Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  Behind those overlarge green glasses, her face was knotted into a frown of concentrated worry.

  “Don’t get upset,” Oxnard said generously. “The laser system works like a charm. Finger and his New York bankers will be completely impressed. You won’t lose your jobs.”

  Montpelier laughed nasally. “Oh, B.F. could never fire us. We’ve been too close for too many years.”

  “What he means,” Brenda said, “is that we know too much about him.”

  Pointing a lean finger at her, Montpelier added, “And he knows too much about us. We’re married to him—for better or for worse.”

  Oxnard wondered how far the marriage went. But he kept silent as they reached the elevator, stepped in and dropped downward.

  “It must make for a nerve-wracking life,” Oxnard said.

  “Oh, no . . . the elevator’s completely safe,” Montpelier said over the whistling of the slipstream outside their shuddering, plummeting compartment.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Oxnard said. “I mean . . . well, working for a man like Finger. He treats you like dirt.”

  Brenda shrugged. “It only hurts if you let him get to you.”

  Montpelier scratched at his beard. “Listen. I’ll tell you about B.F. There’s a lot more to him than you think, like that time he kicked me down the elevator shaft . . . .”

  “He what?”

  “It was an accident,” Brenda said quickly.

  “Sure,” Montpelier agreed. “We were discussing something in the hallway; my memory’s a little hazy . . . .”

  “The chess show,” said Brenda.

  “Oh, yes.” Montpelier’s eyes gleamed with the memory of his idea. “I had this terrific idea for a chess show. With real people—contestants, you know, from the audience—on each square. We’d dress them in armor and all and let them fight it out when they got moved onto the same square . . . .”

  “And the final survivor gets a million dollars,” Brenda said.

  “And the Hospital Trust gets the losers . . . which we would then use on our ‘Medical Miracles’ show!”

  Oxnard felt a little dizzy. “But chess isn’t . . .” Brenda touched him with the fingertips of one hand. “It doesn’t matter. Listen to what happened.” She was smiling. Oxnard felt himself grin back at her.

  Montpelier went on, “Well, B.F. and I went round and round on this idea. He didn’t like it, for some reason. The more I argued for it, the madder he got. Finally we were at the end of the hallway, waiting for the elevator and he got so mad he kicked me! He actually kicked me. He was taking Aikido lessons in those days and he kicked me right through the goddamned elevator door!”

  “You know how flimsy the doors around here are,” Brenda quipped.

  Before Oxnard could say anything, Montpelier resumed: “I went bum-over-teakettle right down the elevator shaft!”

  “Geez . . . .”

  “Luckily, the elevator was on its way up the shaft, so I only fell twenty or thirty floors. They had me fixed up in less than a year.”

  “Les was the star of ‘Medical Miracles’ for a whole week . . . although he didn’t know it at the time.”

  “And Bernard Finger,” said Montpelier, his voice almost trembling, “personally paid every quarter of my expenses, over and above the company insurance. When I finally regained consciousness, he was right there, crying over me like he was my father.”

  Oxnard thought he saw the glint of a tear in Montpelier’s right eye.

  ”That’s the kind of man B.F. is,” Montpelier concluded.

  “Cruel but fair,” Brenda said, trying to keep a straight face.

  Just then the elevator stopped with a sickening lurch and the flimsy doors opened with a sound like aluminum foil crinkling.

  Everything here happens on cue, Oxnard thought as they stepped out into the studio.

  The laser system was indeed working quite well. Montpelier clapped his hands in childish glee and pronounced it “Perfect!” as they ran through the demonstration tapes, although Oxnard noted, from his perch alongside the chief engineer’s seat in the control booth, that the output voltage on the secondary demodulator was down a fraction. Nothing to worry about, but he tapped the dial with a fingernail and the engineer nodded knowingly.

  No sense scaring them, Oxnard thought. He went down the hall to the cafeteria and munched a sandwich with Brenda and Montpelier. There wasn’t much conversation. Oxnard put on the abstracted air of a preoccupied scientist: his protective camouflage, whenever he didn’t know what to say and was afraid of making a fool of himself.

