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face and smudged black eye makeup of a Hollywood vampire.
    "Sure it sells," Maryann Quigly agreed, barely squeezing the words past her heavy-eyed torpor.
    The editor-in-chief shook his wattles. "Stoker writes crap, all right, but it's commercial crap. It keeps this company afloat. If we ever lose him we all go pounding the pavements looking for new jobs."
    Quigly sighed a long, pained, wheezing sigh.
    "What'd we give him as an advance for his last book?" asked the editor-in-chief.
    "One million dollars." Quigly drew out the words to such length that it took almost a full minute to say it.
    "Offer him the same for this one."
    "His agent will want more," snapped Ashley Elton (nee Simkowitz).
    "Murray Swift," muttered the editor-in-chief. "Yep, he'll hold us up for a million two, at least." Turning back to Quigly, he instructed, "Offer a million even. Give us more room for negotiating."
    One by one, the editors presented books that they thought the company should publish. Each presentation was made exactly the same way. The editor would give the book's title and author, and then a brief description of the category it fit into. Thus:
    Jack Drain, the young ball of fire who sported a small Van Dyke on his receding chin, proposed Taurus XII: The Return of the Bull. "It's by Billy Bee Bozo, same as the other eleven in the series. Fantasy adventure, set in a distant age when men battled evil with swords and courage."
    "And all the weemen have beeg breasts," said Concetta Las Vagas, the company's Affirmative Action "two-fer," being both Hispanic and female. There were those in Bunker Books who claimed she should be a "three-fer," since her skin was quite dark as well. There were also those who claimed that Concetta's idea of Affirmative Action was to say "Si, si," to any postpubertal male. The standard line among the office gossips was that a man could get lucky in Las Vagas.
    "Look who's talking about beeg breasts," mimicked Mark Martin, who wore a pale lemon silk T-shirt beneath his biker's leather jacket, and a tastefully tiny diamond on his left nostril.
    Drain frowned across the table at Las Vagas. "There are women warriors in this one. Bozo's not as much of a male chauvinist as he used to be."
    "There go his sales," somebody mumbled.
    Ted Gunn, sitting next to Drain, perked up on his chair. Although he wore leathers and metal studs just like the rest of the editors, he gave off an aura of restless energy that announced he was a Young Man Headed for the Top. He was the only one in the conference room who smoked; his place at the table was fenced in by a massive stainless-steel ashtray smudged with a layer of gray ash and six crushed butts, and a pair of electronic air purifiers that sucked the smoke out of the air so efficiently that they could snatch up notepaper and even loose change.
    "What have sales been like for the Taurus series lately?" Gunn asked.
    Drain said, "Good. Damned good." But it sounded weak, defensive.
    "Haven't his sales been dropping with every new book?"
    "Not much."
    "But if a series is effective," Gunn said, suddenly the sharp young MBA on the prowl, "his sales should be going up, not down."
    That started a long, wrangling argument about the marketing department, the art director's, choice of cover artists, the hard winter in the Midwest, and several other subjects that mystified Carl. What could all that have to do with the sales of books? Why didn't they all have pocket computers, so they could punch up the sales figures and have them in hard numbers right before their eyes?
    Carl shook his head in bewilderment.
    *
    With great reluctance, P. Curtis Hawks entered the private elevator that ran from his spacious office to the penthouse suite of the Synthoil Tower. Lapin had been ushered away in the grip of two burly security men to learn the lessons of failure. Now Hawks had to report that failure to the Old Man.
    Once he had enjoyed talking with the Old Man, gleaning the secret techniques of power and