Death Dream

by Ben Bova

"Go back to London, lobsterbacks!" came a shout from across the green.

  Angela heard a shot, but she was certain that none of the Minutemen had fired. Nor had the redcoats. The officer wheeled his horse about and shouted, "Take aim!"

  The first rank of soldiers dropped to their knees and aimed at the Minutemen while the second rank raised their muskets above their heads. Some of the Minutemen leveled their guns, but most began to back away fearfully.

  "Fire!"

  The blast of noise was much less then Angela had expected but maybe that was because she had clapped her hands over her ears. A big cloud of gray smoke covered half the common for a moment and when the breeze cleared it away the Minutemen were running in all directions, leaving the British soldiers in possession of the green. Angela counted eight Minutemen on the ground, several of them writhing and moaning with pain.

  The mounted officer laughed. "On to Concord, then," he said, spurring his horse toward the extension of the road that led to the next town, not even bothering to chase the fleeing Minutemen.

  "Things will be different at Concord." Angela turned to see a young man, a boy really, crouching in the shrubbery slightly behind her. She had not known he'd been there.

  "Come on," he said, reaching out his hand for her.

  Angela let him lead her back behind the house to a small barn. It was shadowy and cool inside, pungent with the smell of horses and hay. The boy—scarcely older than Angela herself—began rooting through a pile of hay next to the horse stalls.

  "Who are you?" she asked.

  "Names don't matter, not today." His voice was strong, determined. "What matters is this."

  And he pulled a long black musket from beneath the hay. "I'm going to Concord," he said.

  "You're too young to be a soldier."

  "No I'm not. Not when the lobsterbacks are killing us. We need every gun we can muster at Concord and that's where I'm going."

  "How will you get there?"

  "It's only a few miles. I can run faster than those murdering redcoats can march."

  Angela felt breathless with the excitement of it all. And with this young man's fierce determination.

  He started for the barn door, then suddenly grasped her around the waist with his free arm and kissed her on the lips.

  "I'll see you in Concord," he said over his shoulder as he strode out of the barn.

  Barely able to breathe, Angela waved to him as the scene faded and grew dark and she found herself sitting, in the VR booth at school, tears in her eyes, heart fluttering, dying for the next lesson in American history.

  "I don't like it," Jace said as he paced across the office. "It gives me the creeps."

  Kyle Muncrief leaned back in his big desk chair, steepling his fingers. "I don't like it either. We need Dan here, not running off to Dayton."

  Jace shot Muncrief a glance. "I don't mean that. I mean what you're doing with Dan's kid."

  "What you're doing."

  "For you."

  Muncrief conceded the point with a spread of his hands. "It's not hurting anybody. she's even starting to enjoy it."

  "Yeah, but why Dan's kid? Why not one of the others?"

  "She comes the closest to . . . to what I want," Muncrief said, avoiding Jace's eyes. "I'm not going to hurt her."

  Jace kept on pacing, looking unconvinced.

  "What's going on back at Dayton, that's what's worrying me," Muncrief said.

  "Some asshole of a brass hat had a stroke. Big deal. He was always on the verge of a stroke anyway."

  "You know who it is?"

  "A guy named Martinez. A real hard-ass. Serves him right. Big friggin' deal."

  "Big enough to get Dan to hotfoot it out there, despite all the work he's got to do here."

  Jace stopped in the middle of the room and whirled toward Muncrief. "Yeah! What's this special job you've got Dan working on? What's so special he can't tell me about it?"

  "You've got enough to do."

  "I don't like you sneaking around behind my back, y'know."

  His face showing his exasperation, Muncrief said, "I'm not sneaking around. It's a special job that's got nothing to do with your work. It's so absolutely simple that I figured Dan could handle it on weekends and nights."

  "But he can't talk to me about it."

  "The people I'm doing this job for want it kept very confidential. No leaks. We both know you wouldn't put up with that so I didn't bother you with it."

  Jace stared hard at Muncrief, then pulled up one of the chairs in front of the desk.

