Only with a side part and wearing saddle shoes. "The way his former associates tell the story," Jed went on, "Dewayne Korb snacked his way to greatness. He kept a Rubbermaid trash can full of highcalorie treats right beside his keyboard. That's how he managed to put in all those twenty-four hour days at the computer. But we all know how quickly brain food turns to butt food...."
The video shot zoomed in on the broad expanse of the billionaire's backside. There was enough widewale corduroy there to upholster a large armchair.
"And now the moment you've all been waiting for," Jed announced. "Look at who's buffed!"
Dr. Smith shifted uneasily in his ergonomic chair. Unlike the rest of the show's national audience, the head of CURE had a pretty good inkling of what he was about to see. And despite that, he was not prepared for what came next.
The "Peephole USA" camera caught Princess Pye as she posed for the media outside a Manhattan members-only night spot. Her face was chiseled perfection. Her body no longer a heap of unsightly bulges. Its fat content was near zero. The sleeveless bare-midriff top she wore exposed a sleek stomach that was a perfect gridwork washboard above the small, sexy indent of her navel. She had a waist like a wasp, and though she'd lost a good yard from the girth of her hips, the narrowness of her midsection made it appear that she still had womanly curves. Gone was the shuddering heft of her thighs. Those dimpled columns were just a memory. A dream, fading. The legs the princess's miniskirt revealed were slender and shapely from ankle to hip.
And even more stunning than her fat loss, than her muscle increase, was the overall tone of her body. Princess Pye absolutely glowed.
One of the reporters present called out a question. "How'd you do it, Princess?"
The blond beauty gave him a dazzling flash of white teeth and baby blue eyes. "Wouldn't you like to know," she teased.
The video then cut to Skizzle, onstage. The rock star had been changed radically, as well. He was no longer the staggering, drunken blimp. He looked like Mr. Universe in cutoff Levi's. The immense size of his chest and arms had stretched his tattoos almost beyond recognition. And there were a couple of new twists to his stage act.
He jumped as he sang and danced.
This was no hidden-trampoline trick. Over and over, Skizzle leaped five or six feet in the air, effortlessly, and completely on his own. This thanks to his hugely developed calves and hams. His high jumping antics sent his fans into delirium.
And the famous public drunkard had switched from drinking a case of Black Death Porter quarts onstage to drinking a case of Bertolli Olive Oil sixty-eight-ouncers. The plastic bottles with the jug handles. He also had a new international tour to promote his new CD.
After the concert, the "Peephole USA" camera caught Skizzle toweling off in his dressing room. Amid the crush of bodyguards, music celebs and hangers-on, Jed and his crew fought to get the story.
"Wow, Skizz," Jed gushed, "you look like a million bucks."
"Yeah, that's about right," the rock star said. The answer was vintage Skizzle: purposefully mysterious, apparently unresponsive. A response that, as all his fans knew, had to be jam-packed with hidden, important meaning. The rock star cracked the tamperproof plastic cap off a chilled bottle of greenish liquid.
"What's your secret?" Jed asked him.
"I want to thank the Bertolli company of Secaucus, New Jersey, for all its support on the Extra Virgin Tour," Skizzle said. As the singer tipped the jug to his mouth, his right biceps bulged far bigger than even Jed's extralarge head-a physical feature that was required for a career in television. The tattoos on Skizzle's enormous arm looked faded and decades old because ink lines were so far apart.
"Cheers, America!" the rock star said. Then he took a long, satisfying chug from the jug.
Skizzle's grinning, unshaved, lantern-jawed face faded into a long shot of a grassy playing field. Men in T-shirts and shorts ran around with baskets on sticks, chasing a small ball. Behind them, as far as the eye could see, was a sprawling, modern business complex.
Jed's voice over said, "Well, folks, this is just another sunny Saturday afternoon at Korbtown. What you're looking at is a weekend game of the company's intramural lacrosse league. The technical writers are battling the technical editors. It's all part of the nonstop fun-and-games life-style of these young computer whizzes."
The camera closed in on knock-kneed nerds in Nikes trying, in vain, to club each other senseless with their lacrosse sticks. Wild overhead swings ended in clean misses that sent the players staggering, sometimes even spinning to the ground.
"But wait, folks," Jed said. "We have a lastminute substitution on the editors' side...."
The TV audience was treated to a tight shot of a man's bare back. No ordinary back, this. From armpit to armpit, this man's lats were a yard wide. His traps were like great hulking boulders beneath the skin. And all of it shouted density, incredible density, as well as mass.
The man's head, seen from the rear, looked way too small in comparison to the neck width and shoulder spread. Then the head turned.
Dewayne Korb, the new Dewayne Korb, beamed for the "Peephole USA" audience.
The camera retreated to take in the whole picture. The billionaire had traded his extrawide cords for an electric blue Speedo swimsuit. He had ditched his early-eighties hairdo for a slicked-back, supermoussed bullet-head look, with plenty of whitewall over the ears. His bare pectorals were promontories of power, his forearms were tree trunks, his buttocks Rocks of Gibraltar.
With blinding speed, and no word of warning, the computer billionaire snatched up his lacrosse stick and charged into the fray.
Needless to say, it was no contest.
Dewayne Korb not only leveled the opposition, but when he was done with them, he turned on his own team, clobbering them with his stick. Those that tried to escape the field of play, screaming, he ran down. And summarily cold-cocked from behind.
When he was done, and the grass field of Korbtown was strewed with pale, skinny male bodies, some barely breathing, Dewayne Korb raised his hands over the head and did a Rocky-on-the-steps imitation.
"How could you do that to your own employees?" asked the aghast "Peephole USA" reporter.
"Hey, it's not like they're programmers," the billionaire explained.
Jed nodded as if he understood, eager to move on to his next question. "All of America wants to know about your superhard body," he said. "How about letting us all in on how you did it?"
"With money, Jed," the tycoon said. "Lots and lots of money. Now you'll have to excuse me. The Internet development group is about to throw the first pitch to the hardware guys over on the softball diamond, and I don't want to miss my turn at bat."
The cameraman chased after Korb for a dozen yards. But winded and unable to keep up, he let the muscular figure dwindle in the distance.
"Well, Molly," Jed said as the picture returned to the studio, "what do you think?"
"I'll take whatever they're having," Molly replied.
"You and fifty million other people," Jed said, laughing. "Don't worry, folks. We'll stay on this story...."
Dr. Smith shook his head. Deep in his heart of hearts, he'd been hoping that he'd made a fatal error in his forecast. Not so. Like a train on a track, the doomsday scenario he had predicted was approaching. A mysterious wonder drug gets international publicity. The body-image-crazed public clamors for access to it. And when the product finally arrives on the market, the public gobbles it whole.
Presto!
The end of civilization as we know it.
Dr. Smith had just shut off the TV when his scrambled phone line rang. It was Remo reporting in. The news wasn't promising.
"Our man is keeping his lip zipped," Remo said. "He doesn't want to go back to being a geezer."
"You've removed his patch?"
"Yeah, but nothing's happened yet. Lud's still buffed."
"Keep on him. Maybe he'll crack when he starts to lose his fountain of youth."
"What about the analysis of the Boomtower patch?" Remo asked. "Has the report come in yet?"
Dr. Smith had arranged for that evidence to be chemically analyzed by a private lab in Los Angeles-an outfit used by the CIA for work they didn't want the FBI to know about. "We had a hit there," Smith said. "The drug-delivery patch was manufactured in Taiwan, part of a job lot purchased by Family Fing Pharmaceuticals, of the same country."
"Never heard of them."