Cyberbooks

by Ben Bova

  For the vaunted Cleaveland computer system could not actually decide which titles to buy, out of the thousands presented each month. No automated expert system or decision-tree program could handle the avalanche of incoming data that the sales people unloosed each month. So the entire international chain of bookstores depended on this one solitary young woman to make the selections. Each month she sat on that chair, watched the madly flickering screens, and made selections that determined the fate of most of the books published in North America.

  Her right hand gripped a knobbed joystick while the fingers of her left flew madly across a small keyboard. With her left hand she indicated to the computer which screen she was glancing at; if she pushed the joystick up that meant the book would be bought by the chain, the amount of upward push indicated the number of copies bought—ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million. If she pushed the stick down the book was bypassed, doomed to oblivion.

  Her qualifications for this key position? She had been, as a teenager, the champion video game player of California.

  NINETEEN

  Even with the lawsuit looming over them, and the sales force virtually on strike as far as Cyberbooks was concerned, Bunker Books staggered along, trying to stay solvent.

  Lori Tashkajian was in her cubbyhole office that same dreary November morning. The storm that was bringing snow to Iowa was already smothering the New York skyline with gray tendrils of fog and spatterings of drizzle. Mountains of manuscripts still littered Lori's tiny office. But she ignored them as she pondered over the data on her computer display screen.

  According to the computer's program, it would be foolhardy to print more than five thousand copies of Capt. Clanker's novel about the Battle of Midway. The title for the book was still under discussion at the editorial meetings. Every one of the editors except Lori thought that Midway Diary would not sell, although Ralph Malzone (the only one with sales experience at the conferences) liked the title well enough. Currently its working title was Forbidden Warrior's Love, which Lori hated. But at least it was better than Pacific Lust, which she had narrowly averted, after several screaming matches.

  The computer was saying that, no matter what the book's title, they could expect to sell no more than two or three thousand copies of the hardcover. That meant printing no more than five thousand.

  Lori frowned at the glowing screen. Dammit, this novel deserves better than that! But it had been cursed with the strategy of minimal success. The editorial board had decided to take no chances with a first novel by an unknown writer. No money was to be risked on publicity or advertising. No effort made to sell the book to reluctant buyers in bookstore chains or major distribution centers. Minimum success. Spend as little as possible and "let the book find its own level of sales." The level would be on the bottom, Lori knew from bitter experience.

  If only she could get to Mrs. Bunker and make a personal pitch for the novel. She knew it could sell much better, maybe even make a run at the best-seller lists, if they would give it some support.

  But Mrs. Bee was hardly in the office these days. Ever since the cruise—and the lawsuit whipped on them by the sales force—Mrs. Bunker had spent more time out of the office than in it. Strange, though. Even though the company was in dire trouble, with sales down and morale even lower, with a lawsuit by its own sales force threatening to close down Bunker Books entirely, Mrs. Bee seemed smiling, radiant, even girlishly happy on those increasingly rare occasions when she did make an appearance in the office.

  Then Lori's thoughts turned to Carl and his Cyberbooks project. The outlook for him was bleak. Very bleak.

  *

  But Carl Lewis was whistling while he worked. Hunched in front of his own computer display screen in the workshop/office he had made out of the apartment the Bunkers were paying for, Carl traced out the circuitry for an improved Cyberbook model that would reduce the costs of the hand-held reader by at least ten percent.

  He leaned back in the little typing chair and let out a satisfied sigh. Yep, we can make it cheaper. The cheaper it is, the more poor people will be able to afford Cyberbooks. Carl had tried, during the last few months, to interest Mrs. Bunker in a program of giving away a few hundred thousand Cyberbook readers to the children of urban ghettos. Mrs. Bee had given him a puzzled look and a vague smile instead of a definite answer.

  His phone buzzed. Carl rolled in his little chair to the desk and tapped the phone keyboard. Ralph Malzone's long-jawed face appeared on the screen.

  "Hey, are we going to lunch or are you on a diet?"

  "Lunch! I forgot all about it!"

