Death Dream

by Ben Bova

  "She certainly doesn't fit any of those criteria."

  "Then who does?"

  Peterson ran a hand over his bald scalp. "Let's see now. There's Muncrief; about the only trouble he's ever had was dodging the draft during the Vietnam War."

  "Hardly the kind of thing we could use on him."

  "Jason Lowrey—he's a complete kook. No ties to anybody, no loyalties except to his work."

  The other man said nothing.

  "There's Lowrey's assistant, Damon Santorini. He has a wife and two kids. Just bought a new house here and a new car for his wife."

  The Inquisitor took a final drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out in the dashboard ashtray. "Can you get to him?"

  Peterson shrugged. "I don't know."

  "Think about it. Watch him. I want a contingency plan along those lines. We may not need it, but—who knows?"

  Peterson agreed swiftly and got out of the car. He took a deep double lungful of night air. He did not like the idea of pressuring people, but he knew that sometimes it was necessary. He hoped it would not be necessary in this case.

  More than that, though, he badly wanted a cigarette.

  CHAPTER 14

  Dan's office was one of the few for the technical staff that had a window. It looked out on the asphalt driveway that led to the rear parking lot. All Dan ever saw through his precious window was an occasional car passing by and, every now and then, one-armed Joe Rucker plodding by on his daily rounds. He hardly noticed the oleander bushes lining the driveway with colorful flowers.

  Dan's attention was usually focused inward. In the two months he had been working at ParaReality he had added one extra piece of furniture to his office's polished new wooden desk, its row of bookshelves that were mostly bare, and its two light blue molded-plastic chairs: an incongruously long black leather couch that took up one whole wall. The couch was for Jace, whose own cluttered office was too bizarre for Dan to feel comfortable in. So when they were not in the lab or in the Wonderland simulations chamber, Jace would stretch out on the couch while he spewed ideas and directions to Dan.

  Except for the couch, which was already sagging and scuffed, the office was as neat as a furniture showroom. Dan's desk bore .a telephone console that contained a built-in answering machine and tape recorder. Alongside it was a trio of snapshots of Susan and the kids. Otherwise the desktop was bare. On a credenza attached to the desk like a wing there sat a personal computer that linked Dan with the company's mainframe back in the Pit and the supercomputers in Jace's lab that they used for their simulations.

  Dan sat disconsolately at his desk, tilting back in the padded swivel chair and staring at the ceiling. He had not slept well, had not been sleeping well for the past several weeks. Susan told him that he moaned in his sleep and ground his teeth. The pressure of his job had never bothered his sleep before, but now—Dan knew it was more than the pressure. He was having bad dreams, dreams that left him sweating and shaken when he awoke.

  But he could not remember what he dreamed; only that the dreams were making him dread falling asleep. Now there was something more. The message screen on his phone stated in glowing red LCD alphanumerics: DR APPLETON - 513-990-4547-3:26 P.M. THU. Dan tried to ignore yesterday's message from his former boss. It nagged at him, though, while he tried to concentrate on the problems he faced. Jace was goofing off, chasing some mysterious ideas that he refused to talk about and letting the baseball simulation gather dust. And there was nothing Dan could do about it. It had been hard enough keeping Jace even halfway in line back in the old days at Wright-Patt, but now he was becoming totally impossible.

  Could it be that gunfight sim? Dan asked himself for the thousandth time in the past few weeks. Ever since Jace had gunned him down, ever since he had felt the impact of those bullets in his chest, ever since he had died—Dan had felt unable to cope with Jace, unable to rein him in the way he used to. It's as if he's got the power of life and death over me, Dan thought. But then he would shake his head and tell himself that he was being melodramatic. It's just Jace. The same old wild man. I can't let him get away with all this goofing off.

  But try as he might, there seemed to be no way that Dan could get Jace to stick to the problem Muncrief wanted them to solve.

  At least things had settled down at home. Angie was doing okay now. Better than okay, she seemed fine. No repeats of her problem with the VR games. Plays them all the time now, from what she tells us. Loves them.

