Cyberbooks (11 page)
SUMMER,
BOOK II
THE WRITER
It was a blazing hot July day, the kind of molten heat and humidity that drives even the mildest man to thoughts of murder. An Ed McBain day in the city, where the detectives of the eighty-seventh precinct knew that each ring of the phone meant another body had met a meat cleaver.
The Writer had found a job. Not in the city. He could no more afford to live in Manhattan than he could fly to the moon by flapping his arms. His job, and his miserable one-room apartment, were in New Jersey. He could see Manhattan's skyline every day; see the myriad gleaming lights of the city each night. But he was separated from it by a river of poverty whose current was too strong for him to cross.
He worked in the warehouse of Webb Press, one of the dispensable men who were not supposed to be there, but who were needed because the automated machinery could not do what it had been designed to do, and ordinary expendable human beings were required to carry out the work of the imperfect machines.
Twice in the past month he had almost been killed by heavy cases of books falling from the wobbly overhead conveyor belts. Six times he and his fellow nonentities had spent whole work shifts searching the entire warehouse for cartons of books that had been misplaced by the robots. On one frightening occasion the entire workforce had to battle a robot that resisted having a truckload of books taken out to the loading dock. Somehow the robot got it into its minuscule electronic brain that its job was to protect the huge crates from being moved. While the Japanese-American foreman screamed in two languages, the men risked injury and death to duck beneath the robot's menacing arms, pry off its access panel, and turn it off.
Now the Writer worked at the most thankless job of them all: the furnace. Another stroke of some architect's genius, the furnace burned the books that were returned from the stores unsold. In the brilliant design of the automated warehouse, the furnace supplied heat for the winter months and electricity all year long. During the summer the electricity not only powered the lights and computers, it ran the air-conditioning system.
But the heat of the burning books overburdened the air-conditioning system, so the computer program that ran the warehouse's environmental controls shut down the air-conditioning and there was no way to override its dogmatic decision. The supervisors up in their control booth sneaked in a few room-sized air conditioners for themselves. The men and machines on the warehouse floor worked in summer's heat—supplemented by the flames of the book-burning furnace.
The Writer knew that he was going mad. He spent his days shovelling paperback books into the furnace's hungry red fire. He worked stripped down to his shorts, sweat streaming along his scrawny ribs and lanky arms and legs, blurring his vision. The heat made him feel dizzy, crazy. Like O'Neill's Hairy Ape, he began to shout aloud, "Who makes the warehouse work? I do! Who makes the publishing industry work? I do!"
The other men on the warehouse floor started to avoid him.
But the Writer never noticed, never cared. He knew that he was right. If these books were not destroyed there would be no room for the new books coming off the presses. The whole industry would grind to a halt, strangled to death on a glut of books. So he shoveled the paperbacks into the flames: romance novels, westerns, mysteries, cookbooks, diet books, revealing biographies, lying autobiographies, books about God, about sin, about how to get rich in just ninety days. He scooped them all up in his heavy black shovel and threw them into the baleful blood-red fiery furnace.
These were the bad books, the books that did not sell, the books that had been returned to the warehouse by the stores and the distributors. Some of the books had been on store shelves for all of a week, some less. Some had never gotten to the shelves; their cartons came back to the warehouse unopened.
The Writer giggled as he worked. He cackled. These were
other writers'
books! If only he could burn enough of them, he told himself, there might one day be room in the world for his own book to be published. He scooped and threw, scooped and threw, making room for his own book and cackling madly all the while.
"Bad books! Bad books!"
Meanwhile, at the far end of the warehouse one of the robots trundled a newly opened carton of books to the inspection station next to the loading dock.
"Malfunction," it said in its limited vocabulary. "Malfunction."
The human inspector looked inside the box and turned pale.
THIRTEEN
Carl Lewis's life was being dominated by three strong women, and he was not certain that he disliked it.
Since that brief, weird moment nearly three months earlier when he had met P. T. Bunker and the great man had okayed the project—and named it—Carl had become a full-time consultant to Bunker Books. That is, he worked for the company exclusively but was not entitled to any of the fringe benefits or government-ordained insurance that a regular employee received.
That did not matter to Carl one whit. He was being paid handsomely enough to afford a three-room apartment for himself, in the same Gramercy Park building that Lori lived in. He worked all day every day of the week and most of every night. His social life consisted of an occasional lunch with Lori, or a dinner with Scarlet Dean, who insisted on being kept up-to-date on the Cyberbooks project.
Cyberbooks.
