, Kier Dullea, and a few other actors, none of the crew of the production had any experience with a dramatic TV show.

  Harlan worked manfully as long as he could, then quit the show in disgust, abandoning his mutilated brainchild and fleeing back to his home in California.

  As science advisor, my job was to read the scripts, note scientific errors, and suggest ways to fix those errors that didn’t require throwing the entire script into the trash barrel. This I did. I was thanked graciously. I was paid a handsome consultant’s fee. And my advice was totally ignored. Each script was shot as originally written,goofs and all.

  And at the end of each episode there was a full screen credit for SCIENCE ADVISOR BEN BOVA.

  The Show didn’t last long. It received a mercy killing before the first season was through.

  And, back in my apartment in Manhattan, I found myself writing The Starcrossed. My wife tells me I cackled fiendishly as I typed the manuscript.

  So here it is, a roman á clef about what it was actually like to be working on a TV show. It all really happened, folks. Only the names have changed to protect the guilty and one innocent.

  1: The Bankers

  “American ingenuity licked the pollution problem,” said Bernard Finger, glowingly. “And the energy crisis too, by damn.”

  Tanned and golden in his new Vitaform Process body, Finger was impeccably dressed in the latest neo-Victorian style Bengal Lancer business suit, complete with epaulets and an authentic brigadier’s insignia. He stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his sumptuous, spacious office and gazed fondly out at the lovely pink clouds that blanketed the San Fernando Valley.

  The late morning sun blazed out of a perfect blue sky. As far as the eye could see, the entire Greater Los Angeles area—from sparkling sea to the San Berdoo Mountains—was swathed in perfumed, tinted clouds. Except for a few hilltops poking up here and there, it all looked like one enormous dollop of pink cotton candy.

  “American ingenuity,” Bernard Finger repeated. “And American know-how! That’s how we beat those A-rabs and those bleeding heart conservationists.”

  Bill Oxnard watched Finger with some astonishment from his utterly comfortable position, sunk deep into a warmly plush waterchair. Surrounded by pleasantly yielding artificial hides, his loafers all but invisible in the thick pile of the office’s carpet, he still kept his attention on Finger.

  It was uncanny. Oxnard had met the man eighteen months earlier, before he had gone in for the Vitaform Process. Then he had been a short, pudgy, bald, cigar-chewing loudmouth approaching sixty years of a
ge. Now he looked like Cary Grant in costume for Gunga Din. But he still sounded like a short, pudgy, bald, cigar-chewing loudmouth.

  The lovely pink clouds that Finger was admiring were smog, of course. Oxnard had driven from his lab in the Malibu Hills through thirty miles of the gunk to get to Finger’s lofty office. Sure, the smog was tinted and even perfumed, but you still needed noseplugs to survive fifty yards of the stuff and the price of them had gone up to eighteen-fifty a set. They only lasted a couple of weeks, at most The cost of breathing keeps going up, he told himself.

  Oxnard’s mind was wandering off into the equations that governed photochemical smog when Finger turned from the window and strode to his airport-sized desk.

  “It makes me proud,” he pronounced, “to think of all the hard work that American men and women have put out to conquer the problems we faced when I was a kid.”

  As Finger sat in the imposing chrome and black leather chair behind his desk, Oxnard glanced at the two others in the room: Finger’s assistants. The man was lean and athletic looking, with a carefully trimmed red beard. The woman was also slim; she hid much of her face behind old-fashioned bombardier’s glasses. Her longish hair was also red, the same shade as the man’s. Red hair was in this week.

  They both stared fixedly at their boss, eager for every word.

  “A hundred and sixty-seven floors below us,” Finger went on, “down in that perfumed pink environment we’ve created for them, ordinary American men and women are hard at work. You can’t see them from up here, but they’re working, believe me. I know. I can feel them working. They’re the backbone of America . . . the spinal column of our nation.”

  They’re working, all right, Oxnard thought. Every morning he stared with dismay at the black waves of the Pacific turgidly lapping the blacker beaches, while the oil rigs lining the ocean shore busily sucked up more black gold.

  “Men and women hard at work,” Finger went on, almost reverently. “And when they come home from their labors, they want to be entertained. They demand to be entertained. And they deserve the best we can give them.”

  The woman dabbed at her eyes. The man, Les Something-or-Other, nodded and muttered, “With it, B.F.”

  Finger smiled. He carefully placed his palms down on the immaculately glistening, bare desktop. Leaning forward ever so slightly he suddenly bellowed:

  “So how come we don’t have one single top-rated series on The Tube? How come?”

  Les actually leaned back in his chair. The woman looked startled, but never wavered from staring straight at Finger. Oxnard almost thought he could feel a shock wave blow across the room.

  With the touch of a button, Finger projected a column of names and numbers on a wall where a Schoenher had been hanging.

  “Look at the top ten!” he roared. “Do you see a Titanic Productions series? No! Look at the top twenty . . . .” The list grew longer. “The top fifty . . . .” And longer.

  Les Montpelier, that’s his name, Oxnard remembered. He seemed to be trying to sink deeper into his waterchair. He slumped further and further into its luxurious folds, pulling in his chin until his beard scraped his chest. The woman was just the opposite: she perched on the edge of her chair, all nerves, fists knotted on knees. Nice legs.

  Finger flashed more lists on the screen. And pictures. All two-dimensional, Oxnard noted. Everything about the room was two-dimensional. Flat paintings on the walls. Flat desktop dominating the decor. The waterchairs were sort of three-dimensional, but only to the tactile sense. They looked just as flat as everything else. All planes and angles. Nothing holographic. Even the woman wasn’t as three-dimensional as she should be, despite her legs.

