Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  “Nobody’s even tried to do this before,” Carl said, with some pride.

  “I wonder what it could be?”

  Carl forced himself to remain silent, despite the voice inside his head urging him to reach into the courier case lying on the seat between them and pull out the marvel that he was bringing to Bunker Books. A slim case of plastic and metal, about the size of a paperback novel. With a display screen on its face that could show any page of any book in the history of printing. The first prototype of the electronic book. Carl’s very own invention. His offspring, the pride of his genius.

  The taxi lurched around a corner, then stopped so hard that Carl was thrown almost against the heavy steel-and-glass partition. His companion seemed to hold his place better, almost as if he had braced himself in advance. His trenchcoat flopped over Carl’s courier bag with a heavy thunking sound that was lost in the squeal of the taxi’s brakes.

  “Synthoil Tower,” announced the cab driver. “That’s eighty-two even, with th’ tip.”

  True to his word, the dapper gray-haired man slid his credit card into the slot in the bulletproof partition, patted Carl’s arm briefly by way of farewell, then scampered to the imposing glass-and-bronze doors of the Synthoil building. It took a few moments for Carl to gather his two bags and extricate himself from the backseat of the taxi. The cabbie drummed his fingers on his steering wheel impatiently. As soon as Carl was clear of the cab, the driver pulled away from the curb, the rear door swinging shut with a heavy slam.

  Carl gaped at the rapidly disappearing taxi. For a wild instant a flash of panic surged through him. Clutching at his courier case, though, he felt the comforting solidity of his prototype. It was still there, safely inside his case.

  So he thought.

  Reader’s Report

  Title: The Terror from Beyond Hell

  Author: Sheldon Stoker

  Category: Blockbuster horror

  Reader: Priscilla Alice Symmonds

  Synopsis: What’s to synopsize? Still yet another trashy piece of horror that will sell a million copies hardcover. Stoker is awful, but he sells books.

  Recommendation: Hold our noses and buy it.

  Two

  Lori Tashkajian’s almond-shaped eyes were filled with tears. She was sitting at her desk in the cubbyhole that passed for an editor’s office at Bunker Books, staring out the half window at the slowly disappearing view of the stately Chrysler Building.

  Her tiny office was awash with paper. Manuscripts lay everywhere, some of them stacked in professional gray cartons with the printed labels of literary agents affixed to them, others in battered cardboard boxes that had once contained shoes or typing paper or even children’s toys. Still others sat unboxed, thick wads of paper bound by sturdy elastic bands. Everywhere. On Lori’s desk, stuffing the bookshelves along the cheap plastic partition that divided the window and separated her cubicle from the next, strewn across the floor between the partition and gray metal desk, piled high along the window ledge.

  One of management’s strict edicts at Bunker Books was that editors were not allowed to read on the job. “Reading is done by readers,” said the faded memo tacked to the wall above Lori’s desk. “Readers are paid to read. Editors are paid to package books that readers have read. If an editor finds it necessary to read a manuscript, it is the editor’s responsibility to do the reading on her or his own time. Office hours are much too valuable to be wasted in reading manuscripts.”

  Not that she had time for reading, anyway. Lori ignored all the piled-up manuscripts and, sighing, watched the construction crew weld another I-beam into the steel skeleton that was growing like Jack’s beanstalk between her window and her view of the distinctive art-deco spike of the Chrysler Building. In another week they would blot out the view altogether. The one beautiful thing in her daily grind was being taken away from her, inches at a time, erased from her sight even while she watched. Coming to New York had been a mistake. Her glamorous life in the publishing industry was a dead end; there were no men she would consider dating more than once; and now they were even taking the Chrysler Building away from her.

  She was a strikingly comely young woman, with the finely chiselled aquiline nose, the flaring cheekbones, the full lips, the dark almond eyes and lustrous black hair of distant romantic desert lands. Her figure was a trifle lush for modern New York tastes, a touch too much bosom and hips for the vassals of Seventh Avenue and their cadaverous models. Her life was a constant struggle against junk food. Instead of this week’s fashionable biker image, which would have made her look even more padded than she was naturally, Lori wore a simple sweater and denim skirt.

