Ben Bova - The Starcrossed

To Cordwainer Bird…

May he fly high and strike terror in the hearts of the unjust.

“American ingenuity licked the pollution problem;” said Bernard Finger, glowingly. “And the energy arms too, by damn.”

Tamed and golden in his new Vitaform Process body, Finger was impeccably dressed in the latest neo Victorian style Bengal Lancer business suit, complete with epaulets and an authentic brigadier’s insignia. He stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his sumptuous, spacious office and gazed fondly out at the lovely pink clouds that blanketed the San Fernando Valley.

The late morning tan blazed out of a perfect blue sky. As far as me eye could see, the entire Greater Los Angeles area—from sparkling sea to the San Berdoo Mountains—was swathed in, perfumed, tinted clouds. Except for a few hilltops poking up tam and there, it all looked like one enormous dollop of pink cotton candy.

“American ingenuity,” Bernard Mugger repeated. “And American know-how! That’s how we beat those Arabs and those bleeding heart conservationists.”

Bill Oxnard watched Finger with some astonishment from his utterly comfortable position, sunk deep into a warmly plush waterchair. Surrounded by pleasantly yielding artificial hides, his loafers all but invisible in the thick pile of the office’s carpet, he still kept his attention on Finger.

It was uncanny. Oxnard had met the man eighteen months earlier, before he had gone in for the Vitaform Process. Then he had been a short, pudgy, bald, cigar. chewing loudmouth approaching sixty years of age. Now he looked like Cary Grant in costume for Gunga Din . But he still sounded like a short, pudgy, bald, cigar-chewing loudmouth.

The lovely pink clouds that Finger was admiring were smog, of course. Oxnard had driven from his lab in the Malibu Hills through thirty miles of the gunk to get to Finger’s lofty office. Sure, the smog was tinted and even perfumed, but you still needed noseplugs to survive fifty yards of the stuff and the price of them had gone up to eighteen-fifty a set. They only lasted a couple of weeks, at most. The cost of breathing keeps going up , he told himself.

Oxnard’s mind was wandering off into the equations that governed photochemical smog when Finger turned from the window and strode to his airport-sized desk.

“It makes me proud,” he pronounced, “to think of all the hard work that American men and women have put out to conquer the problems we faced when I was a kid”

As Finger sat in the imposing chrome and black leather chair behind his desk, Oxnard glanced at the two others in the room: Finger’s assistants. The man was lean and athletic looking, with a carefully trimmed red beard. The woman was also slim; she hid much of her face behind old-fashioned bombardier’s glasses. Her longish hair was also red, the same shade as the man’s. Red hair was in this week.

They both stared fixedly at their boss, eager for every word.

“A hundred and sixty-seven floors below us,” Finger went on, “down in that perfumed pink environment we’ve created for them, ordinary American men and women are hard at work. You can’t see them from up here, but they’re working, believe me. I know. I can feel them working. They’re the backbone of America… the spinal column of our nation.”

They’re working, all right , Oxnard thought. Every morning he stared with dismay at the black waves of the Pacific turgidly lapping the blacker beaches, while the oil rigs lining the ocean shore busily sucked up more black gold.

“Men and women hard at work,” Finger went on, almost reverently. “And when they come home from their labors, they want to be entertained. They demand to be entertained. And they deserve the best we can give them.”

The woman dabbed at her eyes. The man, Les Something-or-Other, nodded and muttered, “With it, B.F.”

Finger smiled. He carefully placed his palms down on the immaculately glistening, bare desktop. Leaning forward ever so slightly he suddenly bellowed:

“So how come we don’t have one single top-rated series on The Tube? How come? ”

Les actually leaned back in his chair. The woman looked startled, but never wavered from staring straight at Finger. Oxnard’ almost thought he could feel a shock wave blow across the room.

With the touch of a button, Finger projected a column of names and numbers on a wall where a Schoenheer had been hanging.

“Look at the top ten!” he roared. “Do you see a Titanic Productions series? Not Look at the top twenty. The list grew longer. “The top fifty…” And longer.

Les Montpelier, that’s his name , Oxnard remembered. He seemed to be trying to sink deeper into his waterchair. He slumped further and further into its luxurious folds, pulling in his chin until his beard scraped his chest. The woman was just the opposite: she perched on the edge of her chair, all nerves, fists knotted on knees. Nice legs .

Finger flashed more lists on the screen. And pictures. All two-dimensional, Oxnard noted. Everything about the room was two-dimensional. Flat paintings on the walls. Flat desktop dominating the decor. The waterchairs were sort of three-dimensional, but only to the tactile sense. They looked, just as flat as everything else. All planes and angles. Nothing holographic. Even the woman wasn’t as three-dimensional as she should be, despite her legs.

It was a pleasant enough office, though. Brightly colored carpeting and draperies. Everything soft looking, even the padded walls. Up here on the one hundred and sixty-seventh, floor of the Titanic Tower they never had to worry about, smog or noise or dust. The air was pristine, cool, urged smoothly through the sealed offices by gently whispering machinery hidden behind the walls. Very much the same way that people were moved through Titanic’s offices: quietly, efficiently, politely, relentlessly.

Oxnard remembered how nice everyone had been to him’ the first time he had visited Titanic, eighteen months earlier. They had all been very polite, very enthusiastic, had even pronounced laser and holographic correctly, although they never quite seemed to grasp the difference between a hologram and a holograph. He had first met Las Montpelier then, and had been ushered into Finger’s lofty sanctuary, right here in this same room. Finger wasn’t looking like Cary Grant in those days and his comment on Oxnard’s invention was:

“Stop wasting my time with dumb gadgets! What we need is a show with growth potential. Spinoffs, repeats, byproducts. This thing’s a pipedream!”

That was eighteen months ago. Now Finger was saying:

“Every major network has three-dee shows on the air! All top ten series are three-dees! People are standing in line all over the country to buy three-dee sets. And what have you and the other flunkies and drones working for me produced? Nothing! No-thing: Not a goddamned thing.”

Finger was perspiring now. The sculptured planes of his face were glistening and somehow looked as if they might be beginning to melt. He touched another button on his desk and the faint whir of an extra air blower sounded from somewhere in the padded ceiling.

“I had to go out myself and find the inventor of the three-dee process and personally coax him to come here and consult with us,” Finger said, his voice sounding at once hurt and outraged.

It was almost true. The woman, whose name Oxnard still couldn’t recall, had called him and said, Mr. Finger would like to meet with him. When Oxnard reminded her that they had met eighteen: months earlier, the woman had merely smiled on the phone screen and suggested that the future of her career depended on getting him into Finger’s office. Oxnard reluctantly agreed to a date and time.