Death Dream

by Ben Bova

  "Nothing at all," said her client, a lawyer in Cincinnati who had a phobia against using computers.

  Susan thought swiftly. "Is your computer switched on?"

  A pause, then the man answered, "Of course it is!" rather irritably.

  "Is the screen on?"

  "Uh—oh. For gosh sakes. That's a separate button, isn't it? Yep, here's your material coming through. My mistake, Susie. It's coming through fine now."

  Susan did not like to be called Susie, but she kept her mouth shut. This lawyer was one of her oldest clients. As long as he paid so well to have Susan do the computer searches that he could have hired a raw student to do, she was not going to correct his misuse of her name.

  Susan had been a reference librarian in the Dayton Public Library system when she had first met Damon Santorini, nearly fifteen years earlier. When Angela had been born and she took an extended maternity leave, Dan had helped her learn how to use a home computer to "plug into" the growing number of reference services that were available through the telephone lines. It took quite a bit of arguing and cajoling, but her boss at the library finally allowed Susan to work part-time from her home—after she hotly insisted that they either give her this opportunity or have the story blurted to the news media that the library was discriminating against motherhood.

  She built up a clientele across much of Ohio, but still worked as a part-time employee of the library system. Gradually people from further afield heard of her service through friends or their local librarians. Gradually Susan became an entrepreneur, working on her own, charging fees directly for looking up anything from obscure book titles to arcane scientific references. She even helped Dan several times in his work; he got the Air Force lab to pay her a regular consulting fee. She settled bets over the telephone from late-night barroom arguers, although she soon enough learned to put the phone on an answering machine once they went to bed.

  When Dan received the offer from ParaReality it meant that they would have to move to the Orlando region. "Doesn't matter much where you are," Dan told her when Susan worried about her business. "As long as you've got a telephone You'll be okay."

  Then Dan learned that the house ParaReality's Vickie Kessel had helped them to find was being wired with fiber optic cables. The entire Pine Lake Gardens development was a "fiber optic community," as the advertising brochure put it.

  "Is that good?" Susan had asked her husband.

  "Better than good, honey. With fiber optic lines direct to the house you can plug straight into the NREN."

  She was accustomed to his speaking in jargon. The National Research and Education Network linked thousands of universities and research laboratories with the Library of Congress and other data banks all across the country. It even had international branches, connected by fiber optic cables across the oceans or by satellites hovering in orbit. Susan could access the world's libraries without stirring from her new home.

  So she sent notices to everyone whose address or phone number she had in her computerized database and left their new Florida number with Ohio Bell. Within a week of their arrival in their new home Susan was doing nearly as much business as she had in Dayton. Within three weeks her business had almost doubled.

  Now she was sitting at her tiny desk in the alcove off the kitchen that had been designed to be a breakfast nook, sending a massive file of legal references to the lawyer back in Cincinnati who was too intimidated by computers to do his own searches.

  "Is it coming through okay?" she asked into her head-set mike.

  "Yep, fine. I just hope this danged machine is really storing all this material and not losing it like it did the last time."

  The last time, Susan knew, he had dumped the file by turning off his computer before saving the incoming data in its hard disk memory. Susan had to get Dan to write an idiot-proof subprogram for him that automatically saved everything she sent to him.

  The file was almost at its end, she saw from the notation on her screen. The data scrolled past almost too fast even for her trained eye to follow. Then the machine beeped twice and began transmitting facsimile pictures of actual patents, straight from the files of the US Patent Office in Washington.

  "Wow," she heard the lawyer gasp in her earphone.

  "The drawings and everything! Just like that! If I tried to get this stuff out of Washington by mail it'd take a month."

  "Fiber optics," Susan murmured, knowing it would impress him. "I can send you faxes, photographs, even videos if you ever need it."

  She heard him chuckle. "How about a picture of yourself, Susie? I have no idea what you look like."

  Her chin went up a notch. "I'm not a photographer's model," she snapped, then immediately hoped it did not sound as harsh to him as it had to her.