  That's a relief. She's doing fine at school and little Phil is doing great, no asthma attacks, no allergy problems. Susan's business is going so well she'll be making more than I do in another year or two. Everything's in good shape at home. Muncrief's been a big help with Angie. I owe him a lot.

  But Dan's insides flared whenever he thought about the way Muncrief had treated him at the party the previous weekend. Ride herd on Jace. He hired me to be a glorified animal trainer, Jace's goddamned keeper, nothing more.

  Dan's eyes inadvertently strayed to the phone screen. I ought to return Dr Appleton's call, he told himself. Doc wouldn't call unless it was something important. He doesn't make social chit-chat, not over the phone.

  Jace barged into the office, banging the door open and plopping down on the couch, his head resting on one arm, his cowboy boots on the other. "So what's happening?" he asked, locking his fingers behind his head. "How we makin' out?"

  "What've you been doing all morning?" Dan asked, already knowing the answer.

  "Thinking deep thoughts."

  "You've been playing VR games with Joe Rucker, that's what you've been doing!"

  "So? I think deep thoughts while I'm playing with the hillbilly."

  "You're supposed to be working on the baseball game."

  "Yeah, yeah. I am. Foolin' around with Joe frees up my subconscious mind, lets me come up with new ideas."

  "So what new ideas have you come up with?"

  Jace grinned at him but said nothing.

  For more than six weeks Dan had been trying to hammer out some way of getting more visual detail into the baseball simulation. Every one of his attempts had run into a dead end.

  "And what've you been doin' all morning?" Jace asked.

  "You weren't available, so I looked in on Gary Chan and his dinosaur hunt."

  "Charlie Chan? That kid?"

  "His name's Gary, not Charlie."

  "Don't be so obtuse. Everybody calls him Charlie Chan."

  "Well, whatever his name is, that kid has done some very neat work," said Dan. "And I think he's making progress on his Moonwalk, too. And have you seen the medical sim that Hurst and his people are developing?"

  "Yeah, yeah. "Jace dismissed the subject with a flap of one hand. "Muncrief's gonna be pissed as hell if we don't show some progress real soon."

  "We? You haven't even looked—"

  "I hear he's talking to people in Washington, trying to raise more money."

  "Jace, Muncrief's been breathing down my neck while you're off playing games with Joe Rucker."

  "So what have you done about it?"

  Dan sank back in his chair.

  "Come on, Danno, we need something slick. Elegant."

  "You're the genius."

  "Yeah, but this is a hardware problem. That's your department."

  All the tough problems are my department, Dan thought. "You come up with the brilliant ideas and then I've got to make them work."

  "So?" Jace urged. "You wanna be a genius, too? Solve our problem!"

  Dan hesitated only a fraction of a moment. "Have you ever heard of the persistence of vision?"

  Cocking a brow at him, Jace said, "Yeah, sure. From the movies. You show one still picture and the brain registers it as a still picture. Show a series of stills at the right speed and the brain overlaps 'em, makes you think you're seeing motion."

  "What I'm thinking about," Dan said slowly, "is that maybe we can split the time the computers spend on each image projection. Like time-sharing—"

  Jace
sat bolt upright. "Half the time on the foreground and half the time on the background! Yeah!"

  "We could give the computer's full power to each segment of the image, but only part time. Before the eye and the brain can register that a piece of the image is missing, it'll be back on again. To the user it'll seem like a continuous image, just like a motion picture does."

  "That effectively doubles our computing power!"

  "Right."

  Scratching at his two-day beard, Jace asked, "Can the hardware switch back and forth fast enough?"

  "The machines operate in nanoseconds, don't they? That ought to be plenty. Movie projectors run something like twenty-four frames per second, I think. Or is it forty-eight?"

  "What's the difference? That's dead slow compared to nanoseconds!"

  To a nanosecond computer, a twenty-fourth of a second would seem like years. The machines could easily switch back and forth a million times before the human eye-brain system would notice even a flicker.

  "It could work, I think," Dan said.

  "Sure it'll work!" Jace said, jumping to his feet. "You'll make it work!"