Carl liked the name that Bunker had come up with; he did not realize that it was Ralph Malzone's original idea. Nor did it occur to him that the name was now formally registered as a trademark belonging to Bunker Books, Inc. Carl just plugged away at the task of turning his prototype into a device that could be manufactured as inexpensively as possible, while still maintaining quality and reliability. His goal was to have the device on sale nationwide for the Christmas buying season, priced at less than $200.
It was at one of the dinners Scarlet Dean insisted on that he first heard about the cruise.
"Cruise?" Carl almost sputtered out the salad he had been chewing. "Why do I have to go on a cruise?"
They were in the Argenteuil, one of the oldest and finest restaurants of Manhattan. Although it seemed to be Scarlet's favorite place, the restaurant always made Carl feel uneasy. An expense account restaurant, like so many in midtown Manhattan. Too formal and grand for his simple tastes. The maitre d' always made Carl feel as if he were a shabby hobo who had drifted into the restaurant by mistake, even when he wore the new suit that Scarlet had sent him and his formal shirt with the blue MIT tie painted on it.
Daintily spearing an ear of asparagus, Scarlet replied, "It's the company sales meeting. We've rented out the ocean liner for the week."
"A week? I can't take a week off. . . ."
Scarlet smiled soothingly and touched his hand with her own. "Relax, Carl. Relax. You won't have to take the time off your work. I know how important it is. It's vital! We'll fix you up with a workshop and a satellite communications link to the office here in New York."
Somewhat relieved, he muttered, "I've also got to be able to work with the guys in the factory."
"That too," Scarlet assured him. "Interactive picture, voice and data links. Don't worry about it."
But he replied, "I still don't see why I have to go. Why can't I stay here?"
"Two reasons: First, Mrs. Bunker will be on the cruise, and she doesn't want you to be out of her sight."
"Really?"
"Really. Second, the whole sales force will be aboard. We'll need you to demonstrate the Cyberbooks hardware to them. And it will be good for you to meet them all informally, talk with them, get them pumped up about Cyberbooks."
"Hmm. I suppose so," he admitted grudgingly.
"And besides," said Scarlet, "think how much fun it will be to be out on the ocean for a whole week. It's very romantic, you know."
He nodded absently. "Will Lori be there, too?"
Her smile fading just a little, Scarlet said, "Yes, of course. The whole editorial staff will be aboard."
*
Sitting at the bottom of his swimming pool, P. Curtis Hawks made two telephone calls that night. Although he was certain that all the phones in his expansive Westchester home had been bugged by the Old Man's minions, he had obtained a surplus U.S. Navy underwater communications system from a Washington friend in the munitions business. In his fishbowl helmet and wet suit, breathing canned air that smelled faintly of machine oil and carcinogenic plastic, Hawks knew that the ultralow frequency of this communications equipment was beyond the range of the Old Man's tapping.
His first call was to Scarlet Dean, at a prearranged time and place: the ladies' room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel lobby, at precisely ten minutes before midnight. A little square area of his glass helmet glowed with strangely shifting colors, then her face came into focus two inches in front of his nose.
"Good evening, Ms. Dean."
She frowned slightly. "Your voice sounds strange. Like you're in an echo chamber or something. Are those bubbles coming out of your ear?"
"Never mind that," Hawks snapped. "What's going on over there?"
"The entire sales and editorial staffs will be on the cruise. And I've talked Mrs. Bunker into bringing young Tom Edison along, too."
"Tom Edison? Who in hell is—"
"The Cyberbooks inventor, Carl Lewis."
"Oh."
"They'll all be on the ship together. There's talk that P. T. Bunker will be coming along, too, but so far that's just unconfirmed rumor."
"Christ. If I had a submarine or a cruise missile I could wipe out the whole company."
"Not before I get the complete data for the Cyberbooks machine," Scarlet said.
Hawks nodded inside his helmet. "Yes. Right." Then a brilliant thought occurred to him. "
You
could sink the ship and get away in a lifeboat with the device!"
She seemed startled for a moment, but she quickly composed herself. "Mr. Hawks, I'm an editor first, and a spy for you second. I am not an underwater demolitions expert."
"Yes, of course, I understand," he mumbled, his mind filled with visions of the
Titanic
slipping beneath the ice-choked waves. He saw Bunker and his whole staff huddled on the slanting deck while the orchestra played "Nearer My God to Thee." Refuse to sell out to us, will you? Then down you go, Bunker, you and all your flunkies, down to a watery grave.
