Death Dream

by Ben Bova

  Vickie untucked her feet and sat up straight. Dan saw that her stockinged feet barely reached to the carpeting. The stockings were patterned, pale green." Dan, there are only so many hours in the day," she said in a voice that was suddenly stern, demanding. "I know you're upset about what's happened to your daughter, but we have a big job to finish here and a deadline staring down our throats."

  "I know that."

  "I hate to be the one who cracks the whip, Dan, but we need you and Jace to finish up that baseball simulation. Every hour counts!"

  "Come on Vickie," he countered. "I waited until my lunch break to come and talk with you about this."

  "You left the lab early yesterday afternoon and you didn't come in this morning until half-past nine."

  Anger flared in him. "You want me to punch a time clock?"

  "No, not at all. You know that." She was instantly soothing, her voice softer. "It's just that the future of this whole company is hanging on that baseball simulation and the work isn't moving ahead."

  "Yeah. I know." Dan's head drooped.

  "But you want to run the 'Neptune's Kingdom' game just so you can see for yourself what might have happened to your daughter."

  "I could run it tonight."

  With a slight shake of her head and an understanding little smile Vickie said, "Do it now. Spend the rest of the lunch hour on it. You won't be any good to us all afternoon otherwise, will you?"

  He bolted up from the loveseat. "Thanks, Vickie! Thanks!"

  Before he could get to the door, Vickie said, "And Dan—I'd like you to look in on Gary Chan after you're through. Would you, please?"

  "Gary?"

  "Kyle wants him to juice up the Moonwalk game a bit and I think he's run into some problems. He could use your advice."

  "Yeah, okay. Sure."

  Victoria Kessel leaned back in her comfortably enfolding wing chair and watched Dan race out of her office. Like a schoolboy set loose from classes, she thought. No, she corrected herself immediately. Like a father who's worried about his child. Mustn't think of him as a vigorous young male; he's married and has two children. And he's too important to this company to mess around with. She smiled at the door he had left open in his haste. At least you shouldn't mess around with him until he's finished the baseball simulation, she told herself.

  Her smile faded. She glanced at the Louis XIV clock hanging on the wall by the office door Inside its gilt frame was a Japanese battery-powered quartz works. Kyle should be landing at National Airport in another few minutes; he had finally bowed to necessity and flown to Washington. Vickie wondered for the hundredth time that day what she should do about Kyle. Of all the children in that school, why is he messing around with Dan Santorini's? He'll ruin everything if he's getting himself involved with Dan's daughter.

  Her phone rang, snapping her attention to the here and now. Instead of picking up the handset, Vickie touched the speaker button.

  "Victoria Kessel," she said.

  "Hello, Vickie."

  A stab of surprised fear jolted her. She grabbed the handset and whispered into it, "I don't want you calling me here!"

  "Just a quick question: Why'd Muncrief fly to Washington?"

  The man's name was Luke Peterson. He was a paunchy, balding, middle-aged former engineer who had contacted Vickie months earlier with an offer of ten thousand dollars in exchange for information about ParaReality. Vickie had taken the money, telling herself that if Peterson was an industrial spy, it would be best for her to seem to be working with him. Otherwise he would find another employee to corrupt.

  At first she thought of herself as a counter-spy, trying to find out who Peterson was working for. But her contacts with him were neither glamorous nor exotic. Peterson was a drab little man engaged in a dirty business; gradually Vickie realized that it could become a dangerous business.

  But in the back of her mind she thought that if anything went wrong with ParaReality, if Kyle Muncrief cracked under the pressure and self-destructed, a contact with the competition would be to her advantage. It could be my fallback position, she told herself. Yet she still did not know who Peterson was working for. The man did not trust her any more than she trusted him.

  "He's got friends in Washington," Vickie temporized. "He went to try to raise funding from them."

  "Friends in the government?" Peterson asked.

  "In the investment community, I think," she lied.

  "Really?" Peterson sounded unconvinced.

  "You shouldn't be calling me here."

  "Then meet me tonight and we'll talk about it more."