  "Well, I don't know—"

  "Do you realize what I can do with this?" Jace started pacing the office with long-legged strides, brimming with excitement. "We can get a thousand times the detail we've ever had before! They'll be able to read the print on the friggin' scorecards!"

  "I'm not certain it'll work," Dan said.

  "Sure it will. It's been done before, for different applications. All you have to do is write the program and de-bug it."

  "That could take months."

  Jace halted and whirled toward Dan. "We don't have months. Not many, anyway. Doesn't anybody else have a program we could use? Borrow it, copy it, steal it—anything!"

  Dan looked up at his partner. Jace looked as if he had not been sleeping, either. His face was unshaved, scruffy. His eyes bleary and red. His hair a tangled mess.

  Yet he was almost trembling with excitement. His eyes were glowing, bloodshot and all. Dan had dangled a new possibility before him, a new opportunity to build even more complexity into his simulations, a new toy bright and shining, almost within his grasp.

  "I don't know—" Dan began.

  "What about Bob Frankel? He working on something like architecture? Jace prompted. "Wasn't that for his shitfaced SDI?"

  "I thought you had no use for 'Star Wars.' "

  Jace twitched his shoulders in a bony shrug. "Shit, man, if he's got something we can use, who the fuck cares where it comes from? Maybe something good can come out of all the trillions they're spending on that crap."

  Robert Frankel had been one of the brightest mathematicians on Dr Appleton's staff. But he and Jace fought each other from the day they met. Two oversized egos, like a pair of network anchor men. When Frankel finally quit Dayton and went to work for the Strategic Defense Initiative office in Washington, Jace's only comment was, "I never realized he was a friggin' fascist."

  "The work he's doing must be classified top secret," Dan objected.

  "Give him a call," said Jace. "They can't classify mathematics, for craps sake."

  "He can't talk about what he's working on."

  Jace leaned over the desk until his face was so close that Dan could smell his rancid breath. "Look, Danno old buddy, I know you hate to admit you need anybody's help. But give Frankel a call. Can't hurt and you might learn something. Do it! Pronto, Tonto."

  Dan scowled. "What the hell's this pronto Tonto crap? You think you're the Lone Ranger?"

  Grinning crookedly, Jace said, "You don't know what tonto means in Spanish, huh?" Then he spun around and practically loped out of the office.

  Dan sat at his desk for several minutes, staring at the closed door Jace had left behind him. He knew Jace was right, he knew he should phone Bob Frankel, yet Dan felt all the old reluctance hanging onto him like a dead weight. All his life Damon Santorini had worked out his own problems by himself. If Dan had one flaw it was his aversion to seeking help from others. He would gnaw on a problem for months rather than ask for assistance. He usually solved the problem, but its eventual solution brought him little joy. By then he was already worrying about the next problem confronting him. And the one after that.

  It took a conscious effort of will for Dan to reach out and activate the smart phone on his desk. But Jace had told him to do it and Dan knew that Jace was right.

  "Robert Frankel," he said aloud. "Department of Defense in the Washington DC area."

  The phone was programmed to understand Dan's voice. Even so, he had to be careful to speak slowly and distinctly to it. Its "search" light began blinking yellow. Connected to the company's mainframe computer, the phone was accessing the District of Columbia telephone directories, searching for Robert Frankel at the Pentagon.

  Dan half-hoped it would not find him.

  But within seconds he heard the beeping tones of the phone calling a number, then a ring, two rings, and: "You have reached Dr Robert Frankel's phone. I'm not available at the moment, but if you leave your name and number—including the extension, if applicable—I will get back to you as soon as I can."

  Dan felt almost relieved as the answering machine emitted its long beep of a cue. "Bob, it's Dan Santorini," he said. "I need to talk to you about time-sharing. please call me as soon as you can."

  Then he touched the phone's OFF button; the machine would automatically add his number to the tape that Frankel's machine was recording.

  Leaning back in his chair, Dan almost succeeded in ignoring the message still glowing on the phone's LCD screen. Pronto, tonto, he thought. What the hell does tonto mean?

  Finally his sense of duty overcame his reluctance. He reached out again and touched the keypad. "Return the call in memory." His instinct was to add "please" but he felt foolish being polite to a box of microchips.

