Ben Bova - Cyberbooks.pdf - Ben Bova - margozap

CYBERBOOKS

by BEN BOVA

MURDER ONE

The first murder took place in a driving April rainstorm, at the corner of

Twenty-first Street and Gramercy Park West.

Mrs. Agatha Marple, eighty-three years of age, came tottering uncertainly down

the brownstone steps of her town house, the wind tugging at her ancient red

umbrella. She had telephoned for a taxi to take her downtown to meet her

nephew for lunch, as she had every Monday afternoon for the past fourteen

years.

The Yellow Cab was waiting at the curb, its driver imperturbably watching the

old lady struggle with the wind and her umbrella from the dry comfort of his

armored seat behind the bulletproof partition that separated him from the

potential homicidal maniacs who were his customers. The meter was humming to

itself, a sound that counterbalanced nicely the drumming of rain on the cab's

roof; the fare was already well past ten dollars. He had punched the

destination into the cab's guidance computer: Webb Press, just off Washington

Square. A lousy five-minute drive; the computer, estimating the traffic at

this time of day and the weather conditions, predicted the fare would be no

more than forty-nine fifty.

Briefly he thought about taking the old bat for the scenic tour along the

river; plenty of traffic there to slow them down and run up the meter. Manny

at the garage had bypassed the automated alarm systems in all the cab's

meters, so the fares never knew when the drivers deviated from the computer's

optimum guidance calculations. But this old bitch was too smart for that; she

would refuse to pay and insist on complaining to the hack bureau on the two-

way. He had driven her before, and she was no fool, despite her age. She was a

lousy tipper, too.

She finally got to the cab and tried to close the umbrella and open the door

at the same time. The driver grinned to himself. One of his little revenges on

the human race: keep the doors locked until after they try to get in. They

break their fingernails, at least. One guy sprained his wrist so bad he had to

go to the hospital.

Finally the cabbie pecked the touchpad that unlocked the right rear door. It

flew open and nearly knocked the old broad on her backside. A gust of wet wind

flapped her gray old raincoat.

"Hey, c'mon, you're gettin' rain inside my cab," the driver hollered into his

intercom microphone.

Before the old lady could reply, a man in a dark blue trenchcoat and matching

fedora pulled down low over his face splashed through the curbside puddles and

grabbed for the door.

"I'm in a hurry," he muttered, trying to push the old woman out of the taxi's

doorway.

"How dare you!" cried Mrs. Marple, with righteous anger.

"Go find a garbage can to pick in," snarled the man, and he twisted Mrs.

Marple's hand off the door handle.

She yelped with pain, then swatted at the man with her umbrella,

ineffectually. The man blocked her feeble swing, yanked the umbrella out of

her grasp, and knocked her to the pavement. She lay there in a puddle, rain

pelting her, gasping for breath.

The man raised her red umbrella high over his head, grasping it in both his

gloved hands. The old woman's eyes went wide, her mouth opened to scream but

no sound came out. Then the man drove the umbrella smashingly into her chest

like someone would pound a stake through a vampire's heart.

The old lady twitched once and then lay still, the umbrella sticking out of

her withered chest like a sword. The man looked down at her, nodded once as if

satisfied with his work, and then stalked away into the gray windswept rain.

True to the finest traditions of New York's hack drivers, the cabbie put his

taxi in gear and drove away, leaving the old woman dead on the sidewalk. He

never said a word about the incident to anyone.

ONE

IT was a Hemingway kind of day: clean and bright and fine, sky achingly blue,

sun warm enough to make a man sweat. A good day for facing the bulls or

hunting rhino.

Carl Lewis was doing neither. In the air-conditioned comfort of the Amtrak

Levitrain, he was fast asleep and dreaming of books that sang to their

readers.

The noise of the train plunging into a long, dark tunnel startled him from his

drowse. He had begun the ride that morning in Boston feeling excited, eager.

But as the train glided almost silently along the New England countryside,

levitated on its magnetic guideway, the warm sunshine of May streaming through

the coach's window combined with the slight swaying motion almost

hypnotically. Carl dozed off, only to be startled awake by the sudden roar of

entering the tunnel.