  "Not tonight. I'm busy."

  "Tonight."

  She hesitated a moment. "All right. After dinner. Around eleven."

  "I'll be in the parking lot of your condo building."

  "All right."

  Peterson drove a beat-up old Cutlass; Vickie knew it l well. Most of their meetings had taken place in his car. He seemed to live in it.

  She put the phone back in its cradle, her hand trembling slightly. She was determined to keep the government connection a secret from Peterson and everyone else for as long as she could. That's my other fallback option, she told herself. If Kyle actually goes through with the government work then I won't need Peterson or the corporation he's working for.

  But she knew that she could not trust Kyle Muncrief to make a successful contact with the government. He went to Washington reluctantly and he'd screw it all up, she felt certain.

  Kyle Muncrief felt wet, chilled, miserable and terribly uneasy as he entered the Air and Space Museum. Why pick this place as the spot for our meeting? he asked himself. But he already knew the answer. Hide in plain sight. These guys don't want anyone to know what they're up to. What better place to meet, then, than in the midst of the biggest crowds in Washington? If you don't want any witnesses, go where there are thousands of people trooping past. Nobody will notice two guys talking to each other in the middle of the crowd.

  It had been a rough ride from Orlando. A massive early autumn storm was moving up the east coast from Cape Hatteras, making even the high-flying jet airliner shudder and bump in its turbulence. The flight had come in to Washington National nearly an hour late. It was pouring a hard, wind-driven rain, cold and miserable compared to Florida. Taxis had been scarce at the airport and Muncrief had been forced to wait in line with other soggy, disgruntled passengers nearly another hour before the dispatcher pushed him into a broken-down cab. At that, he had to share his ride with three other trench-coated men. They all complained every inch of the way into town about the weather, the airport, the taxi service and anything else they could think of.

  The cab driver, an elderly silent unsmiling black man, had calmly charged each of them twenty-five dollars for their ten-minute ride. On an impulse, Muncrief had added a five-dollar tip. The driver looked surprised.

  "For putting up with those bozos," Muncrief said as he ducked out of the taxi.

  As he hurried up the steps to the Air and Space Museum's front entrance the driving rain soaked his light sports jacket. He had not bothered to bring a raincoat and he did not own an umbrella. Inside the entryway he stopped to catch his breath while the streams of incoming tourists flowed past him. Muncrief wished he could shake himself to get the water off the way a dog does.

  The crowd seemed endless despite the rain. Thousands of people, young couples with small children in their arms, gawking teenagers, older men with gray crewcuts and white-haired women on their arms, grandparents pushing baby strollers, youngsters with wide round eyes, all of them oohing and ahhing and pointing and murmuring to one another. They craned their necks and looked overhead like worshipers arriving at a shrine. Noisy worshipers, thought Muncrief. Everybody's talking at once.

  Then he looked up.

  Above his head hung the Wright brothers' original Flier. The first airplane to truly fly. Next to it, suspended from the high ceiling, was Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, gleaming aluminum contrasting to the Wrights' fabr
ic and wood. And directly in front of him, set on the floor like a miniature temple of adoration, stood the Apollo 11 command module: the spacecraft that had carried the first astronauts to the Moon and back.

  Muncrief blinked, looked up and around, then blinked again. Half a century from first flight to Moon flight.

  In front of the spacecraft was a small stand with a sliver of stone imbedded in its wooden surface. A rock from the Moon. Muncrief stared at it in wonder. This isn't a simulation, he realized. They actually brought this back from the Moon with them. It's real. Like all the other tourists, Muncrief reached out and touched the Moon rock with the tips of his outstretched fingers.

  "Impressive, isn't it?"

  The man standing beside Muncrief looked perfectly ordinary at first glance. He was on the short side, barely topping Muncrief's shoulder. He wore a gray suit with a white shirt and a conservative dark blue tie. His hair was a sandy brown, the kind that had been blond in youth but was now darkening. cut short, carefully combed. A lightweight plastic raincoat was hanging from his arm.

