Death Dream

by Ben Bova

  The g-suit was squeezing his guts just as if he were really flying. Got to hand it to Doc and his brain boys. Physical reactions just like the real thing. Almost.

  The two bogies were diving down toward him, Martinez saw. He kicked left rudder and leveled off, hoping they would overshoot him; then he would slip behind them and fire his Sidewinders at the bastards. He was surprised at how much effort it took to reach the missile arming switches and flick them on. We ought to put that on vocal command, along with everything else, Martinez told himself. Too much effort at this g-loading to reach over and hit the switches physically.

  He realized he was panting. A small deadly black cross appeared on his helmet display. If it touched the symbol of either one of the intruder aircraft one of his missiles would launch automatically.

  But the bogies were not going to overshoot him, he saw. They were slowing down, popping their airbrakes to begin a high-speed yo-yo that would plant them on his tail. Cursing, puffing from exertion as if he were really flying, Martinez thumbed the throttle control forward to full military power and pulled the stick back, trying to put as much distance between them and himself as he could while he clawed for altitude. The intruders immediately broke off their maneuver and hustled after him.

  "They're closing in, Daddy," Adair's daughter's voice warned, edging higher, sounding frightened.

  Martinez scanned the view rastering across his visor. The two red bogies sure did seem closer.

  "Range coordinates," he said, barely mouthing the words. The microphone in his oxygen mask caught the vocalization and immediately the picture before his eyes was crisscrossed with a gridwork marked in kilometers.

  Even as he blinked his eyes, the red bandits came nearer.

  Martinez was alone in the sky except for the enemy fighters; he knew he would get no help. And he was a fighter pilot. His first instinct was to deal with the bandits. The ground targets won't go away, he told himself. No sense getting myself shot down before I can even start my run on them.

  He kicked right rudder and turned into the bandits, who were still slightly above him. coming at them head-on he presented a smaller cross-section to their fire-control radars and masked the heat emissions from his jet engines somewhat.

  Abruptly the two red bandits multiplied into four, two of them breaking off to Martinez's right, two to the left.

  "What the hell?"

  No response from the controllers at their consoles.

  Martinez began to realize that this simulation was really strenuous. Doc and his people had loaded the dice on this one. He kicked in the thrust vectoring as he pulled his F-22 into a hard climbing left turn. The jet nozzles swiveled to make the climb steeper than the enemy planes could match.

  But they did match it. Hell, they must have given the bastards viffing capability too, Martinez thought as he watched two of the red symbols match his climb almost exactly. His chest hurt now from the continuous exertion, the g-forces making his arms heavy, squeezing the breath from his body. His neck ached and the helmet felt as if it weighed six hundred pounds. It's all your imagination, he snarled at himself. You're sitting in a fucking chair on the ground; you're not really pulling nine g's, yet he felt sweat beading his forehead, running into his eyes.

  Blinking and squinting he nosed over into a split-s, but instead of completing it he turned it into a vertical dive. Two of the red bogies followed right down after him, gaining on him. The other two had disappeared from his visor's panoramic view. Martinez pulled up sharply, his g-suit hissing and squeezing his guts to keep him from blacking out.

  He was blasting along on the deck, only a few feet above the cartoon drawing of the ground, his Machmeter jittering at Mach 1. The plane rattled and jounced, shaking his guts. The two bandits roared along behind him, inching closer.

  "Radar lock!" the little girl's voice screeched.

  Martinez snapped the F-22 into a turn so tight that his vision grayed out despite the g-suit. The bandits stayed fixed on his tail as if they had been painted there.

  "Missiles launched!" she shrilled.

  He popped a flare, pulled back on the control stick and slammed the throttles to full emergency power. The overwhelming push of tremendous acceleration crushed in on his chest, flattening him against his seat, making his pulse thunder in his ears. Someone was shoving a red-hot needle behind his eyes; the pain was screamingly intense.