  Maybe Doc will be out of his office, Dan said to himself, glancing at his wristwatch. After all it's Friday afternoon and—

  "Appleton," came the familiar soft voice from the phone's amplifier.

  Dan picked up the handset. "Hello Doc. It's Dan Santorini."

  "Dan! I'm glad to hear from you."

  "Sorry I couldn't return your call sooner."

  "Oh, I know you must be very busy down there. How's everything going?"

  "Pretty well."

  "How's Jace?"

  Dan hesitated, then replied. "Jace is Jace."

  Appleton chuckled. "Yes, I guess it was a foolish question."

  For a moment neither man said anything. Then Dan asked, "What's happening with you?"

  "We have a sort of a problem here, Dan." Appleton's voice dropped a notch, became guarded.

  "Problem?"

  "I need to talk to you over a secure line."

  Dan felt his brow knitting into a frown. "A secure line?"

  "I can set up a call from Patrick Air Force Base."

  "That's over at Cape Canaveral."

  "Could you drive over there tonight?" Appleton's voice sounded strained, urgent. "Or tomorrow morning?"

  "Tomorrow's Saturday," Dan muttered.

  "I know it's an imposition, son, but I really need to talk this thing over with you."

  Two dozen excuses ran through Dan's mind. The only time he had to spend with his kids was the weekend. There was a mountain of work to do here at ParaReality. Susan expected him to help her over the weekend. He hadn't seen Phil awake since last Sunday.

  He heard himself say, "Eleven o'clock tomorrow morning. Will that be okay?"

  "Fine," said Appleton. "Let me give you directions and the name of the officer who'll take care of you there."

  CHAPTER 15

  Dan blinked and tried to remember how he got here. He was walking down his old street in his old neighborhood in Youngstown. He recognized the kids playing on the sidewalks and they stopped their games to wave at him.

  But they'd all be grown-ups now, he said to himself, just like me.

  Then he smiled and realize
d what was happening. This is a simulation. And a damned good one. How the hell did Jace learn so much about my old neighborhood?

  He passed the tobacco store where the kids all bought their comic books. Fat old Mr. Stein waved to him from the doorway. But how did I get into this sim? Dan asked himself. I don't remember.

  Then he saw Doc Appleton standing by the street lamp on the corner.

  "What're you doing here, Doc?" Dan asked.

  Doc's form shifted and suddenly he was Jace in that black gunfighter's outfit.

  Jace grinned at him. "Draw, Danno."

  "But I don't have a gun. I'm not in your gunfight sim, Jace, this is—"

  Jace pulled both revolvers from their holsters and fired point-blank. Dan felt the bullets slam into his chest and knock him over backward into pain and pain and more pain.

  He sat bolt upright in bed, soaked with sweat, his chest flaming raw.

  "Dan, what's the matter?" Susan reached for the lamp on her night table and turned it on.

  Dan was wheezing so hard he could barely speak.

  "Oh my God," said Susan. "Where's your inhalator?"

  "Dream," Dan gasped. "I was . . . back . . ."

  "Don't try to talk." Susan got out of the bed and went around to Dan's side. She rummaged in his night table drawer until she came up with the inhalator. Dan had not had to use it since they had come to Florida.

  He fumbled with the little plastic cap, then got the mouthpiece between his teeth and squirted a long acrid spray of epinephrine down his throat. Susan put her own pillow atop his and plumped them up for him.

  "You've never had an asthma attack in your sleep before," she said, sounding worried. Looking worried too, even in the nude.

  Dan sagged back against the pillows. "I had a dream," he croaked. "A nightmare."

  She got back in bed and pulled the sheet over them both. Resting her head on the pillows next to his, she stroked his chest lightly as she murmured, "It's all right, Dan. It was only a dream. You're all right now." She turned out the lights and they waited in the darkness for his breathing to return to normal. Susan fell asleep before Dan did, her head on his bare shoulder. It was that damned gunfight, Dan grumbled to himself. Jace's damned gunfight. That's what I've been dreaming about all these weeks.