  It was a pleasant enough office, though. Brightly colored carpeting and draperies. Everything soft looking, even the padded walls. Up here on the one hundred and sixty-seventh floor of the Titanic Tower they never had to worry about smog or noise or dust. The air was pristine, cool, urged smoothly through the sealed offices by gently whispering machinery hidden behind the walls. Very much the same way that people were moved through Titanic’s offices: quietly, efficiently, politely, relentlessly.

  Oxnard remembered how nice everyone had been to him the first time he had visited Titanic, eighteen months earlier. They had all been very polite, very enthusiastic, had even pronounced laser and holographic correctly, although they never quite seemed to grasp the difference between a hologram and a holograph. He had first met Les Montpelier then, and had been ushered into Finger’s lofty sanctuary, right here in this same room. Finger wasn’t looking like Cary Grant in those days and his comment on Oxnard’s invention was:

  “Stop wasting my time with dumb gadgets! What we need is a show with growth potential. Spinoffs, repeats, byproducts. This thing’s a pipedream!”

  That was eighteen months ago. Now Finger was saying:

  “Every major network has three-dee shows on the air! All top ten series are three-dees! People are standing in line all over the country to buy three-dee sets. And what have you and the other flunkies and drones working for me produced? Nothing! No-thing. Not a goddamned thing.”

  Finger was perspiring now. The sculptured planes of his face were glistening and somehow looked as if they might be beginning to melt. He touched another button on his desk and the faint whir of an extra air blower sounded from somewhere in the padded ceiling.

  “I had to go out myself and find the inventor of the three-dee process and personally coax him to come here and consult with us,” Finger said, his voice sounding at once hurt and outraged.

  It was almost true. The woman, whose name Oxnard still couldn’t recall, had called him and said Mr. Finger would like to meet with him. When Oxnard reminded her that they had met eighteen months earlier, the woman had merely smiled on the phone screen and suggested that the future of her career depended on getting him into Finger’s office. Oxnard reluctantly agreed to a date and time.

  “All right, then,” Finger went on. “A less loyal man would make some heads roll in a situation like this. I haven’t fired anybody. I haven’t panicked. You still have your jobs. I hope you appreciate that.”

  They both bobbed their heads.

  “After lunch, the New York people will want to see what we’ve got. Take him,” Finger barely glanced in Oxnard’s direction, “back to the studio and make sure all this fancy gadgetry is working when I arrive there.”

  “With it, B.F.,” Montpelier said as he struggled up out of his waterchair.

  The woman got to her feet and Oxnard did the same. Finger swivelled his chair slightly and started talking into the phone screen. They were dismissed.

  It took exactly twenty-eight paces through the foot-smothering carpet to get to the office door. Les Montpelier swung it open gingerly and they stepped into the receptionist’s area.

  “One good thing about flightweight doors,” Montpelier muttered. “You can’t slam them.”

  The Titanic Tower was built to earthquake specifications, of course. Which meant that it was constructed like an oversized rocket booster, all aluminum or lighter metals, with a good deal of plastics. If the sensors in the subbasement detected an earth movement beyond the designed tolerances, rocket engines built into the pods along the building’s sides roared to life and hurtled the entire tower, along with its occupants, safely out to a splashdown in the Pacific, beyond the line of oil rigs.

  The whole system had been thoroughly tested by NASA; even though a few diehard conservative engineers thought that the tests weren’t extensive enough, the City of Los Angeles decided that it couldn’t grow laterally any more—all the land had been used up. So skyscrapers were the next step. Earthquake-proof skyscrapers.

  There hadn’t been an earthquake severe enough to really test the rocket towers, although the Tishman Tower had been blasted off by a gang of pranksters who tinkered with the seismographic equipment in its basement. The building arched beautifully out to sea, with no injuries to its occupants beyond the sorts of bruises and broken bones you’d
expect from bouncing off the foam plastic walls, floors and ceilings. A few heart attacks, of course, but that was to be expected. The pedestrians who happened to be strolling on the walkways around the Tower were, unfortunately, rather badly singed by the rocket exhaust A few of them eventually died, including eighty-four in a sightseeing bus that was illegally parked in front of the Tower. Most of them were foreign visitors, though, and Korean missionaries at that.

  As they walked down the corridor toward the studio, Oxnard noted how the foam plastic flooring absorbed the sounds of their footfalls, even without carpeting. It was a great building for sneaking up behind people.

  “Why did you let Finger yell at you like that?” Oxnard wondered aloud. “Les, you brought me up here to see him a year and a half ago.”

  Montpelier glanced at the woman, who answered: “We’ve learned that it’s best to let B.F. have his little tantrums, Dr. Oxnard. It’s a survival technique.”

  Her voice was low, throaty, the kind that would be unbearably exotic if it had just the faintest trace of a foreign accent. But her pronunciation was flat Southern California uninspired. Over the phone she had managed to sound warm and inviting. But not now.

  “I don’t have a Doctorate, Miz . . . uh . . . .” Oxnard grimaced inwardly. He could remember equations, but not names.

  “Impanema.” She flashed a meaningless smile, like a reflex that went along with stating her name. “Brenda Impanema.”

  “Oh.” For the first time, Oxnard consciously overrode his inherent shyness and really looked at her. Something about her name reminded him of an old song and a girl in an old-fashioned covered-top swimsuit. But Brenda didn’t look like that at all. She seemed to be that indeterminate age between twenty and forty, when women used style and cosmetics before resorting to surgery and Vitaform Processing. She had the slight, slim body of the standard corporate executive female who spent most of her money on whatever style of clothing was fashionable that week and got most of her nutrition on dates with over-eager young stallions. Good legs, though. Flat chested, probably: it was difficult to tell through all the ribbons and flouncy stuff on her blouse. But she had good legs and the good sense to wear a miniskirt, even though it wasn’t in style this week.