Ben Bova - The Starcrossed

Morgan went to the men’s room, threw up as he always did after one of these extended bull-flinging lunches, cleaned himself up, then found a phonebooth out near the bar. He sat down, closed the door firmly, and punched out Ron Gabriel’s number.

It was busy. With a sigh, Morgan punched Gabriel’s private number. Also busy. With a deeper sigh, he tried the writer’s ultraprivate “hot line” number. He can’t be carrying on three conversations at once . Morgan realized it was more a fond hope than a statement of fact.

A sultry brunette appeared on the tiny screen. “Mr. Gabriel’s line,” she moaned.

“Uh…” With a distant part of his mind, Morgan was pleased that he could still be shaken up by apparitions such as this one. “Is, uh, Mr. Gabriel there? This is Jerry Morgan, his agent.”

“I’ll see, Mr. Morgan,” she breathed.

The screen went gray for an instant, then Gabriel’s hardbitten features came on the tiny screen.

“Well? How’d it go?”

Morgan said, “I just finished having lunch with Les Montpelier…”

“God, you sound awful!” Gabriel said.

“I did a lot of talking.”

Gabriel’s face fell. “They don’t want the show. They hated the idea.”

“I talked it all out with Montpelier,” Morgan said. “Finger’s read the poopsheet and…” He hesitated.

“And?”

It was criminal to tease Gabriel, but Morgan got the chance so seldom.

“And what?” Gabriel demanded, his voice rising.

“And… well, I don’t know how to say it, Ron, so I might as well make it straight from the shoulder.”

Gabriel gritted his teeth.

“They’re buying it. We talk money tomorrow.”

For an instant, nothing happened. No change in Gabriel’s facing-the-firing-squad expression. Then his jaw dropped open and his eyes popped.

“What?” he squawked. “ They bought it? ” He leaped out of view of the phone’s fixed camera, then reappeared some ten meters further away. He jumped up and down. “They bought itl They bought it! Ha-ha! They bought it! Those birdbrains bought it!”

The sultry brunette, another girl whom Morgan vaguely remembered as Gabriel’s typist and a third woman rushed into the room. Gabriel was still bounding all over the place, crowing with delight.

With the smile of a man who’s put in a hard but successful day’s work, Morgan clicked off the phone and started on his way home.

Sheldon Fad lay awake, staring at the ceiling as the sun rose over the Santa Monica Hills. Gloria snored lightly beside him, a growing mountain of flesh.

The baby was due in another month or so and Gloria had been no fun at all since she had found herself pregnant. No fun at all. Zero. Sheldon wondered, at quiet times like this, if it was really his baby that she was carrying. After all, she got pregnant suspiciously fast after moving in with him.

He frowned to himself. It all seemed so macho at first. An actress and dancer, lithe and exciting, Gloria had attached herself to Sheldon’s arm when she could have gone with any guy in Los Angeles. They were all after her. He had ignored the stories about the vast numbers who had succeeded in their quest. That was all finished, she had told him tearfully, the night she moved in. All she wanted was him.

Yeah , Sheldon told himself. Just me . And a roof over her head. And not having to go to work. And a two-pound box of chocolates every day. And her underwear dripping in the bathtub every time he tried to take a shower. And her makeup littered all over the bathroom, the bedroom, even in the refrigerator.

A bolt, as the song says, of fear went through him as he realized that in a month—probably less—there’d be an infant sharing this one-bedroom apartment with them. What did Shakespeare say about infants? Mewling and puking. Yeah. And dirty diapers. A crib in the corner next to the bed; Gloria had already mentioned that.

Shit! Sheldon knew he had to get out of it. He turned his head on the pillow and gazed sternly at Gloria’s face, serene and deeply asleep. It’s not my kid , he told himself savagely. It’s not!

And what if it is? another part of his mind asked. You didn’t want it. She told you she was fixed. You believe her? And her line about hemophilia, so she can’t have an abortion? Even if it is your kid, you didn’t ask for this.

He sat up in bed, fuming to himself. Gloria didn’t move a muscle, execpt to breathe. Her belly made a giant mound in the bedsheet.

No sense trying to go back to sleep. He swung his legs out of the bed and got to his feet. Stretching, he felt his vertebrae pop and heard himself grunt with the pain-pleasure that goes with it. He padded into the bathroom.

Twenty minutes later he was booming down the Freeway, heading for the Titanic Tower, listening to the early morning news:

“…and smog levels will be at their usual moderate to heavy concentrations, depending on location, as the morning traffic builds up. Today’s smog scent will be jasmine…”

It was still clear enough to see where you were driving. The automatic Freeway guidance system hadn’t turned on yet. Music came on the radio and began to soothe Sheldon slightly. Then; he saw the Titanic Tower rising impressively from the Valley.

“I’ll ask Murray what to do,” Sheldon said to himself. “Murray will know.”

It was still hours before most of the work force would stream into the Tower. Sheldon nodded grimly to the bored guards sitting at the surveillance station in the lobby. They were surrounded by an insect’s eye of fifty TV screens showing every conceivable entryway into the building.

As Sheldon passed the guard, a solitary TV screen built into the wall alongside the main elevator bank flashed the words:

GOOD MORNING MR. FAD. YOU’RE IN QUITE EARLY.

“Good morning, Murray,” said Sheldon Fad. Then he punched the button for an elevator.

The Multi-Unit Reactive Reasoning and Analysis Yoke was rather more than just another business computer. In an industry where insecurity is a major driving force and more money has been spent on psychoanalyses than scripts, Murray was inevitable. One small segment of the huge computer’s capacity was devoted to mundane chores such as handling accounts and sorting out bills and paychecks. Most of the giant computer complex was devoted to helping executives make business decisions. It was inevitable that the feedback loops in the computer’s basic programming—the “Reactive Reasoning” function— would eventually come to be used as a surrogate psychotechnician, advisor and father confessor by Titanic’s haggard executives.

Sheldon Fad didn’t think of Murray as a machine. Murray was someone you could talk to, just like he talked to so many other people on the phone without ever meeting them in the flesh. Murray was kindly, sympathetic, and damned smart. He had helped Sheldon over more than one business-emotional crisis.

Well, there was one machine-like quality to Murray that Sheldon recognized. And appreciated. His memory could be erased. And was, often. It made for a certain amount of repetition when you talked to Murray, but that was better than running the risk of having someone else “accidentally” listen to your conversations. Someone like Bernard Finger, who wasn’t above such things, despite the privacy laws.

In all, talking to Murray was like talking to a wise and friendly old uncle. A forgetful uncle, because of the erasures. But somehow that made Murray seem all the more human. He even adapted his speech patterns to fit comfortably with the user’s style of speaking.

At precisely 7:32 Sheldon plopped tiredly into his desk chair. He felt as if he’d been working nonstop for forty days and nights. He took a deep breath, held it for twenty heartbeats, then exhaled through his mouth. He punched buttons on his desk-side console for orange juice and vitamin supplements. A small wall panel slid open, a soft chime sounded and the cold cup and pills were waiting for him.