Free Cyberbooks by Ben Bova Page B

bankruptcy.
    She lay perfectly still on the beautiful bed in the beautiful room, waiting for her husband to come to her while her mind searched out a way to avoid the yawning black abyss that was ready to swallow Bunker Books. No path appeared safe; there was no way out of the financial chasm awaiting them. Except perhaps the electronic book. Perhaps.
    She fell asleep waiting for her husband to leave his work and come to bed. She dreamed of electronic books and showers of golden coins pattering gently over the two of them as they lay coiled in a passionate embrace.

MURDER THREE

    John Watson was a professor of sociology at the New New School, at Central Park North. The neat rows of condominiums marched northward through Harlem, each lovingly renovated building flanked on both sides by blockwide vegetable gardens, also lovingly tended by the neighborhood residents. Watson could have taken considerable pride in the role he had played in turning Harlem into a model of peace and prosperity.
    All his younger years he had battled the city, the state government, the feds, and the people of Harlem themselves. His enemies had been hopelessness and resistance to change: the indifference of the masses and the brutal opposition of the dope peddlers and slumlords and crooked city officials who made their millions out of the sweat and suffering of Harlem's people.
    His allies had been the mothers who had seen their children killed by narcotics, or guns, or knives. And the brighter youngsters who sought a way out of the endless cycle of misery and poverty. They had little power. But they had guts and brains. Then John Watson hit upon a stroke of genius. He made allies of the building contractors and their associated trade unions. Rebuilding Harlem made jobs for nearly a generation of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, masons, truck drivers. It made hundreds of millions for the companies that employed them. The money came from taxes, of course: local, state, and federal. But the payoff, as John Watson spent twenty years explaining to appropriations committees, would be a Harlem that was productive, a Harlem that housed taxpayers, not welfare cases. Not criminals and diseased addicts.
    Now, as he strolled along Martin Luther King Boulevard toward Rev. Jesse Jackson Park, Watson took no small measure of satisfaction in the happiness that he saw all around him. Harlem was not heaven; it was not even the Garden of Eden. But it was no longer the rotting, drug-infested ghetto that it had been when he was a child growing up in it.
    It was a considerable shock, therefore, when a strange white man stepped out of a car parked in a clearly marked bus stop zone and sank a switchblade knife into John Watson's heart. He died almost instantly, while the white man got back into his car and calmly drove away. None of the stunned witnesses could provide the police with the car's license number, probably because the license plate had been carefully smeared with dirt beforehand.
    It was a monument to John Watson's life work that this foul murder was treated as any other would be, both by the police and the media. Everyone was shocked. No one suggested that such an event was only to be expected in Harlem.

EIGHT

    Carl sat sweating in the smoky Greek nightclub on Ninth Avenue, watching a fleshy half-naked young woman performing the artfully erotic Oriental ritual known in the West as the belly dance.
    The place was only half-full, but almost all of the customers were men. Most of them sat up at the bar itself, squinting through the haze of cigarette smoke and muttering an occasional "Ya-soo!" at a particularly stimulating movement by the dancer up on the tiny platform that passed for a stage. A three-piece band—reedy clarinet, big-bellied stringed bouzouki, and the inevitable drums—played weaving snake charmer's music. Now and then the drummer would sing in a wavering, almost yodeling high-pitched tenor.
    Carl sat alone at a table near the stage, close