  "Okay. I'm down at Pete's. Meet me at the bar."

  "I'll be there in ten minutes."

  Carl was damp and chilled by the time he entered Pete's Tavern. The drizzle had not looked serious from his hotel window, but walking three blocks with no umbrella or raincoat had not done his tweed jacket much good.

  "Where's the duck?" Ralph asked him, grinning from behind a schooner of beer.

  "Duck?" Carl wondered.

  "You look like a retriever that's just come out of the water."

  Carl laughed, a little self-consciously, and ordered a double sherry to warm himself.

  They took their drinks into the crowded dining room beyond the bar and ordered lunch.

  "You're still working on the gadget?" Ralph asked, his face more serious now.

  "Sure. Why not?"

  "The trial starts next week."

  "So?"

  Ralph leaned forward, bringing his face close to Carl's. "So if Woody and his pals win this suit, the court will enjoin Bunker to stop all work on Cyberbooks."

  Despite a slight pang of fear in his gut, Carl replied, "That can't happen."

  "Oh no?"

  "What judge in his right mind would stop a whole new industry just because some salesmen are afraid it will force them to learn a slightly different way of doing their work?"

  *

  Justice Hanson Hapgood Fish was a man of rare perceptions. So rarefied were his perceptions, in fact, that some whispered they actually were hallucinations.

  He sat in his chambers, behind the massive mahogany desk that had belonged to Malcolm (Malevolent Mai) F. Fortunata until the unhappy day when the Feds had carted Mai away for seventeen counts of bribery, obstructing justice, and aiding and abetting organized crime. The room was large, paneled in dark wood where it was not lined with glass-enclosed bookcases. The leather chairs and solitary long couch were heavy, massive, uninviting. Thick curtains flanked the windows. A gloomy chamber, dreary even on the sunniest day.

  Justice Fish's desk was neurotically bare, except for the inevitable computer display screen, blank and silent. In its empty screen, the judge saw his own face reflected: totally bald, tight-lipped and narrow-eyed, aging pale skin stretched over the skull so tightly that every blue vein could be seen throbbing sluggishly.

  He was engaged in his morning ritual. First the mental exercises: reciting the logarithmic tables of his ancient school trigonometry text, then leaning his head back against the padding of his oversized chair and recalling from his memory the looks of every woman in his courtroom the previous day. There had been only two, both of them aging and lumpy. Nothing had happened in his courtroom except the sentencing of a miscreant embezzler. But he enjoyed replaying before his mind's eye the stunned look on the man's face when he sentenced him to ninety-nine years without probation.

  The damned superior court will lighten his sentence, he thought grouchily. But still, that look on his face was worth it.

  Now he rose slowly from his chair and went to the nearer of the two windows in his office. He moved carefully, with all due deliberation, as much from the desire to appear dramatically dignified as from the arthritis that plagued both his knees. The window was so filthy that he could barely make out the grimy gray City Hall across the way. Standing there, Justice Fish took three deep breaths. Never two, nor four. Never with the window open, either: he knew that fresh air, in Manhattan, co
uld kill.

  Now he returned, still with self-conscious dignity, to his desk and lowered himself onto his imposing chair. Reaching out a long lean finger that barely trembled, he touched the computer's keypad to see what his next case would be.

  Bunker vs. Bunker. A publishing house's sales force was suing its employer over some new contraption that they felt would eliminate their jobs. Hm. Labor relations. Always a thorny issue.

  Pressing keypads carefully, Justice Fish called up the secret, coded program that only he could summon from the computer because only he knew the special code word that accessed it: Polaris.

  It was an astrology program, and the aging judge pecked at the keyboard, asking how he should decide the case he would soon be judging. The computer blinked and hummed, then gave him an answer.

  Justice Fish nodded, satisfied. Now he knew what his decision would be. Now he did not have to listen to the evidence that the various lawyers would present over the next long, boring weeks. It was all decided. Sifting evidence and weighing the slick arguments lawyers dished up to him was just a waste of time, he felt. The stars told him what his decision would be, so he could relax and fantasize about the women in his courtroom without the fear of making a wrong decision. Pleased, he shut down the computer and leaned back in his chair for his morning nap.