  She sighed again, deeply. There was nothing left except the novel, and no one would publish it. Unless . . .

  The novel. It was a work of pure art, and therefore would be totally rejected by the editorial board. Unless she could gain a position of power for herself. If only Carl . . .

  The desk phone chimed. Lori blinked away her tears and said softly, “Answer answer.” The command to the phone had to be given twice, as a precaution against setting off its voice-actuated computer during the course of a normal conversation.

  “A Mr. Lewis to see you,” said the phone. “He claims he has an appointment.” Whoever had programmed the communications computer had built in the hard-nosed suspicion of the true New Yorker. Even its voice sounded nasty and nasal.

  “Show him in,” commanded Lori. Softly. On second thought she added, “No, wait. I’ll come out and get him.”

  Carl could be the answer to all her problems. He was brilliant. His invention could propel Bunker Books to the top of the industry. And, having dated him more than once in Boston, Lori was willing to try for more. But Carl would never find his way through this rabbit warren of offices and corridors, Lori told herself as she made the three steps it took to get through the only clear path between her desk and her door. Carl could design electronic software that made MIT professors blink with pleasured surprise, but he got lost trying to cross the street. She hurried down the narrow corridor toward the reception area.

  Sure enough, Carl stood blinking uncertainly at the first cross-hallway, trying to figure out the computer display screen on the wall that supposedly showed even the most obtuse visitor the precise directions to the office he or she was seeking. True to his engineering nature, Carl was peering at the wall fixture with its complex code of colored paths rather than asking any of the people scurrying along the corridors.

  He looked exactly as she remembered him: tall, trim, handsome in a boyish sort of way. He carried a garment bag and a smaller one both slung over the same shoulder, rumpling his tweed jacket unmercifully and making him look like an ill-clothed hunchback.

  “Carl! Hi!”

  He looked up toward Lori, blinked, and his smile of recognition sent a thrill through her.

  “Hi yourself,” he replied, just as he had in the old days when they had both been students: he at MIT and she at Boston University.

  Carl put out his right hand toward her, and Lori took it in hers. Instead of a businesslike handshake she stepped close enough to peck at his cheek in the traditional gushy, phony manner of the publishing industry. But the heavy bags started to slip off Carl’s shoulder and somehow wrapped themselves around her. Lori found herself pressed against Carl, and the traditional peck became a full, warm-blooded kiss on his lips. Definitely not phony, at least on her part.

  Somebody snickered. She heard a wolf whistle from down the hall. As they untangled, she saw that Carl’s face was red as a May Day banner. She felt flustered herself.

  “I . . . I’m sorry,” Carl stammered, trying to straighten out the twisted shoulder straps of his bags.

  Lori smiled and said nothing. She took him by the free arm and led him back toward her office.

  “Did you bring it?” she asked as they strode down the corridor. It was barely wide enough for the two of them to pass through side by side. Lori had to press close to his tweed-sleeved arm
.

  He nodded. “It’s right here.”

  “Wonderful.”

  As she pushed open the door to her cubbyhole, Lori’s heart sank. It was such a tiny office, so shabby, so sloppy with all those damned manuscripts all over the place, schedules and cover proofs tacked to the walls. It seemed even smaller with Carl in it; he looked like a giant wading through a sea of paper.

  But he said, “Wow, you’ve got an office all to yourself!”

  “It’s a little on the small side,” she replied.

  “I’m still sharing that telephone booth with Thompson and two freshmen.”

  Lori had not the slightest doubt that Carl was being sincere. There was not a dissembling bone in his body, she knew. That was his strength. And his weakness. She would have to protect him from the sharks and snakes, she knew.

  “You can hang your garment bag on the back of the door,” Lori told him as she picked a double armload of manuscripts off the only other chair in the office and plopped them onto the window ledge, atop the six dozen already there. What the hell, she thought. I can’t see much out of the window now anyway.