  "Listen," he said, "this business of recording his daughter's reactions is giving me the creeps. I feel like a friggin' electronic vampire."

  "We're almost finished, aren't we?"

  "How the hell should I know? How much is enough?"

  Muncrief ran a finger across his upper lip and Jace saw that there were beads of perspiration there.

  "I'll go over the disks tonight," he said. "If all the reactions I need are there, we can stop bugging her."

  "And if not?"

  He shrugged. "A couple more sessions ought to do it. She's not complaining any more, is she? She's getting a kick out of it, I tell you."

  "If Dan ever finds out," Jace said, his voice lowered.

  "He won't. How could he?"

  "If he ever does . . ."

  "If he ever does," Muncrief growled, "it'll be from you. You're the only one who knows about it, besides me."

  "What about Vickie?"

  "Vickie doesn't know anything important."

  "The hell she doesn't."

  Waving an impatient hand in the air, Muncrief said, "Let me worry about Vickie."

  "Yeah," said Jace. "And I'll worry about Dan."

  That evening, while she waited for a phone call from Dan, Susan bathed Philip and laid him in his crib to put on his night clothes. Angela came into the nursery to watch, her pink terrycloth robe wrapped around her slim, boyish body.

  "Would you get me a diaper for him, honey?" Susan asked her daughter.

  Angela brought a diaper to the crib and handed it to her mother. Lying on his back, pudgy arms and legs churning, Philip suddenly urinated in an arc that spattered his own face. He blinked and batted his little hands at the tiny stream while Susan instinctively ducked out of the way and Angela giggled.

  Susan used the diaper to clean up her baby as Angela fetched another from the pile on the table beside the crib.

  "Why do they have that funny thing?" Angela asked her mother.

  "You know why," Susan said. "I explained that to you."

  "To make babies with."

  "That's right."

  "Mrs. O'Connell said she's not allowed to tell us anything about sex. She said we're supposed to learn about it from our parents."

  Susan sighed. There was no easier way to wreck a PTA than to bring up the subject of sex education. "Is there something you want to ask about?"

  Angela thought a moment. "No, I don't think so."

  Susan remembered the inevitable moment, about a year ago, when Angela had finally asked the ultimate question: "I know the man has the seed and he has to put it into the woman," she had said. "But how does he put it into her?"

  With some trepidation, Susan explained the process.

  Angela listened with growing disbelief, then burst into wild laughter. "With the wee-wees?" Angela had screeched, almost doubling over with hilarity.

  Susan realized that the story must sound awfully improbable on first hearing. She almost wanted to take Angela into the bedroom with Dan and show her a demonstration.

  Several months later Angela started her first menstrual period. For weeks she followed her mother everywhere asking her everything she could think of about sex and childbearing. Susan tried to answer calmly, clinically, and without offering more information than the child actually asked for. Apparently satisfied with her mother's answers, Angela's interest in sex seemed to have waned.

  Until now.

  "Marta Randolph says she's slept wi
th four different boys," Angela announced as Susan taped the new diaper on her son.

  Susan's guts clenched inside her, but she tried to remain calm. "Do you think she's telling the truth?"

  "I guess."

  "That's not a very smart thing to do"

  "I told her she could get pregnant, or even get AIDS. But she just laughed and said l was a scared bunny."

  "You're a very smart young lady, and Marta is either a liar or a tramp. Or maybe both. I'll bet her parents don't know what she's doing."

  "She says boys like to put their thing in your mouth."

  OhmyGod, Susan groaned inwardly. She busied herself tugging on Philip's pajamas.

  "Is that true?" Angela looked as if she were facing a plate full of broccoli.

  "Angie, sweet, when you love a man, when you know that this particular man is the one you want to spend your whole life with, the one you want to have babies with, then you can do anything that pleases him. But it's got to please you, too! Remember that. Whatever you do with a man, it's got to please both of you or else it's no good."

