Cyberbooks

by Ben Bova

  "But—"

  "No, Raymond. I will not lift a finger to help P. T. Bunker." And he clicked the phone's disconnect button.

  It won't affect me or my sales, Velour repeated to himself as he stared out across the empty bookstore. It won't affect me or my sales.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Carl was surprised to hear his own name called as the plaintiff's next witness. For a moment he felt the cold pain of fear surging through him. But then he looked the cowboy lawyer squarely in the eyes and rose to his feet. The fear burned away in the rising heat of righteousness. I'll show this hotdog what Cyberbooks is all about. I'll set them all straight. He patted his jacket pocket, where he always carried one of the Cyberbooks readers. I'll show them all.

  Swearing to a deity he did not believe to exist, Carl took the witness chair and calmly watched the lawyer approach him the way a gunfighter in the Old West might saunter up a dusty town's main street.

  "Your name?" the lawyer asked.

  "Carl Lewis."

  "Your profession?"

  "I am an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

  "That's your position," the lawyer corrected. "What is your profession?"

  "Software composer."

  "And what does that entail? What do you actually do?"

  Glancing up at the judge, who hovered over him like an implacable death's head, Carl said, "I create the software programs that make computers run. Without such programs, a computer is nothing but a box full of electronic or optical switches."

  "You make the computers actually perform, is that it?"

  "Yes."

  "You bring the machines to life."

  "Right."

  "Sort of like Dr. Frankenstein, huh?"

  Carl felt his cheeks heat up. "It's not at all—"

  But the lawyer cut him off with more questions. Soon Carl was explaining how Cyberbooks worked, and he even pulled his electro-optical reader from his jacket pocket to show the lawyer and the judge how to operate it. Justice Fish seemed fascinated with the device. The book it showed was Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, complete with dozens of beautiful full-color illustrations.

  After nearly fifteen minutes of tinkering with the Cyberbooks reader, while the lawyer and the entire courtroom waited with growing impatience, the judge finally put the device down on his banc next to his silver-plated water pitcher.

  "Exhibit A," he instructed the bailiff. Carl began to wonder if he would ever get it back.

  "Now, Mr. Lewis," the lawyer said smoothly, running a hand through his long silver-streaked hair, "just what motivated you to invent this here Cyberbook machine?"

  "What motivated me?" Carl felt puzzled.

  "Why'd you do it? What was going through your mind while you were working to perfect it? The desire for money? Wealth? Fame? A way to get promoted to full professor?"

  Shaking his head, Carl said, "None of those."

  "Then what?"

  Carl smiled slightly. The lawyer had talked himself into a trap.

  Now I can tell them the real truth, make them understand why Cyberbooks is so important.

  He took a deep breath, then began, "The main difference between human beings and other animals is our ability to communicate. Speech. Without true speech you can't have a truly intelligent species. The two most important inventions in the history of the human race were writing and printing. Writing allowed us—"

  "Mr. Lewis," intoned the judge, "spare us the history lesson and answer the question."

  Surprised, Carl said, "But I am, Your Honor."

  "The question was about your motivation for creating this invention, not about the history of the human race. Be specific."

  There was a slight commotion at the defense table. Carl saw Mrs. Bunker whispering furiously to the lawyer closest to her, who abruptly turned to the one next to him, and so on down the line until the last of the five clones got to his feet and said—rather weakly, Carl thought—"Objection, Your Honor."

  "On what grounds?" Judge Fish demanded.

  "Plaintiff's counsel asked the witness about his motivations for inventing Cyberbooks. The question permits the widest allowable interpretation. Restricting the witness to—"

  "Denied," snapped the judge. Turning to Carl, he commanded, "Restrict yourself to the time period when you were inventing the device, young man."

  Carl's guts churned with boiling hot anger. He glared at the judge, then turned back to the smirking cowboy lawyer.

  "My motivations were simple. I wanted to make this world a better place to live in."