  Finger and his New York bankers glowed with the aura of haute cuisine and fine brandy when they entered the studio. Despite the NO SMOKING signs everywhere, they all had long black Havanas clamped in their teeth. Finger had changed his costume; now he wore a somber, stylish Pickwick business suit, just as the bankers wore. Protective coloration, Oxnard thought. I’m not the only one who uses camouflage.

  The men from New York were old; no Vitaform Processing for them. Their faces were lined, their mouths tight, their eyes suspicious. Three of them were lean and flinty. The fourth outweighed his three partners and Finger combined. He looked hard, not fat, like an overaged football lineman. Oxnard had seen his type in Las Vegas, watching over their casinos through dark glasses.

  “And this is the inventor of the three-dee system,” Finger said, smiling and waving Oxnard over to him. “Dr. William Oxnard. Come on over, Bill. Don’t be shy. I want you to meet my friends here . . . they can be very helpful to a brilliant young scientist looking for capital.”

  Oxnard shook hands with each of them in turn. Their hands were cold and dry, but their grips were tight, as if they seldom let go easily.

  Then Finger led them to the plush chairs that had been lined up for them around the receiver console. Ashstands were hurriedly set up at each elbow, while Finger stood in front of the bankers, scowling and shouting orders to his aides with a great flourish of armwaving. Montpelier and Brenda sat off to one side in plain folding chairs. Oxnard went back to the control consoles, got a fully confident nod from the chief engineer and then walked toward the cameras.

  The lights in the studio went down, slowly at first, almost imperceptibly—then very suddenly dwindled to total darkness, except for a single overhead spot on Finger, who was still standing in front of the bankers.

  “Everything seems to be in readiness,” Finger said at last. “Gentlemen . . . once again may I present to you Dr. William Oxnard, the genius who invented the holographic home entertainment system.”

  Bill Oxnard stepped into the spotlight. Finger scuttled to the seat beside the beefy New Yorker, who had—sure enough—put on dark eyeglasses.

  “Thank you, Mr. Finger. Gentlemen . . . as you very well know, three-dimensional holographic entertainment systems are the biggest thing to sweep the industry since the original inception of the old black-and-white television broadcasting, about a half-century ago.

  “For the first time, fully three-dimensional projections can be shown in the home, using receiving equipment that is cheap enough for the average householder to buy, while low enough in manufacturing cost to provide an equitable profit to the manufacturers and distributors . . . .”

  “We are neither manufacturers nor distributors, young man,” rasped one of the frail-looking bankers. “We are here to see if Titanic has anything worth investing in. Spare us the preliminaries.”

  Bill nodded and suppressed a grin. “Yessir. What Titanic has, in brief, is a new and improved holographic photography system; as you know, the three-dimensional images now received over home sets are spotty, grainy, and streaked with quantum scintillations . . . .”

  “Looks like the actors’re always standin’ in a pile of sequins,” said the beefy one, with a voice like a cement truck shifting gears.

  “You mean confetti,” one of the flinty ones corrected.

  Beefy turned slowly, making his chair creak under his bulk. “Naw. I mean sequins.”

 
; “I call it snow!” Finger broke in brightly. “But whatever you call it, the effect’s the same. Watching three-dee gives you a headache after a while.”

  Beefy muttered something about headaches and Flinty returned his attention to Oxnard.

  “Very well, young man,” he said. “What are you leading up to?”

  “Simply this,” Oxnard replied, smiling to himself. “My laboratory . . . .”

  ”Your laboratory?” one of the bankers snapped. “I thought you worked for the RHB-General Combine?”

  “I was Director of Research for their Western Labs, sir,” Oxnard said, feeling the old acid seething in his guts. “I resigned when we had a difference of opinion about the royalties from my original holographic system inventions.”