His ears popped. The ride had seemed dreamily slow when it started, but now

that he was actually approaching Penn Station it suddenly felt as if things

were happening too fast. Carl felt a faint inner unease, a mounting

nervousness, butterflies trembling in his middle. He put it down to the

excitement of starting a new job, maybe a whole new career.

Now, as the train roared through the dark tunnel and his ears hurt with the

change in air pressure, Carl realized that what he felt was not mere

excitement. It was apprehension. Anxiety. Damned close to outright fear. He

stared at the reflection of his face in the train window: clear of eye, firm

of jaw, sandy hair neatly combed, crisp new shirt with its blue MIT necktie

painted down its front, proper tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches. He

looked exactly as a brilliant young software composer should look. Yet he felt

like a scared little kid.

The darkness of the tunnel changed abruptly to the glaring lights of the

station. The train glided toward a crowded platform, then screeched

horrifyingly down the last few hundred yards of its journey on old-fashioned

steel wheels that struck blazing sparks against old-fashioned steel rails. A

lurch, a blinking of the light strips along the ceiling, and the train came to

a halt.

With the hesitancy known only to New Englanders visiting Manhattan for the

first time, Carl Lewis slid his garment bag from the rack over his seat and

swung his courier case onto his shoulder. The other passengers pushed past

him, muttering and grumbling their way off the train. They shoved Carl this

way and that until he felt like a tumbleweed caught in a cattle stampede.

Welcome to New York, he said to himself as the stream of detraining passengers

dumped him impersonally, indignantly, demeaningly, on the concrete platform.

The station was so big that Carl felt as if he had shrunk to the size of an

insect. People elbowed and stamped their way through the throngs milling

around; the huge cavern buzzed like a beehive. Carl felt tension in the air,

the supercharged crackling high-stress electricity of the Big Apple.

Panhandlers in their traditional grubby rags shambled along, each of them

displaying the official city begging permit badge. Grimy bag ladies screamed

insults at the empty air. Teenaged thugs in military fatigues eyed the crowds

like predators looking for easy prey. Religious zealots in saffron robes, in

severe black suits and string ties, even in mock space suits complete with

bubble helmets, sought alms and converts. Mostly alms. Police robots stood

immobile, like fat little blue fireplugs, while the tides of noisy, smelly,

angry, scampering humanity flowed in every direction at once. The noise was a

bedlam of a million individual voices acting out their private dramas. The

station crackled with fierce, hostile anxiety.

Carl took a deep breath, clutched his garment bag tighter, and clamped his arm

closely over the courier case hanging from his shoulder. He avoided other

people's eyes almost as well as a native Manhattanite, and threaded his way

through the throngs toward the taxi stand outside, successfully evading the

evangelists, the beggars, the would-be muggers, and the flowing tide of

perfectly ordinary citizens who would knock him down and mash him flat under

their scurrying shoes if he so much as missed a single step.

There were no cabs, only a curbside line of complaining jostling men and women

waiting for taxis. A robot dispatcher, not unlike the robot cops inside the

station, stood impassively at the head of the line. While the police robots

were blue, the taxi dispatcher's aluminum skin was anodized yellow, faded and

chipped, spattered here and there with mud and other substances Carl preferred

not to think about.

Every few minutes a taxi swerved around the corner on two wheels and pulled up

to the dispatcher's post with a squeal of brakes. One person would get in and

the line would inch forward. Finally Carl was at the head of the line.

"I beg your pardon, sir. Are you going uptown or downtown?" asked the man

behind Carl.

"Uh, uptown-no, downtown." Carl had to think about Manhattan's geography.

"Excellent! Would you mind if I shared a cab with you? I'm late for an

important appointment. I'll pay the entire fare."

The man was tiny, much shorter than Carl, and quite slim. He was the kind of

delicate middle-aged man for whom the word dapper had been coined. He wore a

conservative silver-gray business suit; the tie painted down the front of his

shirt looked hand done and expensive. He was carrying a blue trenchcoat over

one arm despite the gloriously sunny spring morning. Silver-gray hair clipped

short, a toothy smile that seemed a bit forced on his round, wrinkled face.

Prominent ears, watery brownish eyes. He appeared harmless enough.

The big brown eyes were pleading silently. Carl did not know how to refuse.

"Uh, yeah, sure, okay."