  “We don’t have much time before the meeting starts,” she said as she slid behind her desk and sat down.

  “Meeting?” Carl felt alarmed. “What meeting? I thought—”

  “The editorial board meeting. It’s mandatory for all the editors. Every Tuesday and Thursday. Be there on time, or else. One of the silly rules around here.”

  Carl muttered, “I’m going to have to show this to your entire board of editors?”

  Lori moved her shoulders in a semishrug that somehow stirred Carl’s blood. He had not seen her in nearly two years; until just now he had not realized how much he had missed her.

  “I wanted you to show it to me first,” she was saying, “and then we’d go in and show the Boss. But now it’s time for the drippy meeting, and I have to attend.”

  “It’s my own fault,” said Carl. “The train was late, and it took me longer to get a cab than I thought it would. I should have taken an earlier train.”

  “Can you show me how it works? Real quick, before the meeting starts?”

  “Sure.” Carl took the emptied chair and unzipped his courier case. From it he pulled a gray oblong box, about five inches by nine and less than an inch thick. Its front was almost entirely a dark display screen. There was a row of fingertip-sized touchpads beneath the screen.

  “This is just the prototype,” Carl said almost apologetically. “The production model will be slightly smaller, around four by seven, just about the size of a regular paperback book.”

  Lori nodded and reached out her hands to take the electronic book from its inventor.

  The phone chimed. “Editorial board meeting starts in one minute,” said the snappish computer voice. “All editors are required to attend.”

  With a sigh, Lori said, “Come on, you can show the whole editorial board.”

  “This’ll only take a few seconds.”

  “I can’t be late for the meeting. They count it against you when your next salary review comes up.”

  “They take attendance and mark you tardy?”

  “You bet!”

  Stuffing his invention back in the black case and getting to his feet, Carl said, “Sounds like kindergarten.”

  With a rueful smile, Lori agreed, “What do you mean, ‘sounds like’?”

  Twenty floors higher in the Synthoil Tower sprawled the offices of Webb Press, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tarantula Enterprises (Ltd.). The reception area was larger than the entire set of grubby editorial cubicles down at Bunker Books. Sweeping picture windows looked out on the majestic panorama of lower Manhattan: the financial district, the twin Trade Towers, the magnificent new Disneydome that covered most of what had once been the slums and tenements of the Lower East Side. Farther away stood the Statue of Liberty and the sparkling harbor.

  Harold D. Lapin sat patiently on one of the many deep soft leather chairs arranged tastefully across the richly soft silk carpeting of the reception area. His blue trenchcoat lay neatly folded across the chair’s gleaming chrome arm. Being the man he was, Lapin’s interest was focused not on the stunningly beautiful red-haired receptionist sitting behind her glass desk, microskirted legs demurely crossed, nor even on the splendid view to be seen through the picture windows. Rather, he studied the intricate floral pattern of the heavy drapes that framed the windows, mentally tracing a path from the ceiling to the floor that did not cross a flower, leaf, or stem.

  “Mr. Lapin?” came the dulcet tones of the receptionist.

  He turned in his chair to look at her, and she smiled a practiced smile that suggested much and revealed nothing.

  “Mr. Hawks will see you now.”

  As she spoke, a door to one side of her desk slid open soundlessly and an equally lovely woman appeared there. She nodded slightly. Like the receptionist she was red of hair, gorgeous of face and figure, and dressed in the microskirt and tailored blouse that seemed to be something of a uniform at Webb Press.

  Lapin followed the young woman wordlessly along broad quiet corridors lined with exquisite paintings and an occasional fine small bronze on a pedestal. All the doors along the corridor were tightly closed; the brass nameplates on them were small, discreet, tasteful.

  Power exuded from those doors. Lapin could feel it. There was money here, much money, and the power to do great things.

