Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  “The sales force giving you hell?” Scarlet asked him as they worked their way uphill on the tilting dance floor.

  “Yeah,” he said, making it a long flat exasperated syllable. “Worse than I thought it could be.”

  “Maybe they should drop the Cyberbook project.”

  Malzone shook his head. “P.T. never gives up on anything. You know that. And—dammit! It’s a good idea. I think it could work if we’d give it half a chance.”

  The dance floor shuddered and then started slanting downhill. Ralph held Scarlet firmly in his surprisingly strong arms and guided her past the other dancing couples. The band was playing “Hey Jude” on its synthesized instruments. Carl and Lori were sitting at the table alongside the dance floor, gazing raptly at each other over a forest of tall glasses and empty bottles. Scarlet felt the anger of frustration heating her.

  The song ended just as the dance floor gave another lurch. The couple next to Scarlet and Ralph staggered slightly into them. The woman’s heel caught in the hem of her floor-length dress and she clutched at Scarlet for support. Scarlet’s slim little handbag slid off her shoulder and hit the floor with a thunk as the woman—one of Ralph’s sales people—straightened up and murmured an apology.

  The couple scurried back to their table as Ralph bent down to pick up Scarlet’s purse. She dropped to one knee beside him, anxious to scoop up the things that had spilled out of the bag and onto the polished wood of the dance floor.

  Ralph helped her. “Hey, what’s this?” he asked, picking up the pheromone spray.

  “Ah . . . perfume,” Scarlet improvised, making a grab for it. Her hand clutched for the phial just a touch too hard, and a microscopic mist sprayed from it with an almost inaudible hiss.

  Malzone blinked as the spray hit his face. “Doesn’t smell at all,” he muttered, handing the phial back to Scarlet.

  Scarlet felt the spray tingle on her face, too. She looked deeply into Ralph Malzone’s eyes and knew beyond the trace of any doubt that this was the one man in the world that she absolutely had to have for her very own.

  “Ralph,” she said, her voice shuddering with the urgency of it all. “Would—would you please take me back to my cabin?”

  Nodding absently, as though something had just happened that was beyond his understanding, Ralph straightened up, took Scarlet by the hand, and walked with her right past Lori and Carl without saying a word.

  FISHING BOAT EXPLODES,

  FOUR FEARED KILLED

  Brigantine, N.J. A forty-five-foot fishing boat, Calamara, was blown to bits last night in a mysterious explosion a few miles off the south Jersey coast, according to a Coast Guard spokesman.

  Four men aboard the vessel are missing and feared dead.

  “It was like she was hit by a missile,” said Lt. (j.g.) Donald Winslow.

  Coast Guard radar, on a routine drug surveillance sweep, picked up the Calamara while it was heading out to sea. “One instant it was there, the next it was gone,” said Lt. Winslow. A Coast Guard helicopter sent to investigate found only floating debris and an oil slick.

  “The sea was getting rough, but not dangerously so. There were no other ships within fifty miles of Calamara except a cruise liner, the SS New Amsterdam,” Lt. Winslow stated.

  The missing men are Marco DeAngelo, Guido DeAngelo, and Vincenzio DeAngelo, all of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Salvatore Baccala, of Brigantine, N.J., owner of the boat.

  THEFT OF CRUISE MISSILE REPORTED

  Staten Island, N.Y. An unnamed Navy official reluctantly admitted that a fully armed cruise missile was stolen from the Staten Island weapons depot three nights ago. She stressed, however, that the missile was armed with a conventional warhead, not a nuclear weapon.

  Defense Department and F.B.I. antiterrorist teams are investigating the incident, which may be linked to the mysterious explosion of a New Jersey fishing boat last night.

  The Navy spokesperson, who insisted on anonymity, claimed that all cruise missiles in storage are equipped with automatic self-destruct systems, as a protection against terrorist seizure. “If the people who stole the missile tried to launch it, it would blow up in their faces,” she averred.