  He went silent. The computer finished its run, beeped once, and then automatically transmitted the bill: the telephone time charges plus Susan's fee. The lawyer had not paid for the earlier transmission that he had lost, even though it had been his own fault.

  Almost every cent Susan had made all year had gone into buying a nifty teal blue Subaru Legacy wagon. In Dayton, with her mother and her sisters nearby, she had always had a lift when she needed one. Babysitters; too. But here in this new housing tract of Pine Lake Gardens, surrounded by strangers, she needed a car of her own.

  Proudly, Susan emptied her bank account to buy the neat little station wagon that could carry all of the kids' paraphernalia and still give her good gas mileage. And its teal blue color went well with her hair.

  Little Philip was sitting in his playpen by the big sunny windows. Thank God his asthma hasn't bothered him so much here, Susan thought. So far, that was the one unequivocally good thing to come from this move to the humid heat of Florida: the baby would escape a winter of asthma and bronchitis. Her neighbors all seemed friendly, maybe too friendly. They liked to pop in for coffee and gossip at any time of the day. Susan had explained firmly that she was a working lady and could not be bothered with chit-chat during business hours. The neighbors had become quite frosty after the first week or so.

  So what? Susan asked herself. Who needs a bunch of hens clucking around? Half of them are old enough to be my grandmother; they've got nothing to talk about except their golf games and their husbands' heart ailments. But she knew she was kidding herself. She was lonely. She missed her mother and her sisters, all back in Dayton, all safely tucked in the old neighborhood that they had known since childhood.

  Dan has his work; as long as he can tinker sixty or seventy hours a week with his machines and work with Jace he's happy. What happens here at home he barely notices. Angela's started having periods and he's more embarrassed than interested. He loves us, but all he really comes home for is food and sleep. Then she smiled to herself: and sex, of course.

  But her smile faded quickly. Something's bothering Angie. She hasn't been the same since we moved here. She seems to be doing okay at school but she's not adjusting to the new environment very well at all. Maybe it's Just her period, on top of the move and the new neighborhood and all that. But what if it's something else?

  Susan had phoned her mother about Angela's sulky unhappiness. Mother had laughed. "I raised the four of you girls and all four of you cried every day from the time you were twelve until seventeen or so."

  "I don't remember—"

  "I do!" Mother had said cheerily. "Cried every day, each one of you. I think it's puberty. It hits your tear glands along with all the other glands."

  "But Angela seems really unhappy and she won't tell me what's wrong."

  "Just like her father."

  "Well, yes, I suppose," Susan said.

  During those terrible weeks when their marriage had nearly broken up, Susan had told her mother how uncommunicative Dan could be. When. he had a problem that troubled him, he would keep it bottled up inside him until he nearly shattered. Sex helped to release his tensions, but he could never tell Susan what the problem was. Air Force security, he would claim. He would fret an
d frown and gnaw on his lip with the pressure building every day until he'd explode with an outburst of anger over some trivial thing at home. He was always sorry afterward, apologetic, ashamed. But the tension was still there twisting inside him until he found the solution to whatever it was that had been bothering him. Then he was fine. Until the next problem arose.

  "Dear little Angie probably doesn't even know what's bothering her," Susan's mother said. "All she knows is that she's unhappy."

  "There must be something bothering her."

  Mother said, "Why don't you send her up here over the Thanksgiving holiday? We'd love to have her. Love to have all of you. This will be the first Thanksgiving without all four of my babies sitting around the table."

  That had turned the conversation into a long apology for leaving Ohio and an explanation of how expensive it is to travel with two children for just a few days and besides the weather might not be so good for Phil and Dan probably would be working right through the holiday anyway and—

  The wall phone rang. Startled, Susan saw that the computer screen showed her bill and the words TRANSMISSION FINISHED blinking at her. Pulling off the headset, she turned in her little swivel chair and reached for the telephone on the wall above the kitchen counter. The computer hummed to itself and continued to blink.

  "Hello," Susan said.

  "Mrs. Santorini?"

  "Yes."