  Carl had expected a gasp of awe from the audience. Perhaps some scattered applause. Nothing. Dead silence.

  He plunged ahead. "Books are the life blood of our society. Our racial memory. Poor people can't afford books. Kids in ghetto schools hardly ever even see a book. Certainly they don't buy any. That's because they can't afford them. Books are too expensive for poor kids. Too expensive for the poor people in Latin America and Africa and Asia. Cyberbooks will bring the cost of buying books down to the point where even the poorest of the poor can afford it."

  "But as I understand it," the lawyer said, "the reading device will cost several hundred dollars. How do you expect the poor to buy your fancy machines?"

  "The government can buy them and distribute them free, or at nominal cost. The publishing industry could even donate a certain number of them, out of the profits they'll make from Cyberbooks."

  "And then all these poor people will have to buy Cyberbooks and nothing else, is that right? You'll have them hooked on your product. Very neat."

  "They will be reading books!" Carl countered. "They will be learning. They'll be able to afford to learn, to grow, to pick themselves up and make better lives for themselves. Even people who've never learned to read will be able to use Cyberbooks that talk to you. The books themselves will teach them how to read."

  "While Bunker Books makes a fortune and corners the entire publishing industry."

  Ignoring that, Carl went on. "There's another factor here. Today the publishing industry consumes millions of acres of trees every year. Paper mills pollute the air and water around them. They contribute to the greenhouse effect and alter the world's climate. They contribute to acid rain. When the publishers turn to Cyberbooks we'll be able to stop that awful waste and make the world cleaner and greener."

  "Is that so?" The lawyer smiled craftily as he turned back toward the plaintiff's table. He opened his saddle bag and took out a slim sheaf of papers bound in a set of green covers.

  "I have here in my hand a report by the Wildlife Foundation, a respected international environmental organization." The lawyer waved the report over his head as he approached the witness box. "It says here that if the existing Canadian logging industry were to cease its operations—which they find environmentally sound, by the way—then the beaver population of the forests would undergo a population explosion that could upset the ecological balance of the entire Canadian forest system!"

  Now the audience gasped. One odd-looking fellow in a maroon suit and plaid shirt actually clapped his hands together once.

  "Far from making the world cleaner and greener," the lawyer continued, "your invention could lead to an ecological catastrophe!"

  Carl sat in stunned silence, unable to summon a word of rebuttal.

  The cowboy turned dramatically to the defense table. "Your witness."

  The middle one of the five identical mice peeped, "No questions."

  "Witness may step down. Call your next witness."

  Shakily, Carl walked away from the witness box and headed for his seat. Lori looked sad and sympathetic, waiting for him in the first row of benches. Just before he sat down, Carl heard the western lawyer boom out:

  "I call Mrs. Alba Blanca Bunker."

  "Mrs. Bunker to the stand."

  It was a nightmare. The lawyer badgered and hounded Mrs. Bee, trying to twist every word she said into an admission that Bunker Books was attempt
ing to drive thousands of innocent, hardworking men and women out of their jobs and into miserable lives of perpetual poverty.

  Mrs. Bunker, all in white as usual, seemed to shrink on the witness chair like a little girl being scolded by an unforgiving parent. Her face was so pale that Carl thought she was about to faint.

  "And isn't it true," the lawyer snarled at Mrs. Bee, "that the only reason you became interested in Cyberbooks was your vision of making huge fortunes in profits? That you didn't care if thousands of ordinary men and women were thrown out of work? That sheer, vicious greed was driving you to commit this horrible act of economic mass murder?"

  Mrs. Bunker's eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open. She was staring not at the tormenting lawyer but beyond him, at the muscular figure who had barged through the courtroom's double doors, past the startled uniformed guard there, and now strode up the aisle toward the front of the courtroom.

  Vaulting over the low rail that divided the audience from the front of the court, Pandro T. Bunker reached the cowboy before Judge Fish could even grasp his gavel. P. T. grabbed the westerner by a padded suede shoulder, whirled him around, and socked him squarely on the jaw. The lawyer sailed four feet off the ground and landed in a crumpled suede heap at the foot of the judge's banc.