  At the end of the corridor was a double door of solid oak bearing an equally simple nameplate: P. Curtis Hawks. Idly wondering what the “P.” stood for, and why Hawks preferred his second name to his first, Lapin allowed himself to be ushered through the double doors, past a phalanx of desks and secretaries (all red-haired), into an inner anteroom where still another gorgeous red-haired young woman smiled up at him and gestured silently toward the unmarked door beyond her airport-sized desk.

  Are they all mute? Lapin wondered. Does Hawks clone them, all these redheads?

  The unmarked door opened of itself and Lapin stepped through. The sanctum sanctorum inside was somewhat smaller than he had imagined it would be, merely the size of a bus terminal or a minor cathedral. It was splendidly panelled in teak, however, and its floor-length windows opened onto a handsome terrace that looked out on the East River, the Brooklyn condo complex, and the slender grace of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. A massive teak desk took up one end of the room, its broad clean top supported by four carved elephants with real ivory tusks. The other corners of the huge office contained, respectively, a conference table that could seat twelve, an electronics center that rivalled anything in Cape Canaveral, and a billiard table with an ornate Tiffany lamp hanging above it.

  Hawks was standing by the French windows, fists clenched together behind his back, with the morning sun streaming in so boldly that it made Lapin’s eyes water to gaze upon the president of Webb Press.

  “Well?” Hawks snapped, without turning to face his visitor.

  Squinting somewhat painfully, Lapin said, “Mission accomplished, sir.” He had been told by the man who had hired him that Hawks preferred military idioms.

  Hawks spun around and clapped his hands together with a loud smack. “Good! Let’s see what you got.”

  P. Curtis Hawks was a short, chubby man in his late fifties. His curly red hair was obviously a toupee to Lapin’s refined eye. Hawks’s face was round, puffy-cheeked, with eyes so small and set so deep beneath menacing russet brows that Lapin could not tell what color they were. The man had a plastic pacifier clamped between his teeth; it was colored brown and shaped like a cigar butt. He wore a sky-blue suit tailored to suggest a military uniform: epaulets, decorative ribbons over the left breast pocket, trousers creased to a razor’s edge. Yet he did not look military; he looked like a beach ball that had been unexpectedly drafted.

  Hawks gestured to the electronics center. Lapin placed his trenchcoat neatly on the back of one of the six chrome chairs there, and slid an oblong black box from the coat’s inner pocket.<
br />
  “You know how to work a scanner?” Hawks growled. His voice was like a diesel engine’s heavy rumbling, yet there was a trace of a whine in it.

  “Yessir, of course,” said Lapin. Without sitting, he slid his black box into a slot on the console, then studied the control keyboard for a brief moment.

  Hawks paced back and forth and chewed on his pacifier. “Three-D X rays,” he muttered. “Do you realize that with this one hologram we’ll be able to save the corporation the trouble of buying out those assholes at Bunker Books?”

  Tapping commands into the console, Lapin replied absently, “I had no idea so much was at stake.” Then he found himself adding, “Sir.”

  “There’s billions involved here. Billions.”

  The display screen before the two standing men glowed to life, and a three-dimensional picture took form.

  “What in hell is that?” Hawks shouted.

  Lapin gasped in sudden fear. Hanging in midair before his horrified eyes was a miniature three-dimensional picture of what appeared to be the rear axle of a New York taxicab, overlain with vague blurs of other things.

  “You shitfaced asshole!” Hawks screamed. “You used too much power! The X rays went right through his goddamned device and took a picture of the goddamn cab’s axle! I’ll have you broken for this!”

  The Writer

  The Writer eagerly pawed through the mail box hanging at a precarious tilt from the door of his rusted, dilapidated mobile home. It was not a very mobile home; so far as he knew, it had not moved an inch off the cinderblocks on which it rested since years before he had bought it, and that had been almost a decade ago.

  Automatically ducking his head to get through the low doorway, he let the screen door slam as he riffled through the day’s mail. Four bills that he could not pay, six catalogues advertising goods he could not afford, and a franked envelope bearing the signature of his congress woman, who was being opposed in the upcoming primaries by the owner of a chain of hardware stores.