  Muncrief, in his damp sea-green sports coat, tieless, wrinkled, felt at first that this kid was some errand boy sent to fetch him for the people he was supposed to meet.

  But then he looked again. The younger man's face was taut, tight-lipped. It was a squarish face, hard stubborn jaw and pugnacious button nose. His eyes were cobalt blue, penetrating, like a cop's.

  Muncrief felt his insides tremble.

  "You're almost an hour late," said the younger man, in a clear tenor voice just loud enough for Muncrief to understand him over the babble of the crowd. Then he started walking slowly into the main section of the Museum.

  Following him, Muncrief mumbled, "My plane was an hour late. I still would've made it on time except there weren't any taxis."

  Despite the chatter and laughter all around them, the man seemed to hear Muncrief perfectly. "Sure. The important thing is you're here now."

  Summoning up some courage, Muncrief demanded, "What's your name?"

  "What difference does it make?" The younger man kept walking, slowly, flowing with the crowd heading for the escalator.

  "I don't like doing business with people I don't know."

  "Look Dad!" a kid shouted from a few steps above them on the moving stairway. "There's the Skylab!"

  The young man cast Muncrief a sidelong glance. "What makes you think you're going to be doing business with anybody?"

  Exasperation overtook Muncrief's fears. "Look, you guys called me. You asked me to come up here. Now what's this all about or do I go back to Orlando and forget the whole blasted thing?"

  His companion made a grudging smile; almost a smirk. "My name's Smith."

  "Yeah, sure," said Muncrief. "And I'm Pocahontas."

  The guy actually laughed. "You asked for a name and I gave you one."

  They had reached the Museum's upper level. Muncrief was tall enough to see over the heads of most of the crowd. They were heading past the IMAX theater and into the area where old rockets and spacecraft were on exhibit, standing on the ground floor and thrusting their sleek noses up toward the high ceiling.

  "What's this all about?" he demanded of Smith. "What do you people want?"

  Smith gestured with one hand toward the curving metal bulk of the Skylab space station, big as a ten-room house. "That piece of hardware was built to go into space, not to sit here as an exhibit."

  Muncrief said nothing.

  Pointing again, Smith added, "Take a look at these rockets. Look at those Saturn V engines. That's what lifted our astronauts off to the Moon. And that little guy there, that's a Minuteman missile."

  "So what—"

  "It's an ICBM. They called it Minuteman because it stood ready to protect our nation at an instant's notice."

  "Protect? You mean it carried a hydrogen bomb and was aimed on some Russian city."

  "Several hydrogen bombs," said Smith tightly. "Each one carried three warheads. Now we're dismantling them. Breaking up the last of the missiles and destroying the bombs."

  "Thank God."

  Smith leaned casually against the railing and smiled coldly at Muncrief. "I thought that would be your reaction. You're not into defending your country, are you?"

  The dread that Muncrief had felt just below the surface of his consciousness ever since Vickie had talked him into this journey to Washington now broke into the open.

  Muncrief knew now what he feared. Smith's smile was like a snake's. "When your country called on you, back in nineteen-sixty-nine, you ran off to Canada, didn't you?"

  "That was more than thirty years ago, for God's sake!"

  "You're a draft-dodger, Muncrief."

  "That's all over and done with. Carter granted all of us amnesty, remember?"

  "I remember very well. My older brother was killed in Nam. He left college to volunteer for the Marines. He got killed while you shacked up with some Canadian broad in Toronto."

  How much does he really know? Muncrief felt his heart thudding, his armpits dampening with the cold sweat of fear. But he leaned close to Smith's coldly angry face so that no one in the passing crowd could hear him.

  "Vietnam was a crock," he said. "I'm sorry your brother got killed, but it was all for nothing and you know it."

  "Do I? I know a lot of things but I don't know that."

  Muncrief stepped back and waited for the other shoe to fall.

  "I want to give you the opportunity to do something for your country, Mr. Muncrief," Smith said with murderous calm. "I'm giving you the chance to atone for running away during the Vietnam period."