  Pandemonium broke out. Alba ran to the powerful arms of her protective husband. The judge banged his gavel so hard the head broke off and fell over the edge of the banc, bopping the semiconscious lawyer on the top of his head. The audience was on its feet, pointing, laughing, roaring. The five defense attorneys were running around in circles. The news reporters stared in frozen amazement.

  And then a shot rang out.

  The Writer, standing on the wooden bench of the rearmost pew, his long topcoat flapping open to reveal a veritable arsenal of small arms, held a smoking automatic pistol over his head.

  "Nobody move!" he screamed, his scrawny face red, his eyes wild. "You're all my hostages! First one to make a move gets a bullet!"

  THE FIVE O'CLOCK NEWS

  Bobbi Burnheart elbowed her way through a phalanx of carefully coiffed and jacketed news reporters to a spot where she could be seen dramatically posed against the besieged courthouse. Behind her trailed the highly trained team of dedicated specialists who made Ms. Burnheart the most popular TV anchorperson in New York: her hairdresser, her makeup man, her wardrobe manager, and her speech coach.

  Behind them came the camera crew: two disgruntled guys in greasy coveralls carrying twelve-ounce picocameras with integrated lasers that could light Ms. Burnheart beautifully even in the stygian darkness of a sewer during a power blackout at midnight in the middle of a snowstorm; and her ostensible producer, a young and slimly beautiful black woman recently graduated from the Sorbonne who was the only person at the station naive enough to take on powerhouse Bobbi.

  La Burnheart swept a practiced eye across the facade of the courthouse, its graffiti-covered concrete now glaring with police spotlights. Several battalions of New York police, SWAT teams, FBI agents, and National Guard troops had cordoned off the courthouse.

  Bobbi Burnheart, though, daintily hiked her miniskirt up over her hips (revealing nothing except support panty hose) and clambered over the blue sawhorses that the NYPD had set up as a barrier.

  "Hey, you can't cross . . ."

  Bobbi flashed her dazzling shark's smile at the policeman pointing his stun club at her. "It's all right, Officer. Channel 50."

  "My orders . . ."

  But Bobbi had already turned to her two cameramen. "Get him on tape. Be sure to get his badge and name tag in focus."

  They grumbled but rolled twelve seconds' worth of tape. The police officer, not certain if this was a chance at fame on TV or a warning not to infringe on the First Amendment, forced a smile for the cameras and then turned and ran to find his sergeant.

  "Which windows?" Bobbi asked, now that they were in a clear space. She noted, somewhat smugly, that none of the other TV crews had dared to cross the police barricade even though she had. It confirmed her opinion of her supposed competitors. Of course, none of them had doting fathers who owned a chain of TV stations and a couple of U.S. senators.

  The black producer consulted a smudged photocopy of the courthouse's floor plan, then pointed to a row of windows on the fourth floor. "Up there—I think."

  "Good enough," said Bobbi. "Nobody will know the difference."

  For the next several minutes her team of dresser, hair stylist, and makeup man fussed over her while the two cameramen and the producer talked over the best angles to shoot. Finally Bobbi was ready. She looked splendid in her toothpaste-tube ruched and pleated kelly green dress, her golden hair shining in the glow of the police spotlights like a goddess's helmet. The cameramen knelt at her feet to make a dramatic picture of Bobbi against the courthouse facade.

  The producer put one hand to the nearly invisible communicator plugged into her left ear, cocking her head slightly to hear the voices from the control center at the station. She held up three fingers of her other hand, then two, one, and finally pointed straight at Bobbi—who instantly put on her dazzling shark's smile.

  "Inside the windows you see behind me, a courtroom drama unlike any courtroom drama you've ever seen is being played out against the lives of dozens of men and women."