  MURDER SIX

  Detective Lieutenant Jack Moriarty was not merely a good cop, he was a brave man. Brave in two ways: he had physical courage, the ability to stand up to a man with a gun or a gang of street toughs; he also had the courage of his convictions, the strength to play his hunches even when they seemed crazy.

  Shortly after the murder of retired detective Miles Archer, several months earlier, Moriarty had come to certain conclusions about the Retiree Murders. The computer records of each victim hinted at the possibility of a motive that seemed so farfetched, so tenuous, that only a man as convinced of himself as Moriarty would dare to act on it. But act he did. He bought stock in a multinational conglomerate corporation called, of all things, Tarantula Enterprises.

  It had not been an easy thing to do. Tarantula shares were expensive, more than $1,000 each. And the stockbroker he had contacted told him that not much Tarantula stock was available on the open market.

  "Most of it is held by other corporations," the broker had said, sniffling so much that Moriarty began to look for traces of white powder on his fingertips. "The big boys hold it and sell it in enormous blocks. It's not traded in onesy-twoseys very much."

  Moriarty had assured him that he only wanted a few shares. He could not afford more; twenty shares cleaned out his savings account.

  For months he waited patiently, even buying single shares now and then as they became available. Nothing had happened. His hunch had gone cold. The Retiree Murderer refused to strike at anyone, let alone an active police detective who held a grand total of twenty-four shares of Tarantula Enterprises, Ltd.

  On that same foggy, drizzly day in November, Moriarty learned that his hunch was right. At the cost of his life.

  He was on a routine call to question a witness to a liquor store holdup in the Village when it happened.

  Moriarty stepped out of his vintage Pinto (the auto was his only discernible vice) in front of the liquor store in question. The street was slick from the chilly rain. Only a few people were passing by, and they all were hidden beneath umbrellas. Bunching his tired old trenchcoat around his middle, Moriarty got as far as the liquor store's front entrance.

  He felt a sharp jab in his back, then a horrible burning sensation flamed through his whole body. He had stopped breathing before he hit the sidewalk.

  The umbrella-toting pedestrians stepped over his prostrate body and continued on their way.

  TWENTY

  That evening, the cold November rain gave way to the season's first snowfall. It was nothing much, as snowstorms go, merely a half inch or less of wet mushy flakes that turned to black slush almost as soon as it hit the streets. But the evening newscasts were agog with the story of the storm: coiffed and pancaked anchorpersons quivered with excitement while reporters at various strategic locations around the city—the airports, the train and bus terminals, the Department of Public Works headquarters, the major highway bottlenecks—stood out in the wet snow and solemnly reported how the city almost had been hit by a crisis.

  "Although the traffic appears to be flowing smoothly through the Lincoln Tunnel," said the bescarfed young lady on Channel 4, "it wouldn't take much more snow to turn this evening's homeward rush into a commuter's nightmare." Behind her, streams of buses proceeded without a hitch into the tunnel.

  Channel 2's stalwart investigative reporter was at the airport offices of the U.S. Weather Service, where he had collared a wimpy-looking meteorologist.

  "Why didn't the Weather Bureau provide warnings of this potential disaster?" he demanded.

  The wimp's eyebrows rose almost to his receding hairline. "What disaster? You call a half-inch snow a disaster? The Blizzard of '88 this ain't!"

  Still, all the channels buzzed with stories about the snow, the most inventive being a satellite report from a ski resort in Vermont, where the slopes were still green with grass.

  The news of the storm smothered a human-interest story about a city police detective who had been the apparent victim of a senseless, purposeless murder. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, though, the detective had been revived from a state of clinical death and was recuperating in St. Vincent's Hospital, in the Village.