  “Ahh,” wheezed the oldest of the quartet of bankers. “They squeezed you out, eh?” He cackled to himself without waiting for Oxnard’s answer.

  “At any rate,” Oxnard went on, feeling his face burn, “I now own my own modest laboratory and we’ve developed a much improved holographic projection system. The patents have come through on the new system and Titanic Productions has taken an option on the exclusive use of the new system for home entertainment purposes.”

  “What difference does the new system make?” Beefy asked. “Three-dee is three-dee.”

  “Not quite correct, sir,” Oxnard replied. “The old system is very grainy. It does give viewers headaches after an hour or so. You see, the impedance matching of the primary . . . .”

  “Skip the technical details,” Finger called out. “Show us the results.”

  Oxnard blinked. For a moment he was terribly conscious of where he was, of the cold light streaming down over him, of the people he was speaking to. He longed for the safety of his familiar laboratory.

  But he pressed onward. “All right. Basically, my new system gives an absolutely perfect image. No distortions, no scintillations, no visible graininess or snow. Unless you’re an engineer and you know precisely what to look for, you can’t tell a projected image apart from someone actually standing in front of you.”

  “And that’s what you’re going to demonstrate to us?” Flinty asked.

  “Yes, sir. With the help of one of you gentlemen. Would one of you care to step up here in the spotlight with me?”

  They all looked at each other questioningly, but no one moved from his chair. After a few seconds, Bernard Finger said, “Well I’ll do it, if nobody else . . . .”

  Beefy pushed him back down into his seat. Finger landed on the padding with an audible thwunk!

  “I’ll do it,” Beefy said, with a grin that was almost boyish “Always wanted t’be in show business . . . like my cumpar’ Frankie . . . .”

  He lumbered into the spotlight, glanced around, suddenly self-conscious.

  Oxnard stretched out his right hand. “Thank you for volunteering,” he said. His palms were suddenly sweaty.

  Beefy reached for Oxnard’s hand. His own heavy paw went through Oxnard’s.

  The other bankers gasped. Beefy stared at his own hand, then grabbed at Oxnard’s image. He got nothing but air.

  “Actually I’m ‘way over here,” Oxnard said, as a couple of technicians pushed aside the screen that had hidden him from their view. He looked up from the tiny monitor he had been watching and saw the bankers, more than fifty yards across the huge empty studio. Beefy was standing under the spotlight, gaping at Oxnard’s three-dimensional image; the others were half out of their chairs, craning for a view of where Oxnard really was standing.

  “How about that?” Finger crowed and started pounding his palms together. The bankers took up the applause. Even Beefy clapped, grudgingly.

  Turning back to the camera, Oxnard said, “If you gentlemen will forgive my little deception, we can proceed with the show. I think you’ll find it entertaining.

  It was.

  For twenty minutes, the bankers saw strange and wonderful worlds taking shape not more than ten feet before their eyes. Birds flew, mermaids swam, elephants charged at them, all with flawless three-dimensional solidity. They visited the top of Mt. Everest (a faked set from the old MCA-Universal studios), watched a cobra fight a mongoose, then went on a whirlwind tour of all the continents and major seas of the world. A beautiful chanteuse sang to them in French, a Minnesota sexual athletics class competed for originality and style. The windup was a glider flight through the Grand Canyon, while the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang “America the Beautiful.”

  “Breathtaking!”

  “Perfect!”

  “Awe-inspiring!”

  “Terrific!”

  As the lights came back up, Bernard Finger took the floor again, beaming at the four bedazzled bankers.

  “Well,” he asked, “what do you think? Do we have something here, or do we have something?”

  “I liked the Balinese broad,” said Beefy. “She had something, all right.”

  “She’s right here. We flew her in from Ft. Worth, where she was working. Also a few members of the Minnesota team. I was planning to introduce you gentlemen to them all at a little cocktail party this evening.”

  Oxnard, walking across the studio toward them, could see that they were impressed with Finger’s foresight and generosity.

