In the cabin, I lost no time dressing my arm wound and applying balm to the stinging laceration that ran from my temple to my jaw.
Through the fog of fear and desperation, however, I was somehow able to think about Jinx. Had there ever actually been a Jinx Fuller in my world? Or had she all along been but a projection?
I reached for my coat, tasting at last the bitter irony of having fallen in love with her. I, but a ripple of illusion; she, a real, tangible person. I could imagine her mocking laughter, joining exuberantly with that of the Operator.
Suddenly doubtful, I paused in the doorway. Back to the city? Where Siskin’s police were out to shoot me down? Where, even if I should elude them, they had a sadistic Ally Up There all too eager to program them in the right direction?
There was a blur of movement in the corner of my vision and I ducked reflexively under a flurry of wings and a raucous caw-caw.
But the crow had not purposely aimed itself at me. Confounded, I turned and watched it bank and fly straight in the kitchen. Curiosity exceeded apprehension and I went back inside. The bird had landed on the floor and was pecking at the stud on the door of the packaged power unit compartment.
I thought of the exposed leads within. And, for a horrifying moment of indecision, I was rooted in the cabin.
Then I charged outside, racing halfway across the clearing before I hurled myself to the ground. The cabin went up in a shattering roar, spewing debris over an acre of forest and taking the garage along with it.
Fortunately, none of the hurtling stone and timber struck either me or Jinx’s car in the center of the clearing—a development of which I should have been immediately suspicious.
Surveying the wreckage, I was convinced at last that I would have to take my chances in the city.
At two thousand feet over the forest, the main power supply failed. I switched to emergency and the vanes began spinning again. But the engine coughed spasmodically and with each sputter the car plunged another hundred feet.
I fought the wheel frantically to retain some degree of control. Finally I managed to kick the craft around toward the lake, hoping there would be a final burst of power to cushion the impact.
Just then the Operator cut in once more on my perceptive faculties. The torment of faulty coupling was less unbearable this time, however. It could only be that my plight was providing Him with sufficient delight in itself.
Abruptly a strong headwind began churning the surface of the lake into a frothing mantle and my angle of descent became more precipitous. I was going to crash into the trees before I broke over the shore line!
But an unexpected burst of power boosted me over the hump and another cushioned the car just five feet above the lashing waves.
Knuckles whitened by my fierce grip on the wheel, I sat there trembling and perspiring, as the vehicle climbed back into the sky.
I could sense the Operator’s ecstatic reaction. And I knew, from the intensity of His emotional response, that I was not going to be let off that easily. Bracing myself, I waited for whatever would come next as the car, still gaining altitude, continued on toward the city.
With Fuller’s simulator, I remembered, coupling could be modified to permit reciprocal empathy. That device would be used, for instance, whenever I wanted to communicate with Phil Ashton without having to project myself into his world.
So I tried to reach back across the empathic bond, realizing all the while that He would be aware of my intention. But I could perceive nothing through His senses. It was a one-way coupling. Yet I could almost sense His presence. It was as though I could get the “feel” of Him. And vivid was the impression I received of malicious, twisted purpose.
Then I frowned, perplexed. There was the profound suggestion that the bond existing between us was one of more than just empathy. There seemed to be the obscure hint of a certain similarity between the two of us. Physical? In character? Or was it merely reflective of our analogous circumstances—each a simulectronicist in his own world?
Without further interference from the Operator, I leveled off at six thousand feet. Then I tilted the car’s nose down, exchanging lift for thrust, and sped for the city. The concrete-glass hulk of the metropolis spread out before me, only a few miles away.
Would I make it? Then I sank despondently back in the seat. Did I want to make it? Out there in the forest, alone with the Operator and all His hostile nature, I had little chance of survival. On the other hand, in the city there would be no animals available for attack programming. But what about the inanimate things? The lashing belt of a suddenly snapped high-speed pedistrip? A falling cornice? An air car out of control?
Anxiously, I stared through the plexidome at a small, gray cloud that bisected the horizon. It grew alarmingly as the car carried me directly toward it. I tried to steer clear, but too late.
In the next instant I was in a swirling, darting flight of—red-winged blackbirds? At six thousand feet? They thudded against the car, spattering its plexidome. They were sucked in by the hundreds through the dorsal intakes. The vanes groaned and chugged against the almost solid mass, taking a terrific pounding. The powerplant coughed and wheezed, froze, then freed itself—only to repeat the ominous cycle.
Plunging down, I winced as the Operator switched in anew on my senses. Again, the empathic coupling was bearable. And once more I labored under the incongruous impression that the person who was battening on my desperation and fear bore a certain incomprehensible similarity to me.
The battered vanes, trying valiantly to check the drop, began vibrating. The shudder intensified and presently it seemed that the craft was going to shake itself apart. Then the dome cracked, shattered, and went flying past my head. I glanced outside to see how far I was from the ground. And, ironically, I perceived that I was plunging almost straight toward the low, broad building that was Reactions, Inc.
I had so little altitude now that I could even see the troops. And I wondered whether the Operator, in a brilliant stroke of strategy, was going to send me crashing into the building to wipe out both myself and Fuller’s machine at the same time.