  The missiles raced past below him, chasing the bright infrared signature of the decoy flare. He saw their trails as brilliant red pencil lines darting across the green cartoon landscape. "Gracias a Dios," he gasped despite himself. But then the other two bandits appeared on his visor ahead of him. "Radar lock missiles fired!" Jerry's daughter screamed all in one breath.

  Martinez yelled, "Fuck it! Gotta punch out!"

  But he could not move. His arms were plastered to their rests as if cemented in place. His chest was aflame with agony. His head felt as if it would explode. Eyes bursting from their sockets he watched the two deadly missiles run straight into him and explode into a hellish fireball. He could not even scream. Everything went black. The last thing he sensed was somebody laughing, someone so far away he could barely hear him laughing with evil triumphant glee.

  CHAPTER 22

  Dan spent all day Saturday digging into the stuttering concept and writing the first few lines of programming to apply the technique to the baseball game. Jace had hovered over his shoulder, constantly reminding him of their bet about using the AI system to de-bug Dan's program once it was finished.

  He went home for a quick dinner, then drove back to the lab in the dark, happy to see that Jace's rusted old bicycle was not at its usual spot on the loading dock. The building was empty and dark, except for the night guard who opened the back door after nearly ten minutes of Dan's leaning on the buzzer.

  He felt guilty, sneaking around Jace like this, but he forgot about that once he settled himself at his desk and started working on Smith's project. It wasn't particularly difficult, Dan realized very quickly. It just took a lot of time to set up the program properly. Probably that's why Muncrief asked me to do it, he thought. They don't need a genius, just somebody who knows what he's doing and won't go blabbing about it to anybody.

  Dan was startled by the clear lilting song of a bird chirping outside his window. He looked up from his computer screen and saw that the sky was already a pearly gray. Christ, the sun's coming up!

  Susan was half awake by the time he got home. He grabbed a couple of hours' sleep, mumbled through a late breakfast with the kids, and drove bleary-eyed back to his office.

  Jake's bike was there, he saw. The only other car in the back lot was Joe Rucker's battered old Thunderbird, with the handicapped license plate in its rusting frame. Dan literally tiptoed past Wonderland, wondering what games Jace was playing with Joe in there. He closed the door to his office and buried himself in his work.

  Of course he could not avoid Jace forever. Dan bumped into him at the cafeteria. They were not serving any food on Sunday; Dan had brought a sandwich he had put together for himself while Sue had made breakfast. The coffee and cold-drink dispensers were working, though. So were the junk food vending machines, which is where he saw Jace, peering at one of the machines as if trying to hypnotize it, his long skinny frame adorned in the usual shabby jeans with a tee shirt hanging loose over his belt, proclaiming on its back Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

  "I thought that was your car in parking lot," Jace said, barely glancing at Dan.

  "Hi," said Dan, feeling flustered.

  "What're you doing in here today?" Jace asked.

  "Uh, putting some time into the de-bugging—"

  "Oh? Tryin' to beat the AI system, huh?"

  Feeling miserable about lying, Dan admitted. "I'm doing an extra job for Muncrief, actually."

  "Yeah? What? Need any help?"

  Shaking his head, Dan replied, "No, it's pretty simple, really. Just needs some time put into it."

  Jace gripped
the vending machine with both hands and jiggled it like a kid working a pinball machine. "So you're working on Sunday?" he asked over his shoulder.

  "Yep." Dan headed for one of the tables. They were all empty. Nobody else in the lab, as far as he could tell. No telling where Rucker was; maybe he had left already.

  "What about the family?" Jace whacked the machine smartly with one open palm and a bag of chips fell into its tray. He tore it open and started munching on them as he walked to the table.

  As he put his lunch bag on the table and pulled out a chair, Dan asked, "Don't you intend to pay for that?"

  "Why should I?" Jace looked truly surprised at the question.

  "Isn't that stealing?"

  Jace shrugged. "Think of it as a contest of skill: man against machine."

  Dan shook his head in disapproval as he sat down.

  "How's your wife feel about this?"

  "About what?"

  "Working Sunday."

  "How can you eat that crap?" Dan tried to evade his interrogation. "It's pure grease."