  Angela considered this for a moment, then asked, "Do you do that with Daddy?"

  Susan felt her face flame. "What a man and a woman do when they make love is their business, Angie, and nobody else's."

  "Uh-huh. But do you?"

  Suddenly Susan understood why her daughter was asking. "Are any of the boys in school trying to get you to have sex with them?"

  Angela shook her head. "No, they all go with Marta or Kristy Kelly. They don't like girls with braces on their teeth."

  "Oh, that's not true, dear. They think more highly of you than those other girls. They know you're a good girl and those others aren't."

  "I guess." Very glumly.

  Seeing that Philip was dressed for the night, Susan knelt down beside her daughter and wrapped her arms around her. "You mean the boys don't even look at you? They don't say hello or talk to you on the bus or anything?"

  "Oh, sure, they talk to me and we play ball in the schoolyard. They like me to help them with their class work. Gary Rusic, he's real nice."

  "So you see?" Susan felt immense relief. "You don't have to be a tramp to have boyfriends."

  Angela nodded and smiled a bit.

  "You can bring some of your friends here after school, you know. I could drive them all home afterward; you don't need to worry about the bus."

  "Could l?" Angela's eyes went wide with delighted surprise.

  "Certainly."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "Sure," Susan said, mentally rearranging her own work schedule to free up the late afternoon.

  "That's rad!"

  "Rad?"

  "Totally rad! That means it's real good."

  Radical, Susan guessed as she hugged her daughter, happy that something so simple could please her.

  But Angela whispered in her ear, "Mommy, what's Deep Throat?"

  Kyle Muncrief wandered alone through his big empty house. It had been furnished by the best interior decorator in Orlando but he still thought of it as empty. No one here but me. All alone. It was well past midnight but he knew he could not sleep.

  Booze didn't help anymore and he was afraid of getting started with pills. He had spent hours at his office after everyone else had left, playing and replaying the disks Jace had made of little Angela. Now he was so wired up over them that he could not sleep.

  He was still in the shirt and slacks he had worn at the office. Just before she left for the day, Vickie had told him that the first payment from Washington had arrived. "The cash flow is going to get better and better," she had said, almost triumphantly. Flow. Muncrief snorted. More like a dismal trickle. Just enough to keep the leaky roof over our heads until February.

  He looked out at the pool patio. Standing by the sliding glass doors of his living room he turned on the pool lights, The water glowed ghostlike and he saw white blurs of insects flitting through the night.

  Got to open Cyber World on schedule. We're sunk if we don't. Toshimura's dickering with Sony or one of the other biggies, I can feel it in my bones. Maybe Disney.

  If we don't open Cyber World on schedule he'll throw me to the wolves and steal everything we've done. Him and Swenson, both. They won't give me another penny; they're just waiting for me to fall over, like a couple of grinning vultures sitting in a dead tree. Glass might try to stick up for me, but the two of them will pick my bones clean if I give them the chance.

  And Dan's off playing soldier in Dayton. God damn his eyes! When I need him here. He's supposed to be the reliable one, the steady hand, and he's off on some kind of toot. Says his simulation's giving guys strokes. Absolute nonsense! I need him here and he's running around with his old pals in Ohio.

  Muncrief ran a hand over his face. It's too much, he said to himself. It's just too monumentally much. I'm risking everything on this and they're trying to screw me out of it. They're all against me, every last one of them. Except Crystal. If only I knew where she was. If only she could he here with me.

  He ticked his lips. Then he made up his mind and strode to the marble table in the foyer where he had thrown his car keys. I can't have Crystal. Not yet, he said to himself as he headed for the garage. But I can run through those disks again. Dan's daughter. Little Angela. My little angel.

  I'll turn her into Crystal. Jace will. But I've got to keep control of the company to keep Jace working on this for me. I've got to keep this hardnose Smith happy so I can get the money from Washington. And Dan's not here to do Smith's work.

  "Jesus God!" he screamed in the empty house. "They're all pressuring me!"