If that had been his plan, however, he had forgotten about the emergency net protecting the city. For, with the car scarcely two hundred feet above the building, three intensely yellow beams leaped up from the surface and converged on the helpless craft.
They absorbed its momentum. Pivoting slowly and in perfect coordination, they moved me along several hundred feet above the surface toward the nearest emergency receiving station.
But the Upper Simulectronicist wasn’t going to be deprived of yet another brutal flourish. The car’s powerplant burst into flames filling the cab with fierce heat. I had no choice. Still a hundred feet above the receiving area, I dived from the craft.
By then the Operator had broken empathy. Otherwise, he might easily have arranged for me to slip out of the receiving beam. But as it was, I stayed safely within the brilliant cone and was lowered to the apron several seconds ahead of the car.
I didn’t waste any time there—not with traffic police and firemen spilling out of the station. Leaping from the apron, I hurdled the staticstrip and landed upon the slowest pedibelt. Within a moment I had worked my way to the highspeed conveyor.
Two blocks away, I returned to the staticstrip and walked as casually as I could into the nearest hotel.
In the lobby, an automatic news vendor was headlining the day’s developments in an impersonal, soft voice:
“Siskin Schedules Public Demonstration of Simulacron-3 Tomorrow Morning! Machine to Solve First Problem in Human Relations!”
But Siskin’s strategy held little interest for me as I took the belt to the rear of the lobby and found an obscure pair of chairs half concealed by a huge wax plant. Haggard and insensitive, I dropped into the nearer of the two.
“Doug! Oh, Doug—wake up!”
Somehow, exhaustion must have brought sleep. But I swam wearily back toward consciousness, aware first of the tingling num
bness in my spent legs. Then I opened my eyes and saw Jinx seated in the adjacent chair. I started and she placed her hand on my arm.
Wincing, I sprang up and tried to bolt back toward the crowded part of the lobby. But my legs buckled and I almost fell. I stood there swaying and trembling, trying frantically to place one foot in front of the other.
She rose and shoved me back into the chair. Confounded, I glanced down at my legs.
“Yes, Doug,” she said. “I sprayed them—so you wouldn’t be able to run from me.”
Now I could see the bulge of the small laser gun in her purse.
“I know—everything,” I blurted out. “You’re not one of us! You’re not even an ID unit!”
There was no surprise on her face, only a pained uneasiness.
“That’s right,” she said softly. “And now I’m aware of how much you know. But I wasn’t an hour ago, when we were back there at the cabin. That’s why I withdrew in the forest. I had to find out how much you had figured out for yourself—or how much he had let you figure out”
“He? Who?”
“The Operator.”
“There is an Operator, then? This is a simulectronic world?”
She didn’t say anything.
“And you’re just a—a projection?” I asked.
“Just a projection.” She dropped back into the chair.
I think I would have felt less despondent if she had denied it. However, she only sat there grim-faced, offering no hope, giving me time to realize fully that I was merely a reactional unit. Whereas she was a real, material person whom I could perceive only in an ingenious reflection of her true self.
She leaned toward me. “But you’re wrong, Doug! I’m not trying to trick you. I only want to help.”
I touched my lacerated cheek, glanced down at my laser-sprayed legs. But she didn’t interpret the gesture in the same sarcastic vein I had intended it Instead she said:
“When I withdrew this morning, it was because I wanted to run a spot empathy check on you. I had to see just how much you did suspect. That was so I would know just where to start in on what I had to tell you.”
She laid her hand on my arm and, again, I shrank away.
“You’ve been almost completely wrong about me,” she continued defensively. “At first I was desperate as I watched you work toward the knowledge you weren’t supposed to have.”
“Knowledge forbidden all ID units?”
“Yes. I tried my best to keep it from you. Naturally, I destroyed the notes in Dr. Fuller’s study—physically. But that was a mistake. It only made you more suspicious. Instead, we should have removed the evidence through simulectronic reprogramming. But, at the time, we were too busy manipulating the reaction monitors to call their strike.”
She glanced down the lobby. “I even programmed a pollster to scare you off by warning you on the street that morning.”
“Collingsworth too? You made him try to talk me out of it?”
“No. The Operator was responsible for that strategy.”
Did she want me to believe she had had no part in Avery’s brutal murder?
“Oh, Doug! I tried so many ways to make you forget about Fuller’s death, about Lynch, about your suspicions. But that night when you took me to the restaurant I was ready to admit failure.”
“But I told you then that I was convinced it had all been merely my imagination.”
“Yes, I know. Only, I didn’t believe you. I thought you were just trying to trick me. But when I withdrew from direct projection later that night the Operator told me he had just checked you. He said you were finally sold on the idea of pseudoparanoia and that now we could concentrate on destroying Fuller’s simulator.
“Oh I learned, when I spoke with you over the videophone the next day, that you had come into the house after my withdrawal. But I passed it off lightly and you seemed to accept my explanation. At least you didn’t do anything afterward to make me suspicious.”