  Muncrief blinked at him. Holy God, does he know or doesn't he? Does he have the information or not? Is he just dangling me over the coals? Could it be that the government really doesn't know about me?

  KYLE MUNCRIEF

  He was born of a woman who had mistakenly believed that a son would force the man she was living with to marry her. It was the second time she had tried to gain such a hold on him; she already had a two-year-old daughter. Even though she named the boy after his father, the man left her and the two children, fled from Baltimore altogether for parts unknown. Somehow she blamed Kyle for that. His earliest memories were of her beating him, screaming that he was no damned good, that he was a mistake, a failure.

  His sister took care of him while their mother was away from their one-room flat and even while she was home. Not much more than a baby herself, his sister Crystal fed and clothed him, bathed him in the kitchen sink and showed him the only love he knew.

  Kyle's mother had run away from her stern Baptist parents in Georgia, the kind who had written her off the family rolls as if she had died. She knew she could not go back to them—she did not want to, in any event. She had no skills to speak of; she wandered through a succession of menial jobs, either quitting or getting herself fired within a week or so. She began to augment the welfare checks she received from the state with occasional liaisons with other men, seeking with deepening despair someone who could end her poverty and loneliness.

  She did not realize she was a prostitute until a pair of hard-faced men pushed their way into their shabby flat one afternoon and told her that from now on she would turn over half her earnings to them. In return they would protect her from the police. And from violence. Then they showed her a taste of the violence. Afterward they took turns fucking her.

  Kyle was six years old, sitting terrified on the surplus army cot that was his bed, clinging to his eight-year-old sister, while the men beat and raped his mother. His sister threw a blanket over them both but nothing could muffle their mother's screams and cries.

  For four years he lived in hell. His mother turned into a zombie, dazed on drugs most of the time, bringing home men who laughed and drank and took off their clothes and did things to his mother, who also laughed and drank and took off all her clothes. After the men left his mother always crouched naked on her sagging bed, bent over almost double, rocking back and forth for what seemed like hours. T
hen she would go to the filth-encrusted toilet in the bathroom they shared with the woman next door and vomit as if she were trying to empty herself completely.

  He was under strict orders to stay in his cot under his thin blanket whenever his mother brought a man to the room. His sister always stayed there with him, frozen numb as a statue, holding him so tightly sometimes he thought he would die from lack of air.

  Kyle watched terrified from under the covers of his cot the night that one drunken sailor insisted that his sister join him and his mother in bed.

  "It's all right, Crystal dear," his mother had said, almost as drunk as the sailor on the bottle of vodka he had brought with him. "Come on here next to Mommy."

  Kyle could feel his sister trembling but she let go of him and got off the cot and climbed onto the bed with her mother and the strange, grinning man. Crystal began crying as the sailor and her mother took off her clothes, her whimpers of fear growing to terrified wails until her mother smacked her sharply across her bare buttocks and snapped, "Behave yourself!"

  Even with the blanket pulled tightly over his head Kyle knew they were hurting her. Crystal screamed when the sailor penetrated her and Kyle could stand it no longer.

  He leaped out of the bed and flung himself at the naked sailor. Drunk as he was, the sailor easily fended off the skinny ten-year-old's ineffectual blows and knocked him spinning off the bed. He laughed as Kyle climbed slowly to his feet, rubbing the side of his head, standing in his tee shirt with his stubby bare legs and hairless genitals exposed.

  "You jealous, kid?" the sailor asked. "So maybe you wanna get fucked too, hah?" Kyle ran to the drawer beside the sink where the knives were.

  "Don't you dare!" his mother yelled as Kyle pulled the bread knife from the drawer. The sailor, grinning lopsidedly, got up from the bed. His softening penis was dark with Crystal's blood. He walked slowly across the bare floorboards, long hairy tattooed arms dangling at his sides.

  "Better put the knife down, kid, before you get yerself hurt."

  Kyle wavered.

  "Put it down!" his mother commanded. "Crystal's not hurt. She's all right."