  And he banged through the garage door, jumped into his Jaguar and headed back to his office. And the disks Jace was making for him.

  CHAPTER 25

  Dan spent most of the day at the F-22 simulator that stood silent and unmoving in the hanger down by the airfield.

  Appleton stayed at his elbow as Dan climbed up into the cockpit, checked out all the wiring, and powered up the control consoles. The only thing he found different from his earlier years was that a bank of electrical heaters now sat on the concrete floor, ringed around the simulator, whirring and clanking noisily.

  "Guess I ought to see Ralph," he said to Doc toward the end of the afternoon.

  Appleton nodded grimly. Everyone who worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base said that the base hospital was the best one in the entire Dayton area. Dan had his doubts; but as he followed Dr Appleton along a maze of corridors he realized that the hospital was at least big and well-staffed. Crisply-uniformed nurses, serious-looking doctors, orderlies and technicians everywhere; some were scurrying, most strode the hallways with the purposeful assured look of competence. The corridors were sparkling clean, smelling of antiseptic and whatever that particular odor is that all hospitals everywhere have in common. When he saw Ralph Martinez, Dan realized what that odor was: Pain. And fear.

  Dan stood in front of a window that separated the intensive care unit's central monitoring station from the beds laid out in a semicircle around it. The monitoring station looked like NASA's mission control, bank upon bank of display screens. Three nurses, one of them male, sat before the flickering screens. Only four of the beds were occupied. Martinez's was over at one end, screened off from the others.

  He had a clear plastic breathing mask over his face, but even through it Dan could see how horribly distorted his face was, constricted on the left side so badly that his lips were pulled back from his teeth like a growling feral beast. His left eye was squeezed shut, but his right glared red hot pain and fury. His right arm lay atop the bedsheet, his hand slowly clenching and unclenching like a man enduring torture.

  "Can he talk to us?" Dan whispered to the Indian physician standing with him and Appleton.

  Chandra Narlikar looked startled by the question. His big liquid eyes flicked from Dan to Appleton and back again.

  "He cannot speak at all," Narlikar said. "His vocal abilities are totally gone."

  "
But he might recover his speech, mightn't he?" Appleton asked, almost pleading.

  "Doubtful," said Narlikar, shaking his head sadly. "Extremely doubtful. His condition is deteriorating. He might not even last the night."

  "Jesus," breathed Dan.

  "If he could only tell us what happened in there," said Appleton. "Adair died without regaining consciousness. If Ralph could tell us what happened to him in the simulation . . ."

  Dan put a hand on the older man's shoulder. "Come on, Doc. There's nothing we can do here."

  Appleton nodded, his shoulders sagging. "I'll drive you over to the BOQ."

  Dan had never been in the bachelor officers' quarters before. It was like a moderately plush dormitory: individual rooms that were small and spartan, but clean and good enough for a visiting Air Force officer or civilian employee. High ranking officers and big shots from Washington got better rooms, or even stayed in real hotels with room service and the city's entertainments around them. But for Dan, this little room with its narrow bed, desk, slim closet, and small-screen TV was good enough. At least the TV was hooked to a cable service.

  Dan sat on the bed and phoned Susan. "You sound exhausted," she said.

  "It's been a long day."

  "How is Colonel Martinez?"

  He let out a breath. "They think he might not last the night."

  "Oh dear."

  "I don't know if I'm going to be able to do any good here," Dan said, worming off his loafers and letting them drop to the thin carpeting. "I'll see how much I can find out tomorrow."

  "Your coat should be at Dr Appleton's office by ten-thirty tomorrow morning."

  "Good. I can use it."

  "Anything else I can do?" Susan asked.

  He started to say no, then something popped into his consciousness. "Maybe you can look up some background information for me on nerve physiology."

  "Nerve physiology?"

  While a part of his mind felt almost shocked that he could think of anything except Ralph Martinez, Dan replied, "When we were talking with Angie a couple nights ago about learning to play musical instruments . . ."