  "I'm on a high cholesterol diet," Jace said, grinning. He swung a lanky leg over a chair back and sat down. "I thought Sue wanted you home on the weekends. That's what you told me when I asked you to come in a couple Sundays ago, remember?"

  "You just wanted company."

  "I'm a lonely creative genius," kidding.

  "Sure you are."

  Jace shrugged and grinned and munched chips, all at the same time.

  "I've been thinking," Dan said, trying to get the subject off his working on Sunday.

  "That's what you get paid for," Jace mumbled, his mouth full of chips.

  "About my symphony orchestra simulation." Jace made a sour face.

  "No, this is different," said Dan. "I was thinking—what if we put together a system that'd teach kids how to play musical instruments."

  Jake's eyebrows rose.

  "I mean, do you think we could jigger the data gloves to move the user's fingers? Make the kid's hands play the instrument properly and burn the information into the kid's nervous system that way?"

  Jace stared at Dan.

  "We'd have to attach servomotors to the gloves, I guess. Like those power-amplified gloves the astronauts use, or the waldoes they use at remote manipulation labs. I could kluge something like that together and we could see how it works."

  "Get a real musician," Jace said, his voice low as if he were talking to himself rather than Dan, "track the motions his hands make. Track his whole friggin, breathing system, from his diaphragm to his lips, if he's playing a wind instrument—"

  "And then play it back to a kid who's learning to play that same instrument. Yeah!"

  "Cripes," said Jace, his eyes starting to glow.

  "We could start the kid on simple scales and easy things like that while her nervous system learns the moves she's supposed to make."

  "Screw music," Jace snapped. "What about sports? You could train athletes like that! Jesus! We could corner the market for training Olympics teams!"

  "You think it's possible?"

  "Damn right!"

  "It's be a major change, feeding physical motions into the user instead of having the system react to her motions."

  Jake's eyes widened slightly, as if he had just thought of something else. His excited grin faded.

  Dan went on, oblivious in his growing enthusiasm, "I mean, we could train a user's nervous system instead of just feeding his senses with sensory input. But you think we could do it?"

  The took in Jace's narrow eyes had become wary. "I don't know. It's something to think about, I guess."

  "It's a whole new approach—"

  "Eat your lunch," Jace said. "Don't get yourself into an uproar."

  "But this could be even bigger than the games we're doing!"

  "Maybe. We gotta finish this friggin' baseball sim before we start anything new, y'know."

  "We'll have that locked up in a month or two," Dan said, then added, "if we don't hit any bumps."

  "Yeah. Lemme think about it." But Jace's voice, his face, had lost alt the eagerness of a few moments earlier.

  "I'll tell Muncrief about it. The company can make a fortune out of this."

  Jace waggled a bony finger. "Uh-uh. No sense telling Muncrief until we're ready to. He'll just get pissed and think we're not going balls-out on the baseball sim."

  "But—"

  "Besides," Jace's sallow face went crafty, "why should we make Muncrief any richer than he's gonna be from Cyber World, huh? With an idea like this, we can walk away and start our own outfit."

  Dan stared at his partner. The last thing in the world he had expected from Jace was entrepreneurship.

  "But this could be big enough—"

  "Forget about it!" Jace snapped. Then he added, "For now, anyway."

  Dan felt confused. He had never known Jace to put off a good new idea.

  Hunching closer, leaning his scrawny arms on the table Jace asked, "Okay, so what's so important to Muncrief that you gotta come in on Sunday, huh?"

  Wishing he were a. thousand miles away, Dan tried to evade his friend's curiosity. "It's nothing important enough to bother you with."

  Jace eyed Dan closely. Dan unwrapped the sandwich he had made for himself and took a bite. It was dry and flavorless. Somehow Sue always made better sandwiches, even when they used the same ingredients.

  "You're not gonna tell me?" Jace said

  "It's not important. Forget it."

  "I wanna know!"

  Dan could feel his chest constricting the way it always did when he was under pressure.