  "This is Eleanor O'Connell—Angela's teacher."

  Susan went rigid. "What's happened?"

  "Nothing serious, Mrs. Santorini. please don't be alarmed. But if you can, I'd appreciate it if you could drive over here and pick Angela up."

  "What's happened?" Susan fairly screamed into the phone.

  "She's had a little fainting spell, that's all. She's in the doctor's office now. She seems perfectly all right, but she did faint in class a few minutes ago."

  CHAPTER 9

  Jason Lowrey did not seem to be sitting so much as leaning his long, lanky body against the chair like a wooden pole slanting across it or a case of. rigor mortis. His chin was pushed down on his narrow chest, his fists jammed into the pockets of his tattered jeans, his scuffed-up alligator boots poked out from the jeans' frayed bottoms. He almost seemed to be asleep or hypnotized into rigidity like some stooge for a stage magician.

  Dan knew better. "We're wasting time here," he said.

  "I'm thinking," said Jace, without opening his eyes.

  "Sure you are."

  Dan got up from the molded plastic chair in which he had been sitting and started to pace the lab, unconsciously gnawing on his lip. As usual, he had come to work in a short-sleeved white shirt, neatly pressed slacks and a sports jacket. He had quit wearing ties after a couple of weeks on the job, when he realized that no one wore a tie anywhere in Florida, except bankers and dark-suited missionaries. Now his jacket was hanging from a peg behind the door and his shirt looked rumpled and sweaty despite the frigid air-conditioning.

  This simulations lab was Jace's real office, his real home: a long narrow windowless room of bare gray cinderblock crammed with computers of every type and description from the refrigerator-tall Crays and the glistening new Toshiba 7700 to gray desktop models that had been worked so hard their keyboards looked moldy with grime.

  If a neat, orderly, well-scrubbed laboratory was a sign that no creative work was being done, then Jace's simulations lab looked like a whirlwind of innovation. Computers hummed. Their screens glowed with long streams of alphanumeric symbols that seemed gibberish to everyone—even most of the ParaReality staff—except Jace and Dan. Cables and connecting wires coiled across the desks and tables, snaked along the floor, hung from jury-rigged ceiling supports like dark pythons waiting to ensnare the unwary traveler in this electronic jungle.

  Dan stopped in front of the largest of the display screens. It was fully six feet tall, from its floor mount to its top, slanting slightly backward like a full-length mirror. An intricately detailed picture of Babe Ruth showed frozen on the screen, grinning at Dan out of his wide fleshy face, gripping a heavy baseball bat in both his big hands and resting it against his left shoulder. Dan could see the nubbing on the Babe's sweatshirt sleeves, beneath the short-sleeved Yankee pinstripes. The wood grain of his massive Louisville Slugger was clear and beautiful. He could read the label on the bat.

  He turned back to Jace, still rigidly aslant the chair, eyes closed, chin on chest.

  "Well, it's not the graphics," Dan said, heading back toward the inert scarecrow.

  "Tell me something I don't know."

  Dan had dealt with Jace's moods for years. Usually bright, brassy, full of piss and vinegar, when Jace ran into a problem that he could not solve he withdrew into himself, into the private little world inside his own skull.

  "We just need more brute power," Dan said. "That's all there is to it. Otherwise the imagery's going to keep looking fuzzy."

  "What're we up to now?" Jace mumbled.

  "Five and a half gigaflops." Five billion five hundred million floating point operations per second. Dan had paralleled both the Crays and the new Toshiba to achieve that much computing power. And still the background images in the baseball simulation looked fuzzy, cartoon-like, not even close to the crisp realistic imagery that Jace was insisting upon. "And Muncrief said no more hardware?"

  Kyle Muncrief had almost screamed at Dan earlier that morning. In the three weeks Dan had been working for ParaReality Dan had seen Muncrief, strangely enough, only at his own home when Kyle popped in a few times at breakfast and offered to drive Angela to school. Angie loved the attention and had even started calling the man Uncle Kyle.