  By morning the snow had been obliterated from the city by the ceaseless pounding of millions of buses, trucks, taxicabs, limousines, and pedestrians' feet. The Department of Public Works had not had to call out a single snow plow or digging crew. Still the trains ran two hours late, and the morning backup of traffic at the bridges and tunnels was ferocious.

  Ferocious was the mood, also, of P. Curtis Hawks as he rode in his limousine through the crowded city streets to the annual board meeting of Tarantula Enterprises, Ltd. Vinnie DeAngelo, the Beast from the East, slept with the fishes ever since the fiasco of the cruise missile. Weldon W. Weldon, senile and crippled, still ran Tarantula from his infested jungle of an office. Webb Press—what was left of it—was now located in Brooklyn, in a building that had once been a fruit-and-vegetable warehouse. The place still smelled of onions.

  This meeting is the shoot-out, Hawks told himself. High noon. There isn't room enough in this corporation for the Old Man and me. One of us has got to go, and it's not going to be me. He shifted the pacifier from one side of his mouth to the other and sucked in his gut. Got to make a good impression on the board of directors, he knew. Got to make them see that the Old Man has run Webb into the ground.

  It would not be easy. But Hawks smiled a bitter, cold smile when he thought about his secret weapon. I'll pin the Old Man's balls to the table, or what's left of them. And his own creature, Gunther God-Damned Axhelm, is going to do the job for me.

  *

  "All rise."

  From the front row of seats in the courtroom, Carl Lewis got to his feet together with everyone else as Justice Hanson H. Fish walked slowly, solemnly, in his black robes to his high chair behind the banc.

  Lori stood beside Carl on one side, Ralph and Scarlet Dean were on his other side. Mrs. Bunker was at the table where the defense attorneys—all five of them—sat. Both Mrs. Bee and Scarlet were decked out in the latest fashion: the toothpaste-tube look. Their dresses were tight enough to asphyxiate, and shirred, ruched, pleated—wrinkled—so that they looked like the last moments of a toothpaste tube that had been squeezed to death. Skirts were midthigh and so tight that they could barely walk. Alba Junker wore all white, of course, while Scarlet Dean was completely in red. Between them they wore enough jewelry to ransom a planeload of OPEC oil ministers.

  Lori, as usual, ignored the weekly fashion and had dressed n a sensible plaid suit with a light green turtleneck beneath the jacket. Her skirt was knee-length, her jewelry confined to a small pair of
earrings and matching copper bracelet and necklace.

  Woody Balogna wore his best suit, which still looked ten years old and badly in need of a cleaning. He sat at the table for the plaintiff, with a single odd-looking attorney who represented the sales force.

  Woody's lawyer was dressed in a deep blue velvet leisure suit, the kind that had gone out of style with Alan Alda, countless ages ago. A western-type string tie was pulled up against his prominent Adam's apple, cinched by a lump of turquoise big enough to be used in a shot-put contest. The man's wide-brimmed cowboy hat rested on the table before him, next to a battered slim leather case that looked like the saddle bag of an old Pony Express rider. Apparently it contained all the notes and papers he had brought to the courtroom. He had a rugged, seamed, weatherbeaten face and long flowing dark hair with a wild streak of silver in it. He looked as if he had not shaved that morning; his jaw was covered with grayish stubble.

  Mrs. Bunker's five defense attorneys all wore traditional gray flannels and Ivy League ties painted on their starched white shirts. Their faces were shaved clean and scrubbed glowing pink. They looked young, confident, yet serious. Their briefcases were huge and thicker than parachute packs. Mrs. Bee looked nervous, though, and kept glancing over her shoulder toward the door that opened onto the corridor as if the one thought in her mind was to get up and flee from the courtroom.

  Carl thought the courtroom was strangely empty, considering the importance of the case. No news reporters, no TV lights, hardly anybody in the visitors' pews at all except for the few Bunker employees and himself. And no jury. Both sides had waived their right to a jury trial; this case would be decided by Justice H. H. Fish alone, in his impartial wisdom. And then appealed, of course, by the loser. The lawyers saw the prospects of many years of high-priced work ahead of them.