  All except Flinty. “That’s well and good,” he said, steepling his bony fingers as he sat back in his chair. He cocked an eye at Finger, standing poised before him. “But we haven’t come to Titanic for technical products; your business, Bernie, is show business. What have you got that will get Titanic to the top of the ratings?”

  Finger’s teeth clicked shut. It was the only sign of distress he showed. Immediately they parted again in a cheery smile.

  “Listen,” he said, “shows are a dime a dozen. We’re planning a whole raft of ‘em . . . every kind of show, from quizzes to really deep drama—Simon and Allen, stuff like that. It’s the technical side that we wanted to show you today.”

  Oxnard stopped a few feet behind their chairs. He could see the sort of desperate look on Finger’s face. Beefy and the other two bankers seemed anxious to move on to the cocktail party. Montpelier and Brenda both had disappeared. Glancing over his shoulder, Oxnard saw that the engineers and technicians had cleared out, too. There was no one in the studio except Finger, the four bankers and himself.

  The studio looked like a gaunt framework: big, mostly empty, skeletal girders showing where other rooms have walls and ceiling panels. It reminded Oxnard of an astronomical observatory, although it wasn’t domed. An unfinished chamber, he thought. Full of sound and fury; signifying nothing. He felt a little surprised at his sudden burst of literary pretension.

  “I’ll admit the technical side is impressive,” Flinty was saying adamantly. “But nobody’s going to watch travelogues very long, no matter how perfectly they’re broadcast You need shows, Bernie. Come up with good shows and we’ll come up with money for you.”

  “But . . . .” Finger’s composure broke down for the first time. “I need the money now.”

  Flinty got slowly to his feet. Oxnard could see a crooked little grin forming on his granite-tight face. “Now? Really? You need the money now?”

  He put a bony arm around Finger’s shoulder and, trailed by the other bankers, they walked toward the red-glowing EXIT sign.

  Oxnard stood there alone in the vast, empty studio, with nothing but the echo of Flinty’s cackling laughter to keep him company. Just as he realized that he didn’t know what to do, he heard a movement behind him.

  Turning, he saw Brenda. She looked very serious.

  “It’s been a long day,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He suddenly realized he was very tired.

  “Come on; I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Thanks. But I suppose I should get along home.” Idiot! he raged at himself. Why’d you say that?

  Brenda pointed casually toward the exit and they started walking toward it.

  “Wife and kids?” she asked.

  Oxnard shook his head. �
�Worse. A fifty-person lab that needs me to make decisions and sign paychecks.”

  “You’re there every day?”

  “Bright and early.”

  “But you do eat and sleep, don’t you?”

  Why am I trying to run away? “Sure,” he said. “Now and then.”

  They were at the exit door. She let him push it open for her.

  “Well then,” Brenda said as they stepped into the hallway, “why don’t we have dinner together? I know B.F. will want to have a debriefing later tonight.”

  The debriefing came in the middle of dinner. Oxnard let Brenda drive him through the swirling pink smog—scented like rancid orchids, even through the noseplugs—to a small restaurant in the Valley. They had just finished the wine and asked for a second bottle when the owner trudged up to their table with a portable phone. He placed it on the edge of the table, so they could both see the screen.

  Finger looked ominously unwell.

  “They didn’t put up the money?” Brenda asked.

  Glowering from inside a rumpled Roman toga, Finger said, “They wanted the option on our new holosystem.”

  Oxnard was about to ask where the our came from, but Brenda preempted him. “What did you give them?”

  “Sweet talk. Four solid hours of sweet talk and a horde of teeny-boppers from every part of the world.”

  “And?”

  “They’ll put up the money for one show. One series, that is. We can use the new system and see if the audience likes the series well enough to put us in the Top Ten. If not, they foreclose and take everything.”

  “Not my new system!” Oxnard blurted.

  “The option,” Finger answered tiredly. “They’ll get the option. And sooner or later they’ll get you too, if they really want you. Don’t think you could fight ‘em.”