"Mr. Hawks?" Scarlet Dean's insistent voice broke into his fantasy.
"Eh? What?"
"You were—cackling, sir."
"Nonsense!" he snapped. "Must be something wrong with this phone link."
She said nothing.
"Get me the data on that Cyberbooks machine as quickly as you can. I don't care if you're in the middle of the ocean, as soon as you have the machine in your hands or a copy of its circuitry, send it to me over the special Tarantula communications satellite."
"Yes, sir," she replied. "Of course."
"Don't call me otherwise. I'll call you each night at this time."
Scarlet nodded and cut their link. The tiny picture of her face winked out, leaving Hawks nothing to see but the blue-green haze of his swimming pool, lit by its underwater lights. He sat at the bottom of the pool for several minutes, the only sound coming from the frothy bubbles of his breathing apparatus.
As soon as she transmits the data on the Cyberbooks device, I could sink the damned ship and be rid of Bunker altogether. And all the evidence. Then I could present the Cyberbooks concept as my own to the board of directors. If the Old Man is still around, that by itself should be enough to remove him and put me at the top of the heap.
He resolved to find a reliable terrorist group that had access to speedboats and anti-shipping missiles. Maybe some of the Atlantic City boys, he mused. Didn't they sink a gambling ship that refused to pay them protection, a few years back?
At precisely ten minutes after midnight Hawks made his second phone call. The miniature image of Vinnie DeAngelo's beefy face screwed up in amazement.
"Gee, you look funny, Mr. Hawks. Like your nose is too close to th' camera, you know?"
"Never mind that. How are you coming along on the special project?"
The Beast's eyes evaded Hawks's. "Like I told you, this is a tough one. I been dopin' it out, but it don't look no easier than when I started. He's got snakes, for Chrissakes. Poison snakes."
"He doesn't stay in his office all the time. He goes home to his apartment."
"Yeah, but he takes th' snakes with him. His chauffeur got bit a couple days ago. Damn near killed him."
Exasperated, Hawks snapped, "Then find a mongoose!"
"Huh? A what?"
"Never mind. Keep working at it. There's got to be a weak link in the Old Man's defenses. He's a senile cripple, for god's sake. There's
got
to be a way to get to him."
"Not while all those snakes are sneakin' around." The Beast shuddered.
Hawks fumed silently. "Stay with it. And, by the way, Vinnie, who was that outfit that sank the gambling boat off Atlantic City a few years ago?"
"Oh, you mean my cousin Guido."
*
Alba Blanca Bunker allowed the chauffeur to help her out of the long white limousine and stepped onto the concrete surface of the massive dock. It was a gray, mean, John O'Hara kind of day in New York, threatening rain. But there alongside the shabby, deteriorating two-story passenger terminal rose the magnificently sweeping lines of the SS
New Amsterdam,
the cruise liner that would carry them off on a week-long jaunt on the sunny ocean. She took a deep breath of tangy salt air. Actually, the tang in the air was from a garbage barge being hauled down the Hudson River by a chuffing tugboat.
Alba felt thrilled anyway. For more than a year she had been working on the dozens of different strings that led to this moment. Now everything seemed to be in place. The Cyberbooks project had reached the point where they could brief the sales force. The medical specialists had agreed to come along on the cruise on a contingency fee basis. And P. T. himself would arrive soon.
In fact, there he was! Alba saw the blue-and-white helicopter loaned for the occasion by the American Express office droning purposefully against the gray sky up the river toward the pier. She knew that P. T. did not like to fly, did not like to leave the womblike safety of his office and bedroom, but she hoped that the panoramic view of lower Manhattan and the harbor would inspire him and be the first step toward reinvigorating her husband, the man she loved.
He needs this ocean voyage, she told herself for the millionth time. I'm doing this for him.
She watched as the helicopter settled briefly on the roof of the passenger terminal, its big rotors
whooshing
up a clatter of dust and grit. Even from this distance she recognized P. T., stuffed into his muscle suit and a double-breasted blazer topped by a jaunty white yachting cap. He scurried quickly up the special gangplank and into the ship without turning to see if his wife was watching. The chopper took off again, as though eager to hurry back to its ordained task of hunting down deadbeats with overdue bills.
Alba had suppressed her sudden urge to wave to him, knowing how silly it would look to the other people gathering on the pier. She turned to the chauffeur and ordered him to begin unloading her voluminous trunks and suitcases. P. T. was safely ensconced in their private suite; the medical specialists and the rest of the company could begin boarding the ship now.