  That morning, though, after deciding with Jace that the baseball simulation needed more computing power, Dan had gone up to the quiet paneled offices in the front of the building and asked Kyle if he had a few minutes.

  Muncrief was on the phone, but he waved Dan into his office and pointed a finger like a pistol at one of the upholstered chairs in front of his broad cherrywood desk.

  Dan sat as Muncrief said suavely into the phone, "That's right. The Pine Lake Middle School. It's the only one in the country . . . Sure, we could arrange a visit for you. I think you'll be very impressed. And the teachers love it! They don't need any special training, either. A day's orientation at the beginning of the school year is all it takes."

  Dan's eyes wandered to the architect's rendering on the wall behind Muncrief: a low, windowless building of pure white with a tall slender tower by its entrance, almost like a minaret. Over the front door was emblazoned CYBER WORLD in computer-style letters.

  Muncrief smiled at Dan as he continued, "That's fine. Great. I'll have my assistant set up a visit for you. Her name's Victoria Kessel. Hang on, I'll transfer you . . ."

  He punched buttons on the phone console like a man whacking at mosquitoes. "Vickie? Got the superintendent of schools from St Louis on the phone. She wants to visit Pine Lake. Set it up, okay?"

  He banged the phone back into its cradle. "Those school people! They're so unbelievably slow to move you could starve to death before they start to say hello."

  Dan wanted to talk about buying more hardware, not the shortcomings of school administrators.

  "We've got the best thing to hit education since lead pencils and all they do is pussyfoot around and come to visit and tell me how tight their blasted budgets are."

  "Well maybe—"

  "You know how much that school is costing me? A good-sized fortune, every month. But I keep it going because one of these days VR is going to be the only way those people will build their schools. The only way."

  "We've got a problem," Dan blurted.

  Muncrief raised his eyebrows. Dan began to explain that they needed more hardware to make the baseball simulation completely realistic. Muncrief's usually smiling face got tauter and tauter as Dan talked, and he realized that Jace had sent him in here because he didn't want to face the boss's ire.

  "Another Toshiba!" Muncrief exploded. "Do you know what
they cost?"

  "We'll only need one—"

  "The hell you do! You listen to me, Dan. I hired you to keep Jace happy, not to come running to me asking for money. If Jace can solve his problems with more hardware, what do we need you for? He's already got a Toshiba and two Crays and God knows what else. That's it! The piggy bank is busted! Now get back there and tell that big genius to get his brain in gear and make that baseball game work!"

  Dan clenched his teeth so hard his jaw hurt. He pushed himself up from the chair and headed for the door.

  "Hey, Dan, wait a minute," Muncrief called.

  Dan turned back toward him.

  The suave smile was back in place. "I didn't mean to yell at you. I know you're doing your best. It's just that we're running tight, financially. You know, I don't have the capital for major new equipment buys. Jace told me he had enough hardware when he asked me to hire you. There just isn't enough money in the company to buy anything big. Our cash flow is negative."

  Dan nodded, tightlipped, not trusting himself to say anything.

  "And besides," Muncrief added, pointing to his blank computer screen, "every additional dollar we spend on computer power for the simulation increases the ticket price we'll have to charge the customers. The accountants tell me we're already up against the limit that we can reasonably charge. We've got to be competitive with Disney and the other amusement parks, especially at the beginning."

  Dan nodded. "I understand."

  "You guys have to solve your problems without more hardware."

  "I'll see what we can do."

  Dan got as far as the door.

  "Another thing," Muncrief said.

  Turning, Dan saw that Muncrief was standing behind his desk, his face deadly serious.

  "The media's gotten wind of what we're doing. We've been getting calls; reporters are starting to sniff around."

  "So?"

  "All media contacts must be handled by the front office. Understand that? I don't want any of the staff talking to reporters on their own. Somebody calls you, somebody starts pumping you at the local bar, somebody bumps into you at the supermarket—you tell 'em to talk to me. And you tell me or Vickie right away. We can't have leaks to the media! I don't want to wake up some morning and see a scare story about us on Good Morning, America."