  WHITE HOUSE BLAMED

  FOR MISSILE THEFT

  AND BOAT EXPLOSION

  Washington, D.C. Sen. Mario Pazzo (D., N.J.) accused the White House today of “culpable guilt” in the explosion last night of a New Jersey fishing boat in which four men were apparently killed.

  “The President should realize that all the Navy’s cruise missiles are booby-trapped, and thus a danger to those who operate them,” said Sen. Pazzo. “And if he doesn’t know that, then he isn’t doing the job he was elected to do.”

  Reminded that the only way the four men in question could have obtained a cruise missile was to steal it from the Navy weapons depot in Staten Island, Sen. Pazzo insisted, “The issue here is not crime. It’s the safety of human lives.”

  A Pentagon spokesman, when confronted with the Senator’s statement, expressed surprise. “Hell, there’s red lettering eight inches high that says ‘DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LAUNCH UNTIL SELF-DESTRUCT SYSTEM IS DEACTIVATED.’ Maybe the guys who stole the missile couldn’t read.”

  F.B.I. officials theorize that the missile was stolen as part of the gang wars over narcotics smuggling.

  “If they’re escalating to cruise missiles,” said the F.B.I. agent in charge of the investigation, “then we’re going to have ask Congress for antimissile weaponry to protect the lives of innocent citizens and the Bureau’s agents.”

  Eighteen

  Ralph Malzone struggled up from sleep like a man clawing his way out of an immense, cloying, suffocating ball of cotton candy. He was still half dreaming of childhood guilts and terrors while the rational side of his brain was telling him to open his eyes and wake up.

  It was not easy. He was physically exhausted and emotionally spent. But with a supreme effort of will he unglued his gummy eyes and focused blearily on the ceiling panels of off-white acoustical tile.

  For long minutes he lay unmoving, almost afraid to look about him. Usually he sprang out of bed full of vigor, ready to start the new day. But he was not home in his bare little studio apartment now, he was aboard the cruise ship.

  His heart skipped a beat. He was not in his own cabin, either.

  With a mixture of dread and joy he slowly turned his head. Scarlet Dean lay sound asleep beside him, a sweet smile of bliss curving her red lips.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It’s under the bed, I think,” Scarlet said in a lazy, happy, sultry voice.

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

  “Good evening,” she countered.

  “I . . . uh . . .”

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

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

  The dining salon was almost full and buzzing with three stories: P.T.‘s dramatic entrance in the bar lounge last evening, Scarlet Dean and Ralph Malzone scurrying away arm in arm at the end of the evening, and the spectacular fireworks display off on the horizon around two in the morning.

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

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

  Looking around the tables of the crowded salon, Lori said, “I don’t see Ralph or Scarlet.”

  “Maybe they jumped ship.”

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

  Carl felt his face redden.

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

  “I don’t see Mrs. Bee, either,” said Carl.

  “She usually has breakfast in her stateroom. She’ll be at the conference. She never misses a sales meeting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I don’t feel so good,” said one of the women sales reps.

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

  “So what do we do?”

  “Yeah. What can we do—go on strike?”

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

  “Such as?”

  “What does any red-blooded American do when somebody’s tryin’ to screw him?”

  “Hire a hit man.”

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

  “Relax and enjoy it.”

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

  “Sue?”

  “Who?”

  “Bunker Books, that’s who.”

  “The Boss?”

  “The company?”

  “Mr. Bunker?”

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

  “What?”

  “Us, that’s what!”

  “But Mrs. Bee said—”

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

  “She wouldn’t do that!”

  “The hell she wouldn’t. And even if she wouldn’t, P.T. would. So we sue the bastards.”

  “About what?”

  “About Cyberbooks, of course.”

  “But how can . . .”

  “It can’t be done—can it?”

  “What do we sue them for?”

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

  The sales staff stared at one another, stunned.

  “Well?” Woody demanded. “Anybody got a better idea?”

  Total silence.

  “Then we sue!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That package isn’t going to Brooklyn. It’s a present, from me to you.”

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

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

  “This is unexpected.”

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

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

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