I squirmed away from her. “And you spread it on thick, hoping you would keep me off the track.”
She glanced down at her hands. “I suppose you have every right to look at it that way. But that isn’t true.”
She appeared to be wrestling with the choice of proving she hadn’t simply been manipulating me. But, instead, she said:
“Then, when everything started happening to you yesterday, I knew things had gone wrong. My first reaction was to rush out to where you were as soon as possible. But when I got there I realized I hadn’t acted wisely. I hadn’t foreseen how difficult it would be talking to you like this, without knowing how much you suspected, what you thought of me.
“So, the first chance I got, I withdrew again and cut in on you through a direct empathy circuit. Oh it wasn’t easy, Doug. The Operator had been in almost constant contact with you. I had to take a parallel circuit. I had to switch in with the greatest of care—so he wouldn’t realize what I was doing.
“But when I did, I saw everything—instantly, I hadn’t dreamed——Oh, Doug, he’s so vicious, so inhuman!”
“The Operator?”
She lowered her head, as though embarrassed. “I knew he was something like that. But I didn’t realize how far he had gone. I didn’t know that, for the most part, he was just toying with you for the malicious pleasure he could get out of it.”
Once again she glanced down the lobby.
“What are you looking for?” I asked bluntly.
She turned back toward me. “The police. He may have programmed them to the fact that you returned to the city.”
Then I saw it all. Now I knew what her purpose was in sitting here and talking with me.
I grabbed for her purse, but she sprang from the chair. I struggled to my leaden feet and staggered after her. “No, no—Doug! You don’t understand!”
“I understand, all right!” I swore at my legs because they could hardly support my weight.
“You’re just trying to keep me pinned down until the Operator can steer the police to me!”
“No! That’s not true! You’ve got to believe me!”
I managed to maneuver her into a corner and started to close in.
But she drew the laser gun and sprayed my arms and chest. She narrowed its beam and raked my throat. She opened it to its widest dispersion and caught me lightly across the head.
I only stood there swaying like a drunk, eyes half closed, thoughts mired.
She put the gun away, took my limp arm and draped it about her neck. She supported me around the waist and struggled toward the elevator.
An elderly couple passed us and the man smiled at Jinx while the woman cast us a disparaging glance.
Jinx smiled back and said, “Oh, these conventions!”
On the fifteenth floor, she struggled under my almost dead weight to the first door on the left. Its lock responded to her biocapacitance and she walked me in.
“I got this room just before I woke you up in the lobby,” she explained. “I didn’t imagine this would be easy.”
She let me fall across the bed, then straightened and stared down at me. And I wondered what was behind the impassive expression that clung to her attractive features. Triumph? Pity? Uncertainty?
She drew the gun again, set it for a slightly narrower beam and aimed it at my head. “We don’t have to worry about the Operator for a while. Thank God he has to rest some time. And rest is what you need, too.”
Unwavering, she pressed the firing stud.
16
When I awoke, the darkness in the room was but a feeble barrier against the blazing lights of the city that poured in through the windows. I lay still, intent upon not letting her know I was conscious until I could determine where she was. Imperceptibly, I shifted an arm, then a leg. There was no suggestion of lingering pain. At least it had been a careful spraying, which had left few after-effects.
There was movement on the chair near the bed. If only I could turn my head unobtrusively in her direction, I might learn where the la
ser gun was.
But, as I lay there, I realized I had been asleep at least ten hours. And nothing had happened. Siskin’s police hadn’t come. The Operator hadn’t yanked me. And, more significantly, Jinx hadn’t given me a lethal spraying here in the seclusion of the hotel room, which certainly would have been the easiest way of obliterating me.
“You’re awake, aren’t you?” Her clear words cut into the room’s subdued light.
I turned over and sat up.
She rose, raised her hand into the capacitance-sensing range of the ceiling switch and the lights came on. She waved them to a soft intensity, then came over to the bed.
“Feel better now?”
I said nothing.
“I know how bewildered and frightened you must be.” She sat beside me. “I am too. That’s why we shouldn’t be working against each other.”
I scanned the room.
“The laser gun’s over there.” She indicated the arm of the chair. Then, as though to demonstrate her sincerity, she reached over and offered it to me.
Perhaps, after sleeping off my exhaustion, I was more inclined to trust her. But I could do that as well with the gun in my pocket as with it in her possession. I took it from her outstretched hand.
She walked over to the window and stared into the artificially illuminated night. “He’ll let you alone until morning.”
Standing uncertainly, I tested my legs. No numbness. There was no trace of the spraying, not even the dull headache that sometimes follows.
She turned toward me. “Hungry?”
I nodded.
She went over to the delivery slot and studded the door open. She brought the self-heating tray over and set it on a chair beside the bed.
I tried a few mouthfuls, then said, “Evidently you want me to believe you’re helping me.”
She closed her eyes hopelessly. “Yes. But there really isn’t much I can do.”
“Who are you?”
“Jinx. No, not Jinx Fuller. Another one. It doesn’t matter. Names aren’t important.”
“What happened to Jinx Fuller?”
Counterfeit World Page 15