"Oh, thank you! I'm late already." The man glanced at his wristwatch, then

stared down the street as if he could make a cab appear by sheer willpower.

A taxi finally did come, and they both got into it.

"Bunker Books," said Carl.

The taxi driver said something that sounded like Chinese. Or maybe Sanskrit.

"Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street," said Carl's companion, very slowly and

loudly. "The Synthoil Tower."

The cabbie muttered to himself and punched the address into his dashboard

computer. The electronic map on the taxi's control board showed a route in

bright green that seemed direct enough. Carl sat back and tried to relax.

But that was impossible. He was sitting in a Manhattan taxicab with a total

stranger who obviously knew the city well. Carl looked out the window on his

side of the cab. The sheer emotional energy level out there in the streets was

incredible. Manhattan vibrated. It hummed and crackled with tension and

excitement. It made Boston seem like a placid country retreat. Hordes of

people swarmed along the sidewalks and streamed across every intersection.

Taxis by the hundreds weaved through the traffic like an endless yellow snake,

writhing and coiling around the big blue steam buses that huffed and chuffed

along the broad avenue.

The women walking along the sidewalks were very different from Boston women.

Their clothes were the absolutely latest style, tiny hip-hugging skirts and

high leather boots, leather motorcycle jackets heavy with chains and lovingly

contrived sweat stains. Most of the women wore their biker helmets with the

visor down, a protection against mugging and smog as well as the latest

fashion. The helmets had radios built into them, Carl guessed from the small

whip antennas bobbing up from them. A few women went boldly bareheaded,

exposing their long hair and lovely faces to Carl's rapt gaze.

The cab stopped for a red light and a swarm of earnest-looking men and women

boiled out of the crowd on the sidewalk to begin washing the windshield,

polishing the grillwork, waxing the fenders. Strangely, they wore well-pressed

business suits and starched formal shirts with corporate logos on their

painted ties. The taxi driver screamed at them through his closed windows, but

they ignored his Asian imprecations and, just as the light turned green again,

affixed a green sticker to the lower left-hand corner of the windshield.

"Unemployed executives," explained Carl's companion, "thrown out of work by

automation in their offices."

"Washing cars at street corners?" Carl marvelled.

"It's a form of unemployment benefit. The city allows them to earn money this

way, rather than paying them a dole. They each get a franchise at a specific

street corner, and the cabbie must pay their charge or lose his license."

Carl shook his head in wonderment. In Boston you just stood in line all day

for a welfare check.

"Bunker Books," mused his companion. "What a coincidence."

Carl turned his attention to the gray-haired man sitting beside him.

"Imagine the statistical chance that two people standing next to one another

in line waiting for a taxi would have the same destination," the dapper older

man said.

"You're going to Bunker Books, too?" Carl could not hide his surprise.

"To the same address," said the older man. "My destination is in the same

building: the Synthoil Tower." He glanced worriedly at the gleaming gold band

of his wristwatch. "And if we don't get through this traffic I am going to be

late for a very important appointment."

The taxi driver apparently could hear their every word despite the bulletproof

partition between him and the rear seat. He hunched over his wheel, muttering

in some foreign language, and lurched the cab across an intersection despite a

clearly red traffic light and the shrill whistling of a brown-uniformed

auxiliary traffic policewoman. They swerved around an oncoming delivery truck

and scattered half a dozen pedestrians scampering across the intersection.

Carl and his companion were tossed against one another on the backseat. The

man's blue trenchcoat slid to the filthy floor of the cab with an odd thunking

sound.

"Who's your appointment with?" Carl asked, inwardly surprised at questioning a

total stranger so brazenly and with poor grammar, at that.

The older man seemed unperturbed by either gaffe as he retrieved his

trenchcoat. "Tarantula Enterprises, Limited. Among other things, Tarantula

owns Webb Press, a competitor of Bunker's, I should think."

Carl shrugged. "I don't know much about the publishing business."

"Ahh. You must be a writer."

"Nosir. I'm a software composer."

The rabbity older man made a puzzled frown. "You're in the clothing business?"

"I'm a computer engineer. I design software programs."

"Computers! That is interesting. Is Bunker revamping its inventory control

system? Or its royalty accounting system?"

With a shake of his head, Carl replied, "Something completely different."

"Oh?"

Ben Bova - Cyberbooks.pdf

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