  "Look," he said, thinking as he spoke, "Muncrief asked me not to bother you with this. He doesn't want you distracted from the baseball game."

  "You can just tell me what it is, for chrissakes."

  Feeling awful inside, Dan said, "He made me promise not to tell anybody."

  "Even me?"

  "Even you."

  "And you're not gonna tell me?"

  "I can't. I promised."

  Jake's eyes were blazing. "You're really not gonna tell me?"

  Dan said nothing. He just gripped his cardboard sandwich tightly enough to squeeze half the cold-cut slices out of it. They fell with a messy plop onto his plastic bag spread out on the table.

  Jace grabbed his tattered bag of chips and pushed himself up from his chair. He stalked to the door of the cafeteria, furious.

  "Okay, keep your friggin' mouth shut," he shouted from the doorway, his voice echoing off the bare walls and silent counters. "I got secrets too! Stuff I don't tell you!"

  Dan looked down at the shambles of his sandwich.

  "I'm doin" a special job for Muncrief too, y'know," Jace yelled. "That's what's been keepin' me up nights. Weekends too."

  Sure you are, Dan replied silently.

  "It'd make your goddam eyes pop if you knew what Muncrief wanted me to do for him!"

  Dan stayed silent.

  "And I'm doin' it!" Jace bellowed. Then he spun around and left the cafeteria. Dan could hear his boots clomping down the hallway.

  Dan was startled when Gary Chan tapped at the open door to his office later that afternoon.

  "What're you doing in here on Sunday?" he asked.

  Chan stepped into the office, a happy grin on his face. He was wearing his customary white shirt and dark slacks.

  "Got a minute?" he asked.

  Not really, Dan thought, but he felt himself smile back at the younger man as he said, "I guess. How's it going?"

  "I think I've got it."

  "The Moonwalk sim?"

  "Yes. Want to see?"

  "Uh, Gary . . . I'm pretty busy here."

  "Oh." Chan looked crestfallen. "Sure, I understand. Sorry I bothered you." He retreated toward the door.

  "Wait up, Gary," Dan said to him. "I can squeeze a couple minutes in." And he got up from his desk, wondering how much of Chan's Oriental politeness and self-effacement was a ploy for maneuvering the people around him.
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  Five minutes later the two of them stood side by side on the dusty surface of the Moon.

  "It took a lot of calculation," Chan's voice came through earphones in Dan's helmet. "but that program you tipped me about saved me weeks of work."

  "Good," said Dan.

  They were both in spacesuits, big bulky cumbersome suits with thick-soled boots and clear plastic fishbowl helmets. As they walked across the lunar surface their boots kicked up dust that fell in dream-like slow motion back to the ground. Dan could see their boot prints clearly, bright against the dark lunar soil. All around him the barren, crater-pocked emptiness of the Moon stretched off to a horizon that seemed disturbingly close. Worn-down old mountains slumped across the horizon and beyond them the stars shone with hard, brilliant intensity.

  "Okay," Chan's voice said in his earphones, "now try to jump."

  Dan nodded. He trotted a couple of steps and then jumped toward a big dark boulder some fifty yards away.

  "Holy cow!" Dan soared across the rock-strewn ground as if he were flying and landed, staggering, almost halfway between the boulder and the spot where Chan was still standing.

  "How's that?" Chan asked eagerly.

  "Terrific!"

  Dan jumped back, again gliding across the barren ground. He had time almost to count the tiny craterlets pockmarking the ground before he landed again at Chan's side.

  "It works just the way you said it would, Dan. I can't eliminate your inner feeling of weight," Chan said proudly, "but I can make your body behave as if you were really in the Moon's one-sixth gravity."

  "This is great, Gary. Simply great!"

  "And it's pretty simple to refigure the program for the Mars sim."

  "You've done a marvelous job."

  "Want to see Mars?"

  For a few moments Dan had been able to forget his own work, his own responsibilities. But it all came back to him.

  "I'd love to, Gary, but I can't. I'm really loaded with a lot of stuff."