  Staring earnestly into the nearer of the two picocams, she went on, "At approximately three-thirty this afternoon an unknown gunman seized courtroom number two, up there on the fourth floor, and has been holding several dozen people hostage, including the presiding judge, Justice Hanson H. Fish."

  The producer was madly scribbling prompting words on a long roll of what looked like toilet paper and holding them up for Bobbi whenever Ms. Burnheart took a breath between lines.

  "The case being tried involved the publishing industry. It was not a criminal case. No one knows who the gunman is, or what his demands are. He has released two hostages, the guard and bailiff on duty in the courtroom, but has issued no statement as to his reasons for taking the hostages or what he intends to do with them."

  Breath. New set of prompts.

  "Shortly after releasing the two men, a fusillade of shots was heard. But no one knows who has been killed, if anyone. The chances are that human bodies are bleeding inside that courtroom, while the police, the FBI, and the National Guard wait outside, trying to avoid further bloodshed, if possible."

  Breath. New set of prompts.

  "For now, all we can do is wait. And pray."

  Turning toward the courthouse, but making certain that her face was dramatically profiled against the spotlighted courthouse facade, Bobbi Burnheart ad-libbed: "Will justice be done in courtroom two?"

  TWENTY-SIX

  Carl Lewis thought of a line from the Statue of Liberty as he gazed around the courtroom. "The wretched refuse of your teeming shores."

  The courtroom looked like the steerage class of an old banana boat. Thirty-eight men and women sat, stood, sprawled in various attitudes of fear, frustration, despair, or exasperation, waiting for some unknown fate at the hands of an obvious lunatic.

  The gunman had released the two uniformed men, the bailiff and the overweight guard who was supposed to stand duty at the courtroom's entrance door. Then the news reporters, huddled along the wall opposite the empty jury box, demanded that at least one of them be released too. The gunman had lined them against the wall and then used one of his semiautomatic pistols to shoot each and every one of their laptop computers where they rested on the press table. The reporters cringed. Two of them fainted. When the smoke cleared, they gaped at the wreckage of their precious laptops. And stopped making demands.

  Shortly after the shooting, the New York Police Department, true to its standard operating procedure for hostage situations, had cut off the building's lights, heat, and water. It was not cold in the courtroom, not this early in the evening. And the police spotlights outside threw slanting beams of glaring bright light that bounced off the high ceiling and scattered an eerie ha
rsh illumination across the courtroom. The problem was water. The women were already complaining about toilet facilities. The only one that the gunman would allow them to use was in the judge's chambers, where there was no exit except through the courtroom. At least a half dozen women were lined up there constantly.

  Carl sat on the same stiff bench he had been sitting on when the gunman had seized the courtroom. His back hurt and his buttocks were numb. Lori had stretched out on the bench, looking emotionally drained, and fallen into an exhausted sleep half an hour earlier. Carl had taken off his tweed jacket and bundled it into a rough pillow that now rested under Lori's soft cheek.

  He gazed down at her, breathing the slow steady rhythm of deep sleep. She looked so beautiful, so desirable. He knew that he loved her, and he would do anything to keep her from harm, even face death itself if he had to.

  The gunman was up at the judge's chair, peering out at the windows that glared with police spotlights. He had taken off his shabby topcoat and spread his arsenal of pistols and submachine guns across the top of the judge's banc. Since he had taken over the courtroom nearly three hours earlier, he had spoken hardly a word.

  Ralph Malzone and Scarlet Dean had moved toward the rear of the courtroom, where they sat with their arms wrapped protectively around one another. Mr. and Mrs. Bunker were at the defense table, holding hands and speaking in low, earnest whispers. P. T. Junior had moved from the back of the courtroom to sit with his parents. The five defense attorneys were under the table, cowering.

  "Well, son, I don't know how long you intend to hold us here," the cowboy lawyer called to the gunman, "but sooner or later you're gonna need a good defense attorney." He got up from his chair at the plaintiff's table and reached into the breast pocket of his suede jacket.